The Indian press has carried detailed reports of unfriendly reactions from the Pakistani media after the terror attacks in Bombay. Most reports have been depressingly and monotonously hostile; I do not want to waste readers’ time on them. But apart from the fact that they do not like us, Pakistanis are remarkably like us; they reflect a similar variety of opinions. And there are some interesting opinions — even some interesting hostile opinions from Dawn.
Kamran Shafi called the demand of Manmohan Singh — whom he claims he respects — that the chief of ISI should be sent to assist in the investigations as impossible, and called the president and prime minister of Pakistan geniuses for having agreed to send him. They should have waited for solid proof, and then sent Major General Mahmud Ali Durrani (who has been involved in the past two years’ peace talks with India, and is better known as General Zia-ul-Haq’s military secretary who persuaded him to take his final, fatal flight). The episode proved for the second time that it is the army chief who is in control of ISI and not the elected politicians (the first time was when the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, put ISI under the interior ministry headed by Rehman Malik, an acolyte of Benazir Bhutto who accompanied her in exile, on 27 July; the order was cancelled the next day). The politicians would have been more strongly placed against the generals if they had stood together; but Asif Ali Zardari put paid to that by repeatedly breaking his word to Nawaz Sharif. Even now, Zardari should make peace with Sharif by restoring the judges whom Pervez Musharraf dismissed on 3 November 2007, and repealing the 17th amendment to the constitution, passed in 2003, which gave the president power to dismiss the government and dissolve the national assembly. In the end, Shafi paid a tribute to Hemant Karkare, who arrested the Hindu terrorists responsible for the Malegaon blasts.
Mahir Ali wrote that incursions by the Indian Air Force into Pakistan were probably intended to be a threat; if so, they would please only jehadis, and no one else. Condoleezza Rice and Gordon Brown had advised India to exercise restraint. That was hypocrisy since it was the Bush doctrine not to distinguish between terrorists and the countries of their origin (that is, to punish countries for what terrorists from those countries do). But if India is aspiring to be a regional power, it should look at the experience of the US in Afghanistan and Iraq and desist; invading other countries in punishment for terror attacks is not effective. Maulvi Nazir had said that in the event of a war, the Taliban would send 15,000 fighters to help the Pakistani army and infiltrate 500 terrorists into India to carry out covert attacks; ISI officials were reported to have welcomed the offer. If they did, the alliance between the armed forces and the Taliban spells deep trouble for Pakistan.
The government of Pakistan offered to act against terrorists, and did up to a point: it raided the training camps of Lashkar-e-Toiba, clamped down on Jamaat ud-Dawa and arrested Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, Lashkar’s chief of operations. Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the man who is supposed to have given motivational lectures to the terrorists who were sent to Bombay, was put under rather light house arrest. India was not impressed, since Pakistan usually holds such people for some months and then releases them.
Pakistan should not hand them over to India; it cannot hand over its citizens to India just because India asks for them. It can hand over Dawood Ibrahim, whom Misha Glenny of The Guardian linked with the Bombay attacks, and Tiger Memon. But CIA would not like the Indians to interrogate Dawood (because it used him too).
Pakistan has offered to send an investigation team to India; instead, it should ask India to send its investigators to Pakistan. It does not help to claim that Pakistan is being made a scapegoat or miscast as the epicentre of Islamic terrorism. Pakistan was an ally of the West in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; Saeed and Lakhvi are both veterans of that good jihad. The past cannot be undone, but the future can be secured if the army and the government can work together. Toxic fanaticism needs to be curbed, not to please the US or appease India, but to cure Pakistan of its own virus.
According to Irfan Husain, Pakistanis, when confronted with Pakistan’s having become a breeding ground of terrorists, say that the Americans left after driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan and left Pakistan with jehadis created to assist them. They forget that the same jehadis were used by the army and ISI in Kashmir and financed by the Saudi and by Pakistani and other Muslim businessmen. They continue to be trained by retired army officers; just a few weeks ago, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, minister under Musharraf as well as Nawaz Sharif, boasted of having run a training camp for them on his land just outside Rawalpindi. Such terrorist groups were repeatedly exposed by foreign and Pakistani journalists, and their existence continued to be officially denied. Each time an atrocity like the Bombay one occurs, official spokesmen say, “Show us the proof.” Since the terrorists are either killed or get away, there never is proof. But in Bombay, one was captured alive, and his story points to Lashkar-e-Toiba.
The foreign minister of Pakistan said Pakistan too was a victim of terrorism. If so, foreigners would like to know, why is Pakistan not doing more to stamp out terrorism? The intelligence agencies command such vast unaudited amounts of money that their failure to curb terrorism smacks of gross incompetence or criminal collusion. Benazir’s murder shows how poorly the intelligence agencies serve Pakistan.
Jawed Naqvi cited the 2006-07 annual report of the Swiss Bankers’ Association to say that Indians have parked $1.4 trillion of black money in Swiss banks. The N.N. Vohra committee, which investigated the 1993 Bombay bomb attacks, wrote: “In the bigger cities, the main source of income relates to real estate — forcibly occupying lands/buildings, procuring such properties at cheap rates by forcing out the existing occupants/tenants, etc. Over time, the money power thus acquired is used for building up contacts with bureaucrats and politicians and expansion of activities with impunity. The money power is used to develop a network of muscle-power which is also used by the politicians during elections….The nexus between the criminal gangs, police, bureaucracy and politicians has come out clearly in various parts of the country. The existing criminal justice system, which was essentially designed to deal with the individual offences/crimes, is unable to deal with the activities of the mafia; the provisions of law in regard to economic offences are weak.” India cannot afford to investigate the sources of terrorists’ money because it may run into its own leaders and rulers.
We pride ourselves on our democracy and our free press. I wonder, though, why none of the above views found expression in our democratic press. Maybe we are too patriotic to be democrats.
|
Monday, February 1, 2010
PAKISTAN LOOKS AT INDIA
[I wrote this in the Calcutta Telegraph on 30 December 2008. The Indian view of Pakistan tends to be monochromatic, especially after terrorist acts like the one in Bombay; I reported views that would not be normally heard or read by Indians.]
