The Marriottt bombing was another gory reminder that the citizens of Pakistan are caught in the midst of a vicious cycle of violence and terror, and our ruling elite seems to be running out of time and ideas to stem the rot. We are angry at the loss of innocent lives and destruction inflicted on us for policies and actions for which we share no responsibility or over which we have no control. US drone attacks, Pakistan army operation, and the terror tactics of the Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents have transformed the entire tribal belt into a theatre of carnage - civilian lives and property being the prime casualty. Pakistani cities, on the other hand, have been labelled a legitimate war zone by our homebred terrorists as an act of reprisal to avenge the security operation in the tribal areas.
As the war games continue to strike civilians who have no control over the policies and choices of the Pakistani state, the US administration or the Taliban-Al Qaeda duo, this nation is losing its soul, its spirit, its honour, security and means of subsistence. The question that continues to confuse and divide this nation is, whose war is this, after all? Is the Pakistani army a US proxy, fighting an alien war against its own people? Or is this an internal war that needs to be waged with unity and conviction by the Pakistani nation to secure the lives of ordinary citizens, dry up fountains of religious extremism and hate, and defeat homegrown terrorists who view the killing of innocent civilians as a legitimate tool to try and transform the security policy of the Pakistani state?
The less emphasised reality is that there isn't one war on terror being fought in this region, where Pakistan and the US are antsy allies, but two separate wars with distinct goals and objectives. One is the US war on terror that was born out of 9/11. This is aimed at securing the lives of Americans and to protect them against future attacks from Al Qaeda and its supporters. In its post-9/11 frenzy, the US homeland security doctrine underwent a significant change when the Bush administration decided to "take the war to the terrorists.- - This strategy led the US to bulldoze the questionable concept of pre-emptive first strike as part of conventional warfare into the doctrine of self-defence. The US contrived a "coalition of the willing-- to launch attacks on Afghanistan under the garb of this expansive concept of self-defence, and that is how this war came to Afghanistan.
When the attacks were first launched on Oct 7, 2001, they were devoid of UN authorisation or cover. The same day the US representative to the UN delivered a letter to the president of the Security Council evoking the right to self-defence as justification for the strikes to forestall imminent attacks form Al Qaeda that was training and exporting agents of terror from Afghanistan. By passing a resolution in support of the new Afghan government installed after US-led forces routed the Taliban, the UN has merely acquiesced in the role of NATO and the ISAF in assisting Afghan government with domestic security. Thus, to argue, as President Zardari did on the day of his oath, that the US and NATO strikes in Afghanistan are authorised by the United Nation is to misunderstand the US and NATO mandate in Afghanistan.
The legality of US or NATO air strikes within Afghanistan that cause civilian casualties has to be determined under Afghan law, as these forces are operating within Afghanistan on the request of a national government recognised by the UN and the world. But NATO and the US have no collective security mandate in the region. And while strikes within Afghanistan that indiscriminately claim civilian lives might only be morally abhorrent, any strikes within Pakistan are also illegal and in clear violation of the UN Charter. No sovereign nation-state can afford to tolerate foreign military strikes within its territory that reduce to fiction the concept of its territorial integrity.
Further, incidents such as the air strike that claimed 13 Pakistani soldiers manning a border post, the US Special Forces ground operation that recently killed 20 civilians in Angoor Adda and repeated drone attacks targeting FATA not only brew anger and hate against the US within Pakistan but also dilute the nation's conviction to fight the second war that is Pakistan's own. This second war is the one Pakistan ought to fight against terrorists and hate-mongers who use an obscurantist religious ideology as their philosophy, the federal tribal area as their sanctuary, and suicide bomb attacks against civilians as their strategy to promote their political agendas.
This is our own war that will need to be fought and won to afford security to the average citizen, establish the rule of law in all areas comprising Pakistan and allow Pakistan to develop its identity as a progressive Muslim country. 9/11 might have lit the match and reckless US military actions in Pakistani territory continue to add fuel, but let us admit that for decades before the Twin Towers came down we had been gathering timber for the fires that now rage across Pakistan. There are at least three components of flawed state policy that contributed to the creation of this security monster that now engulfs the country.
One, we have kept in place a bigoted approach toward religion (a) by not creating ample public space to freely debate and develop a national consensus over the appropriate role of religion in the state, and (b) by granting general amnesty to anyone purporting to act in the name of Islam, including those preaching ideologies of hate, collecting charity for jihad, carrying out vigilante actions to enforce morality or even banning haircuts and music. Our convoluted politics of religion has allowed religious extremists to conceive ideologies of hate and propagate them publicly without any fetters.
Two, our security establishment granted legitimacy to the jihadi project and elected to use non-state actors motivated by religious zeal to realise the goals of our national security policy. The jihadi outfits were nurtured, patronised and harnessed by the state as part of military strategy to promote Pakistan's geostrategic interests. The project was misconceived since inception. But there still seems scant recognition of the fact that the state lacks the ability to decommission jihadis or alter their terms of engagement in the event that the country's security policy needs to be altered in view of changing geostrategic realities, as happened after 9/11.
And, three, the tribal areas have fallen beyond the writ of the state since the birth of Pakistan and over the last 61 years we have done precious little to integrate them with the rest of the country. A whole generation of Pakistanis has grown up calling the tribal areas "ilaqa ghair-- (territory that doesn't belong). It was common knowledge that all stolen vehicles and abducted individuals would wind up in the tribal area and could only be recovered through the intervention of tribal leaders upon payment of ransom. Fugitives from justice were given refuge in FATA under the local tradition of hospitality, Bara markets were repositories of smuggled goods and the tribal area was the fountainhead of all drug trade. And yet we are now alarmed that militants in FATA are challenging the writ of the state.
Our paramount failure in FATA is not that we were unable to keep the traditional Malik system intact during the post-9/11 turmoil, but that for six decades we didn't bother to bring our Wild West within the scope of the Constitution and afford its residents the complete rights, benefits and responsibilities that citizens deserve. The residents of tribal areas were never naturalised as citizens bound by national laws and policies. The collapse of archaic authority structures in the tribal areas and all-out rebellion against state policy was a disaster waiting to happen and the US invasion of Afghanistan only precipitated it.
The US war on terror being waged in Afghanistan and Pakistan's indigenous battle against extremism are two different wars. The US war is focused on disabling terror networks from launching attacks against US interests and citizens in the future. Pakistan, on the contrary, is currently under siege and a declared war zone. The security operation in the tribal areas has claimed more soldiers than Pakistan's all other wars put together and we have lost many more citizens to violence since 9/11 than the US did on that fateful day. We cannot be consumed by efforts to 'do more' and prove our loyalty to the US cause of impeding future threats to its citizens.
The pain caused by the loss of an innocent life in Pakistan is no less than that in America. The PPP government needs to wake up to the fact that its job is to secure the lives of Pakistani citizens and the interests of our country by fighting our own war against in-house insurgents and terrorists, with courage and determination, rather than continue Musharraf's flawed policy of playing second fiddle in the US war. There is a natural synergy between these two wars, but whether they complement or impede each other will depend on how carefully strategies are crafted to ensure that the US war effort in Afghanistan does not undermine Pakistan's effort to curb militancy within the country. The policies and not just words of the Zardari government must firmly communicate to the US administration that reckless military manoeuvres from across the border directly translate into loss of innocent lives in Pakistan and is unacceptable.
