Khudi Organizes National Counter-Terrorism Policy Dialogue

More than 41,000 Pak­ista­nis have been killed in ter­ror­ism relat­ed vio­lence since 2003, includ­ing more than 2,000 casu­al­ties only in the first four months of 2012. Yet, apart from mil­i­tary oper­a­tions in Swat and FATA, Pak­istani state has not yet come up with a holis­tic counter-ter­ror­ism strat­e­gy;  a strat­e­gy broad enough to include counter-extrem­ism aspect in order to counter the dan­ger­ous nar­ra­tives which moti­vate peo­ple to com­mit ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties. Some gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives such as the incep­tion of Nation­al Counter-Ter­ror­ism Author­i­ty could not be mate­ri­al­ized prob­a­bly because of the lack of polit­i­cal will from the state actors.

Khu­di invit­ed experts to dis­cuss these issues and to make rec­om­men­da­tions as to what role the gov­ern­ment, inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, civ­il soci­ety, activists and the intel­li­gentsia can play in deal­ing with the mul­ti-faceted prob­lem of ter­ror­ism.

Khu­di team explained “The Blue­print for a Nation­al Counter-extrem­ism Strat­e­gy”, high­light­ing five com­po­nents of the strat­e­gy:

1)      Counter-insur­gency

2)      Counter-ter­ror­ism

3)      Counter-rad­i­cal­iza­tion

4)      De-rad­i­cal­iza­tion

5)      Inte­gra­tion

Lt Gen­er­al ® Talat Masood, a renowned defence ana­lyst, crit­i­cized Pakistan’s for­eign pol­i­cy from Afghan War onward in terms of patron­iz­ing jihad and har­bin­ger­ing inter­na­tion­al mil­i­tants. Khawa­ja Khalid Farooq, the head of the Nation­al Counter-Ter­ror­ism Author­i­ty (NACTA), took a defen­sive stance about the fail­ures of law-enforce­ment agen­cies, owing to the absence of a sup­port­ing legal frame­work.

Muham­mad Amir Rana, the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Pak­istan Insti­tute of Peace Stud­ies, took on the extrem­ist nar­ra­tive preva­lent all over soci­ety as the pri­ma­ry cause of fail­ure of counter-ter­ror­ism pol­i­cy. He added that the state does not seem sin­cere in tack­ling with non-state actors and that there should be zero-tol­er­ance for all sorts of mil­i­tant orga­ni­za­tions involved in ter­ror­ism.

Khalid Masud, for­mer chair­man of Coun­cil of Islam­ic Ide­ol­o­gy, point­ed to the respon­si­bil­i­ty of reli­gious schol­ars in coun­ter­ing the spread of extrem­ism. He said that reli­gious schol­ars need to devel­op con­sen­sus on the jus­ti­fi­ca­to­ry par­a­digms behinds acts of ter­ror­ism which include issues of “Tak­fir” and “Khu­ruj”.

The talks were fol­lowed by inten­sive ques­tions and answers ses­sion. But owing to com­plex­i­ty of the prob­lems, great many ques­tions are still unan­swered.