The commitment of Pakistan’s provincial government in Punjab to fighting militancy has again come under scrutiny after it emerged that it has allocated £650,000 (US$966,684) to a charity on a UN terrorism watch list.
Budget figures released this week confirm the money was set aside for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity considered to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Punjab allocated £625,000 for its sprawling headquarters outside Lahore, which includes a hospital, school and seminary, and £25,000 for its schools.
The provincial law minister Rana Sanaullah said the funds were for charitable purposes and would be administered by government officials. A spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa said the group had not yet received any official funds.
The allocation of such a large sum has resurrected worries about dangerous ambiguities in the leadership of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, which has suffered a spate of militant attacks in the past 18 months.
In February, Sanaullah campaigned at a by-election alongside a leader of Sipah Sahaba, a banned sectarian organization that attacks minority Shia Muslims.
In March, the chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, triggered a storm of criticism after he publicly called on the Taliban not to attack Punjab because his party shared some of the militants’ ideas. Sharif said his remarks were taken out of context. Sharif is the brother of Nawaz Sharif, whose party rules Punjab Province but is in opposition nationally.
The urgency of tackling extremism in Punjab increased last month after a vicious assault on two mosques of the Ahmadi sect in Lahore in which 94 people died.
Security officials blamed the attack on the “Punjabi Taliban” — shorthand for an assortment of extremist groups based in hundreds of hardline madrasas across the province.
Analysts say militants in Punjab are becoming increasingly powerful by coordinating their attacks with Taliban counterparts based in Waziristan in the tribal belt, the area in the northwest of the country with considerable autonomy from the rest of Pakistan.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which was nurtured by Pakistani intelligence in the 1990s to attack Indian troops in Kashmir, does not carry out attacks inside Pakistan and is not directly linked to the Taliban, but its leadership is taking advantage of the permissive environment. Last Sunday, Hafiz Saeed, its leader, appeared at an anti-Israel rally in Lahore, the provincial capital, with leaders of the main religious parties.
“He’s a free man,” Amir Rana, a militancy analyst said. “He’s visiting madrasas, he’s addressing rallies, whatever the topic, religious or political.”
BEYOND WASHINGTON: Although historically the US has been the partner of choice for military exercises, Jakarta has been trying to diversify its partners, an analyst said Indonesia’s first joint military drills with Russia this week signal that new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would seek a bigger role for Jakarta on the world stage as part of a significant foreign policy shift, analysts said. Indonesia has long maintained a neutral foreign policy and refuses to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or US-China rivalry, but Prabowo has called for stronger ties with Moscow despite Western pressure on Jakarta. “It is part of a broader agenda to elevate ties with whomever it may be, regardless of their geopolitical bloc, as long as there is a benefit for Indonesia,” said Pieter
US ELECTION: Polls show that the result is likely to be historically tight. However, a recent Iowa poll showed Harris winning the state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020 US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris courted voters angered by the Gaza war while former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump doubled down on violent rhetoric with a comment about journalists being shot as the tense US election campaign entered its final hours. The Democratic vice president and the Republican former president frantically blitzed several swing states as they tried to win over the last holdouts with less than 36 hours left until polls open on election day today. Trump predicted a “landslide,” while Harris told a raucous rally in must-win Michigan that “we have momentum — it’s
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
TIGHT CAMPAIGN: Although Harris got a boost from an Iowa poll, neither candidate had a margin greater than three points in any of the US’ seven battleground states US Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the final days before the election, as she and former US president and Republican presidential nominees make a frantic last push to win over voters in a historically close campaign. The first lines Harris spoke as she sat across from Maya Rudolph, their outfits identical, was drowned out by cheers from the audience. “It is nice to see you Kamala,” Harris told Rudolph with a broad grin she kept throughout the sketch. “And I’m just here to remind you, you got this.” In sync, the two said supporters
RSS