Daily Times

The conceptualisation and operationalisation of Pakistan’s counterterrorism policies have been inconsistent, contradictory and flawed. Pakistan’s foreign affairs adviser Sartaj Aziz’s latest pronouncement has once again exposed Pakistan military’s lack of sincerity in its counter-terror priorities. Citing fears about blowback from terrorist organisations, Aziz reduced himself to be defending Pakistan’s lack of strong action against the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. He said: “We have to make sure that we move in a decisive way, but at a measured pace and according to our capacity, and ensuring that the blowback is manageable.”

Here again, we are faced with ambiguity, and this is not clarified by Aziz’s statement that was unnecessary and undesirable. From a common sense point of view, his statement meant that seeking a crackdown on all terrorist organisations at once would overstretch the army and lead to more terrorist backlash. Whether or not this is a defeatist mentality, it effectively indicates Pakistan’s backtracking on its explicit commitment that there will no longer be a policy of differentiation between the “good” and the “bad” Taliban. In fact, it will do more damage than good to the prospects for peace.

Despite Islamabad’s repeated proclamations that Pakistan no longer distinguishes between good and bad terrorists, it has been common knowledge that the good Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network have been spared by Pakistan military in its campaign against terrorist safe havens. But Aziz’s public assertion is certainly an alarming reversal of Pakistan’s officially stated policy. It would be naïve to treat his statement as a clumsy attempt at explaining the existing policy — enshrined in the much-trumpeted National Action Plan in 2015 — to treat all terrorist groups as an existential threat that needs to be tackled by their eventual elimination. Pakistan’s foreign office has made no effort to clarify his statement. If what Aziz has said has already been embedded in the official counterterrorism policy of Pakistan, then it is the abandonment of the National Action Plan. It is a classic example of why Pakistan is in a constant state of negativity and self-destruction.

Has Pakistan ever been sincere in rooting out terrorism? Since 2001, the US has provided close to $14 billion in Coalition Support Funds to Pakistan. This is in addition to more than $11 billion in economic assistance to Pakistan funded by the American exchequer. Although the US has conditioned its aid to Pakistan on meeting certain standards, including “demonstrating a sustained commitment to combating terrorist groups on Pakistani soil,” the US administration has had to waive these conditions on grounds that it was in America’s national security interests to continue the funding despite the legislative conditions not being met. Besides pumping billions of dollar in Pakistan, the US has so far been liberal in granting Pakistan access to sophisticated military hardware.

Historical and substantive misgivings about India’s role in Afghanistan play an even bigger role in shaping Pakistani military’s misadventure. Their aggressive anti-Indian mindset and frosty state of bilateral relations has rendered any genuine Indo-Pak rapprochement unattainable. As long as Pakistan’s security establishment does not reinterpret Pakistan’s national security narrative vis-à-vis India and Afghanistan, and accepts the supremacy of civilian leadership, the well-entrenched terrorist networks will continue to harm Pakistan’s and regional security. Although the US Senator John McCain, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Service, who recently visited Pakistan as part of a US delegation, has praised Pakistan’s anti-terror efforts, the price of Pakistan’s unnecessarily obstructionist policies are being felt in the continuous strains in the US-Pakistan relations.

Although there is no “off switch” for the Afghan insurgency somewhere in Islamabad, this is not to say that Pakistan does not control influential Afghan Taliban commanders. In March this year, Sartaj Aziz said, “We have some influence over them because their leadership is in Pakistan”. As long as Pakistan’s security establishment does not realise that the stability of Afghanistan inevitably threatens the stability of Pakistan, no viable road to peace is in sight in Afghanistan.

It is indisputably correct that terrorism is fatally hurting Pakistan, but there seems to be an intractable aversion to abandon it as a policy tool. However, the use of proxies in any shape is a disastrous policy in the longer run. Pakistan’s policy concerning the Afghan conflict must undergo a radical reorientation. If Pakistan hopes to keep the already troubled areas in a state of “controlled chaos” whereby its Afghan Taliban assets as well as the Haqqani network are preserved to be utilised to expand influence into Afghanistan after the eventual American drawdown, Pakistan is not thinking straight.

Pakistan’s immediate neighbours must be worried about the security implications of Pakistan’s apparent turnaround in the fight against terrorism, as reflected in a spate of policy statements from Sartaj Aziz. The international community must now ask Islamabad to clarify its real policy about those terrorists who are operating from Pakistani soil and staging attacks on Afghan territory. Aziz cannot save Pakistan from condemnation by saying that “Pakistan cannot fight Afghanistan’s war on its own soil”. It is as much Pakistan’s war as it is Afghanistan’s.

There can be no escape from frontal assault on Islamist radicalism and terrorism in all their manifestations. Pakistan cannot fight against some terrorist groups and not against others. It cannot dismantle one without the other. Is it possible to imagine a Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, had there been no Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan who were given shelter in Pakistan’s tribal areas? Experience and pragmatism strongly recommends that there is no such thing as controlled chaos as the chaos created by the hydra-headed monster called terrorism cannot be controlled: it can only be ruthlessly eliminated.

The writer is an assistant professor at the Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice, and a coordinator at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Jaipur