Heritage – Our Identity – Our Pride

While recognizing monuments as timemarks with a distinct aura around them and that they are older than we can imagine, stimulates us also to philosophize not only about the past and its relationship with the present but also about the eternity, about the age of humanity, the speed of history, the transience of individuals, the achievement of whole cultures and what the monuments may see in future – us for instance. The melancholic appreciations of ancient monuments often easily acquire a political significance when ruins are taken as evidence of former glory or as fetishes for a social nostalgia. So things which are perceived as ancient and foreign must, first and foremost, make people think. This thinking process forms a significant part of their individual identity, a phenomenon which is followed by common men also.

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HERITAGE - OUR IDENTITY - OUR PRIDE

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WOP Editor explains the phenomenon that beckons peoples to seek their roots in heritage, the pride in their glorious past and a means to their identity in the contemporary world.

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Archaeology enables us view our distant past at the time our life is happening before us. Monuments as long as they exist, give ever new meanings to our lives and acquire an ever new cultural significance; for they are a visible link between our present and the distant past.

Shalimar gardens are a masterpiece of the Mughal style gardens in Lahore, Pakistan. Constructed under orders of Emperor Shah Jahan in 1637, the gardens have marble palaces and mosques decorated with mosaics and gilt. The elegance of these splendid structures on three terraces with lodges, waterfalls and large ornamental ponds, is unequalled.  The Gardens were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, under the UNESCO Convention on protection of the world’s cultural and natural heritage sites.

Reach to the top and beyond

                 Abbotabad: Jinnah Gardens in Early Spring  

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A TALE ON THE TRAIL  TO THE ABBOTABAD PEAK

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  by Nayyar Hashmey 

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Located at a distance of 116 km from Rawalpindi and 217 km from Peshawar, Abbotabad is a popular summer resort in the midst of spacious valleys surrounded by green hills on all sides. The city is noted for its verdant parks, gardens, a beautiful golf course and pine covered hills. Besides, it boasts some prestigious educational institutions of the country and serves as an important gateway to almost all-beautiful places in Pakistan.

The formidable Karakorams and the enchanting Himalayas are approached from Abbottabad. It is a junction from where one goes to places like Hunza, Gilgit, Skardu and Kohistan of the Karakoram Range. One can easily reach Swat, Swati Kohistan, Dir and Chitral of the Hindukush Range along with Naran, Saif-ul-Muluk, Shogran and Babusar Pass of the Himalayan Range. Neelum, Lipa and Jhelum Valley of beautiful Azad Kashmir are also connected through Abbottabad.

While other hill stations are deserted during winter, Abbotabad is blessed with visitors due to its bracing winter season. The place has a beautiful park, the Jinnah Garden, maintained by the local Cantonment Board. The splendid stretch of turf in the city promises plenty of room for sports like polo, football, hockey and golf. The Cantonment area of is still very British. The European bungalows, the club, the church and cemetery are still there.

This is how the city looks nowadays but long time back, when I was doing my HSSC course; it had a different, even more beautiful and natural look than it has today. I was invited then by my elder brother to spend summer vacations in Abbotabad. (My brother in those days, was posted there as a tax officer of the Govt. of Pakistan).

Abbotabad as every one knows, was then and still is the second most important hill station in Pakistan. It was in those days, a clean, fragrant and beautiful town. There was absolutely no stink of diesel fumes, population was small and a rain shower even though a slight one, would dry clean the whole town, giving the small, beautiful Abbotabad a totally new look.

Nestled in the hills of Nawan Shehr locality of Abbotabad, Ilyasi Mosque is Abbotabad’s landmark constrcuted over a natural spring. 

The city had on its brinks green blue hills dotted with poplar forests. Crisscrossing the hills were small streams and rivulets. Up on the hills and their slopes were fruit orchards laden with apples, pomegranates and wild berries of every kind. The place we were living was also on the edge of the city and was called Malikpura. (It exists even today but is a much congested and overcrowded locality now).

Now we had a Gujjar lady who used to bring milk and poultry for us. We called her ‘Masi’. This milk lady or our Masi had a son who sometimes accompanied his mother. One day this son (I would call him a Masizad because I have forgotten his name) told me that up on the peak of the mountain and beyond, down hill there is a cave where Raja Rasaloo, the one time king of the area used to keep his gold and other treasures there. Now the fascination of a place which used to be laden with gold in time unknown coupled with the fact that I had never seen a cave yet, my fascination turned double fold and a strong urge arose to reach the summit of the mountain, descend the other side and sneak into the cave of a Raja who used to rule the valley in ancient days. My younger brother asked this ‘Masizad’ how high is the mountain and how much time will it take to reach there. Came the terse reply “Oh, not much, it’s just a two hours ascent and there you go”.

 My bother and I were so impressed with an idea to scale a peak even though a not very high but then peak is a peak. Our enthusiasm also grew much as a few years back, late Edmund Hillary of New Zealand for the first time had conquered the world’s highest peak on Himalayas, the Mount Everest. If not the highest, yet we would be scaling a peak and that would be great adventure and fun.

A mix of hues, the greens and the blues created by mother nature’s brush on the mountain of Abbotbad. Photo by Usman Qureshi

Now having listened to the very tempting and luring adventure, we decided to go for the expedition next morning. With the feeling of a would be conqueror, from verandah of my house, I just looked at the great mountain in the west, which carries the city like a mother does its child in the lap, I visualized a wonderful, pleasant and comfortable journey upwards. And let it be known dear reader, neither myself nor my younger brother had the least idea of trekking, climbing or mountaineering, yet irrespective of the hazards on the way, we decided to scale the peak of mountain.

Next day, we left at about 7.30 in the morning. While trekking upwards, we felt very pleasant. There was lush green vegetation everywhere; small rivulets came on our way. We happily waded through.. Water was cold and flow was rapid, yet we easily crossed over.

In the beginning our stamina was high so we did not feel the stress and exhaustion of moving upwards. However, at 8.30 am we asked our Masizad, how far it was to the top, to which he calmly replied, “Bhai, just near the top we are”. With these words, we again plucked our spirits and started moving upwards, although both me and my brother were gasping all the time and did not feel like going up any more. But with his words we started going and again gasping, moving upwards, gasping, moving with short breaks for rest and again moving. We asked the Masizad how far was it now to the top and he with his usual calm says” Bhai ab thora sa fasila reh gya hae” (brother, its just few steps now). With these morale boosting words, we again collected our spirits and started moving through but this time it was real hard task because not only was the height a big challenge to our stamina but also the lush green vegetation had turned into thorny bushes. To this malady came another misery in waiting. The grass on the mountain had every now and then shrubs which had a slimy juice in the leaves.

There were many leaves of this type lying on the ground like a creeper. This made us many a time to slip and fall down but we managed it some how. It was almost 9.30 now but the top was nowhere in the sight. We were almost nearing exhaustion both in spirits and physique. Again the morale boosting dosage from our Masizad  “Bhai ab tau aap top per pohnch gayay ho”. (Brothers, you have reached the top almost). These words acted like a tonic but as the poet says “abhi ishq ke imtihan aur bhi haen” we had yet many tests, feats and miracle to perform. That was the price we had to pay for our love, adventure, and persistence to reach the top. Again we collected ourselves and started trekking upwards. We were very much exhausted and now the sun had brightened too much, we could not open our eyes and were terribly thirsty. Fortunately our masizad had with him water in the chhagal. Those of you, who do not know what a chhagal is, well! Chhagal is a canvas container for carrying water. Mostly soldiers used this in their exercises and actual battles. I do not know whether our army jawans still use it but in those days, it was a part of an armor by a soldier, a traveller or a climber in remote areas – whether desert or the mountain. As is the case and this we starkly observed near the top of Abbotabad mountain, that in such places, thirst is another reason to loose one’s life.  But fortunately, we had water so we quenched the thirst to our heart.

After having refreshed ourselves, we started ascending once more. While taking water, we had taken a 15 minutes break and thus had revamped our energies. Our ascent began once again but now we were not so tired as before. Fluid intake had done an elixir’s job. And then we had also the excitement to reach the top. We trekked and we trekked almost for an hour or so and vow! we were on the top. It was an immense joy for me and my brother. We were on the top of a local mountain and yet our excitement was not less than a mountaineer who had reached Mount Everest.

Mountain top was a very fresh and plain ground, lush green shrubbery and pine trees. There was wild fragrance in the air and it was a paradise like atmosphere. All our fatigue had gone in a nu

Having stayed on top for a while, we started descending now and in about an hour’s time, we reached the cave of famed Raja Rasaloo. The cave was not a big one, it was quite muddy inside but in we went. It was as cool as an air-conditioned room. We selected a dry place, plain enough to squat easily. The feel of being inside a Raja’s cave’ even though there was absolutely nothing romantic about the cave, nor anything special, no wealth of the Raja, no gold and nothing else except a hollowed space in the mountain, yet it was a great feel, great fascination and fun for us. At that moment our Masizad asked us whether we had some hunger and both me and my younger brother said we were indeed. To this, he opened his “poatlee” and vow; he had parathas and potatoes made into bhujia done in mountain style by our good masi. There was a special type of achaar made of wild apples, berries and a special fruit which had the look of small black pepper seeds. It was a wonderful recipe, the most sumptuous treat I had ever had in my life especially after such a hectic hike to the mountain and then to the cave of a mythical Raja who used to hide his wealth in the cave. Well dinner with such a relishing food and off we go. We came out of the cave, started ascending once again. The journey back home was quite smooth as we had acquainted ourselves with the whole trek now and were now much experienced hikers.

Later I trekked to many places, the Saiful Malook lake in Kaghan, Parachinar in Kurram Valley, the Alps in Upper Austria and Salzburg, the Czech & Slovak highlands in Eastern Europe and it was a normal way of life with me but the one to mountain in Abbotabad was a tough, yet a very good learning experience to embark on mountain treks, no matter low or the high mountains.

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Can’t Win in Afghanistan, Blame Pakistan

As resistance to the US-led occupation of Afghanistan has intensified, the increasingly frustrated Bush administration is venting its anger against Pakistan and its military intelligence agency, the ISI.

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VIOLENCE & UPRISINGS IN  FATA NOT CAUSED BY “TERRORISM” BUT OUT FALL OF THE US-LED OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN

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by Eric Margolis

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Soon after the US invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government in 2001, I predicted that Taliban resistance would resume in four years.

My fellow pundits, who were cock-a-hoop over the US military victory over a bunch of lightly-armed medieval tribesmen, became drunk on old-fashioned imperial triumphalism, and denounced me as “crazy,” or worse. But most of them had never been to Afghanistan and knew nothing about the Pashtun tribal people. I had covered the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980′s and was well aware of the leisurely pace of warfare favored by Pashtun warriors.

“Do not stay in Afghanistan,” I warned in a 2001 article in the Los Angeles Times. The longer foreign forces remained in Afghanistan, the more the tribes would fight against their continued presence. Taliban resumed fighting in 2005.

Now, as resistance to the US-led occupation of Afghanistan has intensified, the increasingly frustrated Bush administration is venting its anger against Pakistan and its military intelligence agency, Inter-Service Intelligence, better known as ISI.

The White House just leaked claims ISI is in cahoots with pro-Taliban groups in Pakistan’s tribal agency along the Afghan border and warns them of impending US attacks. The New York Times, which allowed the Bush administration to use it as a mouthpiece for Iraq War propaganda, dutifully featured the leaks about ISI on front page. Other administration officials have been claiming that ISI may even be hiding Osama bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida leaders.

The Bush administration claims that CIA had electronic intercepts proving ISI was behind the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul. India and Afghanistan echoed this charge. No hard evidence though was ever produced, but the US media has been lustily condemning Pakistan for pretending to be an ally of the US while acting like an enemy.

During a visit to the US by Pakistan’s newly elected  Prime Minister, President George Bush angrily asked, Yousuf Gilani, “who’s in charge of ISI?” An interesting question, since all recent ISI director generals have been vetted and pre-approved by Washington.

I was one of the first western journalists invited into ISI HQ in 1986. ISI’s then director general, the fierce Lt. General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, personally briefed me on Pakistan’s secret role in fighting Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. ISI’s “boys” provided communications, logistics, training, heavy weapons, and direction in the Afghan War. I kept ISI’s role in Afghanistan a secret until the war ended in 1989.

ISI was primarily responsible for the victory over the Soviets, which hastened the collapse of the USSR. At war’s end, Gen. Akhtar and Pakistan’s leader, Zia ul Haq, both died in a sabotaged C-130 transport aircraft. Unfortunately, most Pakistanis blame the United States for this assassination, though the real malefactors have never been identified and the investigation long ago shelved.

On my subsequent trips to Pakistan I was routinely briefed by succeeding ISI chiefs, and joined ISI officers in the field, sometimes under fire.

ISI, which reports to Pakistan’s military and the prime minister, is accused of meddling in Pakistani politics. The late Benazir Bhutto, who often was thwarted and vexed by Pakistan’s spooks, always playfully scolded me, “you and your beloved generals at ISI.”

But before Gen. Pervez Musharraf took over as military dictator, ISI was the third world’s most efficient, professional intelligence agency. It still defends Pakistan against internal and external subversion by India’s powerful spy agency, RAW, and by Iran. ISI works closely with CIA and the Pentagon and was primarily responsible for the rapid ouster of Taliban from power in 2001. But ISI also must serve Pakistan’s interests which are often not identical to Washington’s, and sometimes in conflict.

ISI was long and deeply involved in supporting the uprising by Kashmiri Muslims against Indian rule, and has been accused by India of abetting groups that have committed bombings and aircraft hijackings inside India, including a wave of terrorist bombings against civilians in Bangalore and Gujarat over recently weeks. For its part, India’s powerful intelligence service, RAW, has mounted bombing and shooting attacks inside Pakistan.

The reason it is often difficult to tell whether Pakistan is friend or foe is because Washington has been forcing Pakistan’s government, military and intelligence services into supporting the US-led war in Afghanistan and in the past, in rounding up and torturing opponents of Pakistan’s military dictatorship. Pakistan was forced to bend to Washington’s will through a combination of over $11 billion in payments and threats of war if Pakistan did not comply. The ongoing prosecution of the US-led war in Afghanistan depends entirely on Pakistan’s provision of bases and troops.

While Pakistan’s government, military and intelligence services were forced to follow Washington’s strategic plans, 90% of Pakistan’s people bitterly oppose these policies. President-dictator Musharraf was caught between the anger of Washington and his own angry people who branded him an American stooge.

Small wonder Pakistan’s leadership is so often accused of playing a double game.

The last ISI Director General I knew was the tough, highly capable Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmad. He was purged by Musharraf because Washington felt Mahmood was insufficiently responsive to US interests. Ever since 2001, ensuing ISI directors were all pre-approved by Washington. All senior ISI veterans deemed “Islamist” or too nationalistic by Washington were purged at Washington’s demand, leaving ISI’s upper ranks top-heavy with too many yes-men and paper-passers.

Even so, there is strong opposition inside ISI and the military to Washington’s bribing and arm-twisting the subservient Musharraf dictatorship into waging war against fellow Pakistanis and gravely damaging Pakistan’s national interests. After coming of the new civilian set up under Mr. Zardari as the new President, and Mr. Gilani, the prime minister, for most of the Pakistanis Pakistani people, there seems to be hardly any change in this policy.

