This article was originally published on islamsperspective.blogspot.com
On 2nd December 2008, Nazeer Naji wrote a column in Urdu, published in Jang. Though the article omits the mention of the very recent Mumbai attacks, it can't go unnoticed that it has been written in their very backdrop. Not only is the context in which it is written around 'terrorism', but its title, body and the final conclusive remarks are all unambiguously about terrorism.
The article first takes us back in history and while depicting what role institutional influences played in alienating the Bangladeshi people before 1971, the author equates the actions taken by the then Pakistani regime and Army to terrorism like we see it in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq today by the so-called Islamists. He goes even further and claims that the partition of East Pakistan was justified and done in the name of Islam and patriotism. This is not only a gross misrepresentation of facts, but also a very contradictory duo of words packed together in one sentence. Patriotism is a very base emotion which, like nationalism, is divisive in essence. By far, Islam is not reconcilable with these parochial ideas and actually fought and obliterated them from the hearts and minds of its followers.
The second anomaly worth pointing out is the claim that all Pakistanis are in one way or another advocates of the terrorists — which he divides into two distinct categories, both originating from FATA. The first category, according to the article, is of those terrorists who carry out attacks against Westerners in their own countries; the second category is of those who carry out attacks in Muslim countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I wonder whether the author left out the third and most active category — those who carry out attacks against Western soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan — because he doesn't consider them to be terrorists, or because their mention would have weakened his case against the other two categories.
Based on these baseless claims, the author is convinced that American rocket strikes in FATA are justified. He brings the escalating security situation in and around FATA as evidence for his claim, simply ignoring the direction of causality. Is it not true that all this fighting erupted and worsened only after the Musharraf regime bowed down to the Americans in 2001 and agreed to fight its own people in the tribal areas under the pretext of 'war on terror' — before which 'suicide attack' was an unheard of phenomenon in civilian Pakistan?
I feel deeply saddened by the fact that instead of asking where the British and Americans draw their moral, ethical and legal legitimacy to bomb and invade Iraq and Afghanistan from, the author ends his article by asking about the legitimacy of fighting the occupiers and their supporters. Shouldn't we expect our intellectuals to be talking about the causes of this evil rather than its symptoms?
