Prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s grand idea of talking peace with the blood thirsty Pakistani Taliban (TTP), flaunted with elan almost four weeks ago, has all but run out of steam. It was a flawed idea to begin with. The government was all excited and overly keen for a peace dialogue with the Taliban without having waged a war against them. So why was it suing for peace without having tasted war? The Taliban, from the word go, insisted on “immediate” implementation of Sharia as their precondition for talks. However, they didn’t bother to elaborate whose Sharia they were talking about. The Pakistan Constitution may have eloquently proclaimed Islam as religion of the State and affirmed to fashion all laws in the country according to Sharia. But Pakistan is not catholic in its religious dogma and creed. It has a Sunni majority but also a sizeable Shiite minority that makes up at least 20 per cent of its Muslim population. Whose Sharia should prevail is a question that has persistently bedeviled Pakistan; and that’s reason enough why despite strong verbal commitment to the rule of Sharia no government, to date, has been able to make much headway. Giving the devil, literally, its due, the Taliban at least had the gumption to make no bones about their distaste for the law of the land. But the Nawaz government lacked even this dubious moral fibre in seeking talks with a banned and proscribed terrorist body. Pakistan’s 1997 Anti-Terrorist Law, predating the “war on terror”, clearly forbids any talk with purveyors of terrorism. Nawaz’ enthusiasm to engage a violent cabal in talks should’ve also been dampened by TTP’s track record of broken agreements; they captured the picturesque Valley of Swat in 2005 in violation of an agreement. It then took the vaulted Pakistan army a costly military offensive to recapture Swat from the oppressive Taliban. While negotiating teams from both sides—made up mostly of non-entities of little substance—were going through the motions of delimiting parameters of talks, the Taliban struck with deadly force. They first blasted a police bus in Karachi, carrying young recruits of a special anti-terrorism squad, killing 14 of them. The very next day TTP announced with obscene pride the decapitation of 23 paramilitary soldiers that had been in their custody since 2010. What now stalks Pakistan’s political landscape is confusion galore; it’s a massive chaos confounding not only policymakers but also the pundits observing them. Kayani’s dialectic on Pakistan’s home-grown terrorism has been buttressed this week by the US National Consortium and Responses for Terrorism (Start) in its latest report, according to which Pakistan overtook Iraq in the number of terrorist attacks—1,404 in Pakistan; 1,271 in Iraq—in 2012, the last full year for which figures could be compiled. Over a 12-year period from 2001 to 2013, terrorism took a horrendous casualty toll of 48,994 civilians, police and military personnel killed across the country. newindianexpress/opinion/Pak-at-Crossroads-of-War-and-Peace/2014/02/27/article2079338.ece#.Uxl5Lc5wKdE
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 00:10:40 +0000
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