I don’t like it
By Farah Zia
My son decided to get on the Facebook long before I did. He lied about his age, extended it by at least a couple of years and managed fine. The virtual world does put a lot of premium on trust, or naivety should I say.

It’s politics, virtually
By Naila Inayat
The recently concluded elections in Iran show how a social networking site like Facebook can be used for politicking. With nearly half of Iran’s 46 million voters under 30-years, the presidential win could be achieved only with significant support of youngsters. This is Iran for you — where media is state-controlled and one of the harshest censors of internet. Before this, mosques served as campaigning grounds.

Facebook mania has spawned applications with additional features that have garnered huge popularity of their own as well. Following is a low-down of some of the most popular ones:

Causes

The application was created with the aim of providing a platform for individuals and non-profit entities to enable them to mobilise others to advance a particular social cause. These causes can be anything ranging from saving and conserving the environment to reviving a lost art form to legalising same-sex marriages. This application serves to connect people via the social networking embedded in the facebook community through various online groups based around a specific cause. As part of the facebook community, you can either become a supporter of an existing cause or start one of your own. Furthermore, the application is also able to direct online donations to relevant charities, though only those registered in the US or Canada.

Top Friends

Top Friends is an application that is as popular within the facebook community as it is silly. What it basically enables a typical "facebooker" to do is arrange his or hers friends’ thumbnail profile pictures on their own profile page. The Top Friends list can be arranged in multiples of 4 and the objective is to make those friends prominent who are close or special to a specific facebook user. So basically the popularity aspect stems from the psychological connection and impact that this application creates amongst the user the respective friends or within the friends themselves. Some psychoanalytical insights could be, "Who is on that list and why?" or "What’s so special about her that I didn’t make the cut!" and "Yeahhh, now I am part of the in-crowd too"! With 12.5 million monthly active users, this application is pushing the social networking ability to a more acute tangent and lets you keep even closer tabs on the ones that most associate with.

Word Challenge/Who has the Biggest Brain

Both are game applications designed by a company called Playfish and are played by some 3-4 million facebook users each month. So you start off with a 2 minute time limit in which you have to make as many words as possible with a set of 6 letters. For every word with made with four letter or more, one gets a bit more time and once you feel the onset of a mental word block, you can click for another 6-letter combination to show up. The addictiveness of this game derives from the competiveness aspect as one can immediately see their score ranking against those of their friends along with the personas awarded to them. Such as a low score of 2000 will label you with having the vocabulary of a playground bully or a wrestler whereas a high score of 25,000 and above will rank you with the vocabulary of a playwright or a poet. Other than an all-time score rank, two friends can also challenge each other via a duel match.

Who has the Biggest Brain claims to apparently test four areas of your brain via puzzle entailing calculation, memory recall, logic and visual recognition. A minute is given in each section of the game in which to solve as many problems as possible and the eventually the scores from all sections are combined to estimate the size of your brain! Low brain sizes of 1000 cm3 or less rank your brain alongside that of a lowly animal or a prehistoric human whereas sizes of 2000 cm3 or more predict that you might be alien of superior intelligence.

ilike

If you want to add some music to your profile then look no further than ilike. This application lets you add a music tab to your profile page that allows you to access clips of your favourite music or keep track of concerts being played by the bands that rock your world. One can also discover new music via the playlists on the profile pages of one’s friends further diversify your musical tastes. Anxiously waiting for the video of that rocking song you have as a ringtone — ilike will instantly give you an update on your facebook profile as soon as it comes out.

With more and more application being churned out every now and then, the world of facebook attempts to engage the user deeper and deeper into its virtual levels.

The first person I talked to for this piece was my an uncle, a 70-year-old retired man who spends most of his day in front of the television and knows little about computers. Facebook, for him, could as well be a fish in Honolulu. When I tried to introduce him to Facebook, he listened very carefully and replied: "So what’s so new about it."

