Roots and leaves

What happens when you prune leaves and leave the roots well nourished? The roots grow right back with a vengeance. Why is our decision-making elite persisting with the folly of repeating the nostrums that far from yielding any results enhance the incidence of terrorism and lawlessness?

The answer to the above questions lies in our inability to indulge in some serious strategic thinking and reliance on cop outs that yield only evanescent results. It is the collective failure of our civil and military establishment to go for the monster’s jugular even after watching it wreak mayhem on our children and women with abandon.

We keep harping on the theme that ours is a nation in denial but things have gone much worse lately with ‘denial of a nation’ being the central motif of a skein of terror weaved by the practitioners of the terror. Why has that happened? It has happened because a soft state has abdicated responsibility to strike at the roots of the terror, partially out of fear and partially out of expediency.

We have become quite blasé about the clear and present dangers to national security having ensured a gated comfort of security and administrative convenience for the elite. Like the ‘Motti’ tactics of the Finnish warriors fighting the Russian invaders in WW II we have hunkered down in garrisons and ‘Red Zones’, leaving the vast multitude of common folks at the mercy of terror. The question arises can a soft state like ours that has a hard time banning graffiti off the public spaces take the bull of terrorism by the horns.

The panacea to our terrorism woes does not lie in a confused mélange of the narratives, a term rendered more fashionable these days out of a forlorn desire to challenge the strategic ambivalence and inaction by the state. Against the advice of Jean François Lyotard, a meta-narrative is truly germane to our counterterrorism strategy. A political oligarchy that is seeking refuge behind a slew of small narratives to cover up its egregious failure to strengthen the state needs to act now. Keeping the state weak and dysfunctional allows predation of national resources with each slice up for grabs for competing criminal mafias with political patronage. Thus the meta-narrative the country needs at this stage is to strengthen the state in order to build a strong nation.

It is a reversal of the age-old practice of strong nationhood defining a strong state but very apt to our special environment. The fissiparous tendencies arising out of ethnic particularism, urban terrorism, and religious terrorism can only be effectively checked if the state clamps down on all kinds of deliberate exemptions granted to the criminal mafias.

There are two main strands of the proposed meta-narrative dealing with internal and external dimensions of the chaos confronting the nation. On the external front, the involvement of neighbouring countries in fomenting unrest need to be checked through a combination of deft diplomacy and aggressive counter intelligence operations.

For sustainable peace it is not only the oft-cited Indian intervention in Pakistan through Afghan and Pakistani proxies that need to be countered but also the destabilising influence of other Muslim countries who are unmindful of the baleful impact of their sectarian proxy support. The same holds good for our traditional allies and influencers like the US. Unless Pakistan is made off limits to the patriotic games and small narratives of our so called external benefactors, our meta-narrative would never get off the ground.

The second strand of our meta-narrative should be internally focused and flow from the basic assumption that all forms of violent extremist groups, whether secular or religious, share a common ideology and need to be dealt with in the same fashion. In countering violent extremism no one should be given to actual or imaginary past services rendered by any militant outfit to any national cause.

It is time we pulled the plug on this anachronistic proxy warfare by initiating self-cleansing even if some of our adversaries persist with their own follies of the use of the proxies. There should be only one lashkar and one jaish – Pakistan Army along with other paramilitary and law-enforcement agencies to fight our wars internally as well as externally.

It is only when we have embraced the two strands of the meta-narrative with the requisite seriousness that other subaltern elements of the counterterrorism strategy will fall easily in place. We owe it to the blood of our 59,907 martyrs.

The writer is a retired brigadier, and a PhD scholar in Peace and Conflict Studies at the National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad.