nicely written article about Imran’s fairy-tale theory of terrorism and Taliban’s of Pakistan.. it worries me a lot that his understanding of this greatest threat to Pakistan is so naive and simplistic that it could cause immense damage to Pakistan.
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Moazzam Husain
Imran Khan got it wrong again – for the umpteenth time. The PTI manifesto unveiled recently proposes to pull Pakistan out of the US’ war and everyone lives happily ever after. By this time I’m actually beginning to wonder why no one in Khan Sahib’s party appears to have a voice to talk him out of presenting a fairy-tale solution to the county’s most serious issue – fighting religious extremism.
When he says “extricate from America’s war”, then how does one walk that phrase? Do you end the alliance with the US? As a policy prescription that’s fair enough, as long as the pros and cons of that have been thought through and it is not simply being presented as a rhetorical solution. Or does extrication simply imply not letting the remaining Nato supplies transit through Pakistan. (Incidentally Nato now relies less on Pakistan and more on the northern supply route).
Or does it mean pulling out our forces from Fata and letting the Taliban and other foreign renegade groups find sanctuary in a region where they feel safe because it is outside the reach of Nato’s air power? But then has the manifesto thought about the consequences of leaving a vacuum in Fata? Does it understand how hot pursuit works and when it becomes permissible under international law? Has it evaluated the risk and consequences of that region being used as a base to launch attacks on the Afghan side of the Durand Line?
Or let’s take the drone war, Khan Sahib’s favourite whipping boy. If evidence emerges of a militant compound on a hillside in Orakzai agency, do we undertake that airstrike ourselves? Or do we send in ground forces? In either case, whose fight would this be? But supposing we don’t act. We refuse to fight the war on anybody’s terms. What would the probable Nato response be? And finally when the drone does come, what do we do? Do we engage it with our own air power? What could be the reprisal of doing that and how far are we prepared and equipped to let that spiral escalate?
Good security policy is built on scenarios. Scenarios are not predictions – far from it – they are often nightmares we hope we never have to see. But a proactive national security policy has to foresee all possibilities – however unpleasant – and script out responses to deal with every eventuality. You cannot have an incompetent “Ah we never thought of that…” type of response.
Here’s another scenario for Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and Khan Sahib’s team to mull over. It’s 2016 and you are in power. There has been a terrorist attack on the US. There are unmentionable casualties. Evidence is rapidly emerging that the attack is postmarked from Pakistan. Some group has handled the Pakistan end of the operation. The American public is baying for blood. Western embassies are evacuating their personnel from Islamabad. Foreign airlines have suspended operations. Our Embassy in Washington informs you that the CIA has provided its list of 250 suspected terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan – safe houses, training camps, compounds, and radical madressahs – to the American president. Never mind that the list is somewhat outdated, as long as it can be acted upon to satiate the American public.
Inside the Situation Room, President Obama is presiding over a meeting of his entire national security team – reviewing plans for precision strikes against these 250 targets. Meanwhile, Khan Sahib’s erstwhile colleagues and companions from the Difa-e-Pakistan Council are burning tyres and effigies of Obama and from the Mall roads of Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar, threatening more attacks on US interests worldwide if the Americans retaliate against the terrorist attack.
End of nightmare and start of reality. The PTI needs to identify a list of actions that can be taken today and demonstrate how these will minimise the risk of such a scenario. As it begins to flesh these out, it will come to the realisation that there is more than one war that needs to be fought. While we are fighting terrorism we are also fighting a Taliban insurgency. While a counterterrorism strategy and a counterinsurgency strategy may have areas of overlap, one predominantly utilises intelligence agencies, while the other uses Special Forces.
The PTI also needs to show how it intends to defeat the ideology(ies) of religious extremism, and how it proposes to dismantle the infrastructure of jihad in central Punjab. For now, unfortunately, the Tehreek-e-Insaf has produced a wrong prognosis of the situation and shown an even poorer understanding of the affliction. You cannot come to power with half-baked and muddle-headed ideas, only armed with hope and good intentions.
In more jumbled confusion the PTI manifesto paints the nationalist armed struggle in Balochistan with the same brush as the war against religious extremism. Devolution under the 18th Amendment followed by the NFC award has started to extinguish the fires of separatism in Balochistan. The credit for that goes to the recent PPP-led coalition government and to all the parties that were part of the last National Assembly. More recently the army chief and the chief election commissioner have both visited Quetta to convince all parties there to take part in the elections. The Baloch problem is being substantially addressed – and not by rhetoric alone.
Meanwhile it’s important for Khan Sahib to get the fight against religious extremism right. To begin with, there are people within his party he can listen to.
The writer is an entrepreneur.Website: moazzamhusain.com