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Teetering
on the Brink
Ajit Kumar Singh
Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management
Pakistan’s
continuing engagement with the production and export of
Islamist extremism and terrorism continued to produce
a bloody blowback at home, with a total of at least 6,142
persons, including of 2,797 militants, 2,580 civilians
and 765 Security Forces (SFs) personnel killed in 2011.
However, even this worrying total constituted an improvement
of 17.75 per cent over the preceding year. 7,435 persons,
including 5,170 militants, 1,796 civilians and 469 SF
personnel, had been killed in 2010.
While civilian
and SF fatalities increased by whopping 43.65 and 63.11
percent, respectively, the steep decline (45.89 percent)
in fatalities among the militants, primarily due to Islamabad’s
approach of going soft on terror, was the sole reason
for the decrease in overall fatalities through 2011.
Meanwhile,
Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik on August 2, 2011,
informed the National Assembly that the SFs had arrested
3,143 alleged terrorists in the country and recovered
4,240 weapons from them over the preceding three years.
However, the Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Iftikhar
Mohammad Chaudhry, on December 24, 2011, expressed dissatisfaction
over the slow disposal of cases in Anti-Terrorism Courts
(ATC), over delays in submission of charge sheets and
frequent adjournments being sought and granted to prosecuting
and defence counsel in trial courts.
The country
recorded at least 476 major
incidents (involving three or more
killings) of terrorism in 2011, in which 4,447 persons
were killed. The fiercest of these attacks took place
on May 13, 2011, when 90 people, including 73 Paramilitary
Forces (PMF) personnel and 17 civilians, were killed by
twin suicide bombers who attacked troops as they were
about to leave a Frontier Corps (FC) Training Centre in
the Shabqadar tehsil in the Charsadda District
of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). After the attack, Tehrik-e-Taliban
Pakistan (TTP)
spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan declared, "This was the
first revenge for Osama's martyrdom. Wait for bigger attacks
in Pakistan and Afghanistan." The number of major
attacks in 2010 stood at 662, inflicting a total of 6,088
fatalities.
There was,
however, a dramatic decline in fatalities inflicted by
suicide attacks, though the diminution in the total number
of such attacks was not as sharp. 41 suicide attacks,
inflicting 628 fatalities, were reported in 2011, as against
49 such attacks inflicting 1,167 fatalities in 2010. Revelations
by Umar Fidayee (14), the teenage suicide bomber who was
arrested as an accomplice in the suicide attack on the
shrine of Sufi saint Ahmed Sultan, popularly known as
Sakhi Sarwar, in the Dera Ghazi Khan District of Punjab
on April 3, 2011, indicated that up to 400 suicide bombers
were being trained in NWA, suggesting that little respite
from such attacks was to be expected in the days to come.
The number
of terrorist engineered explosions across Pakistan increased
from 473 in 2010 to 639 in 2011, resulting in 1,547 and
1,092 fatalities, respectively. Sectarian violence also
continued to haunt the troubled country, with at least
30 such incidents reported in 2011 as against 57 in 2010,
resulting in 203 and 509 fatalities, respectively.
‘Target
killings’ – a continuous stream of assassinations inspired
by sectarian, political or purely criminal motives, and
executed by a range of armed non-state actors – engulfed
the nation. A February 14, 2012, Home Department
Report observed, “Target killings still continue in most
parts of the country and major reasons behind these are
sectarian, demographic changes, easy access to illicit
weapons, mistrust among ethnic groups, family enimities
and business rivalries”. Significantly, official documents
noted that, over the preceding four years, since the Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP)-led coalition came into power in
2008, the Government had issued about 50,000 prohibited-bore
arms licenses. The licenses had been issued to applicants
from all the Provinces, allowing them to carry sub-machineguns
and AK-47s for their ‘personal security’.
