The News International February 20, 2014
Use of force, talks, economic and social steps defeated terrorism
By Sabir Shah
LAHORE: Although at least 50 nations, both developed and underdeveloped, have been hit by insurrections in recent history, just a few like Thailand, Great Britain, Sri Lanka and Burma etc have actually succeeded in overcoming or containing their local insurgencies by designing a system of military actions interconnected with political, economic and psychological warfare like intelligence-gathering and propaganda.
The battle between successive Pakistani regimes and the Taliban is thus just one of the ongoing worldwide armed conflicts, where thousands of humans are being killed like mosquitoes.
A thorough study of reports appearing in innumerable local and Western media outlets like the New York times, AFP, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, Le Monde English edition, Newsweek, Gulf News, Los Angeles Times, Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Tribune and the Indian Express etc shows that apart from Pakistan, the countries presently at war with their internal militant groups include Russia, China, India, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Philippines, Burma, Nigeria, Mexico, Angola, Georgia, Syria, Iraq, the Central African Republic, Sudan, North Korea, Colombia, Indonesia, Peru, Senegal, Yemen, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Tunisia, Niger, Rwanda, Haiti, Liberia, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Uzbekistan, Palestine, Libya, Peru, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, Algeria, Mali and Lebanon etc.
Numerous painstaking studies conducted by the United Nations, Sweden's Uppsala University, internationally-acclaimed NGO Globalsecurity.org and the Belgium-based anti-conflict International Crisis Group further reveal that only a few countries like Great Britain, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Burma etc have made encouraging headway in crushing rebellions and achieving some peace in recent decades.
A research undertaken by "The News International" shows that in Thailand, Great Britain and Sri Lanka, local people residing in or around the insurgency-infested provinces were taken into confidence, so as to prevent them from supporting the rebels.
However, it is common sense that even the employment of these strategies may not guarantee full success, because the nature and causes of insurgency are not static and may vary from country to country.
Moreover, the social and political landscape of a country may affect the results of implementing the afore-stated strategies, as is seemingly the case in Pakistan today.
Having said that, holding futile peace talks, reaching short-lived agreements with the rebel forces and then going for military actions have not reaped any desired results for the Pakistani public till date, which thus means that some of the approaches followed by Thailand, Sri Lanka and Great Britain etc will have to be studied.
The failure to prevent and mediate these global armed conflicts through humanitarian intervention has also resulted in wastage of billions of dollars dished out to the war-ravaged nations by donors.
These conflicts, of course, have varying degrees of intensity, but they have certainly causes colossal economic and social damage to the countries plagued by them.
It goes without saying that most of these war zones have not only experienced grave food production problems and famine; but they have also been haunted by diseases and dearth of basic civic amenities deemed vital to lead a normal life.
Ironically, the major sufferers include children, as is the case in Pakistan, where administration of Polio drops in country's tribal areas has become a massive challenge, especially after the successful American quest of capturing Osama bin Laden.
Nutrition and education also remain unrealized dreams for these under-privileged kids who are born and growing up in war-torn areas.
While most of these are civil or intra-state wars were fueled by racial, ethnic, ideological and religious animosities, an overwhelming majority of the victims in these bloody battles happen to be innocent civilians or the non-combatant parties. Quite painful!
Let us now briefly discuss the successful models of Thailand, Great Britain, Sri Lanka and Burma.In Thailand, the insurgency had dated back to the establishment of the Communist party of Thailand in the 1920s.
Unrest had beset a number of Thai governments and dominated military and police activities for more than 20 years, authorities in Bangkok had successfully downplayed communist insurgency in the country by the late 1980s.
The Thai government has basically employed coordinated efforts, combining them with military and police actions, to reduce the level of insurgency. In 1974, the government had established the Internal Security Operational Command under the military's top brass to coordinate and integrate the counter-insurgency efforts of various government agencies. However, the political and social aspects were also addressed.
While amnesty was granted to all insurgents, the Thai military had conducted selective operations against the guerilla bases in the remote mountainous areas.
Fighting about 12,000 armed insurgents in the late 1970s, Thailand had succeeded in bringing this number of guerillas and separatists down to 600 in 1987.Extensive American military aid and technical assistance had also provided a lot of help to Thailand's counter-insurgency programme in 1950s.
Coming to the British Experience in Northern Ireland, it had a distinct religious dimension to it. Historically, the Irish Catholics were subjected to all kinds of political, social and economic discrimination, as they were perceived to be disloyal to the Crown.
Catholics were not accorded the right to suffrage until the early Twentieth century. They were not allowed to run for any office or hold official portfolios. Moreover, they were also not accepted equal work opportunities with their Protestant counterparts. The political and religious tensions had further increased due to lack of contact between the two warring groups.
After quelling counterinsurgencies in Malaysia, Kenya, Muscat, Oman and Cyprus, Britain had decided to intervene here in 1969 to challenge the defiant forces.
The vital aspects of the British counter-insurgency operations included the identification of the enemy and its reasons for existence; reliance on psychological warfare operations, influencing and conditioning the mindset of the people on how they saw the problem, the coordination of all government resources to banish insurgency from its presence, enactment of required laws, the containment of the enemy to frustrate it and then eventually destroy it.
