Presence of foreign militants

Editorial

A LITTLE discussed but crucial aspect of the government’s dialogue with the banned TTP is the issue of militants of foreign origin who live or have found sanctuary in militant strongholds in Fata. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, the foreign militants, with an eye on the government-TTP dialogue, are keen to secure safe passage out of Pakistan and move on to other arenas of jihad, especially Syria.

But the principal concern here should hardly be what foreign militants living on Pakistani soil want. It should, instead, be how to devise a coherent strategy to nudge out foreign militants from Pakistani soil while simultaneously reducing their influence on the Pakistani militancy spectrum.

To begin with, what the government ought to demand is a full accounting of foreigners associated with militancy in Pakistan and living in the tribal areas. Given the long history of militancy in the region, there are a number of people from the time of the first Afghan jihad in the 1980s who, in their post-jihad career, settled down in Pakistan, married Pakistanis and are living here having long abandoned militancy and violence. Those particular individuals are of little consequence today and pose no obvious threat to the state.

However, there are other foreigners — in the scores, hundreds, perhaps even a couple of thousand — who live in Pakistan, are active in militancy and pose a very serious danger to this country and possibly other states too. Here the government will have to be more firm and insistent in its negotiations with the TTP. To begin with, the TTP must provide a comprehensive and verifiable list of active foreign militants living in Fata, both those living under the TTP’s umbrella of protection and otherwise.

Next, the TTP must guarantee the disarming and decommissioning of the foreign militants. That has been one of the basic conditions of any peace deal that governments have struck with militants over the past decade and it would be disastrous to move away from that at this point.

After that, the question of safe passage can be taken up on a case-by-case basis, but only to allow foreigners to return to their home countries. For obvious reasons, most foreign militants may prefer to move to yet another country to continue their so-called jihad, but the government here must be careful to take into account the potential ramifications: does Pakistan want to be blamed for exporting its militancy problem to other parts of the globe? The worrying bit is that the government has been quiet on the issue of foreign militants.

The TTP is unlikely to easily cut ties with or abandon its allies among foreign militants, so the lack of clarity and purposefulness on the government’s part may encourage the TTP to demand concessions even on this front. What exactly does the government have in mind here?