SSridhar wrote:Muppalla wrote:
(1) The divisions between the bearded ones and the army has widened from 2004 onwards and the gap has increased due drone attacks.
(2) There is serious need to remove this gap to take the relationship between beards and Army if Pakistan has to get back to glorious past
(3) All the security guards and other security is nothing but the ones carefully drafted by Army
(4) In pursuit of show of loyalty to the beards inside Army and outside - the Army has orchestrated dumping few RAPES. Army itself has many fellow RAPES but however, in the larger interest of the nation it is okay to dump few of them.
Muppalla, I have a refinement to what you have written.
I feel that the PA is not completely in control of itself, and that includes the ISI and MI as well. In that sense, the outside world may tend to ascribe every action to the PA as a whole while in fact some of them might have been carried out by factions not entirely under PA control. The reason for this suspicion is not far to seek.
In earlier days, the RAPEs formed the officer corps of the PA just as the aristocrats and nobles did in the Prussian Army. The foot soldiers came largely from the traditional recruiting grounds of Potohar plateau and Pashtun badlands. As PA lost some of its sheen and as other avenues opened up for the RAPEs, the PA began to widen its net for the officers. The Islamization of the PA by ZAB and then Gen. Zia made matters worse as explicit demonstration of Islamist fervour became an important measurement for promotions etc. within the PA. The Kakul syllabus was radicalized. The current batch of top Generals might well be the last pre-radicalization batch. The Tarbela SSG mess suicide bomb attack or the refusal of several PA units to fight the more pious Taliban are indeed pointers. So, beneath the very top Corps Commanders, the radicalization may be more rampant than what we might give credit for.
All that we know is that by his own admission, the then DG, ISI, Lt. Gen Mahmoud Ahmed estimated as far back as
circa 2000, that 15 to 16% of the army officer corps were religious extremists. As we know the Pakistani penchant for underplaying (or overplaying) figures according to exigencies, we can safely assume that the figure should be somewhere between 45 and 50%. Since c. 2000, rather cataclysmic events have taken place that have enormously caused a surge in Islamist fervour and extremism all over the country and PA officers could not have been any exception to the goings on. . In July 2009, the fundamentalist Hizb-ut-Tahrir announced that four Pakistani Army officers sent to Sandhurst for military training had been ‘converted’. One can easily give up any hope for the foot soldiers in this environment. Preachers and jihad motivators like Professor Hafeez Saeed & Masood Azhar have been regularly giving
kutbahs in Army mosques. While very large sections of the society, and hence the PA too, are Sunni Hanafi Berelvi, the PA mosques (because of the officially sanctioned easy access by JI, LeT, JeM and Hizb-ut-Tahrir clerics to them) are easy hunting grounds for conversion of these Berelvis to harder core Wahhabi/Deobandi/Salafi/ Ahl-e-Hadees thought processes. This may be more difficult to achieve in the villages or towns where these foot-soldiers come from because the mosques are largely controlled by the Berelvis still.
It is therefore no longer possible for the top-level PA commanders to be completely in charge of the PA. That is one of the reasons for the PA to delay even a token North Waziristan operation in spite of huge American pressure because of the fear that the PA might unravel.
The other issue is the increasing inability of the PA to hold the flock of the PA-
pasand sarkari terrorist
tanzeems. We now know that one of the reasons for the 26/11 is to show the jihadists that LeT and the PA were still capable of mounting a spectacular assault on India to arrest the flow of deserters from LeT to other Punjabi Taliban groups. I believe that the Khaled Khwaja issue or Maj. Gen. Alavi's case were handled at different levels within the PA and by groups that were aligned with the Punjabi Taliban. Taseer's case might be a similar one. When the PA graduates to the next level of enlightened moderation Insha Allah, such orders to assassinations might well flow from the top, but that may be a few years away yet.
In earlier happy days, the PA split and merged
all the various tanzeems whenever it willed and according to
its requirements. It no longer possesses that sway because the Punjabi Taliban are fighting for a greater cause than the PA and are also more pious than their PA brothers. The PA is split vertically into TTP-pasand and sarkari-tanzeem-pasand types with the former slowly assuming a bigger following. When the tilt happens heavily in their favour, we will see the fireworks.
) But the jihadis have never changed. They are doing what they have always done. They are fighting in Afghanistan, fighting in Paki border areas, trying to fight India.
Waah waah waah