Daily Times

On Monday, February 25, the surgeon general of the army — the highest ranking doctor in the military — Lt Gen Mushtaq Baig, was killed by a suicide bomber. The official version of the incident is that the teenaged suicide bomber, pretending to be a beggar, was waiting for a lucrative target and, spotting the car of a serving general which had stopped at a traffic light, blew himself up, killing the general, all those in his car and some bystanders.
The implication is that the general was not being targeted but was an incidental victim. That might well be true, since the surgeon general, far from being soldierly, was a doctor who, like any other doctor, treated people without concern with who or what they are. What is more, Gen Baig was devoutly religious and prayed five times a day; the archetype that should be safe from the attention of militants — but this, the militants may not have known,
There is, however, the other side of the picture.
The army, more than other security forces, has for quite some time been targeted by extremists, but until now, the extremists had never managed to kill a general.
Of all the serving generals in Rawalpindi, the only one who had a fairly regular schedule of arrival and departure was the surgeon general and his route seldom varied.
It is possible that the militants wanted to target a serving general and it mattered little to them if he were a warrior general or a healing one; it also did not matter if he was devoutly religious or totally immoral or amoral. All that mattered was that he was a serving three-star officer and offered a lucrative, soft target.
It is interesting that during the elections, when trouble was expected, and when plenty of soft targets were available, there was no incidence of a suicide attack; there was what in military parlance is termed as, a ‘strategic pause’.
The puzzling question is: why should the extremists refrain from disrupting the elections when the crowds gathered at polling stations offered such lucrative targets? The only plausible answer that one can find is that they were aware of the fact that the elections would result in a victory for the parties that opposed Musharraf’s policies and the extremists wanted that.
This possibility is supported by the fact that as soon as the election results were in, a spokesmen for the self-styled leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, announced that they were ready for talks with the newly elected government, sans Musharraf!
But if this supposition is accurate, why then, the sudden resurgence of violence, the first instance being an attack on an NGO engaged in relief work in Mansehra and the second targeting a senior military officer?
It is important to realise that ‘extremists’ do not belong to a monolithic organisation; they are more like a hydra-headed monster. There are splinter groups whose sole objective is continued insecurity and unrest in the country. Therefore, all violent instances may not have a unified source, which makes it all the more difficult to figure out motivations behind such attacks.
One thing is for certain: the currently employed strategy to fight extremists is not working. While Pakistan can ill afford the domestic cost of its support to George W Bush’s ‘war on terror’, it is equally certain that we need to scotch our own snakes and bring an end to this insecurity. All self-styled analysts in this country, including this author, have been offering advice on this subject; some purposeful, some less so.
There is perhaps a possibility that we might try to take a leaf out of the book of the British government and try to find out how, after centuries of fighting against their Irish citizens, they managed to reach the negotiating table; where now those very terrorists of the IRA sit across the table of the prime minister to reach a peaceful settlement.
It is patently obvious that when faced with opponents ready to die for their cause, the threat of, or the use of, force is the last thing to deter them; and the indiscriminate use of force, they relish. Not only does this establish their credibility as the oppressed, fighting against tyranny, but the greater the collateral damage, the greater the numbers that swell their ranks. Consequently, against such an opposition, no state can win the war by force; there is no option but to negotiate.
It is also obvious that no state would like to initiate negotiations from a position of weakness and therefore the writ of the state must first be established for successful negotiations.That is the paradox; the use of force does not deter the extremists and without the use of force the state cannot gain the position of strength necessary for a successful dialogue.
To understand the possibility of how this paradox can be resolved we need to advert to a term in the study of military strategy; ‘the centre of gravity’. This term is used for ‘an individual, a location, a city, a composition of force structure, or even a concept which, if destroyed, might break the will of the opponent or, at the very least, weaken them morally or physically, as to enable us to inflict the decisive blow and win the war’.
Perhaps it is time for the Pakistan army to identify and target the centre of gravity, creating conditions favourable for a negotiated settlement; by taking a leaf out of the British government’s book and how they reached where they are today.

The author is a retired brigadier. He is also former vice president and founder of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI). This is the first article in a two-part series. The second article will appear on Monday