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COMMENTARY
June 15, 2002
Bomb culture
Paradoxically the terrorist hit on the U.S. consulate at Karachi is a piece of mildly good news. Most certainly not for the victims nor for the terrified staff picking through all the broken bulletproof glass toppled file cabinets and smashed computers. But it should now be clear that Al Qaeda was attempting another "embassy job" on the scale of the attacks at Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam on Aug. 7 1998 which killed between them more than 300 people and injured many thousands. Warnings reaching the Pakistani police mentioned Islamabad and Peshawar as well as Karachi: I would guess that hits planned for other U.S. targets were compromised. The one in Karachi happened just after Donald Rumsfeld the visiting U.S. defence secretary had flown out of the country. It was therefore late. A very massive truckbomb was used from what I can gather much larger than the car bomb that took out a bus that was loading with French naval officers at the Karachi Sheraton last month. This one could be heard all over the city and up to 30 kilometres away. Credit was claimed by a previously unheard of jihadist group named al-Qanoon. But Pakistani jihadists use small arms grenades and minor explosives in tins and bottles; they haven't been up to a car bomb in years. It was Al Qaeda. Yet the terrorist's intentions were defeated by massive reinforcements and roadblocks so that most of the explosion was absorbed by concrete. It shows the Americans did in fact learn something from the East African experience; they rebuilt their Karachi compound as a fortress; and the rapid evacuation and shuttering of other U.S. facilities in Pakistan showed they've learned the drill. They are beginning to get the hang of Al Qaeda and while terrorist attacks cannot be prevented even against the most predictable targets it is good to know they can be blunted. Less than a dozen were killed in Karachi and none of them were embassy staff. It should also be clear to both Pakistanis and Indians that the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf could not have prevented this hit. He had no conceivable interest in letting it happen. Likewise no conceivable interest in letting jihadists nail targets in Indian Jammu and Kashmir for the foreseeable future. He alas unlike many of his countrymen fully grasps what the consequences can be. Yet he says to our ears very strange things -- denying for instance that Al Qaeda even might be operating in Kashmir and announcing (through his information minister yesterday) that the long arm of the Indian secret service must be behind this Karachi blast. Such remarks play very badly to the Western audience; but we must understand as even the Indians do that they are intended for purely domestic consumption. They are on a level with the accusations made around the Arab world that Jews were behind the attacks of 9/11. Mr. Musharraf is simply saying what the people want to hear and it is intended to calm them. It is perversely enough a kind or re-assurance that nothing out of the ordinary has happened. (We belong to a much different culture where such remarks are instead associated with paranoid schizophrenia.) There is a kind of reasoning within this apparent madness and let me explain it from a Pakistani point of view: 1. Al Qaeda is our enemy. 2. India is our enemy. Therefore 3. India must be conspiring with Al Qaeda. This is what you would hear if you asked for an explanation in say the Anarkali market in Lahore; but if you can't go there you can read it in "analysis" articles on sundry Pakistani websites. In a previous version of this reasoning Al Qaeda were assumed to be conspiring with the Afghan Northern Alliance even while they were killing each other. The good news is that they -- the "Pakistani street" -- think Al Qaeda is an enemy. The bad news is that as one may learn from reader polls on such as "paknews.com" about half of even the literate population finds this an additional reason to fire a nuclear missile at India. (The natural follow-up question But what if India fires a nuclear missile back? would I should think be met with incomprehension the answer being so obvious. "Well then we fire another nuclear missile etc.) Unfortunately, Mr. Rumsfeld walked right into this analytical trap when he said, officially and diplomatically, in Islamabad, that the U.S. has no direct evidence of Al Qaeda movements into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. (Translation: we merely infer it from all the indirect evidence".) This was gloatingly reported across Pakistan as a proof of the propositions enunciated above. ("You see! They are conspiring with the Indians.") There is really no getting around the absence of a common epistemology between East and West on issues such as these. For even when we're both speaking in fairly clear English the words mean different things. Often enough although the truth is being uttered it is prismatically inverted through a figure of speech. When for example Mr. Musharraf says I have done everything in my power to prevent terrorist strikes against India, he means I have no power to stop them whatever. And he doesn't. The Karachi attack shows the impossibility. But it puts new and powerful pressure on Mr. Musharraf and his police military and intelligence services to go after Al Qaeda. The Indians are not yet at war with them. Al Qaeda is. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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