Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Delusions

The News, Pakistan
LAHORE: Lahore High Court Chief Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif expressed grief over series of suicide attacks in the country, which, according to him, were being carried out by Muslims, as non-Muslims could not dare take risk of their lives.

The chief justice further remarked that India was behind these attacks as it was financing terrorists to destabilise Pakistan. The CJ made these remarks Monday while hearing two identical petitions challenging possible extradition of 12 arrested Afghan Taliban.
....

As mentioned before, the fact that the dogs of hell that they unleashed are biting them is something that the Pakistani establishment finds it hard to accept.

The Chief Justice is marginally less deluded - he accepts that the suicide bombers are Muslim. He rationalizes that by saying only Muslims would be so brave. And as usual, these brave Muslims are paid by India.

A more sane voice cries
Lahore has been attacked twice inside of a week, the attacks killing scores of people and injuring and maiming many more. The intelligence agencies failed all ends up yet again, and as per usual, specially the premier agency aka the Mother of All Agencies which seems to have its finger in every matter — from disappearing people to formulating the country’s foreign policy to destabilising the government whenever it is perceived to be stepping ‘out of line’ — except in running the yahoos to the ground and nipping their evil in the bud.

You might well ask what I mean by the title of this piece. Simple: the Crazy Right are the successors of the Crush India Brigade of the late 1960s and early 1970s which gave us the Bangladesh tragedy (which of course had other reasons too); rump Pakistan is the country we are left with after the breakup of Pakistan as a result of the exertions of the crazy Right. They might well succeed yet again.

Speaking of intelligence, this Dawn editorial worries about the missing information:
By now every Pakistani knows about the TTP, {Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan} or at least something about its key leaders, its agenda and its range of operations. The state has done well to take on this pre-eminent threat in Fata and Swat/ Malakand.

But there is a veritable alphabet soup of militant groups about which little is known. Here are just a few names: the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Jaish-i-Mohammad, Fidayeen-i-Islam, Harkatul Jihad al-Islami, Ghazi Force, Abdullah Azam Brigade, the ‘al Almi’ suffix attached to several groups, Sipah-i-Sahaba. What has the Pakistan Army or the government told the public about these threats? Who are the leaders of these groups? How large are their cadres, in the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands? Where do they operate? What is their agenda? The public knows next to nothing about the answers to each of these questions — and that information black hole is a serious worry.

No doubt all in the pay of India.

The Dawn editorial expresses fear, concern; this next from another Pakistani publication is the height of paranoia:
ISLAMABAD: India has evolved a master plan to cause severe damage to Pakistan economy under the garb of talks and assigned an important target to its intelligence agency RAW to provide over one trillion rupees to anti Pakistan Taliban through Afghan transit.

Well placed sources told Online Saturday that Indian intelligence agency RAW has started providing financial assistance to Taliban through alcohol and beetle nut (chalia) under Afghan trade to use them to serve its nefarious designs while they were earlier being assisted through drug trafficking.

Sources told RAW at present was supplying over two hundreds containers of alcohol and beetle nut illegally to anti Pakistan Taliban every month in the name of different companies through Afghan transit. This way billion of rupees are being distributed among Taliban so that on one side Pakistan economy could be undermined and on the other side Afghan Taliban could be strengthened financially in order to use them for fulfillment of its vicious designs.

If only India were that cunning! On that other hand, that one trillion rupees, even it is Pakistani rupees, amounts to tens of billions of dollars, and surely there are better uses for it.