Two APCs before this had tried anti-Americanism to woo the terrorists, thinking the Taliban would be satisfied, but failed and also ended up doing nothing against America. After the army announced it was getting out of Malakand (Swat-Dir) in 2009, the Taliban killed a major general and a lieutenant colonel there, and killed four additional troops in North Waziristan, on 15 September.

The army had already tried its populist anti-Americanism under General Kayani in deference to its internal emotion, but could not do without the $60 million a month it received from the US-led Coalition Support Fund for deployment in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), while needlessly tormenting a government it thought was pro-American and pro-India. The APC line was: fighting the Taliban was part of the big mistake of becoming America’s ally after 9/11. Rumour was that Imran Khan whose party is ruling in strategic Khyber Pakhtunkhwa abutting on FATA had convinced Army Chief General Kayani to take the army out of FATA gradually as an earnest of sincerity to the Taliban who were fighting Pakistan ‘because of its slavishly pro-America policy’.

The APC attached no conditions to its offer of talks, except for self-mortifyingly vowing to go to the UN against American drones killing the Taliban in FATA; which led to the Taliban discussing with their seventy-eight splinters how best to respond to the offer after the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) welcomed it through a spokesman. On 15 September, they proclaimed the freeing of TTP prisoners as their precondition for talks. Pakistan’s politics looked like bringing it humiliation and no peace.

Significantly, in the Urdu language press, the APC was hailed as supreme wisdom; in the English media, serious doubts were expressed about talking to terrorists from a position of weakness. A clash of linguistic narratives took place pointedly on talk shows carried by the well-known Pakistani channel GEO TV where ‘English-medium’ former Pakistan ambassador to the US and head of Islamabad’s NGO Jinnah Institute, Sherry Rehman, was pitted against the ‘Urdu-medium’, recently-’outed’ super-non-state actor, former chief of ‘defunct’ Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and frontrow member of Defence of Pakistan Council which vowed to fight India till the bitter end, Fazlur Rehman Khalil. As for the charge that Pakistan was getting ready to talk to the Taliban from prostration, Khalil’s answer was stock: if the superpower can talk peace with the Taliban ‘strangers’ why can’t Pakistan with its own ‘misguided sons’? Ms Rehman’s rebuttal was easy: the Americans are leaving a country they had occupied; Pakistan was not leaving Pakistan. Then came a more complicated issue: if Pakistan can be ready to talk to the Baloch insurgents taking the terrorism path in Balochistan, why can’t it talk to the Taliban? Ms Rehman said: because the Taliban had come from outside while the Baloch were Pakistanis. She carefully suppressed the comment that, while both were terrorists, the Taliban had to be fought because they were ideologically more threatening.

The Taliban and hundreds of international warriors wanted to create a state according to the tenets of Islam listed in al-Qaeda chief al-Zawahiri’s treatise ‘The Morning and the Lamp’. In this, he denigrates Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan and destroys the Pakistani constitution article by article with Islamic argument. (Pakistan has taken pains to knock it out of the Internet but the ‘alternative constitution’ was translated into Urdu and widely distributed by madrasas in Pakistan.)2

The truth on the ground was that the Pakistan army was fighting the Taliban openly and Baloch insurgents deniably because both were engaging in terrorism, and the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) was learning new tricks from the Taliban, enjoying a kind of terror condominium in Balochistan. There could be no difference of approach: both were terrorists; both funded from abroad and challenged a state that not long ago was doing the same sort of thing in other states. Then how was the BLF different from the TTP?

The answer is: because the TTP was ideologically driven and the BLF secular. The Taliban had the same ideology as Pakistan’s, and its claims were ‘corrective’ of a ‘misguided state’; while the BLF didn’t resonate with the Muslim mind in Pakistan, the TTP did. The TTP could take over the state with people’s consent and dispose of its nuclear weapons, the BLF couldn’t. The Taliban thought themselves destined to rule Pakistan; the Baloch wanted only to secede. And why should the Taliban version of sharia be more persuasive than the sharia proclaimed by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? Because the Taliban sharia was more ‘authentic’. The constitutional sharia didn’t enforce Islamic punishments under the doctrine of deterrence (‘munkirat’ or doing bad things) and had no provision of punishment under the doctrine of approval (for not doing ‘marufat’ or good things).

The new extremist Muslim mind favours Islamic punishments (hudood) without ‘due process’ and wants to punish people for not doing good things like saying namaz. (The modern state punishes crimes listed in the penal code; it doesn’t punish anyone for not doing good deeds.) The biggest complaint from madrasa purists in Pakistan is against bank interest which their jurisprudence consensually condemns as prohibited usury (riba). Therefore, Pakistan was well-advised not to talk peace with the Taliban without first ‘softening’ them with punitive action with the help of other ‘threatened’ nations of the world, including India.

Pakistan was therefore more endangered by the Taliban than by Baloch separatists. (Note the ‘absorptive’ nature of the first and ‘recessive’ nature of the second.) India is not endangered by the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in many of its states because the ideology of the state of India is not the same as that of the rebels. Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed his concern over the spread of this rebellion, there were no signs that India would ever ‘talk peace’ with them from a position of weakness. India was also not holding APCs recommending unconditional peace offers in the northeastern corner of the country.

In the northeast of India, a cluster of small states (Manipur, Assam, Nagaland, Tripura, Meghalaya) have been convulsed with ‘freedom movements’ that have become violent. Out of the five, the first three were still giving trouble in 2007 and violence there had actually increased after a ceasefire agreed by the Indian army in 1997. If Pakistan had been watching, it would have learned that ceasefires with terrorists only give them time to regroup and form bigger armies. Also, there are some other lessons that Pakistan and Afghanistan should have learned from India’s experience with terrorism since the 1950s.

One big lesson was not to glamorize the misfortunes of tribal communities gone wrong for lack of normal evolution. Pakistanis are guilty of fabricating the myth that the Pakhtun never give up fighting and have never been conquered. They often mouth this obscenity standing in front of camps where countless Pakhtun women and children suffer history’s worst brutalization. India has deployed its army against the warriors of the northeast without parlaying with them from either a position of weakness or ideological vulnerability. But as noted above, India is lucky it is not an ideological state and its masses are not given to extremism like the Muslims of the world, thus legitimizing the terrorist creed of al-Qaeda.

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