APS and after

For a parent, the loss of a child remains a searing wound that just will not heal. And when a parent is one of many whose progeny’s lives were snuffed out as innocent victims of a lunatic terrorist attack, the wound suppurates into anger, unremitting grief, and remembrance of those gone through the artefacts of their young school lives.

Such is the collective fate of the parents of the 132 school children massacred brutally by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists in the Army Public School (APS), Peshawar, 10 years ago on December 16, 2014. They cannot stop crying whenever their lost children’s fate comes up.

Fifteen others, amongst them brave teachers who sacrificed themselves while trying to protect their students from those mad, bloodthirsty murderers, were amongst the casualties. Some managed to survive with severe injuries. What was the fault of all these innocent souls? What had they done to deserve such a fate? Merely asking these questions wrenches every heart that is not a cold stone.

The country as a whole was traumatised by this atrocity. The civilian and military leadership came together eight days after the bloodshed to forge a consensus on terrorism and how to combat it. Even Imran Khan was forced to disperse his months-long sit-in at D-Chowk and join the national deliberations (however reluctantly was shown in later years).

It boggles the mind therefore that Imran Khan had the gall to ‘rehabilitate’ and even invite the TTP in exile in Afghanistan to return to the country when he was in power, in exchange for laying down their weapons, which they practiced only in the breach. But before we reflect on this anomaly, we must retrace our steps to the military Operation Zarb-e-Azb, launched in June 2014 to knock out the terrorist sanctuaries in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s (KP’s) tribal areas.

The operation’s strategy was fatally flawed. It attacked the concentrations of TTP and other religious fundamentalist terrorists in KP’s tribal areas, particularly the Tirah Valley, without taking on board the critical task of cutting off their escape routes into Afghanistan.

The result was that the TTP, when it could no longer bear the weight of the military’s unleashed firepower, retreated across the border into Afghanistan, finding safe haven in the poorly policed border regions in that country at war with the occupying US and western forces. When retreating, the TTP made sure to leave behind sleeper cells for when the battle could be resumed.

At the time, my perception was summed up in what I wrote: The military has exported the problem, not scotched the snake. This implied the continuing threat of a revival of the terrorist movement inside Pakistan as and when the circumstances changed.

And change they did, especially after the Afghan Taliban’s victory in 2021. Sure enough, almost immediately after, and continuing at an accelerating pace today, the TTP have revived their campaign of terror, with almost by now daily attacks and their concomitant casualties and damage. One more hopeless effort as part of the National Action Plan (NAP) agreed by all stakeholders in 2014 was the creation of the National Counter-Terrorism Authority (NACTA), meant to coordinate intelligence gathering and analysis across the civilian-military divide.

However, as anyone even remotely familiar with intelligence agencies’ operations could have pointed out, NACTA would inevitably run aground on the reluctance of intelligence agencies to share their information, even to fellow military or civilian agencies. That too has come to pass, and after floundering around in the dark for many years, NACTA is dead in the water.

To pay homage to the innocent victims of the APS tragedy, we as a people must unite behind the anti-terrorist struggle. But this is only possible if the intelligence agencies mobilise the citizenry to contribute to the effort to extinguish the terrorist threat born out of our misguided policies of supporting religious fundamentalist militancy in Afghanistan, which later turned on us in the deadly form of our very own Taliban.

General Ziaul Haq’s religious zealotry failed to provide any good. It left a legacy of religious extremism that still grips large parts of our society and polity, and its Afghan avatar has come back to haunt us. Given the well-established proclivities of the intelligence services, not to mention the apex military establishment, this sounds like a forlorn hope, if not pie-in-the-sky.

Nevertheless the fact remains that without a comprehensive mobilisation of the people and state institutions against the terrorist menace, Pakistan faces the lingering fallout of the APS massacre and after.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024