A twist to COAS’ statement

Unconscionable elements have given a twist to the remarks of COAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa and lied that he issued an order to display the portrait of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh at Bala Hisar Fort Peshwar. The propagandists claimed that he praised Ranjeet Singh in his recent visit to Peshawar, and alleged that he said that when he was student at Government College Lahore, his professors used to praise Raja Ranjit Singh, and that he was their ideal. By building up their premise they then concluded that real enemy is Pashtun and they are fighting this war for Punjabi supremacy. The fact of the matter is that during Army Chief’s interaction with students at Peshawar, one of the participants was a Sikh student from FATA who requested that he should be allowed to put a picture of Ranjit Singh in Qila Balahisar, as Sikhs have ruled Peshawar during his time.
To give a gesture of goodwill to student belonging to minority community, chief said okay. This is the actual story; and he never praised Ranjit Singh. One can imagine how the vicious elements twisted the simple statement and weaved a story of their own. Few politicians and some self-styled analysts and some unconscionable elements of political parties were critical of the military perhaps on the assumption that by weakening the military they would become stronger. During PPP-led government, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the U.S. Hussain Haqqani was involved in Memogate scandal. One would not know what he did was at his own volition or at the behest of the then government. Whatever the case may be, some over-ambitious individuals and detractors of Pakistan like Hussain Haqqani do not feel ashamed of denigrating their own country and depicting Pakistan’s institutions in poor light.
COAS Qamar Javed Bajwa is known for his uprightness and candidness, and that he does not mince the words. Last year, when the FATF meeting was underway, COAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa addressing Munich Security Conference said that few countries achieved as much success as Pakistan did in the war against terror. He recounted Pakistan’s achievements and sacrifices and said: ‘The Frankenstein’ was actually created by the liberal free world, with willing but myopic cooperation from our side after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Therefore, we all are responsible for making the world population in general and Muslim population in particular, hostage to this extremist ideology.” He referred to March 10, 1982, when President Ronald Reagan, dedicated the March 22nd launch of the Columbia Space Shuttle to the valiant Afghan Mujahedeens or Jihadis and termed their struggle against the Soviet occupation forces as a representation of `man’s highest aspirations for freedom’.
The COAS had further remarked that that 1970s were nothing less than a disaster for Pakistan, but even the separation of the Eastern part of our country and the political upheavals thereafter, did not change the society as deeply as the events of 1979 – the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution. A syllabus was designed in one of the western universities for seminaries wherein jihad was fed to young minds in a concentrated dose without context or explanation with the able intellectual assistance of free world. He said: “An exception was created, using a ‘self defence’ clause to justify declaration of jihad by Non-State Actors. Young men were recruited from all over the world, radicalized and then left and disowned after they had achieved the objective – the success. The country is harvesting what we sowed 40 years back.”