...founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba and its false-mustache offshoot Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The United Nations declared the JuD a terrorist organization in 2008 and Hafiz Saeed a terrorist as its leader. Hafiz, JuD and LeT are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Pak intel apparatus, so that amounted to squat...
continues to baffle and challenge in more ways than one.
The US has just asked Pakistain to rearrest the Jamaat-ud-Dawa
...the front organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba...chief whose detention at home came to an end on Friday after a court refused to extend the period of his confinement. The US has asked the Pak government to charge him for "his crimes", though the harshest response to his release has, unsurprisingly, come from India.
Hafiz Saeed, in his turn, is seemingly mindful of the value of putting greater pressure on the PML-N government which, to put it mildly, is faced with a quandary of its own.
Soon after his release, the Dawa chief touched upon his favourite, and a most sensitive, topic when he told a Friday congregation in Lahore that former prime minister Nawaz Sharif
... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf, then by the courts...
was forced to step down because he had betrayed the Kashmiri cause. The latter is the original ‐ and by no means unpopular ‐ slogan of Hafiz Saeed and his now banned Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the
Army of the Pure,an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is
banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
It shows just how knotty the issue, which transcends national and ideological boundaries, is. Deft handling is required by the authorities here, that must also investigate the serious allegations which led to his being designated a "terrorist individual" by the UN.
Violence can never be condoned and those resorting to it must be held accountable. But away from the calls for justice, the problem requires engagement with various parties from the US to India to outfits and institutions within this country. Not that anyone in Pakistain has ever been fully equipped to deal with all these elements at once but the government was perhaps better placed to address the question sometime ago.
A government which has recently lost its prime minister and is being run by his replacement who has one eye on the next election and the other on the court proceedings against his leader can hardly be expected to cope well with the calls for and warnings against a trial of Hafiz Saeed.
Which brings us to the salient point about the futility of repeating the exercise over and over again: Hafiz Saeed is put under house arrest and set free after a while. He is seen by the outside world, which demands his arrest, as having been ’captured’. Is this impression all that is supposed to be achieved? Someone must think so.
Otherwise, the reruns of the arrest-and-release sequence make little sense.