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ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN—The call to arms was chilling.
On a Sunday afternoon last July, a Pakistani cleric named Maulana Mufti Saeed Ahmed delivered a sermon at the Jamia Masjid Mittranwali, a mosque in the eastern city of Sialkot.
“O Muslims,” Ahmed began, his voice warbling from loudspeakers atop the mosque, “get up and take in hand your arrows, pick up your Kalashnikovs, train yourselves in explosives and bombs, organize yourselves into armies, prepare nuclear attacks and destroy every part of the body of the enemy.
“Today Pakistan is at an important crossroads,” Ahmed shouted.
“Americans, Indians and Jews are crawling all over, disguised and hidden in cars with windows covered in black tint. ... The hatred among the people against the kafirs (nonbelievers) has reached a new height. ... We will have to create a graveyard of the Americans like the one created in Vietnam.”
Ahmed’s homily was typical of the kind being delivered nowadays by many firebrand clerics. They find a receptive audience.
From the persimmon and apricot orchards in picturesque Swat Valley to , so-called flood relief camps on the outskirts of Karachi to struggling industrial cities like Sialkot and Faisalabad, Pakistan is awash in anger and frustration.
Anger over the government’s weak response to floods last summer, which left 20 per cent of the country under water and wiped out 3.2 million hectares of crops and a million head of cattle.
Anger over U.S. drone attacks purportedly aimed at terrorists in the mountains of North Waziristan but widely assumed to be killing civilians instead.
Most of all, seething anger over the economic crisis that has led to some food prices doubling in the past year and some government agencies grinding to a halt. (In Lahore, police now demand that people who file complaints provide them with gasoline before they’ll head out and investigate.)
Diplomats, aid workers, local community leaders and politicians say fundamentalists like Ahmed who are bent on fomenting hatred against the west are capitalizing on these crises to push for greater Islamic orthodoxy.
“It’s as if the leaders of this country are on Mars,” says Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani nuclear scientist and peace activist. “It doesn’t seem the government is in charge of anything except arranging trips overseas for its diplomats. There’s an absolute absence of government that is creating a deeper pool of misery.”
In a country where more than half of the adult population is illiterate and one in three children doesn’t attend school, more misery leads to more recruits for militant groups.
Three years after a deadly attack on the heart of Mumbai by a team of young Pakistani militants that left 164 dead, several experts who study religious extremism say the conditions are ripe for a repeat.
Their worry seems justified, given recent events in this nuclear-armed country of 170 million people.
On Jan. 4, the governor of Punjab — the most populous province and the military and political heart of the country — was murdered by a bodyguard. Salman Taseer had championed the case of a Christian woman accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death. Taseer had argued that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws need to be repealed or amended.
As he walked out of a restaurant in an upscale Islamabad market, his guard, assigned to his security detail in 2008, shot him more than 20 times. Other guards nearby stood and watched. They did nothing to stop the attack and didn’t try to shoot Taseer’s assassin.
What came next was just as startling. More than 40,000 people turned up at a rally in Karachi in support of Taseer’s assassin. Lawyers slipped garlands of rose petals on the killer as he was brought to court. And on the day of the governor’s funeral (a ceremony skipped by the president, prime minister and interior minister), a prominent talk-show host started her program comparing Taseer’s killer to a Muslim hero of the 1920s who murdered a Hindu accused of blasphemy.
“There used to be a hope that there was a silent, liberal majority,” says Hoodbhoy, a professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. “Now we know that there’s still a silent liberal group, but it’s no majority.”
Taseer’s killing raises an obvious question: Why doesn’t Pakistan simply crack down on radical fundamentalists like Ahmed, who fan the flames of extremism? After all, it’s not only outspoken politicians suffering at the hands of extremists. In 2010, 10,003 Pakistanis died in 10,283 attacks, according to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. Militants targeted refugee camps, school buses and the army’s general headquarters.
Clearly, some of Pakistan’s leaders are scared to speak in favour of liberal policies. There is widespread fear among politicians that they could become the next Taseer.
Sherry Rehman, a member of Pakistan’s national assembly who also supported changes to the country’s blasphemy laws, went into seclusion after receiving dozens of death threats following Taseer’s murder. The walls around her Karachi home have been built higher, and Rehman has hired her own security guards rather than rely on those provided by the government.
“You saw how governor Taseer was killed by one of the members of his own elite force,” Rehman told the Star.
