Still Much to Answer

It is the first time in the history of Pakistan that a head of the state has admitted what we in India have been repeating over the years and which the US, Pakistan’s patron, has found it difficult to accept because of its own culpability. President Asif Ali Zardari, in an interactive meeting with former bureaucrats on Tuesday night, told the gathering that militants and extremists were ‘‘created and nurtured’’ by Islamabad ‘‘as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives’’. He said that the ‘‘terrorists of today were the heroes of yesteryears until 9/11 brought things into a new light’’. His statement — ‘‘Let us be truthful to ourselves and make a candid admission of the realities... Militancy and extremism emerged on the national scene and challenged the state not because the civil bureaucracy was weakened and demoralized, but because they were deliberately created and nurtured as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives’’ — is an effort to indict the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), because it is this most powerful institution in that country which is responsible for creating and nurturing terrorism. But what kind of terrorism Zardari has in mind? The one that Pakistan has used against India or the one of which Pakistan is itself a victim (thanks to its being the US’ most indispensable ally in the so-called war on terror)? Zardari would do well to clarify this if he expects his candour to be taken seriously by India. Zardari should also explain whether he endorses the ISI’s shenanigans of defining terrorists as ‘good’ and ‘bad’; ‘good’ being those who would carry out the spy agency’s orders to enter India and terrorize it, while those out to punish Pakistan for its role in the US-led war on terror are obviously ‘bad’. In this scheme of things, terror outfits like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) are ‘good’ jihadi groups, while the Taliban and Al Qaeda — ‘‘heroes of yesteryears’’ as Zardari, thankfully, has rightly identified — are ‘bad’ terror organizations. Therefore, let Zardari clarify whether he and his civilian government are regretting the creation and nurturing of outfits like LeT and JeM too, just as they struggle with the reality of the making of monstrosities like the Taliban by their own state (read ‘‘ISI after taking orders from the CIA’’).

By the look of things, Zardari’s is a bold statement. What he has said of ‘‘heroes of yesteryears’’ now being hunted by the Pakistan Army — their very creator — is absolutely true. But why is the same Pakistan Army not using helicopter gunships on LeT and JeM camps as it is using against the Taliban-Al Qaeda formation in Swat? Why are criminals like LeT founder Hafiz Saeed and JeM chief Masood Azhar free citizens in Pakistan? Why, when the LeT was banned, was another front, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, allowed to carry out LeT activities in the name of ‘charity’? Why must Pakistan allow such mischief? What has Zardari’s own government done to apprehend the terrorists responsible for the Mumbai 26/11 cowardice? Is he not the same Zardari who called those terrorists ‘‘stateless actors’’? The Pakistan President has still so much to answer. Therefore, let us not celebrate Zardari’s candour. Let us wait for that candour to be meaningful in the context of what we have suffered from — export of terrorism by Pakistan. SOURCE: THE SENTINEL