It’s simple. Follow the money trail and find who's feeding terror in the country. In order to effectively route out extremism, the financial channels need to be tracked and blocked to ensure that militants are cut off from their well-wishers, and the people they dupe, in order to spread unrest across the country. Terrorist organizations have mastered techniques of playing the public false by raising funds for their sinister activities under the guise of charitable work. Initiatives such as collecting charity and animal hides are often just fronts for collecting funds and the government should ensure that their citizens conduct a thorough research to find out where their money is being spent before their philanthropic actions are turned on their heads.
Apart from kidnapping, drug-running, arms smuggling and a host of other means to fill their insatiable appetites for destruction, it seems that working through religious charities is just another way for terrorists to replenish their supplies. The good thing though, is that money leaves trails, and these tracks can be followed by the government to crack down on these factions. Following the channels of money may be hard at first, but starting points are fairly obvious, to find out how the Taliban links itself to its operatives and their entire network indefinitely. Those operatives can be found based on the transactions they make, and in addition, terrorist loyalists can also be tracked down and held accountable. Talks or no, Pakistan faces growing dangers of polarisation and discrimination. The hate material fed into and legitimised for social consumption makes taking action in the face of public dissension harder. This dissension is actively cultivated by material designed to mislead.
Last year, the government banned around 40 charity organizations that were just fronts for militant organizations around the time of Eid-ul-Azha. It seems that this year, there aren’t as many banners demanding people to donate the hides of the animals sacrificed for a ‘better cause’. Tracking the financial channels in addition, will also reveal the back channels of the paper trail, and will illuminate the government on who they are to watch for. Not only will this help the efforts of stopping the bloodshed, it might also undermine conspiracy theories of foreign hands pulling the strings behind the extremist operations. Claims of the CIA or RAW financing terrorist groups to destabilize Pakistan might lose ground and instead, other stakeholders such as some friends in the Middle East, may have to suffer embarrassment if connections are revealed.