Beyond loose nukes

As Pak army's policy unravels, there is nothing to suggest it is ready to change course

Last week's brazen attack by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants on the aeronautical complex in Kamra, north-west of Islamabad, has drawn renewed international attention to the spectre of loose nukes next door. That the jihadis might lay their hands on parts of Pakistan's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal has long worried strategic communities around the world. Pakistan's air force, which runs the Kamra complex, denied that the facility stores nuclear weapons. The media focus on loose nukes in Pakistan obscures the more important problem. It has to do with the growing strike capabilities of the TTP and the reluctance of Rawalpindi, where the Pakistan army is headquartered, to confront the challenge. The TTP is not merely threatening the security of Pakistani nuclear arsenal. It wants to overturn the Pakistani state.

The latest attack has come amidst reports that the army is planning to confront the TTP militants holed up in North Waziristan. Such military campaigns in the recent past have been half-hearted and unsuccessful. They have only reinforced TTP's determination to hit back at the heart of Pakistan's military establishment. It might be recalled that days after the US Special Forces executed Osama bin Laden, the TTP struck at a naval base in Karachi. If the Pakistan army has been a reluctant partner in the US war on terror, jihadi groups see it as an agent of the "infidel" forces. Rawalpindi's strategy of hunting with the hounds and running with the hare has now left it without much credibility on either side.

For more than three decades, the Pakistan army has actively nurtured terror groups, armed them with weapons, training and ideology as part of a strategy to destabilise Afghanistan and India. Not surprisingly, this ecosystem has generated groups that want to overthrow the Pakistani state. Rawalpindi has responded with a policy of trying to protect groups that it saw as "strategic assets" against Kabul and Delhi and manage the groups threatening the Pakistani state. While that policy unravels, there is nothing to suggest that the Pakistan army is ready to change course. The internal crisis in Pakistan might have to get a lot deeper and the external pressures on it much stronger for Rawalpindi to rethink its strategy of promoting violent extremism.

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