Pakistan’s 9/11

We should ask the question: Why do they hate us?

On September 11, 2001, a band of nihilists boarded planes bound for what was in their minds destination: paradise. In the aftermath of their attacks, as the black clouds of smoke and rage billowed up from the smothering rubble of collapsed towers and fallen ego of the world’s capital city, the national narrative in America quickly shifted to teaching the enemy a lesson never to be forgotten. “I am driven with a mission from God,” bellowed President George W Bush, as he tried to justify the Afghan invasion; a statement one would typically expect to come from the fiery pulpit of a rabid hate preacher in the tribal areas of Pakistan, not the White House.

The discerning among us may see echoes of something similar at work in the fallout of the Peshawar carnage, which many have dubbed the 9/11 of Pakistan. Here again we see a similar outrage and a familiar call for retribution against the enemy. Even the prime minister, moved by this deafening clamour for revenge, was quick to lift the moratorium on the death penalty and hang some TTP prisoners with a promise for more in the coming days.

Immediately after 9/11 when a blinding red mist had sparked madness in America, renowned author and journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote a famous essay “Why Do They Hate Us?” to offer some perspective and, perhaps, also to douse flaming emotions. Maybe, now, a few weeks after the heinous Peshawar shooting episode, we too can ask ourselves the same question that Zakaria asked of the American people. Why do they hate us?

What after all could invert a man’s conscience so thoroughly that it would necessitate in him the urge to open fire on unsuspecting school children? Psychopathy comes to mind but is an unlikely answer considering that this attack, like similar attacks in the past, was not a lone wolf operation, but was in fact a planned and coordinated event by a notorious group – TTP – that vows retribution for the Pakistan army’s military action and its endorsement of US drone strikes in FATA.

While there is no disputing that TTP’s actions on December 16th were murderous, unforgivable and utterly deserving of the highest punishment, it is equally the case that their grievances are not entirely without merit. Suggesting otherwise would be unfair to young Nabeela who witnessed a drone strike blow her 68-year-old grandmother — Mamana Bibi – into pieces while she was gathering vegetables and wood in the family fields in Ghundi Kala village only metres away from her granddaughter. It was Mamana Bibi’s sons who later assembled her charred and mutilated remains to give her a traditional Islamic burial. One of the villagers from her community poignantly remarked that she was the “string that held the pearls together”. In a similar incident back in 2012, 18 men of village Zowi Sidqi that had gathered for an evening meal were mistaken for militants and killed in a drone strike. Accounting for each of these incidents is like having to repeatedly hit the pause button on the reality based horror online casino film that people of FATA have been living out since 9/11. According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), there have been a total of 367 such strikes, between 2004 and 2012, killing 2,562-3,325 people of whom 474-881 were civilians, including roughly 176 children.

The psychological effects of such sustained attacks are profound. According to the NYU/Stanford report on drone strikes, one interviewee – a father of three — said, “Drones are always on my mind. It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them, you know they are there.” One father, after seeing the bodies of three dead children in the rubble of a strike, decided to pull his own children out of school. “I stopped [them] from getting an education,” he admitted. “I told them we will be finished one day, the same as other people who were going [to school] and were killed in the drone attacks.”

The reality is that FATA is home to a traumatised people. People divorced from their times and existing anachronistically in some dark obscure enclave of a bygone era, reduced to a diminished proxy existence — a mere means to other peoples’ ends; their history a blood-red trail of generational exploitation by one superpower after another. When generations grow up through such war and trauma, brutality often becomes a survival mechanism.

In his book The Lucifer Effect psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains that evil is generally a product of three types of variables: dispositional, situational and systemic. He also concludes that de-individualisation of the self, dehumanisation of the other and blind submission to authority, are, among other factors, some of the main catalysts for evil behaviour. What we see in radical groups like TTP is a contribution of all these factors (barring the dispositional component which applies more to individuals than groups). The outcome is a deadly mix of Salafi austerity, tribal xenophobia and the animus of the traumatised war orphan.

Surely, in all of this the moral imperative for the Pakistani establishment – the recipient of billions of dollars of aid money for its war on terror – was to build the long abandoned FATA area from ground up, to invest in education, health and general welfare of its people. Sadly, that never happened. The aid money only made a few rich people richer.

But then there is also the matter of ideology. While TTP’s grievances are steeped in a complex mix of geopolitical and sociological realities, they couch their ideological aspirations in a strictly Islamic narrative – imposition of strict Sharia rule. In this they are eerily similar to radical groups like ISIS, AQ, Boko Haram, Al Shabab etc. And this is one more thing the Peshawar massacre shares with the 9/11 attack: that they were both perpetrated in the name of Islam. It would then stand to reason that there is a certain interpretation of Islam, albeit fringe, that has global appeal and is in the employ of those committing great acts of violence in its name. The fact that the said ideology is still alive, in fact has proliferated, in spite of 15 years of intense military engagement, suggests that military action alone is not enough. That such radical groups often justify their violence through a literal reading of the scriptures makes the need for Islamic reforms that much more urgent. Practical initiatives like increased military engagement, military courts, the 20-point National Action Plan and civic activism are a much needed temporary fix, but one might well ask how culling the landscape of all the poisonous plants will help while the seedbed lays menacingly unperturbed?