ISLAMABAD (AP) – Militant attacks are on the rise in Pakistan amid growing religiosity that has led to greater intolerance, prompting an expert to express concern that the country could be overwhelmed by religious extremism.
The Pakistani authorities agree to strengthen the religious faith among the people in order to bring the country closer. But it does the exact opposite, creating intolerance and opening room for a creeping resurgence of militancy, said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of the Independent Institute for Peace Studies in Pakistan.
“Unfortunately, instead of contributing to a better ethic and integrity, this phenomenon encourages a vision in the tunnel,” which encourages violence, intolerance and hatred, he recently wrote in a local newspaper. “Religiosity has begun to define Pakistani citizenship.”
Pakistan’s militant violence has escalated: in the past week alone, four vocational school instructors who have advocated for women’s rights were traveling together when they were shot in a Pakistani border region. A death threat on Twitter against Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has drawn an avalanche of trolls. They abused the young champion of girls’ education, who survived a Pakistani Taliban bullet in the head. Several men on a motorcycle opened fire on a police checkpoint not far from the Afghan border, killing a young police officer.
In recent weeks, at least a dozen soldiers and paramilitaries have been killed in ambushes, attacks and operations against militants’ hideouts, especially in the western border regions.
An army spokesman said this week that increasing violence was a response to an aggressive military assault on militant hideouts in neighboring Afghanistan and the reunification of fragmented and deeply violent anti-Pakistani terrorist groups led by Tehreek. -e-Taliban. The group is led by a radical religious ideology that supports violence in order to impose extreme opinions.
Gender. Babar Ifitkar said the reunified Pakistani Taliban had found a headquarters in eastern Afghanistan. He also accused India’s hostile neighbor of financing and arranging for a reunified Taliban, offering them equipment such as night-vision goggles, improvised explosive devices and small arms.
India and Pakistan routinely trade allegations that the other is using militants to undermine stability and security at home.
Security analyst and colleague at the Center for Security and International Cooperation Asfandyar Mir said the reunification of a divided militancy is dangerous news for Pakistan.
“The reunification of the various splinters in the central organization (Tehreek-e-Taliban) is a major development, which makes the group very dangerous,” Mir said.
TTP claimed responsibility for the shooting of Yousafzai in 2012. His former spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, who mysteriously escaped Pakistani military custody to flee the country, wrote on Twitter a promise that the Taliban would kill her if she did. return home.
Iftikar, in a briefing by foreign journalists this week, said Pakistani military personnel helped Ehsan escape without elaborating. He said the soldiers involved had been punished and that efforts were being made to bring Ehsan back into custody.
The government contacted Twitter to close 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 threatening tweet encouraged echoing religious intolerance in uncontrolled Pakistani society.
“The problem is that religiosity has a very negative expression in Pakistan,” he said in an interview late Friday. “It was not used to promote positive, inclusive tolerant religion.”
Instead, successive Pakistani governments as well as its security institutions have exploited extreme religious ideologies to gain votes, to appease political religious groups, or to target enemies, he said.
The 2018 general elections that brought cricket star politician Imran Khan to power were included in allegations of strong military support for strong-line religious groups.
These groups include the Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, whose one-time agenda maintains and propagates the country’s highly controversial blasphemy law. This law calls for the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam and is most often used to resolve disputes. It is often addressed to minorities, mostly Muslims, who make up about 15% of most Sunnis out of Pakistan’s 220 million people.
Mir, the analyst, said that the increase in militancy benefited from state policies that were either supportive or ambivalent towards militancy, as well as the region’s sustained exposure to violence. Most notable are the protracted war in neighboring Afghanistan and hot tensions between hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, two countries with 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, state policy that supports or is ambivalent about various forms of militancy … and the influence of Afghan politics incubate militancy in the region.” he said.
Both Mir and Rana stressed the failure of the Pakistani government to remove radical thinkers from militant organizations, as groups that seemed, at least in short, to avoid a violent path, returned to violence and joined the TTP.
Iftikar said the military has stepped up attacks on the reunited Pakistani Taliban, pushing militants to respond, but only targets they can handle, which are light targets.
But Mir said the reunited militants posed a greater threat.
“With the addition of these powerful units, TTP has a major force for operations in the former tribal areas, Swat, Baluchistan and some in Punjab,” he said. “Together, they improve TTP’s ability to launch attacks by insurgents and mass casualties.”