Young achievers

Tanvir Ahmad Khan

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The Pakistani state is being assailed by more than one kind of violence which, if not curbed, can lead to irreversible consequences for it. There is terrorism linked to the country’s role of as a frontline state in the so-called global war on terror. Just as the recent attacks on a children’s school bus and a funeral unrelated to that war demonstrate the total absence of any moral restraints in the terrorist bands constituting the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the destruction caused at the Mehran base, the repeated incursions into Chitral and Dir from Afghanistan and the frequent raids on Pakistani check posts elsewhere reveal ambitions beyond the usual aim of spreading panic amongst the civilians.


Secondly, there is the murder and mayhem in Karachi that is now widely linked to a larger battle for the exclusive control of this port city. That some political parties represented in coalitions set up by General Musharraf and President Zardari might have provided a protective cover for criminal gangs threatens the state no less than the terrorists based in the tribal badlands. Third, three years down the line, the government has still not articulated a credible plan to bring the insurgency in Balochistan to an end; its reform packages already seem to be ineffectual so far as the larger issues fuelling the insurgency are concerned. Fourth, the increasing resort to lethal weapons in social crimes shows that the overstretched police cannot maintain even the semblance of law and order. Fifth, the growing incidence of violence in spontaneous protests by citizens against prices and deficient services, particularly in power supply, indicate anarchic trends.

Terrorism has a long history that shows that time is an important factor in its eventual impact; when sustained over a long period it has been an instrument of setting the stage for decisive political changes, mostly because it debilitates the existing power structure.

Imperial Russia faced indiscriminate violence by nihilists and anarchists from 1860s to 1917-18 when Lenin’s Bolsheviks delivered the coup de grace. Knowing that violence becomes a psychological need of its random practitioners, they used them in their vastly more organised secret services to carry out massive purges all across Russia. The Fenians attacked the British colonial administration in Ireland in the last decades of the 19th century and their successor, the Irish Republican army (IRA) continued the struggle in Ireland and in England; the latter conceded Home Rule in 1914 and a Free Irish State in December, 1922. Then the conflict focused on the northern counties that the Crown did not cede to Ireland. In Palestine, the Jewish terrorist groups, Hagana, Irgun and Lehi played a complex game with Britain and accelerated the end of its mandate in a chaotic situation conducive to the birth of the militaristic state of Israel and expulsion of 650,000 Palestinians.

Ideologues attached to George Bush and Tony Blair endlessly propagated the view that the war against Islamists would last a generation if not longer. In Pakistan, there is realisation that it cannot afford endless violence but frequent atrocities are making the government insensitive and the people are rather blasé about them. A grave challenge warranting a multi-level and multi-dimensional effort that should harness all known approaches to conflict resolution is being largely met only with inefficient law enforcement. Time is of the essence but this simple truth has not been grasped either by the ruling coalition or by the religious political parties that remain reluctant to factor long-term implications of the current situation into policy. Meanwhile the state faces greater attrition than do the terrorists.