Mysteries of the Week

I know, I know. We've been terribly bad. No need to rub it in. But the simple fact of the matter is, things have changed since we began this blog. On the positive side, far more people are keeping tabs on the media in particular and even the media itself has matured and become more self-critical, which takes some of the burden off us and this is something to be celebrated. On the negative side, we have let our own punishing work schedules make us a bit lazy and perhaps also complacent - it's not easy doing things as kaar-e-khair for so long.

In any case, one of the most daunting things is getting back into writing after a fairly lengthy lay-off. Especially, as is always the case with Pakistan, there is so much piled up worthy of commentary. In fact, one of the things that made me hesitate about a number of different posts I wanted to write was because, after such an long absence, I felt the first post should be something truly substantial. I realize, of course, that this was precisely the wrong approach. One really has to ease back into blogging. Furthermore, one should not give two hoots about the morally outraged trolls who inevitably flood every post with their indignation that it is not about what they think should be addressed instead. You know the sort: 'How can you talk about Maya Khan when drones are raining death down from the sky and Memogate threatens to destroy the country?' 'You're writing about drones? What about the genocide of the Baloch Shia!' 'How dare you make fun of maulvis. Why don't you write about the liberal elite scum that have destroyed this country?' You can never win with this lot. But the point is, why should one care what trolls say? You're so concerned, troll, that each and every post is not what you want it to be, why don't you go write about it and leave us the eff alone?

So, with that realization behind me, I present the two great image mysteries of the past week. Look at the following two photographs, both published in The News.

The first is from the March 23 paper, showing the reaction of a crowd assembled in the Arts Council Auditorium watching the Pakistan cricket team securing a last-ball win against Bangladesh in the Asia Cup finals:

The second is from the March 26 paper, showing the reaction of a crowd attending a Karachi mushaira (poetry reading) when suddenly shots rang out outside the venue:

Now, don't you just want to know more about the Uncle in the top picture and the Aunty in the second one (both circled for easy identification)? I mean, in the first photograph, the entire crowd has erupted in jubilation, yet Uncle seems supremely uninvolved, if not downright glum. Was he supporting Bangladesh? If he was, shouldn't he still show some more emotion than he does? Does he play poker? Does he not care about competitive sports? And if so, why is he there?

The second picture is even more of an enigma. Half the audience seems to be on the floor in terror, apparently to save their lives, while a few seem less concerned. But Aunty, oh Aunty, is not even bothering to look around and staring straight ahead at, one assumes, the stage. Was she transfixed by the beauty of the couplet she had just heard? Is she meditating on the metaphysics of a particularly deep ghazal? Or did she have too much Lexotanil before leaving home?

Come on, journalists of The News. Where is your sense of curiosity?

Comedy As Serious Business

“Ever wondered what you could do in light of ongoing terrorism, the Haqqani network, the Taliban, the al Qaeda? Tried shooting off a punch line, or throwing a joke at them?”

So began this piece in the Express Tribune today praising This Is Standup Comedy, a four-part web series in which local comics Saad Haroon and Danish Ali ostensibly “try and explore the effect terrorism has had on Pakistani society”. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that as the series loaded I was already thinking but haven’t we got any psychologists for that?




Half the point of good comedy is that it isn’t earnest, well-meaning or motivated by the desire to please people or explain the world. It is about subversion. A good comic will not say the right things. He or she will say the wrong things. And if, in the process of saying the wrong thing, they punch a hole in my own Line Of Bullshit Control, well then ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. Or rather, a loser. Because that’s what genuinely funny people or POVs tend to be, losers aka misfits, underdogs, freaks, misanthropes, outsiders.

Take the delightful David Baddiel-written film starring Iranian funnyman Omid Djalili, The Infidel:




Take Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Syal and Nina Wadia’s experiences of growing up in multicultural Britain in Goodness Gracious Me:




Take Fifty Fifty, which proved that censorship doesn’t have to be a bar to the pithiest of social commentary:




Take Chris Cooper, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s Four Lions, which showed us the difference between making fun of jihadis and making a funny about jihadis:




Now take This Is Standup Comedy, which consists largely of Saad Haroon and a host of other people pretending stand up comedy didn’t exist before English-speaking Muslims in a post-9/11 world discovered it, lamenting how hard it is to a) be misunderstood b) get a visa, and go outside and jump up and down on it.

You should do this not just because it’s good for your hams and glutes, but also because both Haroon and Sami Shah* – the genuinely wacky Danish Ali, despite his top billing, sadly only has four lines – are both talented, experienced comics and really should have known better than to try to pass of intellectual laziness as an ethical stance.

[*Update: We have received clarification from Sami Shah that he was not involved in the creation of the series and was merely interviewed for it. We apologize if a misleading impression was given by the above lines.]

The series does not explore the effect terrorism has had on Pakistani society as much as it explores the unfortunate results of comics being unable to transcend their own social/religious/ethnic/sexual identities. The answer to why this is so might lie in this line from the ET review:

"Haroon and Ali are well known among the hip crowd for being Pakistan’s première English language stand-up comics."

This is pretty much the comedic equivalent of jumping into a river with a concrete block around your ankles, which, as anyone else who has tried it at home can tell you, is really not funny.

When it happens – as This Is Standup Comedy inadvertently showcases - what you are left with is not the tight writing or detached dissection of universal human traits the four examples above feature but different versions of punch lines that can be summarized thus:

Terrorists are stupid.

People who think I’m a terrorist are stupid.

Why don’t you like me?

Live shows or series inhabiting this position don’t do themselves any favors. First, the comics seem to feel that being brown, from a conservative background and funny is in itself a novelty so they don’t work very hard and the material just isn’t good enough, especially when you compare it to thematically similar work that has already been done in both English and vernacular languages. This goes back to that notion of the wider world, and specifically discrimination, not existing before 9/11. Local comics looking to get mileage out of Islamophobia as a lived experience should look to the Jews. Not to convert (you’d have to be a real motherfucker to do that) but to contemplate what Jewish comics learned years ago; the trick is not to make fun of the goyim being anti-Semitic but to make fun of the Jew experiencing anti-Semitism instead. For example, Sami Shah's throwaway line about just wanting to 'understand the Taliban' could have led into a riff on hipsters at Espresso discussing ideology over a latte, but instead we are left again with the hackneyed profiling joke.

Second, I don’t really believe a stand up show on the day after a bomb blast is fighting the Taliban any more than I believe a fashion show an hour after a bomb blast is fighting the Taliban or my naanwala sticking bread in a tandoor the morning after a bomb blast is fighting the Taliban. Sometimes trying to make a living is just that, trying to make a living. The only difference between a certain kind of Pakistani in the creative sphere and my naanwala is that he doesn’t make a song and dance (and documentary) about it.

