‘Pakistan Bombing no Surprise’

Ze'ev Ben-Yechiel

An analyst at a leading Israeli think tank says he was not surprised by the Saturday night truck bomb terrorist attack which rocked the capital of Pakistan, killing at least 60 people and injuring hundreds. “This is what happens when you try to put many tribes into one state,” said Dr. Mordechai Kedar, an associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and an expert on Arab regimes in the Middle East.



Around 8 p.m. Saturday a dump truck carrying over one ton of explosives was detonated in front of the Marriott Hotel, one of Islamabad’s leading destinations for tourists and visiting dignitaries. The truck bomb was detonated in front of the security gate of the hotel, and the blast, which came hours after Pakistan’s new president addressed his parliament a mere mile away, left a crater 30 feet deep and torched cars in the parking lot. Rescue workers confirmed at least 60 deaths and fear that hundreds more are inside the hotel compound.
"This is a menace, a cancer in Pakistan which we will eliminate."



'No Future for Multi-Ethnic Muslim States'
Dr. Kedar sees the latest terrorist attack in a multi-ethnic Muslim country as proof that regimes like Pakistan are doomed to failure. “It doesn’t work,” said Dr. Kedar. You see the same problem in Afghanistan, in Yemen and in Iraq.”



The population of the modern state of Pakistan is divided into Punjabis (44.68% of the population), Pashtuns (15.42%), Sindhis (14.1%), Seraikis (8.38%), Muhajirs (7.57%), Balochis (3.57%) and a number of even smaller ethnic groups. The Punjabis alone are split along religious lines, with Hinduism and Sikhism competing with Islam as the dominant faith among the group’s believers.



“This is the whole problem of the Islamic world,” Kedar said, “when rival tribes are merged into one state,” which he believes is inevitably “a failing state.”
“This is the whole problem of the Islamic world,” Kedar said, “when rival tribes are merged into one state.”



End of the Road for a Single-State Pakistan?
Dr. Kedar believes that Pakistan can no longer afford the pretense of a single government, and pointed to the United Arab Emirates as the example of a successful multi-tribal Muslim federation. “The solution for each state like [Pakistan] is to divide it into tribes,” and to let each tribe have its own land, like in the Emirates.



“This is why the U.A.E. [are] stable, this is why they can develop” into a first-world economy, he said, “because every state is a tribe.



“Look at Sudan,” said Kedar, where the atrocities committed by Arabs against the black Muslim population of Darfur attest to a violent failure of the groups to coexist under the same flag. “It’s the same thing. They attempted to merge tribes into one state, and they failed.



“The world has to look at the reality and see that,” at least in certain parts of the world, “the tribe is more powerful than the nation-state.”



Saturday’s explosion appeared to be timed to occur when the four restaurants in the Marriott Hotel would be packed with Muslims breaking their daily fast after sundown. They fast during the daylight hours of the current month, on their calendar, of Ramadan.



Rescue workers were seen carrying dozens of bloodied bodies from the hotel, at least one of which has been identified as that of an American citizen. The six-story hotel was almost completely destroyed, and late Saturday night rescue workers suspended the search for fear that the entire structure, still burning after six hours, would collapse.



Senior Police Official Asghar Raza Gardaizi said he fears "there are dozens more dead inside.”



The ceiling of the hotel’s lobby and dining area collapsed in the blast, which mangled dozens of cars parked outside and wrenched the trunks off nearby trees. The bombing occurred just off a busy thoroughfare in the capital city, and windows hundreds of yards away were reported shattered in the shock wave of the blast.



Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the State Department, issued a statement saying that at least one American citizen was killed and several others were injured.



The explosion occurred hundreds of yards away from the president’s residence, in which all the leaders of Pakistan’s government were eating dinner following President Asif Ali Zardari’s address to Parliament.



In President Zardari’s speech prior to the bombing, he condemned the actions of foreign militaries that are crossing the border from Afghanistan in the war against Muslim militants. Many suspect Saturday’s hotel bombing to be a retaliation for such raids, such as last week’s, in which dozens of terrorists were killed by U.S.-led coalition forces in the areas of Bajaur and Swat, near Afghanistan.



Evan Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant who has worked for the F.B.I. and other governmental organizations, said that Saturday’s bombing is the work of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “We are looking at either Al Qaida or Tehrik-e-Taliban [Pakistan’s Taliban] ," said Kohlmann. "It seems that someone has a firm belief that hotels like the Marriott are serving as 'barracks' for western diplomats and intel personnel, and they are gunning pretty hard for them."



President Zardari lost his own wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, to Muslim terrorists last December. He condemned this latest attack in a year which has brought some 250 terrorist-related deaths in Pakistan. "Make this pain your strength," said the president. "This is a menace, a cancer in Pakistan which we will eliminate. We will not be scared of these cowards," Zardari said.