By Pir Wilayat Shah and Iftikhar Hussain

Pakistan’s powerful Army Chief General Raheel Sharif warned Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government, in the aftermath of Quetta’s massacre, that lack of proper implementation of the National Action Plan would result in serious consequences. The General said, “Establishing long term peace and stability in Pakistan would remain a ‘distant dream’ unless all stakeholders deliver meaningfully on the National Action Plan (NAP) against terrorism”.

The General’s remarks were indirectly responded to by Punjab Province’s Law Minister, Rana Sanullah. He stated, “If the criticism against military can take us away from our target, in the same fashion, criticism of our civilian institutions and law enforcement agencies can take us away from our objectives”. The ping pong approach to the shift in blame blatantly exposes the gaps in the Pakistani civilian-military approach in the fight against terrorism.

Gaps in Pak Civilian-Military Approach to Terrorism

Discrepancies in the Pakistan civilian-military approach to confronting terrorism and terrorists in the country has long been debated by independent analysts, who have viewed the policy with concerns. To analysts the reasons are obvious, the stakes for fighting terrorism are different for the military and civilian government are different.

Pakistan’s leading analysts caution on the widening gap between the state and military institutions. Most worrisome for them is perhaps their view of how Pakistan continuously insists that there is a distinction between good and bad Taliban. Meanwhile, Nawaz government is criticized by his opponents for failing to take action against extremist groups within in his home province of Punjab.

Although they share the same surnames, the two Sharifs hardly share the same views on terrorism apart from acknowledging it is a severe issue and shifting the blame on foreign entities. In the aftermath of the Quetta massacre both General Sharif and Prime Minister Sharif stated that a “foreign hand is involved,”

One State, Different Narratives

Former Pakistan Army General and leading security analyst, Talat Masood dubs the army stance that the civilian government is selectively pursuing the 20 point National Action Plan. “The army chief wants to put pressure on the civilian set up to make it more pro-active against the menace of terrorism”, says Talat Masood. General Masood says if the blame game continues, the gap between the two institutions can widen further.

However, Pakistan’s military campaign against terrorism in the tribal region titled, Zarbe- Azb has also come under serious scrutiny following the Quetta attack.

Pakistan Senate Chairman, Raza Rabbani, a respected voice within the Pakistani political scene, equaled Pakistan’s state approach to eliminating terrorism as ‘fire-fighting’; the state puts out one fire and then waits for the next fire to erupt. He called for changing the fundamentals of the strategy after the bloody Quetta massacre. Raza Rabbani’s sentiments on Pakistan’s policy on terrorism are echoed both in Pakistan and abroad.

Pakistan’s Counterterrorism Plan

Pakistan National Action Plan is a concise 20-point plan of action that PM Sharif’s government devised in the aftermath of Peshawar school massacre by terrorist outfit Tehreek Taliban Pakistan in December 2014. Analyst Zahid Hussain believes that selective implementation of the national action plan has yielded very limited results. “Hate material is still easily available in the country and the government claims of arresting thousands of terrorists under national security cannot be verified independently”.

Nawaz Sharif’s Punjab Problem

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif draws his political power from his home land Punjab, the largest province in Pakistan. His government is accused of inaction against Punjab based terrorists such as, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Analysts say inaction against militants, or simply the lack of it, in Punjab will diminish any gains operation Zarb-e-Azb’s has achieved. Their view. is that the root causes of extremism lay in Punjab and unless a decisive action is taken into action, counterterrorism efforts elsewhere will not be able to yield results.

‘Pakistan’s Enabling Environment is the Perfect Cultivation Ground for Extremism’

Michael Kugelman of Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC says an enabling environment in Pakistan allows terrorists to remain resilient. kugelman told VOA Deewa, “The issue here is the environment, the climate continues to be conducive for terrorists. You have the types of narratives, the types of ideologies that drive militancy and terror. This messaging coming from clerics, that appears in school text books, that you quite frankly hear on the television that talks about how India, the US and Israel are trying to surround and harm Pakistan and Islam. These are narratives that are everywhere across society in Pakistan. And these are the types of narratives that terrorists are able to act upon violently”.

Where is Pakistan Heading on Terrorism?

Experts think the more pressing issue at hand are the differences in the state and the military’s priorities. Both institutions are eager to pursue their own interests in the fight against terrorism. Regardless of what each side might say of its success, the nation is caught in a bloody quagmire due to institutional ambivalence. The nation bleeds and the ethnic Pashtun, Baloch, and Sindhis are the innocent bystanders of terrorism as the stakes of peace remain amidst disparities between the military and civilian government of Pakistan.

