Milestones in the devolution of Pakistan: Death Penalty now mandatory for blasphemy

The News “reports”:http://thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=173977:

bq. The death penalty is now mandatory for blasphemy, under Article 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code.

The government has been making some noise recently about how they don’t support the ongoing takeover of Pakistan by the Taliban, but their actions clearly speak otherwise. The terrorists had pulled 2 steps ahead of the Pakistan government by introducing a mandatory death penalty a few years ago, but the Pakistan govt. finally woke up and is now closing the “killing it’s own citizens” gap.


While the Pakistan govt. has stepped up the killing, the Pakistan Army seems happier to be blown up by sucide bombs rather than actually fight the world-wide coalition of terrorists slowly taking over most of Pakistan.

They say they fight, but even now it’s obvious that the number of terrorists taking over the Pakistani towns number in the hundreds, while the Pakistan Army numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The most damning fact is that some of the towns taken over had army garrisons with a lot more men than the terrorists coming in – yet the Pakistan Army mysteriously dissolves into thin air as the terrorists advance, town by town.

Conspiracy theory of the moment: The Pakistan Army is setting up the elected government for a fall. The army has close ties with the Taliban, and their coordinated movements with the militants – the army retreats just before any meaningful fighting can take place – suggests they are setting up the reasons to take over with international acclaim.

The farce rolls on…

3 thoughts on “Milestones in the devolution of Pakistan: Death Penalty now mandatory for blasphemy”

  1. Another theory is that, when the army took decisive action and gave these terrorists a beating in Swat and other areas, every major channel and self-proclaimed analyst they brought on air to comment, criticized them for “killing their own people”. This is recent stuff, we people have really short memories.

    Sure there was collateral damage, and innocent civilians died. I don’t mean to use the term “collateral damage” the way it tends to be used in our current zeitgeist, to belittle the terrible losses suffered by innocent people. Each and every civilian death is a terrible tragedy, but one that’s impossible to avoid if you’re waging a war in a city’s streets and alleys.

    If you talk to people who live in Swat, many people welcomed the army’s operation, because the militants were hammering nails into people’s heads, and digging up graves to hang corpses, and such things. But they tend to be torn about having artiliary shells and full-on warfare taking place in their own streets. Which is why I believe that the army, despite numerous faults and all, did the right thing. By showing a little restraint and going with the peace deal, they let the militants loose their ideological footing, because the militants claimed they were butchering people to bring Islamic laws to the area. This way, the militants agreed to withdraw from Swat without an extensive fight undergoing in that area killing tens of thousands of locals.

    Seriously, the militants stop one army supply truck, and our headlines read that the “militants prevent the army from entering Swat”. That’s very misleading and alarmist, because the army’s already present in Swat, and the title makes it sound like the militants halted an entire army offensive right on Swat’s border. In reality, I don’t think any logical person familiar with the facts would claim Islamabad’s about to fall. If the US was really concerned about this stuff, they should stop their drone attacks, because hundreds of people have died, and while the US claims they killed many terrorists using drones, from the rubble of leveled out buildings, come the corpses of poor farmers and their children. And that’s where these militants get their recruits from.

  2. You’re saying in effect a few TV stations and a couple of english columnists were all it took to get the Pakistan army to retreat?

    Than you go on to say it’s ok to give up parts of the country as long as the capital is safe?

    Doesn’t make sense to me – it’s as big a failure for the country if it hands over control of any part of the country to terrorists.

    The Army might be hiding in a couple of corners of Swat, but the Taliban are in charge – which is the important point.

  3. Hey KO, sorry, I didn’t realize you’d commented back. You might want to think about putting in some comment reply notification mechanism, like how Youtube sends you an email letting you know someone else replied in a conversation/thread you’d participated in.

    My opinion was that in an environment of criticism and resentment, making a deal might have seemed like a good option at that time. Given the passage of events and the insight and clarity that hindsight tends to add, the peace deal might not have been the best thing looking back now. Looks like it gave the militants a chance to dig in all these trenches, ammo dumps, and everything. This strategy of starting a new operation every now and then, displacing a bunch of people, and then going back and letting the militants re-emerge seems very schizophrenic.

    And then our wonderful president announces the army’ll hit waziristan next, and the locals living there are justifiably fed up, because they’re still waiting to get the compensation promised to them, for their houses and stuff that got destroyed in the 2004 army op. And then we wonder why the militants find it easy to get recruits from these areas.

    I didn’t meant to imply that giving up any part of the country’s alright as long as it’s not Islamabad. My point was that our immature news coverage made it look like the militants were going to capture Islamabad next week or something, and impose their own govt on everyone, which didn’t seem like a very prescient and immediate possibility.

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