Anyone foolish enough to still harbour any hope for the much-talked about peace talks between the government and the Taliban should disabuse themselves of all such notions now that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have elected a new leader. After the death of TTP leader Hakeemullah Mehsud in a drone strike last week, Maulana Fazlullah, a ruthless hardliner, has become the head of the militant organisation. This is certainly bad news for all those trumpeting on about any negotiations with these terrorists as Fazlullah himself has said that any talks will be a “waste of time” and that he does not believe in talking to the government of Pakistan because it is a ‘stooge’ of the US. Heartening words indeed.
One need not be reminded that the Taliban under Maulana Fazlullah wreaked havoc in Swat from 2007 to 2009, subjecting the citizens there to the most barbaric form of governance one can imagine. People were publicly hanged in the town square, which became known as khooni chowk (bloody square), women and men were publicly flogged for the slightest discrepancies, girls were not allowed to go to school and, in 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head on the orders of Fazlullah for daring to dream of an education. Yes, this is the man the state must now contend with. After the army’s offensive in Swat in 2009, Fazlullah fled to Afghanistan where he took refuge under the umbrella of the Haqqani network. From there he kept ordering cross-border attacks against our forces and stands accused of being behind the beheadings of 17 soldiers in an attack on a check post in 2012. He is a diehard enforcer of a draconian version of sharia and has vowed to let nothing stop him from his mission. According to latest reports, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Chief Minister Punjab Shahbaz Sharif are under threat, anticipating revenge attacks by the TTP for the drone strike that killed Mehsud. What we can be sure of are more attacks against the nation’s innocent people in devastating ways. While the government may have presented three anti-terror ordinances in the National Assembly on Thursday, no real headway seems to have been made to develop a national security policy or to arm our law enforcement agencies effectively in this war against the terrorists. On top of that we see Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar playing to the gallery by blaming everything on the drone that killed Hakeemullah, saying that it was the reason peace talks have broken down. What makes him think the TTP would have been faithful to them in the first place? It is advised that all such dreamers brace themselves for the terror onslaught that seems sure to come our way. *