The collapse of Islamabad’s recent peace talks with the Taliban, even as indiscriminate killings continue across Pakistan, points yet again to the failure of that country which had been conceived as a safe haven for Muslims
In Pakistan, which was carved out of a united India to give a ‘pure space’ to Islam, Muslims killing other Muslims appears as the daily political diet. In the last two weeks that peace talks between the elected Government of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistani Taliban broke down, the militants retaliated through a brutal execution of 23 paramilitary men.
Then the Army got its prized catch. It shot down the interim chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Asmatullah Shaheen, who carried a bounty of 1,20,000 dollars. Meanwhile, the routine killing between Shias and Sunnis have continued without any break. Talks or no talks, peace is one thing missing for the bulk of Muslim-majority of population of Pakistan, a nation ironically created for the specific purpose of providing safety to Muslims.
A negotiated peace between the Pakistani Taliban, also known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, and the Government was a promise that Mr Sharif had made during his election campaign. But within the TTP there were many opposed to any negotiations with the Government. One leader of the TTP even demanded commitment from Mr Sharif on the implementation of sharia’h law as a pre-condition for talks. Finally, the failure of the peace talks and continued killing of Muslims in Pakistan expose the basic fallacy in the creation of that country.
Why does the Pakistani military both nurture these militants and occasionally attack themIJ It nurtures the militants so long as they do the army intelligence agency, the ISI’s, bidding by building terror squads in neighbouring countries particularly India. The Army is happy with them so long as they cooperate with the Taliban in Afghanistan that continues to target the Government of President Hamid Karzai.
More so, as Pakistan expects a huge vacuum to develop in Afghanistan soon after the American forces withdraw later this year, some assume that the Taliban take over that space and return to power. That will mark a return to the 1990s when Mullah Omar was the boss in Kabul, and his Taliban, with Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden, plotted the attack on the United States and sent waves of terrorists into India.
A spate of books that have come out in recent years from Pakistani and American analysts, like Irfan Husain’s Fatal Faultlines and Stephen P Cohen’s The Idea of Pakistan, have zeroed in on the purported victimhood of Muslims and the romantic idea implanted through concocted religious teaching that only a return to the sharia’h system of governance can solve all the problems they face. Modernity is blamed as the fountainhead of misery. large swathes of Islamic population remain captive to this ideology. Mr Cohen, for instance, reveals that whatever may have been the idea of MA Jinnah and the Muslim league in demanding the division of India, “many who came late to the idea of Pakistan were skeptical of the league’s secular vision”. They came to support Pakistan as an “Islamic state”. “Their goal was to change the way Muslims lived…to make them more Islamic, to see their lives regulated by the Sheriat.”
Mr Cohen, considered an expert on sub continental history, also adds: “After Independence, they moved to a larger canvas — Pakistan itself, their mission being to liberate India’s remaining Muslims from Hindu dominance”.
This analysis of Pakistan’s origins and development explains the hold that Islamists have on the population, the rise of the military in Pakistan’s politics, and the reason why anti-India is the glue that holds the state together even as its several ethnic groups are at loggerheads with one another.
Pakistani diplomat and now a scholar in Washington, DC, Husain Haqqani has rightly titled his book exposé of that country’s politics as Pakistan: between the Military and the Mullahs. Irrespective of what the somewhat more liberal civil society of Pakistan may believe in, the masses in that country are convinced that their main purpose is to bring their Indian Muslims under their sway.
This idea breeds the almost inexhuastive pool of terror recruits in Pakistan who are sent to India. But so long as they only target India, the military is happy with the mullahs who brainwash young terrorists but the moment the latter seek to dictate politics in Pakistan, there is a conflict of interest between the two parties.
The military that dominates the two billion dollar business empire in Pakistan wants to protect its turf. That explains the occasional killings of Taliban operatives by the Army even as they train them for operations in Afghanistan, India and elsewhere. This must caution our policy makers dealing with organisations like the Indian Mujahideen and its many variants. One such variant, active in Kerala, has already been exposed for seeking to impose sharia’h law on vulnerable Muslims there. The close connect between Pakistani Islamists and IM leaders like Yasin Bhatkal has been revealed in recent times.
In this context, it is even more important that policymakers in India are aware of how such links, and the theology that feeds this linkages, will be helped if Islamist orthodoxy is allowed to have its way. The import of what moves the masses in Pakistan into India is actively sought by Indian organisations like the Students Islamic Movement of India and its later-day avatar, the IM. That is all the more reason that the Muslim intelligentsia, as much as policymakers here, must guard against the Taliban.
Pakistan’s current civilian Government, for instance, is unable even to propose some changes in the country’s blasphemy laws which internationally has evoked condemnation for being unjust and barbaric. Every Pakistani leader who asked for changes has faced death threats and some like the former Punjab Governor Salman Taseer have also been killed. But it is this throwback to the Middle Ages, in the mindset of the people, that provides the fertile ground for sustaining terrorism. No wonder most observers of global terrorism describe Pakistan as the “most dangerous place in the world”.
The fear is that Islamabad, with its nuclear arsenal, may fall into the hands of the Islamists sooner or later, if the civilian Government is unable to control the militants. That the peace talks between the Sharif regime and the Taliban did not last even for two weeks is a telling sign.