Operation Silence backfires

The majority of the dead were lower-ranking soldiers and police constables or teenage police candidates who came to try their luck at recruitment centers, hailing from the low-income rural areas where families usually have only one breadwinner.

So, besides killing 52 individuals on Sunday, the bombers also tolled the death knell of many families’ finances. In these areas of Pakistan, the meager salary of $99 per month is considered more than sufficient to feed a family of four to six members. For this, people strive hard to get a family member a job in the security forces. If some lucky chap succeeds in getting such employment, it is regarded as a windfall that can boost family finances. That’s why young men from the poorest families throng police and army recruitment centers whenever they get a chance.  

At just such a recruitment center in Dera Ismail Khan, a backwater of Pakistan, 30 policemen and hopefuls were killed and more than 56 received shrapnel wounds or lost limbs instead of getting jobs. There were 200 candidates at the center at the time of the deadly attack. After the explosion, body parts were scattered all over the place.

Since the Pakistani government stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad using excessive military force against the poorly armed militants holed up in the Lal Masjid, the toll in multiple suicide bombings has jumped to over a hundred.

Furthermore, in an ominous development, the relatives of those killed in the bloody confrontation between Red Mosque militants and security forces have called for a jihad against the government.  

Clearly, Operation Silence has backfired, since the extremists have not been silenced.

According to independent sources, over 400 people were killed -- although the government still insists on 103 dead -- in the bloody confrontation that ended the Red Mosque standoff, many of them women and preteen children from the poorest rural areas who came to the mosque to learn how to read and write because their parents could not afford regular schooling for them. A huge number of relatives are still searching for loved ones who disappeared during Operation Silence.

During the proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, the U.S. used Pakistan to supply its allies, and the CIA invested billions of dollars in religious seminaries in Pakistan to train faith-oriented fighters to wage war against the ‘godless’ empire.

The ‘evil empire’ was defeated through the help of a CIA-funded ‘holy war’, but this process also irrevocably altered the complexion of Pakistani society, radicalizing a once moderate nation. It created a culture of militancy, Kalashnikovs, drug trafficking, and smuggling. In addition, the flush of money made the mullahs and generals millionaires overnight.

According to noted defense analyst Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa’s recent book Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, most Pakistani Army generals have a net worth of between 2.5 and 6.6 million dollars.

Paradoxically, rich clergymen send their children to study abroad at the world’s most prestigious academic institutions but deliver sermons encouraging the underprivileged to enroll in seminaries that do not have computers and do not provide the type of education required in the Information Age.

As a matter of fact, many of these seminaries’ preachers indoctrinate young male and female students, telling them that they are the custodians of Islam who must implement their own version of sharia upon the people by force.

For example, on Sunday BBC telecast film clips of a 14-year-old Pakistani boy who had traveled to Afghanistan from a religious seminary in the northwest of Pakistan to assassinate the governor of Khost Province. The youth, who was shown standing next to Afghan President Hamid Karzai after being pardoned, had been caught wearing a suicide vest on a motorbike in Khost. The boy’s father said that he had sent his son to the seminary to learn how to read and write and was appalled that his son’s radical teachers trained him to be a suicide bomber.

Unfortunately, in the surge of violence instigated by both sides, the sons and daughters of the poorest of the poor have had to pay with their lives.

Pakistan’s long-deprived multitudes are bearing the brunt of the so-called war on terrorism. But on Sunday, George W. Bush’s national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, told Pervez Musharraf to crush the militants and offered logistical and moral support.

Yet, at this point in time, when most countries are withdrawing support for the excesses of the war on terror, Pakistan should also start distancing itself from the failed policies of the United States.

GJ/HG

END

MNA