After the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States of America and its allies in 2001, as the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda militants moved into tribal areas, they succeeded in networking with homegrown militant outfits due to the well-entrenched jihadi infrastructure. Therefore, it can be argued that conditions were already ripe in Pakistan for the spike in militancy at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan by the US.
For one, the availability of supportive infrastructure spawned militancy in the country, and for another, religiously conservative society, fed on the steady diet of an exclusionist ideology and deprived of the competency of critical reasoning, effortlessly accepted the Taliban narrative on war. Giving in to the Taliban worldview has muddled the efforts of the government to find military as well as political solutions to the incessant militancy.
The building block of the Taliban discourse is the narrative of victimhood of the ‘Muslim Ummah’. The argument of victimhood is not new and has remained the staple of the Muslim narrative since the 19th century; it has been modulated and re-modulated by Muslim reformists and revivalists, such as Jamal-ud-din Afghani, Rashed Radeh, Hassan al Bannah, Maulana Maudoodi and Syed Qutb.
In simple terms, the narrative of victimhood has three elements: one, the colonisation of the Muslim lands and the pursuit of anti-Muslim foreign and economic policies by the west are the primary reasons for the socio-economic backwardness and political persecution of the Ummah. Two, the west has succeeded in panning out its imperialistic agenda in the Muslim countries with the active collaboration of a pro-western, secular local elite, which is corrupt and self-serving too. And finally, Muslims can prosper spiritually and materially by going back to the fundamentals of Islam as practised by the Khulafa-e-Rashdeen (the four righteous Muslim Caliphs).
Thus, the Taliban nostrum for regaining the glory of the Muslim golden era warrants a two-pronged war against the western imperial interests and their local stooges, as well as the implementation of shariah, or the Islamic way of life in the country.
The Taliban narrative, which has historical continuum and parallels in other Muslim countries, resonates both amongst the religious conservatives, and the educated, middle classes, who deem the rise in militancy as a natural corollary of the imperial wars of the US and other western countries, waged for control of Muslim economic resources and military bases.
The deeper permeation of the Taliban narrative in society can be gauged by the reaction of many Pakistanis to the rise of Malala Yousafzai as a global icon, who is being derided as a western puppet. Malala’s demand for education has been termed by the Taliban as a western conspiracy, which has been hatched to vitiate their ‘heroic struggle’ against NATO forces. The Taliban have also attempted to create moral ambiguity in their narrative by equating the west’s sympathy for the shooting of Malala with its lack of sympathy for victims of drone attacks.
Having said this, unless the government of Pakistan and the educated, middle classes and intelligentsia of the country acknowledge the reality that religious obscurantism and flawed security and foreign policies are responsible for the Taliban militancy, any approach to fight back against militancy and the Taliban narrative would be largely flawed.
In the first place, Pakistani society needs to be exposed to secular, pluralistic perspectives that nullify the narrow-minded, ideological agenda of the Taliban. However, introducing society to a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints ordains that we tread the ‘forbidden’ path to educational curricula reforms. To undertake curricular reforms, it is important to revamp our history books for teaching students a broad-based version of world history, enabling them to place historical events in context. Then, to learn lessons from history and apply them in the present, happening world, students must be imparted knowledge through pedagogical methodologies that impart critical reasoning skills. Apart from revising history books, students must also be taught about the rituals and belief systems of different religious groups living in Pakistan to sensitise them about different religious perspectives.
Second, as aligning of state identity with religion has produced fault lines in the country and has also increased the propensity of society to sympathise with the worldview of the militants, legal measures that have spawned exclusivist identity must be reviewed to foster the rights of minorities and women. Institutions such as the Council of Islamic Ideology, which advises parliament and the provincial assemblies to formulate laws in conformity with the injunctions of the Quran and Sunnah, must be reconstituted to include ulema (religious scholars) with a more modern vision of Islam.
Third, the infrastructure that is used to foster Taliban militancy and foster their narrative, which includes militarised madrassas, publishing houses printing hate literature, and certain Islamic charity organisations that collect donations from the general populace to use them for funding suicide attacks against different Muslim denominations and other religious minorities must be dismantled.
Finally, our security establishment must realise that giving support to non-state actors and the Afghan Taliban is a flawed policy. The Kashmir-centric sectarian organisations that have joined hands with sectarian militant outfits to carry out their pernicious ideological agenda, while providing succour to the Afghan Taliban, has not signalled the success of the doctrine of strategic depth, but has invariably provided depth to the Taliban to carry out their attacks against NATO. Therefore the doctrine of strategic depth and the policy of using non-state actors as proxy agents, with all their unintended consequences, must be reviewed.
(Concluded)
The writer is a research analyst based in Lahore