Pakistan: Dead in the water

After the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP’s) negotiating team flew to North Waziristan by helicopter to consult the TTP’s political shura (council), the government was left holding the baby of their 15 demands. If the TTP wish list is anything to go by, the government-initiated negotiations are dead in the water. The demands include introducing the TTP version of Sharia in the courts, teaching it in schools, withdrawing the army from the tribal areas, halting drone attacks, and cutting all ties with the US. However, these are secondary to their primary demand to immediately implement their peculiar tribal-religious legal and political system across the country. Most telling is the demand to hand over control of the tribal areas to ‘local forces’ and remove military check posts while pulling the military out. No one in Pakistan, the TTP included, is under any illusions about what their demands amount to: the deconstruction of Pakistan and the creation of a new state in which the TTP rules the roost according to its version of Sharia, which dooms women to life as dispossessed chattel and everyone else to second class citizenship subject to arbitrary sentences of death and mutilation. Of course, the TTP version of Sharia doesn’t include the relevant Islamic legal injunctions on women’s inheritance, rights for minorities, or the personal aspect of religion; these are subsumed by the tribal mindset that dominates its leadership. This should tell the government something, i.e. the TTP will find a way to ignore what they don’t like and will go so far as to find scriptural justification for it, as past broken peace deals have proved. Even acceding to a limited number of demands, particularly those relevant on the ground in the tribal areas, means ceding a portion of the country to the militants. What the TTP are asking for is tribal territory to be placed under their control, with the high likelihood that if ‘their’ Sharia is not implemented in the rest of Pakistan, they will continue waging war against the state.

Mao Tse Tung famously said, “A small compromise today means a bigger war tomorrow.” The government should keep this in mind when discussing the TTP proposals. The TTP will never stop attacking Pakistan until they are able to implement the kind of political order we saw in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Conceding space now will simply give them greater opportunity to wage war against the state later. That they will claim to be part of Pakistan while doing so is not a panacea, but a way to use Pakistan’s sovereignty to shield them from foreign powers who won’t tolerate a Taliban state anywhere anymore. After all, they currently claim to be fighting for Pakistan’s constitution, as absurd a claim as any made by them over the years. The TTP is apparently not interested in the subtleties and gradations of negotiated peace, as most people said from the start. Their way is the Bush way: you’re either with us or against us. That they may hold off attacks for a year, or six months, is not reason enough for the state to quietly surrender to their whims. In fact, attacks continue despite negotiations, the most recent on a shrine in Karachi which bore the hallmarks of the TTP modus operandi. The people of Pakistan have paid, and are still paying, a high price in the battle against extremism. If the government concedes now to demands that give the TTP greater strategic opportunity, those sacrifices will have been in vain. More importantly, the government should recognise that whatever its own leanings, and despite what the TTP says, the people of Pakistan have repeatedly rejected the extreme views of religious fundamentalists in favour of democratic governance. As representatives of the people, the government can’t accept demands that allow enemies of the people and state to regroup and gain strategic advantage.