Gruesome slaughter Of Frontier Constabulary soldiers

Editorial : Frontier Post

With this gruesome slaughter of 15 Frontier Constabulary soldiers in North Waziristan, the outlawed TTP militants have shown themselves up yet more contemptibly what in reality they are: just gangs of thugs and syndicates of mercenary killers. This should tell tellingly the reconciliation-dialogue advocates too how bestial innately are these fiendish characters. The advocates’ very likening of these monsters with Afghan Taliban is a blatant travesty of the truth. There can be no comparison between the two. Afghan Taliban are battling against foreign occupiers for their land’s freedom. TTP brigands are fighting against the very Pakistani State and its citizens to perpetuate their dark agendas. Afghan Taliban target foreign occupiers and their allies. TTP mercenaries murder and maim their own civilian compatriots in bomb blasts and suicide bombings and attack military targets at their masterminds’ behest.
Their religious clothing is just a deceptive device to cloak their murder trade and evil designs. Surely, the noble religion of Islam can have no place at all for their vile errands. It preaches compassion and mercy for even enemy’s women and children. But they slaughter our innocent women and children by detonating bomb blasts and conducting suicide assaults in bazaars, shopping plazas, public parks and crowded streets. Our noble religion veritably stands for showing magnanimity and forgiveness to even a surrendered enemy’s men folks. But these beasts show no qualms even in massacring their male compatriots. And while our beloved faith abhors even sacrilege of any places of worship, these brigands spare not from their violent wickedness our own co-religionists’. And contrary to our most enlightened and forward-looking religion’ teachings, they torch or blast off schools, particularly girls’.
By every reckoning, they indeed are very shady characters, wearing deceitful appearances but with a demonic underneath. In reality, they are not their own masters but someone else’s hatchet-workers. After all, the large number of brigands they harbour in their lairs and the huge mounds of sophisticated deadly weapons and fatal munitions they employ with abandon in their thuggish trades need mountains of money, which certainly cannot by mopped up by kidnappings for ransom, contrary to what some would have it believed. That kind of violence requires perennial assured sources of money and arms supplies. And on that count, their true credentials do come to glaring limelight when they quarrel, as do thieves over booty, among themselves and spill the beans on one another devastatingly. It was a fallen-out comrade who spoke out that Baitullah Mehsud was on India’s payroll, as has recently claimed this about Hakimullah Mehsud by his one estranged lieutenant.
There indeed are very dubious things about these thuggish gangs and syndicates and their ringleaders that may not be unknown to our state agencies, which for reasons best known to them they peak out not. As for one, the Baitullah gang’s close rapport with the Jundullah terrorist outfit of Iranian dissidents. The outfit’s chief Abdelmalik Rigi was statedly Baitullah’s frequent guest. And Rigi was snatched in a high-altitude operation by trailing Iranian spooks as he emerged from the US Bagram military base in Afghanistan and boarded a Gulf flight in February 2010. In fact, weapons of foreign make were captured in quantities by the Pakistan army during its operations against the militants in South Waziristan and notified to the foreign office for further action. One knows what happened on that count. But foreign weapons were also found sizably during the operation the Army launched in Swat to dismantle Swati thug Fazlullah’s terrorist network. That too is gone into oblivion, with the public unaware of any action to identify sources of these weapons supply.
But Fazlullah, now ensconced in the bordering Afghan regions of Kunar and Nuristan after escaping from the military operation, has much mystery about him. When the US-led invaders were warming up to take on the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Fazlullah led up thousands of Swati young greenhorns his father-in-law Sufi Mohammad had seduced to fight on the Taliban’s side. But as soon as the invasion started, the Sufi fled back to Pakistan leaving behind the unfortunate Swati youth to end up either in Afghan warlords’ captivity or US and Afghan jails. Fazlullah mysteriously disappeared inside Afghanistan from where he emerged after a few years laden with loads of money and stacks of weapons to entrench formidably in Swat to lay down a dreadful terrorist infrastructure and recruit bevies of brigands to throw an armed challenge to the Pakistani state. From his Afghan sanctuaries, he now launches attacks in battalion-strength on Pakistani security posts and civilian villages freely and his brigands return unchecked to their safe Afghan havens.
So whose men are actually these bestial monsters posing to be fighting for Shariah rule and what mission have they been tasked for by their financiers, masterminds and arms suppliers? Someone in Islamabad must speak up. And those reconciliation-dialogue advocates too must hold back on their populism and re-chart their discourse in accord with daunting objective realities.