True. There is nothing new about a five-year-old social networking site founded by a group of college students in America. But not for us. In Pakistan it all started with mirc real time chat that allowed users to talk to anyone anywhere without revealing his name, gender, age or appearance. Then came Msn and Orkut. Now it’s Facebook. It spread like an epidemic, sparing none from ten year olds to seventy year olds. Instead of hiding the identity, your Facebook profile has become an equivalent of NIC where you want people to know the real you — only the NIC has the most necessary information.

Those of us living in the cities have joined the West in becoming a generation of Facebookers. But we are not like the West, and as most of us would argue, we take pride in our traditions and values. We like to be ‘separated’ from them on the basis of our Pakistani way of life. At the same time, we never think twice in utilising their technology. For us, the line between private and public is wide. There lies a clear distinction between what should leave the four walls of the house and what should not. Based on this is the close-knit fabric of the society that encourages propriety, protection of women, ego and implicitness.

Why, then, is Facebook our favourite. The site could be an episode in a larger scheme of things where we are opening up, in our own way, to things hitherto unexplored or unaccepted. That we have a long way to go before gender assimilation is encouraged, is unarguable. But there seems to be a consensus on Facebooking as being more useful than harmful, though there are exceptions.

Samar, 22, studies Arts at one of Lahore’s College. She complains that the college’s computer lab is always occupied by students who want to check the comments on their Facebook. "It is like they are addicted and whenever they get time, they rush to the lab to see the comments on their status instead of getting something to eat from the café." But Samar believes it is because they can’t check it at home as freely as they can in the college.

As a society based on collectivism — we the Muslim nation — for us Facebook could represent isolation, communication gap and lack of man to man interaction, things we usually associate with ‘them’ when we ‘otherise’ the West. Imagine a man Facebooking all day long and ultimately addicted to it. Could our likeness for Facebook mean we are treading the same path or is it just another phase?

Twenty-seven-year-old Bushra, a regular Facebooker, disagrees that social networking via computer had "limited face-to-face human interaction." She thinks it is the other way round. "With online chat rooms and communities, people living in different parts of the world have been able to stay in-touch which was previously difficult owing to high cost of telephonic conversations and slow pace of postal mail. Facebook not only allows people to keep all their friends up-to-date about their lives in easy steps, it is also a great tool for networking and mass mobilisation for events and protests."

But many people agree that the major beneficiaries of Facebook are the younger lot — especially the girls. Aitzaz Ahsan, the renowned lawyer, said in a TV show the past week that the men of this country have many worries. But most of the time they are concerned about what the women — more than half of the country’s population — wear, how they walk, whom they talk, where they go, whom they meet, marry and divorce. Talk about building a nation. Enter Facebook. Where the men in the house are to monitor the activities of their female family members the site is a breath of fresh air. Take Fatima, for instance, who is done with her studies but gave in to her parent’s inhibitions regarding joining professions other than teaching girls.

"I hardly ever leave home without someone there to escort me, even to the local market. I am not allowed to work with men and I am not married. All I have is mobile, television and computer. I have many boys in my list who are my friends. It gives me confidence when boys approach me after seeing my picture and reading my profile." A refuge indeed.

Abdullah can’t figure out why girls his age are "so comfortable using Facebook when they are offended when a guy calls them or tries to reach them by any other means. I mean you are showing your pictures and all. Everyone knows who you are and what you look like." But he comes up with an answer himself. "Girls are more comfortable because in a phone conversation or face-to-face the boy takes the lead while it’s the other way round on Facebook."

It can’t be said that Facebook encourages a specific set of values while discouraging others. But it is essentially an antithesis to the notion of hidden because it essentially exposes. But then the perception of what is private and what is public is a generational as well as a social conceit since you have a complete control over your security settings. It’s more about giving you the freedom of a channel to express yourself in whatever way you want. Remember scrap books? Going places to get comments from your friend asking them to fill your scrap book. Not asking someone to do so was like telling her you are not her friend. Facebook is a scrap book and if that was fine, why not Facebook. Who, after all, doesn’t want to look a certain way to others — the projected self.

My son decided to get on the Facebook long before I did. He lied about his age, extended it by at least a couple of years and managed fine. The virtual world does put a lot of premium on trust, or naivety should I say.

