Murshid, Marwa Na Daina

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Murshid, Marwa Na Daina

13 JUNE 2011By Mohammed Hanif

What is the last thing you say to your best general when ordering him to conduct a do-or-die mission? A prayer maybe, if you are religiously inclined. A short lecture underlining the importance of the mission if you want to keep it businesslike. Or maybe you just say ‘good luck,’ accompanied by a clicking of the heels and a final salute.

On the night of July 5, 1977 as Operation Fair Play, meant to topple Z.A. Bhutto’s elected government, was about to commence, the then army chief General Zia-ul-Haq took his right-hand man and the Corps Commander of 10th Corps, Lt General Faiz Ali Chishti aside and whispered to him: “Murshid, marwa na daina.” (Murshid, don’t get us killed.)

Zia was indulging in two of his favourite pastimes: spreading paranoia among those around him, and cosying up to the junior officer he needed to do his dirty work. General Zia had a talent for that; he could make his juniors feel as if they were indispensable to the running of this world. And he could make his seniors feel like gods – as Bhutto found out at the cost of his life.

General Faiz Ali Chisti’s troops didn’t face any resistance that night; not a single shot was fired and like all military coups in Pakistan, this was dubbed a ‘bloodless coup.’ There was a lot of bloodshed in the following years though; in military-managed dungeons at Thori gate, in Bohri Bazar, around Ojhri camp and finally at Basti Laal Kamal near Bahawalpur, where a plane exploded killing General Zia and most of the Pakistan army’s high command. General Faiz Ali Chisti, of course, had nothing to do with this. General Zia rid himself of his murshid soon after coming to power. Chishti had started to take that term of endearment – murshid – a bit too seriously, and dictators can’t stand anyone who thinks of himself as the king-maker.

Thirty-four years on Pakistan is a society divided at many levels. There’s the beghairat bunch throwing economic statistics at the ghairat brigade, there are laptop jihadis and liberal fascists and fair-weather revolutionaries. There are Balochi freedom fighters up in the mountains and bullet-riddled bodies of young political activists in obscure Baloch towns. And of course there are the members of civil society with a permanent glow on their faces, presumably on account of all their candlelight vigils.

All these factions may not agree on anything, but there is a consensus on one point: General Zia’s coup was a bad idea. When was the last time anyone heard Nawaz Sharif or any of Zia’s numerous protégés thump their chest and say, ‘Yes, we need another Zia?’ And have ever you seen a Pakistan military commander who stood on Zia’s grave and vowed to continue his mission?

It might have taken Pakistanis 34 years to reach this consensus, but we finally agree that General Zia’s domestic and foreign policies didn’t do us any good. They brought us automatic weapons, heroin and sectarianism; they also made fortunes for those who dealt in these commodities. And they turned Pakistan into an international jihadi tourist resort.

And yet somehow, without ever publicly owning up to it, the army has continued Zia’s mission. Successive army commanders, despite their access to vast libraries and regular strategic reviews, have never actually acknowledged that what they started during the Zia era was a mistake. Clearly, the late Dr Eqbal Ahmed wasn’t off the mark when he said that the Pakistan Army is brilliant at collecting information, but its ability to analyse this information is non-existent.

Looking back at the Zia years, the Pakistan army begins to appear like one of those mythical monsters that chops off its own head, but then grows an identical one and then proceeds on the only course it knows.

In 1999, two days after the Pakistan army embarked on its Kargil misadventure, Lt General Mahmud Ahmed gave a ‘crisp and to-the-point’ briefing to a group of senior army and air force officers. Air Commodore Kaiser Tufail, who attended the meeting, later wrote in an article that they were told that it was nothing more than a defensive manoeuvre and the Indian Air Force would not get involved at any stage. “Come October, we shall walk into Siachen – to mop up the dead bodies of hundreds of Indians left hungry, out in the cold,” General Mahmud told the meeting. “Perhaps it was the incredulousness of the whole thing that led Air Commodore Abid Rao to famously quip, ‘After this operation, it’s going to be either a court martial or martial law!’ as we walked out of the briefing room,” Air Commodore Tufail recalled.

If Rao Abid even contemplated a court martial, he must have lacked leadership qualities because there was only one way out of this mess; a humiliating military defeat, a world-class diplomatic disaster, followed by yet another martial law. The man who should have faced the court martial for Kargil appointed himself the country’s president for the next decade.

