No one in Pakistan can tolerate a policy of accommodating jihadis, or keep them as backroom allies in the mistaken belief that this is the best way of containing them.
Ahmadiyya Times | News Staff | Int'l Desk
Source & Credit: The Guardian - UK
Editorial | Saturday, July 3, 2010
It is a bit late in the day to be talking about wake-up calls in Pakistan, because after 18 months of bomb outrages that have targeted the Sri Lankan cricket team, intelligence and police officers, busy market places, and now fellow Muslims, the same policies are still in place: the distinction between "good" and "bad" jihadi groups; the official tolerance of hardline madrasas which give shelter to them; and the ambivalence of local political leaders to those groups.
Take Shahbaz Sharif, Punjab's chief minister and the brother of the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Shahbaz assured Lahore yesterday that the people behind the latest attack on a Sufi shrine, which killed 42 and injured 175, would never be allowed to escape. Really?
This is the same chief minister who in March called on the Taliban not to attack Punjab because his party shared some of their ideas (he said later that his remarks were taken out of context). This is the same provincial government whose law minister, Rana Sanaullah, campaigned at a byelection alongside a leader of a banned sectarian organisation that attacks minority Shias; and it is the same administration which gave £650,000 to Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity the UN put on its terrorism watchlist after the Mumbai attacks.
The attack on the Data Ganj Baksh shrine in central Lahore was the second assault against a religious group in just over a month, after the Ahmadi sect was targeted in late May, when 94 people were killed. Popular reaction yesterday blamed America for stirring up the jihadis with drone attacks in the tribal belt. But suicide attacks against Sufis have more to do with the sheer intolerance which the Wahhabi and Deobandi sects have for expressions of Islam they consider heretical. These puritans have found willing agents in the emergence of so-called "Punjabi Taliban" who co-ordinate their attacks with their counterparts in Waziristan and are formed from the same groups that Pakistan's army cultivated in the 1990s to attack Indian troops in Kashmir. Thursday night's attack was the second on Sufis, and will enrage ordinary Pakistanis, the majority of whom identify with that tradition of Islam.
No one in Pakistan, let alone Nawaz Sharif, who hopes one day to return to national power, can tolerate a policy of accommodating jihadis, or keep them as backroom allies in the mistaken belief that this is the best way of containing them. After the last two attacks, his brother Shahbaz cannot claim to have the situation under control in the Punjab. It is not and it needs a concerted police and intelligence operation (the army, too, needs to get off the fence) against all jihadis to settle the point of who runs the country's most populous province.
Read original post here: Pakistan: The crisis of Punjab
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ReplyDeleteAhmedis, particularly, came under great fire. The idea that every dissenter, thus, is ‘vaajib-ul-qatal’ (liable to be killed) came to me the first time through the writings of Ishtiaq Ahmed. Make no mistake about it, his circle of influence wasn’t small. True, that none of the girls in my elitist-ish school were reading him but boys from equivalent schools certainly were, and we know those are the ones whom brainwashing affects directly (though it is not any less hazardous in women). My brother, i remember, once asked me to give him my collections of Ishtiaq Ahmed novels, to take to America for a homesick friend of his. His influence ranged far and wide.
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