I got there by default, not exactly to monitor my son’s activities. And how I regret it! My colleagues — busy putting and exchanging photographs, ever looking for the perfect one I suppose — insisted that I should join too. One of them found his soulmate from school days on the Facebook and even went off to marry her. I kept getting invitations on the email which I ignored till the day one of them sat and opened my account. For a minute, curiosity overtook good sense. Married, happily or unhappily, for 13 years, I don’t know why I did that.

Next thing I was inundated by congratulatory messages for joining the social utility. I must have added one family member and there they were, all of them, ripping my privacy apart. I mean there’s no place you can run for peace now.

Not exactly technology savvy, I had my share of embarrassing moments in the initial days and my inhibition about how and when to use Facebook continues. I clearly remember putting personal details along with year of birth (which people tend to hide, I don’t know why) in a column that did not ask for marital status. So I added that sometime later, only when I figured out I could. Once again friends started congratulating, some genuinely for they didn’t know, and others who knew, sarcastically, with comments like "Better late than never".

I dared not open my account for weeks.

Cautiously, I did, again, to see if there was something for me. All I could find was more friend requests, majority of whom I did not recognise or did not want to add. There were only three options: I could add them, ignore them or let their request stay pending.

Today I have less friends on my list and more pending requests from people about whom I don’t know what to do.

What is worse, there are additional requests, groups and all, that I can make nothing about. Don’t understand how can people declare their love for religious symbols and then go on to create a group in their favour. Besides, most of the quizzes and group requests are dull, to say the least: "what does your birthday mean", "what colour suits your personality", "sweet talk", "sketch me", "what flavour ice cream are you", "which colour is your aura", "what bollywood movie suits your personality", "glad we’re friends". Oh gimme a break!

The only time I became interested in a request was the "Bring back Khuda Hafiz" group and that too for its sense of humour and not the cause. What blew my mind was the one on "Support children in distress and protect children’s rights". A brilliant exercise in philanthropy — join a group. Charity — only a click away.

Dumbing down of intellect, ideas, people, world. Welcome to Facebook.

I really have no problem with the self-projection part and wouldn’t mind doing a bit of it myself if it could be done in style. On Facebook, it’s all very blatant. Fans of the utility tell me it’s all voluntary; you can choose to be here or otherwise. Well, there lies the catch. You see so many people, like yourself, here but don’t know what to do about it. What more could you do except boasting that Mohammad Hanif is "your Facebook friend".

At best, you could send the people you like a message and hear from them. But email did that good enough. Did it not? Or you could go and check their profiles. Now this is what I consider intruding someone’s privacy. Apparently not many think this way. They write comments on photos, inanities of the worst kind I must say, and there it all ends.

Relationships, even if for the purpose of networking, are interpersonal. You can’t have them in a horde and be at the same wavelength with each one at the same time. Facebook tries to do precisely that. It is only being overly-ambitious, I guess.

It has done some great work by keeping a few people I know engaged 24/7, thereby giving many others a chance to avoid them at all other places. Many of these mentally-unemployed buddies have finally found each other. Good for them. The rest of the world is saved from a lot of their cerebral non-sense as long as it stays in the virtual world.

Truth is that human contact in the real world is messy: it has a baggage; there are undercurrents; you don’t need symbols; the body language says it all. The anger and the warmth are more pronounced, the possibilities endless. If Facebook is the alternative for all this, so be it. Though, I may beg to disagree.

The recently concluded elections in Iran show how a social networking site like Facebook can be used for politicking. With nearly half of Iran’s 46 million voters under 30-years, the presidential win could be achieved only with significant support of youngsters. This is Iran for you — where media is state-controlled and one of the harshest censors of internet. Before this, mosques served as campaigning grounds.

"Facebook activities have, in some instances, reached the streets, like a rally for a political figure after the word was spread through a particular group," says Hammad Husain, an architect by profession. "This is an effective way of mobilising people. I believe the line between cyber politics and real life politics may blur with time and alliances, and support groups formed on Facebook will play an important role in real politics in the near future. The role of educated people in politics will thus increase."

