(AKI) - By Syed Saleem Shahzad - Pakistan's security forces should be blamed for Taliban's terror campaign against schools in northern Pakistan's troubled Swat Valley, according to a religious party leader. In Islamic circles this is known as "logic." Other places define it as verbal methane.
Maulana Samiul Haq, chief of his own faction of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam religious party, said national security forces, who have been using schools as "bunkers", were responsible. "Pakistani security forces have actually turned the educational institutes into their bunkers, and that's why militants target those schools," said Maulana Samiul Haq. "Neither the people of Swat nor the people of North West Frontier Province are against women's education," Haq added.
He was addressing members of one of the ruling coalition parties, the Muttehida Quami Movement during a visit to its headquarters in the southern port city of Karachi, the MQM said in a statement.
The Taliban issued an edict in December that private schools must close by 15 January as part of their campaign to ban education for girls. Although around 400 girls' schools last week complied with the ultimatum, Taliban militants continued their campaign of violence and blew up another five schools in Mingora, the largest town in Swat. Over the past year, the Taliban has ordered most of the private schools to close in Swat and has destroyed nearly 150 schools.
Internal and external factors are both contributing to the deteriorating rule of law and mounting violence in the Swat valley, Haq said. He also claimed that foreign intelligence agencies (from India and the United States) have 'sabotaged' any attempted peace agreements with militants in the restive North West Frontier Province.
All of the top Taliban leaders including Mullah Omar studied in Haq's religious seminary at Akora Khattack in NWFP, bordering Afghanistan. For this reason, Haq is widely known in Pakistan as 'the father of the Taliban'.
The anti-Taliban, pro-Western MQM is known to be an anti-Taliban political party which openly denounces the Taliban and has allied itself with Pakistan's secular forces. The MQM recently launched a campaign against the presence of Taliban and pro-Taliban forces in Karachi. The city is home to 3,000 of the country's 17,000 Islamic seminaries and has become a refuge for various Al-Qaeda-friendly militant groups who are are operating there, top government advisor for interior affairs, Rahman Malik warned last November.
Haq denied he was interested in 'Talibanising' Karachi and claimed his visit there was aimed at bringing together different political and religious parties in the city after ethnic unrest there between Pashtuns and Mohajirs last November following the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Karachi is the political stronghold of the MQM, which is the second largest political party in surrounding Sindh province and a coalition partner in the provincial government.