…and it’s about time that they did
The writing is on the wall. The signs are all there. It would appear we are heading off into an operation against the Taliban. Not now, maybe. Not a week from now, maybe. But it is definitely going to happen.
A bit of an anti-climax, this? After all, didn’t the recent elections replace political parties that were resolutely in favour of an operation against the militants with those who wanted to engage in peace talks? Yes, but the development isn’t unexpected. Anyone who looked beyond the rhetoric of these parties and followed their train of thought through realized the sheer impracticality of talks with these groups. What, exactly, would these talks have been about? Regardless of how one would slice it, the state only stood to lose and the militants only stood to gain.
Surprisingly, it didn’t even come down to that. The militants didn’t know it was Eid for them, as it were, and didn’t even agree to negotiations to begin with them. The attacks did not cease, as was thought. The state has to enter into operations against the militants.
It was generally expected that Imran Khan’s PTI would still hold out and use the operation’s negative fallout (that is a given, understood even by those in favour of a crackdown) as political leverage. The PTI, much like the League, proved during the last government that it isn’t above such shenanigans. But, judging from early reports, the PTI says that though it has reservations on the way the peace talks were attempted, it would support the army.
Before we proceed further, what would these two parties now have to say about the stance of the PPP and the ANP? No, those parties did not try to talk to the militants, would be the defence. But that is a grossly incorrect argument. If anything, those two parties’ attempts at dialogue were far more tangible.
But the boat still hasn’t sailed, really. When the going gets tough – and, as mentioned earlier, it will, with the previously relatively peaceful Punjab and Islamabad getting a taste of what the rest of the country had been facing – it remains to be seen whether the PTI will resist the impulse of trying to milk political mileage out of the bomb blasts. Till now, the League, getting uncomfortable by the PTI, was hesitant of taking action because of the fear mentioned above. Matters weren’t helped by the PTI’s rather cryptic stance on the issue. Consider, as an example, the party’s answer to why talks with the militants would succeed when they hadn’t when the ANP-PPP tried: because they will if they are doing the talking.
Only a Nixon can go to China. This phrase, emanating from American politics, has become the gold standard for describing the fact that, counter-intuitively, some issues can be resolved only by parties that are against such a resolution. These parties can “sell” this point of view to their support bases and somehow get away with it. The Lahore Declaration of 1999, for instance, was historic because two relatively hawkish parties on both sides of the Radcliff Award had signed it.
Perhaps we can finally move towards fighting the phantom that confronts us by getting the delusional forces on board.
