The Pakistani Taliban’s radical rebranding: Is there more than meets the eye?

In an announcement launched on Feb. 12, the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) distanced itself from worldwide terrorism, declaring that its violence was singularly targeted on Pakistan.

The TTP additionally strikingly urged the US to associate with it and the “harmless tribal plenty” in protection of human rights as an alternative of with “oppressive Pakistan,” which it alleges has been taking part in a double recreation with America — a chorus typically heard in Washington.

The assertion — issued in response to a United Nations Safety Council (UNSC) monitoring report launched earlier this month that briefly mentioned the group’s presence in Afghanistan — immediately triggered controversy given the TTP’s oddly apologetic tone towards Washington.

The TTP launched a clarification the following day asserting its bona fides as an “Islamic militant group” targeted on “implementing shari’a” (Islamic legislation) in Pakistan. It additionally said that its goals have been to induce world powers to not associate with “our enemy the Pakistani military and institution” and to dwell as much as their claims of supporting human rights by serving to take away the grip of the “oppressor” over “oppressed nations.”

Whereas the TTP’s current feedback on America are unprecedented, they do match into its broader rebranding effort underneath the management of Noor Wali Mehsud, who took over the group in 2018.

The TTP’s legacy of violence and ties to transnational terror

The TTP has receded from headlines lately, however it was as soon as one of many world’s most prolific terrorist teams. Based by commander Baitullah Mehsud in 2007, the TTP served as an umbrella group uniting the disparate Taliban-style jihadist teams that emerged within the years after 9/11 throughout Pakistan’s Pashtun belt. These native outfits have been typically organized alongside geographic and tribal strains.

The TTP’s wave of terror started with the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Within the years that adopted, the TTP wouldn’t solely kill many different main Pakistani politicians, but additionally tens of 1000’s of civilians and safety forces. Its victims included Pashtun tribal elders, Shi’a minorities, Pakistani civilians observing ceremonies alongside the border with India, native Christians marking the Easter vacation in a public park in Lahore, and scores of ladies risking their lives to vaccinate youngsters in opposition to polio. The TTP’s bloodbath of scholars and academics at a college in Peshawar in 2014 was arguably its most barbaric assault.

For a few years, the TTP and its strongholds in Pakistan’s tribal areas constituted the middle of the worldwide jihad. The TTP gave refuge to al-Qaeda operatives in addition to militants from a number of regional jihadist teams. Its relations with al-Qaeda, nevertheless, have been typically troubled. Senior al-Qaeda leaders, together with Osama bin Laden, rebuked the group privately for its indiscriminate assaults on Muslim civilians. And al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate publicly condemned the TTP’s 2014 college bloodbath.

The TTP’s second chief, Hakimullah Mehsud — a reasonably unhinged character — dipped his toes into world jihadism. The TTP claimed duty for the suicide assault on a Central Intelligence Company (CIA) base in japanese Afghanistan in 2009 by a Jordanian triple agent in addition to the failed Instances Sq. automotive bombing in 2010 by a naturalized American citizen.

These assaults have been framed as revenge for CIA drone strikes that pummeled Pakistan’s tribal belt, regularly concentrating on the TTP and generally carried out in cooperation with Pakistan’s Inter-Providers Intelligence (ISI). All three of the TTP leaders who preceded Noor Wali have been killed in U.S. drone strikes — the primary two in Pakistan and the final in Afghanistan.

Migration to Afghanistan

With the Pakistan Military’s first severe large-scale counterinsurgency operations in 2009, the TTP’s territorial management started to shrink, although the group remained a formidable terrorist menace.

In 2014, the Pakistan Military launched Operation Zarb-e Azb to evict the TTP from its final main territorial stronghold: North Waziristan. The ISI additionally led a nationwide counterterrorism marketing campaign coordinated with provincial police forces to uproot city terror networks related to the TTP, al-Qaeda, and different anti-state jihadist teams. Consequently, terrorist assaults in Pakistan plummeted, at the same time as circumstances in neighboring Afghanistan worsened.

As a consequence of Operation Zarb-e Azb, the TTP in addition to different worldwide jihadist teams fled to neighboring Afghanistan. Some TTP commanders — together with Mullah Fazlullah, the terrorist who ordered the assault on Malala Yousafzai — had already been based mostly in Afghanistan as early as 2009.

