Daily Times

The current civilian leadership has growing concerns about the terrorist threat to the state. The planned NATO exit from Afghanistan means that the US will need to reformulate aspects of its engagement in the South Asian region. Without doubt, the overall US approach will stay geared towards maintaining influence to maximise focus on narrow security issues and exploit opportunities to reinforce positive structural change within Pakistan. Specifically, Washington will look towards reviewing its South Asian counterterrorism architecture and working towards equilibrium, maintaining a transactional military-to-military relationship focused on convergent interests. Resistance from the Afghan Taliban will inspire the US to modify security sector assistance and devise more realistic metrics to assess political power and progress in this region.
Although no strategic shift related to ending the negotiations with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has been made, threats to the state from the Taliban and a subset of its groups do significantly influence government decision making and its patience to continue working towards a political solution. Both civilian and military leaders appear to recognise the danger the Taliban pose to the state and take the problem seriously but then some of the country’s main political parties are not as wedded as the military and its intelligence agencies are to a policy of maintaining proxies. The Afghan Taliban insurgency and perceptions about the Kabul government in the post-NATO withdrawal scenario are having a delayed effect on the Pakistan-TTP negotiation accord. Belief that India supports anti-state militants and the fact that it is sitting with a rather large window in the diplomatic enclave on the Afghan border provokes Islamabad to support non-state actors who have domestic as well as geopolitical utility collectively. This will be fundamental in setting the current strategic calculus for how Islamabad approaches negotiating with militants in Pakistan.
Although Nawaz Sharif has announced a national strategy to counter militancy, sincere counterterrorism efforts are hampered by capacity shortfalls and systemic infirmities. Intelligence analysis is simply a necessity now but improved coordination among intelligence agencies and a coherent narrative against extremism is difficult to put into practice. The Taliban have encircled the political parties and law enforcing agencies, including judges and the courts, in an enlarged well of fear. The civilian leadership appears more anxious to make peace with anti-state militants yet it is unclear whether the military leadership agrees on either the extent or nature of the internal threat or giving the Taliban the same leverage. Previous peace deals were struck in part to spare the military losses that negatively affect troop morale and damage its prestige. Nevertheless, the military now seems ready to take a tough line against the TTP, arguing against negotiations unless the TTP disarms and accepts the writ of the state — demands the military must know are both non-starters.
The question remains how Pakistan’s leadership, both civilian and military, perceives the Taliban threat to the state. Their strategy and capability to counter them will certainly have significant implications for the country, the region and relations with neighbours and the US. In the current scenario, the surge in Taliban violence does not appear to make it any more likely that the military establishment will take steps to dismantle militant infrastructure. According to foreign media reports, Islamabad will pave the path after revising its coveted support for some of the pro-government Islamist groups on its soil. Bear in mind, any such reversal in the strategy could have significant geo-political implications and may threaten the fabric of national security. Over the medium to long term, it is possible, though far from certain, that steps needed to curtail the militant insurgency across the Pak-Afghan border could develop a momentum of their own and help create conditions for progress against militancy in Pakistan. This would help explain the readiness to forge peace deals with the TTP. However, other factors undoubtedly contribute, including fears among the TTP that sustained Afghan Taliban campaigns with heavy losses could sow dangerous discord among the militants’ rank and file, concerns about protecting the militants’ reputation, acute recruitment shortfalls and the belief that the military has a force structure built for counterinsurgency coupled with a wealth of experience of this type of warfare and little desire to retreat. In reality, these could minimise the threat and keep violence from spreading to the settled areas. However, previous peace agreements with the TTP failed to halt militant violence and instead contributed to the spread of Talibanisation throughout FATA and eventually into the frontier areas such as Bannu, Tank, Kohat, Lakki Marwat, Dera Ismail Khan, Swat and Buner.
Analysts have seen that both right and left-wing politicians continued to believe that they can manage militant organisations by working through leaders of organisations and local leaders in FATA to control their cadre, eliminating individual ‘bad apples’. Time and again this top-down approach has failed both collectively and individually because these efforts were ad hoc, poorly coordinated, under-resourced and vested with hidden political interests. The TTP was and remains a decentralised entity with many factions operating under its umbrella. Suggestions that the government attempt to exploit and exacerbate existing fissures by negotiating with different factions at different times may beget a reaction to negotiation efforts in FATA and coalesce the Taliban into a rejuvenated jihad, increasing the flurry of terrorist attacks and demanding an extreme interpretation of Islamic law throughout the country. It is far better that efforts be made by pro-state leaders to undercut revolutionary ideology and de-radicalise anti-state militants since it will earn them credibility with their cadre. Moreover, hawks and doves exist in every organisation, and hawks in pro-state groups sometimes sanction anti-state activities. The intensifying integration of the negotiation milieu can dissolve ideological confusion and greater opportunities for collaboration in stopping anti-state violence and increase the potential for people to drift across the line dividing pro- and anti-state actors.
Delay in launching a military operation in FATA is providing the Taliban time to vacate their sanctuaries. In addition to dispersing across the border or within the tribal areas, the Taliban may also flee to south Punjab, upper Sindh and Karachi. Karachi has long served as a sanctuary and organisational hub, and it is emerging as a new target for terrorism and violence. Regarding action outside FATA, civilian and military elites fear that a crackdown on militant networks and organisations could result in a series of standoffs along the lines of the Lal Masjid, followed by a spate of terrorist attacks. Washington is pressing Pakistan to increase its military efforts in FATA while attempting to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. From Pakistan’s perspective, this does not leave space to negotiate a political solution. Notably, this assumes the TTP-led insurgency can be resolved through negotiations in tandem with an end to the US military presence in Afghanistan and presumably to drone strikes as well. Intelligence agencies will be rightly worried that, after 2014, the TTP and its allies could profit further from safe havens in Afghanistan and that this situation could become worse if relations with Kabul deteriorate. Alternatively, if the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network succeed in assuming more power in Afghanistan after 2014 then even Islamabad may worry because they could back the TTP against Pakistan.

The writer is a member of the Diplomate American Board of Medical Psychotherapists Dip.Soc Studies, member Int’l Association of Forensic Criminologists, associate professor Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at the Huntercombe Group United Kingdom. He can be reached at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com