Terrorist attacks inside Pakistan have been steady since the Taliban re-established their rule in Afghanistan. Not just the number of attacks, but their intensity and their geographical spread has also been increasing. In just the first six months of this year, the number of attacks have nearly doubled. Ambushes, targeted killings, suicide bombings, IED blasts, sniper attacks, and of course, fidayeen attacks like the recent storming of the Zhob Cantt have become a kind of new normal. All of Pakistan’s strategic calculations, delusions and illusions about a Taliban victory in Afghanistan have been upended. Not only the generals but also Pakistani politicians, who so enthusiastically backed the Taliban and were euphoric over their victory, are now pretty much at their wits’ end on how to tackle the spate of attacks coming from Afghanistan.
From their public pronouncements, it is quite clear that the Pakistani authorities are running out of patience with the Taliban. After the Zhob attack, the Pak generals issued a very stern warning to the Afghans. The defence minister of Pakistan has also been breathing fire. But much of the rage and outrage coming out of Pakistan doesn’t seem to be impressing the Taliban. The pushback on statements coming from Pakistan is only adding to the consternation inside Pakistan. For instance, a top spokesman of the Taliban, Sohail Shaheen, refused to accept the Durand Line as a border and said it is just a line. Another spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said the Doha agreements were signed with the US and not with Pakistan, thereby hinting that assurances contained in the Doha accord didn’t apply to Islamabad. Ironically, the Pakistanis always took credit for having midwifed the Doha agreement. Other Taliban leaders and cadres have also been issuing provocative statements — sometimes mocking, other times challenging — and still other times threatening Pakistan. While many of these statements are not official, they are translating into actual operations on the ground. The rising number of attacks as well as the expanding theatre of attacks stands as testimony to this fact.
In the first few months after the Taliban takeover in Kabul, there was a spike in Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) attacks in the tribal districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Soon these were extended into the southern districts of the province. A few more months and attacks started in the Peshawar valley as well as in the Malakand division (the Swat region). A few attacks were also reported from cis Indus parts of Pakistan — Sindh and Punjab. But a major new area of operation is now the restive province of Balochistan. Initially, the TTP operations were centred around the Pashtun belt of north Balochistan. But increasingly there are reports of attacks even in the Baloch-dominated parts of the province (central and south Balochistan). There are also some indications that sections of Baloch freedom fighters have made tactical alliances with the Pakistani Taliban to take on the Pakistan Army. From a Pakistani perspective, there could be some rationale behind the Afghan Taliban not severing their ties with the Pakistani Taliban and not expelling them or making them inert. But the refusal of the Afghan Taliban to move against some of the Baloch insurgents who are based in Afghanistan is quite perplexing. After all, unlike the Pakistani Taliban, the Baloch neither share their ethnicity with the Taliban nor their ideology or their theology.
The unkindest cut of all for the Pakistanis is that all their protests, entreaties, and efforts to convince, even incentivise the Taliban, have been responded to with the same disingenuity that the Pakistanis used with India or with the US when these countries made similar protests to Pakistani soil being used by terrorists. The Taliban have surely learnt well at the feet of their trainers from the Pakistan Army and the ISI, and dish them the very same statements that the Pakistanis would to India and the US.
Sample this: Give us information about the whereabouts of terrorists and we will act; you have put up a fence to stop the terrorists, three or four rings of security and yet if terrorists infiltrate it’s your fault, not ours; the terrorist have to travel dozens of kilometres through your territory to reach their target so why didn’t you stop them; there is no camp and no presence of these elements on our soil; don’t try to blame us for your problems, mistakes and incompetence in handling these terrorists; you should hold a dialogue with them, accommodate them, and if you want, we will facilitate it. All of these excuses and more, so familiar to India and the US, are now being flung in the face of the Pakistanis by their Taliban brethren.
