Has Pakistan Army’s Full Control Over Politics Worsened Violence?

The security policies are so counterintuitive because they have always been made by the unaccountable Pakistan army.

Police officials examine the site of a bomb explosion in Lahore, Pakistan, on Thursday, 20 January.

Photo: PTI

What the terror attack in Anarkali, Lahore, has made clear is that the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has the Pakistani security apparatus so preoccupied that it was completely blindsided to the threat of violence from Baloch militant groups in the heart of Lahore. Though the attack wasn’t spectacular in size or in terms of the scale of damage to human lives and property, the shock elements of it comprised a couple of factors: first, that the heart of Lahore was struck, and second, that it was a Baloch militant outfit that demonstrated its capability to strike so far from home.

Though security alerts are issued within the administration in Lahore almost every second week now, they are TTP-centric. They could not imagine in their wildest dreams that an attack in a place like Lahore could come from a Baloch group at this time. The vast majority of recent Baloch militant attacks were confined to Balochistan, mostly aimed at security personnel and Chinese interests.

What this particular attack also demonstrates is that militancy, in general, and Taliban militancy, in particular, has been so badly handled that the state of Pakistan as a target and the people of Pakistan as collateral seem vulnerable and at risk of sliding into the violent era pre-2014, or even worse.

The country is now in a situation where all major militant movements, be they Baloch or be the TTP, are irreconcilable.

A Wrong Approach

The Baloch nationalist movements, which ought to have been handled politically, were always dealt with kinetically and repeatedly crushed with the most brutal responses. The result is that today, there is not one Baloch nationalist movement or party that is not separatist – and there are dozens of them around. And religiously inspired militants such as the TTP, who should have been dealt with militarily, were always considered an ‘asset’ in some manner and “humaray log” (our people) and were repeatedly engaged politically, even though their fundamental ideology is something that a modern political state can never reconcile with.

At least a dozen deals with the TTP and its predecessors have, predictably, come undone, like the latest one struck late last year. The ceasefire lasted one month, and then the TTP, again predictably, resumed its attacks.

How has the state dealt with the attacks of the TTP? By hiding them and forbidding the media from informing the public. The only ones that are reported in the media are the ones that occur in large urban centres that no one can hide, or those that the Chinese raise a stink about, such as the one in Dasu, Gilgit, in July 2021, because over a dozen of their engineers were killed in the attack. Otherwise, it was being dismissed as a gas cylinder explosion.

The huge blast last year in Johar Town, Lahore, was also being passed off as a gas cylinder explosion, till Indian journalists started reporting that it was a terror attack targeting Jamat-ud-Dawa leader Hafiz Saeed, at his home in Johar Town. As many as seven attacks by the TTP took place in the 48 hours leading up to the Baloch Nationalist Army (BNA) attack in Anarkali, and over a hundred attacks were perpetrated, according to experts, by the TTP in different parts of the country since the fall of Kabul.

But they are nowhere in the press or media. A blackout is ensured as far as possible. The fight, instead of being taken to the militants, is taken to journalists and the media.

Why? Because the TTP is armed and the army does not want to fight, and because the failure has to be hidden as long as possible and journalists are unarmed.

How Taliban's Rise Has Emboldened TTP

The escalation in violence is evident from the fact that the attacks have once again started to reach large urban centres such as Lahore and Islamabad, a direct result of the TTP being more emboldened because of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. And it is not a simple morale boost for the TTP – it has made a tremendous difference to them logistically. Before the fall, the TTP would have to seek safe havens in areas under the Taliban’s control across the border, such as the mountains in Kunar or Khost. Now, it has the whole of Afghanistan available to it, and it lives openly in Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Panjshir.

The Taliban has also shared with the TTP its bounty from American weapons and vehicles left, resulting in better resources. And every right-minded person expected this to be the logical outcome and fallout for Pakistan in the event of Kabul’s fall, given that the TTP and the Taliban have always been joined at the hip, ideologically as well as operationally.

But the confounding fact is that Pakistan’s security policy, based on some convoluted logic, had always wanted the Taliban to take over Afghanistan. And now the chickens are coming home to roost, almost literally in this case.

The army’s representatives in the media and Imran Khan’s government could not hide their glee at Kabul’s fall to the Taliban. Imran Khan went so far as to term the militant takeover in Afghanistan as the overthrowing of “chains of slavery” by the Afghan people.

The army’s touts in the media and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) hailed the fall of Kabul as Pakistan’s western border having become safe.

The Public Needs to Wrest Control

The security policy or policies are so bizarre, counterintuitive and harmful in the extreme for Pakistan’s citizens is because they have always been – and still are – made by the unaccountable Pakistan army. Rationality or the well-being and safety of citizens has never underpinned the security policies of the country.

And there seems to be no hope even now of developing transparent and effective policies designed to secure the people of Pakistan if one is to go by the National Security Policy unveiled earlier this month with much fanfare, and which is being hailed as the country’s first-ever National Security Policy written over the last seven years.

The less said about it the better, as it opines on everything under the sun, including macroeconomics 101, well-known principles of governance, equity, democracy, etc., except on actual security issues and policy. The document addresses neither the Baloch insurgency nor the TTP; it also doesn’t talk about the plethora of Islamic militant organisations such as the LeT, the JeM, and the recently born TLP that the state nurtures and patronises for foreign and domestic terror.

The worrisome issue in all this is that the capture of the security policy by the Pakistan army continues, which means that we can look forward to more madness, more killing and terror, possibly culminating in a raging civil war in the coming years. Until the public wrests control of the country, there will be no light at the end of the tunnel.

(Gul Bukhari is a Pakistani journalist and rights activist. She tweets @GulBukhari. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quintneither endorses nor is responsible for them.)