Pakistan to pursue terrorists even outside its borders
Pakistan to pursue terrorists even outside its borders
(about 7 hours later)
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan’s prime minister vowed Wednesday to pursue terrorists even outside the country’s borders and lift a moratorium on the death penalty as mass funerals were held for at least 148 people, mostly schoolchildren, killed the day before in a Taliban siege at an army high school.
KABUL — As the death toll rose to 148 from Tuesday’s massacre at a military-funded high school, the crisis sent Pakistani leaders rushing to Kabul on Wednesday to make a rare request for Afghanistan’s help in fighting Islamist terrorism on both sides of their volatile border.
“We cannot take a step back from this war against terrorism,” Nawaz Sharif said, addressing a hastily called meeting of political parties in Peshawar, where Tuesday’s horrific school attack occurred.
After years of mistrust and enmity, it was a moment of truth for the neighboring Muslim countries, both facing new bouts of terrorism that threaten to reinforce their mutual suspicions and ignite more violence as Western forces finalize their withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet the moment also offered an opportunity to replace finger pointing with something closer to common cause.
The fight would spill over “on the Afghan side of the border,” he added, after speaking with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
In Pakistan, officials hinted that the Taliban militants who attacked the school in the border city of Peshawar had been based in the Afghan tribal belt. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, on a visit to Peshawar, vowed to pursue militants beyond Pakistan’s borders and said his government “will not rest until every terrorist is killed.”
It was not clear what actions that might entail. But such a cross-border offensive would mark a significant shift in Pakistan’s tactics against Taliban militants, whose strongholds and supply lines straddle the frontier .
The prime minister, facing public pressure to take tough measures after the school attack, also approved a committee’s decision to lift Pakistan’s 2008 moratorium on the death penalty, officials said. Pakistan has about 9,000 prisoners on death row, including about 900 convicted on terror-related charges.
Sharif said a meeting between Pakistani officials and Ghani in Kabul was “successful,” adding that “important decisions were made that need to be implemented.”
Ashraf Ghani, the recently inaugurated Afghan president, appeared to agree that action could be taken on Afghan soil against suspects from the Pakistani Taliban. He seemed unlikely, however, to allow Pakistani forces to pursue them there, given the history of bilateral tensions and clashes along the porous border.
Meanwhile, prayer vigils were held across Pakistan to mourn those killed Tuesday after seven Taliban gunmen — with explosives strapped to their bodies — scaled a back wall to enter the Army Public School and College, which includes many students whose parents serve in the armed forces.
The hastily arranged meeting in Ghani’s palace included Gen. Raheel Sharif, Pakistan’s army chief, and Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces here. Afterward, Ghani issued a statement saying, “Now is the time for Afghanistan and Pakistan to act honestly and effectively with each other to fight against terrorism.”
A death toll of 141 was announced hours after security forces reclaimed control of the school and killed the attackers. But the figure rose overnight to at least 148, according to the Associated Press, with more than 120 people injured.
Calling the assault on the Pakistani school an attack on “Afghans and Muslims everywhere,” Ghani declared that the perpetrators were “the same ones who attacked our children” in a suicide bombing last month at a volleyball match in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province that killed more than 45 people.
Students and teachers were shot and some of the female teachers burned alive in an attack that shocked a country accustomed to terrorist assaults. Army commandos fought the militants in a day-long battle.
Gen. Sharif expressed optimism that both Ghani and the coalition will help target Pakistani Taliban leaders who take refuge across the border. A military statement said the general and his aides had shared “vital elements of intelligence” with the Afghan leader about the Peshawar attack and that Ghani had promised to prevent Afghan soil from being used for terrorist activities.
The assault was an apparent retaliation for an ongoing army operation, after years of ambivalent policies toward homegrown Islamist militants.
Some analysts and social media users in Afghanistan expressed deep suspicion about Pakistan’s motives and warned Ghani not to trust its leaders. Many Afghans — including former President Hamid Karzai — are convinced that Pakistan’s intelligence service has been behind many terrorist attacks in Afghanistan in recent years, including a dozen in the capital over the past month.