What is adding to the sense of disquiet in Pakistan is the disarray and lack of clarity on how to tackle the clear and present danger that the TTP and their affiliates, associates and partners pose. The TTP meanwhile is consolidating and expanding its cadres, organisation, strike capability, and geographical reach. What is more, it is running a fairly effective propaganda machine and is able to control the narrative and deliver its menacing message. The TTP has proved to be extremely adept in the game of deception and sowing confusion in the ranks of their adversaries in the Pakistani establishment. Quite like Pakistan has done in Jammu and Kashmir where it has set up shadowy fronts like The Resistance Force or the People’s Anti-Fascist Front, the TTP has set up groups like the Tehrik-e-Jihad Pakistan (TJP). Some of the biggest terror attacks in recent months have been claimed by the TJP which allows the TTP and its Afghan mother organisation to maintain plausible deniability. Other groups like the one led by the erstwhile ‘good Taliban’ Hafiz Gul Bahadur have launched a series of strikes against their erstwhile patrons in the Pakistan Army. Gul Bahadur, though not a part of the TTP, is supposed to be working in tandem with it.
The Pakistani state, on the other hand, is still not sure whether to jaw-jaw or fight-fight with the TTP. They have sent their special envoy to talk to the Taliban after the Zhob attack. But nothing positive has come out of the visit. The problem really is that Pakistan is unable to decide whether the Taliban are friends or foes, are they strategic assets or strategic liability. It cannot afford to break with the Taliban but it also cannot allow the Taliban to continue their double speak and double game. For their part, the Taliban don’t trust the Pakistanis, even less the Punjabis who run Pakistan. Having suffered Pakistani treachery and seen how the Pakistanis have betrayed their ‘allies’ — the US and the rest of the West — the Taliban want to have their leverage over Pakistan. The TTP and the rest of the jihadists are their strongest and most potent leverage to ensure that the Pakistanis never take them for granted or dump them like they did after 9/11. The TTP is nothing if not the Pakistani chapter of the same Taliban ideological movement and at a military level, a phalanx of the Taliban.
The problem with having groups like the TTP as leverage is that they never remain static. For leverages to be effective, they have to be active. In other words, it is a dynamic process and as such it will either grow or shrink — the latter means leverage is lost, the former means it continues to metastasize. In order to deny the Taliban this leverage, Pakistan will have to go kinetic, which is easier said than done because it has far-reaching consequences, many of them unintended and uncalculated. While the Pakistanis are believed to have carried out some operations inside Afghanistan — there have used drones, air strikes, even assassinations of TTP commanders — these haven’t been enough to stem the tide of the TTP operations. Quite to the contrary, the TTP operations have gone up a few notches.
Once again, after the Zhob attack, the Pakistanis are threatening to take the war into Afghanistan. The Taliban have of course warned the Pakistanis against any adventurism, but they would like to avoid getting into a head-on confrontation with Pakistan. The Taliban will bide their time, just like they did with the Americans. They will bleed Pakistan and settle their scores by haemorrhaging it, draining it of all vitality until it is ripe for the picking. The Pakistanis perhaps realise they are in quite a pickle. They can’t launch open attacks inside Afghanistan because the repercussions of that would be getting sucked into the Afghan vortex. And Pakistan cannot afford to keep bleeding. Appeasing or accommodating the Taliban would mean ceding ground to them and further weakening the Pakistani state. When powers bigger, stronger, and more prosperous could not afford getting enmeshed in Afghanistan, a weak, bankrupt, dysfunctional, divided, polarised Pakistan is certainly in no position to take on the Taliban.
Quite like India needs to brace itself for what can be called an ‘endless war’ on its Western front with Pakistan, the Pakistanis need to be ready for an ‘endless war’ on its Western front with Afghanistan. This is something that the Pakistanis have brought upon themselves with their shenanigans, their deceit and duplicity. But in the end, it isn’t only the Pakistanis who will pay a heavy price for their foolish adventurism; the entire region will get severely destabilised.
The writer is Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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