Many of the champions of the leT and the Haqqani group patronise the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Also, the policy of using terrorism as a state policy, sanctifies the culture of terrorism on which the TTP thrives
Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif’s statement on January 3, that India wanted to engage Pakistan in a low intensity war and did not understand the language of ‘love’ and ‘peace’, would make a horse laugh. Dawn, which reported the statement, cited him as stating further that India had started cross-border shelling on Pakistan’s forces on its eastern border when its Armed Forces were fighting terrorists inside the country and its western border. “It seemed that India did not want to see a durable peace in Pakistan, Afghanistan and in the region”, he said. Followed his statement that India seemingly did not want Pakistan to succeed in its fight against terrorism and ‘Indian aggression’ at this juncture, proved that it was supporting the terrorists. And, of course, there came the expression of confidence that Pakistan was capable of replying to any kind of aggression.
Those familiar with Pakistani leaders’ statements about India, including the outrageous ones about this country aiding those fighting its forces in Balochistan, would have no trouble dismissing Mr Asif’s outpouring as a litany of falsehoods. The truth is that it is Pakistan that has been waging a low-intensity war against this country in the form of cross-border insurgency and terrorism from the 1950s when it started aiding Naga rebels. Aid to Mizo rebels, whose uprising in March 1966 was put down, came thereafter. A lull ensued the liberation of Bangladesh following Pakistan’s humiliating defeat in the 1971 war, Islamabad, however, began sponsoring terrorism in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir from the beginning of the 1980s.
Yossef Bodansky writes in his pioneering work, Bin laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, “The main reason the Inter-Services Intelligence decided to keep the Central Intelligence Agency out of out of the camps (for training Afghan Mujahideen) was the extent of training and support non-afghan ‘volunteers’ and others were getting in these camps. Most numerous, were the thousands of Islamist trainees from Indian Kashmir and to a lesser extent the Sikhs from Punjab.
” Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which has been directing, coordinating and controlling the various terrorist organisations like the lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, waging its relentless unconventional war against India, has extracted a heavy toll in term of casualties inflicted and material damage caused. According to a report in the Hindustan Times on December 7, 1999, officials of the External Affairs Ministry said that while a total of 25,267 persons had been killed in terrorist attacks in the State of Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir in the 10 preceding years, 12,316 Indians had lost their lives in the wars the country had foughtsince 1947.
Another report in the Hindustan Times in September 2008, cites the United States State Department’s National Counter-Terrorism Centre as stating that, on an average, terrorist violence killed seven persons daily in India in 2007. Stating that terrorists killed a total of 2,300 persons in India that year, it pointed out that after Iraq (13,611) and Afghanistan (4,673), India was third on the international terror list in terms of the numbers killed.
There has been a fall in the number of terrorism related fatalities though the figures continue to be high. Under the heading cumulative fatalities by conflict theatres, South Asia Terrorism Portal shows that a total of 5,597 persons were killed in Jammu & Kashmir and 828 by Islamist extremists outside Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab and North-Eastern India between 2005 and December 31, 2014, both years included. Elsewhere, under the heading, India fatalities 1994-2005, SATPOR gives the total of those killed during this period, including 1994 and 2015 (up to January 4), as 63,990 out of which 29,970 were terrorists. The figures for civilians and security forces personnel were 24,485 and 9,535 respectively. If anything, it is Pakistan which is waging a low-intensity unconventional war against India and has escalated it sharply since the 1980s.
It is Pakistan’s policy of unleashing cross-border terrorist strikes, and encouraging insurgency within India that led to its sponsorship of organisations like lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, Harkat-ul Mujahideen. Similarly, its obsession with controlling Afghanistan’s territory for achieving ‘strategic depth’ against India, led to its midwifing the birth of the Taliban in mid-1990s, and later, patronage of the Afghan Taliban of Mullah Omar, the Haqqani militia and what has now emerged as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or, simply, Pakistani Taliban. The latter has now turned Frankenstein’s monster and has unleashed savage attacks on Pakistan and its security forces, the most horrendous of these perhaps being the one on an Army school in Peshawar which left 145, including 132 school children, dead on December 16, 2014.
The dastardly attack could not have occurred without inside help, nor could the assault on the Pakistani Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2010 in which the attackers came within a few hundred feet of the then Army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s personal office. The two attempts on General Pervez Musharraf’s life on December 14 and 25 2003, both staged very close to the Pakistani Army headquarters in Rawalpindi, also had military involvement.
There is a section in the Pakistani military establishment, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which is hand-in-glove with terrorist organistions. The links were forged during General Zia-ul-Haq’s relentless campaign to islamise the Pakistani Army in the 1980s and Pakistan’s direction and coordination of the war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan staged with American and Saudi financial and military aid during the same period. The ISI, which played a nodal role, patronised fundamentalist Islamist groups which were prepared to do Pakistan’s bidding and marginalised the moderate, tribal militias loyal to the Afghan King, Zaheer Shah.
Efforts to eradicate their influence following the attempts on General Musharraf’s life and attacks on the military by fundamentalist Islamist groups like Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has failed because of Pakistan’s policy of helping entities like the leT and the Haqqani group to further its designs. Many of the champions of these two groups also patronise TTP. Also, the policy of using terrorism as an instrument of state policy, sanctifies the culture of terrorism on which the TTP thrives. So do Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his family’s close ties with the leT and its chief, Hafiz Saeed, and the decision by all political parties in September last year to hold talks with the terrorists in the teeth of the Army’s opposition. The message is the old one: You need a long spoon to sup with the devil.
(The accompanying visual is of supporters of Pakistani civil society groups, protesting against Taliban and militants in lahore, Pakistan, on January 5, 2015. AP photo)