Hussain Haqqani in The Hindu
The suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan is not the first terrorist attack on a place of worship in Pakistan, and is unlikely to be the last. Imbued with their extremist ideology, jihadis have targeted several Sufi shrines all over Pakistan for several years. As the shrine is a major attraction for devotees, the Sehwan attack resulted in a very high number of fatalities, just like the attacks on the popular shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore in 2010 and that of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan last November. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ruling elite still sees terrorism through a geo-strategic lens, not as the consequence of its appeasement and sponsorship of Islamist extremism.
Jihadi justification
The jihadis justify their violence against Sufi shrines as attacks against ‘impure’ manifestations of the Islamic faith. Killing ‘unbelievers,’ ‘heretics’ and ‘deviants’ is an integral part of their plan to create a purer Islamic state. The same justification has been used in the past to attack Shias and Ahmadis as well as Pakistan’s Christians and Hindus. Although jihadi groups were originally nurtured by Pakistan for proxy wars in Afghanistan and against India, at least some jihadi groups consider Pakistanis as legitimate targets. To them Pakistan is as much their religious battlefield as Afghanistan or India. Pakistan would have to delegitimate the jihadi ideology in its entirety to ensure that more extreme offshoots of its protégés do not kill its people.
Despite periodic noises about making no distinctions among good and bad jihadis, Pakistan’s leaders have shown no interest in defining all jihadis as a threat to Pakistan. The country’s military still sees terrorism in the context of its geo-strategic vision. The jihadis responsible for attacks within Pakistan are deemed ‘agents’ of Indian intelligence or the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS).
For Pakistan’s military, Pakistan has only one enemy and all acts of violence against Pakistanis must be attributed only to that enemy. At a recent event in Washington DC, I was confronted by a fellow Pakistani who argued that terrorism in South Asia would end if the Kashmir issue was resolved in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. He had no answer to my question how resolution of any international dispute would diminish the fanaticism of those who kill Shias and Sufis as part of an effort to purify Muslim society.
In all four provinces
Over the last week, jihadi offshoots claiming links to the Islamic State (IS) have demonstrated their capacity to strike in each one of Pakistan’s four provinces. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Taliban, publicly claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and threatened to attack further Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistan military targets as part of its ‘Operation Ghazi’. Simple research on Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other similar groups reveals that their members are homegrown Punjabi jihadis ideologically convinced of their narrow sectarian worldview.
But Pakistan’s reaction to the Sehwan attack was to blame groups ‘based in Afghanistan’. Some were silly enough to suggest that the latest wave of attacks was aimed at preventing the Pakistan Super League (which plays its cricket in Dubai due to poor security in Pakistan) from having its final in Pakistan. There was no attempt to answer the question how Afghanistan-based terrorists could travel vast distances within Pakistan without being intercepted by Pakistan’s security services. After all, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prides itself at being the ‘world’s best intelligence’ service, shows a high degree of efficiency in dealing with secular critics, ranging from little known bloggers to political activists, but is remarkably incompetent at interdicting suicide bombers.
The only reasonable explanation for why Pakistan is unable to intercept jihadi terrorists targeting its own people is that the state apparatus does not consider jihadis as the enemy in the same manner as they pursue secular Baloch and Muhajir political activists or other critics of Pakistan’s policies.
For decades Pakistan has seen jihadi groups as levers of its foreign and security policy and periodic assertions that the policy has changed have proved wrong. Every step against jihadis is followed by one in the opposite direction. Thus, the much publicised ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ targeted out-of-control Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan but spared groups based in Punjab and Karachi. Hafiz Saeed’s recent detention was accompanied by blocking action against him and Masood Azhar at the U.N. with Chinese support. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is continuously telling jihadis, “Those of you who do not attack inside Pakistan will not get hurt.”
More about image
For Pakistan’s civil and military elite, the priority is Pakistan’s international image and its external relations, not the elimination of terrorism or confronting extremist ideology. Pakistan’s publicly stated view of its terrorist problem is that it is the victim of blowback from its involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad during the 1980s. Former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, described Hafiz Saeed as Pakistan’s hero in a well-known interview on Pakistan’s Dunya TV in October 2015 and argued that Pakistan had “brought Mujahideen from around the world” and “trained the Taliban” at a time when Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Osama bin Laden were heroes for both the CIA and the Pakistanis.
In this version of history, there is little acknowledgement of Pakistan’s role in allowing the ideology of jihad to flourish and grow for two decades after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Americans started telling Pakistan to shut down the jihadi enterprise. Pakistanis spend more energy defending themselves against U.S. and Indian criticism over safe havens for the Afghan Taliban than they do on figuring out how to rid Pakistan of the cancer of jihadi terrorism.
Twenty-five years have elapsed since then Secretary of State James Baker threatened Pakistan in 1992 that its support of jihadi groups could result in the U.S. declaring Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
Over a quarter century, Pakistan has offered excuses and explanations as well as made promises that have not been kept. It has itself faced terrorism, lost lives and fought certain terrorist groups. But its essential policy of using jihadi groups for strategic advantage in the region— in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and against India — has not drastically changed.
