For almost two decades, the Pakistan state has blamed the US ‘war on terror’ and Indian involvement in Afghanistan for terrorism in Pakistan. Yet, two years after the formal end of that war, the scale of terrorism is increasing. But even if there were an external conspiracy, Pakistan’s institutions, both civil and military are unable to defeat it because of a structurally and institutionally flawed response that is not only not able to distinguish forms of militancy and the appropriate responses needed to tackle them but is also unable to break out of its shell of cultivating non-state actors as strategic assets.
Terrorism attacks, which totaled 207 in 2021, have risen to 262 and 306 in 2022 and 2023, a rise of 26 percent and 48 percent respectively. Against 335 casualties in 2021, there were 419 and 693 in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Now that the war is over, with the US and NATO forces already withdrawn and a supposedly pro-India government of Ashraf Ghani replaced in Afghanistan by the pro-Pakistan Taliban, how can this massive surge in the number of attacks and casualties be understood and explained?
Pakistan has discovered other actors to blame: the Afghan Taliban and Afghan refugees who have lived in Pakistan for decades, and has driven hundreds of thousands of them back to Afghanistan, precipitating a seething humanitarian crisis, as Asia Sentinel reported on May 1. The government in Islamabad blames the Afghan Taliban’s unwillingness and inability to eliminate anti-Pakistan terror groups such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), allowing them to regrow and regroup post-2021. At the same time, Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, according to Islamabad, provide safe havens to terror groups.
What Islamabad continues to refuse to acknowledge is its own shortcomings, however, especially those plaguing its own anti-terror infrastructure. According to a recent report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), an Islamabad-based think tank, the government’s counter-terrorism departments suffer from major flaws, including the lack of coordination and a failure to understand the dynamics of terror groups.
The report reveals that, in addition to continuing to blame external powers for the surge in terrorism, Pakistan’s most civilian counter-terrorism departments (CTDs) “lack clarity on the group dynamics, connections and operational strategies of militants. While they have established specialized intelligence units and analysis wings to study militant behavior, they often lack the skills to process data effectively. Consequently, their threat perceptions sometimes rely on popular beliefs and information sourced from both mainstream and social media. This is evident in the divergent views held by CTD officials in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces within the same department regarding the connections between the TTP and IS-K, as well as between Baloch insurgents and the TTP.”
This is in addition to the fact that most counter-terrorism units are underfunded, except in Punjab, which is able to allocate more resources to them because of its relatively better economic position. That is especially the case with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan – two provinces most affected by militancy of various sorts i.e., Islamist and nationalist. According to the report, which includes interviews with several counter-terrorism officials, “Increased resources are necessary for intelligence gathering and processing, as well as training and the acquisition of the latest gadgets and equipment for extracting and analyzing data from social media and the internet”.
As a result, the data that gets retrieved and the action that is deemed appropriate fails to distinguish between Islamist and nationalist militant activity. These forms of terrorism, while both see the Pakistan state as its key enemy, have very different goals to achieve. For groups like the TTP, the ideal goal is to force the Pakistani state to impose Shariah law. A short-term goal is to maintain their own control over the ex-FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) region bordering Afghanistan so that a mini-Islamic Emirates could be established along the lines of Afghanistan.
For Baloch nationalists, the ideal goal is to establish an entirely separate, sovereign state of Balochistan.
Sensitizing the counter-terrorism units to these differing goals is a key part of the training. But, as mentioned above, officials working across KPK and Balochistan continue to view these issues differently from each other. This divergence not only results in different threat perceptions and different understandings of which groups pose a more serious threat but also causes a lack of coordination. The units, as a result, fail to perform, leading directly to allowing these groups to increase their attacks.
A second major outcome of the failure is that it allows the Pakistani Army to play a much bigger role in maintaining internal security. It has more financial resources. It is much better equipped and organized, which allows it to dominate the country’s internal security policy. For the military, however, dominating the country’s internal security policy is not simply an issue of law and order. It uses this involvement to a) maintain high defense spending and b) further its political domination of the Pakistan state.
More importantly, it uses this domination to make policies that more often than not backfire. For example, following the Afghan Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in 2021, Pakistan’s military leadership initiated a process of reconciliation with the TTP. This pursuit of the peace process, which was not directly sanctioned by the country’s elected civilian leadership, created significant space for the TTP to move from Afghanistan to Pakistan – a fact that was acknowledged by General Asim Munir, Pakistan’s current Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), in April 2023.
But this acknowledgment of failure didn’t translate into the military stepping away from leading the role, or permanently shelving its old policy of distinguishing between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Taliban, or radically strengthening civilian CTDs for effective counter-terrorism action. Strangely enough, the army leadership used this failure to arrogate to itself the task of devising a new policy. What the ‘new’ policy is, or will be, remains anybody’s guess.
Whatever it is, this ‘new’ policy has failed to work. In March, Pakistan saw 56 militant attacks across Pakistan in which 77 people were killed. In April, a year after the army chief called for a new strategy, 77 attacks occurred in which at least 70 people were killed. 73 percent of these attacks took place in KPK, which has been a victim of terrorism for almost the past two decades and where successive military operations have been carried out in the same period. From the trend, it seems that 2024 will exceed 2023 in terms of the total number of attacks and casualties.
If the past is any guide, Pakistan will continue to blame the ‘foreign conspiracy’ for this surge. But this is a little more than a smoke screen allowing the military leadership to hide its own successive failures. It also acts as a suitable alibi for the political leadership to de-emphasize the broken, underfunded, and uncoordinated anti-terror infrastructure as a key reason for the terror groups to continue to thrive.
The article appeared in the asiasentinel