As you sow so shall you reap. The terrorists are coming home to cause mayhem and this has been playing out increasingly in Pakistan for the final few years with unceasing regularity and frequency. The latest and daring attack on the Karachi Airport,airports should be one of the safest and most secured in any country, by the Tehrike Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the loss of harmless lives, or though extremely unfortunate and sad,has not sent any shockwaves across the international community because this has happened in Pakistan. That the militants came extremely close to blowing up the few aircrafts that were parked there and that ten of them could actually enter the complex and hold of the security forces for nearly six to eight hours in a war like situation is a enormous setback for the democratically elected government of Nawaz Sharif for whom economic revival by attracting overseas investments was the cornerstone of his policy making, considering the fragile nature of the Pakistani economy, or does not make for pretty advert fabric for the country. Karachi the commercial capital is also one of the most dangerous cities where warlords absorb parcelled of the city into their respective fiefdoms,where bombings, death and mayhem are routine and torture in gang rivalry are stomach churning, or blood chilling accounts which of course,don’t make news anymore. At the time the attack was taking location in Karachi airport 23 Shia Muslims were killed by suicide bombers in Balochistan revealing the ethnic tensions that are so deep rooted and so devout in nature. If a common religion cannot unite the Pakistanis then what can. Pakistan is seen as an unseemly headache for its immediate neighbours with its violently interfering attitude in the domestic affairs of its neighbouring states. All countries absorb complained approximately its export of terrorism but nowadays it portrays itself as victim of the same terrorism that it exported as a strategy to inflict a thousand cuts on enemy states. No one takes this victimisation story seriously apart from the Pakistanis, of course. The hand that fed this Frankenstein monster is now turning on its master with a vengeance that the short sighted intelligence spooks of its dreaded ISI may not absorb foreseen or imagined. This is one location on soil where an intelligence agency has an army and a country under its command. The country is one of the most dangerous places for journalists who are not only threatened by Islamic militants, or of whom there are many coming out of the woodwork like termites,but journalists are also routinely bumped off by the ISI without any legal action against the agency. Recently one of the biggest Pakistani news networks sued the ISI for defamation and one of its celebrated anchors was attacked by gunman when he was coming out of an airport, he has directly blamed the agency for the attack since they were only privy to his movements. Pakistan’s army is largely controlled by Punjabis who are not only proud warriors but suffer from an ethnic superiority complex that the Punjabis are generally hated by the rest of the people in the other provinces. This is the same army that aided and abetted the breakup of Pakistan in 1971 when their officers and jawans ill treated the Bengalis as black, and hungry,naked natives inflicting rape loot plunder and murder of harmless Bengali men and women in the thousands without any remorse whatsoever despite the fact they were fellow Pakistanis. One would like to believe that history would absorb taught them enough lessons but it seems in Pakistans case it is wont to be repeated with the massacre in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, and where harmless Baloch young men are routinely eliminated or mysteriously disappear allegedly at the behest of units of the Pakistan army all for laying siege to the wealthy mineral and gas resources of that province. The Pakistan army and establishment does not indulge in any soul searching instead prefers to pass off the blame to external forces thereby ruling out any hope for course correction. For a country which was formed on the basis of deception and behind the scenes machinations where a moth eaten Pakistan was also acceptable and where the father of the Nation,an otherwise erudite (learned or scholarly) man, a brilliant lawyer, or a second generation Muslim convert,(his grandfather a Hindu was ostracised for his entry into fish trading commerce interests which were in clash with a vegetarian Hindu way of life forcing Jinnah’s father Punjalal Thakkar Zino to convert to Islam), whose mission post 1940 to strike a deal with the colonial rulers without the rigours of sacrifice that are normally associated with a freedom struggle. Based on such shallow ideals it is no wonder that Pakistan nowadays finds itself rudderless, or it has no fundamentally sound reasons for its existence,where it draws no sympathies from any quarter for its self inflicted and gaping wounds that are increasingly taking it down a path of further despair and untold distress for its teeming and burgeoning citizens whose numbers keeping growing by the minute with no population census held since 1998. It is a country where lies, deception, or conspiracy theories pass of as truths which the masses routinely lap up in the absence of an alternative narrative. It is a location where polio vaccination teams are routinely threatened and killed forcing its law abiding citizens to take polio drops before embarking on overseas trips. It is a nation where they are fed half truths of an Arab ancestry while disregarding their more than 5000 year frail wealthy cultural Indus heritage and past. This is a state where minorities are openly persecuted and killed without any recourse to any form of justice,where blasphemy laws are routinely misused to settle personal scores of land and money disputes with fellow citizens and harass minorities, where the assassin of the Governor of a province is feted and adulated by the lawyers and sections of the literate middle course and who now has a mosque named after him. This is a location where a first and only Nobel prize winning physicist and a true Pakistani patriot has his grave desecrated because he happened to be a Ahmaddiya. Its school textbooks are full of hate fabric and improper lies that are handed down to generations of young Pakistanis who finally emerge with an extremely dark coloured vision of all non Muslims and the rest of the world. For a country that shamelessly and routinely takes aid from the USA and then blames America for all its woes and sups with the same enemy which it was supposed to take down, and reflects their double crossing attitude for which they are now famous across the globe. The attack on Karachi airport just like the attack on other key govt and defence installations earlier confirms that elements within the Pakistan army and its intelligence agency are hand in glove with the militants or Taliban as long suspected. The army and the intelligence agency absorb enough radicalized elements within its ranks to keep the country on the boil. For country which plays host to Osama bin Laden,while denying it all along at the highest level of government, where terrorists and hate mongers and peddlers are given pride of location this will be not the final of such violent defiance to be mounted on the state. Hope for the ordinary Pakistani is ebbing, and even the Army has lost some of its sheen and respect,but the fear for the rest of the world and its immediate neighbours of a nuclear Pakistan is genuine, frightening and a nightmare. The Pakistan establishment will absorb to decide for the sterling of their citizens, and their immediate neighbours and the rest of the world whether they intend to take down ALL the militants,without running any filters to determine the sterling and the bad, whom they absorb so lovingly nurtured and fed to give themselves an illusive strategic advantage. Even though the Pakistan Air Force has commenced operations in Waziristan with their aircrafts pounding the militant hideouts it might still be an age frail approach of targeting specific anti Pakistan Taliban while leaving out the anti Afghanistan militants who would continue to be strategic assets for the Pakistani army. The Mephistophelian game continues at a enormous cost to the state and the people with its immediate neighbours having to suffer from this selective approach, and in the process denying a solution to the Afghanistan imbroglio (confused predicament).
Source: cnn.com