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This is Not Just Pakistan’s Battle

While Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar has been put under house arrest, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba operations chief Zakir Rehman Lakhvi has been detained and is being questioned in connection with the Mumbai attacks. The authorities have also picked up 20 other suspects.

Goes without saying this action by Pakistan’s leaders is most welcome. Not because New Delhi and Washington wanted it. But because these groups, once lionised by the establishment and ordinary people for championing the Kashmir cause, have now emerged as a threat to Pakistan’s own stability.

As President Asif Ali Zardari pointed out in his emotional opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday, Pakistan too faces a great danger from extremism and terrorism. In fact, the Islamic republic is going through an existential crisis as it fights challenges at home and abroad. It faces formidable enemies both within and without.

Thanks to Pakistan’s long involvement with the US and West in Afghanistan, it has had more than its share of extremist groups that feed on anti-Western sentiment in the country. Pakistan’s long association with the Kashmiri separatist groups and India’s apparent inability to sort out the mess in its part of Kashmir too have helped militant groups like the Jaish and Lashkar. It’s hardly a secret that the military establishment in the past patronised pro-Kashmir groups and ran training camps for Kashmiri separatists as part of the country’s low-intensity conflict with India in Kashmir. That support dried up and many of those training camps were shut under pressure from the Bush administration during former president General Pervez Musharraf’s reign.

Now, as it is increasingly evident, those ‘jihadi’ and so-called pro-Kashmir groups, abandoned by the establishment, have taken to terrorism.

While it is yet to be conclusively established that Pakistan-based groups were behind the Mumbai attacks, Islamabad should carry the crackdown on extremist groups to its logical conclusion.

These forces are not only a threat to the civilised world but they are by the virtue of what they stand for and preach a clear and present danger to Pakistan’s stability and integrity.

What happened in Mumbai, whoever planned and executed it, was most reprehensible and completely unacceptable.

Whatever the cause and however noble the objective, no one has any right to take an innocent life. This is all the more despicable 
when it is done in the name of Islam or in the name of a country that came into being in the name of Islam.

So Pakistan needs all the support and cooperation in its crackdown on extremism and obscurantism. As President Zardari emphasised in his piece yesterday, Pakistan and India — and the rest of the world — need to work together 
on this front. This is not just Pakistan’s battle but a global fight.