Acts of Terrorism in Pakistan

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

That customized copy is presently held by the COAS under strict security.

Historically, a valid point.

When has it been that PA has been subservient to civillian elected government? It is notorious for being one on its own.

Any time when the COAS was not the Chief Executive of Pakistan simultaneously.

Gen. Nawaz, Gen. Keramat and now Gen. Kayani all had/have reputations of being apolitical. Gen. Kayani's efforts to remove the Army from politics have been documented from the day he took charge.

The past actions of a few do not mean that the same behavior should continue or will continue. These demands for the 'Army to do its duty' are nothing but couched rhetoric demanding the Army once again take unconstitutional steps without the civilian government on board.

It is poisonous advice, that will only complicate things in the long term. The responsibility for taking the tough decisions, for building political and national consensus, and for stepping in to assist those affected by military operations, rests with the elected government alone.

From the DG ISPR:

"However, military spokesman Maj-General Athar Abbas, when contacted, said that according to his information, the provincial government had not yet decided to launch a military operation in Swat and whether the peace deal was over."

From NWFP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain:

"Addressing a ceremony at Peshawar Law College here on Wednesday, Mian Iftikhar said no military operation is underway in Swat. He said the security forces are only reacting against the militants."

The decision rests with the GoNWFP and GoP.

 

[sohailbutt]

Roadside bomb kills 4 soldiers in Malakand​

MALAKAND: Four soldiers were killed and five others wounded when a roadside bomb tore through their convoy in Malakand on Wednesday.

According to sources, the bomb was detonated by remote control as the military convoy was heading to Mingora via Malakand road.

The blast occurred near Bridge post in Chakkadra, killing four security men and injuring five others.

On the other hand, curfew is in force in Malakand from 6am in the morning, forcing the people to remain at homes. The Intermediate exams were also postponed in Malakand Agency over curfew.

Roadside bomb kills 4 soldiers in Malakand - GEO.tv

-----------------------------

May the souls of the fallen one's rest in peace. A very sad moment, and coward action on the part of these lunatics, it seems these bastards are not man enough to face the army one on one, and instead using disgusting tactics.

 

[sohailbutt]

Militants warn doctors not to wear western clothes​

PESHAWAR: Hospitals in Peshawar have received threatening letters from local militants warning their doctors against wearing western clothing to work, DawnNews reported.

Doctors from two of Peshawar’s major hospitals, Hayatabad Medical Complex and Khyber Teaching Hospital have confirmed receiving these threats.

The hospital administrations have circulated the information to all wards, and have asked their staff to take precautionary measures.

Meanwhile, the hospital administrations have not ruled out the possibility that the letters could be fake and may have been issued to create panic.

According to sources, the letter has also been forwarded to the NWFP Inspector General of Police.

The move comes against a background of heightened Taliban activity, with militants targeting barber-shops, music stores and shrines in their bid for moral policing.

DAWN.COM | Metropolitan | Militants warn doctors not to wear western clothes

------------------------------------

I feel really sad and angry, after reading this type of stupid threat's from these lunatics, it makes me think about the mindset of these terrorists.

Doctors are very valuable assets of any society, threating them is an obsolute crime in my eyes, if they were'nt doing what they do, half of us would be dead by now.

 

[muse]

A god of the Islamist is not just a sadist, it is also a fashionista - particular fashion sense appeals to it.

 

[S-2]

"...it seems these bastards are not man enough to face the army one on one, and instead using disgusting tactics."

sohailbutt, nothing personal but DVDs of attacks like these against American soldiers, accompanied to cries of "Allah Akbar"! sell quite well in marketplaces...maybe even Pakistani marketplaces.

This is the way of the war. Pray that DVDs of your own men don't begin to appear for sale. Pray more that, if so, they have no buyers.

This will not be an easy war to reclaim your lands from these fiends.

 

[Hellfire]

Historically, a valid point.

Any time when the COAS was not the Chief Executive of Pakistan simultaneously.

Gen. Nawaz, Gen. Keramat and now Gen. Kayani all had/have reputations of being apolitical. Gen. Kayani's efforts to remove the Army from politics have been documented from the day he took charge.

