The fight against extremism

[arsa]

Najmuddin A Shaikh

Terror is a common enemy, we say. Extremism is eating away at the vitals of our society, we say. Let our actions reflect these beliefs lest we encourage the perception that we pay only lip service to our battle against extremism and dishonour the brave Pakistani soldiers and civilians who have been martyred in the Taliban onslaught

President Asif Zardari’s recent visit to Afghanistan and the understandings that are said to have emerged suggest that the new government is now intent on cooperating fully with Afghan and Coalition forces.

Earlier in the week, the Tripartite Commission had met in Kabul and had reviewed, one assumes, the working of the intelligence sharing centre set up near Khyber Agency and to finalise plans for the setting up of further such centres. There have been other reports suggesting that joint operations along the Pak-Afghan border are being conducted effectively and that the number of casualties being suffered by coalition forces at the hands of infiltrators from across the Pak-Afghan border have shown a considerable decline.

All this gives credence to Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s assertion that “Afghanistan and Pakistan had overcome several hurdles and suspicions to forge a new relationship that would see cooperation on fighting terrorism and more.”

And yet question marks remain. In the interview that General Pasha, the new DG ISI, gave to Der Spiegel and which has attracted a lot of attention in the Pakistani press, there was one reference to which not enough attention was paid, and yet it is this which will attract attention in Afghanistan and in the Coalition countries.

Asked about the reported presence of the Taliban in Quetta, he reportedly said that “Shouldn’t they be allowed to think and say what they please? They believe that jihad is their obligation. Isn’t that freedom of opinion?”

I personally believe that Gen Pasha was probably referring to Pakistani religious extremists who, of course, have the right to hold their own views on what their religious duty is and even their distorted interpretation of what constitutes jihad. The reporter, however, saw this as evidence of the ISI playing a double game, perhaps because she put it together with a 5-week-old report in the same magazine about the Shaldara Koran School in Quetta’s Pushtunabad suburb. This school, according to the reporter, was said to be the centre of the Taliban movement. In an interview, the head of this school, Noor Mohammad of the JUI, told Der Spiegel, apparently when asked about his students going into Afghanistan, that “they have a duty to fight for Islam and to die if necessary.”

It was my hope that the new civilian government and the new military leadership have both learnt from the sorry experience of the twenty years that have passed since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and our continued unfortunate involvement in that country. The use of the Taliban card as a potential means of exercising influence in Afghanistan after the departure of foreign forces is of doubtful value even if we believe that Pakistan has the right to exercise this sort of influence in Afghanistan.

Firstly, this is because it is now increasingly evident that the Americans have no intention of leaving Afghanistan even if the NATO coalition falls apart. The facilities they are building in Kandahar and at Bagram at a huge cost bears testimony to this as does the additional 20,000 to 30,000 troops that they will be transferring to Afghanistan this year. Their exit strategy consists of building a 134,000 strong Afghan National Army largely officered and perhaps manned by Tajiks. They are preparing to spend about 20 billion dollars over the next five years to build this army and to give it modern weaponry and facilities.

A recent Pentagon invitation for bids talks of creating several bases for 600-man strong Afghan army units with 25 embedded American instructors at a cost of $10 million each. They will then, it can be assumed, also provide the $2-5 billion a year that will be needed to fund this army since Afghan resources would not suffice to meet even one quarter of this recurring cost even if half the government’s revenues was earmarked for defence.

Second, there seemed to be a realisation that it was no longer possible to say that there was no cross-fertilisation between the “good Taliban” who operated only in Afghanistan and the “bad Taliban” who, through a reign of terror, had now taken over Swat and large swathes of the tribal areas, burnt schools and government buildings and slaughtered Pakistanis civilians and military alike. It is almost inevitable that only half or less of the graduates from Noor Mohammad’s school go into Afghanistan while the rest remain in Pakistan to create the havoc that they believe is a necessary prelude to the acceptance by an intimidated population of their brand of Islam. This is how we have come to our present sorry pass.

Most of Afghanistan’s problems are attributable to factors other than the Taliban insurgency. We must nevertheless cooperate with Afghanistan to quell the Taliban insurgency because this helps us to cope with our own insurgency problem which arose largely because of Afghanistan. As part of such cooperation, we must treat all insurgents — Afghan, other foreigners and Pakistanis alike — as enemies of both states. We must seek reconciliation with our own insurgents but only when they show themselves to be reconcilable.

