terror 
Take it serious, it’s complicated
The Boston bombings in retrospect
By Beena Sarwar

Historic Copley Square is one of my favourite places in my adopted city of Boston. This is where, last month, we held a vigil against Shia killings in Pakistan. This is where runners at the Annual Patriots’ Day Marathon cross the finish line at Boylston Street past the majestic old public library. And this is where, on April 15, two bombs exploded, disrupting the idyllic scene of the marathon on a crisp, sunny Monday afternoon.

Windows shattered. Road slippery with blood. Flags of various countries trampled into the ground as first responders pulled down barricades to reach the site.

I was in New York when I heard. The explosions injured over 280 people. Fourteen lost body parts. Some are now double amputees, dependent on prosthetics and rehabilitation to resume their lives. Three died: eight-year old Martin Richard, and two young women, Krystle Campbell, 29, a restaurant manager and Lu Lingzi, 23, a graduate student from China at Boston University.

As millions around the world felt Boston’s pain and prayed for the dead and injured, another collective prayer arose from many hearts: “Please don’t let the bombers be Muslim, don’t let this have a Pakistani connection”.

The bombers turned out to be two young men, brothers of Chechen origin — Muslims, but so far, no Pakistani connection. We don’t yet know why they did it, but one can see parallels with the ‘Times Square bomber’ Faisal Shahzad. In financial difficulties like Shahzad, Tamerlane (Taimur) Tsarnaev, 26, the elder brother in the Boston bombing, turned to radical religion and conspiracy theories about the West versus Islam.

This is essentially the ideology behind the militants causing mayhem on a much larger scale, making such scenes tragically familiar, in Pakistan. From Jan 1 to April 14, 2013, 184 bomb blasts killed 626 and injured 1,159 around the country. Targets include residential blocks, mosques, shrines, markets, schools, government offices and military bases. The dead include children and young people with their lives ahead of them, like the brave, smiling activist Irfan Ali — @khudiali. #Bostonstrong was a trending hashtag on twitter after the Marathon bombings. I visualise #Pakistans trong, facing terrorists who are now targeting political rallies in the run up to elections — Peshawar, April 17, 15 killed. Quetta, April 22, 6 killed.

Bombings are rare in the USA, but violent attacks are all too common. Horrific mass shootings just last year include the massacres at a Colorado cinema, a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin, and an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. In 2011, firearms killed 8,583 people, according to FBI records. Firearms are multiplying faster than the population rate; over 310 million guns will soon surpass America’s 312 million population.

Last May, a drive-by shooting killed 16-year old Charlene Holmes, my daughter’s classmate at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), walking home with her sister a few blocks from our rental in Cambridge across the river from Boston.

The previous year, just after we came to Cambridge, a bomb targeting a police officer’s residence went off near my daughter’s school in Karachi. A teacher and her young son at the next school were killed. Dozens were injured. My daughter’s friends witnessed the blast, the shattered windows, the blood. “It’s the same everywhere,” she commented after Charlene died — “People talk about how much better it is in America, but people get killed here too.”

A major difference is how the authorities respond in Pakistan and America.

Although Charlene’s killers have not been caught, the police here are trained, equipped and enabled to take their job seriously. Rogue officers who kill suspects and fabricate evidence are the exception, not the norm. In general, the criminal justice system works.

The authorities’ responded seriously to the Boston marathon bombings, using technology to track down the suspects whose photos they released to the public. They enforced a city-wide lockdown, encompassing neighbouring towns, after the suspects went on the run, killing a police officer at MIT, a mile from where we live. Public announcements warned people to stay indoors; schools and colleges, shops and public transport, were shut down.

“Understand the caution, but still question decision to keep the city of Boston locked down. Feels like surrendering our lives to terror,” tweeted Global Post executive editor Charles M. Sennott, who has covered many bomb blasts around the world as a foreign correspondent.

“What would happen if we locked down a city after each attack. We’d be in perpetual paralysis,” commented Pakistani journalist and television anchor Quatrina Hosain.

True. But if Pakistani authorities took crime as seriously and responded as aggressively in the first instance, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the situation we now face. Pakistan must urgently end the impunity with which criminals operate; train, empower and enable police to do their job effectively; ensure that the criminal justice system works efficiently; introduce a witness protection plan at least.

Unlike Pakistan, America values the lives of at least its own citizens. Which is the least any government should do, regardless of its disregard for “other” citizens’ lives.

Chillingly, it turned out that the bomb suspects lived at the other end of our residential lane with its small two-and three-family houses. On Friday morning, police cordoned off the area and evacuated residents. My husband and neighbours were transported on a public bus to a nearby police station, allowed to return after the action shifted to neighbouring Watertown. That’s where the younger suspect Dzhokar (Jouhar), 19, was nabbed later that evening, from a dry-docked boat in a backyard.

Dzhokar had graduated from CRLS in 2011, the year my daughter joined it as a freshman. CRLS is a well reputed public high school with a diverse student population including Bostonians (prominent alum include actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) besides students from many countries – immigrants as well as children of visiting faculty and fellows at nearby universities like Harvard.

We never ran across Dzhokar or Tamerlane. But a young man walking his dog told me that he often ran into them. A Pakistani friend’s son, now in Dublin, who was on the CRLS wrestling team, expressed his surprise. Dzhokar, he said, “was well known amongst the wrestlers, did very well, came back a few times to train us. Seems odd to think he ended up like this.”

It was Robin Young, the popular host of National Public Radio’s Here and Now show, who introduced a poignant human dimension to the public discourse about the younger bomb suspect. Dzhokar, she realised, was the “beautiful boy in tux” who had attended the prom party she hosted at her house in 2011 for her nephew Zolan Kanno-Youngs.

“Heart is broken. I know Dzhokhar Tsarnave, one of best friends of my nephew, who says he never in his life saw this,” she tweeted.

Zolan wrote for the Boston Globe about his friendship with Dzhokhar, who never gave him a “bad vibe”.

“He was a captain on the Cambridge Ringe and Latin wrestling team, he was in the National Honor Society, he earned a scholarship to a four-year university. It seemed no one ever had a problem with Dzhokhar,” he wrote, recalling numerous instances where Dzhokhar had helped him out as a friend.

Initially, he wondered what kind of “monster” was responsible for the bombings but he never imagined that it was his friend. When he saw photos of the suspect on TV, he in fact tried to contact Dzhokhar to tell him that the police were searching for a lookalike. He is still in shock, unable to comprehend what could have driven his well-liked, laid-back friend, a star student, scholarship winner and athlete, to kill and maim so many innocent people, throwing away his own life and potential.

“People don’t want to hear that Dzhokhar was such a popular kid, and I understand that,” says Robin Young. “What he’s accused of is monstrous. Evil. And we want that person to fit the narrative of loner. Outcast.”

But he wasn’t. Clearly, as Zolan commented, “something had happened”.

P.S. What is the difference between a person who commits a mass shooting or detonates a bomb, I wonder? Both have similar motives: instill fear and panic; kill innocents. Both are driven by hate, twisted minds, and warped ideas of reality. How do we address these issues? How do we prevent such incidents from taking place? Brute force is clearly not the answer. So what is?

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A block down from where the suspects lived.

  Trial case
Convicting and punishing Pervez Musharraf will likely be a case of easier said than done for even the steroid-driven judiciary of Pakistan 
By Adnan Rehmat

Musharraf literally in the dock, finally. Who would’ve thought?

The former dictator has outdone himself in his trademark swagger by managing to miscalculate his strategy to return to Pakistan after four years in self-exile — and instead of finding himself mobbed by his 750,000 Facebook friends, he lands in the prickly lap of the very judges who he shamelessly hounded.

The former man of the uniform is now at the mercy of the men in robes, awaiting his comeuppance in a court of law.

But the lipsmacking spectacle of a hapless general (a ‘chala hua kartoos’, a ‘spent bullet’, as he used to mock the men of his own ilk who criticised him when he ruled with disdain) in the iron clasp of the judges (the proverbial long arm of the law) notwithstanding, will cold, blind justice shorn of emotions be done in Musharraf’s case? Will Pakistan finally be able to cross a legal milestone that, because it cannot be crossed, has allowed the Constitution to be treated as ‘a piece of paper’ by at least four men in khaki?

The jury will be out for a long time on that.

Even though eager judges want to sit in judgment of their own interests in squaring with the man they love to hate, and have the power to temper the tantrums of the mighty as they have demonstrated in recent years, Musharraf being eventually treated before the law as a case of being more equal than others looks to be the likely outcome for more than one reasons.

Musharraf has at least four cases against him — a charge of treason for staging a coup and toppling an elected government in violation of Article 6; charges of murder and abetment in the assassinations of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and former Balochistan governor and chief minister Akbar Bugti; charges of deposing the judges en masse and locking them up; and charges of imposing an emergency and defying court orders against its declared illegality.

All charges are astonishing by way of their grave natures, for they are all grounded in mass public experience, occurrence of these patently mala fide acts in full public view, the fact that they are against a former army chief and the unprecedented circumstance that the former military dictator is now under arrest and seemingly set for a grueling grilling in aide of convicting him.

