Thankfully, unllike strong pro Taliban Urdu press, English media has saner journalists. The following editorial in todays "News" is very well argued.
State and citizen
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
The relationship between a state and its citizens is an intricate one. Philosophers have, for centuries, expounded on it and what it means. But while the debate rages on, the one thing we can say for certain in that this relationship will change profoundly should the Taliban ever seize power in Pakistan. How will it change? In more ways than we can possibly imagine. The vision of the Taliban is a totalitarian one, encompassing every facet of public and private life. It would, for instance, decide how we dress, whom we meet, how we conduct ourselves in public and at least attempt even to decide how we think. This in effect means personal liberties we take for granted like choosing what music we hear and when, or stepping out to buy a CD or a DVD, could vanish overnight. With them would go the right to privacy or a life lived outside the eye of those who rule. The freedom of speech, of artistic expression, of association and of belief would too be snatched away.
The Taliban have shown they have no regard for such fundamentals of civilized life. Girls would vanish from schools and sports fields, women from the public sphere. Against all this, can we even argue that a trade off under which the Taliban would possibly offer better justice and greater social equality is acceptable? The answer of course is 'no'. But it is astonishing how many people continue to delude themselves, insisting the Taliban could offer a better, more equitable society. The fact is that without a respect for the individual, his or her right to choose how to live, what line of thought to follow, a better society is impossible. This is a fact that needs to be emphasized as emphatically as possible. The media, our political leaders and others in positions of influence all need to play a part in this so we can cast away the confusion that is adding to the unrest running through our society.
State and citizen
In addition to the uneducated masses and religious parties; lot of very well educated people, journalists as well as intellectuals are in a sate of delusion. IMO this is the true nightmare. To illustrae my point I quote two articles written by two higly educated individuals also published in the News of today.
Stop the Taliban advance
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Rubina Saigol
The writer is a researcher specialising in social development
While all forms of colonisation and occupation spell disaster for the way of life of the conquered, whose institutions and systems are demolished and replaced by new ones, the most recent colonisation of large parts of Pakistan by the Taliban is by far the most dangerous one, as it seeks to destroy the very basis on which the state and society rest.
The Taliban occupation resembles most other forms of colonial occupation in a number of ways, including: 1) Forcible control over territory and large swathes of the population; 2) use of violence and force to accomplish political aims; 3) imposition of a specific minority version of religion not accepted or followed by the majority; 4) induction of collaborators from among the local people to further their aims; 5) planned demolition of the political, economic and social systems of the defeated; 6) belief in the superiority of the values, practices and systems of the coloniser, coupled with complete disregard for the culture and ways of the vanquished.
1. Forcible control over territory and population: The Taliban established control over large parts of FATA, a territory which was never properly integrated into Pakistan. In the past few months, the Taliban have speedily acquired control over Swat, first through armed violence and finally legally and politically through the Nizam-e-Adl agreement signed by President Zardari on April 13 and supported by Pakistan's elected assembly. As Farrukh Saleem informs us, the Pakistani state has ceded another 5,337 square kilometres of Pakistan adding to the 14,850 square kilometres of Chitral and 5,280 square kilometres of Dir which were already under the control of Sufi Muhammad's Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi. According to Dr Saleem this constitutes around 16 percent of our landmass.
Ecstatic over their triumph in Swat the Taliban quickly moved on to Buner, Shangla and are said to be close to Mansehra and Haripur and about 60 miles from Islamabad. They have openly declared that they will impose their own brand of Shariat on the whole of Pakistan and ultimately the entire Muslim world. Such imperial fantasies of world conquest portend disaster not only for Pakistan but for the world beyond.
2. Use of Violence for political aims: Like many other marauding hordes in history, the Taliban have demonstrated their enormous propensity for violence, brutality and savagery. The reign of terror in Swat before it finally fell involved beheading, murder, public display of decapitated bodies, flogging of women and cold-blooded murder of men and women accused of "immoral" behaviour in the Taliban's distorted code of morality. Those killed, butchered and tortured had not violated any Pakistani law while the Taliban have committed capital crimes against Pakistan's law and Constitution.
3. Imposition of minority religion: Pakistan constitutes a plural and multiple society where different religious groups, sects and beliefs have co-existed for centuries. There are Deobandis and Barelvis, Shias and Sunnis and followers of Sufi saints like Bulleh Shah, Sultan Bahoo, Sachchal Sarmast, Rehman Baba, Ghulam Farid, Khushhal Khan Khattak, Shah Abdul Lateef Bhitai and others. Additionally, Pakistan has a substantial population of Hindus in interior Sindh and Christians all over the country.
Pakistan is a multi-religious society where one single religion cannot be imposed on everyone. The Taliban represent a Wahhabi version of religion to which a tiny minority subscribes. Their notions of the universe represent a grotesque version of religion that carries no moral purpose other than its own imposition, and prohibits no crime, butchery or violence in single-minded pursuit of power, territory and control. Subsidised by the sale of poppy and the underground drug and arms trade, this version of "religion" makes a mockery of religion itself and reduces it to bloodshed, cruelty and barbarism. It is a version that has been rejected by mainstream religious leaders also.
