"We the Mujahideen and Pakistan Army are brothers." Nek Mohammed, a mujahid pardoned by the Pakistani government, is going back to jihad. But he promises not to work from Pakistani soil. From HiPakistan:
"Any Muslim can go to any country to wage jihad but Waziristan's soil will not be used to fire at Afghanistan," he told Dawn when asked whether he would continue his jihad in Afghanistan.Asked whether he would cooperate with the government to get foreign militants registered by the stipulated April 30 deadline, the 27-year-old militant said: "There will be no operation and catching foreigners is not part of the agreement."
Nek Mohammad's assertions run counter to the impression given by the government official that the tribal militants who had been accused of sheltering and facilitating foreign militants would account for their foreign guests and get them registered with the authorities.
Also, Nek insisted that there were no foreigners in South Waziristan. "There is no Al Qaeda here. There are people from all races of Afghanistan. There are Afghan Uzbeks and Tajiks.
"Over three million refugees had come to take shelter in Pakistan and they are everywhere. Had there been a single Al Qaeda fighter here, the government would have caught one by now," he said. ...
Nek Mohammad is one of the five tribal militants pardoned by the government during a ceremony at a Madrassah on Saturday. The Corps Commander, Peshawar, Lt-Gen Safdar Hussain had flown into Shakai, a village about 17km to the north of regional headquarters Wana, to announce the clemency.
The tribal militant said there could be no guarantees between brothers. "We the Mujahideen and Pakistan Army are brothers," he said.
The double-game of Pakistan is too longstanding, and too well-known, to merit much comment. General Gul was in up to his neck in the machinations of A. Q. Khan (in his thefts of nuclear secrets from the laboratory he worked at in Holland, A. Q. Khan was merely harkening back to the hallowed tradition of early Islamic society (when last any intellectual achievements were registered), in which progress in science and technology consisted largely in the borrowing, or transmitting, or lifting, or stealing, the achievements attained by others, from the Chinese invention of paper, to the Hindu concept of "zero," to the Aristotelianism of--well, Aristotle -- that inspired Al-Farabi and Averroes. Given that Islam has for at least a millennium despisted all real curiosity about the world of Infidels, and denied the value of free and skeptical inquiry, even while longing for advancement in one particular are (no, not the eradication or treatement of diseases, not developments in the study of biology at the molecular level, or physics at the atomic level, nothing about quarks or EightFold Paths, nothing about DNA or RNA or chaos theory or De Sitter Space or relativity or a cure for lung cancer -- when Muslims such as Mohammed Mahathir talk about the need to improve Muslim science, what they have in mind is not real science, but only the technology that will allow them to fashion weaponry to further the Jihad. Anyone who re-reads carefully Mahathir's speech at the Organization of Islamic Countries, or who reads similar speeches that are misleadingly billed as calls for "progress" and "openness" in the Muslim world -- they are really calls for just enough "openness" to create a weapons-building establishment (quite similar to those who call for "women's rights" not because they have much interest in women['s rights, but only so that Muslim women may better strengthen the Muslims vis-a-vis the Infidels -- the poster child for this kind of sinister feminism being "Dr. Germ" in Saddam Hussein's regime).
Pakistan remains a problem, as do the Pakistanis == including those who, while themselves interested only in economic bettermen, bring with them the mental attitudes fostered by Islam, which is to say, essential and unredeemable hostility to Infidels. And their children, far from adapting harmoniously in Bradford and Luton and Manchester and Leeds and London, are much more likely to seek, in their own unhappinesses that are the common lot of mankind, the Total Explanation of the Universe that is Islam, and the ready enemy of all Muslims, the Infidels (starting with the less numerous, less powerful, and easy targets -- that is, "the Jews" but immediately going on to the larger circumambient society of Christians).
These tribesmen, released but unrepentant, and ready to conduct Jihad outside of Waziristan, are metaphors for Pakistan itself -- a country most deeply subservient to the most virulent, Arab-centered Islam because, unlike Indonesia or Iran or Turkey, its people have no non-Islamic or pre-Islamic identity with which to partly dilute Islam, or to have something outside of Islam to offer consolation. That is why Pakistan is the most "Arab" of all the non-Arab Muslim states, and the one least susceptible, therefore, to the kind of Ataturkian constraints on Islam (despite the biography of Ataturk being, according to reports, the favored bedside reading of the seemingly-upright and seemingly- trustworthy Musharraf. The inability of Infidels to see through Muslim blague, Muslim declarations of trust, faith, and so on is amazing. Infidels with long experience in the Middle East know far better than our innocent diplomats and grand panjandrums of policy, just how little attention should be paid to all this, whether it is Musharraf, or Prince Bandar, or Mubarak, or Abdullah of Jordan, or for that matter even those who are much closer to our ideals, but themselves help to mislead because, having been out of the Middle East and grown accustomed to Western, non-Islamic ways of sensible and coherent thought, were entirely misrepresentative men -- people such as Kanan Makiya, Ahmed Chalabi, or the current female ambassador from Iraq, Mrs. Francke. They are as little representative of the real Iraq, as Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Nabokov would have been as representatives of Soviet Russia.
Hugh - Once again an informative and insightful narrative. One can see Musharref and all the rest giving a wink and a smile as they release these jihadists back into the tribal areas.
One could imagine the possible reply to Washington's protest of this behavior: "We complied with what you asked of us. Now you must accept the realpolitik of Pakistan."
In any case, the tribal militants don't recognize Muslim brothers are "foreigners" as they are all Muslims regardless of place of birth and there is no need of guarantees between "brothers."
Yes, instead of having India & Pakistan making peace, we should welcome their going to war over Kashmir - and we'd do well to ensure that we be on India's side (at least they are not Muslims for the most part!). When Pakistan is nuked, then things will be at least somewhat harder for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda!!!