Pakistan: A Festering Infection

Nasty, but not hasty, those words, that description. Surely Pakistanis want better for themselves? Most certainly they do, they must. But they're caught, geographically, socially, culturally, in the Middle Ages, that dark period of man's descent into the depths of despair and ignorance, poverty of imagination and potential, and miserable lives of short duration.

There's a socially debilitating, deadly cancer of the mind that has assaulted the people of that country. Correction: too many of the people of that country. Enough so that they present as a high and present danger to much of the rest of the world. Certainly so to their immediate neighbours. Some of them, in any event; with others they are in perfect harmony; Iran, for example.

Iran is grateful in a sense to Pakistan for enabling it in large part, to own a nuclear future. If it were Pakistan and Iran threatening one another with their nuclear devices...but no, it is Pakistan threatening India. And by extension, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Muslim countries, but for India, with its minority Muslim population; its Hindu majority despised by its Muslim neighbours.

Pakistan has seen fit through the decision recently made by its current president, Asif Ali Zardari, to pacify its fanatics in the Swat Valley by permitting the re-imposition of sharia law there. The Pakistani Taliban are exultant, but they aren't pacified, nor will they be contained. Pakistan's inter-services intelligence agency is doubtless satisfied, as well; it is their zeal in pursuing Islamism that engineered the vicious Mumbai attack.

It is their connivance with the Bangladeshi army mutineers that designed the horrific massacre of Bangladeshi army officers under the guise of a pay dispute. The resulting carnage, with some one thousand now-fled border security guards from the Bangladesh Rifles butchering at least 77 officers and a equal number still unaccounted for, are the measure of a Pakistan-based plot to destabilize the government of Bangladesh.

Pakistan, we are reminded constantly, is seen to be a key ally in the U.S.-led "war on terror". Hard though that may be to visualize, given the fractured state of politics in that country and the obvious inability of the executive branch to control the army and its intelligence branch, both of which have been fully infiltrated with fundamentalist Islamists.

The country's tribal areas, a law unto themselves, whose brutality and incessant warring against the country's troops sent to control them, has resulted in mass instability, with hundreds of thousands of tribal people fleeing their homes as internal refugees. Yet the government chose to validate their oppressive, brutal presence by granting them immunity from further government action, granting them the freedom to continue preying on helpless people.

Pakistan's Taliban have destroyed hundreds of schools, they flog and behead those they consider to have "offended" sharia law. They have persuaded those susceptible to violence in Afghanistan, accepting of the vicious Taliban credo, to assault Afghan schoolgirls, to attack them and their teachers with acid. And although Hamid Karzai has promised protection for these vulnerable segments of the Afghan population, they remain unprotected.

There, in that world of demented Islamism, there is no protection from violence, from injustice. Neither from the duly elected governments forsworn to have the best interests of their populations uppermost in mind, nor from the international troops stationed alongside humanitarian groups desperately attempting to stem the tide of Islamic fascism.