Within Pakistan, the unforgiving regions of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan have had an especially violent ‘gun-culture’, for a long time. Bloody, inter-tribal, anti- ‘foreigner’ and familial feuds are a way of life, and often the family sentinels peer at their neighbours through rifle ports.

For centuries the foreboding mountain passes were drenched with the blood of ‘foreign’ conquerors (today the same sentiment is afforded on the Pakistani State or ‘establishment’) who were either killed or made to beat a hasty retreat. Even today, Pakistani society is highly weaponized with up to an estimated 50 million civilian-held firearms, mostly illegally. Statistically, one in every four Pakistanis could be bearing a personal weapon. Partly a means of asserting ‘martial’ status, pride, and time-honoured tradition ~ it also has immense functionality for the burgeoning private militias (terror groups, both internal and external facing), feudal warlords or Vadheras, drug peddlers, land mafias, and even partisan groups.

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The sleepy hamlet or ‘gun valley’ on the border with Afghanistan, just 30 kms away from Peshawar, called Darra Adam Khel, personifies the gun-culture in Pakistan. Besides the notoriety of 2,000 odd shops selling locally made weapons/ replicas of various authorized and banned bor – es ~ the cultural iconography is subliminally embedded with the marble statue of a local hero, Ajab Khan Afridi, who is belie v – ed to have ridden his horse into a British officer’s house in 1923, shot dead his wife and kidnapped the officer’s daughter for ransom. Today, gunsmithing sustains livelihoods.

From guns (even James Bond ‘Pen Gun’), AK-47 replicas, pistols, machine guns to even anti-aircraft guns ~ all are on the menu. Given the limited presence of the Pakistani state in such areas, the duty of ensuring law and order (even, controls and checks) is entrusted to the tribal police or ‘Khasadar’ to check for any violations. This historic hands-off arrangement, ‘distance’, and the lack of formal boots-on-ground of the Pakistani ‘establishment’ (read, military) in the region makes the produce of a township like Darra Adam Khel available to anyone, or any insurgent group, willing to pay a price for the weapons.

Beyond the local consumers, the fierce tribesmen in the region, this practically ungoverned regi – on is also at the cusp of two larger insurgency-prone regions i.e., the Pashtun-dominated hills where the Taliban-Tehreek-e-Pakistan (TTP) has resonance across both sides of the invisible Durand Line separating Af-Pak boundaries, and the restive swathes of Baluchistan where the likes of the increasingly violent Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) operate. Darra Adam Khel is only a metaphor for the easy access of weaponry that has been nurtured domestically for generations.

Yet another easy source of weaponry for the seemingly insatiable gun-lust of Pakistani groups is the lawless 2,640 km long Durand Line that potentially allows weapons to flow in from across the Afghanistan side uninhibited. The fact that the Afghan government under the Taliban (once created and controlled by Pakistan itself) is now counterintuitively hostile towards its former progenitor makes gunrunning across the border easy. With many ‘allowed’ bases of both Baloch and Pashtun insurgent groups within Afghan soil tolerated and even patronized ~ the cross-border flow of weapons into the Pakistani side is well established.

In fact, even in the poorly manned 909 km-long PakistanIran border that demarcates the Pakistani province of Baluchistan from its co-ethnically dominant Baluch on the Iranian side of Sistan and Baluchestan (with many ‘sympathisers’ and insurgent Baluch insurgent bases said to be on the Iranian side) ~ flow of weapons and genuine reasons for the same, are ample.

Today, it is not the much demonised Line-of-Control (LOC) that separates India from Pakistan ~ as popularly imagined to be the ‘enemy’ lands in the Pakistani conscience ~ which accounts for cross border violence or movement of weaponry. It is the barely controlled Dura nd Line and even the Pak-Iran border that accounts for almost all bloodshed, violence and gun-running into Pakistan. It is said that more people have died of terror and violence on the Durand Line in recent times than all people put together in all wars (including decades old insurgent movements) with India since 1947.

But accepting such a stark reality is a further slap on the hollowness of the foundational ‘two-nation theory’ that had got exposed in 1971. Now with the Afghan Taliban breathing down the necks of the Pakistani ‘establishment’, the much-invested bogey of India as ‘enemy number one’ (which legitimised the over-entitled status of the Pakistani military despite its repeated failures), gets further exposed. The Pakistani ‘establishment’ is caught in an awkward conundrum of accepting that the insincere claims of ‘friendly Muslim countries’ (as used for Afghanistan and Iran) do not cut ice anymore.

Even the Pakistani citizenry is waking to the dangers of having nurtured religious extremism, ‘terror factories’, and overplaying the role of RAW or India whenever anything goes wrong in Pakistan. It is with this backdrop that mealy-mouthed Pakistani diplomats are attempting the clumsy balancing-act of still alluding to India for all their problems, whilst getting increasingly more explicit on Afghanistan. The Pakistan Mission to the UN came clean with a statement, “Terrorist armed groups are in possession of billions worth of illicit arms abandoned in Afghanistan” but countenanced the same with the rote line of “These terrorist entities also receive external support and financing from our principal adversary” (while not naming India, the finger-pointing is unmistakable).

While conflating the puritanical Afghan Taliban to the traditionally invested notions of ‘enemy’ in RAW/India would be too far-stretched and implausible for the Pakistanis to digest calling out Afghanistan and India simultaneously, is blurringly less awkward to Pakistani diplomats. It is becoming apparent that neither weapons caught from the BLA or in TPP attacks have had any Indian markings or can be traced back to Indian operatives directly. The critical navel-gazing, if any, needs to be done in Pakistan itself about its own mismanagement and poor governance. Blaming India is not fetching the same resonance, and it is time to accept that something has gone terribly wrong in having invested in ‘terror nurseries’ and overleveraging religiosity.

Earlier this year, the Pakistani ambassador to the UN was more candid in blaming Afghanistan by insisting that the Afghan Taliban had, “failed to address the threat posed to the region and beyond by other terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda, the TTP and Baloch terrorists, including the BLA (so-called Balochistan Liberation Army) and the Majeed Brigade, which are present in Afghanistan”. Some more plain speak on the prevailing reality and less of a fixation with India may help Pakistan accept, address, and fix the terror problems, rather than harping on perfunctory, tired and outdated allusions to RAW and India.

(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd), and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)