SHAFAQNA PAKISTAN (Shia News Agency)
Pakistan adopted negotiations as the right approach to deal with the situation created by the Taliban in its tribal areas. This was a mistake. The political masters did not seem to have appreciated that the only thing common between the two groups of dissidents operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan was their name. The Pakistani Taliban were not organised into a tightly administered group, as were those operating in Afghanistan. They were, in fact, a cluster of many groups with very different objectives. There could not be a single negotiating agenda to deal with them. Some of them were focused on creating an Islamic judicial system in the territories from which they operated. That was the system that had worked for decades but was abandoned in the name of modernisation by the Pakistani state. Some other wanted to create an Islamic state in the territory that was now Pakistan. It was difficult and imprudent to attempt to create common ground for such diverse interests.
It is the use of force that has brought the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table. It will be the use of force that will splinter the Pakistani Taliban group into factions that will be easier to deal with since each will then be able to indicate what it wishes to obtain from the political and economic systems. The use of force in Afghanistan has delivered the most that could be expected of it: the realisation that the dissident forces cannot achieve their goal through the barrel of the gun. That realisation will eventually also come to the groups in Pakistan but more work will need to be done by the state before that point is reached.
pakistan.shafaqna.com