The past actions of a few do not mean that the same behavior should continue or will continue. These demands for the 'Army to do its duty' are nothing but couched rhetoric demanding the Army once again take unconstitutional steps without the civilian government on board.

It is poisonous advice, that will only complicate things in the long term. The responsibility for taking the tough decisions, for building political and national consensus, and for stepping in to assist those affected by military operations, rests with the elected government alone.

From the DG ISPR:

"However, military spokesman Maj-General Athar Abbas, when contacted, said that according to his information, the provincial government had not yet decided to launch a military operation in Swat and whether the peace deal was over."

From NWFP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain:

"Addressing a ceremony at Peshawar Law College here on Wednesday, Mian Iftikhar said no military operation is underway in Swat. He said the security forces are only reacting against the militants."

The decision rests with the GoNWFP and GoP.

I agree with your contention regarding CEO-COAS office bearers

Further I too agree with your assesment of Gen Kiyani. And I think that is a courageous approach on his part (and in one other thread indirectly I have given credit to Gen. Musharraf, for whatever mistakes he made, he has given a commendable COAS and successor)

I shall persist with my position that PA must take independent stand based on internal security assessment and should not pay the price of dithering by GoP/GoNWFP on the best approach to deal with the situation.

Anyways enough of being stuck on that. Thanks AM!

 

[seekndestroy88]

I Agree With the above Person ...

 

[RabzonKhan]

Taliban to benefit if govt fails to help displaced people

* Analysts say govt may face ‘new enemies’ if displaced people not cared for
* Operation against Taliban ‘has to be effective’

By Iqbal Khattak

PESHAWAR: Failure to address the needs of hundreds and thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Malakand may overshadow the efforts of the military and work in favour of the Taliban, experts warned on Monday.

“I fear that successes against the Taliban ... may be washed away if we do not take good care of the IDPs,” said Khadim Hussain, a research fellow at the Ariana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy.

Pakistan is facing the biggest migration in its history, as more than half a IDPs have registered themselves with government-run relief camps. The provincial government has estimated that around one million residents of Malakand have been displaced amid simultaneous army offensives in Lower Dir, Buner and Swat.

While the effectiveness of the latest military strikes against the Taliban is widely acknowledged even by army detractors, the mismanagement of affairs related to IDPs could help the Taliban and organisations such as the banned Tehreek-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi regain lost ground.

Khalid Aziz, an expert on security and development, warned that the country would have ‘new enemies’ if the IDPs were not cared for. “To keep the IDPs’ sympathies with the government, the operation has to be effective, and, secondly, we have to help these people deal with their problems,” he told Daily Times.

Khalid said, “The displaced people will [also] not forgive us if the Taliban survive the operation ... these people have paid a big price for dismantling the terror network in their areas and flushing out the Taliban.”

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has described the military operation against the Taliban as a ‘survival war’.

Meanwhile, a meeting of donor countries is scheduled for May 18 in Islamabad to assess the needs of IDPs, sources told Daily Times

 

[RabzonKhan]

NWFP needs Rs 90bn for rehabilitation of Malakand people: Zahid Khan

May 12, 2009

ISLAMABAD: The NWFP government will require at least Rs 90 billion for rehabilitation of the six million people of Malakand displaced by the ongoing military operation, Awami National Party (ANP) Information Secretary Senator Zahid Khan said on Monday. He said the provincial government had analysed the situation and a task force was already giving final touches to its preparations. “Initially, we had estimated Rs 32 billion for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Swat. However, after the expansion of the operation to other parts of Malakand division, the estimate has been increased to Rs 80-90 billion,” he added. To questions on the success of the operation, he said the initial reports from Dir were encouraging and his party was hoping for a successful end to the operation. Later, he told a private TV channel the people of Malakand held the Taliban responsible for their suffering. “The ANP believes in a do or die strategy. Either we, or the militants, will be left standing. We will not bow to threats of militants,” he said. app

 

[RabzonKhan]

US administration makes urgent aid plea for IDPs

By Anwar Iqbal
Wednesday, 13 May, 2009

WASHINGTON: The US administration urged Congress on Tuesday to provide immediate assistance to Pakistan to deal with a crisis situation caused by the displacement of more than a million people from their homes in the NWFP.

