Pak gets a taste of its own medicine

By Manohar Malgonkar

AT the time when you and I were agonising over the outcome of our elections, Pakistan went through some of its bloodiest bouts of sectarian killings. Masked gunmen with high-powered firearms attacked Shia Muslims gathered for prayers or feasting in Lahore, Karachi and other towns, killing at least 50 and wounding many more, spreading panic and alarm and no doubt setting in motion a cycle of revenge killings. Watch out —Sunnis!

To be sure, these killings, were only a part of the ongoing Shia-Sunni conflict in Pakistan, but this time it had a different spin to it. Hitherto, whenever there were gang warfares in Karachi, or a train got derailed or a bridge collapsed, it had been the custom for some government ‘spokesperson’ to go pop-eyed with outrage and darkly hint that it was the work of a ‘foreign hand’. Over the years, the Pakistani public had been taught to interpret the message: Foreign meant India, hand meant the RAW, its version of America’s CIA.

That particular usage of the two words had been so taken for granted in Pakistan, that this time, when the same standard announcement was made by some official, a subsequent clarification was found to be necessary. A high-level government spokesman explained that this time by ‘foreign’ they did not mean India, but Afghanistan, and ‘hand’ was not the RAW but the Taliban.

And further, that the Pakistani Government had clear proof that the deathsquads sent to kill the Shias were trained in schools located in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Nawaz Sharif had sent his chief of the ISI to Kandahar to, as it were, shake the finger at the Taliban and say: "Hey looks! We know you did it. But don’t you ever do it again! We know you run these schools to train death squads because after all, we taught you how to oraganise them and run them. But keep to your normal targets. Don’t you send any more killer-squads into Pakistan".

To all this the Taliban’s response has been a blank denial. We never sent those killers — our hands are clean!

Is there not something familiar about this exchange? Of course, there is. It is precisely what Pakistan tells us when we complain of their killer-squads gunning down people in Kashmir, or planting bombs in Indian cities far away from our frontiers. "Who us? —but never!"

That such killer-teams have been assiduously put together, given intensive training in commando-type schools, and sent in packs to shoot people and plant bombs in cinema theatres and bazaars, has been established beyond dispute for quite some time because of the confessions of some of these agents captured by our guards. Also, about 10 years ago, Mary Ann Weaver, a veteran American reporter who specialises on investigative writing on Islamic lands, wrote of their existence and even visited one of them called ‘The University of Jehad and Dawa’ which is located in the hills near Quetta.

No matter. The US Government whose intelligence-gathering agency, the CIA, which has developed devices that keep tracks of what Saddam Hussain has ordered for breakfast and can keep tab on any individual’s movement in the world by zeroing on his mobile phone, was completely in the dark about these schools for death-squads and so, to all appearances, was the all-knowing BBC.

Till one day the cat came out of the bag, as a sort of side-effect of what the Americans had done, when their embassies became the targets of one of these killer teams operating from the same general geographic region, in the remote hills where Pakistan’s frontier ends and Afghanistan begins.

Osama Bin Laden, who had declared a Jehad on all infidels, had his hideout in these mountains. The Americans had reason to believe that it was he, Bin Laden, who had blown up their embassies in Nairobi and Khartoum, and reacted with the sort of revenge-attack that only a state as powerful as America could get away with. Ignoring diplomatic niceties as international frontiers, they fired off a hundred or so of their medium-range missiles aimed at targets deep in Afghanistan to destroy Osama Bin Laden’s hideout and training establishments. Bin Laden for his part seems to have known all about those missiles which could be made to zero-in on cellular phones and managed to stay away as far as possible from any telephone. Sure enough, none of these missiles landed near him.

But, among the missiles that did find their targets was one of those off-the-record commando schools for the training of killer-squads, and brought an instant yelp of protest from those in charge of it: "Hey, you! What do you mean targeting us?—we’re not run by either the Taliban or Bin Laden. Sure we run a killer-squad school, but we only send them into Kashmir, damn it!"

This was as close to an open admission of Pakistani-run death-squads before Kargil when the veil of secrecy was finally discarded and these operations were openly admitted. That was when it also came out that the US had known the facts all along but was only pretending not to know, and the Time magazine published what purports to be an interview with a member of one of these squads who had been actually pulled back from Kargil.

And now, in a reversal of roles as it were, instead of being in a position of sending out these human torpedoes at targets chosen by Pakistan, Pakistan finds itself at the receiving end.

It is difficult to suppress the urge to cluck one’s tongue and shake one’s head and look smug and come out with some appropriate grandmother proverb to describe the predicament that Pakistan finds itself in: Sauce for the goose — reap as ye sow—rooks coming home to roost —engineer hoist with his own petard — oh any number that jump to mind, except for the chilling awareness that innocent people being killed by brainwashed hit-squads is no occasion to spout morals. After all, we don’t live on the moon but on the same planet as Pakistan. And brutal killings, whether in Kashmir or in Pakistan, in Kosovo or Chechnya, are revolting happenings to be condemned by all civilised people.

And yet there does seem to be one old proverb which might be quoted without bruising sensivities: The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.