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2016-03-30 India-Pakistan
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Easter massacre
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[DAWN] THERE are times when it is possible to be shocked and horrified without entirely being surprised. Sunday’s atrocity in Lahore falls into that category. The mass murder in a public park, evidently aimed primarily at Christians celebrating Easter, in the full knowledge that a large proportion of the victims would be children, epitomises the mindless brutality of forces unleashed almost four decades ago.
A comment in The Guardian on Monday lamenting the Gulshan-e-Iqbal suicide kaboom was titled ‘Religious snuffies will never succeed in taking over Pakistain’. It’s a well-intentioned piece, but it ignores the fact that Islamic fanatics did in fact take over Pakistain in 1977. Their triumph was never complete, but what was wrought under the aegis of Gen Zia ul Haq
 ...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'état plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...
has never completely been rolled back either.
Continued from Page 4
| What was wrought under the aegis of Zia has never been rolled back. |
The Taliban are a post-Zia phenomenon, but most factions, whether Afghan or Pakistani, would probably be willing to acknowledge him as a pater familias. Their infiltration into Afghanistan, reportedly alongside Pak security personnel, was intended in part to establish an Islamabad-friendly regime in Kabul
...the capital of Afghanistan. Home to continuous fighting from 1992 to 1996 between the forces of would-be strongman and Pak ISI/Jamaat-e-Islami sock puppet Gulbuddin Hekmayar and the Northern Alliance, a period which won Hek the title Most Evil Man in the World and didn't do much for the reputations of the Northern Alliance guys either....
. Another motivation, apparently, was to banish from Pakistain the dangerous ideology in which they had been indoctrinated.
That turned out to be wishful thinking. It wasn’t just that it was far too late to prevent a Taliban mentality from taking hold in Pakistain’s northwest, or that the initial success of the Afghan Taliban lent succour to like-minded elements in the neighbouring state. The Pak security establishment, notably the ISI, remained determined beyond its role in Afghanistan to destabilise Indian governance in Kashmire through outfits such as 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...
.
More or less throughout the ascendancy of  Pervez Perv Musharraf
... former dictator of Pakistain, who was less dictatorial and corrupt than any Pak civilian government to date ...
, the United States was well aware that Pakistain was playing a double game, attacking some Taliban while coddling others. The acknowledgment earlier this month by Sartaj Pruneface Aziz
 ...Adviser to Pak Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on National Security and Foreign Affairs, who believes in good jihadis and bad jihadis as a matter of national policy...
, the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, that the Afghan Taliban have a sanctuary in Pakistain, was intriguing in respect of its confessional novelty, but hardly shifted the international perception of the nation’s dubious role in Afghanistan.
It is not particularly reassuring, then, when the army gives notice of its intent to scour Pakistain’s dominant prince, Punjab, in order to root out extremism. Will it go after the Jamaatul Ahrar
...A Pak Taliban splinter group that split off from the Mullah Fazlullah faction because it wasn't violent enough...
, a Pak Taliban splinter group that has unequivocally grabbed credit for the Gulshan-e-Iqbal massacre, while ignoring other groups of the same ilk? Surely, only an army that divests itself of all bad boy links, domestically and internationally, could possibly play a decisive role in combating the terrorist threat. It is far from clear whether Gen Raheel Sharif
..Pak chief of army staff, meaning he pulls the strings on the Nawaz Sharif puppet to make it dance and sing and not do much at all....
’s force measures up to that criterion.
There has been conjecture, apparently with good cause, that Sunday’s mayhem was in part a response to the execution of Salmaan Taseer’s assassin. It is certainly interesting that the despicable ex-policeman’s chehlum was brought forward by almost a fortnight to March 27, which also happened to be the deadline given by religious groups to the Punjab
1.) Little Orphan Annie's bodyguard
2.) A province of Pakistain ruled by one of the Sharif brothers
3.) A province of India. It is majority (60 percent) Sikh and Hindoo (37 percent), which means it has relatively few Moslem riots....
provincial government for rescinding its attempt to legislate protection for women in the face of domestic violence.
Opposition to this mild and quite conceivably ineffective legislation has been articulated not just by outlawed outfits but by legitimate political parties, including the Jamaat-e-Islami
...The Islamic Society , founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka The Great Apostosizer . The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an independent branch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores...
. Such organizations have consistently bolstered the terrorists, even when they ostensibly do not advocate violence.
It was 60 years ago last week that Pakistain was formally designated an Islamic republic. The subsequent trajectory of the nation that Mohammad Ali Jinnah founded would in all likelihood have reinforced his fear that he had made a mistake.
The terrorist outrage in Lahore followed hot on the heels of the one in Brussels, where half as many people were murdered in suicide kabooms at the airport and in the metro. The reaction to that appalling crime prompted some soul-searching about why it attracted so much more attention and outrage than bigger corpse counts, in similar circumstances and by equally repulsive culprits, in cities in Iraq, The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
and Yemen.
The whole problem stems, arguably, from a reluctance to see all victims as fellow human beings. Deaths by remote control, via drones, are not supposed to count as terrorism, and since no one can conclusively verify what is going on in the dark corners of Pakistain, Afghanistan, Yemen
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of. Except for a tiny handfull of Jews everthing there is very Islamic...
or Somalia, the civilian deaths can easily be underestimated.
In Pakistain, the Sharif brothers, as businessmen, have been accused of pursuing relative liberalism as an economic end. Even if that is so, their project is worthy of support, provided its goals are unambiguous. Everyone knows that Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif
...Pak dynastic politician, brother of PM Nawaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab...
were nurtured by Zia, but if they have changed their minds about what they once stood for, it is a welcome development. The fruits of this switch, though, are yet to be harvested. 
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Posted by Fred 2016-03-30 00:00||
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