Pakistan is in a state of siege. But the veritable enemy is not India or Russia or Iran or America. The enemy is within Pakistan. It is attacking our policemen, soldiers, politicians and religious leaders. Now it is on the warpath against our students. Nothing is sacred. Who will be next? When will it end?
India’s prime minister has warned that “the regional situation has worsened” and another Mumbai-like attack by state and non-state actors on India is imminent. He is pointing to a “Pakistani hand” behind the Taliban attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul recently. When Mumbai was attacked last November, India seriously thought of military retaliation against allegedly complicit targets and groups in Pakistan. But it wisely stayed its hand. Any military conflict with Pakistan could mushroom into a nuclear holocaust. However, the pressure on India next time would be greater and its consequences unimaginably horrendous for the region. This is exactly the state of anarchy and bloodshed which the enemy within Pakistan would like to achieve because it is in such an atmosphere that it flourishes and grows.
Iran’s president has warned of non-state actors in Pakistan’s Balochistan province who are suicide-bombing the Revolutionary Guards in Iran’s Siestan-Baloch province. Two such attacks were carried out last week, resulting in the death of 47 Iranians. The chief of the Revolutionary Guards wants to cross the Pakistan border in hot pursuit of the Jundullah terrorists which has tied up with the Al-Qaeda-Taliban network to destabilize Pakistan’s border with Iran. The same network has joined hands with various groups in the Punjab to foment trouble with India.
Meanwhile, the Americans are digging themselves in and around the main towns of Afghanistan and thinning their pickets on the border with Pakistan. This is CENTCOM General Stanley McChrystal’s new strategy of relocating and protecting his boots-on-the-ground until the Obama administration approves his request for 40,000 more troops. He is increasingly using drones to home into high-value targets in Pakistan’s Waziristan belt, and threatening to extend their area of operation into Balochistan. He seeks a greater operational role for the Pakistani army in Waziristan. The implied threat is that if the Pakistani military doesn’t do the job, then the CIA and CENTCOM may be compelled to put boots-on-ground in hot pursuit of the marauding Taliban in Waziristan.
If Pakistan’s border with Iran, Afghanistan and India should heat up and compel the Pakistan army to dilute attention on the Al-Qaeda-Taliban front, the siege within the country would definitely intensify. Already, Rehman Malik, the interior minister, says the nation is “at war”. As during war time, all schools and colleges are closed. The stock market, which had raised its head cautiously when the Kerry-Lugar Bill’s US$7.5 billion (Rs 62,250 crores) aid was announced, is back in the bunker, cowering at the misplaced passions aroused by mindless TV anchors and poison-pushing columnists fulminating against America even as the enemy within has killed over 170 Pakistanis in the last ten days and lunged at the very heart of the military establishment in Rawalpindi. Ironically, in the latest Taliban attack on a women’s hostel at the Islamic University in Islamabad – a throwback to the bombing of over 400 girls’ schools in Swat last year – the misguided students vented their anger at the university administration and federal government instead of the terrorists.
There is greater irony in deconstructing the enemy within. Why doesn’t the Pakistani media highlight the false security compulsions that led to the creation of the Taliban, Lashkars and Jihadi organizations that bedevil Pakistan’s very existence as a nation-state? Why don’t the students of the Islamic University who protested the suicide attack by pumping clenched fists in the air against the government instead of the Taliban care to remember that their university was a hotbed of radical “Islamist” thought in the 1980s and 1990s and nurtured leaders like Abdullah Azzam, who set up the first Al-Qaeda office in Peshawar? The double irony in this case is that the Taliban group which took responsibility for the suicide attack on the Khassadars or local police levies in Khurram Agency during Ramzan last year was called the Abdullah Azzam Brigade.
But the enemy within Pakistan is not just the Al-Qaeda-Taliban network. It is a national mindset that refuses to see and fight the enemy within. This is a mindset that harbours conspiracy theories of an “external hand” in every disaster that befalls Pakistan; it is a mindset that hankers for an imagined rather than real “Islamic” past; it is a mindset that is constantly trying to anchor Pakistan’s ideological moorings in the autocratic Islamic Middle East rather than democratic secular South Asia; it is a “national” mindset that is based on “tribal” and pre-Islamic notions of honour and justice; it is a campus mindset that is riven with inferiority complexes, insecurities and false bravado. This mindset is reflected in a shallow national culture of angry exclusivism rather than natural integration in the global economy.
Pakistan’s national security apparatus might one day succeed in weeding out the Al-Qaeda-Taliban network. But until Pakistanis can purge their mindset of the ideological demons that reside therein, they shall not be able to lift the siege within.