For ‘strategic advantage’
In the process of securing strategic advantage, Pakistan has unleashed ideologically motivated groups on its soil that have morphed and mutated over time. While groups such as Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa speak of Pakistan’s national interest, other groups such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar have an ideological perspective that is not limited by the concept of modern nation states. For them, Pakistan is as dispensable as other states for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and they have a God-given right to kill those they consider un-Islamic.
In a recent report co-authored by Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation and myself, we pointed out that Pakistan must focus on reversing the extremist trends in Pakistani society. Pakistani authorities — specifically the country’s military leaders, who control its foreign and security policies — need to take a comprehensive approach to shutting down all Islamist militant groups that operate from Pakistani territory, not just those that attack the Pakistani state.
As attacks like the recent one in Sehwan demonstrate, Pakistan’s tolerance for terror groups undermines the country. It corrodes stability and civilian governance, damages the investment climate, and inflicts death and injury on thousands of innocent Pakistani citizens.
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer. "My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
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Saturday 18 February 2017
Friday 17 February 2017
It's not Paul Nuttall's fault he made a mistake about Hillsborough
Mark Steel in The Independent
Some people have criticised the Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, as his website claimed he lost a “personal friend” at Hillsborough, but now he accepts that isn’t true. But we should be understanding, as life can be deeply unsettling for sufferers of “Deceased Close Personal Friend/Someone I Vaguely Knew Back-to-Front Syndrome”.
It must be an awful ordeal as he breaks down every time he reads an obituary, crying, “oh no, Gabriel Santana Lopez has died, he was a close personal friend”, until it’s pointed out he was a 93-year-old Chilean jazz clarinettist who Paul had never heard of, then he calms down for a while.
We should hope he never risks seeing a Shakespeare play. He’ll be devastated for weeks, writing, “I can’t believe Tiberius has been poisoned”, on his website until he’s reminded it was a play and he had no idea who that is.
Walking through graveyards must be a dreadful trial, as he stops by each gravestone, sobbing “oh no, not Beloved Amy Chadwick 1843-1911, she was a close personal friend. Why, why, why?”
Paul’s explanation for the false claim of personal friendship is he never said it in the first place, it was just on his website. This seems reasonable, as you can hardly be expected to keep track of things you say on your own website.
My one probably says I played in the water polo final at the Olympics and I’ve got a license to pilot rockets – I’m too busy to check.
This is an exciting development in the art of responding to a suspicion you’ve said something untrue. Instead of apologising or saying you were under stress, you claim it wasn’t really you who said it. The next stage will be for a politician to say “I reject the charge that I lied because those words I said weren’t mine. They were actually someone else’s words and they were in my mouth, and I had no idea they were being said by me at the time I said them.”
Or maybe Ukip allow people to write stuff on websites by guesswork, without the person whose website it is having any say, so a random person may write “Douglas Carswell speaks Portuguese and keeps llamas” because there’s always a chance they’ll be right.
It’s also possible that when the person who writes Paul’s website applied for the job, they claimed they were well qualified as they were his close personal friend, even though they’d only met him once, in a queue at a tweed jacket store in Bootle.
Paul also claims he was at Hillsborough on the day of the tragedy, and maybe he was. But teachers, friends and colleagues of his say they can’t recall him ever mentioning he was there at the time. The most likely explanation is he must have been at other places as well that day, and he can’t be expected to have recalled being in a major tragedy and popping to the Co-op for some milk.
Another reason Paul wouldn’t have been keen to mention his presence there that day is Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor, has said he’s “sick to death” of hearing about Hillsborough. So the last thing Paul would want is to annoy his party’s donor by mentioning he’d been there.
The reason the Ukip donor was fed up of Hillsborough, he said, is “It was a disaster and that’s it” and “milking a tragedy forever is sick”.
It’s possible the reason Arron Banks is sick of hearing about disasters is that Paul Nuttall tells him every day about all the close personal friends he lost on the Titanic and poor Arron has finally had enough.
But even though we can’t know whether Paul was there, it might not matter any more. Because this is the age of the alternative fact, when there’s no embarrassment about getting caught having lied. Farage can claim the Health Service is crippled by Aids tourists, Boris can claim leaving the EU will bring £350m a week to the NHS, and when they’re told this isn’t true, they’ll say “Well no, the reason the records show the opposite is true to what I claimed, is I lied. But that doesn’t alter the truth about the thing I made up.”
In this new world, if you disprove nonsense that’s been made up, that goes to show you’re part of the elite, with your fancy facts and la-di-da evidence.
So down-to-earth types like Paul Nuttall are at last free to put forward the working man’s case. Now, if he likes, he can write on his website that the Prime Minister of Bulgaria has been creeping round Hampshire, encouraging Bulgarians to shave British cats and smoke their fur as a legal high, or that a study has proved Muslims are thirty per cent gelignite which is why they feel the need to explode.
