Share this story!            

EDITORIAL: Dangers of speculating about the Karachi car bomb

A car exploding near the six-storey building of the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) on Tuesday morning has killed three and injured at least 15 people. One person giving himself the eponymous all-Baloch name, Chakar, rang up to say that the explosion was carried out by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). Another man, equally eponymously, Azad, rang up to say that the BLA had not done it. Neither man could be identified with past BLA “announcers”. While commentators on the TV networks Tuesday night chose their favourite candidates for the blast, the police said they hoped to get to the terrorists soon.

The PIDC neighbourhood is notorious for bombings. The culprits in four or five bombings in recent years, carried out by mujahideen groups, have been caught and convicted. They included men from the Harkat Jihad al-Alami who killed the French engineers; and Jundullah from South Waziristan who had tried to kill the Karachi corps commander. But this time around, our analysts were not willing to pin the act on the religious fanatics who could have been alienated further by the rise of the MQM in Karachi. The BLA involvement was taken into account only to include the United States and Russia as foreign “destabilisers”, with India lurking in the background.

India has not been counted out. In recent days, there has been an apparent resumption of “tit-for-tat” activity between the ISI and the RAW. A spike in allegedly ISI-inspired incidents in Kashmir was followed by “cycle” bombs in Lahore arranged allegedly by RAW, which was followed by motorcycle bombs in New Delhi (ISI), which was followed by the kidnapping and thrashing of a person from Pakistan’s High Commission in New Delhi (RAW), followed by the latest blast in Karachi (RAW). India is also linked to the twinning of strategy between Russia and the United States. Russia presumably wants to protect Central Asia and the Caucasus from Pakistan and is accused of having past networks in Balochistan which it can revive to pre-empt Pakistan. The United States is said to hate the idea of the Iranian gas pipeline and Gwadar Port, and is accused of instigating the blast to sabotage the two projects on the eve of the pipeline talks to be held in Tehran.

Some TV channels have stated that they have actually come into existence to oppose the “Western media onslaught against Islam”. At least one of them thinks it is actually waging a war against the United States. India is included for good measure because it claims to have proof of RAW’s activity here in the past. (The host could name only one convicted RAW agent, Sarabjeet Singh, as proof.) By the same yardstick, the Indian side can surely show hundreds of Pakistani identity cards found on terrorists caught on their side; and Ahmad Shah Massoud’s friends in the Kabul government can rerun video clips of major-rank infiltrators caught by them and shown on TV during the Afghan civil war. Matters worsened when ex-ISI chief Hameed Gul was called upon by the channels to bind together the entire phalanx of anti-Pakistan states who could have done the Karachi job: India, the United States and Russia in collaboration with a pliant government in Kabul.

A TV channel focusing on India called upon former Balochistan IG, Shoaib Saddal, to fill in the picture but he was chary of committing himself. (Even in the Balochistan suicide-bombing that killed the Hazaras in 2003, he abstained from naming RAW.) This time he accepted that the BLA was born when some Baloch leaders were in exile and sent money from there to get their followers to carry out acts of sabotage in Pakistan. He insisted on saying that investigators, who know well that pipelines are blown up in Pakistan on an almost daily basis, must consider all possibilities.

The BLA was considered in light of the statement issued last week by Sardar Akbar Bugti that the government was about to launch an offensive against him and that he was worried that this time he could be target-killed. Did he get the BLA to do the job? In fact, goes the city mindset, a sardar can get anything done by his tribal followers without spending much money. So the common speculation is that he probably used the name of the BLA through an eponymous “announcer” but that, because of fragmentation within the Baloch movement, the “other side” rebutted the claim through a similarly named announcer. The conspiracy theory is strengthened by the fact that no publicly known Baloch personality condemned the blast on the first day.

The most favoured “slant” is of course the grand conspiracy against Pakistan involving big regional and global states against whom Pakistan can do precious little and with whom Pakistan is trying to either consolidate old friendships or mend its old broken fences. The analysts tend to build the big scenario in which India and the United States are trying as “strategic partners” to damage Pakistan, but when asked to follow through on details they recoil from their own imagination. If India is in with the United States, why should it take part in something done to sabotage the Iranian gas pipeline? Even if we accept that India is only pretending to be interested in the pipeline, why should it be committed financially to projects inside Iran together with China with whom it has formed an informal anti-US bloc together with Russia? And if India and the US both hate Gwadar, why should India be in the anti-US grouping?

The unpleasant truth is that the ISI-type analyses pretending to see the Indian pugmark everywhere have come to grief in the past, although one cannot deny that the ISI and the RAW were on the warpath not long ago. In almost 90 percent of the cases when we suspected India or even the Israelis, the culprits turned out to be Pakistanis or Pakistanis sympathetic to Al Qaeda. This time too we are into our Pavlovian reflex, but the best way to deal with the latest act of terrorism is to keep an open mind and see where the investigation leads. We have always got the bombers; only they were never the ones we had suspected. *

Home | Editorial

Share this story!