At a meeting with retired federal secretaries and bureaucrats a couple of weeks back, the President of
Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari reportedly said: "Militants and
extremists emerged on the national scene and challenged the State
not because the civil bureaucracy was weakened and
demoralized but because they were deliberately created and nurtured as
a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives."
Such candid admission by a civilian authority in
Pakistan is certainly fraught with the risk of antagonizing its
all-powerful military, besides, of course, stirring up a hornets'
nest— alienating the right-wing religious zealots farther from
the mainstream politics—but the fact that it has been
made clearly establishes the state of its political confidence.
And interestingly, no `denial' has followed, except, of course, for
an explanatory attempt.
Indeed, it is not the first time for Zardari to make such
out-of-the-box statements: he is Pakistan's first head of the
state to promise a "no-first-nuclear-strike" policy against India.
He also made it plain once that he does not carry any of the
old ideological baggage, particularly, with regard to India.
There is no doubt that the ongoing military action in Swat against Taliban,
and particularly, the public support for it, despite huge displacement of population
and the accompanying troubles, make one believe that whether there is US pressure
or not, Pakistan has ultimately accepted the need for halting further advances of
Taliban into their country. |
