Pakistan's Ideology and Identity crisis

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The insensitivity that prevails
By Dr Tariq Rahman
Thursday, 10 Dec, 2009

To attack Afghanistan was morally unjustified and a strategically flawed move since one cannot alienate the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan, whose numbers happen to be in the Taliban, and hope to win Afghanistan for Karzai who has no roots in the soil. – Photo by AP.

It’s been an eventful period, beginning with the firing on columnist Kamran Shafi’s home in Wah and ending with Obama’s revised policy on Afghanistan. And less than a week after Eid, the bloodbath began.

Last Friday, terrorists massacred army men and their family members in the Parade Lane mosque in Rawalpindi. Peshawar, Lahore and Multan resounded with bombs and human cries. Nobody can tell what tomorrow will bring.

As for the traumatic incident involving Kamran Shafi, I am appalled that there was no hue and cry at the national level. Why has the journalist brotherhood not risen to defend his right to life and freedom of expression the way it should?

Meanwhile, nobody, except the students and professors of Kohat and Peshawar universities, seem to care for the abducted Kohat University of Science and Technology vice chancellor Dr Lutfullah Kakakhel. A decade ago everybody would have been up in arms at such incidents.

But now that scores of people are dying almost every day have we become insensitive to columnists being fired upon and academics being abducted?

Have we come to this that we reel under attack but do nothing? It seems that the only rally against the daily bloodbath was that of the MQM in Karachi on Tuesday. But within the killing fields of northern Pakistan there is the silence of the grave.

Let us now turn to our real Eid gift — from President Obama. His policy of sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan is bad news for us. To attack Afghanistan was morally unjustified and a strategically flawed move since one cannot alienate the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan, whose numbers happen to be in the Taliban, and hope to win Afghanistan for Karzai who has no roots in the soil. Eight years have passed since 9/11 but the Pentagon still feels that it can wipe out the Taliban with more troops.

The greater likelihood is that the Taliban will wait out the months before US troops start to withdraw and then take over southern Afghanistan. Meanwhile more Afghans will cross over into Pakistan; the Pakistani Taliban will be strengthened as the death of innocent people will produce more anger against both America and our own leadership; and, of course, more American lives will be lost.

But the worst thing is that massacres and bombings will continue in Pakistan. Still conspiracy theorists ask inane questions about who the perpetrators are even when the Taliban own their crime. Some say even now that the terrorists cannot be Muslims and that Muslims do not attack mosques, when the recent incident was not the first of its kind.

It is futile to blame India or America. This is our war and the terrorists are fighting us because they want the army to stop action in Waziristan and Swat. If our media people do not say as much they are doing the public no service.

One could argue, of course, about why we blundered into such a war. My view is that Gen Ziaul Haq blundered when he allowed Pakistan to become an ally of the US in its war against the Soviet Union. It was because of this war that radicalised Arabs came to Afghanistan and Fata. It was because of this war that arms and ammunition flooded our society.

Later the militants were used for a covert war against India for Kashmir although many among them also killed members of the Shia community. Our decision-makers accepted that as collateral damage.

Then, when this policy was reversed after 9/11, the same groups started fighting the Pakistan Army. Yet another blunder was Gen Musharraf’s decision to become an American ally in the war against Afghanistan. Again, as when under Zia, we did not stay aloof from a terrible war which we might have avoided.

Pakistan should have stayed away from all wars — the 1948 Kashmir war, the 1965 war, the 1971 war, the first Afghan war, the covert war in Kashmir, Kargil and the second Afghan war — and remained neutral. In that case we would not have had Taliban enemies.

What are we to do now? First, we must support our armed forces, FC, police and guards who are dying in their hundreds. Even if some decision-makers from the military made the policies that unleashed the dogs of war upon us, it does not mean we should not sympathise with the families of those who have sacrificed their lives for us. We should salute them.

I know some people, old comrades, who were wounded in the Parade Lane mosque bombing and I express solidarity with them even if I have disagreed with some of the policies they supported in the past. Our human relations take priority over our ideological positions.

Secondly, efforts should be made to remove the confusion about who our enemies are. There is a lot of evidence that militants taking the name of Islam are fighting our army so why should people be confused and point to foreign powers?

In this context India and Afghanistan can help us and themselves by fighting the militants. India should simply withdraw from Afghanistan because if the anti-India Taliban become stronger in Pakistan, India will be in great danger.

All these Indian consulates, which probably supply arms and ammunition to Baloch nationalists, will eventually be doing the same kind of disservice to India as our own intelligence services did by strengthening the militants in the first place.

After the American withdrawal it is a foregone conclusion that the Taliban will control part of that country. In that case we should be strictly neutral and not allow our soil to be used by any armed group. So should India and this is both in India’s interest and ours.

A proxy war between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan will destroy both. India can negotiate with Pakistan, which is a modern state after all, but not with the Taliban. A stable and strong Pakistan is in India’s interest as it is in America’s.

DAWN.COM | Pakistan | The insensitivity that prevails

 

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Zardari not facing threat of army coup: Petraeus
By Anwar Iqbal
Thursday, 10 Dec, 2009

US Army Gen. David Petraeus, CENTCOM Commander, participates in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. -AFP Photo

WASHINGTON: Pakistani generals had no desire to wrap up the civilian administration, a senior American commander responsible for his country’s military strategy for the Pak-Afghan region told a congressional panel on Wednesday.

But a senior State Department official told the same panel that the United States was trying to build institutions in Pakistan so that a change in leadership did not affect relations between the two countries.

‘I don’t think that the current challenges imperil civilian rule,’ Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

‘We’ve been working with the current government to try and help build the institutions, and not just the people, so that there is the ability to rely on ongoing relationships, regardless of the leadership,’ said Jacob Lew, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources.

Gen David Petraeus, who as head of the US Central Command deals directly with his Pakistani military counterparts, said President Asif Ali Zardari faced many challenges but a military coup was not one.

He praised the efforts of Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has performed shuttle diplomacy with senior Pakistani generals for years. Gen Petraeus said it appeared that the US desire for continued democratic rule in Pakistan had Pakistani uniformed partners: ‘I don’t see the prospect or desire for anyone to change civilian rule.’

Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, raised the issue of a military coup in Pakistan, telling the committee that President Zardari had been under increasing pressure from the military in his country as well as those opposed to his close relationship with United States. ‘And the threat of impeachment continues to loom — I’m told it was the case,’ he said.

Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew, while responding to the senator’s remarks did not address the possibility of impeachment. Instead, he reminded US lawmakers that the difficulties of maintaining a stable civilian government in Pakistan were not new.

Mr Lew said he would not like to address the day-to-day risks that the current Pakistan administration faced, but he did see signs of improvement in strength and governmental capacity in a number of areas.

‘The tension, the constant tension between the civilian concerns and the military concerns is one that is publicly debated,’ he noted.

He pointed out that the support that the US had extended to the Pakistani government over the last year, particularly the adoption of the Kerry-Lugar bill was ‘really central to what we’ve been trying to do — shore up the idea of the need to invest in lasting civilian institutions’.

Mr Lew then invited Gen Petraeus to talk about the military-to-military relationship between the two countries.

The general told the Senate committee that as Centcom chief he had visited Pakistan five times in the last six months, and had a lot of conversations with military leaders as well as the civilian leadership.

‘I actually don’t think that the current challenges imperil civilian rule. There clearly are challenges to — potential challenges — to President Zardari. But again, I don’t see the prospect or the desire for anyone to change civilian rule,’ he added.

The US military, he said, had worked very hard to establish a relationship of trust with the Pakistani military, after the 1990s when a decade-long US embargo on Pakistan had severed those ties. ‘So we’re making up for the lost generation,’ he said.

DAWN.COM | World | Zardari not facing threat of army coup: Petraeus

 

[F-14]

the pakistani Broken record service is at it again

In this context India and Afghanistan can help us and themselves by fighting the militants. India should simply withdraw from Afghanistan because if the anti-India Taliban become stronger in Pakistan, India will be in great danger.

 

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must read.

The myths, the madness, and the media
Posted by Nadeem F. Paracha in Featured Articles, Politics on 12 10th, 2009 | 28 responses

After talking of the dangerously concocted narratives peddled by the state, government, and religious parties of Pakistan that I mentioned in my last blog, let’s now turn our attention towards the political and social narratives emerging from the country’s highly animated electronic media.

Still basking (nay, indulgently bathing) in the sudden spat of freedom provided during the early years of General Pervez Musharraf, the private TV news channels, initially in their attempt to differ from the confining traditions of state-owned television, emerged sounding largely progressive and remaining as close to ‘objectivity’ as was possible – at least until they discovered the commercial wonders of what is called the political ‘talk show.’

It wasn’t until early 2006 that many of these talk shows started to devolve and mutate into the kind of rampant and anarchic ogres that they are today. Many of them actually did a wonderful job passionately reporting the tragic 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, in the process also facilitating the unprecedented interest that common Pakistanis exhibited in helping the quake victims.

But, alas, it seems this episode, which, I believe, finally brought the private electronic media into the forefront, had a rather disastrous impact on the nascent egos of various talk show hosts and TV reporters.

Suddenly, they took the noble idea of missionary journalism, and instead of continuing to tread on the ‘objective middle ground,’ began moving way towards the populist right. And what’s more, once their bosses decided that this new trajectory was actually generating better monetary results (à la FOX News), the channels never looked back, sloganeering all the way to the bank!

Personalities such as Shahid Masood, Hamid Mir, Talat Hussain, Kashif Abbasi, Ansar Abbasi, Zaid Hamid, Shireen Mazari have all emerged from the abovementioned scenario. As part of this largely reactionary and at the same time monetarily cynical phenomenon is the transformation of non-media personalities into regular TV feasts.

These include men and women who have become mainstays on talk shows as ‘guests’. Retired generals, small-time politicians, vernacular columnists and urban maulvis whose job it is to maintain the duration of their individual 15 minutes of fame by sounding off the talk show hosts’ populist and flammable innuendos.

Since the Taliban and the inhuman havoc they’ve been perpetrating is the single most critical issue impacting the country at this very moment, let’s evaluate the popular news channels’ handling of this ordeal.

Recently, many TV talk show hosts and their favourite sounding boards (‘guests’), have come under fire from certain ‘liberal’ sections belonging to the print media, academia, and in the blogsphere.