ISI’s primary duty is defending Pakistan, not promote US interests. Pashtun tribesmen on the border sympathizing with their fellow Taliban Pashtun in Afghanistan are Pakistanis. Many, like the legendary Jalaluddin Haqqani, are old US allies and “freedom fighters” from the 1980′s. When the US and its western allies finally abandon Afghanistan, as they will inevitably do one day, Pakistan must go on living with its rambunctious tribals.

Violence and uprisings in these tribal areas are not caused by “terrorism,” as Washington and Musharraf falsely claimed. They directly result from the US-led occupation of Afghanistan and Washington’s forcing the regimes to attack theirown people.

ISI is trying to restrain pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen while dealing with growing US attacks into Pakistan that threaten a wider war. India, Pakistan’s bitter foe, has an army of agents in Afghanistan and is arming, backing and financing the Karzai puppet regime in Kabul in hopes of turning Afghanistan into a protectorate. Pakistan’s historic strategic interests in Afghanistan have been undermined by the US occupation. Now, the US and India are trying to eliminate Pakistani influence in Afghanistan.

ISI, many of whose officers are Pashtun, has every right to warn Pakistani citizens of impending US air attacks that kill large numbers of civilians. But ISI also has another vital mission. Preventing Pakistan’s Pashtun, 15-20% of the population of 165 million, from rekindling the old “Greater Pashtunistan” movement calling for union of the Pashtun tribes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into a new Pashtun nation. The Pashtun have never recognized the Durand Line (today’s Pakistan-Afghan border) drawn by British imperialists to sunder the world’s largest tribal people. Greater Pashtunistan would tear apart Pakistan and invite Indian military intervention.

Washington’s bull-in-a-china shop behavior pays no heeds to these realities. Instead, Washington demonizes faithful old allies ISI and Pakistan while supporting Afghanistan’s Communists and drug dealers, and allowing India to stir the Afghan pot – all for the sake of new energy pipelines.

As Henry Kissinger cynically noted, being America’s ally is more dangerous than being its enemy.

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Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World.. Copyright © 2008 Eric Margolis

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Loey Loey Bhar Lae Kurhriyay…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4pLOohSIg0

By  Nayyar Hashmey

The magic, the charm of Punjab’s folk songs lies in their heart rendering composition, the poetry which involves a completely synchronized rhythm, emotional import and the melody; the reason this music is untranslatable; can’t be imprisoned in print.

The real spirit of Punjab’s music emanates from this simple and a down to earth poetry blended into text and the tune, a blend which turns into a highly popular genre, a genre of songs that throb the hearts of simple unsophisticated village folk in Punjab.

A folk song is essentially a subjective expression of emotions walling up from the depths. It borrows its metamorphous and imagery from very simple things in life. Punjabi folk is varied and colorful. Laughter, happiness, pain, sorrow, all form ingredients of our folk. It’s simple, charming, and full of the sincerity of emotion, and a purity of the feeling. The entire Punjab culture, so to speak, is reflected in them.

The folk / mystic music of Punjab is part of its people’s body and mind. There is hardly an event or occasion in the countryside which does not find resonance in the soul of Punjabi people. Just as the villagers grow their own food and produce their own raiment’s, they frame folk songs to articulate the wordless passions seething in their hearts. These songs are chastened and polished from generation to generation, and like everything of slow growth, they develop an individuality, which does not lend itself to imitation.

Mazar of Hz Mian Muhammad Bakhsh

Historically in Punjab, it is the saints and Sufi poets who not only mastered in religious faculty but had a deep and perfect understanding of the poetry, a poetry which springs from the soil of Punjab. This poetry is as much a literary classic as it is an embodiment of peoples’ feelings, their culture and their whole concept of life. No wonder the music in Punjab is not only a solace to the soul but also a part of the devotion, of love and of a duty to the mystic and divine realm of one’s Guru or Master.

Seen in this context, there is a long list of mystics, the Sufis, the Gurus and the saints who themselves were a practical embodiment of the teachings of Islam and who did not preach like an orthodox Mullah. We find here the saintly stalwarts like Baba Farid Ganj Shakar, Bulley Shah, Shah Hussain, Syed Waris Shah. In this long list of “Men of God” there are many others including Hindu and Sikh mystics as well, most of whom believed in unity of God and preached something which was a blend of Islam, and local beliefs. One of these pious men was also Mian Muhammad Bakhsh of Khari Sharif.

Mian Mohammad was the last Sufi poet of the Arabic-Persian tradition in Punjab. Born in 1824 at Khari Sharif in Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir, he got his education at the famous religious institution of Samar Sharif. After completing his education he travelled all over the province to quench his thirst for knowledge. Later he returned to his native land and became a disciple of Sain Ghulam Mohammad.

His period was a period of turmoil for the sub-continent for the British colonialists had coloured the land red with the native blood,

Mian Mohammad’s thoughts were a blend of Semetic and Arayan tradition with a significant texture of Islam. He believed in the unity of being. The rich tradition of Punjabi poetry mixed with the under currents of Maulana Roomi and Ibn-e-Arabi made his poetry eternal. His famous epic poem Safar-e-Ishaq popularly known as Saif-ul-Muluk is written in the same atmosphere. The poem Saif-ul-Muluk holds a unique place. In this poem Mian Mohammad explains the spiritual secrets of the Real love through a worldly love story. Mian Mohammad had an ample grasp over music which makes his diction highly mellifluous. Mian Muhammad died in 1907.

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Far away from the city of oneness , logic is wandering aimlessly,

Whosoever knows the secret, He cares for nothing

Devoid of logic and reason, he dances fanaticically,

Inquiring “who am I ?” “from where am I?”

As with other masters he chose poetry as a medium to convey his teachings on the spiritual path and the higher realities in his native tongue thereby allowing access to the illiterate who could hear the verses and memorize them directly. This has been the way of the Sufis throughout history and especially in the non-Arab areas.

Literature for them is just a means of conveying the message and it has to reach out to the greatest number possible in a way that appeals to them. It is in this context that the Saif ul-Malook should be placed. To remove any doubt about the intention one has only to look at the title page of the original book: It is described there as “an epistle on tasawwuf and sulook called Safar ul-Ishq (The Journey of Love) i.e. the tale of Saif ul-Malook and Badi’ ul-Jamal”. Today most people only remember it by the name of its main character: Saif ul-Malook.

The Saif ul-Malook is outwardly a tale of the love of a prince named Saif ul-Malook for the fairy Badi’ ul-Jamal. All the trials and tribulations that had to be undergone before the two lovers would achieve union are described in detail. In reality though, it is an in depth description of the spiritual path, its way stations and its pitfalls and obstacles. Along the way Mian sahib offers jewels of gnosis for those that can recognize them as such. It is a truly amazing tale!

Mer mer ik banawan shisha maar wata ik bhanday

Dunya utay thoray rehnday qadar shanas sukhan day

Awwal tay kujh shauq na kassay kaun sukhan ajj sunn da

Jay sun si tan qissa utla koi na ramzam pun da

Na gayay oh yar piyaray sukhan shanas o’saaray

Sukhan saraf Muhammag Bakhsha lalan day wanjaray

(On top of this title, there is a video of Mian Muhammad’s poetry beautifully rendered by Ata-ullah Eesakhailwi. As always all videos require a high speed internet, otherwise try a replay & you will enjoy this old melody clip without breaks).

President Asif Ali Zardari, A 10% Scammer or a 100% Pakistani?

The Pakistani President Mr. Asif Ali Zardari

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MR. PRESIDENT!

WERE 160 MILLION PAKISTANIS WRONG TO ELECT YOU?

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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As I write these lines, words echo in my mind, words she uttered in her last speech. So said Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, “My dear brothers and my dear sisters, this is the time when our country is in turmoil. My country, your country” said B. Bhutto “is in serious travails and turpitudes; I have come to you to help me save this land. Help me my brothers, my sisters, to save our motherland”. Shortly after she had uttered these words, she was shot at by an unknown assailant. She could not even leave the public park she had chosen to address.

Attacking Pakistan? Don’t Do It.

How do Pakistan’s new leaders propose to deal with the increasingly demanding friends and allies like the Americans? Pakistan’s Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani won the instant gratitude and admiration of his worried people and surprised the world by standing up to the Coalition of the Willing. The reticent General was lustily cheered by the Americans as ‘our man’ when he took over from Musharraf as the army chief. There was much talk of his ‘Enlightened Moderation’ and his positive outlook on the West. Which was why the Pakistanis were elated to see the general lash out at the Americans promising ‘retaliation’ if they continued to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Whether the Pak Army will really take on America, the leading member of the fabled trinity – the other two being Allah and Army of course – is still a hypothetical question.

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YOU NEED NO ENEMY, IF HAVE AMERICA AS YOUR FRIEND OR DO YOU?

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Aijaz Zaka Syed

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Back home in the sub-continent, they say you should always stay away from the cops; their friendship as well as adversity is bad for your health. I am reminded of the advice as the world’s chief cop, the United States, bombs its allies and friends in Pakistan. With friends like these, do you really need enemies?

When former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf promptly and so enthusiastically recruited Pakistan in America’s war after that call from Colin Powell, he had assured his people that this was the only option available to Pakistan. Else, the reasonable General reasoned later, the U.S. would have bombed Pakistan back to the Stone Age. Fortunately or unfortunately for Pakistan, Musharraf is not around. Otherwise we could have asked the good general why the Coalition of the Willing has turned on its own ally.

Folk Tales of Pakistan – Heer Ranjha

It is said that when Waris Shah completed Heer, he showed it to his teacher. The latter was rather disappointed to see his talented student, instead of writing something on fiqh or shariah, had chosen to write a love story. He is reported to have said: “Warsa (deflection of the name, often used in Punjabi to address juniors in age or rank), I am saddened to see that my efforts have gone waste. I taught both you and Bulleh Shah. He ended up playing the sarangi (a string instrument) and you have come up with this.” Waris Shah then opened the book and started reciting Heer. As the teacher listened, the words slowly started sinking in. He was so touched by the language, the poetry, the powerful imagery, the intensity of emotions, and the melody that he is famously reported to have said, “Wah! Waris Shah, you have strung together precious pearls in a twine of “munj” (a coarse string of hemp or jute).”

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STRINGING THE PEARLS IN A TWINE OF “MUNJ”

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by Mast Qalandar

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Note for WoP readers: Here is another post on that great folk tale of Punjab. It already appeared in Adil Najam’s blog. Even then I reproduce this for you, as I think Mast Qalandar is a guy who has done full justice to the leading Sufi poet of Punjab when he details this ever living legend in a very lucid, very absorbing style especially as a writer, who is not a native of Punjab. I myself would never have cast an iota of doubt over his being not a native had he not divulged it himself in this very write up.

The changing colours of autumn in Leepa

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Leepa  is a valley of changng colours

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A RICHLY COLOURED ATTIRE OF RED, ORANGE & YELLOW SHADES

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by Syed Zafar Abas Naqvi 

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The picturesque Leepa valley comprises of several villages, the principal being Reshian Gali, which at a height of 3600 M above sea level is also the gateway to the vale of Leepa. In addition to Reshian, there are other villages in Leepa like:-

• Nokot
• Chennian
• Kappa Gali
• Bigil Dher
• Lubgran &
• Ghaipura

Like Reshian, all these villages, the tiny small hamlets, equally contribute to a wonderful mosaic of patterns mother nature has so ornately and intricately woven here in this part of Kashmir.

Leepa is famous also for its typical Kashmiri style of architecture, mostly in the form of 3 storied wooden houses. A look at the houses here makes one believe, Leepa as a true extension of Indian occupied Kashmir into Pakistan.

The people in Leepa, as in other parts of Azad Kashmir, demonstrate robust character and a steadfast, a resilient way of living. Inspite of 18 years of Indian shelling and continuous fire almost every day (which takes its own tolls in terms of human life and collateral damage), and all this exacerbated by the deadly earthquake of Oct. 2005, life has gradually started turning to normalcy.

The paradise like mini Kashmir in Leepa has numerous water driven flour mills, the only kind of industry in the valley.

The valley has a population of about 75000 inhabitants who generally indulge in farming, cattle rearing and tourism related services. Nearly 400 jeeps ply daily from Reshian to Leepa and back. Jeeps are the only mode of transport in the valley though motor bikes are now also seen in ever increasing numbers on the bumpy jumpy road.

The red Kashmiri rice is grown in October by the farmers in Leepa. This is also the staple food for the people of the area. Husking of rice is done in traditional way, by first beating the rice stack with long sticks, thereafter, threshed along temporarily constructed ditches.

The highest peak is Shmasa Bari, which remains snowbound throughout the year.

Down hills, every year with coming of winter in the valley, when previous year’s snow melted on top of the mountains, soon fresh snow will be falling to interlace them all. It’s the time also when residents of this far flung vale have to brace the chilling winter  which brings heavy snow and thus brings increased hardships  for its 75000 residents. Due to lack of infrastructure, the valley is disconnected from the rest of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir.

Apple is grown in the valley in its different varieties, most popular being Golden, Delicious and Kala Kullo King. These varieties have a unique, highly tempting flavor and taste comparable to none. Walnut is another fruit grown in the valley. It too ripens in early autumn when it is collected, deseeded and then sent to down country markets where they fetch price as high as Rs 450/- per Kg. In Leepa the cost per Kg is Rs. 300/- per Kg.Though poor in infrastructure and no industry worth its name, excepting the water mills, nature has provided spectacular beauty to this valley that can surpass even developed areas of the plains if only its tourism potentials were exploited to the full.

Water in its streams is crystal clear and there is absolutely no pollution. One can breathe, clean fresh air, full of fragrance from virgin forests and wonderful scenery all around to watch.

Allover the valley, high walnut trees likewise put on attire in yellow, red and orange, which adds extra sparkle to our stay in Leepa. We also come across yellow herbs and shrubs tucked nicely into green vegetation comprising of large conifer trees, adding variety to this miracle of changing colors during autumn in the valley.

 Walkways amidst jungle are filled with compost leaves signaling a momentous magnitude of autumn in the valley. The foliage from deciduous trees stays on the ground leaving a damp and decayed trail. The skyline in the whole vale transcends from ardent green to russet red, gold, orange, dark yellow and brown. Strong winds and mild storms also wreack further havoc with the delicate branches, turning them yellow and this too adds to the already damp compost like soil. A walk on these fallen decayed leaves reminds of the harsh winter ahead. Birds are also going nomadic ready to move on an arduous and long journey bracing the chilling winds on the way, to safe havens in down country areas where they can feed and breed.

Kazi Nag Nullah basin also hosts hundreds of poplar trees with ready to fall yellow foliage. Yellow chinar trees acquire a crimson hue as if on a fire, a unique view along the mountains, tracks and the valleys in Leepa.

Soon we reach Burthwar Gali and encounter nearly 300 chinar trees again with their yellow, orange and red mix of colous, shades and hues adding further fire to the panorama of winter in the valley. Local elders said, these trees were planted during the period of emperor Shah Jahan, the builder king of the famed Mughal empire – to provide shade and protection to travelers who used to journey between Srinagar and Punjab either on horses or even on foot. We couldn’t help but admire this wonder of nature which had laid down a carpet of innumerable crimson colored trees, when viewed while passing through Burthwar Gali Pass.

