Ehsanullah Ehsan, the former spokesman of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, a group responsible for one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil, “escaped” from a maximum-security prison in February 2020, three years after his arrest. While Ehsan claimed to have fled to Turkey, evidence suggests that he instead remained in Pakistan under the protection of that country’s Inter-Services Intelligence.
When foreign officials and diplomats confront Pakistan about its double-dealing with terrorist groups, Pakistani authorities often act indignant: Thousands of Pakistani troops and civilians have died in Pakistan’s own war against terror. That fact does not, however, exculpate Pakistani authorities for their complicity with terror. Many countries seek to sponsor Islamist radicals in order to achieve policy goals beyond their borders only to suffer blowback. Saudi Arabia, for example, funded radicalism for decades, including in Pakistan, only ceasing terror financing when the Saudi monarchy started suffering blowback from those it once indulged. Years before the outbreak of civil war in Syria, President Bashar Assad allowed jihadis to use his territory as an underground railroad into neighboring Iraq. Likewise, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cultivated and facilitated Islamist groups in Syria only to suffer blowback into Turkey.
Ordinary Pakistanis are fed up. Fazal Khan, whose son died in the 2014 Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, filed a petition before the Peshawar High Court, seeking to hold several officials including the Inter-Services Intelligence director general and the army chief of staff in contempt for their roles in facilitating Ehsan’s escape. Late last week, the court dismissed the petition, “On the question regarding facilitation and providing opportunity to the said terrorist to make good his escape, it is stated at the bar that respondents are employing all means to arrest the said terrorist whenever they find any clue about him and there is no role of the respondents in the escape of the said terrorist,” the court ruled. “When such is the position of the case, we see no reasons to continue with the contempt petition.”
Adding insult to injury, the court found that Ehsan had never formally been tried because Parliament required him to be tried by a military tribunal, but such military tribunals expired four years later, leaving no opportunity for him to be tried. Neither the court nor the Pakistani government explained why it held a man responsible for so much Pakistani blood and never bothered to try him.
Inter-Services Intelligence authorities may believe they are protecting an asset, but, with so many victims of Ehsan living not only outside Pakistan but inside the country as well, the mystery of how Pakistan’s most wanted man escaped from Pakistan’s highest security prison, and how he went untried, lives on. Pakistani authorities may want to dismiss Indian intelligence reports that place him in Pakistan’s capital because they consider India their enemy, but decades of Pakistani double-dealing has left much of the world believing India to be more credible and Pakistan’s word unreliable. Nor will Pakistan’s leaders, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or the online trolls and bots they employ be able to deflect Pakistani nationalist indignation about Ehsan, for the blood he traded upon was that of Pakistani school children.
Pakistan could succeed, but decades of failing to hold Inter-Services Intelligence terror complicity to account have soiled Pakistan’s reputation, undermined its security, and left the country teetering on the edge of financial and security failure. The Ehsan case affirms that Pakistani authorities, including its judiciary, are either incompetent, complicit, or both. Either way, the most senior heads in the Pakistani government and Inter-Services Intelligence should roll.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