The more sensationalist and unsubstantiated accusations against some talk show hosts of being ‘ISI agents’ and ‘extremists’ can be put aside as subjective groaning. But then so can what usually comes out of the mouths of many hosts and their guests.

In the last three years at least, TV talk shows have openly thrived on building whole ‘debates’ and arguments on what almost entirely belongs in the floozy and demagogic conspiracy theory sphere.

The topics of the show may have a ring of intellectualism and serious policy matters, but it does not take much time for the so-called ‘debate’ to spiral down into sloganeering, wild theory casting (by the ‘guests’) and self-righteous preaching (by the hosts).

I use the word self-righteous because even though most talk show hosts are having a heck of a time being this new kind of TV celebrity with impressive material and social perks, their rhetoric seems to be surfacing from a besieged mindset. Without having any qualms or need for humility or modesty, they are quick to present themselves as heroes, besieged by the powers that be.

The truth is, the media has never been in the kind of free-floating situation it is today. Though the Musharraf regime blundered by putting an old-fashioned authoritarian cap on it in 2007 – not for entirely wrong reasons, mind you – the current coalition government led by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), is actually the one finding its democratic credentials taken hostage by a hostile electronic media that is sumptuously feeding upon the many lingering misconceptions about popular democracy that still linger in the minds of Pakistanis.

So what is that narrative echoing in the corridors of the TV news channels that is making some of us suspect the ideological and political dispositions of so many talk show hosts? One way to find out is to track this narrative’s evolution, especially in regards to the matters of terrorism and extremism.

Till 2003, when, comparatively speaking, suicide bombings were a rare occurrence in Pakistan, they were reported by the newly inaugurated private TV channels as part of a simple narrative: the bombings were being undertaken by indigenous sectarian organisations in cahoots with Al Qaeda in reaction to the United States’ post-9/11 action in Afghanistan.

The narrative was simple, but there was a lot of truth in it as well. Even till this day, sectarian organisations such as the (supposedly banned) Sipah-Sehaba and Lashkar-e-Taiba are believed to be doing the ground work for the Taliban and shady Al Qaeda elements.

In the wake of Pakistan’s more aggressive involvement in the US-run ‘war on terror,’ the above narrative began being tempered by talk show ‘guests’ – mainly from the Jamat-i-Islami, and certain retired generals who still seemed nostalgically stuck in the 1980s’ ‘Afghan Jihad.’

The Pakistan Army’s half-hearted operations in the sensitive Taliban-infested territories too did not help in this respect, and neither did the right-wing provincial government of the NWFP (MMA) that attempted to ‘keep the peace’ by playing the sympathetic ostrich in the volatile province.

As one started seeing talk show hosts and their guests now condemn Pakistan’s involvement against what were clearly monsters, one was left baffled when the reason for their outrage had something to do with ‘tribal Pathans having great honour and appetite for revenge!’

Of course, it was conveniently forgotten that the ‘honourable’ tribals from whose ranks the Taliban were emerging found nothing so dishonourable about slaughtering not only fellow Pakistanis, but also their own Pushtun kinsmen?

But just when this contradiction and the utter feebleness of it started to become apparent, Musharraf blundered by delaying taking action against the violent Lal Masjid clerics and their army of self-righteous thugs.

The Musharraf dictatorship clearly manhandled the whole issue. But it is also true that electronic media coverage of the Army’s action against the terrorists at the mosque is yet to be paralleled in its utter show of irresponsibility, including in-studio and on-site reporting and ‘comment’ by reporters and hosts that sometimes bordered on actually eulogising and applauding the violent holy thugs.

I still wonder how much of the manic and rabid reactionary sparks that one saw flying around the TV studios at the time contributed to the construction of minds seeking violent revenge in the shape of suicide bombings against the common citizens of Pakistan?

The entirely lopsided and irresponsible coverage of the Lal Masjid is clearly the local electronic media’s darkest hour, one that was only partially rectified by the same media’s following fetish: The Lawyers’ Movement.

With the rise in terrorist attacks on Pakistani civilians, the narrative that put the action of Muslims seeking ‘justified revenge’ against fellow Muslims began weakening, until the sudden appearance of the likes of Zaid Hamid (on a struggling news channel and a music channel!) and Shireen Mazari.

Conspiracy theories about Mossad/RAW/CIA involvement in the matter that were once restricted to obscure crackpot websites suddenly exploded onto the Pakistani mainstream media scene. Some suggest this was done to justify the Pakistan Army’s operation in the north-west, making it look like a fight against infidels (as opposed to it being a civil war against monsters created and ignorantly tolerated by us alone).

So the following has become the new narrative, not only on TV talk shows, but consequently, and dangerously, within much of society: ‘Those conducting suicide attacks on common men, women, and children in Pakistan, cannot be Muslims. They have to be infidel foreigners, most probably funded and trained by RAW, Mossad, and even the CIA. These agencies want to take over Pakistan’s nuclear assets and control the imminent rise of Islam.’

Much psychosomatic gibberish emerges from this unsubstantiated and delusional narrative peddled every single day on talk shows. And if this is the only answer that these ‘experts’ have for the besieged people of Pakistan, then, I’m afraid, we truly have become a wretched nation which has decided to hold on to half-truths, myths, and fantastical stories as a means to safeguard our ‘honour,’ instead of depending more on reason and a positive exhibition of self-criticism. There is no bigger honour than saying and respecting the truth, no matter how disturbing it might be.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

The myths, the madness, and the media — The Dawn Blog Blog Archive

 

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A requiem for freedom
By Ayesha Siddiqa
Friday, 11 Dec, 2009

Religion must be reinterpreted, not to make it acceptable to the rest of the world but to breathe life into the Muslim world itself. –Photo by Reuters

One is often asked whether or not Pakistan will survive the current crisis. You tell them that, yes, Pakistan will survive. After all, territories don’t grow feet to walk away with.

There is a sigh of relief and those asking the question happily walk away despite one’s attempts to draw their attention to the fact that there is something fundamentally changed about Pakistan.

In fact, there are some seriously sad things happening around us that do not grab people’s attention because all they are bothered about is the survival of the physical. Saving the soul is not an idea that catches the public’s attention.

I wonder how many people notice the rapidly changing world around them. Suicide attacks and bomb blasts add to the din created by those who are busy establishing a new brand of nationalism which has no shade of tolerance, pluralism or multi-polarity. There are young bloggers who believe that all forms of dissent especially those that challenge their version of nationalism must be silenced. One would not be surprised if they use uncivil methods to achieve their objective.

Another set of people believes that killing is justified as long as it happens in other countries. Conceptually, there is no difference between the thinking of this lot and others who have been murdering innocent people in this and other countries. After all, terrorism is a byproduct of extremism.

Two decades after Ziaul Haq the general is still remembered for changing the nature of state and society. We have not even begun to think about the generation that is being fed on erroneous dreams of attaining national and civilisational glory through brute force. They are being fed tales of Pakistan and the Mujahideen defeating the communist superpower. They hope to perform a similar feat.

Just imagine what will happen inside Pakistan after the US forces begin to withdraw in 2011 — in fact, how about a withdrawal from Afghanistan accompanied by a drastic reduction in America’s financial power which is already happening? This is not to say that the Americans should remain there but that there are elements who will don the victor’s mantle and trample on the rest of society in Afghanistan, and try to do the same in the rest of the world. Choosing sides is no longer an easy task.

Such people, who subscribe to the ideology of Hameed Gul — Pakistan’s indigenous version of Osama bin Laden — see the battle in terms of a clash of civilisations. From the point of view of such people, the world is back to the days of the Crusades except that this time it is the Muslim world up in arms against all other civilisations. Therefore, an American withdrawal would be tantamount to the supremacy of one race over another. Sadly, they are not alone in their adventure.

It is sadder to observe some of those, who were formerly from what was deemed as the liberal left in Pakistan, arguing that the Taliban should not be pushed until the Americans are out. Such an argument is made without recalling that the partnership between the liberal left and the extreme right in Iran was at the cost of the former. The left represented by Ali Shariati didn’t realise how fast it was taken over and swallowed by its partners.

Mention must also be made of the centrist liberals in Pakistan who believe that the right can and must be eliminated. In a nutshell there is a general lack of imagination in creating alternative ideological narratives that are easily comprehensible and can be acted upon. No wonder the Sufi-pop music beat has not caught up with ordinary people.

However, my lament is not just for Pakistan but for the rest of the world as well where labels and ideologies entrap people. Terms like ‘Islamophobia,’ ‘Islamofascism’ and others represent the absolute absence of imagination. Or perhaps this is an easier method to keep the ordinary population engaged and look the other way while the corporate world saps states and societies.

It is interesting to read blogs on the Internet or get email messages from ordinary folk who believe that the only problem with the world is Islam and its ideology.

Such emails are welcome because at least there are some who would like to engage rather than get enraged without communicating with those on the other side of the ideological divide. Their comments reflect ignorance of their own religious history.

The other Semitic religions (even others) have had their fair share of their own version of the Taliban. The Taliban, for example, would envy what transpired between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland.

It is not that one religious ideology is inferior or superior to others. But bloodshed becomes the fate of societies once religions are monopolised by the ruling elite or used to enhance the power of some versus others. The killing of Jews by those that converted to Christianity is another good example of the abuse of religion for the sake of power.

An understanding of their own religious histories by adherents of other faiths would perhaps help them sympathise with Muslims who are at the moment caught between an angry world and an unimaginative religious interpretation and discourse by their own priestly class. A religion that came about to bring a social transformation must not fall prey to those who don’t understand its basic spirit and use it for their narrow power interests.

At this time religion must be reinterpreted, not to make it acceptable to the rest of the world but to breathe life into the Muslim world itself. The fact that this will improve relations with other communities is something that will follow naturally. To present the current crisis as a Judeo-Christian onslaught against Islam or vice versa is criminal. States and societies must understand that such an argument is a trap which can only take the common people towards disaster. As for Pakistan, I hope my readers can empathise with my lament for a country that is receding very fast like the dim lights dotting a distant shore. I don’t see this one being rescued. However, a new one where there is room for all to coexist must be imagined.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.
[email protected]

DAWN.COM | Columnists | A requiem for freedom

 

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The India factor
By S.M. Naseem
Monday, 14 Dec, 2009

Historians of both nations seem to agree that the present state of their relationship was not the vision of their founding fathers, Gandhi and Jinnah.

The argument that it is a compulsive, existentialist imperative for Pakistan and India to cooperate at the military level against the threat of jihadi militancy is difficult to take seriously.

This is so notwithstanding the urgent need for rapprochement between the two countries and however attractive an ideal it may seem in the long run.

Indeed such cooperation is unachievable and it will be counterproductive to the interests of the people of both countries under present conditions. The suggestion, if implemented, could engulf the subcontinent in a perennial civil war, which its partition in 1947 — for all its faults — was aimed to prevent and to a great extent succeeded in doing, despite the horrific bloodletting that occurred in its immediate aftermath.

The logic of military supremacy to solve problems of social and economic imbalance and ethnic strife that underlie the phenomenon of terrorism is seriously flawed. Evidence lies in the ignominious US experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The rationale for joint action against terrorism by the Indian and Pakistani armies would seem to rest on two assumptions. First, that the Pakistani army is now a reformed entity which has distanced itself from and cleansed itself of ‘non-state’ actors and proved its professional credentials during the anti-Taliban operations in Swat and Waziristan in the last six months. The jury is still out on this proposition, both in India and the US.

The second assumption is that the two countries now face a common existentialist threat. The two military machines have very different psychological, social and political orientations and aspirations, having been shaped by the history of their respective country. In the shaping of India’s history the Indian military has had a minimal role while the Pakistani military has had an overwhelming role in its country’s history. This is an incongruity which would inevitably impinge on any cooperative venture.

Recent developments in Pakistan are clearly indicative of the military reasserting its role in the political sphere. Such a development is hardly propitious for the kind of cooperation being espoused and unlikely to inspire much confidence in our neighbour whom our military has always treated as enemy number one.

Although a repetition of the Mumbai attack remains a serious concern, the more worrisome insurgencies rearing their heads in India are mainly indigenous and economic in origin and in which the Pakistan Army would be of little help, even if India were to solicit it.

There is no doubt, however, that India is the elephant in the room with regard to the war on terrorism, and without bringing it on board, South Asia and its neighbouring regions will remain in a state of suspended political instability.

The continued stalemate over Kashmir is the legacy of the botched process of partition that has festered for decades, with both sides hardening their respective stance, at least in public. It is unlikely that external pressure, especially from the US, as is being hoped by the Pakistani media and political circles, will bring the two sides closer.

The trust deficit between the two sides at present is just too wide to be bridged.

The fear of extremist militancy, instead of bridging this gulf, provokes perverse reactions on both sides. Pakistan, fearful of India reneging on any accord on Kashmir, reassures the militants that they won’t be abandoned. India, unwilling to trust the Pakistani security establishment to dismantle what it terms a terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan’s heartland, puts more pressure on the diplomatic front to paint Pakistan as a failed state.

It is only by raising the stakes and converting this to a high-payoff, welfare-oriented, people-centred cooperative venture where winners are willing to make trade-offs that this unending game can find a virtuous closure.

There is no doubt that India-Pakistan relations are inextricably linked to the fight against militancy and neither of the two countries will be safe from its ever-widening dragnet. Unfortunately, the discourse of terrorism and its putative antidote — modernisation — has been defined almost exclusively in terms of the world’s outrage against 9/11 and the appetite of global corporations for profit.

In both India and Pakistan the state has done little in areas affected by insurgencies to combat poverty over the last 60 years — a kind of terrorism not visible on the radar screens of those who operate drones and other lethal weapons. If anything, the latter has resulted in the exacerbation of poverty through forced evictions of settled populations and resettling them in temporary IDP camps and by the poor and weak becoming the prime, if unintended, targets.

As an Indian columnist remarked: ‘Many Indians still live with a sense of permanent crisis, [in] a world out of joint, where violence can be contained but never fully prevented, and where human action quickly reveals its tragic limits’. He could have been writing about Pakistan.

Instead of cooperating at the military level to combat the terrorist menace, which has arisen largely because of lack of attention by successive governments to education, social development and regional balance, Pakistan needs to learn from India’s successful democratic experiment, while avoiding its obvious defects of exclusion and marginalisation.

India needs to scale down its global and militarist ambitions and pay more attention to those who have been left out of the development loop. Indian and Pakistani leaders need to sit together to reduce their military expenditures, which would help both reduce their dependence on foreigners and remove the unnecessary irritants that have spoiled their relations. They need to cross the Rubicon of hatred and demonisation and recapture the dream of Hindus and Muslims living together in harmony in both countries.

Historians of both nations seem to agree that the present state of their relationship was not the vision of their founding fathers, Gandhi and Jinnah.

DAWN.COM | Pakistan | The India factor

 

[ppgj]

a good read.

Clear and present danger
By Gul Bukhari
Monday, 14 Dec, 2009

Demagogues like Zaid Hamid are playing the game unchecked and unchallenged. The political and military leadership, including President Asif Zardari, Interior Minister Rehman Malik and army chief Gen Parvez Kayani, is being painted as a traitor for fighting militancy.

Belief in conspiracy theories focusing on Pakistan is not only new, it is on the increase judging by the content of public blogs and TV talk shows.

One comes across a staggering number of people who are unwilling to look inward, instead placing all the blame on any combination of the CIA, the Federal Reserve, Mossad, RAW, the US, etc.

One natural reaction to this is to dismiss conspiracy theories as a folly present in every society. Still, in developed countries conspiracy theorists and their subscribers remain at the fringe.

In Pakistan’s context, conspiracy theories are on a different scale with different implications. Going by blogs, television and anecdotal conversations with educated and illiterate people, I would surmise we are talking about a frighteningly large proportion of the mainstream. Indeed, it is common to blame the Hindus and Jews for Pakistan’s security problems; the US, Blackwater and CIA for suicide attacks. And there is a total absence of introspection.

Why is the problem on such a large scale in Pakistan considering there are parallel demagogues in other countries? Why is the Pakistani public more susceptible than its western counterparts?

The answer can only be based on common sense since studies on the issue do not exist. The country is underdeveloped, lacks a decent social and physical infrastructure, its people don’t have access to economic or educational opportunities. Living in a war theatre, they face food and water insecurity and see themselves as victims.

Victims of whom, though? Not of themselves, no not even in part, but of the perfect villain (the US, Israel, India…), they are told by our local demagogues. And the reason? Pakistan is a Muslim country, and all the villains are waging a war against Islam. These conditions make for a fertile ground for the breeding and dissemination of conspiracy theories.

Once the black and white of it has been established, and the foreign culprits, states and agencies identified and accepted as the villains, any cooperation by the government with the evil forces is seen in the same light. This extends to fighting terrorism. Well-known proponents of conspiracy theories are continuously reducing complex geopolitical issues the country is in the middle of to simply a matter of Islam vs the West (also Israel and India). And on this canvas depicting the epic battle between Islam and the West/Zionism, our political and military leadership is being painted as ‘agents’ of CIA and the US.

The implications are grave. The common man is being prevented from seeing homegrown jihadism as a fundamental part of the problem. A housewife recently phoned in to a popular television programme on a day that a suicide bomber killed scores and, piously expressing her grief without condemning the act, said, ‘but first tell me who is behind all this?’ This attitude is typical.

As the spectre of imminent doom (the Taliban’s entry into Buner) receded some months ago, thanks to the current government and the armed forces undertaking to decisively push back the extremist insurgency, people started to lapse into their dimly lit comfort zone of conspiracy theories. Why? Because neither have the enabling conditions changed, nor have the leaders and proponents of conspiracy theories been confronted.

Demagogues like Dr Israr Ahmed and Zaid Hamid are playing the game unchecked and unchallenged. The political and military leadership, including President Asif Zardari, Interior Minister Rehman Malik and army chief Gen Parvez Kayani, is being painted as a traitor for fighting militancy. The implication is that by pitting the public against these symbols of the state, and the state’s battle with militancy, conspiracy theorists are turning the public against the state itself.

This is not the Pakistan of yesterday when great games were played and deals struck behind the public’s back, when the media was largely gagged and underdeveloped and, therefore, public opinion did not matter. If a war had to be fought, it was fought, and only sold as a jihad later on to the unknowing public, as Gen Ziaul Haq did in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Today public opinion matters, as was evident in the case of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s reinstatement, the demise of the National Reconciliation Ordinance, the repeal of governor’s rule in Punjab and the current reshuffle of some members of the federal cabinet. For this reason, the implications of conspiracy theories pitting the public against the state on a wide scale are grave.

In the media, there are two parallel universes operating, seemingly unaware of the existence of the other. That section of the media and analysts that carries on a rational debate on issues completely ignores conspiracy theorists. The other section, made up of specific anchors, columnists and programmes, carries on with these theories as if a rational world does not exist.

There are rare exceptions, for example Dawn columnist Nadeem Paracha’s solid response to Zaid Hamid’s theories, or Fasi Zaka’s excellent pieces on the subject about a year ago. But sadly, their words would have only reached the already converted.

The widespread culture of conspiracy theories, increasingly taking on an anti state complexion, is the ticking time bomb of today. It cannot be ignored. The two parallel universes of the Pakistani media must collide, and it is the rationalist section that must catalyse the confrontation — it is not in the interest of the other to do so.

It is imperative that space is reclaimed from conspiracy theorists, for the security of the state is threatened by it. Conspiracy theories are a clear, present and internal danger and the media must take direct action. For only the media and rational elements within civil society, be they defence analysts, politicians, lawyers, retired or serving servicemen, retired judges, cabinet ministers or ambassadors, can fight it. Such credible rationalists from civil society must be invited by the media to help fight this monster. This is an enemy that the security agencies cannot fight off.

Elements in our political leadership, like Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah of the PML-N and Senior Minister NWFP Bashir Ahmed Bilour of the ANP, would also do well not to fan the ‘blame India’ trend for the sake of political expediency. Unfortunately, India is an easy target as it provides a ready excuse for security lapses, absolving to an extent the provincial and federal governments of the responsibility to ‘do more’.

DAWN.COM | Pakistan | Clear and present danger

 

[ppgj]

Pakistan as a security state
By Irfan Husain
Saturday, 12 Dec, 2009

The army’s repeated interventions have weakened the fabric of the state than any other factor. –Photo by AP

Over the years, many readers have asked me why Pakistan should fear an attack from India. They suggest that as we are under no threat from our eastern neighbour, our army could move more of its troops to the Afghan border where heavy fighting is going on, and where our embattled units could do with reinforcements.

For the answer to this question, we need to enter into the innermost recesses of the Pakistani security establishment’s psyche. The younger generations on both sides of the border obviously have no direct knowledge of the bitterness and bloodshed that attended partition.

I was three when we arrived in Karachi from New Delhi, and the story of how our train was attacked on the way is part of the family lore. I have a vague recollection of Liaquat Ali Khan’s famous speech in which he pointed his fist in India’s direction in a show of defiance. He was assassinated shortly thereafter, in 1951.

For just a brief moment, step into the shoes of a senior army officer surveying the strategic scenario from his GHQ in Rawalpindi, shortly after the birth of Pakistan. He sees a large, hostile neighbour to the east. East Pakistan is separated from West Pakistan by over 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Hordes of refugees are flooding across the border. Many of the military resources that were to be transferred to Pakistan have been blocked by India.

Soon after partition, hostilities begin in Kashmir, confirming the establishment’s worst fears about Indian intentions. Never mind that after the initial attack launched by tribesmen into Kashmir to help their Muslim brethren, it was the Pakistan Army that played a major role. In the mind of most Pakistanis at the time, this was a legitimate campaign to bring Muslim-majority Kashmir into the fold.

Even as a child, I remember hearing constant talk about how India wanted to ‘undo’ partition, and was waiting for the new state to collapse. Newspapers were often full of statements by leaders on both sides of the border hurling threats and accusations at each other.

Against this backdrop of fear and paranoia, it is easy to see why the Pakistani leadership reached to the West to bolster security. India had already established close relations with the Soviet Union, and China had not recovered from decades of chaos caused by war and civil strife.

Every state has security concerns, and needs resources to address them. The task of the leadership is to decide how total available funds will be divided between the imperative of guarding national frontiers, and the needs of the population. In a democracy, these competing demands on the exchequer are mediated through parliament. But when the military seizes control of the state, it can dictate the size of the cake it wants for itself.

In Pakistan, where we currently have all the outer trappings of democracy, the army has made sure that elected governments are too weak to challenge it either on the question of resource allocation, or over core security-related policies. The recent army-inspired furore over the Kerry-Lugar Act is an indication of the grip the generals have on real power.

Over the years, the army came to perceive that apart from external threats, it also had to guard against internal weakness. In the eyes of the military establishment, the political class and the democratic system were both sources of instability, and thus had to be kept under strict check. What it failed to see (and still does not) is that its own repeated interventions have done more to weaken the fabric of the state than any other factor.

By becoming the self-appointed guardian of ‘Pakistan’s ideological frontiers,’ the army took on a third role, and one for which it needed the cooperation of the Islamic parties.

This suited the mullahs perfectly, as it permitted them to advance their reactionary agenda in a Muslim country where they were regularly thumped at the polls. This marriage of convenience was sanctified during the Afghan war when jihadis from around the world flocked to fight the godless Soviet Union.

Generations of young officers at the military academy at Kakul have been taught that India is the eternal enemy; and that civilians are a necessary evil who have to be endured, but never trusted. A part of this indoctrination is the notion that one Muslim soldier is equal to 10 Hindus.

These are the officers now manning the highest positions of the defence forces. They are also the ones who shape Pakistan’s foreign relations, especially with nations affecting our security.

In the 1990s, when India made rapid economic strides, it became clear to even our military establishment that Pakistan could no longer compete in terms of conventional military power. While we matched India’s nuclear programme at crippling expense, we could not keep up with our traditional foe in terms of planes, tanks and men.

Above all, we had lost the technological edge that American weaponry had given us. Years of sanctions triggered by our nuclear programme lie behind the anti-Americanism that infects our officer corps, and through them, much of our media.

In order to restore the military balance, our establishment turned to the army of jihadis raised to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. When the Kashmiri uprising began spontaneously following rigged elections in the late 1980s, Pakistan reacted by first training Kashmiri freedom fighters, and then infiltrating Pakistani terrorists belonging to various jihadi outfits. India responded by sending in several army divisions. This suited our generals fine, as they had tied down close to half a million Indian soldiers by sending in just a few thousand jihadis.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan’s support of the Taliban in this period held out the promise of a compliant government in Kabul. These policies were turned on their head by 9/11, when all forms of terrorism began to be viewed as anathema by the international community. The Americans, in particular, put huge pressure on Musharraf to halt his use of Islamic holy warriors as proxies.

But old habits die hard. India is still seen as the real foe. Above all, Pakistan’s generals are convinced that sooner rather than later, the Americans will be forced to pull out because of flagging public support, much as they did from Vietnam. In this scenario, they are sure India would be asked to step in to ensure that the Taliban do not return to Kabul.

Should this happen, Pakistan would be encircled by Indian forces, and this is the security state’s worst nightmare.

[email protected]

DAWN.COM | Columnists | Pakistan as a security state

 

[nitesh]

this should clear the ho halla of having same aspirations

DAWN.COM | Pakistan | A tale of two classes

In Pakistan, two dominant classes compete with each other for influence and privilege. One is the middle class, which provides the catchment area for the civil bureaucracy, technocrats, the military’s officer cadre and the business community.

The other can be called, for lack of a better term, the political class that includes political entrepreneurs of various kinds at various levels, led by the landed and tribal elite.

These two classes represent the two power centres in the country. The middle class operates as the most stable, influential and status quo-oriented segment of society. The institutional expression of this class is realised through the state apparatus. The process of post-recruitment socialisation in the form of the training of the bureaucracy and army officers aims at merging their individual ambitions with an all-pervasive institutional ethos.

The middle class has a near-monopoly over higher education, professional expertise and the cultural universe of the nation. Very few on top and at the bottom level of society make it to these fields. The three metropolitan centres of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, followed by Faisalabad, Multan, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Hyderabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Sukkur, Quetta, Sargodha and a host of other cities represent a sprinkling of the middle class in varying degrees.

More than any other section of society, the middle class is ideologically oriented in the two domains of religion and nationalism. It adheres to scriptural Islam as opposed to syncretic Islam. It supports the madressah-oriented written tradition as opposed to the shrine-based oral tradition of Islam. It is pan-Islamic in its vision. It seeks the unity of the Muslim world and upholds a dichotomous worldview based on conflict between Islam and the West. Secondly, the middle class supersedes all other classes in its nationalist framework of thought, which operates essentially in negative terms. In six decades, it has projected nationalism in the context of the perceived enemies of the nation. It has been all along anti-Indian, anti-Soviet Union in the first four decades and anti-American in the last two decades. It is also anti-communist and anti-secular.

The composition of the middle class has changed in two generations. Previously, it came from the impoverished aristocracy, politicians, the intelligentsia, lawyers, judges and public careerists of various kinds.

In recent decades, the professional middle classes — doctors, engineers, architects, accountants, corporate managers and information technologists among others — have been the descendants of military officers and bureaucrats in increasingly larger numbers. Their political outlook reflects their social background.

The middle class, most typically if not universally, hates democracy. Partition shaped the social, cultural, political and economic views of the emergent middle class along security-oriented lines and a state-centred rather than society-oriented policy framework.

This class lacks a social reformist vision and a public conscience. It distrusts the capacity and thus the right of what it considers the uneducated, irresponsible, superstitious and ‘primitive’ masses to exercise their vote and elect governments.

An absolute majority of the middle class is rightist in its collective thrust for policy and ideology. This includes: the moneyed right, i.e. the commercial elite committed to the preservation of the current privileged structures; the moral right, as the upholder of a conservative code of ethics; and the religious right, with its increasingly radical Islamic worldview. The rightist middle class, or parts of it, often served as a constituency of army rule in Pakistan.

At the other end, the political class comprises electoral heavyweights vying for power. Politicians are strong in the locality but weak in terms of institutions such as political parties or parliament. They are more pragmatic than visionary. While the middle class vows to serve the ‘national interest’ conceived in an idealised form, the political class pledges to serve ‘the public interest’ understood in terms of the distribution of resources on the ground.

Instead of mosque and madressah, the political class adheres to pir and shrine. The vast rural hinterland of Pakistan is studded with a number of devotional sites belonging to Sufi orders. The political class reflects the social structure based on caste and tribe. Partisanship rather than consensus is the hallmark of its political imagination. Ultimately, it depends on the civil bureaucracy for the articulation of its interest.

The political class considers nationalism as the outermost expression of collective life, not as a mission-mantled agenda. It adheres to various sub-national identities based on ethno-linguistic ties, and seeks to build alliances across communities and regions. If ideology is at the heart of the middle class ethos, identity is the rallying point of the political class in pursuit of electoral victory or a popular movement.

The middle class has enhanced awareness about the issue of corruption. It finds it extremely difficult to understand why people vote for ‘corrupt’ politicians. It fails to appreciate that the state structure, run by an administrative elite rooted in the middle class, bars people’s access to the system of governance. People seek to break open the gates of the remote, impersonal ruling mechanism with the help of politicians, corrupt or otherwise.

The middle-class public officials have been generally more powerful than those from the political class, ranging from Ghulam Mohammad and Iskandar Mirza to Ayub, Yahya, Zia, Ghulam Ishaq and Musharraf. Among politicians, only Z.A. Bhutto was a strong ruler, preceded by Liaquat Ali by a generation.

However, it is the less visible and more powerful bureaucrats, generals, judges and ulema from the middle class who wield real power in the administrative, legal, economic, security, cultural and ideological spheres of public activity. Their stock-in-trade is: democracy is hijacked by ‘feudals’; politicians are corrupt and inefficient; society is not yet fit for democracy.

Of course, there are liberal, progressive and public-spirited intellectuals, lawyers, civil society activists, trade unionists, poets, writers, playwrights and media persons, all from the middle class, who uphold the cause of democracy. They speak, write, demonstrate, sing, strike, organise, and perform, all for democracy. Unfortunately, they are only a fraction of the middle class.

 

[ppgj]

Hard-line Pakistani schools lure foreigners

U.S., others fear students could export extremism to home countries

Alexandre Meneghini / AP

This Nov. 5 photo shows a student looking on during a prayer in a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Karachi, Pakistan. Muslims from around the globe are traveling to Pakistan to attend conservative Islamic schools despite a government ban.

updated 4:09 p.m. ET Dec. 13, 2009

KARACHI, Pakistan - Anas bin Saleem, a 12-year-old American, spends seven hours a day sitting cross-legged on the floor memorizing the Quran.

He is one of thousands of foreigners who have flocked to conservative Islamic schools in Pakistan, despite a government ban, the Associated Press has found through interviews with officials, documents, visits to the schools and encounters with dozens of students.

Pakistan and foreign governments consider the international students a potential security threat. The students could export extremism back to their own countries, or stay and fight in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, where the United States is battling a resurgent Taliban eight years after the invasion. Pakistan stopped granting student visas in 2005, but many students still arrive on travel visas and never leave when they expire.

"We are concerned, but what can we do?" said an official from one Southeast Asian embassy in Pakistan who asked for anonymity because he did not want to upset his hosts. "We can't stop people from traveling ... It is their constitutional right."

Officials are concerned in general about foreigners coming to Pakistan for training in militancy. Most recently, five young American Muslims were arrested after meeting with representatives of an al-Qaida linked group and asking for training, a Pakistani law enforcement official said Thursday.

And in a separate case, the U.S. accuses another American, David Coleman Headley, of attending militant training camps in Pakistan and conspiring with members of the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba to conduct surveillance on potential targets in the Indian city of Mumbai before the deadly terror attacks there in November 2008.

Anti-American sentiment

In Anas' school, Jamia Binoria, several hundred students from 29 countries live alongside 5,000 Pakistani pupils, teachers said. Binoria is one of the largest schools in the country and one of at least four schools in Karachi with foreign students on its books.

Anas says he's not taught militant Islam at Binoria. But clerics firmly endorse suicide bombings and jihad against Western troops in Afghanistan on the school Web site, and Anas admits he is fed up with anti-American barbs from teachers and pupils.

"I get it like every second," says Anas, who left Louisiana last year with his Pakistani-born mother, barely spoke the national language when he arrived in Pakistan and misses Hannah Montana. "I'm like 'shut up' and don't talk like that."

Only a handful of the foreign students are Westerners; most are Asians and Africans in the late teens or early 20s. Many come to Pakistan for a cheap Islamic education, albeit a conservative one, part of a tradition of Muslims traveling to gain knowledge that goes back centuries.

But with Pakistan now a main global hub for al-Qaida and other militant groups, their presence in poorly regulated schools — many with links to extremist groups — inevitably raises concerns.

Some get their visas extended by sympathetic officials, according to school and government officials. School principals help by concealing the students' identities from authorities, officials told The Associated Press.

"Where there is a will, there is a way," said Mohammad Naeem, the head of Anas' school, without elaborating. "They are committed to getting an Islamic education."

Many students are from countries themselves battling terrorist groups or Islamic insurgencies, such as Somalia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Governments there are desperate to avoid their citizens linking up with al-Qaida operatives abroad or returning home radicalized.

Ban not fully enforced

The minutes of a meeting attended by government and security agencies in Karachi obtained by The Associated Press concluded that foreign students at Islamic schools are still being admitted with no clearance from security agencies, something those present said was "illegal" and posed a "serious security risk." It recommended they be deported.

Alexandre Meneghini / AP
Students in a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Karachi.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik denied anyone was slipping into the country unawares, and said students suspected of links to militancy were deported. But a senior interior ministry official in the city said the ban was not being fully enforced because of fears of a backlash by the madrassas, which can quickly incite thousands of young men.

"We have a tendency to soft pedal in Pakistan, especially when it comes to Islamic affairs," said the official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject.

Pakistan's government has struggled for years to supervise the country's approximately 15,000 madrassas, many of which critics say are breeding grounds for militants. Several are linked to sectarian or extremist groups implicated in violence.

In 2003, for example, a group of 12 Southeast Asians were arrested from schools in Karachi, one of whom was later convicted of transferring money to fund attacks in Indonesia. Another member of the group was arrested in July and is awaiting trial in Jakarta in connection with twin suicide bombings in Western hotels.

Some madrassas have refused to comply with the ban because they see it as another example of the government interfering in their affairs and stigmatizing them. They complain that no such restrictions exist on foreigners wanting to study at Pakistani medical colleges, for example.

"Under the United Nation's charter, every religion is free to teach," said Qari Iqbal, an administrator at Jamia Islamiyah, which is known for having educated several leaders of the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan as well as at least three militant commanders in Pakistan. "Why are Muslims being singled out?"

Iqbal said the school was home to just 19 foreigners, all of whom were finishing courses that began before 2005.

Large number of Thais

Thais are believed to make up the largest single group of foreigners in the country. Almost all come from the south of the country, where Muslim insurgents are fighting a bloody war against the government of the Buddhist-majority country.

Alexandre Meneghini / AP
A student reads a book written in Urdu, during a class at a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Karachi.

Thai government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn said there was no evidence the students were returning from Pakistan to join the war, but acknowledged the government did not know how many Thais were in the Pakistan, and their identities.

At one rundown school in Karachi, students from Indonesia, Southern Thailand and Cambodia gathered together recently to cook and eat dinner together in a makeshift kitchen on the roof. The smell of dried, fermented fish popular in parts of Southeast Asia hung in the air.

At another, several Africans were among those lining up for communal prayers.

"There are so many African brothers here in Karachi I can't begin to count them," said Musa, from Sierra Leone, before other students urged him to stop talking. The AP team was angrily accosted as it left the mosque by a smartly dressed man who refused to identify himself.

'American Taliban'

Most of the students are affiliated with Tablighi Jemaat, which translates as "preaching community," an international Islamic missionary movement that has strong roots in Pakistan.

While conservative, it is not a militant group. Still, it has appeared on the fringes of many international terrorism investigations, with suspects — including "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh — either using it as mask to travel to Pakistan or as a springboard into violence.

Each year, about 5,000 travel to the country to attend short courses or preach in mosques, said a member of the group.

A yearly gathering close to the group's headquarters in the Punjabi town of Raiwind attracts hundreds of thousands of followers, many from abroad.

Christine Fair, an American academic who has studied Pakistani madrassas and militant recruitment, said foreigners associated with Tablighi represented more of a worry than those enrolled at schools.

"If you want to become a militant, Raiwind represents an opportunity to meet potential recruiters, and get yourself to a camp," she said. "Anyone can get a visa to go."

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Hard-line Pakistani schools lure foreigners - Pakistan - msnbc.com

 

[ppgj]

a good read.

Smokers’ Corner: It is us

By Nadeem F. Paracha
Sunday, 20 Dec, 2009

Demagogic claptrap still manages to pass as being Pakistan and Muslim history in the textbooks and on popular TV.

Across Pakistan’s history a number of politicians, lawyers, journalists, student leaders and party workers have bravely wrestled with the establishment’s civil, military and economic arms.

These arms have played every dirty trick in the book of destructive Machiavellian politics set into motion against democrats so the ‘establishment’ can retain a stagnant and largely reactionary political and economic status-quo; a status-quo that fears the pluralistic and levelling qualities of democracy.

Many from the higher echelons of society have prospered from this status-quo. They are always ready to ward off democracy through a synthetic brand of ‘patriotism’ concocted from overt displays of nationalistic chauvinism and politicised Islam.

Though they are quick to blame the masses for falling so easily for democratic parties’ ‘empty’ promises, the truth is, the same masses have been more susceptible to whatever hate-spewing gibberish and mythical brew these magicians have been feeding the people for decades in the name of history, Islam and patriotism.

This brew, present in the history books our children are taught, has been gradually turning the average Pakistani into a paranoid and pessimistic android who, as if instinctively, lets out his frustrations by pounding the democrats with cynical blows, also swinging wildly at Pakistan’s many enemies he is told are lurking within and outside its borders.

In this mangled discourse, the documented horrors of the long military dictatorships that this republic has suffered are conveniently forgotten; sometimes even by those in the political and journalistic circles who had struggled hard for a democratic setup; they suddenly seem to lose all their painfully cultivated tolerance and patience, once that democratic setup is revived.

No wonder, in this day and age, we are still debating whether democracy is right for Pakistan, and/or is it compatible with Islam. It is not surprising that such debates crop up in a nation constantly injected with a heavy dose of dubious history which begins not five thousand years ago with the Indus Valley Civilisation, but many centuries later with Muhammad Bin Qasim’s conquest of Sindh. In fact, some textbooks have had no qualms of completely bypassing logic by claiming that Qasim was actually the first Pakistani!

This history then cleverly ignores the many terrible intrigues and murders that were committed by a series of Muslim rulers against their own comrades and kin, sometimes in a fit of jealously and sometimes owing to pure power play. This historical narrative goes to work right away when we are quick to present ourselves as noble people who are incapable of murder, genocide and intrigue, and assert that it is actually other races and religions who have been targeting us.

We forget West Pakistan’s controversial role and the bloodbath that followed in the former East Pakistan. We forget how the founder of Pakistan was treated while on his death bed, as he lay lamenting how some of his closest colleagues couldn’t wait to see him die. We forget how a wily general calling himself a pious Muslim sent a popularly elected prime minister to the gallows on the feeblest of evidences.

We forget how an Islamic party being led by a renowned Islamic scholar was behind two of the most shameful acts of mass rioting against the Ahmadiya community. We forget how, long before Hindu fanatics tore down the Barbri Masjid in India, varied Islamic sects and sub-sects were busy going to war against one another in the streets of Lucknow (Muharram processions are banned in that city for over a decade now owing to Sunni-Shia and not Hindu-Muslim rivalry).

We forget the terrible sounds of the army’s tanks rolling into Balochistan (1962, 1973); and then in Sindh (1983), slaughtering a number of young Baloch and Sindhis, accusing them of treason, when all they wanted were their democratic rights. We forget the terrible decade-long armed action by the state against ‘Muhajirs’ in Karachi, in which whole families were wiped out.

We forget how our intelligence agencies schemed the downfall of one democratic government after another in the 1990s, all the while fattening scores of holy monsters many of whom are now blowing up our markets and mosques. There are many more of these horrid episodes in which Pakistanis killed Pakistanis and Muslims slaughtered Muslims.

Why is it so difficult then for us to understand that the mayhem rained on us today is by monsters like the home-grown Taliban? ‘It can’t be us. It can’t be Muslims,’ we say.

Back in 1971, very few Pakistanis were willing to advise Yahya Khan to get into a dialogue with rebelling Bengalis. But today, after years of unprecedented violence perpetrated by the Taliban, we have many politicians, TV hosts, and journalists suggesting a dialogue with men who one can’t even be described as human. These people’s minds and those of their followers have been influenced by all the concocted and mythical moments of glory, and of justified hatred in the name of religion and patriotism present in our historical discourse and the false memories that it has created in us.

Unfortunately such demagogic claptrap still manages to pass as being Pakistan and Muslim history in the textbooks and on popular TV.

DAWN.COM | Columnists | Smokers? Corner: It is us

 

[ppgj]

Pakistani comedians fight Taliban with humour

Sunday, 20 Dec, 2009

Pakistani television artists who take the parts of political leaders characters in a television show, take part in rehearsals in Lahore. – AFP

LAHORE: If the Taliban produced a soap opera, Pakistani comedy writer Younis Butt pondered one day, what would it be like?

The love triangles would be impossible to understand, he thought, because all the women would be hidden behind burkas and no one would know which character was engaged in a heated tiff with another.

An Islamic variety show would be equally absurd, he decided. With singing and dancing frowned upon, women covered from head-to-toe could only sit in a spotlight with their backs turned to the camera.

For the creator of Pakistan's most popular satirical television show, the prospect was too tempting and the spoof Taliban 'T Channel' episode was born, airing in June this year and becoming a major hit.

Segments are punctuated with Kalashnikov fire, as manic-eyed actors sporting black turbans hand out household tips on weapons maintenance.

'There is so much tension and fear, everybody is giving bad news, but comedians give the same news, but with hope,' Butt told AFP from his office in the eastern city of Lahore.

'This show elevates people and they laugh, and when people laugh they have more courage to fight these problems,' said Butt, surrounded by television sets tuned in to Pakistan news shows and the US Comedy Network.

'We should fight terrorism with humour.'

The Pakistani Taliban have a similar ideology to their namesakes over the border in Afghanistan, who decreed music, dancing and television un-Islamic and effectively banned women from public life during their six years in government.

Attacks in Pakistan have escalated this year as the military has pressed major offensives against Taliban strongholds, with more than 530 people killed in suicide attacks since early October.

The insurgency has left people in the northwest and other big cities in a state of anxiety, bewilderment and fear, said Butt, who was a practising psychiatrist before turning his hand to humour.

Coupled with inflation, poverty, unemployment and political scandals, Pakistanis need an outlet to escape the daily grind.

'A scattered mind struggles to enjoy such shows, although I will say we people need it more than others,' said shopkeeper Shahid Khan in the northwest capital Peshawar, where bomb blasts have killed 270 people since October 1.

But bank worker Saghir Ahmad said his thoughts were elsewhere: 'Ask me about bomb blasts, suicide attacks and my security - only women and young people have time to enjoy these shows.'

Another personality trying to use humour to defuse the tension is Fasi Zaka, a radio DJ with a phone-in show which he says tolerates 'no sacred cows.'

Topics on The Fasi Zaka Show on Radio One FM91 range from interfaith marriages and politics to more absurd discussions such as the speed of grizzly bears, Zaka said.

'The idea behind the programme is quite anarchic and there are serious elements within it but they are never planned, they arise whenever a caller demonstrates prejudice, bigotry or ignorance,' he told AFP.

'That seems to resonate more than constant preaching.'

He sees his show as 'an antidote to despondency' in troubling times.

'It's a route to normalcy when all they see is inhumanity daily... with satire it educates the population in a palatable format that makes them see through the emotion and spin-ridden narrative of Pakistan,' Zaka added.

On Butt's show - the title of which roughly translates as We Are All Pregnant With Hope - political figures come in for the most ribbing, with a whole cast of lookalikes ranging from former military ruler Pervez Musharraf to a Pakistani version of US President Barack Obama.

Butt said his show aims to poke gentle fun and shuns cruel lampooning, although it did incur the wrath of Musharraf, who banned it for three months after declaring a state of emergency in late 2007.

So far, the Taliban have made no specific threats against the show - which first went on air on private Geo TV seven years ago - although some television channels have received warnings from the militants.

'America is not happy with me, the Taliban is not happy with me, everybody is not happy - that is why I am happy,' Butt says with a grin.

DAWN.COM | Pakistan | Pakistani comedians fight Taliban with humour

 

[ppgj]

Pakistan's Failing War on Terror

Pakistan needs to rethink its strategy for defeating jihadi groups -- not just throw more troops at the problem.

BY BRIAN FISHMAN | DECEMBER 1, 2009

Despite the shrill public discussion of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, the most important front of the war in South Asia continues to be Pakistan, which the world's most dangerous jihadists call home. On this issue, there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that U.S. President Barack Obama's private deliberations on strategy have focused on Pakistan, coupling offers of increased military and economic assistance with warnings that Islamabad must abandon its habit of supporting Islamist proxy forces. The bad news is that al Qaeda's radical pan-Islamic ideology is infecting militants long-supported by the Pakistani state, and Pakistan's security services have not caught up with the problem.

Pakistan deserves credit for its recent offensive against tribal militants in Swat and Waziristan, but the Pakistani Army's campaign is far from adequate. Pakistan has retained its long-standing balancing strategy of differentiating between pro- and anti-Pakistan militants, regardless of their collaboration with al Qaeda or support for violence against NATO troops in Afghanistan. This balancing strategy is coherent from a Pakistani perspective -- it is self-interested, not evil -- but it creates real problems for the NATO effort in Afghanistan and increases the chance of terrorism in the West. In the long run, it spells trouble for Pakistan as well.

Pakistan's balancing strategy is evident nationwide, but it is particularly clear in Waziristan. When the Pakistani Army invaded Waziristan, it cut a deal with two Waziri tribal commanders, Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir, in order to limit the risk to its supply lines while targeting the most virulent militants in the region: tribal elements loyal to Hakimullah Mehsud (the successor to Baitullah Mehsud, who before his assassination in August was the head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban coalition) and their Uzbek allies. On one level, this deal is logical. Both Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir have a history of animosity (see here and here for more) toward the Hakimullah Mehsud faction, and both have cooperated previously with Pakistani security forces. In 2007, Maulvi Nazir even went to war against the Mehsuds' Uzbek allies. Moreover, the Mehsud faction is closely tied to al Qaeda and under previous leadership even claimed credit for a plot against the Barcelona subway.

By cutting a deal with the Waziri tribes, Pakistan smoothed its operation against the most dangerous threat. That counts as sound operational logic. So, what is the problem?

The problem is that both Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir still support anti-NATO violence in Afghanistan and have long-standing relationships with pro-al Qaeda groups. They are not the South Asian version of the Sons of Iraq (the Iraqi insurgents who supported U.S. efforts to find and crush al Qaeda in Iraq). Indeed, it was only April 2009 when Maulvi Nazir appeared in an al Qaeda-produced As-Sahab video denouncing the United States and Pakistan, and swearing to support Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.

The intensity of Pakistan's recent offensive in Waziristan is laudable, and it's certainly an improvement from previous campaigns in the region. But the increased intensity reflects an operational shift rather than a strategic one.

The balancing strategy is inadequate from a Western perspective, but it will slowly fail Pakistan as well. While Pakistan has negotiated among militias to gain operational advantage over its most worrisome enemies, al Qaeda has extended its ideological and political influence over larger segments of the Pakistani militant milieu. For Pakistan, the most worrisome development is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) coalition between Pashtun tribal groups and Punjabi militias, including Sipah-i Sahaba, Laskkar-e-Janghvi, and Jaish-i-Mohammed.

The Pashtun and Punjabi groups were never enemies, but had little reason to collaborate -- tribal militias fought mainly for autonomy, Punjabi groups pursued narrow sectarian and religious agendas, and Kashmiri groups targeted India. But the rash of bombings in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, and Lahore -- many claimed by the TTP leadership in far-away Waziristan -- indicate that the Punjabi groups have shifted their focus to more political targets, like cricket teams, Army headquarters, and police-training facilities. Militants that used to avoid confrontation with the Pakistani state are now facilitating bombings in Pakistan's Punjab heartland. While Pakistan maneuvers for operational advantage, the strategic playing field is shifting against it.

The rationale for the origin and persistence of Pakistan's balancing strategy is no secret: Jihadi militant groups are useful foils against India. (When your archenemy is four times as big as you and has six times as many people, you take help where you can get it.) But those useful-to-Pakistan jihadi militant groups justify their anti-Indian stance on ideological grounds that also demand opposition to the NATO force in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has used that opening to argue that Pakistan's facilitation of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan makes the Pakistani state and its Army an infidel force attacking true Muslims.

Or, as al Qaeda ideologue Abu Yahya al-Libi put it, "Pakistan has now become a stronghold in the nonbeliever alliance that is waging war on the religion of Islam. Her army, intelligence agencies, and police have now become a spearhead in the direct collaboration of tearing apart the connective tissues of the Islamic Nation ... If these people ... do not deserve combat to eliminate their overwhelming evil and rampant corruption in this life and in religion, who then, deserves it?"

Despite Libi's rhetoric, Pakistan is not on the verge of collapse. The problem is that Pakistan's continued pursuit of the same balancing strategy -- albeit one that pursues anti-Pakistan militants with greater intensity -- will continue to leave space for Afghan-focused militants to plan and train inside Pakistan. That will make successfully concluding the war in Afghanistan much more difficult. Moreover, leaving space for Afghan-focused militants almost certainly means leaving space for al Qaeda.

The Pakistani Army still seems to think it can manipulate the militant groups in its midst. Some in the Army may argue that a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would bolster Pakistani security because the Pakistani government will no longer be complicit with a Western occupation in Afghanistan, thus obviating al Qaeda's argument for attacking it. After all, they will argue, Pakistan has managed instability in Afghanistan before, but did not suffer terrorist attacks in downtown Islamabad until the United States showed up across the border.

That mindset is outdated. Al Qaeda is the wild card because of its uncanny ability to co-opt other militant groups, either wholesale or piecemeal. The power that comes from the publicity and notoriety al Qaeda offers cannot be wished away and has proven infectious for Pakistan's domestic jihadi groups.

Al Qaeda's success in co-opting Pakistani militants has changed the face of the international jihadi threat. Although al Qaeda's own operational capacity to conduct attacks is probably more constrained today than it was several years ago, that does not much matter if Pakistani collaborators such as Sipah-i Sahaba are attacking targets in Lahore while Lashkar-e-Taiba and Ilyas Kashmiri are linked to plotters in Denver and Chicago.

The immediate problem for the United States is that an Afghanistan strategy that does not improve Pakistani performance against its domestic militants will not dramatically mitigate the security threat to the United States from al Qaeda or its allies. But the longer-term issues are worse: increased instability in Pakistan, a festering Afghanistan, and more tension between Pakistan and India.

Even the strongest advocates of Obama's new strategy understand it is a calculated risk. But Obama is right to try to reassure and cajole Pakistan into action. One rationale for putting more U.S. troops in Afghanistan is to bolster Pakistani will, and perhaps a demonstrated commitment to Afghanistan will shake up deliberations in Rawalpindi, the Pakistani equivalent of the Pentagon. Despite the obvious costs, this is an experiment worth trying because the consequences of failure in Pakistan are so disturbing.

When it comes to Western security, the impact of the new U.S. Afghanistan strategy on deliberations in Islamabad and Rawalpindi is more important than its effects on the ground in Kabul or Kandahar. To judge whether it has succeeded, Washington should watch for a strategic shift in Pakistani policy toward its militants, not just greater force employed in the service of an old, failing strategy.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/01/pakistans_failing_war_on_terror?page=full

 

[nitesh]

again a proof of erasing history
A forgotten millennium

Sixteenth December is a shameful date in our recent history. About 80,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendered at Dhaka on this day in 1971, handing the greatest victory ever to a Hindu army over a Muslim force. Indira Gandhi, Indian Prime Minister at the time, exulted at a public meeting: “Today we have erased the ignominy of a thousand years of our dark history”.> She was referring to the long period of Muslim rule of the subcontinent, which began a millennium ago and continued for about eight centuries.

But it is a powerful commentary on our sense of history that while we remember the anniversary of our recent defeat at Dhaka and the loss of East Pakistan, we have allowed the millennium of the establishment of Muslim rule in present-day NWFP and Punjab to pass unnoticed. Muslim dominion over these areas was heralded a thousand years ago by the defeat of Jaipal and his successor Anandpal of the Hindu Shahi dynasty by the Ghaznavi rulers Sabuktagin and Mahmud in four memorable battles. The territories over which Jaipal ruled at the time of his warfare with Sabuktagin included Peshawar and Lahore and according to Tarikh-e-Ferishta extended “in length from Sirhind to Laghman and in breadth from the kingdom of Kashmir to Multan.” In the ninth century the kingdom of the Shahis had been even bigger and included parts of Afghanistan around Kabul. It had since lost most of the territories in Afghanistan to the advancing tide of Muslims from central Asia but still comprised Laghman west of Jalalabad.

Over the past half century, the teaching of history has been downgraded in our educational system. There is little research and the number of quality books being written is negligible. Moreover, the history of Pakistan has been redefined to mean either the history of the Pakistan movement or that of Muslim rule of South Asia. The former is a very partial and the latter a selective approach. It means that the two and a half centuries of decline of Muslim political power after Aurangzeb are largely blacked out from our text-books. Our younger generation knows very little of the Maratha ascendancy and of Sikh rule over Punjab and – briefly over NWFP – that followed the collapse of Mughal power. The pre-Islamic period also receives very little mention.

A nation’s history includes all those past events which have shaped its character. The more recent they are, they more they are likely to have impacted on the present. Pakistan is a country with a long and rich history. Like the history of other nations, ours too had its ups and downs, its triumphs and setbacks. We need to remember all of them.

Henry S Commager, an American historian, wrote: “A people without a history is like a man without memory.” A corollary of this dictum is that a nation that it is selective about its history is like a man with partial amnesia. Clearly, we need to jog our collective historical memory.

and when ever they lie around with number of soldiers surrendered this should be shown to them:

 

[Flint]

Did Indira Gandhi really say that? Her statement is quite provocative, and something that would be expected from the ranks of the RSS rather than the Congress party.

 

[nitesh]

No Madam Indira never said that she said "We have" thrown two nation theory in to Arabian sea". They have habit of lying

 

[F-14]

A nation’s history includes all those past events which have shaped its character. The more recent they are, they more they are likely to have impacted on the present. Pakistan is a country with a long and rich history

let me see the country of pakistan has only 60 years of History so i think most of its so called "history " will be from the Islamic period of Indian History what a pity when will they ever realize that they are always connected to India No matter what

 

[ppgj]

good read.

Demonising America

By Ahmad Faruqui
Monday, 21 Dec, 2009

When it comes to anti-Americanism, there is little doubt that Al Qaeda and the Taliban lead the pack. But the rightwing parties are not too far behind. At a recent demonstration in Pakistan, bearded men held up placards that flaunted the Yankees in no uncertain terms: ‘Crush, Crush, America.’ –AP/File photo

It was in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran that America was labelled The Great Satan. Judging from current trends, the day is not too far off when America will be given the same moniker in Pakistan. Ever since the US resorted to carrying out drone attacks against terrorist suspects inside Pakistan, vocal condemnations of America have been widespread.

The furore over the Kerry-Lugar foreign aid bill brought matters to a head.

At issue, the corps commanders explained, was the affront to national sovereignty. The nation’s honour had been attacked became the rallying cry. So what if the challenger was the globe’s only superpower? And so what if it was simply trying to strengthen Pakistan’s civil institutions? Their crumbling at the hands of the military had been of great concern to civil society.

Lost on the anti-Americanistas was the fact that the US was not obliged to provide $7.5bn over the next five years to Pakistan. If the Pakistanis did not like the conditions that came with the funds, they could simply decline the aid. As Senator Kerry put it, the US had plenty of other places on which to spend the money.

When it comes to anti-Americanism, there is little doubt that Al Qaeda and the Taliban lead the pack. But the rightwing parties are not too far behind. At a recent demonstration in Pakistan, bearded men held up placards that flaunted the Yankees in no uncertain terms: ‘Crush, Crush, America.’

Anti-Americanism has also picked up converts in the mainstream print and electronic media. Conspiracy theories involving America are aired with increasing frequency. Even some leading figures from the diplomatic establishment have joined the fray.

The latest is Shamshad Ahmad, a former foreign secretary and former UN ambassador.

Speaking at a seminar in Karachi on state sovereignty, he went beyond the usual recital of grievances. That well-known list includes three major items. First, the US did not come to Pakistan’s aid during the 1965 war with India. This overlooks the fact that the war was initiated by Pakistan and that US arms were never meant to be used against India.

Second, it did not come to Pakistan’s aid in the 1971 war with India. This overlooks the fact that the war was triggered by the military’s ambitions to negate the results of the general elections and to rule in perpetuity.

Third, it abandoned Pakistan once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. This overlooks the fact that the US had not guaranteed Pakistan’s security for all times to come against enemies of all stripes.

The former foreign secretary, a strong proponent of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons but by no means a firebrand Islamist, stated: ‘The US had used us as a spy in the past to fulfil its motives, while now it is using us as a mercenary.’ And then came the clincher: ‘It is the US intervention, not the Russian intervention which has kept everything on the boil in the region.’

Some political analysts continue to indulge in conspiracy theories about the attack on Pearl Harbour on Dec 7, 1941 and the attacks of Sept 11, 2001. But Ahmad put himself in a class of one by saying that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve in 1979 was engineered by the US.

He said, ‘The Americans think and plan about things they want to achieve in 50 or 60 years. They created a vacuum in Afghanistan. So after the political manoeuvring in Afghanistan, the US created a way for the Soviet Union [to be] sucked in[to] that vacuum.’

The former senior diplomat, who knows the country’s history better than most, went on to say that the Americans got the Pakistanis on their side by saying that the Soviets were out to fulfil the czarist dream of building a warm water port. This is revisionist history. Right after the Soviet invasion, Gen Ziaul Haq put in a plea for the West’s help, saying that the Evil Empire was about to make a run for Gwadar. He famously rejected President Jimmy Carter’s $400m aid package by calling it peanuts. But when President Ronald Reagan offered him a $3.2bn package, he was all smiles.

Ahmad goes on to say that the US forced the Pakistanis to fight the jihad in Afghanistan to fulfil their Cold War agenda. And what did Pakistan get in return? All that came, he says, was ‘drugs, arms and ammunition which still plague our society’.President Zardari, much reviled in Pakistan for his pro-Americanism, has been forced into a retreat. In a carefully crafted op-ed in the New York Times, he says that twice the US has manipulated and exploited Pakistan, once when it supported radical elements against the Soviets who morphed into the Taliban and Al Qaeda and second when it supported the Musharraf dictatorship despite its curtailment of civil liberties.

An ultranationalist theory that is rapidly gaining currency in Pakistan is that there was peace in the region until the US arrived in October 2001. Several of the ultranationalists also subscribe to four ‘booster’ theories.

First, that the US engineered the 9/11 attacks on itself. It needed an excuse to invade Afghanistan and control access to Central Asian natural gas. Second, that Osama bin Laden did not carry out the 9/11 attacks, that he is an American agent trained and armed by the CIA and that he was killed in December 2001. Third, that Al Qaeda does not exist. And fourth, that the Taliban are simply freedom-loving people trying to free their country from foreign occupation. The obvious theory about 9/11 has no vocal adherents in Pakistan. This argues that the attacks were carried out to draw the US into the region, inflame interfaith relations and provoke a holy war that would result in the revival of the caliphate.

With every passing week, Pakistan continues to inch towards the brink. Given the frequency of the Muslim-on-Muslim attacks that are now being mounted, it is moot whether Pakistan is a failing state or a failed state. Neither prognosis is good.

The US is not perfect. It has made its share of mistakes, domestically and internationally. A common charge levied by the anti-Americanistas is that the US acts in its own interests. That should be cause for celebration and not denigration. If only Pakistan would do the same. Instead of demonising America, it should turn on its own demons.

[email protected]

DAWN.COM | World | Demonising America

 

[ppgj]

A crowning touch

By Qurat ul ain Siddiqui
Monday, 21 Dec, 2009

M.A. Jinnah first donned the Qaraqul cap in 1937 to signify his commitment to the idea of a separate nation for the Muslims of South Asia. —File photo

One piece of attire has long symbolised Pakistan’s national ideology: the Jinnah cap. Technically known as the Qaraqul cap, for it is made from the fur of the Qaraqul breed of sheep, the hat is typically worn by Central Asian men (presently, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is rarely seen without his). But in Pakistan, the hat has been firmly identified with the Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah for decades. This affiliation has ensured that others who sport the cap are understood to be making a political, rather than fashion, statement. Indeed, as Pakistan’s democratic fortunes have waxed and waned over the years, the choice by certain politicians to don the Jinnah cap has revealed much about political aspirations and the public mood.

