Pakistan In The US The US In Pakistan Self denial
Is Biggest Threat To World Peace
One of the ironies of
being a Pakistani living abroad, especially in the West, is having to pose as
Indian. According to Asghar Choudhri, the chairman of Brooklyn’s Pakistani
American Merchant Association, a lot of Pakistanis can’t get jobs after 9/11
and after the botched Times Square bombing of 2010, it’s even worse. “They are
now pretending they are Indian so they can get a job,” he told a US wire
service.
That is because while
Indians are highly integrated immigrants – besides being the highest educated
and best paid of all ethnic groups in the US – Pakistanis have taken part in
terrorist activities in the very lands that gave them shelter. (Even the
frequent Gallup surveys conducted in the US, found out repeatedly that the
biggest threat to the international security and peace are: nr. 3 Saudis; nr. 2
Pakistanis, and nr.1 – surprise, surprise – the US itself.)
From Ramzi Yousef,
who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 (8 years before Bin Laden) and is now
serving a 240-year prison sentence to Mir Aimal Kansi, who shot dead CIA agents
and was later executed by lethal injection, to Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square
“Idiot Bomber”, there is a long line of Pakistanis who have left a trail of
terror.
The San Bernardino,
California, attack of December 2015 by a Pakistani American couple was the most
spectacular in recent times. The husband was American-born raised and yet he
chose to launch a terror act against the people of the United States.
But while Pakistanis
wear an Indian mask for Western consumption, back home it’s business as usual.
Two incidents amply
demonstrate that Pakistanis have learnt nothing. One was the widespread outrage
across the country over Osama Bin Laden’s killing by American commandos. In
response to America’s exposure of Bin Laden’s hiding place, Pakistan moved to
shut down the informant network that lead the Americans there.
The other was the
unholy fracas over CIA shooter Kansi’s execution. The day after Kansi was
sentenced to death by an American court, four Americans were shot dead on the
streets of Pakistan. His funeral was attended by the entire civilian
administration in his hometown Quetta, the local Pakistani Corps Commander, and
the then Pakistani ambassador to the United States.
Thousands of mourners
turned out as Quetta city shuttered down. Kansi’s coffin, draped in black cloth
with verses from the Koran embroidered on it in gold, was carried on the
shoulders of young men some 10 miles from the airport to his family’s home in
Quetta. In Islamabad, the capital city, lawyers and university students poured
out on the streets.
Misplaced sympathy
The irony of
outpourings of support for hardened terrorists is that Pakistan is seriously
impacted by terrorism. A global study by the London-based Institute for
Economics and Peace ranks Pakistan fourth on the Global Terrorism Index (GTI)
list, behind Iraq,
Afghanistan and Nigeria.
According to the
study, “Terrorism remains highly concentrated with most (58 per cent) of the
activity occurring in just five countries — Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Syria.”
It mentions the most
fatal terrorist attack in Pakistan, of 2014: “Assailants detonated an
explosives-laden vehicle and then stormed the Army Public School in Peshawar
city, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan. At least 150 students and staff
were killed and 131 were wounded in the attack. All seven assailants were
either killed by security forces or detonated their explosives-laden vests.”
The gunmen belonged
to the terrorist group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is also known as
the Pakistani Taliban because it is based in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It is an
offshoot of the original Taliban which was created by Pakistan as a weapon to
be used against Afghanistan and India.
State sponsored terror
That Pakistan is a
state sponsor of terror is well known. In Hillary Clinton’s words to Islamabad,
if you harbour snakes in your backyard, don’t expect them to only bite your
neighbour.
It was Pakistan’s
demagogue dictator General Zia-ul-Haq who declared that “we will bleed India
with a thousand cuts”. The reckoning was that since Pakistan can never hope to
win a war against India, then India must be hit with terrorism. To this effect,
Pakistan first supported Kashmiri and Sikh separatists, armed them and provided
them safe bases on its territory.
When both these
terror campaigns failed, Pakistan created an alphabet soup of home grown terror
groups such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi,
Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami. These two were complemented by
the Haqqani network and the original Taliban, which has now split into dozens
of splinter groups, some of which are still controlled by the Pakistan military
and its chief intelligence agency, the ISI.
Former Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff of US, Mike Mullen has described the Haqqani Network
as the “veritable arm of Pakistan’s ISI”. Mullen said the ISI was supporting
the Haqqani network, which attacked the US embassy in Kabul in September 2011
and also the September 2011 NATO truck bombing which injured 77 coalition
soldiers and killed five Afghan civilians.
In a November 2014
interview to the BBC, the adviser to the Pakistani Prime Minister on National
Security and Foreign Affairs, Sartaj Aziz said Pakistan should not target
militants like the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network, which do not threaten
Pakistan’s security.
Indeed, Pakistan is
one of the few countries in the world which believes in good terrorists (who
attack the West, India and Israel) and bad terrorists (who target Pakistan). An
example of a ‘good’ terrorist group is the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which regularly conducts
mass rallies and congregation, advocating jihad in Kashmir. For its December
2014 rally, Pakistan ran two special trains to carry the crowd to Lahore.
India’s foreign ministry termed this as “nothing short of mainstreaming of
terrorism”. The congregation was held near Pakistan’s national monument, the
Minar-e-Pakistan, where 4000 policemen provided security.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is
the group responsible for the November 2008 Mumbai terror attack, which led to
the deaths of 156 innocent people. On December 3, 2008 Indian officials named
Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhavi, a top leader of the Lashkar, as one of four possible
major planners behind the attacks. Four days later, Pakistani armed forces
arrested Lakhvi in a raid on a training camp near Muzafarabad in Pakistani
Kashmir.