And now for something completely different…

Reading Al Qaeda In Karachi

In the preface to his book Inside Al Qaeda And The Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11, the late Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote:

“I have never worked for any well-funded international news organizations. Nor have I worked for the mainstream national media. My affiliations have always remained with alternative media outlets. This has left me with narrow options and very little space to move around in… However, independent reporting for the alternative media best suits my temperament as it encourages me to seek the truth beyond “conventional wisdom”. ”

Available outside Pakistan

Before it led him to a tragic death, Saleem Shahzad’s quest for that elusive truth beyond conventional wisdom took him from walks on Clifton Beach with a military officer-turned-Al Qaeda strategist to nights spent in mud huts with Taliban militia men as helicopters passed overhead and drones struck in the distance. It took him from Pakistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan and back to North Waziristan to meet raw recruits and hardened militants. Inside Al Qaeda And The Taliban, however, is not a book about one man’s fascination with other men who like guns. It is a well-researched, cogent argument for the need to recognize that a common tactical goal – death to America the 'Great Satan' – “does not make the two a single entity. Theirs is a unique relationship, in which Al Qaeda aims to bring the Taliban and all Muslim liberation movements into its fold and to use them to forward it’s global agenda.”


The creation and uses of the mujahideen – who helped defeat the Soviet Union – as a strategic asset to be deployed at will by the Pakistani military to help actualize its regional ambitions, has already been well documented. Shahzad’s book does, however, flesh out how exactly the transformation of some of them from idealistic Muslim youth seeking to repel invaders from Muslim lands into uber-violent jihadis thirsting for the blood of their former handlers, came about. Consider the story of Bin Yameen, also known as Ibn-e-Ameen, who the author identified as the actual enforcer behind the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) movement to declare Sharia law in Swat in 2009.

“Bin Yameen was 6 feet 2 inches tall, had a broad chest, was fair in complexion, and had a full head of hair. His looks were God’s gift, but his short temper was not inbuilt.… Born as a Behloolzai, a subtribe of the Youzufzai tribe, Bin Yameen was never the playboy of his village or a poet. He was a school dropout at the matric level. While he was still in his teens he went to Afghanistan and fought alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud. He was arrested in his first battle and then spent seven long years in the inhuman jails of the Northern Alliance. Bin Yameen often remembers how his fellow Taliban detainees died in the jail. Sometimes he witnessed their swift deaths while they were talking or cooking. After the Taliban defeat, he was released by the United States.

“But it was not his seven years in the Northern Alliance jails that embittered him. After his release from [a Panjsheri] prison, his manners were still extraordinarily polite. He always stood up to welcome any guest. The marriage and love life of any Pashtun has always been a very private business. No Pashtun from a village background would ever confide in anyone over matters of the heart. But Bin Yameen used to proudly say that his wife (also his relative) had fallen in love with him and that before their marriage, when they were only engaged during his prolonged imprisonment in Afghanistan, all the family members had pressed her to break her engagement to him and marry someone else. But against all Pashtun traditions, the girl defied her family and said that her name would be tied to Bin Yameen’s forever, whether he lived or died. When Bin Yameen was released and went back to his village the first thing he did was to marry her, proud that this was the girl who had steadfastly stood by him despite all the pressures put on her by her family to forget him.

“Bin Yameen always said that all the pain and agony of his days in the Afghan prison disappeared after the marriage. It was as if nothing had happened. He started his new life with a loving wife. His wife delivered a son and they moved to Peshawar.”

The turning point for this man, according to the author, came after the December 2003 attempt on then President Musharraf’s life. In its aftermath, security agencies starting rounding up the jihadis they had till then supported.

“On August 21, 2004, Pakistan’s security agencies raided Bin Yameen’s house in Peshawar. He was sleeping with his wife. In the next room were two prominent jihadis.” The two managed to escape but the police who had broken into the house captured both Bin Yameen and his wife and “literally dragged them to their vehicles. Bin Yameen was half asleep and half awake, but he saw strangers touching his wife. He attacked them like a wounded lion. He tried to snatch their guns. It took dozens of security personnel to overwhelm him... Later his wife and son were released but Bin Yameen never forgot the humiliation suffered by his wife at the hands of Pakistan’s security personnel.”

After his release three years later he went on to become Al Qaeda’s secret mole in TNSM. They recognized the value of his “unbelievable” hatred – his politeness had become an insatiable thirst to slit the throats of Pakistan army personnel – and recruited him precisely because of it. Interestingly, this is the only time a woman (Bin Yameen's wife) makes an appearance in the book as anything other than a suicide bomber, Osama Bin Laden's daughter, or a purdah-observing student of the Lal Masjid seminary. The world Shahzad wrote about is clearly a world of men, for men, and the lives of women do not in any way figure in the anecdotes, conversations, analysis or vignettes that peppers its pages.


The militants in Swat were eventually pushed back into the Hindu Kush mountains, but Shahzad suggested there was another way to look at this apparent military victory.

“Pakistan’s secularists then boldly stood up against the Islamization of Pakistan. They called for the wings of Islamic seminaries in the country to be clipped. The government arranged religious conferences led by Sufis who spoke out against the Taliban. The Taliban retaliated by killing prominent Islamic scholars like Sarfaraz Naeemi. It seemed at first that the situation had turned against the militants, but behind the scenes Al Qaeda had succeeded in exploiting the ideological contradictions in Pakistan’s society, and deepened the ideological divide.

“In pursuit of this, Al Qaeda’s dialectical process, thousands of people were displaced, hundreds of people were killed, the national economy of Pakistan was on the verge of collapse, and Pakistan became completely dependent on US aid.”

Inside Al Qaeda And The Taliban offers many other examples of Al Qaeda’s ideological opportunism. Shahhzad sketches with forensic skill the way the movement capitalized on the growing disillusionment of operatives like Ilyas Kashmiri, the brothers Captain Khurram and Major Haroon, Major Abdul Rahman (three of whom were instrumental allegedly in the planning and execution of the Mumbai attacks), and Lal Masjid's Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, with the institutions that had once fostered them. Any questions or doubts anybody has about the chronology or motivations for the Lal Masjid incident might well be addressed by reading his take on life beyond the soundbites, the still images, the regurgitated narrative of revolutionary fervor meeting arrogant military might.


Shahzad also establishes chronologically, in detail, the character and purpose behind the umbrella group of what is today known as the TTP or Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. He traces how Al Qaeda, the heart of which is a philosophy held sacred by mostly foreigners who are relatively few in number, has over time infiltrated, influenced and started controlling these 'Neo Taliban.'


According to Shahzad, both the Masjid and the TNSM takeover of Swat were meant to divert attention from the tribal areas and buy Al Qaeda more time to consolidate its position there. Its ultimate goal? Expand the theater of war to include all modern day parts of ‘ancient Khurasan’, where the prelude to the “End of Times” battles were prophesied to begin. Khurasan today includes parts of Iran, the Central Asian republics, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. Ghazwa-e- Hind, or the battle for India, is also supposed to happen. After this the Muslim armies will march to the Middle East to join forces with the promised Mahdi and do battle against the Antichrist and its Western Allies for the Liberation of Palestine.