General Mahmud went on to command ISI, Rao Abid retired as Air Vice Marshal; both went on to find lucrative work in the army’s vast welfare empire and Kargil was forgotten as if it was a game of dare between too juveniles who were now beyond caring about who had actually started the pointless game. The battles were fierce and some of the men and officers fought so valiantly that two were awarded Pakistan’s highest military honour, the Nishan-e-Haider.

But nobody seems to remember the amount of bloodshed during the mission And where were hundreds of others whose names never made it to any awards list, whose names were, in fact, not mentioned at all, and whose families consoled themselves by saying that their loved ones had been martyred while defending our nation’s borders. Nobody pointed out the basic fact that there was no enemy on those mountains before some delusional generals decided that they’d like to ‘mop up’ hundreds of Indian soldiers after starving them to death.

The architect of this mission, the daring commando, General Musharraf, who didn’t bother to consult his colleagues before ordering his soldiers to their slaughter, doesn’t even have the wits to face a sessions court judge in Pakistan, let alone a court martial. During the entire episode the nation was told that it wasn’t the regular army that was fighting in Kargil, it was the ‘mujahideen.’ But those who received their loved ones’ flag-draped coffins, and those that didn’t even get a corpse to mourn, had sent their sons and brothers to serve in a professional army, not a freelance lashkar.

The Pakistan army’s biggest folly has been that under Zia it started outsourcing its basic job – soldiering – to these freelance militants. By blurring the line between a professional soldier who, at least in theory, is always required to obey his officer, who in turn is governed by a set of laws, and a mujahid who can pick and choose his cause and his commander depending on his mood, the Pakistan army has caused immense confusion among its own ranks. When soldiers who cry ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ when mocking an attack are ambushed in real life by enemies who shout ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ even louder, can we blame them if they waver in their response? When the naval chief Nauman Bashir calls the PNS Mehran attackers “very well trained,” is he just giving us hollow justification for what transpired, or admiring the creation of the institution he serves? When naval officials tell journalists that the attackers were “as good as our own commandos,” are they giving themselves a back-handed compliment?

In the wake of the attacks on PNS Mehran in Karachi, some TV channels pulled out an old war anthem sung by Madam Noor Jehan and started playing it against the backdrop of images of the young, hopeful faces of the slain officers and service men. Written by the legendary teacher and creator of childrens’ Tot Batot stories, Sufi Tabassum, the anthem carries a stark warning: Aiay puttar hatan tay nahin vick day, na labh di phir bazaar kuray (You can’t buy these brave sons from shops, don’t go looking for them in bazaars).

Whereas Sindhis and Balochis have mostly composed songs of rebellion, Punjabi popular culture has always lionised its karnails and jarnails and even an odd dhol sipahi. The Pakistan army has, throughout its history, refused to take advice from politicians, as well as thinking professionals from its own ranks. It has never paid heed to historians and sometimes ignored even the esteemed religious scholars it has used to whip up public sentiment for its dirty wars. But the biggest strategic mistake it has made is that it has not even taken advice from late Madam Noor Jehan, one of the army’s most ardent fans in Pakistan’s history. You can probably ignore Dr Eqbal Ahmed’s advice and survive in this country, but you ignore Madam at your own peril.

Since the Pakistan army’s high command is dominated by Punjabi-speaking generals, it is difficult to fathom what it is about this advice that they don’t understand. Any which way you translate it, the message is loud and clear – and lyrical: soldiers are not to be bought and sold like a commodity in shops. “Na awaian takran maar kuray” (That search is futile, like butting your head against a brick wall), Noor Jehan goes on to rhapsodise.

For decades the army has not only been shopping for these private puttars in the bazaars, it has also set up factories to manufacture them. It has, in fact, raised entire armies of them. When you raise the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish Mohammed, Sipah-e-Sahaba, Sipah-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Al-Badar Mujahideen, others encouraged by the thriving marketplace will go ahead and create outfits like the Anjuman Tahuffuz-e-Khatam-e-Nabuwwat and Anjuman-Tahuffuz-e-Namoos-e-Aiysha. And it’s not just Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya they want to liberate; they want to go back in time and seek revenge for a perceived slur that may or may not have been cast by someone more than thirteen hundred years ago in a country far, far away.

As if the army’s sprawling shopping mall of private puttars in Pakistan wasn’t enough, it has also actively encouraged the import and export of these commodities and even branched out into providing rest and recreation facilities for the ones who want a break. The outsourcing of Pakistan’s military strategy has reached a point where mujahids have their own mujahids to do their job and, inevitably, at the end of the supply chain are those poor, faceless teenagers with explosives strapped to their torsos being despatched to blow up other poor children.

