08-02-2008, 06:37 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->At war with Hindu India
Premen Addy
The Pioneer
2 Aug 2008
Pakistan has been at war with India since the partition of the
subcontinent in 1947. Its raison d'etre has been the destruction
of 'Hindu' India, and the restoration of pristine Islamic power and
glory. A Muslim League resolution in the aftermath of World War II
called for the quick departure of Britain, so that the forces of
Islam could wreak havoc on the country in the monstrous tradition of
Ghaznavi, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah and Abdali.
It was in the reading room of the old India Office Library (now part
of the magnificent British Library) that I read these incendiary
words following an accidental reach of the arm to the appropriate
volume of the Annual Indian Register on the open shelves. I drew the
attention of an English post-graduate student -- a friend as it
happens -- who was prone to see no evil and hear no evil in and about
the League leadership. He perceived in cold print what he had been
unable to see through the distorting prism of his supervisor's
received wisdom.
I remember many hours of conversation with the late Air Commodore MK
Janjua, Pakistan's first air chief who, falling foul of his political
masters, was falsely arraigned and sentenced in the 1951 Rawalpindi
Conspiracy case, which allegedly was Communist driven. A fellow
prisoner, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in 1979 assured me during a visit
to London that Janjua was neither conspirator nor Communist, but a
victim of events over which he had no control. He was eventually
cashiered and released and ended his long years of exile in London
where I came to know him well.
Islamabad's genocide in the country's eastern wing had shredded the
conceptual paradise of a South Asian Muslim homeland, forcing Janjua
who, in his time, had fought resolutely for its realisation, to
meditate on this blood-stained saga. The unburdening of a tortured
soul requires a sympathetic witness: I was that person, the right man
at the right place.
I became a repository of my subject's confidences and confessions, of
the grandiose fantasies that haunted Pakistani officers' messes,
where the faithful swore to "bleed the bastards" from across the
border to extinction. It could be a perilous exercise with unforeseen
consequences, warned Janjua to an exuberant acquaintance who came
calling, as he related the incident ruefully.
Jinnah, as Islamic Sisyphus, made the initial charge to the heights
of an imagined triumph by directing his Pathan hordes to Kashmir in
October 1947, but they failed to deliver the prize to their genie.
His successors, seized by Jinnah's spirit, have sought repeatedly to
roll the stone up the mountain to only see it roll back to the
bottom. So the labours of every would-be Sisyphus, under an ancient
curse, are condemned to continue ad infinitum.
Bombings in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Mumbai and myriad other
places take their toll of innocent lives. The Pakistan military, the
shadowy ISI and their jihadi collaborators are no nearer their goal
of laying hated India low today than they were some 62 years ago. The
only way to release Pakistan from its burden is to smoothen the
wheels of an honourable and peaceful exit from the stage. The dodo
may be extinct but its image draws crowds of sightseers to every
museum where the creature's skeletal remains are housed. We pick at
the zoological past to understand the evolution of life on earth, so
might not we profit from a similar exercise on political forms that
have outlived their purpose?
Take heed of Kemal Ataturk's caution to Turkey's new National
Assembly in 1921, in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's defeat and
dissolution: "Gentlemen, by looking as though we were doing great and
fantastic things, without actually doing them, we have brought the
hatred and rancour and malice of the whole world on this country and
this people. We did not serve pan-Islamism. We said we would, but we
didn't, and our enemies said: 'Let us kill them at once before they
do!' And there you have the problem... Rather than run after ideas
which we did not and could not realise and thus increase the number
of our enemies and the pressure upon us, let us return to our
natural, legitimate limits. And let us know our limits... Those who
conquer by the sword are doomed to be overcome by those who conquer
with the plough... That is what happened to the Ottoman Empire."
Britain and America, having delivered and succoured Pakistan, like
the famous Dr Frankenstein, are being stalked by the monster of their
creation. Influential British and American voices across the
political spectrum refer increasingly to Pakistan as the global hub
of Islamist violence and conspiracy against the non-Islamic
international community.
"Breaking the silence on Pakistan and terrorism" is the title of Con
Couglin's recent Sunday Telegraph report on the expanding Taliban
insurgency in Afghanistan. The Pakistani hinterland bears the primary
characteristics of a failed state equipped with nuclear weapons, he
opines.
Fraser Nelson, in an article headlined "Don't Mention The Afghan-
Pakistan War" published in the Spectator, analyses the West's stark
predicament. "Like it or not, war is being waged on Afghanistan from
Pakistan... In theory, the Pakistan Government has signed up to the
war on terror... But in practice it is playing a double game... The
American failure to understand the complexity of the Pakistan problem
is perhaps one of the biggest strategic errors of the war in
Afghanistan." This is now a single conflict, pronounced a British
officer on the ground.
