State of fear Dawn News

Death and dialogue cannot go together. Those who kill civilians, as in yesterday’s church attack, and hit out at the military, as they did by killing a very senior army official a few days ago, are the enemies of both the society and the state. Their cause is nothing except inflicting wanton damage and destruction, in order to cow down the people and overtake the state. Their aims are nothing but running blood-shod over the collective will of the people of Pakistan, as expressed in consecutive elections and the constitution of the country. They are mass murders, dangerous criminals and treacherous outlaws who must be fought against and brought to book. They are rebels without a cause. What is it that the government wants to talk to the Taliban about? Are they fighting for the protection and preservation of the human rights of a particular community? No matter, how hard Imran Khan tries to argue that terrorism in Pakistan is the effect of drone attacks and America’s war on terror, nobody would be willing to suspend disbelief to accept that the Taliban’s killing spree is forcing the world to attend to the plight of the civilian victims of drone attacks or, for that matter, of the war against terror. If anything, it hardens international opinion against the perpetrators of such crimes against humanity as the ghastly church attack in Peshawar. Are they fighting for the right of self-determination of the people of the tribal areas? They could be freedom fighters in Afghanistan where they are fighting against foreign forces but there are no foreign forces in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Here, they are fighting only against the Pakistan Army. If there are any foreigners, illegally staying and carrying out hostile activities from there against Pakistan in particular and the rest of the world in general, they are the Taliban’s own al Qaeda allies. The state, under national and international laws, has the right to expel them from its territory, even if that requires force. Are the Taliban opposing the state because it has carried out atrocities against people detained from across Pakistan, picking them up, keeping them under detention without trial, torturing them and sometimes even killing them? No matter how deplorable such incidents are, they do not give the Taliban the right to take the law into their hand and seek retribution. Their own track record on detentions, interrogations and summary trials followed by public shooting and executions is more dismal than the state itself. What about hundreds of summary executions they have carried out in Swat and in the tribal areas? What about the murders of hundreds of tribal elders executed by the Taliban only for being loyal to the state? If they don’t have a legitimate demand, which they definitely don’t have, then why insist on talking to them? They are not our people gone astray, as the government erroneously proclaims. They are from a different planet where the laws of the land, the state’s writ and the constitution don’t seem to apply, or at least exit only in breach. They don’t consider themselves as the citizens of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and instead have proclaimed their own emirate in the parts of the tribal areas they forcibly and illegally occupy. If this land belongs to Pakistan, the state must act to get it back and negotiations certainly are not the way to go about it. The Taliban’s demand that the state must withdraw its forces from the tribal areas does not have any moral, legal, and constitutional ground (and lo and behold! this is their first and most important precondition to even agreeing to talk). Offering talks to self-confessed assassins will encourage other outlaws, including petty criminals, to hold the state and the society to ransom and get away by holding people and places to gunpoint. Already, a lone gunman has shown just that by flaunting weapons in the open and hurling threats at the state, a proverbial stone’s throw away from the state’s highest institutions, in Islamabad. Parts of Karachi have similarly become no-go areas for the state machinery, as well as some sections of the society, for the main reason that the state, everywhere from tribal areas to Karachi, is reluctant to face the criminals head on. The government and its ministers tell us that talks are the only option to bring peace back. They argue that the state has tried army operations for 10 long years with little success, so now is the time to give talks a chance. For a violence weary nation, the promise of peace returning through talks should sound like music except that the very premise of this promise is flawed. The entire world, including the Taliban supporters, have complained that Pakistan has had a “dual” policy towards terrorism – turning a blind eye to, and in some cases even supporting and sponsoring, the Taliban presence and activities when needs be and carrying out sporadic operations when the international pressure became too much to resist. The much-maligned drone attacks, contrary to what public intellectuals might have you believe, indeed started in late 2000s after the successive flip-flops by the Pakistani state in expelling the terrorists and miscreants from its territory. While the military was carrying out an operation in one tribal agency, it was cutting deals with the militants in another. Sometimes operations and deals were talking place simultaneously in the same area, involving the same terrorist groups. Even within an area under a military operation, certain Taliban factions enjoyed immunity for being so-called good Taliban. In an extreme case in Swat, a series of negotiations with the Taliban militants only led to the erosion of the state’s writ from the valley, through attempts by the state functionaries to cater to the illegal demands of the terrorists over how the police and the judiciary should work and how the society should behave on issues like veil and education for girls. Never in the past decade or so has the state carried out a security operation after having closed all its negotiations with different Taliban groups, except perhaps in Swat in the summer of 2009. If there is any lesson to be learnt from Swat it is that talks only mean seceding space to the criminals and terrorists, allowing them to wreak capricious acts of violence without any fear of getting caught and punished for them. If the government wants to try talks again in the tribal areas in the face of a huge body of evidence that shows that the Taliban have used talks only to strengthen their positions, both strategically and ideologically, it must do with the acknowledgement that it is a fail-proof route to collective capitulation to the diktats of those who oppose the existence and strengthening of democratic rule of the law in Pakistan. As the attack on the church in Peshawar shows, the other side is sending the message loud and clear: Their preferred method to get what they want, whatever that may be, is inflicting death on all and sundry. They only dialogue they would ever like to have is the dialogue through the dead – their suicide bombers and our civilians and military personnel. In this battle of “us” versus “them”, the two sides do not even speak the same language. What to say about being able to talk to each other. - Text by Badar Alam.