Imran and Supporters Beat about the Bush?

Zubair Tor­wali

“Tal­iban attack Pak­istan in retal­i­a­tion to the drone attacks in Fata. In order to bring per­ma­nent peace in Pak­istan the drone strikes must be stopped”. This is the mantra we have been hear­ing in the fiery speech­es deliv­ered by Imran Khan in the streets of Pak­istan. His nar­ra­tive is now tak­en for grant­ed by many peo­ple in Pak­istan; and the nation­al dis­course around the men­ace of mil­i­tan­cy and ter­ror­ism has squeezed to have one sin­gle ‘cause’, the drone attacks.

Imran Khan’s yearn­ing for peace has no adver­sary; and there should be none but his under­stand­ing of the whole issue of ter­ror­ism has many flaws. It seems as if Imran Khan is beat­ing about the bush.
Imran Khan’s nar­ra­tive that Tal­iban kill inno­cent cit­i­zens of Pak­istan and the secu­ri­ty per­son­nel trough sui­cide bombers, tar­get killings and remote con­trol blasts in retal­i­a­tion of the drone attacks con­duct­ed by US forces seems too naïve to buy. Imran Khan nev­er goes back to the his­to­ry of ter­ror­ism in Pak­istan. He also sees ter­ror­ism in Pak­istan in iso­la­tion. He even goes to the extent that ter­ror­ism does not stop in Pak­istan because of the mil­i­tary oper­a­tions against the mil­i­tants. He evades even men­tion­ing the Pak­istani mil­i­tary arrange­ment of groom­ing ter­ror­ists as prox­ies to be used for the ‘secu­ri­ty of the coun­try’.

It appears as if his hos­tile pol­i­tics on drone attacks is just a maneu­ver to save his own polit­i­cal par­ty from mil­i­tants. If he were sin­cere he would have also spo­ken up against the pow­er­ful forces that have nour­ished ter­ror­ism in the past, and as some sug­gest, have not giv­en up the prac­tice even today despite the loss of over 5,000 secu­ri­ty per­son­nel and some top brass offi­cials.

Researchers say the drone attacks began in 2004 while ter­ror­ism in Pak­istan began much ear­li­er. Ter­ror­ism in Pak­istan began with the first use of cit­i­zens against India in Kash­mir and lat­er against the for­mer Sovi­et Union in Afghanistan. The first call to the tribes­men to fight against Indi­an forces in Kash­mir in the name of Jihad and the tribesmen’s blind eager­ness to do so showed Pak­istani mil­i­tary the way to design a pol­i­cy which allowed the mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment to groom, nour­ish and train pri­vate armies. They car­ried out the same prac­tice against their own coun­try­men in the for­mer East Pak­istan where loy­al­ist extrem­ists under the ban­ner of orga­ni­za­tions like Al-Badar and Al-Shams were let loose at Ben­galis. The ghosts of their past still haunt our rul­ing elite as recent­ly the par­lia­ment passed a res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing the exe­cu­tion of Mol­lah Qadir under war crimes.
When the for­mer Sovi­et Union invad­ed Afghanistan the Pak­istan mil­i­tary again turned to the tribes­men and eas­i­ly con­vinced them and their broth­ers in Afghanistan to fight Jihad with the sup­port of Amer­i­can dol­lars.

I remem­ber that in my first ever vis­it to the Uni­ver­si­ty Town in Peshawar in ear­ly 90s I asked my host the address of his office. He told it was near the Tal­iban Markaz. This ‘Markaz’ was being used to enlist Madrassha stu­dents in Pak­istan, to train them and then to send them to Afghanistan. These young men were sent to Afghanistan appar­ent­ly to bring peace after hav­ing test­ed the Muja­hedeen gov­ern­ment there. The rise of Tal­iban in Afghanistan had the full sup­port of Pak­istan and these men under the name of Tal­iban were none but pup­pets of Pak­istan. We in Pak­istan curse the USA as an impe­r­i­al pow­er but for­get the skele­ton in our cup­board. Giv­en our role in East Pak­istan and Afghanistan, what is our cred­i­bil­i­ty when we blame every­thing on oth­er impe­ri­al­ist pow­ers?

In Malakand Divi­sion espe­cial­ly in Swat, Maulana Sufi Muham­mad who used to be a local leader of Jamaat Isla­mi found­ed the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion Tanzeem-e-Nifaaz-e-Shari­at-e-Muham­ma­di (TNSM) in ear­ly 90s when there were no drone attacks. The phe­nom­e­non of Swat Tal­iban was mere­ly an exten­sion of the TNSM.
Pak­istan has a bloody his­to­ry of sec­tar­i­an cleans­ing. And now the Pak­istan Tal­iban have tak­en this war among the war­ring sects to the extreme. This war has its roots in the secu­ri­ty pol­i­cy which has sup­port­ed the ‘High Church’, as senior ana­lyst Khaled Ahmad puts it. This pol­i­cy is based on a war­ring and purg­ing ide­ol­o­gy which was, and is still, spread­ing wide under the aus­pice of reli­gious polit­i­cal par­ties such as JI and JUI, and the apo­lit­i­cal mis­sion­ary move­ment such as Tableeghi Jamaat. Many of our rulers and gen­er­als are also mem­bers of Tableeghi Jamaat.

Imran Khan needs to focus and hit the real caus­es of ter­ror­ism if he real­ly means peace oth­er­wise mere beat­ing about the bush may save him and his par­ty but will nev­er bring peace, while play­ing the ter­ror­ists card will have dire con­se­quences for the future of Pak­istan. Being a new hope for change and pop­u­lar among many youth, Imran Khan must come to the point. Present­ly he does not lead the youth but con­fuse them fur­ther.

Zubair Tor­wali, a rights activist, researcher based in Bahrain, Swat where he also leads IBT an inde­pen­dent orga­ni­za­tion for the rights, edu­ca­tion and envi­ron­ment for the mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties. Email: ztorwali@gmail.com