Daily Times

Another US drone strike last week near Hangu wiped out six associates of the Jalaluddin Haqqani terrorist Network (HQN), namely Kaleemullah, Abdul Rahman, Mufti Hamidullah Haqqani, Maulvi Ahmed Jan, Abdullah and Gul Marjan. Maulvi Ahmad Jan was a confidant of the HQN’s de facto boss Sirajuddin Haqqani and a financier and operational point man. The federal government, except its volatile interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, played down the incident and was content with a run-of-the-mill protest with the US ambassador. The ruling party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and its coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), however, went to town over the incident.

After holding a protest rally this past weekend, the PTI has been blocking the NATO supply route through Peshawar on a daily basis and has asked the provincial police chief to name the US and CIA in an FIR it has filed about the drone attack. While the PTI’s formula — stopping drone attacks and disrupting NATO supply lines — ostensibly to bring peace to the region, is essentially the same as that of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), it does have the right as the provincial government to find out about the drone strike in its territory. The PTI also has the responsibility to explain what exactly the HQN men were doing in the settled areas of Pakistan. The PTI chief, Mr Imran Khan, has claimed that many children were killed in the Hangu attack. He may wish to back up his claim with some evidence now. Mr Khan should also tell whether his provincial administration had secured the crime scene and if it indeed did, how were the bodies moved to North Waziristan (NW) Agency instantly?

While the PTI’s stance on the drones and terrorism is naïve at best and dishonest at worst, the PML-N has also been mum about the HQN’s top moneyman Nasiruddin Haqqani’s assassination. Interestingly, the Islamabad crime scene was hosed and Nasiruddin’s corpse shipped to and buried in NW within hours. It is well known that Jalaluddin Haqqani’s brothers, Ibrahim and Khalil, have been in and out of the Islamabad/Bhara Kahu area for several years now. The HQN men have reportedly travelled from Pakistan to the Gulf Arab countries for fundraising. The practice originally started with Jalaluddin Haqqani himself who used to set up shop in Saudi Arabia at pilgrimage time to raise money and was perfected by his sons and associates.

In tandem with the mystery around Nasiruddin Haqqani’s assassination has been the theory that the Pakistani security establishment has decided to abandon the HQN. A change in the Pakistan army’s, especially the ISI’s, mindset about its longest uninterrupted alliance with a jihadist group would certainly be welcome but it just sounds too good to be true.

During the war against the Soviets and the Afghan communists, the ISI crossed over into Khost to help Jalaluddin Haqqani’s men recapture their infamous Zawara base, which had fallen to the Afghan army. Several writers, including the ISI’s mujahideen handler Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, have chronicled the battle in detail.

If, and that is a huge if, the Pakistani establishment drops the HQN as a partner, that would imply a paradigm shift in not just its Afghanistan policy but will have ramifications for how other jihadist groups are handled. The Pakistani security establishment has abandoned its partners before, replacing the Afghan mujahideen with the Taliban, the JI with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and has discarded many Kashmiri militant factions too. In each of those instances, the replacement was more radical and ostensibly more manageable. The incentive or inducement for the establishment to cut the HQN loose now and the alternatives it might be looking at, may explain the professed change of heart.

While the HQN was never the only show in town, the security establishment favoured it perhaps more than even Mullah Omar’s Taliban. While the HQN has had a symbiotic, not just patron-client relationship with Pakistan, it has grown too big for its size. The extortions, drug running, killings on Pakistani soil and, above all, the perpetual protection the HQN has given to the TTP have become increasingly hard to defend. One proposition could be that (facilitating) the decapitating attacks on the HQN will make it more pliable. A more manageable HQN could pull the rug from under the TTP as well as the Afghan Taliban’s feet. The TTP is unlikely to negotiate and will have to be tackled militarily. The Afghan Taliban are more amenable to dialogue and perhaps more so if they lose the HQN pivot. Could Pakistan be betting only on the Afghan Taliban in the last lap then?

It is unlikely that the Taliban can or will score a decisive victory post-2014, especially if the bilateral security agreement (BSA) between the US and Afghanistan goes through. President Hamid Karzai’s tantrums notwithstanding, the BSA will eventually be signed as the US does not appear ready to leave the field open to al Qaeda and its allies like the HQN. If this scenario pans out, the Taliban might get seated in Kabul but not at the head of the table.

The US has moved from trying to pry away the HQN from the Taliban, to designating it as a terrorist organisation, to decimating its top echelons now. The HQN has been known to be resilient but its time may just be up after all. The Pakistani security establishment may or may not have had a change of heart in the absence of any viable alternatives to its most favoured proxy. But, with the ringleaders of a designated terrorist group being found and killed on Pakistani soil, making unnecessary noise could have serious consequences. Chances are that the Haqqani terrorist network’s fate was presented to Pakistan as a fait accompli.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki