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AS intended, last week’s terrorist attack at Bacha Khan University in the KP town of Charsadda evoked memories of the December 2014 massacre at the Army Public School in Peshawar. Fortuitously, the death toll was considerably lower. Yet the fact that the same Taliban commander has claimed responsibility for both atrocities suggests that the National Action Plan to root out terrorism leaves much to be desired.
In the case of the APS attack, intimidating army personnel was clearly a primary aim. The targeting of Bacha Khan University, meanwhile, was not unrelated to its nomenclature, given that the atrocity was obviously timed to coincide with commemorations marking the death anniversary of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
It’s not hard to see why Ghaffar Khan is anathema to the Taliban. He was a devout Muslim as well as a dedicated Pakhtun nationalist who advocated non-violence in the Gandhian spirit and refused to look upon adherents of other religions as natural foes. Largely revered in India, Ghaffar Khan was ostracised and regularly persecuted by successive Pakistani governments. When he died 28 years ago, the man known as the Frontier Gandhi was buried, according to his wishes, in Afghanistan.
On the day the university named after him came under attack, it had planned to mark Ghaffar Khan’s death anniversary with a poetry recital. One of Ghaffar Khan’s sons, Ghani Khan, was a formidable Pashto poet; another led the NAP — not the National Action Plan but the National Awami Party, which transcended the ban imposed on it by the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto administration and re-emerged in the 1980s as the Awami National Party.
It is arguable whether either of these formations could credibly have laid claim to Ghaffar Khan’s mantle. But the Bacha Khan University was obviously a consequence of the ANP’s sporadic ascendancy in the province, even though it colluded in both its guises with confessional forces that Ghaffar Khan would have found abominable.
The plan to root out terrorism leaves much to be desired.
For whatever it is worth, his legacy is something in which Pakistan should take considerable pride. But that would be a very different Pakistan. Not one that colludes with the forces of Islamist militancy when it ostensibly suits its purposes, notably in the contexts of India and Afghanistan. And certainly not one where a teenager can be persuaded by an imam to cut off his hand just because he inadvertently raised it when the cleric had asked a question. The latter incident is remarkable not just in terms of the masochism of the deluded youngster, but for the fact that his family took pride in his extreme gesture, and that fellow villagers as well as people from neighbouring habitations have been turning up to kiss the youngster’s remaining hand in a salute to his devoutness. Could there be a more grotesque illustration of the obscurantist mentality that drives Pakistan’s malaise?
Perhaps something reasonably equivalent could be located in the demented sphere of popular support, not least among the supposedly well-educated legal fraternity, for former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer’s pathetic assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, who remains unharmed on death row. The imam who instigated the hand-cutting has been taken into custody. What are the chances, though, that he will be afforded an adequately prolonged opportunity to reflect on his criminal behaviour. Likewise, no one seriously expects Masood Azhar, the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad, to remain incarcerated for long.
His Jaish is believed to have been behind the terrorist attack on an Indian military base in Pathankot. The proximity of the assault to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore on Christmas Day prompted the assumption that it was part of a pattern whereby Islamist militants promptly strove to thwart any signs of a thaw between the neighbours. The most insidious instance of this strategy was the Kargil affair, when the instigator was not a proxy force but the Pakistani army itself.
The distance between segments of the armed forces and the outfits that have regularly wreaked havoc in India as well as Afghanistan remains to be determined. Very similar, if not exactly the same, organisations target Pakistan as well. It should be painfully obvious that tackling the menace requires unequivocal cooperation with both neighbours. Sharing the details of the Bacha Khan University outrage with the authorities in Kabul, based on the assumption — or the knowledge — that the attack was planned in Afghanistan, is a positive but insufficient measure. After all, equivalent Afghan claims of Taliban atrocities being incubated in Pakistan all too often prompt derision rather than a credible inquiry.
Neither the Zarb-i-Azb campaign nor NAP has thus far paid sufficient dividends. Arming teachers to tackle terrorists may occasionally produce salutary results, but it is essentially an acknowledgement of failure. Uprooting the consequences of the seeds sown mainly during the long night over which Gen Zia presided will require more than sporadic bouts of right-mindedness.
Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2016
