The Talibanic Spread

Going by what Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) chief Malik Navid told the National Assembly’s standing committee the other day, the Taliban is present in every town and city of Pakistan and is planning more 9/11-type strikes against the West, especially America. As Navid said, the terror outfit, thanks to its amalgamation with Al-Qaeda, is no longer confined to the mountains of NWFP or Waziristan, but is ramifying across the whole state of Pakistan, imperilling all modern systems of governance and jurisprudence. The Taliban-Al-Qaeda formation, according to Navid, is trying to use parts of West Asia as launch pads for attacks against the West and has already developed expertise in making bio-chemical weapons; the terrorists would also destabilize the current regimes of West Asia, which is their long-term objective. Now the question is whether Pakistan would remain a mute spectator to the Talibanic spread or curb the menace before it engulfs the whole of the state and the rest of the subcontinent. The latter option is unlikely in the immediate future given the ISI’s bonhomie and strategic arrangement with the Taliban-Al-Qaeda terrorists and the patronage they have enjoyed all these years from the spy agency to effect a strategic depth in Afghanistan, of which Washington is only too aware of but can do little to stymie the terror growth because its Soviet era past, when the ISI was a party to the US’ Cold War machinations in Afghanistan, deters it from reining in the notorious intelligence agency. No wonder then that the so-called war on terror led by the US on the Afghanistan-Pakistan front should be so ironical in that its own ally, Pakistan, courtesy the Pakistan Army and its ISI, has allowed the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to consolidate in its territory and allowed them a free run; so much so that Sharia has replaced the Pakistani judiciary in the Swat valley and other adjoining areas, giving the Taliban the full right to impose a judicial system that militates against the cardinality of all modern societies.

The most disturbing development is the report of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda having developed expertise in making bio-chemical weapons that could well leak into the hands of other associated groups like Lahskar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), outfits that have vowed to bleed India by ‘‘a thousand cuts’’. This, taken together with their desperation to lay their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear assets, is the greatest threat facing not just India and the West, but the entire world as well. It is not without reason that the US has attempted to take control of the Pakistani nuclear command structure, which in today’s circumstances is impossible given that the Pakistan Army views it as a compromise on Pakistan’s sovereignty, which it will never allow. This in turn has given the Taliban-Al-Qaeda combine reasons to hope that one fine day Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry would be successfully acquired to perpetrate the worst form of terrorism on the world, especially against ‘‘infidels’’ like India and the West. It is time the world community woke up to the dangerous portent and joined hands to confront and defeat the rise of savage forces that are about to take over the entire state of Pakistan. Let there be no doubt that Pakistan’s collapse as a nation-state and its transmutation into Taliban-istan will spell doom for the entire world community. And in that eventuality it is India that will be the immediate victim.
THE SENTINEL