Essentially, Al Qaeda recognized Af-Pak way before the American and Pakistani establishment did. This is because, according to Shahzad, the organization has – thanks to the inspired use of its ‘human resources’ – always remained one step ahead of the great game.

“Before October 7, 2001 – when the United States attacked Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, most of Al Qaeda’s top minds had already left the country, their mission focused on several targets:

• to ideologically cultivate new faces from strategic communities such as the armed forces and intelligence circles

• to bring in new recruits and establish cells

• to have each new cell assigned to raise its own resources and devise a plan, but have only one cell implement the plan, while the others served as decoys to 'misdirect' intelligence agencies”

Methods for ‘raising resources’ have included robbing banks and kidnapping Hindus and Ahmedis for ransom.


Since Musharraf first allied Pakistan to the US post-9/11 and the inevitable crackdown on jihadis began – the author’s thesis goes – Al Qaeda has waited, watched, and selected the, if not brightest, at least most committed former children of the US/Pak military machine to turn on their parents. On one level, it is Freudian: kill your mother (Pakistan), kill your father (the army, any army, dates are fluid, and which parent remembers the exact moment of conception anyway?). On another level, it is frightening: we are not even targets, we are collateral damage, and the suicide bombers' strings are being pulled by a parasitic entity that spreads from host to host in less time than it takes for Ansar Abbasi to go from ‘ISI good’ to ‘ISI bad.’


Other points that the book makes:


• Al Qaeda wants to keep the US in the region, engaged and off balance, till such time as the world’s mightiest ‘military machine’ has been bled dry


• Al Qaeda does not wish for a peace deal between the US and the Afghan Taliban because they want to continue to use US occupation of ‘Muslim lands’ as a rallying call for Muslims around the world. The creation of the TTP, the ‘Neo Taliban’, could also be seen as a move to woo fighters away from purely Afghan Taliban interests, which have more to do with ending the US invasion than they do with waiting for the Mahdi


• Al Qaeda feels – correctly as it turns out – that Pakistan’s tribal areas, with their virtually impregnable mountain ranges, are the perfect bases for the global Islamic insurgency. (Sadly, the book was completed before the ‘Arab Spring’, and any opportunity for the author to comment on how that changed the propaganda context.)


• Al Qaeda accomplished what no one had been able to do in Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies before: break the back of the local sardar/ jirga system


• Al Qaeda’s “Egyptian camp” of core ideologues can be perceived as the ‘intelligentsia of fundamentalism.’ This can either mean they are highly intelligent, learned, well read scholars of history, religion, philosophy and warfare. Or that every third Friday after lights out they regroup in a forest wearing all black to drink wine, smoke cheroots and debate existentialism. Probably the former.


• Saudi Osama Bin Laden might have been the face of Al Qaeda, but Egyptian Ayman Al Zwahiri was always the brains


• Zwahiri’s strategic vision has been to divide and rule, create splits between establishment/ ruling elite and the ordinary citizens of Muslim countries, discord between rulers and people being fertile recruiting ground for pan-Islamic ideals as well as yet another way to diffuse energy that might otherwise be directed at tackling Al Qaeda itself


Like the title suggests, Shahzad’s book is more about the growth and spread of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and tracing the patterns of diversion and consolidation contained therein than it is about the merits and demerits of the policies of the United States of America. It assumes that anyone reading it already has a cursory grasp of recent history. There is, therefore, only the occasional reference to the ‘cowboy’ nature of the American state (throw a rock at it and it will charge you in a tank). It is pretty much assumed that that a particular nation’s role in getting itself into the situation it finds itself in today is understood. Similarly short shrift is paid to Pakistan’s political leadership. Despite the role of the Jamaat-e-Islami, members of PML(Q), Imran Khan and Maulana Fazlur Rehman in giving militants legitimacy in the eyes of the public, they come across as a bunch of non-entities, attached like remoras to the sharks in the water.


It is also pretty much assumed that the reader understands that the Pakistani establishment’s official policy towards the spread of pseudo-Islamic fascism is dictated largely by the aforementioned American cowboys.

“Benazir Bhutto’s murder had undone the US scheme for Pakistan. Washington was compelled to change its entire roadmap. Under the new arrangement General Musharraf was an irritant and he was bade farewell. The United States then welcomed Zardari as the new president… it was now Admiral Mullen and General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani who were central to the Pakistan-US equation.”

Shahzad listed some of the salient features of the new relationship. They included: The Pakistan Army being in sole charge of military operations while “parliament and the civil administration were there simply to provide coordination and moral support ”, a US$1 billion plan to expand the US presence in Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad, private security firms (DynCorp aka Blackwater) setting up offices in Islamabad “where they had already rented 284 houses, besides setting up bases in Peshawar and Quetta. In addition, Pakistan was to provide land in Tarbela to the United States for its operations ”, and the ISI setting up a “syndicated intelligence service under a proxy network to provide information to be transmitted to the CIA predator drones used to target the top Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”


That plan never came to fruition though. Shahzad established how often the Pakistani national security apparatus was outmaneuvered, sabotaged or made to just look plain stupid. This ranged from things like assuming the US would be defeated in Afghanistan in five years, after which ties with militants it wanted dead could be quietly resumed, to not predicting that the deadly cadres would turn their attention to Pakistan’s cities, to not knowing Musharraf's security officer Major Farooq was a member of Hizbur Tahrir and helped Major Haroon bring night vision goggles into the country from China, to not preparing adequately to fight a guerilla war, to mistreating the wrong prisoners during interrogation, to pampering the wrong prisoners during detention, to not knowing militants were about to utilize a shelved ISI contingency plan for a terror attack in India in the tragic events in Mumbai in 2008.


To this we can now add, not knowing Osama Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and not knowing who killed Syed Saleem Shahzad.

Syed Saleem Shahzad: writing with his blood

We are left to draw our own conclusions about, on a policy level, how much of that failure to recognize an enemy within was deliberate or unwitting. Khaled Ahmed, in this excellent piece for The Friday Times, lists what some of those conclusions might be: TTP does nothing without approval from Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda killed Benazir, Pakistan army has ex-officers in Al Qaeda as well as serving officers collaborating with these ex-officers, and Islamic radicalization of Pakistani society and media mixed with fear of being assassinated by Al Qaeda agents - who include ex-army officers - have tilted the balance of power away from the state of Pakistan to Al Qaeda.


The book also examines the ideological and literary inspirations behind Al Qaeda, and compares and contrasts it with other ‘Muslim liberation’ movements across the globe. These brief chapters, and the few times Shahzad felt compelled to romanticize mountain warriors as Iqbal’s shaheen(s) “Swooping, shocking, then retiring, pouncing on the prey/ I do all this to keep my blood warm”, are the only times the author’s voice deviates from the dispassionate narrator position he inhabits for most of the book.


