Pakistan’s prime minister promises day of reckoning with militants

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/17/pakistan-prime-minister-reckoning-militants

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Pakistan buried its slaughtered children on Wednesday, as the prime minister on Wednesday promised a day of reckoning with militants behind the attack and the country’s own history of backing some violent groups.

The brutal attack on a prestigious army school killed 148, mostly students, in a bloody eight-hour siege that horrified even a country numbed by years of bombings, assassinations and suicide assaults.

Facing a wave of anger and grief, Nawaz Sharif lifted a moratorium on the death penalty for terror-related cases, and announced a dramatic shift in government policy towards extremist groups.

“We announce that there will be no differentiation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban,” he said, referring to the Pakistani military’s long history of clandestine support for those militant groups it believes support its own strategic objectives.

These have mostly been groups Islamabad sees as offsetting Indian influence, from violent separatist groups in Kashmir, to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“We have resolved to continue the war against terrorism till the last terrorist is eliminated,” he told a select group of politicians summoned to Peshawar, the site of the attack. “[The country] must never forget these scenes.”

Sharif also echoed army commanders’ vows to step up military action against strongholds along the porous mountain border with Afghanistan.

With the country beginning three days of mourning, the army’s chief of staff, Raheel Sharif, headed to Kabul for talks with the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, over tackling senior members of the Pakistani Taliban, based in the country’s lawless east.

His top priority will almost certainly be to secure Afghanistan’s cooperation in capturing Mullah Fazlullah, the group’s leader.

The tragedy that prompted the visit gave it urgency and gravity, but the irony of Pakistan’s request will be lost on few in the region.

For years Kabul has begged Pakistan to root out the Afghan Taliban leadership hiding inside its border, including its leader Mullah Omar. Instead they have been tolerated, and sometimes supported, Afghan intelligence officials say.

In recent years though, the extremist violence that has tormented Afghanistan so long has become increasingly familiar across the border.

The school assault was unprecedented in its bloody sadism towards children, but comes after a string of other high-profile attacks, including on the international airport in the port city of Karachi.

Seven members of the Pakistan Taliban, or Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), scaled the school wall on Tuesday morning, some wearing suicide vests.

Inside they opened fire on students and teachers, including dozens attending a first aid training session in a large auditorium, leaving the rows of seats slick with blood and the walls pockmarked with bullets.

The siege lasted about eight hours, with commandos killing some of the attackers, while others blew themselves up. Some of the dead were buried on Tuesday, but most of the funerals were to be held on Wednesday.

The father of one of the children, Akhtar Hussain, a labourer who said he had worked for years in Dubai to provide for his family, told the Associated Press: “They finished in minutes what I had lived my whole life for, my son.”

As he buried 14-year-old Fahad, he said: “That innocent one is now gone in the grave, and I can’t wait to join him. I can’t live any more.”

Analysts have long argued that the toll of insurgent attacks on Pakistani society and the army itself would eventually prompt a shift in attitudes inside the military, whose secretive ISI intelligence agency is widely believed to manage relations with extremist groups.

But the sweeping crackdown Kabul wants has so far not materialised, and Afghanistan has been reluctant to chase Pakistani militants while its own enemies are left in relative peace, drawing the two governments into a cycle of bloodshed and destruction.

That was reinforced on Wednesday, when insurgents attacked a bank in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, just as funeral rites for Tuesday’s victims were getting under way. At least 10 people were killed, Reuters reported.

Ghani, Afghanistan’s new president, wants to reset ties with Islamabad, and appears convinced that collaboration with Pakistan is the only path to peace for either nation.

“The time has arrived for Afghanistan and Pakistan to act together against terrorism and extremism with honesty and effectiveness,” Ghani said in a statement after the latest meeting, which also included the ISI chief, General Raheel.

Neither side disclosed the content of the meeting, but Pakistan said it had shared intelligence with Ghani.

“We are hoping that we will see strong action from the Afghan side in the coming days,” the Pakistani army spokesman Major General Asim Saleem Bajwa said, adding that the new leadership in Kabul had shown it was willing to act.

However, Ghani is also a fierce nationalist, and is unlikely to agree any kind of long-term assistance tracking Pakistani Taliban in his country unless it is matched by a genuine crackdown on Afghan fighters sheltering in Pakistan.

It remains to be seen if Pakistan’s military leadership shares the prime minister’s resolve, or if the civilian government will be able to crack down on groups who have carved out important roles for themselves providing services in a poor country with a weak state.

Their ambiguous position was on display at one of the funerals attended by the Guardian, where men with FIF placards mingled among the crowd.

A welfare organisation that makes a point of helping out at the scene of disasters, the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation is the “welfare” wing of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), which is in turn the front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the organisation accused of staging the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. All three organisations are proscribed by the UN’s terrorism sanction committee.

On Tuesday Hafiz Saeed, the leader of JuD and a man subject to a $10m US bounty, took to the airwaves to largely exonerate the TTP of their crimes. He said the school massacre been masterminded by India.