Daily Times

Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad is the tenth joint military operation against religious insurgents across Pakistan since 2007. All these operations and sacrifices of our forces and civilians have indeed helped in significantly weeding out terrorist outfits on the ground, yet Pakistan has suffered intermittently from spectacular terrorist attacks, such as at Army Public School Peshawar and recently at Sufi shrines in Balochistan and Sindh.

Certainly, the menace of sectarian and religiously motivated terrorism won’t end with just sweat and blood from our law enforcement agencies. These terrorists that our forces have to fight out physically have adopted a particular set of beliefs that convinces them to wage a war against not only innocent civilians but also the state as they find the very concept of nation-state heretic.

Of course, it’s then that particular religious interpretation and narrative produces jingoistic champions who believe in this narrative intensely enough to massacre others on the basis of their skewed beliefs. So, weeding out these groups through successful military action has provided us with only a symptomatic relief.

It was interesting to see Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif recently urging religious scholars to present a counter-narrative against extremist and violent religious beliefs so that the dream of eternal peace can be realised. Now, in a nation-state that Pakistan is, albeit with multiple ethnicities, the state has to take the lead in formulating a narrative. Didn’t Jinnah and our other leaders in the country’s independence movement tirelessly claim and succeed in convincing the world at large that the Muslims of India constituted not a minority community but a separate nation entitled for a homeland of its own?

Owing to the state’s policies, the society has become far too intolerant on anything even distantly related to religion. These issues are viewed in black and white terms without the slightest recognition of grey areas. It’s at this point where state narrative should start acting from and fight out on ideological front supplemented by military operations. Pakistan will continue to struggle to stamp out violent extremism from the country unless state institutions overcome their naiveté to remove terrorism mainly through symptomatic treatment. Indeed, religious militancy and consequent terrorism aren’t policing or security issues. They are related to the way religion is propagated, practiced and even exploited in this country in outright violation of the state’s Constitution. After all, people in pre-Zia era were no lesser Muslims and their tolerance of sectarian and political dissent should serve as a guide to counter the menace of violent extremism.

A possible solution lies in state reclaiming its superseding monopoly in regulating factors responsible for the chaos. In this regard, the National Action Plan (NAP) could have been a modest step towards making Pakistan free from sectarian bigotry and terrorism. Unfortunately, implementation on the NAP fell appallingly short on the top five of the twenty points related to containing terrorists and their abettors. It’s so telling that when the 21st amendment was debated in the parliament, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) abstained from voting in favour of the proposed law. JI wanted the word religion to be omitted from the text of the bill while JUI insisted that the word sect is objectionable. Such was the level of disarray among political leaders even after the tragic APS incident.

State institutions’ enthusiasm for NAP also gradually withered away have witnessed in the last two years. Just one of the many instances from the government’s conduct suffices to note how confused it has been. Last October, the government denied the PTI to hold its convention in Islamabad as the banned terror group ASWJ comfortably held its rally in the federal capital.

The enthusiasm of the state has rekindled in the aftermath of a series of suicide attacks across Pakistan just recently. The military, like in past, has launched yet another operation to eliminate terrorism across Pakistan, which is still ongoing as mentioned initially. Unfortunately, this rinse-repeat strategy of launching military offensives after periodic large-scale massacres hasn’t helped us much. And it can’t help beyond removal of a cohort of terrorists operating at any given time.

Until the state and its strategic institutions come forward with outright clarity and vision to institutionalise and enforce the narrative of peace and coexistence within the society, we have no deliverance in sight. The day the government gets determined to regulate seminaries, promote diversified culture in the society and prevent religious outfits from hovering over our security and foreign policy, we will finally be able to move towards the right direction.

The writer is a sociologist with interest in history and politics. He is accessible at zulfirao@yahoo.com