The defence ministry has in a recent report outlined the rising threat of terror attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its affiliated groups on Pakistani soil in coming weeks and months.
According to the report, at least 72 cross-border incidents of violence have been recorded during January-April of the current year alone, in which a number of Pakistani soldiers were killed and injured. The attacks were launched from both Afghan and Iranian territory, involving Islamist as well as Baloch separatist fighters. The area under threat, according to the report, stretched from Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) to southern Punjab as well as the federal capital, Islamabad.
The report, which the defence ministry filed at the Supreme Court in mid-April, was mainly aimed at getting a judicial verdict endorsing the government’s plans to postpone the upcoming elections and was subsequently dismissed by the court.
But the reasons cited in the report, though mostly credible, raise several questions over how a fractured and almost dysfunctional TTP was able to regroup and find its way into its erstwhile sanctuaries on Pakistani soil.
Pakistan’s Role
Some informed sources in the erstwhile tribal districts said that former chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant-General Faiz Hameed, was actively involved in helping the TTP fighters return to their home bases in Pakistani districts along the Afghan border.
This started in early 2022, months after Taliban tookpower in Kabul and released leaders of different TTP factions who had been arrested and jailed during the 2004-21 era of democracy in Afghanistan.
‘In February 2022, Faiz Hameed approached different tribes in our region, including our Aurakzai tribe, holding jirgas and asking tribal elders to bring back and resettle the TTP fighters belonging to their respective clans,’ said one source, requesting anonymity.
The tribes were reluctant, however. Firstly, they had no control over TTP fighters. Secondly, tribes had suffered immense damage due to conflict, bloodshed, and displacements during the reign of TTP, and loathed a return to that era.
According to a source, many tribal elders suspected that the authorities were trying to involve the tribes in the process so they could shift the blame to those tribes in the event of an uptick in international terrorism.While the tribes stood aloof, various TTP groups started to move into the region on a large scale. The groups were given a verbal assurance by the authorities that when they returned, they would be given charge of their erstwhile zones.
This is the current scenario. Significantly, it is not the first time Pakistan has pursued a policy of accommodating rather than fighting off terrorists.
Birth of TTP
It is common knowledge that Pakistan raised and trained Mujahideen forces on western funding to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan during 1980s, and when internal rifts marred the Mujahideen cadres after the Soviet withdrawal, it provided grounds for the birth of the Taliban movement to replace them.
After the September 2001 (9/11) attacks in the US, when NATO troops arrived in Afghanistan to combat Taliban and several Middle Eastern and Central Asian Islamist groups that had set up bases on Afghan soil, most of them had to move to their earlier sanctuaries in Balochistan and KP regions.
One top Taliban commander, Jalaluddin Haqqani, moved his base to North Waziristan, located close to his home province of Paktia in Afghanistan. Some two years later, in 2003, he declared Waziristan region as the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, says Afrasiab Khatak, a former Senator, analyst and former chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).
‘This sparked fears in the power corridors in Islamabad that if the move is not forestalled, over time it may strengthen Afghanistan’s territorial claim to the KP region and undermine the legitimacy of the Durand Line. Since they did not want to eliminate the Taliban, they started pursuing the top Taliban leadership to organise a separate set-up for Pakistani Taliban,’ he stated.
TTP was created in 2007, and Islamabad handed it the seven tribal districts along the Afghan border. With the NATO troops surge in Afghanistan in 2010, ‘TTP became the host of Afghan Taliban and provided cover to their activities in the region,’ says Mr Khatak.
TTP Factions
TTP was a byproduct of jihadi politics in the post-9/11 Afghanistan and Pakistan. As such, it shares deep roots with Afghan Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), among others.
The spread of madrassahs during the 1980s had led to the creation of a wide-ranging Islamist militant mindset in the Pak-Afghan border region from Noshki and Qamaruddin Karez in Balochistan to Bannu, Waziristan, Mohmand, Bajaur, and Swat regions in the KP province.