Two days before the Americans killed Osama bin Laden and took away his bullet-riddled body, General Kayani addressed army cadets at Kakul. After declaring a victory of sorts over the militants, he gave our nation a stark choice. And before the nation could even begin to weigh the pros and cons, he went ahead and decided for them: we shall never bargain our honour for prosperity. As things stand, most people in Pakistan have neither honour, nor prosperity. They will readily settle for merely being able to survive in their little worlds without being blown up.

The question people really want to ask General Kayani is that if he and his army officer colleagues can have both honour and prosperity why can’t we, the people, have even a tiny bit of both?

The army and its advocates in the media often worry about Pakistan’s image, as if we are not suffering from a long-term serious illness, but a seasonal bout of acne that just needs better skin care. The Pakistan army has, over the years, cultivated an image of 180 million people with nuclear devices strapped to its collective body, threatening to take the world down with it. We may not be able to take the world down with us and the world might defang us or manage to calm us a bit, but the fact remains that Pakistan as a nation is paying the price for our generals’ insistence on acting like, in Asma Jahangir’s immortal words, “duffers.” And they are adding insult to inquiry by demanding medals and golf resorts for being such consistent duffers for such a long time.

What people really want to do at this point is to put an arm around our military commanders’ shoulders, take them aside and whisper in their ears: “Murshid, marwa na daina.”

Mohammed Hanif is a journalist, novelist and playwright who worked as reporter for Newsline before joining the BBC. He is the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

© 2009 Newsline Publications (Pvt) Ltd
URL: www.newslinemagazine.com/2011/06/murshid-marwa-na-daina/

Sectarian Clashes Surge in a City in Pakistan’s Heartland

Asia Pacific

Sectarian Clashes Surge in a City in Pakistan’s Heartland

Pakistanis gathered recently in Faisalabad outside a Presbyterian church damaged in riots after two Christian brothers were killed.

By SALMAN MASOOD

Published: August 7, 2010

FAISALABAD, Pakistan — This industrial city, famous for its textile exports, has lately become renowned as the center of a new wave of sectarian violence that has gripped Pakistan as militancy and extremism have taken firm root here in central Punjab Province.

Last month, violent clashes broke out between Muslims and Christians after two Christian brothers — Rashid and Sajid Emanuel — were shot dead outside the district courthouse after showing up to face charges of blasphemy.

The New York Times

Faisalabad, in Punjab Province, has become the center of a new wave of sectarian strife.

Immediately, there were fears of rioters’ setting fire to the Christian neighborhood where the brothers had lived, Warispura, a poor suburb with about 100,000 people — as they had done in a similar episode last year in a district nearby.

Blasphemy is a capital crime in Pakistan, and rights activists say the allegations are usually spurious and used to settle personal vendettas or to score political points.

In this case, for instance, the troubles started on July 1 when a handwritten letter defaming the Prophet Muhammad was distributed in a marketplace; it contained the address and telephone numbers of both brothers.

“A thief does not leave behind an ID card,” said Aslam Pervez, 60, a Christian teacher and a neighbor of the brothers. “A grave injustice has been done. The charges were not even proven, and they were killed. Is it justice? Where is the law?”

Analysts say the communal and sectarian clashes often have a local spark — an economic grievance, for instance — that is easily ignited in an atmosphere in which militant groups have been allowed to thrive for years by politicians who use them as a base of support, or have little to gain by standing up to them.

Looking to expand their influence, the groups, too, read the political winds as astutely as they do the local political terrain.

Such groups have thrived for decades in Pakistan, though sectarian violence has ebbed and flowed. Some groups, like Sipah-e-Sahaba, a Sunni militant organization, have largely domestic agendas, while others, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, focus on jihad in India and Afghanistan.

But it can be hard to draw a firm line, and sometimes the domestic groups channel militants to the others.

Under the nearly 10 years of military government that ended in 2008, sectarian violence was relatively subdued, in part because the military did not need to manipulate domestic schisms to maintain control. But civilian politics and sectarian tensions work hand in hand in Pakistan, and recently the violence has flared again. The last bad spasm was also under civilian rule in the 1990s.

Christians are not the only targets of the violence. In February, one person was killed during armed clashes between two Muslim sects. One of the sects then burned down the homes of several leaders of the other sect. Then in April, four members of the minority Ahmadi sect, declared non-Muslim by the country’s Constitution, were gunned down in Faisalabad by masked gunmen thought to be from Sipah-e-Sahaba.

