Adil Najam
The headline screams out that more than 40 people are dead after a heartless and soulless suicide attack on a mosque in Rawalpindi. The story under it tells us that more than half of those butchered are children.
Numb. Enraged. Without words. One stares into space.
How many such headlines have we seen? How many more are we destined to see?
Carnage. Bloodshed. Callousness. Hatred.
These are not things that anyone with a modicum of humanity can become used to. Yet, the world passes us by. Its not even news for the rest of the world. They are too busy worrying about “their” Taliban, to care about what “our” Taliban are doing. In the crazy world that we have manufactured, not every death is created equal. And certainly not every life.
Once again, Pakistanis die. Once again, Pakistanis cry. Alone.
Once again, Pakistanis stare into the darkness of nothingness, looking for answers. There are few words of sympathy from those who claim to be our friends. There are only sneers and jeers from those who are our enemies.
Why, one asks, why? Why do they hate us so?
In this video interview one would-be suicide bomber speaks up. It is harrowing. Listen, if you will, to the voice of hatred. Listen, if you can, to what Pakistan’s enemy sounds like.
First, my deep sympathies with all those killed and injured in Peshawar, Lahore and elsewhere. Only those devoid of any humanity would so indiscriminately target innocent people.
On a different note, it is shocking to see the extent to which there is belief amongst educated, thinking Pakistanis for various conspiracy theories peddled out by such loonies as Zaid Hamid or Ahmed Quraishi.
So, India and the US are formenting these attacks, according to them. How? They abandon their Northern Alliance allies. Somehow reach out to the Taliban, who have been their sworn enemies for years. Somehow manage to influence them, despite the fact that the Taliban (and other jihadists) were essentially an ISI operation until November 2001 (and according to most observers, even after that to some degree). They manage to establish supply routes through hostile territory. Any sane person can see the absurdity of these claims!
Yes, there are a few more consulates in Afghanistan than before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. One in Jalalabad, one in Herat, another in Kandahar and one in Mazar. There are four Indian consulates in total in Afghanistan in addition to the embassy in Kabul.
But there are non-security reasons to maintain consulates in these places. India is one of the largest donors to Afghanistan – 100% of which money is going for development purposes. A vital road has been built by India allowing for diversification of supply routes into Kabul. The power supplied to Kabul comes through transmission lines, substations etc. built by India. The Afghan parliament building is being built by India. Afghanistan has a school feeding program where all children in schools across the country get high-protein biscuits every day as nutritional supplements. 100% of those biscuits are donated by India. The main hospital in Kabul has been rebuilt by India and is manned by Indian doctors and nurses. A dam is being built in Herat to improve irrigation facilities there. The telecommunication backbone linking Kabul with all the provinces is being built by India, using Indian engineers. The national television network, with a main center in Kabul and centers in each of the provincial capitals is being rebuilt by India. Schools are being built across Afghanistan by India. The list can go on.
Why do I mention these well-known facts? Because it demonstrates that there are a variety of Indian-funded development projects underway across Afghanistan, most of which have Indian personnel – engineers, doctors, educators, technical personnel, etc. These people are deployed in cities across Afghanistan and are operating in great peril. Indian engineers and other personnel have been kidnapped and killed in the past – so the peril is not hypothetical alone. Their protection and well-being is the responsibility of the Indian Government, which is sending them (most of them civilian Government employees and people working for private companies) in harm’s way. The consulates are vitally necessary for this purpose. Add to that the fact that for Afghans, the destination for any advanced medical treatment is India. These Afghans need consular services.
Are there also intelligence personnel in these consulates? Absolutely. Firstly because these are high risk postings, any Government is more likely to send people who are trained to operate in these circumstances and protect themselves and their regular civil-service colleagues. Second, there are important intelligence functions in Afghanistan that are legitimately needed for India’s security. There are several terrorist organizations targeting India and many have close links to organizations operating in Afghanistan. Many of them have over the years operated training camps in Afghanistan. Gathering intelligence about them is a vital security need.
There is neither the capability nor the willingness in India to use the Taliban to target Pakistan. Destabilization of Pakistan adversely affects India’s security. It makes absolutely no sense from India’s point of view to strengthen the Taliban. Even if due to some madness there were to be an order from the political leadership to the intelligence services to do this, there is no capability to do it. It is beyond absurd to suggest that somehow India can control the Taliban, the TTP and other jihadist organizations, all of which consider India to be their sworn enemies and which have had varying degrees of cooperation, interaction and support from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies for decades.
The more plausible explanation, for anybody who is willing to use their brains, is that the Pakistan Army has lost control over some parts of its jihadist enterprise. And that the unwillingness of the Pakistan Army to cut its strings with other elements of the jihad factory (the LeT, the Haqqanis etc. who it sees as tools in its strategic calculus) only makes it harder to regain a measure of control over the situation. Until the Pakistan Army decides that jihad (which is actually in its official motto) will only end up destroying Pakistan from inside, there is no solution to this problem. People will continue to die. And the loonies across the Pakistan media will continue to cook up absurd conspiracy theories.
KC Verma was appointed earlier this year as the new head of RAW, regarded as one of the top intelligence agencies along with Mossad, ISI, SVR, MI6, and the CIA. This choice appears to have been made at the suggestion of intelligence hawks like B. Raman to appoint an outsider, in spite of significant resistance from within the agency. Mr. Verma has been tasked with rapidly building strong covert ops capabilities within RAW. It is not a coincidence that the terrorist attacks in Pakistan have dramatically increased since Verma took the reins of RAW.
Indians have demonstrated that they have the strong motives and the means to hurt Pakistan. They have established a powerful presence in Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan and deployed significant resources to carry out a very violent covert war inside Pakistan, and they appear to have now found the opportunity among the willing allies in the Pakistani Taliban faction in Mehsud tribe.
http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/10/taliban-or-raw-liba n.html
Pakistanis cry. Pakistanis die. Pakistanis weep. Pakistanis beg. Pakistanis plead. Pakistanis will do everything to stop this bloodshed. Let us stop this mayhem. Let us stop this mindless violence. When will it stop? When will the West stop putting more pressure on Pakistan? When will they show more sympathy?
I have an idea. Let both India and Pakistan donate a portion of their desert borderzone to carve out a new nation: Fundistan! We in India will corral as many of our trident-waving orange-clad cranks as possible and release them into their new land, with a year’s supply of food and water. Pakistan can gather up their jihadologists and do the same. It will be a historic moment, undoing partition in a small way! The world can watch as the new nation resolves its internal dissent only the way Fundistanis can…
Should it be walled off on all sides? Hmmm… probably.
Thats Zia’s Mullaism for you.
One posting(razia) said US is building a 800 billion dollars embassy in pakistan. How ignorant of her. Please do your math and stop throwing dumb info.. out there to confuse the confused.
Please send all mullah supporters to waziristan. Air drop them or whatever is required. Time has come to support securalism in Pakistan and keep Mosque and State separate.
I used to hate Ataturk but now I really admire him because you can’t debate Mullahs bent on going to Jannat on our backs.
We are going through our renaissance ..end of story.
it takes 1600 hundred years for all religions.