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Pakistan - Anything Over A School

The children of Pakistan struggle as it is to attain an education, without having the government evict them from the few schools that exist in non-urban parts of KPK. Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pervez Khattak has ordered the evacuation of a high school to establish a training centre for aircraft maintenance. He directed the Elementary and Secondary Education (E&SE) Department to vacate the building of Government Higher Secondary School, Pir Piai, in Nowshera district, and to put the building at the disposal of the Pakistan Air Force. The centre will put 165 schoolchildren out of school, with no other options of attaining an education, as there is no other government higher secondary school in a distance of 15 to 20 kilometres. A vocational training centre can be built anywhere; the school did not have to be its casualty.

The move has triggered anxiety and uncertainty among the students of the school and their parents who could not afford education in private schools. The parents have been approaching the officials going as far as saying that they were ready to provide free of cost land for constructing a building for the training. The children of these conflict-ridden areas are already suffering due to the security situation, and instead of providing innovative solutions to ensure each child attends school, the government is taking away the little opportunities they have.

To attain an education is an inherent right of every child, yet it is unfortunate that the government prioritises everything else over it. The students of Government Boys High School Rukanpur have been forced to hold classes under the open sky as their school building has been demolished for a road project. The PML-N decided to demolish the building to build a motorway. The school had two portions, one for high school classes and other for the elementary classes on total 51 kanals of land, educating 200 children, that now have no other alternatives.

Pakistan’s Way of Fighting Militancy: Wait Until the War Comes Home

By Umair Jamal

June 01, 2016

The state’s policy of allowing fundamentalist groups to operate and preach freely in the country has radicalized Pakistani society.

The death of Mullah Mansour, the Afghan Taliban’s former leader, on Pakistan’s soil has only earned more infamy and distrust for the country. Mansour’s demise came at a time when Pakistan was trying to convince the international world of its supposed genuine effort in pursuit of regional peace and stability.

For the last two years, the Pakistani military has made huge efforts to build the perception that it was finally abandoning the use of militant groups as a tool of domestic and foreign policy. On Pakistan’s part, the pretext of abandoning non-state actors doesn’t just end on the Afghan front; it has other regional and domestic contours, where state-level patronage continues.

In 2014, after the devastating attack against schoolchildren at an army school in Peshawar, Pakistan formulated a 20-point counterterrorism strategy called the National Action Plan (NAP) to deal with all sorts of terror groups. The government had resolved to deal with militant groups with an iron fist. The rhetoric, however, did not translate into action: Apart from the Pakistani Taliban, who had turned their guns on the state, not a single major terrorist or sectarian group has been touched by the state.

To feed into the pretext of giving up on non-state actors, Pakistan launched a much-awaited military operation in Punjab about a month ago. The operation, however, has not gone beyond the military’s barracks. To satisfy the media’s curiosity, some hardened criminals were confronted in the southern districts of the province, where a large number of sectarian groups, such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) are based. Beyond these criminal groups, which are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the militant challenge in Punjab, everything remains intact.

Furthermore, a few weeks ago, Punjab’s law minister, Rana Sanaullah, while giving an interview to the BBC, said that it is impossible for the government to take any action against LeJ or Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) because the state itself has remained involved with them. “How can you prosecute a group with whom the state itself has been involved with?” said Sanaullah. LeT, a militant group based in Pakistan, has reportedly set up Sharia courts in the country and openly held funeral prayers for the deceased Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Mansour.

On May 29, The Nation, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan, published an unusual editorial criticizing the government for not cracking down on these militant groups. “It doesn’t matter what Raheel Sharif [the military chief] says or how resolute he looks, it doesn’t matter what our ambassadors say or how eloquently they say it; unless these extremist groups masquerading as legitimate parties are shut down, the government, in the words of the U.S. Senate, Pakistan remains ‘untrustworthy.’”

The government’s plan to regulate and register madrassas (religious schools) under the NAP has been pushed back by these groups. More children are enrolling in madrassas than secular private or government schools. What is more worrying is that a large part of the Pakistani society either approves or supports the actions of these groups. The violence against minority Muslim sects, particularly the Shia, is not considered a crime by conservative Sunni Muslims.

Pakistan’s NAP—or, more appropriately, the “naïve” action plan—will inevitably fail. If the policy is to wait until the bad guys turn their guns on the state, then Pakistan is headed for a long and deadly round of instability. And if the state’s inaction is due to the fear of blow-back from these groups, then things are going to get far worse before they have a chance of getting better.

How Pakistan’s Passive Extremists Complicate the Country's Fight Against Terror

By Umair Jamal

After a spate of attacks, efforts by the Pakistani government to rein in terror groups are largely window-dressing.

Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan have surged following a series of terror attacks all across Pakistan in recent days. The military in Pakistan has pledged “no restraint” in its fight against extremism in the aftermath of these attacks. Authorities in Pakistan maintain that the recent attacks were planned and coordinated from within Afghanistan. “Recent terrorist acts are being executed on directions from hostile powers and from sanctuaries in Afghanistan. We shall defend and respond,” said the Pakistan military’s media wing in a statement. Reportedly, hundreds of Afghan nationals have been arrested in the wake of recent terror incidents. Moreover, Pakistan also claims to have carried out military strikes against the sanctuaries of various militant groups based in Afghanistan near the Pak-Afghan border.

Domestically, Pakistan has launched a countrywide combing operation and reportedly more than 400 suspects have been apprehended due to the operation. The newly launched combing operation is expected to target militant sanctuaries in South Punjab.

There are growing institutional linkages between militants from Pakistan’s tribal belt and Punjab-based sectarian outfits. A number of militant outfits that fled the country in the wake of Pakistan’s counterterrorism operations more than two years ago have reportedly extended their influence to sectarian organizations working in southern Punjab.

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A series of combing operations reminiscent of the one currently underway have been launched previously. However, all of these combing operations have proven to be a kneejerk reaction to terror incidents, rather than operations with a clear strategy. Pakistan’s “post terror attack reactive measures” have become quite predictable now. There is always a high-level security meeting in reaction to terror incidents that ends with promises of punitive measures against terrorists of all sorts. The provincial government in Punjab has on many occasions promised to act against militant outfits based within the province. However, despite these assurances, there has been little action beyond rounding up the usual suspects. What is also predictable is that it’s just a matter of days before the media frenzy surrounding the recent incidents, families’ reported grief, and national bitterness recedes and, with it, so do any promised punitive measures.

At the strategic level, there exist many loopholes in the government’s counterterrorism strategy. One of the main issues concerning this problem deals with the political stakeholders’ apologetic attitudes toward conservative religious groups, which are not only part of networks that are deepening the country’s ideological divides, but also challenge the state’s writ in the streets every day. While the government in Pakistan has tried to find scapegoats in Afghanistan to shift the blame away from the country’s borders, the government’s tolerance of Islamist extremists, or supporters of radical theocratic Islam, is only undermining the country’s moderate Muslim voices.

A few months ago, the federal government in Pakistan presented Masroor Nawaz Jhangvi a peace award. Jhangvi won Punjab’s Jhang district’s by-election after running a vicious election campaign on a sectarian basis where he openly declared that “Shia are infidels.” After winning the election, Jhangvi joined another far-right religious party, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F). While the JUI-F is part of the government, it has openly confronted the government’s efforts to regulate madrassas (religious schools) and vehemently opposes any change to the country’s blasphemy laws.

Adil Arshad of the School of Education at the Forman Christian College University believes that giving such an award only reflects “a mismatch and mocks the heritage which the award carries.” “It encourages the pro-extremist narrative while compromises the effectiveness and credibility of the government’s any counter-measures in this regard,” he adds.

After the attack in Lahore last week, a local television channel in Pakistan invited the head of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a banned organization, to discuss the country’s counterterrorism policy. During an hour-long discussion, the banned organization’s head recommended that the government should release all captured Taliban leaders, for such measures would only aggravate the threat of terrorism in Pakistan.

Moreover, the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), which, along with the Pakistani Taliban, claimed the majority of recent attacks, has announced the launch of “Operation Ghazi” in the honor of  a cleric, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, who died in the 2007 Lal Masjid operation in Islamabad. The Lal Masjid’s leadership, which has openly declared its allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), has on many occasions called for the enforcement of sharia law in the country.

In 2011, Mumtaz Qadri killed Punjab’s governor, Salman Taseer, for defending a Christian woman over the issue of blasphemy. Qadri’s arrest and his eventual execution last year have been widely condemned by the conservative Islamic parties while mosques and streets have been named after him in his honor. His act has been applauded with titles such as “Shaheed” and “Ghazi.” The violent expression that militant groups such as the JuA, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and ISIS have adopted takes inspiration from the passive support of conservative evangelists with whom the government in Pakistan seems to collaborate.

While Pakistan needs to develop better cooperation with Afghanistan to deal with the two countries’ common militant threat, Islamabad cannot afford to look away from its domestic militant challenges, which span beyond tactical and operational challenges.

The so-called combing operations currently underway and the mostly random arrests in response to terror incidents are only the tip of the iceberg. The deepening ideological divides in the country pose a real challenge, and Pakistan’s leadership needs to prepare on a war footing.

