“We are not saying that it is sponsored by the Pakistan government,” India’s Deputy Home Minister Shakeel Ahmad told the BBC, adding that Pakistani soil was nevertheless being used for “anti-India” activities.
“The terrorists who have been killed in these encounters in Mumbai in the last few days were of Pakistani origin,” Ahmad said, as well as the lone gunman arrested after the stunning coordinated attacks in India’s financial capital.
It’s clear that Pakistan has a problem and by extension we do. The attacks in Mumbai are focusing world attention on Pakistan’s role in global jihad. Certainly no reasoned voices accuse the upper echelons of the Pakistani government of aiding or abetting the Mumbai terror attack, but Pakistan seems unable to control the forces of an evermore violent and extreme global Islamic Jihadi movement that is based on its soil. It is as if Pakistan is but a madrassa for global jihad.
It’s time to confront the bitter reality that Pakistan is a failed state and one with nuclear weapons and 168 million people. Its raison d’etre from the start was born from the whim and determination of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of the state, as a state for Muslims carved out of British India. Problem is that Jinnah failed to provide a compass for the nascent state. Jinnah was no Nehru. The country has drifted aimlessly suffering one brutal dictatorship after another. The brief democratic interludes weren’t any better as one corrupt clique or another ruled with the aim of self-richment. The people of Pakistan deserve better. And the world can no longer tolerate the noxious violence that poverty and ignorance is breeding in the villages of forgotten Pakistan.
“The grim truth is that Pakistan is becoming something alarmingly close to a failed state. And that could have disastrous consequences for the United States, NATO and Afghanistan’’s struggle to hold back its own Taliban insurgency.” — Sumit Ganguly, Director of Research at the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University on October 10, 2008
Here are a few articles on Pakistan’s role in global jihad and the failure of the Pakistani state to seriously address the problem over the past decade or more as well as the perspective of a Pakistani.
India Is Pointing In the Right Direction
By Claus Christian Malzahn in Der Spiegel.
Is Pakistan a Failed State?
The Pakistani government has long ago given up control of this region. The army and the ISI, which takes a lion’s share of the national budget, lead their own independent existence. Their links to the Taliban and to Islamic groups in Kashmir and India have grown.
Even if the government in Islamabad showed a will to crack down on these tribal areas, it’s doubtful the army and the ISI would follow orders. Even Pakistan’s former President Pervez Musharraf was unable to keep a lid on terrorism, and unlike his successor he had not just political but military power.
All in all, medium-term prospects for the subcontinent are rather gloomy. Pakistan recently had to be taken under the wing of the IMF. The state is as good as bankrupt. Its political leadership is either corrupt or — when it comes to the military-intelligence service complex — almost without influence.
And somewhere in Pakistan, nuclear weapons are stored. The Americans have always vouched that the weapons of mass destruction in the bunkers between Karachi and Lahore were secure — but that was before American helicopters were fired at in Pakastani airspace by, ostensibly, their closest allies in the War on Terror.
From a political point of view Pakistan is nearly a failed state. But no Western statesman will say that out loud, because openly admitting it will not make things any easier.
The next American president seems to understand the reality of power relations in Pakistan. During the campaign, Barack Obama’s rhetoric in this regard set him apart with surprising clarity from his opponent John McCain. Whereas the Republican put diplomatic negotiations with the regime in Islamabad up front and centre, Obama was open about bringing military intervention in the tribal areas into the discussion. Strengthening the US presence there seems, in any case, a firm part of Obama’s agenda. The planned American withdrawal from Iraq could — in a worst-case scenario — be followed by an invasion of Pakistan. This must not be something he wants, at least not in the fullest sense. Even Vietnam was never imagined as a long war.
Naturally Obama will talk with the government in Islamabad. But the fact that he has emphasized military strength shows that he is soberly, if pessimistically, assessing the political power relations between the army and the Pakastani government.