Meanwhile,
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) remained
the most volatile region, followed by KP, Sindh, Balochistan,
Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan,
in terms of terrorism related fatalities. FATA recorded
3,034 fatalities in 2011, as compared to 5,321 in 2010;
KP accounted for 1,026 fatalities in 2011, as compared
to 1,212 in 2010; Sindh registered 1,054 fatalities in
2011, as compared to 238 in 2010; Balochistan had 711
fatalities in 2011, as compared to 347 in 2010; while
Punjab recorded 137 fatalities in 2011, as compared to
317 in 2010.
While FATA
continued to reel under the impact of terrorism, there
was no respite from terror in KP
as well. Sindh continued to experience a more centralized
pattern of violence in and around
Karachi. However, the extension of the influence of armed
extremist political, ethnic, sectarian and criminal groups
in the city, and the chances of violence spreading to
other areas of the Province, could not be ruled out.
As in the
past, Islamabad also failed
through 2011, to devise any coherent or unified strategy
against mounting intimidation and violence by terrorist
groups in Punjab. Meanwhile, the policy of encouraging
Islamist
extremists, while using brute force
against those demanding genuine rights and redressal of
long standing grievances, in Balochistan deepened problems.
The most dramatic and brutal instance of this strategy
was witnessed in Karachi on January 31, 2012, when gunmen
shot
dead the 34 year old sister, Zamur
Bugti, and her daughter, the 13 year old niece, of exiled
Baloch leader Brahumdagh Bugti. Baloch sources have openly
blamed Pakistan’s notorious intelligence agency, the Inter
Services Intelligence (ISI), for the killing. In another
context, Baloch nationalist leader and Senator Mir Hasil
Khan Bizenjo declared that Balochistan had been run by
the ISI for all practical purposes for the last 15 years,
with no civilian control over governance in the Province.
Moreover,
the fundamentalists and extremists continued to exercise
their uncontrolled sway across the country. At least two
prominent personalities were killed for voicing their
criticism of the country’s draconian blasphemy law – Punjab
Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated by his own security
guard, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, in Islamabad on January 4,
2011; and Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs, Shahbaz
Bhatti, was assassinated in the limits of the Industrial
Area Police Station in Islamabad on March 2, 2011.
Meanwhile,
the United States Commission on International Religious
Freedom (USCIRF) reiterated that schools in Pakistan continued
to use textbooks that preach intolerance towards non-Muslim
religious minorities. A USCIRF report stated that most
teachers view non-Muslims as “enemies of Islam”. The
Commission reviewed more than 100 textbooks from grades
1-10 from Pakistan’s four provinces. Indeed, charities
from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates financed
a network in Pakistan that recruited children as young
as eight to wage “holy war”. A US diplomatic cable published
by WikiLeaks noted that Saudi Arabia was widely
seen as funding some of Pakistan’s hardline religious
madrassas (seminaries), which churn out young men
eager for “holy war”. “At these madrassas, children
are denied contact with the outside world and taught sectarian
extremism, hatred for non-Muslims, and anti-Western/anti-Pakistan
government philosophy,” the cable noted.
A highly
radicalized society and politics has created vast spaces
for religious extremism and terrorism to thrive.
The Federal Ministry of Interior released a list of
31 banned outfits in November 2011. Most of the organisations
had been on earlier lists of proscribed organizations,
but the People’s Aman Committee of Karachi, Shia Tulaba
Action Committee, Markaz Sabeel Organisation and Tanzeem-i-Naujawanan-i-Sunnat
of Gilgit-Baltistan, were new additions to the list. The
list included several militant outfits which now operate
under new names. Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT),
for instance, was on the list, but its new identity —
Jamaat ud Dawa (JuD) — was missing. Meanwhile, according
to media reports, the Interior Ministry has increased
the number of banned organisations to 38. Despite bans,
however, the Government continued to avoid confrontation
with most of these organizations, and little effective
action has been initiated for their neutralization.
Meanwhile,
all Jihadi groups, in consultation with the Islamic Emirate
Afghanistan (the Mullah Omar led shadow Taliban Government
which operates from Quetta), decided to set up a committee,
Shura-e-Muraqba (Council for Protection), to set
aside differences in their ranks and step up support for
war against western forces in Afghanistan.