Also on Tuesday, senior US officials met at the White House to decide how to rush emergency aid to Pakistan to help it deal with this situation.

Separately, the administration is urging Congress to release $497 million of emergency economic assistance to Pakistan, hoping to make the lawmakers endorse the request as early as possible.

‘Frankly, I don’t really trust what I hear from a situation like that until the dust of battle has settled, but one thing is clear: 900,000 refugees have been registered with the UN in that area, and we have a major, major refugee crisis,’ US special envoy Richard Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr Holbrooke told the panel during a hearing on the situation in Pakistan that senior Obama aides met at the White House on Tuesday to rush emergency assistance to Islamabad. The US, he said, had already provided over $57 million for this crisis from emergency funds.

FM BROADCAST

The White House also discussed a proposal to counter radio broadcasts by extremist clerics in Swat and to jam their transmission.

President Obama has already approved the suggestion to jam their broadcasts and to fund counter-broadcasts in Pashto and Urdu.

The US administration’s special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan said he was not in a position to say how the military offensive in Swat was going because he had not yet received an authentic report from the field.

‘I would welcome any suggestions or advice you have on this, because since our national security interests are so at stake and we look like we’re heading for about 1 million to 1,300,000 refugees, we should not ignore that,’ Mr Holbrooke told the lawmakers.

ALL-PARTY CONFERENCE
The US envoy welcomed Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s decision to call an all-party conference to discuss the situation in Swat and the adjacent valleys, noting that other political parties in Pakistan also had welcomed this suggestion.

Mr Holbrooke noted that recently the PML-N and PPP agreed to continue their coalition government in Punjab, which has 60 per cent of the country’s population.

‘I think that’s a big step forward towards the kind of national unity that’s wanted,’ he added.

Ambassador Holbrooke agreed with the committee’s chairman Senator John Kerry that Pakistan was not a failed state, although it faced many political, economic and social problems.

Stressing the need to strengthen democracy in Pakistan, Mr Holbrooke said: ‘Another military coup, another military takeover, another military intervention would be very much against the interests of the United States and, above all, the people of Pakistan. And every public opinion poll shows overwhelming desire for democracy to succeed.’

But he warned that a sharp division between PML-N and PPP was ‘a big anomaly’, noting that in the period that led to the removal of Gen. Musharraf, they formed an alliance and then they split apart.

‘So before we throw up our hands and assume that Pakistan is, ‘falling apart’, let’s recognise that with a lot of encouragement from their friends, including this committee, you can see the signs that Pakistan’s political effort is knitting together somewhat compared to where it was a few weeks ago.’

Mr Holbrooke noted that 74 per cent of the population in Pakistan supported the Swat deal very strongly, but the Taliban violated it and used it as an excuse to keep moving east. That created a ‘kind of a near panic’ in Pakistan and caused the Pakistani army to launch a major offensive.

TRILATERAL ACCORD

Ambassador Holbrooke also told the Senate committee that during last week’s trilateral summit in Washington, the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan made the following decisions: .Afghanistan and Pakistan signed a memorandum of understanding committing their countries to achieving a transit trade agreement by the end of this year.
• Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed to continue the cross-border Jirga process to be held after the Afghan elections.

• Afghanistan and Pakistan committed to opening two Border Coordination Centres in 2009, one in Afghanistan and the other in Pakistan.

• The US, Afghanistan and Pakistan plan to increase cooperation on agricultural development and research, as well as launching a Regional Infrastructure and Trade Development initiative to accelerate needed infrastructure development.

• Afghanistan and Pakistan plan to pursue, with US support, a Joint Action Plan outlining areas of common concern on issues of law enforcement, border security and management, and rule of law.

The next trilateral consultations is planned to take place this fall

 

[RabzonKhan]

Moderate clerics speak out against Taliban

Wednesday, 13 May, 2009

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's moderate clerics, for years mute in the face of growing Islamist influence, are mobilising support for the government as it battles the Taliban, warning that militants could take over the country.

Most of Pakistan's 160 million people are moderate Muslims, but for years they have been reluctant to speak out against the spread of the hardline Taliban. Not any more.

