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Allies turn the heat on Pakistan

Increasingly, the story of the West’s complicated love-hate relationship with Pakistan is becoming less and less about love, and its reaction to the Lahore terror attack on Sri Lankan cricketers illustrates how much the post-9/11 honeymoon has gone sour.

If Islamabad expected a degree of support from its western allies in its moment of grief, it must have been terribly disappointed. It is hard to recall very many occasions — none, in fact, in recent memory — when a country still reeling under the impact of a terror attack has been so rudely treated by its allies as Pakistan after the Lahore tragedy.

Beyond the mandatory expressions of condemnation, there was little sympathy for it. While the country was still trying to make sense of what had happened, it found itself dragged through the mud and lectured on why instead of sympathy it needed some good old-fashioned flogging. The anger in London and Washington — arguably Pakistan’s closest allies — appeared directed not so much against the terrorists as against the Pakistan government which was effectively accused of bringing it upon itself.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband lambasted Pakistan’s feuding political leadership, saying if it did not get its act together the country would face a “mortal threat” from internal militancy. “I think that the degree of political disunity that exists at the moment is only contributing to the problem,” he said and warned that a “grave situation” was getting “worse.” The warning from America was grimmer with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton branding Pakistan the “nerve centre” of international terrorism. Terrorists in Pakistan, she confided, could be plotting another attack even as she was speaking. “We must recognise that one, tiny remote corner of the world — the borders of Pakistan — is the nerve centre for extremists who planned 9/11, the bombings in Madrid and London, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the recent carnage in Mumbai … They are planning similar attacks right now,” she told NATO Foreign Ministers in Brussels.

There can be no quibbling about what has been said about Pakistan’s nexus with extremist groups and its approach to terrorism. But doesn’t all this plainspeaking sound so different from the line we heard after 9/11 when the equally valid criticism of America’s record of flirting with elements like Osama bin Laden was contemptuously dismissed as an attempt to deflect attention from the attacks themselves? The argument then was that raising questions about what caused 9/11 at a time when America was under attack meant playing into the hands of terrorists, if not actually justifying acts of terrorism. The former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, repeatedly and angrily warned against the danger of what he was fond of calling “moral equivalence” when confronted with terrorism.

So, what’s changed?

Again, much has been made of the fact that the Lahore attack happened in the “heart” of the city — a “proof,” it is argued, that the Pakistani state has lost “control.” But, hold on, what about 9/11? That too happened in the heart of New York. And didn’t 7/7 happen bang in the heart of the British capital?

If anything, given America and Britain’s intelligence and security apparatus vastly superior to Pakistan’s (routinely dubbed a “failed” or “failing” state in the western media), the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks represented a far more serious failure of both intelligence and security than the Lahore attack.

Meanwhile, the British media have been bubbling with dark conspiracy theories based mostly on bazaar gossip including a suggestion that Pakistan may in fact have “engineered” the attacks to cast itself as a victim of terror.

A lot of play has been given to speculation why the Pakistan cricket team left its hotel seven minutes after Sri Lanka’s “thus avoiding” the terror attack. The sub-text, clearly, is that it might have been an “inside job” with the Pakistani cricketers being deliberately held back while the terrorists set out to attack the Sri Lankans.

The Times went to town on it with a two-page spread under the dramatic headline, “Seven-minute delay that kept Pakistan’s players from harm.” The questions being asked, it said, were: did the militants know of the delay? How did they get to know the route that the Sri Lankan team was to take? Did they know that the vehicle they attacked was not the Pakistan bus? And how did they manage to overwhelm the police and escape so easily?

Conspiracy theories may make interesting reading but must they be reported at such length and so seriously? Similar theories about 9/11 were dispatched (and quite rightly) with withering contempt by the same media that now seem to be hanging on to every word uttered by any nutter. Certainly, not a very nice way to treat an ally.

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