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Pakistan - Defaming The Army: Rawalpindi Strikes Back – OpEd

By Nilesh Kunwar

After having repeatedly warned the public “not to drag Pakistan armed forces and their leadership in [the] ongoing political discourse in the country,” Rawalpindi finally got down to walking its talk with military precision by ‘taking-on’ a prominent and ‘marked’ [but soft] target. On May 26, it filed an FIR against lawyer and rights activist Ms Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir for making a “derogatory and hateful” statement against the Pakistan army on May 21. The charges levelled by the army against here were under Pakistan Penal Code [PPC] sections 138 [Abetment of act of insubordination by soldier, sailor or airman] and 505 [Statements conducing to public mischief].

Prominence came Ms Imaan’s way not merely since she is the daughter of Pakistan’s former human rights minister Shireen Mazari but more so because of her courageous work as a social and political rights activist. She became a ‘marked’ person for Pakistan army in 2017, when in a self-recorded video, she said “Shame on the [Pakistan] army that finances the activities of the terrorists, who have burnt down Islamabad and have plans to burn the entire country.” With the Islamabad Bar Association condemning her “for levelling false allegations against the Army and its officers” in the instant case without even any investigation, Ms Imaan was left out in the cold and hence became a ‘soft’ target. Even though her May 21 anti-army comments pale in comparison with what she had said in 2017, yet Rawalpindi took no action then, obviously since her mother was a senior member of Pakistan Tehreek e Insaaf party, whose leader Imran Khan had been shortlisted by the Pakistan army as its ‘selected’ prime ministerial candidate. However, with an ousted Khan turning against his ‘selector’, Rawalpindi has killed two birds with just one FIR- it has sent out a clear message to its detractors to ‘behave’ or face legal proceedings, as well as made it clear to PTI activists to end exposing Rawalpindi’s dubious role in the country’s polity or else suffer Imaan’s fate!

Despite the menacing content of the army’s FIR in which Ms Imaan was accused of having “… abused the senior military leadership of the Pakistan Army” and that “Such statements, [were] made with the intent to cause and create unrest and chaos in the Pakistan Army which is also leading to the punishable offence,” Ms Imaan refused to be cowed down. Instead, she made some very compelling arguments against the army’s FIR, which she aptly trashed as “baseless and an abuse of legal process.” Some examples: · “In view of the statements of relevant police officials and the information shared by my mother before her disappearance. Any statement made by myself on the day of my mother’s unlawful arrest voicing my reasonable suspicion cannot be categorized as an attempt to “aiding/abetting an act of insubordination by officers/soldiers of Pakistan Army.” · “At no point in any statement, did I encourage soldiers in the Pakistan Army to mutiny against the senior leadership of the Armed Forces, nor did I provide any means of assistance for them to do so.” · “It is ludicrous to allege that at the time of my mother’s disappearance I intended to cause mutiny, my only concern at the time was to ensure my mother’s safe return and to ensure that a lawful and efficient inquiry is conducted in the matter of her illegal and suspicious arrest.” · “It was and is my right to name the suspects based on the information I had. My only intent at the time was to ensure that individuals who I reasonably believed to be behind her illegal arrest are investigated.” Most importantly, by stating that the content of the FIR lodged by the army reveals no intent to commit the said offence, nor does it cite any statements made by her that incite officers/soldiers of the Pakistan Army to commit insubordination, the gritty Ms Imaan delivered a coup de grace the army’s FIR!

However, in an unexpected turn of events, Ms Imaan decided to “regret” her May 21 utterance and Islamabad High Court [IHC] dismissed the case against her. While Pakistan army’s top brass must be celebrating her “regret” expressed for what it feels is a “derogatory and hateful” statement, this whole incident is actually a humungous embarrassment for Rawalpindi for two reasons. One, if Ms Imaan had made the purported statements “with the intent to cause and create unrest and chaos in the Pakistan Army,” [as mentioned in the army’s FIR], then being a premeditated act, it is tantamount to sedition, which has serious national security implications and hence, can’t be condoned by a mere apology. Secondly, in its report on this development, ‘Dawn’ mentions that “IHC Chief Justice [CJ] Athar Minallah, who heard the petition, remarked during the hearing that [Imaan] Mazari-Hazir was “a respectable officer of the court” and should not have uttered the words even under “normal circumstances.” This observation merits greater deliberation. By saying that the words that Ms Imaan used shouldn’t have been uttered “even under normal circumstances” the honourable IHC CJ has admitted for the second time that the arrest of Shireen Mazari was done under abnormal circumstances. [The first occasion was while ordering her release, when IHC CJ Minallah reportedly remarked that what happened to Shireen Mazari was unfortunate].

