All Pashtuns are not Taliban

The tide of terrorism has swept across the country and exposed many fault lines. Hundreds of innocent lives were lost in the last couple of weeks. The other tragedy is the trust deficit that the state faces from its own people.

There could be a thousand and one strategic blunders triggering terrorism. However, the mistrust has only one reason: the failure of the Pakistani media to gather and present facts to the masses. As the media lacks professionalism, it indulges in racial profiling of Pashtuns, linking them with terrorism.

I remember, shortly after 9/11, all international media was stationed in Islamabad. Mohsin Naqvi, the incumbent caretaker chief minister of Punjab, was then a reporter for CNN. Stationed in Marriot Hotel, he was busy day and night with teams of budding reporters translating media content from Pashto, Persian and Urdu to English, and looking after a team of reporters assisting his bosses. Most of these reporters acted as ‘porters’, carrying around the luggage of international journalists in Islamabad.

They would present Pashto-speaking bearded vegetable vendors and cobblers to international journalists as Taliban fighters and sympathizers. Everybody made money, starting from $500 a day, to $5,000 a day. It took time before media-literate people educated international journalists about every Pashtun not being a Taliban. However, the ethnic profiling continues, and has put the Taliban and other Pashtun people, on both sides of the border, in one basket. This is a pattern that the media follows, and it has been built to put the state of Pakistan at a disadvantage.

This pattern is also visible in the attack on the Police Lines mosque in Peshawar. The attack took place on January 30. It killed at least a 100 people, and injured over 200, many of them severely.

Investigations have not yet been completed. Suspects are being arrested. Since it happened near the police headquarters, cops and their families are demanding a thorough investigation. Prospects of the attack being an inside job are being examined. Those living close to the mosque are being questioned. After all, over 10 kgs of explosives were used to rip through the worship place, packed with 400 people. A faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The Pakistani Taliban are singularly focused on harming Pakistan’s security apparatus with no global agenda.

They also owe allegiance to the Afghan Taliban, considering their status as the Islamic Emirate. These two factors distinguish them from other terrorist organizations like al Qaeda and Daesh, who have global agendas and are not beholden to the Islamic Emirate.

However, the Pakistani Taliban later disowned the claim of responsibility. The main faction did not express regret over the loss of innocent lives, rather, provided an explanation that attacks are not permitted to be carried out inside mosques. This justification is self-contradictory, as it was not the first time that a mosque had been targeted in a terrorist attack claimed by them.

All the dots had yet to be connected when senior government officials told the media that Afghan soil was used in terrorist activity. Fed on conflict, conspiracy and controversy, the Pakistani media took up these statements, fanning fires of hatred against Afghans in particular.

This is the pattern. On the one hand, it generates hate. On the other hand, it stops information from reaching the people. As a result, the causes of terrorism always remain shrouded in misguided public perception about terrorists.

The latest in the research on how Pakistani media treats Afghans is the work of Ayesha Jehangir, from University of Technology, Sydney, published by Sage Journals on January 28. It is entitled ‘Finding peace journalism: An analysis of Pakistani media discourse on Afghan refugees and their forced repatriation from Pakistan’. Though not directly linked with terrorism, the paper gives us a glimpse of how the media creates public perception about Afghans.

On the basis of analysis of four mainstream English language newspapers of Pakistan, she finds that media discourse about Afghans change with the stance by the state on Afghanistan. “Findings reveal that the coverage in all four publications was highly politicized and inflammatory,” she finds, adding that Afghan voices were missing.

In Pakistan, journalism is not a profession. It is an occupation and anyone able to attract people comes to prominence. Those who fail to do so end up teaching media in our universities. This is a dilemma. The state pays the price of this media unprofessionalism not only in the shape of moral decay in society but also on international forums.

Shortly after the statements of Pakistani ministers, acting foreign minister of Afghanistan, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said the Afghan soil was not used for terrorism. He counted all Afghan neighbours – China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran – to make a point that terrorism prevails only in Pakistan. Even Afghanistan is witnessing less terrorist strikes than Pakistan. Other Taliban representatives warned Pakistan against any kind of invasion, stating that they were prepared for a conflict more than ever, now that the US forces have withdrawn.

Similarly, anti-Taliban Afghans are also standing by the Taliban on this front, arguing that terrorism is a Pakistani product. I briefly reviewed Facebook and Twitter pages of anti-Taliban Afghans living in Islamabad. It came as a shock that they were promoting Bollywood thriller ‘Pathaan’, arguing that Pashtuns were ‘heroes’ in India but villains in Pakistan. They liked the movie not for its quality, but because of its anti-Pakistan and pro-Pathaan stance.

An American mainstream reviewer writes about the movie, “What you’re seeing in “Pathaan” isn’t so much the apotheosis of an Indian action film as the fusion of decades of international styles of mega-powered meta-pulp.”

In such a scenario, it is the responsibility of the government to educate journalists in Pakistan on how to behave during and after conflicts. No race is either superior or inferior to others, and acts of terrorism should not be linked to an ethnicity.

The writer teaches mediatization at International Islamic University Islamabad