Too much politics, too much hypocrisy -- Ayaz Amir

Islamabad diary Friday, September 18, 2009 Ayaz Amir How many doom-and-gloom stories can any reasonable person endure? More than a nation at war we are a nation in perpetual crisis, vaguely discontented if there is no real crisis at hand. In no other country of the world would a Brigadier Imtiaz Billa, a spook who put up his gloves years ago, be taken seriously. Yet in recent days the media almost succeeded in turning him into a TV celebrity, an outcome which must have taken him by surprise most of all. This is just by way of example to underline something obvious about Pakistan: there is too much politics in this country. Why is this so? Why is politics the staple of everyday conversation? Because -- and here's the paradox -- there is too much religion in this country. By which, Heaven forbid, I do not mean the genuine article but religious cant and hypocrisy. The way we go on about religion an alien could be forgiven for thinking that the very concept of religion began in Pakistan. This is General Ziaul Haq's revenge from the grave. Revile him as much as we may, there is no escaping the fact that a good deal of the fake piety on display in the official life of the Islamic Republic is a continuation of the legacy whose baleful seeds ---dragon's teeth?---he scattered. In art the counterweight to too much restraint, or too much order and discipline, is romanticism, a natural urge to reach for the opposite: freedom and perhaps even decadence. This also works the other way round. If there is too much freedom, too much artistic chaos, the desire arises to return to the comforts of order and discipline. This is how Hegel and Marx explained the universe: the combination, or clash, of opposites creating a synthesis or unity. But with us what is the Hegelian counterweight to too much false piety? Alas, nothing more creative than an obsession with politics. In any other climate excessive piety would have led to a loosening of restraint, something like the atmosphere of the Sixties in Britain and elsewhere, when the Beatles were all the rage and permissiveness became a common word. I was in school then and used to scratch my head trying to figure out what permissive behaviour and promiscuity meant. If we had experienced something like the Sixties it might have done us a world of good, perhaps saving us from such of our travails as the march to war with India in 1965 and, only six years later, war and defeat in East Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's period at the helm was only a brief interlude. He could have reinvented the idea of Pakistan and secured the country's future by making it safe for democracy. He had the opportunity but perhaps the times were hard or our good angels not sufficiently kind because events took a turn for the worse when Pakistan, not for the first time in its short existence, once more found itself under a military dictatorship. What is more, this one came with a sinister difference: it was steeped to its eyeballs in religious cant and hypocrisy. As a result, it was not just physical repression which Pakistan suffered under Zia but moral and social repression. Instead of marching into the future, we travelled back in time. Talibanism in the form now familiar to us was a later phenomenon, but the attitudes giving rise to it were forged in the crucible of those dark years. The army's thinking became more conservative, fertile soil for the 'jihadism' that was to shape its outlook first in Afghanistan and then Kashmir, something from which it has yet to fully recover. The richest irony of that period of course is that our American mentors, now so bent on culturally reconditioning the Pakistani mind, were at that time the loudest cheerleaders of what passed for the spirit of 'jihad'. In the 1980s Americans in Islamabad (and I say this with a sense of wonderment) were amongst the most bigoted souls on the planet. About every subject under the sun they could endure scepticism, even cynicism, but the one thing beyond any criticism was the Afghan 'jihad'. That was an article of faith, faith raised to the power of dogma. The demons they are now trying to exorcise in Afghanistan were born of that attitude. Anyway, if any country was ripe for a social revolution -- its Sixties and Beatle moment -- it was Pakistan after Zia's death. But instead of making a clean break with the past Pakistan slipped into a neo-Zia era, with the Establishment -- as personified by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Army Chief Gen Aslam Beg -- serving to put the brakes on any cultural revolution. No hundred flowers bloomed; no hundred schools of thought contended. The old dragons kept their vice-like grip on power. Pakistan remained imprisoned in the old strategic parameters -- Afghan depth, holding down the Indian army in Kashmir, the space for adventure provided by our nuke capability, etc. The Americans, ecstatic at the end of the Soviet empire, had walked on from Afghanistan, forgetting all about it (something which they now rue). But we did not march with the times. We kept holding on to the old certitudes. It was only a matter of time before the Mujahideen morphed into the Taliban and the Taliban provided a congenial setting for Al Qaeda to grow and prosper. We only have a two years' window. The Americans are not going to stay in Afghanistan forever. Support for the Afghan war is beginning to drop in the US. By the time Congressional elections come round next year, what is now a trickle could turn into something bigger. And by the time Obama's first term is about to end, and he is up for re-election, America's continued involvement in Afghanistan is likely to be one of the hottest topics of debate. We should be ready for that eventuality. Our army has done a superb job of cleaning up Swat. Fazlullah's Taliban are on the run. The FATA Taliban are also under pressure, the noose tightening around Waziristan and the army mounting operations at selected points. But for Pakistan to be fully cured of the mindset which drove it into the battlefields of 'jihad', the turning of the military tide is not enough. It must be matched by a lasting change of mind. We need a social revolution so that we jettison some of the spiritual baggage which has served to cloud our thinking. Pakistan will never be fully free in its mind unless the fake piety introduced by Gen Zia into our law books is completely erased. We have to go back not to where the nation stood on Oct 12, 1999, when Musharraf took over, but where it was on July 5, 1977, when Zia and his generals seized power. The aim should not be to hound anyone but to clear our spiritual decks. All the laws Zia introduced at the altar of a fake piety, including the Hadood Ordinance, need to be expunged. The historic task before this National Assembly, elected with such high hopes in Feb 2008, is this. Hopefully, as a consequence, our nation will learn to lighten up a bit and discover a higher combination of opposites than religion and politics. There is too much gloom in Pakistan, too much darkness. We are too moralistic, too judgmental, often too self-righteous. That is why we endlessly preach and endlessly worry about the future while not being able to live in the present and make the most of what it has to offer. Not surprisingly, therefore, Pakistanis at times give the impression of being forever on the cross. We have our problems but since when has the human race, from the dawn of history until today, been free of problems? When they walk the streets of their towns and cities, Pakistanis -- both men and women -- don't act as if they are wholly free. In a social sense -- and here I have to use my words carefully -- they act in a constrained manner, as if a strict censor is watching their backs. Is it any wonder if they have cultivated the habit of doing so many things by stealth? This is no prescription for a free people. Email: winlust@yahoo.com (The News)

