Leave Afghanistan alone
Farhan Siddiqui
Abid Ullah Jan
It is utter nonsense to correlate sectarian violence and terrorism in
Pakistan to anything going on in Afghanistan. Our failure to maintain
law and order situation at home does not mean that someone else across
the border is responsible for it. And if someone from across the border
is responsible for it, why cannot it be the US or India or Israel? If
making a short statement is sufficient for placing responsibility on
the Afghan government and sending contingents across the border, India
then has a stronger right to replicate Pakistan's policy. Today,
Pakistan is sending its forces into Afghanistan on the insistence of
imperial bosses in Washington. Tomorrow the same Washington would join
hands with India to cross borders into Pakistan, because India utters
the same words for blaming Pakistan as Nawaz Sharif is doing for
holding the government of Afghanistan responsible for terrorists'
training and flaming sectarian violence in the country.
If India has no right to cross the borders and attack or catch
the "terrorists" inside our territory; Pakistan has absolutely no
right, whatsoever, to send its own forces and provide cover to the US
intervention for getting whomever it may like to get, dead or alive.
Islamabad cannot live with its childish Afghan policy for far too long.
When the US wants it to support the Taliban, Pakistan becomes the first
and only country to support and recognise the Taliban. When they
refused to accept dictates from Washington and serve the US interest,
Pakistan decides to help the Americans unleash a new kind of terrorism
in Afghanistan.
A stable Taliban government is the only way to have a Pakistan-friendly
government in Afghanistan. Countries like India and Israel not only
support all other Taliban rival groups, but also not interested in a
Pakistan-friendly government in Kabul. We are perilously close to
losing the only opportunity we have in the last 50 years as the fall of
the Taliban would bring to power an anti-Pakistan government which will
never be able to forgive Pakistan for its supporting the Taliban in the
war against them. Pakistan cannot afford the luxury of chicanery,
deceit and betrayal like the US.
Who, except the unreliable Washington, is Nawaz Sharif pleasing with
his sending Pakistan contingents and CIA men into Afghanistan? We are
going to lose all friends on every fronts due to this badly crafted and
Washington-dictated Afghan policy because any military intervention and
the use of force in Afghanistan is terrorism, plain and simple. On the
other hand, it is playing the puppet's role without paying any
attention to the national interest. We cannot justify Pak-US joint
terrorism against Afghanistan by defining terrorism simply as "the
victimisation of unarmed civilians in an attempt to affect the policies
of the government that leads those civilians." Such a definition
applies equally to the violence inflicted by the armed forces and
contingents of established nation-states as to that perpetrated by
small cells of enigmatic non-state or sub-state entities.
Calling killings in individual instances in Pakistan, or any other
place, "terrorism" and interventions on large scale like that of US in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Kosovo, etc, as "fighting terrorism"
is confusing apples with oranges. The only one distinction between what
the Americans and their allies call terrorism and the
deliberate "terrorising" of civilians by military forces (the "scorch-
earth policy" of General Sherman and attendant historical examples of
the rape of Nanking, the London blitz, and the nuclear destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or the acts of far more limited, but also far
more deliberate and selective, violence (like US missile attack on
Afghanistan and Sudan, its sanctions against Iraq and Libya and its
daily bombing in northern and southern Iraq). And that distinction is
of scale. Terrorists on both sides are unleashing as much terror as
they can afford. The undeniable fact is that repression, violation of
rights, injustice and terrorism beget terrorism.
The state repression like what is happening in Saudi Arabia and state
terrorism, in which Pakistan is joining hands with the US, lead to
other forms of terrorism. There are countless examples that provide
convincing evidence of how terrorism for many is often a rational
choice, in many instances reluctantly embraced after considerable
thought and debate. Certainly, Nelson Mandela's frank account of how he
concluded in the early 1960s that the African National Congress had no
choice but to move from non-violent militancy to terrorism if it were
ever to achieve its goals in the face of South African intransigence
and repression proves this point.
Similarly, the logic applied by Menachem Begin, another terrorist head
of state, to the revolt he led against British rule in pre-independence
Israel defies US media categorisation as "neurotic," "psychotic,"
or "sociopathic." In perhaps one of the most famous exegeses of the
rationale behind terrorism (which Mandela himself cites as a major
influence on the ANC's decision to use violence), Begin recalled in his
memoir, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun (1977), "History and our
observation persuaded us that if we could succeed in destroying the
government's prestige in Eretz Israel, the removal of its rule would
follow automatically. Thenceforward, we gave no peace to this weak
spot. Throughout all the years of our uprising, we hit at the British
Government's prestige, deliberately, tirelessly, unceasingly." Indeed,
the strategy defined by Begin for the Irgun fails to evoke images of
mindless, fanatical, or wanton violence as is being portrayed in the
case of Osama bin Laden.
