| News Details |
| Pakistan must not do a Hafiz Saeed trick | |
By Farooq Ganderbali
Now that Pakistan has detained Masood Azhar, head of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), it must now move decisively to charge him with carrying out terrorist activities within the country and for harming national interests. Both these crimes attract severe punishment in Pakistan. In the recent past, both the civilian government and the military leadership had come down heavily on terrorism emanating from within, handing out death sentences to several terrorists in the last one year. Azhar and JeM should not be an exception.
There are compelling reasons why Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his government, committed to improving relationship with India and have put considerable stake in making it happen, could develop cold feet and let the rare opportunity slip away. This seems to be already. It is the past experience how the Pakistani state dealt with terrorist groups which is encouraging widespread scepticism about Pakistan’s intentions. Even US President Barack Obama, at this State of the Union addressed, made it loudly clear that his country had little faith in the Pakistani leadership changing its policy towards terrorist groups.
A few years ago, after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008, there was intense pressure on Pakistan to arrest LeT leader Hafiz Saeed, seize his property and financial assets and dismantle the huge terrorist infrastructure run by him and his family in the name of `jihad`. Saeed was detained much like Masood Azhar. Saeed was in `protective custody` and this is the term a Pakistani minister used to denote the arrest of Masood Azhar, a known Taliban and al Qaeda supporter. His list of terrorist activities is as long as that of another terror mastermind, Hafiz Saeed.
`Preventive Custody` in Pakistan means Azhar would be confined to his Bahawalpur fortress and will not be allowed to move about the country side. There will be no charges of terrorism, no detention, no police presence inside the terrorist headquarters and of course no one would dare question the JeM leader. In all fairness, Azhar, like his brother-in-jihad Saeed, would remain in `protective custody` which means the security forces will protect him from any harm from India or any other country or agency.
But if you were to look at Azhar’s history since 2000 when he openly declared jihad against India at a press conference in Karachi, a few days after he triumphantly stepped out of an Indian government plane in Kandahar,you would realise that it is difficult to tie him down. His ties to the Deep State are too strong. Last time he was detained for a longer time when his group was found to be involved in the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. But he made a joke of the detention and was reportedly travelling within Punjab and Sindh freely. The Pak government said Azhar would not be allowed to travel to other provinces.
This pusillanimity on the part of Pakistan became even more glaring when his group was found to be involved in the failed assassination attempts on the military strongman and martial law administrator and President Pervez Musharraf. The investigation was carried out by the then ISI chief Kayani who later became the chief. Musharraf, with all his powers and bravado, could only ensure that Azhar could not move freely outside Bahawalpur. So powerful was Azhar’s connections to the establishment and the terrorist proxies like the Taliban which Pakistan state protects and sponsors that he remained free and un-charged. A few months later, when Musharraf’s hold was waning, Azhar managed to travel outside his fortress, hobnobbing with his Taliban and al Qaeda friends and opening new offices in Karachi and Peshawar.
So now for Prime Minister Sharif to hold this terrorist leader responsible for the Pathankot or for that matter in any terrorist activity will be an act of bravery. Azhar’s powerful friends in the army and the Taliban are not going to be easy to deal with. Sharif’s own relationship with some of these groups have been ambivalent if not complicit. Prime Minister Sharif is genuinely interested in putting the past into the bin but not his military. He will first have to convince the military leadership that JeM is expendable to the larger national interest. But the problem is the military and civilian leadership have different views on national interest, quite often at tangent and conflicting.
But Prime Minister Sharif can do it. He has to convince his military chief that it would be useful to investigate the activities of JeM and its leadership. Like the Kayani investigations, it wont be surprising to discover that JeM and Azhar were infact working against the state of Pakistan itself and could be hand-in-glove with global terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS in destabilising the region, most of all Pakistan itself.
Even if Prime Minister Sharif is hesitant to charge Azhar in the Pathankot attack, he could find enough evidence of his anti-national activities to charge him with working against the state which is good enough to lock him away for years or even put him on the road to the gallows. It could serve two purposes for him—one he would look good in the eyes of the world, locking up a dreaded terrorist leader and he would find considerable support at home. And of course, he can claim to have worked with India to nab the Pathankot perpetrator. It is a win-win situation. He just needs to act and behave like the Prime Minister of a sovereign nation.
Locking away Azhar and dismantling JeM would make him a leader of stature in the subcontinent. Failure would be disastrous for him and his country.
(The author is a Freelance Journalist and columnist)
(Disclaimer: The views, observations and opinions expressed in above write up of Scoop News are strictly author's own. Scoop News does not take any onus or liability for the veracity, accuracy, validity, completeness, suitability of any of information in the above given write up. The information, facts or figures appearing in the write up in no way manifest the position, standpoint or stance of Scoop News and the Scoop News does not assume any encumbrance or answerability of the same.)
Editor
Scoop News,(scoopnews.in).
... |
| |
|
|
Share this Story |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|