It’s good to be the Taliban: New Age Islam’s Selection From Pakistan Press, 30 November 2015
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
November 30th, 2015
• It’s good to be the Taliban
By Cyril Almeida
• The state fails the Ahmedis yet again
By Mohammad Ahmad
• Syrian civil war: Fruits of foreign intervention
By Munir Akram
• Miss Gaddafi yet?
By S Mubashir Noor
• Lords of darkness
By Zarrar Khuhro
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It’s good to be the Taliban
By Cyril Almeida
November 30th, 2015
AFGHANISTAN is back in the news and you’ve heard the boys’ version. They want to make peace happen, but there’s only so much they can do.
The Taliban aren’t our puppets. We can’t just tell them what to do. And the Afghan government won’t listen to us. They are unreasonable. There’s only so much we can do.
We mean well. Give us time. Help us help you. Trust us.
It’s a good story. The Americans seem to politely agree. The Chinese are sympathetic too. Possibly because there’s some truth to it. More likely because they don’t have a choice — keep your eye on the prize, nod in sympathy, gently nudge along.
Man, it’s good to be the Taliban.
Think of it this way. If it’s all true, have the Taliban played us for patsies or what? Look at all that they’ve got from us in just the recent years.
If you could dream of a partner, there isn’t one better — with more advantage and less cost to yourself — than the Afghan Taliban have found in Pakistan.
We gave them sanctuary to survive the onslaught of the superpower surge. Mullah O — the fabled Mullah O who would rather die than leave his beloved Afghanistan — died in the best hospital in the biggest city we have.
Then, when he died getting the best medical care Pakistani rupees can buy, we helped maintain the lie about his death. Because, y’know, it could hurt T morale just when they really needed it in Afghanistan.
And all of that before the real kick to the head. When news of Mullah O’s dead is leaked to the world, we dive deep into the Taliban rabbit hole to keep the T united. Because a broken Taliban would be easier to fight militarily and manipulate politically.
So the new guy — Mullah Mansour — and his buddies are allowed to hold court in Quetta. None of that clandestine business even; right there in plain sight. Somehow, we convince the outside world, minus the Afghan government, to look the other way and not to pay too much attention to the Afghan government’s protests.
Meanwhile, over in Afghanistan, the TTP types helpfully nudged out of Fata are helping the cause of the preferred Afghan Taliban. Challengers to the Mansour camp are being mowed down.
And now the second kick to the head — we can’t tell Mansour what to do. Because he does what’s in his interest. And the Taliban’s interests and the Pakistani interest are not symbiotic.
So months, weeks, days after we help Mansour get his dream job, it’s already gone to his head and he won’t listen to us. Though he was listening to us when he was No 2, though really No 1 because we and he knew Mullah O was dead.
And now we can’t just go over to his place and make him listen — because, well, we can’t. Not unless the Afghan government plays nice first.
Man, it’s good to be the Taliban.
We should just hand over the keys to our place to them — with their smarts, if the Afghan Taliban were running Pakistan, Kashmir would already be ours and Delhi would be begging us to conquer them.
And all of this for what? The Taliban are the greatest beneficiaries of the Pakistani paranoia about India — perhaps second only to the boys themselves.
If you could dream of a partner, there isn’t one better — with more advantage and less cost to yourself — than the Afghan Taliban have found in Pakistan.
Ah, but history is history, you’re thinking. There ain’t anyone who can do anything about it now. In the here and now, we did say that we would bring the Afghan Taliban to the table and we did.
It wasn’t our fault that the talks were sabotaged. Now, we are again saying we’ll make it happen, and it’s in everyone’s interest to make talks happen, so let’s listen to the folk who can make it happen — the boys here.
But those with longer memories and more sceptical minds could point to three things.
One, once upon a time, during the talks that led to the Geneva Accords, we did a familiar-sounding thing — what we said at the table was very different to what we were doing on the ground. Today’s Afghan-led, Afghan-owned echoes that Geneva lore of non-intervention, non-interference.
