In my humble opinion, blame for the DIK Jail break does not lie on the information Minister but on the entire PTI/JI coalition government. I heard a retired PA Brig. comment on the “Aaj Kamran key saath” Geo TV talk show that local administration and the bureaucracy take their cue from the political government. Police is not sure whether KPK gov’t is with Taliban or against them, especially when CM Pervez Khattak has declared that Taliban are not the enemy.
Jamaat Islami under Munawwar Hasan has now turned into a bigoted sectarian organization on the lines of SSP but it has little following and not likely to have one in the near future. JUI admits that Taliban are their children so we have to accept that Fazlur Rahman will not agree to action against TTP.
This leaves the mainstream PTI and PML-N. Both the parties’ leadership neither openly sides with the terrorists nor actively against them. This is a question of Pakistan’s survival. Both the Imran Khan as well as Nawaz Sharif have to come out and declare whether Pakistanis should fight Taliban are not and also cleanse their party from the terrorist sympathizers such as Rana Sana Ullah. Else we should be prepared for more brazen attacks on jails, mosques, Imambargahs and security personnel.
You may call me a prophet of doom and I do not wish to be alive to see that day, but if current situation remains unchecked, Pakistan is likely to break up with KPK & parts of Baluchistan falling under the Taliban control; same as North Waziristan of today.
An excellent analysis of the situation is described in the following article:
Killing for utopia
IRFAN HUSAIN
2013-08-03 07:17:48
IT has now become a cliché to say: “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”. But like most clichés, it contains an element of truth.
In this space last week, I offered this generally accepted definition of a terrorist: somebody who targets innocent, unarmed non-combatants to further a political agenda. But in this discourse, everything is relative. Who, after all, is innocent?
Surely, all decent people will argue, a child in, say, New York, has nothing to do with the Israeli repression of Palestinians. Wrong, insists Al Qaeda: until the American people and state feel the pain of losing a child to random violence, they will continue backing Israel in its occupation of Palestine.
As for adult Americans, they have elected the government, and are therefore legitimate targets. This is the argument jihadis make in justifying terrorist attacks against US interests. In these tactics, they have, I suspect, the silent support of a majority of Muslims.
However, the latter then exclaim that the Holy Quran specifically bars the killing of one believer by another. Not so, reply the jihadis. They base their attacks on Muslims on the takfiri concept developed by Ibn Taymiyya, the 14th century theologian, and spiritual godfather of many theorists of political Islam.
According to this concept, once a Muslim is declared an apostate, it becomes incumbent on true believers to kill him. The Takfiris — an offshoot of the Salafist tendency in Islam — also justify suicide as a legitimate weapon in the cause of the faith. Thus, the slaughter of fellow Muslims to impose their version of the Sharia is being carried out with religious zeal. In fact, more Muslims have been killed by fellow Muslims over the last few decades than by drones and other Western weapons.
These quasi-theological arguments sow confusion in the minds of many Muslims, and prevent them from confronting and defeating the cancer of Islamist militancy that is devastating their societies. The other factor inhibiting a robust response to the terrorists in some Muslim countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan is that they are perceived as warriors fighting to free their soil from foreigners and their local agents.
Support for both strands is visible in the media and in the public discourse. And when these militant groups carry out a particularly vicious attack, the general refrain is that the killers are actually agents of foreign powers because no Muslim could have carried out such an act.
Given the ambiguity and confusion surrounding Islamic militancy, it ought not to come as a surprise that politicians like Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif should consider them not as violent criminals, but as legitimate partners for negotiations.
Another aspect of the issue liberals like me tend to overlook is that whether we like it or not, groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban are killing for the sake of an ideal. Their utopia is the just society that is supposed to have existed in the days of early Islam. And in this utopia, these zealots would rule under a caliph presumably chosen by them.
Many would recoil from the reality of this construct, but most pay lip service to it, and hence the confusion. However, idealists have used terrorism in an effort to create their particular utopia in the past. In the second half of the 19th century, Europe saw a spate of terrorist attacks carried out by anarchists and other radical groups.
Their aim was to topple the governments of the day so they could usher in a socialist utopia where all were equal. They, like Islamist militants today, denounced democracy because they knew they just did not have the numerical support to get elected. Although they spoke in the name of the masses, they were an intellectual elite who justified their violence by saying they were acting for the greater good.
In his extensively researched book The World That Never Was: A True Story
of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents, Alex Butterworth delves deeply into the underworld of European radicalism. Men like Bakunin, Kropotkin and Reclus, to name only three, were passionate idealists who, despite their humanism, believed that to make an omelette, it is necessary to break eggs.
They acted on the principle of ‘propaganda of the deed’, setting off bombs to create an environment of fear which, they hoped, would destabilise the system and enable the birth of the Promised Land. There was much infighting among various groups and theoreticians, but basically, they were all motivated by a burning desire to change the status quo.
Predictably, the states of Europe responded with varying degrees of repression. Radical groups were infiltrated by police spies and agents provocateurs who encouraged acts of increasing violence to discredit the movement. And though governments had largely stamped out most radical groups by the early 20th century, the ideas they developed and espoused live on.
Fast forward to the 21st century: in varying forms, terrorism is being used by different groups to further different agendas. And while some militants are Muslim, many of their causes are nationalistic, not religious. Whether it is Hamas or groups fighting to liberate Chechnya, they are not interested in global jihad.
Until very recently, the IRA in Ireland and ETA in the Basque region of Spain were conducting terrorist operations to set up their own states.
Ultimately, terrorism is a weapon of the weak. Outnumbered and outgunned, terrorists resort to attacks against the soft targets offered by markets, schools and buses. But as we have seen in Pakistan, jihadis now slug it out with security forces, and often win.
Campaigns against terrorism have only succeeded when they were underpinned by unyielding political will. As long as politicians and the media collude to convince the public that we can negotiate with the jihadis, we will go on witnessing brazen attacks like the jailbreak in D.I. Khan.
irfan.husain@**********
Killing for utopia - DAWN.COM
