“The world must realise that we may not like the face of Mullah Omar but that is how life is, that is what Afghanistan is,” ex-President Pervez Musharraf summed up what’s going on in a post 9/11 Afghanistan, in one sentence. He was quite frank in his interview with WSJ terming Pakistan’s role in nurturing the Taliban and allied militant groups operating in Afghanistan as legitimate counterweight against India’s presence over there. Earlier he accepted in another interview that Pakistan-based militant groups staged attacks on the ISAF and US forces in Afghanistan. Musharraf stressed upon the present government in Kabul to share power with Taliban if it wishes to see peace in the country.
I saw not much condemnation of these ‘revelations’ directly coming from the man who directed the Afghan war theatre from Islamabad for most of the last decade. So, is this an acceptable formula to bring peace in a country: to let terrorists share the government? Why don’t we use the same formula in Pakistan wherein a number of religious and sectarian outfits are operating with and without establishment’s nod? Time has proved time and again that nurturing militants, however the noble cause, always costs governments dearly. Milking snakes will always turn them into serpents looking for flesh, not milk.
Whether it’s different so-called mujahideen factions during Afghan war of 1980s, or Afghan war lords in post-Taliban period, or Al-Nusra front and IS in Syria and Iraq, RSS, or Pakistan specific TTP, LeJ, LeT, SSP, Jundullah, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, etc — all remind of only one lesson: we never learn from history. We like to repeat the same experiment expecting different results. Who cares if it is costing innocent lives across the world?
MASOOD KHAN
Jubail, Saudi Arabia