It takes a particularly courageous, or particularly foolish, person to probe the murky world of terror outfits and ambiguously-oriented militaries in the way that the late author did. Those who do tend to either be accused of fulfilling someone else’s agenda, or dismissed as conspiracy theorists because most of what they write cannot be verified immediately. This dilemma, and the narrative sensitivity Syed Saleem Shahzad displayed when discussing abstract philosophy and human psychology, only makes one more curious about who he was, how he was able to experience people and places others have been unable to access, and which of the exceedingly dangerous positions he put himself in was responsible for his horrific murder.

Straight Talk Continues from KK

I don't really know what's happened to Kamran Khan. Since that day, a couple of days after the Abbottabad raid, he has been more outspoken about the failures of our military establishment and the hypocrisy of our "strategic" security policies than he has probably ever been in his broadcasting career. It does make a nice change from the one-sided diatribes against civilian bungling that had allowed his programme to become extremely predictable and monotonous over the past year. (Lest this be misunderstood, I am not at all arguing that the ineffectiveness or corruption of civilian leaderships and bureaucracy should not be exposed. Only that in matters of security and on foreign policies regarding Kashmir, India, Afghanistan and the US there should be an equally fair assessment of the military which sets the tone, if not the entire agenda, of these issues. And also that the electronic media needs to provide some perspective to viewers when discussing the multiple crises of the Pakistani state - let's just say in the most understated manner that it's certainly not all the fault of the civilians who have been in partial control of this blighted country for less than half its existence).

In any case, whatever it is that has happened to Kamran Khan, I hope it continues.

Watch particularly from around 5:55 through to the end of the clip (from today's show Aaj Kamran Khan Ke Saath on Geo)...

Security Lapse? What Security Lapse?

I realize that everyone is now in a position to lecture our defenders on how to defend themselves. Shut down PAF Museum, close down the shaadi business, demolish Shah Faisal Colony, replace those security cameras, take away Rehman Malik's Blackberry etc. etc. etc.

Can I take the opportunity to share a minor security lapse that I was personally a witness to a couple of months ago?

Like most mid-career journalists I dream of real estate, basically owning my own little beach hut on Hawke's Bay. Occasionally I rent or beg my more resourceful friends but wouldn't it be nice to have a little one-room place there? I, along with a friend, found myself in a Colonel sahib's car in the pursuit of this beach fantasy. An enterprising real estate dealer had convinced us that Colonel sahib has a little plot on Hawke's Bay that he would like to sell for a bargain price.

As we reached that blighted turning on Mauripur Road from where you turn for Hawke's Bay and Sand Spit (you know the one which hasn't been paved for past 20 years, because truckers, you know, will ruin it anyway) Colonel Sahib kept driving towards Masroor Air Base. Much better road, he promised us. As we approached the gate, Colonel sahib rolled down his window and gave out his name and rank, and three layers of security melted away, and we started a very pleasant drive on a very nice road inside the base. It puzzled me as it was a private car with no security stickers or anything else.

"Colonel sahib, do you come here quite often?" I asked earnestly.
"Nahin yaar, haven't been here in six years."
"Is this an army car then?"
"No. Bought it myself."
"So why didn't those people ask for your ID? I mean, this is a very important operational base, how do they know that you are a colonel?"
"What?! Don't I look like a colonel?"

An aerial view of Masroor Air Base from the Federation of American Scientists' website

Colonel sahib lowered the volume on Anoop Jalota's sharabi ghazal and stared at us. He wore a white, starched shalwar qameez and Raybans. Okay, he had the fauji haircut, but I have seen lots of non-colonels who look exactly like him.

"Of course you do, Colonel sahib," I reassured him.

The drive through the base was uneventful. It wasn't as posh as we hacks think these things are. We passed by signboards that pointed to Mirage squadrons, the Senior NCO Mess, and lots of empty fields. Colonel sahib admitted that the security was a bit of joke. I wasn't sure if he was indulging potential customers or actually believed it. We exited through a tiny gate which was manned by two sleepy unarmed men in a uniform that we had never seen before.

"They are not soldiers, just chowkidars," Colonel sahib explained. "Somebody has just given them some uniforms."

As we hit the main civilian road we were reassured to see that we had managed to avoid the truck-congested part of the route but not missed the famous snack shop called Chillkaro.com.

And that beach plot? It turned out to be too expensive for me.

Signs Of The Times?

Let's get some things straight. There are still a large number of BIG questions unanswered about the killing in Abbottabad of Osama bin Laden. Many in Pakistan are choosing to obsess over how the American Navy SEALs team managed to come in and go out of Pakistan without being detected by the vaunted and financially over-indulged Pakistani military. Others are also questioning whether one should take the US government's and the ISI's word that OBL was indeed present in the compound that was attacked and whether he was, in fact, killed as stated. These are NOT the questions I am talking about.

The question that really needs to be answered is how it was possible for the most wanted man in the world to be living literally under the nose of Pakistan's men in khaki, whose leader had declared almost at the same spot only a week ago that his men had broken the back of terrorism and that Pakistani "dignity" would not be compromised for the sake of "prosperity." The question that really needs to be answered is why we - the people of Pakistan - should take anything he says with any seriousness if, in fact, he and his boys are really that incompetent. And why the Pakistani people should continue to give up their prosperity to fund such incompetence. The question that really needs to be answered, if the boys in khaki are not to be taken as the most incompetent people on the face of the earth, is what they were hoping to gain from such brazen duplicity. Because that really is the only choice available in their defence: nincompoop-ness vs two-facedness. Thanks to whatever their defence may be, Pakistan has a choice of being considered either a failed or a rogue state.

But if any good can come out of this fiasco, it had to be what I witnessed while watching Aaj Kamran Ke Saath on Geo tonight. The tone was in remarkable contrast to what most of the Pakistani electronic media (with a couple of notable exceptions) had decided to feed the Pakistani public over the last two days. The 'line' seemed to be completely reversed from what the Pakistani public has been force-fed generally over the last decade. And if it means what I think it does, coming from the well-connected Kamran Khan, it might just indicate some sort of silver lining for a future that looked increasingly bleak.

See this clip of the first 12-odd minutes of the programme and decide for yourself (you can watch the whole programme here):




Can one still hope to dream?

The Pakistanian Defence And Its Alternatives

Pakistan Today's cover May 3, 2011

It can be argued that the world’s most powerful countries are those that understand the difference between perception and reality, and attach equal importance to controlling both. Pakistan’s reality is a harsh, challenging one, but unless we move proactively and immediately to counter the further degradation of our already distorted image, it is about to get a lot worse.


Consider this, from Al Jazeera English:

“The Arab Spring has eroded many of the conventional assumptions about the relationship between dictators, Islamists and the West. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, we heard dictators playing the Islamist card for three decades – "support us unless you want the terrorists to win".

The reality has been quite different...Today, the US continues to lavishly fund the Pakistani military, while using drones and secret soldiers such as Raymond Davis to attack the extremist forces that the same regime supports. It is up to the US to stop feeding the beast.”