She has since withdrawn her proposal to soften the blasphemy law.
There is also a political risk to consider in taking on radical religious mullahs. Years ago, mullahs performed mostly ceremonial roles, appearing at weddings and funerals. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, elevated the role of religion in the country, using its Islamic identity to stitch together disparate tribes, sects and ethnicities.
Zia ordered that government letters begin: “In the name of Allah.” Islamic laws were introduced for theft, adultery and drinking alcohol. He also gave mullahs a new status in society and they became powerful political power brokers. They are now as powerful in their communities as any U.S. Bible Belt preacher.
“In both Pakistan and India you have all this ‘God bless’ stuff and ‘the scriptures say,’ “ says Christine Fair, assistant professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “Both countries have been hit by 9/11, and in both religiosity has become a national identity.
“The problem is that both Americans and Pakistanis are ignorant from the point of religion. These so-called scholars say what they want, attribute it to the Bible, and sell it to a bunch of bozos.”
The “bozos” seem to buy it. In 2009, some 73 per cent of Pakistanis viewed the Taliban as a serious threat to their country, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Just a year later, in 2010, only 54 per cent said they were worried about the Taliban.
One of the U.S. cables recently released by WikiLeaks helped to explain the shift in attitudes. Militant groups here, the cable’s author wrote, are perceived by many locals as “defenders of Pakistan” who manage emergency aid and other social safety nets.
There are practical reasons too for Pakistan to waver on dismantling its network of homegrown radicals, even if they occasionally bite their benefactors.
India and Pakistan are arch-enemies. The neighbours have fought three major wars since they were carved out of British India in 1947.
Some six decades later, it is India which is being lauded as an emerging global power. Its economy surges ahead roughly 9 per cent a year, while Pakistan’s is lucky to grow by 2.5 per cent. India has the money to double its defence budget and invest in new military technologies. Pakistan doesn’t.
Providing sanctuary to militant groups that aim to harm India has helped to even the playing field, says Vikram Sood, former head of India’s external intelligence agency.
“They’re low-cost and high-yield,” Sood says.
Stephen Tankel, author of Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba, says another complication in ridding the country of mullahs who promote a radical brand of Islam is the allure possessed by the Pakistani army in Punjab. According to some estimates, three-quarters of its recruits are from Punjab, a province that also happens to be home to many hardline religious leaders like Ahmed.
“There’s a definite sense among the security establishment in Pakistan that moving on the jihadis in Punjab could destabilize the army itself,” Tankel says. “So it’s fair to say the army is nervous about opening a new front there.”
Spending time even in Islamabad’s well-to-do neighbourhoods nowadays is sobering.
On the magazine racks of some book stores, Jane’s Defence Weekly, Defence Technologies and Home Security Illustrated are featured as prominently as Time and Newsweek. Roads are riddled with checkpoints. Cars slalom slowly through mazes of razor wire, concrete blocks and soldiers armed to the teeth. Most western diplomats are nervously hunkered down in the capital’s heavily guarded diplomatic quarter.
“I can’t meet you for dinner,” one told the Star sheepishly. “We aren’t allowed to go anywhere.”
Even those security analysts who are allowed to leave their compounds concede that trying to predict even the next 12 months in Pakistan is a mug’s game.
The economy is a house of cards, reliant on international donors and remittances from Pakistanis living overseas.
Foreign direct investment is plunging — it was down 45 per cent last year — and the business section of Pakistan’s large daily newspapers are chock-a-block with bad news.
An enormous project involving Canadian giant Barrick Gold is embroiled in scandal because the government may rip up the mining lease.
“If this fails, it will be the end of large foreign investment in Pakistan,” says Sohail Kiani, a former vice-president with Royal Trust in Canada who now lives in Islamabad.
The average family feels the economic pain at their local market, where inflation has doubled the price of some foods.
Inflation surged 20.8 per cent in 2009 and another 11.7 last year, according to the World Bank. (The average in South Asia was 5.6 per cent.)
This year, Pakistan’s inflation is projected to be 13 per cent.
“You have two-thirds of the country making 150 rupees (about $2) a day, and now they’re having to pay that much for one kilo of rice,” says Farrukh Saleem, an economist in Islamabad. “This is the biggest problem.”
Government receipts, meantime, are tumbling. The International Monetary Fund has suggested the government could generate more revenue by scrapping a fuel subsidy program.