Amir Rana, a terrorism expert, said the level of radicalization had grown and spread across Punjab Province, the country’s heartland. Residents say banned Islamic militant groups have managed to increase their presence and clout in Faisalabad, a city of nearly three million, and its surroundings.

Both Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that India and the United States have blamed for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, maintain offices in neighboring districts, which also serve as recruiting grounds.

As riots broke out on July 19, groups of agitated men, many of whom were said to be armed, tried to make their way to Warispura, the Christian neighborhood, from a neighboring village, Malkhan Wala, which is a known stronghold of Lashkar-e-Taiba, residents of the Christian neighborhood said.

Mr. Rana speculated that local economic competition might have been a motivator. Christians in Faisalabad are settled on land close to roads and railway tracks. “This is precious land,” he said. “Industrialists and builders have their eyes on such properties.”

Mr. Rana said Sipah-e-Sahaba had a strong base among the working class of the city; most Christians are in the working class, too.

Khalid Rashid, vicar general of the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul in Faisalabad, said the acts of violence against minorities, especially Christians, were on the rise, as the militant groups wanted “their presence to be felt.”

Religious minorities are feeling vulnerable and insecure. Christians make up only 5 percent of the population.

Neighbors and family members said the two Christian brothers who were killed had enmity with nobody. Rashid, 31, was a pastor who ran a local prayer group. Sajid, 28, was pursuing an M.B.A. degree.

They were taken into custody after a case was registered against them at the urging of local traders. On July 19, after a court appearance, an unidentified gunman entered the court premises and opened fire in the hallway. Both brothers were shot in the back and died at a hospital. A police officer was wounded. The attacker escaped easily.

The government has ordered a judicial inquiry into the killings. The Punjab police suspended two police officers for security lapses. But the family of the brothers is in hiding. The father, a retired government employee, and his three other sons and a daughter fear being singled out and are afraid to pursue the case.

Joseph Coutts, the bishop of the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul, attributed such attacks to the growing intolerance and militancy in Pakistani society.

“These groups have become so strong that they have become a law unto themselves,” he said. He added: “There is a lot of anger amongst Muslims, and there is a revival of militant Islam. Local Christians are seen as linked to the West, the United States, and therefore the fallout.”

Indeed, a city resident, Khurram Shahzad, who lodged the initial complaint with the police against the brothers, claims not to know them personally. Muslims in the Warispura neighborhood said that Christians had been provided financing from abroad to spread Christianity and convert Muslims.

“They had been given money to spread their religion,” said Muhammad Nadeem, 25, an electrician. A crowd of onlookers nodded in agreement.

Waqar Gilani contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 8, 2010, on page A10 of the New York edition.

URL: www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/world/asia/08faisalabad.html?_r=1

Pakistan’s Punjab heartland alive with extremist groups

---McClatchy News, USA

Posted on Thursday, April 29, 2010

Pakistan’s Punjab heartland alive with extremist groups
By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers

FAISALABAD, Pakistan — Even the Pakistan army conducts military operations against Taliban guerrillas in northwest tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, banned al Qaida-linked groups are operating openly in the Pakistani heartland of Punjab, which itself has been the target of dozens of terror attacks.

The province on Pakistan’s eastern border with India is home to more than half the country’s population and functions as its economic and political powerhouse, as well as the main recruiting ground for the military.

It is the stronghold of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who leads the opposition to President Asif Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party, which rules nationally from Islamabad.

Critics accuse Sharif and his brother, the chief minister, of accommodating extremist groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba, a banned sectarian group blamed for the killing of hundreds of Shiites, the minority sect of Islam. The Sharifs draw political support from the religious right.

During a recent election campaign, Punjab’s law minister, Rana Sanaullah, who is close to the Sharifs, seemed to endorse Sipah-e-Sahaba when he traveled in a triumphal motorcade with Ahmed Ludhianvi, the alleged leader of the group in the town of Jhang, in southern Punjab province.

They were surrounded by the green and red flags of Sipah-e-Sahaba, and the group’s gunmen provided security, working alongside the Punjab police. The crowd showered rose petals on the pair, who stood in an open vehicle, garlands around their necks.

Sanaullah denied that there was any danger of extremists taking over parts of Punjab.

“There is no Talibanization in Punjab. Not a single street where you can say there is a no-go area,” Sanaullah told McClatchy.

The federally appointed provincial governor disagreed.

