Whoever the people who carried out the blast outside the Lahore Police Lines, it wasn’t Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davotoglu. He might have been in town the day before, but that was on a state visit. I know that facilitators come to the city where the strike is to take place the day before, but I very much doubt that he carries around many militant facilitators with him.
I know facilitators are important, but the real persons to be caught are the fellows ready to blow themselves up. And what threats do you hold out to someone ready to blow himself up? That might be why they are willing to take on the police. After all, what can a DSP of the old school, potbellied and pigeontoed, do to someone ready to blow himself up? Cause him a little pain? Well, a lot of pain, actually, but will it matter to someone willing to go through the agony of dying? And can we rely on people to protect us when they are concentrating so hard on protecting themselves? What was the use to the police of all those potbellied DSPs if they couldn’t stop that attack?
That attack took some of the sheen of the visit. Some more of the sheen was taken off because Davotoglu is, though Prime Minister, not the most important man in Turkey. That would be Recip Tayip Erdogan. And by the way, Erdogan would have spelled his name Rajab Tayyab, if Turkish Romanisation had not been left to Mustafa Kamal, who was an Army officer. Imagine what would happen to Urdu if its Romanisation was left to the military? But the visit to Lahore was highly symbolic, because of the Metro Bus Service, which we got from Turkey. Where Turkey got it from, we’re not asking.
Well, I suppose it was a bit of a relief that it wasn’t an imambargah being attacked. That seems to be the latest in-thing. Even though there used to be sectarian terror, it was mostly focused on killing religious leaders of the other sect. Now, it means attacking the other sect’s place of worship. So far, that has meant going after Imambargahs. Now the militants have attacked one in Rawalpindi, as if in follow-up to the one they hit in Shikarpur some days before.
Of course, the mine disaster in Balochistan had nothing to do with it. No one is blaming the death of so many unfortunate miners on terrorism, just on the usual old-fashioned stinginess by the mine management, in failing to make safe mines. However, they’re not terrorists, just people trying to turn an honest rupee.
And no one is blaming the Rawalpindi attack on anyone following up on the Copenhagen shooting, in which the capital of Denmark witnessed its version of the Valentine’s Day Massacre, when a lone gunman killed two people outside a synagogue there, next to a café which was hosting an event on blasphemy. Hmmm… Especially after the original Jyllands Posten blasphemous cartoons, Denmark has been a symbol of the Western defence of freedom of speech as extending to the right of blasphemy. So holding a seminar on the subject was going to be a risk anywhere in Copenhagen, let alone near a synagogue. There has been a connection drawn between that shooting and the one in the USA in which three Muslims were shot by a redneck neighbor, as well as the attack on Charlie Hebdo, but none with the imambargah attacks, except that ISIS is being blamed, and ISIS would probably approve of attacking Shias.
The problem seems to be that the Taliban, after being driven from Afghanistan 15 years ago, have relied increasingly on sectarian groups in Pakistan. Indeed, a lot of those groups had formally joined the Taliban, and are now leaving it, and proclaiming allegiance to ISIS, probably because they approve of what it is doing to the Shia populations in its control. Thus blasphemy doesn’t matter; sect does.
Of course, the importance of the Copenhagen shootings is also that Denmark can hold up its head in the comity of nations as a victim of terrorism. That would have become important after the USA became a victim through 9-11, and then after France too became a victim through the Charlie Hebdo attack. Now plucky little Denmark can look the big countries in the eye and say, “I’m a victim too?”
So can Pakistan, though at cricket. However, it’s not much to boast about. To lose to India, as it did last week, is to advance national interests, but to lose to the West Indies can only mean the match was deeply in the book. Or that the team is really bad. This is a West Indies team which lost to Ireland, remember, which must mean they are not at all good. After all, that match was probably not in the book. I mean, not even Irishmen thought they were going to win.
Has anyone seen what the Danish police did to the shooter? They shot him. Sounds like a good old encounter to me, showing that we can probably earn valuable foreign exchanger through our DSPs. Apart from changing buffaloes to Holstein cows, I suppose. In a strange version of blowback, we have the arrest of a woman, Asma Amir, accompanied by her handicapped child, and unable to get bail. I hope she has failed because the courts think her guilty of involvement in what she is accused of, not because the courts too want to seem stern after the Peshawar massacre. She was not guilty of that, or of attacking the Police Lines, or of attacking any imambargahs.