Talibanenemy
The repeated terror attacks in the country bear testimony to the fact that the country’s anti terror policy is failing to deliver. There is no gainsaying that the popular support for the Taliban is waning, if not in the Pashtun areas then at least in the rest of the country. Meanwhile the Taliban are learning quickly from the tactics of other terror groups like al Qaeda and its umpteen other regional counterparts. Some may call their recent tactics desperate acts of a failing force but the fact remains that this army of darkness has uncountable levers to manipulate the war in a country given to countless ideational contradictions and perpetual insecurity.

With this, undoubtedly, the myth that there is in essence a difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban has come crashing down. If there was any difference between the Taliban’s medieval tribalism and al Qaeda’s fanatical globalism before 9/11, it is no more visible. But what should be done with the people who not only insist on distinguishing the two, but also protest at the Pakistani Taliban being called Taliban at all. Being the eternal proponents of conspiracy theories, these Platos believe that the elements wreaking havoc in the country in the name of Talibanisation are nothing but a ragtag army of foreign funded thugs introduced to weaken the nation’s moorings, whereas the real Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, is good. Ironically while these ideational pundits go to unnecessary pains to distinguish the two, they do not even support the operation against the Pakistani Taliban and are often found in either hunger strike camps or on television screens shedding tears for the affected.

As for the merit in their arguments, it must be said that any reductionist approach in the war on terror may only harm the efforts to contain the spectre of Talibanisation. And so it has. Actually the assumption that someday the Afghan Taliban can once again prove to be a strategic asset has fractured the official policy against them and only empowered the enemy with more time to regroup and pool resources. It takes no rocket scientist to understand that the Taliban’s version of Islam at best is the perversion of the faith itself and that its branches in both Afghanistan and Pakistan propound identical misguided doctrines. So believing that the two sides are any different is akin to self-defeat.

If somehow this principle could be settled and the people of the country or a majority could be convinced of it, great help could be found in tracing and culling the sympathisers of the menace. Likewise it would help in fighting the fallacious perceptions of the world at large that the country lacks in sorting out the issue of terrorism once and for all.

What we witness in Pakistan in the name of the Taliban, in fact, is the rise of a supremacist state of mind. The Taliban claims to be a better Muslim and hence the custodian of the implementation of its version of the faith. If anything it is hardly more than a blowback of our own fallacious foreign and defence policies. If today we refuse to accept the Pakistani chapter of the Taliban as the true Taliban, it is because from up close all its ugliness is visible to our eyes. When this element was poisoning the foreign lands we could afford to ignore its nefarious nature and allow our establishment to spin a romantic tale around it. But that what cannot be good for us cannot be good for our neighbours either. Call it what you like but in civilised lexicon this attitude is called hypocrisy.

The origin of this hypocrisy, as I mentioned earlier, can be traced back to our misguided security assumptions. Take the concept of strategic depth for instance. Recognising that our eastern border is not too distant from our core industrial installations and seat of power, the country should have a proxy to fall back on in the eventuality of a war. This is an interesting concept but ignores one reality — that of nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD). A nuclear-armed Pakistan, as was manifested by the Kargil conflict, does not need any strategic depth to avoid, or perhaps even survive, a full-scale war. And since Pakistan is said to have acquired the nuclear capability in 1986, the proponents of this misguided concept and the benefactors of the Taliban were advancing these arguments for purely self-serving purposes.

If truth be told, there is nothing new about proxy wars. A number of countries fight them for the sake of self-preservation. Yet while the usual proxy wars retain their characteristic secular disposition, the Platos in our country transformed secular proxy wars into a trade of destabilising religious ideologies. This trade has brought back tribalism and fragmentation of society in exchange for the exported fanaticism. In the best interests of the country, at the very least, we can admit where we went wrong and try to find remedies. And this journey of introspection starts with the admission that there is no difference between the Afghan Taliban and its Pakistani counterparts, and that they are both in essence evil in nature. Unfortunately this realisation still seems to be eluding us.

Unlike other forms of intolerance, religious intolerance has the capacity not only to rob a citizen of his rights but also to deprive him even of the sense of loss. And it comes as no relief to understand that the seeds of this intolerance have always existed in our society and often manifested themselves as constant threats to the social fabric. These days it has become a fashion to blame Ziaul Haq’s regime for all intolerant behaviour in this country. While his regime was the worst in its misuse of religion, we must not forget that the Rawalpindi conspiracy case, the prohibition law, etc, all materialised before his takeover. There is no gainsaying that every society has its share of the intolerant few but when this intolerance takes a state’s apparatus hostage, its people should not expect anything but gloom and misery.

Perhaps the time has come for all rational moderates of the country to unite around the conviction that there is no difference between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban; if one is bad the other can never be good. Moreover our response to the threat posed by the Taliban should be comprehensive and unanimous, not fractured or reductionist. And finally it is about time we decide whether we want to be an intolerant and confused theocracy or a modern progressive republic. If we choose to be the latter, as reason dictates, moderates present in parties and in all segments of society should play a proactive role in advocating permanent changes in our collective outlook. Remember, fanatics can only win battles, not wars. This intellectual struggle is the war for our survival. If we fail now there may not be any hope left for our future generations.

(Note: The above article was carried in Friday, November 13th’s edition of Daily Times, Lahore. The original article can be viewed by clicking here.)

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