**Niala Mohammad contributing editor

Michael Kugelman, a senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson

By Iftikhar Hussain and Niala Mohammad

Michael Kugelman, a senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C. and a leading expert on Pakistan. Kugelman says that militants in Pakistan are resilient due to the enabling environment of extremism. Following the Quetta suicide attack, Michael Kugelman spoke with VOA Deewa on the continuous militant attacks within Pakistan, limited impact of Pakistan’s campaign against terrorism, the military’s anti-India approach, and its policy of distinguishing between good and bad Taliban. The interview with Kugelman was done by VOA’s Iftikhar Hussain. Following is a complete transcript of the Michael Kugelman’s interview:

Question: Your recent WSJ piece “Hospital Bombing in Quetta, Pakistan, Fits Pattern of Terror Attacks on ‘Soft Targets'” gives an interesting insight to why militants thrive in Pakistan. Could you elaborate on those reasons for our audience?

Kugelman Answer:  I think it’s very simple why Pakistan continues to suffer from terrorism even after two years of a heavy military offensive in North Waziristan. The issue here, the environment, the climate continues to be conducive for terrorists. You have the types of narratives, the types of ideologies that drive militancy and terror. This messaging coming from clerics, that appears in school text books, that you quite frankly hear on the television that talks about how India, the US and Israel are trying to surround and harm Pakistan and Islam. These are narratives that are everywhere across society in Pakistan. And these are the types of narratives that terrorists are able to act upon violently. So, you have that on the one hand and then of course the other issue is that you have a Pakistani state that continues to distinguish between so called good and so called bad militants. And it only goes after the terrorists that launch attacks in Pakistan. You have plenty of terror groups inside Pakistan like Lashkar e Taiba and the Haqqani network that don’t attack Pakistan they attack other places, other countries.

All of these terrorist groups regardless of who they target, they are all cut from the same cloth, and they all want to do terrible things. And most importantly you have members of these diff orgs that go back and forth between the other. This comes back to what I was saying earlier, that the climate and the environment in Pakistan is simply so enabling for extremism and allows terrorism to flourish. This is why you can kill so many terrorists as Pakistan has. And yet until you kill the ideology that drives these terrorists you are not going to make terrorism go away.

Question: Pakistan’s military chief Gen Raheel Sharif visited Quetta following the massacre stated that the attack was “an effort to destabilize CPEC”.  This statement was widely criticized because terrorism was already in existence in the region and attacks had occurred prior to CPEC being launched in the province. Why do you think General Sharif he devised his statement as such?

Kugelman Answer: I think it was really inconsiderate and inappropriate of the Pakistani military to essentially suggest that this attack was meant to sabotage CPEC and to undermine the improved security environment to sabotage CPEC. I mean, let’s face it, Baluchistan was not exactly a stable place before this attack happened. The military by pitching its argument that way, by saying this was meant to sabotage CPEC that allows the military to really subtly accuse India of being behind this attack. Because the Pakistani army for several months has been accusing India for trying to sabotage this CPEC. And of course CPEC is very important for the Pakistani military. So essentially what you have here is the Pakistani security establishment has been resorting to the same type of blame game and denial that it has so many times. It simply refuses to acknowledge that there are forces inside Pakistan that continue to have the ability to launch horrific mass causality attacks.

A group like Jamat ul Ahrar its status or connection to the Taliban is unclear. At one point it had broken off I think it is still a part of the TTP, but the bottom line is that even after two years of military offenses in North Waziristan you have a terror group like Jamat ur Ahrar that is able to stage mass causality attacks across the country as its done in the Lahore park attack, its attacked, it’s gone after churches. This is a group that staged at least 10 attacks over the last year or so. It has a lot of ability to get things done, and if the army were to acknowledge that, then it would essentially be admitting that the military has not eliminated the all of the major threats, the terrorist threats to the Pakistani state. So instead it simply resorts to the usual blaming of India and blaming outside forces which is not very helpful and of course is not very accurate.

Question: Pakistan’s anti-terrorism policy has not delivered. To put it in the words of Pakistan’s Senate Chairman, Raza Rabbani “it’s like fire-fighting, the state puts out one fire and then waits for the next fire to erupt.” What type of strategy does the state of Pakistan need in order to yield results?