So, if you think politics is a child’s play on Facebook, think again. Just browse through Facebook groups with the names of the key political leaders and you would be surprised with the results: ‘Bilawal Bhutto is the BOMB,’ ‘Salar-e-Millat General Pervaiz Musharraf’, ‘Mian Nawaz Sharif LION,’ ‘Altaf Hussain Rulz,’ etc. Even if the titles suggest frivolity, they’re actually not. It’s one serious business.

Let’s hear the Facebookers comment on politics on Facebook:

"Facebook has been a medium for people to express their views on issues they feel strongly about. Giving vent to thoughts, and that too publicly, and engaging in discussions is positive," says Hammad Husain. He sees something good coming out of these groups, as there is a lot of learning through debates. Arguments take place and people get personal and start abusing, he agrees, but it is important to see the silver living in every dark cloud.

Irtiza Ali, a student at Middlesex County College New Jersey, used to be on the groups once. But, "not anymore," he says. "All the politicians are a disappointment. Also, people have always been rendering support on the basis of ethnic grounds. For instance, majority of the Punjabis will not tolerate anything against the Sharifs. Similarly Karachites will not tolerate anything against MQM."

Irtiza believes that the majority of Sindhis are still in love with Benazir and PPP and the Balochis will follow their sardars what-come-may. Imran Khan is one person loved by everyone regardless of race or ethnicity.

A slow revolution is under process because in the last two years I have started looking at things in terms of what is good, or bad, for Pakistan and Pakistanis rather than supporting some political party on ethnic basis.

Nayyar Afaz, a Ph.D student from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, says, "I do visit, join and participate in discussions on political groups for a reason. One must not live in isolation. We are living in the modern age, where at every instant changes occur, which might impact our lives enormously. I do believe that we need to have a youth-oriented political order in Pakistan."

Afaq thinks we don’t need the same feudals. The time is here to end the politics of dynasty. For it, youth has to start showing interest in what is going on in the name of politics. Once our youth starts participating, there would be an initiation of the revolutionary thoughts to start making a new system — a system that will change the course of Pakistan’s history.

This is the positive face of Facebook politics. But it could be a long way before we actually bring change though Facebook.

"People don’t take these groups very seriously. If they, by any chance, take interest, they are made fun of or abused" says Faraz Siddiqui, an architecture student from the Karachi University.

Even if these groups are not taken seriously, many join them. "It has become a fad to become political hence the use of Facebook."

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Baitullah Mehsud was reportedly killed in an American predator attack barely four months after the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) declared him the most wanted al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani terrorist and announced a five million dollars bounty on March 26, 2009. The Pakistani ministry of interior confirmed his death in Zangara village of Laddha subdivision in South Waziristan on August 5. Although the authorities have failed to retrieve his body, they claim to have credible intelligence information that Mehsud died on the spot, with his torso totally damaged except for his head.

Going by the official version, Mehsud was laid to rest in the village of Narghasi the same day along with his wife and father-in-law, Ikramuddin. The official circles say Baitullah’s smashed Prado jeep has also been found from the compound of the Zangara village, thus confirming his presence in the area at the time of the strike. And last but not the least, the arrested TTP spokesman Maulvi Omar has also claimed that Baitullah is dead.

Baitullah Mehsud, who preferred to be called a Pakistani Talib, used to represent a growing threat to both the Pakistani government and American hopes of tracking down Osama bin Laden and dismantling his al-Qaeda network. His meteoric rise from a comparatively little-known figure in South Waziristan to the head of a full-fledged Taliban movement in Pakistan has not only had serious repercussions for local security but also for the global war on terror.

He was an obscure figure on the tribal scene until late 2004, when he filled the vacuum left by another tribal militant leader, Commander Nek Mohammad; killed in June 2004 in South Waziristan in a laser-guided missile attack carried out by the Afghanistan-based US Allied Forces. Baitullah became the hero of tribal youth, who opposed the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Pakistan government’s siding with the US in the war against terror.

The shadowy Taliban commander’s swift rise to notoriety landed him on 2008’s the Time Magazine’s list of "100 most influential people in the world" and made Newsweek the same year to title him "more dangerous than Osama bin Laden". Baitullah had allegedly transformed the badlands of South Waziristan on the Pak-Afghan tribal belt into al-Qaeda’s most vital redoubt.

