We all know that such groups are potential Frankensteins if their masters lose control over them.
NEW DELHI: This is with reference to Avirook Sen’s article of September 9 titled “Home truths”. I am afraid the writer seems to have gotten it all wrong when he concludes that the problem of Pakistan has now come home to India. Almost all militant organisations operating in Pakistan were nurtured by the country’s establishment over the past three or four decades. Many of them were created to fight the anti-Soviet jihad and others were exclusively created to fight India in Kashmir. We all know that such groups are potential Frankensteins if their masters lose control over them. This clearly seems to have happened in the case of groups like the Tehreek-i-Taliban and Jaish-e-Mohammad, since all of them have now developed their own agendas which run contrary to the interests of the Pakistani state.
Even as many of these groups have been banned, others like the Lashkar-e-Taiba are allowed to operate openly and freely. This can only lead to the conclusion that such groups are still under the control of the country’s establishment. When a militant outfit is fighting for Pakistan’s interests, its fighters are hailed as mujahideen, but the moment they go out of control they are labelled terrorists. When the Taliban captured Kabul and dispensed brutal medieval-style justice to hapless Afghans, Pakistan looked the other way since a Taliban regime in Kabul provided it with much-needed ‘strategic depth’. But when the offshoots of the same Taliban got out of control and started dispensing the same medieval justice to Pakistani citizens in Swat and other places, all hell broke loose. They were very rightly called barbarians, but only when they targeted Pakistan and Pakistanis.
Sonam Shyam
Published in The Express Tribune, September 11th, 2011.