Two, you could not make up a better script for these talks than the Taliban have got. Had Murree-II gone ahead and some big concession been made without the world knowing Omar was dead it would have shattered the T’s credibility. Murree-I, perversely, helped flush out the secret the Taliban had trapped themselves inside of.
Now, Omar’s shadow is disappearing and the military push by Mansour has made the Taliban the quintessence of the strategy that is talk and fight — the gains on the battlefield will be reaped at the negotiating table. And the gains are huge. For the Taliban.
Three, we’ve alienated and diminished the one leader who represented a historic opportunity — Ashraf Ghani. Instead of partnering him — like the N-League wanted, but was brushed aside partly because of — we’ve weakened Ghani at home and diminished him abroad.
If peace was the real purpose and the only goal, the most obvious route would’ve been to create capital for Ghani to help him fend off the hawks at home. Instead, we’ve demanded he do more for us.
So, yeah, Afghanistan is back in the news — but change you can believe in? Wait until you see it.
Cyril Almeida is a member of staff.
dawn.com/news/1223072/its-good-to-be-the-taliban
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The state fails the Ahmedis yet again
By Mohammad Ahmad
The state, yet again, has failed in protecting the most vulnerable of all communities in Pakistan, the Ahmedis. This first organised attack on the community after the initiation of the National Action Plan (NAP), put in place after the Army Public School (APS) massacre by some other champions of the faith, has happened in Punjab.
This time around, it has happened in Jhelum where initially allegations were trumped up about the desecration of the Holy Quran inside a factory owned by Ahmedis. Using this as an excuse, a mob was galvanised to first hold up Ahmedis inside the factory and then put the unit to arson in the presence of a small contingent of police. According to press reports, loudspeaker announcements from the mosques (flouting the legislation on misuse of loudspeakers) in the area were instrumental in gathering the people. The police have a permanent presence in the area and conceiving that they could not foresee a situation emerging that would require a tackling by personnel in proper numbers borders on stupidity. It can be arguably said that that too few were later deployed to provide an excuse for lukewarm action. A proper and proactive response by the police could have saved the horrific happenings from occurring. Were it not for the Pakistan army the lives of those trapped inside the factory would not have been saved and their fate would not have been any different than the innocent Christian couple of Kot Radha Kishan, a husband and wife who were burnt to death by the so-called champions of the faith. The timid response of the district administration on Friday emboldened the mobsters who, the very next day, ransacked one of the Ahmedi places of worship in the area and set it ablaze. Then again, the army had to be called.
Unfortunately, in these incidents, and in many before them, the allegations involve the burning of papers with holy verses on them. It has, therefore, become imperative that the masses are educated in the disposal of such holy material when such a need arises. In this age of print, newspapers, magazines, books and other materials have the holy verses or names printed on them. With the commercialisation of religion, the sheer number of such pages has indeed become very high.
Resultantly, there does arise a genuine need for the disposal of such material after some time. Sometimes, a copy of the holiest of all, the holy Quran, too, becomes old, too difficult to read from and, therefore, needs proper disposal. What should be done? The holy Quran itself is silent on this. There arose a need for such a disposal less than 30 years after the death of the holy Prophet (PBUH) and a happening in the time of Hazrat Usman, the third caliph, does provide a precedent. The very early scripture of the Quran, when it was first collated and put into binding, created a lot of loose papers more than 1,400 years ago. The first companions of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), led under the leadership of the third caliph, Usman, instructed the followers to take all of those pages and burn them and the other un-authentic versions. This he did for the sake of preserving only the authentic copies. Unfortunately, this action of his was misunderstood by the people of his time who raised a great commotion on how the sacred book was burnt. So, if people rise today doubting the intent, it is not strange.