In Afghanistan, the TTP splintered additional, with some offshoots pairing up with the now-former Afghanistan republic’s intelligence service, others persevering with to associate with the Afghan Taliban, and a few defecting to the so-called Islamic State. The TTP has at all times been fractious, because of its tribal cleavages and the rank criminality of a lot of its membership.

Retooling and pivot again to Pakistan

The TTP’s fortunes have taken a flip for the higher since Noor Wali assumed management in 2018 after the killing of the group’s then-leader Fazlullah in a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan. Noor Wali has re-established the group’s inner self-discipline, strategic focus, and unity, bringing collectively the numerous TTP factions underneath a single umbrella as soon as once more.

Deaths because of terrorism continued to drop in Pakistan into 2020, reflecting Islamabad’s skill to maintain a lot of the safety beneficial properties made because the launch of Operation Zarb-e Azb. However the total decline lately obscured a disconcerting pattern: the persistence of TTP assaults concentrating on Pakistani safety forces alongside the border areas with Afghanistan.

At present, the comparatively low ranges of terrorism in Pakistan usually are not solely attributable to its improved counterterrorism capabilities, but additionally behavioral change on the a part of the TTP, which has moved away from indiscriminate mass casualty assaults, honing its violence largely on Pakistani safety forces.

This shift in TTP violence together with its restructuring and launch of a laiha (code of conduct) are among the many many adjustments underneath Noor Wali that counsel inspiration from the Afghan Taliban and maybe even steerage from al-Qaeda. In cease-fire talks with the ISI final fall, the TTP even demanded the creation of a “political workplace” in a 3rd nation, just like the Taliban’s Doha workplace.

Extra importantly, just like the Afghan Taliban, the TTP immediately is portraying itself as a territorially-limited motion for shari’a. In an interview with CNN final summer time, Noor Wali asserted that his group’s combat is “solely in Pakistan” and its objective is to take over Pakistan’s tribal areas and “make them unbiased.” He reiterated the give attention to Pakistan in an interview that an Indian information outlet purports to have carried out with him final month. The TTP has additionally tried to reposition itself as a defender of ethnic Pashtuns, in addition to aggrieved Baloch minorities, leveraging discontent with military operations in areas neighboring Afghanistan.

So what’s to be fabricated from the TTP’s localization technique? Does it quantity to a rejection of al-Qaeda’s model of transnational jihadism as we’ve seen from teams equivalent to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham? Publicly accessible sourcing suggests there may be greater than meets the attention.

For starters, the TTP’s makes an attempt to journey the coattails of secular protest teams just like the Pashtun Tahafuz Motion (PTM) don’t essentially replicate a clear break with al-Qaeda. In any case, al-Qaeda itself sought to leverage the favored actions of the Arab Spring. Furthermore, reporting from the United Nations and different sources claims that al-Qaeda has a hand within the TTP’s change in technique. Certainly, unnamed al-Qaeda operatives who reportedly spoke with CNN final 12 months hailed the TTP’s behavioral adjustments and reunification. The TTP’s public distancing from al-Qaeda may merely be a ploy to remain out of the crosshairs of the US and keep away from creating hassle for its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.

Finally, the TTP’s localization technique is a response to its personal failures and recognition of its restricted choices. It’s altering course by appropriating the rhetoric and organizational construction of higher performing or profitable fashions within the area, specifically these of PTM and the Afghan Taliban. Whereas the TTP is proving that it may well nonetheless pack a punch, the Pakistan Military, not like the defunct Afghan Nationwide Military, isn’t any pushover. The TTP’s attain as an insurgency immediately is a far cry from its peak greater than a decade in the past.

The perfect case situation for the TTP is that it causes nice sufficient ache for Islamabad to compel it to concede management over restricted territory — most probably areas in North and South Waziristan — that will successfully represent a mini-emirate between the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Such an consequence, nevertheless, is unlikely in the mean time.

Arif Rafiq is the president of Vizier Consulting LLC, a political threat advisory firm targeted on the Center East and South Asia, and a non-resident scholar on the Center East Institute. The views expressed on this piece are his personal.

Picture by ABDUL BASIT/AFP by way of Getty Pictures