What Produced TTP And Other Terror Groups?
By Samuel Baid
United States former Secretary of States Hillary Clinton must have sounded like a voice in the wilderness when she warned Pakistan against rearing poisonous snakes in its backyard. By these snakes she obviously meant terrorists in the garb of Islam. They project Islam as a face of terrorism. This is more satanic than the Islamophobia in Europe, Holy Quran burning in Sweden or Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie.
India’s neighbour Pakistan and now Afghanistan abound with such snakes. Names like Sipah-i-Sahaba, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Lashkar-i-Tayyiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa and many others have begun to sound obsolete in the face of about the daily killing of Muslims by the Tehreek-i-Taliban, Pakistan (TTP) and its factions and the Islamic states in Iraq and Levant-Khorasan (ISIL-K) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda remains active in these countries as a guide of terrorists.
The TTP’s main targets in Pakistan are the Army and the Police. The ISIL-K’s target in Afghanistan are the ruling Taliban. Pakistan, too, is its target. On December 2 last year it attacked Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul targeting Pakistan’s Charged’ Affaires Ubaidur Rehman Nizamani. He escaped unhurt but his guard was critically injured. Subsequently, the Taliban government killed 8 ISIL-K men who were involved in the attack on Pakistan’s embassy.
Again on July 30 this year, the ISIL-K staged a suicide attack in Pakistan, on a convention of the workers of Islamic Party Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Islam killing 54 workers in Khar area of Bajaur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). As said above, the Army and the police are the targets of the TTP. It has also threatened Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto. A TTP statement said “if these two parties Nawaz Muslim League and Pakistan People’s Party remain firm on their position and continue to be slaves of the Army, action will be taken against their leading people”.
TTP has been mighty emboldened to attack Pakistan, ironically, after Pakistan planked the Taliban on Afghanistan against its people’s will for the second time in about 20 years in August 2021. Pakistan in its twisted wisdom hoped that with the Taliban in power in Afghanistan it would have practical suzerainty over that country and the Taliban fighter could be used against India in Kashmir. But things would go the other way: the Taliban announced they would not be used against another and the soil of Afghanistan would not be used against another country. This was considered to be the Taliban’s reply to Pakistan’s design. In addition to this, the Taliban’s Pakistan-based ideological juniors, the TTP, announced its programme to increase attacks on Pakistani Army. And true to its word, it increased its almost daily attacks on the Army and the police.
Their biggest attack was early this year when they suicide-attacked a large mosque in Peshawar which was patronised by the policemen. More than 100 worshippers were killed. Earlier in December, the TTP took over a police detention centre in the garrison city of Bannu (KPK) and held Army and police official hostages after snatching their weapons and released some prisoners.
On January 2,Pakistan’s National Security Council sternly told the Taliban to stop patronising those terrorists who have fled from Pakistan to safe havens in Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s reply is:
- The TTP has safe heavens in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan.
- The Taliban tell Pakistan they signed the Doha agreement not to let foreign terrorists operate in Afghanistan with the United States, not with Pakistan. Therefore, Pakistan cannot ask them to honour this agreement.
- Pakistan should have direct talk with the TTP
- To Pakistan’s threat of using its right of hot pursuit into Afghanistan, the Taliban reminded it of its Army’s meek surrender to India’s Army in December 1971
The Taliban who have much to thank Pakistan for their emergence what they are today, don’t seem ready to sacrifice their benefactor’s enemy number 1, the TTP. Perhaps the Taliban seriously believe in the assumption that an unstable country needs an external enemy. It is becoming clear that the Taliban cannot control the TTP. The TTP has come close to al-qaeda and other terrorist groups. There are already emotional issues between Afghanistan and Pakistan like the Durand line and Pakistan’s credibility in the eyes of the Afghans.
Pakistan’s problems like the Taliban, the TTP and many others are the product of its policy of mischievously exploiting the name of Islam. All Pakistani leaders right from the country’s creator Mohammad Ali Jinnah, have depended on the exploitation of Islam because none of them had a clear vision of Pakistan. As a result, poisonous snakes are covering the soil of this “God-given” country.
(The writer can be reached at [email protected])
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinion of the author.