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AFTER you spray a stagnant pool, you get rid of the mosquitoes for a while, but unless the standing water is drained, the pests soon return to plague you again.
And so it is with the terrorists the army is going after in North Waziristan currently. While we are told on a daily basis of our successes in the battle, it remains unclear what will happen after the militants have been cleared from the area.
I have little doubt that our soldiers will evict or eliminate the militant groups infesting our tribal areas, but holding territory is a whole different ballgame. This requires an administrative structure that will permit the hundreds of thousands of IDPs to return to their homes.
The problem here is that the tribal areas are largely autonomous, with little or no state machinery in place. And to ensure that the militants do not return, a permanent security apparatus will have to take over from the army, especially as the authority of local tribal leaders has been severely degraded.
The list of what needs to be done is long.
Then there is the question of national cohesion to support the military in this existential war. In no other country I have heard of do politicians try to destabilise a government when soldiers are laying down their lives in a battle for survival. So for Qadri to bring his circus to Pakistan at this juncture is hardly the act of a patriot.
The last thing we need now is the distraction of political turmoil. True, the Punjab police gave Qadri and his followers an excuse for causing an uproar, but his Pakistan Awami Tehreek is clearly using the Model Town incident, tragic as it was, to raise the stakes and the temperature.
Another issue relates to the role extremists have come to assume in the army’s arsenal: for years, our generals and spooks have come to view them as a proxy force that allows them to pursue military and political ends while giving them the luxury of deniability.
Can our establishment be weaned away from this dependence? Already, there are credible rumours that militant groups like the Haqqani Network were warned of the ongoing operation, and moved to another base near the Afghan border. Given the imminent exit of Nato and Isaf forces from Afghanistan, it is hard to believe that our army would eliminate what it views as its assets.
But taking the optimistic and charitable view that the area will indeed be purged of the extremist jihadists that have controlled it for so many years with the Pakistani state’s connivance, what comes next? After all, militancy did not appear spontaneously out of the blue.
From Zia’s promotion of the Sipah-i-Sahaba against the Shia in the early 1980ss to the promotion of Islamist jihadists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, there has been a growing legitimisation and acceptance of Islamist militancy. Once the Soviets left, our military switched to supporting the Kashmiri uprising in the late 1980s, sending militants across the Line of Control.
Soon thereafter, I recall asking a general about the use of these militants. He replied that it made military sense for a few thousand guerrillas to tie down several Indian divisions in Kashmir that would otherwise have been facing our troops on the Indo-Pak border.
Over the years, extremist views have come to be accepted and internalised in our classrooms, our TV chat shows, our defence forces, our judiciary and our administration. Indeed, our entire national discourse has been steadily moving towards the religious right.
In a recent column in the foreign pages of this newspaper, I cited an apt metaphor used by Michael Gove, the British education secretary, to describe his country’s fight against Islamist terrorism. In a book written after the London attacks in 2005, he said it wasn’t enough to fight off the crocodiles: the swamp had to be drained as well.
So how do we drain our swamp of the extremist poison that has been accumulating for years? Who will stop the Saudi and Gulf financing of our thousands of madressahs, and bring the curricula of these seminaries in line with modern needs? Who will force the private TV channels to tone down their hysterical broadcasts and their subliminal support of extremism?
The list of what needs to be done is long and formidable. In our schools, madressahs and military cadet colleges, intolerance and suspicion of everybody who does not follow the majority belief have become pervasive. Changing this mindset seems a Herculean task beyond the abilities or desires of our ruling class.
On the contrary, these values are now central to the ethos of most of our mainstream political parties and our military. It is this that provides a fertile breeding ground for extremism and militancy.
Looking ahead to the post-operation scenario, we may not have much to celebrate. While I support the army in its fight, its victory may well be a Pyrrhic one in which there are no victors.
Published in Dawn, June 28th , 2014
