Nothing to do with Cricket

The tragic events in Lahore this week had little to do with Cricket. There can, despite the usual cat-calling from India and the flailing, surreal counter-accusations from Pakistan Government spokesmen about this being the False Flag work of Indian subversives, be no doubt that this was an attack by Muslim Terrorists. What is being witnessed here is nothing less than the slide into failed-statehood, Sharia-style for Pakistan – by way of the irresistible rise of the Taliban.

It started up North in the badlands of Waziristan, the long border region with Afghanistan,  a couple of years ago – warning letters started to appear in the mailboxes of shop owners – particularly music and video vendors and male hairdressers (female hairdressing not being particularly lucrative in total-coverage Burkah-land). Continue to sell Haram (forbidden) entertainment media or trim male beards and we’ll put you out of business. With bombs.

Road blocks were set up to inspect commercial vehicles for forbidden goodies. clean-shaven men were warned to change their ways by armed men.

Then came the attacks on Girls’ schools. In Waziristan and the Swat Valley. 

Since militant followers of pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Fazlullah established their own government (with the unbelievably cowardly but hushed-up approval of the Pakistani Government) in Swat in October 2007, over 100 girls’ schools were destroyed. Last October, ‘militants’ blew up another girls’ school in the Mingora district of Swat. In July last year, an umbrella network of Pakistan’s Taliban movements, Tehreek-e-Islami Taliban, posted warnings in parts of Punjab threatening that women who did not wear the hijab would have acid thrown in their faces.

Events also moved into the big cities around this time. In late July 2007, the extremely-radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in the capital Islamabad was the location of a bloody confrontation with the Police and Army in which over 100 died. The radicals were openly defying the Government and its ‘man-made laws’; saying that they only recognised Sharia.

And so it has been going for several years. The Taliban are now taking hold of much less remote areas and have their eyes on the conurbations. There seems neither the will nor the inclination to resist in most places, a fact no doubt due at least in part to the horrific and bloodthirsty summary punishments dished out to previous dissenters – although the overt, diaphanous corruption and sleaze that riddles Pakistan’s political class could also be a contributing factor. You know what you’re getting with the Taliban.  

But surely the biggest open goal of all has been the double game that has been played for years by Pakistan with the US and the West – whereby Pakistani military actively supported the Taliban while the Government helped themselves to millions of dollars in military aid to fight them – the reason for the legally-dubious but highly-successful cross-border raids into Pakistan by the Americans last year.

And there you have it. Unsustainable short-term delaying tactics from a corrupt élite. Radical Muslim Terrorists only too eager to accept a hand-up from wherever they can find it – and a bewildered public standing beneath the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Not being able to host the international matches of its beloved national game anymore should be the least of Pakistan’s worries. Due to a tactical masterstroke of political destabilisation that has hit as hard at home and in its neighbourhood as it has internationally; Pakistan has begun what may well prove to be a rapid descent to the failed-state depths of a South Asian equivalent of Somalia.

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