Maulana tries, and fails

For what it’s worth, Fazlur Rahman’s trip to Kabul has left me five hundred rupees richer. I bet with a journalist friend that the maulana would be received with the pomp and show of an official visit – which is what it was, after all – that the Taliban would assure him that Afghan soil was not and shall never be used for attacks on Pakistan, and that that would be the end of the matter. There would be no surprises, and certainly no breakthrough.

Hence the quick 500. Thank you very much.

I was surprised, though, that the prime minister of the “emirate”, Mullah Hassan Akhund, asked Islamabad to end its “cruel attitude” towards Afghan refugees. That’s rich. Because most of the Afghans here who’ve been asked to return to their country – except the ones on missions to run sleeper cells and carry out suicide attacks, etc. – were only here because of the Taliban’s own very cruel attitude towards them, their religions and sects, their liberal beliefs, especially their desire for a normal, progressive life.

If the Taliban were never too concerned about those refugees when they lived inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, why are they so worried about how they’re treated in Pakistan? Especially since most of them fled Afghanistan, for their lives, to take refuge in Pakistan. If it was meant to dilute the delegation’s one-point agenda – of discussing what needs to be done about TTP – then it worked. For, unable to overcome his penchant for dissing Islamabad whenever and wherever possible, the maulana promptly enlightened his hosts, reportedly, about how JUI-F “opposed the treatment meted out to the Afghan refugees in Pakistan and asserted that such an attitude was the root cause of the problems between the two sides”, according to the front-page lead of a major English daily.

Root cause? The refugees, not TTP? From what little reached the press, they must have talked about this a lot; at least more than they talked about TTP. Because the statement out of Kabul after the talks “did not make any reference to this contentious issue and only obliquely referred to the oft-repeated statement of the Taliban regime that it would not allow anybody to use the Afghan soil against any country”, the same report added.

So the maulana returned just as empty handed as he left. That’s not surprising. What is shocking, however, is that the Pakistani establishment is still groping in the dark about dealing with the TTP threat. Nobody believes that the maulana went on a private visit. And the most the media is saying is that he led a nine-member delegation, with at least one editorial in a reliable newspaper confirming that “Pakistan’s top diplomat in Kabul [was] with him during his engagements, indicating that the JUI-F chief’s visit had official sanction”.

What now? Reminding the Taliban of their promise in Doha didn’t help. Taking their advice and negotiating directly with TTP – for which plan- and bus-loads of clerics belonging to only one sectarian denomination were taken to Kabul to negotiate on behalf of the entire state of Pakistan and all its people with terrorists that have already claimed 90,000 innocent lives – didn’t help either. Then the threat of “decisive action” was laughed away by Kabul and also didn’t help at all. Now the maulana was shuttled to Afghanistan, most probably to leverage his connections with some Taliban officials that go back to their student days in Pakistani seminaries, and that too did not help.

Meantime, TTP’s insurgency is gaining momentum and Pakistanis, especially security forces, are falling to their bombs and bullets just like all those years ago when their attack, amid all the noise of the war on terror, caught the country off guard. This time, though, it was as predictable as the maulana’s failure as assured. And now it’s certain that the Taliban are not going to shut down TTP inside Afghanistan. And that TTP will continue with its attacks.

But it’s shameful that Pakistan’s response has become equally predictable. We go round the same circle after each attack – remind the Taliban of their pledge, then take their word that Afghan soil was not used and wait for the next TTP attack, which is often bolder and kills more people than the previous one.

One would have thought that the lowest point was when the PTI government green-lighted repatriation of TTP fighters into the tribal area, insulting thousands upon thousands of Pakistanis who had put loved ones in early graves only because the state could not protect them. Yet it keeps getting worse.

Now they’ve even played the maulana card, and failed once again. But will this make them realise that they are only doing favours to people who’re betting against them opening their eyes anytime soon?

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024