Pakistan's Terrorist Groups: '''Banned, but no action'''

SIXTY organisations have been proscribed by the interior ministry’s National Crisis Management Cell since 2001, each deemed to be a terrorist organisation. But the list of those groups published in this newspaper on Sunday raises at least two questions. First, on what basis have successive governments made their assessments and what is the evidence against each group? A quick scan of the list and it becomes apparent that a number of groups have been included under political, military and international pressure. To label a political group or an organisation championing ethnic rights a terrorist organisation is a double disservice: it denies the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association of the citizenry while simultaneously detracting from the real threat — countering genuine terrorist organisations.

On that score — dealing with the real terrorism threat — the question is more basic: is there any group that has been banned by the state that has well and truly been dismantled? Or even severely dented in its ability to operate inside Pakistan? The normal practice for such groups is to quickly rename themselves and then return to business as usual. Where some bank accounts get frozen, fund-raising and other revenue-generating activities quickly replenish the group’s coffers. Where some leaders are temporarily put under house arrest under preventive detention laws, they are soon enough allowed to be active again. If they are, in the very rare cases, prosecuted, the legal teams of the accused run circles around the state prosecutors.

If the state’s response is flawed enough, political parties have played their part in bestowing credibility and legitimacy on banned groups. Denied at the official, national level but known to one and all at the local, constituency level, electoral adjustments and even outright alliances with terrorist groups are fairly common — and not just in a particular province. Of course, all sides that ought to be involved in sidelining and gradually making extinct terrorist groups tend to blame each other for the end goal growing ever more distant. The civilians point towards the military’s long-standing support for some stripes of militancy, the security establishment accuses the civilians of putting politics ahead of everything else, while the different limbs of the state argue whether it is the judiciary’s fault that suspected terrorists are let off or the government and legislature’s fault, etc. Amidst all the finger-pointing, accusations and recriminations, there is only one incontrovertible truth: terrorist groups have proliferated to the point that the state has been nearly battered into submission and has all but accepted them as legitimate stakeholders in the Pakistani system. A list of banned groups maintained and publicised by the interior ministry is meaningless if there is no meaningful action taken on the basis of that list.