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Muslims can't commit suicide-bombings in mosques: Claim right-wing politicians !

Jamrud Mosque attack: read the message!

A mosque housing nearly 300 people who were saying their Friday prayers was attacked by a suicide-bomber, killing 70 and crippling 125. The reaction of the political agent of Khyber was that “the attackers could not be Muslims because Muslims would never attack a mosque and that a Muslim would never spill the blood of a Muslim, especially when he was saying his namaz”. This statement flies against the worldwide evidence of Muslims at sectarian and national war with and against each other in many different places and at different times in history. Most regrettably, the conclusion thereafter drawn by some TV anchors was that a “foreign” non-Muslim power had staged the attack to destabilise Pakistan. Of course, one can only read “India” into this allegation, which is not very original.

The political agent said something else of interest without making the necessary connections himself, possibly for reasons of simplicity of mind or just fear. He said the attack came because the mosque was next to the checkpost of Baghiari and that among the people killed were many “khasadars”, or local levies, standing guard at the checkpost, a number of whom had been killed in the attack while praying. Later, a government official, who was less opaque about what had happened, clearly accused the Taliban of having done the job in retaliation against a recent operation by the khasadars and other security personnel targeting a militant group in Khyber that owed allegiance to Baitullah Mehsud, the self-proclaimed leader of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan.

When Pakistanis say that “Muslims can’t do this or that” in or out of Pakistan, they are being hypocritical. There are all sorts of Muslims, moderates and extremists, Sufis and Wahabis, and so on. The fact also is that some sorts of Muslims have been killing other sorts of Muslims from Algeria to Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan for the past two decades. They dynamite sacred mausoleums, they blow up mosques and routinely kill other Muslims in the act of praying. What is happening in Pakistan today is serious violence against the state of Pakistan by local warlords who are affiliated with the Taliban who in turn are linked up with Al Qaeda. We may have weak resolve to take on the enemy but there is no validity in the assertion that we don’t know who is killing us. (Daily Times, 29 March 2009)

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A young Pakistani would-be suicide bomber.
This boy was caught at a security check-post in NWFP's city Nowshera.

Pakistani paramedics give treatment to injured suicide blast victims at a hospital in Peshawar on March 27, 2009. A suicide bomber attacked a packed mosque in northwest Pakistan at prayer time, killing 48 people and wounding dozens more.

