Islamabad: The Islamic State–Khorasan Province’s (ISKP) greatest strength is connectivity, and Pakistan remains central to that connectivity because of history and geography, a report stated.
"Pakistan has always attempted to present ISKP as a foreign infection entering from Afghanistan. This is convenient, but historically false. The organisation did not arrive in Pakistan from another planet. It emerged in part from the same jihadist ecosystem that the Pakistani state had cultivated, tolerated, or selectively fought since the Afghan war of the 1980s," said a report by Stringer Asia.
The report called out Islamabad’s long practice of distinguishing between useful and hostile jihadists, which nurtured an environment where groups like ISKP could recruit, reorganise and survive.
"A state cannot construct an entire strategic policy around armed religious proxies and then convincingly claim surprise when militants begin changing allegiance," the report argued.
"Pakistan’s jihadist landscape has long depended on compartmentalised organisations linked through facilitators, financiers, preachers, safe houses and logistical intermediaries. The state often understood these networks perfectly when it wished to use them. It became remarkably blind when asked to dismantle them," it highlighted.
Highlighting the activities of ISKP in Pakistan's Balochistan, the report noted that the organisation has expanded its presence by targeting minority communities like Shia, Sufi and Baloch nationalists.
"Its hostility towards secular Baloch movements overlaps conveniently with the interests of the Pakistani security establishment, which has spent years attempting to weaken Baloch nationalism through religious militancy and state-protected armed groups," stated the report.
According to the report, in the Balochistan province, which is saturated with military checkpoints and intelligence installations, Jihadist organisations are threatening Baloch nationalist groups, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), the Balochistan National Party and minority communities.
"Militants somehow maintain training facilities, weapons, communications and movement in areas where peaceful activists can barely organise a demonstration without being detained. Pakistan explains this contradiction by invoking state weakness. Yet its weakness is curiously selective. The security establishment can disappear students, track journalists, monitor political organisers and dismantle protest camps. It is less successful when confronting sectarian and jihadist groups whose activities undermine Baloch nationalism," highlighted the report.
Citing this info, the report argued that allegations about Shafiq Mengal and the use of pro-state militias as intermediaries between the extremist networks and the security establishment cannot be dismissed as propaganda. It said that Mengal has been accused of leading death squads, operating private detention and torture facilities. He was also accused of participating in the counterinsurgency architecture built by the government in Khuzdar city of Balochistan.
"Pakistan’s security establishment helped create the strategic culture from which ISKP emerged: one in which armed religious groups are cultivated, fragmented, renamed and redirected rather than eliminated," said the report by Stringer Asia.
–IANS
