essay on terrorism in pakistan pdf

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Terrorism in Pakistan: the psychosocial context and why it matters

Asad tamizuddin nizami.

1 Assistant Professor, Institute of Psychiatry, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, Benazir Bhutto Hospital, Rawalpindi Medical College, Rawalpindi, Pakistan; email moc.liamg@imazindasard

Tariq Mahmood Hassan

2 Assistant Professor, Providence Care Mental Health Services, Kingston, Canada

Sadia Yasir

3 Consultant Psychiatrist, Shifa International Hospital, Shifa College of Medicine, Islamabad, Pakistan

Mowaddat Hussain Rana

4 Director General, Centre for Trauma Research and Psychosocial Interventions, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan

Fareed Aslam Minhas

5 Head Institute of Psychiatry, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, Benazir Bhutto Hospital, Rawalpindi Medical College, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Terrorism is often construed as a well-thought-out, extreme form of violence to perceived injustices. The after effects of terrorism are usually reported without understanding the underlying psychological and social determinants of the terrorist act. Since ‘9/11’ Pakistan has been at the epicentre of both terrorism and the war against it. This special paper helps to explain the psychosocial perspective of terrorism in Pakistan that leads to violent radicalisation. It identifies the terrorist acts in the background of Pakistan's history, current geopolitical and social scenario. The findings may also act as a guide on addressing this core issue.

Most nations are unable to reach a consensus on a legally binding definition of ‘terrorism.’ The term seems emotionally charged and, as such, governments have been devising their own definitions. So far the United Nations has been unable to devise an internationally agreed-upon definition of terrorism. Terrorism is suggested to be ‘the use of intimidation or fear for advancement of political objectives’ (Kruglanski & Fishman, 2006 ). Since the ‘9/11’ incident, Muslim countries in particular feel emotionally threatened with the word terrorism and perceive it as synonymous with the acts of terror carried out by so-called Muslim extremist groups. This is further complemented in the media by the unjust linking of such horrendous terror attacks to Islamic Jihad.

Terrorism has brought an enormous burden on South Asian countries through the adverse impacts on their social, economic, political and physical infrastructure. Pakistan has suffered particularly excessively from the social, economic and human costs due to terrorism (Daraz et al , 2012 ). Surprisingly, Pakistan is portrayed as being on the front line in the international war against terrorism and at the same time has been wrongly labelled as a sponsor of international terrorism. Terrorism in Pakistan is a multidimensional phenomenon and, among many precipitating factors, the psychosocial factors play an important role. This paper attempts to address what we believe are significant psychosocial determinants to terrorism in Pakistan.

Historical developments

Pakistan is a Muslim majority nation in South East Asia with India to its east, Iran and Afghanistan to its west, China and the landlocked Asian countries to its north and the Arabian Sea to its south. Pakistan gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947 and is the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons – a nuclear device was detonated in 1998 – and is thus part of the informally named ‘nuclear club.’ Pakistan is a federation of four provinces (Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) and Balochistan), a capital territory (Islamabad) and a group of federally administered tribal areas in the north west, along with the disputed area of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan is the world's sixth most populous country with an average population density of 229 people per km 2 (World Bank indicators; http://www.tradingeconomics.com/pakistan/urban-population-growth-annual-percent-wb-data.html ). Since independence in 1947, Pakistan has been challenged not only by the trauma inflicted by its colonial occupiers but also by the mass murder of people migrating to the ‘new’ country. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, looted, raped or burnt alive. At the same time, the stability of this fledgling country was significantly hampered by the lack of resources. Just a few years later, due to political instability and separatist movements and terrorism, the east wing of the country was separated from Pakistan; this paved the way to the creation of a new country, Bangladesh, in 1971 (Wadhwani, 2011 ).

The Soviet–Afghan war, which began in 1979, provided a breeding ground for terrorism in the region. A fundamental change was witnessed that altered the very character of the existing Pakistani society. Withdrawal of the Soviets revealed a Pakistani society that had been forced into one of violence and weaponisation, plaguing Pakistan with so-called ‘Kalashnikov culture’ and ‘Talibanisation’ (Wadhwani, 2011 ).

Pakistan's social landscape has for the most part been plagued with illiteracy, disease, insecurity and injustice. Since the 9/11 incident, Pakistan has been intricately linked with the many facets of the ‘war on terrorism.’ Some argue that Pakistan is a breeding ground for terrorist outfits, but it is certain that all of this havoc has resulted in the significant loss of innocent lives as well as loss of economic revenue. These fragile conditions provide a fertile ground for terrorism to grow.

