[Dawn] THE other day, little Suleiman entered the room and announced: "It's very dangerous! It's very dangerous!" Since my grandson is only two, I was amused and asked his mother what that was about.
Chuckling, Sheila said he was repeating what she told him when he was about to get too close to the stove, or stick his fingers into a power outlet. And this is how children are brought up: parents warn them against dangers, and teach them about the consequences of their actions.
When they grow older, they learn rules at school, and the concept of reward and punishment guides their actions. Society imposes its own regulations. When we were growing up in Karachi in the 1950s, cops would stop us and make us get off our bikes if we were riding them after dark without lights. Now, of course, few are even aware of this legal requirement.
Over the years, I have watched the growing disconnect between cause and effect. In my 50 years of adulthood, I have seen people getting off for all kinds of crimes and misdemeanours ranging from theft to murder. And as the state's authority has receded, criminals of all kinds have been emboldened.
A few days ago, a friend was held up at gunpoint on the outskirts of Karachi, and relieved of his cellphone, wallet and watch. A common enough occurrence in a crime-ridden city, and hardly worth reporting. But what was revealing was his subsequent experience at the local police station: the officer on duty told the victim that he could take him to where the criminals came from, but if he arrested them, they would be released in a couple of hours.
It is this virtual immunity from punishment that has made Pakistan such a dangerous country. When nobody has to pay a price for criminal behaviour, there's nothing to stop them from robbing and killing at will. Even if criminals are occasionally arrested, they are usually let off by an incompetent judiciary, especially if they are accused of terrorism.
Without the kind of deterrence normal states deploy, groups like the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and the Taliban are free to slaughter at will, safe in the knowledge that even if they are caught, they will soon be released. Why should young men like the ones who held up my friend work for a living when they know that crime pays and that the political party they belong to will have them released?
Today's violence in Karachi is being fuelled in large measure by the immunity provided to criminals from different ethnic groups by the political parties that formed the ruling coalition. In return, these gangs pass on some of the proceeds of their crimes to their political masters. The police are helpless because they know that even if they arrest these thugs, they will soon be released.
Meanwhile, the people of Karachi suffer frequent 'protest days' when the city is forcibly shut down. But there are economic consequences of these 'peaceful and democratic' closures. Ever since the mid-1980s when the MQM acquired a stranglehold on the port city, industries have been moving out.
Later, as some parties acquired firepower to counter the MQM muscle, the situation got worse and today, many industries have moved to Punjab or the Gulf from the country's biggest city. With these businesses have gone thousands of jobs. So when young people can't find work, they should demand relief from the cynical politicians who control the city's destiny.
With laws being observed only in the breach, politicians, bureaucrats, generals and judges have all cashed in, knowing that there will be no sanctions, either legal or social. Businessmen avoid taxes as a matter of routine, generally in connivance with tax-collectors. Legislators and ministers don't pay their utility bills.
When Shahrukh Jatoi allegedly shot Shahzeb Khan dead a few months ago, he must have felt secure in the knowledge that his powerful daddy would protect him. His bad luck was that the murder caused such a hue and cry in the media that the chief justice called for immediate action. The fact that young Jatoi was able to flee allegedly with the help of airport staff speaks volumes for the culture of entitlement that has taken root in Pakistan.
This disconnect between cause and effect has also infected our security establishment. When they created and used jihadi groups to further their agenda in Afghanistan and Kashmir, our generals were acting against internationally accepted norms. In the former theatre, they were aided and abetted by the CIA in the 1980s. Clearly, they assumed that using Islamic militants was a no-risk, win-win tactic. Decades later, these terrorists are ravaging the country with little resistance from the state.
In the tribal areas, we continued the colonial policy of using the lawless territory as a buffer zone. But by not integrating it fully within the state, we allowed criminal activity to flourish. Now we are surprised that it is home to several nests of terrorists.
Clearly, we did not understand the long-term effects of uncontrolled tribal autonomy, and are now paying the price.
New York was once known as the crime capital of the United States. This image was transformed when Mayor Rudy Giuliani hired Bill Bratton as police commissioner to implement a policy of zero tolerance. There was a crackdown on petty crimes like graffiti, public drinking and urinating, and travelling free on the subway system. Soon, the overall crime rate declined, and has stayed relatively low.
What this "broken windows" theory, developed by George Kelling, shows is that once the authorities begin to make even petty criminals pay for their acts, society becomes safer. If -- as happens in Pakistan -- lawbreakers know they are safe no matter what they do, peaceful citizens will be at risk.
In New York, it took one determined mayor who had the political will to clean up his city. In Pakistan, sadly, all the power brokers are too busy lining their pockets and protecting their interests to bother about the rest of the country.
When the state is unable to arrest, prosecute and sentence known leaders of terrorist outfits, this sends a clear signal to the rank and file that they are free to kill and rob. It also sends a signal to the police to lay off. Until the link between criminal action and retribution is restored, we will continue wringing our hands over the daily slaughter taking place around us.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/10/2013 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
ya reap what ya sow.
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/10/2013 12:38 Comments ||
Top||
#5
This report dovetails nicely with the SPLCs recent report about the rise of Right-Wing Hate Groups. (Ex-Military religious bigots) What a cowinkeedink?
