Pakistan Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan’s statement about the Lal Masjid cleric, who had justified the killing of Peshawar school students, should come as no surprise.

Maulana Abdul Aziz is said to have submitted a written apology to the Islamabad police for justifying the terror acts by Taleban that had murdered over 150 students and teachers in a Peshawar school. In a statement in Washington recently, the interior minister said the government therefore would not take any action against the cleric “to avoid any negative consequences.”

I wanted to know if this is Islamabad’s new policy to deal with the extremists. That they would first fan radicalism, support wanton killings, hurt people’s sentiments and then tender an apology. That’s it? They go scot-free to repeat the same thing?

What credibility remains if the top leadership is found to be sympathizer of such violent outfits? If this is not the case then why the proscribed/banned outfits list has been removed from the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) website leaving the recently adopted policies like Nation Action Plan (NAP) redundant? Clause 7 of the NAP reads: “Ensuring against re-emergence of proscribed organizations.”

Regardless of tall claims and targets as mentioned in NAP and after sacrificing 50,000 Pakistanis, regrettably we are still a confused lot. Let’s be frank and true to ourselves. Terrorism will not go away by just exerting the military might. It needs a real jihad against the mindset, which is producing zombies ready to kill/destroy and be killed.

The grand mufti of Al-Azhar University was spot on, while addressing a counterterrorism forum in Makkah, when he linked extremism to ‘bad interpretation’ of the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and called for radical reforms of religious teachings to tackle the spread of extremism.

Masood Khan

Jubail