Source/Credit: The News International | Pakistan
By S Iftikhar Murshed | December 18, 2011
Pakistan seems to be perpetually confronted by problems, mostly of its own making. It has again drifted into turbulent waters and is lashed by the storms generated by the Mansoor Ijaz memo, the Supreme Court’s rejection of the NRO review petition, the controversy spurred by the president’s illness, and the unprecedented Pakistan-US tensions.
The tempests will eventually subside till the faltering government stumbles yet again into avoidable pitfalls. These self-created crises will come and go but what will remain are the twin nightmares of economic paralysis and incessant acts of terrorism. Misery thus hangs over the dusky air of the country. Ordinary people have never known, and will never know, the exquisite joy that comes from savouring the magic and mystery of beautiful things, till things change. This is unlikely to happen.
A report carried by the print media last week claimed said that in 2010 there were only 1,159 suicide attack-related deaths, 581 kidnappings and 977 abductions in the country. These computations are at variance with Interior Minister Rehman Malik’s statement in the National Assembly in July that there were 15,365 incidents of kidnapping and abduction last year. Of these 13,497 were in Punjab, 273 in Khyber-Paktunkhwa, 250 in Balochistan, and 52 in Islamabad. Many of the victims, particularly children, are indoctrinated and trained for suicide attacks, which some commentators believe are in response to drone strikes.
Earlier in the week a television talk-show host was at pains to emphasise that the last drone strike was on Nov 17 and since then there had been no suicide bombings. The assumption that there is a co-relationship between drone operations and suicide terrorism is premature, but if a linkage is established then it also demonstrates that the Predator attacks have significantly hurt and weakened the militant groups.
This was confirmed in March by Maj Gen Ghayur Mehmud, GOC of the 7th Division in North Waziristan. During a rare press briefing he said that the drones had killed mostly “hardcore Taliban or Al-Qaeda elements, especially foreigners” and civilian fatalities had been “few.” His brief, titled “Myths and Rumours about US Predator Strikes,” was then distributed among the journalists.
The WikiLeaks disclosures show that the chief of the army staff, Gen Kayani, wanted drone strikes to complement Pakistan’s military operations in the tribal areas. Though this was later vehemently denied by the Inter-Services Public Relations, as well as by the COAS himself, my own experience is that the WikiLeaks documents are accurate. For instance, I was quoted with remarkable precision in one of the confidential cables on Afghanistan.
Another factor that needs to be determined is the extent to which drone attacks are resented by the tribal people. According to the scholar Farhat Taj, whose recent book Taliban and Anti-Taliban is as controversial as it is well-researched, the overwhelming majority of drone strikes have been in the areas where the Ahmadzai Wazir, the Uthmanzai Wazir and the Dawar tribes of South and North Waziristan are predominant. Yet, not a single person from these tribes has been involved in terrorist attacks in Pakistan.
Though there were fewer suicide bombings this year, the overall tempo of violence has not abated. There has also been a surge in sectarian massacres and killings inspired by the perverted interpretation of Islamic tenets.
Human Rights Watch has reported that in the first ten months of the current year there were 118 attacks on Shias alone and “at least 275 Shias, mostly of Hazara ethnicity, have been killed in sectarian attacks” in Balochistan since 2008. The carnage has mostly been perpetrated by the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which is an offshoot of the Sipah-e-Sahaba the most murderous of the anti-Shia terrorist groups in Pakistan.
The same venom of distorted religious beliefs was on display again a few days ago when an Ahmedi cemetery was attacked and 29 graves were desecrated. This summer, pamphlets were distributed by the All-Pakistan Students Khatam-e-Nabuwat Federation in Faisalabad with the names and addresses of prominent Ahmedi doctors, teachers and businessmen. The leaflets called upon citizens to kill Ahmedis because of their “conspiracies against Islam and Pakistan.” These were not empty threats and resulted in the murder on Sept 3 of Naseem Ahmed Butt, a widely respected member of the beleaguered community.
The 11-year-old child prodigy of Pakistan, Sitara Akbar, recently set a world record by passing O Levels in English, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. Instead of feting this resplendent little star that has brought honour to her country, there have been comments that she is an Ahmedi. The painted mask of false piety can scarcely be more nauseating.
The nexus between banned sectarian organisations such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Afghan Taliban, Jundullah, and Al- Qaeda, along with its affiliates, has long been established. This was unwittingly reconfirmed by Rehman Malik when he thanked the TTP for not attacking Shia processions on the occasion of Ashura earlier this month. Malik has a reputation for saying the most outlandish things. But never before has an Interior Minister actually expressed gratitude to an extremist outfit for not killing people on a particular day.
Shortly afterwards there were three terrorist attacks in Karachi. On Dec 9 a bomb explosion in Gulistan-e-Jauhar near a van belonging to the Pakistan Rangers took the lives of four of its personnel. A few days earlier, the Global Islamic Media Front, a website maintained by Al-Qaeda, acknowledged that Moeed Abd al-Salam, who had been killed by the Rangers in the same area in November, was one of its key operatives. The attack should have been anticipated as it was almost certainly in retaliation for the killing of Abd al-Salam.
Ayman al-Zawahiri has declared war on Pakistan and has instructed his operatives to undertake coordinated attacks on military targets. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, including the TTP, have established sleeper cells in the major cities, particularly Karachi. These have to be penetrated through adroit intelligence and neutralised, failing which dramatic attacks such as the one on PNS Mehran last May are likely to recur.
But Islamabad’s preference is a policy of spineless appeasement. Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, the TTP commander in Bajaur Agency, has revealed that peace negotiations with the government are underway. Nothing seems to have been learnt from the past. Till now 13 peace accords with the militants have unravelled.
Maulvi Faqir also disclosed that the government had released 145 TTP fighters. Thus, heroes such as the human-rights activist and teacher Zarteef Khan Afridi, who was gunned down by the TTP in Jamrud on Dec 8, have died in vain. His had been a relentless struggle for the emancipation of the tribal people, particularly women, through learning. He believed, as the 18th-century English statesman Lord Brougham did, that “education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”
When adult franchise was introduced in Fata in 1997, Zarteef Khan launched a vigorous campaign for the registration of female voters in Khyber Agency, despite fierce resistance from the tribal leaders. His efforts were successful because of the support of a brave Waziri tribesman, Syed Amiruddin, who was the Political Agent at the time. Amiruddin paid dearly some years later when 13 members of his family were killed by the TTP.
Bigotry with its sodden face is corroding the soul of the nation while the economic meltdown has made survival for ordinary people an ordeal. Some years before the Russian Revolution, it was said that “the beasts of the forest have their lairs, and the wild beast their caverns, but the people of Russia, conquerors of the world, have nowhere to lay their heads.” That is the direction towards which Pakistan is also hurtling. The descent into chaos must be arrested.
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S Iftikhar Murshed is the publisher of Criterion Quarterly. Email: iftimurshed@gmail.com
Read original post here: The venom of false beliefs
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