Unsurprisingly,
Pakistan’s opportunistic alliance with the United States
(US) deteriorated rapidly, even as the US announced the
decision to withdraw ‘combat Forces’ from Afghanistan
by 2014, providing a fillip to Pakistan-backed radicals
to escalate their campaigns in Afghanistan.
In the
most recent of a long chain of such incidents, at least
18 militants, among them foreigners, were killed when
US drones fired missiles on a compound and a vehicle in
different areas of South Waziristan Agency of the FATA
on March 9, 2012. According to intelligence sources, up
to 12 militants were killed when drones fired four missiles
on the vehicle in the Jandool Mandow area of Shaktoi.
In another incident, six Uzbek militants died when drones
fired two missiles at a compound in Nesphah, 12 kilometers
from Jandool Mandow.
Drone attacks
had, in fact, been stalled in the aftermath of the strong
Pakistani resentment over the killing of at least 25 Pakistani
soldiers on November 26, 2011, in a cross border attack
by NATO Forces on a check post in Salala village in Baizai
tehsil (revenue unit) of Mohmand Agency in FATA.
These were, however, resumed on January 10, 2012, when
missiles fired by US drone killed four suspected militants
in the outskirts of Miranshah in the North Waziristan
Agency (NWA) of FATA. According to the South Asia Terrorism
Portal (SATP) database, 2012 has so far witnessed
at least eight drone attacks on Pakistani soil, in which
68 persons have been killed. 548 persons were killed in
59 such attacks in 2011; and 831 were killed in 90 drone
attacks in 2010. 2,142 persons have been killed in drone
strikes since 2005.
Pakistani
civilian and military leaders, who had, earlier, privately
supported US drone attacks, have developed sharp anxieties
on this count during the course of 2011, and have repeatedly
protested against US operations, including drone strikes,
inside Pakistani territory, as a transgression of Pakistan’s
sovereignty. US-Pak relations, consequently, continued
to sour through 2011.
The first
open confrontation followed the Raymond Davis case. Pakistan
had been coerced by the US to release American official
Raymond Davis, arrested for killing two men in Lahore
in Punjab on January 27, 2011. Another blow to an already
edgy relations was dealt on April 25, 2011, when official
documents leaked by the WikiLeaks website disclosed
that the US administration had placed Pakistan’s external
intelligence agency, ISI, on a list of terrorist outfits
alongside groups like Hezbollah, al Qaeda and the Muslim
Brotherhood. Before the storm over these issues could
settle down, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed
in a US Army operation at Abbottabad
in KP on May 1-2, 2011, without ‘Pakistani knowledge’.
When Pakistan made hue and cry over the issue, the US
argued that the trust deficit between the Forces of the
two countries precluded sharing of intelligence prior
to the attack.
The NATO
attack on November 26, 2011, brought relations to their
nadir. Pakistan has since shut down all supply routes
through the country for materials to the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF) forces stationed in Afghanistan,
forcing NATO to rely increasingly on the relatively cumbersome
Northern Distribution Network (NDN). Indeed, according
to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report of December
19, 2011, the US had progressively increased reliance
on the NDN with regard to non-military supplies since
2009, with as much as 40 per cent of cargo going through
the NDN, and just 29 per cent transported through Pakistan.
However, the Committee report noted that the NDN was not
a perfect substitute for the current supply routes in
Pakistan as it costs roughly an additional USD 10,000
per twenty-foot container to ship via the NDN instead
of Pakistan. The US was forced to pay as much as six times
more to send war supplies to troops in Afghanistan through
these alternate routes, according to an Associated
Press report.
