Post-Peshawar: It's the army's show, again

It was only fitting that Pakistan’s leader should be there in person to welcome pupils returning to the Army Public School in Peshawar on a chilly mid-January morning.

The slaughter that took place at the school on December 16, when nine Pakistani Taliban suicide attackers killed 150 people, 132 of them children, was an act of terror that has shaken Pakistan like nothing before, and heaven knows the country had endured enough atrocities already.

However, the man waiting at the school gate was not the nation’s elected leader, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, nor even the country’s figurehead president. Instead it was Sharif’s unrelated namesake, General Raheel Sharif, head of the Pakistani army. His presence was a measure of how fast the army has moved to secure dominance as it propels Pakistan into its own war on terror.

General Sharif and his fellow officers argue that the school massacre has brought not only a reluctant political class but also the bulk of the country to recognise that Islamist militants pose a threat to Pakistan’s very existence. Since he became army chief, in late 2013, he has wanted to “take the bull by the horns” and crush the extremists. However,
the prime minister and other leading politicians-notably

 Imran Khan, a former cricketer whose political base is in Peshawar-were reluctant to counsel force.

Both men feared that going after militants would stir a hornet’s nest. They also were concerned that the public would not back a military campaign. Widespread popular misunderstanding of the militant threat has been the product of decades of army support for so-called “good” militants -  those who restrict their atrocities to Afghanistan and India. Khan and the prime minister urged peace talks with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the official name for the umbrella group loosely known as the Pakistani Taliban. They are vicious cousins of the Afghan Taliban.

The generals treated the peace process with impatience, correctly gauging that the TTP were not sincere. Last summer, general Sharif launched an offensive against the militants, notably in North Waziristan in the tribal lands bordering Afghanistan. The Peshawar massacre, the generals argue, now has brought the nation behind the fight against militancy. Certainly, the number of ordinary Pakistanis who dare to be associated with calls to go against the Taliban has surged.

The army insists that the distinction between “good” and “bad” Taliban no longer exists. General Sharif has been making big claims for his war, particularly during recent trips to Washington and London, where, in the grand tradition of the Pakistani army, he has been seeking cash and helicopters from the West. He told his hosts that countless strikes in the tribal badlands have virtually destroyed the militants’ training camps and that only a couple of areas remain unsecured.

The claim is almost impossible to verify. One senior diplomat in Islamabad said that it is a gross exaggeration, with insurgents still operating widely across the tribal areas. As for the distinction between “good” and “bad” Taliban, on January 22, the government announced the banning of the Haqqani network, a brutal Afghan Taliban affiliate with historic links to the Pakistani army’s spy agency. Before that, however, he group got help to move out of North Waziristan to safety before the military onslaught began.

So far, pressure has not been brought to bear on the wider Afghan Taliban movement, whose leadership resides in Quetta, Peshawar and other locations in Pakistan. However, the state may be beginning to move against jihadist groups that focus their violence on India, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was responsible for the bloody attacks on Mumbai in 2008.

On January 22, the government surprised many by announcing that Lashkar’s political wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, also was banned. Restrictions were slapped on its poisonous leader, Hafiz Saeed. A “national action plan” now is meant to block funding for unsavoury groups, to counter hate speech and to regulate religious schools.

Back on the northwestern border, the Pakistani army will stand no chance of securing order without help from Afghanistan. That country’s strained relations with Pakistan have improved dramatically since President Ashraf Ghani came to office in the autumn.

Unlike President Hamid Karzai, his often-difficult predecessor, Ghani has worked hard to accommodate Pakistan, including by diverting forces to confront the TTP in the eastern province of Kunar. Afghan officials complain that Ghani has yet to see anything in return for a policy that does not play well among a public that dislikes Pakistan. They want to see a sharp decline in violence, as well as pressure exerted on the Afghan Taliban leadership in Pakistan to enter peace talks.

Civilian power?

And, always, the army’s dominance comes at a cost to civilian rule, never strong in Pakistan. The generals speak as if Prime Minister Sharif were a cipher in the country’s affairs. That is not all the army’s doing: In those areas where the civilian power still holds sway, the results are underwhelming. Sharif’s government is made up of a coterie of allies and family members. It has not even managed to make political gains from the windfall of lower global oil prices, because of nationwide gasoline shortages, a mess for which Pakistanis rightly blame the government.

Elsewhere, though, the army has taken over the government’s powers and even the judiciary’s. Under pressure since the Peshawar attack, the prime minister has agreed to the abandonment of an informal moratorium on the death penalty for terrorist cases. Already several men languishing on death row have been executed.

The army has cajoled Parliament into voting for a constitutional amendment that, for the next two years, allows civilian terror suspects to be tried in military courts. Nine new courts will conduct trials on military bases, most likely in camera, with the aim of executing those found guilty within two weeks of sentencing. The new courts’ backers argue that civilian judges, scared for their lives, are unwilling to convict members of terror groups, but oversight of the military courts will be negligible.

The army’s reinsertion into national affairs amounts, as one pro-democracy campaigner puts it, to a “postmodern coup.” General Sharif’s intentions after his war for Pakistan’s survival remain unclear, perhaps even to himself. Many Pakistanis no doubt hope that it will be a postmodern withdrawal back to barracks.