Confronting Terrorists

By Farooq Ganderbali

Abdul Aziz, a radical cleric and chief of the Red Mosque, has been released on bail.

Over the last few months Pakistan has been helplessly sliding into chaos and violence. The gun battles and suicide attacks have become a norm of those terrorists who were once pets of Pakistan government. It seems that the sins of the past seem to be visiting Pakistan. All the Frankensteins created by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence are now attacking their creator. Buoyed by gaining sway over Swat, the Taliban is on a high. And, they would try to advance deeper into Pakistan in a bid to establish their writ. In this, they would get ample support from groups like Al Qaeda, LeT and Jaish which espouse global jihad. This would destabilize the region and make it more insecure than it already is.

US has a major role to control this situation before it goes out of hand. Unless and until the US takes the initiative for such a strategy focused on eradicating all terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistani territory India, Afghanistan and other sovereign nations will continue to bleed at the hands of jihadi terrorists spawned in Pakistan and the US will meet the same fate in Afghanistan as the erstwhile USSR did in the 1980s.

No doubt efforts are being put by the state department to make anti terrorism operations more effective. In his famous Af-Pak policy President Obama announced annihilation of al Qaeda its principle objective. To meet that objective one has to look beyond the borders of Afghanistan. There are elements in Pakistani security apparatus who openly support these terrorists. Be it Afghanistan’s intelligence chief or the Richard Holbrooke himself, all have accused ISI of helping Taliban militants to carry out attacks in the two countries.

Overwhelmed with the complex politics in US, Obama’s strategy for the Af-Pak region is still unfolding in bits and pieces. He has already announced the expansion of US troops by 16,000. Predator strikes on terrorist hide-outs and training camps in Pakistani territory are also being systematically intensified. The implementation and gradual intensification of these two components will determine the success of other strategies. One good thing related to drone strikes has been that the US administration has been expanding their geographic and target spread. From North and South Waziristan and the Bajaur Agency in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the geographic area of the strikes has been extended to the Kurram Agency in the FATA. The Bannu area in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which was already targeted once by the Bush Administration, has been receiving more attention from the advisers of Obama.

The cancer of terrorism has spread too much in Pakistan and its diseased spots are not only confined to some border areas. Balochistan is becoming a hub of terrorist activities patronised by ISI. A report carried by the New York Times in March 2009, indicates that the Obama Administration is also examining the advisability of hitting at the hide-outs and training camps of the Afghan Taliban in Quetta and some other areas of Balochistan adjoining the border with Afghanistan. Mulla Mohammad Omar, the Amir of the Neo Taliban, and his advisers are thought to be operating from sanctuaries in these areas.

The policy already being followed by Obama and the change now recommended cover only attacks on the sanctuaries of Al Qaeda and its associates, the Neo Taliban, the TTP and the Hizb-e-Islami. They do not cover the group of five organizations–the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the Jaish and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ)–which are commonly referred to in Pakistan as the Punjabi Taliban.

There is need of quick review into the scenario. US has a habit of letting the monster grow and then confronting it with more resources and a lot more collateral damage. Why not nip the evil in the bud. The Punjabi Talibans have the potential to become a threat equivalent to Al Qaeda in a short course of time. They has been helping the TTP in the Swat Valley of the NWFP. The LET has been helping the Neo Taliban and the Hizb-e-Islami in the Kabul area. It was involved in the explosion outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul in the first week of July last year. The HUM, the HUJI and the LEJ have been active in the tribal belt since the 1990s.

It is not that these terrorist groups have not attacked people beyond the borders of Pakistan. Some of the attacks taking place in Afghanistan have been loosely traced to these groups. These organizations have been behind most acts of jihadi terrorism in the Indian territory. Unless the new US counter-terrorism strategy covers the terrorist infrastructure of the Punjabi Taliban too, the results will not be satisfactory.

In spite of Pakistan now facing the brunt of terror attacks, ISI’s patronage to Taliban and motley terror groups it nurtured to bolster its anti-India mission of death by a thousand cuts is unlikely to wilt away any time soon.

Even though the political establishment of Pakistan is uncomfortable about this truth about the ISI, they hardly have any control over the agency. Thus the task of eliminating these terrorists rests with the free and democratic world. It is their duty to take up this painful cleaning operation before it’s ill effects spread to peaceful world.