Thursday, December 18, 2014

A crucible of terror threatening the world: How the future of Pakistan is getting darker

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Published: 00:18 GMT, 17 December 2014 | Updated: 05:02 GMT, 17 December 2014

To rise and shine, to bring out their best, to respect their parents and elders – above all, to be good human beings. These are the stated goals of the several hundred pupils at the Army Public School (Junior) in Peshawar, Pakistan, many of whom are the children of serving soldiers.

Today, scores of them are dead, victims of murderous fanatics for whom being a good human being was never a priority.

Why would people be so morally despicable as to massacre schoolchildren?

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Armed response: A Pakistan army sniper takes up position outside the school yesterday

In this case, the motive was not to stop someone bravely insisting on the right of girls to have an education, although the same group – Tehrik-i-Taliban – was responsible for shooting Malala Yousafzai in the head in 2012 after she refused to be intimidated by them, an act of courage which has seen her awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

Rather, the latest atrocity, one of hundreds carried out by this group, was an act of revenge against the Pakistani army, which since the summer has been valiantly and vigorously attempting to suppress the Pakistani Taliban (and affiliated groups) in the wild heights of north Waziristan, part of the almost ungovernable Federally Administered Tribal Areas abutting Afghanistan.

The army’s Operation Zarb-e-Azab, which means ‘sharp and cutting strike’ in Urdu, was launched on June 15 this year, a week after the Pakistani Taliban murdered 28 people in an attack on an airport in Karachi. This atrocity led the government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif to abandon attempts at dialogue with these terrorists.

The army fightback involved combined air and land operations by 30,000 Pakistani troops, and yet arguably it came too late in this huge, corruptly governed and restive nation, which is armed with an estimated 100-120 nuclear warheads.

For the truth is that, as we witnessed this week, the Pakistani Taliban are now a terrifyingly effective force.

They have acted with such indiscriminate violence that even those sections of the Pakistani security establishment that cynically sought to use the Taliban to gain leverage inside Afghanistan began to realise that they had a tiger by the tail.

A Pakistani soldier stands near the debris of a house destroyed during a military operation against Taliban militants in Miranshah, North Waziristan in July this year

The Inter Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, Pakistan’s devious and duplicitous intelligence service, was concerned about the extent of the influence in Afghanistan of its sworn enemy, India.

As a result, it sought to destabilise the regime in Kabul by allowing Taliban fighters to pass across the porous border with Pakistan, as well as sharing intelligence with the militants. Such actions directly damaged the UK and American forces on the ground in Afghanistan.

Western intelligence agencies were frankly amazed to discover that the fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden had lived for years close to a major Pakistani army base in the midst of retired officers in the town of Abbottabad.

In reality, the ISI had tacitly encouraged a monster that now threatens to destroy Pakistan itself. It is the very situation being played out in dramatic fashion in the current series of the US TV drama Homeland, in which an ISI officer facilitates a blood-soaked Taliban attack on the American embassy in Islamabad.

The Pakistani Taliban are now a terrifyingly effective force and has acted with indiscriminate violence

Nobel prize winner Malala 'heartbroken' by Pakistan school attack

Pakistan’s military dictators were much more reliable Cold War allies of the West than neutral India.

Yet recently, while outwardly at least our friend (primarily because of the huge amounts of foreign aid Britain sends there), Pakistan has seethed with hatred and resentment towards the West.

This is whipped up by Islamic religious fanatics whom the regime tries to accommodate, believing it better to have dealings with them than declare them enemies of the state.

The Pakistani Taliban came into existence in 2002, as a response to the arrival of Pakistani troops in the lawless north-west border region of Waziristan.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif abandoned attempts at dialogue with terrorists after the Pakistani Taliban murdered 28 people in an attack on an airport in Karachi in June

The army had deployed there to stop Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters using the area as a rear operating base for their attacks on US and other forces inside neighbouring Afghanistan. Naturally, the militants did not take kindly to such interference.

Although the Pakistani Taliban were not formally allied with their Afghan namesake, they shared similar extreme religious beliefs, and were from the same Pashtun tribe, which meant they felt a duty to fight the Pakistani army – viewed by them as a foreign occupying force.

Gradually, about 12 such groups coalesced into a loose coalition under a leader named Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone strike in 2009.

Shortly afterwards, in a revenge attack, the CIA suffered its worst losses ever when a double agent working for the Taliban detonated a huge car bomb inside the US base Camp Chapman in Afghanistan’s Khost Province.

At that point, the Pakistani Taliban’s emphasis shifted from fighting Westerners in Afghanistan to fighting Americans everywhere they could reach them around the globe, and trying to impose fundamentalist sharia law on the whole of Pakistan through a campaign of terror.

Month after month since then, the Taliban has launched bomb and gun attacks, often against Pakistani army convoys and bases. Army and police training academies have been prime targets, but there is something truly wicked about the targeting of so many children at an army school educating the children of forces personnel.

There are, of course, haunting echoes of the attack on a school in Beslan, Russia, by Islamic militants in 2004, in which 186 children were killed.

Then, the world hoped such an appalling tragedy could never happen again – yet it has come to pass once more.

So what can anyone do to stop the Pakistani Taliban?

The great problem for the army is that the terrorists are an invisible force who can move where they like within the country, striking inside major cities like Karachi, which are virtually lawless nowadays and riven with crime.

The ISI had tacitly encouraged Osama Bin Laden - the very situation being played out in dramatic fashion in the current series of the US TV drama Homeland (pictured)

The danger for the wider region is that the departure of Nato forces will surely embolden militants further to launch ever more audacious raids – such as the one this week – in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Little wonder there is a growing fear that Pakistan could soon become the most unstable and dangerous nation in the region.

Ironically enough, thanks to the tentative co-operation of China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Russia – nations which surround Afghanistan – the outlook for that benighted country seems marginally brighter.

But the future of Pakistan itself is getting darker. One of the central problems is a vast social schism which is the result of a wealthy and often corrupt urban middle class living such different lives to the huge, impoverished underclass, who feel they get no justice.

Little wonder there is a growing fear that Pakistan could soon become the most unstable and dangerous nation in the region

Such grotesque inequalities have perhaps helped to fuel the rise of militant Islamism.

Yes, the venal political class in Pakistan has united in its revulsion at this latest atrocity, but by next week they’ll be back to their old ways, deferring the wholesale reforms Pakistan actually needs, such as making rich people pay their taxes.

And all the while, the Pakistani Taliban will continue in its aims to topple the government, which is of course custodian of all those nuclear warheads.

The army will fight tooth and nail to stop that happening, but with every morale-sapping terrorist attack the will of the soldiers and the people to resist the militants will be further tested.

If that were not worry enough, in a deeply disturbing development in October, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban pledged allegiance to the leader of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who now calls himself Caliph Ibrahim. We must pray the two groups are never allowed to join forces.

That, truly, would be an axis of evil incarnate.