Pakistan's crisis global concern

With Pakistan, people are holding their breath to see if the predictable train wreck in the making is by some prayer and luck averted for a nuclear weapon state.

The failed bid of the suicide bomber -- belonging likely to one of the many Islamist groups in Pakistan -- to eliminate Benazir Bhutto on her return home from exile is an omen of much worse to come.

The much worse could be the already ruinous failed state imploding as another Somalia or former Yugoslavia.

The present crisis -- the bid to kill Bhutto merely being the early intimation of the fight ahead -- has been a long time in the making and is loaded with irony.

General Pervez Musharraf as the army chief deposed an elected government and its leader, Nawaz Sharif, in 1999. This coup was a replay of previous army chiefs removing Bhutto twice elected as prime minister. Her father, Ali Bhutto, also was deposed then hanged by the military dictator General Zia ul Haq.

Moreover, this is the army or its shadowy branch, the Inter-Service Intelligence, that sowed the dragon seeds to sprout as the legions of jihadis (holy warriors) joined in a common cause to make war against the enemies of Islam preached by Taliban's chieftain Mullah Omar and al Qaida's Osama bin Laden.

But 9/11 confronted Pakistan and its military ruler with an existential choice of being branded by the U.S. as a rogue state sheltering terrorists, or taken as an ally in the war against Islamist terror.

The much postponed yet unavoidable and necessary test of will between the army and the jihadis looms large. The fight over the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, in July was merely the prologue of this test to come.

This fight will more or less determine if Pakistan can avert the train wreck and make a fresh beginning with the military restoring politics back to the people, thereby mobilizing the people in sufficient numbers to eliminate the jihadis and their wild politics bringing ruin to the country.

There is insurgency in the province of Baluchistan, Taliban-al Qaida warriors with local allies in the border lands of Afghanistan, political disquiet in the heartland of Punjab, and recurring sectarian strife in Karachi, the country's largest city in the southern province of Sind.

The strategic public support needed by Pakistan's ruling elite to eliminate the jihadis will not be forthcoming if Musharraf makes selective deals with some politicians in his bid to fix the outcome of the forthcoming election ahead of the vote.

This is what Musharraf has done by removing the bars against Bhutto to come back from exile abroad, while denying the same to Nawaz Sharif in defiance of the Supreme Court justices ruling in favour of the former deposed prime minister's fundamental right to return home.

An election in which Sharif, a native of Punjab, is denied participation will be seen by most Pakistanis as rigged.

And Bhutto will discredit herself as a willing stooge of Musharraf if she contests the election from which Sharif is absent.

The stakes for Pakistan, the region and the world beyond are unforgivably high in the twin outcome of an election accepted as legitimate, and the battle against the local jihadis with their foreign cohorts.

Moreover, this is the army or its shadowy branch, the Inter-Service Intelligence, that sowed the dragon seeds to sprout as the legions of jihadis (holy warriors) joined in a common cause to make war against the enemies of Islam preached by Taliban's chieftain Mullah Omar and al Qaida's Osama bin Laden.

I admit to not knowing much about Pakistan beyond the usual run of news stories I've read, but this paragraph strikes me as being fatally flawed.

I am always skeptical of ANY claim to link Jihadism to some righteous reaction to oppression. Jihadism comes from the Koran, and has been around since the 7th Century. I am no expert, but I am sure that the "Islam preached by Taliban's Chieftain Mullah Omar and al Qaida's Osama bin Laden" was not born out of resistance to the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence.

The Islam of Omar and bin Laden come from an ideology of hatred, created by their pedaphile founder back in the 600's. A hatred of all things free. A hatred of all things human. A demonic hatred. A particularly vicious Hate Meme.

A hatred that is perfectly replicated, generation after generation, by the study of the Koran and the perpetuation of inhuman practices at the family, village and state level all through the Islamic world.

I understand. You can always point to particulars here and there. This group did this. Another group did that. And that action caused the next action.

But what I’m saying is the Taliban is a direct outgrowth of the Koran. If not named the Taliban, if not directly assisted by the Pakistani military, it would have arisen under some other name, by some other proximate cause.

Hate-filled Islamic extremists are not a new phenomena born in the 20th century.

They weren’t new in the 10th century.

Sorry, I should've been clearer. You wrote:

I am no expert, but I am sure that the "Islam preached by Taliban's Chieftain Mullah Omar and al Qaida's Osama bin Laden" was not born out of resistance to the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence.

My only point was that the sentence you were responding to was not saying that resistance to the ISI was the source of Mullah Omar's and bin Laden's islam. The ISI guys were supporters, not antagonists.

You’re right. I screwed up. I see your point and stand corrected on that aspect of it. I was conflating the two different assertions (on the one hand, saying that jihadism is a product of oppression, on the other that it is the product of state-sponsored warriors) which are often bandied about regarding jihadism. Thanks for pointing that out.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda is Koran-inspired, no doubt. But what enables them to create so much havoc in countries with a great deal of a capability to secure itself, is the military intelligence and know-how, that the ISI provides.

The ISI is very good at bending the Islamaniacs and using them as an effective tool, against modern militaries and nation-states. The ISI may seem to appear like they are colluding with the Islamaniacs, but they are not. One is being used by the other, and it certainly isn’t the ISI that’s being used.

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