Pakistan and Extremism

(Published for the Islamic Foundation E-Newsletter July 2009 issue).

It was on September 20^th, 2008 around 7 pm. Me and some friends had just prayed maghrib and were seated at a table in small restaurant in Islamabad. We were about to engage in a conversation when suddenly the building took a powerful shockwave. The main entrance door, made of thick glass fell into pieces and I could feel the air compression in my ears. Everybody froze. There was a deep silence. We all thought it was an earthquake but we soon realized it was an explosion. We rushed outside and from a couple of hundred yards; we could see a thick cloud of smoke above the Islamabad Marriot Hotel. We didn’t take time to drive away from the site, fearing a secondary explosion. We went straight to a friend’s house and turned on the news. It was a dumper truck, loaded with a ton of RDX that was blown up at the gate of the hotel leaving hundreds of dead.

Since its formation in 1947, Pakistan has had a long history of internal problems, very often between political and religious groups and sometimes between the state and its people. Almost every government that has ruled the country has had to face severe opposition from different groups across the country where most clashes resulted in either destabilizing the government or dragging the whole country into a state of anarchy. During the last ten years, indiscriminate violence has escalated to an unprecedented magnitude where literally every day, Pakistan makes the news headlines on the top news channels around the world. Today, violence is not restricted to only remote areas of the Pakistan, but as if the whole country has been turned into a battlefield.

The situation got bad after the U.S. drone strike on a madressah in Bajaur, North West Pakistan killing 83 civilians, with the help of the Pakistani intelligence, the ISI. It got worse when the Red Mosque standoff was ended with the brutal killing of hundreds of young students. When the Taliban decide to react to that, Condoleezza Rice declares the Taliban an extreme terrorist group, a similar group with similar ideologies which America once referred to as ‘mujahideens’ (Holy War fighters) during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and aided them to fight off the Russians. Indeed, there is religious extremism in Pakistan where different groups choose to follow extreme ideologies and creeds, the main reason being ignorance. However, in the case of the Taliban, they are simply a group of people that are really angry at the Pakistani government. Let alone being bombed, people don’t like being stepped on the toe. It is easy to condemn their way of doing things, but how do we expect them to react when in their view, it is blatant that the Pakistani government is fighting America’s war? We are not advocating violence, but there’s a need to know who the aggressors are and who the victims are. North West Pakistan with its warm, welcoming and hospitable people used to be one of the most peaceful places in Pakistan. Today things have changed. We ask ourselves, why has this happened? ‘Extremism’ doesn’t just come into being on its own. If today we see extreme ‘reactions’ all around the world, it’s most likely because there are extreme ‘actions’ being done to the world.

The undeniable and sad truth is that in Pakistan, those group that are called ‘extremists’ live in the most underdeveloped areas of the country such as the Waziristan and Baluchistan provinces. Outsider authors who have written extensively on what they define as extremism and terrorism argue that the main reasons behind that are usually: political deprivation, the state’s inability to satisfy social demands and corruption. Pakistan, a country where the majority of its people live below the poverty line, spends massively on military equipments. There is a clear unjust distribution of wealth in the country. Half of the country’s gas production is based in the Baluchistan province, yet its people are living in extreme poverty conditions in mud huts, next to those huge factories and have no access to the wealth generated. No wonder, there exist a separatist group in that region, the Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) who have been struggling for autonomy for a long time. South Korea, in contrast, no longer has an army and is investing hugely in elevating its people and in its tourism industry. Countries like that usually don’t have problems like extremism or rebellion. For the last ten years, Pakistan has just been making enemies, both externally and internally and keeps doing it.

After the Islamabad Marriot Hotel incident, I understood what it was for those people living under constant fear in North West Pakistan, with U.S. drones patrolling above their homes, searching for new targets or ‘training camps’ ,most of the times ending up in killing unarmed civilians. There are indeed many issues with the Taliban and the way they deal with things, but those problems can be sorted out through proper education and dialogue and not by beating the living daylights out of them. As I said, five years ago, North West Pakistan was a quiet and peaceful region but now its people have been provoked into this dirty war with increasing violent and aggressive attacks on both sides. As long as America keeps pressurizing and dictating Pakistan, the internal tension that already exists will keep on rising. We tend to forget the past. Vietnam, Rwanda, Bosnia, Philippines, Somalia and many more are all the forgotten chapters of America’s dirty military involvement. In 1994, while hundreds of thousands of people were being butchered in Rwanda, Madeleine Albright, then secretary of state was still not sure whether she could call that ‘genocide’, and therefore the U.S government did nothing to intervene. Yet we don’t learn any lesson from that but instead we keep buying the myth that America is the ‘good guy’ and is working towards maintain peace around the world. What the Pakistan government sees as ‘religious extremism’ is just something that it has created with its own hand and continues to aggravate it. Let’s reflect on the words of Al Ghazzali : “Do not buy the enmity of one man for the love of thousand men”.

Saad Bin Muslim.

Student of Islamic Banking, Finance & Development

MIHE, UK.

sheikhnbakes@gmail.com