Appreciating the allure of autumn trees in narrow alleys is the best pastime in this vale of wonders – wonders that this picturesque valley showcases to the outside world.

Tailpiece: Daily strolls along the fabulous terraced fields devoid of any crop at this time of the year offers you chance of a life time to enjoy nature’s beauty at its best. No words are able to describe the true beauty and incomparable sight of this touristic paradise in Kashmir.

Each year, on start of autumn in Kashmir, Leepa, which lies at a distance of about 90 KM from capital Muzaffarabad, starts to dress up in a new and richly colored attire-a mix of red, orange and yellow shades. It’s the time when apple picking season in the valley comes to an end.

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Vien Voir – Africa Thinks Africa Blinks

http://www.ziddu.com/download/2467932/09ViensVoir.wma.html

09ViensVoir.wma.html

Vien Voir, A Song from Africa

By Umair Ghani

WOP Contributing Editor and Photographer Umair Ghani is nowadays in Africa. On a special photographic assignment to capture the soul of Africa through his lens, he met many African artists, painters and poets there.
In his first report which he filed for our readers, Umair sends me a poem written by African poet, Tiken Jah Fakoly. As I read this poem, I was stunned to observe the feelings, the pain, the anguish Jah feels for his land. Its same story every where. You just put Pakistan in place of Africa and every thing what Jah says, seems to portray a perfect picture – of us – of our country – our own sufferings at the hands of unscrupulous rulers. A fact that betells, common people all over the world think the same way.

Its now time for more people to people contacts. Interaction between different civilizations, people and countries. This will definitely help usher an era of understanding between different cultures. It’s incumbent for our generation to act now, when things like North South, East West Polarization, War on Terror, Uni-polar World have turned this beautiful earth into nightmares, not only for us but also for our coming generations.

Umair Ghani reports…

Tiken Jah Fakoly (1968–)a reggae singer from Côte d’Ivoire, was born into a family of griots and christened Doumbia Moussa Fakoly on June 23, 1968 in Odiené, north-western Côte d’Ivoire. He discovered reggae at an early age, assembling his first group, Djelys, in 1987. He became well-known at a regional level, but would soon ascend to national recognition. Since the rise in political instability and xenophobia in Côte d’Ivoire in recent years, Tiken Jah has been living in exile, particularly in Bamako (capital of the neighboring country of Mali) where his concerts are well-attended. In December 2007, Fakoly was declared persona non grata in Senegal after criticizing President Abdoulaye Wade.

Viens Voir is a moving song by Tiken Jah Fakoly, a symbol of unity and strength for African people. Here in Africa, almost everyone is playing or singing his REVOLUTIONARY songs everyday. All taxi cars consistently blare out his voice, all cafes and bars and everyone on the streets is humming… Jah Fakoly is living in exile in Paris, after his severe criticism of Senegalese, South African, Ivory Coast and Congolesean puppet rulers in his previous albums. One of his songs goes like this….”give me arms Ohhhh people, so I can kill these criminals who are ruling over us for nothing.”

Come See [Viens voir]

Come see, come see

Come see, come see

You who speak without knowing

Bamako, Abidjan ou Dakar Bamako, Dakar or Abidjan

Sierra leone, Namibie, ? come see

My Africa is not what makes you think

It is believed still faces the same

It is believed the same comments

It is believed the same stories

Listening to my Africa would be drought and famine

When we listen, my Africa would be fighting and minefields

Come see

Chorus

My Africa is not doing what you believe

Not a word about the history of this continent

On civilizations and wealth of yesteryear

No word on the meaning of values

People who t’accueillent hand on heart

Chorus

My Africa is not what makes you think

Africa is not doing what you believe

Come in our families

Come to our villages

You know what hospitality

The heat, smile, generosity

Come see those who have nothing

Look how they can give

And leave you richer

And you will not forget

Come see

You can listen to this song by clicking on the title which provides the link to audio player. The website would demand for a code to be filled in (to avoid spammers), therefore, go on putting in the codes provided therein and the song will be played acc.

`Want to offer Comments on this post? Click on the CommentsTab following this line.

Empower Yourself with the Power of Your History – Taste the Real Essence of Historical Places

Main Enterance to Dai Anga's Tomb

Have you ever been to Dai Anga’s mausoleum, in case of Yes or No, here we reveal the essence of this historic place, which we call the “History” should be our present, for those whose answer is “No”, have the chance to visit this marvelous piece of architecture and art of our forefathers, its beauty of art is about to end.

This is a monument which gives us a spur to build an incredible future like our marvelous and glorious past. When the sun unveils the day, the horizontal directional rays expose the real texture and art work of this square brick structure built on a raised platform with a large dome and four square pavilion like kiosks carrying projecting eaves and cupolas. 

This is the perfect season to enjoy and understand the real ornamental and symmetrical beauty of the tomb; the fresh morning cool air gives you a rhythmic pleasant breath, which will allow you to properly concentrate on the nature of tomb and its art work. After few moments you’ll understand the splendid, magnificent and regality living of our subcontinent’s Muslim emperors.

As the sun rises gradually this worthy tomb, it’s top borders of the walls (parapet) having “Kashi Kari” (the mosaic) on it, which points towards the quality and kind of tile mosaic that in all likelihood once covered the entire façade and all this show you the love, respect and care for our loved ones. As being the Dai (Wet Nurse) of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, she deserves this honor. You can easily understand her importance as a Dai, as our Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) respects his Dai Haleema R.A.

At noon when the sun is at its full glory and its peak, this fully lighted worthy memorial mausoleum describes our generation the real height and boom of our powerful Muslim rulers in this continent. This is the perfect time when the warmth of sun rays increasing the temperature of the surrounding to give us the grandeur feeling of the respect and dignity that we had. Now is the time to let you imagine and float with the feelings that you are in the past and part of that era.

Now it’s the evening after illuminating the whole day of more than 400 years of Mughals’ the sun started setting, and the tomb shows the damages by the Singh and the Englishman.

Sun is setting now, you can hear the sound of birds chirping, birds, those who lived the whole day out from their nests in search of food, just came back their homes awaited by their children, this calm and peaceful atmosphere is available on the roof of the tomb which make you realize that you also have someone who needs your care and love. At this time looking through the arc one of the kiosks towards the red sun it will knock on our minds that we are missing something, we are losing something, where is our glory?

Kanjwani Mela – The Spirit Lives On…

Festivals are a part of human psyche; men in Punjab are no exception to this spirit in the people of all regions, all countries. A change in weather, some saint’s birthday, a harvest or just a show of composure, the folk’s will to rejoice, the people in Punjab find a way to celebrate. Such festivals popularly called mela’s in Punjab are a common sight especially in our rural areas. As the summer ends, the hot and sultry months of June and July are over, a wave of celebrations hits almost every rural district which demonstrates expression of peoples’ enjoyment in an ambience of festivities all over Punjabi.

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AN ENCHANTINGLY PICTURESQUE EVENT

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Festivals are a part of human psyche; men in Punjab are no exception to this spirit in the people of all regions, all countries. A change in weather, some saint’s birthday, a harvest or just a show of composure, the folk’s will to rejoice, the people in Punjab find a way to celebrate.

Life in a Pakistani Village

Culturally, Pakistan’s rural folk enjoy a seemingly happy and contented life. Not that they tend to be passive and lack initiative. On the other hand our rural folk are more energetic and struggle minded than their city dwelling counterparts.

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A Way of Life…But More Natural

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by Hira N. Hashmey

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Pakistan is the cradle of Indus Valley Civilization, civilisation that is spread over more than 4000 years of history. Archaeological excavations here have revealed evidence of the meticulously planned cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro that lived and died along the banks of the mighty Indus and its tributaries. The ancient Hindu epics narrate life between the 7th and 5th century BC which carry rich descriptions of the land and people of Indus at that time. These relics throw light on the culture and changing architectural styles of Punjab since the Harappan age. At Taxila near Islamabad, sites associated with great Gandhara Civilization yielded remarkable relics that showcase the magnificient age of Buddhism in the region.

But along with its magnificent past, the rural life in present day Pakistan is as rich even today as it used to be before. The lush green crops which ripen in summer to yield golden harvests, fruit laden orchards which bear delicious fruits similar to those of the paradise and above all a mouth watering food that makes many a chefs to envy. The luscious fruits are so dominant in Punjab’s rural culture that a special variety of mangoes is called Samr-e-Bahisht, literally meaning the fruit of the paradise.

Colin David – Avant Garde of Non Conformist Painters

Colin was one of those good adroit painters who fashioned human anatomy with skill and imagination. Like Ustad Allah Baksh, Sadiqain, Shakir Ali, Saeed Akhtar, Colin portrayed women figure as a special element in his paintings, a superb draftsman with a technical perfection that is all too rare. According to Marjorie Husain, an art critic, Colin used to paint non traditional style in the highly censored environment created by Gen. Ziaul Haq which consolidated his position as the most popular artist in that period.

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CREATING BALANCE AND HARMONY IN COMPOSITION

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by Sehrish Chaudhary

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Colin David’s mortal body left this world on 25 Feb., 2008 but his soul breathes in his art and people.

Colin was one of those good adroit painters who fashioned human anatomy with skill and imagination. Like Ustad Allah Baksh, Sadiqain, Shakir Ali, Saeed Akhtar, Colin portrayed women figure as a special element in his paintings, a superb draftsman with a technical perfection that is all too rare. According to Marjorie Husain, an art critic, Colin used to paint non traditional style in the highly censored environment created by Gen. Ziaul Haq which consolidated his position as the most popular artist in that period.

Can India and Pakistan live in Peace

The curtain has finally rung down on this current phase of history, at least by explosion of nuclear bombs by both India and Pakistan, and their experimentation with the long range missiles and of satellites that will hit the moon.

In this age of terrifying, lethal gadgets which have supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited subcontinent. Should this be our fate?

 ·

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Hinduism in Pakistan is viewed more in a political sense than religious, an approach that has turned both Islam and Hinduism into adversaries. The politicization of two great faiths in the subcontinent is goaded in the pages of history ever since partition of India and beyond.

The View Point

 

by Swaraj Chauhan

President Asif Ali Zardari is Pakistan’s first head of state to promise a “no-first nuclear-strike” against India. He talked of the need for change and reconciliation in India-Pakistan relationship, and the possibility of doing away with passports for travel between two countries.

The surprise statement came when Zardari was addressing the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit at New Delhi on Saturday via a satellite link from his official residence in Islamabad. Telecast live from India by CNN-IBN, the session was picked up simultaneously by news channels in Pakistan.

“Zardari borrowed a quote from his late wife (Benazir Bhutto), who once said that there’s a ‘little bit of India in every Pakistani and a little bit of Pakistan’ in every Indian. He also talked about Indians’ and Pakistanis’ ‘shared bloodlines’.

” ‘I do not know whether it is the Indian or the Pakistani in me that is talking to you today,’ Zardari said, amid applause from his high-profile audience, which included diplomats, politicians and industrialists.

“The President also talked of a common South Asian economic bloc with other countries. He suggested a ‘flexible Indo-Pak visa regime’, eliminating the travel documents now required and replacing them with a smart-card enabled e-visa system.” More here…

The deteriorating relationship with the US administration seems to be prompting Pakistani leaders to abandon the traditional 60-year-old bitter rivalry with India. India and Pakistan have a shared heritage going back to centuries. But that came to an abrupt end in 1947 with the end of the British colonial rule and a bloody partition.

“Polls show that the U.S. already faces ‘mounting popular opposition’ in Pakistan, which has not been significantly influenced by the election of a new civilian government in February,” wrote Jim Hoagland in July 2008 under the heading “India the Key to U.S.-Pakistan Relationship” in RealClearPolitics.

“Pakistani politicians, civil servants and military men have told me in recent months that open ‘collaboration’ with the United States is so ‘dangerous’ that they cannot afford to be seen working with the U.S.

“India’s growing economic power will leave its neighbor in the dust unless Pakistan becomes part of that prosperity. Pakistan’s future will be determined by its relations with India, not by increased U.S. aid or maintaining its support for tribal war in Afghanistan.” More here…

The New York Times has an interesting take on India-Pakistan-US tangle…Please click here.

Courtesy: The Global Voice

How To Win Elections, The Hindutva Style!

Signs of An Attempted “Soft Coup” in New Delhi

 

by Ahmed Quraishi

 With a traumatized nation and an apparently paralyzed government, millions of secular ideologues and Hindu nationalists are executing a ‘soft coup’ in New Delhi to bring to power the hawks who want to pursue America’s agenda of grooming India as a regional policeman, sort out Pakistan and confront China. India will self-destroy in the process. India’s military and intelligence has been penetrated. The man who uncovered the plot, Hemant Karkare, the antiterrorism chief of Mumbai police, was the first target of the mysterious terrorists. Patriotic Indians need to wake up and save their country.

Preliminary signs emerging from India’s power center, New Delhi, paint a picture of an unstable situation. Security is already compromised. But a bigger story is taking place in New Delhi, not Mumbai. There are disturbing signs that India, a nuclear-armed nation of a billion people, is witnessing a ‘soft coup’ attempt involving secular rightwing ideologues and Hindu nationalists.      

Exploiting the fears of a traumatized nation and a government caught sleeping at the wheel, a core group of rightwing ideologues within India’s military, intelligence and political elite are trying to overthrow Manmohan Singh’s government. The plan apparently is to help the rise of rightwing elements in power and firmly push India to a confrontation with Pakistan and some other countries in the region. 

The objective of this core group is to see India emerge as a superpower closely allied with the United States. They are excited about American plans for India as a regional policeman and have no problem in confronting China and Pakistan to achieve this status. They think time is slipping and they don’t want a hesitant political leadership in their way. Already the instability in the wake of Mumbai attacks is being exploited to start a war with Pakistan. The fact that this will also help U.S. military that is facing a tough time in Afghanistan appears to be more than just a coincidence.

In the very first hours of the Mumbai attack, the unknown terrorists were able to achieve a singular feat: the targeted murder of Hemant Karkare, the chief antiterrorism officer in the Indian police. The man was responsible for exposing the secret links between the Indian military and Hindu terror groups. His investigation resulted in uncovering the involvement of three Indian military intelligence officers in terrorist acts that were blamed on Muslim groups. At the time of his murder, Karkare was pursuing leads that were supposed to uncover the depth of the nexus between the Indian military and the sudden rise of well armed and well financed Hindu terrorism groups with their wide network of militant training camps across India. 

Curiously, a CCTV camera has caught on tape one of the unknown terrorists when he arrived with his group at their first target: a train station. The man, dressed in a jeans and a black T-shirt and carrying a machine gun [see picture below], is wearing an orange-colored wrist band very common among religious Hindus. As a comparison, a recent picture of a Hindu militant activist taken during an event this year is shown on the top where the militant is wearing a similar band.