Osama is Saudi Menachem Begin and to get him and teaching the Taliban
an American lesson, the US propaganda machinery is spreading the
popular misconception that terrorists are "neurotic or even
psychotic...sociopathic killers" and some well-aimed blows __
administered by a muscular American military of deluded neurotics __
will bring these persons to their senses and either remedy their
intolerable behaviour or dissuade them from further transgressions. If
the individual terrorist causes "frequently attract individuals who
simply use philosophical or political rationalisations to veil their
more fundamental greed and bloodlust," the US-sponsored terrorism also
blinds and forces many heads of state, like Nawaz Sharif, into
submission to the American will, as they have no choice but to choose
between the devil and the deep sea.
In support of the American acts of terrorism, the establishment in
Washington and its media argues that the dimensions of the terrorist
threat are vast enough to warrant military action and more American
lives were lost to terrorists than to the soldiers of Saddam Hussein
during the Gulf War." While this is true, it is neither a complete nor
accurate depiction of the dimensions of the threat posed by terrorism
to Americans. For example, since the advent of what is considered the
era of contemporary international terrorism in 1968, terrorists have
killed fewer than 800 Americans: a number that pales in comparison to
the 20,000 or so homicides recorded annually in the United States over
the past decade or more. And what about the thousands of lives taken by
the American interventions in the name of fighting terrorism? If the US
can kill thousands of civilians only to take revenge or avenge for less
than 800 of Americans killed in terrorist strikes, shouldn't anyone
else declare a war on the American terrorism for it has taken lives in
thousands? Accordingly, even if more American civilians have been
killed by terrorists than Americans in uniform by Saddam's forces, an
average of fewer than 28 fatalities per year can hardly be construed as
representing a salient threat to either America's national security or
citizenry.
The US propaganda claims that "we live now in a world in which
terrorist acts are often not linked to specific demands, a world in
which many powerful terrorist groups consider themselves at war with
the United States and have no goal more specific than America's
destruction." Such a view is as patently false today as when similar
theories of monolithic, global terrorist conspiracies were peddled to
receptive presidential administrations at the height of the Cold War.
At the time, such books as The Terror Network (1981) by Claire Sterling
claimed that the Soviet Union was behind most, if not all, of the
world's terrorism. The US propaganda machinery resurrects this same
argument today, hinting at a network primarily of Islamic organisations
arrayed against the United States.
A review of at least some of the most significant terrorist incidents
directed against or in the United States in recent years disproves this
contention. The intent of the World Trade Centre bombers __ at least
according to the letter claiming credit for the blast they sent to the
New York Times __ was not the destruction of the United States per se,
but to affect American policy toward, and in support of, the
terrorists' stated enemies: Zionist Israel and the Mubarak regime in
Egypt.
Similarly, the bombings of the US Air Force barracks in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia, and of a joint Saudi-American training centre in Riyadh the
previous November were designed less to destroy the United States than
to undermine American support for the ruling repressive Saudi royal
family. Other parallels can be drawn with the 1983 bombing of the US
Marine barracks in Lebanon, where the goal was to force Washington to
withdraw its troops from the multinational peace force then deployed in
Lebanon. With the departure of the American forces, the multinational
effort __ precisely as the terrorists predicted __ collapsed.
America's latest strategy is that "terrorism is a problem requiring a
more expansive and coherent military effort." Before jumping on the
American bandwagon and supporting it in its war on the Taliban, Nawaz
Sharif must distinguish international from domestic terrorism and
use "common-sense" steps to minimise danger while protecting our
national interest and our sovereignty, recognising that terrorist
violence cannot be entirely eliminated. Making the sectarian killing a
pretext for dispatching Pakistani and American commandos to Afghanistan
shows that a premeditated plan is in operation and if that is true,
both American and Pakistani governments are as much responsible for the
sectarian violence in Pakistan as they are blaming someone else from
Afghanistan for it. We must learn never to react to the limited
violence of small groups by launching a crusade in which we put our
national interests at stake and destroy our chances of a peaceful
neighbourhood and economic prosperity.
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Before you buy.
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about how they establish use of smuggling routes or the instability they
need to create to maintain them?(if you don't just look at southeastern
Turkey) Follow the money!