By Agha Iqrar Haroon
There are news reports in mainstream media that the federal government had decided to curtail the power of the provincial government of KP or to remove Chief Minister Sohail Afridi with a better political arrangement that can care about national issues instead of only thinking about the jailed founding chairman of the PTI.
Government circles indirectly confirm such media reports. Meanwhile, security circles do not comment on media reports, but they express concerns about the situation indicating that Pakistan is right now going through an extremely critical phase where politicians and the public must think beyond what suits them; rather, they should think and act on what is needed to safeguard national interests.
Informal talks with the government as well as security circles suggest that something serious is cooking up in Kandahar and Kabul. Are Afghan Taliban planning to launch a full-fledged onslaught on KP province, where a political party is in power that has a soft corner for Afghan Taliban and publicly pays protection money to TTP terrorists?
Since Friday, September 18, some of official mosques in Afghanistan are reading religious decrees (Fatwas) for launching Jihad (holy war) against Pakistan. In these circumstances, any special arrangements or change in the government of KP should not be considered as a political move of the federal government, rather a strategic, security and national requirement because the KP government has virtually surrendered district by district to TTP terrorists. North Waziristan links with Bannu, which links with Kohat, which borders Attock district (Punjab) and, on the south, Mianwali district (Punjab). So, terrorists are not far away from Punjab as well as Islamabad if they are not curtailed with full force. The situation in Kohat is already grave, where TTP terrorists roam about freely at night in many areas of the district.
Reports from Kabul suggest that Afghan Taliban are building a Jihad narrative against Pakistan officially and shifting US-left heavy weaponry to Pak-Afghan bordering areas along with KP boundaries. Meanwhile, anti-Taliban social media also indicate that Taliban are planning something big against Pakistan, including full-fledged attacks on Pak-Afghan borders. However, such reports are not taking space in Pakistani media, nor does Pakistan’s Foreign Office indicate any such possibility. As a journalist who covered the Afghan War as a reporter during 1995-97 while working inside Afghanistan, I cannot rule out any such likelihood and have reason to believe that Afghan Taliban, with the funds and support of India, can do anything against Pakistan. Continued cargo shipments coming to Kabul airport from India are another reason to doubt that Afghan Taliban want to mend issues with Pakistan. It is pertinent to mention that giving any kind of Fatwa in Afghanistan is not possible without the permission of the office of Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada; therefore, one can understand that Jihad weapon is being greased against Pakistan whether Pakistani media is covering this development or not. Should Pakistan wait for an official decree of Hibatullah Akhundzada to wage the Jihad against Islamabad?
This grave situation is the ultimate result of a horrific decision former Prime Minister Imran Khan took to resettle TTP terrorists back in Pakistan after August 2021, when Afghan Taliban, through a settlement with the United States, took over control of Afghanistan. Pakistan Army and the nation won the war against TTP terrorists through Operation Zarb-e-Azb, which was started in 2014 after the tragic and horrific incident of the Army Public School Peshawar massacre. However, the table was turned around in favour of terrorists by Imran Khan by inviting 5,000-plus terrorists back to Pakistan. Since then, Pakistan is bleeding while the PTI government is sleeping.
Related Story: Operation Zarb-e-Azb— A War against Terrorism
Some video clips of former Prime Minister Imran Khan are available in social media that explain what he did with the country. In his interview with the BBC, he said that Afghan Taliban told him after coming to power to take citizens of Pakistan back to Pakistan, and these citizens, as Khan accepted, were terrorists and their families. He, in his interview, said that he had no option but to resettle and gel these terrorists into mainstream society or to kill them.
There is no doubt killing them could be the best option because they left Pakistan for Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan through Afghan Taliban-hosted and Indian-funded terrorism but Imran Khan opted to resettle them. He could also revoke their nationality of Pakistan and let them live inside Afghanistan. This revoking of the nationality of terrorists is a normal routine in many Central Asian countries that had citizens who left their countries for Syria and Afghanistan for global Jihad. Instead of killing terrorists or revoking their nationality, former Prime Minister Imran Khan not only resettled them back in cities but also spent public funds on their so-called rehabilitation, and he accepted this factor in video clips.
In his video clips, he also accepted that local people in KP, particularly in erstwhile FATA areas, strongly criticized his decision to resettle terrorists back in their areas, and in the video, he also mentioned that local people expressed their fears that when TTP terrorists would come back, they would take revenge from local people who stood with the state of Pakistan against terrorists. This is what actually happened: this factor breached the trust of local people of Pak-Afghan bordering areas in the state of Pakistan.
When TTP terrorists came back, they started massacring local people who were against terrorism. Now, local populations in bordering areas are afraid of providing ground information to security agencies about terrorist hideouts because they fear that today security forces are fighting against terrorists, tomorrow the government of Pakistan can settle problems with terrorists and can again invite them back to Pakistan, and they will again start killing everybody who provided information about them to security forces.
I recently travelled to some areas of KP and felt that people are still annoyed that they fought terrorists side by side with security forces against with a commitment that Pakistan is fighting the last war with them, but the government (Imran Khan government) invited them back and reinforced their position in bordering areas. It is difficult for the state to overcome this deficit of trust that had been developed by the reckless, senseless and insensitive decision of Imran Khan because, for the public, the decision was of the government of Pakistan. Whatever the country is facing today is directly linked with PTI leadership, and whatever the country gained through sacrificing over 80,000 Pakistanis, including 6,000 men in uniform, till 2018 went down the drain due to one terrible decision of Imran Khan. Unfortunate to say, his party has not learned anything and still it is supporting TTP terrorists as the founding chairman had done in the past.
