Ignoring our heroes; honouring our enemies

I am gobsmacked! An Associated Press (AP) story titled: “Fight, fight and keep fighting: Defiance of Pakistani soldiers maimed by Taliban stirs pride in country’s only rehabilitation clinic” was published in the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail newspaper on August 25, 2011. I came to know of it when someone sent it to me by email just the other day, two and a half years later!

It says: “Of the 7,000 soldiers wounded in the War on Terror many have had their limbs blown off or been severely handicapped due to brain injuries. Captain Qasim Abbas had finished a six-month stint fighting the Taliban close to the Afghan border and was heading home to get engaged when the militants struck, ambushing his convoy, pitching his vehicle off a 90-foot cliff and leaving him with brain injuries that make speaking and walking a daily battle.”

The report goes on: “Abbas and the other soldiers recovering at Pakistan’s only military rehabilitation hospital are a testament to the human toll from Pakistan’s fight against Islamist militants. Their plight receives little attention from Pakistani politicians, possibly because they are afraid of associating themselves with an unpopular fight that many citizens see as driven by the United States.

“Fight, fight, keep fighting, Abbas said slowly but with purpose when asked if he had a message for his colleagues still battling the Taliban. He raised his fist in the air to drive home his point.

“Captain Kaleem Nasar was part of an operation elsewhere in the northwest in January of this year when he stepped on a bomb. The explosion blew off one of his legs, and the other had to be amputated below the knee. He visited the rehab hospital recently so doctors could work on his artificial limbs. Despite his injuries, he does not regret going to war against the Taliban and hopes he can return to active duty.

“I am satisfied I have done something for my country, said the 27-year-old soldier. If I can go back to that area and serve my country, God willing I will. But Major-General Waheed, the head of the hospital, is worried that Pakistani troops wounded in battle don’t receive enough recognition in the country. None of Pakistan’s civilian leaders or other politicians have visited the hospital in the five years he has been running it, he said.

“They need much more recognition because they have done so much sacrifice for the cause,’ said Waheed (who) contrasted the lack of political attention in Pakistan with a visit he made to Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in the US. He was there for only five days but saw a stream of officials and reporters come to the facility to meet with US soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said.”

Now then, how very shameful is it that not one political leader has visited the facility that rehabilitates brave young men like Captains Qasim Abbas and Kaleem Nasar, and many other officers and men similarly handicapped by the War on Terror? Far more than this, why has this story not been covered by our media, even official? Might I here and now ask the good Murtaza Solangi, the brilliant DG of Radio Pakistan, and the people over at PTV to immediately do the needful to honour these heroes and inform the country of their sacrifice?

However, while we heap scorn on politicians and ‘bloody civilians’, we must not lose sight of the fact that the War on Terror has been bad-mouthed, there is no more suitable word, by the Deep State through its own organs, as well as through its paid journalists in the extreme right media, both electronic and print.

Every single day, there are reams written on how this war has been thrust upon our poor country with nary a thought to the fact that the Pakistani Deep State is the Mai Baap (the Mother and the Father) of the extremists who are running riot in the country and killing and maiming our soldiers and civilians alike.

Indeed, the unceasing propaganda (with no supporting evidence whatsoever), that foreign powers are running the TTP adds to the confusion in the minds of lay Pakistanis. This especially when the Taliban are one day portrayed as foreign-inspired killers and the very next, as the saviours of Islam fighting the infidel. It is little wonder then that polls conducted on these matters show wildly different results in successive weeks.

It is high time that we Pakistanis realised our hour-glass is running out rather fast; that a huge miscalculation has been made as to the consistency of the sand which is running through it. It is time we got together and realised that this is a fight for the very soul of this country. Let me belabour the point: make no mistake that the enemy is within us and is threatening to take over our very lives. If anyone has any doubts, let her or him read the young and intrepid Munizae Jehangir interviewing Syed Mohammad Akbar Agha, the chief negotiator of the Afghan Taliban in this newspaper of record of February 28, 2013. Just two points made by Akbar Agha should send the shivers up the geniuses (aka the Rommels and the Guderians) who control Pakistan’s foreign and security policies, and up those politicians, who are falling over one another advocating immediate talks with the terrorists.

One, that enforcement of the Taliban’s hard-line version of Sharia was ‘not negotiable’. And two, that Akbar Agha “also indirectly condoned the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)’s bloody insurgency. Pakistani Taliban only retaliate against their government in support of their Afghan namesakes, he said, adding that the Afghan Taliban would always support them”.

So then, friends, the games are about to begin, only this time, the Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani (and Chechen, and Uighur, and Somali, and Arab, and Egyptian, and Uzbek, and Tajik) cousins will be far better armed and mounted than the last time around.

I do not think anyone is listening, by the by ...

Published in The Express Tribune, March 1^st, 2013.