AT a quiet lunch recently, a top western diplomat expressed his amazement at the sight of lawyers showering Salmaan Taseer’s killer Mumtaz Qadri with rose petals.
“I thought most Pakistanis were Barelvi — moderate Muslims — and the Salafist thinking would not find resonance here. Tell me then,” he went on to ask me point-blank, “does Al Qaeda’s retributive ideology find resonance with ordinary Pakistanis?”
For a few seconds I was speechless, another diplomat froze, as he held his fork midway to his half-open mouth, all eyes gaping at me. Amidst a tense moment my fleeting mind searched for an answer that would diffuse the tension. “I’ll tell you what finds resonance with ordinary Pakistanis your Excellency; Bollywood!” The chuckles around the table told me my retort had done the trick, but several weeks later I still don’t have an answer to his question.
“No Pakistani would condone blasphemy,” an elderly gentleman proclaimed at a dinner a few days later, a few grains of rice caught in his beard.
This time I was not speechless. “Very well then, would any Pakistani condone taking the law in one’s own hands? Would he or she condone an act of cold-blooded murder? Had Salmaan Taseer himself committed any act of blasphemy?” I shot back. The elderly gentleman just shrugged and continued eating, his head down.
A younger fellow sitting next to me leaned in close and lowering his voice suggested “you see it’s really all inspired. There are foreign powers backing the Taliban … all these attacks and bombings, it’s all a huge conspiracy”.
“Be that as it may,” I replied. “What stops our military from liquidating the TTP? Why does it take US drones to eliminate Nek Muhammad, Baitullah Mehsud and others that are locked in war against our military? And if these elements are foreign-backed, shouldn’t we hit them twice as hard?”
Talking to my compatriots, I get a sense of utter confusion over what we’re dealing with. To further cloud matters, the state institutions are not on the same page. What you get is total dysfunction and strategic paralysis producing little will and determination to decisively deal with a clear and present danger.
Political religion, vigilantism, militancy and terrorism are not individual phenomena but a continuum of the same strain. They function together as one large living creature and this dragon feeds off the society which it inhabits.
Today that society is Pakistan.
In 2008, when Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Danish embassy in Islamabad in retaliation to some obscure blasphemous cartoons, a series of questions ran through my mind. The last and perhaps most reprehensible in my innermost thoughts was; was Pakistan the only country in which Al Qaeda could find a Danish target?
The project to de-radicalise Pakistan requires a clear road map and a systematic plan to relentlessly pursue precise pre-determined objectives. Containing the TTP alone is not going to serve much purpose unless the whole ecosystem is drained. If you peel off the top layer it regenerates. You have to eliminate it at the core underneath three layers.
Back to my earlier question: to remove the first layer, what will it take for our military to decisively liquidate the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan? Given the recent jailbreak in Bannu, my instinct says the TTP is alive and well.
Down to the second layer, I ask the interior minister and the provincial chief ministers: what is stopping our civilian security agencies and police from liquidating the various jihadi outfits amidst us, the LeT, LeJ and HuM and all those other initials, of which lists are already there? The people are known, their locations are known. Who needs to approve the operation? What resources are needed? If given both, when can we see results?
Coming to the third layer, don’t the provincial home departments have precise locations of this infrastructure of global jihad that spawns mosques, madressahs, safe houses, jihadi publications, websites, recruitment and training centres?
Getting to the core, do information and indeed the cognitive capabilities with which we process everyday information play a role? Do the education system and curriculum also need cleaning up? At the same time, isn’t it the job of the information ministry to disseminate an intelligent and credible counter-jihadi narrative? Are there merits to regulating the preaching in mosques and madressahs? Should these be brought under the control of the civilian security apparatus of the state?
Can a de-radicalisation project succeed without a meticulous purge within the institutions? Without this, you will hear things like ‘by time we got there they had escaped’. Assassin Mumtaz Qadri was an insider. Can we spot others?
Let’s be clear, 2014 will bring a substantial reduction in US presence in Afghanistan. It will not bring an end to the war. As the factions fight for the spoils, the war will, in all likelihood, escalate. We must keep that bigger war from spreading inside our territory. That will only be possible if we build internal resilience and deny the use of our territory and prevent our citizens from participating in the coming conflict in any capacity. The US drawdown is an opportunity to extricate ourselves from this conflict.
The present policy flux between the institutions must end. They must come together to develop a coherent and proactive policy that addresses defence, foreign affairs and the economy in an integrated manner. This window of opportunity is still open and the time to slay this dragon has never been more urgent.
The writer is an international business strategist and entrepreneur.