But since most of the country’s diesel is consumed by well-to-do and presumably politically connected families — it’s fuels the generators that chug to life every day during the typical three- to four-hour power outages — the government has balked at the IMF’s suggestion.
Pakistan has similarly waffled on enforcing its residents to pay income tax.
Just 1 per cent of Pakistanis pay the tax. In Karachi, tax collectors are so desperate to increase local revenues that they have hired transsexuals to stand outside the homes of tax dodgers, hoping to shame them into paying. Even that hasn’t worked.
“They’ve stood outside some homes only to discover that they belong to current government officials,” says a retired Pakistani ambassador, sitting in a coffee shop at the Marriott Hotel as a sharpshooter patrols the roof above.
“No one enforces the law. These tax evaders should be in prison. You can speed and pay a bribe to get out of your ticket. You can just say no to paying taxes and nothing happens. We have an absolutely ineffective government.”
A former senior adviser to Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister assassinated in late 2007, says some Pakistanis believe President Asif Zardari, Bhutto’s widower, might even be charged with corruption before his five-year term expires in 2013.
Zardari is widely referred to as “Mr. 10 Per Cent” for allegedly skimming government contracts. Before his wife’s death, he spent 11 years in prison for corruption. In 2009, Pakistan’s Supreme Court restored a series of corruption cases from the 1990s against him.
“The Supreme Court has the support of the army. It might be only a matter of months before they show up at Zardari’s office with an arrest warrant,” says Bhutto’s former adviser, who requested anonymity.
Just kilometres from the Marriott, Muhammad Murad ponders his family’s future.
After last year’s floods destroyed his home in Shahdadkot, he and his wife Rashida Bibi brought their 10 children to this refugee camp near the Arabian Sea. Murad, a sober-faced man, says the government hasn’t provided food or medical care to any of the camp’s 7,000 residents since November.
A few days earlier, his wife’s 11th and 12th children — twins — died just hours after birth. There has been no time to grieve.
Most days, Murad leaves the camp to scrounge for scrap metal and recyclable garbage in the streets near Karachi’s busy port. He’s lucky to come back with 50 rupees.
“Of course I’m angry,” Murad says, wearing a mud-splattered shalwar kameez. “I’m angry at Pakistan and I’m angry at you in the West. You have money and you have not come to help.”
Thousands of kilometres away, Nousher Wan delivers a similar message of frustration and resentment.
Wan, 56, has farmed the fertile fields of Swat Valley for as long as he can recall. When the Taliban swept into Mingora and other cities in Swat two years ago, waving AK-47s in the air as they rode in on convoys of pickup trucks, it wasn’t long before Wan and other locals saw their life savings vanish.
The government estimates Taliban criminals took 100 million rupees from local bank lockers during their stay. The DVD shops and movie theatre they closed have since been reopened, but Wan says most locals are fuming that there is still no government plan to replace the stolen funds.
What’s more, four million locals in Swat are still homeless after last year’s floods. Locals lament that the secular Awami National Party government, which was elected in 2008, has done nothing.
Transparency International reported last year that the provincial government for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as North-West Frontier Province) is the most corrupt in Pakistan. Wan is one of several residents who said they plan to re-elect the alliance of pro-Taliban parties known as the MMA next year.
“There is corruption on every level now,” Wan says as his sons weed an onion field.
Nearby stands a large government billboard proclaiming a pledge to Swat: “It’s peaceful time in Europe. You don’t have to worry about suicide bombing attacks. . . . These bad days are not for ever. Every night has a morning.”
“The Taliban were very bad, but this government now steals from us and is worse,” Wan says. “You ask anyone here how to get a government job. You either have to have a brother in charge or you have to pay.”
Ahmed looks at the signboard and shrugs. Like most people here, he speaks no English.
“The government is trying to make a connection with locals, I guess,” Wans says with a shrug after the sign is translated for him.
The government might take a lesson from fundamentalist clerics like Ahmed, whose grip on Pakistanis is strengthening.
Hoodbhoy, the Quaid-e-Azam University professor, spent the past year working with students to secretly record and transcribe sermons at hard-line mosques across Pakistan.
“Despair and grief are really the capital that these militant groups trade in, and there is a lot of it in Pakistan right now,” says Hoodbhoy.
“Pakistani is in a perilous position and it’s on its own trajectory,” says Georgetown University’s Fair. “It’s dangerous — and it’s on course to get even more dangerous and inhospitable to everyone around it.”
