Pakistan must fight its jehadi groups or watch the nation slide into more chaos

The Pakistanis love their cricket. They are highly skilled in it and like to flaunt their cricketing prowess. They were disappointed when both Australia and India refused to play on Pakistan soil citing inadequate security for the players as the reason.

The Pakistan government then persuaded Sri Lanka to send its team to play.  Since Sri Lanka is obliged to Pakistan in terms of military assistance it receives from Islamabad in its war against the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), Colombo decided to risk sending its cricketers to Pakistan, depending on the rightful assumption that while the ISI may use its Jehadi instrumentalities against Pakistan’s adversaries, they would not unleash them on Sri Lankan cricketers. This is unexceptional logic.

What both Pakistanis and Sri Lankans overlooked is while cricket may be loved by Pakistanis and cricketers may be worshipped by them, what did the Jehadi outfits think of cricket? Did they love cricket or did they look up Koran and Hadith and conclude since there were no references to the sport in those Holy Books it cannot be deemed Islamic? In Jehadi logic, very often what is not specifically endorsed  is un-Islamic. Pakistani and Sri Lankan cricket boards should have been prudent to check with various Jehadi organisations whether playing cricket is permissible Islamic activity as also watching it.

Had the issue been done, one may have got as many replies as there are organisations, each asserting perhaps that his interpretation alone was valid and all who disagreed were apostates. Once conditions were created in Pakistan when  a large number of Jehadi groups are allowed to function autonomously, they are bound to extend their autonomy of functions and interpretations and act on their own. This risk of creating Frankinsteins who openly despise democracy, man-made rule of law and are guided only by God’s wishes as interpreted by themselves was completely overlooked by successive directors-general of Inter-Services Intelligence and their bosses, the army chiefs when they nourished the Jehadi militias. Today, they reap the harvest of what they sowed over the last three decades.

Eminent terrorism specialist B Raman has speculated that this terror attack could have been carried out by Pakistani Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) as an obligation to the LTTE. Neither HUM nor LTTE is known to love cricket. Just as Sri Lanka has obligations towards the Pakistani government, HUM has obligations towards LTTE which has assisted in the drug trade. It also helps HUM to send a clear message that they are expanding their jurisdiction to determine what is permissible in Islamic terms and what is not even in respect of sport. Raman’s logic is persuasive since only Sri Lankan players were targeted, not the Pakistanis.

The Pakistani Army is being pushed into a corner. It has to decide whether it will take a stand and fight the Jehadi groups which it nurtured and which are getting out of control or will passively watch Pakistan slide into the status of a failed state like Somalia  and Zimbabwe. Pakistani generals are hoping against hope that they will be able to exercise effective control over Jehadi groups, sustain influence over a Talibanised Afghanistan as strategic depth for Pakistan, milk the US for billions of dollars and succeed in continuously bleeding India through a thousand cuts.

Pakistani politicians face a test in the next few days. The world will know whether even at this stage they are prepared to save Pakistan from Jehadi terrorism or start a new blame game vis-a-vis India.The first signs are not propitious. Already there is a general wail that Pakistan like India is a victim of terrorism. But the fact is that various terror militias operate openly in Pakistan without little or no hindrance. Taliban chief Mullah Omar has lived openly in Quetta for the last seven years. Chiefs of Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and other Jehadi groups give media interviews and conduct tours of their training camps.

US authors have quoted officially provided intercepts of conversations where Pakistani military leaders have referred to the Jehadis as their assets. US and Nato have no confidence in Pakistan’s commitment to fight terror and hence their drone- missile strikes without prior information to the Pakistani Army. The US wants to calibrate its aid flow to Pakistan on the basis of Pakistani efforts. Pakistani civil society knows how the army had used the jehadis against them all these years. If Pakistan goes down to terror, the responsibility will lie with arrogant and over-confident generals who thought they could outsmart the entire world and a supine civil society which has no backbone to fight for its own survival.

K Subrahmanyam/ DNA-Daily News & Analysis Source: 3D Syndication