'The military must eliminate the Taliban once and for all,' Mufti Sarfraz Naeemi, a senior cleric of the moderate Barelvi branch of Sunni Muslims, told Reuters.

'Otherwise they will capture the entire country which would be a big catastrophe.'

The military launched a major offensive against Taliban militants in the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, last week after the Taliban tried to capitalise on a February peace pact by pushing out of the valley to conquer new districts.

Pakistanis overwhelmingly supported the pact aimed at ending violence in Swat but were shocked to see the Taliban, emboldened by the deal, vowing to impose their rule across the country.

That raised alarm, not only in the United States which needs Pakistan to tackle the militants for success in Afghanistan, but also among ordinary Pakistanis, for the first time confronting the possibility the Taliban might appear in their towns.

Naeemi said the Barelvis had wanted to avoid confrontation with the Taliban so had not spoken out against aggression. But they could not stand by and let the Taliban impose their rule.

'They want people to fight one another, that's why we have kept silent and endured their oppression,' Naeemi said.

'We don't want civil war ... But God forbid, if the government fails to stop them, then we will confront them ourselves.'

BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL

Most Pakistanis are Barelvis, adherents of Islamic Sufi mysticism, who venerate saints and their shrines dotted across the country.

The austere Taliban, adherents of the Deobandi school of Islam, reject mystical Islam and recently blew up a famous shrine in the northwest, to many Pakistanis' shock.

For the first time in Pakistan, protesters have been taking to the streets to denounce the Taliban.

Barelvis have been holding anti-Taliban rallies across the country and are organising a gathering of 5,000 clerics in Islamabad on Sunday to drum up support for the military in Swat.

'We support the army operation in Swat because it is a battle for the survival and defence of Pakistan,' Sahibzada Fazal Karim, leader of Jamiat-e-ulema-e-Pakistan, a moderate Islamic party, and an organiser of the weekend conference, told Reuters.

'What these militants were doing was un-Islamic. Beheading innocent people and kidnapping are in no way condoned in Islam.'

A political analyst said there was a degree of self-interest in the newfound outspokenness.

'Politicians are realising there is no future for the country if the militants continue to expand their influence,' said retired general and analyst Talat Masood.

'The moderate clergy is also feeling threatened because their role will be over. So everyone is trying to look at his own turf ... It's in their self-interest as well as the national interest.'

Most Pakistanis, including political parties and the media, have backed the offensive in Swat, 130 km northwest of Islamabad, which comes after the United States accused the government of “abdicating” to the militants.

 

[RabzonKhan]

It is time to show our support for our soldiers!


Can the Taliban be defeated?

By S.M. Naseem
Wednesday, 13 May, 2009

THE moment of truth for the federal government and the Pakistan Army to save Pakistan from imploding under the threat of the Taliban insurgency has arrived.

President Zardari in Washington and Gen Kayani in Rawalpindi, with the blessings of the tripartite ****** strategy meetings presided over by President Obama, prompted Prime Minister Gilani in Islamabad to tell the nation near midnight last week about the decision to call out the armed forces ‘to eliminate the militants and terrorists in order to restore the honour and dignity of our homeland, and to protect the people.’ That reassurance was needed since previous army operations were half-hearted and botched and the operation in Buner and Dir was hardly faring any better, notwithstanding the claims of the ISPR.

The broadcast recalled a similar dramatic moment two months ago when the prime minister in the early hours of the morning announced the reinstatement of the chief justice and the end of the siege of Islamabad by the security forces to prevent the lawyers’ long march. The armed forces — whose refusal to support the government action against the long march is believed to have played a role in reinstating the chief justice — overcame their reservations about a full-fledged military action against the Swat Taliban.

The latter’s proximity to Islamabad had raised the spectre of a Taliban takeover within weeks and led to alarm all over the world, particularly in Washington. The latter seemed more worried about Pakistan’s cache of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands than the fate of the country’s 170 million people. No one can possibly doubt the pivotal role of the army in our politics.

While the motivation and the circumstances that led to this announcement will be debated for long, the decision to take the Taliban head-on, if successfully executed, could become a historical landmark, along with the reinstatement of the chief justice, and transform Pakistan’s currently bleak future.