The $5 million FBI head money announced by the FBI had placed Baitullah just below the fugitive ameer of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Mohammad Omar in terms of his weight to the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The FBI bounty for Mullah Omar is $10 million and that for Osama and Zawahiri $25 million. The Obama administration’s move against Baitullah was largely aimed at dissuading his 25000-plus private army to join hands with the Taliban militia of Afghanistan headed by Mullah Omar who had announced to launch a major spring offensive against the NATO forces’ bases in Afghanistan.

Baitullah Mehsud had pledged himself to Mullah Mohammad Omar in March 2005. On April 1, 2009 — hardly four days after FBI announced the bounty for Baitullah — he broke his silence and claimed responsibility for a series of terror attacks inside Pakistan besides threatening attacks on the White House. On April 4, 2009, Baitullah Mehsud had claimed responsibility for an April 3 gun attack on a US immigration centre in New York in which 14 people were killed. But an FBI spokesman refuted his claim. Yet, there was a consensus in the American and the Pakistani intelligence circles that Baitullah could be using his rhetoric in an attempt to steer the more nationalist jehadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan towards his trans-national agenda and that he should be hunted down.

On April 8, 2009 Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, described Baitullah Mehsud as a "terrible man" and a great danger to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Addressing a joint press conference with Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Holbrook said: "Baitullah’s threats against the US are not backed up but he is bad as any bad actor can be". These remarks were followed by a reported understanding between Islamabad and Washington to stage coordinated military operations in South Waziristan to kill Baitullah Mehsud.

Hardly a few weeks before his reported death, Baitullah Mehsud had been described by the Pakistani media as an agent of the United States and India. This, they argued, was being done to fulfil the American aim of establishing the hegemony of India in South Asia and to facilitate the elimination of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. A few Pakistani government officials even complained that the Americans had failed to target Baitullah Mehsud with their drones despite them having supplied co-ordinates three times. The reason they came up with was that the TTP chief had been more focused against Pakistan in his militancy rather than fully directing his militants against the US-led Allied Forces stationed in Afghanistan.

But the situation changed after the launching of the military operation in Swat when it became obvious to the US policy-makers that the Pakistani establishment was serious in combating terrorism. They had also realised that Baitullah had developed strong ties with the fugitive Taliban ameer Mullah Mohammad Omar and was providing sanctuary to him. The American reaction to Baitullah’s supposed death is a testimony to the fact that he had been a prime target of the US drones. Commenting on the killing of Baitullah, the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described him as a murderous thug.

Baitullah had actually invited the wrath of Americans following his May 24, 2008 confession at a press conference that he had been sending his Taliban fighters to battle the US troops in Afghanistan. Addressing reporters —invited to a hideout in the mountainous South Waziristan region — Baitullah stated that the holy war would continue until the US-led forces are made to withdraw from Afghanistan. "Yes, we are helping the Taliban in the jehad against the US," Baitullah had said, holding an AK-47 as he sat in a disused school building in Kotkai, a Waziristan village. "We send our people to fight against the Americans and God willing we will evict them from Afghanistan the same way the Soviet forces were driven out from there". Mehsud denied that he was sheltering Osama, but said he would like to meet him. "If Osama needs protection in our areas, we will feel proud to shelter him."

Baitullah’s confession led to enormous US pressure on the Pakistan government to scrap a likely peace deal it was about to sign with the fugitive TTP ameer. A NATO spokesman went to the extent of threatening retaliatory strikes if the Taliban militants kept entering Afghanistan from Pakistan to attack its forces in Afghanistan. This compelled the Pakistani military authorities not to withdraw troops from the tribal area under Baitullah’s control, as had been agreed in the proposed peace agreement with the TTP chief. Baitullah, therefore, announced the suspension of further talks with the Pakistan government, saying the American pressure had forced it not to honour the peace accord.