Kugelman Answer: I would actually agree with what Senator Rabani has had to say in this regard that Pakistan really does need a strategy, it needs a very clear strategy, a very specific strategy that lays out exactly what’s going to happen and when. But on the other hand Pakistan has come up with strategies, plenty of strategies, Pakistan has developed all kinds of policies and measures to deal with terrorism. One of the more prominent ones in recent years was the National Action Plan (NAP), which was a 20 point agenda for dealing with terrorism and violent extremism. The problem is that the measures laid out in that NAP have not been followed up on, they really haven’t been implemented. And this is the crux of the problem, I think that devising the right strategy is hard enough but the issue of implementing, and overseeing and enforcing various aspects of implementation are the challenge. And quite frankly it’s perfectly nice to have this 20 point plan that talks about the need to criminalize hate speech to remove hardline extremist narratives but, actually getting that done is very difficult. And in Pakistan the reason why it’s so hard to get that done is that you have very powerful interests such as those that I had mentioned earlier, religious forces and even elements of the state that really don’t have interest. They don’t want these enabling environments to be eliminated because let’s face you could argue that the state in Pakistan derives some benefit from propagating these hardline narratives about India and all because it essentially portrays India to threat which therefore gives the military legitimacy to essentially have a big role in the state in Pakistan to protect the country from India.

So, I would argue that the big problem and the big challenge for Pakistan is not as much with developing policies and strategies but actually implementing them and following through on them. And for that to be done you’re going to need some whole sale changes in state policy. One being the need to essentially reject all forms of terrorism and its practitioners.

By Iftikhar Hussain and Ihsan Mohammad Khan
With the fifth anniversary of Al-Qaeda Chief Osama Bin Laden killing in Pakistan Abbottabad city, US lawmakers are renewing their call on Pakistan to free Dr. Shakeel Afridi, the surgeon who helped CIA track OBL.

Dr. Afridi was arrested following the US Navy Seals raid of Abbottabad on May 2, 2011. Dr. Afridi was first accused of treason for working for a foreign intelligence service, CIA. But later he was sentenced to a jail term over charges that he had ties with an Islamic militant group, Lashkar-e-Islam, in his native Khyber tribal area.

Dr Afridi life inside prison

Dr. Shakeel Afridi is in a high-security prison in Peshawar but his life is in a complete blackout. A narrow journalistic peek into his restricted life behind the bars shows that he was being held in virtual isolation, only jail authorities and intelligence officials have free access to him. His occasional meetings with family are kept secret.

Family Visits

“Nobody, even me, except his wife and three children (have) occasional access” to Shakil Afridi, his lawyer Qmar Nadeem Afridi, told VOA Deewa. The jailed doctor and the lawyer are not relations. They share the same common last name Afridi because they both belong to a larger tribe with the same name.

Dr. Shakil gets visits by his wife and two teenage sons once every two months. But his lawyer said he does not get any updates about his client because the family lives in hiding and incommunicado. “His family used to live in Peshawar but now their whereabouts are not known. They avoid meeting anybody. I do not know that his three teenage kids goes to school or not”, his lawyer Qamer Nadeem told VOA Deewa over the phone.

Dr Afridi case status

Dr. Afridi was arrested a few days after the killing of OBL. Initially Pakistani officials accused him of collaborating with a foreign intelligence service, CIA. He is suspected of running a fake anti-hepatitis campaign in the vicinity of OBL Abbottabad compound, part of efforts to collect DNA samples to confirm bin Laden’s identity.

He was later handed over to authorities of his native tribal area and a government administrator of Khyber, who adjudicated his case, sentenced him to 33 years in prison, under the Frontier Crimes Regulations, a set of rules dating back to the region’s British colonial rule. On an appeal, his sentence was reduced to 23 years. Qamar Nadeem Afridi said he is seeking that his jail term be dismissed but the case has not moved forward since 2012.

US stance on Dr. Afridi case

Dr. Afridi case has become a litmus test for the shaky US Pak relations. A furious US senate committee voted to cut aid to Islamabad by $33 million — $1 million for each year of his original sentence.

“The aid cut threat will not work, diplomatic efforts are needed by the US and that is the only way to Dr. Afridi can be released”, says Qamar Nadeem,

The United States’ ultra-secretive Central Intelligence Agency tweeted the details of an operation that killed a top terrorist leader Sunday, drawing thousands of retweets and likes from apparent supporters while others responded with criticism that ranged from “please don’t” to “WTF?”

Lawyer’s Perils

Before, Qamar Nadeem, took up Dr. Shakil’s case, another lawyer for the doctor has been killed.
Unidentified gunmen attacked Dr Afridi first lawyer Samiullah Afridi, in his car near the city of Peshawar in March last year. Qamar Nadeem, talking of any threat to his life told VAO Deewa, “I am cautious but do not think any threat to my life at the moment”.

Pakistan stance
Pakistani officials were outraged by the bin Laden operation, which led to international suspicion that they had been harboring Al Qaeda’s founder.
On Monday, Pakistani authorities rejected a call by visiting US congressional staff delegation to release Dr. Afridi, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported.