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Repercussions of past policies

EDITORIAL UPDATED JAN 22, 2016 02:35AM

THE wave of terror unleashed in the first month of the new

year and the apparent links to militant safe havens
along the Pak-Afghan border triggered some reflection
in parliament on Wednesday.
Reacting to the Bacha Khan University attack, Mahmood
Achakzai, chief of the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party,

drew a line connecting policies of the past with the

terrorism the country faces today.

Bacha Khan University

teachers forced to go on
battlefront to save
students futures

Agreeing with Mr Achakzai was Defence Minister Khawaja

Asif, who had this to say: The fires that were lit in the
1980s are now engulfing us. While the defence minister
predictably also assailed the Musharraf-era cooperation

with the US-led war in Afghanistan, the broader point that

Mr Asif and Mr Achakzai made is undeniable the fight
against militancy is rooted in wrong choices made in the
past.
True as that may be, it is something of a victory that the
past can be so readily acknowledged in parliament. Some
years ago, to question the Afghan jihad of the 1980s would
have attracted angry denunciations and allegations of
unpatriotic behaviour.
Yet, how widespread is that view outside parliament or
even inside parliament? In some circles, there still appears
to be a great deal of denial.

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to be a great deal of denial.

Consider that Wednesdays attack in Charsadda
immediately led to allegations of Indian perfidy or Afghan
involvement. While there is certainly an urgent problem of
cross-border militancy, there is also another reality.
Each one of the attackers is likely to be proved a Pakistani.
They are also likely to have been raised in Pakistan,
embraced extremism inside Pakistan, joined militant
groups inside Pakistan and waged war against Pakistan
from inside.
It is likely that only during the very last stages of their
lives would the attackers have relocated to Afghanistan.
Similarly, the architects and planners of the attack are
entirely likely to be citizens of this country.
What makes denial more dangerous is that it is often
paired with the belief that armed jihad has a role in the
modern world that the war fought in Afghanistan in the
1980s was a glorious religious victory and that the war
being fought in Afghanistan today is a legitimate religious
struggle against imperial invaders.
This country will struggle to defeat terrorism, militancy
and extremism as long as such views prevail about the
outside world.
The debate in parliament on Wednesday fell short in one
regard: there were few ideas mooted about how to tackle
the internal militancy threat today.
Simply demanding NAP be implemented in full is not a
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policy recommendation. The latest wave of militant

violence suggests that specific steps need to be taken to
keep so-called soft targets better protected.
It will require reallocating intelligence and lawenforcement resources to either prevent such attacks or
respond to them faster. The enemy is shadowy and tends
to adapt the state must learn to tailor its response to
that reality.
Published in Dawn, January 22nd, 2016

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