Why 2015 Will Be The Year of Never

Again Again
In Nigeria and Pakistan, unforgivable attacks on schoolchildren have made the world rise up in anger.
Unfortunately, thats all it did.

BY LEELA JACINTO-DECEMBER 23, 2014

Its that time of year when we journalists push out our year-in-reviews and
annual top 10, 50, or 100 lists. Alas 2014, for me, is the year we watched terrorists attack
thousands of kids in schools, made a huge stink about it, allowed ourselves to dream that this
time things will change and then nothing was done about it. And nothing will be.
Months before the remarkable Malala Yousafzai and Indian child rights activist Kailash

Satyarthi won the Nobel Peace Prize, Boko Haram militants swept down on a school in Chibok
in the remote northeastern corner of Nigeria. More than 200 schoolgirls were abducted,
triggering howls of condemnation, a star-studded #BringBackOurGirls campaign,
andinternational summits where regional and global leaders pledged their help. All of which
achieved nothing. The girls and their families have been left to rot and nobody seems to
have any idea where they are; meanwhile there was speculation this summer that some had
been used as human bombs, though the government dismissed such claims. Meanwhile, heaven
knows what all those foreign military advisors from the United States, Britain , France, China,
and Israel in Nigeria have managed to achieve.
At last update, Nigeria had told the United States to take your military aid and shove it. Abuja
is throwing a fit because Washington has refused because of the Nigerian militarys abysmal
human rights and corruption track records to supply it with the Cobra attack helicopters and
other sophisticated military hardware the generals want. Now, with barely two months to go
until Nigerias critical 2015 general elections, politicians are playing an old campaign stunt,
telling voters they have failed to deal with Boko Haram because a fickle superpower is denying
the country the necessary military equipment.
If the kidnapped schoolgirls from Chibok and their marginalized families were Chinese
workers or the wife of the vice prime minister in neighboring Cameroon, for instance, ransoms
would be paid, prisoners swapped, and theyd be ringing in the New Year at home. But alas,
they live in remote northeastern states, where nobody even knows if the elections will be held,
so are best used to score political points. Sucks for you guys.
Then, just as the year was slouching to a close, Peshawar happened. As six Pakistani Taliban
militants tore through the Peshawar army school, mowing down 132 students and more than 10
staffers, one question kept playing in a loop in my mind as Im sure it did for many others:
How many schoolchildren must be killed, kidnapped, or intimidated for us to make this world a
safe enough place for kids to just get an education?
Theres little doubt the Tehreek-e-Taliban (the official name of the Pakistani Taliban) made a
strategic error with this one. Their bloodlust has put off the likes of the Afghan Taliban and
Lashkar-e-Taiba even al Qaeda. Jihadist groups squirming over the brutality of their jihadist
brothers always strikes me as rather rich: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi hurt Osama bin Ladens
sensitivities, the Islamic State is too bad for al Qaeda, and now, the Afghan Talibans
Zabihullah Mujahid and Lashkars Hafiz Saeed are distraught about the havoc Brother Umar
Khorasani of the Tehreek-e-Taliban has wrought. Save it for some security wonk who gets fired
up tracking splinter groups and tribes and factions. Too many precious months and years have
been wasted chasing the vain talking to the Taliban dream, plugged and pushed so effectively
by the talking to the Taliban industry of politicians, middle men, and negotiators.
In the shocked aftermath of the Peshawar school attack, though, many wondered if this was
the tipping point when sense will dawn across fundamentalist-lite sections of Pakistan, when
the people, their leaders, and generals will come together to heal their world. I too wondered if
maybe, just maybe, the lessons of the Peshawar army school attack will finally be learned.

But then the next day dawned, and the day after, and I wondered how could I have been so
nave? High-profile terror attacks invariably spark public outrage, followed by some tough talk
from the authorities. In Pakistans case, this has meant lifting an unofficial moratorium on
executions, with six convicted militants hanged barely a week after the school massacre. As
angry protesters in cities like Karachi and Lahore took to the streets over the weekend waving
placards proclaiming, Crush Taliban, Hang Terrorists! Pakistani officials told reporters that
around 500 more convicts will be executed in the coming weeks. This has of course
sparked criticism from human rights groups such as Amnesty International.
But the populist, tough on terrorism government response is a sop to the lack of a national
strategy or the will to address the root of the problem. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif has said the government is abandoning its futile, decades-old attempt to differentiate
between good and bad Taliban. For the moment, the politicians including Sharifs arch
political rival, Imran Khan have warmed to the theme.
Both Sharif and Khan made huge political gains in recent years running on a platform of
negotiating with the Taliban: Sharifs Pakistan Muslim League (PLMN) won the 2013 general
election, while Khans Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) governs the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
province of which Peshawar is the capital. Come election time, and once the rage over the
Peshawar school attack dies, none of the politicians will be willing to take on the national
narrative aided by decades of Islamization and a jihadi curriculum in schools introduced
by the likes of Khan because this is what wins elections.
And the politicians are just the tip of the iceberg. All this talk of no differentiation between
good and bad Taliban has masked the real problem: Pakistans powerful military is
perfectly happy to intensify its current military offensive in the border tribal areas, but will it
suddenly turn on the jihadi groups it has wielded in Indian-controlled Kashmir and neighboring
Afghanistan, abandoning a key foreign policy strategy in Islamabad and Rawalpindi?
Dont hold your breath; the answer is no, of course the generals wont stop funding and
supporting their favorite jihadists.
On the night before the Peshawar school attack, as the Tehreek-e-Taliban militants were no
doubt gearing up for the next days assault, Pakistani audiences tuning into satellite TV stations
were being fed the latest on a planned Dec. 18 nationwide shutdown by opposition politician
Imran Khan. The former cricketer-turned-politician has kept up a high nuisance-valueprotest
campaign demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. In a country where the
military has historically undermined and unseated civilian governments, Khans sit-in protests
have ground cities to a halt, sparked deadly clashes, and fueled rumors that Khan is backed by
the military.
Following the gruesome Peshawar school attack, Khan called off the protests. We have always
supported the government in the fight against terrorism, Khan maintained, rather
disingenuously considering he has been one of the most vociferous pillars of the talking to the

