EDITORIAL: Terrorism: it can be anyone’s son

Saturday, October 28, 2006 E-Mail this article to a friend Printer Friendly Version

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\10\28\story_28-10-2006_pg3_1

The gang which nearly set off rockets near the Presidency turned out to be local boys led by a retired brigadier’s son. The suspects were seized on Monday, based on information provided by eight alleged militants detained earlier this month after the three foiled attacks. The rest are also educated, one of them an engineer who was technically familiar with circuits. The police called them “hard core terrorists” connected to Al Qaeda. The three were the driving force behind the plot and the eight arrested previously were only “facilitators”.

The trio were the masterminds of Al Qaeda whose literature was found in their car. And they were after General Musharraf. They just made a single mistake. They left behind a cell phone attached to one of the rockets which gave them away through its call record. Had they not made this mistake, many innocent lives would have been lost in addition to the possible hit on the president.

Received wisdom holds that terrorism is growing out of poverty and the state’s inability to educate the masses properly. There are far too many poor boys, it is said, who can’t get into normal schools and are therefore sent to madrassas where they get training in killing the “enemies of Islam” — which often means other good Muslims you don’t like.

But the fact is that increasingly it is well — to — do people like Osama bin Laden or educated middle-class youngsters like the ones in Britain who are getting attracted to killing in the name of Islam. Not many years ago a research paper published by an organisation in Islamabad complained about the textbooks taught in our normal state-run educational institutions. The finding was that even outside the madrassas the indoctrination in favour of violence was quite widespread. To that we must now add a constant bombardment of “religious” and reactionary news and views on our “free” TV channels. Most of these TV programmes are not rational discourses advising moderation in the face of difficulties. Indeed, there is recourse to inflammatory language which radicalises the youth.

The rich and the well to do are susceptible to this indoctrination. They express their biases in violent language in their drawing rooms. Instead of being cautious and realistic because they are living in a state with weak institutions, they fly off the handle and curse the ‘feebleness’ of fellow Muslims, implying that if we had been strong we would have spent most of our time fighting and killing our enemies. They focus excessively on international events and link our domestic failings to foreign policy and not to internal causes that can be set right with vision and courage. In our homes, most of us demand satisfaction of honour rather than satisfaction of our basic needs. This means that unless the world is set right we can never think of reforming ourselves.

President Musharraf is hated by Al Qaeda because he saved the country from the violence that could have overtaken Pakistan, the violence of an international community united under a UN resolution. Other generals (and many politicians) who thought he should have defied the Americans would have rather faced the violence of a force under Chapter Seven than let General Musharraf save the people of Pakistan from great suffering. The brigadier’s son who nearly got close to his objectives must have listened to his elders and peers constantly complaining about the ‘shamelessness’ of Pakistan sitting quietly on the sidelines as brother Muslims were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan .

The mullahs are bad enough. Their constant blaring has done us more damage than we can safely calculate. But it is also our daily discourse in which we vie with each other at being purveyors of bad news. All the time, the young men in our families are listening and readying themselves to become cannon fodder for Al Qaeda. Pakistan was always a kind of security state devoted to Islam. Now it is a state of insecurity through the very ideology it thought would give security to everyone. *