Will the Peshawar massacre drive the Taliban out of Pakistan?

The massacre of 132 children at a military-run school in Peshawar has already led to an unprecedented backlash of public feeling in Pakistan against the terrorists.

It is also a reminder that—contrary to the impression one might sometimes receive from the Western media—the overwhelming majority of victims of Islamist militant terrorism have been not westerners, but fellow Muslims. Pakistan alone has lost at least ten times more people to terrorism than the USA lost on 9/11. Pakistani soldiers killed fighting the militants also outnumber the total number of US and NATO troops killed in neighbouring Afghanistan. Now, the children of Pakistani soldiers have also died.

It is important that this atrocity should not be seen as some sort of malign success for the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP). On the contrary, it was a sign of desperation, and a reaction to the repeated defeats that they have suffered in recent years at the hands of the Pakistani Army.

When I visited Pakistan earlier this year, officers and security analysts warned that terrorism in Pakistani cities would get worse in the short term precisely because the TTP were losing their ability to conduct successful insurgency in Pakistan’s Pashtun-inhabited Tribal Areas (FATA). In particular, this summer saw the Pakistani Army move into the last major stronghold of the TTP in North Waziristan. There is no possibility now—as there appeared to be for a while in 2008-2009—of the TTP extending their control over large areas of the country and even one day bringing down the state.

But, the TTP do still have sympathisers in many areas of Pakistan, giving them the ability to carry out terrorist attacks on a large scale. To deal with this threat in the country as a whole, military action alone is not enough—if only because while FATA has long been a de facto war zone, elsewhere the Army can only act at the request of the civilian government, and needs the help of the local police to act with any effectiveness. For this to happen, the Pakistani political classes, the media and the Army need to come together to generate public support for a tough anti-terrorist campaign.

This happened once before. The successful military campaign in Pakistan’s Swat region in the spring of 2009, which began the wider counter-attack against the TTP and their allies, was made possible by strong—though belated—political support from the Pakistan People’s Party government of President Asif Ali Zardari in Islamabad, and the provincial government of the Awami National Party in Peshawar. Together with the army high command, they brought strong influence to bear on the military to support the operation and wrest back control of the region. They were helped by a growing public backlash against the Taliban, after they had used a peace deal in Swat negotiated with the government to overrun yet another district.

Tragically, while the military campaign continued and drove the TTP from more areas (until by this year only North Waziristan was still largely in their control), public support for this gradually ebbed away again—until last year, the two parties which won the national elections and the provincial elections in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (the former North West Frontier Province) did so on a platform of negotiating peace with the TTP. This was particularly true of the centrist, nationalist Pakistan Justice Party (Pakistan Tehriq-e-Insaf, or PTI) founded by former cricketing legend Imran Khan Niazi.

This political pressure for a deal and the end of military operations continued despite a long series of TTP terrorist attacks dating back to 2007, many of them indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets. Much of the media, after the initial surge of support for military operations, reverted again to a depressing pattern of finding excuses for the TTP, or hinting that not the Taliban but various foreign forces (meaning India or even the USA) were really to blame for the terrorism.

The reasons for this are manifold. In part it stems from an attitude in India as well as Pakistan which says—often rightly alas—that governments and militaries are also guilty of atrocities, and that it is better to make a deal with an enemy than to pursue his extermination at whatever cost. For example, when I was a student and journalist in India in the mid-1980s the Indian government sought peace deals with bandit groups in central India. In both India and Pakistan, not just the military but elected governments have been complicit in atrocities and massacres. In the 1990s, successive Pakistani governments launched ferocious crackdowns against ethnic parties in Karachi, and then later made accommodations with their chastened survivors.

More importantly, the Pakistani Taliban have exploited the bitter anti-Americanism of most Pakistanis, and their belief that it is America’s blunders in Afghanistan that are responsible for Pakistan’s problems. This incidentally is by no means wholly untrue. As a recent book by the former British army officer Mike Martin (An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, 2014) and another by US journalist Anand Gopal (No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes, 2014) make clear, the revival of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan after 2003 is very largely due to the way in which the USA brought predatory warlords back to power in the region, and then at their behest killed, arrested and tortured former Taliban figures who were seeking to live in peace with the new Afghan state.