A CCTV snapshot of one of the Mumbai terrorists, wearing the sacred Hindu armband and carrying a machine gun. Right, below, a picture of a typical member of Hindu terror groups, wearing the same armband. The band is sacred to fundamentalist Hindus who believe wearing it shows devotion and brings good luck from gods. An aggressive advertisement campaign has already begun across India urging a scared population to rise against the government.On Friday, front-page ads appeared in several newspapers in Delhi showing blood splattered against a black background and the slogan “Brutal Terror Strikes At Will” in bold capital letters. The ads signed off with a simple message: “Fight Terror. Vote B.J.P.”

The Indian, the Pakistani and the international media has not woken up yet to this ‘soft coup’ taking place in New Delhi. Some observers and journalists are beginning to catch its first signs. This is how a New York Times reporter, Somini Sengupta, has characterized it today:

 “Mr. Singh’s government had lately hit back at the Bharatiya       Janata Party with evidence that its supporters, belonging to a range     of radical Hindu organizations,         had … been implicated in terrorist   attacks. Indeed, in a bizarre twist,   the head of the police                   antiterrorism unit, Hemant   Karkare, killed in the Mumbai   strikes, had been in the midst of a high-profile investigation of a suspected Hindu terrorist cell. Mr. Karkare’s inquiry had netted nine suspects in connection with a bombing in September of a Muslim-majority area in Malegaon, a small town not far from Mumbai. “
 Evidence is emerging that Karkare  knew he was facing the prospect of a violent death because of the investigation he was pursuing. What Karkare probably didn’t know is that his elimination would come in such a perfectly executed operation.Only hours before Karkare’s violent death, his close friend, retired Colonel Rahul Gowardhan, received an envelope. Karkare called him to say he was sending him a confidential letter. This is how Times of India has reported the story:Just some hours before that, Karkare had sent a letter to him in an envelope which had some “personal” content. “Hemant had called me up on Wednesday,” said Gowardhan, a top official with MSEDCL. “As I was in a meeting, we decided to postpone the talk. He hung up saying he would be sending me an envelope. When I wanted to know the content, he told me to just read the letter that’s inside it. I returned home and read it. I cannot share the content of the letter with anyone,” said Gowardhan.
 

The highly sophisticated nature of the attack in  Mumbai, lasting for almost 60 hours, diminishes the  chances of a foreign invasion and increases the  possibility that influential elements in Indian                      intelligence and Hindu militant organizations might  have helped orchestrate this incident, pretty much like  they did in the Sept. 29 Malegaon attack, in which they  tried to simulate a Muslim terrorist group. In that attack, in which three Indian military intelligence officers have been arrested, the objective was to provoke a Muslim backlash that could justify a massive state crackdown against minorities.
Observers are already seeing how the hawks within the Indian establishment and Hindu militant organizations have seized the initiative from a paralyzed government. The Indian army and intelligence are already penetrated. Now the real culprits are channeling the fears of a traumatized people toward Pakistan.
 India is on the same path today that the  Bush administration hawks took the  American nation on after 9/11. But this  time, patriotic Indians have the benefit of  hindsight. They should stop the secular  warmongers and Hindu militants from  hijacking their country. The future of the  entire region depends on it.

Ahmed Quraishi is a Pakistani writer, TV Anchorman and a Political Commentator

© 2007-2008. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com  & PakNationalists

MUMBAI ATTACKS – INDIA’S 9/11

Upcoming Post by Michel Chossudovsky

A few days back, I inserted a post by Ahmed Quraishi on India’s so called 9/11. (You can see more here). I say it’s so called because what happened on 9/11 in New York was highly tragic, yet it turned into a bonanza for the neocons in the US who covertly used it as a ploy against Islam and the Muslims.

The real cause and the master mind / s of this act, are still shrouded in mystery. Yet the information gathered from relevant books, interviews and videos creates a lot of doubts on what has been reported in the western media. All research into this incident points to the master minds who seem to have a global agenda to control the world, but the whole blame has solely been shifted to certain extremist Muslims.

Extremism in any form is not desirable, yet it prevails in every religion, every faith, and every society. Highly tragic though the 9/11 was, yet a powerful lobby in the corridors of power in Washington D.C. meticulously used it to bracket extremism only with Islam. With power over the mass media, the west particularly USA succeeded to influence the public opinion there. However, there are also the voices who know the real reason of this tragic incident, the root cause of this propaganda war, and therefore, are raising their voice at every forum, every platform and above all, with the force of their pen because these men believe the pen, the human conscience and the humanity are mightier than the sword even today. One such voice is Michel Chossudovsky’s.  WOP readers are familiar with writers like Eric Margolis, John Maszka, Ron Johnson and so many others who through their writings and the media are doing their best to fight out neocons’ agenda.

I am inserting now for the first time a thought provoking, highly analytical post from Prof. Michel Chossudovsky.  Professor’s analysis enables us to find the way even in the darkest of darkness created by the western media and therefore highly relevant and a “must read” for our policymakers as well.

61 years of independence has not delivered the ‘independence’ our leaders had then thought. From British colonialism we landed into US imperialism. In this regard both Indian as well as the successive Pakistani leaderships played into the hands of the US who fuelled differences between the two neighbors to an extent that we fought three wars, wars which brought no benefit either to the Indians or the Pakistanis. The only beneficiary was US whose war industry sold billions worth of military hardware to both India and Pakistan.

In Pakistan’s context it’s also the oil and in case of India it’s the military sales; and thirdly to install India as Asia’s policeman especially against China. But as the former Shah of Iran, also one time policeman of Asia built up by the US in the area failed miserably, so will India.

Both neighbors need to understand that they have a shared history. Instead of fighting each other, they can peacefully work together to contribute not only towards economic well being of their own people but also play a highly constructive role in the global economy as well. Prof. Chossudovsky’s analysis too points in almost the same direction.

 

Coming up next

1. What happened in India’s commercial capital on 26th November?
2. Who was behind the attacks?
3. “Clash of civilizations” and Mumbai attacks?
4. The disinformation in the US and in Indian media. The purpose?
5. Is Pakistan’s military intelligence America’s Trojan horse?
6. Pakistan’s Chief Spy appointed by CIA?

To find answers to these questions, see next the first part of Chossudovsky’s article on these pages.

From all of us at Wonders of Pakistan

(wondersofpakistan.blogspot.com, wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com & www.nadeemkhawar.net)

I wish our readers, viewers, contributors, and all those friends, institutions who have been with us since day one, a very happy Eid Mubarik.

 While I send these greetings, I do understand the challenges, the crises and dangers we are facing at the moment but dear readers, nothing is going to happen Insha’ Allah to this great land of ours.

 It has persisted not for decades, centuries but for millennia, a beautiful land that has a history, not from 1947 but far beyond. It started from the time when man got to perceive the basics of a civilized life. Being inheritors of a great civilization, our nation demonstrated a unique type of resilience against all odds; all ups and downs and Insha’Allah will overcome its present predicaments too.

 This Eid is a symbol of a great sacrifice. Let this symbol be a sacrifice for our beautiful land as well. And this sacrifice is nothing but a will that we are one, together do we celebrate, together do we stand and together do we win.

PAKISTAN – The Largest Land of Glaciers [2 of 3]

The Majestic range of Karakoram in Northern Pakistan has the honor of having World’s largest glaciers outside north and south poles. The picture here is among one of them taken in the extreme summer month. The place here is a junction of Biafo and Hispar glaciers which together form 118 km of longest layer of ice on the Earth outside the pole.

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THE LARGEST LAND OF GLACIERS

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by Dr. Nayyar Hashmey

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In about 1978, the Indian Army mounted an expedition to Teram Kangri peaks (in the Siachen area on the China border and just east of a line drawn due north from NJ9842) as a precursor-exercise (a camouflage to occupy the area by force). The first public mention of a possible conflict situation was an article by Joydeep Sircar in The Telegraph newspaper of Calcutta in 1982, reprinted as “Oropolitics” in the Alpine Journal, London, in 1984. India launched an operation on 13 April, 1984. The Indian Army and the Indian Air Force went into the glacier region. Pakistan army quickly responded with troop deployments and what followed was literally a race to the top.

PAKISTAN – The Largest Land of Glaciers [3 of 3]

Green In the Black refers to the Kararkoram mountains whose name means Balck Mountains and it is surprising that a lush green valley is found inside the snow clad peaks and largest glaciers of the world.

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THE LARGEST LAND OF GLACIERS

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by Dr. Nayyar Hashmey

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BALTORO GLACIER

The Baltoro Glacier, 57 kilometers long, is one of the longest glaciers outside of the Polar Regions. Located again in Baltistan, in our Northern Areas it runs through part of the Karakoram mountain range. The Baltoro Muztagh lies to the north and east of the glacier, while the Masherbrum Mountains lie to the south. At 8,611 m (28,251 ft), K2 is the highest mountain in the region, and three others within 20 km top at 8,000m or above.

The glacier gives rise to the Shigar River, which is a tributary of the Indus River. Several large tributary glaciers feed the main Baltoro glacier, including the Godwin Austen glacier, flowing south from K2; the Abruzzi and the various Gasherbrum glaciers, flowing from the Gasherbrum group of peaks; the Vigne glacier, flowing from Chogolisa, and the Yermandendu glacier, flowing from Masherbrum.

Masherbrum (7821 m), enveloped in mist, stands without its usual sheath of ice and snow in the Karakoram summer.

Masherbrum was first named K-1 for Karakoram 1 when it was believed to be the tallest peak in the Karakorams – an honour that was later taken away by the group of 4 mountains just a days trek away where the mighty K-2 (8611m) accompanied by the other 3 Eight-thousanders (Broad Peak, Gasherbrum 1 and Gasherbrum 2) rises out of the Godwin-Austen glacier in all its majesty.

Masherbrum has been summited 4 times.

CONCORDIA

The confluence of the main Baltoro glacier with the Godwin Austen glacier is known as Concordia. Concordia is the name for the confluence of the Baltoro glacier and the Godwin-Austen glacier, in the heart of the Karakoram Range. The name was applied by European explorers, and comes from this location’s similarity to a glacial confluence, also named Concordia, in the Bernese Highlands, part of the European Alps.

This location and K2 base camp are popular trekking destinations. The trough of the glacier here is very wide and its central part is a vast snowfield. Small valley glaciers form icefalls where they meet the trunk glacier. The sidewalls vary from very steep to precipitous. The glacier has carved striations on the surrounding country rocks. Moving ice has formed depressions, which serve as basins for numerous glacial lakes. The glacier can be approached via the important Balti town of Skardu.

BALTORO GLACIER, Taken upon return to Concordia from the K2 Base-camp day trek, Altitude: 4900 meters. Its around Concordia where some of the highest peaks are clustered as nowhere in the world. Four of the world’s fourteen“eight-thousanders”are in this region, as well as a number of important lower peaks.

Concordia offers the region’s best place to camp for mountain enthusiasts not involved in climbing. With breathtaking views, it also offers short hikes to several important base camps: K2 (three hours), Broad Peak (two hours) and the Gasherbrums (three hours). An alternative exit to returning down the Baltoro glacier is available by climbing the Gondogoro Pass (5,450m). Visitors to the region are advised to carefully monitor their water intake with concern. To avoid often painful and sometimes debilitating stomach upsets at high altitude, water should be obtained from clear water sources, preferably white ice dug from the glacier.

BATURA GLACIER

Batura Glacier (57km long) lies in the Gojal region of Northern Areas just north of Batura (7,795m) and Passu (7,500m) massifs. It flows west to east. The lower portions can be described as a grey sea of rocks and gravelly moraine, bordered by a few summer villages and pastures with herds of sheep, goats, cows and yaks and where roses and juniper trees are common.

BIAFO GLACIER

The Biafo Glacier is a 63 km long glacier in the Karakoram Mountains which meets the 49 km long Hispar glacier at an altitude of 5,128m (16,824 feet) at Hispar La (Pass) to create the world’s longest glacial system outside of the polar region. This highway of ice connects two ancient mountain kingdoms, Nagar (immediately south of Hunza) in the west with Baltistan in the east. The traverse uses 51 of the Biafo Glacier’s 63 km and all of the Hispar Glacier to form a 100 km glacial route.

The Biafo Glacier presents a trekker with several days of very strenuous, often hectic boulder hopping, with spectacular views throughout and Snow Lake near the high point. Snow Lake, consisting of parts of the upper Biafo Glacier and its tributary glacier Sim Gang, is one of the world’s largest basins of snow or ice in the world outside of the Polar Region, up to 1,600m (one mile) in depth.

The Biafo Glacier is the world’s third longest glacier outside of the Polar Region, second only to the 75 km Siachen Glacier and Tajikistan’s 77 km long Fedchenko Glacier.

Camp sites along the Biafo are located off of the glacier, adjacent to the lateral moraines and steep mountainsides. The first three (heading up from the last village before the glacier, the thousand-year-old Askole village) are beautiful sites with flowing water nearby. Mango and Namla, the first two camp sites, are often covered in flowers and Namla has an amazing waterfall very near the camping area. Biantha, the third camp site, is often used as a rest day. A large green meadow, it has a few running streams near the camp and many places to spend the day rock climbing or rappelling.

Evidence of wildlife can be seen throughout the trek. The Ibex and the Markhor Mountain Goat can be found and the area is famous for brown bears and snow leopards, although sightings are rare.

GODWIN AUSTIN GLACIER

The Godwin-Austen Glacier is located near K2. Its confluence with the Baltoro Glacier, the Concordia is one of the most favorite spots for trekking in Pakistan since it provides excellent views of four of the five eight-thousanders in Pakistan.

The five major glaciers are like five monarchs of Pakistan’s ice kingdom that have ruled their territories since ages. With their spellbinding beauty, grandeur and their steadfastness to protect their domains, they offer also a challenge to climbers from all over the world. Many climbers have lost their lives but the lure, the challenge and the spirit to conquer still prevails.

Concluded.

Previous 1, 2, 3

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Photo Credits: Top by Atif Gulzar, Centre and Bottom by Aqib, Heartkins Photostream

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PAKISTAN – The Largest Land of Glaciers [1 of 3]

The dark green part in the map are karakorams and the dark orange, small part is Siachen

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THE LARGEST LAND OF GLACIERS

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Dr. Nayyar Hashmey

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In Pakistan, we have more glaciers than any other land outside the north and south poles. Our glacial area covers some 13,680 sq. km which represents an average of 13 per cent of mountain regions of the upper Indus Basin. Baltistan in our north eastern corner and in the heart of Karakorams, provides the world’s most magnificent mountain scenery and mountaineering possibilities. Renowned for the largest glaciers and towering peaks, it has four 8000m peaks, and many over 7000m.

The glaciers in Pakistan can rightly claim to possess the greatest mass and collection of glaciated space on the face of earth. In fact, in the lap of our Karakoram mountains alone there are glaciers whose total length would add up to about 6,160 sq. km. To put it more precisely, as high as 37 per cent of the Karakoram area is under its glaciers against Himalayas’ 17 per cent and European Alps’ 22 per cent. The Karakorams have one more claim to proclaim; its southern flank (east and west of the enormous Biafo glacier) has a concentration of glaciers which works out to 59 per cent of its area.

Eric Shipton, a great mountaineer who perished in Pakistan’s Northern Areas, while describing the peaks and glaciers in Pakistan wrote in his account “To describe this region is to indulge in superlatives, for everywhere you look are the highest, the longest and the largest mountains, glaciers and rivers in the world”.

