“Peace Under Fear Is Suppressed War” - 2
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“Greed and corruption at the top tend to foster greed and corruption at all levels. People think, 'If those guys are just out for themselves and break the rules to grab what they can get, then I’d a fool not to do the same.' ” - French historian Alexis de Tocqueville
Another silly logic advanced by leaders like Imran Khan, Munawar Hassan, Maulana Fazlalur Rahman, Maulana Samiul Haq and others of the like is: “Did we not conduct a number of military actions in the past 10 years? What was the result? Terrorism and more terrorism.” Imran Khan even gives a number of 6,000 when he talks of military actions. Could a country’s leadership be so dumb as to talk like that? The man needs a hair-cut and induction in the army for a brief period to see how it functions.
The answer to this question was given by none else but Imran Khan himself in one of those unguarded moments when his inner goodness got better of him. Immediately after Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year old girl, was shot in the head on October 9, 2012, he called her "a courageous daughter of Pakistan.” But, when asked on television to condemn the Pakistani Taliban, his answer was: “Who will save my party workers if I sit here and give big statements against the Taliban?” as reported by The Economist of October 13, 2012. Sir, this precisely is the whole truth. If you cannot speak the truth, then silence is gold.
Life is not a bowl of cherries that one may pick and choose whatever and whenever one wants. Good and evil are all mixed up here. It is a fact of life that in the eradication of evil, a good portion of good also suffers. Parents love their children, but often they severely chastise or punish them too; when afflicted with a disease, patients often get subjected to painful treatments; surgeons do not stop doing surgeries, even amputations, because surgery is extremely painful to the patient, or that it is inhuman; soldiers are trained to kill the enemy though killing is a bad thing; in the recent Japanese Tsunami, at one stage when the nuclear reactor got damaged, a possibility arose to evacuate almost 40% of the total Japanese population, including everyone living in Tokyo. In order that the coming generations may live in peace, it is imperative to bring those to justice who foul with life. It is the preservation, and the values of life that matter most.
A country is like a garden where all plants need to be kept in shape; grass properly watered and manicured. Cut are those branches that go too high. Weeds are diligently rooted out and are burnt by using a toxic material. Parasitic ivies often manage to climb up lush green trees, and if ignored, they tend to suck out every nourishment of the tree, and ultimately cause it to die. At the end, the ivy also dies. The question is: Why? Because it was parasitic, it had never learned to give anything back to the tree. It was an eternal taker. Those who do not give anything, they never grow, neither spiritually nor otherwise. Terrorism is that parasitic ivy. Either you remove it from the tree of the country, or someone else will have to do it. The choice is clear.
So, please do not allure people with that kind of peace illusion that is tampered with fear. It is essentially your own paralysis. Lady Hagar did not sit idle and pray when Hazrat Ibrahim (s) left here in an arid valley with her baby child. She employed her two legs to make an effort, and her two eyes to stay watchful and look for water. Water is life. Allah rewarded her effort by making it a permanent feature of Hajj and Tawaaf what we call, “Sai”. What an honor for a woman’s effort!
In the last 3,443 years of recorded history, only 268 years have not seen war,” says Durant in “The Lessons of History”. Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350) makes an important point on the need of an effective government when he says, “God sent His messenger and His Books to lead people with justice… Therefore, if a just leadership is established, through any means, then there is the Way of God… in fact, the purpose of God’s Way is the establishment of righteousness and justice… so any road that establishes what is right and just is the road (Muslims) should follow. Democracy if it is true in its representative character and in conformity with the laws justice and accountability as desired and urged by Allah and His Messenger is all right for people.
We are all warned by great scholars like Ibn Khaldun (d. 784/1382) and Imam al-Ghazzali (d. 505/1111), much before the 17 th century Western philosophers of Enlightenment, ( Hobbes, Locke and even the Framers of the American Constitution that “human beings are by nature fractious, contentious, and not inclined towards cooperation”. Therefore, a government is necessary to force people to cooperate with each other, and in everyone’s general best interest.” Focus, therefore, on good governance because you were dying to get it. Setting a world record of creating a Pakistani flag with human heads; or breaking maximum number of coca-nuts with human head is a gimmick. The country needs good schools, proper health centers; people yearn for justice, and drinking water, discipline and order. They want to live in peace. The present government has let loose on them hoards of TV anchors, ill-informed religious zealots, writers whose only knack is to spread hatred and plead the case of the Taliban. PM’s visit to Imran Khan should have taken place 9 months ago, why now? Obviously, it is a political move to counter the military resolve which now appears firm like a rock to deal with this menace of terrorism once and for all as it is Pakistan’s number one problem.
