There will be blood
By Feisal H NaqviPublished: December 24, 2012

The writer is a partner at Bhandari, Naqvi & Riaz and an advocate of the Supreme Court. He can be reached on Twitter @laalshah
About a week ago, a 20-year-old by the name of Adam Lanza walked into a school in Newtown, Connecticut — a small town a few hours northeast of New York City. In the next 30 minutes, Lanza shot and killed 27 people before finally killing himself. Of those 27 casualties, 20 were children aged between five and 10.
The massacre at Newtown set off a firestorm in the US, with most of the anguish and the anger aimed at America’s notoriously lax gun laws. President Barack Obama announced at the funeral of the victims that he would be pushing for legislative changes to prevent future massacres. And The New Yorker spoke for many when it asked, “What does it take for a society to be sickened by its own behaviour and to change its attitudes?”
By the end of the week, The New Yorker had its answer: the vice-president of the National Rifle Association responded defiantly that the answer to massacres like Newtown was to have more guns not less, because “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.” And pundits had already started scaling back their earlier optimistic predictions that American society would now support limits on guns.
The Newtown massacre and its aftermath are instructive because they show that Pakistan’s pathological society is not unique in its pathology. As I write these words, the newspapers lying crumpled around me all carry banner headlines announcing the demise of Bashir Ahmed Bilour in a suicide attack. Page after page praises his bravery; page after page laments our inability to unite in anger against his killers. Which again begs the question: what will it take to wake us up? What does it take for a society to be sickened by its own behaviour and to change its attitudes?
The honest answer is that I don’t have the faintest clue. About a month ago, a remote controlled bomb was recovered from under the car of famed journalist Hamid Mir. The recovery of the bomb had been preceded by news reports stating that the TTP had decided to strike against journalists like Mr Mir who had condemned the attack on Malala Yousufzai. And after the fortuitous recovery of the bomb, the TTP expressly accepted responsibility, saying that it had wanted to kill Mr Mir because of his criticism of the TTP and its tactics.
Mr Mir’s response to his brush with death was instructive. On the day the TTP took responsibility, he began his show with an oddly defensive monologue in which he denied being an enemy of Islam and hinted broadly that even if the TTP were actually the ones who had carried out the attack, they were only tools being used by others upset by Mr Mir’s efforts in favour of an independent judiciary and the Muslim world.
As I watched Mr Mir’s show and waited for the defiant condemnation of the TTP that never came, I imagined a scene as surreal as the one unfolding in front of me.
Somewhere on a psychiatrist’s couch, a TTP spokesman is holding forth. “Doc, what do we gotta do to be taken seriously? We killed BB; they blamed Musharraf. We shot Malala; they blamed the US. We beheaded an SHO in Peshawar and I thought people would compare us to Grendel; we didn’t even make the front pages! We attacked the Peshawar airport and people worried about tattoos. We killed polio workers and even a Harvard-educated lady senator thought it could have been a conspiracy. I swear the next time this happens, I’m gonna set someone on fire outside the Islamabad Press Club! Maybe that way we’ll finally get some respect.” And then the psychiatrist leans forward and murmurs “Have you considered changing your PR agency? I have a brother who’s got lots of great experience, knows all the right people …”
Back here in the real world, I am still bemused by our national confusion. I was, for example, stunned to learn that the late Bashir Bilour was the brother of Haji Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, our railway minister. Why was I stunned? Because three months ago, Bilour the senior called the Taliban his ‘brothers’ and offered to pay a US$100,000 bounty for whoever would kill the idiot responsible for the blasphemous anti-Islam video. Note, by this time, Bashir Bilour had already survived at least two assassination attempts by the TTP. So, Haji Sahib was referring to his brother’s murderers as his brethren.
Really, how complicated is this? There are people trying to kill us. They have repeatedly announced that they would like to destroy our Constitution, kill the educated ones and subjugate the rest. Since 2007, they have killed more than 3,000 Pakistani soldiers and more than 20,000 civilians. Our options are either to fight back or be killed. But it looks like we would rather be victims.
All I can say then is to count me out of the list of idiots. Despite my Shia heritage, I have no interest in being a martyr. My sentiments instead are those of General George S Patton: “No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country.”
Let me add one thing more. These are days whose history is being written in blood. There will come a time though when the blood will stop flowing. And then there will be an accounting. The people of this country will look back and ask why their leaders were so quiet for so long.
That moment of accountability may or may not be in the lifetime of those currently in charge. But even if it happens after those currently in power have passed on, our people will be justified in digging up the bones of their current leaders and hanging them as traitors to this country. The people will have their revenge. And it will not be pretty.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 25th, 2012.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/483824/there-will-be-blood-2/

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Terrorism and National Consensus

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The recent attack on Peshawar airport by TTP terrorists has raised several important questions regarding national security, civil-military relations and media perceptions. Unfortunately, the fact is that on a core concern of national security – the army chief has admitted that the existential threat to Pakistan is internal and not external – the key players are not on the same page for one reason or other. Consider.

