Nurturing terror with US dollars
Daily Pioneer : Jan. 18, 2009
Kanchan Gupta
Commenting on America’s response to the multiple terrorist strikes of 9/11, the most spectacular of which was Mohammed Atta and his fellow jihadis flying two passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and reducing the glittering chrome-and-glass symbol of American power to twisted steel and rubble, Gen Pervez Musharraf writes in his memoir, In the Line of Fire, “I was chairing an important meeting… when my military secretary told me that the US Secretary of State, Gen Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later, but he insisted that I come out of the meeting and take the call. Powell was quite candid: ‘You are either with us or against us.’ I took this as a blatant ultimatum… I told him we were with the United States against terrorism, having suffered from it for years, and would fight along with his country against it.”
Gen Powell’s pronounced pro-Pakistan bias was no secret in the first Bush Administration. It is possible that his colleagues were not too sure whether he had been blunt enough while delivering what Gen Musharraf was to later correctly describe as a “blatant ultimatum” to Pakistan. So a follow-up message was sent, this time through a person who had little time and lesser patience for niceties. “When I was back in Islamabad the next day, our director-general of Inter-Services Intelligence, who happened to be in Washington, told me on the phone about his meeting with the US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage.
In what was to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Armitage added to what Colin Powell had said to me and told the director-general not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we would be bombed back to the Stone Age.”
It is anybody’s guess as to whether the Americans would have carried out their threat had Gen Musharraf cast Pakistan’s lot with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But being the crafty man that he is, Gen Musharraf decided to play along with the Bush Administration by pretending to be a ‘staunch’ and ‘steadfast’ ally in the war on terror, and thus get the West to acknowledge Pakistan as the ‘frontline state’ deserving of military and civilian aid, which has since run into billions of dollars, most of it contributed by the US.
Seven years after Gen Powell asked Gen Musharraf to choose between America and the terrorists, and Mr Armitage made sure Pakistan chose to support the US, there is little or nothing to show for the military and non-military aid. Oversight audits have revealed that much of the money meant to modernise the Pakistani Army to fight terrorism in that country’s badlands has been pocketed by its top brass through the rampant use of bogus vouchers and fake bills.
As for non-military aid, it is obvious that generous cash transfers from Western capitals to Islamabad have not helped prevent Pakistani society’s descent into Islamic fanaticism and jihadi bloodletting. Gen Musharraf had promised to reform the education system by cleansing school curriculum of the regressive elements introduced during the Islamisation drive of Gen Zia-ul-Haq, shutting down non-registered madarsas run by rabid mullahs, and modernising those seminaries which are recognised by the Government.
For all his talk about “enlightened moderation”, Gen Musharraf did nothing on this front; by the time he ordered his troops to storm Lal Masjid and its two madarsas, including Jamia Hafza, in the heart of Islamabad on July 8, 2007, thousands of clones of this Deoband-inspired seminary of hate had sprung up across Pakistan. Many more have mushroomed in the last two years and each one of them preaches a simple, one-sentence message: “Jihad is your salvation.”
Distinguished Pakistani scholar and columnist Pervez Hoodbhoy, in an article, “The Saudi-isation of Pakistan”, published in the latest issue of Newsline, laments how radical Islamism and mullah-driven Arabisation are furiously gnawing at the innards of a tottering Pakistani state. He says although the Government admits to the existence of only 13,000 madarsas with 1.5 million taliban, the real number is likely between 18,000 and 22,000.
That would mean millions of taliban being indoctrinated by hate-mongers for whom Islam means being in a state of constant war with those who refuse to submit to oppressive Islamism that militates against human liberty, equality and dignity.
The preaching of hate and the teaching of ‘virtues’ of jihad are not limited to Deobandi madarsas alone. Such has been the all-pervasive influence of state-sponsored Islamisation since the days of Gen Zia’s dictatorship — contrary to popular belief Benazir Bhutto did nothing to reverse the trend after the dictator met a justly deserved fiery death (those with an evil mind insist the CIA did him in), nor did Mr Nawaz Sharif bother to halt the onward march of radical Islam while Gen Musharraf tricked the Americans into believing he was working on education reforms but it would require a few more million dollars, please — that private schools have now begun adopting offensive textbooks.
Rezaul Laskar of PTI has filed a report from Islamabad which is worth quoting verbatim: “Thousands of Pakistani schoolgoing children are growing up learning that the Urdu equivalent of the letter ‘A’ stands for Allah, ‘B’ for bandook (gun) and ‘J’ for jihad. Though not officially prescribed for pre-schoolers, books printed by Iqra Publishers are being used in several regular schools and madarsas across Pakistan.
The three examples of Allah, bandook and jihad are not the only ones which sound like a ‘blueprint for a religious fascist state’. The Urdu letter for the ‘T’ stands for takrao (collision), ‘K’ for khanjar (dagger), H for hijab (veil) and ‘Z’ for zunoob (sins) which include watching television, playing musical instruments and flying kites.