Psychological influence

The act of carrying out terrorist activity does not come from a single moment of inspiration but rather from a complex process of cognitive accommodation and assimilation over accumulating steps. It is wrongly reductionist to label the terrorists as mad or psychopaths (Atran, 2003 ; Horgan, 2008 ). Terrorists’ motivation may involve a deep, underlying quest for personal meaning and significance. Several analyses of such motives have appeared in recent years. There are differences in these analyses regarding the type and variety of motivational factors identified as critical to terrorism. Some authors identified a singular motivation as crucial; others listed a ‘cocktail’ of motives (Sageman, 2004 ; Bloom, 2005 ).

The socioeconomic adversity combined with political challenges were bound to have a detrimental impact on the psyche of the average Pakistani. A terrorist adopts a dichotomous way of identifying their victims, the black-and-white thought that ‘I am good’ and ‘you are evil,’ with no intermediary shades of grey. This thinking leaves no doubt in their minds and they find it easier to kill their opponents with little or no sense of remorse or guilt.

The unmanned army drone strikes killed and maimed thousands of innocent civilians in poor and difficult to access regions of Pakistan. This infuriated people, leading them to take up arms against the perceived aggressors. This triggering of the relatives of the deceased to engage in such activity is the culture of revenge in Pakistan, which unfortunately can last for generations.

Self-sacrifice and martyrdom has been explicitly used in almost all religions and is aggressively exploited by terrorist outfits who groom suicide bombers using the ideology of Islamist martyrdom (Atran, 2003 ). Some have argued that suicide bombers may actually be clinically suicidal and attempting to escape personal impasse (Lankford, 2013 ). In grooming young impressionable adolescents, extremist organisations brainwash these adolescents into believing that the ultimate self-sacrifice by suicide bombing will elevate their stature in the eyes of God and send them straight to heaven. This is associated with massive financial compensations to the deceased family. Terrorist organisations in Pakistan, through this process of brainwashing, have been able to convert young impressionable Muslim adolescents into a ‘suicide bomber in six weeks’ (Nizami et al , 2014 ). In the current scenario of the existing war on terror, this complex process of recruiting young adolescents as suicide bombers seems irreversible.

The contribution of the religious schools

In the West, Madrassas (Islamic religious schools) have gained a reputation of being a sinister influence on young impressionable Muslims. These institutions are not completely regulated and can vary from a single room to large institutions offering schooling and boarding to hundreds of students at a time. A survey of just over 50 000 households in Pakistan found that children in Urdu-medium government schools and madrassas were from poorer households than those in English-medium private schools. The primary reason for parents to send their children to madrassas as opposed to mainstream schools was that these institutions provided a good Islamic education. The second most common reason was that the madrassa provided education that is low in cost along with the provision of food and clothing (Cockcroft et al , 2009 ).

Another survey indicated that in Pakistan only a minority of the religious schools promoted an extremist view of Islam (Bano, 2007 ). An interrogation of 79 terrorists involved in anti-Western attacks found that very few had attended a madrassa. This suggests that terrorist groups may selectively recruit better qualified people for technically demanding tasks (Bergen & Pandey, 2006 ). However, the religious seminaries have been implicated as playing the role of recruitment centres for the suicide bombers (Nizami et al , 2014 ).

In an effort to break this incorrect perception the Darul Uloom Deoband, the largest Islamic seminary in the world, hosted an anti-terrorist conference in 2008. This was attended by 6000 Imams declaring that ‘Islam is a religion of mercy for all humanity. Islam sternly condemns all kinds of oppression, violence and terrorism. It has regarded oppression, mischief, rioting and murder among sins and crimes’ (Press Trust of India, 2008 ). However, it is yet to be ascertained how many religious schools in Pakistan adopted this school of thought. With the revolution in the world of information technology, experts agree that the internet played an important role in the radicalisation and self-recruitment process into terrorist groups. Messages and videos on jihadi websites target the ‘soft spots’ of potential recruits and inflame their imagination (Kruglanski & Fishman, 2009 ).

The link between terrorism and mental disorder

With both mental disorder and terrorism in Pakistan being highly prevalent, it would be a fair assumption that the two may have a causal relationship. Walter Laqueur wrote that ‘all terrorists believe in conspiracies by the powerful, hostile forces and suffer from some form of delusion and persecution mania… The element of… madness plays an important role in terrorism’ (Silke, 2003 ).

However, apart from certain pathological cases, a causal connection between an individual's mental disorder and engagement in terrorist activity could not be established (Daraz et al , 2012 ). However, there can be a connection between an individual engaging in terrorist activity and developing a mental disorder as mental disorders worsen in stress, anxiety and depression.

The adverse impacts of terrorism lead the masses towards anomie and create the tendency towards suicide and mental illnesses (Daraz et al , 2012 ). Poor health, depressive symptoms, risky behaviours in young adults, personality variables, social inequalities, criminality, social networks and international foreign policy have all been proposed to be influential drivers for grievances that lead to radicalisation and terrorism (La Free & Ackerman, 2009 ).

