These jokers are again pushing the non state actors s**t to the hilt.
Why are they all pushing the peace process and the composite dialogue so hard. Are we missing something?
They need our money I guess.
http://www.thesundayindian.com/21122008 ... 3&pageno=1
Can Pakistan LeT go?
Will Pakistan's Military and Intelligence establishments play ball? Or are they just biding time to keep the United stateS in good humour? shahid husain reports from inside pakistan
It was only after the intense pressure from India and the United States started to hurt that Pakistan’s security forces finally swooped down on the bases of the terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba (LeT) and arrested Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi.
Lakhvi – the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai attacks that killed 188 people and injured 327 – is among the 15 LeT operatives who were detained in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) and is said to be the outfit’s “operation commander”. The Pakistani operation came after Lakhvi was identified as the Mumbai attack mastermind by the sole terrorist whom the Indian security forces were able to catch alive in India’s traumatised financial capital.
The LeT – banned by the Pakistan government in 2002 – has since re-surfaced under a new name, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and is led by Hafiz Saeed. While it has a sizeable presence throughout Pakistan, in PoK it is hyperactive. Small wonder, then, that the outfit, that claims to be involved in charitable works, was among the first to reach the victims of the 2005 earthquake in which over 79,000 people in PoK and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) were killed. But senior surgeons told TSI that the quacks hired by the Jamaat-ud-Dawa botched up the entire operation, forcing scores of the quake’s injured survivors to undergo amputation. These quacks did not even care to disinfect the wounds before bandaging them.
The Pakistan authorities have also restricted the movements of Maulana Masood Azhar, chief of the outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), by confining him to his multi-storey home in the Model Town area of Bahawalpur in Punjab. The adviser to Interior Minister Rehman Malik said in Islamabad that India had been insistent that Pakistan extradite Maulana Masood Azhar, Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon. All three notorious figures are believed to have enjoyed the patronage of Pakistani intelligence agencies in the past, and are allegedly involved in exporting terror to India and fomenting sectarian violence in Pakistan.
The US government has reacted positively to these arrests, with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly happy that, despite Pakistan’s traditional closeness to the LeT, it was now committed to fighting it. Rice charged the group with being involved in not just the Mumbai carnage, but also of moving in “the same circles” as al-Qaeda. Yet at the same time, she seemed to be quite satisfied with the role the Pakistan government had played in the war on terror. “Pakistan is a different place now, with a civilian government and an army leadership working in concert to crush extremism in Pakistan,” she has been quoted as saying.
What Rice did not say, however, but which is known generally, is that the terror raging today is the result of decades of brainwashing of Pakistani youth through both formal and informal indoctrination. It is this deadly mix of classical religious education and militancy that is widely believed to have led to the spawning of worldwide jehad.
But this observation must be qualified. Madrassas are not the only institutions breeding hate and intolerance. The textbooks of the government-run schools do much more than madrassas to spread jehad and lure students by holding out to them the promise of shahadat (martyrdom), according to `The Subtle Subversion – The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan', a research study published in 2004 by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, an independent Islamabad thinktank. The study adds, "Over the years, it became apparent that it was in the interest of both the military and the theocracy to promote militarism in society. This confluence of interests now gets reflected in the educational material."
This is precisely why, despite the efforts of both Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, who is said to be both secular and a thoroughly professional soldier, and President Asif Ali Zardari (himself a victim of terrorism) to eradicate terrorism, it will be a long time before Pakistan’s general populace, and not just the jehadi elements in the establishment, are re-educated.
Also make a note of this: in its 61 years of existence, Pakistan has been governed through direct military rule for fully 34 years; and all the elected governments have failed miserably to assert themselves. Remember how the populist government of the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto buckled down under pressure from the right-wing Pakistan National Alliance-led movement of 1977 to appease the mullahs? And declared the minority Ahmedi community to be non-Muslims? It is a measure of the ironies contained in the politics of appeasement that it were these very mullahs who collaborated with military dictator General Ziaul Haq – whose July 1977 coup sent Bhutto to the gallows. And who, thus, enabled jehadi elements to hold Pakistan’s liberal sections hostage.
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Today, religious extremism and intolerance in Pakistan are not confined to madrassa students. After the 9/11 terror attacks in the US, and the subsequent American bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, even some of the most highly educated people in Pakistan have come to be influenced by the Taliban and the al-Qaeda. A major American casualty was The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl, who was trapped in Karachi on January 23, 2002 and brutally murdered by a highly educated al-Qaeda operative. And Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a key member of the Hamburg cell that was behind 9/11, was eventually arrested in Karachi. Psychiatrists say aggression could be a response to frustration; which, if rewarded by society at large, gets reinforced and gains acceptance. This is precisely what is being witnessed today throughout Pakistan, whose government has patronised ethnicity, sectarianism and jehadis down the years. But as we have seen, its strategy of using madrassa students for furthering its geopolitical interests in Afghanistan backfired badly; so that today, try as it might, the state finds itself at a loss every time it tries to rein in the Taliban and other jehadi forces in Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), as also other parts of it. It cannot have been otherwise considering how thoroughly brainwashed these lethally armed operatives are.
It is no surprise, therefore, that the forward-looking among Pakistan’s intelligentsia want sterner action against the LeT, the JeM and other jehadi outfits. “I think the action against the LeT is under outside pressure, mainly from India and the United States, because now India has provided inconvertible proof of the LeT’s involvement in the Mumbai carnage,” said Dr AH Nayyar, a leading educationist and Fellow of the Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute. But he was not certain that the Pakistani establishment was as yet ready to regard the LeT as a threat to Pakistan as well. “The establishment had proceeded against the LeT and the JeM some years ago – then too under outside pressure, and without being convinced that these two entities could harm Pakistan as well. This is why both outfits were able to resume their activities soon after. So till these two begin to be perceived as threats within as well, neither of the two will cease its activities,” Dr Nayyar explained. Dr Nayyar seemed equally pained by the suspension of the peace talks between India and Pakistan, but hoped that it was a temporary phenomenon and that the two neighbours would not fall into the terrorists’ trap.
Dr Syed Jaffer Ahmed, Director, Pakistan Study Centre and a leading political scientist, said: “Being unaware of the exact nature of the crackdown, it is difficult for me to say whether or not it is satisfactory. But what we do know is that in his statement President Zardari made it clear that if non-state elements were involved in the Mumbai attacks stern action would be taken against them.”
But a senior Intelligence officer holds a diametrically opposite view. “There are more than 100 terrorist organisations in India, and only a few of them are Muslim. Since they (India) cannot blame themselves, they are blaming Pakistan. In the Samjhauta Express case too there was an Indian army officer involved. So whether by design or by default, India continues to be interested in painting Pakistan as a rogue state.” Just as well that he was not part of the peace process!