Musharraf's Recent Admission of Guilt

Gen. (r) Musharraf is on a roll. His interviews in Der Spiegel, NDTV and Times Now (with Maroof Raza) have rivetted attention once again to the perfidious state of Pakistan. While he also talked about his political ambitions and the state of affairs within Pakistan, it was his references to terrorism that caught Indian attention. I will take up in another post the nonsense that Gen (r) Musharraf trotted about Pakistan Army's role in governance etc. For the time being, I will confine myself to terror emanating from Pakistan. Anyhow, Gen. (r) Musharraf 's outpourings are nothing 'revealing' to the Indians who have been watching Pakistan, even cursorily. Like a true, blue Pakistani, Gen. (r) Musharraf has audaciously admitted to Pakistan's use of terrorism as a policy of the State and justified it on the grounds that "The West was ignoring the resolution of the Kashmir issue, which is the core issue of Pakistan".  .Like a true, blue Pakistani, Gen. (r) Musharraf also believes that somehow the world will simply gulp this comically persuasive argument on why Pakistan had to choose terrorism as the most potent weapon of the State. In the NDTV and later in the Times Now interviews, he went ahead to suggest that terrorism in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir was nothing but freedom fighting and there was a great swell of sympathy for such activities in the entire state of Pakistan and so Pakistan cannot be faulted on that score. He went on to add that Pakistan would never accept the Line of Control (LoC) as a final solution to the Kashmir issue.

Pakistan's Foreign Office spokesperson Abdul Basit, when confronted with the ex-General's revelations, denied them as 'baseless'. He further said, "I do not know really what prompted him (Musharraf) to say this because he is not in Pakistan and I would not really know as to the purpose of saying this". This hollow and comical denial that had Musharraf been in Pakistan he would not have made these comments only goes to add to the perfidious and fraudulent nature of Pakistani state's policies on terrorism directed against India.

Gen. (r) Musharraf's admissions, especially about the public sympathy within Pakistan for jihad against India, take us directly to the era of Nazi Germany and its comparison to present day Pakistan. Both regimes employed extensive, sometimes subtle but many times blatant, social engineering to condition the minds of their peoples. The Nazi Germans believed that all their obnoxious actions were morally correct, helped in this pursuit by the intelligentsia and the academic who justified Nazi actions through innovative theories. Same has been the case in Pakistan where the mullahs incite people and justify jihad, which is then touted by people like Gen. (r) Musharrf as 'great public sympathy' little realizing that irrespective of all the spin, such cross-border jihad is nothing but pure and unalloyed terrorism.

On similar line, can one assume that it was a similar 'great public sympathy'  that led to genocide and massacre in the then East Pakistan in circa 1971 ? Some of the atrocities committed in the then East Pakistan, like eliminating academics and intelligentsia, closely parallel techniques widely employed by the Third Reich. Let us remember that it was the Pakistani Army under Gen. Tikka Khan, nicknamed 'Butcher of Bengal' and later to become the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) of Pakistan, that indulged in this massive genocide along with jihadi fanatics of Al Badr and Islami-Jamia't-e-Tulaba (IJT). Nothing exemplifies the brutality of the Pakistani Army more than what its top most commander in East Pakistan, Gen. A.A.K. 'Tiger' Niazi said of the rapes there insensitively: “You cannot expect a man to live, fight, and die in East Pakistan and go to Jhelum for sex, can you?”. Both Nazi Germany and Pakistan employed terror as a tactics by the State organs to make their own people submit to the will of the State. The hundreds of missing Pakistanis are proof enough of this practice. The fact that the people of the rump Pakistan have not only kept silent for nearly forty years now on the biggest genocide since Nazi Germany but even been 'running to the {Pakistani Army's} general headquarters' whenever there is crisis within Pakistan because the Pakistani Army is the only 'disciplined, oraganised, stable, institution which integrates Pakistan', as per Gen. (r) Musharraf in the NDTV interview, confirms that the Pakistani Army and the people have the same agenda and the same terrorist outlook.  Now, if the Pakistani Army is so people-friendly and people-centric and if it is great sympathy that leads to the support for jihad by Pakistanis against India, shouldn't we conclude that the genocidal Pakistani Army supports such a jihad ?

Gen. (r) Musharraf then went ahead and described the Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT)as a group that fights Indian occupation in Kashmir. Let us recall what the chief of Lashkar-e-Tayeba, Prof. Hafeez Saeed, said as early as in November 1999, ‘The Jihad is not about Kashmir only. It encompasses all of India. Today I announce the break-up of India, Inshallah. We will not rest until the whole of India is dissolved into Pakistan’.  It is the same Prof. Hafeez Saeed who now heads the Jamaa't-ud-Dawah (JuD), an outfit banned by the UNSC as a terrorist organization, but which Gen. (r) Musharraf now praises in that NDTV interview as "one of the best performers in the relief during the earthquake and even now in flood". This best performance does not absolve LeT and its reincarnation, JuD, of terrorism and the Government of Pakistan is supposed to eliminate this group rather than praising it. When Gen. (r) Musharraf speaks eloquently about the Kashmir dispute, the UN resolutions and Indian obligations under that (though if anyone is to implement UN resolutions first, it is Pakistan by withdrawing its forces, handing over PoK including Balawaristan to India along with CoK and enabling a peaceful environment conducive for a plebiscite etc.), he should be reminded of the UNSC resolution banning LeT and JuD and requiring all nations to stop supporting these organizations.

And then, he goes on to blame India for creating a war hysteria after minor {emphasis is mine though intent is Musharraf's from the NDTV interview} incidents such as the parliament attack or the 26/11 Mumbai attack and unnecessarily blaming the ISI. Now, the involvement of the ISI, the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani Navy are proven facts in the 26/11 attack and Gen. (r) Musharraf is either unaware of them or pretends to be so. It is strange that a man who admitted that the Pakistani Army trained the militants in Kashmir while the Pakistani government turned its head the other way, finds it difficult to believe that the ISI could be at all involved in the 26/11 attack. Lt. Gen. Shuja Ahmed Pasha, the ISI Chief, admitted to the Americans that only rogue elements from the ISI were involved in the attack as though that is condonable. Not only the captured LeT jihadi, Ajmal Kasab, but also the American CIA/DEA double agent of Pakistani descent, David Coleman Headley, has categorically explained the involvement of serving Army officers also in the planning and execution of the 26/11 attack. Pakistani bluff has repeatedly been called from the days the Father of the Pakistani nation, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, lied to the world that it was the tribals who were attacking Jammu & Kashmir in October 1947 after having sponsored them under the guise of 'plausible deniability', a ruse that this liar nation has unwaveringly followed ever since. Whether it was the 1965 war, or the hijackings of several Indian Airlines flights including the IC-814 to Kandahar in circa 1999, or the sponsoring of the Punjab terrorists in the 80s followed by terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, or the terrorism all over the country since c. 1993, or the Kargil intrusion and war, or the terrorist attacks in Kabul or the cold-blooded killing of Indian project workers in Afghanistan, or nuclear and missile proliferation, this ruse has been followed even when it was repeatedly blown to smithereens every time. The shameless Pakistanis remain un-embarrassed by the exposures.