The leadership of the Pakistani Taliban—including its titular head, Maulana  Fazlullah, and the commander allegedly responsible for planning the school massacre, Umar Naray, have now taken refuge in Afghanistan. The USA and NATO have not seemingly been able to prevent this, while there is evidence that in recent years the Afghan state intelligence service has created links with the Pakistani Taliban by way of revenge for Pakistan’s shelter of the Afghan Taliban—a game of rival states and dissidents on the two sides of the border that goes back to the British-Afghan conflicts of the 19^th Century. It is therefore necessary not just that Pakistanis unite against the Pakistani Taliban, but that in order to promote reconciliation and Pakistani support for peace in Afghanistan, the Afghan state also take action against them on its side of the border.

By portraying themselves simply as allies of the Afghan Taliban in what most Pakistanis see as a legitimate war of resistance (or in Islamic terms a Defensive Jihad) against US forces and their local “puppets” in neighbouring Afghanistan the Pakistani Taliban have garnered much sympathy among people who would never support their ideological programme or wish to be ruled by them.

This is close psychologically to the equally ridiculous line one hears among pro-government Afghans that the Afghan Taliban have no real support in the Pashtun areas and are not even really Afghans at all but are Pakistanis—something that has been comprehensively disproved by countless western intelligence reports.

Among Pakistanis, the result all too often is a mentality which convinces itself that any terrorist atrocities in Pakistan are the work not of the “real” Taliban, but of foreign forces. These feelings are especially strong in the Pashtun areas, from which Imran Khan draws much of his support. The great majority of Pakistani Pashtuns with whom I have spoken, from all classes of society, have at least some sympathy with their fellow-Pashtuns in the Afghan Taliban—for very much the same reasons that they sympathised with the Afghan Taliban in their struggle against Communist rule and Soviet occupation in the 1980s, a war I covered as a British journalist. They see them as essentially the same people as the Pashtun Mujahedin in the 80s—and in this they are right. Mullah Omar and the Taliban inner circle are veterans of the war of the 1980s, and the Taliban rank and file are drawn from the same rural Pashtun areas from where the Pashtun Taliban drew their recruits. Opinion surveys show that the great majority of them—like the Mujahedin—see expelling foreign soldiers and their Afghan “slaves” as the chief motivation for their fight.

Most Pakistani Pashtuns loathe what they see as Pashtuns being forced to fight each other at the behest of others; and this leads to an even stronger effort to convince themselves either that it cannot be fellow Pashtuns who are carrying out terrorism against Pakistani civilians, or that they are somehow justified. Before last year’s elections, when I interviewed supporters of Imran Khan who had transferred their allegiance from the two historical main parties, the Awami National Party and the Pakistan People’s Party, every single one gave the main reason for their switch that the ANP and PPP governments had supported military operations against the Pakistani Taliban, while Imran Khan had opposed both such operations and the alliance with the USA.

Imran Khan has now strongly condemned the massacre in Peshawar, as has the leadership of the Afghan Taliban. Moreover, unlike in some previous cases, the Pakistani Taliban have taken public responsibility for the massacre (declaring that it was revenge for the Pakistani military’s killing of women and children in its operations against them) making it much more difficult for even the most sympathetic or wilfully confused Pakistani to allege that they were not “really” responsible. So there is now a real hope of a united will in Pakistan to crush the terrorists.

For this to happen however all mainstream forces in Pakistan will have to take their share of responsibility. The Army will have to stop using the Islamist insurgent group the Haqqani network, who are allied to the Taliban, as anti-Indian proxies in Afghanistan, and urge the Afghan Taliban to negotiate with the government in Kabul. Imran Khan and the PTI provincial government in Peshawar must abandon their support for peace talks and back an uncompromising struggle against the Pakistani Taliban. In order to allow the national government to do its job in this regard, they must also call off the mass movement to overthrow Mr Sharif’s government, respect the democratic process, and wait for the next elections.

And the national government of the Pakistan Muslim League (PMLN) under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the PMLN provincial government in Punjab, must clearly be seen to launch a nationwide campaign against the terrorists with the full participation of the national and Punjabi police. If all these things can happen— and there is at last a chance that they may – then at least some good will have come from this tragedy.