Dr Ijaz Ahsan

Coming on the heels of the suicidal assassination of the Army’s surgeon general, the latest suicide bombing of the Navy War College at Lahore provides proof, if such were needed, that the main target of the terrorists are Pakistan armed forces. Two of the current theories accuse the agencies and the victims of army actions in NWFP and Balochistan respectively. The agencies seem unlikely to be responsible; how can they do this? However, the protagonists of this theory say: agencies that can keep hundreds of Pak citizens ‘disappeared’ for years can surely do anything at all.

The other natural suspects are people of NWFP and Balochistan affected by the military action over there. After all, 80 students were killed in the Bajaur madrassah missile strike, and hundreds of girls in the Jamia Hafsa; and most of them were from NWFP. More have been dying since then. Our religious affairs minister at the time of the Jamia Hafsa episode, Ijazul Haq, said during a TV programme the other day, that neither his advice nor that of the president of the ruling PML-Q, Ch Shujaat Hussain, was heeded by the highest in the land. Incidentally, the compere did not ask ljazul Haq the obvious question: why he did not the resign? As far as Balochistan is concerned, Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed by a laser-guided missile. Actually, Bugti could have been deprived of contact with his followers by surrounding him with the army, as the Israelis did with the leader of their enemy nation, Yasser Arafat.

America’s so-called ‘War On Terror’ has made a mince-meat of us, and I do not mean it as a figure of speech; every day the bodies of our citizens are being torn to shreds. We have already lost as many as half the number of armymen as US soldiers that have died in Iraq. If the number of our civilians is added to the list, we may have lost more Pakistanis then the Americans that have died in Iraq. Remember, dear reader, Iraq is the Americans’ own war; this one, at least to start with, was not our war. However, we fought so loyally and hard, shoulder to shoulder with the Americans and against our own people, that now it has become our war, in fact our civil war. When fifty people are killed inside the country every day, it is a civil war by whatever name called.

Every person dying in Pakistan is a Pakistani; the Americans are simply supervising the slaughter taking place in our land on either side. The Taliban may be among the most backward people on God’s earth, but they had no blood feud with us; our role in the American ‘war on terror’ has created one. One does not know how long we will have to watch our rulers proceed on this self-destructive path. The intention may be good, to get rid of ‘terrorism’, but then the way to hell is paved with good intentions.

Pakistan joined this war on America’s side because our ruler was terrified of the Americans taking us back to the ‘Stone Age’. One inevitably compares Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, who has fought for decades under the heels of a superpower but was not deterred and triumphed, with our ruler who capitulated to the same superpower after one phone call. If a sovereign parliament had been in existence on September 11, 2001, matters would have been different; the prime minister would not have collapsed like jelly. One feels General Musharraf’s methods have been tried long enough. He ought now to retire and let someone try perhaps a different approach to the matter. In different sports they say, “Never change a winning game, but if you are losing, try a change.” Surely here a change of guard is needed.

The supply of suicide bombers is, to all appearances, endless. It therefore does not seem that these bombings are likely to end any time soon. The Pathans’ most important cultural tradition is revenge, even for slight insults, what to say of the massacre of their people. They are taking revenge, and will continue to do so as long as our effort is to solve the matter by military might alone. If the country is to be pulled out of the morass, someone else at the helm of affairs should be tried; perhaps he could make a difference.