SHAFAQNA PAKISTAN (Shia News Agency)
IN recent days, the military leadership has taken on the task of elucidating a broad-based understanding of what constitutes security for a country and of identifying the principal and most immediate threat confronting Pakistan today.
On Thursday, army chief Gen Raheel Sharif once again described the militant threat in forthright language: according to him, the enemy “lives within us and looks like us”.
While such candidness should be applauded and a front-line role for the military is essential in the fight against militancy, the wider problem remains: where is the broad-based strategy to fight a complex threat, as the military itself describes militancy today?
Gen Sharif and other senior military leaders are on the right track when it comes to defining the militancy problem. It will take many years, possibly longer, to truly defeat militancy. Militancy cannot be defeated by military operations alone.
Militancy is not a problem confined to Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It is a national threat. Combating militancy will need significant input by all other institutions of the state, and not just of the military and intelligence variety.
Yet, articulating the problem well has appeared to lead to only doubling down on the military option alone so far. Surely, without a North Waziristan operation, and even the one launched in Khyber Agency more recently, militancy would not be defeated. Clearly, given the slow, if steady, pace of those operations, the militants are fairly strong still and their sanctuaries in Fata need to be dismantled.
That requires the full attention of the military. But can a war truly be won by focusing solely on the fight today when the next stage is already clear? Consider the peace in Swat, the most successful of all the counter-insurgency operations waged by the military so far.
Five years on, while relative peace has been established, the military has become a permanent presence — and the civilian administration is far from a pre-eminent force there.
If the end state is to be a vastly expanded permanent role for the military internally, then can it really be said that the war is winnable, let alone being won? Surely, the inadequacies of the civilian-led institutions are manifold.
In many cases, the civilian, political and administrative leadership do not have the capacity to understand the militant threat. But without building up that capacity, how will the kind of militancy spreading outwards from the big, urban centres to the hinterlands in the provinces ever be contained?
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