It may well be that individuals with mild depression would be a better target for gradual psychological moulding. Female suicide bombers who are predominantly motivated by revenge as opposed to their male counterparts may have some degree of clinical depression (Jacques & Taylor, 2008 ). Personality traits are useless as predictors for understanding why people become terrorists. However, personality traits and environmental conditions are the contributing factors for terrorism (Horgan, 2008 ). There are protective and modifiable risk factors early on the path towards radicalisation. The benefits of early intervention have far reaching implications for preventing significant depressive symptoms, promoting wellbeing and perhaps social capital (Bhui et al , 2014 ).

By understanding, appreciating and addressing the psychosocial factors contributing to terrorism in Pakistan, one may find long-lasting solutions to the fall out on Pakistan's war against terror. This war has led to a loss of innocent human lives, compounded by the deep psychological scars for survivors which will undoubtedly persist for generations to come. An ongoing, concerted effort to gain peace and security in the region is essential and is the only way to counteract the revenge attacks and further brainwashing of young impressionable youths. These psychological determinants, however, are markedly different than terrorist activities in Western countries, where it seems that a different set of psychological rules apply.

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Terrorism in Pakistan has declined, but the underlying roots of extremism remain

Subscribe to the center for middle east policy newsletter, madiha afzal madiha afzal fellow - foreign policy , center for middle east policy , strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology @madihaafzal.

January 15, 2021

This piece is part of a series titled “ Nonstate armed actors and illicit economies: What the Biden administration needs to know ,” from Brookings’s  Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors .

According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, Pakistan saw 319 terrorism-related incidents in 2020, and 169 associated deaths of civilians. That represents a decline, from a high of nearly 4,000 such incidents in 2013, with over 2,700 civilian deaths (see figure below).

This fall is largely due to the Pakistani army’s kinetic operations against the Pakistani Taliban — also known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — which had been responsible for the majority of deaths of civilians and security forces since 2007, the year it formed officially as an umbrella organization of various militant groups. Over the years, American drone strikes targeted and killed successive TTP leaders, including Baitullah Mehsud in 2009, Hakimullah Mehsud in 2013, and Mullah Fazlullah in 2018. The Pakistani military’s Zarb-e-Azb operation (named for the sword of the Prophet Muhammad) began in 2014 — after a TTP attack on the Karachi airport that June — and increased in intensity after the Peshawar Army Public School attack of December that year, which killed more than 130 schoolchildren. Since 2017, having largely routed the TTP (because of limited information access to the area, there are questions about how many terrorists were killed, versus simply displaced across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border), the military’s operation entered a new phase of “elimination” of militant groups. The operation is called Radd-ul-Fasaad, which literally means elimination of all strife.

Figure: Terrorism-related fatalities in Pakistan

While this top-line picture in terms of number of attacks and casualties is clearly a positive one, the TTP has been regrouping since last summer. Various breakaway factions pledged allegiance to the group last July, and there are reports of it making a comeback in at least six districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa “ with the intimidation of locals, targeted killings, and attacks on security forces .” The TTP is reported to have killed at least 40 security forces between March and September 2020. Official Pakistani sources blamed India as “behind” the revival. On the other end, the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, an ethnic protest movement that claims human rights violations against civilians by the Pakistani military during its operations against the Taliban, has alleged (without systematic proof) that “the Taliban are being allowed to return” to the tribal areas in a “secret deal with the military.”

The TTP, of course, maintains ties with the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida. Some have speculated that the TTP comeback may be linked with the Afghan peace process and Pakistan’s fencing of the border with Afghanistan, both of which threaten the group’s sanctuary in Afghanistan. (A U.N. report from July 2020 stated there were 6,000 Pakistani fighters in Afghanistan, most affiliated with the TTP.) There has also been some speculation that the Afghan peace process might include, at some point, a separate Afghan-Pakistan deal, with Afghanistan denying safe haven to the TTP potentially in return for Pakistan denying sanctuary to the Haqqanis (though it is unclear whether that will be possible, or acceptable to Pakistan). Pakistan has already raised questions about Afghanistan’s sanctuary for the TTP.

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The Islamic State in Khorasan (ISIS-K), which operates in Afghanistan and is the Afghan Taliban’s rival, has been responsible for recent attacks in Baluchistan, including of 11 Shia Hazara coal miners this January — complicating Pakistan’s already violent sectarian landscape. In discussing this attack, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan again blamed India for “backing ISIS” to “spread unrest” in Pakistan. (Pakistan has also long claimed that India uses Afghan soil — on which ISIS-K is based — to destabilize Pakistan.)

