Pakistan is both a terror perpetrator and it’s victim. Do you agree? Examine.
The recent encounter, at Handwara in northern Kashmir, has once again brought to the fore the terrorist threat emanating from Pakistan.
Analysts of terrorism are well aware of the paradox that Pakistan is both possibly the leading perpetrator of terrorism and a major victim of the same menace.
The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 left the Pakistani military with a large surplus of Islamist fighters that it had trained and armed.
Pakistan decided to use this “asset” to intensify the insurgency in the Kashmir Valley and also a number of homegrown terrorist groups emerged.
But, it soon became clear that Pakistan had created trouble for itself as some terrorist organisations turned against their creator because Pakistan, under American pressure, decided to collaborate with the USA in the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has ideological affinity with the Afghan Taliban has even attacked an Pakistani army school killing 150 innocent children.
The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) have been engaged in attacks on Indian targets identified by Pakistan’s ISI, and also attacked within Pakistan as well, especially against the Shias and Sufi shrines.
Many of the terrorist groups were deliberately created by the Pakistani state to serve its purposes. However, its ability to control the various terrorist outfits is uneven and some of them have turned against their creator. It establishes the fact that using terrorist outfits for state objectives is a highly risky business whose blowback cannot be predicted and can have very negative consequences for the stability of the state itself.