Making some allowance for Shipton’s tendency towards slight exaggeration, born out of awe and fascination, the fact remains that Pakistan boasts of the largest share of the highest number of glaciers after the poles.

SIACHEN

The biggest glacier is Siachen, which is 75 kms in length. The Hispar (53 kms) joins the Biafo at the Hispar La (5154.16 metres (16,910 ft) to form an ice corridor of 116.87 kms (72 miles) long. The Batura, too is 58 kms in length. But, the most outstanding of these rivers of ice is the 62 kms Baltoro. This mighty glacier fed by some 30 tributaries constitutes a surface of 1291.39 sq. kms.

Siachen is located in the eastern Karakoram range in the Himalaya mountains. It is the longest glacier in the Karakoram and second longest in the world’s non-polar areas. It ranges from an altitude of 5753m (18,875 ft.) above sea level at its source from a pass near the China border to its snout at 3620m (11,875 ft.)

The glacier lies south of the great watershed that separatesCentral Asia from theIndian subcontinent. The 75 km long Siachen lies between the Saltoro Ridge line immediately to the west and the mainKarakoramrange to the east. The Saltoro Ridge originates in the north from the Sia Kangri peak on the China border in the Karakoram Range. The crest of the Saltoro Ridge’s altitudes ranges from 5450 to 7720m (17,880 to 25,330 feet). The major passes on this ridge are, from north to south, Sia La at 5589m (18,336 ft), Bilafond La at 5450m (17,880 ft), and Gyong La at 5689m (18,665 ft.)

THE CONFLICT ZONE

This largest ice mass in the subcontinent however, continues to mar relations between India and Pakistan.

Located in the disputed region of Kashmir its average winter snowfall is 10.5m (35 ft.) and temperatures can dip to minus 50○C (minus 58○F). In spite of this severe climate, the word ‘Siachen’ ironically means ‘the place of wild roses, a reference some people attribute to the abundance of Himalayan wildflowers found in the valleys below the glacier, but specifically refers to the thorny wild plants which grow on the rocky outcrops.

Presently the glacier is also the highest battleground on earth, where India and Pakistan have fought intermittently since April 13, 1984. Pakistan maintains permanent military personnel in the region at a height of over 6,000m and so does India. The site is a prime example of mountain warfare.

The glacier’s melting waters are the main source of the Nubra River, which drains into the Shyok River. The Shyok in turn joins the Indus River. The glacier’s melting waters are a major source of the river Indus, a vital water source for Pakistan

The conflict in Siachen stems from the confusion in the improperly demarcated territory on the map beyond the map coordinate known as NJ9842. The 1949 Karachi Agreement and the 1972 Simla Agreement did not clearly mention who controlled the glacier, merely stating that from the NJ9842 location the boundary would proceed “thence north to the glaciers.” In the 1960′s and 1970′s, however, the United States Defense Mapping Agency (now National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) issued maps showing detailed position of the area and made their maps available to the public and pilots as proceeding from NJ9842 east-northeast to the Karakoram Pass at 5534m (18,136 ft.) on the China border. Other international (governmental and private cartographers and atlas producers) confirmed this position. This implied in a cartographical and categorical allocation of the entire 2700 square kilometers (1040 square miles) Siachen area to Pakistan. However, prior to 1984 neither India nor Pakistan had any permanent presence in the area presumably due to the extremely harsh conditions which prohibited any such presence.

Fighting

In the 1970s and early 1980s several mountaineering expeditions applied to Pakistan to climb high peaks in the Siachen area and Pakistan granted them, which reinforces our claim on the area, as these expeditions arrived on the glacier with a permit obtained from the Govt. of Pakistan.

The glacier is well inside Pakistani territory. However, India with a design to keep an eye over Pakistan’s strategic route to China (the Karakorum Highway) in 1982 sent a training expedition to Antarctica to train under “Siachen Glacier Like” conditions. Then in April 1984, it conducted its Operation Meghdoot’, and invaded Pakistani territory.

Since the Glacier is not physically connected to India (there is no natural ground routes connecting India and Siachen Glacier), therefore, it used its air force to drop all of its forces at Siachen. And still to this day uses helicopters and aircrafts to transport supplies, food and soldiers.

On this third pole on earth, Pakistani military is confronting the Indians who have a force 5 times its size. In the process India is paying a heavy price. According to a book on the War at Siachen Glacier, 50% of Indian soldiers, who make back alive, suffer from permanent mental retardation, not to mention amputations and other terrible things that Indian soldiers have to go through.

The war has been going on for about quarter of a century. Though the price has been heavy for both sides (especially for India), Pakistan has been slowly driving the Indians out of Siachen Glacier.

Contd….

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We at Wonders of Pakistan use copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

Tourism in Azad Kashmir

A serious follow up of Prime Minister’s initiative on tourism development in Azad Kashmir can definitely turn this area into a real paradise not only for domestic tourists but also for our foreign guests as well.

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Last Sunday, the 4th of Jan. 2009, I was watching “Jawabdeh” the Pakistani version of BBC’s HARDTalk show by Geo News. The interviewer was channel’s most popular anchorman Iftikhar Ahmad, who is known for his razor sharp questions – questions that baffle even the sharpest, the wittiest and the wisest guy. At the grinding disc of Itikhar now was none else than the young prime minister of Azad Kashmir, Sardar Ateeq Ahmad Khan.

Though presently the PM is facing a no confidence move in the Assembly, he appeared very confident to emerge successful over what he called move by a bunch of legislators who could hardly muster 2-3 seats in the AJK Assembly.

But politics apart, the most important aspect of this Q & A session was young PM’s approach towards a policy of dialogue vis-á-vis his father’s on Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. Quite logically did he respond to pointed questions raised by I.A. and apprised the latter on salient features of phased withdrawal of Pakistani and Indian forces from both parts of Kashmir. A step which, he said, will pave way for a gradual move towards a permanent solution of Kashmir dispute, a solution which would guarantee a face saving formula for all stake holders.

Another idea which this writer found highly innovative was Saradar Ateeq’s approach on development and promotion of Tourism in Azad Kashmir. Hitherto A.K. has been an area where only Pakistanis could see the touristic attractions of this paradise like part of the valley. Foreigners were allowed only on a special permit to visit the area.

During my personal visits to Azad Kashmir I saw lot of developments, which were done during the administration of former prime minister of the state. But this wonderful developmental work was shattered during the terrible earthquake in Oct. 2005. Extensive efforts were made ever since and the life in the affected areas has almost come to normal. Now the state administration endeavors to go beyond restoration and is intending to surpass development much above the pre 2005 level. It is good news that the present prime minister of A.K. recognises the importance of tourism in the economy of the state.

We do hope that he seriously will follow up his own initiative, in which case the area of Azad Kashmir may definitely turn into a touristic paradise not only for domestic but also for our foreign guests.

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DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.  

We at Wonders of Pakistanuse copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

 

HARAPPA – Whispers of an Ancient Past

River Ravi and Bias provided large scale irrigation to Indus Valley settlements around Harappa. Water was abundant so an advanced drainage system also existed. Drains started from the bathrooms of the houses and joined the main sewer in the street, which was covered by brick slabs. Living quarters even had latrines [which still can be seen in their most ancient traditions in many cities of Sind and also in modern day Harappa village]. Map aboove shows location of the two sites of ancient Indus Valley Civilisation in modern Pakistan

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Time present and time past, Are both present perhaps, in time future, 

And time future contained in time past, If all time is eternally present all time

is unredeemable.

[T.S. Eliot]

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by Umair Ghani

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Seated on a high deserted mound amid ruins of Harappa I experience timelessness, envisioning the time when world was not a chaotic blend of tension, power and dominance, but a warm cosmic breath that gave impetus to a simple yet blooming life. I tried to relate frayed ends of an existence distorted by merciless scythe of time.

A Peacock Story

The Tale of a Mound in Harrapa

 by Umair Ghani

One of world’s most renowned archeologists, Sir John Marshall reacted with sudden surprise when he saw the famous Indus Bronze Statuette of a slender limbed “Dancing Girl” in Mohenjo-daro:

“When I first saw them I found it difficult to believe that they were prehistoric; they seemed to completely upset all established ideas about early art and culture. Modeling such as this was unknown in the ancient world up to Hellenistic age of Greece, and I thought, therefore, that some mistake must surely have been made, that these figures had found their way into levels some 3000 years older than those to which they properly belonged…”

Similar thoughts permeated my being in front of a huge mound in Wahniwal, as I witnessed unearthing of a small piece of pottery with a beautifully drawn figure of subcontinent’s most cherished fowl: a peacock. Sheer awe besieged me. I heard Zubair Ghouri’s victorious yell. I watched his dance of euphoria and triumph in a state of ecstatic delirium. “What a way to end a day!” he cried out loud and ancient winds carried his words to me years across the dust covered mound.

I felt that eternal satisfaction surge through my whole being which comes while witnessing an accomplishment. I was part of this discovery.  I was member of a team which had found this beautiful piece of terracotta pottery that remained buried for several thousand years in oblivion. I touched and felt the rough clay figurines which carried primeval tales of the earliest settlers on these soils.

I and Zubair Ghouri had only arrived at Qutabpur a day before. Spurred by excitement to visit ancient Harappan sites by the side of the dry course of river Ravi and Beas, Ghouri had consented to take me along on one of his very personal explorations of Indus Valley sites. Ghouri, the author of a significant book in Urdu titled Ravi Kinary Ki Harappai Bastiyan [Harappan Settlements on the Banks of River Ravi], loves to talk about his earlier discoveries in Balochistan, Sindh and now in Punjab. Since this was our maiden venture, he was hesitant to deliver scholarly opinions in response to my incessant queries. “I am still in the dark. The evidence is insufficient. It will be too early to establish any authentic opinion on the basis of excavations at Harappa and Moenjodaro only,” he said; as we eagerly started eating Halwa in guest room of Qutabpur railway station, which Ahmed Bukhsh, the station master offered us as a token of gratitude for Ghouri Sahib’s gracious presence.

Tea tasted even better. I sipped it down my cold stomach in big swallows. Wintry winds howled outside cutting through the silence of the dark wintry night. Charpoys felt cozy and I dozed off amid dreams of ancient voices and figures dancing all around me.  

Fog and cold descended stealthily on the mound near Qutabpur cemetery. Probably to guard hush of the ages that laid buried there. ‘Twenty Minutes, Umair sahib,” said Ghaouri as he began to reveal secrets of the dead, “You’ll find surprises awaiting you, but we need to be at Wahniwal before noon!” I looked around with shy curiosity of a bewildered child. Suddenly aware of my presence amid silence and secrets of an epoch now lost forever, shrouded in a deep and mysterious hush, waited me to approach and break the silence. With cautious steps of a dazed explorer, I moved above the mound. Shreds of pottery crunched and creaked under my heavy boots.  Ghouri was busy looking for objects of his particular interest.

 Occasionally he would pick up some portion of ancient pottery and after a close observation would place it into plastic bags [which he carried in abundance] with great care. “What is this,” I pointed to a tiny round piece which apparently looked like fragment of plaster of Paris. “Steatite Bead!” said Ghouri, “also called burial beads and sometimes termed as ankle beads. You’ll find them at almost every mound we visit.” With quivering hands I touched that object from antiquity and watchfully placed it in a synthetic bag which Ghouri Sahib had offered with great bounty. I spotted a piece of stone, sharpened at one edge like a blade, probably used as a knife. And then through Ghouri’s guidance learned my first on field lessons in anthropology.

Looking down consistently, with observant eyes proved to be a tedious task, but the fear to miss something significant was more tiring. My gaze remained glued to the ground and I did reap rewards for that. Ghouri Sahib occasionally glanced back and encouraged me with satisfactory nods.

We arrived at Fojianwala a little later. This mound had a considerable spread. Pottery shred scattered on the surface and I found myself bamboozled in the age old kid’s game of Yasu, Panju, Lal, Kabutar, Doli…a kid’s game but a riddle of never ending times. What I found there, too…was again a riddle… of never ending time.

Ralli Quilts of Pakistan

Asia, traditionally is known as a place producing the best in textiles. The art of making fabric from cotton was first perfected here, in the ancient southern part of this subcontinent. The Romans even sent traders to this area to get fine fabrics for their togas.   Womenfolk in the Indus Region of the subcontinent, presently the domain of an independent sovereign state of Pakistan have traditionally been the harbingers of this historical tradition. A particular type of such beautiful textiles produced in the area is the “Ralli” quilts.  Adorned with bright colors and bold patterns, the quilts are also called rilli, rilly, rallee or rehli derived from the local word ralanna meaning to “mix or connect”.

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THE MAGNIFICENT ART OF PAKISTANI HANDMADE TEXTILES

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by Hira N. Hashmey

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Throughout history

• Asia has been known as a place producing the best in textiles. The art of making fabric from cotton was first perfected here, in the ancient southern part of this subcontinent. The Romans even sent traders to this area to get fine fabrics for their togas.   Womenfolk in the Indus Region of the subcontinent, presently the domain of an independent sovereign state of Pakistan have traditionally been the harbingers of this historical tradition. A particular type of such beautiful textiles produced in the area is the “Ralli” quilts.

•  Adorned with bright colors and bold patterns, the quilts are also called rilli, rilly, rallee or rehli derived from the local word ralanna meaning to “mix or connect”. For sake of simplicity and to avoid confusion in terms, used in different places of ralli production, the term “Ralli” has been used in this post; which by no means be taken as a standard term.

• In Pakistan, rallis are made in the southern province of Pakistan including Sindh, in Balochistan province and Cholistan desert in Bahawalpur district of Punjab. Just across our borders, in India the art is found in the adjoining states of Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Muslim and Hindu women from a variety of tribes and castes in towns, villages and also of nomadic settings usually make rallis. It’s an old tradition which probably dates back to the fourth millennium BCE, (as evidenced by similar patterns found even today on the ancient pottery in the subcontinent).

Rallis are commonly used as a covering for wooden beds, floor covering, storage bags, rugs and padding for workers or animals. In the villages, ralli is an important part of a girl’s dowry.

Ralli is termed “patchwork” in the west, a nomenclature used because of combining fine craftsmanship with thrifty recycling; more so, because it is the joining of shaped pieces of patterns or colored fabrics to form a rich mosaic. The technique offers a limitless scope to experiment with patterns, color and textures.

Patchwork is either a pieced work or appliqué:

The Pieced workis usually small regularly shaped scraps of material sewn together to form a strong fabric. Since patches are stitched to each other rather than to a background fabric, therefore, pieced work must be lined to hide raw edges at the back.

In Appliqué or the applied patchwork motifs are cut from plain or decorative fabrics. The edges are turned under the pieces and are hemmed or slipstitched to a background fabric. Sometimes the edges are left raw and a buttonhole stitch is used to join the fabric to the base in a more elaborate way

The pattern making possibilities offered by patchwork are almost infinite, but the traditional patterns are still the most popular. The simplest patchworks are one-patch design based on a single geometric shape such as a triangle, a square or a hexagon. Beautiful effects can be achieved by using different fabrics to create patterns. For instance, in the tumbling block design, light, dark and middle tones are used to create a three-dimensional illusion.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, crazy patchwork became fashionable. Scraps of unrelated fabrics, silks, ribbons, satins or velvet, were sewn on to a backing. Each piece was outlined with feather stitching in thick silk, often in a golden thread. Crazy patchwork was used for quilts, table coverings, cushions, handkerchiefs and nightdress cases.