Anti-India militant groups continue to have a foothold in Pakistan, but Pakistan has begun taking action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in recent years, especially in the wake of its enhanced monitoring by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in 2018 for terrorism financing; it is a key goal of Khan’s government to have Pakistan removed from this “grey list,” because it hurts the country’s image and causes it financial harm. Most notably, Pakistan has sentenced Hafiz Saeed, the leader of the LeT, to 11 years in prison for terrorism financing. Another LeT leader, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was also recently sentenced to five years for terrorism financing. The United States has acknowledged these steps, but has argued that Pakistan needs to hold these LeT leaders accountable for more than terrorism financing. Pakistan has taken less action against Jaish-e-Mohammad, the terrorist group responsible for the Pulwama attack of February 2019; its leader, Masood Azhar, is at large. Notably, Pakistan-based militant groups have not been responsible for any violence in Kashmir since the Pulwama attack; in an interview later in 2019, Khan asked Pakistanis not to engage in any violence or “jihad” in India, because it would be blamed on Pakistan and would harm it. That signal seems to have worked.

Placing the blame on India for terrorism in Pakistan is something the country has long done, although not always in as direct a manner as in 2020. Beyond linking the recent ISIS-K attack with India, Pakistan also linked the Baluch Liberation Army’s June 2020 attack on the Karachi Stock Exchange with its eastern neighbor (Pakistan has longed argued India supports the Baluch insurgency). In November, the Pakistani foreign minister, in a splashy press conference, released details of the “ dossier ” Pakistan has compiled linking India to funding, arming, and training terrorists (including the TTP) against Pakistan. Only the summary — not the full dossier — discussed in that meeting has been made public. It found a receptive audience in a Pakistani population already wary of the Narendra Modi government for its actions in Kashmir and the alarming rise in intolerance toward Muslims in India. The Pakistani government says it has shared the dossier with the U.N. and various governments, but those parties have not publicly acknowledged it.

Pakistan’s strategy toward militant groups has long been two-pronged, as it were: to take overt (and successful) action against groups targeting the Pakistani state and citizenry — the TTP — without taking action against the groups it has considered “strategic assets,” including the Afghan Taliban that have sought sanctuary on its soil and anti-India militants that its intelligence agencies have covertly supported. Underlying this approach has been an effort to hedge bets: regarding the Taliban’s possible influence in Afghanistan after an international withdrawal, and regarding militant proxies who may give Pakistan parity on an otherwise lopsided conventional military footing with India. There are signs some of this is changing. For instance, Pakistan has developed a good relationship with Kabul, especially in recent months, but it also knows its leverage over the Taliban keeps it relevant to the Afghan peace process. The FATF listing has induced Pakistan to take its strictest action to date on militant groups, especially LeT. It also helps that Pakistan is keen to shed an image associated with terrorism. Yet the long-term sustainability of actions Pakistan has taken in response to pressure from FATF remains to be seen; will they be reversed when the FATF grey-listing is lifted? And what happens after the international withdrawal from Afghanistan is complete?

The central issue is not one of state capacity, but an unwillingness of the Pakistani state to paint all jihadist groups with the same brush, to recognize the linkages in ideology that connect them all — and to acknowledge how those ideologies find fodder in Pakistan’s laws, educational curricula, politics, and indeed the very nature of how Pakistan has defined itself, as I detailed in my book . This issue holds for Pakistan’s military, and also across its spectrum of major political parties, as has been demonstrated over the last 12 years with all three of them successively holding power. That lack of recognition of how terrorism and extremism are connected, and of the very roots of extremism, is the crux of the problem: Militant groups can always find recruits, from other groups or from the general population. Non-armed right-wing fundamentalist groups, notably the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), share these ideologies, glorify violence (the TLP, after all, celebrated the murder of Salmaan Taseer for daring to propose reform in Pakistan’s blasphemy laws), and enjoy growing support and sympathy.

For a brief time after the Peshawar school attack of 2014, there was some clarity in recognizing the homegrown nature of the Pakistan Taliban, and the country devised a National Action Plan to tackle extremism and terrorism. While it was incomplete and never acknowledged the deeper roots of extremism, it was a start. But it has gone by the wayside as the Pakistani state has turned back once again to blaming India for terrorism in the country. Meanwhile, the underlying roots of extremism — the country’s curricula, the way its politics works, and its laws, which have all primed its citizenry to buy into and sympathize with the propaganda of extremist groups — remain intact. Pakistan’s claims about India deserve to be heard and investigated, as the international community ignoring them only worsens Pakistan’s sense of victimhood, but that does not absolve the state of its own policies that have fostered extremism and allowed terror groups to proliferate on its soil.

