...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat...
in 2009, when internally displaced people were given succour by 'charities' run by bad boy organizations. This time it is the IDP crisis unfolding in the wake of the military operation in North Wazoo that has once again seen such groups leap into the fray. A report in Dawn on Friday detailed a visit to relief camps run by the Falah-e-Insaniyat
...the current false nose and mustache of Jamaat ud-Dawa, which was the false nose and mustache of Lashkar e-Taiba...
Foundation — the Jamaat-ud-Dawa
...the front organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba...
's latest iteration — and supporters of Maulana Masood Azhar
...One of the major players in Pak terrorism. In early 1994, India incarcerated him for his terrorist activities. In 1995, foreign tourists were kidnapped in Jammu and Kashmir. The kidnappers included the release of Masood Azhar among their demands. One of the hostages managed to escape but the rest were eventually killed. In 1999, he was freed by the Indian government in exchange for passengers on hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 that had been diverted to Kandahar. The hijackers were led by Masood Azhar's brother, Ibrahim Athar. Once he was handed over to the hijackers, they fled to Pak territory despite the fact that Islamabad had earlier stated that any of the hijackers would be tossed in the clink at the border. The Pak government also previously indicated that Azhar would be allowed to return home since he did not face any charges there. Shortly after his release, he made a public address to an estimated 10,000 people in Karachi, firing up the rubes against America and India..., the firebrand
...
firebrandsare noted more for audio volume and the quantity of spittle generated than for any actual logic in their arguments...
holy man who heads Jaish-e-Mohammad
...literally
Army of Mohammad, a Pak-based Deobandi terror group founded by Maulana Masood Azhar in 2000, after he split with the Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin. In 2002 the government of Pervez Musharraf
bannedthe group, which changed its name to Khaddam ul-Islam and continued doing what it had been doing before without missing a beat...
, which is banned both internationally and in Pakistain. The report quoted the FIF camp's chief organiser lauding the army's "cooperative" attitude towards them. At the same time, local NGOs are being asked to apply for no-objection certificates to set up relief camps.
The bad boy threat to Pakistain is a deep-rooted one precisely because groups espousing dangerously obscurantist ideologies have been allowed to weave themselves into the warp and weft of society. They have been encouraged to fly the banner of patriotism while those with a secular approach have been marginalised and regarded with suspicion by the powers that be. The disastrous fallout from this attempt at social engineering is one reason the military finds itself fighting a battle in the mountains of North Waziristan today. However,
if you can't say something nice about a person some juicy gossip will go well...
to effect long-term reversal of Pakistain's slide into radicalisation, every strain of extremism will have to be painstakingly excised from the body politic. Moreover, until the establishment severs its ties with 'favoured' holy warriors, the country cannot truly change its trajectory. In times such as these, such groups must be denied the space to act as saviours of vulnerable people in terms of material assistance, while along the way making inroads into their minds in the guise of saving their souls.