ISLAMABAD (AP) – Militant attacks are on the rise in Pakistan amid growing religiosity that has led to increased intolerance, prompting an expert to worry that the country could be overwhelmed by religious extremism.
Pakistani authorities are adopting the consolidation of religious beliefs among the population to bring the country closer. But it is doing just the opposite, creating intolerance and opening up spaces for a growing resurgence of militancy, said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of Pakistan’s Independent Institute for Peace Studies.
“Unfortunately, instead of helping to instill better ethics and integrity, this phenomenon fosters a vision of the tunnel” that fosters violence, intolerance and hatred, he recently wrote in a local newspaper. “Religiosity has begun to define Pakistani citizenship.”
Militant violence in Pakistan has escalated: just last week, four vocational school instructors advocating for women’s rights were traveling together when they were killed in a region bordering Pakistan. A death threat on Twitter against Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai drew an avalanche of trolls. They attacked the young champion of girls ’education, who survived the head of a Pakistani Taliban bullet. A pair of men with a motorcycle opened fire on a police checkpoint not far from the Afghan border and killed a young police officer.
In recent weeks, at least a dozen military and paramilitary personnel have been killed in ambushes, attacks and operations against militant hideouts, mainly in the western border regions.
A military spokesman said this week that the escalation of violence is a response to an aggressive military assault on militant hideouts in the border regions with Afghanistan and the reunification of split and deeply violent anti-Pakistani terrorist groups led by the Tehreek- e-Taliban. The group is driven by a radical religious ideology that advocates violence to apply its extreme views.
General Babar Ifitkar said reunified Pakistani Taliban have found a headquarters in eastern Afghanistan. He also accused neighboring hostile India of funding and equipping a reunified Taliban, which provided them with equipment such as night vision goggles, improvised explosive devices and small arms.
India and Pakistan routinely exchange allegations that the other uses militants to undermine stability and security at home.
Security analyst and member of the Center for Security and International Cooperation Asfandyar Mir said the reunification of a split militancy is dangerous news for Pakistan.
“The reunification of several splinters in the central organization (Tehreek-e-Taliban) is an important development, which makes the group very dangerous,” Mir said.
The TTP claimed responsibility for the Yousafzai shooting in 2012. Its former spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, who mysteriously escaped from Pakistan’s military custody to flee the country, tweeted the promise that the Taliban would kill her if she returned home.
Iftikar, in a briefing by foreign journalists this week, said Pakistani military personnel helped flee Ehsan, without detailing it. He said the soldiers involved had been punished and that efforts were being made to return Ehsan to custody.
The government contacted Twitter to close Ehsan’s account after he threatened Yousafzai, although at first the military and the government suggested it was a fake account.
But Rana, the commentator, said the official silence that welcomed the threatening tweet encouraged religious intolerance to resonate in Pakistani society.
“The problem is that religiosity has a very negative expression in Pakistan,” he said in an interview late Friday. “It has not been used to promote a positive and inclusive tolerant religion.”
Instead, successive Pakistani governments and their security establishments have exploited extreme religious ideologies to get votes, appease political religious groups, or target enemies, he said.
The 2018 general election that brought to power Imran Khan, who has become a cricket star politician, added to the allegations of support from the powerful military to hard-line religious groups.
These groups include the Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, whose one-point agenda is to maintain and propagate the country’s highly controversial blasphemy law. This law requires the death penalty for anyone insulting Islam and is most often used to resolve disputes. It often targets minorities, mostly Shiite Muslims, who make up about 15% of the majority of Pakistan’s 220 million Sunni people.
Mir, the analyst, said the increase in militancy has benefited from state policies that have been supportive or ambivalent towards militancy, as well as a sustained exposure of the region to violence. Most notable is the protracted war in neighboring Afghanistan and the slow-fire tensions between hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, two countries that possess an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
“More than extreme religious thought, the region’s sustained exposure to political violence, the power of militant organizations in the region, state policy that is supportive or ambivalent toward various forms of militancy … and the influence of Afghanistan’s policy is to incubate militancy in the region, “he said.
Mir and Rana noted the Pakistani government’s failure to alienate radical thinkers from militant organizations, as groups that seemed at least briefly shunning a violent path have returned to violence and rejoined the TTP.
Iftikar said the military has intensified attacks on the assembled Pakistani Taliban, pushing militants to respond, but only targets they can manage, which are soft targets.
But Mir said the assembled militants pose a greater threat.
“With the addition of these powerful units, the TTP has great strength for operations in the former tribal areas, Swat, Baluchistan and some in Punjab,” he said. “Overall, they improve TTP’s ability to launch attacks by insurgents and mass casualties.”