The message to the Pak govt is that terrorists can strike at will
EVENTS in Lahore on Tuesday morning are in many ways just another link in a long chain of events after the Pakistanis used Afridi and Waziri tribesmen as a policy option in Kashmir in 1947. Since then, it has been a downhill journey to bigotry and intolerance where Pakistan is now a victim of the demons it created.
Since then, Pakistani rulers have used terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy, extra-constitutional means to rule over its own people and lied to and cheated its main benefactors to draw financial and armament support. Pakistan is a victim of human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it: Nemesis, the Greek Goddess of Retribution.
When they are not killing each other, Pakistanis weave conspiracy theories. The Lahore attack is being described by some of these theorists as a conspiracy by the President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari after he had dismissed the Nawaz Sharif government, as he feared a backlash and was seeking to prevent the Long March from Lahore to Islamabad.
Another theory is that the army wants to discredit Zardari and get the nation ready for an army take over. Yet another is that Sharif and his party are trying to discredit Zardari. And the expected theory is to try and draw similarities between the Mumbai massacre and the Lahore attack. The idea would be to establish that Pakistan and India are victims of the same terrorists and draw sympathy. Worse, it will be also insinuated, especially in the jihadi press, that Lahore and Mumbai attacks were an Indian conspiracy to malign Pakistan. But Pakistan cannot go far with this theory since all evidence available clearly show that there is a Pakistani hand in the Mumbai massacre.
There are obviously going to be two or three main questions. Who did it? And why the Sri Lankans? Why not the Pakistani cricketers? Almost certainly, we will never know the truth and most likely, this attack is either a Talibantype attack, or maybe a splinter group of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba or the Jaishe- Mohammed. The Sri Lankan team was an easy target. They had come to Pakistan after being assured that they would be given full security. The attack shows that the Pakistan government cannot ensure this — not even in Lahore. The message to the Pakistani government is that the terrorists can strike at will. The state is losing control.
Besides, Sri Lankans make acceptable targets in the narrow world of the radicals as they are idol worshippers and therefore, infidels. Alongside the rise of the Taliban of different Shuras in Pakistan — Quetta, Waziristan and Malakand — there have been terrorist attacks in recent months in Islamabad, Sargodha, Dera Ghazi Khan and Rawalpindi. Now that the terrorists have struck in Lahore, the heart of Punjab, the battle for Pakistan’s soul is that much closer. Will it be Wahabi Islam or will it be Sufi liberal? Most certainly, the former.
Western discourse still concentrates on terrorism that originates in the Arab world but ground zero is in Pakistan. That country is far more fragile today than it ever was. We are now facing a Talibanised Pakistan and after the creation of Bangladesh, they do not now have a fallback.
We need to seriously think of our future policy options and not make the same mistakes that Pakistan made by suborning its foreign policy to those of the US or China. We have to work out policies that look at a restructured Pakistan — and restructured in our interests.
Source : Mail Today , 4th March 2009
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