Solomon2
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Solomon2 note to mods: have you thought about making "Giving in" a sticky thread in this forum?
We are successfully being held hostage
By Jahanzaib Haque
Published: November 19, 2013
The writer is Web Editor of The Express Tribune and tweets @Jhaque jahanzaib.haque@tribune.com.pk
Writer and journalist Muhammed Hanif’s latest article for the New Yorker accurately captures a part of the equation when it comes to our leaders’ twisted, yet, very vocal support for the terrorists that have killed thousands of our own. He writes, “The logic — or its absence — goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So, how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him? If the United States is talking to the Afghan Taliban, why can’t we talk to our own Taliban?”
Hanif is right in pointing out the logic is flawed, playing to the benefit of the militants and the continued disintegration of the state in the face of an enemy who truly, “believe in something”. What gets left out of his analysis was the very real role fear is playing in what, on the surface, seems to be clouded, delusional thinking and an absence of logic. I’m going to give our power players a little benefit of the doubt and assume not all of them are as clueless as they seem with regard to the direction they are pushing Pakistan with their calls for peace talks and condemnations of a terrorist’s death. Many of them know they are edging closer to a precipice, but are too afraid to turn around and face those prodding them forward.
They utter words that please militants to ensure their names, and the names of their extended families stay off hit lists. They speak out against the US and condemn drone strikes in the hopes that their words will stay the trigger-happy hands of the terrorists who have kidnapped their son, their nephew, their relative. They hold back on purpose, hoping to keep alive those of their rank captured from check posts, from raided prisons, during operations.
Through media reports, the public has been clued in to this strategy employed by the terrorists, but few can really understand the daily terror of knowing someone you love is being held in a terrorist camp — only Amna Taseer, Yousuf Raza Gilani and others facing this situation right now can really relate. Similarly, while the public is aware of the strategic holding and exchange of prisoners as a part of any war, most are unaware of the extent of the problem in the current war, or how deeply it could be impacting strategy. Bear in mind, this is just one of many terror tactics we tend to overlook in this debate.
Make no mistake, our state is under very real threat and no individual or institution involved is safe. I can vouch for this as a journalist. Without naming names, media houses and the journalists working for them live with fear on a daily basis, forced to self-censor, or worse, ordered to censor, retract or publish a counter-piece to whatever brought them on the radar. Promises have to be made to not cover a certain issue in a particular way, or in a particular context, or even with/without particular words.
In TV channels, everyone from the anchor down to the tickers desk may be told where the line is to be drawn, not as an editorial decision, but to ensure colleagues working out in the field or in vulnerable bureaus are not attacked.
While it is true that generally confusion reigns when it comes to Pakistan’s role in the war on terror, the role of fear — the terrorists’ real weapon — has to be included in any discussion of the current situation. Fear of death and personal injury. Fear of taking on an enemy, and losing. Fear of saying the wrong thing and getting killed for it. Fear of passing the wrong judgment in the wrong case. Fear is palpable in Pakistan; it can be felt across all pillars of the state. In such an environment, where those who are meant to provide you security, justice, governance and information are under constant attack, it requires no delusions or absence of logic to see why we are lionising our tormentors.
We are successfully being held hostage.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 20th, 2013.
Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.
NOVEMBER 14, 2013
WHY PAKISTAN LIONIZES ITS TORMENTERS
POSTED BY MOHAMMED HANIF
Four years ago, in the main street of Mingora, the largest town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, I saw a man trying to make and sell kebabs. The coals weren’t catching fire, he was fanning them with a rolled-up newspaper, and the skewers were all over the place; it was quite obvious that the man was new to this type of work.
Swat had just been handed over to a man called Mullah Fazlullah, who had terrorized the valley in a bid to usher in his one and only version of Sharia law. He was trying to achieve this by running a very lively and illegal FM radio station and commanding a bunch of fighters from tribal areas, along with young sectarian zealots from the Punjab who specialized in blowing up girls’ schools and slitting the throats of Pakistani soldiers. They didn’t like dancers, so they pulled one out of her home and executed her in the bazaar. They also didn’t care much for barbershops, video stores, or women. Under Fazlullah’s regime, the main square in Mingora was known as Khooni Chowk—“Bloody Square”—because his fighters dumped their victims’ bodies there.
The struggling kebab-maker told me that he had owned a video shop, until a few days earlier, at least. Now he was trying out a new career, but it seemed like he didn’t have much of a future in Pakistan’s booming barbecue business, either; his eyes were teary from the smoke billowing off his improvised pit. He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”
In 2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.
Fazlullah kept himself busy in exile: among other things, he issued the order to shoot Malala Yousafzai, the young education activist from Mingora. But he got a promotion earlier this week, when the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (usually known simply as the Pakistani Taliban, or T.T.P.) elected him as their new leader. In his very first statement, he declared that he would refuse any peace talks with the country’s government, which had finally managed to get a mandate from all political parties to hold such talks. Instead, Fazlullah’s first priority will be to take revenge for the death of his predecessor, Hakimullah Mehsud.
Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a martyr.
During his four years as the head of the T.T.P., Mehsud raised the Taliban game in Pakistan. No longer were they just tribal men fighting to preserve their way of life; they started dreaming they could convert everyone to it. Mehsud consolidated a number of small but ruthless militant and sectarian groups into close-knit fighting units that seemed able to strike anywhere at will. He ordered attacks on Pakistan’s military bases, organized a couple of spectacular jailbreaks, and sent an endless stream of suicide bombers after politicians and religious scholars who didn’t meet his exacting standards. After his men kidnapped an Army colonel, Mehsud delivered a short speech, and then shot him in front of a video camera.
Yet the state seems to have lost the will to fight its old foe, Fazlullah, and his followers. When Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle.
Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting? The logic—or its absence—goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him? If the United States is talking to the Afghan Taliban, why can’t we talk to our own Taliban?
According to Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, our Taliban are not a fighting force with clear goals but merely people “who are mentally disturbed and confused.” These confused people have attacked mosques, Air Force bases, and anyone who looks remotely like a Shiite; in Swat, they barred all women from leaving home without a male companion. Not to mention shutting down girls’ schools. (One of my friends and fellow-journalists once told one of Fazlullah’s commanders, You can get away with slitting people’s throats in public squares, but shut down girls’ schools, and there will be a lot of very irritated and angry parents. The commander was not persuaded.)
The popular narrative in Pakistan holds that the Taliban’s fight is simply a reaction to American drone strikes: it’s a war between American kids sitting in front of LCD screens eating their TV dinners and our own men in the north, who are better Muslims than we are. The Pakistani logic seems to be that if America stops killing them, they’ll stop killing us. But the truth is that the Taliban leadership has made no such promises. They have only said that if the government stops drone strikes, and stops coöperating with America’s war in Afghanistan, they would be willing to talk. But what would they talk about? The little problem they have with Pakistan is that it’s an infidel state—almost as bad as America, but with some potential; they believe that they can somehow make us all better Muslims.
Our Taliban are simply saying, “Save us from the U.S. drones, so we can continue to kill you infidels in peace.”
Pakistan’s rulers have developed a strange fetish for lionizing its tormenters. Watching the proceedings in Pakistan’s parliament last week, after Mehsud’s murder, you could have mistaken it all for a Taliban meeting. “This is not just the killing of one person,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, said. “It’s the death of all peace efforts.” It was mentioned, but only in passing, that since Pakistan had proposed talks with Mehsud in September, the peacemaker and his allies had killed an Army general, blown up a church filled with worshippers, and killed hundreds of other civilians.
One of Pakistan’s leading religious and political leaders, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, whose party is a member of Sharif’s ruling coalition, probably summed up the situation best when he said that even if a dog was killed by the Americans, he would call it a martyr.
The head of Pakistan’s oldest religious party, Maulana Munawar Hassan, has declared that Pakistani soldiers killed at the hands of the Taliban are not martyrs—so, in a way, worse than dogs. In an usually strong and emotional statement, Pakistan’s Army condemned Hassan’s remarks and demanded an unconditional apology for “hurting the feelings” of families whose loved ones had died at the hands of the Taliban. As a result, we now have a raging national debate, in which serious-minded journalists are asking even more serious-minded politicians and religious scholars if the godless Soviet soldiers killed by American-funded mujahideen in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties should also be declared martyrs.
This debate was still going when Nasiruddin Haqqani was martyred last weekend, while buying bread at a bakery in the suburbs of Islamabad. He was the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, whom the Pakistani Army considers a valued ally—a tenacious commander who spares us and restricts his jihad to Afghanistan. The Haqqanis, who spread terror on the other side of the border, are our friends—unlike Fazlullah, who lives over there but kills over here. You can see how this might get complicated. It’s no wonder our politicians are so confused.
Pakistani soldiers are trained to shout “allahu akbar” when attacking their enemies. But the enemy they face shouts “allahu akbar” much louder. The Taliban are not mentally disturbed, as our Prime Minister suggests—they believe in something. The state doesn’t. There is no real threat that the T.T.P. will take over Pakistan: there are far too many girls’ schools for them to blow up, and they face a huge military, which may fight on both sides of the war but knows that there can be no Army without a state. But in their collective hankering for one true Sharia, the leaders of Pakistan’s political and security establishment—and their American backers—have long since lost their bearings.
Mohammed Hanif is the author of two novels, “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti.” He lives in Karachi.
Above: Hakimullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader who was recently killed by a U.S. drone strike, speaks to the press in 2008. Photograph by A. Majeed/AFP/Getty.
