Will Pakistan’s grief force it to cut ties with Islamic militants?

By Matthew Green December 17, 2014

Pakistan’s army knew it would pay a price when it launched an offensive in the mountains of North Waziristan. But even in their worst imaginings, few officers could have foreseen the way revenge would be served: an attack on an Army-run school that cost the lives of 132 students. Many were the teenage sons of soldiers.

Pakistan is wearily familiar with violence, but what happened on Tuesday was different. It was the biggest such attack targeting children. Unlike many other mass casualty atrocities of recent years, the victims were not primarily members of persecuted religious or ethnic minorities. Instead, the massacre pierced the very soul of the army — which sees itself as the guardian of national destiny. Pakistan is united in grief.

In the short-term, there will be consequences. Pakistan’s army chief, General Raheel Sharif, will intensify his six-month campaign against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in North Waziristan, an enclave on the Afghan frontier, and its increasingly fractured splinter groups. Pakistan’s political class, locked in a feud that has paralyzed the government and brought cities to a standstill, will mount a refreshing display of unity. Space on the airwaves for Taliban apologists will shrink.

Yet if the attack is to represent a genuine turning point in Pakistan’s long battle with extremism, military and civilian leaders must take two decisive steps. Neither is by any means guaranteed.

First, and most important, Pakistan’s security establishment has to make a permanent break with its decades-long romance with jihadi proxies. The distinction that some in the nation’s security apparatus draw between “good Taliban” — shorthand for groups who serve their regional interests — and “bad Taliban” — militants at war with the state — must end.

Sharif impressed Pakistan’s allies when he launched in June an offensive dubbed Zarb-e-Azb to confront the TTP (“bad Taliban”) in their forbidding hideouts in North Waziristan, a task that his predecessor, General Ashfaq Kayani, prevaricated over for years. Significantly, North Waziristan has also been the primary haven for the Afghanistan-focused Haqqani network (“good Taliban”), whose members seem to have shifted back across the frontier. The United States has branded the Haqqanis as terrorists.

However cynical Pakistan’s generals may be, it bears repeating that they have sacrificed many more troops fighting the TTP than America and its allies have lost in Afghanistan.

The problem is that radicalization has spread well beyond the borderlands. Obsessed by a fear of India, the deep state — that part of government not affected by elections, such as the country’s spy agencies — has long sought to bolster its influence in the region by supporting a plethora of armed groups, ranging from Afghanistan’s Taliban movement and the Haqqanis to sectarian death squads and jihadis fighting in Kashmir. The gunmen are no longer confined to eyries on the saw-toothed Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. They are now firmly embedded in the provincial capitals of Karachi, Quetta and Lahore. Increasingly, they have slipped the leash of their former masters.

The upshot is that religious extremists and allied Kalashnikov-toting thugs now wield a far greater degree of influence over Pakistani society than their small constituencies might otherwise project. As long as nobody is quite sure where the military and its feared intelligence agencies stand in relation to jihadis, liberal politicians, community leaders and moderate religious voices rightly assume they will live longer by keeping quiet. Equally, this lingering ambiguity means the government in Afghanistan, which has long suffered from Pakistan’s support for the Afghan Taliban, will have little incentive to listen to Sharif’s pleas for help in tackling TTP militants who have fled onto its territory.

Second, Pakistan’s political class needs to move beyond its default setting of crisis-prone self-absorption and set a credible agenda for steering Pakistan off the road to deeper radicalization. The country passed a milestone in the evolution of its democracy in 2013 when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif led his party to victory in a smooth transition of power. But his government has spent months under a virtual state of siege due to protests led by Imran Khan, a cricketer-turned-politician intent on bringing down the government. Pakistan has more pressing problems than Khan’s aspirations to become prime minister.

The horror of what happened at the school has — for now — spurred politicians to set their squabbles aside. Khan, who has long clung to the unrealistic hope of dialog with the TTP, quickly condemned the attack and attended a cross-party emergency meeting hosted by the prime minister on Wednesday. Encouragingly, Sharif convened the gathering in Peshawar, the chaotic frontier city where the attack took place, rather than in the capital of Islamabad, which has a reputation as a bastion of entitlement and complacency. Relations between civilian leaders and the military are often frosty in Pakistan, but if ever a tragedy had the potential to trigger a thaw, the school attack is it.

Waves of popular outrage crest quickly in Pakistan. Unless the fragmented actors wielding military and political power can finally make common cause against all shades of militancy, the risk remains high that this moment, too, will pass.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/12/17/will-pakistans-grief-be-enough-to-stop-its-double-game-with-militants/