As the Biden administration takes office, it is worth recognizing the effectiveness of the FATF tool, and the limited leverage of the United States to effect real change on security matters in Pakistan, at least initially. Ultimately, Pakistan must be the one to connect the dots linking all the terrorist groups on its soil and their ideologies, acknowledge how it has contributed to extremism within its borders, and decide on addressing the roots of that extremism. I would argue that the best way to encourage it to do so is for America to develop a relationship with the country that is separate from Afghanistan, and separate from India: to deal with Pakistan on its own terms. Meanwhile, security concerns in Pakistan are more or less contained, with the FATF listing and the Pakistani state’s action against the TTP being the primary mechanisms for that control, and the Biden administration need not make them the center of its Pakistan policy.

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Essay on Terrorism in Pakistan Causes Effects and Solution

Terrorism is in the broadest sense the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror among masses of people or fear to achieve a religious or political aim. It is used in this regard primarily to refer to violence during peacetime or in context of war against non-combatants. The terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” originated during the French Revolution of the late 18th century but gained mainstream popularity in the 1970s in news reports and books covering the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Basque Country and Palestine. In this page we discuss Terrorism in Pakistan its causes and salutation. Essay on Terrorism in Pakistan Causes Effects and Solution. Read complete article and improve your knowledge about terrorism in Pakistan.

Terrorism is one of the biggest problems in Pakistan due to which we are not saved. Terrorists always attack the schools, colleges, universities, hospital and many more and killing the students and small kids marble heartedly. We could observer that in this month, we have faced many attacks where we have lost precious lives.We face the war as a situation against terrorism. There are many dimensions in this situation due to many factors. These factors include social injustice, economic disadvantages, political instability, religious inconvenience, as well as foreign hands or international conspiracies.

Those people who had forced to meet the interests of their evil, they did not kill innumerable lives, but by the tyranny, the real image of Islam destroyed the face of the world on the face of the world. . Terrorist actions, such as suicide bombs, have become today’s laws. Due to these attacks, Pakistan has economically uncertainly damaged the citizens. People have become digital data, since time has increased. Terrorists have left no place like Market, mosques, educational institutions, offices, hotels, no safe place.

Religious Causes:

• Role Of Madrassahs.
• Religious Intolerance.

External Causes

• Afghan War: 1979
• Iranian Revolution:
• War On Terrorism: 9/11

Factors Boosting Terrorism:

• Anti-Terrorism Campaign And Drone Strikes:
• Negligence Of Government:
• Persecution Of Innocent Muslims In Kashmir And Palestine:

Steps Taken By Pakistan:

• Ban On Terrorist Organisation
• Operation Rah-E-Nijat
• Operation Rah-E-Rast

Once a convicted “terrorist” Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography “the hard facts were that 50 years of nonviolence had brought my people nothing but more repressive legislation and fewer rights.

Causes of Terrorism in Pakistan.

The sectarian anti shite militant groups like Sipah I Sahaba Pakistan were preaching hatred against the Shiite Muslims and employing some terrorist activities. The extremist sectarian intolerance came to Pakistan only after 1979 revolution in Iran.

Terrorism in Pakistan originated with supporting the Soviet–Afghan War, and the subsequent civil war erupted in Afghanistan that continued for at least a decade. The conflict brought numerous fighters from all over the world to South Asia in the name of jihad. The mujahideen fighters were trained by Pakistan’s military, American CIA and other western intelligence agencies who carried out insurgent activities inside Afghanistan well after the war officially ended.

Pakistan has done its level best to rid terrorism and terrorists from its soil. In first step, many terrorist organisations were banned by the Musharraf government. After those successful military operations namely Rah-e-Nijat and Rah-e-Rast have been conducted. Pakistan army has fought bravely against terrorist and has destroyed their safe dens. It has broken the backbone of the terrorists and has forced them to flee. These operations still keep ongoing in some tribal areas. In this context, it is worth-mentioning that public support to military operations is very essential, and without people’s backing no army can win this ‘different war’ against terrorism.

For Pakistan the consequences of being the epicentre of the war on terror have been disastrous physically, psychologically and economically. Nobody understands terrorism better than us (Pakistanis). We have been victims of various manifestations of it since the Soviet Afghan war. Since 9/11, the wave of suicide bombing has so far killed scores of innocent Pakistani civilians and muffled the already slow pace of our economic growth. The financial cost of the ongoing global war on terror in the last two years alone has been $35 billion. This has badly affected in particular, the socio-economic development of Pakistan. Lest we forget, we even lost our prominent political leader Benazir Bhutto to an act of terror.

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Khurram Ahmad

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Pakistan has been known for it perennial support of the Taliban in Afghanistan and other terrorist organizations in Indian Administered Jammu & Kashmir. The country has become a victim of its own holy war as a consequence of the ‘unholy alliance’ between the Inter Intelligence Services (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, military and self-styled religious scholars. This historic alliance has resulted in colossal rise of radical Islam being a factor in the country’s proclivity to Islamic fundamentalism. There is urgent need that the people of Pakistan, its politicians, and the powerful Army stand on the same side in the fight against terrorism and set clear priorities.

