Blowing up bin Laden’s house

As the night fell on Saturday February 25, 2012 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the mechanised backhoes moved in and started demolishing the house bin Laden had lived for seven years (or maybe five) and was killed in by the US Navy Seals last year in a midnight raid. The Pakistani military and the ISI have decided not to keep the building as a reminder of their abject incompetence or as a shrine for the al-Qaeda sympathisers. By Sunday morning the diggers were taking away the debris. I am sure the plot will be turned into turnip filed or something.

While the ISI can turn the three-storey house with ten-foot wall around it into turnip field it is going to be a tad bit harder to put the fundamentalist genie back in the bottle, house or no house! It is the ISI who decided to ride on the Dragon of hatred i.e. fundamentalist Islam. Now the Dragon wants to devour the rider but before it does, the Dragon wants to burn every design and every dream that the rider has ever had. At the end of the day, the monster nurtured by hate is proving to be larger than the designs by the "oh-so-clever" boys hiding behind the very discreet entrance near a hospital in Islamabad.

Every day there is yet another bomb blast, 24 people dead here, 13 people dead there, 46 maimed and so on and on. The media is getting tired of reporting on the carnage. It seems that people are forming calluses on their hearts and maybe their perceptions. The world becomes an unbearably dangerous place when mayhem, deaths and cruelty do not register. That is what is going on in Pakistan. And how did it all get started?

Back in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to protect its client regime it all seemed like a just war and a just cause. By then I had moved to the US. I along with many other people saw resisting the Soviet occupation of a poor country by a superpower a valid and just cause. I stood on the street corners in Bloomington, Indiana and passed out little leaflets. I am sure that did not do any good but it made me feel good and maybe it informed a few people about the occupation. So on the surface, Afghan Resistance was for a just cause, a just resistance but underneath there was a game that was steeped in mystery, intrigue and hubris that would plunge Pakistan into the chaotic situation that lingers on till today.

In early 1980, the Pakistan military appointed Lt. General Akthar Abdur Rahman as the director general of ISI. If there is a single person who is responsible for making the Afghan fighters into a truly lethal force and a melting pot of religious hatred, General Akthar would be that man. He had an overly rigid fundamentalist view of Islam and an uncompromising view that his version of Islam (a Deobandi strain) was superior to all comers. He brought something else to the table, he was closely allied with Zia ul Huq who eventually became the president of Pakistan and set the country in the current ruinous road. Gen Akthar was constantly at the side of Zia ul Huq and died with him in the mysterious plane explosion on August 17th 1988. Mohammed Hanif's "A case of exploding Mangoes" gives a fictionalised version as a form of autobiography. Fascinating read, that!

The good Generals decided to unleash a faith based war in Afghanistan. They reasoned with some justification that great emotional tumult can be caused by tapping into the deep religious feelings of the largely Pashtun tribal folks. Religion in Pashtun environs is something of an alien mix to me. I visited the Khyber area and what was called the NWFP in the '70s as a very young vagabond well before the battle lines were drawn. The place is still burnt into my memories. There was the great big chaotic haggling circus at Kissahkhani Bazar where these hardened guys walked around with guns on their shoulders but wearing "khol" in their eyes. Khol is a form of eye shadow that people use in that part of the world. When I was very little my uncle tried to put Khol in my eyes. We call it surma in Sylhet. That was the first and the last time. It is probably OK for a little boy. But, these guys with their guns and made up eyes looked sinister. They made it much more sinister by trying to kidnap young boys! There were towns in the NWFP where the men trolled for boys on their Suzuki motorbikes or walked up and down the road holding hands. They did all these in a sporting sort of way. God and sodomy sharing parts of the same mind! Into this strange mix enters our good General Akthar.

The ISI probably did not really understand the depth of passion that they were about to arouse. But, arouse they did. The Generals including Zia ul Huq believed that the Soviet 40th Army will roll on to Pakistan after it had pacified Afghanistan and get to the warm water port of Karachi. It was perceived as an existential threat. So, the ISI set out to execute an elaborate plan under the code name Operation Cyclone to wage both armed and psychological warfare. First and foremost they cast the Soviets and the government in Kabul as infidels. However, based on the conduct and behaviour, Babrak Kamal's folks in Kabul were probably no more infidels than the gun totting, boy hunting tribal marauders. They got some religious scholars to declare a defensive jihad on the Kabul government and the Soviets. The Soviets made things easier by committing unrelenting atrocities and using the Hind helicopter gunship without any discrimination whatsoever.

Billions of dollars came ashore from the US and the Saudi regimes. The US war effort and funding was solely inspired by a semi-literate and semi-drunk Congressman named Charlie Wilson from Texas. No one is quite sure how this rather strange guy came to influence the fate of the world so irrevocably. Saudis were bent on exporting Wahhabi theology along with its troublesome youths so they can fight and shed blood some place outside the Kingdom. General Akthar then started to choose who will get the largess based on Pakistan's strategic need and not based on Afghanistan's national interests. The net result is that the ISI trained over 85,000 Mujahideens most of whom fought for one or the other warlord and never formed a cohesive Afghan soldier identity. Pakistan fuelled the tribal divisions precisely because they wanted a weak Kabul centre so that they can manipulate the government in Kabul and preserve the so-called "strategic depth". In this fractured world came the ideologues in the form of Osama bin Laden, Aymen al Zawahiri and many other gun-toting and Quran thumping radicals.

They do not want to say it but it is almost certain that the ISI arranged for Mr. Bin Laden to be ensconced in a large house next to its Military Academy at Kakul. They may or may not have worked in conjunction with the civilian government but the signatures are of the folks who wear civilian clothes and carry out extrajudicial murders in the name of Pakistan's national security and preserving the faith. They wanted to keep the symbol alive because if nothing else an occasional video from Mr. bin Laden in his perfectly coloured black beard would keep the money flowing from the dumb Americans in Pentagon and the Foggy Bottom. Now, that the dumb Americans have killed off the symbol why keep the house?

But the real issue is can they somehow demolish the 'hatred genie' that is killing Shias, throwing battery acid on women and causing mayhem in neighbouring India or is it just that house?

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Kayes Ahmed lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA with his three dogs. He runs a small yet global apparel and design business based in Boulder.