#10
Christians have dominated the military from day 1.
Christians have dominated the American population, being as America was originally settled from Christendom. Nonetheless, Dino Shomomp7692, the first graduating class of West Point was 50% Jewish. Granted, there were only two graduates, but even so.
I received a friend request on Facebook and a twitter follower.
The person requesting those claimed to be part of the Catholic Worker movement. Now, I am no longer a part of that community, which was 25 years ago, but I have known a few of those folks.
Consider: they're pacifist, followers of Christ, believing that Good Works helping the poor is the work of the Lord. What's not to like, right?
Consider also I moved past that many, many years ago abandoning most of those precepts, such as non-violence as a means of making peace, the concept itself of social justice, only to later learn that while looking good and sounding good on paper, those concepts are both potential social calamities for the poor.
But I am a sentimental human being, and I thought it was good to maybe reconnect to see where individuals such as the requester were, or how far they had gone down those roads. The people I knew sure as hell knew how to throw a party, besides.
Only a day or two later, around the the time of the anniversary of Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision, the guy posts this missive in which he said that antiabortionists were actually warmongers because they wanted to suppress womens rights enough so that women could spawn cannon fodder for the wars of the plutocracy.
Squeezing those concepts through your brain is a little like trying to look out of one skull socket with both eyes.
Unlike the great massive majority of conservatives, I know how to deal with crazy people. You really have two choices.
You can chuck them out of your life summarily and without debate and never make contact with them again. In this method, you get all the safety you desire and nearly zero personal cost. But on the downside you don't get to look into the face or hear the voice of madness.
Or you can listen to them, consider the ideas they have, perhaps even debate them at some moment. An intelligent individual can do this all without even fearing whether such contact will taint them, or that their ideas could overwhelm your own good sense.
Then you tell them they are out of their minds and to either start drinking heavily or to get help.
I have nothing against crazy people. They exist and they have as much right as anyone to express their views. The same with the majority of the population, crazy people are harmless, probably less than one percent of them represent a threat to others or even to themselves.
Unfortunately, mentally ill people are about to become victims of the political class as discussions become more focused on making mental health issues a matter of public record for the purpose of purchasing a gun. I read Saturday morning an opinion piece by a Soviet immigrant now residing in Florida that gun registration is bad but mental health background checks are good. All of which has been proposed and advanced in some states in an effort to prevent tragedies such as the Sandi Hook school massacre last December.
Criminal background checks, for warrants and the like make sense, but the rest of it, protective orders, misdemeanor convictions for assaults going back a lifetime do not.
By the way, I am a prohibited person, not permitted to buy a gun through a federal firearms dealer because of a now 19 year old protective order. Getting the order lifted would cost me a month's pay, and the cooperation of the other party. Only one of those two conditions are insurmountable. My rights have been taken away from me forever for something that isn't even a crime.
Does anyone think that mental health background checks would not be abused the way the law is now with gun buying? Do you really want the same people who interpret law to impose a lifetime ban for misdemeanors to make the same decisions with regard to your mental health? But it is law now, the court have endorsed this madness repeatedly to the degree that the only way real justice can be served is from the barrel of a gun.
And we have friends who agree that it is a good thing I can't protect myself. To those, I say: wait until the state or a pissed off ex-wife and her lawyer in a divorce declares you as mentally ill. I'll be laughing my ass off.
Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com
Joe's kid comes cross/wise with somebody working at the school. Joe goes down there to find out what happened, he is directed to the principles office. As a way to prevent abuse, school policy requires somebody from the school clinic to also attend. Now at this point it does not matter if Joe is calm or loud, the school clinic has been deputized to determine if Joe is dangerous, and if labeled as such can summarily end Joe's ability to own firearms. Joe has challenged the State on something. Puts a lot of power into a couple of people, and if they decide Joe was irrational - even if he was not - he can appeal, hire a lawyer, take some tests, then go put his word above a certified health worker and a school principle with a judge or other local magistrate. All on his own dime and time.
Also, I had an appointment at a hospital and Obamacare had just passed, so they had new paperwork for me to sign. In that contract was a brief statement saying my records could be opened if I ever made a threat IIRC any government official or foreign dignitary. So if I wanted to tell the King of Sod to go FOAD - there they go.
#3
My girlfriend's mother was recently murdered at breakfast by her 26 year old, diagnosed severely schizophrenic son.
Everybody knew of the problem. The county therapeutic aid specialists agreed that she and her mother were at risk of violence at some point, and she'd been trying for a year to find some sort of treatment and residence for him so that her father didn't throw the lad out in the street for the safety of the rest of the family, where he would have died -- even when medicated he had the life skills of primary schoolchild. However, there was no way to force him to accept treatment once he was of legal age, and so when the Archangel Michael told him to kill Grandma, he calmly got a knife and stuck it into her back. Then he sat outside to wait for the nice policemen, as his mother told him to do while his grandmother bled to death in her husband's arms.
That is the kind of mental illness that needs to be kept away from guns and locked up. Not someone with an angry soon-to-be ex-wife.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Dawn] THE other day, little Suleiman entered the room and announced: "It's very dangerous! It's very dangerous!" Since my grandson is only two, I was amused and asked his mother what that was about.
