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No humanity in our times
OUR world is being increasingly defined by governments — from the most powerful to the smallest of minions — which are bereft of empathy and humanity and seem immune to misery, death and destruction of scores of people in their areas of influence and control.
Just look at the images of what is rightly being described as the second Nakba (catastrophe) and forced displacement of Palestinians from their Gaza homes where they have lived for decades and where their children and their children’s children have been born since their expulsion from their homes in Palestine 75 years ago.
Seeing thousands of men, women and children, including the infirm and elderly, streaming out of Gaza on short notice, during a few hours’ ‘pause’ in Israel’s genocide, with not even their basic belongings, it is difficult to imagine that just a few weeks earlier, they lived their lives with roofs over their heads and some rudimentary amenities, even if they lived in a ghetto, described as an open-air prison.
Their circumstances may be vastly different, but similarly long lines, whether of trucks, trailers or people on foot, were observed at both the Torkham and Chaman borders as ‘illegal’ Afghans were expelled from Pakistan.
The question is whether the leadership will hold to account some of its own.
The 241-million strong nuclear-armed nation saw these hapless refugees, totalling not even a couple of million, as a security threat and, strangely, blamed some of these poorest of the poor Afghans for the wave of terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil targeting mainly security forces.
One can heave a sigh of relief that the current military leadership says that the Afghan Taliban are not friends and have done nothing to rein in TTP fighters who come across from the Durand Line, cause havoc in Pakistan, and then return to their safe havens in Afghanistan.
The question is whether the leadership will hold to account some of its own, including the one who announced with unmistakeable swagger “Don’t worry. Everything will be OK”, when asked in the lobby of the Kabul Serena shortly after the Taliban takeover in 2021 what he hoped to achieve during his visit.
The idea here isn’t to suggest that someone is culpable for a quote like that. But who does not know that the particular intel chief, aspiring to the even higher office of the army chief, told his prime minister of the time that it was a great idea to allow back TTP and resettle them on our soil with their weapons and firepower without getting them to renounce violence and disarm first.
Another reason why these two, and the then army chief, who cleverly kept a low profile on this issue, are responsible for the mess the security policy is in, particularly on the border areas, is that the Afghan Taliban suggestion that Pakistan talk directly to the TTP was agreed to.
With their safe havens in Afghanistan and their ideological comrades at the helm in Kabul, now even better armed thanks to sophisticated US weapons and explosives that they laid their hands on as the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces collapsed, what possible leverage could Islamabad or Rawalpindi have on TTP?
What was once supposed to be our strategic depth has now turned into our Achilles heel. Yet another vulnerability, another chink in our armour. Our list of follies seems to snake dozens of miles. One struggles to decide where to start. Our mercenary leadership dubbed young student activists like us ‘traitors’ and Soviet agents when we opposed the country’s US dollar-induced ‘jihad’ fervour.
What followed ate away at the roots of our country. From a Muslim nation with a fairly liberal outlook, we transformed into an intolerant mob where the rights of religious minorities and even Muslim sects, other than the one we needed to ‘officially’ embrace for ‘jihad’ indoctrination, amounted to zero. It was our suicide, funded and scripted by Langley and other ‘allies’.
We didn’t stop with the exit of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. There was more — from Hameed Gul backing Gulbadin Hekmatyar’s relentless rocket assault that destroyed Kabul, after the Soviet withdrawal and the resultant power struggle, to the rise of the Taliban and their brutal execution of deposed leader Najibullah, who was snatched from a ‘UN-protected’ building. He’d stepped down as a result of a UN-brokered deal.
Then, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan became the headquarters of militants of all stripes and origin who’d been recruited and indoctrinated to fight the Red Army and then abandoned after the Soviet withdrawal. Their grandiose and suicidal visions culminated in 9/11 and all know what followed. Yet another long war, where GHQ partnered with the Pentagon again. At the end, Pakistan bet on the wrong horse and lost. One is not saying the Taliban lost. They won but their harbourers and backers lost as the dramatic uptick in TTP terrorist attacks since their return to Kabul shows.
To cut a long story short, yes, we have been hosting a large number of Afghan refugees, displaced by fighting in their country. Isn’t it equally true that in each of the wars, periods of insecurity that led to an exodus of civilians from Afghanistan, Pakistan was a minion pressing the violence lever for a superpower or for its own security needs?
This isn’t to question any country’s right, including Pakistan’s, to decide who lives within its borders. But surely to pin the blame for crime and violence, unjustifiably, on displaced persons and not our own policies, then set a ludicrous deadline to be enforced by a broken and corrupt enforcement set-up is cruel to say the least. As is sending back any woman or girl, given the Taliban’s hostility to women’s education and employment.
The Palestinians have to atone for the sins of Nazi Germany as they face expulsion from their homes and are subjected to brutality that is being called genocide. I wonder whose sins the Afghan DPs have to atone for as they are pushed back into hell.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, November 12th, 2023
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