But convicting and punishing Musharraf will likely be a case of easier said than done for even the steroid-driven judiciary of Pakistan, which has long waited for this day to try their tormentor-in-chief. Weigh up the proclamations with the practice: witness the seizure of the former army chief’s property and bank accounts on court orders, declaration of him as a proclaimed offender and fugitive from justice, and issuance of red warrants against him through the last government to aid the Interpol in nabbing him and hauling him before the courts.

And what happens when he lands in Pakistan of his own foolish accord in defiance of common sense and sincere advice from high and mighty interlocutors? First a prompt bail to allow him to lead his party into elections. Then another bail. And another. And yet another.

And then, yes, cancellation of one bail and order of his arrest, but it was Musharraf who foolishly, if unsurprisingly, worsened his litmus test of obeying the law by fleeing the court instead of surrendering and promptly seeking bail after arrest, which he would’ve been granted on grounds of genuine security considerations.

It was only after the media had a ball with the story of Musharraf refusing to give himself into the custody of the police, evoking ridicule and public glee at his plight, that promptly hardened the stance of the judiciary which swiftly added another charge — this time under the Anti-Terrorist Act — to his basket of woes. It also ordered the police to evict him from his home and lock him up in jail.

From there onwards, the push back from the Establishment to the public ‘humiliation’ of the former army chief that everyone had been expecting, finally started to manifest. Musharraf was not sent to jail, as ordered by the magistrate, but instead to a newly purpose-built police officers mess. He was back after just one night, there in his home, for a much more comfortable arrangement of home arrest.

Another two days and the caretaker government bluntly refused to be the requisite primary mover of the case of treason against Musharraf, leaving it to the next government to do so if it so desired. We all know what any new elected government headed by either PML-N or PPP will do. Or PTI, if the tsunami levels Pakistan’s political battlefield.

Musharraf simply won’t be tried under Asif Zardari’s watch, or for that matter Imran Khan’s as neither was the victim of Musharraf’s 1999 coup. Or even the 2007 emergency.

Musharraf actually wanted Imran Khan as his prime minister instead of Shaukat Aziz and Zardari was freed by Musharraf and pardoned, along with Benazir Bhutto and others, under the National Reconciliation Ordinance. So why should they try to become heroes when in this game you can only become a martyr?

And however much Nawaz Sharif as the next prime minister may fancy fettering the former dictator with Article 6 just as the former army chief had literally handcuffed him on a plane, he will be in the untenable position of a conflict of interest as formally instituting a charge of treason on behalf of a federal government in a case in which he personally was the victim and Musharraf the perpetrator.

Reading the tea leaves, the Supreme Court has already expressed doubts the federal government is interested in justice on this count. But of course, for all federal governments, politics comes first (especially the self-preservation variety) rather than the niceties of the demands of justice that may reduce them to the status of victims.

So, the treason case is going nowhere without a willing government ready to help a former army chief hang because judges want it. That day is not for our lifetimes, for you can hang a prime minister but you cannot hang a general.

Also, Musharraf’s 1999 coup was not just endorsed by the Supreme Court (including Iftikhar Chaudhry on its bench) but also validated by the parliament. So that’s water under the bridge unless the honourable judges are in the mood of indicting themselves as abettors.

Short of a confession, proving Musharraf’s complicity in the sad assassinations of Bhutto and Bugti is a procedural labyrinthine and unlikely to throw up a red-hot conviction. The investigations over the past several years in these cases have led nowhere and it’s hard to see Musharraf arriving at a conviction in this case however strong any circumstantial evidence. The only benefit of Musharraf being formally tried in this case is to derive the pleasure of seeing a former dictator hauled over the coals of a painful judicial process just as poor Benazir Bhutto, Asif Zardari, and Nawaz Sharif were, as were many other politicians, at the hands of the Establishment. It’s a case of optics over opprobrium here.

The only case where Musharraf is relatively easy prey for the judges and ripe for punishment is the imposition of the state of emergency in November 2007 and the prompt order of the Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry declaring it illegal and ordering the state machinery to not comply with Musharraf’s orders. The parliament also refused to give it legal cover, rendering the act an offense liable to ready punishment. The Supreme Court’s order was respected in the breach and the state machinery under the control of Musharraf as president and army chief promptly detained over 70 judges across the country and reinstalled PCO judges under Justice Dogar. But the problem with convicting Musharraf in this case will be also punishing abettors in the emergency case.

And that includes the current army chief.

Possible? Azad adaliya notwithstanding, simply not possible.

