Daily Times

The focus of much of the media, both print and electronic, is the future of Imran Khan’s party and who is or is not joining it. Or it is about the latest misdoings or non-doings of the incumbent government and its elected opposition. In all the noise of talking heads shouting at each other and all the acres of print, we need to remind ourselves that, far away from our blustering urban centres, there are other realities as well.

Among the fine print, we read (for example) that “Malak Amanullah, one of the leaders of a tribal lashkar (private militia), and two other persons were gunned down (by) suspected militants.” This was in Bajaur. Another similar incident is also reported from South Waziristan in the same news story. There has been a bomb blast in Swabi, and another one in Kurram Agency. Are these unimportant, isolated happenings? Or are they symptoms of something deeper — like the flu-like fever symptoms that precede the fatal haemorrhaging of untreated dengue?

On a recent TV talk show, General Pervez Musharraf opined (quite correctly) that the Taliban-al Qaeda regime at Kabul, broken by the 2001-02 American attacks, was able to regroup over the next few years. What the General did not mention was the culpability of his own regime in bartering away Pakistan’s sovereign territory to these bloodthirsty savages through ‘deals’ that effectively granted them judicial, governmental and tax collection privileges in much of FATA. After 2003, the anti-Pakistan fulminations of Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri and the Takfiri theories spewed by the firebrand cleric Sheikh Essa, who considers most Pakistanis as wajib-ul-qatl (deserving to die), infidels, galvanised extremist forces, who now sought to militarily carve out ‘Islamic Emirates’ from the regions of Pakistan’s northwest.

The terrorist enclaves into which the FATA agencies had been transformed threatened the ISAF forces in Afghanistan. More important, from our perspective, they constituted a deadly existential menace to our own state and society. Violent primitives erupted outward, carrying their war against the state of Pakistan into our major cities, from Peshawar to Karachi. Their terror bombings have caused the mass murder of citizens everywhere and they are clearly implicated in the assassination of Pakistan’s best known political personality — Benazir Bhutto.

The armed forces correctly, if belatedly, recognised their patriotic duty and responded by driving the insurgents out of Swat first and then, bit by bit, engaging them in their tribal area redoubts. General Kayani, with spot-on accuracy, defined the need for a three-pronged approach: clear, hold and develop.

Where, we need to ask ourselves today, do we now stand in this battle for regaining Pakistan? What is it that we have cleared, held and are now developing?

Let us consider the case of Swat, a settled part of Pakistan and not part of the tribal area fringe. First, Maulvi Sufi Mohammed and then his son-in-law Fazlullah (known as ‘Mullah Radio’) commenced a series of incursions, which began initially as an ideological crusade, as far back as 1995, and developed under the very noses of our authorities. By 2002, the insurgents had achieved effective governmental control over much of this formerly gentle valley. The first phase of the army’s counter-insurgency campaign began in November 2007. But a facile peace agreement was actually signed in May 2008 with Fazlullah, who still refused to lay down arms and demanded the withdrawal of the troops. In April 2008, the insurgents captured the district headquarters in Mingora. They marched into the neighbouring district of Buner and began to move toward Swabi and reconnoitred Mardan.

Enough was enough, finally. The army launched a second round of operations in July 2008. Nearly 2.5 million people were evacuated from their villages. The army bombed Taliban positions using heavy artillery, jets and helicopters. After softening their positions, the military moved in with ground forces. Victory was declared in July 2009.

Operation Rah-e-Rast was the most successful operation to date against the militants. The point, however, is that it was an incomplete success. For one thing, the local agricultural economy was destroyed by the Taliban and army operations. The destruction of bridges, roads and other infrastructure made it almost impossible for farmers to harvest produce. The much-promised reconstruction is far from satisfactory. Only a few dozen of the hundreds of schools and other buildings destroyed by the Taliban have been rebuilt. Normal governmental processes have still not been restored.

Worse, the Taliban leadership escaped and Fazlullah is once again threatening the beleaguered citizens. The Pakistani Taliban continue to launch attacks, keeping the local population in constant fear of a return to the dreaded days of the past. Several local political and social figures have been assassinated.

So much for the clear-hold-develop process in this vital test case of Swat!

When we look beyond Swat, at the tribal areas proper (Bajaur, Orakzai, Mohmand, Khyber, Kurram, North Waziristan and South Waziristan), the picture is even less encouraging. In the past three years, the Pakistani security forces have launched a number of operations against militants in FATA. Each operation concluded with government pronouncements that the ‘miscreants’ had been routed and the area secured. In almost all of these cases, however, the goals of the operations have remained elusive. Although militants were routed in the initial phase, their staying power afterward remained. While hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their villages as a result of the fighting, the Taliban leadership remains alive, seeming to miraculously escape each time, and their support mechanisms are intact.

Now, before Imran Khan and the Ghairat (honour) Brigade come along chorusing that we must surrender our state and society to the worst set of mass-murdering traitors in history, let us accept facts. There has been a generalised failure to implement an effective counter-insurgency strategy that could prevent the Pakistani Taliban from regaining influence once the military operations have wound down. Whatever bouquets or brickbats one may direct at the army, the fact is that the necessary measures beyond the initial army action are not solely military in nature. They are governmental, juridical and economic.

Even the first steps prominently include issues of effective law enforcement, which concern the law enforcement agencies of the Ministries of the Interior at the federal and provincial levels. Law enforcement, let it be clearly understood, comes under civilian governments, which are responsible to civilian parliaments and assemblies, and which are called to task by civilian political parties, courts of law and media commentators. And these as-yet-untaken steps are only the prelude to the large-scale regeneration of governmental institutions and systems in the areas scarred by the insurgency.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet