Pakistan's Counterterrorism Challenge

8. Cyberia: A New War Zone for Pakistan’s Islamists

C H A P T E R 8 Cyberia A New War Zone for Pakistan’s Islamists ZAFARULLAH KHAN TIME AND AGAIN, militants have demonstrated their expertise at catching people and their governments off guard. However, the policy responses to check these challenges have been lukewarm. The latest addition to the militants’ toolkit is the use of modern gadgets and technology to propagate their medieval ideology. Ostensibly operating from rough terrains in comparatively less-developed areas, they have exhibited an amazing level of sophistication in wielding their ‘‘digital sword’’ (Blunt 2003, 25). They use and abuse information and communication technologies (ICT) in several ways: (a) to occupy normative communication and social spaces to present, project, and promote their narratives; (b) to create their own spaces to disseminate unfiltered propaganda based on their worldview; and (c) as tools to communicate, train, and network for waging global jihad. The focus of this chapter is these ‘‘technologies of liberation’’ (Diamond 2010) that aid extremists in establishing their own ‘‘Cyberia’’ with dangerous digital trenches. The chapter examines the overarching context that facilitates the militants’ use of Cyberia to pursue their agendas in Pakistan, the specific tools and technologies they employ, and the weakness of the state’s response that are allowing greater space to militants for actions linked to cybercrime and cyberterrorism. This is a crucial and grossly neglected aspect of counterterrorism (CT) as far as the Pakistani state apparatus is concerned. Besides the question of will, there is no coherent legal regime or a corresponding institutional capacity to check the threat of cyber militancy. The communication vectors among existing institutions with a mandate to check abuses—for example, the Pakistan 169 170 Chapter 8 Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), and the Cyber Crimes Wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA)—are very weak. Therefore, most of the efforts to curtail the resources available to terrorists—in this instance, technology—have produced little success in Pakistan. The Context: Militant Organizations and the Use of Media The South Asian region witnessed a proliferation of militant organizations during the first Afghan conflict (1979–89) against the Soviet Union; after the Soviet withdrawal, the sphere of their violent activities expanded to Pakistan as well. The Pakistani security establishment tolerated, and in a large number of cases actively supported, militant outfits as tools of its foreign policy in Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir. It only hardened its attitude toward these jihadi proxies after they became a domestic sectarian problem in the latter half of the 1990s. Pakistan had started banning militant sectarian organizations prior to 9/11. While it banned various Islamist outfits with varying agendas and activities , some under international pressure and others of its own accord, these bans have largely proved ineffective.1 First, the mere banning of an organization does not signal a complete closure or an end to their activities because monitoring every member of the organization is impossible. Also, the larger phenomenon of militancy and the aura of ideological ambivalence with respect to the legitimacy of violence in the name of religion in Pakistan add to the difficulties in structuring a CT strategy that targets the use of technology and the internet by terrorist groups. Huge governance gaps and the failure of the Pakistani state to provide basic social services to its citizens further add to the conundrum; they allow space for these militant outfits to run schools, charities, ambulance services, and so on—all activities that come across as innocent social work and that help knit a vibrant community of radicals who are able to earn the trust of people by providing humanitarian services. Like any other institution, the media is also a microcosm of the society in which it exists. The media ecology is influenced by popular discourses and narratives that prevail in any given context. The use of media in Pakistan has always reflected its internal dynamics, especially those surrounding religion. Since its birth, the country has experienced an intellectual struggle over its ideological foundations; at its core, the debate has been between modernists and traditionalists. The country’s mainstream population is conservative, and selective readings of history through textbooks have created public discourses Cyberia 171 and worldviews in the idiom of Islam (Nayyar and Salim 2005). The media professionals are drawn from the same sociology. The emergence of the press in the subcontinent during the colonial period was part of the nationalism project...