The coming weeks should demonstrate what the Pakastanis are in a position to undertake in the battle against terror. If they want to prevent the Americans from raising the stakes, they must act now. Of course the chances of purging the jihad zone with one, two, or three military actions — whether from Americans, Pakastanis, or some combination — are very slim. If a serious battle there is now envisaged, it will be very protracted.
Mumbai Terrorism: Pakistan in the Dock
By Saheed Ahmed in Ground Report.
At a time when the Pakistani foreign minister is visiting India with the hope to foster relations between nuclear-armed neighbors and inch-ahead on decades-old mistrust and misconceptions, recent terrorist acts in Mumbai are seen as yet another stumbling block in aching those goals. Initial reports suggest that 101 people were killed and few hundred injured while financial and entertainment hub of India, Mumbai stand occupied by the Indian army for flushing out the terrorists from three different five-star hotels and a Jewish- synagogue, where terrorists of a previously unheard of group “Deccan Mujahedeen” have taken about 40, mostly British, US and Israeli citizens hostage and firing at the security forces. Chief of Indian armed forces have summoned a meeting of all services chiefs, while reports of arresting Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harkatul Mujahedeen and extremist Hindu organizations have also poured in. Pakistan, itself the victim of terrorism has been prompt to condemn the attacks and is suffering this war-on-terror-syndrome as its foreign investment has evaporated into thin air, whatever little financial gains or claims we had during Musharraf era have vanished altogether and the country is not only in the grip of terror but financial famine by being at the verge of defaulting on foreign payments. And another blame-game, which has started with Manmohan Singh’s televised address to the nation, is sure to destroy the little both countries have achieved through five-rounds of composite dialogues since 2004 and will hurt Pakistan more than perhaps India. By announcing a number of measures, Mr. Singh seems to have taken the same old route of getting back into a shell and instead of looking to improve the internal dynamics of its home-grown terrorism and agreeing to share the burden of Pakistan in it fight against terrorists, he seems to have done what many ideologues on both sides would have wanted to happen. Pakistan and India have a unique history in foreign relations, despite having four wars since a bloody separation in 1947, both the countries have never remained far from the negotiating table for very long but it also remains a fact that the embedded ideological immobilization fueled by hawks on both sides keep both the countries from making any headway in any positive direction.
The Role of Pakistan’s Madrassas
By Tufail Ahmad in Ocnus.
Zardari made these statements against the backdrop of the fact that campaigns for the February elections had taken place in mosques and madrassas in the NWFP (1). In the speech, he added that his party’s government would review the curricula of madrassas in Pakistan and that any content preaching extremism and violence would be removed.(2)
Madrassas, of which there are some 20,000 in Pakistan, are Islamic seminaries, usually established by a cleric of some importance who also manages the madrassa’s resources, which come from voluntary contributions. Madrassas owe their allegiance to various Islamic schools such as Sunni and Shia. Sunni madrassas also adhere to different doctrines, such as those of the Deobandi, Ahle Hadith and Brelvi schools of thought. Depending on their doctrinal leanings, individual madrassas are aligned with different federations, the most prominent of which are Wafaq-ul-Madaris al-Arabia, Tanzeem-ul-Madaris Ahle Sunnat, Wafaq-ul-Madaris Shia, and Rabiat-ul-Madaris al-Islamia. Wafaq-ul-Madaris represents the Deobandi school of thought, and has the largest number, an estimated 10,000, of Pakistani madrassas under its control.
The number of madrassas in Pakistan grew rapidly during the 1980s, and their alumni, the Taliban, fought the Soviet “infidels” in Afghanistan. However, since 9/11, the role of Pakistani madrassas has come under international criticism, especially for their enrolling foreign Muslim students and for their training of a new breed of Taliban that is destabilizing the democratic government in Afghanistan and providing safe havens to Islamist militants.