It is perhaps due to the possibility of the intent being misunderstood and its fallout that the later day Hanafi imam, Ibn Abidin, states: “If a copy of the Mushaf (Quran) becomes old and it is difficult to read from it, it should not be burnt in fire. This is what Imam Muhammad (student of Imam Abu Hanifa) pointed out and this is what we take. It will not be disliked to bury it.” The imam, however, did not pronounce a punishment for those disposing of it in a different manner. The imam refrained from acting God as the so-called current day champions of faith prefer acting like.
As for the happening in Jhelum, the spokesperson of the Ahmedi community, in a press statement, as reported by the media, said: “Every Ahmedi is mindful of the shaair of Allah more than his life as they are part of his faith. We have been taught that, ‘those who honour the Quran are honoured in the heavens’.” Therefore, any allegation on them needs proper inquiry. Prima facie contemplating any disrespect for the holy book or any wrongful intent that goes contrary to their fundamental beliefs is injustice. Ahmedis and indeed all shall ultimately die and God will either reward or punish on the basis of individual deeds.
The role of the ulema (clergy) is not to divide the people and feed rivalry. A genuine man of knowledge will try to find a way to bring people to reason rather than add fuel to the fire by inciting them to violence. Videos of the events that happened in Jhelum are circulating on social media and if there is any desire to identify and prosecute the perpetrators of the arson attacks, sufficient material is there to act upon. The whole incident requires a transparent investigation and swift action to bring the perpetrators to justice. That will require material losses to be compensated for in addition to booking the arsonists. Is there the will to provide justice to this vulnerable community? This is the question. It is also a test for the NAP that lists countering hate speech as one of its objectives.
dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/30-Nov-2015/the-state-fails-the-ahmedis-yet-again
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Syrian civil war: Fruits of foreign intervention
By Munir Akram
November 30th, 2015
THE chaos and carnage that has now spread from Afghanistan through West Asia and the Levant to North Africa and the Sahel is widely ascribed to Al Qaeda, the militant Islamic State group and their franchises or affiliates.
Yet, the origins of the conflicts and terrorism that engulf this arc of Muslim countries, and threaten Europe and beyond, are, fundamentally, the consequence of misguided or malevolent intervention by foreign powers in the affairs of Muslim states.
This history starts with the Soviet Union’s December 1979 military intervention in Afghanistan and the decision of the US, supported by its allies, including Pakistan and several Muslim states, to sponsor the religious Afghan parties — the Mujahideen — and import several thousand extremist fighters as their auxiliaries.
After the Soviet withdrawal, the Mujahideen mutated into the Taliban. The Islamic auxiliaries morphed into Al Qaeda.
Emboldened by their Afghan ‘victory’, Al Qaeda’s ambition was to eject the US from the Islamic world and overthrow Arab regimes allied to it. Many veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad stayed on in Afghanistan and Pakistan to form Al Qaeda ‘central’; others returned to their home countries to build Al Qaeda as a global movement.
Wherever their ‘terrorist’ insurgencies were ruthlessly suppressed, these ‘jihadis’ went underground or ‘migrated’ to more hospitable locations.
The ‘war on terror’, unleashed in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US homeland, forms the next chapter in this history. Disregarding the lessons of the past, the US invaded Afghanistan instead of targeting Al Qaeda only.
Over a decade, America was able to degrade Al Qaeda and eventually kill its leader. But, by extending the fight to the Mullah Omar’s Taliban, it exacerbated Afghanistan’s ethnic fault lines, made national reconciliation difficult and created conditions in which Al Qaeda’s competitor, the IS, could emerge as a prominent force.
The Syrian civil war represents the sum of all the sins of foreign interference.
Hubris, generated by its post-Cold War monopoly of global power, led the US to make its most critical strategic mistake in recent years: the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the third episode of interventions, ousting Saddam’s (repressive and minority) Sunni regime, dismantling his army and administration, and enabling the Iran-affiliated Shia parties to gain power in Baghdad through ‘democratic elections’ (held basically to legitimise the US and foreign presence in Iraq) led to splintering the country into its Shia, Sunni and Kurdish components and generating a Sunni insurgency led by Saddam’s soldiers and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQIP) — which has now morphed into IS.