Some of the loveliest patchwork comes from the United States, where it is a popular folk craft. The earliest American quilts were made for protection against the harsh winter. As time passed, the colonists developed their own style. Indeed, the names given to many of the patterns – log cabin, barn raising, bear’s paw and cactus basket – reflect their origins.

They evolved in particular, the block method of working, in which case a series of rectangular or square units were made up separately and the stitched together to create a large quilt. The advantage was that the individual blocks were more manageable to work than one large quilt. Sometimes quilts were worked by several different people and became known as friendship quilts. Each individual would work a separate block, often in a different design. The skill came in assembling these independent blocks into an amazing pattern.

On many old quilts one may find a spider’s web embroidered in a corner, as recognition of a creator’s skill. In some areas a spider’s web would be laid on the back of a baby girls’ hand so that she would acquire some of that dexterity. Often, one finds a deliberate error in a patchwork, such as repeating motif worked in the wrong color. This reflected a belief that only God could create perfection and it was therefore inappropriate for a mere mortal to aspire new heights.

The rallis are made from numerous panels, some of which are square and some rectangular. Each panel is individually worked before being joined to its neighbors by means of a network of fine border strips. Some panels are made from colorful patchwork shapes, while others are prettily quilted and appliquéd with a range of motifs.

A patchwork quilt is centuries old craft with intricate patterns and a breathtaking admiration for the talented womenfolk who stitch these quilts. The designs look so intricate and the stitches so tiny and neat; yet in reality anyone who has made a patchwork knows how simple they are for these ladies to make. Patience is indeed the essence of such work because ralli quilts are usually very large and therefore take time to stitch, but most designs, are based on a square pattern made up of about a dozen patches. Once the craftswoman has mastered the design of one square, she can simply repeat it many times over and at the end sew them all together to make the beautiful cover. Some also include interesting border designs which make them extra special.

Once finished, the patchwork is backed with cozy wadding, quilted and lined. The quilting is not essential, but looks decorative and has the practical function of holding the wadding in place.

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Related Post:

1. RALLI – Blending One’s Soul & Self into a Piece of Textile

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DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.

We at Wonders of Pakistan use copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

RALLI – Blending One’s Soul & Self into a Piece of Textile

The fascinating fabric called Ralli or Rilli is a remarkable textile artwork converted into quilts, table runners and cushion covers. Thousands of women are involved mostly in Sindh, partly in some parts of Cholistan in Bahawalpur distt. of Punjab and in some areas of Balochistan. A normal ralli whether a quilt, a cushion cover or a table runner, is a textile jewel finished with physical and spiritual labor done with hand and mind putting in almost 180 hours of an artisan woman doing this job. Women start making ralli in early ages as part of their dowry. In other cases, the poor artisans offer these products as gifts to elite families of Sindh on occasion of marriages or births and in return get an animal like cow, buffalo or a goat (locally called as khir piyarina i.e. to provide a regular source of milk for the artisan’s family).

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THE FABULOUS WORLD OF RALLI TEXTILES

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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What’s the true sense of beauty? Does it lie in the eyes of the beholder; or is it manifest in the crafted object itself or is it a coming together of kindred spirits – that of the maker and the beholder, the magical moment when a common chord is struck across the barriers of time and space. Just such chemistry ripples through the articulated patchwork of traditional homemade products crafted by the rural feminina of Sindh in Pakistan.

This fascinating product called Ralli or Rilli is a remarkable textile artwork converted into quilts, table runners and cushion covers. Thousands of women are involved mostly in Sindh, partly in some parts of Cholistan in Bahawalpur distt. of Punjab and in some areas of Balochistan.

A normal ralli whether a quilt, a cushion cover or a table runner, is a textile jewel finished with physical and spiritual labor done with hand and mind putting in almost 180 hours of an artisan woman doing this job. Women start making ralli in early ages as part of their dowry. In other cases, the poor artisans offer these products as gifts to elite families of Sindh on occasion of marriages or births and in return get an animal like cow, buffalo or a goat (locally called as khir piyarina i.e. to provide a regular source of milk for the artisan’s family).

Ralli, the beautiful handicraft from Sindh in Pakistan exhibits the wide array of cultural beauty. Its intricate patterns show the creativity, the skill and dexterity of the Sindhi artisans which places the area among the culturally rich lands of the world.

Sindhi rallis are beautiful and colorful. They are cluster of patchwork and or embroidery. Used also as bed linen Sindhi ralli is made with multicolored pieces of cloth stitched together in attractive designs. The color combinations and unique patterns speak for the aesthetic sense of its creator. The designs vary from floral motifs, waves and images of animals or trees. Many handicrafts of great beauty like cushion covers, embroidered shirts; wall hangers and mirror worked handbags are also made in ralli style mainly in Umarkot and Tharparkar area of Sindh.

Patricia Stoddard, an American author, teacher and expert writes in her book “The Ralli Quilts” Ralli textiles are very traditional made by women in the areas of Sindh, Pakistan, Western India and Gujarat. Ralli textiles are just gaining international recognition, even though women have been making these quilts for hundreds, may be thousands of years. The levels of the people, who make these textiles, are woven into each piece. The symbols of flowers and animals used in the decoration and colors are imaginative and exotic. Every ralli quilt tells a story. It tells of the natural creativity and love of color and design of the woman who creates them. Every ralli tells the story of the strength of tradition and motifs of rallis which have been passed from mother to daughter and woman-to-woman may be for thousands of years.

Cecilia Eddy, a British author and too a teacher of quilts has a deep study on ralli quilts. She in her book “Quilted Planet” says “The pattern and colors of ralli quilts embody all the romance and exoticism of the East. Did you know that in the Indus region of Pakistan where many rallis are made to this day for dowries, the word ralli means to mix or connect”. One of the ralli quilts pictured in her book looks like a bar quilt of flying geese, surrounded by a saw tooth border and a wider border of square-in-a-square on point.

Ironically, this fascinating cultural product, gaining recognition abroad, is loosing its importance back home. Textile market trends are changing as do the changes in ultra fashioned home textiles which influence the purchasing priorities of the buyers. A major reason involved in decline of usage of the cultured goods is also the poverty of the inhabitants of Sindh.

A lot of skilled artisans are leaving their profession because of a lack of patronage. This work of art is exclusively handmade and cannot be duplicated. The skill travels from generation to generation but due to dearth of proper avenues for young artisans, new generation has not much interest in learning the trade of their forefathers. Their priorities too have changed.  Which’s why this centuries old art is on decline. For a revival and preservation of the handicrafts support is needed from the concerned quarters of the society. New markets need to be explored within the country as well as internationally.

AHAN steps in…

To solve the problems and to tackle on-ground issues, due credits go to AHAN (Aik Hunar Aik Nagar) project of the Ministry of Industries, Govt. of Pakistan, wo with a three pronged strategy initiated a pilot project for the craftswomen of Sukkur  (Sindh).

During first phase of this pilot, a large number of designs were reviewed by the designers. They observed that different geographic locations have different ralli designs having their own history and tradition, hence different geographic clusters and craftswomen were identified by AHAN. They were then trained as master trainers. About five clusters of 12 master craftswomen were given one month on-job training at designers’ training centres in Karachi.

The training course provided skills in product development with different themes and tones. The object of this pilot project is that by training the ‘masters’they will then work further at their villages to train more women.

Renowned Pakistani designer Deepak Perwani was involved to provide his expertise in product development and training. He has now trained a group of female artisans at his factory in Karachi.

The idea behind such trainings is to add value to this village craft by turning out different ralli products like fashion apparel, handbags, embellishments on shawls  and bedroom accessories that include table lamps shades, cushions and toys. The women participants were also trained on modern designs and guided on different marketing channels. Their products were also displayed at a women expo to get the market feedback.

In embroidery and patchwork ralli, Ms. Shehnaz Ismail, Head of the Textile Deptt., of the Indus Valley School was engaged to design and develop a tailor made course for the artisans engaged in embroidery and patchwork.

The first training of the groups was conducted by the craftswomen who were already familiarized with design, measurements and pattern making, improvement of aesthetic- ability / sense and quality aspects of the product. During trainings they were also introduced with different markets for purchase of good quality raw material and sale of their products.

Once the training programs scheduled by the AHAN are completed, we can see some chances for the womenfolk indulged in this rural craft; that their economic lot will be improved and their products will be sold not only in their traditional markets but also in modern, trendy fashion boutiques of the world as well.

Note: This post is based on information from different Internet sources and so are the pictures.

Related Post: Ralli Quilts of Pakistan

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Welcome Mister President

 

     Barack Hussein Obama has already assumed office as the 44th President of the United States of America. Just two days in office, he has introduced some major policy shifts. He seems to prove he has a vision – contrary to shortsighted approach by George Walker Bush who mainly believed in military solutions to every problem everywhere.

     As a sequel to this major change at the White House, we are inserting two posts here. In the first post by Eric Margolis, the existing, outdated, fruitless US policy against its only Communist neighbor in the Americas is reviewed. Eric has also some suggestions for the new American president. In the second post, Michael Carmichael tracks on what Obama primarily needs to do for his fellow Americans and the world.

     These posts are being put up to enable WOP readers have some insight (with respect to US context) of the issues of immediate import for the new President. On global scale, Obama as a pragmatic young leader needs to take such steps, which can save this world from chaos that George W. Bush in collusion with his toadies like Tony Blair and Pervaiz Musharraf left as his legacy. A million dollar question, however, still remains. CAN HE DO it? The neocons who contributed towards Bush’s doctrine of New World Order are still occupying important seats both at the White House as well as the Pentagon. Only time will tell whether the statesmanship of new US president brings tangible results: that he introduces a Universal World Order instead of this so called New Word Order!

by Eric Margolis

The inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States of America has more of the mood of a second coming than the investiture of a new president. Of course, the Bush administration, the most catastrophic in memory, is an easy act to follow.

Barack Hussein Obama brings a bounty of hope, whereas the Bush administration brought fear-mongering, wars, flirtation with fascism, and financial ruin.

Some 80% of Americans in a recent poll are strongly positive about Obama. But now that Obama has taken office, reality is going to set in and the euphoria will quickly dissipate as the young president confronts truly gargantuan problems and Washington’s powers that be assert their influence and bind him with a thousand cords.

Still, like most people, I am elated to see the departure of the sinister Bush administration and welcome the new president, a man of dignity, intelligence and strength. 20th Jan. 2009, was a majestic day for all Americans. As an American (and a Canadian) I am awfully proud. It’s been a long time since I felt good about my country.

So all best wishes to our new president. I am happy I suggested that one of his first official acts should be to immediately close the shameful Devil’s Island at Guantanamo Cuba, (which he has already ordered on the very first day of taking office). He should now further order this base, an embarrassing relic of 19th Century American imperialism, returned forthwith to Cuba. His next step should be to ask Congress to end the hypocritical, idiotic 50-year embargo of Cuba.

I am just back from Cuba, and here follows my observations on its 50th anniversary of Communist rule.

HAVANA – The 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution has been a very modest, low key affaire, totally out of keeping with this island’s normally boisterous fiestas. Fidel remains gravely ill. He has been out of sight for the past two years, though he publishes news commentary from seclusion.

Economically stricken Cuba is hanging on by its fingernails. Life is grim and hard on this beautiful but impoverished island. Food is rationed and scarce, public transport erratic, and blackouts common. Many people living in decrepit apartment buildings must haul buckets of water up numerous flights of stairs.

In the early 1950′s (an era how seemingly as remote as Ancient Egypt), my parents used to bring me to Havana each winter, and we often joined Ernest Hemingway and his mistress Pilar for daiquiris at its fabled ‘Floridita Bar.’ He was big, vivacious man with a white beard and a rumbling laugh. I took an immediate liking to the famed writer, and he was very kind to me, telling me stories about the Spanish civil war and deep water fishing. I still have one of his books, inscribed, ‘to Eric, from his friend Ernest Hemingway, Havana, 1951.’

Eight years later, a Communist lawyer named Fidel Castro Ruiz stormed ashore with 81 men to begin a guerilla war against the US-backed Batista dictatorship. Cuba was then a virtual American colony: Americans owned 60% of Cuba’s farmland and industry. But, contrary to Communist history, the island was not a wasteland of gangsters, prostitutes and oligarchs. It was the West Indies’ most developed, prosperous island with a well-developed middle class and a living standard that was near the top of Latin America’s.

On 1 January, 1959, Castro’s guerilla fighters arrived in Havana and proclaimed a revolutionary republic. For the first time in its long history (Havana is 50-70 years older than New York City), Cuba was genuinely independent of Spanish rule and American domination.

Once Castro was in power, his comrade-in-arms, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevera, today an icon of romantic revolution to the uninformed and juvenile, ordered the execution of over 600 ‘bourgeois.’ Che then went off to the Congo to wage revolution but found cannibalism instead of a waiting proto-Marxist proletariat and was quickly run out of the chaotic country by the CIA.

Undaunted, Che headed to Bolivia, where he got killed leading a farcically inept Marxist revolution. That nation’s dirt poor peasants rejected Che and turned him in. CIA’s famed agent, Felix Rodriguez, finished off Che. But, as Che rightly observed, ‘revolutionaries never die.’ His memory went on to live as a pop image on t-shirts and berets around the globe.

Che’s fiascos notwithstanding, in an era when America bullied and exploited Latin America, and treated its people with contempt and scorn, Castro’s revolution was a triumph. His resistance to 50 years of US efforts to overthrow or assassinate him, and a near-lethal embargo, was epic. Recall that this was the era when most of Latin American was ruled by US-backed military dictators or civilian oligarchs.

US attempts to topple Castro nearly led to nuclear war with the USSR in 1962. The Soviets rushed nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba to thwart a planned US invasion. The US imposed a naval blockade of Cuba and massed forces for an invasion. Nuclear war was very close. I was a student at Washington’s Georgetown University at the time and vividly recall how frightened we all were.

In the end, Moscow won the confrontation, though Americans were led to believe by White House spin, their media, and Hollywood that President John Kennedy was the victor. Moscow withdrew its missiles in exchange for the US agreeing never to invade Cuba and pulling its missiles out of Italy and Turkey. Castro was saved by Moscow.

In recent years, KGB veterans of the Cuban missile crisis have claimed that Castro begged Nikita Khrushchev to fire nuclear weapons at the US mainland. Moscow refused.

The cost of maintaining Cuba’s independence and dignity was poverty, dictatorship, and quickly becoming a Soviet satellite until the USSR collapsed in 1991. Today, only oil-rich Venezuela and Canadian tourists are keeping battered Cuba afloat.

Havana, once called ‘the naughtiest city on earth,’ is a museum of the 1950′s: decaying, melancholy, dark and depressing.

Cuba has one of Latin America’s best medical and education system, and highest literacy. But life in Cuba is punishing: food and power shortages, endless queuing, grinding poverty and constant supervision by secret policemen and Communist party informers – in short, tropical Stalinism.