US covert action, through the CIA, in Afghanistan was "actually
authorised full six months before the Soviet invasion" -- in July
1979 -- wrote veteran American reporter John K Cooley (Unholy Wars:
Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism). President Jimmy
Carter's Polish American National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski's insouciant admission that this was a Machiavellian ploy
to trap and weaken the USSR is not without irony. The boot today is
not on Washington's foot.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Premen Addy
The Pioneer
2 Aug 2008
Pakistan has been at war with India since the partition of the
subcontinent in 1947. Its raison d'etre has been the destruction
of 'Hindu' India, and the restoration of pristine Islamic power and
glory. A Muslim League resolution in the aftermath of World War II
called for the quick departure of Britain, so that the forces of
Islam could wreak havoc on the country in the monstrous tradition of
Ghaznavi, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah and Abdali.
It was in the reading room of the old India Office Library (now part
of the magnificent British Library) that I read these incendiary
words following an accidental reach of the arm to the appropriate
volume of the Annual Indian Register on the open shelves. I drew the
attention of an English post-graduate student -- a friend as it
happens -- who was prone to see no evil and hear no evil in and about
the League leadership. He perceived in cold print what he had been
unable to see through the distorting prism of his supervisor's
received wisdom.
I remember many hours of conversation with the late Air Commodore MK
Janjua, Pakistan's first air chief who, falling foul of his political
masters, was falsely arraigned and sentenced in the 1951 Rawalpindi
Conspiracy case, which allegedly was Communist driven. A fellow
prisoner, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in 1979 assured me during a visit
to London that Janjua was neither conspirator nor Communist, but a
victim of events over which he had no control. He was eventually
cashiered and released and ended his long years of exile in London
where I came to know him well.
Islamabad's genocide in the country's eastern wing had shredded the
conceptual paradise of a South Asian Muslim homeland, forcing Janjua
who, in his time, had fought resolutely for its realisation, to
meditate on this blood-stained saga. The unburdening of a tortured
soul requires a sympathetic witness: I was that person, the right man
at the right place.
I became a repository of my subject's confidences and confessions, of
the grandiose fantasies that haunted Pakistani officers' messes,
where the faithful swore to "bleed the bastards" from across the
border to extinction. It could be a perilous exercise with unforeseen
consequences, warned Janjua to an exuberant acquaintance who came
calling, as he related the incident ruefully.
Jinnah, as Islamic Sisyphus, made the initial charge to the heights
of an imagined triumph by directing his Pathan hordes to Kashmir in
October 1947, but they failed to deliver the prize to their genie.
His successors, seized by Jinnah's spirit, have sought repeatedly to
roll the stone up the mountain to only see it roll back to the
bottom. So the labours of every would-be Sisyphus, under an ancient
curse, are condemned to continue ad infinitum.
Bombings in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Mumbai and myriad other
places take their toll of innocent lives. The Pakistan military, the
shadowy ISI and their jihadi collaborators are no nearer their goal
of laying hated India low today than they were some 62 years ago. The
only way to release Pakistan from its burden is to smoothen the
wheels of an honourable and peaceful exit from the stage. The dodo
may be extinct but its image draws crowds of sightseers to every
museum where the creature's skeletal remains are housed. We pick at
the zoological past to understand the evolution of life on earth, so
might not we profit from a similar exercise on political forms that
have outlived their purpose?
Take heed of Kemal Ataturk's caution to Turkey's new National
Assembly in 1921, in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's defeat and
dissolution: "Gentlemen, by looking as though we were doing great and
fantastic things, without actually doing them, we have brought the
hatred and rancour and malice of the whole world on this country and
this people. We did not serve pan-Islamism. We said we would, but we
didn't, and our enemies said: 'Let us kill them at once before they
do!' And there you have the problem... Rather than run after ideas
which we did not and could not realise and thus increase the number
of our enemies and the pressure upon us, let us return to our
natural, legitimate limits. And let us know our limits... Those who
conquer by the sword are doomed to be overcome by those who conquer
with the plough... That is what happened to the Ottoman Empire."
Britain and America, having delivered and succoured Pakistan, like
the famous Dr Frankenstein, are being stalked by the monster of their
creation. Influential British and American voices across the
political spectrum refer increasingly to Pakistan as the global hub
of Islamist violence and conspiracy against the non-Islamic
international community.
"Breaking the silence on Pakistan and terrorism" is the title of Con
Couglin's recent Sunday Telegraph report on the expanding Taliban
insurgency in Afghanistan. The Pakistani hinterland bears the primary
characteristics of a failed state equipped with nuclear weapons, he
opines.
Fraser Nelson, in an article headlined "Don't Mention The Afghan-
Pakistan War" published in the Spectator, analyses the West's stark
predicament. "Like it or not, war is being waged on Afghanistan from
Pakistan... In theory, the Pakistan Government has signed up to the
war on terror... But in practice it is playing a double game... The
American failure to understand the complexity of the Pakistan problem
is perhaps one of the biggest strategic errors of the war in
Afghanistan." This is now a single conflict, pronounced a British
officer on the ground.
US covert action, through the CIA, in Afghanistan was "actually
authorised full six months before the Soviet invasion" -- in July
1979 -- wrote veteran American reporter John K Cooley (Unholy Wars:
Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism). President Jimmy
Carter's Polish American National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski's insouciant admission that this was a Machiavellian ploy
to trap and weaken the USSR is not without irony. The boot today is
not on Washington's foot.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->