A statement posted Wednesday by the Pakistani Taliban said it took the “extreme step” of targeting the school in response to the deaths of children and other civilians from the military’s crackdowns in Taliban-held areas, according to the SITE monitoring service, which tracks militant groups.
It is also widely believed among Afghans that Pakistan and its security establishment seek to dominate their poorer and weaker nation and to use it as a source of strategic depth in countering the regional influence of Pakistan’s arch-rival, India.
The Taliban statement, attributed to spokesman Muhammad Khurasani, listed demands that included a halt to military operations in tribal areas. Otherwise, it warned, there will be more attacks against “all the organizations associated with security forces.”
Atiqullah Amarkhail, a retired Afghan army general in Kabul, dismissed Gen. Sharif’s visit as an attempt to distract attention from Pakistan’s failure to prevent the school attack. He called it a “maneuver” to pressure Ghani’s government and “pretend those responsible for the deadly attack in Peshawar are based in Afghanistan.”
The military said Wednesday that it has carried out 20 airstrikes since the school massacre, killing 57 militants.
“Pakistan will never give up destabilizing Afghanistan,” said one Afghan, Fatel Arezoi, in a Facebook post Wednesday night. “Gen. Raheel is here to get support from the Afghan army to destroy the TTP [Pakistani Taliban]. . . . Do not help him. The TTP is Pakistan’s problem, not ours.”
In a sign that Pakistan could be preparing to expand its offensive, the country’s powerful military chief made an emergency visit to Kabul to meet with Ghani and Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan.
In Pakistan, prayer vigils were held across a nation in shock and mourning after the unprecedented attack, in which seven Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers stormed the school, then systematically gunned down scores of teachers and students before being killed by army commandos after a lengthy battle.
Speaking to reporters, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, chief spokesman for the Pakistan military, said army intelligence officers believe they know where the attack was masterminded. Bajwa declined to pin the blame on militants residing in Afghanistan, but many Pakistani Taliban leaders are thought to reside in eastern Afghanistan.
Amid the outpouring of national grief, there were signs that the attack had temporarily united Pakistan’s political opposition behind Nawaz Sharif and the military. On Wednesday night, politician Imran Khan announced that his Movement for Justice party was ending its four-month protest campaign against the Sharif government.
“We will not rest unless and until every terrorist is killed,” Sharif said at the Peshawar meeting. “We cannot take a step back from this war against terrorism. There is no room for that, especially after the tragedy that occurred at the school.”
The army’s chief spokesman, Maj Gen. Asim Bajwa, hinted that army officials know where the attack was orchestrated. He did not specifically blame militants living in Afghanistan, but he refused to rule out a cross-border military operation to try to capture or kill more Pakistani Taliban leaders.
The prime minister also approved the decision of a ministerial committee to lift the death penalty, said Mohiuddin Wani, an official close to the Pakistani leader.
It has been widely reported that Pakistani Taliban leaders use Afghan tribal areas as hideouts, just as the Afghan Taliban has long used Pakistan as a base. They share a common religious agenda but operate separately. An Afghan Taliban spokesman Tuesday condemned the Peshawar school bombing, as did some Islamist groups in Pakistan.
“It was decided that this moratorium should be lifted,” he said. “The prime minister approved.”
Until now, despite years of terrorist attacks, Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment has remained ambivalent about taking on the domestic Islamist fighters, in part because they function as proxies in Pakistan’s 50-year rivalry with India and in part because they are popular with many Pakistanis.
The mass targeting of children, in a military zone in the northwestern city of Peshawar, drew condemnation from around the world, as well as from across Pakistan’s political and religious spectrums — a rare display of unity in a country where Islamist violence is often quietly accepted and sometimes defended. Taliban leaders in Afghanistan also condemned the attack.
A Pakistani military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said one of the militants killed at the school had “well-established” links to Pakistani Taliban leadership in Afghan border areas and that officials had traced phone calls back to Afghanistan.
The government declared a three-day mourning period, starting Wednesday. Some of the funerals were held overnight, but most of the children and staff killed were due to be buried Wednesday.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, formally known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, issued a statement describing the assault on the school, naming the commanders involved and laying out the group’s motives. The statement declared that for the past six years, Pakistan’s “evil army has been targeting innocent Muslims” in the tribal areas and had killed thousands of them in military raids .
