Daily Times

Since 2008 Pakistan military along with federal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial governments have signed over a dozen truce agreements with TTP and its variants. These agreements ranged from with a particular group of TTP within a part of the FATA Tribal Agency to a broader agreement as we saw in Malakand Swat. While the incumbent government, military officials, and apologists of TTP in Pakistan’s mainstream politics assured the public and the world beyond Pakistan of an imminent peace in the offing, each of those agreements proved to be eyewash and so often government and military had to launch a military offensive against almost all factions of TTP. If it wasn’t so the current military operation Radd-ul-Fasad would not have been number eleventh in this sequel.

Last week our military spokesperson claimed the former spokesperson of TTP, Liaqat Ali, who’s notoriously known as Ehsanullah Ehsan, has surrendered and he was in military’s custody. Initially hailed as a great success of current operation, the excitement turned sour when in the following days what Pakistan saw on media was no less than astonishing; that marauder was presented as if actually innocent and was just misled by some radical Islamists. To lace this impression with credence he was shown saying in a video confession that it was the RAW and NDS from our neighbourly nemesis on the east and west that were behind all the terrorism in Pakistan. The RAW and NDS part of his confession has, since then, been blown so intensely as if Pakistanis can forget that Ehsanullah’s hands are stained with the blood of thousands of people and hundreds of school children such as those from APS Peshawar. Ironically, not once did he say anything remorsefully for being the part of TTP.

What otherwise seems as such a shame but media was given access to him to have his interview for TV where he was outrageously eulogised as being benign, with softer heart, the one who liked poetry and many of those who watched breathlessly feared lest he’s asked to share something from his anthology! On a serious note, the way Ehsanullah has been treated and presented leaves no doubt that the state of Pakistan, in the most favourable estimates, is still wishfully groping for a miraculous wand to stamp out religious extremism and insurgency with eyes wide shut. Our erstwhile Army Chief General Kayani had so rightly, after all the bloodshed by terrorists, determined that internal threat from terrorism and insurgency to Pakistan is more existential than the external one. In a matter of five years we have stepped back to stick to our traditional external threat syndrome. With this attitude to counter the religiously motivated sectarian terrorism not only we are earning immense guilt of utter callousness to all those lives lost in the last one and a half decade but also we are inviting the tragedy again.

As usual many have tried to explain this Ehsanullah episode in the context of post conflict Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) without having a slightest idea of this approach in international peace keeping. This particular event and the ones we saw in past in the form of truce and peace agreements with TTP are far from a well thought-out DDR strategy. Over the last almost 30 years, the DDR programmes supported by United Nations and World Bank in tens of countries lying from Latin America to Africa and to Asia has helped in shaping up the DDR principles and best practices. From this rich experience, it’s a well-documented learning that such initiatives are national undertakings, supported by international actors as more often the conflict has open or clandestine international support, and where not individuals but groups and communities of perpetrators and victims are the targets and primary stakeholders agreeing to leave the hostilities and pave way for peace and stability. Nevertheless, importantly, it is not without a transitional justice to minimal reparation, from the outright perpetrators of most heinous crimes.

Instead, what we are witnessing is something we have seen in Balochistan for decades where every now and then a group of ferari i.e. Baloch run-away insurgents surrendered while holding Pakistan flags. Have these occasional surrenders in Balochistan helped us in bringing stability and peace there? We obviously can’t say yes. As it’s in Balochistan, in this case too, the message the citizens of Pakistan get is that security establishment of the country has the exclusive right to capriciously define national security and implement it without much care about the rest. We must be warned that this exclusivity is not just narrow-minded and over simplistic to see and deal with things from overtly security lens but it’s detrimental to the unity of the country for it alienates citizens, civil society and renders democratic institutions such as parliament and judiciary virtually redundant. This will only keep us in the quagmire that we are stuck in for decades. Let’s learn.

The writer is sociologist with interest in history and politics. He’s accessible on Twitter @Zulfirao1