The removal of the Sunni regimes in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq expanded Iran’s influence and power in the region and eroded that of America’s Saudi and Gulf allies.
The Saudi and Iranian power struggle and support for rival Sunni and Shia groups surged across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Terrorism became entwined with proxy wars. This is the fourth and under-acknowledged part of this history.
Then came the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt which were naively embraced by Western powers as heralding the long-awaited birth of Arab ‘democracy’.
Tunisia has succeeded so far in making a peaceful transition to democracy.
Egypt has experienced a cycle of military rule, an Islamic democracy and military rule again, precipitating an Islamist insurgency centred in the Sinai and now linked to IS.
In Libya, Qadhafi’s ouster was secured through armed support to insurgent groups and a prolonged aerial campaign by European powers, with America “leading from behind”. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, little thought was given to what would come the day after.
Libya is now splintered into rival areas, cities, tribes, groups and governments, some with connections to terrorist organisations including IS — which has a direct presence there.
After Libya, attention turned to Syria. Externally encouraged demonstrations against the minority Alawite regime of Basharul Assad were met by characteristic violence.
Opposition groups from Syria’s Sunni majority secured ready support from the West as well as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
As the conflict escalated, the most effective fighters turned out to be those belonging to an Al Qaeda affiliate (Jabhat al Nusra) and IS, led by AQIP’s Al Baghdadi and Iraqi veterans.
The Syrian civil war represents the sum of all the sins of this history of foreign intervention. A repressive minority regime fights on with support from Iran and Russia. An estimated 250,000 people have died in the conflict.
It has created a refugee crisis of epic proportions. The tide of Syrian and other refugees from the region has divided Europe, strained its vaunted commitment to human rights and humanitarianism and revived racism and Islamophobia.
This conflict has created IS, a militant organisation which occupies and rules the Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq with unparalleled brutality and whose influence and affiliates span a wide swath of the Islamic world.
Its appeal for extremists will grow unless it is defeated. Months of US bombing has failed to dislodge it from its strongholds.
Instead, IS has brought the war to its opponents, carrying out terrorist attacks against Russia, Turkey, Lebanon and France. It is unlikely to be defeated without “boots on the ground”.
No one is prepared to send in an army to eject IS, except Iran and its allies. This is naturally not acceptable to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Western powers since it would further enhance Iranian and Russian influence in the region.
A strategy to defeat IS and end the conflicts in Syria and Iraq will need to start with an alignment of the objectives of all the major players involved.
This implies a prior agreement on the future governance of Syria and Iraq before any combined military operations can be contemplated — mainly by Sunni forces.
A confederal structure in which Assad is confined to the Alawite majority regions of Syria and wide autonomy for the Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq are the only feasible political solutions.
Hopefully, political accords on Syria and Iraq and a joint campaign against IS will generate momentum for dismantling IS and Al Qaeda affiliates; create the political space for compromises to end the conflicts in Yemen and elsewhere, and bring to an end the modern history of foreign interventions in the Muslim world.
Munir Akram is a former Pakistan ambassador to the UN.
dawn.com/news/1223073/syrian-civil-war-fruits-of-foreign-intervention
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Miss Gaddafi yet?
S Mubashir Noor
The former Libyan ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, served an important function in North Africa: keeping a lid on Islamic extremism. As a pan-Arabist and Nasserite, Gaddafi was wary of and quickly muzzled any Islamist groups that mixed religion with politics. He also kept neighbouring economies afloat by direct investments and employing their citizens in Libya’s oil fields. After a NATO-backed revolt upended Gaddafi in 2011 and later took his life, the Sahel region he effectively policed slid into militant chaos.
