The Death Throes of Pakistan's Hindus

I just returned from a month in India during which time an incredible number of significant events were occurring. My primary mission in going was to document and raise awareness of the ethnic cleansing of Bangladeshi Hindus. I found plenty, including evidence of ongoing attacks on them both in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, India. The border between the two is so porous that terrorists and contraband move freely with and without the help of India's Border Security Force or West Bengal police. But I also witnessed the tragic beginning of the end for Pakistan's Hindus. Once one in five Pakistanis, they have been reduced to one percent of the population.

But as the Taliban take over ever larger chunks of that country, that remnant of a people is streaming across the border into Indian Punjab. The stream became a torrent with the Taliban's seizure of the Swat Valley earlier this year. Hindu refugees report attacks and threats by the Taliban, as well as officials telling them to leave the country "or else." The February agreement between the Taliban and the Zardari government ceded the area to the former and allowed Sharia law to be imposed on Swat's 1.2 million inhabitants.

President Obama has used this agreement as a model in his stated quest for "moderate Taliban." But not only does the agreement countersign ethnic cleansing, it also failed even before Obama's anticipated speech on US policy in the region. Just hours before the President spoke, one of the Taliban parties to the agreement, Tehrik e Taliban, abrogated it with a terror attack on a mosque in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, and has engaged in other terrorist attacks subsequently.

One Hindi language channel quoted a Taliban spokesman confirming that his group was pulling out of the agreement not to attack elsewhere in Pakistan because, he said, it would be contrary to Allah's wishes to limit Sharia to the Swat Valley. Yet, no major media in India, the US, or elsewhere made this connection.

Even more shameful, no media or government has protested the ethnic cleansing of Pakistan's Hindus, who are being finished off by the Taliban. All governments involved in the region are just allowing it to happen,too. What kind of a world do we live in when India will not defend Hindus attacked for being Hindus; when the US ignores the atrocity; when not a single human rights group or the UN utters a word of protest?

What is happening to Pakistan's Hindus is a crime, but a crime that is largely accomplished. There remain 13,000,000 Hindus in Bangladesh subject to the same attacks, the same racist laws, and the same intention to eradicate them. Worse, the battle is spilling across the open border into India, and it is changing the demographic balance in the region. It is also allowing terrorists into the country whose intention is to undermine the very nation of Hindustan.

My mission is to prevent that, to prevent the murders and other atrocities, even if I am the only voice of protest to cry out about this crime against humanity.

Obama's Afgh-Pak Policy Already Unraveling

Delhi, India. United States President Barack Hussein Obama unveiled his much awaited South Asian strategy in a globally televised speech last night (Indian time). Today many Indians told me, as one put it, that Obama “lived up to his middle name by showing the face of a pro-Pakistan US policy,” a critical component of which that policy is to find “moderate Taliban” with whom the United States and its allies can negotiate a peace. Imagine if in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt said the US was going to look for moderate Nazis who could negotiate peace. Americans would have been outraged then, and history would show the policy to have been a calamitous mistake. Fortunately, we do not have to wait for the passage of history since those moderate Taliban have already provided evidence that the policy is terribly flawed.

Obama’s template for it is the agreement earlier this year between the current Pakistani government and the Taliban that gave the latter control of Pakistan’s Swat Valley and accepted the imposition of Sharia law there. In exchange, the Taliban “promised” not to launch further attacks against the Pakitani government. Yet just hours before Obama’s speech, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque located in the Khyber region near the Pakistan-Afghan border. So far, the dead or injured number at least 170 of the 250 worshippers. The mosque was completely destroyed. Most news outlets reported the event as a message to Obama that defeating the Taliban will not be easy and that the “militants” could strike at Pakistan pretty much at will. The media also said that no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. All of that is true, but very few outlets reported the fact that several security sources have evidence that the attack was the work of Tehrik-e-Taliban, a deadly Islamist group headed by Batullah Mehsud. What makes that especially significant is that Tehrik-e-Taliban and Mehsud were one of those “moderate Taliban” that entered into that agreement in the Swat Valley. One of the Hindi language channels reported that the group’s spokesman claimed it abrogated the treaty because “it is against the will of Allah to fight for Sharia only in Swat Valley, that all of Pakistan must be under Sharia.”

It took only a month for these “moderates” to do what Hamas, Hizbollah, and other radical Islamists terror groups have done consistently; treating all agreements with us as nothing more than temporary respites valid only until they believe it in their interests to fight. It is a clearly established pattern among these groups yet no one in the Obama Administration seems able to make a connection.