[lbo-talk] War within Pakistan

[uvj at vsnl.com]

Daily Times
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/

Thursday, February 01, 2007

EDITORIAL: War within Pakistan
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\02\01\story_1-2-2007_pg3_1

Two days before the Ashura or the climactic tenth day of Muharram, the
cities and towns of Pakistan were being hit by sectarian suicide bombers,
this time beginning with the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP). After
Peshawar, the terrorists hit Dera Ismail Khan, a Frontier town on the border
of Punjab and the hometown of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the country's
largest Deobandi party, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). This time too, the
administration was ready for the bomber, but there was no way to prevent
him. He killed two people. Later, an imambargah was rocketed. On the Ashura
day itself, when the government was fearing more violence, the toll was only
two dead and several injured when Sunni sectarians opened fire on a
procession in Hangu. Most of the injured were policemen. In Bannu, a
rickshaw was found with explosives and other munitions but whoever intended
to use them could mercifully not do so.

DI Khan is an old sectarian trouble spot, with many past tragedies to its
name. It fits the prognosis that such aggression is always targeted at a
minority which is concentrated in any area. This has happened in Jhang,
Quetta, Gilgit, Hangu, Bannu, Karachi and a number of towns in South Punjab.
It is also significant that Deobandi seminaries are prominent in these
areas, which is why Multan remains vulnerable to sectarian violence despite
its dominant Sufi ambience.

It is a stroke of good luck and heightened security that these cities could
somehow avoid getting hit by suicide-bombers on Ashura in the new anti-Shia
wave that is radiating from Iraq where Al Qaeda decided last year to change
the direction of its jihad and make it anti-Shia and anti-Iran. In the past,
Quetta was targeted repeatedly to kill the Hazaras who are living in a part
of the city since the rise of the Taliban whose savage treatment of them in
Afghanistan led to their exile and ghettoisation in Quetta. But since
Pakistan could not escape being selectively Talibanised, Quetta was helpless
in the face of this punishment.

Karachi is the other place where the Shia have been attacked by extremist
Sunni organisations. But here the Shia have tried to retaliate and in turn
killed some of the top sectarian Deobandi clerics. Unfortunately, the state
of Pakistan has been unable to stem this growing trend because of its past
involvement with the jihadi militias who were trained out of the Sunni
seminaries. Now we find that 20 percent of our Shia population is under
threat from the very Sunni militias which our state nurtured in the past and
before which it now seems helpless.

In Shabqadar on the Afghan border, Pakistani tribal teenagers are being
recruited for battles inside Afghanistan. The active militia there is
Harkatul Mujahideen, yet its leader lives in Islamabad merely under the
surveillance of the government. Nearly 4,000 Pakistani teenagers have died
fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan while many hundreds of others from the
Pushtun regions are also getting ready to be suicide-bombers against the
Shias.

Pakistan's police sources had warned about the coming wave of Shia killings
last year, saying that this time Al Qaeda would be clearly involved in the
mayhem. As usual, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ) was named as the only organisation
involved in planning this Ashura bloodshed, ignoring or obscuring the fact
that many other religiously-inspired organisations used in the past by the
state to fight its Kashmir jihad are also involved in this activity. The
logic of this policy is incomprehensible. Either the state is too weak or
too scared to name and take on all such sectarian organisations or it still
hopes to 'use' some of them for dubious 'national security' purposes in the
future or, as is more likely, it is a bit of both.

The fact, however, remains that violent sectarianism will not be extirpated
unless President General Pervez Musharraf reorients his own domestic stance
and also changes some aspects of his foreign policy in regard to Kabul and
New Delhi. His first decision to bring the MMA into the political system to
balance the power of the PPP and the PMLN resulted in worsening the
sectarian situation in the country. (It should be recalled that the greatest
number of sectarian killings have taken place on his watch rather than in
the days of General Zia-ul Haq who first planted the seeds of sectarian
hatred in our faith.)

The news that India too is going sectarian should not please anyone in
Pakistan. Hard line Islam is coming to Indian shores from the Gulf where
many poor Indian Muslims work as labourers. And, ominously, they are turning
to sectarianism under further blandishments of Wahhabi charities such as
Rabita and Motamar Islami. In fact, Al Qaeda is riding the crest of this
Wahhabism in South Asia, as was apparent after the hanging of Saddam Hussein
in Iraq. India erupted into a fever of sectarianism led by the most powerful
Deobandi seminary of India in Lucknow, the Nadwa, while the Shias of India
refused to mourn.

Sectarianism is the outcome of the process of national-security driven
'nation-building' by the military in Pakistan for many decades. We are,
however, glad that the military has begun to diagnose the disease under
President General Pervez Musharraf's regime. But until the remedial surgery
isn't undertaken, the cancer of violent sectarianism will continue to eat
into the entrails of the state. *

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