Opinion What the jailbreaks say

Two jailbreaks in the span of a few months in the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) have forced Pakistan to think again about the viability of the state. Last year,after the Taliban broke into the Bannu jail and took away its 400 inmates,an inquiry was conducted into its causes; and it was shelved because it revealed collusion from quarters no one wants to think about. This time,the ace Taliban terrorist sprung from Bannu,Adnan Rasheed,has personally opened the oyster of Dera Ismail (D.I.) Khan jail with his sword.

The Taliban,who attacked the D.I. Khan prison with 150 men in dozens of vehicles containing suicide-bombers,say they spent Rs 1 crore on the operation,just half the amount spent on Bannu. Where did they spend the money? Explosives,cars,etc? Or bribes to people who moved the prisoners around to get them all in a bunch in D.I. Khan? Adnan Rasheed,on death row for participating in terrorism as an employee of Pakistan Air Force,was shifted to Bannu,no one can say by whom. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was honest when he said the D.I. Khan jailbreak was the result of “mili-bhagat” (collusion).

A quaint commentator on the Bannu-Kohat-Hangu-D.I. Khan region of KPK is a woman who can hardly be expected to visit Pakistan today. Farhat Taj — a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research,University of Oslo,Norway and an MPhil in gender and development from the University of Bergen,Norway — had put Pakistan on notice two years ago. Her book Taliban and anti-Taliban (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2011) was based on “2,000 face-to-face interviews,discussions and seminars with people across FATA and KPK for two years.”

Typically,in this case of Western-oriented research,interviews were conducted with “tribal leaders,leaders and volunteers of anti-Taliban lashkars,khasadars (local levee) and officials recently retired from the political administrations in FATA,daily wagers and jobless people,internally displaced people (IDPs) from FATA — displaced as a result of military operations in the area — and people hosting the internally displaced population (IDPs) in their houses on humanitarian grounds or tribal and kinship basis.”

The book sought to establish that: one,the Afghan Taliban,plus al-Qaeda Arabs and Uzbeks and their local supporters,were made to become dominant inside Pakistan under a considered policy by the Pakistan army; two,local leadership opposed to them was allowed to be decimated and political agents were subordinated to the terrorists after the destruction of the local tribal jirga; three,loyalty to the Taliban was obtained through intimidation allowed by Pakistan; four,local lashkars willing to fight the terrorists were discouraged and allowed to be destroyed; five,this was facilitated by “peace treaties” between the army and the Taliban; six,there were no paramilitary Frontier Constabulary (FC) desertions and FC Pakhtuns felt no ethnic attachment with Taliban; seven,local marriages of Pakhtun girls to Arabs and Uzbeks remained unproven; eight,drone attacks by the CIA are popular with the local population; nine,Pakistan’s pro-Taliban policy was a part of the “strategic depth” Pakistan sought against India,aimed at controlling Afghanistan; and ten,the Taliban attracted individuals of dubious moral character,joining terrorism with the criminal underworld.

What comes to the fore after two years is that the policy of allowing terror to become dominant in the country may have been pushed by certain elements in the military,and not the military as a whole. That could be the reason behind the shelving of the Abbottabad Commission Report on the death of Osama bin Laden.

The daily The News (August 1) has dropped a bombshell by reporting that the commission may have bent to the establishment winds once again: “It has emerged from internal correspondence that members of the Abbottabad Commi-ssion compromised integrity to favour the accused. This has been revealed in the documents sent by an anonymous whistleblower which were duly verified from all ‘concerned’. The documents say that the influential ‘accused’ received an uninterrupted access to the classified record. They [the accused were regularly briefed about the internal politics of the commission,the hardline position taken by one member pitting himself against his three colleagues whom he accused of being ‘soft on certain institutions.’

“The ‘accused parties’ were the first to get the commission report copy well before it was sent to the prime minister. Of the four members,one was in direct contact with the accused and another distinguished colleague was supporting him in bailing out ‘the accused’. One of the members went abroad on the pretext of illness as he was not contented with the report but did not want to write a note of dissent.”

Read this incident in the Farhat Taj book: “One Wazir interviewee once saw a Punjabi militant,whom he had seen many times in Wana,in full military uniform in Islamabad. The Wazir addressed him: ‘Are you the Talib from Wana?’ The man,who was in a military vehicle,looked at the tribesman and immediately drove away. The tribesman was with a parliamentarian from Waziristan,who snubbed him for being too reckless. He told the tribesman that he must now pray for his life. The tribesman has since lived in fear” (page 99).

On the eve of the arrival of US Secretary of State John Kerry in Islamabad to discuss what most Pakistanis call “the endgame”,ex-Ambassador Ayaz Wazir,our consul general in Mazar-e-Sharif when the Taliban attacked it in 1997-98,wrote in The News (August 1) in an article titled “Afghanistan: handle with care”: “The Afghan issue will not be solved by Kerry,nor will any other country ever conquer and pacify Afghanistan. It’s better to live in peace with a neighbour whose history is replete with wars and fighting. It will thus be in the interest of all outside forces to stay away from interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. It is also best to ensure that the world’s best-known warriors are your friends rather than your adversaries.”

For any foreign policy to remain pragmatic,it is important to shape it quietly through professionals and not in parliament,where members care for honour and counsel defiance rather than wisdom. (The constitution mandates only the passage of the annual budget in parliament.) Pakistan unfortunately hogties its professionals by issuing aggressive,apparently pro-Taliban,and anti-US,unanimous resolutions impossible to implement. Now it is thinking of convening an All Parties Conference (APC),and the result is easily predictable.

But this time round,Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wants to be pragmatic and is averse to grandstanding defiance,as he did by testing Pakistan’s nuclear bomb in 1998,after which the stock exchange in Karachi had to be padlocked.

Today,as the nation kowtows to the al-Qaeda fiat of hating the US and its Western allies,including India,TV commentator Najam Sethi,once arrested for the treason of “sucking up” to India,tells us that the police is simply not capable of taking al-Qaeda on while the army is not meant to fight terrorism,and that the state is too bankrupt to buy the training from the West and put its merit-inducted (sic) security manpower through it.

The writer is a consulting editor with ‘Newsweek Pakistan’