That Musharraf is a monster and managed to mangled Pakistan’s polity, doing deep damage to it is hardly any secret. That he deserves severe punishment is also necessary. That there is the need to resort to the proper legal mechanisms to this end that are fair and transparent are inevitable for the ends of justice and rule of law.

That this is easier said than done given Pakistan’s history and tradition is a reality. As is the fact that the civil-military equation in Pakistan despite strides forward in recent years is not a settled issue, is the stark truth and therefore a Rubicon yet to be crossed.

That Saudi Arabia, more than the United States, is a benevolent patron that has deep interests in Pakistan’s Deep State and supports it is an equation that will not change soon. That the sands of Arabia can blow in favour of important Pakistanis is a thinly veiled secret. The jurisdiction of Pakistan’s emotional judicial process does not extend beyond the Arabian Sea. That Musharraf’s ageing, ailing mother needs him in Dubai before elections is also in “national interest.” And as we know the national interest prevails. The judiciary can, at best, make Musharraf do the rounds of courts for a while. Musharraf may yet get a safe passage. Again. The law, and Article 6 of the Constitution, will have to take a breather.

Yeh Woh
Wither young Pakistan?
By Masud Alam

Data collectors have an important job to do: they help quantify a problem and give it context so that it’s easy for decision makers to understand it and to do something about it. You cannot rush into a disaster hit area without first finding out the extent of loss, the nature of help required, known hazards in the area, maps, equipment etc. if you are to save lives and help survivors.

Little bits of data become the colour-coded pins on a giant map, telling the big story, giving information, feeding knowledge.

Like today’s economy and defence, rescue is knowledge-based too, and it follows, so is governance. And knowledge is what we don’t have. To begin with, we do not know, even within a couple of millions’ range, how many we are. We are more than 180 million, is all we know for sure, on the basis of a far-from-decent census completed 15 years ago. For all other demographic and cartographic data on our country, people, and its resources and environment, you need to go to a UN agency or a foreign NGO.

Equipped with information, foreign institutions and charities know us a lot better than we do. And so it was British Council, Islamabad, that informed us four years ago that we are a youthful nation, with more than 60 per cent of our population under the age of 29. Its research also told us that we’d already entered a crucial period of around 50 years in which we could become a prosperous country on the strength of sheer number of working hands, like South Korea and China have done before us.

But demographic dividend doesn’t come for free, it cautioned us. The nations that have in recent history benefited from a youth bulge did so by putting their young ones in schools and technical training institutes. If we fail to channelise this great reserve of energy, the consequence is not just a passive waste of opportunity, but active anarchy and bedlam on our streets.

In recent weeks British Council has come up with a follow-up research on youth that tells us that we are now a little more advanced on the path to destruction. We have failed to fix our education system and we have failed to provide opportunities for advancement. More and more young men and women are likely to be illiterate or semi literate and jobless or under-employed as they enter adulthood; less and less is the level of motivation, innovation and entrepreneurship; and pessimism is fast becoming a defining trait of the next generation.

In 2009 Pakistan’s youth felt they lacked the skills they needed to prosper in the modern world and, even the well-qualified were struggling to find decent work. Disillusion with the political system was high as young people lost faith in core institutions. They felt angry about corruption and the failure of their leaders to bring about positive change.

Today they seem to have all but given up on Pakistan. A good 94 per cent believe things in Pakistan are headed in the wrong direction, nearly 70 per cent have no trust in the federal government and political parties, half of them have unfavourable opinion of provincial governments, assemblies and police force, and only one in five thinks their personal economic situation could improve next year.

Forget your gripes of today and let’s suppose our next government is as weak, inept and corrupt as the ones before it. Where do you see this huge bulk of undirected youthful energy going five years from now? Will blaming the military, politicians, right or left wing, democracy etc. make the outcome any less painful for us? It’s our children we are talking about, can we afford to give up on their future? Faced with an historic urgency can we continue to buy into the theory of ‘sluggishness of democracy’ that enables the crooked ‘democrats’ to buy more time to steal state resources?

In the cacophony of pre-election days you are hearing a lot of talk. There are those who talk about our collective agonies and failures, but only as a capricious child and they blame someone or the other for all that is not well. And then there are few, very few, who talk wisely as grown-ups and turn their power of judgment upon themselves and take responsibility.

And here lies the dilemma for any people making the difficult transition to democracy: To elect the wise and the responsible as representatives of people, the people must have an appreciation for wisdom and responsibility. Election 2013 is another test of people of Pakistan. Have we as a nation entered adulthood yet? Have you as a voter?

masudalam@yahoo.com