Although it is a gamble worth taking in the present circumstances, it does entail serious risks. These can only be overcome by a series of well-coordinated actions requiring political leadership of a high order and the involvement of all sections of society in making transformative decisions which would eliminate the injustices of the past that have led to our present predicament.

Gen Kayani’s remark that ‘The present security situation requires that all elements of national power should work in close harmony to fight the menace of terrorism and extremism,’ serves both as a welcome admission that the army alone can’t face the challenge and as a timely warning that without the active cooperation of all other elements, the operation could backfire and result in the emergence of the Taliban as a stronger force than before.

Can the Pakistani Army live up to its reputation as one of the world’s largest and finest fighting armies by flushing out the Taliban and forcing them to surrender their arms? Now that the nation, including many of the religious parties with a soft corner for the Taliban in the past, has almost unanimously sensed the danger to its existence posed by the militant Swat Taliban, there seems little reason for the army’s hesitancy in taking up arms against them and taking the war to its logical end.

However, the Pakistan Army, having tasted power and pelf for 20 of the last 30 years, has become a bit rusty in the exercise of its professional duties, especially since there is a sense of reliance on atomic weapons against the only enemy it has ever considered as a mortal foe. Its experience in fighting internal insurgency has been minimal. The two territories where it has tried to put down insurgencies, East Pakistan and Balochistan, have resulted in the separation of one and a sense of near-complete alienation in the other.

Its hubris as an elite western-style fighting force — with a built-in polarised hierarchy of the underprivileged soldier (with little education and reliance on faith rather than logic) and an elitist officer class — has not prepared it for facing the quick-footed tactics of the insurgents who have enjoyed local loyalty and hospitality. Indeed, an added danger in the present case is that many of the jawans, along with some of the officers, may still retain latent sympathies for the insurgents.

As for the local population, although it may not have much love for the Taliban, they hardly see the security forces as their protectors. They are now in the midst of a crossfire and are desperate for peace even at the price of the lowest level of existence and dignity, which has been the sales pitch of the Taliban movement since its birth in 1994, with the Pakistani intelligence agencies acting as its foster mother. If the army wants to play its role in saving the nation from the threat some believe it had helped create, it will have to both reinvent itself internally and reconstruct its role in societal transformation. Besides reconciling to a low-profile role in politics and pruning its expenditures to accommodate other more pressing social needs, it will have to keep itself better prepared for meeting natural and man-made disasters of which the country has had more than its fair share.

It needs to be realised that, like all insurgencies, the Taliban insurgency can’t be quashed through a military operation alone, unless the people themselves are convinced of its viciousness and futility. Unfortunately, despite the barbaric atrocities perpetrated on them in the name of the Sharia, many at the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder are still unable to view the Taliban as worse than the rulers. The latter hardly ever paid attention to their needs until their own lifestyles began to face an ‘existentialist threat.’ Unless these ‘root causes’ receive the attention they deserve, it will be foolhardy to believe that people at large will rise against the Taliban.

 

[RabzonKhan]

State writ returning to Buner, Dir: Iftikhar

May 14, 2009

* Minister says complete control over Buner, Dir in 15 days
* Says foreign news agency’s report faulty g 0.8 million new IDPs registered

By Iqbal Khattak

PESHAWAR: The government’s writ is gradually returning to Buner and Lower Dir districts as the military is pushing hard against the Taliban, NWFP Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain said on Wednesday.

“In the next 15 days there will be complete control of the government over Buner and Lower Dir, as the forces’ action has been very effective,” Iftikhar told a news briefing.

“We will soon be in a position that the [displaced] people could return to their homes in Buner,” he added.

However, he said that the situation in Mingora was still not completely under control, but things were improving in Swat as well.

The minister was reacting to a BBC map that suggested that only 38 percent of the NWFP and its surrounding areas were under the government’s control.

The map, compiled by the BBC’s Urdu language service, was based on local research and correspondent reports as well as conversations with officials.

The map showed the Taliban “strengthening their hold across the north-west”.

