In November, 24 Pakistani army soldiers were killed by the Afghanistan-based US and NATO forces in a border attack at Salala checkpost in FATA. The Pakistani media, banned militant organisations, religious political parties and urban middle class as well as liberal Pakistanis continue to condemn the attack on a daily basis. More than a month since the incident the public demonstrations against it continue to take place in the country. Pakistan has sought an apology from the US for the attack. The incident has worsened Pak-US relations, which were already at one of the lowest points in history.
Compare this grandiose response with the response given to the killing of almost the same number of Frontier Corps (FC) paramilitary soldiers killed by the militants in Tank and Bannu a month after the US killing of the Pakistani army soldiers. The difference could not be starker. The government, the military, the media, militant organisations, right-wing political parties, middle class and liberal Pakistanis stand united in silence over this incident as if it never happened or is not worth paying attention to. Neither the government has asked for an apology from the Taliban nor has it expressed the resolve to bring the killers of the FC soldiers to justice. If the past record of the government is anything to go by, one must forget about justice for the affected FC families. In May 2011, over 70 FC recruits were most brutally killed in twin suicide attacks in Charsadda district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. By 2010, over 700 FC soldiers have been killed in the war on terror. It seems justice for the FC soldiers killed or injured by the Taliban or for their families have never been even an issue. Are the FC soldiers less worthy than the soldiers of the Pakistan Army? Are the sufferings of the families of the FC soldiers any less than the sufferings of the families of the army soldiers? What reasons explain the totally different Pakistani response to the two equally brutal killings?
One explanation can be that the killing of the soldiers, whether FC or the Pakistan Army, really does not matter for those Pakistanis who continue to protest the border incident at Salala checkpost. What matters is who killed the soldiers. If the killer is the US, they will condemn with all they have. If the killer is the Taliban, they will forgive and forget. Many will even blame the US for the acts of terror committed and publicly owned by the Taliban. This is the logical outcome of Pakistan’s role as a hostile ally in the war on terror whereby it fights with the US against the militant groups but at the same time nurtures the militants as proxies against the US. It is obvious that this dubious role is neither capable of pleasing the US nor all of the proxies as some among them might feel cheated and violently react, especially those who are no more wanted by the military establishment that has tried to eliminate them in the US drone attacks or in mysterious targeted killings by Pakistani spies. The bottom line is that publicly anti-Americanism has to be kept going to support the Pakistani Generals in dealing with the US no matter how many Pakistani soldiers or innocent Pakistanis have been killed by the disgruntled proxy elements or by ‘design’ by their state handlers to show to the world that Pakistan is really paying the price for participation in the war on terror. This is because the US and Pakistan are not on the same page in terms of strategic objectives in Afghanistan.
The other reason that explains the silence over the brutal killings of the FC soldiers is their Pashtun identity. Let me say at the outset that many soldiers of the Pakistan Army are Pashtuns who have been giving their lives in the line of their professional duty along with their colleagues from other ethnicities. There has been an ethnic profiling of the Pashtun soldiers and officers of the Pakistan Army in a malicious manner whereby their sympathies have been associated with the Taliban while absolving the non-Pashtun soldiers and officers of any pro-Taliban views, especially the Punjabis in the army. They were portrayed as the only soldiers and officers in the army who have refused to perform their professional responsibilities or have hindered the army high command from taking action against the Taliban due to their Taliban sympathies. Well known Pakistani journalists have been promoting this misleading as well as degrading view about the Pashtuns in the Pakistan Army. As far as I know, the ISPR never came forward to reject this propaganda against the Pashtun soldiers and officers. This leaves one wondering whether the army was endorsing the propaganda against the professional loyalties of its own soldiers and officers from a specific ethnic group. I will come back to this issue on some other occasion. Now I will only focus on the FC soldiers, whose rank and file and non-officer cadre, unlike the Pakistan Army, are exclusively drawn from the Pashtun tribes in FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while its officer cadre is exclusively drawn from the Pakistan Army.
The FC is split into two independent forces: FC Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FC Balochistan. Both FCs are individually led by senior level military officers from the Pakistan Army. The force is under a strict military discipline and its immediate command remains in the hands of the commissioned army officers appointed on deputation from the Pakistan Army. In theory, the FC is meant to be assisting the regular armed forces of Pakistan on need basis. In practice, however, the FC remains part and parcel of the powerful military-intelligence complex of Pakistan that has remained beyond the control of any civilian government of the country. On the one hand the FC is used to brutally suppress any opposition to the military establishment of Pakistan, no matter how genuine the opposition may be, such as the use of FC in suppression of the ongoing nationalist resistance in Balochistan. On the other hand, the FC soldiers are mercilessly exposed to the worst kinds of brutalities from the battle-hardened militants in pursuit of the strategic objectives in Afghanistan, such as the war on terror, while at the same time they are subjected to a malicious propaganda linking their sympathies with the Taliban rather than the Pakistani state.
(To be continued)
The writer is the author of Taliban and Anti-Taliban