ANP-laid trap

The Frontier Post
Commitment to Journalism
ANP-laid trap
What kind of a trap is it the ANP honchos have laid out? After wangling jammers to block Swati thugs’ vile FM broadcasts and some 340 million rupees for compensating families of victims of suicide bombings and terrorist acts, Frontier chief minister Haidar Hoti returned to Peshawar triumphantly from a high-level security meeting in Islamabad, where he sat in the affectionate company of his maternal uncle, Asfandyar Wali Khan, happening to be the ANP’s head honcho. In that meeting, President Asif Zardari had vowed fighting the militants to the finish. But Hoti, instead, set about Nizam-e-Adl’s enforcement in the Malakand division. But when was it that a referendum was held in Malakand to ascertain if its people want this nizam? In the 2008 poll, the people, particularly in Swat, had voted overwhelmingly for the ANP? Had it fought the election on this nizam’s poll plank? Hadn’t it on the promise of security and peace to the Swatis and of development to the electorate all over the province? And if the Swatis and others in the region are now asking for this nazim, what does it tell if not that the ANP has failed utterly delivering on any of its election pledges and has come a cropper in giving security and peace to them? And that it is in desperation that the beleaguered Swatis are asking for this nizam, hoping this could perhaps relieve them of the thuggery of Fazlullah and his wicked brigands? And that the others in the region are asking for it, if at all, for their lack of trust in the ANP’s capability to secure them against the Swati thug’s creeping onslaught to their areas as well? But if it was a party interlocutor with Sufi Mohammad of the outlawed TNSM fame, who had it to be? Information minister, Iftikhar Hussain of Pubbi and Afrasiab Khattak of Peshawar hideout? Not Afzal Khan Lala of Swat? That brave Pakhtun has held the fort defiantly against the Swati thug while the rest of the ANP clan took to its heels in the face of his bullying and bluster to hole up in safe havens afar? The Lala knows the pulse of the people in Swat and around as he has stood by them while the rest just betrayed them for their own safety. He should have been the prime figure in any political initiative concerning Swat or Malakand. But neither was he taken aboard when the party’s select grandees struck a hasty deal with the thug; nor is he anywhere in sight in the party’s present expedient foray. But what has flung the ANP honchos into the sweet dream that this contrivance of theirs will not go the way of their previous one and again fail in deflecting the people’s attention from the inept, incompetent and corrupt administration they have inflicted on them? The problem of Swat or Malakand is not nizam, their scourge is the Swati thug and his vile brigand. It is they who have to be curbed. Beheading and slaughtering whoever they wish, stringing up on poles their hapless victims’ bodies, bombing and threatening out helpless people from their livelihoods and businesses, forbidding girls from education and blasting off schools have nothing to do with Islam, an admittedly religion of enlightenment, tolerance and moderation. It is not Islam that the thug wants. It is his own rule he wants to impose on a frightened people. This is the agenda his masterminds, financiers and arms supplier have tasked him to accomplish. His acts call for the rope, not for mollycoddling. But isn’t shamefully demeaning for this ANP clan that instead of being in the dock, he has anointed himself as monitor, judge and prosecutor of its accord with the Sufi? Quite magnanimously has he decreed to this spineless clan that for ten days he would watch its act and then pass his verdict. And for those days the crafty thug says he would unilaterally keep truce. But what for? Isn’t it to regroup and relocate his brigand, believably badly mauled in the military operation, as indeed he did in the past? But it would be very foolish if the Centre walks into this ANP-laid trap. It should know if it surrenders here, it will open up a floodgate to all sorts of sit-ins, surrendering all the way. If there is a sit-in in Peshawar, will it agree to opening up casinos, gambling dens and flesh shops in the city? It must think twice before getting into this ANP gambit, having nothing to do with counter-terrorism.
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Dated: Tuesday,February 17, 2009, Safar Al-Muzaffar 21, 1430 A.H.