ISLAMABAD (AP) – Militant attacks are on the rise in Pakistan amid growing religiosity that has led to increased intolerance, leading one expert to express concern that the country could be overwhelmed by religious extremism.
Pakistani authorities are embracing strengthening religious beliefs among the population to bring the country closer together. But it does the exact opposite: it creates intolerance and provides room for a creeping resurgence of militancy, said Mohammad Amir Rana, executive director of the independent Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
“Unfortunately, instead of helping instill better ethics and integrity, this phenomenon encourages tunnel vision,” which encourages violence, bigotry and hatred, he recently wrote in a local newspaper. “Religiosity is beginning to define the Pakistani bourgeoisie.”
Militant violence in Pakistan has increased, with four vocational education teachers defending women’s rights traveling together when they were gunned down in a border area with Pakistan in the past week alone. A Twitter death threat against Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai drew an avalanche of trolls. They beat assault on the young champion of girl education, who survived a Pakistani Taliban bullet in the head. A few men on motorcycles opened fire at a police checkpoint not far from the Afghan border and killed a young police officer.
In recent weeks, at least a dozen military and paramilitary men have been killed in ambushes, attacks and operations against militant shelters, mostly in the western border regions.
A military spokesman said this week that the increasing violence is in response to an aggressive military attack on militant shelters in regions bordering Afghanistan and the reunification of fragmented and highly violent anti-Pakistani terrorist groups led by the Tehreek-e-Taliban. The group is driven by a radical religious ideology that embraces violence to enforce its extreme views.
General Babar Ifitkar said the reunited Pakistani Taliban have found headquarters in eastern Afghanistan. He also accused the hostile neighbor of India of financing and equipping a reunited Taliban by providing them with equipment such as night vision goggles, improvised explosives 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 fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Asfandyar Mir, said the reunification of a fragmented militancy is dangerous news for Pakistan.
“The reunification of different splinters in the central organization (Tehreek-e-Taliban) is an important development that makes the group very dangerous,” said Mir.
The TTP has claimed responsibility for the shooting of Yousafzai in 2012. Former spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, who mysteriously escaped Pakistani military custody to flee to the country, tweeted a pledge that the Taliban would kill her if they went to returned home.
Iftikar said in a briefing to foreign journalists this week that Pakistani soldiers helped Ehsan’s escape, without elaborating. He said the soldiers involved had been punished and attempts were being made to reinstate Ehsan.
The government reached out to Twitter to shut down Ehsan’s account after he threatened Yousafzai, although the military and government initially suggested it was a fake account.
But Rana, the commentator, said the official silence greeting the impending tweet encouraged religious intolerance to portray uncontrollably in Pakistani society.
“The problem is that religiosity in Pakistan is expressed very negatively,” he said in an interview late Friday. “It has not been used to promote positive inclusive tolerant religion.”
Instead, successive Pakistani governments and its security institutions have exploited extreme religious ideologies to gather votes, appease political religious groups or attack enemies, he said.
The 2018 general election that brought cricket-star turned politician Imran Khan to power was bogged down in allegations of the powerful military’s support for hard-line religious groups.
Among those groups is the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Party, whose one-point agenda is the enforcement and dissemination of the country’s highly controversial blasphemy law. That law requires the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam and is usually used to settle disputes. It often targets minorities, mostly Shia Muslims, who make up about 15% of the 220 million people, mainly Sunni Pakistan.
Mir, the analyst, said the increase in militancy has benefited from state policies that have been either supportive or ambivalent about militancy, as well as the region’s continued exposure to violence. Most notable are the protracted war in neighboring Afghanistan and the dormant tensions between hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, two countries with nuclear weapons.
“Beyond extreme religious thinking, the region’s continued exposure to political violence, the power of militant organizations in the region, state policies that are either supportive or ambivalent to different forms of militancy … and the influence of the politics of Afghanistan is incubating militancy in the region, ”he said.
Mir and Rana both pointed to the failure of the Pakistani government to pull radical thinkers away from militant organizations, as groups that at least briefly seemed to avoid a violent path have returned to violence and rejoined the TTP.
Iftikar said the military has stepped up attacks on the reunited Pakistani Taliban and prompted militants to respond, but only targets they can save, which are soft targets.
But Mir said the reunited militants pose a bigger threat.
“With the addition of these powerful units, the TTP has great strength for operations in the former tribal areas, Swat, Baluchistan and some in Punjab,” he said. “Taken together, they improve TTP’s ability to carry out insurgent attacks and mass casualties.”