After Lahore

After Lahore

It took a gruesome attack for Pakistani authorities to recognize extremist activity in the country’s most populous province. But an incoherent counter-terrorism policy only threatens to make the problem worse.

When the police trucks and ambulances arrived at Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park in Lahore, where a suicide bomber had just blown himself up near the merry-go-rounds and throngs of families celebrating Easter, presumably the scenes of dead bodies, severed limbs, and hundreds of injured were sufficient to dispel the oft-repeated pabulum that there is no real network of militancy in the rich province of Punjab. Perhaps this myth—promulgated by the Pakistani government as an excuse not to expand counter-terrorism operations to the region despite the known presence of numerous extremist and sectarian groups—can finally be laid to rest, and Pakistan’s counter-terrorism policy can be seen for what it really is: a mess.

It seems the bombing in Lahore on Easter Sunday—rather than the attacks on the Christian colony of Youhanabad or the Lahore Police Lines, the assassination of a provincial home minister in Attock, or the other innumerable acts of militancy across Punjab the year before—really did do the trick. For the very next day, following a military huddle with high-ranking government officials at General Headquarters, the Pakistani army announced an operation across the Punjab province. The operation would give the paramilitary Rangers unlimited powers to raid and interrogate suspects, powers it already exercises in regions like North Waziristan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi, and northern Balochistan. Apparently, the only card the government had left to play was to hand over the reins to the Pakistani institution with the most storied history of duplicity: the army.

Of course, the Pakistani government has never had a problem it couldn’t spend years imagining away. Although the Easter bombing seemed to have finally caught its attention, the attack was claimed—yet again—by the deadly offshoot of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a group that has never failed to warn of its growing presence in Punjab.

In 2014, when Pakistan’s counter-terrorism military campaign Operation Zarb-e-Azb was underway in North Waziristan and FATA, regions long considered the major sanctuaries of the Pakistani Taliban, many warned that an operation of such scope would inevitably provide immunity to terrorist groups elsewhere, particularly in Punjab. But as recently as January 2016, police officials issued gems like, “You do not conduct large-scale operations in any area just on the basis of speculation and public perception.” One is hard-pressed to find better euphemisms for mass murder.

To be sure, the simplest explanation for why military operations were previously not expanded to Punjab, the stronghold of the ruling PML-N party, lies in the very different agendas of Nawaz Sharif’s government and the Pakistani army. The former has long been locked in a perpetual battle to repel incursions into Pakistani politics by the latter. Pakistan’s history has been dominated by periodic military coups that have interrupted every elected government but one, followed by long periods of military dictatorship.

This fundamental tension has introduced a bizarre calculus into the government and army’s counter-terrorism efforts, only parts of which seem to converge. In North Waziristan and FATA, even though it laid waste to whole provinces and triggered the displacement of well over a million people, the army cracked down on militancy, substantially decreasing the number of terrorist attacks in 2015. In the wake of the brutal attack on school children in Peshawar in 2014, Nawaz Sharif’s government announced the National Action Plan (NAP): a set of counter-terrorism policies that, among other things, lifted the moratorium on the death penalty for convicted terrorists and allowed for citizens to be tried by special anti-terrorism courts.

It has been on the back of Operation Zarb-e-Azb and the NAP that many have recently concluded that Pakistan is winning its fight against terrorism. In January, Murtaza Hussain at the Intercept wrote, “Over a year and a half later, Operation Zarb-e-Azb appears to have garnered results.” Hussain quoted Arif Rafiq, a scholar at the Middle East Institute, saying that the militants only existed “in pockets across the tribal areas, but in small numbers,” and most were “either dead or in Afghanistan.”

Clearly, Taliban offshoots like Jamaat-ul-Ahrar considered reports of its death to have been greatly exaggerated. After claiming responsibility for the Lahore attack, a spokesman for the group Ehsanullah Ehsan said, “We want to send this message to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that we have entered Lahore. He can do what he wants but he won’t be able to stop us. Our suicide bombers will continue these attacks.”

According to Maryam Haq, Legal Director at the Justice Project Pakistan, to date sixty-six convicted “terrorists” have been executed under the NAP—many of whose links to terrorism have been spurious at best. The joint civil-military operations following the terrorist attacks introduced sweeping measures permitting the bombing of entire villages, the execution of juveniles, the widespread use of torture, and massive intelligence and surveillance operations. Few of these measures seem to have curbed the activities of virulently extremist Punjab-based groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Muhammad, and of course, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar.

