Daily Times

They say there is a reason,

They say that time will heal,

But neither time nor reason,

Will change the way I feel,

No-one knows the heartache,

That lies behind my smile,

No-one knows how many times,

I have broken down and cried,

I want to tell you something,

So there won’t be any doubt,

You’re so wonderful to think of,

But so hard to be without.

Even when you know your child is in heaven, it still hurts like hell. Three years are gone yet it seems like yesterday. The people have not forgotten the nightmare that unfolded on this day back in 2014.  The December 16 attack on the Army Public School (APS)in Peshawar was the worst terrorist act in Pakistan’s history that claimed the lives of more than 149 people, including 134 children, and a nearly equal number injured. After a squad of many armed men launched a suicide attack during class hours, indiscriminately firing on school children as they raided classroom after classroom, eight hours elapsed before military forces regained control of the school.

Terrorism has claimed thousands of innocent lives in Pakistan over the last several years, but the APS massacre is the bloodiest in the nation’s recent history. It sparked unparalleled shock across the country and abroad, as people grieved the loss of young children attending an otherwise normal day at school. This national tragedy failed to words which could express the grief and sorrow Pakistan felt that day. All consolation was meaningless. I happened to attend few funerals of relatives who died at APS. The winter gloom of Peshawar was further exacerbated; city and surroundings were consumed by a grief that was beyond narration. Any mention of the tragedy still brings many Peshawar residents to tears.

Responsibility for the massacre was claimed by the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who declared to have undertaken it as revenge for Operation Zarb-e-Azb which had been ongoing since June 2014. The formation of the TTP dates back to 2002. The organization absorbed many Al-Qaeda fighters who fled from Afghanistan to the bordering tribal areas of Pakistan following the US attack in October 2001. In the year 2007, TTP was formally created as an umbrella organization, led by Baitullah Mehsud, incorporating 13 militant groups. Mehsud’s successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, declared a war against the state of Pakistan in October 2013, seeking to replace Pakistan’s ‘un-Islamic system’ with an Islamic one. Hakimullah Mehsud was killed the following month in a US drone strike. Major differences in the historical background, interests and goals of the TTP and the Afghan Taliban mean there is no direct affiliation between the two. The distance between the groups was highlighted when an Afghan Taliban spokesman criticized the APS attack by calling it ‘un-Islamic’.

Words failed to express the grief and sorrow Pakistan felt that day. All consolation was meaningless. I happened to attend few funerals of relatives who died at APS. The winter gloom of Peshawar was further exacerbated; city and surroundings were consumed by a grief that was beyond narration. Any mention of the tragedy still brings many Peshawar residents to tears

After much ado, operation Zarb-e-Azb, was finally launched on June 15, 2014, after it became clear to the government that the peace talks with the TTP were nowhere close to fruition, and that, despite the talks, the TTP had been conducting attacks. The Army was also getting edgy as more and more military installations had been targeted by the TTP. In one particular strike, Lt Gen Sanaullah Niazi, a three-star general involved in previous military operations against the TTP, was assassinated by the group in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa near the Afghan border. Another key event that triggered the military was the TTP’s beheading of 23 captured soldiers from the Frontier Corps in February 2014. The TTP further provoked the military by using Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) members to conduct an attack at the Jinnah International Terminal of Karachi Airport, which resulted in the killing of 28 airport security personnel.

The government’s policy to root out terrorists has been two pronged and polarized, the government has sought to either negotiate with the TTP in the hope of salvaging peace through a deal, or when such peace deals have failed, the army has launched military operations to exterminate the Taliban, as was the case with the Swat operation in 2009 when the Malakand Accord broke down. The Malakand Accord, which was struck between the Government of Pakistan and the TTP in February 2009, and involved making concessions to the militants including the imposition of a radical form of Shari’ain the Malakand Division, has already exposed the dangers of brokering a peace deal with the Taliban. Following the government’s decision to take the offensive, the military launched airstrikes, and 30,000 troops marched into North Waziristan to take part in the operation against the terrorists. Operation Zarb-e-Azb was successfully completed by February 2017 after achieving the desired results. It was replaced with another operation named ‘Radd-ul-Fasaad’ to conduct Counter-Terrorism operations by Rangers in Punjab, to continue the ongoing operations across the country, focus on more effective border security management, countrywide explosive control and de-weaponisation, and pursuance of the National Action Plan.

