Reaping Seeds Of Religiosity

The gloves are finally off, and it is an eventuality that was waiting to happen. Pakistan’s deliberately incubated and nurtured strain of religious extremism i.e., Taliban, has turned on their progenitors. A real life redux of the Frankensteinian monster story.

History is instructive that the genie of religiosity once unleashed in a participative democracy, is impossible to control, direct and misuse forever. Someday, it will backfire and certainly extract a terrible price on its creator, and the nation at large.

Religion-inspired extremism will metastasise like cancer, and morph into a limitless evil. This evil has a mind of its own and starts consuming the same body that it lives within.

What started as an Afghan-centric creation (just like many India-centric terror groups), the movement started by Mullah Mohammed Omar and Abdul Ghani Baradar in the madrassas of Pakistan in the early 90’s, has now mutated into strains like Tehrik-i-Taliban, Pakistan (TTP), which now eats into Pakistan, unrepentantly.

Pakistan is bemused, wounded, and baffled as the global chorus of reminders pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s prescient warning, “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard”, grows larger.

The snake of religious extremism has now gripped the Pakistani polity and reality, and this self-goal cannot be wished away, as simply as it took the Pakistani spy agency Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI) and its accompanying unhinged politicians like Zia-ul-Haq, Naseerullah Babar, Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman etc., and its unprofessionally ambitious soldiers like General Mirza Aslam Beg, Lt Gen Hamid Gul etc., to create this regressive phenomenon.

There were many warnings of the situation going out of hand. The most definitive one happened on December 16 2014 when six terrorists of Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) mercilessly attacked schoolchildren of the Army Public School in Peshawar, killing 149, including 132 schoolchildren. The ironical symbolism of attacking the ‘Army School’ was not lost on anyone and soon enough, Pakistan framed its counterinsurgency measures under the National Action Plan.

But as is the wont of incorrigible Pakistani politics, lessons from the bloody history were conveniently relegated to the bin till they reared their worsened avatar, after some time. Benazir Bhutto had knowingly allowed her Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar to play with fire in seeding and creating the Taliban. Years later she was killed in a terror suicide attack, ostensibly at the hands of a religio-inspired extremist from the possible likes of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Al Qaida or Tehrik-i-Taliban, basically feathers of the same flock.

During the 2014 Peshawar attack, Nawaz Sharif was in power. He too has a complicated history as the one-time lackey of Pakistan’s institutional bigot, Zia-ul-Haq. Later Nawaz was to be the first and only foreign leader to visit Afghanistan after the mujaheddin victory on April 28 1992.

In his reckless quest for political one-upmanship over his political rival Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz had used the slogan, ‘You gave up Dhaka, we took Kabul’! In 1998, when Taliban took over Afghanistan for the first time, Nawaz Sharif-led Pakistan was the first country to officially recognise the Taliban Government on May 25 1997.

Today, serendipitously it is the coalition government of Nawaz Sharif’s & Benazir Bhutto’s PML (N) & PPP combine respectively, and the guns are oddly pointed at the Taliban Government in Kabul (in its second coming). History has a cruel way of reiterating its unlearnt lessons, especially if it is forgotten at the altar of convenience and political short-termism.

Less than two years back, in a curious case of Pakistani ‘establishment’s’ (read, Military) dangerous dalliance with Taliban, one Hamid (Lt Gen Hamid Gul, infamous as the ‘Father of the Taliban’) was replaced optically by another Hameed (Lt Gen Faiz Hameed) who landed cavalierly in Kabul to have a ‘cup of tea’ with the Taliban, even before the Taliban cabinet formation!

Keeping in the traditions of Pakistani machinations with the Taliban movement, the then Prime Minister Imran Khan was also popularly known as ‘Taliban Khan’. Imran Khan had prematurely hailed the Taliban victory as ‘breaking the shackles of slavery’, as Pakistan had clearly celebrated the success of revisionism, too soon.

Irrespective, if it is PML (N), PPP or PTI dispensation, the urge to play what former US President Donald Trump called the ‘double-game’ in Afghanistan was so strong, that the current morass is only consequential.

Today, in a free-for-all, attacks on Pakistani soil, lives and interests from across the invisible and unrecognised Durand Line are commonplace and growing dangerously. The brazenness and audacity of the attacks are getting more and more violent, sinister, and uncontrollable.

From the Baluch swathes to the traditionally lawless area of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, all is fair game for terror attacks. The finger pointing between Kabul and Islamabad has assumed unbelievable ferocity (and Delhi is already a relegated story in Islamabad). The Interior Minister of Pakistan, Rana Sanaullah spoke about possible strikes against TTP hideouts in Afghanistan in case the Taliban Government failed to act!

Expectedly, Kabul slammed Pakistani Interior Ministers comments as “provocative and baseless”, and added for good measure that it was “ready to defend its territorial integrity and independence”!

It was not just the uninitiated politicians who upped the ante but even Pakistan’s informed National Security Committee (NSC) issued a terse warning, “No country will be allowed to provide sanctuaries and facilitation to terrorists and Pakistan reserves all rights in that respect to safeguard her people”. The open battle between the Taliban Government in Afghanistan and the State of Pakistan is now playing out in full glory.

Not wanting to be left out, the Taliban hit out by mocking and hitting Pakistan with the sort of insinuation that it knows will shock Islamabad no end i.e., by positing, reminding and shaming it of India’s victory and splitting of Pakistan in 1971.

In an unprecedented level of attack, Taliban leader Ahmad Yasir, posted the famous surrender signing picture of Pakistani General, AK Niazi, to the Indian Armed Forces and attached a telling message, “Interior Minister of Pakistan! Excellent Sir! Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan are not Turkey to target the Kurds in Syria. This is Afghanistan, the graveyard of proud empires. Do not think of a military attack on us, otherwise, there will be a shameful repetition of the military agreement with India”.

The deliberate conflation of India in the Af-Pak war of words has significant augury as it nails the new dynamics in place i.e., a new phase of Taliban versus Pakistan and of the proverbial ‘snakes’ coming home to roost and bite all with utter impunity.

Lt General Bhopinder Singh (Retd), is the Former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. Views expressed are the writer’s own.