Growing incidence of violence

TERRORISTS have hit again. On Tuesday morning, they first targeted a bus carrying personnel of a government organisation and then exploded a bomb apparently carried by a motorcycle riding suicide bomber that hit the passers-by. Both the targets were in the cantonment area of Rawalpindi, not very far from the Army offices. In the two incidents that took place during the morning rush hour, more than 30 persons were killed and many more injured, some seriously. The explosions in the capital’s twin-city took place seven to eight weeks after Islamabad was rocked by two deadly bombing incidents. The authorities say Islamabad bombings were carried out by elements sympathetic to the victims of Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa action. Of the three assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf, in late 2004, two were also carried out in the cantonment area of Rawalpindi. The third attempt was made during the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa siege when a missile was fired at the President’s aircraft as it flew over a residential area of Rawalpindi city. The growing incidence of violence in the heart of Capital tends to bring under sharper focus the government’s increasing inability to enforce its writ in various parts of the country. How much of low-level insurgency still persists in Balochistan one came to know of it last week on the first anniversary of Nawab Akbar Bugti’s killing. There were not only protest marches but also numerous bomb blasts and acts of sabotage throughout the province. But it is the on-going ‘rebellion’ in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan that appears to be the real challenge to the writ of the government. Quite a while after the army had moved into these badlands to hunt down the al Qaeda remnants, what we have there today is massive fighting, more in the nature of civil war than an expedition against some outlaws. It is no more a hunt and destroy operation by the government. Look at the scale of engagement. Of the 90,000-plus men under arms deployed there, about 750 have been killed against much higher but unknown casualties among the locals. Only last week, over 300 members of security forces were taken prisoner by the hostile tribesmen in an ambush, and despite the release of 100 tribesmen by the government as a gesture of goodwill, the security men are still ‘guests’ of the militants.
A dozen government troops are being held by the militants in Mohmand Agency. Last month also about a score of soldiers were taken prisoner and later released, curtsey intervention of a jirga, after stunning beheading of a solider by a young child militant. These kidnappings and arrests are in addition to the non-stop firing by automatic weapons at the government forces and repeated incidents of sabotage against check posts, schools and other government buildings. All these developments fully reflect the situation on the ground in tribal areas, leaving no one in doubt about the fact that the writ of the government has shrunk to the black-top of some principal roads in the tribal region. The fact is that Taliban militancy is rapidly spreading past the boundaries of tribal agencies into the settled districts. If in tackling a law and order problem, a government has to invest in terms of troops deployment and military operation at a scale our government is doing in the tribal areas, then the need emerges for a reappraisal of the situation. It would be also necessary to look more dispassionately into the problem and as to what caused it. The solution too has to be multi-faceted, factoring in political, social, cultural and economic dimensions of the imbroglio.
 

German arrests

THE arrest of terror suspects creates considerable speculation because the security forces involved are invariably tight-lipped. There may be other suspects, other links to be followed up and the certainty that however many terror cells may be cleaned up, there will be others, now or in the future. Thus the arrest of two German converts to Islam and a Turk this week and the discovery of 1500 pounds of hydrogen peroxide, Al-Qaeda’s preferred ingredient for homemade bombs, has produced little immediate information. The main assertion is that the authorities have foiled a “massive” attack on US targets in Germany, likely to have been timed for Sept. 11. There is, however, room to deduce that the authorities have known about the suspects for some time. They claim that all three men attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan last year. It seems that one of the men was also arrested in December, suspected of spying on at US base but then released. That arrest may have been a mistake by police who did not realize the group was already under surveillance. At all events, the impression given at the moment is that the authorities have had the suspects under close observation for well over a year and only moved in when they believed an attack was imminent.
To have left the men at liberty for as long as possible makes sense in that it enables intelligence to build up a bigger picture of how Al-Qaeda cells operate and perhaps find some key information that will lead to top leaders, even to Osama Bin Laden himself. It does, however, carry a risk for innocent members of Germany’s Muslim community to which the conspirators belong. Such contacts spread suspicion in the same way as a dangerous infection. The lives of maybe hundreds of totally innocent people have been blighted and opened up to exhaustive covert investigation because of chance dealings they may have had with these three individuals. If German police were merely toying with the suspects, perhaps provoking them to incriminate themselves further, did a similar situation exist last year with the planned suitcase bombings on two German trains. For some reason — perhaps interference by intelligence agents? — neither device exploded but this June, six Lebanese went on trial in Lebanon accused of the crimes. Since 9/11, the world has learned to its cost, whether here in the Kingdom or in Bali or Madrid or London, the bloody price of terrorism. We must be grateful for the international counterterror network of cooperating police and intelligence services that has sprung up to meet the challenges. But we must be equally vigilant that in combating the evil of international terror, a new evil is not created in its place — that of xenophobia and bigotry. Many Americans, for instance, still have not got beyond the idea that all Muslims are terrorists. The dragnet gathering of Al-Qaeda terror suspects is also catching many totally innocent people whose blamelessness deserves public recognition.

—Arab News