Those Who Were Not Meant To Be Martyrs: New Age Islam’s Selection, 22 January 2016
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
22 January 2016
• Those Who Were Not Meant To Be Martyrs
By Zeeba T Hashmi
• A Question Of Ideals, Not Security
By Aisha Sarwari
• Let Afghans Decide Their Future
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
• A Troika Of Relations
By Misbah Arif
-----
Those Who Were Not Meant To Be Martyrs
By Zeeba T Hashmi
January 22, 2016
And so it has happened again. After the passing of a year and a month, another gruesome attack took place in an educational institution. This time, the target of the terrorists was Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, which is about 50 km from Peshawar. From media reports, we learnt that four terrorists had entered the university complex. About 21 people, including one professor, have been killed and more than 60 people injured. According to the Vice Chancellor (VC) of the university, there were 3,000 students present on the premises when the attack occurred. They were hosting about 600 guests who had gathered for a poetry recital to commemorate the 28th death anniversary of Bacha Khan. Though it has been a relief that a large death toll has been averted by the quick response of army personnel, it does not mean the terrorists have been unsuccessful. In fact, they have become stronger, availing every opportunity they find in our security loopholes.
We must not be oblivious to the fact that beside this and the Army Public School (APS) incident last year, there have been over 900 school attacks since 2009, depicting a dangerous situation for our children to face. The security of schools, to date, remains a huge concern for the authorities despite steps to improve it. Condemnations, as expected, have followed this attack. The fallen students, a teacher, security guards and security personnel have been deemed martyrs, maybe rightly so, as our educational institutions have indeed become battlegrounds for our scholars. But does it really do any justice to those who had no intention to be martyred? They were there to study and become future professionals, on whom many a hope was pinned. Have their lives been taken in vain? Does singing patriotic songs in their honour really help? The mother of a fallen child in the APS school attack screamed in pain saying she did not ready her little one for this martyrdom but to learn at school. To call them martyrs is to sort of distract one’s attention from the real problem: the failure of the state to protect its people.
Exactly how serious is the role of the state in countering terrorism? Operation Zarb-e-Azab and the National Action Plan (NAP) have failed with this incident. The government cedes in to the demands of the military, yet it does not have the power to ensure the transparency and accountability of the security establishment’s operations. The controversial military trials of the terrorists or those accused of being involved in terrorism was a desperate attempt by parliament to aggressively address the violent menace by enabling the military to take them to task. But with the steps taken towards it, the inefficiency of the process has started to surface, sparking more questions on the extent of the army’s successes in eliminating terrorism. Umer Mansoor, the head of the Taliban in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and also the mastermind behind the APS school attack, has been held responsible for this attack but, according to some media outlets, another faction of the Taliban has denied such a claim. The confusion created over this claim is worrisome, as it provides easy ground for our authorities to blame the “external hand” and relieve itself from the necessary focus on home-grown militancy. There is the question as to why a person like Umer Mansoor, who has vowed to take revenge against the state by targeting children, remains unaffected by Zarb-e-Azab. It should also be mentioned that this attack occurred just a day after a military check post was attacked by militants in Peshawar.
With a harrowing incident like this, the interior minister has become almost invisible as he remains incapacitated in issuing statements on his own. He even feels powerless to take action against Lal Masjid’s Maulana Aziz who has been involved in propagating jihadist mentality, justifying militancy and even in having links with terrorist groups, including Islamic State (IS). So far, banned militant groups are working with other names, and hence are not easily detected. Moreover, organisations like the Quetta Shura, Haqanni network and Jamatud Dawa are considered strategic assets that are hardly touched. The problem lies in their uncontrolled networking with other proscribed organisations, resulting in militancy that cannot be resisted by our security agencies. In other words, all the policiesmade by the establishment in protecting the strategic assets has backfired, as they no longer are in their direct control. With the current security policies adopted by the military, the claim of the army chief to completely free the country of terrorism this year seems dubious.
