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 Pakistan's
terrorist challenge
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
The
Milli Gazette
The abortive attempt by an American of Pakistani
origin to set off a home-made crude bomb at New York's busiest public
place, the famed Times Square, on a week-end puts a sharp focus on
America's failing 'war on terror,' which Obama has adopted as his own
under the new name of the 'long war.'
The administration has tried to finesse the issue by hailing it as a
success of vigilance mounted by FBI and other such agencies to keep
potential terrorists at bay. President Obama himself showered praise on
these agencies' vigilance that saved lots of lives that would otherwise
have been lost had the bomber succeeded in his nefarious design.
However, Obama's bravado is beside the point and is, in fact, an obvious
attempt to shift the public focus away from the fact that in spite of
waging two wars-in Iraq and Afghanistan-over the past 9 years, U.S. is
still far from achieving its target of snuffing out terrorism directed
against U.S. and the safety and security of its people. George W. Bush had
embarked on his ploy of pre-emptive war by raising the slogan that his
objective was to keep the terrorists away from American shores. With that
ruse he unleashed America's proven military might against Afghanistan, in
the first instance and 18 months later against Iraq, which has had nothing
to do with the events of 9/11 that triggered the U.S. wrath in the first
place.
That an American citizen living in U.S. attempted to set off another 9/11
mishap, albeit on a much smaller and tentative scale, still proves the
point that U.S. is nowhere near success in keeping the terrorists away
from its shores. In a cynical sense, it's the terrorists which are not
only confounding America's grandiose strategy but also, apparently,
succeeding in planting themselves well within the U.S. heartland despite
all its military muscle and intelligence expertise with a world-wide
reach.
Another issue at stake-which the administration, in particular, and the
establishment media, in general, have been trying to gloss over not only
in this case but in all such incidents-is that the potential terrorist is
an educated person hailing from a middle-class background. Faisal Shahzad,
the 30-year old American of Pakistani origin, belongs to a well-to-do
family from the frontier region of Pakistan. His father was a senior
officer in the Pakistan Air Force when he retired from service. Shahzad's
background and antecedents aren't that of a poor, under-privileged and
madrassa-educated youth fitting the stereotype of terrorists from Pakistan
and such other countries on the terrorism list of U.S.
This fact nails the canard and a vital cog in the American propaganda
material concerning the caricature of terrorists painted routinely in U.S.
and other western countries, as far as the focal relevance of Islamic
countries to the issue of terrorism is concerned. Faisal Shahzad not only
doesn't fit the typical description but clearly disproves the theory that
Islamic education-oriented madrassas are the hatcheries breeding
terrorists.
On the contrary, this latest incident highlights, in full glare of the
media spotlight, what Muslim intellectuals and friends of U.S. in the
Islamic world have long been trying to impress upon the American policy
makers and opinion formulators. Their constant refrain, since Bush went
into Afghanistan and, subsequently, into Iraq, has been that unbridled use
of force targeting Muslim states and holding Islam and its teachings
responsible for this current wave of terrorism is not only without
justification but is also, clearly, counter-productive.
It's obvious that anger over U.S. incursions into the Islamic world is
boiling over and generating the kind of backlash that made an abortive
attempt to manifest itself at the Times Square on May 1. That it failed
should be a cause of satisfaction not only to the Obama administration and
the American people but to those peace-loving people all over the world
who understand that anger in response to provocation is as unproductive
and unhealthy as the unbridled use of force to stem the tide of violence
and terrorism is, no matter how powerful and militarily-resourceful a
country may be. The U.S. failure in its 'long war,' still being waged in
all its ferocity and cruelty, is a loud and clear evidence that force is
not going to rid the world of the menace of terrorism. Force only begets
more force while forcing people to think of other ways to make their
point. The real tragedy is that in its blind pursuit to settle the issue
of terrorism with force, U.S. is showing the red rag to potential
terrorists and making it easier for ring-masters and principal ideologues
of terrorism to recruit more adherents to their archaic philosophy with so
much ease and facility.
But while U.S. and its people deserve to be empathized with and
congratulated for having averted another tragedy on the model of 9/11,
it's Pakistan that has been served with another timely reminder, if
anybody thought one was still needed, that it's being consumed much more
rapidly than anybody thought only some years ago, by its lethal-and
largely home-grown-culture of fanaticism and terrorism.
There is no denying the point that Pakistan has paid a much stiffer price
than any other 'ally' of U.S. in its war against terrorism.
It's very true and can't be disputed as a historical fact that it wasn't
Pakistan's war when the tin-pot dictator, Musharraf's paranoid
pre-occupation with perpetuating himself in power, led Pakistan into the
front trenches of Bush's war against terror. The tribal belt of Pakistan's
northern province sharing a 1600 mile-long border with Afghanistan, was,
then, a model of calm and tranquility, and there was no trace of terrorism
of any kind bedeviling it, as it has been the norm ever since.
But while that, 9 years down a road littered with barbaric atrocities and
mayhem of the worst kind, may now sound like fiction the bitter truth is
that Musharraf's monumental blunder has saddled Pakistan with a gory drama
the denouement of which seems far too complicated and gruesome to
comprehend by the most competent of observers and tea-leaves-readers.
The Pakistan army's involvement with U.S. in Afghanistan and, in
particular, vis-à-vis the 'war against terror,' has led to the unfolding
of the previously unheard-of phenomenon of the army operating on a very
large scale against its own people and well inside its own territory. It's
estimated that as many as 150,000 soldiers of the army are currently
engaged in combat activities in the region of Pakistan contiguous to
Afghanistan.