Or this, from The New York Times:

“... Bin Laden’s death near Islamabad has rekindled suspicions in Afghanistan…“Pakistan is the problem, and the West has to pay attention,” said Amrullah Saleh, the former intelligence director of Afghanistan, who resigned last summer. Though jubilant at the death of Bin Laden, he said it was time for the United States to “wake up to the fact that Pakistan is a hostile state exporting terror.”

Or this, from Salman Rushdie for The Daily Beast:

“ There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Laden’s compound provides further proof of Pakistan’s dangerous folly.

As the world braces for the terrorists’ response to the death of their leader, it should also demand that Pakistan give satisfactory answers to the very tough questions it must now be asked. If it does not provide those answers, perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations .”

Despite American and British efforts to diffuse the situation, this hard-line ‘enough is enough’ stance is being echoed across the globe. It is neither surprising nor unexpected, and in the long run questions of whether it is justified will remain, as they are now, relevant only to Pakistan’s internal dialogue, but more on that later. The world, like the mob, is ultimately uninterested in the nuances of things. Can it, like the beast, be lulled into stillness with the right tune?


I cannot comment with any authority on the PR plan our politicians, military, past/future leaders and broadcast journalists are currently following. I know that most of the politicos are sticking with the ostrich routine, most of our leaders are rechecking their visa-to-safer-climes status, most of our broadcast journalists are continuing to miss the forest for the trees, and that the ISPR is shooting a feature film, written possibly by the official behind the 'We're good, but we're not God' line featured in this BBC report. The two sole Pakistani voices who have spoken for us internationally today, then, are the rather Laurel and Hardyesque pairing of novelist Mohsin Hamid and President Asif Ali Zardari; Hamid in an opinion piece for The Guardian and Zardari in a comment for The Washington Post.


Both have chosen to follow what I would like to dub ‘The Pakistanian Defense’ (a nod to George Bush, which is also interestingly often a feature of the PD, as is the kind of ironic self referencing you see here). The Pakistanian Defense has a few standard features, some of which are listed below, which can be tweaked to accommodate word length, timing and audience.


1) More of my countrymen have died than all of yours combined.


Zardari, or his resident ghost writer, does it with: 

“Let us be frank. Pakistan has paid an enormous price for its stand against terrorism. More of our soldiers have died than all of NATO’s casualties combined. Two thousand police officers, as many as 30,000 innocent civilians and a generation of social progress for our people have been lost.”

Hamid does it with: 

“Less well known is the statistic that since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed nearly five times that number of people in Pakistan. The annual number of Pakistani fatalities from terrorism has surged from fewer than than 200 in 2003 to almost 1,000 in 2006, to more than 3,000 in 2009. In all, since 2001 more than 30,000 have died here in terror and counterterror violence; slain by bombs, bullets, cannons and drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24-7-365.”

Zardari’s piece is simple in structure and word choice, much like a lot of the hostility currently emanating from the pens of opinion makers in other countries. It, like Clinton’s ‘you cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us’, outlines the outer limits of the diplomatic dance. Hamid, on the other hand, co-opts the linguistic weapons of choice of the other side (surged, counterterror, America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24-7- 365) and in doing so creates a space where nuance may one day live.


2) Pakistanis want peace, not war.


Zardari raises the facts that: 

“Radical religious parties have never received more than 11 percent of the vote. Recent polls showed that 85 percent of our people are strongly opposed to al-Qaeda. In 2009, when the Taliban briefly took over the Swat Valley, it demonstrated to the people of Pakistan what our future would look like under its rule — repressive politics, religious fanaticism, bigotry and discrimination against girls and women, closing of schools and burning of books. Those few months did more to unite the people of Pakistan around our moderate vision of the future than anything else possibly could.”

Hamid reinforces that with: 

“If Osama Bin Laden's death means that the war in south and central Asia can now begin to end, that America can begin to withdraw its forces from the region, and that Pakistan and Afghanistan can somehow rediscover peace, then one day there may be celebrations here as well.”

3) They will be gunning for us even more viciously now.


Zardari points this out with: 

“Only hours after bin Laden’s death, the Taliban reacted by blaming the government of Pakistan and calling for retribution against its leaders, and specifically against me as the nation’s president.”

Hamid says it with: 

“As news of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden's death reverberates in Pakistan, embassies here are shutting down, hotels are ramping up security, restaurants are reporting cancelled reservations and public gatherings like plays, concerts and lectures, are being postponed. The feeling in Lahore is familiar: it is like the dread that lingers over the city in the days after it has suffered a massive terrorist attack. This time, though, the attack has not yet happened, and the dread spans the entire country. Pakistanis know they may pay a blood price for Bin Laden's killing. A purported mirror has been broken. Bad luck is to be expected.”

Zardari makes the mistake of sticking with the royal ‘we’, demanding an acknowledgement of worth nobody currently wants to give us. Hamid comes in from the other end and makes us ordinary, human, sketching life for Pakistanis in details The Other can understand, even if they are details actual ordinary, human Pakistanis would scratch their heads at (hotels, restaurants, plays, concerts, lectures…er…what?). A universal symbol of bad luck, the broken mirror, is weaved in too, to reinforce the pathos and significance of ‘dread’ and ‘blood price’. Zardari invites you to stick a sock on your hand and pillory his pomposity. Hamid invites you to sit down, listen and sympathize.


4) Why on earth would we want to make the most trigger-happy nation in the world angry with us?


Zardari feels the best way to make this point is:

“The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as it is America’s…My government endorses the words of President Obama and appreciates the credit he gave us Sunday night for the successful operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa. We also applaud and endorse the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that we must “press forward, bolstering our partnerships, strengthening our networks, investing in a positive vision of peace and progress, and relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people.”

Hamid goes with: 

“But there are other, truly frightening theories, such as that even in a town with as dense a military presence as Abbottabad, Bin Laden managed to elude Pakistani security forces, suggesting a remarkable degree of incompetence. More terrifying still would be if there were official complicity in harbouring him, putting Pakistan on a collision course with the US. Pakistanis must hope that neither of these is true.”

The royal megaphone of royalty sticks with the moving speechwriting software writs and having writ moves on. Hamid establishes the difference between the sheep and the shepherds with one fluid reference to the ‘incompetence’ of the state within a state that consistently fails to protect its charges. 


To be fair to President Zardari, this is where the difference between a novelist and a head of state is, governed by realpolitik as much as it is by style. The privilege of implying, publicly, that their nation's army is either incompetent or duplicitous rests only with one. This is evident also in the contrast between Sir Salman Rushdie's Down With Pakistan and David Cameron's more measured public stance.


5) Forget the past, it is not in our power to change it. Lets talk about what happens next.


According to our president: 

“We can become everything that al-Qaeda and the Taliban most fear — a vision of a modern Islamic future. Our people, our government, our military, our intelligence agencies are very much united. Some abroad insist that this is not the case, but they are wrong. Pakistanis are united.”

