Knowing nothing about Swat’s militants has allowed them to carry the flag of Islam with impunity. —File photo

YOU’VE been declared Public Enemy No 1. Your suicide bombers have wreaked havoc on Pakistan’s cities in recent months.

There is a $5m bounty on your head. The Americans finally seem to be training their drone-mounted Hellfire missiles on your neighbourhood. What would you do?

Probably not pick up a phone, casually dial a reporter’s number and vow to send yet more suicide bombers. But that’s what Baitullah Mehsud is doing, and nobody seems to know how he gets away with it.

The official Pakistani line is that while we can track Mehsud, we don’t have the technology to wipe him out from the sky. And that when we ask the Americans to take him out for us instead, they find a million excuses to avoid doing so.

Fine. So America is playing its own double game. But if we can’t and the Americans won’t take Mehsud out, does that mean we do nothing instead?

Actually, we are doing something: we’re obfuscating the truth. Mehsud’s enormous and sophisticated war machine in South Waziristan is being financed by India, so go the whispered accusations in our intelligence circles. It’s a neat little theory: Pakistan’s oldest enemy supporting the country’s latest enemy.

Except it has little basis in the truth. One of Mehsud’s favourite fund-raising techniques is kidnapping the rich in cities in the north, and even as far away as Karachi in the south. At the moment the going rate at the high end is Rs90m. Do the math: 35 such victims a year comes to over Rs3bn.

And this in addition to the rents he extracts from the denizens of his kingdom. Commit a crime, smuggle stuff, steal your neighbour’s goat or wife, look at the wrong person the wrong way – and you’re liable to pay a fine, duly deposited in Mehsud’s kitty.

And then there’s the mysterious disbursement of development funds in Mehsud’s area. Eventually, perhaps when it’s no longer relevant or nobody cares, the truth will come out about how the state lined the pockets of the very man who turned his guns on it. But for now, the lie of Indian support continues.

The mystery of Baitullah Mehsud is only one, albeit prominent, example of the terrible reality of recent years: despite being one of the foremost victims of terrorism in the world, we as a nation remain stunningly clueless about its perpetrators and their motives.

Look no farther than Swat for proof. Despite being in the full glare of the national media for nearly two years, what do we really know about the militants there? Who is Maulana Fazlullah? What does he want? Where did he learn to not just fight but defeat the Pakistan armed forces? Are his fighters local or foreign? Who is Muslim Khan? What are the tactics of Swat’s militants? Are there similarities to fighters elsewhere?

Knowing nothing about Swat’s militants has allowed them to carry the flag of Islam with impunity and camouflage their bid to wrest territorial control from the state as a crusade for the Sharia.

And it’s allowed canards to flourish. Militancy in Pakistan would disappear if the Americans left Afghanistan. But what does the American presence there have to do with flogging a girl here? Up in the Khyber Agency there is a rumour that the thug Mangal Bagh, another crook who has wrapped himself in the cloak of Islam, ordered the stoning to death of girl for committing adultery. Nobody made a video of it, so the incident hasn’t travelled outside.

But the fault isn’t of the media and the people alone. For all its talk of militancy being the biggest threat to the state, of ‘new strategies’ and of the 3 Ds, the government has yet to do something elementary: flesh out a coherent plan to take on the militants.

The desultory, purposeless, piecemeal actions of the government would be laughable were the consequences not so horrifying. Of the ‘deterrence’ component of the anti-militancy strategy – what is it supposed to mean? Surely a coherent response would begin with a thorough review. Identify the threat. Identify the resources available to fight it. Study the literature. Identify the doable, and what’s needed to do more. Explain how it will be done.

But instead of serious policymaking we’re flying by the seat of our pants. Intelligence coordination failures? Hmmm … let’s set up a new body. Enter the National Counter Terrorism Authority. Never mind that the national coordinator doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to do and that the agencies he’s supposed to coordinate among aren’t really interested.

Cities unsafe? Let’s recruit anti-terrorism squads. Their brief? Protect public officials and property. Wouldn’t it make more sense to find and eliminate the terrorists rather than wait, guns at the ready, to mow down suicide bombers dashing towards their targets?

The army has fared little better. Gen Kayani tells us that the army is alert to the threats, internal and external, that confront the nation. Excellent. But what about learning how to confront the threat you’re so alert to?

Three phases of Operation Rah-i-Haq in Swat and the militants were unbowed. What has the army learned from it? Has the institutional army, responsible for organising, training and equipping the armed forces, absorbed any of the lessons the combat forces learned in engaging the militants?

Is the army studying counterinsurgency strategies used by other armies? How many Pakistani officers have read Gen Petraeus’s COIN manual? What is the army’s view on killing the enemy versus protecting the population? The army has learned to live with drone strikes in Fata, but what exactly does it understand about safe havens?

There is a growing debate in American military circles about the validity of the assumption that safe havens are a necessity for modern trans-national militant groups. Which side wins that debate could have far-reaching consequences for Pakistan, given the current American obsession with safe havens in Fata and even Balochistan.

But what about the likes of Qari Hussain, Ustad-i-Fidayeen, who trains his suicide bombers in South Waziristan and sends them to Pakistan’s cities to attack the state and occasionally Shias? Could there be a more direct link between safe havens and the upsurge of militancy inside Pakistan?

Following a perverse security agenda is one thing, not knowing or understanding its effects another. The fact is Pakistan isn’t the world’s most dangerous place because of rampant militancy. It is the world’s most dangerous place because it doesn’t know what to do about it.

cyril.a@gmail.com