Tehreek-e-Taliban, the umbrella organization for Pakistan's multiple Taliban movements, seeks to spread its strict Deobandi interpretation of Islam to all of Pakistan. "They don't just want to control FATA [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where they are based], but want to control the entire country," says Ayesha Jalal, one of the foremost historians of Pakistan who recently wrote a book on the history of jihad in South Asia. The Taliban claims it fights in the name of Islam.
BUT IF the Taliban is judged by actions and not words, their primary targets are ordinary Muslims. A Taliban suicide attack on the Wah army munitions facility in August killed 70 and injured over a hundred more. All those killed were ordinary, working Muslims, as were the people killed by a Taliban suicide bomber when he blew himself up at the casualty ward of a hospital in the city of Dera Ismail Khan on August 19. The Taliban said the attack was justified because the hospital was administering polio vaccinations, something it considers prohibited by Islam. The nearly weekly attacks on girls' schools — such as the more than 100 destroyed in Pakistan's northwestern and mountainous Swat district in the past 10 months — are justified in the same way.
Photo: A young Taliban recruited in Pakistan and committed martyrdom in name game of Jihad
The BIMSTEC leadership was exposed to inherent anger of the pro-democracy activists in India, when they urged to review the membership of Burma (Myanmar) in the prestigious forum. During the 2nd BIMSTEC summit held in New Delhi, the advocacy groups even demanded the suspension of the Burmese military junta until peace, justice, human rights and democracy is restored in Burma (Myanmar). Moreover, the activists for democracy urged the forum to put pressure on the military rulers of Burma for immediate release of all political prisoners including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
IN A memorandum submitted to the members and leaders of BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) on November 13, the Burma Centre Delhi has expressed anger that the forum largely ignored the issue of gross human rights violations by the military regime of Burma known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). It revealed that the Senior General Than Shwe led SPDC has been identified as one of the worst human rights violator in the world.
SOMETHING GOOD is happening in the Muslim world. A man with a half-Muslim parentage will soon take oath as the American President. The Malegaon blasts are being fairly investigated. Recently, Muslim scholars, activists and clerics got together and issued fatwas delinking Islam with terror. An 18-coach Sheikh-ul-Hind Express from Deoband carrying 2,000 clerics set out on a journey with a message of peace and integration. Some 6,000 clerics from 21 states met in Hyderabad to issue more fatwas against terror activities. From shock and denial modes, the Indian Muslim community has begun to introspect and take positive steps.
Now, a collective body of Muslim clerics has taken another commendable step by denouncing televangelist Zakir Naik’s speeches and demanding a ban on them. Popular Muslim resentment against Naik became evident last December when he used the phrase, “May God be pleased with him”, for Yezid, the debauch ruler and murderer of Imam Hussain; the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson who was martyred at the battle of Kerbala. Throughout Islamic history, these particular words have been used only for the Prophet’s trusted companions. Anger has now peaked with Naik declaring that praying to Prophet Mohammed and seeking his intercession with God is heresy.
To combat jihadism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, India will have to play a role and be part of the solution
AHMED RASHID
US President-elect Barack Obama will face some of his trickiest foreign policy challenges in South Asia.
THE EXTRAORDINARY electoral victory of Barack Obama will hopefully tilt the world away from what many see as the ruinous unilateralism of George Bush's policies towards greater multilateralism.
Photo: India has been rattled by Mr Obama's comment that US should help resolve Kashmir problem
Barack Obama has appointed John Podesta to run his transition. During the lean years of the Bush administration, Podesta, native of Chicago, ran a shadow cabinet for the Democrats. Since 2003, the home of this government-in-exile has been the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank set-up to rival the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The money, about $10 million per year, came from George Soros, Peter Lewis, Marion Sandler and Herb Sandler – the main liberal financiers. CAP has its set of fellows. Many of them worked in some capacity within the Clinton administration (where Podesta was Chief of Staff). There are hard-nosed people like Rudy deLeon (who went through every Defense secretariat in the Clinton years) and Jeanne Lambrew (who served as a health analyst in the National Economic Council during the waning years of the Clinton administration). But there are also the fresh faces, young people who came to Washington with glowing references from the Ivy League. Others marched over from the Hill, after serving various terms as staff members for the Democratic warhorses. They have been groomed to be part of the next Democratic administration. Their hibernation is over. Obama has called.
THE LIKELY suspects have picked up the phone and moved to the transition headquarters. Among them is a former CAP fellow and now Google employee, Sonal Shah. Shah is well known in the South Asian American community, and is a fixture in the Washington liberal circuit. The latter know her for her Democratic credentials, most of which seem to lie somewhere between neo-liberalism and welfare liberalism. The bleeding heart pauses, but then ticks again to the tune of pragmatism. This is perfect material for the CAP, which is hardly enthusiastic about the Democratic Leadership Council’s total commitment to triangulation (which means capitulation to conservatism), but it is not averse to a little political calculus itself. Shah, a product of the University of Chicago, shined her corporate shoes at Anderson Consulting (who was Enron’s accountant), which probably made it easier for her to go into Clinton’s Treasury Department, where she helped Robert Rubin put a U. S. stamp on the post-1997 Asian economic recovery. The corporate side was balanced with an interest in the ideology of “giving back.” When Bush took office, Shah went to the Center for Global Development, and while there joined her brother Anand in forming Indicorps. Knowing full well the desire among many South Asian Americans to give back to their homeland, the Shahs created an organization to help them go and volunteer in India, to do for them what the Peacecorps did for young liberals in the 1960s. Shah left the CAP to work for Goldman Sachs, and then went to Google. Shah’s story is not unlike that of most of the CAP fellows, many of whom honed their dexterity at trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, capital and freedom, private accumulation and human needs.
