Bad news and worse
By Kamran Shafi
Tuesday, 28 Apr, 2009 | 02:03 AM PST
IN a brave statement, the COAS has said that the army ‘has the resolve to fight and eliminate militancy from the country.’ And that what all of us understood to be the helplessness of the fifth largest army in the world facing a vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped bunch of thugs was actually an ‘operational pause’.
One should have liked to believe the COAS of an army that has forever boasted that but for it Pakistan should have long hence disappeared from the face of the earth, and which has therefore expropriated the lion’s share of our poor country’s treasury. He will forgive us if we don’t click our heels and do a merry jig, for the record of the Pakistan Army is bad. Read on.
But first to the ISPR’s clarification (Dawn, April 21) which tried to debunk my article ‘The march of the Taliban’ (April 14) in which I had said that the Swat Taliban, riding in 10 double-cabins and bristling with arms, had been observed driving from Daggar in Buner to Swat via Swabi, the Motorway and Mardan. The ISPR states that this is not true.
Quite apart from the fact that I have gone back to my impeccable sources who assure me the Taliban marched in exactly the fashion I had described, could the ISPR kindly tell us why anyone should believe it, considering its track record? Could it also please clarify its locus standi in the matter? Why did the Frontier government not make the clarification?
Or is it at all possible that the army is at long last beginning to realise that if the Taliban are showing naked and brutal force all over the Frontier, and thence surely will show it in the rest of Pakistan, it has much to answer for, for not effectively fighting them in Swat?
We can only live in hope, for very soon after my piece was published, there were reports that the Taliban — ragtag, wearing broken chappals but also web equipment (freely available in Hayatabad’s Amreekan market where pilfered Nato and US army equipment is sold) — were within striking distance of Tarbela dam and also of Islamabad the Beautiful. Intriguingly, the Taliban’s foremost supporter, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a most important pillar of Asif Zardari’s federal government made this claim.
But what gives in Swat? The reports are not encouraging, to say the very least. Mullah Radio goes on preaching violence and hate from his FM radio station which has still not been taken out despite the DG ISPR himself assuring us many weeks ago, before the army put its hands up in Swat, that the ‘equipment’ to find the source of FM broadcasts had finally been acquired by the army. Well, where is it then?
There is far worse news. An army convoy has been blocked by the Taliban just outside Mingora and sent back! Is this the way that an army that pretends to be well-trained and equipped and which says it is capable of taking on all comers behaves when confronted by a gang of criminals?
And worse still. There is talk of a general amnesty for the Swat renegades, no matter what their crimes against humanity. Crimes such as decapitation; robbing graves and shooting up corpses and hanging them after decapitating the dead bodies; slaughtering women school teachers and 70-year old ex-servicemen.
Amnesty for these Yahoos, sirs?
What is wrong with everyone? Must the Pakistani state debase itself in this manner? Must it prove again and again that it is mendacious enough to let its own monsters do what they will to whomever they will, and that it will then help them get away with it? Must the Pakistani nation, whose misfortune it is to live under this cruel and mindless state, be dishonoured to the extent that whilst murderers and executioners and thieves and robbers, many of them foreigners, are given ‘amnesty’, thousands of its poor brothers and sisters languish in its awful jails awaiting trial for petty offences such as gambling Rs10 in a game of cards, and other such ludicrous misdemeanours?
Who came up with this particular jewel of an amnesty for the Swat criminals please? They not only brought mayhem and death to that valley, but also took up arms against the state. Surely treason of the first order, what? And yet an amnesty is being considered for them? If you must give the Yahoos amnesty, then please open the gates of all the jails in Pakistan and release those who are lesser criminals.
I
n the meantime, back at the ranch, instead of constantly monitoring the deteriorating situation in Swat and Buner and, (breaking news) in Battagram of Mansehra district where NGOs have stopped work after being threatened, the ‘agencies’ have made a menacing call or two to some ‘unfriendly’ media people. In addition, the ISPR, when rebutting or complaining about the media actually copies its communications to the directorate general of the ISI! What does the ISI have to do with the media?
So then, bad news all around. To the extent that even in these fraught times, the army high command is fixated on acquiring more and more land. A recent article in The News by the good Asim Sajjad Akhtar who has done excellent work on the way the army treats its tenants on the farms it leases (not owns, please note) from the Punjab government — leases which have run out in many cases — tells us that as recently as the end of 2008 GHQ was exchanging letters with the Punjab Board of Revenue asking for another 100,000 acres!Which reminds me:
considering the need of the army high command for more and more land, why not allot 500 acres of Frontier/central government land in every town in Swat where its senior officers can build holiday homes and cottages?
PS. In 1897 the Malakand Field Force numbering approximately 6,200 all ranks, but led from the front by Sir Bindon Blood, defeated 15,000 tribesmen armed in same fashion, except for two Maxim machine guns and a battery of mountain artillery. No helicopter gunships, no tanks, no armoured cars.
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