ISLAMA BATH (AP) – Militant attacks are on the rise in Pakistan amid a growing religiosity that has led to greater intolerance, leading to one expert overpowering the country through religious extremism.
Pakistani authorities accept the strengthening of religious faith among the population to bring the country closer together. But it does just the opposite, creates intolerance and allows for a creeping revival in militants, said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of the independent Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
“Unfortunately, instead of instilling better ethics and integrity, this phenomenon encourages a tunnel vision that encourages violence, intolerance and hatred,” he recently wrote in a local newspaper. Religion has begun to define Pakistani citizenship. ‘
Militant violence in Pakistan has increased: in the past week alone, four vocational school instructors working for women’s rights traveled together when they were shot dead in a Pakistani border region. A Twitter death threat against Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has attracted an avalanche of trolls. They abused the young champion of girls’ training, who survived a Pakistani Taliban bullet. A couple of men on a motorcycle opened fire on a police checkpoint, not far from the Afghan border, killing a young police constable.
In recent weeks, at least a dozen military and paramilitary men have been killed in ambushes, attacks and operations against militant shelters, mostly in the western border regions.
A military spokesman said this week the escalating violence was a response to an aggressive military attack on militant shelters in regions bordering Afghanistan and the reunification of fragmented and violent anti-Pakistani terrorist groups led by the Tehreek-e-Taliban. The group is driven by a radical religious ideology that supports violence to enforce its extreme views.
Gen. Babar Ifitkar said the reunited Pakistani Taliban had found headquarters in eastern Afghanistan. He also accuses India’s hostile neighbor of financing and equipping a reunited Taliban, and supplies equipment such as night-vision goggles, improvised explosives and small arms.
India and Pakistan regularly deal with allegations that the other militants use to undermine stability and security at home.
Security analyst and fellow of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Asfandyar Mir, said the reunification of a shattered militant country was dangerous news for Pakistan.
“The reunification of various splinters in the (Tehreek-e-Taliban) central organization is an important development that makes the group very dangerous,” Mir said.
The TTP claimed responsibility for Yousafzai’s shooting in 2012. Its former spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, who mysteriously escaped from Pakistan’s military custody to flee the country, tweeted a promise that the Taliban would kill her. when she returns home.
Iftikar, in a briefing by foreign journalists this week, said Pakistani military personnel aided Ehsan’s escape without expanding it. He said the soldiers involved had been punished and that efforts were being made to arrest Ehsan.
The government took to Twitter to block Ehsan’s account after threatening Yousafzai, although the military and government initially suggested it was a fake account.
But Rana, the commentator, said the official silence that greeted the looming tweet unnoticed religious intolerance 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 the positive, inclusive tolerant religion.”
Instead, successive Pakistani governments as well as its security institutions have exploited extreme religious ideologies to gain votes, appease political religious groups or target enemies, he said.
The general elections in 2018 that brought to power Imran Khan, appointed by the cricketer, were caught up in allegations of support from the powerful army for hardline religious groups.
These groups include the Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, whose one-point agenda upholds and propagates the country’s deeply controversial blasphemy law. The law requires the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam and is mostly used to settle disputes. It is often targeted at minorities, mostly Shiite Muslims, who make up about 15% of Sunni Pakistan’s 220 million people.
Mir, the analyst, said the increase in militants benefited from state policies that were either supportive or ambivalent towards militants, as well as the region’s continued exposure to violence. Most notable is the protracted war in neighboring Afghanistan and the simmering tensions between hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, two countries that have a nuclear arsenal.
“More than extreme religious thinking, the region’s continued exposure to political violence, the power of militant organizations in the region, state policies that are supportive or ambivalent towards various forms of militancy … and the influence of Afghanistan’s politics militants in the region, ”he said.
Mir and Rana both pointed to the Pakistani government’s failure to pull radical thinkers away from militant organizations, as groups that appeared at least briefly to avoid a violent path returned to violence and rejoined the TTP. .
Iftikar said the army had intensified attacks on the reunited Pakistani Taliban and pressured the militants to respond, but only targets they can handle are soft targets.
But Mir said the reunited militants pose a greater threat.
“With the addition of these powerful units, the TTP has great power for operations in the former tribal areas, Swat, Baluchistan, and some in Punjab,” he said. “Collectively, it improves TTP’s ability to carry out rebellious and mass casualty attacks.”