“This is all the work of AGENCIES; Government itself is behind all this; why would religious factions do all this and perpetrate acts of violence; this is CIA’s doing; US wants to control Pakistan” are some of the many statements that hit the ears. Anyone who is an active Pakistani or Non Pakistani resident and has the time, energy and insight to comment on the ongoing acts of extremism is likely to share similar views. For simplicity sake the extremism bit is restricted to the one which is being attributed to Taliban, TTP, Al-Qaeda and many other names that they have earned, proclaimed or assigned to them. And petty acts of terrorism if we do not want to stretch our collective memory too much since we already as a country are blessed with a pretty selective memory with an even more selective use of recent happenings only.
To further the analysis firstly Taliban exists and there is no denying that from any quarter to date because we have not exactly ever heard that they do not exist. Secondly thanks to an extremely good media there is no denial about heinous acts such as beheading of 17 Pakistani soldiers, attacking a hostel housing police recruits, and the more common and convenient act of suicide bombings amongst multitude of other acts. Both of these are logical truths in proven existence. Assuming that there is an inside help and further assuming that this is all a farce & a front so it would be but logical that someone is using the name Taliban to do it all. But how come in these past many years when we have seen numerous statements claiming responsibility for such acts of violence within matter of minutes how often have we seen statements of denials from any quarter? It is but logical for someone whose name is being used in something which would still be considered as wrong to atleast come forward to clean the good name or is it that they simply do not care? These are students as the name suggests so what about their teachers and leaders? Don’t they ever want to put up a denial and come to the rescue of these bands of students & brothers?
While we are deliberating between these 2 points pertaining to logical existence of Taliban and terror let us move to one of the main pillars of this country which is your clerics, Masajids’ Imam and other support functions. They pretty openly accept that it was these student blocs, volunteers, which saved our neighbor Afghanistan from the oppression of USSR and backed by US & Pakistan saved this very country 2 decades back. So again this merely supports the existence or rather creation of older days Mujahideen turned modern day Taliban. While they support this existence and their cause (best known to them alone) the denial of involvement in acts against the state and more importantly against common men, women, children, soldiers of this states is simply not forthcoming not likely. Why not? It’s a simple denial to make the masses think otherwise and Allah knows that they have the forum and audience to clear this fallacy and haze. That is if they wish to.
Last but not least hypothetically speaking assume for a moment that there is no Taliban threat and there is no such thing as Taliban but in the face of these brutalities is there ever been a condemnation of such acts from this support layer? And if that is not the case then is there any combination which would make sense regarding these elements? This is a collusion of multiple denials in the face of multiple rude realities in which all our party and all our guilty.
Extremism is a threat and a curse but more than this curse it is this ignorance which is consuming this country and at an increasing pace.
The Umar Rahman Blog 