Source: Daily Express 28th March

One can find following statements in the attached news report of Daily Express

*Shareef Brothers said “No Muslim or Pakistani can play Holi with innocent Muslims’ blood in a mosque”.
* Leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami Qazi Hussain and Munawwar Hassan said “those who blew up mosques and religious seminaries can never be Muslims and hidden hand of Pakistan’s enemies must be involved in this incident”.
* Moulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, Abdul Ghafoor Haideri and a federal minister Azam Khan Swati “blamed American CIA for this suicide bombing”.
* Imran Khan said that “No Muslim can commit such a heinous crime”.
* Tahir-ul-Qadri claimed “Terrorists are enemies of humanity and they have no religion”

After every suicide bombing we hear and read such statements of our right-wing politicians and mullahs.

While our own indigenous terrorist organizations such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi have claimed responsibilities of several suicide bombings, it is really shameful on part of our politicians and mullahs that they instead of condemning those who have been actually claiming responsibilities of suicide bombings and running training camps for the training of terrorists and suicide bombers, they always point fingers towards “some hidden hand”, “agents of RAW or CIA”, “enemies of Islam and Pakistan” and “ Christian crusaders and Jews”.

Why don’t our right-wing politicians and mullahs simply condemn Talibans and their associate terrorists and sectarian organizations who have been claiming responsibilities of suicide bombings???

Why don’t our right-wing politicians, mullahs and even so-called civil society activists mobilize masses and organize rallies and public meetings for the condemnation of crimes against humanity by Taliban terrorists and their associates terrorists of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi?
Shame on our right-wing politicians and mullahs ! (Socrates)

Following is a relevant Letter to the Editor Dawn dated: 29th March, 09

Terrorists have no religion

By ALI IRTIZA RIZVI

‘People-sans-religion’ have yet again struck. So far 70 people are feared dead in the Khyber Agency suicide attack. I am sad, but what makes me sadder as well as pessimistic is that a majority of Pakistanis are yet again bent upon avoiding the main point: instead, they are justifying the act and blaming the ‘enemies of Pakistan and Islam’ for the act. The immediate statements that are repeated in the media after such heinous acts speak of ‘an unknown suicide bomber’, the ‘enemies of Pakistan’, the ‘enemies of Islam’, ‘such people cannot be Pakistanis’, ‘such people cannot be Muslims’, so on and so forth to be behind the crime. Many political analysts after much deliberation and contemplation tend to reach the same, and oft-repeated, conclusion that India, Israel and covertly America are on a crusade against Pakistan. The people of Pakistan have nothing to do with terrorism, they say. Not a single Pakistani has been identified as a terrorist. Pakistan has itself been a victim of terrorism. This to me is nothing but rubbish. The painful realisation is that when the self-proclaimed divine soldiers bomb a mosque or kill innocent civilians, they are given a clean sheet. The aforementioned vague statements are issued in order to create ambiguity or to cover up the identity of the terrorists. But when the same people force the government to bow down to their demands for the implementation of their version of the Shariah, it is celebrated as the victory of Islam. However, when military action is initiated against such elements, the pro-Taliban media, especially anchor persons and so-called analysts, and the religious parties create an uproar and an environment of uncertainty for the masses who succumb to the propaganda. If these suicide attacks are seen in the light of a foreign hand that is determined to make Pakistan unstable, that foreign power is probably using these religious fanatics to fulfill its malicious designs, which plausibly make these religious fanatics (Taliban, Al Qaeda, or the many Lashkars and Hizbs) Indian allies, and foes of Pakistan. Why is it that when the government of Pakistan carries out military action against these elements that are allegedly Indian agents in Pakistan, considering the action to be in the best interest of Pakistan and guaranteeing Pakistan’s survival, there is an uproar from the religious and some political parties and media personnel against it? Should we assume that the religious parties in Pakistan, and their allies and friends, from the politicians to mullahs and the military to the media, are all Indian agents or at least the enemies of Pakistan? Why do such conspiracy theories fascinate us? There is always a need to put the record straight. The simple chronology of events in this regard is that under the US cover, taking advantage of its involvement during the Soviet invasion, Pakistan bred these terrorists and used them on either side of the border. This continued even in the post-9/11 period, and the same flawed ideology and strategy are being applied even today. It needs to be admitted that this is a problem created by Pakistan itself, supported by its ideological allies, and the pawns used in this game have been Muslims. The suicide bombers and their cohorts are also Muslims, and mostly Pakistanis. We should admit our mistakes. Though this may not solve the problem, the problem should be identified at least.

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