Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Security forces 'torturing' 'innocent' civilians in Swat?

A recent video has gone viral, showing uniformed soldiers torturing bearded persons in a jail. The uniformed person are shown kicking the inmates and lashing them. An other uniformed person who appeared to be the officer would ask the inmates about their connection with Taliban organisations, after they were kicked and lashed by a couple of soldiers. The video was filmed by a mobile phone camera. Some scenes of the video also showed policemen standing guard in the jail. The inmates are seen crying ‘Ya Allah’, binding their hands before their captors to spare them as they are innocent.
A debate is going to start on the clip soon. The human right activists will brand the video as inhumane and violations of human rights. They will accuse the army of brutally torturing its citizens without penalising them. The army public relation organisation, ISPR, will call the video fabricated and an attempt to malign the army.
Human right activists have never been in a war like situation and no army’s curriculum is vocal on human rights.
Who are those people which were being tortured by the army? First thought to hit any person’s mind will be innocent citizens. It can be true and it can be false.
What if those people were arrested out of a cave which contained beheaded bodies of our troops?
What if those people were horbouring Taliban terrorists who were involved in the beheading of soldiers?
What if those people were Taliban sympathiser and used to give information to Taliban organisations about the movement of the army in the area?
What if those people were involved in the abduction and beheading of army persons abducted from the same camp/unit in which the interrogators also worked?
All is fair in love and war. The party which has more deterrence wins the war. The Pakistan army got some severe blows when the war on terrorism started in our tribal areas. Abductions and beheading of army personnel were common place. At that time Taliban had more deterrence than our army. In Swat and later in the Tribal Areas, the situation changed in army’s favour. Army was using its full might and as a result it got a stronger deterrent than the Taliban.

PS: Irony is that the bearded persons were once our national defence policy’s vanguards in Afghanistan and Kashmir. We would send truck loads of our strategic assets in Afghanistan and Kashmir. By the spin of fate, our strategic strategies changed and now we regard these bearded persons, trained by us in urban and guerrilla warfare, as our biggest enemies. Hats off to our strategists in GHQ and our geo-strategic location, which has never given us any benefits except more troubles.

1 comment:

  1. Old news. Don't do the crime if you cant do the time.
    Atrocities in war? Like thats never happened before.

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