The state considers raising the walls of schools, providing training to teachers on the use of guns and employing more security guards for duty at school gates but all this does not seem to be working towards deterring suicide bombers from attacking. The terrorists are in fact far more sophisticated and well-trained, standing invincible before the teachers who have been provided meagre self-defence training. It is not expected of the teachers to be commandos when an attack occurs even though there have been stories of the immense bravery of teachers who confronted the terrorists by sacrificing their lives for the protection of their students.
The real weapon is not the superficial policies of enhancing school security; in fact, it is better coordination and liaison between different security agencies to prevent an attack from taking place. There are various security agencies working on the ground who have links with militant organisations and know well in advance their intention or next moves through tips they receive from their paid informants. But it appears that every such agency is working on its own agenda, hence lacking cohesion and a central command.
It is nothing but a bit of sincerity and efficiency of the modus operandi that can play a decisive role in eliminating terrorism. This is not to say that the army as an institution is not sincere. In fact, it is the brave army personnel on the frontlines who have laid down their lives for the sake of their nation. It is, in fact, the lack of transparency and accountability of this institution by the state that fails to bring to surface those who are responsible for the army’s failures.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/22-Jan-2016/those-who-were-not-meant-to-be-martyrs
-----
A Question of Ideals, Not Security
By Aisha Sarwari
January 21, 2016
Even in the most elite of hotels and accommodations where politicians and the intellectual elite are in attendance, the security protocols are laughable. I know exactly when security personnel are at their least effective, taking long prayer breaks and being slow in taking charge after a change of duties. Everything oscillates between two extremes — on good days, I get a rough body search when there is a beep at the security gate, and on bad ones, the security gate isn’t working because of a power outage and the body-search team is more interested in staring at the Shahrukh Khan lookalike who just walked in instead of carrying out its duty. On good days, my identification check and the Q&A session at entry points take 10 minutes and on other days, the guards are feeling too hot or too cold to stand on duty so they let everyone pass. The point I am trying to make is, there is no escape from human error or boredom. No amount of training or security funding can wipe out the small or even large gaps in the alertness required by security personnel to prevent a terrorist attack.
As is evident from the Bacha Khan University attack in Charsadda, the onslaught from the terrorists’ side is relentless. They have such a vast canvas to spurt blood on — there are so many crevices they can sneak through despite there being seemingly beefed up security across the country. They prefer targeting children and young adults who are pursuing education so that they can cultivate fear in their hearts in place of idealism and the growth of ideas. They fire at point-blank range so these students go to the next world silent and without the will to protest their education may have instilled in them. Numerous attacks have followed the one on the Army Public School. No amount of fortification around schools can make them impermeable.
In Charsadda, the attack was orchestrated under a thick blanket of fog enabling the perpetrators to strike undetected like thieves. Such tactics are typical of all religiously-motivated terror — there is no honour in the war being perpetrated by terrorists. However, they are not the only ones that lost the plot when it comes to the teachings of Islam. As a country we have lost the plot too. The Punjab IT Board recently came out with a game depicting the APS attack. How do you score against an enemy that has already finished off 144 little souls? The government has instructed schools to mount higher boundary walls and install guards with more menacing-looking weapons. It even provided teachers with weapons training. We released feel-good videos about taking revenge from terrorists by proposing that we educate their kids. You just can’t go to war against evil actions; you have to go to war against the idea.
We hate to admit it, but there have been so many boots lost on the ground in Operation Zarb-e-Azb. We are also losing the war on archaic tribal ideas prevalent in society at large as was made evident by the boy who was paid homage for cutting off his hand and presenting it on a plate to a cleric who accused him of blasphemy. We are not going to win until we figure out the answers to the big questions.
We need to state this unequivocally: Pakistan was not created in the name of Islam; Jinnah, as its founding father, was a liberal who believed in everyone having access to the highest offices of this country regardless of their faith; and we cannot exclude any sect from the realm of Islam. We need to stop using our soil to cultivate covert wars; we need to cut down on unaccounted defence spending; we need to reform our curriculum and we need to also stop teaching our kids that we can only define our identity by creating and recreating an enemy.