Which takes us back to Peerbhoy’s lament: “Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind.
The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.” Not given to grand pronouncements, Peerbhoy has been cautious with his words. For, Pakistan has not only set itself on a self-destructive course, it is also headed for a catastrophe whose victims shall not be Pakistanis alone.
Tragically, the Americans refuse to read the writing on the wall. If the Bush Administration erred in trusting Pakistan, the incoming Obama Administration has compounded that error by promising to treble aid to a criminal state whose ruling elite, both military and civilian, is a complicit partner in promoting a particularly virulent form of radical Islamism. Little does the Pakistani elite realise that it too shall be devoured by the beast it is nurturing with American dollars. – kanchangupta@rocketmail.com
1) India & Obama @ http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers31/paper3013.html
2) Aiding Terror @ http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=277&page=10
3) Act Tough, India! @ http://newstodaynet.com/newsindex.php?id=14033%20&%20section=13
http://www.dailypioneer.com/150623/Nurturing-terror-with-US-dollars.html
[...] Nurturing Terror with $ @ http://honestreporting.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/nurturing-terror-with-us-dollars/ [...]
[...] 2) Nurturing Terror with $ @ http://honestreporting.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/nurturing-terror-with-us-dollars/ [...]
[...] NURTURING TERROR @ http://honestreporting.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/nurturing-terror-with-us-dollars/ [...]
[...] May 8, 2009 by honestreporting http://news.rediff.com/report/2009/may/08/-the-us-is-making-a-mistake-in-pakistan.htm ‘The US is making a mistake in Pakistan’ May 8, 2009 A conference on ‘Pakistan’s Troubled Frontier: The Future of FATA and the NWFP’ in Washington, DC witnessed several speakers expressing concern about the situation in Pakistan. In the third of the five-part series (read the first and second), Stephen P Cohen, the distinguished expert on South Asian affairs, discusses the crisis. An acute equipment shortage and an army that has only been trained to fight against India has left the Pakistani army highly ineffectual in its counter-insurgency efforts against the Taliban [ "There's truth to what the Pakistanis will tell you, that they lack equipment," Cohen, who has written books on both the Indian and Pakistan armies, said. "They are short on helicopters, short on night-vision devices, two main things, and they may be short on intelligence assets." However, he said, this does not obscure the central fact, that the army is "trained and prepared and geared to fight India than to fight their own people, which is what they have to do. There is no dedicated counter-insurgency force." A strategic error, Cohen said, was that the Pakistan's army [ Setting out the case of the Pakistan army's shortcomings, Cohen said, "There is an ethnic mismatch in the army. For example, there's a great fear in the army -- and I've heard this from a number of sources -- that the Punjabi soldier, perhaps not the Punjabi officer -- may be infected or could be infected by the local sectarian conflicts that are raging in Punjabi itself. So the ethnic balance in the army presents some problems." Compounding the problem, he said, is the fact that there is zero expertise among civilians in the government about national security, unlike their Indian counterparts, since India has all along had a civilian government and has constantly been engaged in counter-insurgency operations within the country. As a result, Cohen said, Pakistan's Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani has no civilians to turn to "when he has to provide a balanced strategy -- nobody." The United States, argued the expert, was making the mistake of asking Pakistan to do much more than it was capable of. "There are limits to what that the government can do -- they can barely stay in power, let alone clean up madrassas, fight a counter-insurgency, guard the nuclear programme, practice democracy, treat women properly, revive reform in economic policy." It is therefore necessary for the administration of US President Barack Obama [Images] to find out what it is that Pakistan is capable of doing, and what it will actually do, Cohen said. “In a sense, our relationship with Pakistan should be based both on what we think is important and what they can and what they will do.” “If we think that they can do everything, they will wind up doing nothing right � they will do everything very badly. So, while it’s nice to have a wish list about what Pakistan can and should do, it’s nice to reward them for doing things they can do under any circumstances.” The BBC’s Pakistan correspondent Haroon Rashid said since Pakistan and the US had jointly created the Taliban, it was necessary for the two countries to join hands to “put the genie back into the bottle.” The majority opinion in Pakistan is that the US is forcing its agenda on that country, said Rashid, pointing out in passing that the administration’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, is known as ‘the bulldozer.’ Arguing that this perception needed to change, Rashid said it was vital for the Pakistan government to be seen as working with the US on an equal footing, “without being labelled as agents of the US.” In common with the other panellists, Rashid said Pakistan’s failure to deal with extremist groups was in part because “the political and military strategy to deal with the militants has never been uniform.” Further, he said, the Pakistan military’s obsession with the idea that its main threat is India, and the perpetual tensions that notion creates, has been “another drain on resources” that should have been employed to contain the spread of terrorism.Reportage: Aziz Haniffa in Washington, DC. Nurturing Terror with $ @ http://honestreporting.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/nurturing-terror-with-us-dollars/ [...]
[...] Also Read: Nurturing Terror with $ [...]