Daily Times Dec 19, 2012

Jamrud massacre A car bomb killed 17 people and wounded more than 60 in the Jamrud bazaar in Khyber Agency on Monday. Twenty-one cars and seven shops were also destroyed in the huge explosion. No claim of responsibility has been forthcoming but the cast of usual suspects must head the list of possible perpetrators. This is the third attack in Jamrud this year. Each one has yielded a fair crop of deaths and injuries. The attack on the Peshawar airport the other day and now this bombing are part and parcel of the terrorists’ counter-offensive to relieve the pressure on them in Khyber Agency where the military has been conducting an operation. As further evidence of the counter-offensive perception, on the same day, three soldiers were killed and another three wounded in clashes with terrorist attackers at a check post in Lakki Marwat. Another bomb was discovered and defused in time near Bacha Khan Chowk in Peshawar. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Minister for Information Mian Iftikhar Hussain has called for a full scale military offensive against the terrorists, who he thinks are now looking for soft targets, having seen the stiffened security forces’ response to the Peshawar airport attack. Another interesting new aspect that has been brought forward as a result of the Peshawar attack is that many foreigners, including Uzbeks and Daghestanis, were part of the group that carried out the action. The authorities have revealed that some of the 10 terrorists who carried out the attack on the Peshawar airport were Uzbeks, or certainly of Central Asian origin, and the by now infamous tattooed gentleman who has found widespread mention in the media, has been found to be from Daghestan according to a letter in Urdu found on his person after he was killed. This has led to the conclusion that the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) are now collaborating in their war against the Pakistani state. Mian Iftikhar surmises that this is because the TTP is running into difficulties now in recruiting people and is being forced therefore to rely on these foreign trainers to carry out actual actions. Certainly the big Bannu jailbreak earlier this year proved the TTP-IMU collaboration according to the respective claims of the two groups. The IMU is well known to have an al Qaeda connection. It follows therefore that the nexus of terrorist groups now enfolds a wide array of groups from the TTP to the Afghan Taliban to Central Asian and other groups that are aligned with al Qaeda. The terrorist fanatics have targeted polio campaign workers according to reports when these lines were being written, causing a halt to the immunisation campaign in Karachi. The terrorists are enemies of everything that a modern, forward looking society aspires to: education, healthcare, and an open, vibrant culture. These enemies of humanity, including women and children, and arguably enemies of the religion they purport to speak for, are the black vermin of our times, unleashed in the past by the unthinking obsession of the west to overcome communism through every and any means, and whose unintended consequences have drenched our country and the region and to some extent the rest of the world, in blood and gore. Without eliminating the threat they pose to everything civilisation stands for, there can be no good future for Pakistan, the region, or the world. This is the existential struggle of our times, and if we fall short, subsequent generations would be within their rights not to forgive us for blighting their future, perhaps beyond redemption.