Terrorism still simmering

The martyrdom of Colonel Mujeebur Rehman at the hands of terrorists should give us pause for thought. The intelligence-based operation by the security forces in Granni Sheikhan area of D I Khan was based on information that some terrorists were hiding in that area while preparing attacks on the security forces and police. The terrorists opened fire when they were surrounded. In the exchange of fire, Colonel Rehman and two terrorists were killed. ISPR described the unnamed terrorists as high value targets. It also informed that weapons and ammunition were seized from the terrorists' hideout. The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the killing of Colonel Rehman, and their spokesman, Mohammad Khorasani, said army troops had raided their position on March 9, 2020. Prime Minister Imran Khan praised the martyred officer and all those from the military and security forces who had made sacrifices to free Pakistan of terrorism. While we condole the death of a brave officer and appreciate the successes of the military and security forces against the terrorists who at one stage had made Pakistan a byword for terrorism, it remains a painful task to remind ourselves how we got here.

Pakistan got embroiled in the Afghan inferno about four decades ago. Pakistan-Afghanistan relations had been rocky since Independence in 1947 because of the latter's irredentist claims to the Pashtun areas of Pakistan. In fact Afghanistan's was the sole vote against Pakistan's admission to the UN. The differences simmered until 1973, when events in Pakistan and Afghanistan took a new turn. In Pakistan, conflict in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and a nationalist insurgency in Balochistan followed the then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's dismissal of the National Awami Party-Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam coalition government in Balochistan. A similar coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa resigned in protest. While these events were unfolding here, Sardar Daud overthrew the monarchy and declared Afghanistan a republic. Bhutto feared the Pashtun nationalist Sardar Daud would fish in the troubled waters of Pakistan's Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. That was the embryonic beginning of the Afghan mujahideen, initially consisting of Islamist student leaders and professors of Kabul University who fled to Pakistan to escape Daud's repression. By 1978, when Daud was assassinated in a Communist coup, Pakistan had raised the stakes through supporting the Afghan mujahideen. Afghanistan was rocked in that period by internal conflict and power struggles within the ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The turmoil led to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. With the West joining in, Pakistan became the staging post for the mujahideen struggle while hosting millions of Afghan refugees. The Soviets departed in 1989 but Afghanistan's troubles and internal strife continued until the Taliban seized total power in 1996. Pakistan's support to the Taliban had unforeseen consequences. A by-product of that engagement emerged in 2007 in the shape of the TTP. During Musharraf's regime, these local extremist groups were both attacked and cajoled, a posture that ended up falling between two stools: annihilation and appeasement. By December 2014 when terrorists carried out the massacre of students and teachers in the Army Public School Peshawar, sufficient political will was finally gathered to deal with the terrorists in an effective and meaningful manner. While the military's operations broke the back of the terrorist resistance, they could not prevent the survivors fleeing to the relative safety of the poorly policed border areas of Afghanistan. Despite these setbacks, the fear amongst informed observers was that from the safety of their bases across the border, the TTP would look to resurrect itself inside Pakistan through sleeper cells either left behind or newly created to carry on the terrorist campaign. This is the context for the D I Khan operation referred to above. The consequences of flirting with extremist forces for strategic reasons may have triggered the birth of homegrown terrorist groups, but it is our armed forces and security forces that are having to 'mop up' the remains of a much depleted terrorism threat.