waziristanWasim was recently hired as a Software Engineer in our company. Yesterday he was introducing himself and said that he belong to Waziristan. The word “Waziristan” generated various alerts in my mind like “Baitullah-mehsud“, ” Taliban” etc. Waziristan is a place between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It comes under FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) of Pakistan and is not included in any province. Baitullah-mehsud is the leader of the Taliban umbrella group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, formed in December 2007.

Wasim told me that people living there have very limited resources, literacy and the employment rate is very low. It is not unusual for some people to remain unfed for one or two days. They do not fear the death because they don’t have anything to lose. He said “people are illiterate and they start never ending fight with each other without any good reason”.

Regarding Taliban Wasim told me that it all started after Afghanistan Soviet war when the group of people [called them self Taliban] started hunting the dacoits, the aimless youngsters began to join them and that’s how Taliban came into existence. Their motive was to capture dacoits but later they started to maintain law and order in the region. One thing that Wasim liked about Taliban was providing “justice” to everyone. Taliban also played some role in development of the region. Wasim gave an example of his own village. He said before Taliban several attempts were made to build the road in his village but because of some culprits of the village the road was never build. But when Taliban came, no one dared to go against the Taliban and the road was finally completed.

One of my colleague asked about the Taliban involvement in 9/11 incident from Wasim. I can assume you might be having the same question in your mind. Well he said he don’t know, and there was a discussion that it was all planned by the Americans and Taliban had nothing to do with it.

According to Wasim America attacked Afghanistan not because of Taliban or to eliminate terrorism but because America wanted to acquire resources of Afghanistan. Taliban was also the main hurdle of pipeline project of American Oil Company UNOCAL who tried to construct a pipeline from The Caspian Sea. The pipeline was to run from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to the Port of Karachi. It was a very huge project and lots of revenue for the America was expected. The Caspian Sea is a California-size body of salt water that may sit on as much as 200 billion barrels of oil, which would be 16 percent of the Earth’s potential oil reserves.[compared to Saudi's 250 billion barrels of oil and America's own 22 billion barrels - New York Times.] America tried every possible effort to convince Taliban but all in vain so they took advantage of 9/11 incident and declare that Taliban’s are the terrorist. The war against terrorism was actually the war to acquire resources. The IRAQ war was also for the same reason.

We humans are greedy and want to have everything. We don’t care about others, we are selfish. We will do whatever it takes to acquire what we desire. The man had never changed and will never change. Hate begets hate, war begets war. I can only hope someday humans can understand is not a solution to have peace.

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