Challenge for politicians
DAY after the deadliest terror attack in the country’s history, the political leadership gathered in Peshawar to focus on the militant threat and, crucially, to develop a unified response.
That Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, PTI chief Imran Khan, former PPP prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and sundry other national leaders, including from religious parties, chose to address the media together suggests that at long last the political leadership understands the need for unity in the face of the militant threat. Whatever the complexities of crafting a meaningful and effective anti-militancy plan, no strategy can have any possibility of success if the country’s mainstream political leadership does not own it and fully support it.
For too long, despite several multi-party conferences before, fighting militancy has been seen as the sole responsibility of the party in power, with other political parties either doing little more than paying lip service or, often enough, scuttling the possibility of clarity and unanimity with doublespeak. Now, seemingly stirred by the monstrousness of what happened on Tuesday in Peshawar, meaningful unanimity appears to have been achieved.
Political consensus alone, however, will not create a meaningful strategy. Prime Minister Sharif yesterday announced that a committee under the leadership of Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan will devise a policy in seven days to fight militancy. Perhaps the political leadership meant to sound serious and purposeful, but it is not clear what really can be achieved in seven days that could not be done yesterday at the conference. After all, the government already has a nearly year-old National Internal Security Policy in place. Then, four different parties are running the provincial governments in the country and each of them is intensely familiar with various facets of the militant threat. Finally, the mainstream political parties of the country have attended APCs before on the militant threat and also been briefed in parliament by the military leadership. So why not announce immediate steps and wait seven days? With the hard decisions deferred, it will be even more difficult to maintain a consensus in a week’s time, given that there are fundamental differences among the various sections of the political spectrum on how to define terrorism, let alone how to defeat it. If there is already reason to doubt that a meaningful anti-militancy strategy will emerge in a week’s time, perhaps it can be hoped that the sheer savagery of the Peshawar attack will not allow the usual style of politics to reassert itself so quickly. There was also another important development yesterday: the military leadership’s dash to Kabul for urgent talks. That is key because the country’s leadership has a choice: either develop a full-spectrum, civilian and military response now or allow the military-led response to militancy to continue. As Peshawar so tragically demonstrated, a military-only response to terrorism is not an adequate strategy.
Assault on education
THE atrocity in Peshawar on Tuesday underscores the particular vulnerability of schoolchildren and educational institutions in Pakistan. In essence, schools and the young learners within them are perhaps the most vulnerable of all the `soft` targets on the militants’ hit list. For long, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata have witnessed militant violence targeting schools. For example, as per an International Crisis Group report, in the period from 2009 to 2012, about 800 to 900 schools were attacked in KP and the tribal areas.
In most of these incidents the extremists chose to strike empty schools, in a symbolic gesture, without causing many casualties. But perhaps out of frustration, the militant camp has shed any inhibitions about targeting schoolchildren and now has no qualms about slaughtering students, as the Peshawar tragedy shows. Girls’ education has been a particular thorn in the obscurantists’ side. The conflict in the tribal belt has also upset the education of local children in other ways, as thousands of families have fled the region for safer climes. Fata and KP are not the only areas where education has come under attack. A school principal was killed in an incident in Karachi carried out by suspected militants last year, while also in 2013 a terrorist assault on a university bus in Quetta killed a number of female students. This year, too, began on a bloody note, when a suicide bomber targeted a school in Hangu. Were it not for the selfless heroism and sacrifice of young Aitzaz Hasan, a student who confronted the bomber and tackled him, greater carnage could have resulted in the schoolhouse packed with students. Unfortunately, this time around there was no Aitzaz to confront the monsters who stormed the Army Public School.
The militants have declared war on education and by extension on society. Perhaps only Nigeria`s dreaded Boko Haram outfit has a more ferocious anti-education agenda in the murky global militant spectrum. There, of course, needs to be greater security of schools, especially in vulnerable areas. But more than posting a policeman or paramilitary trooper outside every threatened school, a more long-term solution is required. For too long, violent obscurantists have been allowed to publicly spew venom on modern education in Pakistan with barely any reaction from the state. It is time these avowed opponents of learning were taken to task and uprooted in order to allow the youth of this country to build a brighter, literate future.
Attack on media team
THERE`S no argument that Pakistan is, for a variety of reasons, already amongst the most challenging of terrains for journalists to navigate. Even so, the events that took place during the PTI`s `shutdown` of Lahore on Monday mark a new low; the media team of Geo TV, whose management PTI leader Imran Khan has in recent weeks been censuring from the podium, was shamefully harassed.
Party supporters lobbed plastic bottles and gravel on the reporters, one of whom was a woman, raising slogans and making indecent gestures.
This is not the first time PTI supporters have made this particular media house their target consider, for example, the fact that while a showdown was under way between the police and party supporters in Islamabad soon after Mr Khan launched his series of protests, the Geo building was singled out by PTI affiliates to vandalise.
That a female reporter was so poorly treated by supporters of a party that is rightly proud of its ability to attract large numbers of women out on the streets is considered by some to be an anomaly. Yet at another level, the violence is not at all hard to understand.
For months now, the PTI leader has been leading the verbal attacks against particularly this member of the media community, hurling threats and giving ultimatums. While he has stopped short of calling for physical violence to be visited on the owners or employees of the media house, what is the message that the ordinary party supporter and activist walks away with? That media people are legitimate targets, even if their presence at the scene is necessitated by the demands of their profession. While it is true that this particular television channel’s approach to issue or politics-centred journalism is problematic, in no way can assaults such as that by the PTI be justified. It is not enough for party leaders to issue condemnations after violence has already taken place; the PTI leadership must unequivocally emphasise that such attacks are abhorrent.