Lahore Bombing Kills at Least 30, Wounds 100
A car bomb exploded in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Wednesday morning, killing at least 30 and wounding 100. The death toll could rise. The bomb targeted Pakistani security and intelligence offices, and likely was a Taliban response to the military campaign against them in the northwest.
Lahore is a quintessentially Punjabi city, and there is an ethnic dimension to the fighting against the largely Pushtun Taliban by the largely Punjabi national army.
Pushtun refugees from the northwest are said not to be welcome in Sindh and Punjab. Sindhis launched a strike on Monday to protest displaced Pushtuns coming into their province. The Muttahiddah Qaumi Movement (MQM) that organizes many of the Urdu-speakers in the southern port city of Karachi is secular and has a longstanding vendetta with immigrant Pushtun clans in the city. It also advocates keeping the Pushtun refugees in the northwest.
In a decision important to social peace within the Punjab, the Pakistani Supreme Court ruled that the Sharif brothers, leaders of the Muslim League-N, can now again hold high office. Punjab was roiled this spring by MLN supporters who both wanted a reinstatement of the Supreme Court that had been dismissed by the military dictatorship in 2007 and a return to provincial rule under the MLN with the Sharifs able to hold political office.
The Pakistani military maintained that its campaign against the Taliban in Malakand district was continuing on Wednesday.
Samina Ahmed asks if Pakistan can win the hearts and minds of the over a million Pakistani displaced persons who have fled the fighting in Swat. If not, the current operation could be sowing the seeds of future conflict in Pakistan.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/27/2009 12:22:00 AM
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2 Comments:
Disintegrating perhaps, in time?
Not disintegrating, but the longtime survival does seem at risk. The State is held together by a thin fabric of national myths to which the military was once central. These myths are now dissolving, and ethnic rivalries are coming to the fore. The local 'war on terror' always had an ethnic side to it, but until now the catch-all term 'Taliban' concealed the real target of much of the state repression -- the tribal and rural Pakhtuns. With the decision of Punjab and Sindh governments to limit migration, the true motivations have been laid bare for all to see. This is significant, because growing up in Peshawar, we had several large influxes of Afghan refugees, at one time numbering over a million just around greater Peshawar, yet such insensitivity to their plight was simply unheard of. Even now, about 80 percent of the refugees have been absorbed by families and well wishers. It is only the remaining few -- the most destitute -- that are being discriminated against in this contemptible manner.
See: http://pulsemedia.org/2009/05/27/crises-that-loom-beyond-the-military-action/
Juan, you write:
"The Muttahiddah Qaumi Movement (MQM) that organizes many of the Urdu-speakers in the southern port city of Karachi is secular and has a longstanding vendetta with immigrant Pushtun clans in the city. It also advocates keeping the Pushtun refugees in the northwest."
I'm not quite sure why you sneak in the word 'secular' into this paragraph. Is that supposed to make the actions of the MQM, which has long been active in terrorism against mostly Sindhis, more reasonable? What has secularism got to do with all of this? Why do western experts always insist on using categories that are meaningless to the context, but feed on the prejudices of their audiences?
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