Reviewed by Madiha Sattar

THE tragedy of the attack on Malala Yousafzai is not just that extremists targeted an innocent 14-year-old for speaking out against their opposition to girls’ education. What makes the incident all the more devastating is that it is a result of decades of the Pakistani state’s own short-sighted and wrongheaded policies that have fostered the creation of the very groups that are terrorising Pakistan today.

This is not a new argument, and in recent years, especially with the increasing freedom of the Pakistani media, the security establishment’s failures and mistakes on this front have been written about extensively. Partly this work has been done in books by American journalists and analysts, particularly since 9/11, although these have tended to focus on the evolution of Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s links to that phenomenon.

Former American career diplomat and now international affairs professor John R. Schmidt, who served as the political counsellor at the US embassy in Islamabad from 1998 until two months before 9/11, takes a different path in The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad. His project is to map out the evolution of the different strands of violent extremism in Pakistan, from groups created to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan to Kashmir-focused militants and sectarian outfits. As he does this, he fills an important gap in literature on the topic by trying to unravel the increasing interconnectedness and complexity of Pakistan’s jihadist threat.

Much has been made of the cross-pollination between militant groups, of the increasingly blurred boundaries between outfits with different goals, origins and techniques who have forged collaborations of varying intensities, from providing safe havens to each other to sharing training facilities to actively joining forces. It has now become fashionable to talk about the extremist threat to Pakistan as a complicated nexus of jihadist groups of various stripes. But rarely is this argument backed up by a mapping out of this complex web of relationships and its evolution.

With The Unraveling, Schmidt has done three important things. He has traced the ways in which a range of violent extremist groups that operate within and from Pakistan have collaborated and evolved with each other: how, for example, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan grew partly out of the Afghan jihad of the 1980s and both supported

Al Qaeda, or how Harkatul Jihad-i-Islami — students from Pakistani madrassahs, some sponsored by the JUI, who had banded together in the 1980s to fight the Soviets across the border —evolved into the Kashmir-focused and ISI-backed Harkatul Mujahidin (which was later found sharing a training camp with Al Qaeda) and then splintered into the Kashmir-focused but also violently sectarian Jaish-i-Mohammad, which has attacked the Pakistani state and Western targets inside Pakistan as well. For Pakistani journalists and analysts this type of information might be fairly basic, but for most other readers it’ll work as a useful overview of the country’s crisscrossing landscape of jihad.

Second, Schmidt has fleshed out the role of more mainstream religious parties such as the JUI-F and Jamaat-i-Islami in supporting the growth of some of these groups, including through madrassahs. Third, and particularly relevantly today given the epidemic of Shia killings across the country, he has described the growth of violent sectarian outfits in the country and their own connections to religious political parties and jihadist groups.

But overemphasising such links, or ignoring the distinctions that persist, is also tricky territory. American policy in Afghanistan, for example, conflated the Afghan Taliban with Al Qaeda on the basis of safe havens the former provided to the latter. What started out as a targeted counterterrorist strike on a particular slice of Afghan soil to take out the organisation behind 9/11 expanded into expensive nation-building and a battle across Afghanistan against the Afghan Taliban, who have turned into insurgents fighting both their own government and Nato troops. Still, the Afghan Taliban’s goals, unlike Al Qaeda’s global agenda, remain limited to home soil, something that America is belatedly incorporating into its

policies by trying to talk to them and separating their operatives from Al Qaeda members on the UN’s sanctions list. And even as the US asks Pakistan to go into North Waziristan against the Haqqani network, the calculation in Rawalpindi includes the fact that that faction of the Afghan Taliban poses no threat to Pakistan — at the moment — in the way that the TTP does. Beneath the increasing collaboration among violent extremist groups lie critical distinctions that have real implications for how they need to be tackled.

What Schmidt does manage to demonstrate, though, is how the fostering of any such groups, no matter what their goals, has ended up contributing to the destabilisation of Pakistan; even the Kashmir- and India-focused Lashkar-i-Taiba, for instance, is not fighting the Pakistani state but has had disastrous consequences for Pakistan’s foreign relations and international reputation and has only increased the possibility of a confrontation with its eastern neighbour.

This idea that there are no ‘good’ militants has also become a sound bite, a claim usually made without analytical rigour. The Unraveling maps out why it is in fact true, and the book is worth reading for anyone who wants to understand how the specifics of Pakistan’s history of the last three decades prove that breeding any extremist group, no matter where its goals lie, is a gamble with the country’s own destiny.

The reviewer is a Dawn staffer