The 2007 operation launched on Islamabad’s Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) not only triggered stronger unity among regional factions, but also brought in jihadi groups focused on Kashmir, known in the Afghan parlance as Punjabi Taliban. The list also includes militant groups from the Central Asian states – such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) comprising Uyghur militants from the Xinjiang region of China.
While each group had its own set of ideological and strategic aims, their affinity with the TTP mainly sprang from the latter’s ability to provide relatively safe havens to these groups on Pakistani soil at a time when the west’s war on terror was intensifying across Afghanistan.
Things changed for TTP due to two subsequent developments. First, the western coalition effected a troops surge in 2010 to bring southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan under control. And second, Pakistan launched a military operation in 2014 after an embarrassing attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar.
These developments triggered factional conflicts and splits within the TTP alliance and led to its decline during 2014-18.
However, the signing of the Doha agreement in 2020 rekindled prospects of TTP’s reunification, with at least 30 splinters of former allies having rejoined it since July 2020, says Abdul Sayed, a Sweden-based researcher who specializes in Afghan affairs.
‘These include four major regional factions that had separated from TTP in 2014, namely Jamaatul Ahrar (dominated by Mohmand factions of TTP), and splinters comprising tribal fighters from Waziristan, Khyber and Bajaur regions,’ he says.
The TTP’s latest ideological shift to focus more on Pakistan than a universal bid for Islamisation has also attracted some secular Baloch separatist groups to coordinate operations with TTP, Mr Sayed stated, adding that this was evident in a recent interview of TTP spokesman, Mohammad Khurasani, published in a pro-Baloch separatist media.
Meanwhile, Central Asian and ETIM fighters continue to avail TTP’s sanctuaries, as do the more lethal Islamic State of Khurasan (ISK), the local chapter of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
ISK was founded in 2015, and in 2018 it was listed as one of the top four deadliest terror organisations by the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index. At present, while it continues to have links with TTP, it is fully opposed to the Afghan Taliban.
American Role
So, what to expect in the coming months and years? According to experts, an answer will largely depend on how the international game of one-upmanship in the region shapes up in the near future. A brief look at how things have evolved over the last four decades may be helpful here.
During the cold war era, the Americans used Pakistan as its base to raise Mujahideen to prevent the spread of Soviet-led socialist mindset into what has long been considered a strategically important region for the west to protect its long-term economic interests.
This region was aptly defined by the former US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard
Holbrooke, when soon after assuming office in 2009 he coined the term Af-Pak – meaning that for the western block, Pakistan and Afghanistan were not two separate sovereign entities but a single operation theatre.
After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989, and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Americans left Afghanistan to be largely managed by Pakistan.
Within a decade, the Cold War was replaced by the ‘war on terror’ following the 9/11 attacks in Washington and New York. The Americans poured their forces into Afghanistan to combat terrorism, and to create space for democratic governance.
But the way they handled the Doha peace process is interpreted by analysts as an indication that they did not intend to put an end to terrorism in the region.
As Afrasiab Khatak points out, the democratic Afghan state, which had been recognised by the international community and was a member of the United Nations, was kept out of Doha talks, and thus ‘de-recognised’ by the US
As such, according to him, Taliban were deliberately injected into Afghanistan, and the apparent aim was to ‘use them in a new cold war between the US and the west on the one side, and China and Russia on the other’.Creating hurdles in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – connecting China and the Central Asian region to warm waters across Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan – appears to be the more immediate aim of the western powers, he says.
‘In this new arrangement, TTP also has a role,’ says Mr Khatak. ‘For a second war on terror to start, there has to be terror in the region, and the TTP-ISKP duo offer a perfect chance to make this happen.’
Against this backdrop, and in consideration of multiple entities involvement, it becomes important to contextualise TTP’s resurrection. It cannot be viewed in isolation, hence the burden of re-emergence of terror, a collective transgression.
The writer is a senior journalist and former BBC English correspondent.
