Surge of Militancy in KPK and Balochistan

 

The militancy-hit areas of KPK and Balochistan are heavily weaponised.  The warring factions, comprising marauding bands, with a sprinkling of battle-hardened veterans (particularly in the former Tribal Areas), are constantly at each other's throats. Their animosity is based on the Shia-Sunni divide – a power play that is based on ancient rivalries and prejudices. Besides Iran and the Gulf states, sectarian groups in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq – the so-called Shia Triangle, play their part in keeping the militancy in Pakistan’s restive North-West alive. How were the foreign interlocutors successful in emotionally blackmailing the Pakistani militants?

Pakistan inherited a northwestern region that remained in flux for thousands of years. Lacking the fertility of India’s Indus and Ganges valleys, the terrain across the Durand Line is harsh. The Pakistani and Afghani Pashtuns struggle many times more to earn their livelihood than inhabitants of the Indian mainland. The situation is the same in Balochistan, with the difference that Baloch society is secular. Thousands of kilometres to the West of the Indian Subcontinent, the Scottish highlanders also faced a harsh life. According to Encyclopaedia Brittanica:

An austere land, subject to extremes of weather, Scotland has proved a difficult home for countless generations of its people, who have nonetheless prized it for its beauty and unique culture. “I am a Scotsman,” the poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote in the 19th century; “therefore I had to fight my way into the world.” Historically one of Europe’s poorest countries, Scotland’s contribution to political and practical theories of progress is extraordinary.

How did Scotland overcome its backwardness and poverty?

Scotland became a commercial and industrial powerhouse during the Industrial Revolution, with textiles, mining, shipbuilding, and heavy industry important to the country's development. The discovery of oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s led to a new industrial revolution, with the construction of oil rigs, refineries, and support services. A Scottish Parliament was reintroduced in 1999 after a referendum in 1997.

The Scottish National Party became the governing party in 2007, and in 2014 a referendum was held on Scottish independence. The vote was lost, with 55.3% of voters answering "No". Scotland has produced many great inventors, including John Logie Baird, Alexander Graham Bell, James Goodfellow, Alexander Wood, James Watt, and John Boyd Dunlop. Scotland has also produced many notable civil engineering innovations, including the tubular steel, the Falkirk wheel, and the patent slip for docking vessels. 

By comparison, the people of KPK and Balochistan – a microcosm of Pakistan’s backwardness, have remained socially and economically backward for a long time. The Industrial Revolution, which lasted in Europe from 1789 to 1799, bypassed the so-called Islamic world because it was under European colonial rule during this period. The British colonialists established modern educational institutions, the latest irrigation systems, and industrialization in India to serve the colonial interests. After gaining independence, instead of progressing, KPK and Balochistan, like the rest of Pakistan, remained hostage to sub-nationalism and Byzantine politics.

The militants are Frankenstein’s monsters raised by Pakistan during the Cold War period, with help from the United States, to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were not a liberation army like the Viet Cong were in the Vietnam War, but a conglomeration of prospectors who had joined in a gold rush in the treacherous mountain terrain of Afghanistan. This was the best Zia could achieve since raising resistance through a liberation army was impossible in Afghanistan’s tribal society. Afghanistan was a tribal confederacy strapped together precariously through a monarchy.

Zia had been quite astute in dealing with the Mujahideen. It was Zia’s shrewdness, matched by the single-mindedness of General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, his spymaster, that the Mujahideen circus was kept under the leash. They had served their purpose during the war and should have been curtailed after the Soviet withdrawal. This did not happen. The militants now provide their services to the entire spectrum of political stakeholders in Pakistan – from liberals to religious extremists. Their services include providing soldiers of fortune used in the kidnapping, murder, and extortion.

For the last two decades, the militant outfits in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been trying to form a string of fiefs all across the Durand Line, in the former Tribal Areas of Pakistan. They need these fiefs, or emirates, as they prefer to call them, as firm bases for extracting their pound of flesh. TTP had already established its firm bases in former FATA’s North and South Waziristan agencies. The Pakistan Army launched several operations to dismantle these. Establishing these mini-caliphates across the Durand Line addressed a deep-seated psychological craving among these semi-literate and deprived people. There was an urge among the militants to wrest power from the state. Their vision does not extend beyond delivering summary punishments and beheading their opponents. The Baloch separatists get support from Iran, India, and the Gulf states. Despite the Iranian support, BLA and BLF  want to establish a unified Baloch state incorporating Pakistani and Irani Balochistan.

We are well aware of the security environment along the Durand Line. Pakistan’s northwestern and southwestern borders are no longer inert like in the 1960s, when King Zahir Shah and King Reza Shah Pahlavi ruled Afghanistan and Iran. Today, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Gulf states, particularly UAE, consider the development of Gwadar port and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor as a threat to their economies. They, along with India, are supporting various separatist Baloch groups that have sprouted along the coastal belt of Balochistan during the last three decades.

Pakistan Army has unwittingly allowed itself to be sucked into the vortex of an unconventional confrontation with the foreign-sponsored miscreants. This has resulted in the erosion of its ability to fight a conventional war with India. By contrast, China, a much stronger military power, has helped Pakistan to engage India in Gilgit-Baltistan, threatening it with a two-front war. Similarly, by reinforcing the Pakistan Navy’s deployment in the Arabian Sea, China has checkmated the Indian threat to Chinese naval deployment across the Malacca Straights.

What is the way forward?  First, the army should evolve a strong and no-nonsense narrative to counter the Indian-sponsored TTP/PTM/ BLA/BLF narrative which has forced it on the back foot. Economic development, not embroilment with insurgents, should be the future strategy to combat militancy.

Along the Western border, the Pakistan Army should disengage itself from militants, transfer the border policing and anti-smuggling responsibilities to a civilian set-up, and focus on facing the conventional military threat from India. The army needs reorganization and capacity building to counter India’s cyber, electromagnetic spectrum, and outer space