In November, terrorists connected to al Qaeda stormed an upscale Malian hotel, leaving 21 people dead. Earlier the same month, Boko Haram, an Islamic State (IS) affiliate, bombed two marketplaces in Nigeria with over 50 fatalities. The US’s missionary zeal to impose democracy in tribal societies has backfired again, a story replayed across the Middle East after the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. Gaddafi was in power for over four decades but that was no reason to dump him, claims former US Congressperson Pete Hoekstra, ex-chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Sure, there were allegations that he had previously funded the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and ordered the Lockerbie bombing, but Gaddafi, Hoekstra believes, was a changed man after Saddam Hussein’s execution.
He subsequently helped the US gather intelligence on Islamic radicals, gave up his nuclear programme and paid reparations to the victims of Lockerbie. The White House, Hoekstra rues, “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” when it decided to dislodge Gaddafi because he was “doing everything we had asked him to do and had been doing it for eight or nine years”.
Four years on, post-Gaddafi, Libya looks like a quadrangular death-match between former rebels of the National Transitional Council (NTC), militias loyal to former general Khalifa Haftar, fighters from the Tuareg and Toubou ethnic groups, and IS militants. NTC partisans now call themselves Libya Dawn, rule Tripoli and western parts of the country, while Haftar’s internationally recognised Operation Dignity government controls east Libya from Tobruk. IS, meanwhile, has staked claim to tracts around the port of Sirte, while tribal militias control swathes of the southwest.
IS in Libya has its roots in Islamist rebels who, upon overthrowing Gaddafi in 2011, went off to seek deadlier pastures in the Levant. There, they fought the Syrian regime and Hezbollah alongside US-backed militias before returning in 2014 to wreak havoc at home. Now called the Islamic Youth Shura Council, these rebels pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and dove into the Libyan civil war with perfect timing. Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, was especially ripe for conquest in the midst of growing local frustration with both the NTC and army for hastening Libya’s slide.
The group has so far avoided a media blitz for two reasons. First, all warring parties in Libya have taken to murder and pillaging with equal gusto, so IS does not stand out in comparison despite its 5,000 strong roll call. Moreover, even though a US airstrike felled the group’s senior leader, Abu Nabil, on November 13, the hit was opportunistic and not a result of an active manhunt. Two, other IS affiliates have stepped up headline-grabbing attacks against coalition targets of late, like the Russian plane and Paris bombings, and eclipsed the mischief of their Libyan cousins for now.
IS in Libya made headlines in February when a propaganda video showing the mass execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians went viral and sparked international outrage. A few months later, Tunisian authorities revealed that terrorists trained in Libya carried out the Sousse and Bardo Museum attacks, killing over 50 civilians. Still, runaway success eludes the group. Local militias kicked IS out of the eastern city of Derna in June and it is, at present, only able to mount hit-and-run attacks on oil fields.
The reason could be a “superabundance of armed groups” in Libya, who, “for the most part, are busy fighting each other, but could potentially be harnessed to eliminate Islamic State,” claims Geoff Porter from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre. His assessment ties into US President Barack Obama’s policy on combating IS. “If you do not have local populations that are committed to pushing back against ideological extremes, then they resurface,” Obama stressed at the recent G20 meeting in Turkey.
Even as vengeful France and Russia begin another round of jihadist whack-a-mole in Syria by upping the tempo of airstrikes, Obama is right to caution against putting boots on the ground. Ethnic and sectarian cracks mar the Middle East and any attempts to reboot the regional status quo will smack of neocolonialism. Unilateral force did not work in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it will not work in Syria unless local stakeholders are strong enough to take charge. More bombs, after all, only leave bigger craters and angrier locals.
