Afghan-Fazlullah nexus

Ever since he fled from his Swat stronghold after humiliating defeat at the hands of the security forces, Fazlullah has been hiding on Afghan side of the border and his group of militants have launched several attacks in Chitral and Dir at Pakistani security check posts killing a number of personnel.
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 Interior minister Rehman Malik may have revealed that fugitive Swati thug Fazlullah is being backed by some Afghan government elements. But no revelation could it be. His alien props were indeed more than evident as he surfaced abruptly in Swat, after years-long mysterious sojourn in Afghanistan, to challenge the state writ. It is only the simpletons in the media and the commentariat who were taken in wittingly or unwittingly, and rather impressively, by his postures of bravado and defiance. And it is the holy fathers then ruling the roost  in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa who for their own religiosity had fallen to playing ball with him.

But the worldly-wise knew that he was a proxy of alien powers. And so must be the Pakistani establishment, although one remains bamboozled till today why this official hierarchy had kept quiet then and had not spoken out the homely truths about this operative wearing the deceptive cloak of a cleric. In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan by the US-led invaders, a master-dupe Sufi Mohammad, the father-in-law of this chairlift operator, seduced some ten thousands of wretched Swati young greenhorns to fight on the side of the Afghan Taliban. Sufi put Fazlullah in command of this literally gun-fodder. 

And the two together led (rather misled) those unsuspecting Swati youths into Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban wanted no part of this raw youth force and insisted on Sufi to take it back home. But he was adamant. Nonetheless, the moment the US-led invasion of Afghanistan ensued, Sufi pissed in his baggy pants, abandoned his force of the Swati youths, and fled back to Pakistan, where he begged the Pakistani authorities to take him into protective custody, fearing being lynched by the kith and kin of the innocent Swati youths, whom he had betrayed and left behind to be killed or to end up in the private jails of Afghan warlords.

 But Fazlullah disappeared right inside Afghanistan. What safe house had he landed in there, one wouldn’t know, though our agencies may be knowing all this but keeping mum for reasons they know the best. Nonetheless, not so reticent is Amrullah Saleh, a former chief of Afghanistan’s premier intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security. And he keeps roaming about nowadays, boasting of how deeply had his intelligence agency infested Pakistan, especially its tribal areas and the adjoining settled territories. Anyway, when after years of disappearance in Afghanistan Fazlullah surfaced in Swat he had turned from a mere chairlift operator into a devilish rabble rouser and a defiant challenger of the state.

With his unobstructed use of FM broadcasts, which earned him the sobriquet of Mullah Radio, he started propagating his message of hatred and revolt against the state, and steadily putting on display a formidable financial and muscle power. Ironically, some of our own pundits, compulsively given to an unrelenting antipathy to our security establishment, then went to town crying that his increasingly aggressive postures against the state had had a helping hand from our own military. The factuality nevertheless came to the public fore once he threw the armed challenge to the state. After a very tough fight to vanquish him, the military stumbled on huge caches of his weapons, all of foreign makes, mainly of Indian origin.

 All through the fight, the clandestine pipeline originating from Afghanistan for money and weapons supply to him kept working overtime. And once he was flattened on the floor in the powerful military action, he faced no obstruction either to escape to reunite with his masterminds in Afghanistan. It was from there that soon after his escape he rang up BBC to tell that he had repaired to Afghanistan where he was safe and secure. Since then, he has spoken to the foreign media many a time from there. His whereabouts are thus not unknown.

Hence, instead of beating about the bush, the Pakistani establishment must ask for his repatriation and the handing over of hundreds of his brigands holed up along with him in the Afghan safe havens. They all are fugitives, who have not only committed sedition against the state but also the crimes of murders, rapes, and gross human rights violations against our people. No leniency can be shown to them all.
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