Dangerous truths

[SpArK]

Dangerous truths

By Tariq Khosa

“THE truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run,” wrote the late Ben Bradlee, editor of The Washington Post whose exposé of the Watergate scandal led to a president’s resignation. Pakistani state and society have to face the truth that the hydra-headed monster of militancy has permeated every institutional, social and political portal of power, and the war against it cannot be won through military means alone.

As illustrated so vividly in Quetta in recent days, sectarian terrorists, political insurgents and regional purveyors of violence are fully exploiting the fault lines that the state machinery has failed to address through a comprehensive national security policy.

How do we get out of the mess we have created on account of faulty and unwise state policies pursued for over three decades? What use is an unimplemented and ownership-deficient National Internal Security Policy (NISP) that was unveiled with such fanfare by the interior ministry earlier this year? A headless National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta) with an ineffective legal and organisational framework reflects policy paralysis resulting from turf battles within the government’s civilian and military components.

It is time we put our house in order. The prime minister has to take some quick and tough decisions to galvanise the state apparatus to combat the scourge of militancy.

The first and foremost task is to bring all the federal and provincial governments as well as the military and civilian security agencies on the same page against the mortal threat posed by the militants. The National Security Committee (NSC) should come up with a policy that unequivocally declares that no militant organisation will have the covert support of the government and its agencies. The state should completely dissociate itself from the proxies created in the past.

The Quetta killings show how militants can exploit state apathy.
Second, the prime minister should appoint a professional internal security adviser to implement NISP and coordinate with all the federal and provincial stakeholders as well as agencies dealing with terrorism and militancy.

Third, Nacta has proved a non-starter with the government unable to find a suitable serving BS-22 police officer as its head and the issue of placing the authority under the prime minister or interior minister still unresolved. Setting up a new organisation will take time. However, the NSC should constitute a national intelligence directorate under the internal security adviser for streamlining intelligence gathering and sharing to enable effective anti-terrorism operations.

The ISI should deal with militants with external links and agendas, including those operating from Fata. The ISI’s counterterrorism wing should be given legal protection under the Protection of Pakistan Act to formally detain and interrogate TTP and foreign-linked militants. The Intelligence Bureau and police, including crime investigation departments, should focus exclusively on sectarian terrorism.

Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ) and other banned groups will continue to flourish if the activities of their patrons and facilitators are not curbed and their movements not curtailed under the Anti Terrorism Act.

Moreover, the activists and criminal elements associated with them are known to local police; they should be detained and interrogated by joint investigation teams in a countrywide crackdown.

Fourth, religious extremism can only be curbed through zero tolerance against hate speech. The state has looked the other way for far too long. The virulent mullah-militant combine has done irreparable damage to tolerance in our society. The provincial special branches and local police should monitor and regulate the use of loudspeakers in mosques and madressahs and keep an eye on wall chalking as well as printed material aimed at creating sectarian trouble.

Fifth, firm gun control is now required as gun-toting militants mock the state by silencing voices of dissent through violence. The police will have to play a major role in the recovery of illegal lethal weapons.

Balochistan needs these measures: one, constituting a joint task force of police, Frontier Corps, ISI and IB to apprehend and bring to book known LJ militants in order to stop Hazara killings. Two, the kill-and-dump strategy against Baloch activists has to be curbed and no private militias allowed under state patronage. Three, the role of police and its jurisdiction should be gradually enhanced and the FC restored to its original mandate of border control. Four, the chief minister should be given the mandate and the autonomy to win back the ‘angry Baloch’.

Above all, the heartland of militancy is the Punjab province. The real battle will thus be fought in this most populous and prosperous region. This dangerous truth has to be faced by our security and military establishment. The lie has had a long run. It is time to change course and adopt a saner path for a peaceful and prosperous future.

The writer is a retired police officer.

Published in Dawn, October 28th, 2014

Dangerous truths - Newspaper - DAWN.COM

 

[SQ8]

State apathy or rather political support for militancy will only ensure that this truth continues to exist.

 

[Kompromat]

LEJ is the apple of the current govt's eye.

 

[Bratva]

LEJ is the apple of the current govt's eye.

It is inappropriate to put all blame on current government while giving free pass to our security establishment "blind eye" policy to a group fighting Baloch insurgents who are harbouring LEJ due to their Anti Shia tendencies.

