Daily Times

The so-called stakeholders struck again last week. A suicide bomber killed the law minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Mr Israrullah Khan Gandapur. The minister, a decent young man from all accounts, was exchanging Eid greetings with the visitors at his house in his native Kulachi. The official response of the provincial ruling party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), to which Mr Gandapur belonged, and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), which rules at the Centre, was nothing more than muffled bleating. Forget an unequivocal condemnation of the act and its perpetrators, if not a befitting response to such an atrocity, the federal interior minister ‘expressed sorrow’ and the provincial government begged the terrorists to stop killing on humanitarian grounds! The current leadership clearly lacks a plan and the resolve to fight terrorism. The PTI and the PML-N may just be what Winston Churchill would have called sheep in sheep’s clothing.

The PTI and its leader, Mr Imran Khan, lead the herd that continues to dream of a dialogue with those who continue to kill and maim without pause. Never being willing to name the jihadists for the barbarity they have unleashed over a decade, Mr Khan and his lieutenants are now actively muddying the waters by blaming the elusive ‘foreign hand’ and ‘enemies of peace’ even for the violence that the terrorists directly claim. The PTI leader seems to suggest that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) wants a negotiated settlement but there are spoilers, handled presumably by the Afghan-Indo-US-Zionist combine, which are thwarting the process through bombings. He had the gall to say that if the Taliban had been given an office, according to his whims, they could be asked directly if they had killed Mr Israrullah Gandapur. The irony in insisting on negotiating with and accommodating these ‘foreign agents’ is lost on Mr Khan.

Mr Khan’s naiveté about the terrorists and their motives is now downright dangerous as his party runs the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province worst affected by jihadist terrorism. If it were just an individual losing the plot it might be different, but Mr Khan has a large following, and a strong presence in the National Assembly, where he reportedly is jostling to become the opposition leader. Mr Khan’s relatively new theory that there are bad Taliban within the bad Taliban of the TTP does not hold water. The jihadists have never been one cohesive force even when their antecedents ravaged Afghanistan in the 1980s. Hundreds of Mujahideen groups fighting then made it difficult for even their ISI handlers to keep track, and they mandated that the insurgents join one of the Peshawar-based seven Afghan groupings to be eligible for the Pak-Saudi-US largesse and weapons. Similarly, the TTP has been a coalition of assorted groups and thugs operating in different areas, pledging nominal allegiance to Mullah Omar and Hakeemullah Mehsud, and cooperate to extend and multiply force, but, at times, also fight among themselves.

But it is not all naiveté on Mr Khan’s part. He disingenuously ignores not just the TTP’s own claims for perpetrating hundreds of attacks across Pakistan but its stated objectives too. When asked by the BBC recently if the US withdrawal from Afghanistan will have an impact on his movement, Hakeemullah Mehsud had said: “There will be no impact of the American withdrawal on the TTP, because friendship with America is only one of the two reasons we have to conduct jihad against Pakistan. The other reason is that Pakistan’s system is un-Islamic, and we want that it should be replaced with the Islamic system. This demand and this desire will continue even after the American withdrawal.” Contrary to Mr Khan’s portrayal of the TTP as wayward boys fighting to avenge the harm done to their tribal home and honour by the US drones, the TTP’s head honcho is clearly vying to impose a sharia-based emirate in Pakistan, regardless of the US presence in the neighbourhood. Whether TTP can succeed or not is a different story but it surely seems hell-bent on endless bloodshed along the way.

While building a strong narrative for no action against the relentless jihadist enterprise, Mr Khan also conveniently passes on all the responsibility for talks to the federal government. Although the PTI chief is merely playing politics, the buck does stop with the PML-N and its Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. As Khyber Pakhtunkhwa reels under terrorism, Mr Sharif’s gingerly attitude towards that hapless region remains deeply disappointing. The Cabinet Committee on National Security has met perhaps once, and the PML-N’s much-touted national counterterrorism policy and force remain elusive as ever. But Mr Sharif did order fast-tracking the planned special counterterrorism force in Punjab. The prime minister has had several days’ sojourns in Saudi Arabia and London but spent barely an hour in Peshawar — the city that has lost hundreds of innocent lives within days.

Mr Sharif appears as clueless as Mr Khan about both the negotiations and the dialogue. When on foreign tours Mr Sharif makes some noises about dealing forcefully with those (terrorists) who flout the state’s writ, but when at home, he settles for calling the terrorist attacks in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, such as the one that killed Mr Gandapur, as “not acceptable”. It seems that for all practical purposes Mr Sharif is concerned only with saving his home province of Punjab, and considers the Pashtun lands a sandbag to achieve that goal. Some argue that better policing and law enforcement has kept the terrorist menace to a minimum in Punjab. But there are clear signs that the PML-N’s appeasement of the jihadists and sectarian terrorists over the past several years has bought it some reprieve in the Punjab.

The TTP’s Omar Media has released the video of their IED attack that had martyred General Sanaullah Niazi last month. Watching the gruesome clip one is reminded of its marked resemblance to the videos the Afghan Mujahideen used to release after killing Afghan and Soviet soldiers in the 1980s. According to its planners, the Pakistan-sponsored jihad was supposed to remain confined to consuming Afghans only, but it did not. And the terrorism consuming the men, women and children in the Pashtun lands won’t remain confined to across the Attock Bridge either.

Churchill had said that an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. The PTI and the PML-N sheep must not forget that the jihadist crocodiles are aplenty in the political waters of Punjab.

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