پیپلزپارٹی میں لوگوں کی جوق درجوق شمولیت بلاول بھٹو کی قیادت پراعتماد کااظہار ہے

پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی بلوچستان کے صدر سابق صوبائی وزیر حاجی میر علی مدد جتک نے کہا ہے کہ بلوچیت اور پشتونیت کی بات کرنے والوں کے پاس اب کوئی اور ایشو نہیں بچا اس لئے کبھی مردم شماری پر سیاست کرتے ہیں اور کبھی بلوچ پشتون تضاد کو ابھار کر اپنے سیاسی مقاصد حاصل کرتے ہیں جن سے اہلیان بلوچستان کو خبر دار رہنا ہوگا، بلوچستان سمیت ملک بھر میں امن وامان کی صورتحال تسلی بخش نہیں مگر افسوسناک طور پر وفاقی وزیر داخلہ اپنا فرض نبھانے کی بجائے بیانات جاری کرکے لوگوں کی دل آزاری کرتے ہیں پیپلزپارٹی کے قائدین پر وفاقی وزیر داخلہ کی بلا وجہ تنقید سمجھ سے بالاتر ہے ، پیپلزپارٹی میں لوگوں کی جوق درجوق شمولیت ہم پر اعتماد کا اظہار ہے ۔ان خیالات کااظہار انہوں نے سریاب کے علاقے کلی گوگڑائی مسلم آباد میں منعقدہ شمولیتی جلسے سے خطاب کرتے ہوئے کیا ۔

اس موقع پر میر غلام فاروق سرپرہ حاجی غلام رسول سرپرہ طارق سرپرہ بہادر نیچاری میر گل سرپرہ مولوی محمد رفیق عبدالواحد لہڑی جمعہ خان لانگو منیر بھٹی اور دیگر نے اپنے درجنوں ساتھیوں سمیت مختلف سیاسی جماعتوں سے مستعفی ہو کر پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی میں شمولیت کا اعلان کیاانہیں خوش آمدید کہتے ہوئے حاجی میر علی مدد جتک پیپلز پارٹی بلوچستان کے سیکرٹری اطلاعات سردار سربلند جوگیزئی جہانگیر خلجی محبو ب سرپرہ ثناء اللہ جتک درمحمد ہزارہ شاہجہان گجر لیاقت سرپرہ یعقوب زیارتوال حاجی غلام رسول اور دیگر مقررین نے کہا کہ کوئٹہ سمیت بلوچستان کے مختلف علاقوں میں لوگ جوق درجوق مختلف سیاسی جماعتوں سے مستعفی ہو کر پیپلزپارٹی میں شمولیت اختیارکررہے ہیں جو کہ چیئر مین بلاول بھٹو زرداری کی قیادت پر اعتماد کااظہار ہے انہوں نے کہا کہ بلوچستان سمیت ملک بھر میں امن وامان کی صورتحال تسلی بخش نہیں وفاقی وزیر داخلہ ہر واقعے کے بعد میڈیا پر آکر صرف دعوے کرتے ہیں گزشتہ روز انہوں نے پیپلزپارٹی کے قائدین پر جو بلا جواز تنقید کی اس سے صاف ظاہر ہوتا ہے کہ وفاقی وزیر کو بلاول فوبیا ہوچکا ہے اگر انہوں نے اپنی زبان درست نہیں کی تو پیپلزپارٹی کے جیالے بھی اپنے قائدین پر ہونے والی تنقید کا جواب دے سکتے ہیں پیپلزپارٹی نے ہمیشہ ملک میں تحمل اور رواداری کی سیاست کی ہے ۔

انہوں نے کہا کہ حکومت سی پیک سی پیک کھیل رہی ہے مگر تاریخ گواہ ہے کہ سی پیک کی بانی بھی پیپلزپارٹی ہے اور پیپلزپارٹی ہی اس کو مکمل کرے گی سی پیک کے مکمل ہونے سے بلوچستان میں خوشحالی کے ایک نئے دور کا آغاز ہوگا اور لاکھوں بے روزگار جوانوں کو روزگار میسر آئے گا۔انہوں نے مزید کہا کہ بلوچستان میں 67سالوں سے قوم پرست جماعتیں بلوچیت اور پشتونیت کے نام پر سیاست کررہی ہیں مگر پشتونوں اور بلوچوں کا نام لینے والی ان جماعتوں نے پشتونوں اور بلوچوں کی ترقی کے لئے کوئی کام نہیں کیا بلکہ ان کی یہ کوشش ہے کہ پشتون اور بلوچ پسماندہ رہیں تاکہ انہیں اپنے مفاد کیلئے استعمال کیا جاسکے پیپلزپارٹی رنگ و نسل سے بالاتر ہو کر عوام کی خدمت  ہے۔ یقین رکھتی ہے اور عوامی خدمت کو عبادت کا درجہ دیتی

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