New Delhi, January 30: Well known Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid has said the country is going through a series of ”multiple crisis” that have all come together.
”There is an economic crisis, which is of an enormous magnitude now and there is a global crisis that is going to be a part of that. There will also be a very serious domestic economic crisis,” Mr Rashid said in an interview to a TV news channel.
”Inflation is running at 15-18 per cent, there is acute joblessness, there is no power, nothing. There is a political crisis- this is a coalition government run by the People’s Party but they are deep in trouble with their coalition partners and the opposition is ganging up,” he said.
Mr Rashid added that there was a foreign policy crisis- a lack of relations with India and with Afghanistan the things were very tense, there was terrorism and there were extremist groups who the army have not been able to curtail and there were floods also.
The author of ‘Taliban’ and ‘Descent into Chaos’, Mr Rashid written after Punjab Governor Salman Taseer’s assassination, more importantly after the response of lawyers, Mullahs and civil society that ”This has unleashed the mad dogs of hell.
We Pakistanis are at the edge of a precipice.” When asked a question on Taseer’s death, he said, ”What I think shocked Pakistan is the reaction of the millions of people in support of the killer of Salman Taseer, in sympathy of the killer, the people who are supporting the blasphemy law and refusing to amend it.” When asked that whether Taliban has actually infiltrated large swathes of the country, Mr Rashid said, ”I won’t say the Taliban, but their kind of thinking. And people want simple explanations for the crisis. People are not prepared to accept complicated explanations as to why they have been made jobless or why they are not getting an education.
They want that this is all America’s fault or this is India’s fault or this is somebody else’s fault. People don’t want to analyse their own, self-made, crisis.” He added that the people of Pakistan were not cowering.
People have come out but the point was that civil society was very much on the retreat.
”It is very frightened. There is all sorts of talk about more killings of human rights workers, NGO workers, journalists and others. But a few people are coming out and are resisting.
When asked that was there a fear among top generals that if elite soldiers could kill the Governor of Punjab, then may be an elite soldier could kill army generals as well, he stated, ”No well I don’t know about that and I don’t know what the mood is within the top generals but there is speculation in the media so as to why the army did not issue a public statement of condolence for somebody who is after all the representative of the federation in Punjab.
It was not a political position, it was a state position.
This has surprised a lot of people.” ”I don’t think so. There obviously is a very strong minority wing of extremists who have been involved in wars on both sides of our borders, who have been pushing, are pushing for the overthrow of the state, who want to bring about some kind of caliphate. And there is a very small liberal part of the society which is trying to express itself and which is trying to come back.
But there is a vast silent majority which is not expressing its view but which is certainly not extremist and realises that extremism is not the answer to their economic or educational or job problems,” Mr Rashid said when he was asked that whether Pakistan become an extremist and fundamentalist country.
–UNI