The son of Naseer Mengal, a former federal minister, Shafiq Mengal set up a pro-government tribal militia known as the Baloch Musallah Difaee Tanzeem, in the latter half of 2008. The original mission of the militia was to defend the local population in the Mengal-dominated Khuzdar, Wadh and Awaran areas of central Balochistan against attacks from Baloch separatist militants. But it soon degenerated into a death squad, killing people for political as well as non-political and tribal reasons. The high court lawyer, who accompanied Justice Meskanzai on his visit to Tootak, tells the Herald that Shafiq Mengal is considered a “pawn set up by the intelligence agencies to counter Baloch militants in the province”.

Shafiq Mengal first appeared in Tootak in November, 2009, when he lured a few activists of the separatist Baloch Student Organisation to the area with the promise that he would organise the broadcast of nationalist songs there to create awareness about separatism among the local people. To gain the confidence of the local population, in 2011 he renamed his organisation the Haq Na Tawar — which means the Voice of the Truth in the Brahvi language, the mother language of most people in and around Tootak. All this was a decoy to spot, abduct and kill separatist activists, say government officials.

By then, Shafiq Mengal had also shifted his base to Tootak. It was around this time that pro-separation graffiti first appeared in the area, say local sources. “Until then, it was a place where people had no idea of, or interest in, the ongoing separatist movement,” says the lawyer.

Recovered bones are pictured near the mass graves discovered in Khuzdar. — Photo by Fahim Siddiqui/White Star

Shafiq Mengal, whose mother is the first cousin of Sardar Ali Ahmed, the head of the Qalandrani tribe in Tootak, and owns land in the area, soon fell afoul of his mother’s tribesmen who were unhappy with his activities. The Qalandrani chieftain first accused Shafiq Mengal of the abduction of his three sons — aged 31, 22, and 16 — in 2011. By the end of that year, 17 of Qalandrani’s relatives had gone missing. The last of them – a 22-year-old – was abducted from Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Maymar area.

Shafiq Mengal, who comes from an influential and educated family, dropped out from Aitchison College in Lahore, and later attended a Deobandi madrasa. A high court lawyer based in Khuzdar claims that Shafiq Mengal has been involved in providing protection to many Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives in Balochistan and that he has worked closely with the avowedly anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. “He works as their subcontractor,” he said.

Officials unearth bullets in what they suspect was a secretarian militant camp in Tootak. — Photo by Fahim Siddiqui/White Star
Shafiq Mengal’s long-time tribal and political opponent, the former chief minister Akhtar Mengal, who heads the Balochistan National Party–Mengal (BNPM), also accuses him of killing several of BNPM workers in Wadh and Khuzdar. The Musallah Difaee Tanzeem, indeed, openly claimed responsibility for many of these murders. A BNPM official based in Khuzdar says that Shafiq Mengal and his men have adopted a two-pronged strategy in the area. “They are either killing people for their political or ideological affiliation or they are kidnapping people to demand a heavy ransom,” he says. But their brutal control is absolute. A station house officer in Khuzdar was brazenly killed when he tried to register a case against Shafiq Mengal for the September 2013 kidnapping of Manaf Tareen, a senior Quetta-based doctor, says the BNPM official. All this bloodshed has put immense pressure on the government to put an end to Shafiq Mengal’s activities, and the sudden interest officials are showing in the Tootak graves is a means to contain him, says the Khuzdar-based lawyer. Otherwise, he says, the discovery of mass graves is not an unusual incident in the area. “Qalandrani tribesmen have been reported in a Quetta-based newspaper as saying, again and again, that there are mass graves in other areas as well,” he says. But nobody has taken note of those graves. Deputy Commissioner Shah is highly circumspect. He does not reject or confirm any theory about the mass graves. “What I know is that we are trying very hard to bring transparency in the way we work. Considering the environment around us, that is a huge feat in itself,” he says.

Herald Exclusive: Mangled facts - Home - DAWN.COM
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[Kompromat]

@Bratva

Herald has its own vested interests in reporting this which conforms to its objectives. Establishment has holy cows and they need to be scrapped.

 

[Jaanbaz]

Too late, too little I'm afraid. The state does not/cannot do anything against the menace of terrorism. There does not seem to be any interest from the Government or the security apparatus to come up with a viable policy regarding terrorism. Some sectarian outfits are left alone as long as they target the minorities specially Shia and do not disturb the majority.

 

[rockstarIN]

Change of foreign policy is not that easy which was followed for decades. The good and bad separate table will still come into effect.