How sad that in our campaigns to prove us struggling for the “TRUTH”; truth is always the first victim of our onslaught. Once, truth is so brutally assaulted, raped, mutilated, and destroyed - after that it is free for all, everyone is right and is ‘entitled’ to force his version of ‘truth’ on everyone else and the adage is understood that “might is right” not right is right and we regress further back to where we started as humans.

By Dr Tariq Rahman

Men read newspapers at a stall in Karachi on Sept 21, 2008 a day after an overnight suicide bomb attack in Islamabad. –AFP

Men read newspapers at a stall in Karachi on Sept 21, 2008 a day after an overnight suicide bomb attack in Islamabad. –AFP

I had been invited to the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad for a seminar on Sept 20, but I did not go. If I had.… Let our leaders think of the unthinkable. The stark facts are that terrorists are as capable of bringing truckloads of explosives to government installations in Lahore as to a posh hotel in Islamabad to take the lives of hundreds of people at will.

The local Taliban have been threatening such attacks and several of them — including the one in Wah and one near Peshawar earlier this month — have also been owned by them.

It is, therefore, somewhat foolish to keep up the rhetoric of the ‘foreign hand’ when homegrown militant groups are obviously involved. Also, let us remember that even if foreign elements supply the money or weapons for such deeds, it appears to be locals who have their own agenda and who carry out such attacks. They would continue to do so even if there were no foreign support. This is also true for India where the Indian militants have their own agenda (probably inspired by the frustrations of the under-employed Muslim youth) which makes them seek vengeance.

They could be backed by some Pakistani groups with or without the knowledge of state functionaries but that does not mean that such attacks are not India’s internal problem. Similarly, the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamic militant groups are a Pakistani problem even if some sections of them at some level are backed by India through Afghanistan.

It is true, however, that if the Americans had not fought the Afghans the Taliban would not have shifted to Fata. But then, if the Americans had not fought a proxy war against the Soviets after 1979, the extremist Arabs and Chechens would not have come to Afghanistan in the first place. Al Qaeda would not have been created and both the United States and Pakistan would have been safer. The American war of 1979-1988 was not Pakistan’s war. Gen Zia Ul Haq made it our war in order to perpetuate his personal interest and consolidate his rule or out of folly or perhaps as a mixture of all factors. The present war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban would not have been our war if they had not endangered Pakistan. But they are fighting us.

Unfortunately, if scholars like Ayesha Jalal (Partisans of Allah) and Ahmed Rashid (Descent into Chaos) and a number of others are to be believed Pakistan has been following disastrous and suicidal policies whose terrifying results are now being felt. Pakistan had been using trained fighters to fight a proxy war with India in Kashmir in the hope that if there was sufficient bloodshed, India would let Kashmir go.

This did not happen and these fighters being Islamists the whole Kashmir question came to be seen in a religious context. Local groups in Kashmir demanding freedom such as the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front were suppressed by Pakistan’s intelligence services and the ones in India so that the secular aspect of this struggle for self-determination was choked off.

The Islamists who waged a covert war in Kashmir also kept killing members of the Shia community in Pakistan. Eventually, the Shia community retaliated in kind leading to a civil-war-like situation in our cities. Other instances of the Shia-Sunni conflict can be seen in the Northern Areas and the Kurram Agency.

The Pakistan Army’s obsession with Kashmir and rivalry with India also inspired our disastrous Afghan policy. Seeking depth in Afghanistan meant protecting certain militant groups while handing over others to the US without a trial. Thus, the ‘war on terror’ has been fought by Pakistan with its arms and legs tied; with duplicity and double-dealing and with maximum loss to the country.

Our people were never told that aspects of this war affect us and are, therefore, part of our war. Many among the media kept commenting on each attack on our cities as the work of foreign agents (’no Muslim can do such a thing’ was a common refrain). Meanwhile, girls’ schools kept being torched, CDs kept being destroyed, barber shops were gutted and the Taliban abducted people with impunity. Nobody spoke up and if they did it was with such reservation and uncertainty and such repetitions of the mantra about this being America’s war that the common people were totally confused.

Also, our elite lives in such luxury and has such an unfeeling attitude towards the people’s real problems — spiraling prices of food and utilities, the lack of justice, deteriorating law and order — that the people have lost all faith in it. Now even if officials tell the truth—as the interior ministry keeps doing regarding the danger from within — many are hesitant to accept their words.

This is because previous policies which were known to have been wrong are never openly condemned by those in power. Those who created and administered such policies have never been made to answer for their lack of judgment, or worse. In short, it appears as if there is no concerted effort to say which policies have led to this religious militancy and what is the solution to ending it?

As for America, it is responsible for destabilizing much of the Muslim world. Had it reacted to 9/11 by removing its forces from the Middle East, by giving justice to the Palestinians and by giving help to educate Fata and lifting its people out of the dire poverty they are mired in, we would have seen a stable Pakistan and a safer America.

This did not happen, but even now the Americans can help us by not attacking inside Pakistan; not giving statements that disregard the feelings of our people and by keeping a low profile. If they do not do all this, our government will not be able to fight even its own war against the Taliban. And if that happens will Pakistanis, Americans or even the Indians be safer than they are now or far more unsafe? Let them decide.

TRUTH IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING IN WORLD.

kio k woh upnay batil par mutahid hain aur tum apnay haq par bikhray hoey ho,

woh batil ki rah mein apnay rehber ki ita’at kartay hain or tum,

haq ki rah mein apnay rehber ka hukum nahi buja laatay”. Hazrat Ali (A.S)

I swear upon god that “I have a perception that these wrong doers will snatch your power and reign, for in spite of their deviated theme of truth, belief and worship, they are standing together,

Whereas you (people) are smashed and dispersed, thou the then, at the verge of their wrong belief, (they) obey the notion of their leader yet, you (People), with requisite affirmative belief as truth, decline the notion of year leader” (Hazrat Ali A.S)