Some analysts suggested that after years of suicide bombings and attacks on markets, mosques, hotels and military bases, the insurgents had finally gone too far and that widespread public outrage over this attack might signal a decisive turn in the nation’s — and the government’s — reluctance to fully take on the Taliban.
“Due to this historical injustice,” the statement said, the militant group was “forced to take the extreme step” of attacking a school where the sons of army officers were studying. It demanded that the “genocide” of tribal Muslims be stopped, as well as the arrests and killings of militants’ relatives. Otherwise, it warned that the Pakistani Taliban would be “forced to attack all organizations associated with the security forces.”
The massacre was the most intimate assault to date on Pakistan’s military, the nation’s most respected and powerful institution. The only comparable incident was in December 2009, when a small group of assailants penetrated army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi and killed more than 30 people praying at an army mosque.
Craig reported from Peshawar, Pakistan. Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar and Shaiq Hussein in Islamabad contributed to this report.
The death toll Tuesday also rivaled one of the highest in Pakistan in recent years, when suicide bombings in 2007 killed about 150 people in the port city of Karachi during celebrations to welcome former prime minister Benazir Bhutto back to Pakistan after years in self-exile. Bhutto was assassinated soon after.
Yet even when previous attacks have drawn strong condemnation and vows of action from military officials, Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment has remained deeply ambivalent about taking on the domestic Islamist forces and has often been accused of playing a double game in its partnership with the West in the war on terrorism.
One chief reason is that such extremist groups have long acted as proxies in Pakistan’s rivalry with neighbor India, an issue that trumps all others for Pakistan’s security leaders. Terrorist attacks are routinely decried as the work of unknown foreign hands.
Pakistan’s civilian leaders, for their part, have long deferred to the army on security and foreign policy, and they have been reluctant to act against Islamist violence, for fear of alienating the nation’s deeply religious Muslim masses and organized groups.
“Despite this national tragedy, I don’t see any chance of the nation as a whole building an anti-terrorism narrative,” said Aftab Khan Sherpao, a veteran Pakistani legislator from the northwest.
He noted that a variety of religious and political leaders have “deep sympathy” for the militants.
“For now they may tone down their support,” he said, but in time they will “start showing their true colors again.”
The army, however, has always been attuned to public opinion, and Tuesday’s attack provoked a remarkably swift, broad and emphatic outpouring of revulsion and anger.
“Today is the saddest day of the history of our nation,” said Haniyah Siddiqui, 18, who was shopping in Karachi. “It is high time to make up our mind to fight terrorists and eliminate them in toto, not just mourning or condemning the tragic incident.”
Sharif, who rushed to Peshawar, denounced the assault as a “cowardly act” and vowed to continue the military action “until the menace of terrorism is eliminated” from Pakistan. “The nation needs to get united and face terrorism,” he added. “We need unflinching resolve against this plague.”
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager and Taliban attack survivor who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting girls’ education, said from Britain that she was “heartbroken” by “these atrocious and cowardly acts” but vowed that even as she and millions mourn the students’ deaths, “we will never be defeated.”
Her denunciation was echoed by Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa Islamist movement, whose followers were blamed for a 2008 terrorist siege on the Indian city of Mumbai. Saeed said the attack was “carried out by the enemies of Islam. It is open terrorism. . . . These are barbarians operating under the name of jihad.”
Even the Afghan Taliban, which operates separately from the Pakistani group but shares a religious agenda, took the unusual step of indirectly condemning the attack. A statement from spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said, “The intentional killing of innocent people, women and children are against the basics of Islam, and this criterion must be considered by every Islamic party and government.”
The school, while open to the public, is funded by Pakistan’s army, and many students are children of military personnel based in Peshawar.
“My son was in uniform in the morning. He is in a casket now,” wailed one father, Tahir Ali, as he collected the body of his 14-year-old son, Abdullah, according to the Associated Press. “My son was my dream. My dream has been killed.”
Pamela Constable reported from Kabul and Daniela Deane from Rome. Brian Murphy and Karen DeYoung in Washington, Aamir Iqbal and Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad and Nisar Mehdi in Karachi contributed to this report.
