Pakistan: No acceptance but diktat

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

This acceptance of the government's peace negotiation offer by the outlawed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is no acceptance at all but out-and-out a diktat. TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud says they would not surrender arms to the state till Shariah's implementation in the country. It is the state he thus clearly wants to surrender to the TTP's dictates to re-rewrite the constitution, unanimously adopted by the people's elected representatives, in accordance with its desires. He also wants to dictate the country's foreign policy. Over the time, the outlawed outfit has slaughtered some 40,000 of our innocent civilian compatriots and maimed many more in terrorist attacks, bomb blasts and suicide bombings. Tragically, the victims include innocent toddlers, children and women, who in no event deserved the terrible fate they were meted out by the outlawed outfit so inhumanly. A horrific bloodletting by the TTP has it been, indeed. Yet Hakimullah, in short, wants this horrendous bloodshed to be rewarded by the state by bowing down to its diktat. The past experience of peace deals with the militants has not been pleasant, anyway. It has been repentantly bitter and sombre. When the ANP-led government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa struck peace agreements with Fazlullah in Swat, he assumed that the state had invested him with the sultanate of the region and started behaving like the uncrowned emperor of Swat, setting out his brigands to establish his writ through terror all over the territory. And when the KP government did a peace deal with his father-in-law Sufi Mohammad, he anointed himself as the chief prosecutor and chief judge of Malakand division who would act as the final authority to adjudge the verdicts of the Shariah courts in the area. Similar story goes about the peace accords that the state concluded from time to time with the Taliban in the tribal areas. Those were abided by the Taliban more in breach than in observance, taking the accords as the sign of the state's weakness. And there are only a few who are sanguine if a peace deal with the TTP this time round too would not go the same way, if concluded at all. In the popular eye, the Taliban command very low credibility for adherence to peace deals because of what is generally perceived their bloated egos and emboldened posturing. But they should understand that in the face of raging militancy or terrorism, the states do go through difficult periods for a time. But cave in they do not. They triumph ultimately. But since violence begets violence, the local populaces go through a spell of harrowing times until peace and normality returns to their beleaguered territories. As indeed is presently happening to our tribal areas, where the people are sandwiched in the fighting between the Taliban and the security forces. The fight has led up to large-scale internal displacement of our tribal compatriots, throwing them into the wholesale miseries of a disturbed dislocated life. They may not be happy with the security operations in their areas. But the Taliban too have not created any constituency of theirs among these distressed folks. The tribal people hold them no lesser responsible for their doleful plights. By every consideration, the TTP is launched on a self-defeating enterprise. It must renounce violence and opt for the political stream and constitutional ways to attain the objectives it says it cherishes. Its conditions for peace negotiations, as they are, are unarguably too unrealistic and too unattainable. No state or polity in its right frame of mind will agree them. And states are always hard to bully or blackmail into a deal that doesn't meet the consent of the mass of its people. Now that the TTP has taken this step for rapprochement, it is hoped better sense would prevail on its ranks and it would scale down its demands to be reasonable and acceptable. Diktat won't work. The ways of peace should get all the chance to fructify. There is no point in fighting your own people, killing and maiming others and getting killed yourself. Peace, tranquility and security must return to the blighted areas so that their pitiable residents could get on with their normal lives. The TTP owes this very much to them.