Another Operation in the Tribal Areas

There is a doctor that suggests surgery to his patient every once in a while. He has not got the diagnosis all right from the very start. Now, with his retarded mind, he can not see the fact that if the first step is wrong, he can not go far and the patient’s body is not a ground for his crooked lab experiments or show of faulty expertise. The whole body of the patient is bruised and in pain. The patient has filed cases against the doctor in hospital committees and at the nearest police station. The disease is still growing.

The patient and many colleagues of the doctor ask him whether the disease can be cured this way or if he is efficient enough to treat the disease. It may be so that the diagnosis is faulty or that the disease has got roots elsewhere, they suggest. It can be so that the patient gets opinions from other doctors, too. But the doctor is reluctant and now and then forces the patient to the operation theatre as if the damage will go away if he just proves that what he sees as the problem is the problem.

The Pakistani state is this doctor and the patient is the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas where we have been the target of every discrimination possible at the hands of the Taliban and the Pakistani state since the very start of the century and even before that. Since 1947, it has tried to alienate us by keeping the Frontier Crimes Regulations as part of its constitution and keeping the Pak-Afghan international border porous for all kinds of harmful elements to pass through. Manzoor Pashteen rightly calls it a ‘semi-permeable’ membrane where whatever the cell wants, gets passed through it.

With the rise of the Taliban, even after knowing its role in their gaining ground, the Pakistani state kept the population messed with and deprived of basic rights during its drama of war on terror. Our lives, education, health, economy, culture, and political lives; we’re all we lost to the Taliban and the military operations. Since 2018, we have been asking for the suffering to end and for missing people to be produced, we wanted the mines to be found and cleared, and we have been questioning every operation of the state. We have been protesting at every forum one can imagine, every human rights committee, and even have international agencies involved. The harm we faced being targeted and profiled as if we were the wrong-doers is getting unbearable. We were made homeless and we lost years of our lives to the Taliban/ AntiTaliban games. We have to live with the trauma of the whole episode for generations.

Now, instead of focusing on mending its ways and accepting its flaws and problems with its whole policy-making regime, the Pakistani state blamed it all on us and started making excuses when it should have made ways for us to see better days.

I got this idea when my cadet college fellows, after joining the army, started to talk like some Nazis who had found problems with the genes of the tribals, how the region needed harsh treatment, and why we deserved all we had to suffer. They would not talk much of the Taliban and the war on terror with its international proxy war nature. We were the scapegoats, the easy targets, the collateral damage.

It has been shown since the very start, that this state has negligence and conspiracy theory problems at their worst. Okara Peasant Movement was not seen as an indigenous uprising to talk of genuine grievances of the peasants whose lands the state stole but as a drama of people who have got patriotism problems. Bengalis needed help with the Bhola and other climate disasters but they were treated as step-children and punished for what they had not yet done: separation. Balochs have been the target of state violence and inquisitive terrors since the very start. Saraikis, Muhajirs, indigenous people, and all the social groups have grievances. The state thinks it has got ethnicity problems, no. It has got performance and delivery issues.

Pashtuns are the same. We have been talking of a resurge of Taliban everywhere across the Pashtun belt since the Taliban occupation of Kabul. The state paid near to no attention while imprisoning our MNAs and community leaders. Now, the Taliban are back in our bazaars and highways. Every other week there is a blast or target killing. It’s not that the state is ignorant of all this. Tehrik E Taliban Pakistan issues its announcements. It has been in discussion with the state through intermediaries. The state while branding us traitors and anti-state nuisances, kept its contact with the Taliban. The blasts and attacks grew and now the state wants a new surgery so that it can keep itself busy with games while covering the shit under the carpet.

The state would not put it into its skull that the people want no more dollar-wars, no more international sympathies, and no more double crosses and crooked zealotry in the name of anything whether it’s law and order, national security, political stability, and even religious moderation.

We university fellows and simple villagers are all asking each other two simple questions. First, is this true that we are gonna get operated on once again in the same old way by the same old egotist doctor with the faulty diagnosis still as the procedural roadmap? Let me tell you all, yes, it is true. Pakistan wants yet another operation in Waziristan and it wants to earn whatsoever it needs from the international community and its regional games.

Second, what are we gonna do? I have found so many different answers to this from so many people. It is true that the majority of us would want things to stay non-violent and would want that we suffer the least, but who can bet on things as uncertain as responding to a military operation once again? The youth is informed now and is angry, too.

Whosoever wants the Pakistani state to not break at unwanted places and get the taste of its designs would advise it to stop making the lives of Pashtuns miserable and start growing to be a responsible twenty-first-century social state. They would do so and the state would not agree. The fact that makes me sad and concerned is that the consequences will be harmful to us all. Faiz Ahmad Faiz was right; Pakistan will get worse because it will repeat what it has been doing and the burden will get unbearable for most of us.