Some experts question Pakistan violence fighting efforts

World Today

One country that continues to deal with violent extremists is Pakistan. Some experts in the U.S. have started to question whether the Pakistani government is really serious about confronting extremists. CCTV’s Hendrik Sybrandy filed this report from Denver, Colorado.

A Taliban attack on a school there killed over 140 people in December 2014. Many of the victims were children. There have been a number of terrorist incidents since, including a bombing at a mosque on Wednesday February 18. Armed militants burst into a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan and began firing guns and tossing grenades. A recent attack killed almost two dozen worshipers and is part of a pattern of violence that continues to plague this country.

“This is an ongoing cycle that has been producing mayhem, chaos and of which there is no end in sight,” Nader Hashemi, Director, University of Denver, Center for Middle East Studies said.

Hashemi said this tragedy and December’s devastating Pakistani school attack occurred in a weak country where illiteracy, corruption and a radical religious ideology are all widespread.

“So what Pakistan is experiencing is blow back,” Christine Fair, Georgetown University’s Center for Peace & Security Studies said.

Pakistan expert Christine Fair puts it even more strongly. She argues the government’s support of militants like the Taliban has come back to haunt it.

“It wants to have those good jihadists that kill people in India and Afghanistan while wanting to have a very selective war against those terrorists that are now mobilizing against the state and you can’t do that,” Fair said.

Fair said the U.S. has gotten Pakistan all wrong by thinking that throwing money at its military will convince Pakistanis to see the world the way Americans do and persuade it to renounce its use of terrorism.

Half a world away from Pakistan, the White House summit on extremism has focused on militant groups like ISIL. Hashemi said ISIL ranks high on a scale of 1 to 10 as a terrorist threat, the Taliban much lower.

“The Taliban on a global scale would be maybe a two,” Hashemi said.

Fair said Pakistan remains a real security problem and that a major incident, perhaps involving its nuclear weapons, is still very possible.

“As a scholar of this, it’s difficult to not be concerned about where Pakistan is going,” Fair said.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said it’s time to end the menace of terrorism. But Hashemi predicts this incident inside a Peshawar mosque won’t be the last.

“The basic structural conditions that produce and lend these societies to instability are all there in Pakistan. I don’t see them changing anytime soon,” Hashemi said.


Gus Martin explains extremism and it’s root causes

CCTV America’s Mike Walter interviewed Gus Martin, Professor and author of Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues about extremism and it’s root causes.