Peshawar Attack

I woke up today to the hashtag #PeshawarAttack. Yesterday was#SydneySiege. Another day, another terrorist, several innocent hostages and victims. And thus the world rolls.

5-6 men scaled the walls of a school compound, armed with guns, and headed for classrooms where they shot indiscriminately at those inside - students and teachers. It is an Army school for children aged 10-18 years. It is reported that 80+ children have been slaughtered, shot in the head and chest and wherever else the bullets found them. According to an NBC News report, citing an unidentified military official, the terrorists burned a teacher alive and made the students watch. Apparently, some of the bodies brought to hospital have been headless. The scale of monstrosity is such that it must have silenced all the storytellers in Peshawar's legendary Qissa Khawani bazaar.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Taliban have claimed the attack is a response to army operations in the NWFP.

So, who are the Taliban, remind me again? They are ‘students’ who hate other students. They wage war by planting IEDs in schools and massacring the children inside. They want to establish their diktat over as large a geographical swathe as possible. And they plan on an afterlife in Heaven.

So, are they schizophrenic? No, they are perfectly lucid. It is us who are the schizos here. Let me tell you why. The slippery slope of self-delusion and false beliefs starts much earlier. When it becomes alright to replace Khuda Hafiz with Allah Hafiz. When it is deemed normal to ban short skirts on women. When it is okay for a school to ban Darwin from class. (And no, Darwin ain’t a truant, just a fellow with a hoary beard who tells us we descended from the apes.) 

Were there signs that we were stepping on a slippery slope? Hell, yes. When calling god by his Urdu name wasn’t good enough, and we needed to invoke the Quranic Allah because how else do we proclaim we are good Muslims. When the behavior of our women - going to pub, sending Valentine’s Day card, wearing jeans - is against our ancient Indian culture, and has to be banned. When we pit religious belief against science and preach Creationism in a nation that sent people to the moon.

And what did/do we do? Blame the neighbor, blame the immigrants, blame the minorities.

When religious fundamentalists claim x/y/z is against our culture, beware. Be very aware. They think this divisive rhetoric is a tap they can turn on-off at will. Alas. The attack in Peshawar did not come out of nowhere. The slippery slope is an escalating spiral, it feeds on amplifying shock. The trickle that Zia and the House of Saud unleashed is a tsunami now. See it for what it is, people. Deal with it. Call a spade a spade. Call terror terror. Power grab is its only agenda. 

Terror does not have a religious denomination. And if you think it is anything to do with religion, the murder of a 100 school children in the cold light of day should be a wake-up call. Otherwise, admit to yourself that you are schizophrenic and go see a shrink.

#Zia #Saud #PeshawarAttack #Taliban

Pakistan on the Brink

This review appeared in the South China Morning Post on Sunday, 6 May 2012

Pakistan on the Brink

by Ahmed Rashid

Viking

4 stars

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

This week, in what is being called the biggest jailbreak in Pakistani history, Taliban fighters stormed a prison in the NWFP province of Pakistan and freed almost 400 prisoners. The raid was efficiently organized – a blockade of all roads leading to the prison kept the security forces at bay even as the fugitives hightailed into neighbouring North Waziristan, a lawless tribal area rife with Al Qaeda and several militant groups that straddle the Afghan-Pakistani border.

If you’re wondering how the Taliban, who started as a militant Islamic group within Afghanistan, morphed into a rallying force for pan-Islamic militants and jihadis operating out of Pakistan, then this is the book for you.

Ahmed Rashid is a respected Pakistani journalist who has reported on the AfPak region for thirty years. Pakistan on the Brink is the third book in a trilogy that has seen him chronicle the rise of Taliban and Al Qaeda beginning in the 80s, the US war in Afghanistan following 9/11, and the lead-up to the current crises in the region. Divided into nine essays, the book examines the conflict from the different perspectives of the parties involved – key countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and USA, and other critical players such as Iran, India and the ‘Stans’ of Central Asia. 

An insurgency is growing within Afghanistan even as the US timeline for withdrawal of its forces approaches. Meanwhile, President Karzai’s government is corrupt and has little authority beyond Kabul. An economy dependent on aid will go into a deep recession upon US exit in 2014, and worse, see a civil war as its neighbours replay the Great Game.

One key neighbour, Pakistan, has contributed significantly to the current Afghan crisis. To keep the US happy, it put pressure on Al Qaeda in the war on terror, received billions of dollars in aid, but continued to provide sanctuary to Afghan Taliban in its Baluchistan province. Pakistan wants to retain leverage on Taliban who, it believes, will be in control once the US departs Afghanistan.

Despite a civilian government Pakistan is run by its Army and intelligence service, the ISI. Rashid worries that the ISI has become a “state within a state” which advocates a hostile foreign policy towards neighbouring countries even as Pakistani society has become increasingly radicalized. The nuclear-armed nation needs a new narrative, “one that does not perpetually blame the evergreen troika of India, the United States, and Israel for its own ills”.

What then is the way out of this quagmire?

Ahmed Rashid has acted as a turkoman for several Western officials looking to understand the region. During the course of this book he mentions meeting personally with Presidents Obama, Merkel, Karzai, and Zardari. Descent into Chaos, his previous authoritative work on the region was a prescient look at the future, one that is aptly captured by the title, Pakistan on the Brink. An update, it attempts to put some solutions on the table, suggesting that Turkey could be a possible role model for Pakistan’s leaders as a nation that turned itself from a “military dictatorship into a thriving democracy”.

However, this might be a case of wishful thinking: the self-serving nexus of Army-Jihadi-spies-political cronies looks unlikely to yield a better ruler.