The logical inference from these statements is that there were indeed very serious irregularities in actions of law enforcing agencies during Shireen Mazari’s arrest. Hence as a daughter and an advocate well-versed with the law and legal procedures, Ms Imaan had all the reasons [and the right] to question the ‘arrest’ of her mother and in exercising her right to freedom of expression, had articulated her suspicions. From the haste with which IHC dismissed this case, it’s evident that the judiciary has bailed out the army from getting cornered for “abuse of legal process” as sagaciously opined by Ms Imaan.

Reacting to the IHC CJ’s observation that “If the petitioner asks for forgiveness, what is left in the case?” the army’s Judge Advocate General [JAG] counsel made two points. One, that Ms Imaan hadn’t mentioned the word ‘forgiveness’ in her reply, and two, “If she has to apologise, she should do so in front of the media.” By and not insisting that given the seriousness charges levelled against her in the FIR, she should be brought to book and not allowed to get away with a mere regret, and wanting Ms Imaan to issue an apology before the media, it’s absolutely clear that for Pakistan army this case was nothing more than a public relations exercise to refurbish its deteriorating image!

So, despite her expression of ‘regret’, ultimately, it’s advocate Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir who has won hands down!

https://www.eurasiareview.com/22062022-defaming-the-army-rawalpindi-strikes-back-oped/

Pakistan’s Negotiations With Terrorists

By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Pakistan is reportedly set to send a 13-member delegation of Islamic clerics to continue negotiations with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), with the talks being brokered by the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network. The delegation is being sent following the return of the 50-member tribal jirga, which had gone to Afghanistan for talks, after the Pakistani Taliban announced their latest “indefinite” ceasefire.

The TTP has orchestrated some of the deadliest terror attacks in Pakistan over the past decade and a half, with over 80,000 Pakistanis killed in jihadist raids. The TTP’s goriest attack on a Peshawar school in 2014 sparked the government to craft the National Action Plan, in which the state vowed to never compromise with terror outfits.

Today, it is back at the table with the nation’s foremost killers.

Even while vowing never to bow down to terror groups like the Pakistani Taliban, the state has been involved in a decades-old push to establish the Afghan Taliban in Kabul, which came to pass in August last year. However, soon enough, as the Pakistani establishment basked in its success in Afghanistan, there were signs that the Afghan Taliban had pulled a reversal on the military rulers in Rawalpindi. Now Afghanistan’s new rulers were aspiring to use Pakistan’s volatile regions for Kabul’s expansionist ambitions instead of the other way around.

There was a precipitous hike in the TTP’s maneuvers both immediately before and after the Afghan Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, with 282 attacks claimed by the group in 2021. Despite announcing a ceasefire in November, which was soon overturned, the TTP has continued its aggression in 2022, killing almost 100 Pakistani soldiers in the first three months of the year. Pakistani forces responded in April, as air force jets bombarded reported TTP hideouts in Afghanistan’s Khost and Kunar provinces. The message given by the Pakistani military in April was that it was ostensibly willing to alienate Afghan Taliban allies, and openly attack the territory of a sovereign state, if it meant weakening the TTP. A little over a month later, it is the jihadist group that appears to have the upper hand as the military arbitrarily pushes negotiations belatedly owned by the newly installed Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM)-led setup. A senior military official told The Diplomat that after a crisis-laden couple of months, the negotiations would allow the Pakistan Army to regroup and refocus its attention toward bringing peace along the Af-Pak border. “There are raging economic and political crises in the country, which naturally impact the army as well. We have also invested a lot of energy in the Afghan Taliban and have to keep them on board as well. [The army] won’t allow TTP to expand itself, but it is biding its time for the decisive crackdown,” claimed the military officer. However, sources within the government suggest that more than a military strategy, a political battle has resumed in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). “The Taliban want to regain political control over parts of [former] FATA. They want to impose Islamic Shariah in the area, and we are back to our decades old pleas reminding them that Pakistan already is an Islamic country with Islamic laws,” a government official told The Diplomat. Clearly, despite the imposition of Islamic Shariah in the Pakistan Penal Code, the Taliban continue to long to take it up a few notches, as the TTP aspires to recreate its de facto rule over Swat from over a decade ago.

