Talibanism is Pakistan

Consider what happened in Quetta, Pakistan, a couple of weeks ago. Militant members of the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI) attacked shops in Balochistan's capital, smashing television sets and video cassette recorders - ostensibly as part of a campaign launched by the party during Ramazan against what it describes as unIslamic activities. The local administration watched silently as JUI activists raided shops and shouted slogans against the "sinful" trade in music and video films.

If this episode sounds chillingly familiar, it is because the JUI's ideological brothers - the Taliban - in neighbouring Afghanistan, have, as part of their medieval understanding of religion, banished the television set as indeed any form of music or entertainment from their country. Many voices in our country have long warned Islamabad about the consequences and ramifications of its Taliban policy in our neighbouring country.

But our Afghan policy makers have so disconnected the external and internal dimensions of this policy in their minds that warnings about the domestic political fallout of Islamabad's close identification with the Taliban have always fallen on deaf ears. This policy-making elite seems to continue to be in utter denial about the domestic costs and internal dangers of Islamabad's Taliban alignment. It has closed its eyes to the intensification of sectarian violence in Pakistan being a direct consequence of our myopic and irrational Afghan policy. The Quetta incident is only another dimension of the blowback effect, which is visiting Pakistan is so many ways and signposts the dangers ahead.

Pakistan and Pakistanis are Islamic and Muslim, and have been so far over half a century. Those going around forcibly trying to impose their medieval and obscurantist views on people, whom weak-kneed and timid administrations fail to check, are unable to understand that piety is not established by attacking television sets or terrorising the public into submitting to their version of Islam. By doing so, they actually violate Islamic tenets, which warn against compulsion and coercion in matters spiritual. As for those in authority who stand by when misguided zealots incite violence and threaten to burn down shops, such abdication of responsibility involves heavy costs for all of society - of which they too are a part.

At the end of the day, such happenings, while not surprising, can acquire a momentum which can ultimately overwhelm even the remnants of any civilised society. Shouldn't our officials wake up to this reality and start addressing it - including a review of our Afghan policy - instead of just using the spectre of such extremism to acquire international donor money and support?

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