Perils of suicide attacks

NO amount of security or any number of warnings and threats can dissuade the misguided who are so convinced of their righteousness that they willingly become human bombs. Saturday’s blast in Charsadda which targeted the interior minister was the eighth suicide attack of the year; in just four months, suicide bombers have claimed at least 66 lives and left nearly 200 injured. Mr Aftab Sherpao miraculously survived the attack, thanks largely to the buffer provided by his police guards who laid down their lives in the line of duty. Virtually unknown in Pakistan before 9/11, suicide bombings are now an established weapon in the terror tactics employed by pro-Taliban militants in their fight against the state and its leaders. President Musharraf survived a two-pronged suicide attack in Rawalpindi in December 2003 while Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz escaped another such bombing in Fatehjang, Attock, in July 2004. Fanatics of a sectarian genre have also resorted to suicide missions but lately it is the security forces, the police as well as the military, that have borne the brunt of such assaults, widely seen as reprisals for strikes against militant hideouts and the government’s support for the US-led war on terror. The civilian toll too has been high in the suicide-bombing spree of recent years that has so far claimed over 450 lives in Pakistan.

By Sunday afternoon, no one had owned up to the Charsadda attack but then such admissions of culpability are rare. It is also a sad commentary on the country’s state of affairs that any number of militant outfits could be responsible. In the recent past, militant commander Baitullah Mehsud of Waziristan and Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Aziz have both publicly threatened suicide attacks for different reasons. But the possibilities do not begin or end there for the ranks of the zealots are growing by the day. Here, the crucial question is why there is no shortage of young men willing

to embrace ‘martyrdom’ through suicide bombings. Religious notions and brainwashing by bigots and jihadi outfits constitute the principal factor of motivation, others being poverty, purposelessness and a lack of identity in a fragmented and inequitable society. Perhaps only a person who has insufficient reason to live can contemplate becoming a suicide bomber, at least in the Pakistani context. Aimless and malleable young men — and soon possibly women — are cannon fodder for the jihadi cause, irrelevant in the mortal world but led to believe that they will be amply rewarded in the hereafter. Another factor is the hundreds of thousands of madressah pupils who have no worldly knowledge and are thus not equipped to become productive members of society. They can, however, become foot soldiers in the Talibanisation drive.

It sometimes seems that no wake-up call is loud enough for the government. True, it is almost impossible to stop a suicide bomber once he has reached the site of his attack. That is no excuse, however, for poor intelligence gathering by the security agencies whose job it is to be on the trail and to nip such plans in the bud. Moreover, what progress, if any, has been made in investigations into many such bombings

in the recent past? Also,

it does not help when the state bends over backwards in appeasing the militants, ceding vast tracts of territory that are then run as mini-states and serve as the breeding ground for jihadism. The country is facing crises on several fronts and this is not the time for half measures.

Abolishing the death penalty

PAKISTAN deserves strong censure for topping the list of countries with the largest number of convicts on death row. According to Amnesty International, more than 7,000 persons are facing the gallows while 82 — the third highest figure globally — were executed last year, a considerable increase from 2005 when 31 death sentences were carried out. It also has the dubious distinction of being the only country, apart from Iran, to have executed, in 2006, a convicted murderer who was a juvenile at the time of his crime. This was in violation of the Convention of the Rights of the Child which Pakistan ratified in 1990 and which forbids the execution of persons who have committed a crime punishable by death before they turned 18. More and more countries are either abolishing the death penalty or have stopped invoking it as they realise the futility of its application in deterring further crime and so view it as contrary to the norms of civilised society. So far 89 countries have abolished it while 29 have not carried out executions for the past 10 years. Among them are some Muslim countries.

It is unfortunate that Pakistan is not among them, especially when there are few signs that justice is even-handed in the country. Most of those who go to the gallows are poor, unable to afford proper legal assistance or the blood money demanded by the murdered victim’s family. There is excessive corruption in both police and judicial ranks which could tilt the case in favour of the richer party. Intimidation of witnesses and the extraction of forced confessions by the police are another unsavoury dimension of the judicial and investigative process. Human rights bodies have pointed out that the absence of effective forensic technology and the heavy reliance on oral evidence have also contributed to unfair trials, resulting in a grave miscarriage of justice in many cases. All moral arguments in favour of capital punishment lose their validity in the light of these facts and the truth that carrying out the death sentence is an irreversible act. Should Pakistan then continue to be in the camp of those countries that retain it?

