ISLAMABAD: Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Defense Minister Khawaja Asif separately clarified on Tuesday that the government was not planning to launch a “large-scale armed operation” against militancy, as controversy grows around measures announced last week.
Pakistan’s top national security forum on Saturday announced a new anti-terrorism operation titled, “Operation Azm-e-Istehkam,” or Resolve for Stability, after a meeting of senior military leaders and top government officials from all provinces, including the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-backed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur.
Opposition factions like the PTI and Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), two key political parties in the militancy-hit Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, have rejected the military operation, accusing the government of not taking the opposition or parliament on board before approving the measures. The protests have promoted the government to clarify its position and say the planned operation was still a work in progress and up for debate.
“Instead of a new organized armed operation, the operations will be intensified based on the intelligence already in progress,” PM Sharif was quoted as saying in a statement released by his office after a meeting of the federal cabinet on Tuesday. “A large-scale armed operation requiring displacement, launching such an operation under the vision of stability is simply a misunderstanding.”
In a statement released on Monday night, Sharif described the new operation as a “multi-domain, multi-agency, whole of the system national vision for enduring stability in Pakistan.”
“It is meant to reinvigorate and re-energize the ongoing implementation of the Revised National Action Plan, which was initiated after the national consensus across the political spectrum,” Sharif said, referring to a strategy formulated in 2014 to stamp out militant groups.
He said the new anti-terrorism operation would include political, diplomatic, legal and information prongs and continue operations by law enforcement agencies.
“CONSENSUS”
Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Islamabad on Tuesday, the defense minister said the government would create consensus before moving ahead with an operation.
“This [operation] will go through its process before it is enforced,” Asif said. “It will be presented in the cabinet today after which there will be a discussion on it in the House [parliament]. A consensus of the House on it will be built.
“The opposition parties and the government’s allies will be given a suitable amount of time to debate it and their questions and reservations will be answered.”
Asif said the government did not want to achieve any “political objectives” through the operation but wanted to combat the surge in militancy and eliminate it permanently.
Pakistan has witnessed a rise in militant attacks in recent months, many of them claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which pledges allegiance to, and gets its name from, the Afghan Taliban, but is not directly a part of the group that now rules Afghanistan. Its stated aim is to impose Islamic religious law in Pakistan, as the Taliban have done in Afghanistan.
Pakistani forces were able to effectively dismantle the TTP and kill most of its top leadership in a string of military operations from 2014 onwards in the tribal areas, driving many of the fighters into neighboring Afghanistan, where Islamabad says they have regrouped and from where they launch attacks.
Kabul denies this, saying rising violence in Pakistan is a domestic issue for Islamabad and it does not allow militants to operate on its territory.