According to one of our brightest literary lights: 

“In the meantime American, Pakistani, Afghan, and terrorist commanders will go on conducting their operations, the slaughter will continue, and human beings – all equal, all equal – will keep dying, their deaths mostly invisible to the outside world but at a rate evoking a line of aircraft stretching off into the distance, bearing down upon tower after tower after tower. Bin Laden is dead. But many Pakistanis sense the impending arrival of yet another murderous plane, headed their way.”

Zardari takes the opportunity to tell people Pakistanis are united against ‘terrorism’. Hamid points out that Pakistanis are united only in being the direct target of everybody else’s cross hairs.


The defining characteristic of The Pakistanian Defense, finally, is that…


6) People are no longer buying it.


And that, really, is the point of the deconstruction. It doesn’t matter how well or how badly written our responses to this situation are, what notes we hit or don’t hit in our explanations, the rest of the world no longer gives a shit.

Consider this, from an Economics Times report on our President’s article:

“Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari defended his country on Monday against accusations it did not do enough to track down Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but made no direct comment on alleged intelligence failures…Zardari provided no detailed explanation on how bin Laden managed to live for years undetected in Abbottabad, a hillside retreat popular with retired Pakistani generals just a few hours drive from Islamabad. “

Or consider this, from one of the responses posted to Hamid’s article in The Guardian:

“I once referred to Pakistan as the classic informant, who tells the thief about the whereabout of the owner of the property and then informed the owner of the property the thief is coming…Pakistan as I have also posted before is a country the world should fence off and throw away the key. It is a country that its only contribution to the world is misery and danger to lives and limbs. In fact it is terrorist country. The most dangerous terrorist country on the planet.

Every western gov't including ours should not only cease aid to Pakistan, immigration from Pakistan should also be stopped. The world should let Pakistan sleep in the bed it made.”

Back now, to the question of whether the bile and revulsion this ‘rogue state’ and ‘terrorist sanctuary’ is currently provoking is justified. You can choose to find your answer amongst the six points of The Classic Pakistanian Defense outlined above. You can find it while channel surfing, watching someone like Ansar Abbasi holding forth on how Osama Bin Laden was a Muslim Hero. You can find it in the pages of an Urdu paper as a columnist obsesses over the burial ritual of one murderer and not the mass graves of the multitudes of innocents he, and those he was a figurehead for, killed. You can find it in the online edition of an English one detailing how the banned Laskhkar-e-Taiba held funeral prayers for Bin Laden in Karachi today.


People of that ilk make Pakistan’s image crisis worse by openly exposing their – and by extension our - tolerance for intolerable positions. If what the foreign commentators I have quoted above said offends you, and you think they are refusing to distinguish between Pakistanis and those elements within Pakistan that gave Bin Laden shelter, acknowledge the role those elements play in shaping the outside world’s refusal to make that distinction. This, from outside the bubble, is a country where a sentence is blasphemy but a murder is not, rape victims are vilified for attempting to challenge patriarchy, terrorists are sheltered after slaughtering innocent civilians, and the challenge to sovereignty by a western force is always more important than the steady, decades long erosion of sovereignty by some imported, medieval hogwash.


Once, there might have been room in the world for an ideology that thinks it is special, God gifted, exempt from the rules and norms of the comity of nations of which one commentator speaks, but that place has already been taken. Certain Pakistanis need to accept that we are not Israel. By this I mean we cannot defend an indefensible position by virtue of association with unshakeable allies because really, at the end of the day, we have none. Even Saudi Arabia had the sense to let its most notorious son slip quietly into the sea, we on the other hand built him a home in a hill resort.


Today, we have a twofold crisis. One, the incompetence, exposed, of a bloated institution that has never lost an opportunity to enrich itself and steadfastly refused to fix itself. Two, a perception that Pakistan is populated by illiterate Muslims who will come out on the street to protest Danish cartoon strips but not to protest an almost comical, internationally inflammatory misstep. How do we fix the first? The rogue state within a state needs to be broken, examined forensically, and rebuilt in the shelter of a democratically elected civilian government, never to take a step without a popular mandate again, and then only to protect our citizens not endanger them further. 


How do you fix the second? For a start, apologize. Apologize Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, to the world for not keeping your side of the bargain, to your country for letting us be shamed on your watch. Apologize even if it kills you. Because your subsequent loss of face might embolden you enough to hold others accountable. And because somebody or the other is always trying to kill you anyway and you might as well die on the right side of the line.

Rant of the Day

I have to admit I'm not particularly fond of PPP Senator Faisal Raza Abidi's appearances on television. But that's just because, my ears having been bled from the apparent dominant paradigm of anchors and participants on Pakistani television talk shows, I have a general aversion to over-emotional and LOUD grandstanding. And nobody gets more emotional and louder than Senator Abidi.

However, this typically cataclysmic rant from him on Aaj TV's Aaj Ki Khabar programme on March 17th (which one missed partly because the England - West Indies thriller was on the same night and partly because one doesn't normally bother with Aaj in any case) deserves to be heard. To be fair, he only let loose after the other participants (including the host Absar Alam, Khalifa-ul-Waqt Ansar Abbasi, Justice (retd) Tariq Mahmood, PMLN's Pervez Rashid and Jamaat-e-Islami's cretinous Fareed Paracha) all pointed fingers at the federal government for either letting 'Raymond Davis' go or lying about it.

But more importantly, if you can look beyond the political grandstanding and the ear-splitting volume of Abidi's splenetic fury (I'll admit it'll take some doing), he also makes some rather pointed and valid arguments against those casting the 'Raymond Davis' issue as one of national honour and 'ghairat' as well as the silent sympathisers of extremism and the opportunistic judicial system.





Yeah, so what indeed about the 23,000 plus Pakistanis killed by the Pakistani Taliban? But if you thought this could coax some soul-searching from apologists for extremism such as Fareed Paracha, you'd be sadly mistaken. Paracha subsequently responded that by letting 'Davis' go, the government had blocked people from collaring the people who are actually behind terrorism in Pakistan (i.e. it was 'Davis' and his Blackwater cohorts, it's never the Taliban and their ilk). As I said, cretinous.

An Overdue Acknowledgement

Unlike MSS, or at least partly unlike MSS, I truly was at a loss for words about the the assassination of Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti. The only words that seemed to express the intensity of the despair I felt about the abyss staring us in the face came from poetry. In fact, before MSS posted her piece, I thought a collection of Urdu couplets was the only way I could mark this tragedy, because what is the point of repeating all that I have said so many times before. I might still do a post with such a collection, but here's a sample, from Faiz:

"Amaa'n kaisi ke mauj-e-khoo'n abhi sar se nahin guzri
Guzar jaaye tau shaayad baazu-e-qaatil thehr jaaye"

[No one is safe, for the wave of blood has yet to wash over our heads
Perhaps once we drown the killer's hand will be stayed] 

But my reasons for writing today are slightly different. I have to admit that I am not a regular watcher of DawnNews, a hangover probably of experiences from the channel's earlier incarnation. But I also have to admit that whenever I have had a chance to see its Reporter programme (usually on someone's recommendation), it has generally pleasantly surprised me. Reporter, and its host, Arshad Sharif, have been quietly and soberly plugging away with sensible debate about issues that most television current affairs programmes either do not touch or deal with only in bombastic or sensational overtones. I thought I owed it to Reporter to link to parts of the hard-hitting programme about this murder of an upright Pakistani which bear being viewed and heard by more people. It almost made me have hope in Pakistani political talk shows again.

