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Targeted ordinary people |
WHEN the chief of 'fidayeen' (suicide-bombers), Taliban commander Qari Hussain, declared entire Pakistan as a war zone he was obviously warning of a murderous retaliation against the ongoing military operation in South Waziristan. He had promised huge retaliation and revenge killings all over the place. So there were these suicide-bombing incidents in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore and a number of other places which took heavy toll of human life and limb.
Barring one or two attacks that targeted ordinary people, like the one in Peshawar, almost all other targets were the security facilities including GHQ, FIA centre in Lahore and police training centres. That these rampaging shamans will not spare the International Islamic University either and kill girl students, was not being seriously contemplated. By and large security at the gates of educational institutions including the IIU campus at H-10 Sector of Islamabad was therefore not strict.
Otherwise, how could the two suicide-bombers go, unnoticed, deep into the campus and explode themselves; one at the door of the girls' cafeteria and the other at the gate of the faculty. Indeed it was a case of intelligence failure and a serious lapse of security arrangement; if at all any such arrangement was there. Not surprisingly, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who arrived at the site soon after the carnage in protective custody of a bevy of well-equipped commandos, was accorded a 'shame shame' welcome by the students. That should remind him that security of educational institutions and rest of the places in the Capital is the baby of the federal government; a failure he would find hard to blame on provincial authorities.
Given that the target is one of the Islamic world's premier institutions, with some 17000 students including a large number of girls on its rolls, and is located right in the Capital, quite expectedly then a huge number of people turned up at the site - as well as an equally large media presence, particularly the television channels, for instant coverage. As a result the scene acquired messiness which tended to hamper the rescue and relief operation. By now, after all these months and years of relentless terrorism, there should have been some orderliness in coping with tragic aftermath of suicide-bombing. It was hoped that by now some kind of standard operating procedures (SOPs) to help expedite evacuation of the wounded and facilitate meaningful media coverage would have been in place.
But that has not happened, often resulting in difficulty in evacuation of the dead and the wounded. Of equal concern to the people are the half-baked reports that emanate from the 'man-on-the-spot', sometimes contradicting what the rival channels put out, seriously undermining the credibility of the media. That calls for a voluntary code of ethics devised by the electronic media. As for the print media, let the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors (CPNE) come up with its own code of ethics for the coverage of terror-related incidents.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik is right in saying that Pakistan is in a situation of war, the assertion aptly reflected in Qari Hussain's threat to take his war to all four corners of Pakistan. One would be grossly over-optimistic to believe that this war is going to be over soon enough. In fact, on the other hand, there is ample evidence to suggest that we are in for a long haul, indicated as it is by the suicide-bombing of the International Islamic University campus. By targeting a seat of learning based on Islamic principles the terrorists have exposed yet another dimension of their 'philosophy', which is that our Islamic Republic of Pakistan falls far short of their concept of an Islamic state.
They have destroyed hundreds of girl schools in Swat and elsewhere in tribal region and are now in the Capital on the same mission. It is a huge challenge that terrorists pose to our society and that may last for a long time. Are we ready to face it? Perhaps, not. As government we have not been able to gather enough intelligence on the worldview of terrorists.
It is also a fact that our official response to this threat is fractious, scattered and compartmentalised. A national organisation fully equipped with information-gathering wherewithal and a unified force suitably trained to confront terrorists is not in place. Similarly, while the political leadership is good in making some cosmetic motions the general public lacks awareness of the apocalyptic dimensions of terrorists' mission. Media can be a great help here by presenting the facts as they are and dispassionately disallowing exigencies of trade to compromise their professionalism.
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Afghan election |
THE decision to hold a runoff to the fraud-distorted Afghan presidential election matters more to the foreign countries combating the Taleban and Al-Qaeda than it does to the ordinary Afghans. Most of the latter were already resigned to another five years with Hamid Karzai as their president.
It was those nations supplying troops to the NATO-run International Security Assistance Force who drove the political fix that caused Karzai to back down from his earlier insistence that the vote was fair and free and that he had won the necessary outright majority to avoid a second round.
Nowhere is the Afghan war popular. In both the US and UK in particular there has been outrage that soldiers’ lives were lost guaranteeing the security of an election that turned out to be bogus.
Conveniently ignoring their own controversial first-term election of George W. Bush in 2000, ordinary US voters asked why America was shedding blood and coin to back a fraudster. This also ignored the fact that Karzai’s chief opponent, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah was also found guilty of fraud — 200,000 of his votes were thrown out by the UN-backed Afghan Electoral Complaint Commission. US voters also seemed to forget that they have been told this is a war that they have to win, for their own safety. If the Taleban return to power, they were told, Al-Qaeda will come with them and will once again have a secure base from which to assault the US and its allies in the war against international terror. Nevertheless concern about US public opinion has clearly held up President Obama from sanctioning the extra 40,000 troops his generals say they need in Afghanistan.
The question now is whether as the Afghan constitution stipulates, a runoff really can be held on Nov. 7. Can 7,000 polling centers and 25,000 polling stations be re-established, 200 top electoral officials deemed guilty of fraud be replaced and can the whole infrastructure be kept secure from both the Taleban and further fraud attempts, in less than two weeks? More importantly will Afghans, especially those in conflict areas, bother to vote again? A very low turnout on Nov. 7 would very probably dismay the international community almost as much as the ballot-stuffing first round.
The answer, of course, is for Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah to agree on a power sharing-deal and avoid all the risks of a second round. In the end it is less important which of these two men is running the country than that Afghanistan has a stable government, capable of tackling the mountainous issues before it. Karzai’s first term was lackluster. Maybe working effectively with Abdullah Abdullah, a second Karzai administration could do better. However, both men need, at this time at least, to put aside much of their political ambitions and work instead for a secure and stable future for their country.
—Arab News
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