EU asylum agency report exposes Pakistan’s ‘good Taliban, bad Taliban’ fiction: Report

New Delhi: A recent report by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) has punctured the myth on which Pakistan’s counterterrorism policy has rested for decades by naming Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Harakat-ul-Mujahideen among the factions linked to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a report said.

Writing for Parrhesia News, Italian journalist and South Asia expert Francesca Marino said the EUAA Country Guidance: Pakistan, released on October 1, does not claim that JeM takes orders from the TTP, but acknowledges that Pakistan’s militant landscape does not fit into the neat compartments projected by the state.

"The walls between the organisations have always been porous. Men move, commanders defect, factions merge, seminaries supply recruits to more than one battlefield, and ideological affinities survive changes of name or patronage," Marino wrote.

Islamabad has for years portrayed the TTP as an Afghan problem, with militants supposedly sheltered across the border and sent into Pakistan, an account the analysis described as convenient but "incomplete to the point of dishonesty".

"But geography is not genealogy. The presence of militants in Afghanistan does not make Afghanistan the author of a movement created by Pakistani commanders, rooted in Pakistan’s former tribal areas, and shaped by decades of Pakistani jihadist policy," it stated.

Tracing the roots of Pakistan’s ‘good Taliban, bad Taliban’ approach, Marino said it began when the state chose to sort armed Islamist groups by their strategic usefulness, treating those fighting in Afghanistan as assets and those targeting India as proxies, while branding only those who turned on Pakistan as terrorists.

"The policy assumed that organisations sharing seminaries, clerics, veterans, financiers, and a Deobandi-jihadist vocabulary would respect the filing system of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. They did not," the analysis said.

Highlighting Islamabad’s double standards, it noted that Pakistan bombs Afghan territory and demands that Kabul dismantle militant sanctuaries, even as JeM’s headquarters in Bahawalpur, struck by India, is being repaired.

“Apparently, the principle that governments are responsible for militant infrastructure on their territory becomes geographically flexible somewhere near the border,” Marino wrote.

The analysis said that after Operation Sindoor proved that India could find and hit visible terror camps, JeM has chosen dispersal over disbanding, reportedly rebuilding Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur and expanding digital fundraising.

Blaming Afghanistan for the TTP, the analysis said, lets Pakistan pass off blowback as foreign aggression, adding that the state’s “good Taliban, bad Taliban” doctrine “failed because the categories were never real to the militants themselves”.

"Pakistan built a proxy system for wars beyond its borders and eventually discovered that borders were the one thing the system did not respect," Marino contended.

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