On June 27, 2008, Baitullah declared: "If the security forces’ operations continue, people will see Sindh and Punjab turn into a furnace. Let me make it clear that regardless of the situation in the tribal areas, the holy war against Americans in Afghanistan would continue and the Taliban militants would resort to waging a jehad against the Pakistan Army as well if it continued helping the Americans launch attacks inside tribal areas. Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Quran extols Muslims to wage jehad and we only fulfil the orders of God. Only jehad can bring peace to the world and we will continue our jehad until the foreign troops are thrown out of Afghanistan. Then we will attack them in America and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jizya (a form of tax which the non-Muslims living in an Islamic state used to pay in the past)."

The Pakistani authorities had been accusing Baitullah of receiving money from al-Qaeda and the Taliban to run the affairs of his parallel state in Waziristan. He had been in the limelight for almost five years now due to his role in spearheading an insurgency across Pakistan. But many in Pakistani establishment believe it was the peacemaking policies of the Musharraf regime that actually led to the rise of Baitullah as a powerful Taliban leader to reckon with. There had been a consistent pattern of negotiations going on between the military authorities and Baitullah — there was a military operation, then negotiations, followed by a cease-fire. Then the cease-fire was violated by his men and the intervening period was ostensibly used by his private army to strengthen his position.

Basically, Baitullah was propped up by the Pakistani state agencies as a strategic asset. This was before he turned a renegade after the Lal Masjid operation in Islamabad in July 2007. Supposedly, Pakistan-based jehadi groups which have been involved in waging Jehad-e-Kashmir and Jehad-e-Afghanistan are still being treated at some level, in the powerful intelligence establishment, as Pakistan’s strategic assets thus evading a massive state action despite increasing international pressure. To recall, Baitullah was the same person with whom the Pakistan army had signed a peace agreement in February 2005 despite the fact that he had been a wanted terrorist even at that time.

On February 7, 2005 thousands of people attended the signing ceremony of the peace deal with Baitullah near the Sararogha Fort, 80 kilometres from Wana. They included the government and military officials and the then Corps Commander Peshawar Lt Gen Safdar Hussain. Baitullah said the peace agreement was in the interest of both the tribal regions and the government of Pakistan, since hostile forces like former Northern Alliance fighters were benefiting from the lack of unity between the government and the tribesmen. The signing ceremony ended with the Corps Commander declaring Baitullah Mehsud a soldier of peace and the militants raising slogans of Allah-o-Akbar (God is great) and Death to America.

Interestingly, a Pakistani military spokesman described Baitullah as a patriotic Pakistani on December 1, 2008 in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks. As the war of words between India and Pakistan intensified, a military spokesman said at a news conference in Islamabad that all the key militant groups fighting in FATA have contacted the government and offered a ceasefire if the Pakistan Army also stops its operations in the tribal belt. "We have no big issue with the Pakistani militants in FATA. We have only a few misunderstandings with Baitullah Mehsud that could be removed through dialogue."

Subsequently, on December 23, 2008, Baitullah warned the Indian authorities that he had provided suicide jackets and explosive-laden vehicles to hundreds of his would-be bombers who deployed on Indo-Pak border alongside the country’s armed forces to counter a possible aggression by the enemy forces. Talking to the scribe on phone from an undisclosed location, Baitullah Mehsud even declared that the Taliban were ready to fight under the Army command. "Thousands of our well-armed militants as well as suicide bombers are ready to fight alongside the army if a war is imposed on Pakistan. Our mujahideen would be in the vanguard if fighting broke out with India. Our fighters will fall on the enemy like thunder."

With the departure of President Bush and Barrack Obama becoming the new American President, the Pakistani civil-military establishment was made to turn its guns on Baitullah. The Pakistan government revised the head money for Baitullah and increasing the amount up to a whopping 50 million rupees on June 27, 2009, besides launching a military operation against him in South Waziristan. As the battle lines were clearly drawn between the military and the militants led by Baitullah Mehsud, his mountainous demesne came under intense missile attacks by the Pakistani fighter jets as well as the Afghanistan-based American drones, finally hunting him down on August 5, 2009.

