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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (42557)	5/10/2002 3:21:10 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Gen Musharraf reaps harvest of military predecessors Official circles describe Wednesday’s bomb attack in Karachi as another in a series of terrorist attacks meant to target Western nationals and destabilize General Pervez Musharraf’s government.By Ejaz Haider Gen Musharraf reaps harvest of military predecessors That is true. But the Karachi attack itself has some peculiar features. First, this is the first time such an attack has been carried out by a suicide bomber in Pakistan. This type of attack was frequently carried out in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Second, the choice of the target was precise. The suggestion that the bomber may have planned to attack the New Zealand cricket team is wrong: given the planning and professionalism of the attacker, the likelihood is that the Pakistan Navy bus was the target. The terrorists were sending a message to the West as well as to the Pakistani military government. That is why they chose to target a mix of military or military-related personnel and a group of foreigners. Furthermore, the French engineers and technicians belonged to the state-owned DCN (Direction des Constructions Navales) and were working in Pakistan as part of a joint technology transfer project to develop the Agosta 90B class submarines for Pakistan. Those who have survived the attack have now been called back. This is going to hurt the defense project on which they were working. In the event, the terrorists targeted Western nationals, the Musharraf government, Pakistan’s economic prospects (the country badly needs foreign investment and a new image for itself) and the military’s political and economic interests (just the Agosta project has cost Pakistan US$1 billion and any delays will only hike up the bill). The attack has therefore severely called into question Islamabad’s ability to put down Islamist militancy, establish the writ of the state and guarantee the safety of Western nationals. Interestingly, national interest has never been high on the agenda of Islamist groups, especially the more extremist ones. A good example of this is Takfir wal Hijra (Apostatisation and Migration), a name given by the Egyptian press to Shukri Mustafa’s group while Shukri and some of his disciples were on trial for assassinating an Egyptian minister. Transcripts of the trial in the military court indicate that Shukri and his group did not consider it appropriate to fight Israel since Egypt was in a state of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance) and therefore they were not bound to defend a jahiliyya state. What Shukri was in fact saying was that nation-state is not the acceptable framework in which Islamists are prepared to operate. And since Muslim countries are all ruled by the pre-Islamic jahiliyya, therefore Islamists have to wage a war against them. If that means striking at the economic, political, social and even strategic interests of a state, so be it. In the present case, the Islamists are also livid at how the state has ditched them. And while the state used them for its own ends, they were playing along only so far as it suited their agenda, which not only cut across Pakistan’s adversarial relations with India but also targets US imperialism. Besides, the framework in which a state makes policies and the constraints it has to factor in is alien to the Islamists’ thinking. They may attack Western interests whenever and wherever they can, but they also want to appeal to the people in the Islamic world to rise and take sides and by doing so get rid of the corrupt regimes. General Musharraf’s troubles have only now begun. The irony is that he is reaping a harvest sown by his military predecessors.