Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It was with a sense of foreboding that the people of Swat staged a massive rally, demanding an end to the recent spate of violence in the valley. The playbook of the miscreants is the same as it was the last time the valley had been embroiled in a most terrible conflagration.
The day after Malala Yousafzai came to Pakistan to visit the victims of the floods, a school van was attacked in her native valley, harking back to the times when she was attacked exactly a decade ago, in almost exactly similar circumstances. This is a vicious cycle that does not show any sign of abating.
Obviously, it is the security establishment that should take most of the blame in this situation, but the political class, when it comes to how to deal with the establishment’s peculiar style of managing militancy. MNAs Mohsin Dawar and, till he was still out of jail, Ali Wazir, kept on reminding the rest of the parliament, during the fleeting time that they were given the microphone on the floor of the house, that the militants are regrouping all over the former tribal areas and beyond. Whereas, the rest of the then ruling PTI had chosen to ignore these cautionings, it was, ironically, Swat’s very own Murad Saeed, who had vociferously attacked Dawar for spreading lies and misinformation against the security agencies. Staying quiet on the emerging storm in his home constituency because of political expediency is one thing; rubbishing anyone who does speak out, however, isn’t quite forgivable. On the flipside, the time is right for people like Mohsin Dawar, who has pockets of support in all areas that were affected by militancy, including Swat, to bury the hatchet and completely own the current uprising against militancy.
There is no way that the larger situation can be resolved without the political government, both federal and provincial, being in the driving seat of monitoring and, if not designing, then at least signing off on design, of the anti-militancy policy, rather than all this being in the hands of an opaque and unanswerable military bureaucracy. That is the way this cookie crumbles the world over. If we plan to treat the disease, and not just the symptoms anyway.
