SRI LANKAN PLAYERS....The Lahore mayhem

The Frontier Post
EDITORIAL
A huge security lapse it was unquestioningly, this terrorist attack in Lahore on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket players. As the Indians are still vindictively accusing Pakistani agencies for the Mumbai assault and were also angry with Colombo for allowing its team to play in Pakistan, an extraordinary security net was essentially needed to protect the Sri Lankan players. Obviously, that umbrella was not there, for which we squarely blame both President Asif Zardari and the Sharif brothers. With their politics of confrontation, they have plunged Punjab into a boiling political turbulence, to cope with which the provincial security apparatus's big chunk has been apportioned out, leaving just a sprinkle for safety of the whole lot of the populous Punjab's swarming population and our valuable foreign visitors, as these Sri Lankans were. But then neither Zardari nor Nawaz is a Nelson Mandela. For his nation's greater good, this giant of a leader and a statesman par excellence buried his personal hatchet with his three-decade-long tormentors, a racist White minority, preached mutual tolerance and accommodation to his black majority with its centuries-old oppressive White colonial masters and worked hard for the two to coexist and thrive together. It was a Nelson Mandela that the people of Pakistan needed at this critical time to lead it to surmount the gigantic existential threats confronting it so menacingly. Instead, to its great misfortune, it has landed with these two, who are not even a politico worth the salt but just pigmies with myopic mind and barren intellect, driven not by the nation's interests but their own personal agendas and fracas. Even a bloke knows this country is in the throes of a vicious international conspiracy to hurt and cripple it. In the western military academies, their strategists are teaching their trainees on a new world map on which Pakistan does not exist at all as it is today, but as a fragmented land absorbed in regional geographical entities. And knowledgeable people are extremely worked up over the intriguing happenings in and around this country. It is not just the homegrown fanaticism they are distressed at. Their worries are swirling sky-high over the inspirations, inducements and incitements streaming in torrentially from the outside to subvert this nation's unity and solidarity and disjoint its territorial integrity. Money and arms are flooding in here in spates for these outside powers' proxies; even their agents they are infiltrating to fight on their proxies' side against our security forces. And Afghanistan has virtually become a lair of all the inimical agencies working against this country, and the main base of the evil axis of America's CIA, India's RAW, Israel's Mossad and the Northern Alliance-controlled Afghan intelligence agency, Central Directorate of Security. This axis is creating history for hurting this country, as part of their common geopolitical objective of reshaping this region, dismantling Pakistan, disabling China here and encircling it from here. The Lahore assault, too, speaks of a sinister plot, bearing a sophisticated planning and execution beyond the pale of a rig-rag outfit. Yet, undistracted and unconcerned, Zardari and Nawaz are engrossed in their own power plays. The others too are no better. Internal security czar Rehman Malik after mumbling about foreign involvement in Balochistan and tribal region has long fallen stone silent. The prime minister spoke only once or twice of Uzbek, Arab, and Afghan foreign fighters battling on Swati thug Fazlullah's side. The Frontier Corps chief has reiterated feebly that fighting against his formation in Bajaur are also Afghans, Sudanese and Egyptians, making up nearly half of the enemy force of Taliban, a generic term easily covering up the evil axis's proxies and agents. Frontier Chief Minister has at last admitted of foreign fighters in Swat, although his information minister still peddles the bunk that Pakistan army and the ISI are in league with the Swati thug's brigands, as do the dollar- and euro-laden think tanks. Nawaz never ever speaks of it; nor does Zardari; he simply says extremists want to capture the state of Pakistan, never defining who these extremists actually are. It is this inept and lackadaisical leadership that has let down our venerable Sri Lankan guests and this nation in their eyes. We salute them. They dared to come where the Australians and the Indians had refused to come. We apologise to them for our security apparatus's failure to protect them. And we also grieve for the police cops and civilians, killed or wounded in the assault. They were brave people. We pray for them.