The NewAge Islam site is printing an article by Najam Sethi that strikes very hard at the mindset that has been cultivated by the elite and the military in Pakistan. I have appreciated some of Sethi's writing in the past and became even more admiring of him after he was imprisoned by Pakistan for giving the same lecture in Delhi that he had just given in Karachi [!]. He is not alone in being a fearless Pakistani journalist. There are several and I am so thankful for them. This, in any case is worth our notice, and I hope he and NewAge Islam will not mind that I reproduce the article here; it's worth paying attention to, and encouraging in any way we can. RLC
[Click on the title for a link to the original source.]
Islam,Terrorism and Jihad
23 Oct 2009, NewAgeIslam.Com
THE ENEMY IS NOW WITHIN PAKISTAN
The stock market...is back in the bunker, cowering at the misplaced passions aroused by mindless TV anchors and poison pushing columnists fulminating against America even as the enemy within has killed over 170 Pakistanis in the last 10 days and lunged at the very heart of the military establishment in Rawalpindi. Ironically, in the latest Taliban attack on a women’s hostel at the Islamic University in Islamabad — a throwback to the bombing of over 400 girls’ schools in Swat last year — the misguided students vented their anger at the university administration and federal government instead of those who perpetrated the slaughter of innocents.
THERE IS GREATER irony in deconstructing the enemy within. Why doesn’t the Pakistani media highlight the fact that the Taliban, Lashkars and Jihadi organisations that bedevil Pakistan’s very existence as a nation- state ... were created by military dictators and “security organisations” that conjured up “enemies without” to brainwash generations of Pakistanis into giving them legitimacy and longevity? Why don’t the students of the Islamic University who protested the suicide attack by pumping clenched fists in the air against the government instead of the Taliban care to remember that their university, to which the leaders of various jihadi groups still owe allegiance, was a hotbed of radical “ Islamist” thought in the 1980s and 1990s and nurtured leaders like Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian scholar exported from Saudi Arabia who headed the Rabita al Alam al Islami and set up the first Al- Qaeda office in Peshawar? The double irony in this case is that the Taliban group which murdered many Khassadars or local police levies in Khurram Agency during Ramzan last year and took responsibility for the suicide attack was called the Abdullah Azzam Brigade.
BUT THE ENEMY WITHIN Pakistan is not just the Al- Qaeda- Taliban network. It is a national mindset in the ruling elites that refuses to see and fight the enemy within. This is a mindset that harbours conspiracy theories of an “external hand” in every disaster that befalls Pakistan; it is a mindset that hankers for an imagined rather than real “Islamic” past; it is a mindset that is constantly trying to anchor Pakistan’s ideological moorings in the autocratic Islamic Middle East rather than democratic secular South Asia -- Najam Sethi
URL of this Page: http://www.newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1971
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THE ENEMY IS NOW WITHIN PAKISTAN
By Najam Sethi
23 October, 2009
PAKISTAN is in a state of siege. But the veritable enemy is not India or Russia or Iran or America.
The enemy is within Pakistan. It is attacking our policemen and our soldiers.
It is attacking our politicians and our religious leaders. Now it is on the warpath against our students. Nothing is sacred. Who will be next? Where and when will this state of siege end? India’s prime minister has warned that “the regional situation has worsened” and another Mumbai- like attack by state and non- state actors on India is imminent.
He is pointing to a “Pakistani hand” behind the attack by the Haqqani faction of the Taliban on the Indian embassy in Kabul recently. When Mumbai was attacked last November, India seriously thought of military retaliation against allegedly complicit targets and groups in Pakistan.
But it wisely stayed its hand. Any military conflict with Pakistan could mushroom into a nuclear holocaust. However, in the event of another such attack, the pressure on India this time would be greater. If it reacts militarily across the border with Pakistan, the consequences would be unimaginably horrendous for the region. This is exactly the state of anarchy and bloodshed which the enemy within Pakistan would like to achieve because it is in such an atmosphere that it flourishes and grows.
