Pakistan is once again mourning mass casualties from an armed assault on one of its schools. At least 20 people were killed and dozens injured on Wednesday when gunmen stormed the northwest Bacha Khan University under the cover of morning fog. The four attackers scaled the school’s rear wall before storming through the campus, gunning down students and teachers in classrooms and halls.
he rampage ended when Pakistani security forces cornered the attackers, killing them before they could detonate their suicide vests. At least some of the gunmen were apparently teenagers.
The assault came on the 28th anniversary of the death of Pashtun nationalist leader Bacha Khan, the university’s namesake. Khan’s party, the Awami National Party, is known for its anti-Taliban views. The attack also comes just weeks after Pakistan marked the first anniversary of the December [ 2014 ] Taliban massacre at a school in Peshawar. More than 150 people were killed in the massacre, most of them children from military families. It was the deadliest militant attack in Pakistan’s history.
The Taliban faction that committed the Peshawar massacre in 2014 has also taken responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, calling it revenge for the military’s intensified crackdown on its members. Pakistan has hanged over 300 alleged Taliban members over the past year as part of a wider offensive launched in June 2014. But Pakistan’s main Taliban group, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, quickly disavowed Wednesday’s massacre, calling it an “un-Islamic act.” The Pakistani Taliban is an offshoot of the Taliban movement in neighboring Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban remains divided over whether to join peace talks to end Afghanistan’s more than 14-year war.
Tariq Ali talking:
every atrocity comes as a shock and a surprise, but I have to point out that this has been going on now for several years. And when the Afghanistan War began, I pointed out that one of the side effects of this war was going to be the destabilization of Pakistan, especially in the northern province which borders Afghanistan and where people, the Pashtun people, speak the same language as many Afghans. So there are very close links between Pashtun, the Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan, and the Pashtun people in Afghanistan, who form a majority. So, when you wage war on one country, and the way you wage that war, it’s very difficult to stop that war from spilling over.
And the effects of this spillage now in Pakistan have become completely uncontrollable. Every time there is an atrocity, not just the schoolchildren who were killed a few years ago or the tragedy that happened two days ago—it’s not just them, it has been attacks in different parts of the country by different jihadi fundamentalist groups. Every time it happens, the prime minister of the country vows in public to end this menace forever. The army tells the public and actually does mount some operations, but these operations then are temporary affairs, and they can’t be anything else. They come back from the area, and more recruits are found by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and some of the other groups.
So, the attack on this particular university seems to be motivated by little else than symbolism. The university was—is in the name of Bacha Khan, which was the nickname of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, one of the pre-partition leaders of the national movement for Indian independence, together with Gandhi and Nehru and others. And his most important contribution in this region was to teach the Pashtun people the value of nonviolence. All his work, his political work, in this area was carried out on the basis of nonviolence. And it was successful. Even when the British committed atrocities, like the massacres that took place in Qissa Khawani Bazaar in Peshawar during British rule, his response was, “We will fight them via mass movements, by civil disobedience. We will not use violence.” And he, of course, is seen today as a progressive, secular, nonviolent leader who fought for his people against the British. And this, they don’t like, because they don’t like him. Ghaffar Khan was imprisoned by virtually every single Pakistani government when he was alive—military dictatorships and civilian governments. And when he died, his will said he wanted to be buried in Afghanistan in Jalalabad, and that is where he was buried. So this is a symbolic attack, to stop the university from marking his anniversary, by a group of total fanatics.
And the serious question that we have to ask is this: What are the transmission belts that supply these young fanatics to organizations like the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or the Jaish-e-Mohammed or other smaller groups that exist in the country? And this is a question that the ruling elites in Pakistan never actually ask themselves, because if they ask this question, then they themselves are partially guilty.
I think this has certainly been true over the last 20 years, because Pakistan feels it has a stake in Afghanistan. And don’t forget that the capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban, when it happened, was backed by Pakistani troops, by Pakistani Air Force units, by undercover people, organized, armed, funded by the ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence. So, after 9/11, when the United States compelled them—actually forced them, at the point of a gun—to withdraw support and to bring the Taliban out of there, they did so, but reluctantly. And they have been waiting for a long, long time to go back in there. And this is one reason why some groups, not all, are not touched by them, because they see them as a strategic asset which might need to be used again once the U.S. withdraws.
the Pakistani state has responded to the attack as it always does. It has denounced it, and it has pledged that it will discover the people who ordered the attack, since the perpetrators have already been killed. And, no doubt, there will be an army—units will be sent out to try and find a few people. But that is not going to be sufficient. It is a long haul, this.
As for how these groups developed, there’s no doubt. We know it. They developed when the Soviet Union, as it then was, entered Afghanistan to try and save a pro-Soviet government, and the United States decided that this was their opportunity, as Brzezinski said, to get revenge for the defeat in Vietnam and teach the Russians a lesson they wouldn’t forget. So the United States poured in money into the region, armed religious groups, helped to create them. Brzezinski stood on the border with Afghanistan with religious leaders and said, “Go and wage the jihad.” That’s how it all started. The money created these groups. They did not rise spontaneously from below. They were created from above with the support of Washington, London and the local ISI and the military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. That’s when they started.
Now, the fact that they were created in this way doesn’t mean that they’re still totally controlled by the military or the ISI. Many of these monsters have developed their own patterns of functioning. Some of them fight against the military, kill military officers, kill their children, etc., etc. The thing is: How can we bring this under control? In my opinion, two things are absolutely necessary. One is peace in Afghanistan. At whatever cost, with whatever government, we need to end. You know, Afghanistan has now been fighting wars, and subjected to wars, longer than the first and second World Wars put together. And you can only imagine the effect that leaves on the population. This is a appalling society.
And that degree of appallingness is now existing inside Pakistan.
Secondly, while one can blame the United States—and I often do—there is no doubt, in my opinion, that the atmosphere created in Pakistan by successive military and civilian governments has made it impossible to challenge any of this. The fact that religious schools teach people violence—in many cases, not in every case—that they basically provide transmission belts, where young kids are taught lessons which lead them to become sympathetic to these groups, the fact that religiosity has now reached such a height that just a few days ago, almost at the same time as the attack in Charsadda near Peshawar, you had a young boy who had been incited by a mullah and told, “You committed some blasphemy,” and this boy went and cut off his own hand to repent—now, when you have a situation like this, we have to say that the fault lies largely within Pakistani society, which has failed to educate its people. It educates the elite, educates itself. For the children of the elite, there are great schools, great hospitals, in many parts of Pakistan. But there is nothing for the poor. There is nothing for the bulk of the population. So they’re very vulnerable to appeals from religious groups, because they have nothing else left. so, a government in Pakistan—no government, neither the PPP nor Nawaz Sharif nor the military, has spent any money in creating an education system where everyone is educated, free of charge, by teachers.
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Tariq Ali
political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker, novelist and an editor of the New Left Review. His most recent book is The Extreme Centre: A Warning. He is also the author of several books on Pakistani politics and history.
— source democracynow.org