Islamabad, December 15: As the country is gripped by Taliban insurgency, the Pakistani government is planning to brainwash hundreds of militants in cooperation with Saudi Arabia.
“We are going to set up a special cell for the detained militants in line with Saudi Arabia, where they will be psychologically treated by senior physiatrists,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told IslamOnline.net Monday, December 14.
“We have 2000 militants in our custody. Many of them were in initial stage of training and have not been converted into hardcore militants. We will try to de-radicalize them.
“We will consult the Saudi officials in this regard and will take advantage from their experiences.”
A senior interior ministry official confirmed that the government has planned a two-pronged strategy to de-radicalize the Taliban militants.
“The hardcore militants, including their top leadership, will be tried in military courts, comprising a brigadier and two colonels,” he told on condition of anonymity.
“The low-ranked militants will be sent to the proposed jail, where they will be brainwashed by senior psychologists.”
Pakistan is in the grip of a fierce insurgency, with more than 2,680 people killed in attacks since July 2007.
In April, the government launched an offensive into the Swat Valley to uproot Taliban militants from the region.
Months later, the army launched a deadly offensive into South Waziristan, the hub of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a conglomerate of different Taliban groups in the northern tribal belt.
Malik, the interior minister, insisted that the government would make no concessions to hardcore militants.
“They are being tried. There is no concession for them,” he said.
“However, there will be leniency for those who have been misguided by these criminal elements.
“That is why we are going to set up an exclusive cell for those misguided youths in line with Saudi Arabia, where they will be reformed through psychological treatment.”
But psychiatrists see the effort time-consuming. “It is a good move, but we should not expect results within weeks or months,” Dr. Haider Rizvi, a veteran psychiatrist, told.
“It is a time-consuming process, particularly in this case, whereby the patients (detained militants) are deeply brainwashed on religious grounds.”
He, however, seems unconfident that the fruit of the brainwashing process.
“US authorities used psychologists to mentally torture the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in the name of brainwashing. But actually, it was not brainwashing and it didn’t work either,” he said.
“However, if this phenomenon is used in a positive way, it can produce results.”
Dr. Rizvi sees some hurdles in de-radicalizing the Taliban militants.
“The first and foremost hurdle will be the availability of experienced and specialist psychologists, which unfortunately are not there at the moment,” he said.
“There are four or five clinical male psychologists in Pakistan, who, I am afraid, won’t be sufficient to deal with such a huge numbers.”
He opines that failure to tackle the root causes of the Taliban insurgency would nip the effort to de-radicalize the militants in the bud.
“Psychologists can make a difference, but cannot change the things from black to white,” he said.
“For this, you have to address the root cause of the problem,” he said, in an indirect reference to US and Pakistani policies vis-à-vis war on terror.
Abdul Khalique Ali, a Karachi-based analyst, agrees.
“These steps are mere waste of time. I don’t know what does the government want to earn from this idea?”
“Till, the war is over in the region, no such step would work, no matter how much sincere the governments of the US and Pakistan are.
“The blood of innocents will continue to create more and more militants. How many will be treated by the government?”
–Agencies–