We can open up trade routes with China and the grand markets of India and elsewhere, but if we don’t transform our intellectual ideals, the prosperity will only fuel hate and exclusivism instead of levelling the playing field for the marginalised. The youth bulge we boast about can easily end up being a malignant tumour for the country. In any event, there is no such thing as foolproof security. What we need to do is fortify the progressive values of humanity, scientific thinking and critical analysis. We need reform, not take revenge.
Aisha Sarwari is a freelance writer based in Islamabad.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1031849/a-question-of-ideals-not-security/
-------
Let Afghans Decide Their Future
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
21January 2016
If asked about the future of our country, most people would say they want to see Pakistan as a prosperous, peaceful and powerful nation, a nation renowned in the world for its “raw talent” instead of being notorious for its association with international terrorism, a constitutional state where political destiny is determined only through the power of the ballot and not through the power of the gun, even if the person holding that gun is uniformed.
No doubt, it has taken us a long time to come to this conclusion: almost six decades and four martial laws to be precise. Just a few years ago, quite honestly, most of us used to think that a messiah would zoom into the land of the pure on a flying carpet one day, a magic wand in his hand, his cape slung across his shoulders. Invincible, intelligent and honest, he would be as powerful as Superman, as talented as Ironman, as humble as Spiderman and as careful as Batman in not killing the criminal without due process of the law. In short, we would find the qualities of all super heroes in one military general!
Once he rose to power, he would swing his wand from left to right resulting in the arrest of all criminals within a matter of days, if not weeks. Then, turning towards the corrupt politicians, he would cast a spell upon them forcing them to disclose the location of their hidden treasures, all of who would later be returned to Pakistan. After that, he would wave his cape three times and eradicate corruption from every department on every level forever. The result: an egalitarian society within a month or so would come into existence with zero crime rate ruled over by a God-fearing, down-to-earth, virtuous and patriotic commando, an icon of truthfulness and honesty who would hoist the nation up to the top from the bottom down.
However, after experimenting and failing many times, we concluded that no one can possess such extraordinary powers, not even a commander general. And to expect so much from a single person may signal a more complex psychological problem — like insanity combined with an inferiority complex and mixed with jealousy — of the whole nation. Hence, we dropped that idea altogether, though we still see the sparks of that flickering here and there.
On a serious note, no one can fix our problems in a short amount of time even if he wants to with complete sincerity and honesty. We all have to work for it, chip in one piece at a time and wait for the parliamentary process to mature while letting political governments finish their tenure without the fear of conspiratorial long marches and sit-ins. To some extent, we can appreciate the glimpses of democracy at work already: healthy competition being witnessed between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab in resolving the problems of their provinces, a consensus being achieved on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) through negotiations and the electricity shortage reduced every year.
Having said that, I do not know why but when you ask the same Pakistanis about the future of Afghanistan, squirming in their seats, their voices changing into growls, they declare the Taliban a real power, the true representatives of the Pashtuns without whom Afghanistan would never attain peace. Do you see the double standards here? What we like for ourselves is modern and enlightened, a process of building collective wisdom, but what we like for our neighbours is puritanical, ambiguous and, to some extent, malicious and unfair.
On our side, we never vote for religious parties in the elections; we do not want them to come into power or guide us in state affairs in any form. But for Afghanistan we have already decided how they should govern their country and who should rule them. Elections? No way, they are not ready for it. Democracy? It is against the fundamentals of Islam. Constitution? We already have the Quran for them.
Have you heard any of our Afghan experts say we want the people of Afghanistan to decide themselves if they want to accept the presence of the Taliban in their country? No. Instead, we tell them, or more accurately, shove the pill known as the Afghan Taliban or the ‘good’ Taliban down their throats to interpret Islam for them, implement it in any form they like and use it to grab more power however they please.
We press the Afghan government to negotiate a peace deal with the militia or risk the country being thrown into chaos. Children would not stay safe, civilians would be blown up, embassies bombed, airports attacked and mosques converted into graveyards. Of course, we do not put this as bluntly but everyone knows what happens when negotiations with the Taliban are cancelled, delayed, interrupted or abandoned. Put it another way: this power of running an underground force, a faceless organisation that casts fear through violence is what many experts mean when they say Pakistan holds the key to peace in Afghanistan. Of course it does. The question is if this key is legitimate or not.
