Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - ANALYSIS: Voices from FATA and the panic — III —Farhat Taj
.... Families of the target killed leaders hold officers of the Pakistan Army and the ISI stationed in Waziristan at the time responsible for the killings. The government of Pakistan never had any impartial investigations to verify the claims of the families. But it is pertinent to note that the so-called ‘free’ media of Pakistan usually follows the military establishment’s line on matters related to the Afghan policy, including an uncritical dissemination and promotion of the distorted information about the events on both sides of the Durand Line. This context of the media-military alliance of Pakistan seems to explain why the perspective of the family members of the target killed tribal leaders has never been accommodated by the media. Large sections of the international media, which has no independent access to FATA, have also breached professional standards by uncritically projecting the information and narratives picked up from the Pakistani media.
The families of the target killed leaders do not view the militants based in Waziristan, including foreign militants, as anything more than an ‘irregular’ army of the state who were and still to this date are ordered by the regular army commanders based in Waziristan to carry out the killings in order to silence the tribal opposition to the state’s Afghan policy through terror. Moreover, the militants are also directed for cross-border attacks inside Afghanistan. Secondly, the establishment, the family members argue, needs this kind of irregular army for the ‘necessary’ acts of terrorism to plausibly deny any state involvement in them and thus continue their double-dealing in the war on terror.
In terms of state control, several people draw a parallel between the Taliban fighters and the soldiers of the FC, a paramilitary force of Pakistan. The FC soldiers are abused in all kinds of brutal ways by the military establishment and these poor men from the poorest Pashtun families continue to suffer in silence. The Taliban are, in the words of some of the affected family members, like the ‘irregular’ FC soldiers of the military establishment and they just execute the orders given by their handlers from the Pakistan Army. The Taliban fighters are also eliminated by the state’s agents when they are no more useful for the state in its double-dealing in the war on terror whereby the Pakistan Army ostensibly fights the Taliban but tacitly recruits, trains and arms them in order to beat the US in Afghanistan and to create a reign of terror in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan to assure the world that the Pakistani Pashtun are enraged by the US attack on Afghanistan. ...
-bth: this opinion piece from the Daily Times of Pakistan is worth reading in full.
0 comments:
Post a Comment