(19th Feb 2013)

Disturbing questions

WITH each attack on Balochistan’s Hazara Shias, it becomes harder to understand why those responsible continue to get away with their agenda of wiping out the community. Who carries out the attacks, and where they are based — in and around Quetta and Mastung, the home base of former chief minister Aslam Raisani — is publicly known. The madressahs that have mushroomed in these areas since the spread of extremist religious ideologies to the province exist in plain sight. And the attacks on Hazaras take place in certain areas and have demonstrated speci-fic patterns. So why the continuing intelligence failure? There are the straightforward explanations: that even if security agencies know which groups are responsible, it is hard to track them as they move around to avoid capture. That it isn’t possible to completely guard all civilian areas against attacks at all times. And that intelligence-sharing between agencies isn’t happening. The military intelligence agencies are better equipped and informed than civilian and police agencies, but poor coordination means that information isn’t used effectively.

But then there are the more sinister explanations, and the longer Hazaras continue to get killed, the more strength these will gain. Baloch nationalists claim that the state is using — and therefore patronising — anti-Shia groups to fight them. According to that narrative, Sunni extremism is foreign to the secular nature of Baloch politics and has been cultivated for a purpose, so that in Balochistan these militants are not the anti-state elements they are elsewhere in the country. Here they are a tool, and in the state’s calculation, using them has the inconvenient but accepted side effect of sectarian conflict. As attacks continue unabated, this theory is gaining currency. Locals point out that the base of anti-Shia ideology in the province is in the former chief minister’s stronghold in an area with a heavy Frontier Corps presence; or that two of the leaders of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi’s Balochistan faction escaped a high-security prison in Quetta’s cantonment area; or that some pro-state Baloch groups have links to Sunni extremism.

Official denials will at this point not be enough. Only tough action to stop the attacks will. In part this is for historical reasons; though there are signs the state may be moving away from its earlier policy of supporting certain militants elsewhere in the country, memories of support for ‘useful’ militants still linger. And in the case of Balochistan, continued failure to do something about an obvious problem is reviving them. Is Balochistan’s sectarian problem an intelligence failure? Or is it deliberate negligence? Unless something changes on the ground, those questions will continue to be asked.

Room for Improvement

PERHAPS it speaks to the condition of the once glorious city by the sea that the Karachi Literature Festival is celebrated more for what it represents than what it does. The mere fact that a demoralised Karachi can be in the news for positive reasons, even if only for a weekend each spring, is seen as a boost for its beleaguered denizens. But with the festival now crawling out of its infancy and having established itself as a significant annual event, it is time to focus more on what the KLF does and has achieved over the last weekend. From a purely literary point of view, this year’s event was somewhat of a letdown. Local literary stars were assembled in strength once again and trotted out in many sessions but there is a growing sense of familiarity about them. After all, pick up a newspaper, flip through a magazine or attend any civil society gathering and one or more of them is present. Missing this year, then, was a strong international contingent of writers. Perhaps this has to do with an over-reliance on star-power from across the border, always a risky proposition because Pakistan-India ties get disrupted frequently enough and this makes for many a no-show. Going forward, the KLF may be better served by reaching out more to authors, writers and performers from beyond India.

Also disappointing this year was the tendency towards the overtly and purely political. Given the region that Pakistan exists in and the existential questions being asked about this country’s future, politics is never far from the surface — and can never be really — but the KLF is perhaps one venue better anchored in the literary than in geopolitics. If going big necessarily means veering away from the core of books and literature, then the festival may want to consider reverting to smaller and more thoughtfully planned sessions for its next edition. The KLF has much going for it: to have come out of nowhere and established itself as a big event in a mere four years is incredible. The next step is to build on that admirable success.

Defeat in South Africa

THE Test series loss against South Africa has once again exposed the brittleness of Pakistan’s batting and the lack of mental toughness among the players which for long has been the Achilles’ heel of our national team. Although the tourists put up an improved show in the second Test at Cape Town compared to the rout at Johannesburg, where they had capitulated for an all-time low of 49, it was their batting once again that let them down giving the hosts a decisive 2-0 lead in the three-match series. In the final analysis, one is compelled to note that the Pakistan Cricket Board and the team management overlooked several key factors while planning for the extraordinary assignment at hand i.e. going into battle with the top team in world cricket that South Africa is today.

To begin with, the tour itinerary contained basic flaws with only a couple of practice games scheduled in between the Tests that were clearly insufficient and did little to familiarise our players with the bouncy tracks or to acclimatise them to the sultry weather. The weeklong camp in Lahore prior to the series, too, served no purpose since the coaches failed to draw the players out of the hit-and-run Twenty20 mode which eventually proved to be the team’s undoing in the five-day format. Moreover, the absurd choice of replacement players — Tanvir Ahmed and Rahat Ali — backfired as both the players failed to make any impact in the Tests. While Saeed Ajmal’s 10 wickets at Cape Town and fine centuries from Younis Khan and Asad Shafiq have been a few high points for Pakistan on the tour, Misbah-ul-Haq and his men have failed to fire as a unit so far. They must regroup now to win the third Test and avoid a white wash which, unfortunately, looks imminent.

__________________
Yes We Can Do It!