Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

The Christian Science Monitor is probably the only quality paper in the US mainstream, but this article on Pakistan is pretty poor. It reports on the deployment of 15,000 Pakistani troops (who have historically excelled in fighting their own people even as they’ve lost every war against the putative adversary — India) to Swat, where they will be combating local militants. Recall that earlier such operations in Waziristan relied on heavy handed, Israeli-style collective punishment which left many innocent civilians dead in their wake.

These operations were carried out with the support of the Pakistani urban liberals while in the NWFP and Baluchistan they have succeeded in generating enormous resentment. It isn’t surprising then that the two English language dailies and a couple of ‘bloggers’ (one of them sitting in Canada) that CSM has chosen all exhibit the same gung-ho appetite for destruction. Like so many other scoundrels, they will fight these wars to the last drop of someone else’s blood. The only conceivable solution lies in dialogue and accommodation. Swat had not history of militancy before Bush’s war of terror was introduced to the region.

Let me advise CSM: next time you want to gauge public sentiment, ask someone who is at least in a 100 mile radius of the conflict zone, and who preferably speaks the language of the people on the receiving end. The ignorant ravings of a pustule with a laptop sitting in Canada are not a substitute for the lived experience of a Swati enduring Busharraf’s war of terror.