Opinion How to talk to the terrorist

What the UK can do is assist Pakistan in facing up to terrorism rather than talking to the terrorists. (Talks with the IRA came much later.) It can train our police in light of their experience in Northern Ireland,and in the depth of the country where the IRA was able to strike. Will Pakistan be willing to get its police trained by the UK experts,possibly helped by other EU states with Nato funding? If a special force is set up in Pakistan,as promised by Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan,will Pakistan be able to do its induction on British advice? Is Pakistan willing to get out of its self-imposed and insidiously pro-terrorism international isolation to go through the national trauma of consulting the UK in this regard?

To muddy the waters further,Islamabad has announced that the Karachi-based political party,the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM),runs its own terrorist outfit in the mega-city under the dubious name of Muhajir Republican Army. Maybe London should be consulted on that since the MQM leader lives in London. The kind of process London was able to start with the IRA may not be possible with the Taliban. However,a close study of how Colombia is talking to its 50-year-old terrorist movement FARC should be undertaken. Last month,Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was getting ready to send his team to Cuba “for talks”,but only after verifying that FARC was prepared to return to the negotiating table.

Santos is gambling on talks because FARC is apparently weakened after a 10-year US-backed military offensive reduced the number of terrorists to 8,000. Pakistan too was on the same side as the US in the fight against the Taliban and their master al-Qaeda,till the Americans got too serious and stepped on the corns of the deep-state fighting India while shadow-boxing with the Taliban. It got so angry once that it closed down the Nato supply route through Pakistan,offending states other than the US too. Now,anti-US populism has scared all leaders from going down that road,although there is nostalgia for the drone strikes that killed many major terror leaders killing people deep inside Pakistan.

There was another parallel: FARC killed 13 Colombian soldiers the same week President Santos was fuelling his plane for Cuba. Translated to English,FARC means Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army,and it has an ideology like the Taliban: Marxism-Leninism,Bolivarianism,revolutionary socialism and left-wing nationalism. Like the Taliban ideology,the above combination has international resonance,especially Bolivarianism,because it inspires a number of South American states and intellectuals like Pakistan’s brilliant Tariq Ali. Islamic Bolivarianism is on the rise in the Middle East while most Muslims are busy killing Muslims,just like FARC in Colombia.

The other factor is the drug trade. The Taliban are busy using the exit points in Pakistan to smuggle heroin being produced in Afghanistan. FARC controls more than 60 per cent of Colombia’s drug trade,including cocaine trafficking overseas. It earns as much as $1 billion a year from the production and sale of cocaine in Colombia.

According to a Newsweek Pakistan story filed by Ron Moreau in June this year,“Helmand is [Afghanistan’s largest opium producer… farmers are expected this year to sow more than the 1,85,000 acres of opium poppies they planted in 2012… Leading members of the Northern Alliance had long produced opium and refined heroin in northern provinces like Badakhshan — exporting both products north through Uzbekistan,Tajikistan and Turkmenistan,and then on to Russia and Europe. Now,they are also able to ship this harvest through Taliban-controlled areas in the south and into Iran and Pakistan.” Afghanistan produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin and,after the recent spike in production,Pakistani airports often catch trained youths with heroin capsules in their rectum.

Pakistan needs to do much more than simply ask for a clinically sealed how-to procedure from the UK. The Taliban are mountain people just like FARC,which is led by peasants,and have the same ideology as Pakistan,sans some modern concepts of justice like “due process”,while applying Quranic punishments. The Taliban are no longer restricted to the mountains or even one province like Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa: there are far more numerous Punjabi Taliban doing terrorism in Punjab under the umbrella of al-Qaeda,and they almost dominate the terror-crime scene in Karachi.

What if the UK tells us to first separate the war against Taliban from the war against India? In the coming conflict in Afghanistan,Pakistan will be fighting the most confusing war against the Afghan National Army with the help of the very “proxy” elements killing innocent people inside or outside Pakistan. While asking the UK for help,Islamabad will not be able to stop the “long marches” the potential warriors in Afghanistan are in the process of leading from Lahore to Islamabad against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s policy of normalising relations with India.

London would be hard put to conflate its experience with the IRA with what it knows of the Taliban. What if they ask Islamabad to “soften” the Taliban leadership in North Waziristan a bit before engaging in talks with them? The “Big Leader” Hakimullah Mehsud runs his emirate from there and he is no mean enemy. Only the drones can “soften” the Taliban,but Pakistan’s policy is to reject the drones to placate the very people it would be asking London to help in taking down.

In After bin Laden: Al Qaeda,the Next Generation(2012) editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi,Abdel Bari Atwan,writes: “In 2008 Hakimullah demonstrated the ruthlessness for which he has become infamous when his men managed to kidnap an entire platoon of 300 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers. In exchange for the release of 100 Taliban from prison,Hakimullah set most of the paramilitaries free… but not all; he killed five of them and returned their mutilated bodies.” Hakimullah would have been more lethal if the drones had

not forced him to hole up in North Waziristan.

In North Waziristan,Pakistan has its trump card in the so-called Haqqani Network — Afghan Taliban who strike across Afghanistan — which will not be sacrificed merely to be able to talk to the Taliban. The UK didn’t talk to the IRA while using some of its cadre against,let’s say,its neighbour France. As for Punjabi Taliban culled from the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba,Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammad,London might ask Islamabad to tackle them first,unless it wants to be stabbed in the back during talks.

Lastly,talks are made easy if the terrorists are united. Normally,states are readier to take on terrorists if they are divided; but a desperately willing-to-talk Pakistan wants to do the opposite. Unlike FARC,the Taliban are organised as atomised entities only notionally united under the banner of al-Qaeda. Since they are heavily involved in crime,they will be least willing to talk unless Pakistan embraces capitulationism,in which case it doesn’t have to consult London.

The writer is a consulting editor with ‘Newsweek Pakistan’