Pakistan in peril - thestar.com
On a Sunday afternoon last July, a Pakistani cleric named Maulana Mufti Saeed Ahmed delivered a sermon at the Jamia Masjid Mittranwali, a mosque in the eastern city of Sialkot.
“O Muslims,” Ahmed began, his voice warbling from loudspeakers atop the mosque, “get up and take in hand your arrows, pick up your Kalashnikovs, train yourselves in explosives and bombs, organize yourselves into armies, prepare nuclear attacks and destroy every part of the body of the enemy.
“Today Pakistan is at an important crossroads,” Ahmed shouted.
“Americans, Indians and Jews are crawling all over, disguised and hidden in cars with windows covered in black tint. ... The hatred among the people against the kafirs (nonbelievers) has reached a new height. ... We will have to create a graveyard of the Americans like the one created in Vietnam.”
Ahmed’s homily was typical of the kind being delivered nowadays by many firebrand clerics. They find a receptive audience.
From the persimmon and apricot orchards in picturesque Swat Valley to , so-called flood relief camps on the outskirts of Karachi to struggling industrial cities like Sialkot and Faisalabad, Pakistan is awash in anger and frustration.
Anger over the government’s weak response to floods last summer, which left 20 per cent of the country under water and wiped out 3.2 million hectares of crops and a million head of cattle.
Anger over U.S. drone attacks purportedly aimed at terrorists in the mountains of North Waziristan but widely assumed to be killing civilians instead.
Most of all, seething anger over the economic crisis that has led to some food prices doubling in the past year and some government agencies grinding to a halt. (In Lahore, police now demand that people who file complaints provide them with gasoline before they’ll head out and investigate.)
Diplomats, aid workers, local community leaders and politicians say fundamentalists like Ahmed who are bent on fomenting hatred against the west are capitalizing on these crises to push for greater Islamic orthodoxy.
“It’s as if the leaders of this country are on Mars,” says Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani nuclear scientist and peace activist. “It doesn’t seem the government is in charge of anything except arranging trips overseas for its diplomats. There’s an absolute absence of government that is creating a deeper pool of misery.”
In a country where more than half of the adult population is illiterate and one in three children doesn’t attend school, more misery leads to more recruits for militant groups.
Three years after a deadly attack on the heart of Mumbai by a team of young Pakistani militants that left 164 dead, several experts who study religious extremism say the conditions are ripe for a repeat.
Their worry seems justified, given recent events in this nuclear-armed country of 170 million people.
On Jan. 4, the governor of Punjab — the most populous province and the military and political heart of the country — was murdered by a bodyguard. Salman Taseer had championed the case of a Christian woman accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death. Taseer had argued that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws need to be repealed or amended.
As he walked out of a restaurant in an upscale Islamabad market, his guard, assigned to his security detail in 2008, shot him more than 20 times. Other guards nearby stood and watched. They did nothing to stop the attack and didn’t try to shoot Taseer’s assassin.
What came next was just as startling. More than 40,000 people turned up at a rally in Karachi in support of Taseer’s assassin. Lawyers slipped garlands of rose petals on the killer as he was brought to court. And on the day of the governor’s funeral (a ceremony skipped by the president, prime minister and interior minister), a prominent talk-show host started her program comparing Taseer’s killer to a Muslim hero of the 1920s who murdered a Hindu accused of blasphemy.
“There used to be a hope that there was a silent, liberal majority,” says Hoodbhoy, a professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. “Now we know that there’s still a silent liberal group, but it’s no majority.”
Taseer’s killing raises an obvious question: Why doesn’t Pakistan simply crack down on radical fundamentalists like Ahmed, who fan the flames of extremism? After all, it’s not only outspoken politicians suffering at the hands of extremists. In 2010, 10,003 Pakistanis died in 10,283 attacks, according to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. Militants targeted refugee camps, school buses and the army’s general headquarters.
Clearly, some of Pakistan’s leaders are scared to speak in favour of liberal policies. There is widespread fear among politicians that they could become the next Taseer.
Sherry Rehman, a member of Pakistan’s national assembly who also supported changes to the country’s blasphemy laws, went into seclusion after receiving dozens of death threats following Taseer’s murder. The walls around her Karachi home have been built higher, and Rehman has hired her own security guards rather than rely on those provided by the government.
“You saw how governor Taseer was killed by one of the members of his own elite force,” Rehman told the Star.
She has since withdrawn her proposal to soften the blasphemy law.