Fault lines: Iftikhar said the BBC was reporting the government’s writ to be shrinking at a time when the state was gaining control of Taliban strongholds. “I think the BBC is using old data. It should update its data,” he said.

IDPs: Iftikhar said around 0.8 million new internationally displaced persons (IDPs) had been registered at various registration centres.

“Around 7,46,256 new IDPs were registered by Tuesday and still 500,000 people are waiting for their registration to qualify for the government-backed assistance,” the minister said.

He said carrying food and daily-use items sent by the Punjab government in 10 trucks had been distributed among the IDPs and 100 more relief-supply trucks from the Punjab were expected.

 

[muse]

CI specialists/experts have their place but look at results, look to experience - what works is killing the insurgent, dead insurgent equals dead insurgency.

Don't get me wrong, better training, a more enabled state structure delivering services, sure, that is necessary but at the end of the day, you cannot leave a live insurgent in place - that means killing the insurgent who seeks to usurp the state -- the state delivers services but no sane person will argue that the state will want nothing in return -- the state DEMANDS submission to it's writ and is open to persuasion and activism, not armed attempt at dislodging the state.

Look at what all insurgents, especially the Islamist type prove - they prove that if you terrorize the population, they will succumb and cooperate - can you guess what lesson the state must take from this? Did you notice how the same people who seemed apathetic suddenly came to life and supported the govt? Now what lesson should be taken from this??

 

[RabzonKhan]

analysis: Waking up to terror

Suroosh Irfani
May 14, 2009

Pakistan has finally woken up to the reality of Taliban as terrorists. Even so, there is no let up in conspiracy theories that only serve to deflect the existential threat Taliban are posing to Pakistan as a fledgling democracy.

According to one such theory doing the rounds, it is not the ‘real’ Taliban who are carrying out suicide attacks against Pakistan’s security forces, but agents of India, Israel and America who want to destabilise the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim state.

Surprisingly, such a standpoint is partly supported by Juan Cole, distinguished professor of history at the University of Michigan, who suspects “US policy makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity”.

His widely circulated article on the internet (“Pakistan crisis and social statistics”) also argues that Taliban threat is overblown by vested interests within Pakistan: former President General (retd) Musharraf, who “wants to make another military coup”; and “civilian politicians in Islamabad who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are also secretly bribing to attack Afghanistan”.

Cole’s conspiracy theories, however, are rooted in a confidence in Pakistan that many Pakistanis themselves lack. He dismisses Talibanism as an essentially Pashtun phenomenon mostly confined to FATA and the Frontier province, of little interest to the vast majority of Pakistanis who voted for the Pakistan People’s Party and the Muslim League-Nawaz in last year’s elections.

Moreover, besides key social indicators militating against Talibanism, the 5,000 or so Taliban fighters in the Frontier region are no match for Pakistan’s well trained army, the 6th largest in the world.

While Cole’s social statistical analysis is impressive, it is at a far remove from the subjective realities and home truths of Pakistan itself. After all, the impasse Pakistan is embroiled in today is also entwined with rethinking of flawed policies of the past, staking Pakistan’s future on jihadi politics in Afghanistan and Kashmir for almost three decades.

Inevitably, undoing past mistakes by re-visioning Pakistan’s national security is a bone of contention in a country where the imperatives of domestic security and cultural identity are weighed down by connotations of “war between Islam and America” — a misleading slogan which is a new avatar of the rightist slogan of the 1970 general elections, when the religious-political right drew the battle line by declaring that the election was, in fact, a war between “Islam and Socialism”.

Even so, the ‘leftist’ Pakistan People’s Party under the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto won a landslide victory, heralding a revolution through the polls in South Asia that echoed Salvador Allende’s triumph in South America. While President Allende was later toppled by a US-backed military coup, Bhutto was overthrown by General Zia-ul Haq and the religio-political right in 1977.

The battle against the Taliban in north-western Pakistan, therefore, needs also to be seen in the context of Pakistan’s history and a general radicalisation of the religious right, whose new vocabulary of wresting “power from the army by force” is rooted in an ideological affinity with Al Qaeda and Taliban that pre-dates 9/11.

