[Reader-list] "Time to get real" - Kamran Shafi in DAWN

[Kshmendra Kaul]

December 16, 2008 
Tuesday 
 
"Time to get real"
By Kamran Shafi
 
THE Indians may have doctored all of the filmed evidence of Ajmal Kasab going about shooting people in Mumbai, but why are unknown people stopping the Pakistani media from interviewing the residents of Faridkot, District Okara?

On his part, President Asif Ali Zardari has said that whilst our intelligence agencies may well have had some connection to jihadi groups (read LeT) pre-9/11, they do not any more. And that if at all there were Pakistanis involved in the Mumbai attacks they were non-state actors. He also said that India had not yet provided Pakistan with enough evidence of Pakistanis being involved in the first place.

Why then, good sirs, were government goons despatched to Faridkot to discourage the media from asking questions of the villagers to investigate the fact of Kasab’s residence there? Why, indeed, do the president and his minders not know that the father has admitted that the boy Kasab is indeed his son who was lured away by militants some years ago?

Why do the government and its spokespersons then keep their respective heads buried in the sand, pretending not to see or hear, while the storm builds and ill winds blow all around our poor and hapless country? Why do they continue to live in denial when the tiny window of deniability has been shut tight by the government’s own foolhardy and much-repeated foolishness?

We, and our many spokespersons and even more spin quacks, can stand on our heads; we can jump through hoops and turn cartwheels for all the world cares. Pakistan has long been perceived to be the fountainhead of terror and terror-related activities, no matter where in the world they are committed. The latest Bombay outrage has only solidified that perception.

But let’s do some stocktaking, and see if the perception is unfair, and only a wicked Hindu/Jewish/American conspiracy as some of our media allege. For which we will go back a few years and recall, as just two examples, the beauties called Jose Padilla, who was accused of attempting to use a dirty bomb in a large American city, and Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who allegedly tried to blow up an airliner on a transatlantic flight.

Padilla was an American and a violent man who had done time for robbery and was convicted of “aggravated assault and manslaughter as a juvenile when a gang member he kicked in the head died”. Richard Reid was a Briton, a petty criminal who in the mid-1990s was “jailed for a string of muggings, for which he served sentences in a number of prisons, including Feltham young offenders’ institution in west London”. They both visited this country several times over the years before they were arrested.

Jose Padilla is doing 17 years and Richard Reid something like 300 years in US prisons, and while it is no business of ours to question the validity of the sentences imposed, we have to ask just who in the world let these two into this blessed country in the first place. Not once but several times.

What impelled the visa-issuing officials of the Pakistani mission to issue these two Pakistani visas? They, the both of them, had criminal records as long as my arm; they both had no occupation to speak of, unless mugging and armed robbery and murder are occupations; Richard Reid had no fixed abode; and far more than anything else they both looked utterly disreputable. How then did they walk in and out of the Land of the Pure with such ease?

As is repeatedly being said on our television channels and in our newspapers, the time is here to face up to the hard facts, and to come as clean as we possibly can so that we may claim our people’s rightful place among the ranks of the good and the meek; meek used in the best possible sense of the word: humble and gentle and modest.

On another note now, another example of our state’s gay abandon. I was in Peshawar on Sunday to attend a dear friend’s son’s wedding and drove back via the Ring Road on which the Nato supplies transport yards have been repeatedly attacked by gangs of men armed only with assault rifles and matches — yes, safety matches with which they set the trucks on fire.

There were several such yards containing hundreds of containers stacked as in a seaport. The burnt-out hulks of trucks and containers and vehicles could be seen in at least two yards, but conspicuous by their absence were guards of any description let alone troops or police. Hmmm!

This gay abandon will not serve us well for Pakistan simply cannot afford to alienate the whole world and Charlie’s aunt. If it is in a compact with Nato to let its goods transit through Pakistan safely it should honour its commitment.

Bushism of the week: “I want to share with you an interesting programme — for two reasons, one, it’s interesting, and two, my wife thought of it — or has actually been involved with it; she didn’t think of it. But she thought of it for this speech.” — President George W. Bush; Washington D.C., Oct. 21, 2008, discussing PlayPumps International, which improves access to clean water in Africa.

kshafi1 at yahoo.co.uk