By Ahmad Faruqui

EIGHT years after they were deposed from power, the Taliban are resurgent. Not only are they causing much grief in Afghanistan — where the number of British dead now exceeds the number killed in Iraq — they have opened up a pretty busy shop in Pakistan.

While the operations carried out by the Pakistani army in Swat and now underway in Waziristan seem to have stemmed what appeared at one point to be the Taliban’s inexorable march on Islamabad, the Taliban are far from vanquished.

Indeed, they will continue to pose a threat to the national security of Pakistan unless they are defeated militarily, politically, socially, culturally and religiously. What stands in the way of their defeat is confusion of purpose.

On the surface, Islamabad and Washington are fighting the same war. Beneath the surface, there is a radical divergence of views. In Pakistan, there are still many in the civil and military elite who regard the Taliban merely as an expression of Pakthun nationalism. Others regard them as waging a class war against feudal interests which dominate the mainstream political parties and the army.

Some go a step further and argue that the Taliban cannot be defeated. Amir Sultan Tarar, a retired colonel of the Pakistani Army with reported ties with the ISI, advocates this viewpoint. He told the Sunday Times that they will never be defeated, showing all the confidence that one might associate with Newton’s laws of motion.

He earned the moniker of ‘Colonel Imam’ during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when he helped train the forces of Mullah Omar fight and ultimately repel the Soviets. Tarar is silent on the reign of terror that was unleashed in Afghanistan when the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996.

Women were enslaved in their homes. Men who shaved their beards were flogged and others who stood up to the tyranny lost their lives. Tarar argues that the Taliban could not have carried out the terrorist attacks of 9/11 because such an operation would have required ground support. He contends that the Americans (perhaps aided by the Israelis) attacked themselves so they could generate support for an operation to topple the Taliban.

So what is Tarar’s solution? He would like the Americans to stop negotiating with the so-called moderate Taliban because they are of no consequence. They should negotiate with Mullah Omar because he is “a very reasonable man … [who] would listen and work for the interests of his country”.

That Omar has never done so does not bother Tarar in the least. Entirely at the other end of the spectrum, there are many in the US security establishment who see in the Taliban an existential threat to western civilisation. Until they are decimated, goes this theory, they will continue on their mission to attack and destroy key targets in the US with weapons of mass destruction pilfered from the Pakistani nuclear stockpile.

It is this theory which has brought about the surge in US forces in Afghanistan and a dialling up of the military campaign under Gen Stanley McChrystal.

More recently, America’s Afghan mission has been endowed with a humanitarian and economic reconstruction element whose aim is to save the Afghans from the horrors of “brutal governance, international isolation, a paralysed economy, and the denial of basic human rights”.

Critics of this policy argue that the Obama administration knows that the American public is unlikely to support ‘nation building’ at the cost of American lives. In this view, the administration is either naïve or sinister. It is pursuing a policy that is clearly unsustainable politically. Or it is clothing a humanitarian policy with the veneer of a major threat to American security when it knows that such a threat is non-existent.

Critics argue that over time, the American public will see through this façade and equate it with the one that President Bush used to invade Iraq. At that point, support for the Afghan mission will dip precipitously, the Americans will leave and the Taliban will return.

That cannot be allowed to happen. Pakistan and American officials need to find common ground on their Taliban policy. In that vein, they would do well to review the writings of Sir Michael Howard, one of Britain’s leading military historians. Some 30 years ago, he wrote a paper in Foreign Affairs about the forgotten dimensions of strategy.

He argued that by focusing exclusively on the military dimension, political leaders were ignoring the lessons of history. To win, they needed to factor in the economic, political, social and cultural dimensions of strategy.

While he was writing of wars between states, his thesis applies a fortiori to fighting counter-insurgency. The Taliban who portray themselves as liberators of the Pakthun people are in fact the most tyrannical force the Pakthun have seen in centuries. They need to be exposed for what they really stand for.

So should the Pakistani Army stop the military campaign against the Taliban? Most certainly not! The bigots who are armed to the teeth and who do not for a moment hesitate to behead Muslims and blow up countless civilians in their frenzy of suicide bombings need to be exterminated. But this should be accompanied by a civil offensive. Talibanism needs to be exterminated through a grass-roots campaign in mosques, in schools and in colleges. But it cannot stop there either.

The battle has to be joined in the political sphere. The national and provincial assemblies should convene on the same day and pass a resolution condemning Talibanism. Perhaps the campaign should go one extra step. It should rally the people of Pakistan and deploy a policy instrument that has precedent in Pakistani history (albeit one that has been wielded for the wrong purpose). This is a national referendum.

People should be asked to vote ‘yes’ ‘or ‘no’ on Talibanism. The Taliban now stand exposed and it is very likely that Talibanism will be defeated in the referendum. Such a vote will attract not only national but also international attention. It will simultaneously isolate the Taliban domestically and send a signal globally that the people of Pakistan are united in their opposition to terror and that the Pakistani nation, contrary to how it is depicted in western media, does not pose a threat to world peace.

faruqui@pacbell.net

-{Source: DAWN}-