Yeah, tame stuff. But we do need people to stand up for free speech, so if this provides their come-to-Jesus, this-is-the-crocodile-eating-me moment, all the better. Like 9/11 was for a lot of us.
This week we heard our interior minister duck a question in the Senate about what is being done to trace the funds coming into madressahs from abroad. "Some madressahs are receiving financial support from Moslem countries. However, it's easy to be generous with someone else's money... it is often difficult to trace the transaction of such money," he is reported to have replied. The law provides "sufficient control and vigilance" to monitor the working of seminaries, he said, but the responsibility to carry out this monitoring now rests with the provincial governments, he added. Frankly, I don't buy this answer.
Last week, we saw our finance minister host a meeting on terror financing, in which they found that police, FIA or prosecutors "rarely invoked specific provisions relating to funding of terrorism as contained in the Anti-Terrorism Act and anti-money laundering laws". Given the inability of our legal system and network of regulators to properly curb the 'pump and dump' schemes that have turned our capital markets into a casino, I'm not surprised at the level of helplessness displayed by them before the more sophisticated monster of terror financing.
What's amazing is that all the elements of power -- the technology, legislation and institutions -- needed to track these funds and locate their beneficial owners exist. What is missing is the will to go after them, the ability to properly analyse the information, the discipline to sustain an investigation of this sort.
But nobody seems properly willing to pull them together and really create a picture of where the money to pay for terrorist activities is coming from and to whom it's going. Much like the 'pump and dump' schemes in the stock markets, these activities use the formal system of payments in substantial measure so they must be leaving a trace.
The meeting also noted that "focus of the security agencies was in nabbing forces of Evil rather than looking for their sponsors". It's astonishing that this would be the case a full five years after the emergence of mass casualty terrorism on Pak soil, and more than a decade after the start of the war against terrorism.
Clearly, much needs to be done to trace terror financing. But the track record of successive attempts to uproot 'pump and dump' rackets from the capital markets inspires little confidence that our security agencies can muster the brains needed to prevail in this war. Without ending the financing behind it, the fight against militancy will remain an exercise of whack-a-mole.
AN event organised by Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat ...which is the false nose and plastic mustache of the murderous banned extremist group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistain, whatcha might call the political wing of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi... in Chakwal at the weekend showed how banned groups continue to advertise their presence in the country and how the local administration does not want to or is not able to block their activities.
As per the usual practice, the proscribed group was given full freedom to announce its meeting, and a news report noted how the busy squares in the city were decorated with ASWJ banners in the run-up to the meeting. A local official said it was not the ASWJ but its 'parent' body, the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistain ...a Sunni Deobandi organization, a formerly registered Pak political party, established in the early 1980s in Jhang by Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi. Its stated goal is to oppose Shia influence in Pakistain. They're not too big on Brelvis, either. Or Christians. Or anybody else who's not them. The organization was banned in 2002 as a terrorist organization, but somehow it keeps ticking along, piling up the corpse counts... , that had been banned. He was wrong. Both he and the state need to go over the list of banned groups once more before they allow themselves the innocence with which they approach this very serious matter. As things stand, the moment an organization is given the title of 'proscribed', it is seemingly freed from any control or oversight by the state.
A banned outfit assumes the status of a force that instils fear in everyone around. It is a group which cannot be challenged and that is above reproach. There may be a change in name, but that's about all the adjustment needed. The proscribed 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 banned the group, which changed its name to Khaddam ul-Islam and continued doing what it had been doing before without missing a beat... took up a new identity as Tehrik-e-Khuddam-ul-Islam and Lashkar-e-Taiba ...the Army of the Pure, an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI... was renamed Jamaat-ud-Dawa ...the front organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba... ; in essence though they retain their original character. The sameness of ideology, leadership and ranks in the new groups that have emerged from the embers of the old ones, should negate any impression that they are different.
It then becomes very clear that unless strict measures are put in place to disperse the ranks of such groups and to put curbs on the activities of their leadership, a common past and shared objectives will reunite them. Any exercise in banning an organization would be of cosmetic value unless there are legal provisions, as well as a willing government, to stop individuals -- the leaders of the group -- from resorting to hate-mongering in the name of ideology.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