A system of non-justice

THE heartrending photograph of two distressed sisters carried by Dawn the other day speaks volumes for the mediaeval mindset that prevails in the country’s rural hinterland — in this case in a village in Sindh. The girls’ father, Buland Ali Buzdar, who was embroiled in a water dispute, was accused of having an illicit affair with another man’s wife. He was ordered by a jirga to give as compensation his two minor daughters in marriage to a man who was also handed over the land that he was cultivating. Buland Ali’s supporters want the courts to take suo motu notice of the matter and to instruct the police to register an FIR against those who declared him a “karo”. One can only hope that judicial intervention will provide protection to Buland Ali and his daughters from the wadera elements whose ruling is in contravention of the law, especially because jirgas are banned.

So far, there is little to show that the government is coming down with a heavy hand on those who bolster parallel legal systems like jirgas. Left to solving property matters, jirga members could have been accepted as arbiters of disputes which would have taken the overburdened courts a long time to resolve. But their role has not been limited to such disputes and they have a free hand to rule on diverse matters, often pronouncing harsh penalties on people. Strangely enough, parliamentarians, many of whom come from landed backgrounds and are thus well acquainted with the anachronistic jirga system, do not raise a collective voice against this barbaric manner of administering justice.

The shortcomings of the present judicial system are no excuse for allowing the jirga system to exist. It is illegal and must be routed out to prevent further abuse of individual rights.

If Iran is attacked by the US

BEING based in Dubai offers one a rare vantage point view over the Middle East. And Iran is not far from where we are. The Bushehr nuclear power plant — at the heart of Iran’s standoff with the West — and the strategic port of Bandar Abbas lie within the striking distance of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and many Arab cities.

We are too close to the Persian giant for comfort. No wonder we can often feel the currents and shocks of geopolitical upheavals in Iran – almost literally. Which explains why we are more than apprehensive about the shape of things to come.

Not surprisingly, Iran is currently the favourite subject of small talk as well as media chatter in our part of the world.

This, despite the fact that the UAE has always been an oasis of peace and security in the volatile region, even during the successive Gulf wars. And journalist friends from around the world breathlessly ask us: “What do you think? Is the war imminent?”

Like all good, old-fashioned hacks, they are secretly hoping for bad news. After all, there’s nothing like a good war to boost your circulation figures or viewer ratings, day after bloody day.

In fact, what would we journalists do without leaders like Bush and Ahmadinejad? Life would be so dull without the shenanigans of the two gentlemen. Of course, you can’t put the two in the same league. The president of the world’s most powerful nation and the leader of the Islamic republic live on different planets.

All good journalists love bad news. And the current leaders of Iran and the US generate enough of it. While Bush’s own party, the American people and the US allies and friends are at their wits’ end making sense of the royal mess that he has unleashed at home and abroad, the so-called leader of the free world himself appears to revel in it.

Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, wouldn’t miss any opportunity to beat the ‘Big Satan’ and the rest of his allies with the big stick of fiery rhetoric and cold reason he always carries with him.

There are many who find it hard not to admire the Iran leader for his courage to take on the big bullies of our world. And it is not only in the Muslim world that Ahmadinejad strikes a receptive chord.

In a remarkably short period, the ordinarily dressed, diminutive leader has built himself a constituency that is not limited to the Middle East or the Muslim world. True, Ahmadinejad is unreasonable to the point of being absurd in denying the Holocaust and the suffering of Jewish people. Also, it’s not easy defending him when he talks of rubbing Israel off the map – although he is alluding to the historical injustice the creation of Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians.

He may be playing to the gallery. But he has endeared himself to the Muslims and the oppressed people everywhere by standing up for a wronged people. He makes you want to join him in questioning the West’s logic of making the Palestinian people pay for Europe’s own sins against the Jews.

At the same time, one can’t close one’s eyes to the reality that the Iranian president, by his hawkish and in-your-face posturing, has managed to earn more enemies for Iran during the past year and half than all the leaders of the Islamic republic have over the past quarter century or so.If the US and its ever-willing allies are today spoiling for a duel with Iran, Ahmadinejad’s style of leadership has played not too insignificant a role in it. However, the Iran leader is not entirely to blame for the current confrontation with the West and tensions in the neighbourhood.

Bush and his neo-con pals never needed an invitation to take on the Islamist Iran, just as they didn’t require a provocation to strike at Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. After all, Iran had been one of the key targets of the neo-cons, according to the blueprint unveiled during Bush’s first year in office. The ambitious plan for a new American century seeks to reshape the Middle East and the Muslim world by taking on the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and others.

