Violence in Pakistan: Cold shoulder for Sharif

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FOR over a century All Saints Church in Peshawar, with its dome and minarets in the Mughal style, stood as a symbol of interfaith harmony. The notion was shattered on September 22nd when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in the middle of a crowd of 600 Christians milling about outside the church just after a service. They killed 85 and injured over a hundred. Even in a country drenched in violence, the attack caused a huge shock. Pakistan’s tiny Christian minority is used to prejudice and to bouts of mob violence, but a bloody suicide bombing is new. The government announced three days of mourning. The interior minister told Parliament he was lost for words.

Pakistan’s extremists are mainly Sunnis, whose chief target is the hated Shia minority. One murderous group, Jundullah, part of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the Peshawar attack. The Taliban’s umbrella organisation, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), later attempted to disown it. No matter. The attack leaves in tatters the prime minister’s policy of seeking reconciliation with Pakistan’s violent Islamists, only a few days after he officially unveiled it.

Nawaz Sharif came to office scarcely three months ago. He campaigned to bring the Pakistani Taliban into the fold. He wanted, he said, to talk to them not fight them, and he persevered with the idea of peace talks despite sectarian atrocities, the execution of ten foreign tourists and a spectacular assault on a prison that freed 248 convicts. On September 9th he convened an “all parties conference”. Unanimously it backed the opening of unconditional discussions with the Taliban. The conference’s final statement made no mention of militants. Rather, these havoc-wreaking extremists were just another set of “stakeholders”.

Even before this latest attack, the Taliban’s response was unequivocal. They issued a long list of demands, among them the imposition of sharia law and the army’s withdrawal from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the badlands along the border with Afghanistan that serve as the extremists’ refuge. There, a major-general and a colonel were blown up on September 15th. From the start, army chiefs have been appalled at Mr Sharif’s willingness apparently to allow the Taliban to lay down the conditions for peace. The army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, is clear that the Taliban must “unconditionally submit to the state, its constitution and rule of law”. Indeed, the army has had a measure of success in rolling back militant control of the tribal areas. The chief problem is that the business is unfinished in North Waziristan.

Experts on terrorism are also opposed to unconditional talks. They point out that the TTP is a motley coalition, too fragmented to ensure that a peace deal will stick. All the local peace accords signed with militants in the past decade have broken down. More fundamentally, it is hard to see where negotiations can lead when religious militants are bent on destroying a state they regard as fundamentally un-Islamic. Now the reality appears to be sinking in. After the Peshawar attack, Mr Sharif said that the government may be “unable to proceed further” with the talks.

Yet the cause of negotiations retains a powerful grip over the political classes. The party of Imran Khan, a cricketer turned politician, controls Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly North-West Frontier Province, of which Peshawar is the capital. Hours after the attack Mr Khan rushed to the city to hold a press conference in which he appeared to make excuses for the militants. He even suggested that some sort of conspiracy was out to derail the peace talks. He has long accused American drone strikes of fuelling militancy in Pakistan.

One problem, says Zahid Hussain, an authority on militancy, is that politicians are afraid. During this year’s election campaign, the TTP demonstrated its ability to kill or intimidate those whom it does not like. Mr Sharif’s faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, the PML (N), and Mr Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf were notably unaffected. Mr Khan knows that, if anything he says puts the militants’ noses out of joint, he could be dead. But he seems genuinely to believe that the violence is a consequence of Pakistan being dragged into “America’s war” in Afghanistan. He also believes that violence is a natural response to the presence of Pakistani troops in the tribal areas. It is an unhelpful position, letting the extremists off the hook. But it also protects Mr Khan’s flank from the religious parties that are his competition in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

As for the PML (N), it is loth to trigger Taliban retribution in populous Punjab, the party’s heartland. Militants there do not launch anything like as many attacks as they do in the borderlands, even though Punjab is home to a dizzying array of groups. Mr Sharif’s party has long been accused of striking informal deals and electoral pacts with Punjab-based groups.

The political establishment’s wilful refusal to condemn the militants makes ordinary Pakistanis even more susceptible to flimsy conspiracy theories that India, Israel or the CIA are behind every tragedy that befalls Pakistan. The attack a year ago on Malala Yousafzai, a teenager whom the Taliban tried to kill because she believed in education for girls, is suspected by many to have been a foreign plot to defame the Pakistani Taliban. The radical mullahs and loudmouths in the media who help to spread such nonsense are rarely challenged. This month Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, who has a $10m bounty on his head, put up by America for his alleged role in masterminding deadly attacks in Mumbai in 2008, marked Pakistan’s national defence day on September 6th by leading thousands of his followers to a rally in the capital, Islamabad.

Given the lack of clear public support for a full-blooded crackdown on the militants, many analysts say that Pakistan’s politicians have no choice but to go through the motions of trying to negotiate with the Taliban. Only then can the talks’ futility be demonstrated, and more hard-hitting policies be implemented. Perhaps a reckoning with the militants will come one day. Mr Sharif’s peace plans have taken a big knock in Peshawar.

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