Castro blames this misery on the US embargo. The US blames Castro’s failed Stalinist economics for the mess. In fact, both are responsible. Cuba has suffered fifty years of the kind of pitiless collective punishment that Gaza has been experiencing, just in slower-motion.

The US has maintained its crushing boycott under the laughable pretexts that Havana holds 200 political prisoners and is Communist. Yet the US cheerfully deals with Communist China and Vietnam, and itself holds 36,000 Iraqi political prisoners, not to mention Guantanamo. America’s ally Israel holds 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners.

It’s high time the West Indies’ largest island was welcomed back to this hemisphere and given civilized treatment. A recent poll showed that even 55% of Miami’s once fanatically anti-Castro Cubans now support ending the US embargo.

On an interesting side note, Fidel Castro used to warn black and mulatto Cubans, who are about 60% of the population, that the US was a deeply racist nation that hated blacks. The election of Barack Obama has exploded that argument. Cubans are just as agog over Obama as everyone else.

Chinese influence is moving into Cuba, and Russia is reasserting its strategic presence by rearming Cuba’s obsolete military forces. So the US has little time to lose.

First Fidel, and now Raul Castro, have been happy to keep the US at arm’s length by provoking occasional crises. An end to US-Cuban hostility could bring up to two million US tourists. The creaky Communist control system could not withstand this invasion. Nor could the Spartan tourist infrastructure.

Young Cubans are yearning for the kind of anti-Communist revolution that swept Eastern Europe. So the Party, which refuses to implement Chinese-style reforms, may keep Cuba frozen in time.

As I wrote from Havana eight years ago, there will be no major changes until Fidel Castro, whom just about all Cubans regard as their nation’s beloved ‘papa,’ finally dies.

The age of Yankee imperialism in Latin America is over. Cuba raised the banner of revolt, and paid the price. Now is the time for Cuba to rejoin the polity of Latin American democratic nations as a member in good standing. America, I hope, will by now have learned to treat Cuba with dignity, respect and economic restraint.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009

Obama: Amaze us!

As Barack Obama has approached the helm of the American ship of state, he is facing many challenges.

Michael Carmichael

Just as she was being born at the dawn of her journey into history, the American nation is poised on the brink of a new beginning.  In those revolutionary times, America faced a roiling sea of danger, uncertainty and trepidation.  Today, after more than two centuries of venture, America moves forward beyond and away from the final and most tragic acts of the second Bush presidency.

The American journey has been filled with triumph and tragedy.  Triumph over the bonds of colonialism transformed into the tragedy of slavery, Manifest Destiny and the genocide of Native Americans followed by Civil War.  Abolition began to right the wrongs of slavery, but America careened forward into the excesses of the Gilded Age and the arrogance of her Imperialist Presidency that extended her empire to the islands of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

The Roosevelts expanded the American vision to encompass economic justice, environmental preservation and the duty to deliver peace beyond our borders.  At the same time, American philosophers advocated the virtue of selfishness, the goodness of greed and the siren song of supply side trickle down economic miracles, while Martin Luther King, Jr. marched to the beat of a different drummer to demand the fulfillment of civil rights for our black brothers and sisters.

In an ancient scenario, the culture of greed infiltrated the American defense establishment and commandeered the ship of state to instigate conflicts and to impose its will by force.  American power came into conflict with competing ideologies promising a better and more just society through cooperation rather than competition.  For more than three-quarters of a century, America has moved forward toward its promise of freedom for all her people:  freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom from want and freedom from fear.

As Barack Obama approaches the dais to take his oath of office, he is focused on delivering the four freedoms to all Americans.  Each of FDR’s four freedoms is in danger in America today.  Freedom of speech was curtailed in pursuit of solidarity against the Axis of Evil in the War on Terror.  Freedom of religion is under threat as Muslims are treated like criminals and terrorists.  Freedom from want is on its deathbed, for millions of Americans have been expelled from their homes, banished from their workplaces and shunned by their employers.  Freedom from fear has vanished, as Americans are convulsed in a paroxysm of panic apprehensive about their financial security and in fear for their very lives.

Barack Obama faces an insurmountable Himalaya of fear.  In its face, Obama brings a message of hope for change.  Obama erases fear with the promise of hope.  Now he must turn to the people of America and deliver the four freedoms they have been promised.

Obama faces anxiety over the economy. While there are differences of opinion about what must be done and what must not be done, Obama has few choices.  Obama’s errant predecessor capitulated to the demands of his capitalist coterie for massive federal bailouts of financial institutions.  With the bloated banking system now in bankruptcy, the calls for government regulation from Wall Street and the Federal Reserve will herald the beginning of state capitalism, a propagandistic oxymoron for a socialized banking system.  While the incomes of financiers, bankers and others will shrivel, the confidence of the American people will be restored.  The new American banking system will resemble a vast public utility, where salaries are strictly limited and profits are regulated.

But, the American people fear for their very lives today. Faced with the rapacious appetite for corporate profit that no population of any other industrialized nation faces, Americans spend more than twice what citizens of other democracies spend for their healthcare.  In order to restore the freedom from fear, Obama must deliver a better system for healthcare that will be nothing less than revolutionary for it must delete the profitability of illness, injury and disease from the national vocabulary.  The people of America are suffering through a stupefying crescendo of ghoulish greed that is pervasive throughout the healthcare industry.  Obama believes that healthcare is a human right that government must deliver to a free people to ensure that they do not experience fears for their own lives.

But, Americans fear for more than their financial futures and their health, they fear for their very existence under threat from those who would destroy the fabric of our society – the terrorists.  Bush launched his War on Terror to galvanize political support for a Gotterdammerung of Islamist terrorists.  In the process, Bush triggered a massive avalanche of fear within America that has led to two immoral and counterproductive wars in Asia. America’s standing in the world has been toppled from the top of a tall column.  For the world at large, the Statue of Liberty has lost all meaning.  America’s prestige has morphed into a global loathing of the stars and stripes.  In 2008, America has become the most feared and hated nation on earth.

Like no other president before him, Obama faces a global challenge to America’s faltering leadership. To address the global challenge, Obama must replace opprobrium with trust and restore equilibrium with peace.  American Muslims must be freed from the burdens of ostracism, stereotyping and the prison of Guantanamo. But, the closure of Guantanamo is only the first step.  The American prison population has inflated beyond all sense of reason.  Alone among all other nations, America imprisons one out of every one hundred of its citizens.  For shame, more American prisoners are from the black and tan minorities rather than from the white majority.  The American prison-industrial complex has transformed the land of the free into a police state where minorities are incarcerated for misdemeanors while whites go free for felonies.  Obama must right this terrible wrong that tarnishes America’s luster in the eyes of the world.

Even more importantly, Obama must forge a new foreign policy that does not genuflect to the Pentagon and resort to military interventions and wars to enforce American power by the simplistic application of force — for force has failed America in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.  In the Information Age, hard power is indeed outmoded, outdated, obsolete and counterproductive.  Soft power is now the only instrument available for forging ahead on the global seas of commerce, ecology and culture.

Obama’s global challenges are manifold, but none more difficult than in the Middle East. In recent days, hard power inflicted pain and destruction in the Arab-Israeli conflict.  America’s involvement in the Middle East has not delivered peace or security of the freedom from fear to the peoples of the Middle East.  Since the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Agreement, the Middle East has devolved into conflict and crisis.  Under George W. Bush, American policy made the insufferable situation worse by launching the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and unwise favoritism in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nowhere does Obama face a more difficult challenge than in the Middle East, but in challenge therein resides opportunity – a unique opportunity to redefine America’s vision in the eyes of the world.

On Wednesday, the 21st of January 2009, Barack Obama has entered the Oval Office where he wields the power of the American nation.  From that date onwards, the world will judge him for the priorities he engages from the very outset of his presidency.

While he has promised America that he will order the cessation of torture, the withdrawal from Iraq, the final phase of the war in Afghanistan and the restructuring of American involvement with the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama’s global reputation will be cast in the flames of the forge.

In that moment and in the others rapidly to come, we shall learn the extent and the tenor of the change Obama will bring – not only to America but to the tiny planet where he will be the most powerful leader in world history, a leader for all peoples – for better or worse — and it is indeed quite difficult to imagine how he might be worse than George W. Bush.

President Obama, the time is now ripe.  Bring on all the changes you have promised from sea to shining sea and from nation unto nation – you must now bring peace unto all the nations of the earth.  We, Americans who summoned and supported you are waiting; the nations are gazing intently upon you.  Amaze us.

Courtesy: Globalresearch.ca

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Tourrism not Terrorism

              ♦ Pakistan can sustain its economy only by promoting tourism.

              ♦ Once normalcy is restored, this country has tremendous potential to become an economic hub of tourism. Its history and heritage alone are fabulously rich – to lure international tourists to this land of immense beauty.

              ♦ The electricity and gas crunches have crippled our textile industry the main source of export earnings and employment provider in this country.

 The end of January, the starting month of the year, the coldest one is ending now. A change in the air is coming. Trees will soon be loaded with fresh green. Multi colored flowers – many with a mosaic of beautiful patterns will open up to fill the airs with a sweet fragrance. The whole ambience all over the country will wear a cool, green and fresh look of spring.

Simultaneously in the months to come, the vales of Swat and the rugged mountains of federally administered areas in our tribal belt will welcome the spring with ear shattering cannon shots. In return shall come again the gun shots. The point is – who is getting killed? If a soldier of the Pakistan army or a paramilitary sepoy loses life, it is the blood of a Pakistani that is spilled on the sacred soil of Pakistan. Again if an unarmed civilian tribal from the other side is killed, it’s the blood of our own country man. Dilemma before us is that guns and the drones do not precisely differentiate between a terrorist and a peaceful civilian living nearby.

Why can’t we understand, in this modern age when technology has reached its zenith, when information revolution has taken the whole world like a storm, we in Pakistan are fighting along with the US, a war which seems to have no end. We should not overlook the very fact that a Pakistani can never be and should never be the enemy of another Pakistani? Our common enemy at the moment is terrorism. And this very enemy is working against acceptability of our country as a modern democratic entity which has endless beauty to offer to its visitors. But alas! With firing of guns, and people getting killed through bomb blasts, would a foreign guest ever think of coming to Pakistan risking his / her life!

It is the time, we as a nation should think, should ponder over the core question: how can we make this land of ours a land of peace, tranquility, a secure and a leisure-full vacationing land so that the endless touristic wonders that we have can be properly marketed to the outside world as an ideal place to visit, for a land infested with wars, extreme polarizations in political and social culture, with acute lawlessness all over, who would ever dare to enter this land just to view such touristic splendors.

 We could perhaps go a step further.  Why not initiate a nationwide dialogue amongst all stakeholders on one point agendum only: “Tourism not Terrorism” will henceforth be the creed, the philosophy and the dictum of Pakistan. Once we succeed to achieve this, we would be leaving a prideful legacy not only for our coming generations but may see happy days in our lifetime as well.

By promoting tourism, not only do we offer a wholesome environment to international guests, to see the real beauty of the country, the hospitality of its people but also succeed to wash our image as  a nation abetting terrorism. (Wrong though, unfortunately this is the image we have).

Kashmir: The Country Without a Post Office*

Dargah Hazrat Bal – Landmark of Srinagar, the Capital

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THE WAIL OF KASHMIR

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Note for WoP readers: Ever since the 1947 partition of Indian subcontinent, Kashmir has always been on fire. India and  Pakistan fought three wars and the main cause of these wars has always been Kashmir. India maintains that the one time princely state, Kashmir is its integral part. Pakistan contests this stance and has stressed a solution based on fair and free plebiscite which would allow the people decide their own future through a right of self determination; whether they wish to continue living in India or would want to secede and join Pakistan.

Though both India and Pakistan remain ‘fastened’ to their respective stands, there have been efforts on the way to resolve this decades long dispute between two nuclear neighbors. Various formulas were discussed by which no one would lose its face and a solution agreeable to all parties, is finalized. Deliberations of these talks, referred to as Track II diplomacy were kept secret (for obvious reasons). Even in the valley itself three different views persist. 1) Those who think separation of Kashmir from Indian Union is unconceivable. 2) Those who want to secede from India and join Pakistan. 3) Those who would wish Kashmir an independent state.

Scant details of these options available are based on four different scenarios. It is said that the Chenab formula was almost agreed by all the parties before departure of Gen. Pervez Musharraf from the scene.

Shortly before a no confidence move against him, Sardar Ateeq Ahmad Khan, former Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir in an interview, did hint to some extent of a solution on similar lines.(WOP will cover this option including other scenarios in its next post)

The first one of this series is being inserted in our current issue. Written by Shubho, a fellow blogger from India, it will be followed by a second report by BBC on the four scenarios under consideration.

The third and the fourth post again from India show the picture in the valley and views by so many Indians who believe a solution of this 61 years old dispute must be sought.

We at WOP believe: being part of the Indian sub-continent, the two neighbors who share landmass, mountain ranges, rivers and seas, ancient cultures, history, and religions cannot be and should not be a hostage to this or that issue. Soft borders and free trade between the two can release immense potential in terms of tourism, intercultural exchange, and a common South Asian approach to world affairs. [Nayyar]

 

by Shubho

Since the dawn of independence, Kashmir is the main cause of disagreement between India and Pakistan. The only difference today from what it was in 1947 is, that the state seems to be more divided and communalized. Regular attempts by both countries took place to resolve the dispute through various means: from bilateral talks, wars and state sponsored militancy but the crisis sustained as the major source of tension and dispute between them.

Today the divide among the Hindu and Muslim communities has enormously widened up in the region, credit goes to the intensified promotion of religious politics by major political parties from both sides. When one side desires to justify the ‘Two Nations theory’ that emphasizes that Muslims and non-Muslims can’t live together, the other side promotes jingoistic nationalism and demands Muslims to be treated as second-class citizens. Religious sentiments are repetitively injected to both communities, as it is a well-known fact that religion is the only topic that can easily rouse the ordinary people to fight against each other.

History confirms again and again the famous Karl Marx maxim “Religion is the opium of the masses“. An elderly Muslim shopkeeper in Udarana, a mixed Hindu-Muslim village near the town of Bhaderwah, expresses this enormous divide “Now we hardly visit each other’s homes or patronize each other’s shops. …We really don’t have love in our hearts for each other.” From the early nineties, Hindu-Muslim relations have rapidly been diminished in the state.

Jammu and Kashmir’s first political party, the ‘Muslim Conference’ was founded in 1932 with Shaikh Abdullah as its President. While a student at Aligarh Muslim University, Shaikh Abdullah was influenced by liberal and progressive ideas. He became convinced that the feudal system existing in the land was to blame for the miseries of Kashmir, which was ruled in an oppressive and autocratic manner by a Hindu monarch. ‘Muslim Conference’ changed its name to ‘National Conference’ in 1938 with an objective to create a broader platform and allow people from all communities to join the struggle against the monarch Maharaja Hari Singh.

At the time of partition, when the Maharaja was hesitating over the choice of acceding either to India or to Pakistan, Shaikh Abdullah supported India. He was appointed Prime Minister of Kashmir on March 17, 1948. Until the monarchy existed, most Muslims in the region were landless laborers. Along with the Dalits, they were also treated as untouchables by the ‘upper’ caste Hindus. Under Shaikh Abdullah, radical land reforms were introduced in the state, through which sharecroppers, mainly Muslims and Dalits, got land previously owned by Rajput and Brahmin landlords.

