The Soapbox | Where South Africans Speak Out

BY DANIEL MORGAN

Former cricketer Imran Khan is pushing his own populist, anti-West agenda just as Pakistan’s president embarks on a tour of Western capitals. His opinion piece in The Times last week firmly lays the blame for Pakistan’s manifold terrorist problems and social ills at the door of the UK, the US and (most incongruously) the IMF.

In a bid to further his political ambitions he downplays the role Pakistan’s state intelligence agency (the ISI) and the erstwhile Musharraf regime played in providing a fertile environment for militant Islamist groups to flourish.

In suggesting that suicide attacks were a phenomenon unknown in Pakistan prior to 2004 when Western military intervention in the tribal regions began, he ignores the fact that Islamabad underwent its first such attack in 1995. In reality, the rate of suicide attacks really gathered pace in 2007 after the siege of the Lal Masjid when Islamabad began to clamp down on Islamist militant groups who had been gifted control of large swathes of the country.

It is important to take notice of Khan’s views as they reflect an important and dangerous trend amongst Pakistani politicians to use the straw man of the West rather than accepting responsibility for what is largely a homegrown problem. The Pakistani people have a right to be angry but their anger should be directed closer to home.

My response, published in The Times on 28 July goes as follows:

Sir,

While I am sure that Imran Khan’s impassioned plea for a full withdrawal of Western soldiers from the Afghanistan Pakistan region is heartfelt, he is playing fast and loose with the facts. Although the rate of suicide bombings in Pakistan has increased significantly before 2004 is palpably untrue. To my knowledge, there were at least two major suicide attacks in Karachi in 2002 and another attack in Islamabad in 1995.

Furthermore, to lay the blame for these attacks on Western forces in the region is to ignore the fact that Pakistan’s security service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has been linked with running networks of suicide bombers in Afghanistan and providing logistical support and ideological backing for groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, which frequently carries out suicide attacks within Pakistan’s borders.

To say that the ISI is “not that powerful” is also far from accurate.

The ISI has been described by the Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain as a “state within a state”, dictating foreign policy and leading Pakistan to engage in nuclear brinkmanship with India.

Daniel Morgan is a journalist and blogger based in London. Visit his blog on South Asian defence issues here.