At the same time, a crucial point that conspiracy theories at home and abroad are missing is that the army’s deployment against the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan falls in line with the strategic objectives of global jihad, as theorised by Al Qaeda ideologues Ayman Al Zawahiri and Abu Mu’sab Al Suri during their stay in Peshawar and Afghanistan.

Indeed, going by Al Suri’s online treatise, “The Global Islamic Resistance Call”, TTP’s suicide bombings and blowing up of schools corresponded with what he calls ‘the first stage’ in the global jihad against “the crusaders, Zionists and apostate (Muslim) regimes”. This entailed “limited terrorist warfare”, including “assassinations, ambushes, and selective bomb attacks to confuse the enemy”.

The aim was to bring about “a state of security exhaustion, political confusion and economic failures”. No wonder that an exhausted and desperate Swati population welcomed the ‘peace deal’ that a confused political leadership offered as the Nizam-e Adl Regulation, the fig leaf for handing over Swat to Taliban.

However, having taken control of Swat, TTP then moved on to ‘the second stage’ in Al Suri’s jihadi paradigm: “large strategic attacks” to compel the army “to enter decisive battles” — a stage we are in now, as the army launches decisive operations against Taliban.

However, for Al Suri, success in this stage depends on the disbanding of army units, with some officers and soldiers “joining the guerrilla forces”. The third stage, then, (“the liberation stage”) won’t materialise unless army units “have joined the revolutionaries, and the guerrilla fighters have attained a sufficient level of armaments to enter into open battles”.

However, this is unlikely to happen with the units of the Pakistan Army as it fights the ethno-millenarian Taliban under conditions radically different from that of revolutionary Iran in 1979 — the case upon which Al Suri seems to have based his flawed theorisation of the second stage. After all, the Iranian revolution was a singularly popular mass democratic movement against an autocratic monarchy, and the Iranian army declared its neutrality after a discredited Shah had fled the country and the revolution’s success had become nevitable.

It is, therefore, imperative for the government and the media to unmask the Taliban for what they are — foot soldiers of a violent global jihad that virtually failed to take root in other Muslim countries, even in a Talibanic Afghanistan, as noted by Al Suri himself, in Architect of Global Jihad: the life of al Qaeda strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri (Hurst, 2007).

In this groundbreaking study, Brynjar Lia brings together the writings of “one of the most important jihadist ideologues of the post 9/11 era”, and his disappointment with prospects of a worldwide jihad emanating from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of Muslims came for military training between 1996 and 2001 from around the world, but only 1500 stayed back for jihad, the rest going back to their countries of origin.

Such a dismal turnout suggested that a global jihad from the Taliban’s Afghanistan might well have ended like the failed Syrian jihad of the 1980s, which “people no longer believed in (nor) wished to support”.

However, global jihad’s fortunes were boosted after the US-led invasion of Iraq, and an upsurge of Pakistani jihadi groups, affirming Al Suri’s observation that Pakistan’s religious groups constituted “a strategic depth for Arab jihadi and Resistance movements”. (p.394)

Clearly, whether it was Islamabad’s Red Mosque in 2007 or TNSM-TTP’s Swat in 2009, global jihad succeeded in planting its Trojan Horse in Pakistan, not so much because of organisational linkages of Pakistani extremists with Al Qaeda, but because the jihadi flows of Al Qaeda were in synch with an ideological climate promoted by Pakistani rulers and functionaries in the past.

Indeed, it is interesting to note that when Al Suri was arrested in Quetta in October 2005 with his bodyguard, the latter turned out to be a member of Jaish-e Muhammad, the jihadi outfit that reportedly supplied weapons to militants in the Red mosque showdown of July, 2007 in Islamabad.

Clearly, despite Al Suri’s disappearance from the scene, his jihadi worldview is reflected in TTP’s outlook. Such a worldview is marked by contempt for “the plague of democracy and Parliament” on the one hand, and praise for an ‘Islam’ where “terrorism is a religious duty, and assassination a prophetic tradition”. (p.384-385)

Indeed, ‘peace deals’ are a hassle for such a worldview and conspiracy theories an asset — they help deflect the threat this worldview poses to Pakistan and the rest of the world.

Suroosh Irfani is an educationist and writer based in Lahore