Here's one part where renowned rights activist Hina Jilani rightly sticks it not only to the government but also to the media and the political opposition:




Here's another part, where Dr. Moeed Pirzada (newly inducted into Pakistan Television) gives a very decent summation. But in particular do not miss the strong speech by Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, Chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council. It's probably the only time I have heard a political maulvi talk sense on this matter.




Could television still be reformed?

A Graveyard for Lunatics

DISCLAIMER: This piece was written yesterday, and then languished overnight due to a PTCL outage. It contains emotion and other profanity.


I am rarely at a loss for words. I certainly wasn’t this morning, when I started out on a smarmy skewering of George Fulton’s ‘I’m leaving Pakistan because she’s being mean to me dammit!' piece in the Express Tribune yesterday. I was going to run with his personification of the blessed motherland as a flighty female prone to self-destructive megalomania, I was. I was particularly taken with the bit featuring the Bryan Adams song where Pakistan, the impenetrable, fecund, feminine other, sings to him the lyrics To really love a woman/ To understand her - you gotta know her deep inside/ Hear every thought - see every dream/ N' give her wings - if she wants to fly/ Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms/ You know you really love a woman...

Then I ran it by another Pyala who, with what is in hindsight admirable self-restraint, politely asked me if I’d bothered turning on the TV or reading the news today. I did both and found out that our Federal Minister for Minorities had been assassinated in Islamabad. And then there I was, open mouthed, shell shocked, silent, on the dreaded Island of Lost Words. In such a situation, what is the value of mere words?

Ironically enough, it is Infinite, according to those behind the latest assassination in Islamabad this morning. I will be happy to issue a retraction should the motives behind this senseless tragedy be conclusively proved to be something mundane, like extortion, or something exculpating to the national conscience, like ‘a hidden hand’, but until then I shall continue to assume that, like the late Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer, Shahbaz Bhatti was killed because of the words he uttered.

These words, for which he had been receiving death threats for the past month, had specifically to do with the late minister’s position on our blasphemy law. Mr. Bhatti, representing as he did some of the most disenfranchised citizens of this blighted nation, bravely and ceaselessly kept pointing out the way the law has been misused to harass and oppress his constituents. His essential argument, that a law that leads to injustice more often than it does justice merits reform if not repeal, was in direct opposition to the simplistic, ignorant stance taken by most of the participants in what passes for public discourse on the subject. For this principled stance Mr. Bhatti, like others before him, paid with his life.

Words then, I have to continue to assume, are powerful enough for other people to feel threatened by. Words that carry truth, particularly when they touch upon the misinterpretation of religion, intimidate those whose words don’t. In our history, or rather our collective amnesia, we have often responded to words of truth and beauty with the vituperation, forcing into exile or silencing of those who utter them. But now I have to ask myself a different question, i.e. what is the value of mere words when the other side is using guns?

There was a time when some of us would have leapt at the chance to throw words into this maelstrom, to comment on a senseless tragedy like the one today. As journalists, as commentators, as columnists, it would have been like going to the Promised Land. High profile murder? Check. Law and order issue? Check. Spectre of extremism? Check. Possibility of point scoring against toothless government? Check. Energizing, empowering, emboldening feeling of being part of a struggle that is bigger than one’s self? Check, Check, Check and Check!

That time is long past.

Now, when we sit down at our keyboards, our desks, or take our notebooks in our hands to begin the process of writing another Pakistani’s obituary, another summation of the life of a brother or sister felled by the demon of militant extremism we have allowed to feed on our children, it is not the purposeful elation of a collective struggle we feel but despair. Despair, in someone else’s words, “of the possibility of ever changing the prevailing state of affairs, of ever being redeemed from it..”

Faced with this insidious, creeping bleakness, even the strongest of us might be tempted, fleetingly, to embrace the self-anesthetization, the comfortable numbness, of those who survive by not speaking at all, by not writing at all, by not thinking at all. But we must. We must because there is soft ground beneath us and if we stop, even for a second, to rest or lick our wounds we might sink and be lost.

So today I write this not as a journalist or a commentator or a columnist or a wiseass but as a Pakistani. I write this for those moderate Muslims who no longer wish to think, write or speak into an apparent vacuum so that you know you are not alone. I write this for my Christian, Hindu, Scheduled Caste, Atheist, Agnostic countrymen and women, so that they know that they are not alone. I write this for me, so that I know I am not alone.

I write that I condemn, in the kind of language I would like to hear from our gutless, myopic leaders, the brutal, unjust slaying of a brave, principled man advocating a return to the pluralistic principles on which this country was founded. I write that I condemn those within the political and military establishment who protect the nest of vipers in our midst. I write that I condemn the spineless, self-preserving hedging about of the spineless, self-preserving fuckwits swarming TV and newsprint. I write that I condemn the willful, witless intolerance seemingly decent people practice through their silence during bloodthirsty sermons delivered in mosques and drawing rooms. I write that I condemn those whose reaction to events like this is a diminishing of their personal and political engagement with the world around them rather than an expansion. I write that I condemn every parent, grandparent or caregiver who lets strangers dictate their child’s moral code.

And I write that I take personal issue with every man, woman or adolescent who says ‘but’ when debating whether dissension merits death.

:::UPDATE:::

I picked up the papers with trepidation this morning, precisely because I was afraid to read passages like the one below, taken from Dawn’s story about PM Gilani’s ‘new strategy to fight extremism’.

"THREE REMAIN SEATED: But many in the house and the galleries were surprised to see three bearded members of the opposition Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam of Maulana Fazlur Rehman remaining seated in their chairs when the rest of lawmakers stood up to observe two minutes’ silence for Mr Bhatti.

There was no immediate explanation what motivated the JUI back-benchers, in the absence of their party leader, to violate a parliamentary etiquette, and a directive given by the chair, in agreement with some voices raised in the house, that members stand up to pay a silent tribute to their assassinated colleague."

Here’s a new strategy for you to fight extremism with PM Gilani: name and shame those who will not rise against it.

Fatwa Back At You (Corrected)

Further evidence of the depths to which some in Pakistan have sunk. This is a short video of the Murtid Qadri being presented in court yesterday, charged with the murder of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer, where he was lauded by some lunatic lawyers, showered with rose petals, garlanded and even kissed. (Link courtesy Shahid Saeed.)