By Jahanzaib Haque
Published: November 19, 2013
The writer is Web Editor of The Express Tribune and tweets @Jhaque jahanzaib.haque@tribune.com.pk
Writer and journalist Muhammed Hanif’s latest article for the New Yorker accurately captures a part of the equation when it comes to our leaders’ twisted, yet, very vocal support for the terrorists that have killed thousands of our own. He writes, “The logic — or its absence — goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So, how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him? If the United States is talking to the Afghan Taliban, why can’t we talk to our own Taliban?”
Hanif is right in pointing out the logic is flawed, playing to the benefit of the militants and the continued disintegration of the state in the face of an enemy who truly, “believe in something”. What gets left out of his analysis was the very real role fear is playing in what, on the surface, seems to be clouded, delusional thinking and an absence of logic. I’m going to give our power players a little benefit of the doubt and assume not all of them are as clueless as they seem with regard to the direction they are pushing Pakistan with their calls for peace talks and condemnations of a terrorist’s death. Many of them know they are edging closer to a precipice, but are too afraid to turn around and face those prodding them forward.
They utter words that please militants to ensure their names, and the names of their extended families stay off hit lists. They speak out against the US and condemn drone strikes in the hopes that their words will stay the trigger-happy hands of the terrorists who have kidnapped their son, their nephew, their relative. They hold back on purpose, hoping to keep alive those of their rank captured from check posts, from raided prisons, during operations.
Through media reports, the public has been clued in to this strategy employed by the terrorists, but few can really understand the daily terror of knowing someone you love is being held in a terrorist camp — only Amna Taseer, Yousuf Raza Gilani and others facing this situation right now can really relate. Similarly, while the public is aware of the strategic holding and exchange of prisoners as a part of any war, most are unaware of the extent of the problem in the current war, or how deeply it could be impacting strategy. Bear in mind, this is just one of many terror tactics we tend to overlook in this debate.
Make no mistake, our state is under very real threat and no individual or institution involved is safe. I can vouch for this as a journalist. Without naming names, media houses and the journalists working for them live with fear on a daily basis, forced to self-censor, or worse, ordered to censor, retract or publish a counter-piece to whatever brought them on the radar. Promises have to be made to not cover a certain issue in a particular way, or in a particular context, or even with/without particular words.
In TV channels, everyone from the anchor down to the tickers desk may be told where the line is to be drawn, not as an editorial decision, but to ensure colleagues working out in the field or in vulnerable bureaus are not attacked.
While it is true that generally confusion reigns when it comes to Pakistan’s role in the war on terror, the role of fear — the terrorists’ real weapon — has to be included in any discussion of the current situation. Fear of death and personal injury. Fear of taking on an enemy, and losing. Fear of saying the wrong thing and getting killed for it. Fear of passing the wrong judgment in the wrong case. Fear is palpable in Pakistan; it can be felt across all pillars of the state. In such an environment, where those who are meant to provide you security, justice, governance and information are under constant attack, it requires no delusions or absence of logic to see why we are lionising our tormentors.
We are successfully being held hostage.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 20th, 2013.
Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.
NOVEMBER 14, 2013
WHY PAKISTAN LIONIZES ITS TORMENTERS
POSTED BY MOHAMMED HANIF
Four years ago, in the main street of Mingora, the largest town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, I saw a man trying to make and sell kebabs. The coals weren’t catching fire, he was fanning them with a rolled-up newspaper, and the skewers were all over the place; it was quite obvious that the man was new to this type of work.
Swat had just been handed over to a man called Mullah Fazlullah, who had terrorized the valley in a bid to usher in his one and only version of Sharia law. He was trying to achieve this by running a very lively and illegal FM radio station and commanding a bunch of fighters from tribal areas, along with young sectarian zealots from the Punjab who specialized in blowing up girls’ schools and slitting the throats of Pakistani soldiers. They didn’t like dancers, so they pulled one out of her home and executed her in the bazaar. They also didn’t care much for barbershops, video stores, or women. Under Fazlullah’s regime, the main square in Mingora was known as Khooni Chowk—“Bloody Square”—because his fighters dumped their victims’ bodies there.
The struggling kebab-maker told me that he had owned a video shop, until a few days earlier, at least. Now he was trying out a new career, but it seemed like he didn’t have much of a future in Pakistan’s booming barbecue business, either; his eyes were teary from the smoke billowing off his improvised pit. He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”
In 2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.
Fazlullah kept himself busy in exile: among other things, he issued the order to shoot Malala Yousafzai, the young education activist from Mingora. But he got a promotion earlier this week, when the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (usually known simply as the Pakistani Taliban, or T.T.P.) elected him as their new leader. In his very first statement, he declared that he would refuse any peace talks with the country’s government, which had finally managed to get a mandate from all political parties to hold such talks. Instead, Fazlullah’s first priority will be to take revenge for the death of his predecessor, Hakimullah Mehsud.
Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a martyr.
During his four years as the head of the T.T.P., Mehsud raised the Taliban game in Pakistan. No longer were they just tribal men fighting to preserve their way of life; they started dreaming they could convert everyone to it. Mehsud consolidated a number of small but ruthless militant and sectarian groups into close-knit fighting units that seemed able to strike anywhere at will. He ordered attacks on Pakistan’s military bases, organized a couple of spectacular jailbreaks, and sent an endless stream of suicide bombers after politicians and religious scholars who didn’t meet his exacting standards. After his men kidnapped an Army colonel, Mehsud delivered a short speech, and then shot him in front of a video camera.
Yet the state seems to have lost the will to fight its old foe, Fazlullah, and his followers. When Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle.
Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting? The logic—or its absence—goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him? If the United States is talking to the Afghan Taliban, why can’t we talk to our own Taliban?
According to Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, our Taliban are not a fighting force with clear goals but merely people “who are mentally disturbed and confused.” These confused people have attacked mosques, Air Force bases, and anyone who looks remotely like a Shiite; in Swat, they barred all women from leaving home without a male companion. Not to mention shutting down girls’ schools. (One of my friends and fellow-journalists once told one of Fazlullah’s commanders, You can get away with slitting people’s throats in public squares, but shut down girls’ schools, and there will be a lot of very irritated and angry parents. The commander was not persuaded.)
The popular narrative in Pakistan holds that the Taliban’s fight is simply a reaction to American drone strikes: it’s a war between American kids sitting in front of LCD screens eating their TV dinners and our own men in the north, who are better Muslims than we are. The Pakistani logic seems to be that if America stops killing them, they’ll stop killing us. But the truth is that the Taliban leadership has made no such promises. They have only said that if the government stops drone strikes, and stops coöperating with America’s war in Afghanistan, they would be willing to talk. But what would they talk about? The little problem they have with Pakistan is that it’s an infidel state—almost as bad as America, but with some potential; they believe that they can somehow make us all better Muslims.
Our Taliban are simply saying, “Save us from the U.S. drones, so we can continue to kill you infidels in peace.”
Pakistan’s rulers have developed a strange fetish for lionizing its tormenters. Watching the proceedings in Pakistan’s parliament last week, after Mehsud’s murder, you could have mistaken it all for a Taliban meeting. “This is not just the killing of one person,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, said. “It’s the death of all peace efforts.” It was mentioned, but only in passing, that since Pakistan had proposed talks with Mehsud in September, the peacemaker and his allies had killed an Army general, blown up a church filled with worshippers, and killed hundreds of other civilians.
One of Pakistan’s leading religious and political leaders, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, whose party is a member of Sharif’s ruling coalition, probably summed up the situation best when he said that even if a dog was killed by the Americans, he would call it a martyr.
The head of Pakistan’s oldest religious party, Maulana Munawar Hassan, has declared that Pakistani soldiers killed at the hands of the Taliban are not martyrs—so, in a way, worse than dogs. In an usually strong and emotional statement, Pakistan’s Army condemned Hassan’s remarks and demanded an unconditional apology for “hurting the feelings” of families whose loved ones had died at the hands of the Taliban. As a result, we now have a raging national debate, in which serious-minded journalists are asking even more serious-minded politicians and religious scholars if the godless Soviet soldiers killed by American-funded mujahideen in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties should also be declared martyrs.
This debate was still going when Nasiruddin Haqqani was martyred last weekend, while buying bread at a bakery in the suburbs of Islamabad. He was the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, whom the Pakistani Army considers a valued ally—a tenacious commander who spares us and restricts his jihad to Afghanistan. The Haqqanis, who spread terror on the other side of the border, are our friends—unlike Fazlullah, who lives over there but kills over here. You can see how this might get complicated. It’s no wonder our politicians are so confused.
Pakistani soldiers are trained to shout “allahu akbar” when attacking their enemies. But the enemy they face shouts “allahu akbar” much louder. The Taliban are not mentally disturbed, as our Prime Minister suggests—they believe in something. The state doesn’t. There is no real threat that the T.T.P. will take over Pakistan: there are far too many girls’ schools for them to blow up, and they face a huge military, which may fight on both sides of the war but knows that there can be no Army without a state. But in their collective hankering for one true Sharia, the leaders of Pakistan’s political and security establishment—and their American backers—have long since lost their bearings.
Mohammed Hanif is the author of two novels, “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti.” He lives in Karachi.
Above: Hakimullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader who was recently killed by a U.S. drone strike, speaks to the press in 2008. Photograph by A. Majeed/AFP/Getty.
Have the @WebMaster and mods here at PDF made similar "promises"?
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