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Counter Terrorist Trends and Analysis

ROHAN GUNARATNA

A series of developments — some new but mostly the legacy of more than a decade of terrorism and extremism and the fight against the same — warrants a re-write of the nature of the threat that the world faces today. These developments include the withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces from Iraq in 2011 and drawdown from Afghanistan in 2014, the Arab Spring fallout in the Middle East, and the flow of fighters in thousands from all over the world to Iraq and Syria, among others. At the heart of these developments is the declaration of the establishment of a so-called Islamic Caliphate by the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) (known as Ad Dawlah al Islamiyya fil Iraq wa ash Sham/Daesh in Arabic). More specifically, post-Arab Spring political chaos and instability in the Middle East have enabled fledging, mostly marginalised, groups to reorganise and pose threats to the security and stability of the world. While old actors such as Al Qaeda (‘The Base’) and its affiliates, including the Jabhat al Nusra (JN or ‘Support Front for the People’, also known as Al Nusra Front) are struggling to retain their prominence, new players, like ISIS, are competing for supremacy and legitimacy in the global jihadist arena. This has polarised radical and violent Muslim groups and individuals worldwide — particularly in Asia, Africa, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. While some have pledged allegiance to ISIS, others remain loyal to Al Qaeda. At the same time, the sectarian divide within the Muslim world has hardened significantly, leading to increasing levels of violence in many countries.

Counter Terrorism Trends and Analysis

In the first half of 2016, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) dominated the global threat landscape by mounting attacks in North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus and Asia. At the forefront was IS’ spokesperson, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, who directed and inspired attacks worldwide, including those which took place during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. On 24 July 2016, a suicide bombing attack took place in the south German town of Ansbach. The attacker was a 27-year-old Syrian man who faced deportation to Bulgaria and who had detonated the device after being refused entry to a music festival. Investigations revealed that the suicide attacker had pledged allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a video found on his mobile phone. IS has since claimed responsibility for the attack. In May 2016, in an audio message purportedly from al-Adnani, the spokesman declared Ramadan a "month of conquest and jihad." He announced: "Make it, with God's permission, a month of pain for infidels everywhere" (Mowat 2016). The “Ramadan jihad” of IS killed at least 800, mostly Muslims, across five different continents (Drury 2016). Some of the attacks included those in Orlando (US), Nice (France), Bavaria (Germany), Istanbul (Turkey), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Kabul (Afghanistan), Mindanao (Philippines), Puchong (Malaysia), Solo (Indonesia), Medina (Saudi Arabia), Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. The spate of IS attacks were most intense during the last week of Ramadan when IS carried out an attack on Istanbul Airport, killing 45 people, detonated a truck bomb in Karrada, in Baghdad, killing 290 people, and carried out a suicide bomb attack in the vicinity of the Prophet’s mosque in the Saudi Arabian city of Medina, the second holiest site in Islam, after Makkah.

Asian Social Science

Muhammad Umais

The main argument of this paper is that desperate efforts by Afghan government and the international community to bring peace to Afghanistan through talks with Taliban are destined to fail mainly because of the complex nature of the war. It proposes state-building, long-term vision for military campaign against insurgents as well as more robust diplomatic, economic and limited military actions against state-sponsors of terrorists as alternatives to desperate efforts for peace talks.

Saroj K Rath

On independence days, India’s citizens lose their freedom, as streets and marketplaces convert into highly restricted areas because of the threat of terrorism. No place in Pakistan is out of a terrorist’s reach and in Afghanistan, an assassin can kill his target anywhere anytime. By the turn of 2016, when global debate, action, and reflection about violence and counter-terrorism had shifted comprehensively to the Arab world – the old ghost of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – terrorism is becoming ever stronger. South Asia, especially India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is the original homeland of a great game between superpowers, the cradle of prolonged terrorist violence, safe sanctuary and a storehouse of global terrorism. A nuclear flashpoint and nursery for countless terrorist organizations, this region has defied global might and wisdom to sustain violence and terrorist groups with surprising ease. In today’s world, international security threats are no more linked with rival nation states but originate from rogue non-state entities. While inter-state conflict and the threat of war is reducing, the threat of terrorism perpetrated by extremist groups, aided and abetted by state agencies, is increasing. During the decade and a half long history of the 21st century, no two nations go to war against each other. The theatres of war in the 21st century, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, are a product of extremist groups and individual’s excesses. A coalition of leading nations, the mightiest militaries across all divides, in a rare show of unity, are directing their finest weapons towards their common enemy — no more than a motley crew of fighters, with no air force or navy. Pakistan, unlike Afghanistan, is not the theatre of war, but it is precisely the region from where warriors, ideologies, and supporters are supplied to Afghanistan and elsewhere. India is at the forefront of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and home-grown insurgencies.

