It is only form

LET’S stay with asking last week’s question. Does this country run only on form?
It has a land mass — now disputed by the Americans of course, because they want direct access to Fata — it has a flag and is a member of the United Nations; it has pompous ‘core professionals’ posted hither and yon who mostly are ‘unaware’ of what is going on; it has a rather large army which has captured its own country, repeatedly; and above all it has the AGENCIES, the most dreaded of them the ISI, The Mother of All Agencies. And yet we are in the utter mess we are in.
First things first then, and where is the report of the inquiry committee that should have presented its preliminary findings by now regarding the procedures and actions followed/taken by all concerned before/after the Marriott hotel bombing? Whether the hotels own firefighting and fire escape systems existed at all, and if they did, whether they worked? Were there any fire hydrants installed at several places outside the hotel for use by the firefighters? What was the exact number of firefighting vehicles that finally arrived at the scene and what was their performance?
What, indeed, was the total number of guests staying at the hotel at the time of the blast and how many are accounted for: how many died; how many were injured? What was the exact number of hotel staff on duty at the time, ditto for them too on all of the above questions?
The government tells us that the bombers were facilitated by collaborators within Islamabad: if they know that, why doesn’t it tell us who they were and what is being done about them? A quick aside: the government also tells us that the Wah bombers stayed in a certain mosque as guests of the maulvi.
Pray, why not tell us the name of the maulvi, and the mosque in which he plied his trade? The people of the area whose near and dear ones perished in that ghastly attack would never again allow such an activity in their area’s mosques. Unless it is lying as heretofore, of course, the government’s battered credibility can only be enhanced if it lets this information out.
But, the answer is NO to all of the questions. Everything has been shoved under what I call the humungous and filthy carpet under which the cruel and venal and the mindless sweep everything that is unsightly and ugly: be it Liaquat Ali Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s murders; the case of the disappeared; or Benazir’s ugly assassination. Even the cruel murder of hundreds of thousands of our Bengali brothers and sisters, and the ongoing tribulations of our tribal brothers and sisters.
Look at how the state behaved, seven years ago, when it was given the ideal opportunity to put away for good, Maulana Sufi Mohammad of the TNSM and his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah aka Mullah Radio who is today the leader of the resurgent Taliban in Swat.
To refresh your memories, in October and November 2001, Sufi Mohammad took hundreds of young men and boys for jihad against the Americans who were bombing Afghanistan at the time. As decoys he used to take his own nephews and relatives along but used to bring them back as lures for more young ‘jihadis’ and so on and on, never leaving his own in Afghanistan.
When the people of the area found out about this little stratagem of the mullah’s, leaving their children to have their heads blown off while bringing his own back, they began to scream for his blood. Instead of letting his own people sort him out, what do you think the state did? I will let a report in this newspaper of Nov 21, 2001 speak for itself:
Quote: PESHAWAR, Nov 21: Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM) chief, Maulana Sufi Mohammad, was imprisoned for three years under section 40 of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) at Kurram Agency, according to official sources.
The secretary of home and tribal affairs, Javed Iqbal, told Dawn that Section 40 FCR had been applied to the TNSM chief by the court of Political Agent of Kurram Agency. “This is not a conviction,” the secretary said, adding that the PA court had the authority to release him any time.
Maulana Sufi Mohammad and some 30 of his armed supporters were arrested by the political authorities of Kurram Agency in Fata, on the charges of entering Pakistan without valid documents and possessing unlicensed weapons.
The secretary said the PA court had the authority to release him if he furnished an affidavit assuring good conduct in future. The TNSM chief and his supporters were sent to Dera Ismail Khan jail under tight security. Unquote.
In the event, the mullah was kept under wraps for upwards of seven years, to be freed only after Mullah Radio had taken over Swat. Why? Has anyone asked the Commando and the other members of his junta why this happened on their watch? Has anyone asked them why they protected Sufi Mohammad and Fazlullah from the wrath of their own people?
Of course not! Under the filthy carpet this went too. And yet there are loud pronouncements by the camp-followers of the American government demanding a dumbing down on the whole matter of the so-called War on Terror, repeating ad nauseum the mantra “IT IS OUR WAR; IT IS OUR WAR”!!
It will not become our war unless there is a rethink on the stupid way in which the Americans have gone about the whole thing; unless there is closure on what has happened over the past seven years during which thousands of innocents have been blown to little bits. Closure will not come unless Pervez Musharraf and his chief rufaqaa are tried for their crimes of omission and commission that have put our country on fire.
Let me end with a little sampler from the University of New Hampshire’s Prof Marc W. Herold’s website re. Afghanistan: “A US officer aboard the US aircraft carrier, Carl Vinson, described the use of 2,000 lb cluster bombs dropped by B-52 bombers: ‘A 2,000 lb bomb, no matter where you drop it, is a significant emotional event for anyone within a square mile.’” Emotional event, eh? Well then, little wonder that suicide bombers want to cause ‘emotional’ events too. Such as the emotional event of bombing the Marriott in Islamabad the Beautiful.
This country runs only on ‘form’, nothing else.
Bushism of the week: “Should the Iranian regime — do they have the sovereign right to have civilian nuclear power? So, like, if I were you, that’s what I’d ask me. And the answer is, yes, they do” — President George W. Bush, speaking to reporters in Washington, DC, July 2, 2008.
kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk