Taliban’s Threat is Real to Pakistan: The menace of Taliban has perpetrated the worst form of terrorism and violence against the Pakistani State and society. Taliban has gravely affected the Pakistani way of life and the government has miserably failed in educating the people about the ownership of this war for preserving the soul of Pakistan. There is no doubt that Pakistani armed forces are capable to thwart any attempt by the militants to “shake up” Islamabad but just the talk of Taliban marching toward the Federal Capital has perturbed the whole nation. Pakistan’s political government, military and people must understand and act in unity against the menace that threatens the very existence of the nation.

Militant Islam on the Move: Maulana Sufi Mohammad of the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) made it abundantly clear on April 19 that he intends to stretch the Nizam-e-Adl to Chitral (14,850 sq km) and Dir (5,280 sq km). Forces challenging the writ of the state stalk the roads and streets even in cities such as Peshawar, Mardan, Nowshehra and Swabi, mowing down police and paramilitary at will, and thereby sowing terror in the hearts and minds of security forces and people at large. The list of failures is long including the failure to integrate FATA and Federally Administered Northern Areas -- i.e. 99,716 sq km, nearly 13 per cent of our total landmass -- in mainstream Pakistan since 1970. What is happening in vast parts of the NWFP (Swat and Buner in particular) and FATA offers quite a glaring glimpse of what had preceded and followed the Taliban emergence in Afghanistan: governance had broken down, central authority melted away, and the country degenerated into medieval fiefdoms, controlled by individual warlords, who at times also operated in a well-knit network under one umbrella. Pakistani Taliban – whether in Waziristan or Swat – are practically doing the same. In fact through their ruthless terror campaign against police in particular, they have scared most of the police in Swat and the Malakand region either into hiding or resigning from the service. On April 20, they did the same in Buner and established their writ there.

Western Pressure and Pakistan’s Loss of Writ: Starting April 23 2009, a spree of statements pouring in from the American officials, including Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, Admiral Mullen, General Petraeus and others denoted that Pakistan faced an existential threat because of ascending militancy. Their words had connotations as if the Pakistani government and the Army were not willing to facing or understanding their domestic challenge. It was emphasized that the threat was “certainly real,” and the Pakistan Army untrained in counterinsurgency and rigidly focused on India was either “reluctant to take on” the Taliban or “mostly ineffective.” On April 27, CENTCOM Chief, General David Petraeus once again warned of the militants, saying they had turned the situation in Pakistan very dangerous. In recent months, based on the extremely controversial Swat deal leading to the Nizame Adl Regulation, the string of suicide attacks – about 22 so far this year – and the inability of the provincial and federal governments to arresting the slide and offering workable dialogue-development strategies to countering the militants, most talk about Pakistan has centered on whether it stands before a possible disintegration and how to stem the drift into chaos. Statistics and events in the last four weeks or so seem to have evoked these alarmist views; let us look at the western border; today, 27,220 sq km of FATA i.e. Bajaur, Khyber, Kurram, Mohamand, North Waziristan, Orakzai, South Waziristan FATA are beyond Pakistan’s control. Some 5,337 sq km of Swat and the areas around it are, by virtue of the Presidential approval of the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation 2009, are beyond the Constitution of Pakistan de jure.

Need for Introspection for Pakistani Government and Military: If more than half-a-million strong army cannot take out a few thousand radical militants who are considered threat to the entire world, the US-led western forces would do it for Pakistan. A string of analysis and studies by Washington and London-based think tanks also support this western military push, maintaining that Pakistan itself is unable to handle the spiral of violence unleashed by Al Qaeda and its local associates. This argument requires the Pakistani government and the security establishment to indulge in a deep introspection of its acts and words in the last 62 years. It is incompetence, absence of commitment and vision as well as sheer indifference of the ruling elite – backed up by a pliant and conniving bureaucracy – that has brought this country to the brink: a point where conjectures about its survival or disintegration have become an inevitable element of discussions even at home. Also that nearly a 50 million dollar US aid for Swat and affected areas is still unspent for lack of initiative by the government. Despite promises, the Balochistan government is still beset with extreme funds shortages. Despite the raging militancy all over, the entire country is manned by less than 400,000 largely underpaid, under-trained and under-equipped policemen for over 170 million. Similar, is the case with the Frontier Corpse, a force in the forefront of the questionable war against terrorism.

Taliban are Strategic Threat to Pakistan: Once considered as the “strategic assets,” this is about time that Pakistani government and military establishment understand that Taliban are in fact “strategic threat” to Pakistan. Only a few thousand militants have taken virtually the whole country hostage with much of the time on the national media spent on them and people expressing worries of Talibanization of an otherwise moderate Pakistani society. According to an immigration consultant based in Islamabad, the “quality human capital,” that already was fleeing Pakistan, has doubled their efforts to leave the country because they feel “threatened against the naked aggression of the Taliban that has made their and the life of their families extremely insecure.” Pakistan Army and other security related services have seemingly spun into a full-swing action against the militancy and Dir and Buner and have met success. The menace of militancy in the name of an inflexible interpretation of Islam has to be stopped as a lot of flexibility shown in the past only strengthened the hands of the militants who perpetrated death and destruction in the name of Islam.

# P260409I66