Through the rebellious IRA forces had still continued to operate, a ceasefire accord (Belfast Agreement of 1998) was reached with them at state level. The promotion of equal rights between Catholics and Protestants, power-sharing and the devolution of autonomy to the troubled territory were the chief characteristics of this pact.
In the case of Sri Lanka, a country that is literally rising from ashes after having fought with the rebel Tamil Tigers for nearly 27 long years and ultimately defeating the insurgents on May 29, 2009, we need to learn how they had declared "No Fire Zones" for the safety of the civilians who were used as "battlefields" by the terrorists.
Equipped with heavy artillery and mortars, the raging Tamil Tigers had disregarded humanity by killing the fleeing civilians and also by carrying out suicide attacks on those who would attempt to escape from their camps during the war.
These suicide attacks on civilians were in addition to the ones that had regularly targeted the country's Army personnel and sensitive installations.
What is more enviable is the fact that Sri Lanka had only spent $5.5 billion between 2006 and 2009 to banish the Tamil Tigers. This figure was made public in June 2011 by the then Sri Lankan Central Bank Governor, Dr Ajith Nivard Cabraal. This amount of $5.5 billion is far less than what the powerful countries normally spend on training their military personnel every year. Remember, the United States spends in excess of $40 billion every year to train its Army.
The intermittent insurgency by the defiant Tamil Tigers against successive Sri Lankan governments had resulted between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths, according to the United Nations.
According to the May 30, 2009 edition of the "Sydney Morning Herald," the deaths included at least 27,639 Tamil Tigers or the LTTE fighters, not fewer than 23,790 Sri Lankan soldiers and policemen, some 1,155 Indian soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
The 2010 Sri Lankan "Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission" had estimated that from August 2006 to May 2009, 5,556 Sri Lankan soldiers were killed, 28,414 were wounded and 169 were missing in action.
During the same period, the Tamil Tigers had lost 22,247 men, of which 11,812 had been identified by name.
On May 21, 2009, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had carried an AFP report that had stated: "The UN's humanitarian co-ordination office says 80,000 to 100,000 people were killed in the war between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels. Sri Lanka's president formally declared victory over the Tigers yesterday (May 20, 2009), after the government troops had captured the last sliver of rebel territory."
However, a US State Department report had suggested that the actual casualty figures were probably much higher than the United Nations' estimates and that significant numbers of casualties were not recorded.
But whatever the death toll may be, nobody denies the fact that tranquility reigns supreme in Sri Lanka today and regular Cricket fixtures in this part of the world speak volumes of how this country has accomplished peace by trampling all over the armed rebel factions of the Tamil Tigers.
After the war, this tiny island was left with a daunting post-war task to ensure the welfare of nearly 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons, who were held as a human shield and a bargaining chip by the rebel Tamil Tigers.
Under its well-planned reconstruction, resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration and reconciliation programmes after the war, the Sri Lankan government has surely helped the besieged Tamil civilians restart their lives.
Burma had also nearly succeeded in ending one of the world's longest running insurgencies in January 2012 after signing a peace deal with the rebels, who had been fighting Burmese forces since the country had gained independence from Britain in 1948.
The January 12, 2012 edition of "The Telegraph" had stated: "The development, which brings to an end more than six decades of fighting, puts Burma on course to secure a significant reduction in Western sanctions as early as April 2012."
The Burmese government had issued an amnesty for 651 prisoners, though the previous ceasefire pacts in the 1990s were short-lived.
Pakistan can also seek inspiration from Philippines, which is now inching closer to the enviable goal of peace, have learnt lessons from the bitter past experiences.
While the successful military offensives have continued to reduce the number of insurgents over the years, rebel forces continue to remain in action.
Actually, as research tells us, the double policy of engaging insurgents in peace talks and then waging an all-out war against them had previously destroyed whatever confidence base the Filipino government had created with the dissidents.
The Jan 25, 2014 edition of the "New York Times" had revealed that the Filipino government and the country's largest Muslim insurgency group (the Moro Islamic Liberation Front) had negotiated the final details of a peace accord, which many hoped would end more than 40 years of violence that has claimed an estimated 120,000 lives and displaced more than two million people.
However, some most violent militant groups including the Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf, had refused to join the agreement. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, according to the "New York Times," had agreed to incorporate some of its 11,000 fighters into Philippine government forces and gradually disarm the others with the oversight of a third party yet to be named.
Abu Sayyaf, we all know, has been carrying out kidnappings, bombings and beheadings for more than a decade and says it wants to set up a strict Islamic state.
The negotiations were brokered by Malaysia, and countries including the United States and those in the European Union were expected to help in the implementation by providing aid.
The afore-cited "New York Times" report had stated: "The agreement will create an autonomous Muslim-dominated region in the restive south of the predominantly Christian country, handing much of the responsibility for security there to local authorities as well as a large share of revenues from the region's wealth of natural resources. The militants have agreed to disarm, with many expected to join Philippine security forces."
The prestigious American newspaper had added: "Although many challenges to sustained peace remain - notably that some militant groups have refused to join the agreement - the deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is considered a signature achievement for President Benigno Aquino III. Mr. Aquino has vowed to end the conflicts on the island of Mindanao that have bedeviled the Philippines for more than a century and that would eventually hinder the nation's ability to expand its economy and catch up with more prosperous neighbours."
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