Pakistan: Monster turns on Frankenstein

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

29 May 2009, NewAgeIslam.Com

Pakistan: Monster turns on Frankenstein

The butchers call again   Editorial in Dawn, Karachi: 28 May, At about 10:25 am on Wednesday the butchers called again to Lahore (and next day Peshawar). They did their work well. At the time of writing there are 19 confirmed dead (35 according to unverified reports) and over 200 confirmed injured. (11 dead in Peshawar, over 90 injured.) Perhaps as many as a dozen policemen are dead and a rescue services building destroyed, with many other buildings within the blast radius having had their windows blown in and ceilings brought down, employees injured…. What we should be doing however is listening very carefully to the tone and nature of the condemnation of the attack by the various political parties. We need to be hearing - loud, clear and consistent - repugnance at the loss of innocent life, with no equivocation. No mealy-mouthed failure to point the finger at those most likely to be responsible. If we don't hear it – the loud clear and consistent condemnation – then we may be reasonable in making the assumption that those who fail to raise their voices against it are the tacit supporters of the butchers who visit our towns and cities. Indian analyst B. Raman, a former R&AW official: The increasing resort to commando-style attacks by different groups in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan gives rise to the following questions: Are they merely instances of copy-cat terrorism or is there a common training centre for different organizations? If so, who runs this centre? Is there a common command and control coordinating these attacks? It would be useful for the investigating agencies of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to exchange notes on their respective investigations and to pick each other's brains. One should not fight shy of agreeing to a common brainstorming on the investigations. Pakistani analyst Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of NWFP:  In my view both FATA and PATA should be merged into NWFP – a better opportunity will not come our way. This cloud may have a silver lining!   URL of this page: http://www.newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1432   ---------------------------------------     The butchers call again Thursday, May 28, 2009   At about 10:25 am on Wednesday the butchers called again to Lahore. They did their work well. At the time of writing there are 19 confirmed dead (35 according to unverified reports) and over 200 confirmed injured. Perhaps as many as a dozen policemen are dead and a rescue services building destroyed, with many other buildings within the blast radius having had their windows blown in and ceilings brought down, employees injured. Ganga Ram Hospital has been damaged – the roof of the operating theatre reportedly collapsed. Two alleged suspects are in custody, one of them said to have been caught in the act of disposing of his weapons. Rescue workers are still uncertain as to what the final toll will be.   We have all seen the picture before, and our media are no strangers to reporting the violence and its aftermath. There will be the usual accusations of 'failure of intelligence' or 'security lapses' but the reality is that this is an extremely difficult type of attack to countervail, even if you have good security and unsurpassed intelligence. Stopping the detonation of the bomb was virtually impossible and we should not waste our breath in speculating about which intelligence service did or did not pick up that this terrorist unit was in the city and ready to act.   What we should be doing however is listening very carefully to the tone and nature of the condemnation of the attack by the various political parties. We need to be hearing - loud, clear and consistent - repugnance at the loss of innocent life, with no equivocation and havering. No mealy-mouthed failure to point the finger at those most likely to be responsible. If we don't hear it – the loud clear and consistent condemnation – then we may be reasonable in making the assumption that those who fail to raise their voices against it are the tacit supporters of the butchers who visit our towns and cities. If they fail to speak out then let that be their own condemnation. We fight today for our own survival, for the survival of our nation. The fight is all the harder for having to carry the burden of those who are the apologists for the butchers – and the butchers take heart from their continued support. http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=179882 --------------------------------------   Monster turns on Frankenstein   B Raman   Wednesday's daring attack by Taliban bombers on the ISI's headquarters in Lahore reveals a pattern to jihadi strikes. Increasingly they are resorting to commando-style attacks. Who are the plotters?   At least 23 persons —many of them Lahore Police officers — are reported to have been killed and over 200 injured in a swarm attack by unidentified terrorists in a busy area on the Mall Road of Lahore. A number of important Government buildings housing the offices of the Lahore Police, the Lahore office of the Inter-Services Intelligence and the Lahore High Court are located around the area where a car suspected to be carrying explosives exploded when it was sought to be stopped by the police. There have been reports of exchange of fire between the security personnel posted in the area and an unidentified number of terrorists before the car exploded. There are no reports of any continuing exchange of fire after the explosion.   