Prologue The ideological imprudence and political short-sightedness of Indian leadership has never allowed it to win the hearts and minds of Kashmiris. Treating the Kashmiris with an iron fist would never complement Indian grand strategy in the region and beyond. The human sufferings in Indian-held Kashmir (IHK) would also continue to jeopardize India's self-proclaimed world shining image. The Kashmir conflict has long begun to cease as a 'mere territorial dispute' between India and Pakistan given the strategic pattern of regional and international politics in the last few decades, large-scale western influence in the region, proxy wars, dynamics of alliances and coalitions within and beyond the region, and most importantly, the rise and spread of dissident elements in IHK with strong linkages elsewhere. Becoming well aware of these socio-political dynamics, New Delhi has lately realized the futility of any solution of Kashmir issue without taking into account the diverse political aspirations of Kashmiris living in the region. What is still missing in New Delhi's policy vision, however, is her stiffness over not allowing a trilateral dialogue to break the impasse of political negotiations and finding a win-win solution on all three fronts, i.e., India, Pakistan, and Kashmir. The nature of India-Pakistan peace parleys and the strategic issues involved in them often fail to complement whatever New Delhi and Kashmiri leadership arrives at and vice versa. The peace process on Kashmir is a broad subject to be dealt with in a single study. This paper, therefore, limits itself to socio-political and military dynamics through which IHK has been passing during the past six decades, making it vulnerable to communal wrangling just like the rest of India.

Umbreen Javaid

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An ISIS Terror Group Draws Half Its Recruits From Tiny Tajikistan

Young migrants from the former Soviet republic were accused of an attack on a concert hall in Moscow that killed 145 people.

By Neil MacFarquhar and Eric Schmitt

The mother of one of the suspects in the bloody attack on a concert hall near Moscow last month wept as she talked about her son.

How, she wondered, did he go from the bumpy, dirt roads of their village in Tajikistan, in Central Asia, to sitting, bruised and battered, in a Russian courtroom accused of terrorism? Even though he spent five years in Tajik prisons as a teenager, she said he never exhibited signs of violent extremism.

“We need to understand — who is recruiting young Tajiks, why do they want to highlight us as a nation of terrorists?” said the mother, Muyassar Zargarova.

Many governments and terrorism experts are asking the same question.

Tajik adherents of the Islamic State — especially within its affiliate in Afghanistan known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province (I.S.K.P.), or ISIS-K — have taken increasingly high-profile roles in a string of recent terrorist attacks. Over the last year alone, Tajiks have been involved in assaults in Russia, Iran and Turkey , as well as foiled plots in Europe. ISIS-K is believed to have several thousand soldiers, with Tajiks constituting more than half, experts said.

“They have become key to I.S.K.P.’s externally focused campaign as it seeks to gain attention and more recruits,” said Edward Lemon, an international relations professor at Texas A&M University who specializes in Russia, Tajikistan and terrorism.

Analysts say a kind of double whammy leaves Tajiks vulnerable to recruitment. An increasingly authoritarian former Soviet republic, Tajikistan ranks among the world’s poorest countries, which fuels discontent and drives millions of migrant laborers to seek better lives abroad. In a country of 10 million people, a majority of working men, estimated at more than two million, seek employment abroad at any given time.

And most migrants end up in Russia , where rampant discrimination, low wages, poor prospects and isolation make some susceptible to jihadist recruiters. Officially, about 1.3 million Tajik laborers are in Russia, although experts believe hundreds of thousands of others work there illegally.

“The new Tajik generation has lost all belief in the future,” said Muhiddin Kabiri, the exiled leader of the country’s Islamic Renaissance Party, a moderate opposition group that was abruptly outlawed as “extremist” in 2015. “There are only two choices: a secular dictatorship and, as an alternative, the Islamic State or other radical Islamic groups.”

As many as 2,000 Tajiks flocked to the physical caliphate established by the Islamic State in parts of Syria and Iraq from 2014 to 2019. With the caliphate dismantled but not eradicated — and with branches from Africa through the Middle East to Central Asia — ISIS-K has revived some of the would-be state’s global ambitions.

Recruitment of foot soldiers is focused online, where ISIS-K maintains an extensive media operation in Arabic, English, Russian and other languages. Russia is a frequent target. Many online testimonials from Tajiks imply that Muslim men who avoid fighting with ISIS are not really men.

Asfandyar Mir, a senior counterterrorism specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, highlighted the kind of audio message intended to incite Tajik migrant workers in Russia. A commander who has since been killed, using the nom de guerre Furkan Falistini, speaks directly to laborers there: “When the Russian police see you on the streets, Tajiks hide their eyes, hoping the police do not see them,” he says in the video. “You should look at them so that they are scared of you. You start killing them, and God will remedy your fears.”

