In his latest public statement, Chief of the Army Staff General Qamar Bajwa has said that the country faces a hybrid war meant to weaken it internally. ‘Hybrid wars’ is a broad category that comprises many hostile tactics, over and above, conventional warfare. Given his position as the head of the country’s armed forces, each and every word associated with the COAS is taken quite seriously by the Pakistani public, but use of vague categories run the risk of multiple interpretations. The fear, in such instances, is that those with axes of their own to grind will interpret such statements to suit their agendas. This politicises his office as well as the institution he represents — a possibility he will neither desire, nor tolerate, we are hopeful. In the best interest of Pakistani democracy, then, General Bajwa may consider specifying exactly what aspect of this hybrid war he refers to. That being said, the COAS’s latest statement follows his reference to engineered protests, earlier last week, at a time when there is an ongoing wave of public activism led by youngsters from displaced Pashtun communities seeking, among other constitutional demands, enforcement of due process of the Pakistani law in their territories. Given this timing, it is likely that General Bajwa sees the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) as a component of hybrid warfare. Given his responsibilities towards the country’s security, we don’t underplay his concerns about the designs of hostile intelligence agencies. To uncover and tackle those designs is his job. But we plead with him to not loose sight of history, as it unfolded in reality rather than as it was retrospectively told by those with ideological designs of their own. For once he does that he will realise that the only time foreign interference harmed Pakistan was when our state institutions failed to address the grievances of the majority population of the country in 1971. We also plead with him to not look at the PTM from a narrow security-centric perspective. The youngsters leading the PTM, and the masses following them to their rallies, have suffered more than any other community at the hands of terrorist outfits and flawed state policies in the past four decades. The PTM is a classic case of civil society activism, emerging from the grassroots, and its demands are completely within the ambit of the Pakistani constitution. Once met, these demands will strengthen the federation. In doing so, the PTM will help us achieve what the mainstream political forces of the country have been trying to for a while, but haven’t yet been able to. The COAS also said that the armed forces remained focus on the primary objective of eliminating terrorist outfits without discriminating among them. Here too, greater clarity is needed since insufficient action against certain groups was the reason why Pakistan was grey-listed. Not coincidently, some of those groups are being mainstreamed into the electoral process, without any regulatory checks on their extremist narratives. An across-the-board action must encompass these groups for their extremist activities as well. * Published in Daily Times, April 16th 2018.