<I wish Musharraf well, but your positive spin is I am afraid just that. >
Militant political Islam is vocal strain but a force that is now facing its final death. Muslims own failures have resulted in the emergence of militancy as a response to the abject failure of Muslim society to provide the essentials needed for dignified human existence. When dignified human existence is denied unfortunately 'dogma' becomes the acceptable currency.
Grossly unequal distribution of wealth in Muslim countries, suppression of fundamental human liberties, mistreatment of minorities and women, and populations soaring out of control, have produced a nightmare in the populace. This is very well exploited by the likes of Osama's of the Islamic world, which see in this failure of governance the possibility of painting new rosy picture of the waiting houries. This is one reason that 'genital' organs of all these suicide bombers are well protected. They sometime wear several underwear’s before the devilish attempt to make sure that everything is functioning when they meet their 'maker of evil' and get their booty; not a second to be lost in last minute re-attachments problems. With these perverted minds in ascendancy, lack of democratic expression and consensus building, a social vacuum emerges that is a natural associate of such perversion. If one forgets usefulness of this life and think of it as a burden and make next one an objective you detach the basic contract of life gifted by god, once this is tragically severed nothing can mend it.
It is for this that you see amongst Muslim states that most of them have massacred their own citizens by the thousands in Iraq, Syria. There are dictators and coups, nepotism and corruption. Heads of government in Muslim countries rarely retire they are either overthrown or they often meet violent death through assassination. We are little lucky, no other country in the Islamic world could have stomached the kind of fundamentalist rioting we are seeing, the reason we can see through it is that they are allowed to do what they are doing, allowed to express themselves until they take law in their hands, this basic difference is one fact that you will see that Pakistan with all its inherent contradiction will be able to deliver on this one commitment to get this man and clean this mess.
The riots and upheavals are part of expression and no one can stop it but the leadership will also not relent that know it well that this is the time that Pakistan has to deliver. In any other Islamic country such expression could not be imagined or the rulers would be too afraid to take the populace on, in Pakistan call it weakness but the very ability to call the bluff of the fundamentalist gave us the ability to choose our sides well defined, their is no ambiguity. Now states like Saudi whose very power structure and ruling family is at the heart of this conflict is ambivalent and cannot take a stand for two reasons they have no idea how their population is going to respond and the militant strains of this unholy 'jihad' has germs of Wahabism and extremism that were reinvigorated by none else than Abdul Wahab and Syed Qutb.
If you just look at Iraq and Yugoslavia and Afghanistan the latest in last one decade and try to find similarities with Pakistan, you may on paper find a lot but in actuality none, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan all were given chances to roll back the crime, Iraq by getting out of Kuwait until 15th Jan in Geneva Baker was proposing this to Tariq Aziz, next was Yugoslavia given a lot of chances in Kosovo after Bosnia, and Afghanistan until today is being told not to harbour Osama and hand his cohorts and him but all these states have dogma or vain arrogance more important than security of its people. Now look at what Pakistan did, it did not waver for a second and joined the coalition within seconds of the call on that 11th midnight, if one would have gone by media depiction of Pakistan, we should have made similar errors of arrogance and political highhandedness rather bigger considering our ego should have been greater as we are a ‘crude nuclear power,’ but as fate would hold it, the entire posturing of the world media that Pakistan is a rogue state fell on its face, for one reason we are not, we are very open society, openly critical of our countries wrong doing and openly critical of our ideological mooring. The open mass demonstration against a military ruler depicts the difference we have with Iraq or Syria or any of the other Muslim dictator ship, we cannot quell these by mass removal, we will quell them by continuing the policy of removing the cancer from our northern borders and than addressing these bandits within our own borders. This clamp down is unique as far as I remember and it will hopefully change our image and hopefully help us to regain a enhanced status of semi-enlightened state.
The things I write here are things I talk about in my own country, as you know I spend a lot of time in Pakistan. Pakistan is not a case of lost opportunities rather you may see that it will pick up from here, the best thing happened to us is this show down with extremist right and if we come out successful by calling their bluff of ‘street power’ agitation the extremists may have now discovered that the days that they could use Pakistan as their cot state are over, deny them sanctuaries and vacuums and you will never have Osama’s of the world threatening you, this Afghan war is all about deny a crib of terrorism to crazy lunatics, I hope that India and Pakistan can resolve a bundle of differences once our country is freed from this dark forces of terror. I surely do credit Indian culture for teaching me 'jeeven jeeven ka sathi' that is monogamy, and respect for life, the reason we don't have that Arab gassing methods is because we were and part of Indian sub-continent and not Arab an land. We saved our neck because we did not get involved with that false pride where raining bombs decimate populations but not the false cry of jihad for Allah. WE are seeing one other example of this kind of vainglory being punished but unfortunately religious extremisms breeds this exceptional insanity.
Iqbal Latif
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