File Photo. Aref Karimi—AFP
Pakistan’s most intractable foreign policy problem is how to deal with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) staging attacks on its soil—their own homeland—from bases in neighboring Afghanistan. The nature of conflict is such that there is no possibility of “negotiation”; Pakistan must confront these infiltrators and put an end to them, which includes taking them on as they cross the unfortunately penetrable Durand Line or, more dangerously, bomb them from the air in their hiding-places inside Afghanistan. There are several notable proponents of negotiations with the TTP, but the well-known underlying fact is that the TTP will not talk as long as an Afghan Taliban government rules in Kabul with a negative “tribal” view of the state of Pakistan.
Can the state of Pakistan “talk” to the TTP? Not as long as their hideout in Afghanistan lasts and the funds that keep them going do not stop. Given the temperament of those who fight this battle against Pakistan, there cannot be any “peace talks” with them. More than half of Pakistan has given rise to this kind of “sovereignty” to elements who assert their tribal “patriotism.” This feeling, prevalent in much of the erstwhile tribal areas and Balochistan, has grown out of Pakistan’s lack of “writ of the state” there. Examined closely, there are other regions where some areas have been without this writ of the state that is outwardly “nuclearized” but internally subject to lack of sovereignty.
Pakistan is becoming aware of the difficulty of getting these breakaway rebels to talk peace. Actually, the menace of “breakaway regions” is spreading in parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, like Swat where the TTP strikes from across the border with Afghanistan, reminding us of the breakaway rebel, Fazlullah, who snatched the valley away from Pakistan with the help of such “foreign” help as the “Uzbek warriors” who oversaw the destruction of girls’ schools there in order “to spread Islam” which they thought outlawed women’s education. Today, at the back of the TTP is the state of Afghanistan ruled by elements who once sheltered in Pakistan in “familiar” areas of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa during the 1980s. Pakistan bartered away its sovereignty while conceding to such gangs as the Haqqanis who are today reckoned to be in control of the Taliban government in Kabul.
Pakistan’s “uncontrolled” regions and their borders are at the root of what the country is confronting. Normally, the state should have imposed its writ during its early decades, which it did not. American scholar Francis Fukuyama thinks that Pakistan’s foremost problem is faulty governance, which is based on lack of writ of the state. Almost everyone you talk to will say that the loss of writ affects law and order, and that its institutions are too weak to act effectively to save the rights of its citizens. Today, the TTP is actually threatening the PTI government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, some of whose members are said to be paying bribes to the extremists for their safety. Above all, the state actually threatened from across the border is also internally threatened, thus leaving the Army to face up to the challenge alone.