Not the time for exit strategies

Yesterday Adam drew attention to the situation in Afghanistan and whether people really understood the issues.

Today he came across this article, by Pamela Constable in The Washington Post ,on the way in which the Taliban are increasingly taking control of areas in Pakistan, not just SWAT.

A handful of influential Pakistanis have begun to raise the alarm, warning in newspaper columns or speeches that government and society need to confront the enemy within and acknowledge the difference between conventional sharia and the crude, brutally enforced Taliban version of an extremist Islamist state.

“In Swat they got their system imposed at gunpoint, and now they are ready to Taliban-ize the whole country,” Altaf Hussain, the exiled head of the Muttahida Qaumi Majlis political party, said at a teleconference of Muslim clerics in Karachi on Sunday. Denouncing the insurgents’ abusive and autocratic methods, he said, “We have to decide between our country and the Taliban.”

Washington Post Graphic

The Taleban are within 90km of Islamabad.

Let us remember that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Pakistan is a powder keg.

Exit strategies should not be the issue. The issue is one of ensuring security and keeping the bomb out of the hands of fanatics.

Consider the following:-

A potentially troubling era dawned Sunday in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where a top Islamist militant leader, emboldened by a peace agreement with the federal government, laid out an ambitious plan to bring a “complete Islamic system” to the surrounding northwest region and the entire country.

Speaking to thousands of followers in an address aired live from Swat on national news channels, cleric Sufi Mohammed bluntly defied the constitution and federal judiciary, saying he would not allow any appeals to state courts under the system of sharia, or Islamic law, that will prevail there as a result of the peace accord signed by the president Tuesday.

“The Koran says that supporting an infidel system is a great sin,” Mohammed said, referring to Pakistan’s modern democratic institutions. He declared that in Swat, home to 1.5 million people, all “un-Islamic laws and customs will be abolished,” and he suggested that the official imprimatur on the agreement would pave the way for sharia to be installed in other areas.

When these people talk about ‘un-Islamic’, what they mean is democracy, science, education for women, human rights. They want to live by a primitive code based on a dubious interpretation of the Islamic faith.

This comment by Serum, a regular reader and commenter here, on Adam’s post re Afghanistan yesterday is worth reading as well.

The consequences for the West of Pakistan coming under control of the Taliban do not bear thinking about.

It is perhaps time to recall these words from John Kennedy’s inaugural address:-

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty

To Adam it seems now more than ever we need to stand fast and confront the foe of intolerance which threatens not just the West, but those it enslaves under its yoke as did Communism before it. Now is not the time for ‘exit strategies.

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