Daily Times

Sir: “The world must realize that we may not like the face of Mullah Omar — but that is how life is, that is what Afghanistan is” — ex-President Pervez Musharraf summed up what’s going on in post-9/11 Afghanistan in one sentence. He was quite frank in his interview with The Wall Street Journal, terming Pakistan’ role in nurturing the Taliban and allied militant groups operating in Afghanistan as a legitimate counterweight to India’s presence there. Earlier, he accepted in another interview that Pakistan-based militant groups staged attacks on the International Security Assistance Force and US forces in Afghanistan. Musharraf stressed upon the present government in Kabul to share power with the Taliban if it wishes to see peace in the country. I saw not much condemnation of these ‘revelations’ coming from the man who directed the Afghan war theatre from Islamabad. So, is this an acceptable formula to bring peace in a country, to let terrorists share in government? Why don’t we use the same formula in Pakistan wherein a number of religious and sectarian outfits are operating with and without the establishment’s nod? It has been proved time and again that nurturing militants, however noble the cause, always costs governments dearly. Milking snakes will always turn them into serpents looking for flesh, not milk. Whether it is different so-called Mujahideen factions during the Afghan war of the 1980s or Afghan warlords in the post-Taliban period or the al-Nusra front and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, or Pakistan-specific Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jundullah, Harkatul Mujahideen — all remind us of only one lesson that we never learn from history. We like to repeat the same experiment in the expectation of different results. How pathetic as it is costing millions of innocent civilians lives across the world, but who cares.

MASOOD KHAN

Jubail

Saudi Arabia