Pakistan Minister admits to JeM, JuD support
It's a rare occurrence when India and Pakistan find themselves on the same page with regard to Pakistan-sponsored anti-India terrorism, but it happens every once in a while. And so it was early last week that the law Minister of Pakistan's Punjab Province, Rana Sanaullah, went on record saying that it was not possible to prosecute even proscribed militant groups such as the Jamaat-ud-Dawa'h and the Jaish-e-Mohammad because the “state itself is involved” with these outfits. India has been saying this for decades that the so-called non-state actors who operate against India from Pakistani soil enjoy the support of at least some influential sections of the Pakistani establishment, including the country's all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The Pakistani state uses terrorism as a legitimate tool to achieve its foreign policy goals, not just with regard to India but also in the case of Afghanistan. Unless this nexus between the state and its non-state proxies is broken down, there will be no change in the fundamentals of the terror problem that afflicts Pakistan’s neighbours. Specifically, any expectations of Pakistan bringing to justice anti-India terrorists like Hafiz Saeed, Masood Azhar or Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi will fall flat.
The scope of the problem is perhaps most evident in Punjab. Pakistan's most prosperous Province which wields a disproportionate amount of influence in power corridors, Punjab hosts the sprawling, high-security headquarters of 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed's Jamaat-ud-Dawa'h, in Muridke, just 35km outside lahore. The JuD campus has hospitals, schools and mosques which are part of its elaborate charade of being a charitable organisation — even as its military wing, the lashkar-e-Tayyeba, continues to wage war in Kashmir and Afghanistan. It’s the same deal for the JeM, which now functions under the name of a different front organisation, and is arguably even closer to the Pakistani establishment than the JuD. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the JeM, which peaked in Kashmir in the 1990s, has now been resurrected to launch a second wave of militancy and terrorism — as the Pathankot court attack stands proof.
In Punjab, it is an open secret that political parties not just offer benign support to these groups but have electoral alliances with them as well. For example, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's PMl(N) is known to have tight linkages with militant groups such as the lashkar-e-Jhangvi and its bloodthirsty offshoot, the Sipaha-e-Saheba Pakistan. In fact, in the run-up to the 2013 general election that brought Nawaz Sharif to power, Sanaullah was seen campaigning with these groups in Punjab's Jhang district. Both groups are Sunni extremists and responsible for large-scale sectarian violence within Pakistan; and yet the Government in Punjab, led by the Prime Minister's brother Shahbaz Sharif, has done precious little to rein them in. The Pakistan Peoples Party is no better either — after all, it was Benazir Bhutto who, as Prime Minister, first recognised the barbaric and unlawful Government of the Taliban in Kabul. Bhutto, in fact, played a key role in the creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which in turn spawned the Pakistani Taliban, Islamabad's biggest internal security threat today.