Pakistan’s military operation in North Waziristan (NW), Operation Zarb-e-Azb, is entering its second month now. Over a million ill-fated Pashtun civilians have been displaced internally to various cities in Pakistan and tens of thousands more have taken refuge in Afghanistan. Families and clans have been disrupted and health, education, economy and safety, already in shambles in a region abandoned by the Pakistani state, are non-existent now. The Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are unwelcome in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan provinces while the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government is trying to herd them into camps. The federal government has not yet asked for international humanitarian assistance. It is not clear if the officials are just waiting for the exodus to turn into a catastrophe or not but one thing is certain: the region’s innocent civilians are the biggest victims of Pakistan’s disastrous policies in NW. Truth is the other major casualty of this conflict, like in all wars.
From the start of Zarb-e-Azb, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) has claimed almost daily that dozens of terrorists have been killed. The Director General (DG) ISPR, Major General Asim Bajwa, stated in a recent press briefing that the security forces have killed 447 terrorists, destroyed 88 hideouts and cleared 80 percent of the Miranshah area. The terrorists’ body count — down to the last corpse quite curiously — presented by the ISPR boss is interesting as no other verification was provided and independent journalists are still not permitted in the area. The figures apparently are estimates based on the intercepts of the terrorists’ communications. One would take his word for it if the other parts of his briefing had not raised some very serious questions about the military’s handling of the NW region for about a decade now. Major General Bajwa said, “North Waziristan had become a hub of terrorism where several terrorist networks were based and had been operating for a long time…terrorists used to brainwash suicide bombers while recruiting them in North Waziristan.” He had also claimed a few days ago that terrorists would not be allowed to escape and that the tribesmen would not let them return.
The operational commander, General Zafarullah Khan, on the other hand has conceded that many terrorists including their ringleaders had escaped: “They had smelled that the operation is about to be launched. The build up for the operation had already begun, and they could see that.” Now, as clichéd as it sounds, a terrorist does not need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. Why on earth would guerillas fight pitched battles when they had months of advance warning to trim their hair, shave their beards and melt away? Did the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) really need to ‘smell it’? Were the rounds upon rounds of negotiations and, failing that, intermittent air bombardment not enough for the ‘bad’ Taliban or were the friendly reminders to the ‘good’ ones not sufficient for them to make good their escape? General Khan also said, “It (NW) was no doubt the epicentre of terrorism.” How is it possible that the Pakistan military did not know about the jihadist free-for-all happening right under its nose? The Pakistani troops, including Tochi Scouts, have after all been garrisoned within a stone’s throw of the terrorist Woodstock in Miranshah that the ISPR is now showcasing to the world. The magnitude of the security establishment’s omission, if that indeed were the case, is surpassed only by the colossal misery it has inflicted upon the uprooted civilian population.
On the other hand, if it has been a conscious decision, which many suspect it was, to allow the ostensibly friendly jihadists to thrive in NW, someone must answer for it. Thousands of innocent civilians, brave servicemen and valiant political leaders like Benazir Bhutto and Bashir Bilour have lost their lives in attacks almost invariably traced to the jihadist lair in NW. Who knew about these terror sanctuaries, when did they know and what did they do about it and, if not, why not? Cleaning up is welcome but responsibility must be affixed for who created or allowed this disastrous mess in the first place. It is mindboggling that a military equipped with the latest gadgetry and flush with cash from the US Coalition Support Fund did not have the wherewithal to detect, in its immediate vicinity, terrorist activity of the magnitude that General Zafarullah Khan has described. Did the former dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, not threaten the Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti with “It is not the ‘70s; he would not know what hit him”? Nawab Bugti sahib was subsequently martyred in an army attack. But what prevented the army from using this sophisticated weaponry against the jihadists in NW? It was nothing but the duplicitous ‘good/bad’ jihadist policy that General Musharraf had presided over.
Sadly, there is no confirmation that the Pakistani security establishment has indeed dropped differentiating between the good and bad Taliban, the ISPR’s pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding. There is a discrepancy between the statements of General Zafarullah Khan and the DG ISPR but, on a closer look, they are not so incongruent after all. As the local journalists and the NW tribesmen have been saying consistently for the past month, the ‘good’ jihadists seemed to have gotten a free pass yet again. The ‘bad’ Taliban, i.e. only the TTP groups that could not be reconciled, have come under attack and potentially a ringleader or two, like the ex-Pakistan air force airman-turned-Taliban Adnan Rashid, may have been pinned. However, even the media persons escorted through Miranshah by the military have not reported seeing a single terrorist dead or alive. Chances are that the ISPR’s assertions will remain a mystery and those who have alleged for years that the TTP is a US-Indo-Zionist plot put into practice by the Afghan security service will still not produce a shred of evidence to support these tall claims.
The ‘good’ jihadists appear to have been redistributed by design and the ‘bad’ ones by default. The melting away of the Taliban in NW is not much different from how their Afghan cohorts simply evaporated in Afghanistan in 2001 only to reappear within four years, courtesy their handlers. The jihadists, at least the ‘good’ ones, seem to have pulled another Houdini act. And if the suicide attack that slaughtered 89 Afghans in Orgun, Paktika, across from South Waziristan is anything to go by, the resurgence will not take much time. One would like to trust the Pakistani military’s claims about Zarb-e-Azb’s monumental success but, given the history, diligent verification is in order.
The writer can be reached at [email protected] and he tweets @mazdaki