I RAN’S president has warned of non- state actors in Pakistan’s Balochistan province who are suicide- bombing the Revolutionary Guards in Iran’s Siestan- Baloch province. Two such attacks were carried out last week, resulting in the death of 47 Iranian security persons. The chief of the Revolutionary Guards is demanding permission from Teheran to cross the Pakistan border in hot pursuit of the terrorists. Reports say that an organisation named Jundallah has tied up with the Al- Qaeda- Taliban network to destabilise Pakistan’s border with Iran just as the same network has joined hands with various groups in Punjab to foment trouble with India.
Meanwhile, the Americans are digging themselves in and around the main towns of Afghanistan and thinning their pickets on the border with Pakistan. This is CENTCOM General Stanley McChrystal’s new strategy of relocating and protecting his boots- on- the- ground until the Obama administration approves his request for 40,000 more troops. He is using drones to home into high- value targets in Pakistan’s Waziristan belt, and threatening to extend their area of operation into Balochistan while urging a greater operational role for the Pakistani army in Waziristan where Al- Qaeda and the Taliban are holed out. The implied threat is that if the Pakistani military is found wanting, then the CIA and CENTCOM may be compelled to put boots- on ground in hot pursuit of the marauding Taliban in Waziristan.
If Pakistan’s border with Iran, Afghanistan and India should heat up singly or, worse, together, and compel the Pakistan army to dilute attention on the Al- Qaeda- Taliban front, the siege within the country would definitely intensify. Already, Rehman Malik, the interior minister, says the nation is “at war”. As during war time, all schools and colleges are closed. The stock market, which had raised its head cautiously when the Kerry- Lugar Bill’s US$ 7.5 billion (Rs 62,250 crore) aid was announced, is back in the bunker, cowering at the misplaced passions aroused by mindless TV anchors and poison pushing columnists fulminating against
America even as the enemy within has killed over 170 Pakistanis in the last 10 days and lunged at the very heart of the military establishment in Rawalpindi.
Ironically, in the latest Taliban attack on a women’s hostel at the Islamic University in Islamabad — a throwback to the bombing of over 400 girls’ schools in Swat last year — the misguided students vented their anger at the university administration and federal government instead of those who perpetrated the slaughter of innocents.
THERE is greater irony in deconstructing the enemy within. Why doesn’t the Pakistani media highlight the fact that the Taliban, Lashkars and Jihadi organisations that bedevil Pakistan’s very existence as a nation- state [even General (retd) Pervez Musharraf is talking of an existential crisis in Pakistan today created by the Al- Qaeda- Taliban network] were created by military dictators and “security organisations” that conjured up “enemies without” to brainwash generations of Pakistanis into giving them legitimacy and longevity? Why don’t the students of the Islamic University who protested the suicide attack by pumping clenched fists in the air against the government instead of the Taliban care to remember that their university, to which the leaders of various jihadi groups still owe allegiance, was a hotbed of radical “ Islamist” thought in the 1980s and 1990s and nurtured leaders like Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian scholar exported from Saudi Arabia who headed the Rabita al Alam al Islami and set up the first Al- Qaeda office in Peshawar? The double irony in this case is that the Taliban group which murdered many Khassadars or local police levies in Khurram Agency during Ramzan last year and took responsibility for the suicide attack was called the Abdullah Azzam Brigade.
But the enemy within Pakistan is not just the Al- Qaeda- Taliban network. It is a national mindset in the ruling elites that refuses to see and fight the enemy within. This is a mindset that harbours conspiracy theories of an “external hand” in every disaster that befalls Pakistan; it is a mindset that hankers for an imagined rather than real “Islamic” past; it is a mindset that is constantly trying to anchor Pakistan’s ideological moorings in the autocratic Islamic Middle East rather than democratic secular South Asia.
It is a “national” mindset that is based on “tribal” and pre- Islamic notions of honour and justice; it is a campus mindset that is riven with inferiority complexes and insecurities that find expression in false bravado and hollow claims of self- reliance. This mindset is reflected in a shallow national culture of angry exclusivism rather than natural assimilation and integration in the global economy.
Pakistan’s national security apparatus might one day succeed in weeding out the Al- Qaeda- Taliban network. But until Pakistanis can purge their mindset of the ideological demons that reside therein, they shall not be able to lift the siege within.
Source: Mail Today, New Delhi
The writer is editor The Friday Times and The Daily Times (Lahore)
URL of this Page: http://www.newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=19671
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