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Pakistan has banned toy weapons. It has restricted the display and use of arms in films and television. There are euphoric claims that the government has successfully wiped out poppy crops. It would seem Pakistan has managed to turn the clock back, disarming its populace and eradicating drugs, and redicovering its pristine, innocent self.
Experience, however, forbids optimism. The ongoing campaign against guns and drugs, the two menacing problems Pakistan has been reeling under in the last decade, could well lose momentum as most government drives do. Once the initial enthusiasm and fanfare ebbs, it's back to cynicism and indifference—of letting the underbelly fester and spread.
Yet, for the moment, Pakistan ought to be applauded for belatedly launching a countrywide deweaponisation campaign and supporting the UN-sponsored drive against narcotics. But, perhaps, it could have adopted a more rational approach, targeting private armies and fundamentalist brigades at the outset. This could have convinced people about the government's seriousness.
The country today bristles with armed units which have the temerity to call themselves Sipah, Lashkar, Jaish (meaning armies or soldiers), consequently undermining the notion that the state is the sole repository of all coercive powers. The campaign against illegal weapons should have had the government disarming these militant groups, instead of focusing on unlicensed arms people possess. Indeed, they are a lesser menace to peace and security than those groups wedded to militancy.
The guns-drugs problem is closely entwined with the 18-year-long Afghanistan chaos. As a frontline state, and because of the army's deep involvement in the crisis, Pakistan couldn't escape its deadly repercussions. In certain phases, the war was fought from Pakistan's soil. No wonder it has now entered a 'post-war' period—drugs and arms are the natural concomitants.
Yet, it would be wrong to describe Pakistan as an innocent victim. For instance, Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues (ogd), a Paris-based independent research organisation, recently accused Pakistani intelligence agencies of using drug money to fund various militant organisations operating in Jammu & Kashmir, Muslim areas in China, and funnelling nacro-money to assist Osama bin Laden. The ogd report says all these movements, including parties espousing religious ideology in Pakistan itself, enjoy financial support from Pakistani arms-dealers living in Belgium, especially those belonging to an extremely influential family from the Frontier Province. Obviously, no Pakistani would like to believe these worrying allegations and would give the benefit of the doubt to the ruling establishment. But it is strange that the government hasn't countered the ogd's charge.
The ogd report apart, it's indeed a fact that the military establishment has often been accused of indulging in the growing narcotics trade. For instance, Nawaz Sharif, in a 1994 interview, publicly accused the powerful military establishment of financing covert operations through drug smuggling. He alleged that in '91, the army chief and the isi chief had proposed to him a detailed blueprint for selling heroin to pay for the country's covert military operations. The army, however, strongly refuted these charges. The UN figures are more damning—out of a population of about 140 million, Pakistan has an estimated four million drug addicts, about half of them hooked to heroin.And this figure balloons by 1,00,000 annually. Similarly, gun-running is well-organised, with over 300 illegal arms factories that together employ something like 40,000 people.
The influx of illegal weapons and the thriving narcotics trade came as a boon to the deprived sections of society. Gun-running and drugs enabled many to amass wealth quickly. Its flip side was the sudden spiralling of crime-rate in urban centres and their peripheries, enervating investors and adversely impacting the economy.
Armed groups have mushroomed, either
caught in internecine conflicts or using Pakistan as a sanctuary for their
battles across its borders. For one, Pakistan is engaged in the ongoing
dispute with India about the status of j&k. A large number of these
groups have bases on the Pakistan side of the LoC and receive political
and material support from the establishment.
Similarly, Pakistan has been intimately
involved in the Afghan conflict for more than two decades, supporting a
variety of armed groups engaged in resistance to the erstwhile Soviet Union
and then subsequently taking sides in the civil war that followed Moscow's
withdrawal from Afghanistan. The existence of these militant groups could
be justified as a foreign policy imperative, necessary for the country's
national security.
But then, it's often difficult to control the debilitating impact of gun culture. For instance, community disputes in Pakistan increasingly snowball into armed conflicts. Sindh, for instance, periodically reverberates with gunfires and grisly killings because of the ethnic tussle involving parties drawing support among the indigenous Sindhi community and those purporting to represent Mohajirs. More recently, though, the Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (jsqm) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (mqm), both espousing a separatist ideology, have reached a tacit alliance. The self-exiled mqm supremo, Altaf Hussain, has been talking about a unilateral declaration of independence, threatening his organisation might take recourse to armed struggle to achieve its "cherished goal" of independence. These developments make it imperative for the government to immediately locate and confiscate the arms caches of the mqm.
Equally important is to disarm sectarian outfits and communal terrorists, who have indiscriminately targeted mosques and other places of worship and assassinated prominent personalities of the rival sects and communities. The government can't but combat and extirpate communalism. But this cannot be done unless it's prepared to take punitive action against those jehadi organisations that preach hatred against other sects of Muslims or against non-Muslims.
The military government erroneously believes that deeni madaris (religious schools) haven't fuelled terrorist activities. With religious schools providing footsoldiers in Afghanistan, and with guns readily available, the military regime has to not only disarm militant groups but also wage an ideological battle.
(Columnist Amir Mir occasionally
contributes to Outlook.)
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