The terrorist attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery café in the diplomatic quarters of Dhaka on July 1 and 2 triggered a chain reaction. The Bangladesh government banned Doctor Zakir Naik’s Peace TV from being aired in the country, implying thereby that the doctor-turned-preacher may have inspired the brazen hostage-taking incident. India’s Maharashtra state government, too, went on a similar offensive against Dr Naik, after sections of Bangladeshi media reported that one of the Dhaka cafe attackers had been inspired by Naik’s speeches to carry out the attack. A Bangladeshi newspaper, The Daily Star, had claimed on July 6 that Rohan Imtiaz, one of the five militants involved in the Dhaka cafe attack, ran a propaganda campaign on Facebook last year urging all Muslims to be terrorists, quoting a speech by Naik on Peace TV. On her part, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called on every school, college and university to “create a list of absent students and publish it”. “We will be rigorous,” the premier said. “We must uproot militancy and terrorism from Bangladesh,” Hasina said in a televised address to the nation, urging unity against criminal elements.  To her credit, she has on many occasions publicly articulated her secular beliefs, particularly in the aftermath of the killing of two self-declared atheist professors. “If anybody thinks they have no religion, OK, it’s their personal view…,” she had said. “But they have no right to write or speak against any religion…When you are living in a society, you have to honor the social values, you have to honour others’ feelings.” The prime minister’s impassioned appeal for unity and the resolve to deal with criminal elements with an iron fist notwithstanding, her rule since winning the controversial 2014 election is itself marked with inconsistencies and high-handedness. The Awami League’s near autocratic rule and secular ideals –coupled with a penchant for clubbing Islamists with the opposition parties, particularly Khaleda...

  If we ever needed a damning indictment of ugly geo-politically motivated military interventions, Sir John Chilcot delivered it on July 6 — The Iraq inquiry. It also triggered a string of apologies that reveal hypocrisy and self-preserving expedience of some of Tony Blair’s former colleagues. “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort. … the notorious dossier presented in September 2002 by Tony Blair to the House of Commons did not support his claim that Iraq had a growing programme of chemical and biological weapons. … the people of Iraq have suffered greatly,” Chilcot said in his UK Inquiry Report on Iraq. Most of Western media and diplomats based in Islamabad used to scoff even at the hint of flawed and concocted justifications for the war in Iraq but it was interesting to see how most of the CNN/BBC reporters — who pounced upon every bit of UK/USA intelligence to explain and justify the Iraq war then — took a U-turn once the report was released; claims by Bush and Blair seem to be pale in contrast to what Iraq has gone through since 2003, said one of the CNN star correspondents. John Chilcot has literally exposed the fallacies that masked the illegal war on that country; with up to half a million lives lost and a raging sectarian war, Iraq continues to bleed even today. It saw over 250 vanish in a horrific suicide bombing only two days before Sir Chilcot released his report. “I will never apologise for the decisions I took in 2003,” Blair adamantly told the media the same evening about a war that former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had already declared illegal. Blair’s Deputy Prime Minister, Sir John Prescott (May 2006 — June 2007), consented with Annan and offered “my fullest apology, especially to the families of the 179 men and women who gave their lives in the Iraq War … any actions needed the endorsement of our...

The Pakistani state’s strategic outlook is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. Security policy drives overall foreign policy rather than the other way round. The establishment has spearheaded this agenda. One reason the prevailing strategic paradigm seems under no real pressure is the increasing irrelevance of ‘strategic liberals’ (I am referring to strategists with a liberal view on geopolitics, not liberals writ large). Given their knowledge of strategy and liberal orientation within this domain, one would expect them to spearhead the challenge to the status quo. The state has been myopic in keeping them at bay. But they haven’t done themselves any favours either. The Pakistani liberal discourse on strategy tends to present the realist framework as something of an anathema. Realism personifies the ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’ mindset. States tend to be realist beings — those in conflict zones more than others. They see logic in defining national interest in hard security terms and manoeuvring to secure themselves as they see fit — irrespective of normative concerns like morality of their choices. The liberal paradigm challenges this mindset on multiple counts — generally the least effective in influencing policy is what I see Pakistani strategic liberals employ the most: declaring this mindset paranoid, self-contradictory, immoral, etc. (Western policy discourse on Pakistan often takes this line as well). Pakistan’s current policy has led to its growing isolation. They are not wrong. Taken too far, realism leads to these perversions. And the establishment has developed somewhat of a habit of living dangerously close to this zone. Yet, while a challenge merely pointing to these fallacies and highlighting liberalism’s normative superiority may be powerful for public intellectuals of liberal leaning, it does little to effect realist policy minds. Not in Pakistan, not anywhere else. Achieving this requires engaging the state’s brand of realism in its...

This month nine years ago, the world watched in awe as the Lal Masjid brigade terrorised Islamabad citizens and shopkeepers, including Chinese business owners, before being smoked to death on July 10. This day is a grim reminder of how things can spin out of control if state institutions ignore, promote or condone violations of law by non-state actors. The government had dithered for months before going for the kill. The residents of the Lal Masjid had refused to submit to the writ of the state, taking up arms, assuming the role of moral vigilantes and thereby not only harassing local and foreign individuals but also challenging the state’s authority and refusing to surrender. This is what necessitated Operation Silence after nearly six months of soft-peddling a group of clerics led by Maulana Aziz and his brother Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, both of whom had challenged the state’s writ. Both the ruling elite as well as the populist former chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, pandered to these non-state actors. By doing so, a dangerous precedent was set for years to come. Operation Silence was an unavoidable, though delayed, need of the hour in view of the rebellion by Ghazi and Maulana Aziz. Timely action — enforcement of the rule of law — coupled with political foresight probably could have prevented the bloodshed, and most probably the backlash that the country suffered in the aftermath of the operation. Ideally, nothing beyond police action and the arrest of the clerics and their followers would have been needed if the authorities had acted in a timely manner — a purely law and order issue against a couple of hundred baton-wielding youth who had become symbols of defiance to the state. The post-operation circumstances were even more detrimental to the state. While Abdul Aziz was detained initially along with more than 600 students, they were all released on bail in the following months. These were people who had been considered rebellious enough to deserve a...