On the Fidayeen attack in Peshawar

The news report in The Hindu this evening says this about the Fidayeen attack in Peshawar this morning: 

Dressed in para-military Frontier Corps uniforms, the six Arabic-speaking terrorists entered the Army Public School...went from classroom to classroom shooting innocent children in one of the most gruesome terror attacks anywhere. Before the Taliban attackers were eliminated on Tuesday night, they had killed nearly 140 people, nearly all of them students except a female school teacher and a watchman.

The report further adds:

We targeted the school because army targets our families. We want them to feel our pain," the Taliban said....All six militants died in the attack with four of them blowing themselves up...The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the attack....The Taliban spokesman claimed that its 6 suicide bombers attacked the army school, saying it was a revenge for the military’s operation against militants in the North Waziristan tribal area close to Peshawar.

At the outset, it is very clear that this is a dastardly and heinous attack and deserves unequivocal condemnation and leaders across the world have condemned it unambiguously.

Look at it from the Taliban point of view.  The Taliban wanted to strike terror in the hearts of the military establishment and the people of Pakistan. As they have said, they wanted to spread the pain universally. One Malala escaped and was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize.  Now the Taliban have killed many Malalas.

There is also another aspect.  Wily Brandt of West Germany, Henry Kissinger of US, Menachem Begin, Shiman Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel have all been given the Nobel Peace Prize and the world knows their accomplishments. But the Taliban or rather its earlier avatars have not been given the Nobel Peace for its contribution to world peace by bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union and the socialist block.  This great error of misjudgement is something about which the Anglophile world has to ruminate.

It is said there is no effective defence against ‘suicide’ attackers determined to kill and be killed and they have their reason it is a reprisal for the Pakistan Army’s military operation against the Taliban in the tribal belt.  Whether they were tribesmen from the neighbourhood or recruits from the Islamic states of the Middle East it matters little; but they carry on the legacy of the mercenaries trained, funded and equipped by United States and Pakistan and unleashed against the fledgling republic in Afghanistan a few decades ago. Let it be said here that the Soviet forces had no business to be there in Afghanistan and the republican regime ought to have relied exclusively on their own strength like the Vietnamese did for nearly three decades against the US forces replacing the retreating French.  But all that happened in the cold war era, which had a different logic or not logic at all.

Even granting that you have secured yourself profusely against any prospect of the Frankensteins you have nursed, raised and let loose around the world will never try the skills you taught them against you as well.  Even when you have all the power and the ability to control the conflagrations you bring about, it is always the case of just more planning than something easily done. The saying ‘As you sow, so you reap’ holds well. The Pakistan’s Army has been in league with the Taliban and this arrangement suited the global superpower well so long as the tie-up was under its thumb but now things are beginning to unravel as the US-Israel alliance is something unbreakable and the US still needs to keep the fires burning in the Middle East.

For people in India, what is happening in Pakistan is not very welcome.  In fact what is taking place in Pakistan is a foretaste of what may come to pass in India sooner or later, if the current drift continues.  In India, we have our own Taliban. Our Taliban is the para military outfits of the Sangh Parivar.  Our Taliban is ensconced as the party in power through the ballot.  Our Taliban in power is spreading its tentacles to the nooks and corners of our country. Pakistan was and still is a subordinate ally of the global superpower.  India is very close to achieving such a status and we have taken the initial steps with the Indo-US nuclear deal.  So we are on the track to emulate Pakistan, notwithstanding the fact that our ‘democratic traditions’ are deeper and stronger than in Pakistan; because the logic and the compulsions of the neo-liberal regime we have put in place is such. This should give us the necessary spur for introspection rather than continuing to wallow in self-induced delusions of grandeur.