Making of the ransom state

Written by Khaled Ahmed

June 5, 2015 

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/making-of-the-ransom-state/3/

The kidnapping of Warren Weinstein, later killed by a US drone, is part of a spreading pattern in Pakistan.

Weinstein was kidnapped three months after the US Navy SEALs raided a compound in Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden.

only Muslim country where the media is free and where journalists get killed straying into grey areas where the state interfaces with terror. The Muslim mind in Pakistan, as elsewhere, is “bicameral”. There is a part that believes in conspiracies and communicates in Urdu; there is another that is rational and uses English, which doesn’t lend itself to conspiracy-weaving. The self-loathing seen daily in the media is owed to this partitioning of the national mind.

Ideology is coercive and usually produces a uniformity of mind, as was evidenced in the Soviet Union. Among Muslims, it produces the power to disagree with professional seniors on the basis of the “certitude” of ideology. The Soviet man obeyed. The Muslim believer may disobey on the basis of the difference of stringency of faith. A Sunni soldier or officer may disobey after sensing “superior” ideology in al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the IS, simply because they are more hardline. While all ideologies have been coercive, they have also tended to lose their intensity over time. But the faith of Islam becomes more hardline with time. Pakistan, from Jinnah to Zia, appears to prove it.

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