THE moment of truth for the federal government and the Pakistan Army to save Pakistan from imploding under the threat of the Taliban insurgency has arrived.

President Zardari in Washington and Gen Kayani in Rawalpindi, with the blessings of the tripartite Af-Pak strategy meetings presided over by President Obama, prompted Prime Minister Gilani in Islamabad to tell the nation near midnight last week about the decision to call out the armed forces ‘to eliminate the militants and terrorists in order to restore the honour and dignity of our homeland, and to protect the people.’ That reassurance was needed since previous army operations were half-hearted and botched and the operation in Buner and Dir was hardly faring any better, notwithstanding the claims of the ISPR.

The broadcast recalled a similar dramatic moment two months ago when the prime minister in the early hours of the morning announced the reinstatement of the chief justice and the end of the siege of Islamabad by the security forces to prevent the lawyers’ long march. The armed forces — whose refusal to support the government action against the long march is believed to have played a role in reinstating the chief justice — overcame their reservations about a full-fledged military action against the Swat Taliban.

The latter’s proximity to Islamabad had raised the spectre of a Taliban takeover within weeks and led to alarm all over the world, particularly in Washington. The latter seemed more worried about Pakistan’s cache of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands than the fate of the country’s 170 million people. No one can possibly doubt the pivotal role of the army in our politics.

While the motivation and the circumstances that led to this announcement will be debated for long, the decision to take the Taliban head-on, if successfully executed, could become a historical landmark, along with the reinstatement of the chief justice, and transform Pakistan’s currently bleak future.

Although it is a gamble worth taking in the present circumstances, it does entail serious risks. These can only be overcome by a series of well-coordinated actions requiring political leadership of a high order and the involvement of all sections of society in making transformative decisions which would eliminate the injustices of the past that have led to our present predicament.

Gen Kayani’s remark that ‘The present security situation requires that all elements of national power should work in close harmony to fight the menace of terrorism and extremism,’ serves both as a welcome admission that the army alone can’t face the challenge and as a timely warning that without the active cooperation of all other elements, the operation could backfire and result in the emergence of the Taliban as a stronger force than before.

Can the Pakistani Army live up to its reputation as one of the world’s largest and finest fighting armies by flushing out the Taliban and forcing them to surrender their arms? Now that the nation, including many of the religious parties with a soft corner for the Taliban in the past, has almost unanimously sensed the danger to its existence posed by the militant Swat Taliban, there seems little reason for the army’s hesitancy in taking up arms against them and taking the war to its logical end.

However, the Pakistan Army, having tasted power and pelf for 20 of the last 30 years, has become a bit rusty in the exercise of its professional duties, especially since there is a sense of reliance on atomic weapons against the only enemy it has ever considered as a mortal foe. Its experience in fighting internal insurgency has been minimal. The two territories where it has tried to put down insurgencies, East Pakistan and Balochistan, have resulted in the separation of one and a sense of near-complete alienation in the other.

Its hubris as an elite western-style fighting force — with a built-in polarised hierarchy of the underprivileged soldier (with little education and reliance on faith rather than logic) and an elitist officer class — has not prepared it for facing the quick-footed tactics of the insurgents who have enjoyed local loyalty and hospitality. Indeed, an added danger in the present case is that many of the jawans, along with some of the officers, may still retain latent sympathies for the insurgents.

As for the local population, although it may not have much love for the Taliban, they hardly see the security forces as their protectors. They are now in the midst of a crossfire and are desperate for peace even at the price of the lowest level of existence and dignity, which has been the sales pitch of the Taliban movement since its birth in 1994, with the Pakistani intelligence agencies acting as its foster mother. If the army wants to play its role in saving the nation from the threat some believe it had helped create, it will have to both reinvent itself internally and reconstruct its role in societal transformation. Besides reconciling to a low-profile role in politics and pruning its expenditures to accommodate other more pressing social needs, it will have to keep itself better prepared for meeting natural and man-made disasters of which the country has had more than its fair share.

It needs to be realised that, like all insurgencies, the Taliban insurgency can’t be quashed through a military operation alone, unless the people themselves are convinced of its viciousness and futility. Unfortunately, despite the barbaric atrocities perpetrated on them in the name of the Sharia, many at the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder are still unable to view the Taliban as worse than the rulers. The latter hardly ever paid attention to their needs until their own lifestyles began to face an ‘existentialist threat.’ Unless these ‘root causes’ receive the attention they deserve, it will be foolhardy to believe that people at large will rise against the Taliban.

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