Exploding minds

Busting the terror ring involved in the Safoora massacre, the killing of Sabeen Mahmud and targeting other prominent personalities is surely good news. Such swiftness and potency of response is rare and therefore needs to be appreciated and generously acknowledged.
But even this silver lining is not without its dark cloud: the gang members were well-educated, had studied in reputable institutions and looked, from their use of technology to their interest in political and social affairs, like normal young men with fairly secure careers.
There has been some chest-beating and expressions of lament over this side of the tragedies that the gang collectively perpetrated. Information on how they war-gamed their bloody pursuits and tick-marked and crossed their targets shows extreme comfort with terrorist acts. For them killing ‘others’ was of great interest and immense pleasure too. You have to be at ease with the darkness in your soul to shoot a perfectly innocent man, woman or child from point-blank range ignoring that unforgettable pair of pleading eyes, that last look asking ‘why?’, saying ‘please don’t.’ They did that repeatedly in Safoora and as they left they were shouting triumphant slogans and praising themselves for their act of bravery.
However, this category of terrorists is hardly a discovery: it has always been around. It is just that we have tended to ignore them by creating oversimplified definitions of the challenge of terrorism and by glorifying even more over over-simplified descriptions of what success means in the context of countering terrorism. In almost all cases of terrorism in the urban areas and in most cases of perpetual trouble in far-flung chunks of our territory like Fata, the planners and executors have been men and women who could hardly be considered social outcasts or economic failures.
Perfectly functional families have been throwing up perfectly defected human beings for whom spilling blood comes as naturally as sipping tea or coffee at a popular hangout. But these characters have remained outside the realm of our debate on terrorism because our popular narrative about the ‘threat’ has hovered around the more-known profiles of criminals: that they are products of a non-performing social and political order and come out of hopeless neighbourhoods.
We have traditionally looked as madressahs and their products as the source of all our troubles and have unconsciously factored out the possibility of the threat being too wide to be confined to a particularly social class or institutional base. We have believed, and wrongly, that anyone with a computer, a pair of jeans, coffee mug and a career is automatically immune to the virus of terrorism.
Similarly, we have consistently ignored the changing trends of terror recruits in the UK, Europe and other economically better-off countries that clearly suggest that well-groomed men and women, boys and girls, are consciously taking up arms and donning suicide jackets, leaving comfortable homes and normal, routine, unhindered lives.
As a result of this reduced focus on the totality of the peril that the modern terrorist alongside the traditional one poses to the system we have been measuring progress and success against terrorism purely in kinetic terms. The more areas we clear through drones, jets, mortars, tanks and then through close combat, the taller we stand vis-a-vis the terrorist. The stricter the laws and punishments meted out to the criminals the more secure we feel. The more we hang, the better the prospects of national stability.
Only a fool would take issue with the importance of application of force as a way to fight organised structures of terror. We only have to recall the days of dread and horror before the Swat operation to appreciate the criticality of clearing territory as a way to defeat terrorists. More to the point, read and reflect on the juggernaut of the Islamic State that continues its march of destruction across ancient lands of Mesopotamia laying to waste all it sees, overcoming resistance and the beaconing a terrifying future by making territorial gains. Without the territory under its control, the menace of Islamic State would have been far more manageable than it is now. The same goes for other groups like Boko Haram in Nigeria. It was their hideout that had made them so dreadful and potent.
Yet the forgotten side of all terrorist organisations’ growth and expansion is that long before they venture out in the open and take over land, they are born in the heads and hearts of men and women. The mind is the nursery of all terror plots. The ground is just a field of execution of these plots. To deny territorial space is important, but to reduce mental space is most important. What could be done to carry out the most important part of the job is something we haven’t figured out yet. And that is a costly failure. We hear generally-formulated suggestions about building counter-narratives – of the role of the media, of preaching tolerance and other such truisms – and that is about all. There is hardly any sustained effort to knit a durable plan of action that could prevent minds from getting infected by the thinking that in killing ‘others’ there is redemption, that there are causes that would justify destroying homes and lives of harmless men and women.
There is no institutional platform functioning to give concrete shape to even these general recommendations much less conceive a more sophisticated game-plan to fight the war for the hearts and minds. You only have to look at the state and affairs of the Council of Islamic Ideology to understand the point in good detail.
A beginning of the attempt to forestall more minds falling prey to deadly ideas that governed the actions of Safoora killers can be made by the acknowledgement that a reasonably educated individual going on the astray path of terrorism is akin to losing an important town in a ground battle against terrorists. The state and the government have to make a larger appeal to families to take keener interest in the issues of the youth and more passionate engagement in the lives of individuals who live in the circle of their care and attention. Schools, colleges, and homes ought to be in our permanent focus to stop the drift of young men in what can be called the pre-radicalisation phase.
The state and government can perhaps induct special liaison committees tasked to engage neighbourhoods under the local bodies structures that will be coming up across the country through elections in the coming months. At the provincial and federal levels these committees can be tied into a system that analyses social trends at the grassroots level and suggests timely remedial measures which can then be incorporated into development or political planning.
This effort to understand and engage with the minds that are susceptible to dangerous thoughts would remain limited and ineffective if there is no documentation of communities. Reliable numbers, demographic figures, migration statistics, neighbourhood profiles are important to accurately determine trends and make fair projections.
How can we engage at any level of reform of the mind without knowing who we are engaging with, how many and where? Cities and towns have become sprawls. The state and the government have no idea about the sheer size of the bulge that harbours a death wish for the other in its heart. No message can be designed nor course of action taken if we don’t have the data baseline sorted out.
And finally the issue of attention: it is rightly said that a mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory. There is too much happening in this country – too much that is too much for the too limited capacity of governments at the center and in the provinces. On top of it there is politics of disruption and agitation, governance through antics and opposition through pranks that has created a live-for-the day mindset.
Thoughtful, insightful and determined planning is conspicuous by its absence. So is coordination among the provinces which is as flimsy as coordination between the civil and the military on this count. Everyone is concerned with fighting to reclaim the territory. No one is talking about the need to operate in the realm of impressionable minds set to explode.
This is why we have those in our midst who live seemingly normal lives, use mobile phones, join animated discussions on politics, go out to kill a few dozen and then return home to kiss their children to sleep. And this is why every time they do it, we wonder where they come from.
The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.
Email: syedtalathussain@gmail.com
Twitter: @TalatHussain12