Killing every Taliban and then offering not to kill the rest in return for negotiations is a winning strategy.
LAHORE: With reference to Pervez Musharraf’s artice of Dec 15 titled “What needs to be done in Afghanistan”, may I ask was it not because of the establishment in Pakistan that a rag-tag bunch of madrassa graduates managed to capture power in Afghanistan? Surely, the general knows that the Taliban were never popular among ordinary Afghans partly because they killed leaders who were actually popular, such as Ahmad Shah Massoud. Recognising them for killing everybody isn’t exactly a winning strategy. In fact, killing every Taliban and then offering not to kill the rest in return for negotiations is a winning strategy.
The former president also wrote: “The Taliban and al Qaeda were dispersed and they ran into the mountains and the cities of Pakistan.” And in response to that one would have to ask that wasn’t it the job of the government led by none other than the general to ensure that they didn’t run?
The general then wrote that one of the blunders committed by Pakistan was that it did not wean away the Pashtun from the Taliban. And again, the obvious question is: how could this have been possible since the state followed a policy of duplicity and this was also the case under General Musharraf’s rule. Who helped airlift the madrassa students who had gone from Pakistan to fight the Americans, just as the Americans were closing in? They were brought back to Pakistan and, in a couple of years time, started biting the hand that was feeding them.
Further on, the general writes that “moderation has to be brought into society” and that this can be done by “stopping misuse of mosques for preaching militancy; banning militant organisations and not allowing them to resurface with different titles; ensuring that the curriculum/syllabus in schools has no content of religious or sectarian extremism and mainstreaming students in madrassas”. Yet again, the obvious question that comes to mind is that didn’t the general have almost ten years to do all of this? Why wasn’t all this done when he was in charge? And as for the mention of India, perhaps if we concentrated more on our own faults, rather than finding faults in other countries, we would get somewhere.
A Sultan Ahmed
Published in The Express Tribune, December 16th, 2010.
