Curse of non-state actors

Legal eye

The writer is a lawyer based in
Islamabad.

No one said making peace between India and Pakistan would be easy. The two countries are sitting atop a reservoir of painful history, bitter memories, hate and mistrust. They have active war-mongering constituencies that benefit from their hostility.

Since inception, their definition of national interest has been zero-sum: defeat of one is success of the other. Liberating them of this regressive mindset holding them captive, breaking from the past and imagining a mutually beneficial interdependent future requires bold and determined leadership.

Our leaders will need to cash out their political capital for this cause. Nawaz Sharif went out on a limb when he showed up at Narendra Modi’s inauguration, and again in Ufa. Modi did the same by dropping by at Lahore. But while such creative initiatives could help kick-start the peace process, they won’t be able to sustain it unless entrenched institutionalised thinking on both sides begins to consider that the current state of antagonism is not in fact enhancing the security of the states and interest of their people.

We know the competing narratives. India never accepted Pakistan and so broke it up in 1971. RAW funds militants in Fata and creates trouble in Balochistan. Ajit Doval’s strategy of using terror as a weapon against Pakistan is on YouTube. For the other side, Pakistan initiated all wars. It promotes separatists in India, does a Kargil when India extends a hand of friendship and nurtures non-state actors as instruments of policy to unleash terror in India. Now Pathankot can either reinforce these narratives or become an opportunity to break from them.

Indian government’s response during the Pathankot attack was measured. As opposed to its reaction post-Mumbai, it hasn’t gone to town framing Pakistan before an international audience. It hasn’t drummed up anger or unleashed its streets against Pakistan. It has said it has intelligence and indications that the attackers were handled by Jaish-e-Mohammad from Bahawalpur, that it has shared actionable intelligence with us, that it expects us to act on such information and that it won’t accept cross-border attacks.

If we put ourselves in India’s shoes, there is nothing wrong with what it has said so far. The ball is in our court. It doesn’t matter that there are holes in stories we hear on Indian media. Aren’t details we grapple with in the aftermath of each terror attack within Pakistan patchy? The question is: will we dismiss offhand that the attack could have been executed by non-state actors from Pakistan, find glitches in the information shared and why it isn’t actionable, or act such that it is for all to see that we are serious about helping India find the perpetrators?

In December 1999, months after Kargil, an Indian airplane was hijacked and forced to land in Kandahar. The hijackers sought the release of a few prisoners from India in exchange for the passengers. The prisoners included Masood Azhar and Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh (later convicted for Daniel Pearl’s murder). Azhar and Sheikh returned to Pakistan. Logic suggested that Pakistan would stay as far away from the incident as possible. But Azhar was allowed to lead and address rallies all over the country, including in Karachi and Islamabad.

But that was then and this is now. We have told the world that everyone makes mistakes: the Americans did in Afghanistan when the sponsored Afghan Jihad, and so did we. The Americans paid on 9/11 and we have been paying ever since. In a different time when rearing non-state actors was a thing we indulged too. But we have learnt from our mistakes. The learning culminated in Operation Zarb-e-Azb and NAP, and no week passes by when the army chief and the PM don’t reiterate that we will extinguish terrorists of all hues from Pakistan.

We have told the world that non-state actors might have been assets once, but are now seen as liabilities that Pakistan is actively fighting to neutralise. That we shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions because: (i) these actors are rouge and not in our control, and (ii) we are the prime victims of their actions. We made loud claims about cutting off the cord connecting state and non-state actors during Musharraf’s time. But the world only started paying heed after the initiation of Operation Zarb-e-Azb when we were seen to be walking the talk.

We can make sophisticated arguments about lack of state responsibility for acts of non-state actors and repeat explanations about how legal systems require admissible evidence that is hard to come by in terror cases, especially of the cross-border variety. But that doesn’t change the reality that while, as a matter of law, states might not be liable for actions of rouge citizens, as a matter of fact they are. And it isn’t just the state but also all citizens of the state who are painted black in the world’s perception due to vile acts of fellow citizens.

It is not that we haven’t made progress. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s the charge against us was that of commission. That changed over the last decade when the charge became that of omission: Pakistan is a sanctuary for non-state actors and does nothing to rein them in. More recently the charge has been that of selective omission: Pakistan is mowing down some terror groups that attack it, but not those that attack others. In all honesty, broadly these charges have neither been fanciful nor completely off the mark.

We did flirt with the idea of good and bad Taliban, to talk to the good and fight the bad. How did that work out for us? Since the onset of NAP we have talked a lot about curbing extremism, the factory of terror, without walking the talk. We aren’t unfamiliar with the challenge of finding admissible evidence in terror cases (despite intelligence) and using it for investigation and prosecution purposes or with loopholes in our criminal justice system. But whenever the state decides to act, whether against the TTP or Karachi mafias or the LeJ, everyone understands its power and the fact that it means business.

After Pathankot, the official Indian suggestion has not been that this is a state-sponsored non-state actor attack, as in the case of Mumbai, nor has our initial reaction been that of plain denial of the possibility of links being traced to Pakistan. The ball is in our court because it is for us to decide how we wish to act on the information provided by India. And our actions will be guided by how our security establishment feels about acting against all non-state actors without discrimination in the immediate term and peace with India in the medium term.

We know that the LeTs and JeMs have never directly attacked the Pakistani state. We will take them on if we truly believe what we tell the world: we are victims of terror perpetrated by non-state actors comprising rogue agents who are motivated by their own ideological agendas and not state interests, and we are committed to extinguishing terrorists of all varieties from Pakistani territory whether or not they are attacking the Pakistani state at the moment.

Part of how we answer this is linked to how we view our future with India and our place in the world. If we believe that peace with India is in our long-term national interest and terror the foremost threat to our national security, even the Machiavellian motivation to keep some non-state actors alive (even if comatose) should die down. If we wish to be perceived as a responsible nation-state, we would know that the age of non-state actors as state assets has passed. Let’s hope we see Pathankot as an opportunity, and not let our past define our future.

Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu