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By Zain Nisar

"They died from natural causes; they died in alphabetical order." This was an official entry in a record about deaths in a nazi concentration camp. Nobody is keeping such records, even fake ones, about Pakistan now being machine-gunned and bombed to smithereens in Afghanistan.
Who is responsible for the hundred of Pakistan massacred in cold blood in Mazar-I- Sharif and Takhta Pul? And possibly more to be butchered when Kandahar falls? Dostum, Hazaras, Americans?
One can go on blaming any foreign possibility or group for the massacres. But that would amount to evading the real question, which is: who among us Pakistan is responsible for this carnage? Indeed, who were the "leaders" who in the first place exhorted the Pakistan to go to Afghanistan and kill fellow Muslims?

Pakistan have been fighting for the Taliban ever since they emerged on the sense in the mid-nineties. Under the ISI, it was a controlled operation in which the Jehadis played second fiddle to the farmer.However, as Pakistan's institutional meltdown worsened during the nineties. The Jihadi organizations become more assertive. They broke out of the confines of the NWFP, and spread their tentacles through out the country. They set up recruitment centers in the cities, gave training to boys, and, what is more, did something the ISI was incapable of doing: they provided a religious justification for their partisan interest in having a Taliban in power in Kabul.
All said and done, the ISI had not made the fratricide in Afghanistan appear a picnic; nor did it present the Taliban rule as an Islamic utopia. This letter phenomenon, which romanticized and debased the concept of jihad, was the work of some religious parties. This romanticization of jihad was the gift of small minds to Pakistan. Jihad is a serious affair. If it is war, then it must be conducted with the seriousness a war deserves. It cannot be sustained by emotions, nor can it produce results without mobilizing a society's and state's full economic, manpower and intellectual potential.
There is no such thing as a part-time jihad. You cannot be a part-time shopkeeper and be a part - time Mujahid anymore than you can be a part - time colonel in a professional army. As it finally turned out, the jihad as conduced by our religious parties had a third world touch to it - indiscipline, noise, chose, and the inevitable disillusionment. No jihad can be conduced in a situation where the state is not a party to it. In Pakistan's case, the government was on one side and the presumptuous Jehadis on the other. A nation divided ten to ninety, or even half-and-half, should be the last nation or earth to undertake a jihad. A jihad is conducted by a nation that is turned by can-accepted leadership into 'bunyanun marsoos' a well of steel. Parties, which secure less than five per cent of the votes, are hardly the stuff that can achieve this feat. Lacking any understanding of the intricacies of a modern war, these parties presented to the raw minds of Pakistani boys of jihad that was fun.
This is not to doubt the seriousness with which Pakistani volunteers undertook their mission: this is merely to point out that those who raised the slogan of jihad and pushed half - trained boys into battle lacked any understanding of the dynamics of a modern war. A collective jihad cannot a private affair.No political party can declare it, nor can a preacher a mosque. Ask the JI

people, and they will tell you how Mulana Maudoodi was right on Kashmir. They would even give you pure ' fighai' reasons for proving how the war in Kashmir in 1948 was not a Jihad. Here, in Afghanistan, the Pakistan Taliban were killing Muslims, and our clerics were exhorting Pakistan young men to go and take part in this slaughter which had no aim higher than that a keeping the Taliban in power. Does in Islamic "system" really need enforcing? And can you really enforce it by making war on fellow Muslims?In the decade-long real Jihad - the straggle for Afghanistan's liberation from the Russian infidels - the Taliban played no part. The credit for the liberation of Afghanistan went to Mujahiin Groups led by men like Ahmed Shah Massoud, Rabbani, and Mujahddin and, to a lesser extent, Gulbadin Hikmatyar.

The Taliban, on the country, waged war on those who had, waged war on the Russians. They killed no Russians; they only killed fellow Afghans. They razed villages and destroyed orchards and showed mercy toward their enemies, who were the enemies?
Fellow Afghans. It was to this kind of "jihad" that our religious parties sent our young boys to be slaughtered by the Northern Alliance and bombed into oblivion American gunships in the hill hole called Qala-I- Jangi. Not all the volunteers were tribesmen; hundreds of them were from the urban areas of Punjab and Sindh. They did not have the pleasure of killing one infidel; they killed, or were killed by, fellow Muslims. Now they are holed up there in the barren fastness of Kandahar, waiting for the death, while those who urged them to Jihad and turned them into cannon fodder have confined their own part in Jihad to issuing press statements and observing black days.
It is time our religious leaders showed the real sprit of jihad and went into Afghanistan themselves to rescue our boys instead of merely applying to the government of Pakistan having sumptuous iftars in the safety of Pakistan


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