National Barbarism

"Fighting terrorism isn't just about drones and troops. It's about ensuring respect for the law and human rights. Here, you have people inciting assassination, and others applauding them - and the state refuses to act." Rafia Zakaria, Amnesty International

"The Shooting is evidence that is not necessary for extremists to be in the garb of the Taliban, with their beards and turbans. They exist everywhere and come in all forms." Pakistan's The News

Well, in fact, even a supporter of the Taliban, cleric Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi recognizes standards of human behaviour and brutal transgressions: "It is the product of extremism and fanaticism which is damaging for an Islamic society." He should be speaking, seriously, with his fellow clerics, not all of whom like him are pro-Taliban, but all of whom appear to approve of death meted out as a necessity to those singled out as 'blasphemers'.

He might start with his colleagues, the 500 scholars (and whoever uses that word to describe blighted religious fanatics is guilty of verbal malfeasance) from the Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat group who saw fit to heap praise on the demented act of assassination by an elite police officer entrusted with the safety and security of the governor of Punjab. These men of god, representing a 'religion of peace' clearly celebrate death.

The 'scholars' have given clear instruction to their faithful that their fate will resemble that of governor Salman Taseer, should they mourn his death. They should instead, they are instructed, hail his assassin as a hero in his courageous act of firing 29 bullets into the governor's back, avenging the honour of the Prophet Mohamed.

Peace will be once more upon him that a man who sought to instill a modicum of reason into the debate has been forever stilled.

Pakistan teeters on the brink of a moral, civilizational abyss. It threatens to fall into the blood-stained hands of the mullahs for whom any critique of their interpretation of Islamic instructions and values are held to be intolerable. "We pay rich tributes and salute the bravery, valour and faith of Mumtaz Qadri", they crow, in support of the assassin who took care to advise his fellow agents of his intent and to caution them not to fire upon him.

This is what Pakistan has become, a cesspool of violent human rights transgressions, a nation of intractable Islamist fundamentalists for whom life's passage is fraught with the need to surrender all humanity to the will of a brutish clergy determined to represent a divine being whose insistence on surrender is all-encompassing and inhumane, enslaving and de-humanizing.

Sixty years ago, the country's founding father imagined a tolerant, secular government of a moderate, Muslim state. In the last two decades that dream has become corrupted into a state that is increasingly theistically totalitarian, demanding complete and utter subservience to the unalterable word of Allah as transcribed by his prophet. A creeping fundamentalist mindset has overtaken rationality.

Mosques and madrassas funded by another fundamentalist Islamic state, Saudi Arabia, set the stage for ignorance and fanaticism resulting in Islamist extremism that has flooded out of Pakistan's training camps for jihadists into the world at large, resulting in bloody attacks in the United States, Spain, England, India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere.

The Pakistani army and the country's ISI has been complicit in absorbing within their ranks the very Islamists whom they have pretended to assist the United States in uprooting. They have encouraged, trained and armed the Taliban in Afghanistan, and now attempt to battle their own Taliban. The Pakistan Peoples Party stands alone as an elite political entity with a reasonable agenda reflecting moderation and modernity. And it has failed.

"No Pakistani leader can afford to take such a deadly gamble again, to play with the destiny of the nation, betray the people's trust, and foster Islamic extremism that bites the hand that feeds it. Pakistan needs national reconciliation that brings an end to the demonization of politicians by the army; a new military culture that is taught to respect civilians, institutions and neighbours; and reformed intelligence agencies that cease to interfere politically." Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos.

But it is late in the day. And what can the world anticipate when and if Pakistan does fall into the hands of its Islamist political parties? As looks increasingly likely, with the withdrawal of support for the PPP by one of its coalition partners.

What then can be expected of a country whose feeble democratization has failed so spectacularly, whose civilian executive is a tired and timid facade, and whose armed forces the tail that wags the dog, prepared to pay service to a new Islamist master?

This growing new, war-fanatic, religion-obsessed, India-antipathied, nuclear state together with its fearsome peers in neighbourly Iran and collegial North Korea is a future dreadful to contemplate.