A building in which the emergency control room of the police, with a staff of 50, was located bore the brunt of the explosion and was totally destroyed. Other buildings in the area too suffered damages. No details are available regarding the damages, if any, sustained by the building housing the ISI office and whether there were any casualties. Sections of the Pakistani media have reported that Professor Hafeez Mohammad Sayeed, the Amir of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political arm of the Lashkar-e-Tayebba, who is under house arrest, was to appear in the court today in connection with the hearing on a petition in which he has challenged his house arrest.   A swarm attack is a commando-style attack involving multiple targets or multiple modus operandi — that is a mix of the use of hand-held weapons and explosives. Since the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks, which were itself a major swarm attack, there have been six more — three in Kabul, Kandahar and Khost in Afghanistan and three in Lahore including the latest one. The two earlier swarm attacks in Lahore were directed at a Sri Lankan cricket team (March 3) and a police training school (March 30). There were no multiple targets in the earlier two attacks in Lahore.   The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan headed by Baitullah Mehsud had claimed responsibility for the attack on the police training school. Pakistani authorities had suspected that the TTP was also responsible for the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team. They seem to suspect the hand of the TTP in the latest attack also.   Different cities of Pakistan - including Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Sargoda — have seen a never-ending succession of suicide and non-suicide attacks involving the use of car bombers and suicide bombers since the commando raid in the Lal Masjid of Islamabad in July 2007. During 2007 and 2008, the attacks were uni-targeted and mainly involved the use of explosives. They were not commando style attacks. They were often carried out by a single individual or by two persons. Commando-style attacks involving a group of persons is a phenomenon seen in India since 2001. One saw it in the Parliament attack in New Delhi in December 2001 then in the attack on the security guards outside the US Consulate in Kolkata in January 2002, in the attack on a temple in Ahmedabad in September 2002, and in the attack on a training centre of the Centre Reserve Police Force at Rampur in Uttar Pradesh on January 1, 2008. The originality of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks was that the attackers came via sea whereas those involved in the earlier attacks came by land.   Similar commando-style attacks had not been seen in Pakistan before 2009. The LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammad were the prime suspects in the commando style attacks in Indian territory mentioned above. The Pakistani and Afghan authorities seem to suspect the hand of the Taliban in the attacks in their territory.   The increasing resort to commando-style attacks by different groups in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan gives rise to the following questions: Are they merely instances of copy-cat terrorism or is there a common training centre for different organizations? If so, who runs this centre? Is there a common command and control coordinating these attacks?   It would be useful for the investigating agencies of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to exchange notes on their respective investigations and to pick each other's brains. One should not fight shy of agreeing to a common brainstorming on the investigations.   -- The writer is director of Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. Source: http://www.dailypioneer.com/179048/Monster-turns-on-Frankenstein.html -----------------------   Civilians suffer most as Taliban wages jihad   In Pakistan, it is the people who are paying the price for radical Islamism, writes Kathy Gannon   Moabullah dragged the dead in his wheelbarrow for burial behind a girl's school. There were about 30 bodies, he says, many blown apart in fighting between the Pakistan Army and Taliban militants in the Swat Valley.   As Pakistan fights to take back the valley and other parts of the northwest, residents fleeing the fighting are pouring into hospitals and refugee camps. Many, like Moabullah, are telling their stories to anyone who will listen.   Taken together, their accounts — along with those of aid workers and hospital staff — suggest significant civilian casualties, mostly as a result of aerial raids by an army more equipped for conventional war with India than guerrilla warfare with the Taliban. The AP conducted more than 150 interviews in refugee camps from Mardan to Swabi, at hospitals and basic health units as well as into the battle zone in Buner to seek a picture of the plight of civilians amid the combat.   No independent tallies of the dead have been conducted. Aid groups like the international Red Cross and US-based Human Rights Watch say such a task is impossible until they are able to enter most parts of the roughly 4,000-square-mile (10,360 sq km) area of fighting — about four times the size of Hawaii. But the very perception among villagers of the causes of widespread killings, injuries and damage to homes could undermine popular support needed for the US-backed Pakistan Army campaign and possibly generate sympathy for the insurgency.   "Civilian casualties are much higher than those of either the Army or the Taliban," said Ali Bakt, speaking at a hospital in the northwestern capital of Peshawar after fleeing the Taliban mountain stronghold of Peochar. He said both sides were firing mortar shells — an inaccurate weapon that often hits targets other than the intended one.   Yusuf, a 21-year-old man who fled the fighting in Buner, said he supported the military operation but was fed up with the civilian casualties.   "It's good to take action against the Taliban, but there is a problem for civilians," said Yusuf, who like many in the Pakistani frontier region offers only one name. He recalled the killings of 10 people whose bodies could not be recovered for three days because of the fighting.   The Army is not releasing tolls of civilian casualties, but insists they are minimal and that it is doing everything possible to avoid causing them.   "In our judgement there are very few casualties," military spokesman Gen Athar Abbas said, emphasising the main targets are militant training camps and their mountain hide-outs. "But even if we are fighting in a populated area, we are using precision strikes."   At a Government-run hospital in the town of Mardan just south of the Swat Valley, Moabullah gave his account of the carnage. "I myself put the bodies in the wheelbarrow and took them to a graveyard behind a girls' school," Moabullah said as he held the hand of his dehydrated 9-year-old son, Abu Bakr, who was lying in a rancid-smelling bed.   Intravenous drips from makeshift poles were nourishing the thin boy and, in the next bed, an elderly gentleman who appeared to be malnourished and barely breathing.   The old man's nephew, Nawab Ali, said they fled their homes in the Swat Valley's main city of Mingora on May 22, defying an Army-imposed curfew. They had run out of food, and water supplies were low.   "People were coming on foot. We had just reached near the village of Abwa when the Army fired on us. Six people were killed and seven others hurt. I saw this myself," Ali said. "The Army was trying to hit the Taliban but hit civilians trying to flee instead."   Four women were killed including the mother of a four-month-old baby, whose grandfather carried him to safety, according to Ali. Many casualties occurred after residents defied the curfew to flee their homes, often out of desperation because of little food, water or medical aid. Most villagers blamed the casualties on Government aerial assaults and missile attacks. They said they were either caught in the crossfire or targeted for defying the curfew.   But villagers also recounted, particularly in Mingora, the Taliban refusing to allow people to leave because the militants wanted to use the civilians as human shields, according to Ali Dayan Hasan, Human Rights Watch's Pakistan representative.   -- AP ---------     The implication of operations in NWFP and FATA Khalid Aziz Thursday, May 28, 2009   The conduct of multiple military operations by the Pakistani forces in NWFP and Fata coincides with the planned surge of US troops in southern Afghanistan. The induction of fresh US forces on Pakistan's Baluchistan border generates its own dynamics. The surge will push the Pashtun living in the Baloch border areas inwards towards Quetta and onwards to Karachi where their extended families already live. The start of operations in Waziristan and the increasing number of skirmishes in Orakzai, Mohmand and Bajour gives a picture, whether by coincidence or design, which clearly shows how the Pashtun both in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been placed in the tweeze of death and destruction.   In Karachi the MQM has shown its ethnic leaning by doing it best to stop the movement of Pashtuns to that city; Karachi incidentally is the largest Pashtun metropolis in Pakistan. In Punjab the police are preventing the Pashtun IDPs from entering their areas although publicly the government is saying the opposite now. One responsible officer from Punjab commented that they had made a mistake by permitting the Afghan refugees in the 1980s and 1990s free entry to their province. The Pashtun is thus unwelcome in his own land. These restrictions imposed on them are against the law and the Constitution. Is it then the case that the Pashtun IDPs are not Pakistanis?   There are already more than 2.5 million Pashtun homeless. Their forced migration from Swat, Dir or Waziristan makes this displacement bigger than that of Darfur or of the Rwandans a few years ago. Many of the Pashtun that I have spoken with are fearful about their future. It is worth noting that this violence against the Pashtuns extends from eastern and southern Afghanistan to northwestern Pakistan and it has now clearly become ethnic – or is certainly being perceived that way.   If someone wants an image to visualize what is befalling the Pashtun today the region truly reflects a scene from Vin Diesel's recent science fiction movie Babylon AD. People are moving from place to place aimlessly and directionless. They have lost their homes, families, children and livelihoods. They are people without identity and if they also lose hope and are unable to return soon then I am afraid the promise of Pakistan in their minds will be broken. It is a great irony of history that those who are sons of the soil in Pakistan have become homeless, yet those who were homeless previously are anchored in Pakistani cities and are its masters - what a remarkable turn of events!   