This is an account of his presentation in court today from the Express Tribune, where the lunatics once again greeted him. In addition to the lunatic lawyers, most religious fitna parties have refused to condemn Taseer's murder, with many going out of their way to praise the "valour" of the deranged criminal. They include the so-called "sufism-inspired", "moderate" Barelvi parties (Qadri is from the Barelvi sect) who in fact have been at the forefront of defending the murder.

Many in the media seem also to be hemming and hawing, refusing even to attach the word "shaheed" [martyr] to Taseer (whereas they think nothing of attaching it to people dying in accidents and even the Lal Masjid terrorists), apparently buckling to open threats hurled at media houses and anchors by extremists. The height of hypocrisy has come from anchors and talk-show participants, pretending to treat the issue "objectively" by debating the straw-man polarization of the country into 'left' and 'right' extremists. Actually, as Kaalakawaa has pointed out in his excellent post, all they are doing is equating murder with a voicing of opinion and demonstrating their blinkered cowardice. (There have been a few notable exceptions to the general cowardice on the electronic media in this case and it is only fair to also point these out: Iftikhar Ahmed (Geo's Jawabdeyh host as a panelist on Dunya TV), Kamran Khan (on Geo), Mosharraf Zaidi (as an independent analyst on Dunya), Moeed Pirzada (on Dunya), Najam Sethi (on Dunya), Arshad Sharif (on Dawn News), Rauf Klasra (as a panelist on Dawn News) and Sana Bucha (on Geo) - of the ones I watched - did not try to hedge their bets.)

But perhaps worst of all, most mainstream 'secular' political parties, including the Taseer's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), have been at best mealy-mouthed about their condemnations. In fact, the PPP has shown remarkable pusillanimity and short-sightedness by refusing to take on the issue of religious extremism head-on and instead claiming a political conspiracy behind Taseer's murder, basically attemting point-scoring against the PML(N) Punjab government. The PML(N) government does indeed have a lot to answer for (since Qadri's Elite Force came under its jurisdiction) but surely the greater issue is of the mindset that has been allowed to be cultivated in this country. The party's official stance - as articulated by the closet rightist law minister Babar Awan and the blundering interior minister Rehman Malik (who boasted he would shoot a blasphemer himself as if to prove his piety credentials) - has been nothing short of abominable. This at a time when even conservatives such as Pakistan Muslim League (Q)'s Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain are willing to concede - in the face of growing civil society outrage - that steps do need to be taken to stop the misuse of religion by the lunatics.

The Let Us Build Pakistan blog has published a fatwa (religious decree) by Mufti Idris Usmani against not only Qadri but also those who support him in word or deed. Normally, I would never post a fatwa on here because I believe them to be largely irrelevant to today's world and usually absurd. But as I pointed out in an earlier post, it's about time these lunatics got a taste of their own medicine.

"Shaykh-ul-Islam Hazrat Mufti Muhammad Idris Usmani of Jamia Islamia has issued the following fatwa about the killer of Governor Punjab (Pakistan) Salman Taseer and about those who are praising and justifying his murder.

Question:

What do the Ulema say about the murder of Governor of Punjab (Pakistan) Salman Taseer who was killed by his own security guard. The guard claimed that he killed Salman Taseer because he was blasphemous to the Prophet (peace by upon him). However, there is no evidence of Salman Taseer’s blasphemy to the Prophet (pbuh). What do the Ulema say about many people who are praising Salman Taseer’s killer?

Answer:

“In the Name of the Merciful and Compassionate Allah, Dar al-Fatwa. Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Universe; blessings and peace be upon our Master Muhammad, the Apostle of Allah, and upon his Family, his Companions, his Followers and those who have found the way through him.

I have carefully read the whole issue and also read various news reports and articles related to this (issue). I have also spoken to the jayyad ulema (eminent scholars) in Pakistan and India.

In the light of the available evidence, I state the following:

1. Malik Mumtaz Qadri has committed gunah-e-azeem (great sin) by killing an innocent soul. By taking law into his own hand, by killing an innocent man, and by bringing disgrace to the name of Islam, Malik Mumtaz Qadri has created fasad fil arz (mischief on earth) and committed tauheen-e-risalat (blasphemy to the Prophet). Same applies to those who are creating further mischief (fasad) by praising or justifying this heinous crime in the name of Islam. The killer of Salman Taseer is a real blasphemer to Islam and the holy Prophet (peace be upon him).

2. Those individuals and groups including the ignorant ulema, misguided journalists, politicians, lawyers wa deegar (etc), who are celebrating or justifying in any manner this heinous crime must be treated as accomplice in this crime. Those who endorsed a fatwa of Salman Taseer’s murder too must be treated as mufsid fil arz and must be punished according to the Shariah.

3. While the state of Pakistan will pursue a legal case against the killer and his abettors according to their national laws, the following verses from the Quran clearly specify the punishment for Malik Mumtaz Qadri and his supporters and cheerers.

This is a case of fasad fil arz. The perpetrators of such acts should be punished as provided in Sura Maida of the Quran (Ayah 32 and 33).

32. We ordained for the Children of Israel that if anyone slew a person―unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land― it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if anyone saved a life it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people. Then although there came to them Our Messengers with clear Signs, yet even after that many of them continued to commit excesses in the land.

33. The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter.

According to Islamic Shariah, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, any one supporting or praising his act must be executed by law or crucified or their hands and feet cut off from opposite side. Exile is not needed in the present case as the State can exercise Shariah authority on its citizens and subjects.

Those who are praising a killer and a mufsid want to go to Hell of their own accord.

For others, we can only pray for their path of righteousness.

In the light of religious commands, in the light of religious rules known to us, I think that these people should renew their faith and renew their marriages. But no one can remove anyone’s obstinacy. I pray to Allah to enable all Muslims, through His Prophet, pbuh, to be steadfast to His religion, Islam. Ameen!

Muhammad Idris , Mufti, Darul Ifta, Jamia Islamia

29 Muharram-ul-Haram 1432 AH"

There's also a list of people on the LUBP blog of who they think fall under the ambit of this fatwa.

Here's an idea. Register blasphemy cases against all these fitna leaders and lawyers. Clog up the courts with blasphemy cases and let's see how the pious Federal Shariat Court and the enlightened Supreme Court deal with it.


: : : UPDATE / CORRECTION : : :

We have been made aware that the above mentioned alleged fatwa posted on the LUBP blog is fake. And while I personally may still subscribe to the notion that religious lunatics need to be dealt with strongly, as a blog we cannot allow fabricated propaganda to damage our credibility. We really should have been more skeptical of the source and while we did link to the original, we should have qualified ourselves better. The inclusion of the made-up fatwa also marginalizes the rest of the post, by which we stand. Apologies to all our readers. A separate clarification will also be posted. Needless to say, we will look upon any future information posted by the LUBP blog with a far more skeptical eye.