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Who Started the Fire?
- Terrorism and Islamist extremism are now very much part of our lives in the subcontinent. Daily and gruesome killings of innocent people in the name of jihad no longer raise many eyebrows in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
- Pakistan was widely seen as a moderate Islamic state.
- Afghans were deeply religious and intensely conservative.
- In India, the secular fabric designed by the founding fathers seemed to survive many odds in the post-Partition phase.
- Hiro, a prolific writer based in London, recounts the rise of jihad and the brutalisation of the subcontinent since then.
- He walks us through the communist revolution in Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s, the Soviet intervention to protect the left-wing regime, Zia-ul Haq’s injection of extremist Islam into Pakistan’s politics, the Pakistan army’s role in instrumentalising the jihad in Afghanistan with Western and Saudi support in the 1980s.
- Buoyed by the successful ouster of the Russians from Afghanistan, the Pakistan army applied similar tactics of cross-border terror against India from the 1990s.
- Jihad on Two Fronts offers neither significant new insights about the subcontinent’s recent past nor thoughtful assessments about its future.
