Daily Times

Terrorist hideouts being raided across the northwest has prompted a fit of introspection about the integrity of our security. However, this misses the point. Military operations clearly need to be carried out but we should be wary of the notion that dangerous individuals cannot be weeded out without a rigorous, integrated, centralised intelligence bureaucracy. The history of plots and atrocities in recent years shows us that terrorists do not conform to any simple profiling. The effectiveness of routine background checks is limited. Inevitably, there is already a debate in this country about whether our security services have the resources and powers that they need. That is a debate that swings from strong public support for higher spending and intrusive measures in the days after a shock, to a more sceptical mood during the longer periods between them. There is also a tendency for debate surrounding the security response to terrorist outrages to follow the media cycle and to swing sharply from one extreme to another. Immediately afterwards, most people readily accept the inconvenience of having to wait in long queues to go through school security and some of us positively welcome the reassurance that it provides. But then, as the months turn into years, such precautions start to chafe and, when the security measures outside schools and foolproof security guidelines are relaxed, most of us become mightily relieved. Can we solely rely on countermeasures such as security procedures? It may not be sustainable in the long term because terrorists will just change their strategy and find a new target or mode of attack.

Speculation ran rife that those individuals involved in the Peshawar school incident on December 16, 2014 were merely posing as Frontier Constabulary (FC) security. However, they could easily be genuine. And that would not necessarily make them any less of a threat. Rather than fretting about vetting, we need to get to the roots of the problem: militancy and thousands of deaths due to terrorism in Pakistan. Terrorists are often discovered to be astonishingly well integrated. An NHS doctor from Iraq was involved in the botched 2007 attempt to bomb a nightclub in London. Mohammed Siddique Khan, the orchestrator of the July 7 London bombing, was a classroom assistant at a Leeds school. The public is receiving the blowback from the failure of the Islamabad government to dismantle terrorist groups that continue to operate from within Pakistan’s borders. Our own security services estimate that about three-quarters of the plots against soft targets they are monitoring have a homegrown connection.

The Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif, has as much reason as anyone in Pakistan to want the country to be rid of proxy jihadists. His soldiers have been in the line of fire and the morale of our forces has been a major casualty. This is not axiomatically a bad time for him to make his argument. It is not necessarily a bad thing to be reminded of the threats from which the army exists to protect us. And it is better that General Sharif himself should make these arguments than a politician. General Sharif, to his credit, had been vocal about such things even before the massacre of December 16 in which too many innocent lives were lost. However, since in power, Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif has been more preoccupied with neutralising the threat of his political rival, Imran Khan, than with extinguishing the threat of Pakistan’s radicalising madrassas (seminaries) and proxy jihadist groups, giving the impression that the government had a grip on the situation. There had been little apparent effort until recently when General Sharif decided to root out the Taliban and ban those proxy jihadist outfits that are still offering material support to their old radical clients in the western tribal areas and in Kashmir. With US, UK, China and Afghanistan tours in succession, the general is showing strength and thought for the future. No prudent PM would authorise a National Action Plan (NAP) without first knowing its purpose but the rules of the game have changed: General Sharif seems determined and incontrovertibly signalling who is running foreign policy now.

The process of crushing jihadist organisations operating in Pakistan will be anything but easy. They have had two decades to entrench themselves. Worse, the tribal regions of Pakistan, where several operate, have historically never truly been under the control of Islamabad. But the longer the delay in taking the fight to these groups, the greater the threat they will pose to Pakistan’s very stability. And the greater too will be the threat to peace and security in the whole region. Simply tightening the NAP is not going to eliminate terrorism, not least because we still face a danger from home-grown radicals, many of them institutionalising in the proxy jihadist madrassas. If methods to monitor the education in these madrassas are going to be left at the mercy of the same religious-political organisations, that threat will remain.

The forces of terror do not respect moral boundaries. And those prepared to murder and die for a perverted interpretation of Islam are not easily identified. We need to wake up to the fact that we will never be able to safeguard Pakistan’s streets totally so long as the mindset of violent extremism is not understood. Understanding the mindset of a terrorist and their motivation is not easy. What drives them may be more useful in winning the war against terrorism and we have to come up with alternative ways to fight terrorism. Counterterrorism measures make the mistake of attaching our own social mores and biases to the actions of terrorists, thinking we understand their motivation, when we have sometimes got it totally wrong. Often they are not looking for political gain but financial and psychological benefit. It is also difficult to know exactly what they want when they appear to be so inconsistent.

There is no question that those who mastermind the attacks are intelligent, rational and brilliant strategists, often one step ahead of the game. However, their actions can also seem counterintuitive to most of us. First, we may have the wrong idea about what terrorists are trying to achieve and that their priorities may change over time. In addition, we may be overestimating their ability to weigh their options and poorly realise that emotions play such a big role in their actions. How, then, should governments devise countermeasures to halt terrorism when they are dealing with completely different personalities and mindsets prone to change? One solution, as with disease management, should include prevention and not only countermeasures. A greater emphasis should be put on proactive measures such as stopping people wanting to join a terrorist organisation in the first place. Many of them do not even understand the cause they are fighting for; they just want to belong to a group and be part of something. Reaching people before they are drawn into the terrorists’ group and feel sympathy for them would provide a far better chance of winning the war against terrorism. Government and security officials are increasingly trying to find ways to protect the public against terrorist attacks but the fight against terrorism is difficult. It will require us looking at this in more than one way.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com