Despite all the success stories of the Operation Zarb-e-Azb a sense of pessimism still prevails on this great drive of government against militancy in Pakistan. No doubt, the incidents of terrorism have taken a nosedive, and the number of victims of terrorism has also significantly declined, but the implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) still appears to be far from its basic goal.
During a Senate session on September 5, 2016 — which was held to discuss the suicide attacks on lawyers’ fraternity in Quetta and Marwan — some members of the Senate pointed out that even banned outfits and their leadership were freely carrying out activities in Pakistan, collecting donations and carrying posters with images of generals printed alongside their leaders, and all this was going on unnoticed. These accusations can be regarded as utterances of some disgruntled members of the Senate who always have an axe to grind against the government. Brushing aside these remarks from Senators as unreliable let us move on to another event.
On August 18, 2016, a report had appeared in the press claiming that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police officials were trying to hide the escape of 11 ‘hardcore terrorists’ from police custody in Mardan. This ‘great escape’ was executed with the help of a Mardan police constable nearly two months before this report was made public, and the escapees, after staging jailbreak, were able to sneak out of Pakistan, and take shelter in the neighbouring country of Afghanistan without facing any difficulty. According to the report, these terrorists were planning to carry out some attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially in Mardan. Lo and behold, this pre-warning came true merely two weeks after the report. The cities of Mardan and Peshawar resounded with suicide bomb explosions on the same day, leaving several people dead and injured. Among the victims were many lawyers.
Connivance of insiders with terrorists is not a new phenomenon. The jailbreaks of Dera Ismail Khan and Bannu, and the terrorist attacks on the PAF Mehran base, the GHQ and dock area are a few examples where complicity of insiders had played a role. In Mardan it appears to be the complicity of a low-profile police constable, but the sheer carelessness and inefficiency of top level police officials cannot be ignored for the role it played, especially for their decision to allow detention of 11 hardcore militants in a barrack of the Police Lines with only two policemen on guard. Nothing could be more suitable for militants to execute their escape plan. Simply by alluring one of the two guards and eliminating the other one, terrorists were free to proceed to their destination across the border in Afghanistan. How did they manage to skip all check posts and police contingents that must have been on the lookout for them is a mystery. But these terrorists are not the only ones that have found sanctuaries in Afghanistan, there are umpteen more.
Right before the initiation of the Operation Zarb-e-Azb, most of the militants hiding in FATA slipped out of the country, and took shelter in the bordering areas of Afghanistan. Among them were most of the top-level commanders and other militants belonging to banned groups like the Lashkar-e-Islami, Pakistani affiliates of Daesh, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its multiple splinter groups. The porous Pak-Afghan border, non-existent writ of government, and the factor of easy-to-mix with the migrating local population were quoted by government as the greatest advantages available to FATA militants. All these factors helped them sneak in and out of the country at their will.
One can buy this argument because of the geographical location of FATA and its history of militancy that spanned over three decades, but what about Punjab? Is it also situated in a FATA-like geographical location? If not, then what message does the admission of Rana Sanaullah, Law Minister of Punjab, convey when he says that all ‘most wanted’ criminals from Punjab have gone outside the country, and are now hiding in Kunar or beyond? The readers can make their own guesses.
As many as 109 criminals belonging to different banned outfits, and with their names posted in each police station of the province with head money ranging from one hundred thousand to 10 million rupees, were able to dodge the security agencies of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA regions, and reach their destination without having any ‘encounter’, a very frequent phenomenon these days. Mind it, some of these militants are involved in attacks on the former president, Pervez Musharraf and former prime ministers, Shaukat Aziz and Benazir Bhutto, besides many other high profile victims.
More than 90 of these criminals belong to the banned outfits like the TTP, Sipah-e-Mohammed Pakistan, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi; five of them are affiliated with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Muhammed, organisations that are believed to be fighting for freedom in the Indian-held Kashmir. However, for some reasons, they, at some point in time, had turned their guns inside Punjab and targeted a PAF bus in Sargodha.
The oft-repeated assertion of government that the security operations will continue until the last terrorist is eliminated sounds like a hollow pledge when we look at the ground realities. With so many hardcore Pakistan-based militants hiding outside the country, how can the security operation eliminate every militant? As the porous Pak-Afghan border cannot be sealed off, and the scope of the Operation Zarb-e-Azb cannot be extended beyond the border, the threat of terror attacks in the country will continue to raise its head as long as militants enjoy a safe haven in the neighbouring country. The revelations of the recently arrested suicide bomber from Shikarpur can vouch for this fear. Along with his three partners he was trained by the TTP in Afghanistan, and they were later smuggled into Pakistan to carry out an attack in Shikarpur on the day of Eid.
What these undeniable facts reveal is the bitter truth: that within the current scenario if the basic goal is to wipe out all kinds of terror threats emanating from inside or outside the country, it remains an unaccomplishable task. Do we need a new NAP or an amendment to the current one defining strategy for elimination of Pakistan-based militants hiding in Afghanistan and posing a real terror threat to Pakistan? The policy makers need to take the nation into confidence on this issue.
The writer is a Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Research & Security Studies, Islamabad