Fighting terrorism
THE Bacha Khan University attack forced us to relive the horrors of APS. The punditry following the attack tells me that it may have come as an even bigger shock than APS to most. The state's consistently positive readouts on Zarb-i-Azb and the improvement in the overall security situation over the past year seemed to have convinced people that the Taliban were no longer in a position to pull off something like this again. This is perplexing.
On the one hand, the palatable feeling among commentators that Charsadda must necessarily cast doubt over the efficacy of the military's anti-TTP efforts points to little more than a case of unrealistic expecta- tions. If you look at contemporary insurgencies around the world, one common trend is immediately apparent: insurgent groups manage to retain the capacity to attack state interests long after they have passed their peak.
The reason is simple. Preventing terrorism is a matter of probability. The state has to get it right every time; the terrorists need to get through the net just once. The good news is that empirical evidence also shows that as horrible as one major failure on the part of the state may seem at the time, it doesn't necessarily reflect on the overall direction of its counterterrorism effort. This is true for Pakistan where the prevention rate in terms of terrorist attacks has been going up. Importantly, not only has TTP's manoeuvring space been restricted, their ability to adapt to new strategies has also been curtailed by the state's fairly innovative CT measures. Charsadda doesn't change this assessment one bit.
Despite the gains, challenges remain. On the other hand, a number of challenges will continue to prevent us from achieving zero-violence levels anytime soon. This is not surprising. Throughout last year, multiple indicators pointed to significant problems. For starters, the absence of independent information on just how well the military's operations in Fata are going should have kept the nation somewhat sceptical. It was clear that the military campaign had gone on far longer than predicted; the forces are still not fully out of the hold phase of the 'clear, hold, build' cycle, meaning that active resistance - and thus terrorist capacity - remains intact in pockets; and we weren't moving seriously enough on some of the crucial institutional changes we promised.
For instance, we stopped hearing of any real forward movement (beyond existing on paper) on the joint intelligence directorate that is to coordinate terrorism prevention tasks between civilian and military agencies. This was the single most important data point since you simply can't prevent periodic slippage in detecting terrorist plots without truly functional civ-mil cooperation on intelligence.
The regional dynamic is another major complicating factor where things went from bad to worse last year. Specifically, TTP has physical sanctuary in Afghanistan that guarantees against its extinction purely by Pakistani action. Pakistan needs greater cooperation from Afghanistan. But this isn't about to happen. Not until Pakistan settles the issue of Afghan insurgent sanctuaries to Kabul's liking and both sides begin to see eye to eye on the dangers of cross-border movement of non-state actors. We've messed this one up big time - and worse yet, I don't see much recognition that the ball is in our court.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to attaining sustainable peace (as opposed to violence reduction) however is the fact that CT approaches comprising narrow, punishment-focused tactics against existing militants are never good enough to get you there. States must employ genuine counterinsurgency (COIN) strategies aimed at tackling deeper issues that breed terrorists and incentivize terrorism in the first place.
Pakistan's kinetic-heavy strategy fixated on physically destroying infrastructure and human capacity of terrorists is as classic as CT gets. The only element out of the COIN toolkit that has been employed in tandem is development spending in conflict-ridden areas. Incidentally, this is the one thing all South Asian states have tended to opt for in trying to win over people's loyalties amidst internal conflict. Sadly, while it generates employment and livelihoods, there is no evidence to suggest that it can resolve root causes for the grievances and mindsets that may have got the insurgency going in the first place.
The National Internal Security Policy and National Action Plan signified giant leaps ahead in terms of a COIN vision because they honed in on real obstacles to sustainable peace: radical mindsets, narratives, education, etc. These are the issues to prize over all else if we are serious about transforming CT gains made thus far into something more lasting. Unfortunately, NISP seems to have been forgotten and NAP remains a paper tiger.