Sooner than later the ethnic nature of operations in Af-Pak and the issue of simultaneous displacement of Pashtuns in such large numbers, the less-than-fraternal attitude of individuals from other provinces of Pakistan coupled with the matter of so many ruined lives will aggregate into an ugly conundrum which will take many unpalatable directions in the not-too-distant future. Unfortunately, the leadership of the ANP in NWFP has lapsed into political oblivion. It's only visible face is its brave and yeoman information minister, Mian Iftikhar. Secondly owning to their failure in Swat the secular ANP will suffer in any future election because available signs clearly indicate that new dynamics are in the making and they will usher their own political direction which may not be within the framework of the present political discourse of growth and development. People want security and development has become irrelevant in the face of basic issues of survival and identity. The crying need is for Pakistan to quickly rehabilitate the displaced persons or forego the right to lead the Pashtun. They could well then seek their own destiny.   Some intellectuals feel that the timing of the current operation was badly planned since the crops in Swat were ready to be harvested. They ask: "Couldn't the operation have been delayed for a few more weeks?" A few on the other hand say that the timing of the operation was planned to coincide with the president's US visit! Coming from this perspective it is claimed that Pashtun blood was spilt as a sacrifice for other strategic gains.   It may be noted that in 2005 there was no insurgent movement of the type witnessed in Swat and Buner and elsewhere. It all happened after the occurrence of the October 2005 Earthquake in Balakot and Azad Kashmir. The camps where jihadis used to receive training for fighting against Indian forces in Kashmir had to be sequestered from the prying eyes of US and NATO troops who were using helicopters for delivery of relief to NWFP and Azad Kashmir and were clearly aware of the presence of such camps.   Many of these camps were shifted and relocated in Swat and the Dir mountains. The location policy showed colossal ineptitude. A small section of the population in this region already stood radicalized by the TNSM movement of the 1990s. The creation of a lashkar by Sufi Mohammad, which he led into Afghanistan to support the Taliban against the US led invasion in December 2001, further radicalized those residents of Malakand who had accompanied him. The arrival of more radicals due to the shifting of the camps and their evangelical programming of the local population created the monsters that the military is now trying to get rid of.   Furthermore the use of the sledgehammer of the artillery and the air force which causes collateral damage is like operating against a shadow and such tactics cannot succeed. A counter-insurgency war cannot be fought from a distance. For success the "enemy" has to be hunted at close quarters. This calls for the use of special forces and the police. Draining the swamp cannot eliminate the fish if other rivulets of escape are available.   The present operation cannot be considered successful until the leaders of the Taliban who have challenged the writ of the state are brought to justice. If this doesn't occur rest assured that the IDPs are not returning and it will be futile to return the area to civil administration because the militants will surely return again and the civil administration will be made a scapegoat again.   Some other important questions are why arrangements were not made for the reception and feeding of IDPs before the operations began. The argument that secrecy has to be maintained is, to say the least, egregious. Didn't President Zardari "announce" before hand that Pakistan would launch operations in Waziristan? He did and still we did not make any arrangements for caring for those who were leaving after the announcement.   Agreed that every nation passes through rough patches during its history but there are clear indicators which warn the leaders and people to correct their direction. We in Pakistan unfortunately ignore such indicators and live in a make believe world. We regularly take up futile positions which can only result in injuring ourselves We spend hours of air time every evening fulminating against the US as if that will bring peace to Pakistan. Apparently the US is implementing its national security objective which is to ensure that 9/11 is never repeated. It will do everything to ensure that. By allowing the spirit of militancy to flourish in Pakistan we are prolonging the stay of the US in Afghanistan. Is that wise?   Finally let us not forget that both Fata and Pata come under the President's personal dispensation. Art 247 lays this down and in my mind is a time bomb inserted in that document to devour Pakistan! If you look at areas where insurgency flourishes today then strangely they coincide with the special areas defined under Article 247 of the Constitution. It is proposed that before the military operations end in FATA and PATA we should use the opportunity to amalgamate them fully under the normal law within the Pakistani state. In my view both Fata and Pata should be merged into NWFP – a better opportunity will not come our way. This cloud may have a silver lining! Source: http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=179889   Khalid Aziz is a former chief secretary of NWFP. He now heads the Regional Institute of Policy Research. Email: azizkhalid@gmail.com   URL of this page: http://www.newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1432