Let me remind you of a similar situation: a few years ago, the federal government tried to negotiate a peace deal with the Pakistani Taliban like the one we want Afghanistan to have with their Taliban. Do you remember what happened to that? How it failed? We should share our experience with the current Afghan administration and tell them the opposite of what we have been telling them all along: we would like to help you eradicate the insurgency in every way possible, that our experience in holding talks with them did not yield any positive results, it just gave them time to regroup and strike again, that the Taliban, whether Pakistani or Afghan, are our common enemies and they have no place in any state. But we will not and will stay unstable for a long time even if the Taliban takes control of Afghanistan.
Syed Kamran Hashmi is a US-based freelance columnist.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/22-Jan-2016/let-afghans-decide-their-future
------
A Troika of Relations
By Misbah Arif
January 22, 2016
The war of words between Tehran and Riyadh has escalated during the last few days. Bilateral relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have been strained because of a number of geopolitical reasons, including the desire to lead the Muslim world, regional hegemony, oil export policies and relations with the super power, the US. Recently, efforts have been made by Pakistan to defuse tensions between the two archrivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Various incidents have escalated the tensions between Tehran and Riyadh. Last year, the 2015 hajj stampede escalated these tensions due to the deaths of Iranian pilgrims in the stampede that claimed many lives. Iranian officials have accused Saudi Arabia of mismanagement, which resulted in such a huge disaster. The execution of Sheikh Nimr al Nimr, a Shia religious leader, again raised tensions between the two states. The protesters started demonstrations in Tehran in front of the Saudi embassy and later set it ablaze. Saudi officials immediately announced the breaking of all diplomatic ties with Tehran because of this incident. The situation became more complex when Iran’s embassy was attacked in Yemen and it was claimed by Iranian officials that Saudi warplanes had “deliberately” targeted its embassy in Yemen. Keeping in view all these incidents and their resulting repercussions, the rational choice available to both countries is to pursue diplomacy.
Pakistan shares a history of good relations with both countries. Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif along with Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif met with Saudi and Iranian officials, urging them to resolve their differences in a peaceful manner. Saudi Arabia has been supporting Pakistan financially and has been investing in the country for many years. It is estimated that 1.5 million Pakistanis are working in the Kingdom and are the largest source of remittances. On the other hand, Pakistan also enjoyed a good relationship with Tehran during the time of the Shah. After the revolution, bilateral relations between Iran and Pakistan went through many ups and downs according to the geopolitical environment. Iran, being a neighbouring state of Pakistan, is equally important for Pakistan as its historical ally Saudi Arabia. The removal of economic and political sanctions on Iran by the US and EU will again bring numerous opportunities for Pakistan and Iran. After the reintegration of Iran in geo-economics Pakistan will be able to restart its economic ties with Iran, which will serve the many energy needs of Pakistan.
It is a difficult decision for Pakistan to support one and go against the other in this situation. Pakistan has made a rational decision and has adopted a policy of neutrality. Pakistan is at war at home and has to defend its eastern and western borders so in this scenario Pakistan has to show tenacity. In order to avoid this complex situation, Islamabad has decided to act as a mediator and resolve the tensions between the two Muslim countries. This policy of neutrality will help Pakistan maintain balanced policies towards both of its friends. In the past Pakistan has acted like a bridge between the US and China so now it can do the same for Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The complex political dynamics of the Middle Eastern region makes it highly volatile and uncertain. Many are of the view that Pakistan would be able to lessen the tensions between the two countries. It would be an idealistic thought to believe that both the states will come closer to each other and tensions will be decreased at once. But, as per present circumstances, there is an urgent need to adopt a few confidence-building measures to avoid further escalation between the two Muslim countries. The regional stability of the Middle Eastern region is of great significance for international security. The presence of terrorist organisations, interests of great powers and the role of great powers in the domestic politics of states has made the situation most complicated.
Misbah Arif is an M.Phil Scholar at School of Politics and International Relations, Quaid I Azam University Islamabad
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/22-Jan-2016/a-troika-of-relations
URL: https://newageislam.com/pakistan-press/those-were-meant-be-martyrs/d/106074