Review of a true Taliban newspaper

My father’s office gets many local and regional newspapers which I have never seen on any newspaper stall. One of them is monthly Juraar -  an Urdu newspaper published by the religious outfit Jamaatud Dawa. Everything in this newspaper is attractive in an odd way. I am going to call it Taliban Times from now onwards for easy reference.
All human faces in the images were blurred. One photograph in the newspaper showed a billboard. The faces of the people on the billboard were also blurred. I decided to call the Jhelum distributor of this newspaper. I asked him the reason behind the blurring of the picture. In a little condescending way, he curtly replied that Islam do not allow display of human faces.
I had realised that the person on the phoneline is a hardcore fundamentalist. All the news items in the four-page broadsheet newspaper are related to jihad in someway.
Headlines are quite catchy. The newspaper celebrates the killing of Indian soldiers by choosing the appropriate words in Urdu. A headline reads Mujahideen lay down (lauta diyaay) 15 kafirs (infidels), instead of Mujahideen kill 15 Indian troops.
The news about an Indian soldier committing suicide was given a cruel heading. The heading read, “Indian soldier finishes himself.”
The choice of pictures was a mixture of stale and funny images. This week’s edition contains a picture showing Mujahideen riding on a Russian tank during the Russian occupation days, whereas the caption is silent about the time and place of the picture. The caption only says that God’s will is being implemented in Afghanistan, through mujahideen.
On the backpage, there is a close up photo. The picture shows an M-16 assualt rifle’s magazine area. The holder of the gun has a cigarette between his fingers. The caption reads, “An American soldier smoking weed due to depression, in Afghanistan.” You can’t see any soldier in the picture let alone his nationality. I have never seen any camera lens that can tell about the drug content of a cigarette.
There was no mention of Taliban casualties in Afghanistan or Kashmir. The newspaper also gave some coverage to wikileaks. Only those leaks were published which showed that America and its allies are loosing control in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The newspaper was ironically silent on the ongoing military operation in the tribal areas of Pakistan, suggesting that its a mouth piece of an organisation which has no role in the insurgency in the tribal areas.

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.

My media friends owe their jobs to Taliban?

On the national media front, Taliban alone are fighting the war to break monotony. On almost all the Mondays, the PPP gets space in the headlines about its new stance in the Supreme Court. The apex court judges give vent to their unfulfilled desires on Tuesdays. The PML-N joins the judges on Wednesday. Taliban come out of their slumber on Thursday, sensing the media’s dire need for some hard news, do a suicide blast.
Friday sees the police officials speaking and Interior Minister Rehman Malik claiming the recovery of the head of the suicide bomber from the blast site. And Saturday has nothing but the fillers. This is the routine of our national media for last so many months.
Had not been Taliban active, my friends in the media would have lost their jobs. At the best my reporter friends can bring rhetoric and that too courtesy of the press releases from political parties’ media wings.

Contraceptive for Talibanisation

Few days ago, I went to Services Hospital Lahore to give money to a relative who had telephoned me for. He was in an emergency so I did not change the dress and went there in shorts. When I was about to leave the hospital premises, I bearded man came and introduce himself as doctor (name withheld) and told me in a strict tone that a girls? hostel is nearby and I should not come in this dress. My dress only revealed part of my legs below knees. The doctor believed that I was seducing the girls with my bare calves.I was annoyed as he violated my liberty. I decided in a split-second to ask him what?s wrong with this dress but he walked past hurriedly. I call this mindset Talibanisation. One does not have to sport a unkempt beard, wear shabby clothes or tot an Ak-47 to be a Taliban. The Taliban thinking emerges when we stop respecting or listening to other people?s opinion and force them to accept ours. What happened in Swat when some men tried to introduce social reforms as per their interpretation of Islam. People complied for sometime but later retaliated beyond the expectations of these social reformists. Before the operation in the valley started, various markets in the Malakand region would sport banners barring the women from coming to markets and ordering barbers not to shave beards. Those who violated the Taliban code faced barbaric punishments. Women were also killed on charges of prostitution by groups of young men gathered and armed by the Taliban. The interpretation of the religion is one?s opinion. Various sects have opposite views and interpretations of a certain issue and both the interpretations are not wrong.What one professes is between him and Allah. The problem starts when the interpretation-cum-opinion is preached to other people; and they refuse to accept it, inciting religious hatred.The sensible solution to religious hatred that comes to saner minds is keeping one?s interpretation of religion to one?s self because debates on religion are mostly inconclusive.