Taliban industry. In his relentless quest to oust the Sharif government, Khan has kept the antiU.S. pitch on full blast, flirted with the Taliban, got in bed with the likes of cleric Tahir-ulQadri and Jamaat-e-Islami chief Sirajul Haq and earned himself the moniker Taliban Khan.
Still, many analysts rushed around proclaiming, among other things, that Pakistan had just had
its 9/11 moment and that much-awaited change is around the corner. I wish I could have what
these pundits are having. But I fear Pakistan, like Nigeria, will do precious little to address the
groundwork that has enabled groups like Boko Haram and the Tehreek-e-Taliban to attack
school kids on a mass scale. While the Nigerian political and military elites centered in the oilrich south lack the will to address the Boko Haram menace plaguing the remote northeast, in
Pakistan, the favored jihadists are too entrenched, powerful, and vocal to be silenced.
The night of the attack, as Pakistani TV stations featured wall-to-wall coverage of the carnage
in Peshawar, old jihadist granddaddies such as Fazlur Rehman Khalil and Hafiz Saeed were
rolled out, presented as legitimate clerical elders, and allowed to discourse on the un-Islamic
nature of the Peshawar school attack. Khalil is the founder of Harakat al-Mujahideen (HuM), a
militant Islamist group that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, Britain,
and the United Nations but not Pakistan which has splintered into myriad other groups,
all bound together by the jihadist umbilical. According to a 2011 New York Timesreport,
Obama bin Ladens couriers seized cellphone showed extensive contacts with HuM leaders,
and the groups close ties with Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) led the New York
Times to question ISI and Pakistani Army complicity in bin Ladens Abbottabad hideout. Now
its leader is expounding on Pakistani satellite channels in a country where guys like these dont
go on national TV without a nod from the military bosses.
As for Hafiz Saeed, hes the founder and still widely believed to be the true leader of Lashkare-Taiba (LeT), the militant group behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed more
than 160 people, including six Americans. The U.N. has placed him on a terrorist list, the
United States has put a $10 million reward for information leading to his arrest, and yet he
walks and talks freely in Pakistan. As the New York Times Declan Walsh
whointerviewed Saeed in his Lahore home guarded by Pakistani security officials noted:
Ten million dollars does not seem to buy much in this bustling Pakistani city.
The problem with this official talk of no such thing as a good or bad Taliban is that it omits
any mention of the ever-mutating, multiheaded hydra of jihadist groups that concentrate on
Indian-controlled Kashmir or on Pakistans Shiite problem. They splinter and split, their
members swim from one group to another, but the ideology remains. These are the groups that
were bred in the ISI petri-dish and fed on the spy agencys payrolls as strategic assets to
further Pakistans strategic depth. Theres so much strategic goodwill between these jihadist
groups and the countrys intelligence agency, you have to be a fool to think fundamental
change is coming to Pakistan anytime soon.
My guess is that once the furor over the Peshawar army school attack dies, life will just carry
on like it did after the Chibok abductions. The ISI bosses will be back in business, advancing
their strategic mess. The TV stations will go back to covering the minutiae Imran Khans
political antics. An alarming percentage of the population brought up on decades of

Islamization will continue to believe a good Muslim (whatever that may mean) cannot
possibly be a bad jihadist. An even bigger percentage of the population will blame all manner
of foreigners for the problems created and ignored by military-intelligence toughs and
shortsighted politicians.
In the old days, the United States, the CIA, India, and the Indian intelligence services got the
rap. Now, theres a new bogeyman: Afghanistan and the Afghan intelligence service. Pakistanis
today accuse Afghanistan of providing sanctuary to the Tehreek-e-Taliban. The cruel twist to all
this, of course, is that the Afghan Taliban was supported and sustained under former Prime
Minister Benazir Bhuttos reign to destabilize Afghanistan. Now if the Pakistanis are to be
believed, the Afghans are playing a game conceived and honed by their Pakistani brethren.
Some might say its comeuppance at last, which would have been sweet if only it was not so
damn stupid and dangerous for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and all the school children.
Eight months after we took to Twitter, demanding the authorities #BringBackOurGirls, we now
know the girls are never coming back home. They have been sold, married, or dispersed. The
Nigerian authorities lost precious time in the days and weeks after the kidnappings as the
Goodluck Jonathan administration hemmed and hawed, underestimated the figures, lied and
denied until ordinary Nigerians got so fed up, they organized an international campaign that
succeeded in drawing attention to the tragedy but failed to retrieve the girls. At some point this
year, we got trapped in confusing narratives of the Nigerian governments own version of the
talking to the Taliban drama, with the military announcing it had signed a truce deal with
Boko Haram, a claim that many Nigerians immediately and rightly dismissed.
Negotiating with jihadist groups like Boko Haram and the Taliban is not the same as dealing
with the likes of the IRA or FARC, but try telling that to the select circle of international
mediators who think they can replicate Northern Ireland in the Pashtun badlands or
northeastern Nigeria. And so, Boko Haram which means Western education is forbidden
won the round this year. And with the much-promised 2014 U.S. troop drawdown in
Afghanistan finally upon us and the Taliban waiting until the snow melts in the high mountain
passes to begin the spring 2015 offensive, the schoolchildren will be no safer next year than
they were in 2014.