Karachi blast
April 6th, 2012
Before the political parties and their proxies in Karachi decided to indulge in their latest round of bloodletting they might have stopped to consider that outside forces might take advantage of the violence and cause some mayhem of their own. That is what seems to have happened in Malir on April 5, where a suicide blast targeting a senior superintendent of police, Rao Anwar, resulted in the death of four people. It is still not known who is responsible for the attack but all signs point to it being the work of a militant group. One possibility is that the perpetrators belonged to the Sipah-e-Sahaba, as Anwar was on his way to appear in court in connection with the murder of a former Malir Bar Association president who is also believed to have been killed by the same militant outfit.
While the primary responsibility obviously lies with those who carried out the attack, the city’s political parties need to accept responsibility for having created a space where militant groups can cause havoc and confusion. With Karachi already on edge, the fear caused by such attacks is immeasurable. In fact, just a few hours after the attack, rumours arose that there was a second suicide blast in Malir, although these reports remain unconfirmed. Interior Minister Rehman Malik has often blamed a “third hand” for the violence in Karachi, which has always come across as an excuse for the government’s inability to get its own political allies to cease and desist from violence. The Malir attack shows that third parties like militant groups may not be primarily responsible for the violence but that they will certainly take advantage of it.
In light of the damage that has recently rocked Karachi, the political parties need to immediately purge their ranks of armed elements and restore a semblance of peace in the city. Otherwise we can expect to see similar chaos wreaked by militant outfits to destabilise Karachi.
The curious case of Hafiz Saeed
April 6th, 2012
When a bounty is placed on a person, especially by the world’s sole superpower, the normal reaction is to hunker down and stay quiet for a while. Jamaatud Dawa (JuD) leader Hafiz Saeed has done anything but that. When the US announced that it would give $10 million for any information that can be used to bring Saeed to trial, the head of the JuD decided to give a press conference in Rawalpindi, which aired on several news channels, among other things, he said that he was in Lahore if anybody needed to get in touch with him. Clearly, America has mishandled the situation because later in the day on April 4, it had to issue a statement saying that the bounty was not for the man’s whereabouts but for information that would lead to his conviction. Already seen by many people as a symbol of defiance against India and the West, the bounty comes as a boon for his image of a leader of the resistance against the Americans. The irony is that in announcing the bounty on Hafiz Saeed, the US has ended up adding to his fame, especially among his loyal constituency.
The fact is that the Pakistan government, and the international community as a whole, has been trying to nab the JuD chief for some time, but without getting any of the charges against him to stick. Twice, the government placed him under house arrest only for the courts to release him due to lack of evidence. The UN has also declared the Lashkar-e-Taiba a terrorist organisation but that has had little effect in Pakistan, where the group has been able to maintain plausible deniability simply by changing its name.
That said, the bounty does, however, increase pressure on Pakistan to deal decisively with the JuD chief. Presumably, the only way forward would be for the government to make a case against Mr Saeed that holds up to judicial scrutiny. After all, when the JuD chief taunts the US government to contact him in Lahore — since he is a free man in Pakistan — he is also thumbing his nose at the country’s civilian government which has tried and failed in arresting him for alleged involvement in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.
Laptops for free
April 6th, 2012
On one level, the report about students in Punjab selling the laptops they were given for free by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif is good news since it shows that the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well among the youth of Pakistan. But it also reveals how totally flawed this laptop scheme was to begin with. According to a report, two billion rupees from the higher education budget has been diverted to this scheme which has now cost the taxpayer a total of four billion rupees. The first problem with the plan was that it did not target which students to hand out the laptops to and nor was income level taken into account. The result was that pricey colleges were now receiving a gift — thanks to taxpayers’ money — that they could already afford. It should come as no surprise, then, that some enterprising recipients are taking advantage of this largesse to make a bit of spare cash.
From the beginning it seemed as though the laptop scheme was more of a publicity stunt for the PML-N in the run-up to the elections. It did nothing to take into account the needs of the students. In a province where there are power outages for more than half-the-day, where a lot of students lack basic literacy skills and where there exists a shortage of qualified instructors, gifting students a laptop was not going to solve their need for a sound education. The chief minister would have been far wiser to spend these funds on improving facilities at schools and training more teachers.
Gifting laptops to students is like providing them with a high-speed sports car before they have learned how to drive. The point is not that they can’t find any use for the laptops; simply that there are more crucial tools they need to add to their educational arsenal first. The failure of this scheme provides insight into how government funded plans need to be well thought out and should be implemented keeping in mind the long-term interest of all those concerned instead of short-term glorification.