The dangers inherent in a military operation against the TTP have also manifested themselves through the ugly horror of suicide attacks and blasts that have plagued the country. Pakistan saw a 48 percent rise terrorists attack related fatalities in 2009 following the launch of the army offensive in Swat and Waziristan, which provoked a backlash from the Taliban. Terror attacks having claimed 72,000 lives in the past 14 years. With those numbers in place, Pakistan’s watershed moment was not readily decipherable, but the macabre scene that unfolded in December 2014 in Peshawar was being termed the strongest contender. The brazenness of the APS massacre united all the political parties and military leadership of the country to unanimously condemn the attack and make the National Action Plan (NAP) to eradicate terrorism.

The NAP contains 20 points aimed at eradicating the terrorist mindset and to defeat extremism and sectarianism. Unsurprisingly, there is little evidence of progress on many NAP targets. Groups and individuals banned in Pakistan and also blacklisted under UN Security Council(UNSC) Resolution 1267, continue to operate freely. Efforts to regulate the Madaris, curb hate speech and literature and block terrorist financing have been haphazard at best. A reformed and strengthened criminal justice system could have helped to achieve NAP’s objectives.

The government still has an opportunity, albeit fast shrinking, to reverse course and meaningfully overhaul the current counter-terrorism strategy, but this necessitates revoking major policy concessions to the military. The government should take on that challenge in order to replace an overly militarized response with a revamped, intelligence-guided counter-terrorism strategy led by civilian law enforcement agencies, particularly the police. Dismantling terror networks, detaining and trying jihadi leaders and foot soldiers, disrupting terror financing and ending radicalization through hate speech and literature will require reallocating limited resources in order to strengthen the capacity of the provincial police forces. While the three basic bodies of law, the Penal Code, Criminal Procedure Code and Evidence Act, need to be modernized, it is even more urgent to build police capacity to enforce them. That capacity has been gravely eroded due to the inadequacy of resources, training, internal accountability and autonomy. The current emphasis on revenge and retribution and the emasculation of fundamental rights and rule of law are under miningcitizen’s confidence in the state to deliver justice, a flawed approach that also fuels grievances that benefit the violent extremists the NAP is aimed at combating.

Operations Zarb-e-Azb and Radd-ul-Fasad have almost taken up three and half years. These military operation sare the first of their kinds against the terrorists based in the North Waziristan and other parts of the country. However, there have been previous operations elsewhere in FATA since Pakistan’s first operation against al-Qaeda, TTP and other foreign Islamist militant groups in the area in 2002. The current operation is intended to target al-Qaeda and its associated movements, both foreign and domestic, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Chechen Islamic Jihad Union and Emirate-e-Kaukav, as well as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and other various factions of the TTP. Phenomenal successes have been achieved from these operations. The terrorists’ backbone was broken, main infrastructure dismantled and nexus with sleeper cells largely disrupted.

Despite all its successes, one additional risk arising from these operations is that adjacent Afghan provinces could now become a ‘new North Waziristan’ as Islamist militants pushed out by Zarb-e-Azb have taken refuge there, underlining the problems caused by our failure to get the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani on board before launching the operation. This lack of Pak-Afghan cooperation, and the resulting militant safe havens in Afghanistan, is likely to be one reason why no major terrorist leaders such as Fazlullah, Adnan Rashid, and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, has been killed or captured so far. It is true that the presence of right wingers and self-appointed warders of religion who have emptied the divine from divinity and stand antithetical to everything that God stands for are still the biggest threat. An upheaval of great proportions may be required to counter this growing threat to the country’s survival.

The Writer is Ph.D in Political Science, and a civil servant based in Islamabad. He can be reached at zafarkhansafdar@yahoo.com and tweet@zafarkhansafdar

Published in Daily Times, December 16^th 2017.