There is also a political risk to consider in taking on radical religious mullahs. Years ago, mullahs performed mostly ceremonial roles, appearing at weddings and funerals. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, elevated the role of religion in the country, using its Islamic identity to stitch together disparate tribes, sects and ethnicities.
Zia ordered that government letters begin: “In the name of Allah.” Islamic laws were introduced for theft, adultery and drinking alcohol. He also gave mullahs a new status in society and they became powerful political power brokers. They are now as powerful in their communities as any U.S. Bible Belt preacher.
“In both Pakistan and India you have all this ‘God bless’ stuff and ‘the scriptures say,’ “ says Christine Fair, assistant professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “Both countries have been hit by 9/11, and in both religiosity has become a national identity.
“The problem is that both Americans and Pakistanis are ignorant from the point of religion. These so-called scholars say what they want, attribute it to the Bible, and sell it to a bunch of bozos.”
The “bozos” seem to buy it. In 2009, some 73 per cent of Pakistanis viewed the Taliban as a serious threat to their country, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Just a year later, in 2010, only 54 per cent said they were worried about the Taliban.
One of the U.S. cables recently released by WikiLeaks helped to explain the shift in attitudes. Militant groups here, the cable’s author wrote, are perceived by many locals as “defenders of Pakistan” who manage emergency aid and other social safety nets.
There are practical reasons too for Pakistan to waver on dismantling its network of homegrown radicals, even if they occasionally bite their benefactors.
India and Pakistan are arch-enemies. The neighbours have fought three major wars since they were carved out of British India in 1947.
Some six decades later, it is India which is being lauded as an emerging global power. Its economy surges ahead roughly 9 per cent a year, while Pakistan’s is lucky to grow by 2.5 per cent. India has the money to double its defence budget and invest in new military technologies. Pakistan doesn’t.
Providing sanctuary to militant groups that aim to harm India has helped to even the playing field, says Vikram Sood, former head of India’s external intelligence agency.
“They’re low-cost and high-yield,” Sood says.
Stephen Tankel, author of Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba, says another complication in ridding the country of mullahs who promote a radical brand of Islam is the allure possessed by the Pakistani army in Punjab. According to some estimates, three-quarters of its recruits are from Punjab, a province that also happens to be home to many hardline religious leaders like Ahmed.
“There’s a definite sense among the security establishment in Pakistan that moving on the jihadis in Punjab could destabilize the army itself,” Tankel says. “So it’s fair to say the army is nervous about opening a new front there.”
Spending time even in Islamabad’s well-to-do neighbourhoods nowadays is sobering.
On the magazine racks of some book stores, Jane’s Defence Weekly, Defence Technologies and Home Security Illustrated are featured as prominently as Time and Newsweek. Roads are riddled with checkpoints. Cars slalom slowly through mazes of razor wire, concrete blocks and soldiers armed to the teeth. Most western diplomats are nervously hunkered down in the capital’s heavily guarded diplomatic quarter.
“I can’t meet you for dinner,” one told the Star sheepishly. “We aren’t allowed to go anywhere.”
Even those security analysts who are allowed to leave their compounds concede that trying to predict even the next 12 months in Pakistan is a mug’s game.
The economy is a house of cards, reliant on international donors and remittances from Pakistanis living overseas.
Foreign direct investment is plunging — it was down 45 per cent last year — and the business section of Pakistan’s large daily newspapers are chock-a-block with bad news.
An enormous project involving Canadian giant Barrick Gold is embroiled in scandal because the government may rip up the mining lease.
“If this fails, it will be the end of large foreign investment in Pakistan,” says Sohail Kiani, a former vice-president with Royal Trust in Canada who now lives in Islamabad.
The average family feels the economic pain at their local market, where inflation has doubled the price of some foods.
Inflation surged 20.8 per cent in 2009 and another 11.7 last year, according to the World Bank. (The average in South Asia was 5.6 per cent.)
This year, Pakistan’s inflation is projected to be 13 per cent.
“You have two-thirds of the country making 150 rupees (about $2) a day, and now they’re having to pay that much for one kilo of rice,” says Farrukh Saleem, an economist in Islamabad. “This is the biggest problem.”
Government receipts, meantime, are tumbling. The International Monetary Fund has suggested the government could generate more revenue by scrapping a fuel subsidy program.
