ULTIMATELY, they’re going to have to do it. They know it, we know it and the targets do too: decommission the favourites; defang the good ones.
Get rid of militancy.
Think of it as an arc: from Musharraf to Kayani to Raheel to the next chief, a progressive clampdown against groups that had to be taken on.
For Musharraf, it was Al Qaeda — 9/11 changed the world and the world changed how we did business.
From Kayani to Raheel, a second purge — the anti-Pakistan lot. They came after us, so we had to go after them.
And soon the next chief — confronted with the spectre of a roiling Kashmir and the long-term presence of a right-winger in Delhi causing the last line standing to go into agitated motion.
Something will have to be done before they do us in.
One, two, three — is there an arc of inevitability to it? Each successive chief having to go incrementally further than the last, not necessarily because he wanted to, but because he had to.
Lost in the warfare of the last month was an important consensus: the civilians said something needed to be done and the boys agreed — though, tellingly, the civilians resisted other actions in Punjab.
But the path to recognising that something has to be done about the anti-India lot has begun to be trodden.
It is the logic of utility, institutional self-preservation and the mechanism of jihad: if the groups exist, they occasionally have to go into action; and when they do, the outside world has a reaction.
Once, twice, thrice — from Mumbai to Pathankot to Uri, the future is being written for us.
Uri was perhaps the least significant and so the reaction the most telling. Pathankot was really the bigger deal, but it came a week after Modi’s Christmas Day Lahore surprise.
He couldn’t react as angrily because he had just pushed open the door to normalisation. So India swallowed its rage and the world kept quiet.
When Uri happened, there was no such luck. India went into a rage and the world sympathised, even before the facts were known.
On India, we don’t have the advantage we have with the Afghan-centric lot. There we can always nudge them across the border — go home to where you belong, we can tell them when the time comes.
With the anti-India lot, this is home. They’re from here and this is where the fallout will be suffered.
And so this is where they’ll have to be dealt with.
The past offers some clues about what the future could look like. With Al Qaeda there was an opening wallop followed by sustained action.
The wallop came because 9/11 was momentous. It is how history will be measured, time before 9/11 and time after.
The sustained, years-long pursuit of Al Qaeda, in Fata and the cities, came because America insisted and America had the resources to make sure we listened.
But then came the Osama anomaly — what the hell was he doing here for those long years in plain sight?
The lesson: we’re like the kid who hates homework. We’ll make a show of it in the beginning and then find reason to go slow or switch off.
posted by f.sheikh