Another action plan?

Why did the prime minister feel the need for another “national action plan” when he vowed to deal with terrorism with an “iron hand”? Doesn’t one already exist? Or was it completely discarded when the military and the PTI (Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf) government decided to listen to their friends, back in power in Kabul, and talk peace with TTP (Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan)? Because mollycoddling terrorists wasn’t part of the original 20-point NAP hammered out the day after the Peshawar army public school nightmare in 2014, the darkest day in the country’s history.

It almost beggars belief that the military endlessly indulged the TTP, sending busloads of clerics to appease them, when they deliberately pitched demands that were never going to be accepted. Most Pakistanis thought releasing hardened, convicted terrorists for a chance of peace with the people that killed our children was a very bad idea. And people wondered why the military was trying to get them to tone down their demands of reversing the FATA-KP merger and handing over control of Waziristan to them even as they openly started moving back into Pakistan.

You couldn’t sell the idea of a powerful, nuclear armed military falling for such a see-through tactic in a cheap fiction novel, yet the Pakistani establishment did, in fact, fall for it. It approached the talks from a position of weakness, was snubbed when TTP unilaterally ended the ceasefire, and now it is rushing to control both TTP attacks up and down the country and surprising Afghan aggression on the border.

That is why it is of great significance that the PM also promised to address the “external facilitation of terrorists who disseminate and support it in Pakistan”. For the longest time this meant the Karzai and Ghani administrations in Kabul along with Indian intelligence agencies that provided TTP with sanctuary, arms, money and training. Now this equation has changed very sharply.

And Pakistan’s own security agencies would have finally realised that not only were they wrong to bet on the Afghan Taliban to sort out the Pakistani Taliban holed up in Afghanistan, as promised in Doha ahead of the US withdrawal, they also completely misread the new relationship between the two militias. And now, just because they took their eye off the ball, they have to deal with a charged TTP as well as a reliable proxy turned hostile neighbour on the western front.

To address this new external factor, like the PM promised, the government will have to take it up with the Afghan Taliban. And while they’ll tell you that they’re already ahead of you, and that they’ve initiated contact with Kabul, they won’t explain why this is again being done by engaging clerics on both sides instead of proper government functionaries. Even after this strategy has failed for years, why do they choose to send one particular section of extreme right mullahs to represent the government and all the people of Pakistan?

If another, or at least an upgraded, NAP is indeed needed, as clearly seems the case, it must also incorporate a way of filtering dominant public opinion into the anti-terror policy. That way they will come to understand that people who buried more than 80,000 loved ones and lost lives and limbs to TTP’s terror do not want their prisoners released, or to give them any space in the country, or even talk peace with them. They also do not believe, at all, that TTP are actually “our own children that went astray”, and that we must settle them back in Pakistan, as a former PM used to lecture the country.

Pakistan’s government needs to take a very sharp turn in its anti-terror policy. And that, given the circumstances, will require shaking the new Afghan government out of the false belief that it can double cross Pakistan and get away with it. Given that the writing on the wall couldn’t be any clearer, how quickly the establishment can digest the complete failure of its four decades of “strategic depth” goose chase will decide how quickly we can begin acting instead of reacting.

And if a new national action plan is what it takes to turn things around, then so be it.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022