“The Sharifs are creating a potential bomb here in Punjab,” Salman Taseer, the governor, told McClatchy in an interview. “These (militant) groups are armed and dangerous. There is no way you can accommodate these people. There has to be zero tolerance.”

Punjab government officials and police personnel insist that Sipah-e-Sahaba, and Jaish-e-Mohammad, another major military group, are not involved in terror activity within Pakistan.

That view is not shared by U.S. officials, who are now broadening their attention from what had been a singular focus on Pakistan’s northwest fringe. Both Punjabi groups are thought to have links to al Qaida.

“We think there also needs to be progress against these Punjab-based groups, many of which, by the way, are targeting Pakistan, as well,” Robert Blake, an assistant secretary of state, told reporters in Washington earlier this month after returning from Pakistan.

Although security in the provinces is a local responsibility, the growth of the banned groups in Pakistan’s industrial and political heartland raises new questions about the commitment of the country’s security services, especially its Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, to cracking down on the Islamic extremists they created to wage a proxy war against rival India over the divided Kashmir region.

In March, Nawaz Sharif’s younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, who is chief minister of Punjab, provoked an outcry when he appealed in a speech to the Taliban to spare his province violence because his party, known as PML-N, shared their ideals. He contrasted his party’s position to that of Pakistan’s previous ruler, military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf.

“Gen. Musharraf planned a bloodbath of innocent Muslims at the behest of others only to prolong his rule, but we in the PML-N opposed his policies and rejected dictation from abroad,” Shahbaz Sharif said in an address delivered at a religious seminary in Lahore, the provincial capital.”If the Taliban are also fighting for the same cause then they should not carry out acts of terror in Punjab.”

Militancy appears to be on the rise. Police in recent weeks have traced a spate of armed robberies and kidnappings of the Ahmedi religious sect in the central Punjabi city of Faisalabad to members of Jamaat ud Dawa, the group previously known as Lashkar-e-Taiba that was blamed for the devastating 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, India.

Three Ahmedis were also shot dead, in what was likely to be the work of the same outfit. Jamaat ud Dawa is focused against India and was not previously known for violence inside Paksitan. The United Nations labeled Jamaat ud Dawa a terrorist group in the wake of the Mumbai attack.

In March, Jamaat ud Dawa held a public rally in Lahore, marching down the colonial-era Mall Road, the city’s main thoroughfare, to protest against India “stealing” water from rivers that flow from its territory into Pakistan.

The recent admission in U.S. federal court by an American citizen, David Headley, that he scouted targets for the Mumbai attacks raised the profile of Lashkar-e-Taiba, with which he was affiliated. A recent Pentagon report found that Lashkar-e-Taiba was active in the insurgency in Afghanistan.

McClatchy reported in September that another banned group, Jaish-e-Mohammad, whose orientation is anti-India, was operating openly from Bahawalpur, another town in Punjab, and had expanded to a new site on the outskirts of town.

Sheikh Waqas Akram, an opposition member of parliament from Jhang, which is the headquarters of the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba, likened the situation in Punjab to the Swat valley, where official inaction led to the area being taken over by Taliban in 2008.

“There can be ten Swats in Punjab, if you don’t check them (extremists),“ said Akram. “These groups are connecting up, they are increasing their political influence, they are spreading to new districts.”

Unlike the Taliban in the northwest, extremist groups in the Punjab have not sought to capture territory or enforce Islamic law but operate out of seminaries and compounds amid the population.

Sanaullah insisted that groups based in the north west were behind the terrorist attacks in Punjab, not local groups and that “95 percent of the people of Sipah-e-Sahaba are not terrorists”.

“We must persuade these persons to put aside their guns, to participate in elections,” said Sanaullah. “They have the right to vote, so why can’t I ask them (Sipah-e-Sahaba) for votes?“

But independent experts believe that the attempt to distinguish among militant groups overlooks the fluidity of individual membership in the groups. The Pakistani Taliban’s leader, Hakimullah Mehsud is a former member of Sipah-e-Sahaba, as is the head of the Taliban’s suicide training squad, Qari Hussain. The Pakistani Taliban’s spokesman calls himself after a former head of Sipah-e-Sahaba. Jaish-e-Mohammad, another group supposedly not involved in domestic terrorism, provided many of the commanders and for the Taliban’s takeover of Swat valley.

Mehsud was reported dead in February from a U.S. missile attack in Pakistan’s tribal area. But Pakistani intelligence reported Thursday that it now believed him to be alive.

(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.)

URL : www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/29/93168/paki...d-alive.html#none