The Nutcracker Within

File Photo. Arif Ali—AFP

Pakistan continues to misread the room.

Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri is determined to hit the streets with his disciplined Pakistan Awami Tehreek swarms to avenge the 2014 killings of his devotees by the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) government in Lahore. His return is sure to make Pakistan more politically unstable.

As if through orchestration, the terms-of-reference dialogue on the Panama Papers inquiry between the ruling PMLN and the combined opposition has finally broken down, and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will have to be ready to face street agitation demanding his ouster as a culprit in the money laundering scandal. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Imran Khan is already itching to topple the government through “peaceful” street protests. These didn’t remain peaceful the last time he led them.

The Pakistan Peoples Party, the big party backing the combined opposition campaign against Sharif, wants the prime minister to get the Rangers in Karachi to stop hounding Dr. Asim Hussain, a close friend of PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari, accused of corruption linked unconvincingly to terrorism. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement similarly wants the government to walk away from a case of murder involving its leader-in-exile Altaf Hussain.

Pakistan has been internally disturbed for long years. Law and order has been dicey for the past quarter century with no-go areas indicating loss of state sovereignty, making it possible for the strongmen of “unofficial” jihad to run private illegal courts. So far the world was sympathetic, despite muffled criticism in certain quarters about “safe havens” and “sanctuaries” for terrorists. In 2016, Pakistan is finally charged with cross-border terrorism in India and Afghanistan with Iran joining the aggrieved parties recently saying the Baloch separatists of Iran were also being trained as terrorists in Pakistan.

The situation is read all wrong on Pakistan’s cable news channels. The U.S. is being cursed for demanding the capture and rendition of certain Pakistanis and foreigners charged with terrorism. Pakistan denies the presence of individuals like Dawood Ibrahim without convincing even its own population and it pleads innocence for others like Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda-backed clerics like Maulana Abdul Aziz of Lal Masjid in Islamabad remain “untouchable” because their critics have a strange way of being killed by youths working for international terrorist organizations.

The reactive “siege mentality” is even more dangerous as it imagines India and the U.S., with help from Afghanistan and Iran, creating a “nutcracker” move against Pakistan by building a trade route linking India to Afghanistan and Central Asia through Iran. China is dragged in gratuitously on the Pakistani side ignoring the fact that it is not opposed to the Chabahar route and remains the biggest investor in Afghanistan and Iran, the two countries Pakistan now counts among its enemies. This will be an impossible war to take on without normal internal peace. The threat is from within, not from any “encirclement” from our neighbors.