...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire.
and Nairobi on the weekend were dissimilar but not exactly disconnected.
For one, both were explicitly directed against non-Mohammedans. The dozen or so men who stormed into the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital reportedly queried potential victims about their faith before singling out their victims. Outside the All Saints Church in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central...
capital, no such interrogation was deemed necessary.
The pattern of the Nairobi siege has been compared with the Mumbai rampage of 2008. The suicide kabooms in Peshawar, on the other hand, resemble the targeting of Shia imambargahs and Ahmadi places of worship. In both cases, however, commentators purportedly representing the perpetrators have harped on the theme of foreign military intervention as a primary motivational factor.
The Somali militia Al-Shabaab
... Somalia's version of the Taliban, functioning as an arm of al-Qaeda...
, which has grabbed credit for the Nairobi carnage, has said it was a response to Kenya's military role in neighbouring Somalia, where a ramshackle regime in Mogadishu barely survives in the presence of troops contributed by the African Union
...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful...
(AU). The Shabaab militia, though, has a particular beef with Kenyan forces, which have collaborated with local warlords to substantially restrict its remit.
In Pakistain, it was initially reported that the Junoodul Hifsa, which is linked to the local Taliban, claimed the responsibility (subsequently denied by the Taliban). Reportedly, it said it had been provoked by the American drone strikes in the tribal areas -- without elaborating, obviously, on the connection between the All Saints churchgoers and the CIA's Predators, because there is none.
Sadly, but not altogether surprisingly, Imran Khan
... aka
Taliban Khan, who is the lightweight's lightweight...
, whose party wields provincial power in KP, chose to implicitly harp on the same theme, while also linking the attack to elements opposed to the prospect of peace talks between the Taliban and the government in Islamabad, without specifying who he had in mind.
It is intriguing that the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP) reportedly denied involvement in the attack, but in itself it proves nothing. It is hardly a secret, after all, that groups loosely affiliated with the Taliban pursue relatively independent agendas, so even if the TTP is not being entirely disingenuous, it is perfectly conceivable one of its associates may have decided to commit mass murder without clearing its plans with the TTP hierarchy.
It may well also be the case that whoever authorised the unutterably vile act was indeed determined, inter alia, to thwart any sort of grinding of the peace processor. If so, they are likely to have been pleased by Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf...
's indication from London that in the wake of the monumental tragedy, conciliatory talks were off the agenda.
Perhaps he felt he had little choice. After all, many sensible voices in Pakistain oppose negotiations with dedicated killers as pointless, and arguably irresponsible. After all, in any civilised state, some things must be non-negotiable. Such as the sanctity of life.
Talks ought not to be written off completely as long as there is the slightest chance that they could lead to a modus vivendi that does not entail submitting to obscurantist blackmail. But given that the prospects of successful negotiations are incredibly slim, is there a Plan B in place? A dozen years after the 9/11 backlash, has the notion sunk in that Pakistain and terrorism cannot indefinitely coexist?
Pakistain cannot, surely, want to lapse into another Somalia. The lessons are tangential, no doubt, but ought not to be ignored. The African state fell into disarray following the ouster of Siad Barre in 1991, and was overrun by competing militias under rival warlords, a trend that UN and US intervention in the mid-1990s -- including an ill-fated contingent of Pak peacekeepers -- singularly failed to arrest.
A semblance of stability was eventually restored by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which fell short of a satisfactory solution, but temporarily brought peace to Mogadishu by sidelining the warlords. Its nomenclature alone may have sufficed, though, to provoke a disastrous US-backed Æthiopian invasion, which led to the ascendancy of Al-Shabaab, which had until then been a relatively minor component of the ICU.
There have since then been competing factions within Al-Shabaab, which affiliated itself with Al Qaeda a few years ago, with Somali nationalists -- who primarily opposed a foreign presence on their soil -- lately weeded out by the votaries of global jihad, who have attracted adherents, including British and US-born Somalis, from across the world. Both Al-Shabaab and the Kenyan authorities claim that the Westgate faceless myrmidons were a disparate bunch in terms of nationality.
The vast area Al-Shabaab once controlled within Somalia has also been shrinking, largely because of military operations by Kenyan and other AU forces in collaboration with warlords whose loyalties are easily bought. What's more, its leadership and ranks have lately been depleted by a vendetta against nationalists averse to the agenda of global jihadism.
The militia is likely to have been aware that the shopping mall it targeted in Nairobi is Israeli-owned, but it appears Westgate was chosen because it is magnet for Westerners as well as the Kenyan elite.
Its ruthlessness inevitably made the world pay attention. And Kenya, whose president and vice-president have both been implicated by the International Criminal Court
... where Milosevich died of old age before being convicted ...
in the violence that followed elections five years ago, has received offers of additional support from the UK, US and Israel.
Pakistain and Somalia are very different entities but, although it is clear that US intervention has not had a salutary effect in either case, stemming the bloodshed in both cases deserves more concerted engagement at a local level than, most tragically, has hitherto been the case.