Days after Russia charged four migrant laborers from Tajikistan with the concert hall attack that killed 145 people, ISIS-K launched an online Tajik-language magazine, the Voice of Khorasan . Its rollout, days after the first Turkish edition, appeared to underscore the group’s widening aspirations, noted Lucas Webber, a researcher who tracks the Islamic State’s presence online.

While the magazine mentioned the Islamic State’s longstanding hostility toward Russia, the main story lambasted the 30-year, iron-fisted rule of Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon.

“Rahmonov the Devil was the first to start eradicating Islam under the guise of being a Muslim,” the article said. The president changed his surname to the more Tajik-sounding Rahmon in 2007, but the Islamic State uses the old one, not least to highlight his close ties with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

After the Tajik suspects in the concert hall attack appeared in a Russian courtroom bearing wounds from an apparent torture , one online poster said, “Broadcasting videos of prisoners being tortured by you has increased the thirst of thousands of brothers for your blood.”

Another post showed what appeared to be a man in military fatigues staring at television screens that showed London, Paris, Rome and Madrid. “After Moscow … Who is the next?!” the English text read.

There is no single formula for radicalization, experts say, but for some young Tajik migrants, personal grievances outweigh geopolitical considerations.

Tajikistan’s problems are rooted in a vicious civil war that raged for five years, starting in 1992, after it won independence from the Soviet Union. Mr. Rahmon, the former head of a collective farm who became president in 1994, signed a peace agreement with the opposition that guaranteed representation.

Initially, some criticism of government corruption and nepotism was allowed, and the Islamic Renaissance Party held a couple of Parliament seats. But when the party was declared a terrorist organization, opposition figures were killed, jailed or driven into exile. Tajikistan holds at least 1,000 political prisoners, according to Mr. Kabiri, the party’s exiled head.

Mr. Rahmon, 71, was born in the Soviet Union two days before Mr. Putin, and they share autocratic impulses. The Kremlin has long shored up Mr. Rahmon’s rule by stationing an estimated 7,000 troops in Tajikistan, a rare large deployment outside Russia.

The more ISIS ties Rahmon to Putin, “the more it looks like he is hitching his wagon to Russia, the less legitimate his regime seems and the more likely they are to increase their popularity among Tajiks,” said Steve Swerdlow, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California and a veteran human rights researcher in Central Asia.

Mr. Rahmon pushed through a constitutional referendum in 2016 allowing him to remain president for life. News releases on the presidential website refer to him as “the Founder of Peace and National Unity.” His oldest son, Rustam Emomali, 36, chairman of the National Assembly and the mayor of Dushanbe, the capital, is expected to succeed his father.

Mr. Rahmon wages a rigorous campaign against public signs of piety. People with beards or hijabs are subject to random harassment, with beards sometimes forcibly shaved in public or hijabs torn off. A powerful Committee on Religion, Regulation of Traditions, Celebrations and Ceremonies oversees every facet of worship, including building mosques and printing books.

“They have this very tight control over official Islam, and anything that exists beyond that is deemed extremist, dangerous,” said Mr. Lemon, the professor at Texas A&M.

Given the violence fomented by jihadists globally, Tajikistan’s government has reasons for concern, Mr. Swerdlow noted. But harsh measures can feed the very extremism that they are intended to curtail.

Echoing Soviet positions, Mr. Rahmon blames extremism solely on outside influences. In a speech last month, he said Tajiks enjoyed freedom of religion, while radical ideas originated from “dubious” religious schools abroad or foreign intelligence services.

“These actions were plotted by malicious groups and special services of some countries, and they take advantage of the lack of education, inexperience and ignorance of some of our youth,” the president said. More than 1,000 Tajik militants had died in foreign armed conflicts, he said, with thousands more missing.

In terms of religious freedom, the United States has repeatedly designated Tajikistan a “country of particular concern.” Officials at the Defense and State Departments declined requests for interviews about extremism linked to Tajikistan.

The State Department issued a brief statement saying it worked with Tajikistan and other Central Asian countries to strengthen law enforcement and degrade terrorist groups. One former senior Tajik police officer, trained in counterextremism in the United States, famously became the overall military commander for the Islamic State’s caliphate around 2016 before he died.

After the terrorist attack outside Moscow, Russia inaugurated sweeping expulsions .

In Tajikistan, the mothers of three suspects listed the problems their sons typically faced in Russia: Salaries too low to pay rent or to afford the permits needed to drive a taxi, for example.

“Let them answer who bought the weapons, who gave them their equipment,” Ms. Zargarova said. “My son didn’t have money for a gun.”

Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.

Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States. More about Neil MacFarquhar

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported on for more than three decades. More about Eric Schmitt