S Mubashir Nooris a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad
dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/30-Nov-2015/miss-gaddafi-yet
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Lords of darkness
By Zarrar Khuhro
November 30th, 2015
IN 2004 Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, wrote a letter to Osama Bin Laden in which he set out his organisation’s strategy. Outlining Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian fault lines, Zarqawi declared his intention to target Iraq’s majority Shia population in order to create a reaction against Iraq’s Sunnis. He wrote, “If we succeed in dragging [the Shias] into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death at the hands of the [Shias].”
The logic was that those Sunnis, or some of them at least, would then flock to Al Qaeda’s banners. At the very least, the idea of coexistence and political compromise, abhorrent as it was to Zarqawi, would be badly damaged if not destroyed.
In 2015 the militant Islamic State group, that Al Qaeda in Iraq eventually metamorphosed into, featured an article in their English-language magazine, Dabiq. Titled ‘The Extinction of the Grey Zone’, it was published a month after the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Here they state their intention to create an environment which forces Muslims to choose between ‘kufr’ and the ‘khalifah.’ This was to be achieved in classic Zarqawi style, by provoking the West to act against its Muslim citizens; those who were living in that very grey zone of coexistence.
François Hollande said the Paris attacks targeted “youth in all its diversity”, and he was right. But the attacks themselves are a means to an end, not the end itself.
The targets were chosen to strike at the very soul of France.
Cafes, a stadium, a concert hall; these targets were chosen not just to maximise casualties but to, as clichéd as this sounds, strike at the very soul, hope and future of France. Like Zarqawi’s atrocities in Iraq, Paris was meant to provoke a reaction against the vast majority of Muslims peacefully living in the West; Paris was a blow at the grey zone and all those who dwell in it.
It was also aimed at the Syrian refugees fleeing to the West. The planting of a (likely forged) Syrian passport at the site of the Bataclan massacre was a clear ploy intended at creating mass hatred and fear of the Syrian refugees arriving in Europe; those ‘sinners and apostates’ who are living refutations of Baghdadi’s propaganda.
The right seized on the refugee issue to cement their own political support, marrying it to their long-standing xenophobia and hard-line stances on immigrants and Muslims. And in the aftermath of Paris, they used atrocity for political gain. Neither they nor IS can flourish in the grey; it is hate and fear that sustains them. Most European governments have not yet taken the bait, but there is little doubt that right-wing sentiment is on the rise. For every act of compassion and coexistence there are a dozen displays of hate and rage; fissures widen, hearts harden.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump campaigns on one of the most openly fascist political platforms the US has seen in years. And here too is method. Here too, the extinction of the grey in-between is something to be encouraged. Here too, polarisation means political gain. The wave he is riding is built on the fear of a section of white America that they are going to be second-class citizens in ‘their’ country; that they will be subject to alien laws in their own land. And, if poll numbers and public response is to be believed, he has a ready and growing audience for his hate-filled agenda.
Thus, when he talks of building a wall along the Mexican border, or says that a black activist attacked at his rally ‘should have been roughed up,’ he gains support among his core group. And when he talks of building a national database of Muslims and practically endorses warrantless searches of the same, many nod in agreement. From the armed protesters outside Texas mosques to the New Jersey policeman who posted an epithet-laced rant against Muslims on Facebook, all gather under Trumps’ banner.
There is a tendency to look at Trump as some kind of clown, with his boorish ways and impossible hair. Some claim he isn’t a serious contender but merely a businessman building his own personal brand. All this may be true but to ignore his stated political beliefs would be short-sighted indeed. After all, Hitler was also subjected to the same mockery at one time, for his militaristic pageantry and ridiculous moustache.
Even if we assume that Trump does not believe what he says and is instead speaking purely for cynical political gain, the fact that he has rallied the racist and the fearful, the bigoted and the ignorant under a single banner is significant indeed. It means that he has galvanised and given voice to a large number of people who think coexistence is something to be abhorred, that tolerance is the enemy. A world away, next door, Baghdadi has the last laugh.
Zarrar Khuhro writer is a journalist.
dawn.com/news/1223232/lords-of-darkness
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