But since most of the country’s diesel is consumed by well-to-do and presumably politically connected families — it’s fuels the generators that chug to life every day during the typical three- to four-hour power outages — the government has balked at the IMF’s suggestion.
Pakistan has similarly waffled on enforcing its residents to pay income tax.
Just 1 per cent of Pakistanis pay the tax. In Karachi, tax collectors are so desperate to increase local revenues that they have hired transsexuals to stand outside the homes of tax dodgers, hoping to shame them into paying. Even that hasn’t worked.
“They’ve stood outside some homes only to discover that they belong to current government officials,” says a retired Pakistani ambassador, sitting in a coffee shop at the Marriott Hotel as a sharpshooter patrols the roof above.
“No one enforces the law. These tax evaders should be in prison. You can speed and pay a bribe to get out of your ticket. You can just say no to paying taxes and nothing happens. We have an absolutely ineffective government.”
A former senior adviser to Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister assassinated in late 2007, says some Pakistanis believe President Asif Zardari, Bhutto’s widower, might even be charged with corruption before his five-year term expires in 2013.
Zardari is widely referred to as “Mr. 10 Per Cent” for allegedly skimming government contracts. Before his wife’s death, he spent 11 years in prison for corruption. In 2009, Pakistan’s Supreme Court restored a series of corruption cases from the 1990s against him.
“The Supreme Court has the support of the army. It might be only a matter of months before they show up at Zardari’s office with an arrest warrant,” says Bhutto’s former adviser, who requested anonymity.
Just kilometres from the Marriott, Muhammad Murad ponders his family’s future.
After last year’s floods destroyed his home in Shahdadkot, he and his wife Rashida Bibi brought their 10 children to this refugee camp near the Arabian Sea. Murad, a sober-faced man, says the government hasn’t provided food or medical care to any of the camp’s 7,000 residents since November.
A few days earlier, his wife’s 11th and 12th children — twins — died just hours after birth. There has been no time to grieve.
Most days, Murad leaves the camp to scrounge for scrap metal and recyclable garbage in the streets near Karachi’s busy port. He’s lucky to come back with 50 rupees.
“Of course I’m angry,” Murad says, wearing a mud-splattered shalwar kameez. “I’m angry at Pakistan and I’m angry at you in the West. You have money and you have not come to help.”
Thousands of kilometres away, Nousher Wan delivers a similar message of frustration and resentment.
Wan, 56, has farmed the fertile fields of Swat Valley for as long as he can recall. When the Taliban swept into Mingora and other cities in Swat two years ago, waving AK-47s in the air as they rode in on convoys of pickup trucks, it wasn’t long before Wan and other locals saw their life savings vanish.
The government estimates Taliban criminals took 100 million rupees from local bank lockers during their stay. The DVD shops and movie theatre they closed have since been reopened, but Wan says most locals are fuming that there is still no government plan to replace the stolen funds.
What’s more, four million locals in Swat are still homeless after last year’s floods. Locals lament that the secular Awami National Party government, which was elected in 2008, has done nothing.
Transparency International reported last year that the provincial government for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as North-West Frontier Province) is the most corrupt in Pakistan. Wan is one of several residents who said they plan to re-elect the alliance of pro-Taliban parties known as the MMA next year.
“There is corruption on every level now,” Wan says as his sons weed an onion field.
Nearby stands a large government billboard proclaiming a pledge to Swat: “It’s peaceful time in Europe. You don’t have to worry about suicide bombing attacks. . . . These bad days are not for ever. Every night has a morning.”
“The Taliban were very bad, but this government now steals from us and is worse,” Wan says. “You ask anyone here how to get a government job. You either have to have a brother in charge or you have to pay.”
Ahmed looks at the signboard and shrugs. Like most people here, he speaks no English.
“The government is trying to make a connection with locals, I guess,” Wans says with a shrug after the sign is translated for him.
The government might take a lesson from fundamentalist clerics like Ahmed, whose grip on Pakistanis is strengthening.
Hoodbhoy, the Quaid-e-Azam University professor, spent the past year working with students to secretly record and transcribe sermons at hard-line mosques across Pakistan.
“Despair and grief are really the capital that these militant groups trade in, and there is a lot of it in Pakistan right now,” says Hoodbhoy.
“Pakistani is in a perilous position and it’s on its own trajectory,” says Georgetown University’s Fair. “It’s dangerous — and it’s on course to get even more dangerous and inhospitable to everyone around it.”
Pakistan in peril - thestar.com