The madrassas’ ideological role in producing extremist worldviews in Pakistan has worried many, especially after the suicide bombers in the July 2005 London bombing are reported to have attended Pakistani madrassas. An editorial by a leading Pakistani newspaper described madrassas as “the incubator of personalities that later lead Muslim society to extremism and violence.”(3)
Over the years, successive Pakistani governments have tried to introduce curricular reform in the madrassas. The only forum for the government to negotiate with the privately run madrassas is the Ittehad Tanzeemat-e-Madaris Deenia, an alliance of different federations of madrassas. It was through this forum that the government of outgoing Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf tried to get the madrassas registered with the government. However, this drive for madrassa registration did not get far; although several thousands did register, the government still had no control over them.
The role of the madrassas was highlighted again in July 2007, after the female students of Jamia Hafsa and male students of Jamia Faridia madrassas – both controlled by Islamabad’s Red Mosque clerics Maulana Abdul Aziz and Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi – occupied a government building for several months in Islamabad, directly challenging the authority of the Pakistani government. The stand-off led to a military operation in which Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and dozens of madrassa students were killed. However, this did not diminish the role of the madrassas. Madrassas have continued to function autonomously across Pakistan, unregulated by the government despite Musharraf’s promises to reform them.
Failed State Pakistan Still the Most Dangerous Place in the World
Article in Thaindian News.
According to Sumit Ganguly, Director of Research at the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University and an Adjunct Fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy, Pakistan is in even scarier shape than most of the so-called experts are willing to admit.
He believes that this nuclear-armed state of 168 million is no stranger to political upheaval, and the crises that it is facing today such as the rash of suicide bombings, the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto last December, inflation as high as 25 percent and a resurgent Taliban movement, could spell further doom for it.
“The grim truth is that Pakistan is becoming something alarmingly close to a failed state. And that could have disastrous consequences for the United States, NATO and Afghanistan’’s struggle to hold back its own Taliban insurgency,” Ganguly warns in his article for the Washington Post.
He also does not hold out much hope for Pakistan under President Asif Ali Zardari or former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
“Simply put, Pakistan is facing an existential crisis — on its streets and in its courts, barracks and parliament I don”t see much chance of a happy turnaround,” he says.
Having studied Pakistan for almost two decades, Ganguly says that the roots of Pakistan’’s problems run deep, back to the failure of the state’’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to plant deep democratic roots and create a tradition of compromise.
He says that the military has dominated the nation ever since, with disastrous results.
He also claims that the ISI and Pakistan’’s generals “have been playing a duplicitous game with the United States for nearly two decades.”
“Pakistan’’s tragedy is that, from the beginning, no government, civilian or military, has fixed the underlying fragility of the state’’s basic institutions. Instead, democrats and dictators alike have subverted political parties, threatened journalists and cowed the civil service in their quest for short-term political gain and personal advantage,” Ganguly feels.
So can Pakistan be reformed? Ganguly doubts it, and warns that the country could once again make a desultory return to military rule as its troubles mount.
“We need a stern, serious international effort — led by the United States — to put Pakistan back together again, reform its institutions and reorder its priorities. If not, we will face a terrifying prospect: Pakistan’’s collapse (slow or otherwise) into a full-blown failed state, armed with nuclear weapons, riven by ethnic tensions, infused with resentment and zealotry, with roving bands of Taliban sympathizers and bin Ladenists in its midst,” he concludes.
In January 2002, I lost one of my dearest and closest friends to Islamic terrorists in Karachi. Danny Pearl was my fraternity brother at Stanford. We shared a love of folk music. I introduced him to Colombian cumbias, he introduced me to kelzmer and Israeli folk music. I saw Danny last about six months before he was killed in a glorious weekend in Udaipur, India. We talked then about the dangers of militant Islam. The situation has only gotten worse in the intervening years. It’s time to save Pakistan from itself for we don’t save Pakistan then that forces that country is unleashing presently may yet sink us all.