Meanwhile,
the worsening situation in Afghanistan has not helped
US-Pakistan relations. According to a February 29, 2012,
US Congressional Research Service report, as many as 3,021
civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2011, as against
2,777 in 2010. The number of civilian fatalities stood
at 2,412 in 2009, 2,118 in 2008 and 1,523 in 2007. 116
civilians had been killed in 2012 till the date of the
report. Media reportage, meanwhile, indicated that Pakistan
continued to play a pivotal role in the militant campaigns
in Afghanistan. In one of the most high profile attacks
of 2011, former Afghan President and head of the High
Peace Council (HPC), Burhanuddin Rabbani, was assassinated
on September 20, 2011, with the finger of suspicion pointing
to a Pakistani role in the assassination, which is currently
being investigated. Pakistan also continues to support
and encourage militants to continue attacks on ISAF forces.
According to data compiled by the icasaulties.org,
a total of 566 ISAF personnel were killed in 2011 as against
711 in 2010. A total of 2,915 ISAF personnel have lost
their lives in Afghanistan since November 25, 2001.
Simmering
border
tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan
between June and August, 2011, provided Pakistan an ‘opportunity’
to increase assistance to militants in securing control
over a larger swathe of land in the border region. On
June 18, 2011, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told a visiting European delegation
that “Pakistan wants a stable Afghanistan but not at the
cost of Pakistan,” suggesting that Islamabad sought to
dominate any peace initiative in Afghanistan and was unlikely
to accept a solution that would undermine its purported
strategic interests. Significantly, footprints
of Pakistani terror continued to manifest themselves across
the globe. In the most recent incident, nine British-Asians
of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, arrested on December
20, 2010, were jailed in the UK on February 10, 2012,
over an al Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb the London Stock
Exchange and to organise a terrorist training camp in
Pakistan. A US Congressional report observed that Islamist
militant groups operating in and from Pakistan territory
fell into five broad types: globally oriented militants,
Afghanistan-oriented militants, India- and Kashmir-oriented
militants, sectarian militants, and domestically oriented
militants.
US efforts
to bring peace in the region has also been adversely affected
by Pakistan’s continued reluctance to act against various
Afghan Taliban Forces operating from its soil, most significantly
including the Haqqani Network, the most formidable force
in Afghanistan operating from sanctuaries in NWA. Islamabad’s
continuing patronage to other militant groups operating
in Afghanistan and elsewhere the globe has added fuel
to the fire. In a recent indictment, the Chairman of US
Senate Committee on Armed Services, Senator Carl Levin,
on February 16, 2012, said, “Pakistan’s support to the
Haqqani Network is a major cause for US-Pakistan relations
reaching a low point where they’re going to remain until
the Pakistan military ends its ties to these extremists
carrying out cross-border attacks.”
Unfortunately,
the disastrous military-mullah combine continued
to thrive. In one glaring instance, Mullah Omar, the Afghan
Taliban, leader who suffered a heart attack on January
7, 2011, was reportedly treated for several days in a
Karachi hospital with ISI help, according to a report
prepared by the Eclipse Group, which operates an
intelligence network run by former CIA, State Department
and military officers. In another instance, a November
4, 2011, BBC report, confirmed that the ISI was
behind the Mumbai attacks (November 26, 2008, also known
as 26/11) as well as the July 7, 2008, bombing of the
Indian Embassy in Kabul. In a two-part series titled 'Secret
Pakistan', Bruce Riedel, the CIA officer who served as
advisor to US President Barack Obama, disclosed that he
had informed the then President-elect about 26/11: "Everything
pointed back to Pakistan. It was a defining moment.”
Meanwhile,
the media continued to bear the brunt of both state and
extremist ire. The SATP recorded at least nine
journalists killed in 2011, the same number that were
killed in 2010. The most prominent of such killings took
place on May 31, 2011 when Syed Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani
investigative journalist for leading European and Asian
media, was found dead near the town of Mandi Bahauddin,
about 75 miles (120 kilometres) south of Islamabad. Shahzad
had been tortured before being executed. Reports indicate
that he had been ‘picked up’ by ISI agents before his
‘disappearance’ and the subsequent discovery of his body.
The ISI’s involvement in the case is being ‘investigated’.
