ISLAMABAD (AP) – Attacks by militants are increasing in Pakistan amid a growing religiosity that has brought greater intolerance, leading an expert to express concern that the country could be dominated by religious extremism.
Pakistani authorities are taking steps to strengthen religious belief among the population to bring the country closer. But it is doing just the opposite, creating intolerance and making room for a growing resurgence of militancy, said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of the independent Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies.
“Unfortunately, instead of helping to instill better ethics and integrity, this phenomenon is encouraging a tunnel vision” that encourages violence, intolerance and hatred, he wrote recently in a local newspaper. “Religiosity has started to define Pakistan’s citizenship.”
Militant violence in Pakistan has increased: just last week, four instructors from vocational schools that defended women’s rights were traveling together when they were shot in a region on the border with Pakistan. A death threat on Twitter against Nobel winner Malala Yousafzai attracted an avalanche of trolls. They abused the young champion of girls’ education, who survived a bullet in the head of the Pakistani Taliban. Two men on a motorcycle opened fire at a police station not far from the Afghan border, killing a young policeman.
In the past few weeks, at least a dozen soldiers and paramilitaries have been killed in ambushes, attacks and operations against militants’ hideouts, mainly in the western border regions.
A military spokesman said this week that the increase in violence is a response to an aggressive military attack on militants’ hideouts in regions bordering Afghanistan and the reunification of fragmented and deeply violent anti-Pakistan terrorist groups led by Tehreek -and-Taliban. The group is driven by a radical religious ideology that advocates violence to impose its extremist views.
General Babar Ifitkar said that the reunited Pakistani Taliban found a headquarters in eastern Afghanistan. He also accused neighboring hostile India of financing and equipping a reunified Taliban, providing them with equipment such as night vision goggles, improvised explosives and small arms.
India and Pakistan routinely negotiate allegations that the other is using militants to undermine stability and security at home.
Security analyst and member of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Asfandyar Mir, said the reunification of a fragmented militancy is dangerous news for Pakistan.
“The reunification of various factions in the central organization (Tehreek-e-Taliban) is a major development, which makes the group very dangerous,” said Mir.
The TTP took responsibility for the Yousafzai shooting in 2012. Its former spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, who mysteriously escaped Pakistan’s military custody to escape to the country, tweeted a promise that the Taliban would kill her if she returned home. .
Iftikar, at a news conference with foreign journalists this week, said Pakistan’s military aided Ehsan’s escape, without giving further details. He said the soldiers involved were punished and that efforts are being made to return Ehsan to custody.
The government contacted Twitter to close Ehsan’s account after he threatened Yousafzai, although the military and government initially suggested it was a fake account.
But Rana, the commentator, said that the official silence that greeted the threatening tweet encouraged religious intolerance to echo in unchecked Pakistani society.
“The problem is that religiosity has a very negative expression in Pakistan,” he said in an interview on Friday. “It was not used to promote a positive and inclusive tolerant religion.”
Instead, successive Pakistani governments, as well as their security establishments, have exploited extreme religious ideologies to garner votes, appease political religious groups or target enemies, he said.
The 2018 general election that brought cricket star Imran Khan to power was affected by allegations of support by the powerful military for hardline religious groups.
These groups include the Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, whose sole agenda is to maintain and propagate the country’s deeply controversial blasphemy law. This law requires the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam and is most often used to resolve disputes. It often targets minorities, mainly Shiite Muslims, who make up about 15% of the 220 million Pakistanis, mainly Sunnis.
Mir, the analyst, said the increase in militancy has benefited from state policies that support or are ambivalent in relation to militancy, as well as from the region’s sustained exposure to violence. Most notable are the protracted war in neighboring Afghanistan and the latent tensions between hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, two countries that have an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
“More than extreme religious thinking, the region’s sustained exposure to political violence, the power of militant organizations in the region, the state policy that supports or is ambivalent in relation to various forms of militancy … and the influence of Afghanistan to incubate militancy in the region, ”he said.
Mir and Rana pointed to the Pakistani government’s failure to remove radical thinkers from militant organizations, as groups that seemed, at least briefly, to avoid a violent path returned to violence and joined the TTP.
Iftikar said the military has stepped up attacks on the assembled Pakistani Taliban, forcing militants to respond, but only targets they can control, which are easy targets.
But Mir said the assembled militants posed a greater threat.
“With the addition of these powerful units, TTP has great strength for operations in the former tribal areas, Swat, Balochistan and some in Punjab,” he said. “Together, they improve TTP’s ability to organize insurgent and mass casualty attacks.”