Iraq, part of Bush’s original axis of evil, has already been liberated and democratised, in accordance with the neo-con-Zionist worldview. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan may be next in line. That plan is still on the table, as Bush would put it, despite the series of humiliating defeats the neo-cons have suffered and all-round havoc they have wreaked.

So the attack on Iran – absolutely nutty as the idea may sound – may still be coming. In fact, the possibility of a US-Israel combine strike on the Islamic republic is growing by the day. So it’s not a matter of IF but WHEN Iran is likely to get hit by the Coalition of the Willing.

The Iran-UK row over the 15 British sailors, who were on a social visit in the neighbourhood – according to Blair, was only a tiny piece of the Middle East jigsaw that will unravel in the days and months to come. So don’t be surprised if Blair is surprised and ‘disgusted’ at Iran’s ‘behaviour’ that made the sailors sing on Iran TV that they were indeed in Iranian waters. No prizes for guessing what the British were doing in the strategic Shatt Al Arab.

Of course, Blair had every right to protest against Iran’s treatment of the Britons during their detention. For God’s sake, don’t the mullahs know how to treat enemy combatants? There were no hoods, no dogs no leashes. Is this the way to treat the prisoners? It seems the Iranians drew no lessons from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. When will the Muslims ever learn the civilised world’s rules of engagement?

Looks like the Iranians have to learn it the hard way. Just as the Iraqis have. But Iran is no Iraq. For one, the Islamic republic is not the toothless tiger that Iraq had become in the twilight years of Saddam. The long war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait and then the subsequent attack by the US and its allies under Bush had reduced the Baathist Iraq to a hallowed, cardboard country.

Let alone the weapons of mass destruction that Bush claimed Saddam had and the late dictator pretended to possess, Iraq didn’t even have enough conventional arms or men to defend the country. No wonder the regime collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions at the mere touch of the invader.

But Bush and company would be committing a historic blunder – even bigger than in Iraq – if they went ahead and attacked Iran.

Iranians are a young nation with over 60 per cent of the population being born after the 1979 revolution. Fiercely patriotic and proud of their ancient past as well as Islamic identity, the 70-million strong people have never been more united as a nation. And they would fight with their lives to defend every inch of their territory.

Not only would an attack on Iran add to the overstretched US coalition’s troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is certain to inflame the already restive Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world. Although Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons – at least not yet – to stave off aggression, it has other options of retaliating.

It boasts a standing army of 450,000 troops as well as long-range missiles that could hit Israel and even Europe. More importantly, a desperate Iran can play havoc with the global economy by blocking the Strait of Hormuz through which much of the world’s oil supply is routed.

Just a few missiles or gunboats could bring down vessels and block the channel, hitting the global oil supplies with untold negative consequences for the world. Then there is the humanitarian suffering of epic proportions that is sure to follow such a dangerous, pointless and unjust war.

The Oxford Research Group has warned that up to 10,000 people would die immediately if the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites, and that an attack on the Bushehr nuclear reactor could send a radioactive cloud over the Gulf. If the US uses nuclear weapons, such as earth-penetrating bunker buster bombs, radioactive fallout would become even more disastrous.

Which is why one wonders how the American people can allow their administration to undertake such a disastrous campaign after all that it has done over the past seven years? Especially when Iraq and Afghanistan, the two other fronts in America’s war, are still burning.

Is there no one who can stop Bush from unleashing this madness on us all?

The writer is a Dubai-based journalist who writes a weekly column for Khaleej Times.
aijazsyed@khaleejtimes.com

Street food

INDIANS love their food, and they often seem to want every visitor to try a bit – from relatives who pinch children's cheeks and vow to fatten them up (however unnecessary that may be) to the vendors whose cries of "chai" are heard on trains day and (interminable) night, and of course the roadside stalls that offer a seemingly endless supply of hot snacks.

Sometimes it all seems too much. It certainly sticks in the craw of the Delhi authorities, who are trying to get the kitchens off their streets. Food stalls clutter up the roads, it is said, and they are unhygienic. No one could ever describe the main roads of India's capital as undercrowded, but if London's parks are its lungs then Delhi's food "hawkers" (the term may be archaic in Britain yet it lives on in this former colony) are its kitchens - sometimes literally so, for those without cooking space at home.

Besides, Delhi belly can hardly be blamed solely on these providers of freshly cooked sustenance. –– The Guardian, London