4. Collaboration: Local and national administrations and political leaders of our country have become forced collaborators in the Taliban enterprise of destruction. The failure of our security forces to protect the country and its people has led to the capitulation by the National Assembly and the government to their illegal and unconstitutional demands. The fear generated by the no-holds-barred violence of the Taliban has led to the muting of any critique of their inhuman actions. The civilian government and legislators, dependent upon the police, administration and the army to protect civilians against the occupation of their country, had no choice but to relent when those responsible for protecting the country seemed to be retreating.
5. Demolition of political, economic and social systems: Like all colonisers, who entrench themselves in the society of the colonised and make sweeping changes in local systems and institutions, the Taliban have already threatened to destroy democracy which was only recently wrested from the hands of a dictator reluctant to relinquish control.
The Taliban have declared democracy, the judiciary and the Constitution as being western impositions to be removed by them once they gain power in Islamabad. They are not bothered by the obvious contradiction that they themselves are a product of the same western world that they so despise. Their version of religion comes from a westerly direction and is not an indigenous manifestation of the rich South Asian context.
Their own worldview comes from the west from west Asia, to be more specific and has no roots within the subcontinent which boasts syncretic versions of religion that are tolerant of difference and are peaceful in their actions. The Taliban threaten the essential multiplicity of South Asia and the traditional peaceful tolerance of its people by planning to transform the political, economic, social and cultural landscape of the country.
The worst sufferers of the Wahhabi imperialism that they represent will be women and the minorities, as is already evident. The Taliban's insecurities often tend to be focused on cultural and religious policing of the weaker sections of society. The prohibition of women's education and work as well as of all music, art and higher culture is as clear a sign of degradation as any and promises a world in which civilisation would become a thing of the past.
6. Belief in superiority: Like the former colonisers, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, the Taliban have a deeply embedded view of their own superiority. They believe that the cultural and social norms and values that they represent are better than those of most Pakistanis, and that it is the Bearded Man's Burden to correct the morals of society and inculcate higher values among the populace.
In spite of the fact that they kill, butcher, cut off limbs and heads with wild abandon and loot and plunder resources mercilessly (demonstrated by the takeover of the Emerald Mines), they project all their vices onto "the other." They accuse liberal and progressive people of lacking virtue, morality and piety. Yet, it is the Taliban who clearly lack any moral compass and have been reared on an ideology of hate, bloodshed and violence.
The onslaught of the Taliban must be resisted with all the resources at our disposal administrative, political, military, intellectual and cultural. If we have to fight them, we must fight; if we have to dance and sing, we must dance and sing to challenge their Stone Age worldview and to assert our own humanity. It is no use blaming our civilian elected leaders for capitulating to the Taliban under pressure, as disappointing as that may be. The real issue is, why is a 600,000-strong army powerless against them? Why was the army not able to subdue an insurgency in Waziristan before the poison spread to the settled areas?
The Pakistani people give a huge chunk of their hard-earned resources to the army the largest chunk after debt-servicing. All they want in return is protection, security and not abdication of responsibility. Why is a half-a-million-strong army ineffective against 5,000 marauders, criminals and thugs?
It has become our national pastime to blame only our elected governments when in reality they have no options and have been forced to accept Talibanisation of Swat due to the failures of others. If we do not fight back the Taliban today, we may not even live to regret it, for they will not spare our lives.
Email:
rubinasaigol@hotmail.com
Stop the Taliban advance
Thank you, Sufi Mohammad
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Asif Ezdi
NNWFP Chief Minister Amir Haider Hoti announced on April 21 that the government was facing a revolt in the province and that the salaries of the police were being doubled to cope with this threat. Hoti's warning calls to mind a similar foreboding expressed by the king of France at the time of the French Revolution. On July 12, 1789, two days before the storming of the Bastille, when the duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt warned Louis XVI of the state of affairs in Paris, the king is said to have exclaimed, "This is a revolt." The duke's reply: "Non, sire, c'est une révolution." ("No, majesty, it is a revolution.")
In a revolt, only the ruler is toppled as a result of a popular uprising. But in a revolution, the entire ruling class is replaced. In our history, we have only known coup d'états, but neither a revolt nor a revolution. We do not know yet whether we are seeing the beginnings of a revolt or of a revolution in Pakistan. But whatever it is, it is certainly not a law and order problem and it is not going to be stopped by raising the salaries of policemen.
Our newspaper columns, airwaves and cyberspace have been saturated with the bloviations of our "liberal" commentators of different stripes chattering endlessly about the state being threatened by Islamic militants and extremists. In a rare display of unity, the apologists for our political class have also been saying the same thing. Hillary Clinton would be pleased that her call to the Pakistanis to speak out against the Taliban has been heeded.
