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4 January 2015

The willful blindness of Pakistan’s civil population

By Massud Ebady
Jan 03 2015

A truly incredible spectacle is the Pakistani civil population ignoring and at times justifying their government’s sponsor of factions that perform terror which result to innocent civilians dying in Afghanistan and Kashmir. In Afghanistan the Pakistani government supports Taliban and other anti-government factions such as the Haqqani network through the ISI. The operation is quite sophisticated and it has been for many years now, however the government is but of a fraction of the population of Pakistan. The population of Pakistani in 2014 is roughly 188 million, can the majority overlook the murder of innocent human beings in Afghanistan and Kashmir? There are few Pakistani individuals who have voiced their concerns however their arguments have been nullified, voided and looked frowned upon by the rest to the point where they had to leave Pakistan for security reasons.

Pakistan has mastered propagating religion as a coating around their geo-political agenda, as the Americans and British did prior to them. Since Pakistan deems itself an Islamic ideological state to its population it makes this process almost seamless. This strategy they have implemented has created a willfully blind population towards their government’s action, and when the population hears about innocent children and women dying in Afghanistan they turn the cheek as if it was justified for them to die. Even if some find the humanist element link to the innocents who have died, the propaganda through religion easily destroys the link and any remorse.

The state sponsoring factions outside of Pakistan and the heavy influence of neighboring nations through military means has also shifted an enormous amount of power from the civil government to the Pakistani army. The most influential Pakistani Prime Ministers have been Generals of the Pakistani army and a few of them won over the country through a coup d’état. This also may explain why the government of Pakistan is spending $ 8.127 Billion dollars on military expenditure while roughly 40 million live below the poverty line. The more humanist and logical approach would allocate that budget otherwise; the money should have been spent on social welfare and not on the military.

We are also now witnessing some of the repercussions of this policy Pakistan has adopted and it was recently though the Peshawar attacks. The use of religion for a deeper political agenda always has double edged sword, the other side of the sword in this case is the TTP. Although a small population, which is gaining support rapidly because it is utilizing the extremist approach the government rooted into the population. There are already popular Pakistani Muslim clerics that are not condemning the Peshawar attacks. We can now only hope there is a revamp in policy that can end the innocent slayings of Afghans which occur on a daily basis.

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