In addition to imposition of Islamic Shariah across former FATA, the TTP has conveyed to the Pakistani state via the jirga negotiations that it wants the mainstreamed tribal areas to be returned to their original status, delinking the region from the constitution to return the lawlessness that creates volatility conducive to TTP’s rise. The Pakistani Taliban have also asked the state to withdraw armed forces from former FATA and release captured TTP jihadists. Two top TTP leaders, Muslim Khan and Mehmood Khan, were handed over last month to the Afghan Taliban, who released around 2,300 TTP fighters from Afghanistan prisons immediately after coming to power. If it needed reiterating, the Afghan Taliban view the TTP not only as their ideological brethren, but also a natural strategic ally that would facilitate the expansion of the Islamic Emirate to at least the Pashtun-majority parts of Pakistan, in which all Afghanistan regimes have maintained a stake, since the creation of Pakistan.

With the mainstreaming of FATA through its incorporation into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province still limited to paperwork, the area remains central to the powerplays between state and extra-state actors, resulting in surrendered rights, lost lives, and the abandoning of any semblance of peace. “Other than the Taliban and [Pakistan] army, there is another stakeholder – the people. The locals want civil supremacy and permanent peace no matter what,” Lateef Wazir, the coordinator of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) in Jani Khel town, told The Diplomat. Wazir maintains that in times of both war and ceasefire, the violence in his area has continued relentlessly. “While negotiations have been ongoing, there have been continuous targeted killings, blasts, violence from both sides, the army and the Taliban. Over the past couple of months in Jani Khel alone, an FC [Frontier Corps] personnel was murdered, four people were killed in a gun attack, and a woman was targeted and killed at her home,” he said. “These incidents aren’t reported in the [Pakistani] mainstream media, because the army has been here for the past 13 years. Such incidents, after years of operations, countless check-posts, continuous search operations, pose question marks over the military’s presence,” he added. The PTM leader insists that the uncertainty over the success of any negotiations notwithstanding, any form of agreement would be detrimental to the future of the locals. “Peace might be temporary, for a month or two or a few more. But more importantly, how can we accept a state within a state?” Wazir asked. Many locals from the tribal areas insist that, despite the TTP rearing its head intermittently to signal its return to former FATA, the Pakistani Taliban never actually left the area. “The TTP sleeper cells were always present in ex-FATA. Pakistan’s policy and operations somehow were always inadequate or lacking in eliminating these militant outfits,” tribal activist and blogger Mona Aurangzeb told The Diplomat. “You cannot have good Taliban in Afghanistan and bad ones in Pakistan. Ideologically they are the same outfits. They all are acceptable to the Pakistan government under different adjustments.” She added that the government continues to give mixed signals over the tribal areas, with the military running a vicious circle of military operations and expensive warfare.

“Ex-FATA, in the recent budget, like previously, has been promised decent allocation. However, with no security, [turbulent] law and order situation and instability, I don’t know how the TTP talks and development policy go hand in hand. Talks with them and then kitty-draining military operations against the bad Taliban, and then legitimatizing them with talk is the biggest contradiction,” Aurangzeb added. Pakistan’s negotiations with terror historically have always been designed to concentrate the jihadist bloodshed in certain segments, predominantly the Af-Pak border area spanning across Balochistan and former FATA. The ongoing negotiations too, regardless of their outcome, are designed to reach an agreement over which people the TTP is free to subjugate, persecute, and massacre. “The state is bowing doing too much, trying to pacify them, instead of being firm. The type of agenda and ambitions that they have there is nothing that Pakistan can compromise. They stand against the constitution. They need to be stifled. If they gain more power, it can be even more damaging,” Lt.-Gen. Talat Masood, former secretary of Pakistan’s Ministry of Defense Production, told The Diplomat. “The Afghan Taliban have given them so much space. Pakistan was hoping with the Taliban taking over, Afghanistan would be friendly with Pakistan and look after Pakistan’s interests; it is the other way around. They know that we cannot afford to annoy them, but they too cannot afford to annoy Pakistan so they are playing the middle game,” he added.

“The previous Afghan regime would be very happy that Pakistan is paying the price for supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

https://thediplomat.com/2022/06/pakistans-negotiations-with-terrorists/