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Pakistan's Taleban
by Thanos Kalamidas
2009-04-28 08:33:49 |
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I’ve been writing about Pakistan for a long time and through this time Musharraf ruled the country I wrote more intensely and often. But it seems that even during Musharraf era we hadn’t seen the worst. Pakistan has a chronic dispute with India that keeps the region in constant tension and one of the reasons of this tension and according the other the balance is that both countries’ nuclear arsenal. I suppose the right word is fear, they are scared of each other and who will be the first to press the button.
And perhaps USA and Russia managed for decades to balance in this horror and the vision of a war that could terminate life as we know it but would you trust a self-centered and paranoid dictator? For the ones interest in history they know how important it had become the race for the nuclear bomb in 1943, so tense that Norway was often victimised and teams from both sides were playing a game that included scientists kidnapping! Nuclear power would never serve any balance in the hands of Hitler. The same comes when we talk about Saddam Hussein, after all the invasion to Iraq was based in the fear that the dictator might have nuclear weapons.
But then how you can trust Musharraf, that’s something I found very hard to understand but then again it might be me because I have problem to understand how others are included in the …good guys and the respectful allies. But to return to Pakistan with the fear of an unstable country that has nuclear arsenal what came to make it far worst is the Taleban. I think what we missed to understand and underestimated from the beginning is what is the real face of the Taleban and we just put it geographically in Afghanistan ignoring the fact that what the Taleban representing has expand in all the Muslim world and has create a new stronghold, Pakistan.
Pakistan is for long balancing between a life that follows the example of another Muslim country, Turkey which also has a lot of dictators in the book and the religion fanatics who would like to see the country becoming Iran in every sense with the Ayatollahs and the Sharia law. I think because it was important for the American geopolitical plans in the area is the main reason they supported the Pakistani dictators ignoring how the people felt and actually leading them to the open hands of the other side and the more extreme the better. The same time the Pakistani dictators felt that they could handle and often use the Muslim terrorists and extremists for their own agenda until they lost control and they saw Bin Laden becoming the guest star that took over the stage and became the main character.
Bin Laden is living, hiding whatever you like call it the last five years in Pakistan and this is were he and his partners in terror organize and sometimes even execute their darkest plans with a Pakistani state constantly lost in corruption, personal agendas and political games with international interests and of course never forget that, a lot of drugs so millions of dollars. Usually when we talk about Asia and drugs our mind goes to Afghanistan or Laos, wrong Pakistan has the biggest share.
So now we have a new dangerous player in Pakistan, the Taleban and we like it or not the Taleban are winning in the area, and it is so obvious that even the American administration is thinking the possibility of negotiating with the more moderate parts of them. The last days we are reading in the news that the Taleban withdrew in from Buner, 100 kilometres from the Pakistani capital Islamabad and I was surprised to see some think that this was good news. What most miss again to see is that this is obviously a tactical move and is a result of a long negotiation between the Pakistani state and the Taleban where the Pakistani state didn’t win.
The Taleban fighters might have withdrawn form the area but they weren’t replaced by the Pakistani state and its laws but by the Sharia laws and the preachers of hate the Taleban left behind. The militants are not under any pressure on the contrary they are expanding their influence from Afghanistan to Pakistan and they expand it in a very strong way creating new strongholds that can cover better the actions of any Taleban extremist and any Bin Laden.
If there is a need of policing the world to prevent Bin Ladens and most importantly to prevent the execution of innocent like it happened in New York, in Madrid and Spain we better chose better the targets and do something about the Taleban who I’m going to say it once more, they are winning.
Musharraf Pakistan Nuclear |
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