Ending the decade with terrorism
December 31st, 2010
The year 2010 brought to an end the decade that most inflicted violence on the common man in Pakistan, resulting in a response of ‘extremism’ from the country’s civil society. The terrorism exercised by the Taliban and al Qaeda against the state was paralleled by people’s own violence against people. What began in 2000 as a violent reaction against the incursion of Isaf-Nato forces in Afghanistan, reached a civil war-like level by 2010, rocking the country internally and causing violent events in the regional neighbourhood.
There is agreement among expert analysts that the state was responsible for causing itself to come apart at the seams through an embrace of jihad or covert war, starting in 1990. Non-state actors employed as warriors of Islam in Afghanistan and India turned against the patron state. In 2010, Pakistan saw two diametrically opposed policies being run by the ‘security’ state: nurturing non-state organisations as a challenge to India and the US; and fighting terrorism that these very militias inflicted on the people of Pakistan under the guidance of al Qaeda.
A study of the sermons delivered from the mosques in 2010 has revealed that clerical authorities are divided on the basis of intolerance. The year 2010 saw the climaxing of Deobandi-Barelvi conflict — in the shape of suicide-bombing of tombs of popular saints in Lahore and Karachi — on the issue of qabar-parasti (worship of tombs) debated by al Qaeda and its allied Deobandi madrassas. By the end of the year, the Barelvis seemed to rise as a counterforce to terrorism, but this hope was dashed when the clergy united across-the-board against any rationalisation of the blasphemy law. 2010 was the beginning of the conversion of the Pakistani state from ‘modern’ to ‘pre-modern’.
The misfortunes of Pakistan were foreign policy-related. And the central knot of conflict was in Afghanistan where an ‘India-centric’ Pakistan sought to head off possible Indian regional outreach, allegedly through the very terrorists it was supposed to fight. Since the economy was in a poor shape and in need of foreign assistance to make its essential purchases, the international community was in a position to exercise control over Pakistan’s conduct. Pakistan’s neighbours and some Nato countries, including the US, accused Pakistan of playing a double game, helping the terrorists strike inside Afghanistan to kill foreign troops.
Iran and India warned Pakistan of dire consequences if terrorist attacks inside their territories by Pakistani terrorists continued. The Pakistan army, after retaking control of Swat-Malakand in 2009, went out to Orakzai and South Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) to flush out terrorists harassing the major cities of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. In Swat, as well as Bajaur and Khyber, the battles have fluctuated and the Taliban have a pattern of coming back and retaking territory.
In the midst of extremism, floods of historic proportions struck Pakistan in the middle of the year, converting 20 million people into refugees and adding them to the camps of people displaced by Taliban. The cost was pegged at $10 billion, clipping agricultural production in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, Punjab and Sindh. The fact that Pakistan’s economy is predominantly agricultural and a majority of its people live in the countryside, the damage to standard of living was colossal, subjecting the affected masses to pauperisation. The government was unable to cope, given its traditionally curtailed service delivery outreach.
Although the State Bank pointed out slight improvement in the national economy over the past year, the demonstration effect of economic suffering through the media was overpowering. Being in the IMF programme, Pakistan was under pressure to expand its resource base. The old indirect Sales Tax had been rendered useless by exemptions and Pakistan had to agree to enforce a Reformed General Sales Tax (RGST) which would rely on an efficient system of tax ‘draw back’ while bringing concerned sellers on the records of the state.
Despite the fact that scores of countries have successfully enforced the system without drowning in inflation, there was political opposition to the RGST, which was postponed, once again, in December through a period of grace. The State Bank kept the interest rate high to prevent hyperinflation, which meant more pains of economic contraction such as double-digit inflation and unemployment.
Coalition politics is meant for civilised societies. Countries like India have learned to live with coalitions at the cost of action on policies requiring consensus. But in Pakistan, it means a leap of the lemmings into the politics of toppling. The country remained politically unstable through 2010 with a painful series of revelations of corruption in the PPP-led coalition. When physically insecure and unsure of completing their term in office, politicians take to corruption, which damages much during an economic downturn, unlike ‘shining’ India where corruption is balanced by a high growth rate.
Judicial ‘activism’ in 2009, which created some of the factors of political instability, slowed down somewhat after the lawyers’ community underwent a split in 2010; it also suffered decline because the lawyers became violent. The 2007 stance the Supreme Court took on the Steel Mill privatisation cost a lot in 2010 in the shape of billions of rupees in subsidy; its interference in the market during the ‘sugar crisis’ actually increased the suffering of the people.
Most Pakistanis don’t believe that Pakistan has lost control of nearly 60 per cent of its territory. There is an insurgency going on in Balochistan which is 40 per cent of the country’s territory; there is a Taliban uprising in Fata which is seven tribal agencies along the length of Afghanistan; Peshawar, together with its ‘settled’ cities like Bannu, Kohat and Hangu, are under a kind of diarchy of the state and the Taliban warlords.
In Sindh, the Indus River has a stretch some 80 kilometres long where only the dacoits rule; in Punjab, the south is gradually succumbing to the influence of pro-Taliban ‘jihadi’ elements, forcing the ruling PML-N to fraternise with them. In Karachi, entire settlements comprising different ethnic-linguistic groups have become ‘no-go’ areas for the administration; and 2010 has seen a spike in ‘target-killing’ that the mega-city has not seen since the 1990s.