Or that unicorns died out because they were banned by the EU on grounds of health and safety for being too pointy.
He can clarify his outlook by writing “I object strongly to the charge that my views are in any way racist, as I was a black man for six years while I was a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, including three months as a Rastafarian until my dreadlocks got caught in the propellers.”
None of it matters, because we’re at last liberated from the stifling constraints of truth. Rather than apologise, Paul Nuttall should make the most of this new situation, and before the election in Stoke claim he’s always felt connected to the area, since he was at the great Stoke pottery disaster of 1809, in which he lost a personal friend whose head got stuck in a Wedgwood vase.
Some people have criticised the Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, as his website claimed he lost a “personal friend” at Hillsborough, but now he accepts that isn’t true. But we should be understanding, as life can be deeply unsettling for sufferers of “Deceased Close Personal Friend/Someone I Vaguely Knew Back-to-Front Syndrome”.
It must be an awful ordeal as he breaks down every time he reads an obituary, crying, “oh no, Gabriel Santana Lopez has died, he was a close personal friend”, until it’s pointed out he was a 93-year-old Chilean jazz clarinettist who Paul had never heard of, then he calms down for a while.
We should hope he never risks seeing a Shakespeare play. He’ll be devastated for weeks, writing, “I can’t believe Tiberius has been poisoned”, on his website until he’s reminded it was a play and he had no idea who that is.
Walking through graveyards must be a dreadful trial, as he stops by each gravestone, sobbing “oh no, not Beloved Amy Chadwick 1843-1911, she was a close personal friend. Why, why, why?”
Paul’s explanation for the false claim of personal friendship is he never said it in the first place, it was just on his website. This seems reasonable, as you can hardly be expected to keep track of things you say on your own website.
My one probably says I played in the water polo final at the Olympics and I’ve got a license to pilot rockets – I’m too busy to check.
This is an exciting development in the art of responding to a suspicion you’ve said something untrue. Instead of apologising or saying you were under stress, you claim it wasn’t really you who said it. The next stage will be for a politician to say “I reject the charge that I lied because those words I said weren’t mine. They were actually someone else’s words and they were in my mouth, and I had no idea they were being said by me at the time I said them.”
Or maybe Ukip allow people to write stuff on websites by guesswork, without the person whose website it is having any say, so a random person may write “Douglas Carswell speaks Portuguese and keeps llamas” because there’s always a chance they’ll be right.
It’s also possible that when the person who writes Paul’s website applied for the job, they claimed they were well qualified as they were his close personal friend, even though they’d only met him once, in a queue at a tweed jacket store in Bootle.
Paul also claims he was at Hillsborough on the day of the tragedy, and maybe he was. But teachers, friends and colleagues of his say they can’t recall him ever mentioning he was there at the time. The most likely explanation is he must have been at other places as well that day, and he can’t be expected to have recalled being in a major tragedy and popping to the Co-op for some milk.
Another reason Paul wouldn’t have been keen to mention his presence there that day is Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor, has said he’s “sick to death” of hearing about Hillsborough. So the last thing Paul would want is to annoy his party’s donor by mentioning he’d been there.
The reason the Ukip donor was fed up of Hillsborough, he said, is “It was a disaster and that’s it” and “milking a tragedy forever is sick”.
It’s possible the reason Arron Banks is sick of hearing about disasters is that Paul Nuttall tells him every day about all the close personal friends he lost on the Titanic and poor Arron has finally had enough.
But even though we can’t know whether Paul was there, it might not matter any more. Because this is the age of the alternative fact, when there’s no embarrassment about getting caught having lied. Farage can claim the Health Service is crippled by Aids tourists, Boris can claim leaving the EU will bring £350m a week to the NHS, and when they’re told this isn’t true, they’ll say “Well no, the reason the records show the opposite is true to what I claimed, is I lied. But that doesn’t alter the truth about the thing I made up.”
In this new world, if you disprove nonsense that’s been made up, that goes to show you’re part of the elite, with your fancy facts and la-di-da evidence.
So down-to-earth types like Paul Nuttall are at last free to put forward the working man’s case. Now, if he likes, he can write on his website that the Prime Minister of Bulgaria has been creeping round Hampshire, encouraging Bulgarians to shave British cats and smoke their fur as a legal high, or that a study has proved Muslims are thirty per cent gelignite which is why they feel the need to explode.
Or that unicorns died out because they were banned by the EU on grounds of health and safety for being too pointy.
He can clarify his outlook by writing “I object strongly to the charge that my views are in any way racist, as I was a black man for six years while I was a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, including three months as a Rastafarian until my dreadlocks got caught in the propellers.”
None of it matters, because we’re at last liberated from the stifling constraints of truth. Rather than apologise, Paul Nuttall should make the most of this new situation, and before the election in Stoke claim he’s always felt connected to the area, since he was at the great Stoke pottery disaster of 1809, in which he lost a personal friend whose head got stuck in a Wedgwood vase.
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