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Editorial: Another chapter of terrorism closed

Baitullah Mehsud, the fearsome top leader of the self-styled Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, is reportedly dead, killed in last Tuesday’s Predator strike. Earlier reports had suggested that the attack had claimed his wife. There is need for further confirmation but if the report is correct then the hit is a big positive for the ongoing counterinsurgency and terrorism operations. Consider.

Mehsud had emerged as the biggest menace for Pakistan attacking soft and hard targets in the tribal areas as well as across Pakistan. He had become the main plank between Al Qaeda and the several sectarian and terrorist groups within Pakistan drawing cadres from all of them and forging them into a well-knit terrorist force. He considered himself safe in the craggy mountain redoubts of South Waziristan and so far all attempts to get to him through ground extraction operations had failed. In the final analysis, he had become the centre of gravity which needed to be hit because he managed from that central position to expand the zone of irregular war, a combination of insurgency and terrorism, and forced the security forces to fight several small wars on the periphery.

His death therefore sends a clear signal to the Taliban, and whoever his successor might be, that the heat and din of war can reach their headquarters. Also, that no matter how rough and difficult the terrain, superior technology will be used to blunt the terrorists’ advantage. Wherever it is difficult to execute ground operations, air power can be used to take out even mobile targets.

The other setback would be the need for the Taliban to find someone to replace Mehsud. That they will be able to do but it will take time and it will be some time before that person will be able to get a handle on things. Going by reports of how Mehsud dealt with his second-string leaders, we know that he never allowed any of his lieutenants to grow too big. Qari Hussain, who trained and prepared suicide bombers for the TTP, had to mend fences with Mehsud when the Qari overstepped his brief and attacked the house of Khyber Agency’s political agent in Tank. Mehsud knew that in the game that he was playing, he could not afford to let anyone grow beyond a certain point. But now that he is reported dead, this could prove a problem for his successor. In fact, this could even lead to a battle for succession and a splintering of TTP. If the TTP falls apart into various factions, its ability to mount coordinated attacks could suffer. That would make it easier for the security forces to pre-empt future insurgent and terrorist attacks.

Having said this, however, we should not consider this as the beginning of the end of this menace. There is every possibility that the Taliban and their sleeper cells will mount a string of attacks across Pakistan to avenge Mehsud’s killing. So, before it begins to get better, it could get worse. The government should be alive to this fact. Secondly, Mehsud became big in the way that he did because Al Qaeda needed to prop up someone to act as go-between itself and the several extremist groups. With Mehsud gone, Al Qaeda will be looking for the right person to replace him and is very likely to throw its weight and resources behind that person. Similarly, given that Mehsud did get taken out by a drone despite much precaution, the Taliban are likely to become more cautious in avoiding a similar fate for their next leader.

Nonetheless, the operation has notched a big success and it must be looked at as such. It also disproves the thesis in Pakistan that Mehsud was operating at the behest of a US-India combine because those countries want to dismember Pakistan. If anything, it now points to greater intelligence and military cooperation between Pakistan and the US which is the only way the two sides can fight this war. Also, Pakistan had long insisted that it cannot take care of groups that are sustaining the insurgency in Afghanistan because it has to deal with the menace of Mehsud. Islamabad will now have to revisit that argument. With elections coming up in Afghanistan, the US would want Pakistan to help it maintain security in Afghanistan by ensuring, as far as Pakistan can, that groups operating from the Pakistani soil are neutralised. *

Second Editorial:‘Evidence not enough’

The Foreign Office has repeated what it has been saying about insufficient “evidence” against the Mumbai attack terrorist provided by New Delhi: “it is not enough to put the accused persons on trial”. From India, the message is positive on the release of information Wednesday about the terrorist organisations banned by Pakistan, hoping for more action on the same lines. Few in Pakistan knew that the 25 organisations were banned; but the ban-order was issued not because the United Nations had given “enough evidence” but because that was what the international community had decided.

There is evidence of another sort in Pakistan that the world is finding out: terrorists have been let off because of the intimidation they are able to use against the institutions involved in producing and examining the evidence: the police and the judges. Again and again the people who were going to be targeted complained that their killers had been released unfairly by the court of law; some of the targeted complainants were then actually killed.

If the world doesn’t believe us when we say “there is no evidence” it is of no use to us in the international context, especially if we are making a sincere case for non-complicity of the state in terrorism and want to proceed to the negotiating table and not face sanctions. The latest story about “there is no evidence” has been carried in The New York Times and everyone in Pakistan knows it is true. The case discussed is about a sectarian killer whom the entire country recognises as a public threat: Lashkar-e-Jhangvi’s Malik Ishaq, the killer of 70, is about to be let off the hook after 12 years of trial by a Multan court. Reason? “No evidence”.

The plaintiff whose family of Shia faith was wiped out by Malik Ishaq says he has been threatened by the incarcerated man and has been reduced to living within the four walls of his house in Multan. The newspaper reports: “When Ishaq was arrested in 1997, he unleashed his broad network against his opponents, killing witnesses, threatening judges and intimidating police, leading nearly all of the prosecutions against him to collapse eventually”. It is certain that the man who was fighting the case against him will have to run away from Pakistan while Malik Ishaq will walk away to South Waziristan as a swaggering “jihadi hero” and join his masters, the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

In the Multan case the witnesses to the killing of 12 Shias in a family gathering began to die one by one after the trial got under way. Other witnesses began to change their depositions. The judge saw it and drew his own conclusions. Indeed, we dare say that the judge who will finally acquit him for “insufficient evidence” will remember that a fellow judge had indeed handed down a guilty verdict in one case against Ishaq, but that the Supreme Court had overturned it. In Pakistan the refrain coming from the common man is: there is no justice. How can the world believe that Pakistan will be able to do justice in the case of terrorists?

Righteous passions are inflamed over the recent killing of Christians in Gojra in Punjab but the quality of reporting on the incident that unfolded over four days has been poor for the same reason: the threat of a terrorist attack on the home of the honest reporter. Indeed, in other places in the NWFP, reporters have actually been killed in cold blood, resultantly affecting the extent and nature of reporting while the terrorists were still the dominant force. In Gojra, the camera did not cover the mainspring of the crime. Most reports refrained from naming the organisation involved, and avoided looking at the portrait of Pakistan’s most notorious sectarian killer on the wall of the local madrassa.

The state is too weak yet — it doesn’t mean that this is a permanent condition that has to be accepted — to try the terrorists fairly. But by putting this fact before the international community honestly it can begin to regain its sovereignty with global support. What India wants from us we can’t do because the power of the clergy and the non-state actors is still too overwhelming. But our efforts to push back the terrorists through military action are there for the world to see as an earnest of Pakistan’s resolve to become internally sovereign again. *

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