The Taliban may be on the run in Swat (if one were to believe everything that ISPR told us) but it seems that in some cases they may have simply fled to neighbouring districts, especially Shangla and neighbouring Battagram and Mansehra. I remember once receiving a letter some months back (which was then printed) from a most worried resident of Mansehra whose wife used to run a beauty parlour at home, in order to contribute financially to the running of the household. He had written about another beauty parlour in the town and that both its owner — also a woman — and his wife had received threats on the telephone from a man claiming to represent the local Taliban and warning them to shut down the establishments or face the consequences.

The reason one is talking about Mansehra and beauty parlours being threatened to shut down is because on Aug 17 there was a report in several newspapers saying pretty much the same thing. And a quick search on Google news showed that in the last week of July a shop selling CDs in Mansehra had been targeted and bombed — and two people had lost their lives. In fact, another such attack took place a week later as well, in the town of Balakot (which is in Mansehra district. Mansehra happens to be the name of the main town in Mansehra district) and in this two people were injured.

Does this mean Mansehra, which is just about a couple of hour’s drive from Islamabad, has become a hotbed of militancy? The purely alarmist view to this would be ‘yes’; especially since the operation in Malakand began (which meant that some of the Taliban there may have fled to neighbouring districts). After all, Mansehra district is Hazara’s largest and most-populous administrative unit and many people think that Hazara is not as infested with militants as some other districts of NWFP and certainly not as much as NWFP. But from what many people familiar with the area seem to be saying is not the case anymore. In fact, things have been getting worse for quite some time there, and one is saying this from personal experience. Also, there is considerable anecdotal evidence to suggest that — much like in the rest of the country — rising conservatism and increasing dominance and assertion by the clerical orthodoxy has led to a situation where a substantial proportion of the local population may be deemed as being sympathetic to the ways of the Taliban, if not directly to the Taliban.

Consider what I saw as long ago as 1995 during a hiking visit to the area. Though Ayubia and Nathiagali are not exactly in Mansehra district, they are in neighbouring Abbotabad district and close enough for any correlation or connection to be made to Mansehra. (Geographically speaking, the latter is connected with the Kala Dhaka area of Hazara, which is treated as a provincially autonomous region governed directly from Peshawar. The majority of the population is Pashtu-speaking and is considered to be generally hostile to outsiders. However, the flip side of this is that it is as good a place for the Taliban to blend in and hide, as they are on the run in Malakand.) Around a decade ago, Ayubia was not as bad a place in terms of rampant commercialism and pollution, as it is now, but a couple of things that spoilt the experience of going to the top of the chairlift ride are certainly worth mentioning. One was the hotel in which we — a group of recently-graduated university students — were staying where while checking in we were warned by the people at the reception that we could not have any female guests in our room (at any time!) and that if we did that we would be handed over to the police (so much for the hospitality industry!).

Now back to the chairlift experience. On the way up what is apparently considered to be one of the country’s most-visited tourist (mostly domestic ones) spots, I noticed a small white board nailed on just about every tree and written on it in Urdu was the following: "Agar kissi bhee aurat ko lambay baalon kay saath dekho tau us kay baal kaat do. Kyunkay jiss aurat kay lambay baal hotay hain voh jannat mein kabhi bhi nahin ja sakay gi." (If you come across any woman with long hair then cut her hair yourself because any woman who has long hair will never go to Heaven). This is just about among the most misogynistic and bigoted things I have ever read (and I have read a lot of serious hate literature as a journalist and a person interested in finding out what drives people to hate and so on).

The next day — as we were ending the pipeline walk (it connects Ayubia with Donga Gali) — we came across a makeshift mosque where we could hear the pesh imam giving a khutba. It was a Friday and we had started the walk just after noon, so by the time we were reaching the end (it is three to four kilometres long and is called a ‘pipeline’ walk because it follows a pre-Partition water pipeline laid in the area by the British) it was time for prayer, and hence the maulvi delivering the khutba. He said many things about certain sects, all of which cannot be printed here and which are pretty similar — in magnitude and severity of hate and bigotry — to what the RSS and the Shiv Sena would say about non-Hindus.

So much for tourism in the mountains.

The writer is Editorial Pages Editor of The News.

Email: omarq@cyber.net.pk