An awakening but is it enough?

By Cyril Almeida ( from Dawn)

THANK you, Sufi Mohammad. With one speech Sufi has done more to galvanise public opinion against militancy than a hundred suicide bombings and beheadings.

Suddenly, people have woken up to the fact that the great soldier of Islam is a dangerous kook. ‘He thinks we’re what?’ ‘He wants to do what?’ Yep, he thinks the rest of us are sick and what we really need is a dose of Sufi’s medicine. Y’know, to straighten us out about our romance with infidel democracy and yearning for quaint things like basic rights, a functional economy, education, etc.

Sufi’s utopia, it turns out, is everyone else’s dystopia. The fact that people are surprised though has everything to do with the catastrophic, collective failure of our politicians and army.

How did Sufi become the state’s go-to man in Swat? Ask the politicians and they’ll tell you it’s the army’s fault. The army promised they would crush the militants but didn’t, the politicians say. Ask the soldiers, and they blame the politicians. Every time we were close to securing a victory the politicians forced us to stand down so that they could talk to the militants, the army says.

The truth, as ever, lies in between. Militarily, the army let us down. The story of Operation Rah-i-Haq has yet to be told but when it is, ugly secrets will spill out. Were the local commanders and GHQ on the same page at all times? If there was a united will, was there a coherent strategy? Why were people defying Maulana Fazlullah abandoned? What happened last December when Pir Samiullah and his band of Barelvi fighters pleaded for help but didn’t get any and were duly slaughtered by the TTP? There is a stench that surrounds the army operation in Swat and it doesn’t just come from the piles of dead bodies.

Politically, there are serious doubts about the ANP’s role in the affair. The so-called secular party has fallen over itself to appease the militants. Yes, their MPAs and MNA from Swat were under threat. Yes, their party workers were in the militants cross-hairs. But it’s hard to shake off the feeling that there’s more than meets the eye here. The best-case scenario is that the ANP has been playing the Pashtun nationalist card, hoping to identify itself with the people against a security establishment that has always been suspect. The worst-case scenario is that some in the party have sympathies for the militants and eventually hope to make common cause with them.

Caught in this wretched smoke-and-mirrors game, the media and the people have inevitably clutched at straws. Sufi Mohammad claims he can broker a peace, so let him have a go. It’s not like anything else has worked.

And that’s the problem from the citizen’s perspective. Zoom out from Swat — it is a serious, immediate problem, but not the main issue in the long term — and consider some basic questions. What is Pakistan’s policy against militancy? Who are the bad guys and what are we going to do about them? What are Pakistan’s red lines in this shadowy war in which friends may be foes and foes may be friends and sometimes both friend and foe at the same time?

Surely, without having answers to basic questions, without having the enemy clearly defined for them, the people cannot be expected to develop a consensus against militancy. So it takes a wild rant from Sufi Mohammad to alert the people to the horrors of what the militants have in mind for us.

But the outrage will prove momentary, the consensus fleeting if the people’s representatives don’t rise to the occasion. There are a few promising signs, with the PML-N and the religious parties joining the MQM in expressing their reservations about what was agreed to in Swat. Who knows whether anything will come of it, whether Sufi’s outburst will be the catalyst for the national consensus against militancy that the country has so desperately lacked. It is a great opportunity though, with two key ingredients present: there is a clear villain, Sufi Mohmmad, and there is a clear issue, a system of governance that nobody considers inherently un-Islamic has been denounced.

But desperately as we do need a public consensus against militancy that is not what is ultimately going to defeat the militants. To defeat the militants, the state, particularly the security establishment, must be on board. Right now there are two big questions hanging over the security establishment.

One, will it definitively give up on the idea of using non-state actors to pursue its national security agenda? Perhaps more than anything feeding the national confusion on militancy is this very point. The people cannot be convinced that militants are the enemy if the state continues to differentiate between good and bad militants.

Sufi Mohammad’s kindred spirit, Maulana Aziz of Lal Masjid fame, also glorified jihad and called for the overthrow of Pakistan’s existing political system in his first Friday sermon after being released. Hardly surprising. What was troubling though was that jihadi literature and CDs glorifying suicide bombers were openly being distributed outside Lal Masjid.

This schizophrenia — denouncing Baitullah Mehsud’s suicide bombers, but letting a favourite son sell the same propaganda — is simply irreconcilable.

Two, does the security establishment have the capacity to devise a credible plan to defeat militancy? Because the resolve hasn’t been there, the plan thus far has necessarily been inadequate. But once — if — the will is present, a winning strategy will not create itself. Wanting to defeat militancy is different from knowing how to defeat militancy — and it’s far from clear that the security establishment or the regular army or the government have the capacity to develop such a plan.

Take one look at the terror map of Pakistan. Is Fata the epicentre and NWFP and Punjab where militancy’s tendrils have spread? Is militancy in all those areas interdependent? Have the militants figured out a way to sustain themselves as geographically separate groups? While the state and its people have dithered over the threat of militancy, the militants have not stood still. Defeating them today is not simply a case of whacking them with all we’ve got. First we need to understand how the militant networks have evolved and what their capabilities are.

The fear gnawing at those who have been following the rising arc of militancy is simple enough. So many pieces of the complex jigsaw that is an effective policy against militancy have yet to fall into place that it is far easier to see the state collapsing first instead.