WHEN Pakistan first decided to use terrorism as a tool of its state policy, it did not realise that it was about to mount a tiger from whose back it would never be able to dismount later. For, the truth is that once you mount a tiger, you have no choice of getting off the beast’s back. For, if you do that, the tiger will devour you. The terror tiger is now trying to gobble up Pakistani rulers -- and it is most likely to succeed, in the process demolishing the State of Pakistan in time.

The latest news on the terror front in Pakistan is that the Teherik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has threatened two of the constituent parties in the country’s ruling coalition -- Pakistan Muslim League- Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) -- with attacks on their top leaders if they did not stop supporting action against terrorists. TTP has made it clear that it disapproves the policy of the Shehbaz Sharif Government to launch a drive against terrorism, and that it would start targeting top leaders of the two parties as its retaliation. The PML-N is headed by Prime Minister Mr. Shehbaz Sharif and the PPP is headed by Foreign Minister Mr. Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. This makes the Taliban thought-process clear and candid. Its threat is specific and serious, to say the least.

It must be recalled here that TTP has been banned in Pakistan and has no legal locus standi in the country’s internal affairs. Unmindful of the ban, the Taliban in Pakistan has often dabbled in internal politics of the country. Time and again, it has mounted attacks on Pakistani Army or Chinese developmental teams. These terror strikes have already become a big headache for the Pakistani authorities. On one hand, they support and sponsor terrorist activities and on the other hand take stern measures against them as well. There is no logic to this contradiction -- which has only angered all terrorist groups in the country. The TTP’s threat is one manifestation of the situation full of contradictions.

Factually, the Pakistani rulers are in a self-created quandary in the sense, they support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but outlaw its outfit in their own country. Such contradictions are available only in a country like Pakistan where there is little connection between the ideology and the reality. The Pakistanis also made fools of themselves by asking for international help for Afghanistan under Taliban. The Taliban leadership was upset with that kind of overture and told the Pakistanis to shut up on that issue. When a State is so confused, all it does is to prove how scatter-brained it is on critical issues. It does not know what is happening and how to handle those happenings. The TTP threats to its political leaders are a clear indication of Pakistan’s poverty of ideas. When Pakistani leadership chose to use terrorism as a tool decades ago, it really did not imagine that one day, the same tool would become a tiger from whose back they would never be able to dismount.

There is a strong and growing opinion in Pakistan that association with terror must be snapped immediately. The stern measures the current dispensation in power is taking against militants -- armed terrorists and religious zealots -- is a reflection of that opinion, though in an awkward manner. And the TTP is opposed exactly to that shade of opinion -- in complete consonance with the Afghani Taliban. This proves that the Pakistani rulers have hurt the sentiments of the Taliban as a whole by banning the TTP.

The issue gets quite complicated at this point. For, it relates to the entire confused thought-process of the Pakistani leadership in which the military dabbling is always disproportionately high. The current displeasure of the Pakistani military about the TTP is because of the attacks on the Army personnel at various places in Pakistan. But that does not go well with the overall pro-Taliban policies the country has had. The situation of conflict that is now available in Pakistan, thus, is promising to increase in negative intensity. When the country is already in a tight economic situation, when inflation is at its worst height, when foreign exchange reserve is already at its lowest ever, and when the common people are despondent about their future, Pakistani rulers have on their hand something they do not know how to handle. This is the bane Pakistan was born with -- and is living with.