Thousands of people have been killed in the process, tens of thousands
have been uprooted from their homes and hearths and countless others have
been rendered refugees within their homeland. The army, in taking on the
tribesmen suspected of harbouring the much-hunted and sought-after Al
Qaeda operatives, has itself suffered thousands of casualties; their exact
count is, of course, a closely guarded secret because of the sensitivity
of the matter.
But the crux of the matter is that the Pakistan army's involvement in the
war alongside U.S. remains critically unpopular in Pakistan and with an
overwhelming majority of the Pakistanis. Their anger boils over the
critical point all the more because of the nightmare of regular
'visitations' by unmanned American aircraft, the much-dreaded Drones.
These stealth strikes over the tribal areas of northern Pakistan have,
invariably, resulted in more civilians being killed than suspected
terrorists, whose presence is the main alibi for these clandestine
strikes. The ratio of innocent men, women and children killed in
indiscriminate bombing of populated areas, to those of the alleged
terrorists targeted is infuriatingly large and is the principal cause of
the popular unrest and anger against the Americans.
The government of Pakistan is, in equal measure, a target of vilification
by the man-on-the-Pakistani-street because, in his perception, the
government is fully complicit with the Americans and, thus, deserving of
the popular wrath. Indeed the government isn't only incompetent and
corrupt but its most glaring failure, so far, is that it has failed to
explain its role to its people in the war against terror.
By the same token, it has not been able to convince the people-and even a
segment of the intelligentsia-that what wasn't, initially, Pakistan's war
has, by now, become very much its war and Pakistan's well-being and
homogeneity as a nation depends, unfortunately, on its favourable outcome.
So, this, by far, is the number one problem of Pakistan: its ruling
elite's incompetence to explain to its people the rationale of the
country's involvement in the ongoing 'long war'; and the inability of the
people to realize that Pakistan's survival as a nation is now hinged,
irrespective of their liking or disliking it, on its earliest resolution
in a manner that doesn't rub down negatively on Pakistan's integrity.
Accepting its national failures has never been a strong suit with the
Pakistanis. They are still in a collective denial, for instance, that the
eastern-half of the country was lost-and spawned the independent country
of Bangladesh-in 1971 because of the abysmal failure of the then ruling
elite from the western-half to come to terms with its eastern opposite
number. The conventional wisdom in Pakistan still blames the Bengalis for
being disloyal to Pakistan and for conspiring with a hegemonic India to
dismember Pakistan.
The collective national denial in this latest episode is equally
appalling, if not worse than what it was 30 years or so ago. Finger
pointing is facile. It's easy as an escape route to point the finger at
the Americans unleashing a war on Pakistan's borders and thus triggering a
domino effect. But in pursuing this line of argument-and holding the
American proclivity of shooting a fly with a shot-gun responsible for
igniting a tinder-box within Pakistan-the nay-sayers conveniently overlook
the fact that the tinder of religious fanaticism and obscurantism in
Pakistan is not of recent origin or provenance. This tinder had been
gathering mass ever since General Ziaul Haq, with his overly-zealous
religious pretensions, opened the portals of Pakistan to the influx of
Afghan refugees and the induction of the lethal philosophy of religious
orthodoxy on the heels of the American-abetted Afghan jehad against the
then Russian invaders of Afghanistan.
Pakistan has failed to tame the monster of religious extremism which, in
turn, has led to its society being polarized between an effete and
voice-less majority of saner elements understanding the implications of
endemic violence, and a strident minority of fanatics and obscurantists
who have been dictating the national agenda on the strength of raw power
and its unabashed demonstration.
It's not only that violence is becoming endemic in the Pakistan society
but, concomitant with it, the shirking by its people to face up to the new
reality. The most regrettable phenomenon of present-day Pakistan is the
tendency among its people, notably a sizeable segment of the
intelligentsia to deny that the nation is in error. Instead, the
proclivity to pin the blame on others is becoming a common malady.
Take for instance the Mumbai mayhem of November 2008 of which a hefty
segment of Pakistanis is not prepared to own responsibility for. There
are, already, similar voices murmuring belief that the Times Square
incident is nothing but a conspiracy by the Indian Raw and Israeli Mossad,
in cahoots with CIA, to implicate Pakistan and thus malign its name with
impunity. It's hard to think of a greater folly than this.
This is a nihilistic attitude which must be shunned if salvation from the
current cycle of vicious violence and murderous terrorism is what every
Pakistani covets. Facing up to its weaknesses is proof of a vibrant and
alive nation. The Americans may have failed to win the hearts and minds of
the people in those countries invaded by them because of their still firm
belief in the feasibility of force as the ultimate weapon. However, the
Pakistanis are no less guilty of not sweeping the dirt in front of their
own door-step. Angry men like Faisal Shahzad may think they have all the
justification to settle score with their tormentor, in its own home, as
best revenge. But in taking to this self-defeating course they are doing
the greatest disservice to their religion that only believes in sharing
with man-kind the universal gospel of peace. The sooner the Pakistanis
also remembered this, too, the better would be their prospect of coming
out of the present cycle of violence and terrorism as a united nation.
Source: The Milli Gazette, 16-31 May 2010
This article appeared on
page no. 26 of the 16-31 May 2010 print edition of The Milli Gazette.
Subscribers of print edition The Milli Gazette are now reading the 1-15 June
2010 issue
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