Democracy and poverty cannot live together. The presence of one will end the other. Same formula applies to freedom and debt; the one eats the other. The current leadership lives in palaces, moves about in bullet-proof cars while poor people die either of hunger and disease or on the streets, or in the deserts of Tharparkar.
Lastly, as Haider Ali Hussain Mullick writes in his article, “Pakistan Mustn’t Surrender”, “Peace talks will fail. They are an effort to surrender, and they ignore what most Pakistanis want: to retain control of their country from this deadly insurgency. The people of Pakistan have already been taking a blood-bath. Pakistan is already in a state of siege. According to Haider, “The groups recruit and train ideologues and fighters; raise funds; run seminaries and businesses; broadcast hatred of their political and religious enemies; and get hospital treatment when they are wounded… in 2004, 2006 and 2008, Pakistan’s army signed deals that gave insurgents territory, amnesty, reparations, exemption from constitutional rules - along with time to rearm, regroup and resume their attacks”.
It is understood that the new army chief has made it clear to Mian Nawaz Sharif that his job as PM is restoring law and order as he is in charge of the civilian police. General Sharif’s job is reducing and then eliminating the spreading Taliban menace, not just in the Afghan border areas, but throughout the country where they go under the banner of TTP.” It would be unfortunate that once again the army had to come to rescue the people of Pakistan from terrorists on one hand, and from the incompetent, scared-to-death and even hostile leadership on other hand. The need of the time is that both the civil administration and the military come on the same page, and jointly move against terrorism. Give Taliban a timeframe, demand that they put down their arms, surrender and learn to live like 180 million Muslims who are living in Pakistan, or they would be eliminated. The country’s Constitution is a sacred document. There is a way to improve it, but there should be no way for those who just reject it. Anyone who is familiar with how the army works would also know that the Pakistan army is fully capable of doing the job. Army assumes a different attitude when a new commander gets in the saddle.
Paul Sullivan in his article, “Why Leaders Fail Under Pressure?” published in the Forbes magazine of 10/1/2010, highlights three main reasons, and all those three appear to be present in our leadership in Pakistan. They are: First, they fail because they choke under pressure. Second, they refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, and lastly, leaders become over-confident and begin to indulge in over-thinking about their importance. They grow a culture in which no one dares to challenge them. Power is like alcohol for our leaders. These addicts keep saying, “I don’t have a problem.”
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Why Would Anyone Choose to Smoke?
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
The American Surgeon General’s Report issued on January 14, marking the 50 th anniversary of the historic first Report that came out in 1964, attributes a number of diseases, besides lung cancer, to smoking. The first report had suggested an association of smoking with lung cancer. Meanwhile, new and substantial evidence, accumulated over half a century, has identified smoking as a major cause of heart disease, emphysema, stroke, asthma, colorectal cancer, and type 2 diabetes. Although, the conclusions cited in the current Report are drawn from studies on the US population, they most likely have general and wider applicability around the globe.
The latest report estimated that nearly 21 million Americans had died prematurely during the past fifty years from illnesses directly related to smoking. Of these, six-and-half million died of cancers resulting from smoking. Over 87% of all lung cancer deaths and 61% of those from lung ailments were caused by smoking. A troubling finding is that some 2.5 millions nonsmokers also died of heart disease, stroke or cancer through no fault of their own. They were close relatives or friends of smokers who were exposed to second-hand smoke over long periods by being in close proximity to smoking relatives or friends.
The exposure to second-hand smoke is especially injurious to infants and children whose bodies are still developing and who live in the same household as smokers. An estimated 10,000 babies died from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), traceable to smoker parents, especially mothers. In order to protect nonsmokers from the toxic effects of second-hand smoke, smoking in the US has now been banned from all public places, restaurants, offices, shops, and public transport, buses, planes and railways. However, there is no easy way to protect children or adult relatives who share the same household.
An intriguing finding is that today’s cigarettes are more deadly that they used to be only a few decades ago. The reasons are not entirely clear. The authors speculate that the tobacco companies have redesigned cigarettes and cigars by incorporating ventilated filters and blended tobacco, lowering their tar and nicotine content. Consequently, the new brands of cigarettes require heavy puffing to draw the full pleasure: in the process, the smokers inhale larger quantities of toxic substances.
There has been a long and sustained effort in the US spread over several decades to educate the public, especially the young, about the deadly effects of smoking. The young are especially vulnerable, as the smoking habit acquired during the teenage years is extremely difficult to abandon in later life. Nicotine, the main ingredient in tobacco, is highly addictive and, once hooked on it, cessation is extremely difficult to achieve, just like from other life-threatening drugs, heroin. Women smokers are at an even higher risk than men for disease. According to a recent research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, women who smoke are much more likely to die from lung cancer, as compared to men, as they usually acquire the habit at an early age.
Campaigns in affluent Western countries to highlight the harmful effects of smoking have been exceedingly successful and, since 1965, the smoking rate in the US has declined sharply from 42 to 19 percent of the population and is still going down. The prestigious American Journal of Medicine reported that cessation of smoking has saved more than eight million lives over the last fifty years, and raised hopes of a longer lifespan for many more. Giving up smoking at any age adds extra years of life. Quitting smoking at the age of 40, for example, erases almost all the damage done by cigarette smoking in the previous years.
Unfortunately, as their market share in the Western countries has shrunk, the tobacco companies have now concentrated their efforts on the developing countries where people are less well informed and thus more vulnerable. In an article published two years ago in the Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association, investigators at the Agha Khan University Medical College, Karachi, reported that 33% of middle age males in their survey had used tobacco products, including cigarettes, chewable tobacco, and water pipes. Many of them were drawn from the ranks of colleges students. There is a growing popularity of shisha smoking which is mistakenly considered less harmful than cigarette. The authors lamented lack of efforts to educate the public about the harmful effects of smoking.
While there has been a marked decrease in cigarette smoking in the West, the popularity of shisha smoking has been growing in some countries. Figures collected and published in 2012 by the British Heart Foundation, claimed that there had been a 210% increase in shisha bars in the UK, catering to mostly young men, causing much concern among the British health officials.
Over a span of five centuries, tobacco became the narcotic of choice for many people. It was unknown before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. According to the legend, American Indians introduced him to the dried tobacco leaves, reportedly in October 1492. The tobacco plant was subsequently brought back to Europe by sailors accompanying Columbus. In Europe, its popularity grew enormously as initially an astonishing number of curative and therapeutic properties were ascribed to it. It was even incorporated in the Spanish pharmacopeia of the sixteenth century, listed among medicinal plants derived from the New World. The advent of cigarettes in the late nineteenth century gave a big boost to smoking, making it a convenient and inexpensive means of delivery.
The practice spread worldwide. In India, smoking Huqqa was common place during the twilight years of the Mogul empire among the court patricians. The last Mogul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar and his father, Akbar Shah II, are often seen in pictures smoking Huqqa while holding court. Even the British servants of the East India Company adopted the practice, considering it a benign practice.
The truth about tobacco, as it turned out, was far different than had been understood by the Europeans. Yet, for the British colonizers in America, tobacco cultivation and export became a big profitable business, and smoking became a highly popular habit worldwide. We have no record of how the Native American Indians who had cultivated it for centuries were affected by its use, or whether they had any awareness of its toxic effects. They used tobacco extensively on all ceremonial occasions, as well as for medicinal purposes. However, since their normal life span was relatively short, the deleterious effects of tobacco probably did not fully manifest in most cases.
The New World gifted us a number of new, highly desirable food items, completely unknown before the discovery of the Americas. Among them are potatoes, tomatoes, corn and pumpkins, all excellent sources of nutrition. Unfortunately, tobacco is one item we would have been much better off without.
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