The clamouring chorus of appeals to General Raheel Sharif not to think about retiring this year continues unabated. In the meantime, the general has had it announced that Operation Zarb-e-Azb, with which his name will always be linked, has now entered its final phase. Having achieved its objectives, or so it is implied, it will thereafter be wound up.
Yes, general, and shortly after that we will find that the long-lived insurgency, against which you have led the charge, will be active again along with its expanding exterior perimeter of spectacular acts of terrorism. Since you will have retired, we will be looking to your successor, and later your successor’s successor, to take up the good fight. The point to remember is that the goal of the insurgent is not to defeat the military force. That is almost always an impossible task, given the disparity in resources between a national army and guerrilla bands. Rather, the insurgents seek, through a constant campaign of sneak attacks, to inflict continuous casualties upon superior forces and thereby, over time, demoralise the military and erode political support for operations. It is a simple strategy of repeated pinpricks and bleedings.
Now, let us be perfectly clear. One is all for Operation Zarb-e-Azb, which finally re-awakened our counter insurgency efforts and carried them out in to North Waziristan, Over the years, one has also been all for Operations Rah-e-Rast, Rah-i-Nijjat, Black Thunder, and the numerous other campaigns that were mounted against the savage, so-called ‘Islamic’ enemies of the state. But the point is that a counter insurgency (COIN) campaign is only one part — although an essential part — of the necessary process. There is a massive counter terrorism campaign that also needs to be undertaken, as per the National Action Plan (NAP) but which still seems to be idling and sputtering without any real movement, the protestations of the interior minister notwithstanding.
Beyond even these processes, as I suggested in these pages a fortnight ago, the success of these campaigns — indeed, our national survival — are predicated, first and foremost, on cleaning up the arms that have multiplied across the land and blocking further supplies thereof. Sadly, this simply does not seem to be even remotely under consideration. In fact, the proliferation of weaponry seems to be growing at an accelerating pace. One reads, horrified, of plans to now hand out still more guns, to teachers, this time! It is not just a matter of deweaponisation, difficult a proposition as that may prove to be in a land as wedded as ours is to manly displays and horrifyingly frequent use of firearms; it is also imperative for our legitimate authorities to conceive and put in place processes that one can only describe as structural. These would include the development of a more valid national narrative, the absorption of FATA into Pakistan as an ordinary part of the state, the reforming of madrassas (seminaries) and mosques, and the cleansing of toxic content from textbooks and syllabi.
What happened to this unfortunate country at the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s was that three sets of ambitions came together to seize the opportunities presented by the destruction of Afghanistan’s Durrani monarchy at the hands, first, of the former monarch’s own Pakhtoonistani cousin and then by a cabal of communist military officers. The first of these ambitions was a need for legitimacy — and therefore longevity — on the part of the evil regime of the usurper Ziaul Haq. The second was the desire of the US, working through the CIA, to humiliate the USSR in revenge for the debacle the Americans had suffered in Vietnam. The third was the desire of Saudi Arabia to project its own influence, by spreading its particular Wahhabi variant of Islam into the rest of the Muslim world, a project that had gained greater urgency in the context of the Iranian revolution.
For this particular confluence of ambitions, it was not enough that Pakistan should act as a conduit for arms and fighting men into Afghanistan. Pakistan had to be totally transformed into a gigantic nation-wide ideological processing plant for the production of fanatical killing machines — murderous goons, totally brainwashed into subservience to the wishes of their controllers. No less than a complete socio-cultural engineering project was therefore undertaken. Our history, the history of one of the earliest birthplaces of human civilisation, was rewritten to disconnect us from the splendours of Mohenjodaro and Gandhara, and connect us exclusively to the Ummayyads, through Hajjaj bin Yousaf’s able nephew Mohammed bin Qasim.
The religious values of Pakistani Muslims, which had ranged in the main between the broadly tolerant Hanafi conservatism of our grandparents’ generation to the devotional ecstasies of our Sufi forbears, were cast into a new, more aggressive mould. Markers of this new kind of faith were not faith-driven, but identity-based. Religion had become a political tool, indeed, a political weapon.
The educational system was remodelled to valorise the warrior ethic, militancy and intolerance. Whole new curricula were devised, at all academic levels, and textbooks were developed at the University of Nebraska in the US and then printed in Pakistan. This was perhaps the most disgraceful part of this project, this long-term disfigurement of the minds of our nation’s youth by feeding them massive doses of toxic conceptual nostrums.
Within the educational system, madrassas were seen as particularly adept mechanisms for churning out hordes of the indoctrinated: educated but in fact unfit for most occupations. There were fewer than 300 madrassas in Pakistan at the time of partition. In the Zia years, it ballooned to 2,800. However, even after the downfall of the Zia regime, the state seems to have continued to have an interest in supporting these institutions and they are now believed to have crossed 35,000 in number. Now, one is by no means suggesting that all, or even most, of these are necessarily involved in promoting militancy. But, clearly, by its very nature, madrassa education is inherently prone to such misuse. The state must therefore keep a sharp eye on what they are doing and how they are being funded, an oversight measure that the madrassas are staunchly resisting.
Where such thoroughgoing socio-cultural engineering has been carried out over so many years, is it not clearly necessary to develop and institute a conscious re-engineering process? Unfortunately, I do not think that this near-geriatric government, whose vision hardly rises above motorways and other shiny gewgaws, can make the necessary imaginative leap. As for the opposition, it is obsessed, on the one hand, with petty patronage and graft and, on the other, with sloganeering and dharnas (sit-ins). I believe that civil society will have to unequivocally step forward.
As for the remodelling of FATA and the stanching of terrorist fund flows, I will offer my comments another time.
The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet