[Dawn] Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Tuesday said the hydra-headed menace of terrorism was our common enemy and no one country could battle it out alone.Certainly not, if more than one country's generating it...
He termed the Friends of Democratic Pakistan "a collective determination against an evil mindset" and urged the international community to address root causes of terrorism such as poverty and unemployment.
But the "Magnificent 19" weren't poor, and their employment prospects would have been very good in most places, had they not hijack two aircraft and smashed them into skyscrapers in New York, another one to smash into the Pentagon, and yet another one into the ground in Pennsylvania. Osama bin Laden was reputed to have a personal fortune of $300 million. So perhaps we can discount poverty and unemployment as root causes, since Haitians, who're poorer than your run-of-the-mill Arab or Pak and even less employed, haven't been committing acts of terrorism world wide.
The foreign minister was addressing the Friends of Democratic Pakistan's Public-Private Partnership Conference in Dubai. He said the three-year plan of reconstruction and rehabilitation in Malakand comprised close to 500 projects and would cost about $ 300 million.
Which leaves us with the intellectual problem: if the roots of terrorism aren't in poverty and unemployment, where are they? What single factor do 95 percent of all terrorists working today have in common?
The five year development plan, based on Post-crisis Needs Assessment, would cost around $1.2 billion, and the FoDP must expedite its process to complete these projects, the minister said.
Oh, what can it be?
Pakistan has suffered huge economic losses of over $35 billion since September 11 in terms of infrastructure, investment and exports, Qureshi said.
Actually, we see next to no terrorism emanating from those places where the religious ethic is Lutheran or Catholic or Buddhist or Hindoo or Shinto or Taoist. The worshippers at the shrine of the Risen Elvis don't explode. When was the last time a Wiccan took a hostage? When was the last time a Jew wiped out a pizza parlor or shot up a bat mitzvah? No military adherent of the Church of the Subgenius has ever gotten up on a table and shot up his fellows.
This amount, he said, is indeed negligible, as compared to the billions of dollars being spent in the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan.
Perhaps it would be to the world's advantage to push translations of Marcus Aurelius or Thomas Aquinas or the collected works of John Knox or the Rg Vedas into the reluctant hands of the beturbanned masses.
Qureshi said that Pakistan prefers foreign investments in building joint ventures, public-private partnerships, investment and trade under frameworks and mechanisms that can be sustained in the years to come.
We don't even have to hand out bibles to the benighted Mohammedans. Mere study groups extolling the logic and virtues of agnosticism would go a long way toward removing the edge of bloodthirst. I wouldn't go so far as to push atheism, mind you, since they don't want little kiddies to be allowed to enjoy Christmas, but a bit less certainty of the truth of Arabian superstition wouldn't hurt.