The Jinnah cap was first initiated into national politics in 1937, when Jinnah sported it at the Lucknow session of the All India Muslim League on October 15. The cap was part of a complete change in Jinnah’s wardrobe; he surrendered his Saville Row suits in favour of a sherwani and Qaraqul cap meant to signify his commitment to the idea of a separate nation for the Muslims of South Asia.

Interestingly, at that point, many regarded the Jinnah cap as an answer to the hand-spun cotton cap which Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru used to wear, and which had come to symbolise the Congress Party’s ideals at the time.

Since then, the cap has graced many a brow vying for a successful political, even religious, career in the Land of the Pure. The cap has come to acquire ample political significance and is bought usually by oath-takers as a ritual to achieve the ‘crowning touch.’ In most cases, however, the cap’s symbolism has not proved powerful enough to achieve the degree of leadership success that Jinnah managed.

Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, who also wore the Jinnah cap, was assassinated while the country was in its early years. The leader, who was widely regarded as Jinnah’s ‘right hand man,’ tried to fill the leadership vacuum after Jinnah’s death and proved a fairly successful diplomat especially with regard to the Kashmir conflict.

Another national leader who donned the Jinnah cap was Khwaja Nazimuddin. Stepping in as prime minister after Khan’s assassination, Nazimuddin’s government tried to tackle challenges posed by the Bengali Language Movement and a campaign aimed at declaring Ahmadis as non-Muslims. His reign, however, ended abruptly as Ghulam Mohammad, the then Governor-General of Pakistan, dismissed the prime minister, thereby kicking off a disturbing trend that has haunted the political history of Pakistan over the decades.

Ayub Khan also sported the Jinnah cap to symbolically assure the public of his goodwill and potential to lead the nation. Of course, it was during his reign that the infamous ‘Operation Gibraltar’ was set in motion that eventually led to the 1965 war and thousands of casualties.

The cap then found another faithful in Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, dubbed an ultra-nationalist by several. The brilliant orator Bhutto was quite the secularist, much like Jinnah himself. But he was also the one to restrict the sale of alcohol in order to please religious groups, many of whom were critical of him. That didn’t help; the die had been cast. The leader who set Pakistan’s nuclear programme in motion and founded the country’s largest political party was sentenced to death on charges of ‘conspiracy to murder’ Ahmed Raza Kasuri. To this date, Bhutto’s trial remains amongst the most disputed in the country’s sordid politico-judicial history.

Not surprisingly, General Ziaul Haq chose not to don the Jinnah cap. After all, by the 1980s, the accessory had become synonymous with the secular ethos that Jinnah espoused and that the general was rabidly opposed to. For this military man, official army attire and the occasional trappings of Islamisation were sufficient.

The cap had to wait a decade before staging a comeback on the crown of Nawaz Sharif, the chief of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz group and the prime minister of Pakistan. In that tumultuous decade of democracy, the cap hovered, on and off, with Sharif’s dismissal, and then re-election.

With Sharif, the Jinnah cap took on political as well as explicitly religious proportions, as this was a leader who defended democracy even while aspiring to be the Amirul Momineen (commander of the faithful). No doubt, many religious scholars over time have sported Qaraqul caps and Jinnah, too, used it to symbolise his call for a Muslim state. But in the Pakistani public sphere, the accessory was a distinctly political symbol until Sharif tipped the balance.

Over the years, the cap has been used by others who didn’t attain the country’s highest offices to enhance popular support and, by extension, political clout. In fact, the Jinnah cap would be an interesting case study for an esoteric European semiotician looking for research fodder.

Altaf Hussain, once the staunch mohajir nationalist, now an avowed federalist, has exploited the cap’s symbolism along with that of the Sindhi ajrak to facilitate his politics in Sindh. Another recent example of a politician channelling the cap’s veneer of legitimacy is Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who showed off his Jinnah in Lahore’s sweltering heat. In both cases, the public figures remained in line with Jinnah’s secular vision of Pakistan.

But for some, the Jinnah cap has always been intrinsically linked with Pakistan’s Islamic identity. Jamaat-i-Islami chief Munawar Hasan, who almost always wears the Jinnah cap, explains, ‘Quaid-e-Azam died too early in the country’s history and politicians and other leaders naturally look up to him as the ideal example of leadership.’ Hasan adds that, ‘during the last few years of the Pakistan Movement, Jinnah completely changed his garb from western to eastern and Muslim. His cap was a manifestation of his Muslim identity.’

Veteran journalist, playwright, and actor Imran Aslam seconds this idea: ‘In pre-Partition India, the cap became part of a political campaign that distinguished the Muslim League from the Congress. It was a political ploy and although I’m sure Jinnah must have felt uncomfortable wearing it, he looked quite elegant in it. Later, politicians used it as a leadership symbolism which intended to show their association with Pakistan’s roots and with the Pakistani identity.’

It is poignant to note, then, that with Messrs Pervez Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz, the cap became virtually obsolete. Currently, too, Pakistan’s top leadership continues without the cap. Perhaps the shift away from this symbol of Pakistani nationalism, pride, and secularism is a good measure of the profound extent of this country’s ongoing identity crisis. For if the head that wears the crown is meant to lie uneasy, one can only fear for the fate of the head that governs without the crowning touch of the Jinnah cap.

DAWN.COM | Art & Culture | A crowning touch

 

[ppgj]

Traveller’s tales

By Irfan Husain
Wednesday, 23 Dec, 2009

Apparently, only passports containing valid visas for other countries have gone missing. –File Photo


I am currently struggling to find out how I can enter Laos, given that the country does not have an embassy or consulate either in Sri Lanka, or in Pakistan. According to the Internet, I should be able to get a visa on arrival at the airport. But as I travel on the deadly green Pakistani passport, I am somewhat dubious: surely it can’t be that easy to enter another country. The others in our party are all Brits, and will have no problems, but I can easily visualise a scenario in which I will be denied entry. If readers have any advice, I would be grateful to hear how to solve this problem.

This personal issue underlines the larger problem faced by all Pakistanis when they seek to travel abroad. A large number of bad experiences have made our passports noxious in the eyes of other nations. Issues ranging from illegal immigration to drug smuggling to extremist terrorism have caused much of the international community to view travellers from our shores with suspicion.

Given the difficulties faced by Pakistanis in getting visas, losing a passport endorsed with several of these precious stamps is a huge nightmare. That’s what has been happening to several Pakistanis who have sent their passports to the British High Commission in the recent past. An old friend recounted his horror story of applying to get his multiple-entry, five-year visa to the UK renewed. His passport contained a similar valid Schengen visa to the EU, and one for Canada.

When he got a call from Gerry’s, the travel agency designated to collect and return documents, that his papers were ready for collection, he was delighted and went to their office to collect the visa he had waited over two months for. When he opened the official-looking envelope, he found his passport missing, and a letter saying the High Commission regretted the loss of his passport, but would issue him a visa as soon as he got a new one, offering to pay the cost. What the letter did not say was how he was to get new Schengen and Canadian visas, and who would bear the cost.

The larger issue here, of course, is how the High Commission managed to lose my friend’s passport from one of the most secure areas in the entire country. According to a spokesman of the British Border Security Agency, an enquiry has been launched into the loss of passports from the HC premises. Apparently, only passports containing valid visas for other countries have gone missing. This obviously indicates that officials are pilfering these documents to sell to people who can get the passport details altered to travel to the countries that issued these visas.

I have written earlier about the long delays faced by Pakistanis applying for a UK visa as the procedure now involves the applications being processed in Abu Dhabi. Many people who have been travelling to Britain for years have been effectively grounded for months while they wait. Many of them have had their visas refused on flimsy grounds, and their hefty visa fees appropriated by Her Majesty’s government. This policy does little to make the UK safer as the real terrorist threat faced by it is from home-grown extremists, and not from middle-aged professionals and businessmen.

Talking of extremism, I was bemused recently by the sight of large bearded men blocking the aisle and access to the galley and toilet in a Sri Lankan Airways flight as they spread out mats and knelt and bowed in prayer. It was bad enough when the small club class section was thus used as a flying mosque, but when passengers from economy seats began encroaching, people complained to the staff.

Apparently, these devout Pakistanis were members of the Tablighi Jamaat; one of them, no doubt taking me for a Sri Lankan, suggested in English that I study Islam. I was so annoyed by this time that I told him rather brusquely in Urdu that I did not need his advice or guidance.

This kind of thing often happens in PIA flights, but to inconvenience other passengers is hardly Islamic, especially when there is a clear dispensation from praying for travellers. And there is nothing to prevent people from praying quietly in their seats.

The hypocrisy of these people was exposed when we were waiting for our baggage at Karachi airport. The maghrib azan was relayed over the sound system as our bearded fellow-passengers stood around the luggage belt. Not one of them moved to pray, although there was ample space available. So clearly, their ostentatious display of devoutness while we were airborne was purely for show.

This public parading of piety is yet another legacy of the Zia era we are still struggling with. Now, separate areas have been designated for prayers in various airports around the world due to demands made by Muslim travellers. But they are largely empty as it appears the faithful would rather catch up on their duty-free shopping than pray.

Much as we might deplore the recent phenomenon of Islamophobia in the West, we should recognise that largely, it is fuelled by the outward symbols of their faith so many Muslims insist on displaying prominently. Long, unkempt beards for men, and all-enveloping shrouds for women, have come to symbolise Islam in many Western eyes. Somehow, people who insist on shoving their faith in the face of others seem to think this outer display makes them better Muslims.

To some extent, this attitude can be explained by the desire of a minority to express their separate identity in an alien milieu. However, the irony here is that this identity is being asserted by a generation that was born and brought up in the West. By insisting on parading the symbols of their separateness, they are in effect rejecting the values of their host culture. Unfortunately, in these polarised post-9/11 days, erecting this barrier means that many Muslims are marginalising themselves.

In practical terms, this growing gap between Muslim migrants and their descendants, and the host community of Europeans and Americans, means that Muslims remain behind in terms of education and employment. This is truer of Europe than America, but clearly, this cleavage does not help the cause of mutual understanding. Until we learn that belief is a private matter not to be paraded at every excuse, we will continue being viewed with suspicion wherever we go. And selfishly, I will keep wondering if I will be allowed to enter Laos.

DAWN.COM | Columnists | Traveller?s tales