More recently, on January 17, 2012, a senior tribal reporter,
Mukarram Khan Atif, correspondent for the Washington-based
Pashto language Deewa Radio and a reporter for
a private TV channel, was shot dead by two unidentified
assailants in the Shabqadar area of Charsadda District
in KP. Meanwhile, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari's
media adviser Farahnaz Ispahani on January 24, 2012, alleged
that she fled the country over fears that the ISI might
abduct her to force her husband, former Ambassador to
the US Husain Haqqani, to sign a confession and implicate
the President in the MemoGate scandal.
On the
political front, the MemoGate scandal created an upheaval
that retains the potential to destabilize the ‘democratic
setup’ of the country. Wikileaks had disclosed
that the then Pakistani Ambassador to Washington, Husain
Haqqani, had asked Pakistani businessman, Mansoor Ijaz,
to deliver an anonymous "memo" to the American
military leadership in May 2011, offering to rein in the
Pakistani armed forces in return for US support for the
civilian Government. This resulted in a significant confrontation
between the Army command and civilian Government in Pakistan,
with the judiciary stepping in to ‘investigate’ treason
charges against Haqqani.
A rising
economic crisis is adding to the political instability
in the country, with GDP growth stagnating at 2.4 per
cent in fiscal year 2010-11, barely offsetting population
growth, as compared to 3.8 percent in the preceding year,
and the population in poverty burgeoning to an estimated
90 million out of a total population of about 177 million.
Conspicuously,
as the US adventure in Afghanistan approaches a critical
juncture, events in that country will have a critical
bearing on Pakistan, even as developments in Pakistan
will leave an inescapable impact on Afghanistan. Bruce
Riedel has noted that the US needs to ‘reset’ its policy
toward Pakistan, to contain the ambitions of the Pakistan
Army, the ISI and the flourishing syndicate of terror,
including groups like the LeT, if it is to hope for any
success in Afghanistan. Pointing to President Obama’s
promise to make the al Qaeda core, or al Qaeda al Umm
(the mother al Qaeda), his top target if elected, Riedel
noted, “The group's [al Queda’s] allies and affiliates
in Pakistan, by contrast, are under virtually no pressure,"
adding, "Al Qaeda is on the defensive in Pakistan,
but its many allies and affiliates are on the march".
The incoherence
of US policy and strategy in Afghanistan can only add
to instability in the AfPak region. Despite noting that
aid given to Pakistan to fight militancy had been diverted
‘for other purposes’, US aid continued to flow into the
country. The US State Department requested Congress to
approve USD 2.4 billion towards allocations for Pakistan
for the fiscal year 2013. USD 20 billion has already been
pumped into Pakistan over the last decade and over a billion
dollars had been provided under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman
Bill.
Despite
the US-Pakistan relationship approaching its nadir, and
Pakistan’s continuing domestic crises, there is little
to suggest that Pakistan is going correct course and to
improve, in the foreseeable future, its current rank,
as the 12th among the countries approaching
state failure. Indeed, available indices suggest that
none of the power players in the country have altered
the fundamentals of their devastating, indeed, suicidal,
approach to the instrumentalization of Islamist extremism
and terrorism, both for domestic political management
and for strategic extension across and beyond the country’s
neighbourhood. Increasing cooperation, outside state patronage,
among Islamist extremist formations, under umbrella organizations
such as the Shura-e-Muraqba and the Difa-e-Pakistan
(Defence of Pakistan) Council (DePC) (the latter, forging
unity between more than 40 religious and extremist formations
under the leadership of the LeT-JuD), creates the spectre
of even greater radicalization and a progressive loss
of control by state agencies that have, in the past, ‘handled’
Islamist terrorism in the region. A flight of elites from
the country has long been in evidence, even as those who
remain within the country build up their assets abroad
for eventual and quick escape. The progressive evisceration
of state structures and institutions of governance, the
visible weakening of the Army’s stranglehold over the
country’s affairs, and the increasing accumulation of
armed force among non-state actors can only combine with
rising popular frustrations and anger against arbitrary,
repressive, indiscriminate and often brutal state action
against groupings that seek justice and redressal of real
grievances, to push the country further into the embrace
of a rising anarchy.
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