This situation in Afghanistan and along the Pak-Afghan border has been thirty years in the making. It is compounded by the growth of extremism fostered by such actions as Israel, with American support, is taking in Gaza and in Palestine as a whole. It will take a generation or more to change the mindset and to restore in some measure the fabric of the conservative but tolerant and peaceful society that had existed previously.

There will not only continue to be an American and western interest in Afghanistan but equally so in Pakistan since this is now seen as one combined problem. The greater the advance we make in combating extremism, the lesser the chance of other “regional” countries being drawn into the search for stability in the region but the American interest is assured at least for the next decade.

That is why US Vice-President-elect Joseph Biden, in his capacity as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed along with Republican Richard Lugar an economic aid package worth $1.5 billion annually for ten years in economic aid for Pakistan. In his visit to Pakistan, he will be carrying assurances that formal passage of this bill will be one of the priorities of the Obama administration. There is thus going to be no loss of American interest even though it is likely that military assistance will be more closely audited and weaponry provided will only be such as can be used for counter-insurgency operations.

And this brings me to our eastern border and the current tension engendered by the terrorist attack in Mumbai. The enemy, Gen Pasha said in the interview quoted above, is not India but terror. I have no doubt that Gen Pasha, who takes his instructions from the president, was reflecting the government’s policy in labelling terror and not India as the enemy. In our reaction to the information that the Indians provided us somewhat belatedly, we have been, to say the least, somewhat confused and more importantly divided.

On the one hand we said that no record of Kasab existed in the NADRA data bank. On the other we have not only foreign correspondents — notably the Observer correspondent who traced the parents of Kasab in Faridkot — but local reporters also saying that Kasab did in fact belong to Faridkot.

On the one hand, a Pakistani official briefs Wall Street Journal and the New York Times correspondents on the results of the interrogation of two Lashkar-e Tayba detainees — Zarrar and Lakhvi — saying that they acknowledged being involved and that “These guys showed no remorse. They were bragging. They didn’t need to be pushed, tortured or waterboarded”. The official was also quoted as saying that the confessions made no mention of any involvement by the Pakistani government and that “They talk about people acting on their own.”

On the other hand, these reports are denied by government spokespersons.

The latest and perhaps most significant evidence of divisions rather than mere failures of coordination was the unfortunate episode of the national security adviser and his summary dismissal by the prime minister. The NSA’s well intentioned but ill advised interview to an Indian TV channel acknowledging Kasab’s Pakistani nationality was preceded, he says, by an official statement to that effect by the Foreign Office spokesman and perhaps by text messages from the information minister to various media representatives. This was followed, one understands, by another Foreign Office statement which said that it was premature to talk of the nationality of Kasab having been definitively ascertained.

What is the end product? People speak of this showing that there is no coordination in the government. Certainly. This shows the divisions within the government. Certainly. But much more destructively, it suggests that for some in power, the admission that a Pakistani national or a Pakistan-based group may have been involved in the Mumbai carnage means that the state of Pakistan or the government of Pakistan is involved — that Kasab and the Government are synonymous or that the Jama’at-ud Dawa and the Government are synonymous.

Why should this be so? The Saudi nationality of the 9/11 attackers did not mean that the Saudi government was involved. The large number of Saudis, Egyptians, and Indians who appear on the list of the UN sanctions committee has not meant the governments of these countries are involved.

Terror is a common enemy, we say. Extremism is eating away at the vitals of our society, we say. Let our actions reflect these beliefs lest we encourage the perception that we pay only lip service to our battle against extremism and dishonour the brave Pakistani soldiers and civilians who have been martyred in the Taliban onslaught.

The writer is a former foreign secretary

[Saqib Shah]

what you learn from this issue
and whats your recommandations?........

[arsa]

what i learn when v look like slaves of US ordars n we just obey the orders of USA bt this artical n these types of many discussions clear that our govt is nt take any bold decission with out the approval of usa their (so-called aqa's). i think (may b u n many ppl r nt agree wd me) that the clash b/w pak-afghan is the results of US attacks in pakistani boarders