The TTP is relentlessly targeting the military that has lost over 3000 soldiers in the war to date. Some terrorist attacks, as on the GHQ in Pindi and Mehran Naval Base in Karachi, etc, have been downright audacious. Yet, apart from the Swat operation 2007-08, there has been no focused attempt to uproot the TTP from its hideouts in Waziristan. The military is constrained by four factors.

First, it doesn’t want to create the public impression that it is “going into Waziristan” only because the Americans have said it must “do more”. Earlier this year, it determined the time was right, but Leon Panetta, the US Defense Secretary, announced that a “joint operation” in Waziristan was on the cards, prompting the Pakistanis to issue a swift denial and call off the operation.

Second, the military leadership is wary of taking additional casualties. COAS General Ashfaq Kayani has been internally sapped by a string of developments – an unprecedented three years extension in service that hasn’t gone down well with the rank and file, the Raymond Davis affair, the US Navy Seal raid to kill and extract Osama Bin Laden, the botched-up Memogate witch-hunt, mishandling of the NATO supply routes blockade, and aspersions on the business conduct of his brothers – and is therefore hesitant to take the brunt of decisions that could rebound on him.

Third, the civilians, both in government and opposition, have shown no inclination to bail the military out. The PPP government has been dragging its feet on the anti-terrorism law proposed by the military, both to facilitate nabbing, holding and prosecuting terrorists but also to avoid charges of violating human rights that could have an adverse impact on military and financial assistance from the US because of strict Congressional oversight of such violations. It has also absolved itself of such decision-making after being stung by the military on the Kerry-Lugar Bill and Memogate. Understandably, it is reluctant to shoulder the burden of ordering the military into Waziristan when the media, mullahs and opposition parties – in particular Imran Khan who represents the populist third force that is threatening both mainstream parties in the forthcoming general elections – are poised to condemn it for “pursuing an American agenda”. It doesn’t help when the military leadership is loath to openly admit that “this is our war”.

Fourth, the military’s Afghanistan end-game strategy for Afghanistan is still wobbly. It wants to protect its Mulla Umar – Haqqani network assets and help them get a key position in Kabul after the Americans leave but it doesn’t have the will or ability to break the nexus between its assets and liabilities – the TTP is a liability but it is inextricably networking with the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Fifth, the military is also keen to remain on the right side of the vernacular media and mullahs that remain part of the problem rather than the solution. Many journalists and religious leaders are still prisoners of misplaced religious nationalism. They say the TTP is an Israeli-India-American conspiracy against Pakistan because “Muslims cannot possibly kill Muslims”, or variations of the theme. For example, a section of the media has made a big issue of a tattoo (of a painting by a Peruvian artist given to erotica, sorcery and fantasy) on the back of an Uzbek terrorist, claiming it as proof of the non-Muslim identity of the foreign devils because “mutilation of the body is forbidden in Islam”. Evidence suggesting the opposite is blithely ignored. Many Taliban fighters in Afghanistan have been found with tattoos because they were “inspired” by foreign jihadis from Muslims countries worldwide where tattoos are part of the local culture – especially in the countries of Central Asia where it is a growing art form – after they made Afghanistan their base area in the 1980s. Indeed, Abu Musab al Zarqavi, the tattooed Al-Qaeda terrorist from Jordan who served time in Afghanistan and wrought havoc in Iraq until he was killed by a drone strike in 2006, was the one man who symbolized the new Al-Qaeda culture imported into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al Zarqavi introduced beheadings, suicide bombings, kidnapping for ransom, hostage taking and attacks on the Shia as new elements in Al-Qaeda ‘s strategic armoury.

A national consensus against terrorism is lacking because there is no clear demarcation of civil-military rights, responsibilities and power on the one hand and the place of religion in Pakistani nationalism on the other. Unfortunately, there is no party or leader on the Pakistani horizon who is ready to shake us out of this hopeless situation.

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20121221&page=1

Can understand how Naqvi plays golf in the evening now.

That same year, National Public Radio began airing his 26-week radio program, “Making the Music.” For these two outstanding expositions of jazz music, Marsalis won a George Foster Peabody Award. In addition, he has authored or co-authored a number of books, including “Sweet Swing Blues on the Road” (1994), “Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life” (2001), “To a Young Musician: Letters from the Road” (2004), “Jazz ABZ: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits” (2005) and most recently, Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (2008). In the spring of 2010, Marsalis launched a multi-year lecture series at Harvard University to convey the importance of cultural literacy to America’s future leaders and to illuminate the relationship between American music and the American identity.

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