Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
In the absence of hard evidence, let alone an official account of the Pakistan military’s drive against homegrown terrorists, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban, Pakistan, one must of necessity accept the tiny tidbits of news coming from the frontline as evidence that the country’s Army has finally taken the offensive.
What is known is that the Pakistan Army has launched a ground offensive against militant strongholds in North Waziristan. What’s also known is that nearly half a million tribals were allowed time by the Army to move out of the lawless mountain terrain to safer places for it to be able to commence operations in an area that has always been a virtual safe haven, a no man’s land of sorts, used by the terrorists to attack targets both in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Miran Shah, the principal town in North Waziristan, has been the focus of attention in the first phase of the operation; there have been several killings, mostly of rebellious tribals, this even as the soldiers carried out house to house searches in the town.
The operation, it was officially stated, began soon after the terrorists attacked the country’s prestigious Karachi airport last month; the subsequent firing by Taliban snipers on an aircraft as it was landing with all its passengers on board, gave an added impetus to the military operations. Nearly 500 terrorists have been killed during the first fortnight of the operations; the Army too has suffered casualties in this initial phase.
The Army had by and large agreed to give Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif time to try out his belief that he could turn the terrorists around, the surprise attack on Karachi Airport and its severity finally persuaded the Army to say “enough is enough”. The five-hour siege of the airport had shocked the Pakistani people, bringing home to them the vulnerability of the country’s institutions.
Most Pakistanis are willing to give the military a freer hand to meet the Taliban challenge even as they dread the thought that it may tempt the soldiers to take charge of the country once again and force another ouster on the democratically elected Nawaz Sharif Government. Remember the night Musharraf had toppled him in a bloodless coup?
Skeptics do however doubt how far the clean-up in North Waziristan will succeed. For all the opprobrium it may have brought Pakistan, it has also provided a base for Afghan groups, regarded as useful allies of Pakistan’s decades old effort to dominate its neighborhood.
It is feared that many of these so-called “good Taliban” have been allowed to slip away or not attacked hard enough.
So far, though, the Army has claimed to have done away with hundreds of terrorists, particularly Uzbeks and assorted other foreigners, it has not claimed strikes against groups that have never attacked Pakistan : the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Hafiz Gul group.
The Army has claimed that it is determined to eliminate terrorists of all stripes. But the motivation for Pakistan’s change of heart is not the misery North Waziristan has brought to the world but its role in the terrible rise of domestic terrorism in recent years. Yet militant groups have infiltrated themselves across Pakistan’s heartland. So even if it is effective, the cleansing of North Waziristan will not end terrorist atrocities elsewhere. The Pakistani Taliban have made it known that theirs is a pan-Pakistan presence. They have demonstrated it on the ground. And the Taliban movement as such is something that embraces Pakistan as much as it does Afghanistan. The Army cannot be all that uncaring when it comes to maintaining close contact with the Afghan Taliban who have in the past operated in concert with Pakistan’s military and the ISI.
And no one knows it better than the Americans who have for more than a decade moaned about the presence on Pakistani soil of an important safe haven for global terrorists and Pakistani’s stubborn refusal to do anything about it.
North Waziristan has been a known command-and-control centre for fanatics attacking Pakistan itself, never mind the role that this particular area has played historically. By providing a sanctuary for them in the area, Pakistan did make an outright victory against the Afghan Taliban impossible. As noted by many analysts Pakistan has resisted all American demands of the past decade and more to come to grips with the place that is the most likely home of what remains of the Al-Qaeda’s core leadership, the base for especially lethal Afghan insurgent groups and the site where the jihadists hatched the most serious plot against the American homeland since 2001 – the botched car-bombing in 2010 of Times Square in New York. That is well before Islam had acquired its latest Caliph Abu Bakr Baghdadi and Al-Qaeda was, and indeed does continue to be the prime Jihadi force in many troubled lands.
None of these reasons was, it seemed, to persuade Pakistan to take its troops inside North Waziristan out of the bases where they were locked down. Frustrated by the Pakistani stance the Americans resorted to drone attacks to tame the menace, in the process making it more unpopular in Pakistan. At the fag end of their 13-year-old misadventure in the region the Americans have at last had the satisfaction of seeing their long denied wish granted : defanging of North Waziristan by the Pakistan Army.
The fortnight old operation launched by the Pakistani Army (Operation Zarb-e-Azb) it must be remembered came about only after the especially provocative attack by the Pakistani Taliban on the country’s busiest airport in Karachi on June 9. The operation may indeed have been in the coming for weeks. It was delayed only at the instance of Mr. Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister whose improbable bid for peace with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, who obviously feared that failure to talk may result in terrorist strikes in Pakistan’s other cities including in his home province of Punjab.
The Army had in the meantime tested the ground, as it were, with repeated air strikes against militant hideouts. Little, though, was done to prepare for the inevitable outflow of some half a million tribals. The Americans were angry that the Pakistani Army hardly gave them any notice of the operation, not long enough for them to put in place preparations to block the retreat of the militants into Afghanistan’s volatile eastern border with Pakistan.
As has been argued “had the Pakistani military operations happened some years ago, foreign forces could have provided an anvil, for the Pakistani hammer to crush the terror outfits”. But you can never tell which way the Pakistani cat will jump – and when. The stakes for the Pak Army are pretty high indeed, not in North Waziristan alone. Much more so in Afghanistan where it believes it has a vital stake.
Follow our WhatsApp channel