Has what many see as Pakistan’s use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy against India and Afghanistan actually brought the country to the edge of self-destruction? Earlier this month, two suicide bombers blew themselves up within the revered Data Darbar Sufi shrine in Lahore, killing scores of worshippers.
After being in denial for too long, the Punjabi regional government has moved to ban several terrorist groups operating in the state, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which executed the November 2008 carnage in Mumbai. India wants the group’s leader, Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, to be prosecuted. But Pakistani courts have let him off for want of evidence.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is widely believed to be close to the Pakistan Army and ISI and to carry out terrorist attacks against India at their behest. A US-Pakistani terrorist under trial in the United States, David Coleman Headley, who scouted targets in India for the group, says that Hafiz Sayeed was involved a tevery stage of the planning and preparation for the Mumbai attack.
So India will keenly watch how serious Pakistan is about proscribing the group as part of its recent decision to hunt down terrorists. In 2002, then President Pervez Musharraf banned the organization, but the terrorist group changed its name and prospered.
The Pakistani Taliban has inspired the Punjabi Taliban, which had a key role in the twin bombings at the Data Darbar shrine. Because Hafiz Sayeed has spoken out against the Taliban, decrying the terrorist methods used by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan government claims he’s actually in danger.
And the complexities to all this don’t end there. The leader of Pakistan’s second-largest political party, Nawaz Sharif, blames the US drone attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas for provoking the Pakistani Taliban to pick targets within Pakistan, including the Lahore shrine. Sharif wants the federal government to open peace talks with the Taliban, which the United States is bound to oppose.
Given all these twists and turns, Pakistan’s latest decision to go after indigenous terrorist groups will likely amount to little, so deeply wedded are the interests of the terrorists and Pakistan’s security apparatus, that it will be nearly impossible to prise them apart.
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Michel Gourd
Working with Afghan and Pakistan on ISI
Gen David Petraeus, plan to arm villagers against the Taliban is a good one. It recognizes something not often reported. Ordinary people in Afghanistan are not on Taliban sides. They are not the ones opposing the Americans and their allies’ vision of a better Afghanistan. It is not them who make the forces to fail to achieve their objective in nine years.
There is one stakeholder that was in Afghanistan before the war and before 9/11.It trained the Taliban and helped them take power. Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency got its fingers in all Afghan pies. It is providing extensive funding, training and sanctuary to the Taliban in Afghanistan and in the same time playing as allies’ friends providing them with some intelligence.
There is split loyalty in ISI. One part of it supports the Taliban, trains and funds the Afghan insurgents. ISI agents create a network of ‘sleeper agents’ in all Afghanistan. All ISI’s operatives should be put under important scrutiny, including their G-Force. Strong actions needed ASAP. This can be done with the help of India with its new strong posture in regard to Afghanistan as shown in the Hindu Black Cobras recent intervention.
Faheem
Under the mask of democracy and secularism, Indian subsequent regimes dominated by politicians from the Hindi heartland Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) have been using brutal force ruthlessly against any move to free Assam, Kashmir, Khalistan, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu and Tripura where wars of independence continue in one or the other form.
India which is maintained through militarisation of the country by incurring too much expenditure for importing arms, for subjugating minorities through force, for crushing wars of liberation with brutal tactics and for sponsoring insurgency in Pakistan, China, and other regional countries, is bound to result in self-destruction.
fahim
Pakistan only needs Kashmir for water for Punjab and have nothing to do with Kashmir and its people. India should help Sindhis, Baluchis to get freedom from the clutches of Punjabi rule.