Destroying evidence
Pakistan doesn’t want
to bring terrorists like Lakhavi to justice because that would expose its
sponsorship of terror groups. After India produced evidence of the Lashkar’s
hand in the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan did the predictable. In order to claim
that none of these guys were technically within Pakistan, the ISI asked the
terrorists involved in the attack to leave the country.
But it turned out to
be a big mistake as one of these terrorists was caught in Saudi Arabia, which
presented him on a platter to India. During his interrogation by Indian
investigators, the terrorist revealed he was one of the key people tasked with
training the 10 Mumbai attackers. He said he was in the control room near the
international airport in Karachi from where Lakhavi was directing the
attackers. He also said that after Lakhvi’s arrest in December 2008, the
Pakistanis destroyed the control room in Karachi.
Pathankot denial
The January 2016
attack on an air force base in Pathankot, India, in which seven Indian security
guards and six terrorists were killed, will give you an idea of how Pakistan
continues to deny links with terror groups on its own soil.
After the Indians
allowed a Pakistani investigation team to visit the air base, the Pakistanis raised
the outrageous claim that the attack was carried out by India to defame
Islamabad. This has a parallel in 9/11 deniers in Muslim countries where
everyone seems to be convinced that Israel and the US were behind the Twin
Tower attacks.
According to the
Indian Express newspaper, the Pakistani investigators were given a full
transcript of the telephonic conversations between the terrorists and their
Pakistani handlers along with their identity. The Indian side gave the
Pakistanis “the links of Pakistani officials, believed to be ISI personnel,
with the handlers of the terrorists”. They were provided with “electronic and
forensic evidence regarding the slain terrorists’ Pakistani links, name of the
terrorists and several other critical evidence after an exhaustive probe
conducted” by India.
The Pakistani team
was given concrete proof that a senior terrorist leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammed
was in constant touch with the terrorists and giving them necessary
instructions during the three-day carnage.
And yet Pakistan
claims it was a stage managed attack by India.
Pakistan’s image
The stark reality is
that Pakistan has now become synonymous with terror. An unfortunate fallout of
the country’s long association with terror is that ordinary Pakistanis
worldwide appear tainted. A broad survey released on June 27, 2012 by the
United States-based Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes says that in a
number countries, including China, as well as several Muslim countries such as
Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon, the majority populations negatively view
Pakistanis.
Pakistan is not only
a universally disliked country but the Pakistanis themselves have learnt
nothing from their history, continuing to support the very actors who are
responsible for Pakistan’s negative image.
It is a measure of
Pakistan’s penchant for exporting terrorists, counterfeit currency and drugs
that India has constructed a 1400 km long steel fence across its border with
its wayward western neighbour. The floodlit fence, which is patrolled 24/7, can
be seen from space as a bright orange line snaking from the coast to Kashmir.
Iran is also building
a 700 km steel and concrete security fence along its border with Pakistan “to
prevent border crossing by terrorists and drug traffickers”. When complete it
will make Pakistan the most fenced-in country in the world.
In four of the five
predominantly Muslim nations covered by the survey, over half gave Pakistan
negative ratings. Jordan (57 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Tunisia (54
percent) and Egypt (53 percent) had an unfavourable opinion of Pakistan. The
only exception was Turkey, where attitudes were divided (43 percent negative
and 37 percent favourable).
In East Asia, 52
percent of Chinese saw Pakistan unfavourably, as did 59 percent in Japan and 59
percent in India. The Chinese statistic is not surprising as Pakistan-trained
Chinese Uighur Muslims have launched terror strikes in their remote province in
China. Japan deported around 15,000 Pakistanis after 9/11.
Beaten, corrupt military most loved
Every country has an
army but the Pakistan Army has a country. The Pakistani military is the most
corrupt institution in the land, with a finger in every national pie. Army
officers get prime plots of land post-retirement at a third of the market
price. It is certainly a case of generals fattening at the expense of an
increasingly poor population.
The Pakistani
military has lost fours against India. After every war, Pakistan has lost
territory, face and the credibility of its fighting forces. And yet Pakistanis
rate this military very highly.As many as 77 percent said the military has a
good influence on the country.
The media came next
with a 68 percent rating, followed by religious leaders at 66 percent.
With religious
zealots getting a solid two-thirds rating, is it any surprise that support for
using the Pakistani military to fight extremist groups has declined over the
last three years? Opposition to using the army to fight extremist organisations
is especially high in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (where 54 percent opposed) and
Baluchistan (50 percent).
Biting the hand that feeds
India does not get
any aid from the United States and yet among all 21 nations Pew surveyed,
Indians seemed most favourably disposed towards it. Only 12 percent said they
had unfavourable opinion of the United States. On the other hand, 80 percent of
Pakistanis had a negative opinion of America, with 74 percent regarding it as
an enemy country.
American aid efforts
were seen in a negative light by Pakistanis although the country continues to
get billions of dollars of US aid. Around four-in-ten (38 percent) said US
economic aid was having a mostly negative impact on Pakistan, while just 12
percent believed it was mostly positive. Similarly, 40 percent thought American
military aid was having a mostly negative effect, while only 8 percent said it
was largely positive.
This is a snapshot of
Pakistan, where the arrow of time is travelling backwards, taking them into a
cycle of medieval madness. Where the death of a terrorist merely means he will
be instantly replaced by a hundred clones.
About the author:
*Rakesh Krishnan Simha, New Zealand-based journalist and
foreign affairs analyst. According to him, he writes on stuff the media
distorts, misses or ignores. Rakesh started his career in 1995 with New
Delhi-based Business World magazine, and later worked in a string of positions
at other leading media houses such as India Today, Hindustan Times, Business
Standard and the Financial Express, where he was the news editor. He is the
Senior Advisory Board member of one of the fastest growing Europe’s foreign
policy platforms: Modern Diplomacy.