Meanwhile, another NAP policy has been curiously overlooked: Agenda 9, which calls for the protection of minorities. And it is the Punjabi extremist groups—those that the counter-terrorism policy has thus far deliberately ignored—who are primarily responsible for the assaults on minority communities.

In the aftermath of the bombing of two churches in Youhanabad last year, the Punjab government did indeed increase security at the remaining churches in Lahore, especially on Sundays. But there was scant police presence at Gulshan-e-Iqbal park this Easter despite the holiday. Many of the victims were Christian women and children celebrating Easter, although most were Muslims. As people accounted for their dead or missing family members, the injured were transported to state-run hospitals. Soon after, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar categorically stated that the targets had been Christians and that more attacks were to come.

Many commentators have speculated as to why Nawaz Sharif’s government has been so reluctant to expand counter-terrorism operations in Punjab until now. All rely on the native understanding that the Pakistani government can and will zealously partake in counter-terrorism efforts against some extremist groups, while simultaneously mollifying others for political gain, even if that means half-heartedly applying its own decrees for the protection of minorities.

After all, extremist groups in Punjab have long held public rallies with impunity. Hours before the Lahore attack, these same religious parties laid siege to Islamabad to protest the execution of Mumtaz Qadri, a man who in 2011 murdered the Punjab governor in cold blood for taking a stand against Pakistan’s egregious blasphemy laws, which disproportionately target minorities. Two thousand Qadri supporters—admittedly not quite the extremist strain of the Pakistani Taliban or the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, but hardline right-wingers the state has pandered to nonetheless—remained ensconced outside Parliament in Islamabad to protest what they claim is an assault on the nation’s Islamic identity. Among their demands was the release of clerics and leaders who had been booked for terrorism and murder, removal of all non-Muslims from key government posts, and retention of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

Radical groups and parties have actively participated in both public and political life in Punjab for years very much by design. Soon after the Easter attack, Nawaz Sharif claimed that the government would “avenge every last drop of our countrymen’s blood”—ostensibly by appealing to the army. But it is unclear why a military operation is necessary, when more robust protection of public spaces, and minority colonies and enclaves, or more targeted police raids and crackdowns on known extremist strongholds and seminaries could have sufficed. In other words, instead of embracing yet another bloody, sweeping, yet selective, military operation, only this time in Punjab, the Pakistani government could have seriously reconsidered its unofficial policy of providing cover to fundamentalist clerics and the madrassas that have overrun South Punjab.

But such a reckoning would have required abandoning strategic alliances with massively popular religious groups. After four days of protests, Qadri supporters in Islamabad dispersed following negotiations with the government. The protesters claimed the government agreed not to amend the blasphemy laws.

What now? The conundrum of Pakistani politics is that it forces us to choose between an ineffectual, opaque government and its police forces, and a deceitful military and intelligence agency. Are the government’s half-hearted, piecemeal efforts to protect minorities enough? How can citizens be expected to embrace a military operation in Punjab of the size and scale as those in North Waziristan and FATA, which razed entire villages to the ground and prompted a massive crisis of internal displacement? What good are ceaseless military operations without the necessary groundwork of integrating the poor and disenfranchised into the socioeconomic and political fabric of Pakistan?

And what of Pakistan’s beleaguered minorities? As families spent this Easter picnicking and their children took turns on the swings, seventy-three people were killed and 300 wounded—a chilling reminder that minimal security details outside churches are not enough to disrupt the core political processes that sustain extremist and sectarian violence in Pakistan.

Almost too quickly after the Lahore attack, Punjab authorities detained more than 5,000 suspected militants, and even mistakenly identified a victim as the suicide bomber. But regardless of how this latest crisis is handled, commentators a year or two from now are sure to once again mistake Pakistan’s aggressive counter-terrorism policies for a victory over terrorism. Pakistan’s citizens, however, especially its minorities, know better.

Kamil Ahsan is a doctoral student in developmental biology at the University of Chicago and a freelance journalist. His writing has appeared in Aeon, Jacobin, In These Times, AlterNet, and others.