Horrors of nurturing terror organisations

The nature of the beast in Pakistan — which, again, claimed scores of minority lives on Sunday — is such that the state it is fighting is complicit in letting it loose. That is a key fact which differentiates the terror unleashed in Peshawar and that suffered by civilians in Nairobi, Kenya. In pure forms, both acts of savagery are based on the ultra-extremist ideology that takes it upon itself to decide who is a Muslim, while making war on all others, be it non-Muslims or different sects within Islam or generally anyone not within that crazed circle of selfdefined identity.

But al Qaeda-linked terrorists might be attacking Kenya because of the action Kenyan troops have taken against the Somalia-based al Shabab group. In Peshawar, the brutality was probably committed by members of outfits that have, at some point or the other, received state patronage, or at least were tolerated.

The original sin in Pakistan was the belief that extremist groups could be used as a tool of domestic and foreign policy, and that they could always be controlled.

Later, as some of the groups thus spawned widened their operations, the logic of good extremist and bad extremist was applied. Even now, as the Pakistani state has acted against the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in some areas, it leaves it, and some of its affiliates, untouched in other areas. Unless Pakistan, more so the army, abandons this devilish dual approach, it will keep bleeding.

Even as a senior general was killed, days before the massacre on Sunday, the Nawaz Sharif-led regime was talking of negotiations with the TTP. That, instead, the beast needs to be tackled by junking the “dual approach” could be impressed upon Sharif if PM Manmohan Singh meets him in New York, as they attend the UN General Assembly. In fact, he should.