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| Saeed and Azhar same, Pak must act against both | |
By Manzoor Ahmed
First of all Pakistan must clarify whether Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) leader Masood Azhar is in custody and that the government is serious about prosecuting him on terror charges and dismantle his jihadi infrastructure. This has become a matter of urgency and importance given the disquieting media reports that Azhar is not in detention. In fact, the only public information about alleged action against Azhar has come from a minister in the Nawaz Sharif government. He said Azhar was in preventive custody or protective custody, both means the same: he is not in prison. This cannot go on and it is the bounden duty of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his government clarify, once and for all, the government’s stand on terrorist leader, Masood Azhar.
This prolonged ambiguity about the fate of JeM and its leader Azhar is set to undo what the two Prime Ministers, at great risk to their reputioan, have set about doing against all odds—find a way out of the mess that the bilateral relationship has become, particularly since November 2008. Much of the blame for the mess, impasse, should be borne by the successive Paksitani governments and Pakistan Army. Instead of coming clean on terrorist groups like LeT and JeM, the government chose to hoodwink the international community, and India, by promising swift and visible action without really doing anything at all. Instead, the government has been seen to help LeT and JeM flourish.
Recollect that within months of the Mumbai attack, the Punjab government, led by Prime Minister Sharif’s own younger brother, chose to give an official grant close to $1 million to the terrorist group to run its charity wing. It was the most preposterous action on the part of any civilised nation—to reward a terrorist group for killing over 160 people in a dastardly terrorist attack. The world should have condemned it but it didn’t. This only made Pakistan more belligerent in its jihadi war and indifference to India’s continuous plea to punish those who were guilty of the Mumbai attacks.
It was business as usual for the government and the army—Hafiz Saeed was freed by the court because the government could not or did not present evidence of his and his group’s direct involvement in terrorist activities and attacks, particularly the Mumbai attack. Successive governments could easily have told the court that there was enough proof to nail Saeed and his group and that he should be charged under the anti-terrorism act of the country. But both the Zardari government and the Sharif government chose to hide behind the fig leaf that there was no admissible evidence against Saeed and LeT and that the courts would decide the issue.
These were merely excuses to fudge the legitimate concerns of India. The state has considerable resources and heft to punish terrorist and anti-national individuals and groups if it so desires look at the swift manner in which Pakistan Army hanged several terrorists charged for various attacks within the country. If the army can summarily try and execute own citizens in terrorist cases, the exceptions made to Saeed and Azhar are disturbing and unacceptable. Azhar’s lieutenant Syed Omar Sheikh was sentenced to death several years ago in the Daniel Pearl murder case but has not been executed after remaining in jail for over 13 years now. The truth, of course, is that Omar Sheikh has been a key asset of ISI. His senior, Masood Azhar, is similarly an important asset for the army to be discarded like others who were executed in the past year or two.
Prime Minister Sharif must not repeat the past and set a new beginning by launching a serious prosecution against JeM and LeT, both the groups are as much of enemies of India as that of his own country. If the state, more specifically Pakistan Army, had not pursued the jihadi strategy, there would not have been a Peshawar University attack this year or that of the Peshawar Army school in 2014. In fact, there would have fewer, if any, attacks inside Pakistan if the state had chosen to dismantle the jihadi infrastructure instead of blaming the US and India for the attacks at home.
The Peshawar University attack of January 20, 2016 has made Prime Minister Sharif’s task even more urgent—he must now act on his own words. He said, after the Peshawar school attack that there would be no distinctions between terrorists groups. He meant terrorists were terrorists and had nothing to do with religion. He must therefore move decisively and visibly against JeM and LeT simultaneously—that would be the signal world is waiting for so long to come from Pakistan: a decisive state campaign against terrorists.
The actions against JeM and LeT go beyond the Pathankot attack—it is about Pakistan. Today it is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan which is inflicting untold misery on the people of Pakistan, tomorrow it will be the Islamic State or al Qaeda. To save Pakistan from terrorism, Prime Minister Sharif has no choice but to treat LeT and JeM simply as terrorist groups which no civilised country should tolerate.
(The author is Kashmir based Freelance Journalist )
(Disclaimer: The views, observations and opinions expressed in above write up of Scoop News are strictly author's own. Scoop News does not take any onus or liability for the veracity, accuracy, validity, completeness, suitability of any of information in the above given write up. The information, facts or figures appearing in the write up in no way manifest the position, standpoint or stance of Scoop News and the Scoop News does not assume any encumbrance or answerability of the same.)
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