Following in the footsteps of Musharraf, who not so long ago used to wax eloquent about how his brand of military dictatorship stood for enlightened moderation, the self-appointed protagonists of our hard-won democracy have been lamenting how our modern, enlightened way of life is being challenged by obscurantism and fundamentalism, when actually they are mostly defending only their class interests. Few, if any, votaries of this new enlightened moderation have pointed out that the Taliban movement in Swat has been able to win support among so many young men because the state has failed them, massively and comprehensively.
To portray the ferment in Swat as a medieval backlash against modernism is either a blinkered view or a deliberately misleading one. It ignores or tries to cover up the fact that the wellspring of Islamic militancy in Pakistan is to be found in the alienation of the mass of the population by a ruling elite which has used the state to protect and expand its own privileges, pushing the common man into deeper and deeper poverty and hopelessness. Past governments, whether military or civilian, dictatorial or democratic, have been little more than convenient tools of the privileged few for perpetuation of the status quo.
What has changed now is that people are much more aware of their rights and their power. The availability of uncensored information on television has widened their horizons. In much of NWFP, the Afghan jihad gave them access to military training and modern weaponry: the Kalashnikov, the rocket launcher and the machine gun. With an annual population increase of four million in the whole country and an economy which is stagnant, there is a fast growing army of unemployed angry young men waiting to be recruited.
The turmoil in Swat and in the adjoining areas is being portrayed by some as a contest between obscurantism and enlightenment, between bigotry and tolerance and between extremism and moderation. Actually, it is more like a movement of the common man against vast disparities in wealth and the failure of the authorities to provide justice, jobs and those essential services like education and health for which governments are supposed to exist. In some areas at least, it has pitted landless tenants against wealthy landlords and there are reports that big landowners are being forced to leave the valley. Once such a movement gains momentum, it acquires its own uncontrollable dynamic. As Joseph de Maistre, a French political philosopher, wrote in 1796, it is not men who lead revolutions, but it is the revolution which employs men.
The appeal of the sharia and Islamic justice gives the Taliban an unparalleled ideological motivation. As the Persian saying goes, ham khorma wa ham sawab ast. There are rewards both in this world and the next. It is this combination of revolutionary and religious zeal which makes the Taliban such a formidable force. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair came close to the truth in a speech on April 22 in which he likened militant Islam to revolutionary communism for its tenacity. It would not of course be the first time that what began as a religious movement also acquired the character of a socio-economic upheaval. Examples can be found in the history of most civilisations.
The Swat deal, it has been said, signifies a retreat from Jinnah's Pakistan, that it is a negation of his vision. A Pakistani journalist has equated the "capitulation in Swat" with the surrender document signed in Dhaka in 1971, incidentally a comparison first made by a retired colonel of the Indian army by the name of Harish Puri in an op-ed in this newspaper. All this is shocking, because it suggests that before the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation, Pakistan was well on the way to becoming the country of Quaid-e-Azam's conception. Nothing could be farther from the truth, because the retreat from Jinnah's Pakistan and the betrayal of his vision began much earlier. It started shortly after his death, continued under successive civilian and military governments and accelerated under military dictators, reaching its culmination with Musharraf. The responsibility for this betrayal lies not with the Taliban or Sufi Muhammad but largely with the same class which is now howling the loudest.
Fundamental to the Quaid's vision of Pakistan was the concept of Islamic social justice. But we have seen none of that in the policies of the government in the last six decades. Instead, the main role of the state has been to enable the ruling class to keep its hold on power, privilege and national wealth. The gap between a thin upper crust of the rich and the vast majority who live in privation is growing. Greed and rapacity have now been officially sanctioned by the NRO. An ordinary Pakistani born into destitution has little chance of breaking the shackles of poverty. The machinery of government, the political system and the upper classes are all arrayed against him.
In most countries, there is a single universal education system for all, which helps to blunt class differences. In Pakistan, not only is the level of school enrolment abysmally low, but there is a stratified school system which replicates and consolidates the class divisions. The elites send their children to the best schools which are beyond the means of the common man and which generally ensure a secure place in the system in later life. For the others, there are either the government schools or the madressas. Even the most talented of those who go to a government school find it hard to break the glass ceiling which keeps them down in the job market. And the most gifted of those educated in madressas become Taliban.
To accuse those who have risen against our exploitative socio-economic system of obscurantism is scandalous. In reality, it is Pakistan's ruling class, desperately clinging to its privileges, that is seeking to preserve an outdated medieval order. They are the ones who stand for obscurantism. We do not yet have a full-blown class conflict but the genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back in.
If and that is a very big if our ruling elite and the government are smart, they will have been jolted out of their complacency by the Swat deal and will have focussed their minds on issues of social justice. But that is unlikely. At least, they have been warned. Thank you, Sufi Muhammad.
The writer is a former member of the Pakistan Foreign Service. Email:
asifezdi@yahoo.com
Thank you, Sufi Mohammad
I rest my case.
