By Aqab Malik
Dawn News
Many young men and soldiers hailing from diverse societies identify with the concept of dying for honour, the latter term referring to a willingness to die in battle. One of the ways of building up such an idea is through the process of indoctrination - as in the case of those who are recruited for the task of suicide bombings by extremist forces in the country.
There are many theories about the type of people who are inducted into the ranks of the extremists and those sections of society that can be most easily recruited, the disenfranchised, impoverished and destitute among them. What is particularly evident is that the Taliban and Al Qaeda recruit relatively young boys, in cases even girls, sometimes as young as 12 years old from the many madressahs in Pakistan and Afghanistan to do their dirty work for them.
Estimates of the number range from 12,000 to 45,000, but the actual number will not be known until the education ministry completes a comprehensive survey of Pakistan’s madressahs. However, although these are ideologically sound venues for the recruitment of Taliban fighters and suicide bombers, the vast majority of madressahs do not permit such activities. But the potential remains. In fact, the process of indoctrination is common to both militant fighters and suicide bombers. The latter are just taken further in the brainwashing process.
During one doctoral research visit to Afghanistan prior to 9/11, I was able to observe how students were indoctrinated by the Taliban once taken from the various madressahs around Pakistan. In one particularly rudimentary camp (actually a scrap yard of sorts for military vehicles) on the outskirts of Jalalabad, the classes comprised a variety of students of predominantly Pakhtun but also Punjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri ethnicity.
The process of indoctrination is meant primarily to produce fighters, or Talibs, but as a consequence suicide bombers are also produced. A select few are taken from the ranks because they are particularly susceptible to further brainwashing. I use this term to refer to a higher stage of indoctrination as the whole process is catered towards producing lambs for a sacrificial slaughter.
The indoctrination process at the camp followed an intense curriculum comprising Quranic studies interspersed with motivational talks by senior students and fighters and combined with physical exercise and combat training in assault with live weapons, more religious, including Quranic, teaching, daily duties, and then more Quranic studies, motivational talks and prayers before resting. The content of the motivational talks and religious study focused primarily on anti-material, anti-western and anti-worldly sentiments as well as the injustices inflicted on the Muslim people in the past and present.
Much of this was done through the application of Quranic verses and the teachings of the Prophet (PBUH) pertaining to the paramount reward, the benefits of paradise and the absolute rejection of a worldly life. In addition, there was much focus on the dire consequences (such as a constant stream of molten lead being poured on the head of a citizen of hell) for not submitting to the extremists’ interpretation of Islam and jihad and of being a hypocrite or non-believer. In other words, according to their interpretation, the vast majority of Pakistanis and the rest of the world were damned anyway, so there was nothing wrong in taking out many of them. It was an exhausting process of intense indoctrination with the strategic aim of creating ranks of highly brainwashed students (Talibs) through what is called in-group consolidation.
The ones selected for higher sacrificial duties after this indoctrination had to go through intensified one-on-one fine-tuning to harden the students towards anything perceived as worldly. This was done to the extent of getting the students to reject any link with the world or anybody in it, including their parents, and to thus achieve in them a constant state of an induced trance.
The Taliban’s indoctrination process is without mercy because it is perceived as a strategic asset. In this respect, the intention is not only to inflict physical destruction through an easier route, but to also damage society’s psyche and instil fear in opposing parties exposed to the terror tactics of the extremists. In other words, the message they send out is ‘we are willing to die. Your lives mean nothing and you are insignificant to us.’ This can produce an enormous amount of stress for the targeted community that has no idea how far the militants will go or when the next attack will be or where it will come from. This causes a state of social paralysis brought about through sheer terror and results in the psychological cowering of a community.
Communities subjected to the communal punishments of the Nazis showed these tendencies.Unfortunately, this state of affairs is all too evident in Pakistan, as evidenced by the paralysed reaction of the government that appears to have ceded to the terrorists through the so-called Swat peace deal which was used by the Taliban only as a period of tactical consolidation within Swat and its surrounding areas. The people in Swat have no way to fight back, their families are subjected to intimidation and violence on the part of armed youth suffering from what can only be called a mental disease induced through intense indoctrination and brainwashing.
According to the philosophy of the Taliban and their foreign cohorts, ‘peace’ deals are fundamentally used only to secure short-term objectives for long-term goals. In this respect, the Swat deal is only a means to an end and can be discarded at any time, as indeed it seems to have been. The promises within the deal are written and signed, but are not being pursued on account of the Taliban’s delaying tactics.
There appears to be little doubt that the Taliban’s long-term strategy is to secure the whole of Pakistan, irrespective of what they say while making deals with the government. After all, if they are bereft of a conscience when it comes to killing innocent human beings, why would they care about the deals they make?