His effort made him a hugely popular mass leader. In 1953, the Indian government betrayed Shaikh Abdullah by sacking him from the Prime Minister’s post. He was accused for conspiring against the State and jailed from 1953 to 1975. Meanwhile, the Indian Constitution, vide Article 370 had granted a special status to the state guaranteeing it autonomy except for defense, foreign affairs and communications.

After his release, he was sworn in as the Chief Minister in 1977 with a massive mandate. For the next five years, until the death of Shaikh Abdullah in 1982, Jammu and Kashmir was politically calm and stable. The separatist movement in the Kashmir Valley restarted from April 1988. The movement gathered momentum through a close nexus between Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and Pakistan, which reached its peak in the mid nineties. The controversy on the Amarnath Shrine Board land transfer and the subsequent incidents which arise in the valley one after the other are based on such facts of Kashmir history.

AMARNATH SHRINE BOARD LAND TRANSFER FIASCO

The Amarnath Caves are one of the most famous Hindu shrines located in the Himalayas at the altitude of 12,760 feet. The caves are about 88 miles away from Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir (Jammu is the winter capital). It is one of the most significant pilgrimage destinations for the Hindus and attracts about 400,000 pilgrims (Yatri) every year. In the year 2000, the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board was set up to take care of the pilgrims passage (Yatra) to the caves that was previously conducted jointly by tourism department of the state government and Dharamarth Trust.

On 26 May 2008, the Congress-led coalition government of Jammu and Kashmir decided to transfer 100 acres of forestland to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board to set up temporary shelters and facilities for the pilgrims. The government decision snowballed into a huge public outcry in the Kashmir valley. During protests, six people were killed and 100 injured in police firing at Srinagar. The coalition partner PDP pulled out its support and the government was reduced to a minority.

Keeping in mind the coming state election and under pressure from different quarters, the government revoked the order on 1 July. Immediately, violent counter protests sparked off in the Jammu region spearheaded by Shri Amarnath Yatra Sangharsh Samiti, a conglomeration of several Hindu chauvinist groups but with a large mass support. Here also at least three people were killed by police firing. Questions were raised by the Samiti, which was formed around the Hindu sentiment, that if the decision to transfer the land was revoked after the protests in the Kashmir region, why not it is further restored after the more aggressive Jammu counter protests?

On 7 July, Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad resigned after loosing the trust vote in the state assembly and Governor’s rule was imposed in the state.

The Yatra and Yatris were largely assisted by the local people of the region, who are Muslims. Apart from the obvious gesture of religious harmony, the Amarnath Yatra is also economically important for the local peopl

In this political chaos, the role of the PDP (Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party) was the most to condemn. The decision to transfer the forestland to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board was a unanimous cabinet decision cleared by the state forest ministry and the deputy chief minister, both top notches from the PDP leadership. PDP president Mehbooba Mufti’s remark that she came to know about the decision only from newspaper reports were a full-size lie. The fact is that the PDP leadership could not foresee the huge public protests following the order and when the situation turned worst did a volte-face to safeguard its political ambitions in the coming election. After the government revoked the land transform order, PDP started demanding a credit for it. This is a clear example of the politics of opportunism being played by political parties jeopardizing the life of the ordinary people of Jammu and Kashmir.

THE AFTERMATH

The turmoil clearly shattered the myth of Jammu and Kashmir as a single entity. The deep-rooted religious and social divide prevailing in the region entirely exposed as a ‘Jammu versus Kashmir’ dispute. In the Jammu region, the Muslims are a minority compared to Kashmir where the Muslims are the majority. Therefore, while protesters in Jammu enforced an economic blockade of the Kashmir Valley by stopping traffic on the Srinagar-Jammu National Highway, on 11 August last year separatist leaders of the Kashmir region instigated a march to Muzaffarabad (the capital of Pakistan controlled Kashmir referred as Azad Kashmir) bypassing Jammu. The intention was to explore new trading options by crossing the Line of Control, the temporary border dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan. The march violated the imposed curfew, clashed with the security forces leading to ten more deaths including All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz. The polarization in the state became absolute and there was no space of suppleness visible from either side.

My memory is again in the way of your history. Army convoys all night like desert caravans:

In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved— all winter—its crushed fennel.

We can’t ask them: Are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked In each other’s reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like these centuries later in this country

I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms. Children run out with windows in their arms.

You drag it behind you in lit corridors.

If the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

- Farewell: Agha Shahid Ali

Political gambits have caused a colossal damage to the economy, education system and social fabric of Jammu and Kashmir. The once tranquil and gorgeous land has turned into a ‘valley of fear’. It has turned into a land of orphans and widows, a land of graveyards. After frequently witnessing violent deaths and funerals of near and dear ones, the people here have lost their normal human feelings. Violence has affected all sections of life. It has in fact become a way of ‘communication’. Human lives are so devalued that a few killings hardly shock anybody. Students have lost their inquisitiveness to learn. Teachers lost their enthusiasm to teach. To visit homes of friends and relatives people have to prove their innocence before security personnel. Everyone has to carry an identity card, which is regarded almost as oxygen. The situation is best described by Agha Shahid Ali in his poem, “everyone carries his address so that at least his body will reach home“. Anxiety and tension has become a part of the daily life here. A very disturbing psychology of suspicion and fear has permanently etched in the minds of local people.

Though located within free and democratic India, Jammu and Kashmir no more signifies to be a free place. The presence of army and security forces in every nook and corner has developed a feeling of confinement and repression. To the ordinary Muslim minds in particular, the most humiliating feeling must be to live under regular scrutiny about their ‘patriotism’ and allegiance to the Indian state. Armed conflict and disputes have halted the economic development of the state. In one and a half month following the Amarnath Shrine Board land dispute, the local economy suffered a loss of nearly Rs. 200-250 crores.

We shall meet again, in Srinagar,

by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ll enter

our last world, the first that vanished  in our absence from the broken city.

We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets and bind the open thorns,

warm the ivy into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate-  the bird will say-Humankind can bear

everything. No need to stop the ear

- A Pastoral: Agha Shahid Ali

There is very little hope left over for the ordinary people of Jammu and Kashmir today, the hope for an exuberant future. In the present circumstances, it is almost impossible even to dream about a brotherhood involving the two communities, as the poet Agha Shahid Ali did in his deeply emotional poem A Pastoral dedicated to his Kashmiri Hindu friend Suvir Kaul. To hope, one should regain trust and rely on truth. Who will bring back trust and truth among the people of Jammu and Kashmir?

Note:

* Derived from the title of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali’s book The Country Without a Post Office published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1998. Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, grew up in a distinguished Muslim family in Srinagar, Kashmir and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and the University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. He died peacefully, in his sleep, of brain cancer in December, 2001.

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Source: The Words from  Solitude

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Post Mumbai: Conclusions

 

An article carrying an excellent analysis on post Mumbai situation has recently come up from Gen. (Retd). Jahangir Karamat, formerly Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US, Chief of Pakistan’s armed Staff and one of the few generals who literally followed the constitution of Pakistan 

Hitherto our army generals (the COAS-cum CMLA’s-cum Presidents) have been lecturing us only on dangers that this country faces and they as Supremos of Pakistan army are the only saviors, the only judge to decide on patriotism of an ordinary Pakistani. Anybody who opposed their government (which was in every case, without any single exception100 percent dictatorial) was either a mulk-dushman or agent of somebody who is outright determined to undo this land.

In case one didn’t fit into any of the above categories, he was a communist, an Indian agent or many a time just a “persona non grata”. (I remember once our friend from Safma (South Asia Free Media Association) an ardent supporter of India Pakistan Friendship while speaking on this subject, was told by then Governor of Punjab, again a military general that to him the former appeared to be an agent of RAW and to this quipped our friend, “my dilemma is when I speak of friendship between two of us (India and Pakistan) in India am told, am an agent of ISI and here in my own country I become an agent of Raw. The fact is General Sahib! Am agent of Pakistan only and as a Pakistani I sincerely believe in friendship between the two countries”.

In this context, am extremely delighted to read this post and find it extremely heartening that Gen. (R) Jehangir Karamat has the sagacity to utter the stark truth, a truth that most of our policy makers always tend not to recognize. Rightly says he, we just shove our eyes in the sand and forget that there is something happening, something which we need to redress. By now so much has been said and written and has happened that there is a dire need to draw conclusions. Not just draw conclusions but to evaluate them, prioritize them and act on them.

 The general consensus is that India and Pakistan need to talk. This is a decision that the political leadership on both sides needs to take. The how, when, where and what can be sorted out once this political decision has been made.

by Gen. Jahangir Karamat ex COAS

 By now so much has been said and written and has happened that there is a dire need to draw conclusions. Not just draw conclusions but to evaluate them, prioritize them and act on them.

The general consensus is that India and Pakistan need to talk. This is a decision that the political leadership on both sides needs to take. The how, when, where and what can be sorted out once this political decision has been made.

By now it is clear to all except the ostriches that Pakistan faces a serious internal crisis. This crisis is multifaceted and has many interconnected dimensions. It cannot be addressed unless there is an in-depth understanding of its reality. To do this it is necessary to develop a comprehensive picture of the scale and magnitude of the internal threat

Recent writings, discussions and decisions have made it abundantly clear that Pakistan lacks a national intelligence coordination mechanism and a policy planning and decision making structure. This gap leads to reliance on intelligence agencies for not just intelligence but also the response options. This must change. Coordinated intelligence will produce the threat picture and the policy planning process will develop response options. From these options the decision maker will choose the course of action. This process will also respond to the criticism of intelligence agencies.

Political stability will be one facet of the response to the internal threat but the general conclusion being reached by most Pakistanis is that has to be the first step and it can be a comparatively easy step if personal ambitions and vendettas are shelved and simple decisions taken on restoring the parliamentary system, empowering the judiciary and election commission and removing controversial appointees.

 There is a dawning realization that Pakistan should not seek an identity beyond our region in Arab lands. Our identity is in the greater South Asian sub-continent that includes Afghanistan. If we come to terms with this reality our bilateral relations with our neighbors will take on a whole new significance and urgency. For this a process of re-education has to start. Muslim countries and particularly Arab countries will remain our close allies and friends.

 Finally it is clear that in a globalized world Pakistan’s foreign policy has to be on a global scale and Pakistan should never be seen as a threat to global peace. To climb out of the economic quagmire Pakistan has to forge relationships on the basis of trade, economic activity, technology transfers, investment, education, health care and support at the international level. This should help in prioritizing relationships and developing public opinion that supports foreign policy rather than opposing it. This is what will redefine and drive our relationship with the West.

Courtesy: http://www.wichaar.com

US war against Pakistan?

Instead of intimidating the pro-Taliban Pakistani Pashtuns, limited US air strikes flown from secret US bases inside Pakistan have ignited a firestorm of anti-western fury among FATA’s warlike tribesmen and all Pakistanis are now united in their opposition to any US strikes into their nation and enraged at the United States for supporting dictator Pervez Musharraf. In doing this, the US still emulates Britain’s colonial divide and rule policy by offering up to $500,000 to local Pashtun tribal leaders to get them fight pro-Taliban elements. However the big question still looms large over the horizon in Pakistani borderlands. Will these old colonial tactics succeed in today’s world as well??

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WIDENING THE AFGHAN WAR INTO PAKISTAN

A MILITARY STUPIDITY ON A GRAND SCALE

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by Eric Margolis

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Mehrgarh: The Lost Civilisation [1 of 4]

Pakistan is the epitome and zenith of diverse cultures and harmonized expressions of human creative influences ranging from initial agricultural relics at Mehrgarh and the first human dentistry which was practiced here in Balochistan. The archaeological evidence revealed in the vast span of this country gives the sense of immense cultural origins of civilization from the cave art of Chilas to the well developed and oldest urban civilisation in the world excavated so far. The ancient history of the world has heitherto bee more centered on Mesopotamia and Egypt in the Middle East, specially the sites in present day Israel. China. However, a comparative study leads us to realization that all civilisations like Middle East, Europe, China, Asia and other parts of the world are not older than 4000 BC. [Image: Female Figurine of fertility from Mehrgarh]

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THE FIRST URBAN SETTLEMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY

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by Mahmood Mahmood

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• The people of Mehrgarh in ancient Pakistan were the first to start a community life in human history
• They knew the art of making fabric “just” 9000 years ago.
• They had an organized social life when the humanity at large was ‘housed’ in caves.

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The origin of man on this earth is one of the most mysterious and intriguing questions boggling the human mind. The search for the origin of man’s endeavors and any traces of these activities is rightly considered a step forward in the solution of the jigsaw puzzle of human endurance and survival.

The knowledge developed for the search of the origin of the humanity is called anthropology and it has a diverse mosaic of tools and branches developed to assist in the understanding of the basic question of humanity’s origin. The range of subjects and techniques applied in tracing and understanding the bases and origin of humanity in the universe and earth is exhaustive. But on the earth the archaeology is the most potent field in understanding the remnant and footsteps of the ancestors of the human being.

Tourism: A Vista of Opportunities for Our Ailing Economy

Imagine! What could have been our share had we captured only 5% of 20 billion US dollars? By the year 2020 the number of Chinese travelers is expected to grow up to 100 million generating 200 billion US dollars. If we could target just 5% of that Chinese market by 2020 it would mean 10 billion US dollars directly added to our economy from one country only. Above: Masood Ali Khan talking to ‘Wonders of Pakistan’ in his office

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NEED FOR TOURISM FACILITIES

TO MEET THE MINIMUM INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS

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Masood Ali Khan

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In 2001around 10 million Chinese traveled all over the world spending 20 billion US dollars.

What could have been our share had we captured only 5% of 20 billion US dollars? By the year 2020 the number of Chinese travelers is expected to grow up to 100 million generating 200 billion US dollars. If we could target just 5% of that Chinese market by 2020 it would mean 10 billion US dollars directly added to our economy from one country only.

The Indus Civilisation- “Boring No More”

[Left:HORNED GODDESS ... depiction. It's dated 6,000 BC and has been found at Mehrgarh site, in the then Ancient Balochistan, the earliest phase of Pakistan’s Indus Valley Civilisation."]

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Since start of humanity’s civilized settlements on this planet, man has always tried to trace its origin. Consequent to this endeavor, archeological excavations were undertaken all over and conclusive evidence on many ancient civilizations gathered. In this regard, holy scriptures of Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions / beliefs were a big source to educate and guide researchers about those ancient people and their civilizations.

In Holy Quran there is a complete discourse over such ancient civilizations; civilizations which prospered and then perished during different time periods of ancient history. In Bible’s old and new testaments too, there is a mention of such civilizations. The three holy books carry details of the life and time of prophet Abraham (Hazrat Ibrahim Alay-his-salaam) that period related to civilization in Mesopotamia in present day Iraq. Places like Ur, Babel and Nineveh belong to the same region. That period probably dates to 4000-5000 BCE. It has been a common belief that Mesopotamians were the oldest, and the successive ones were the people in the ancient Indus Valley.

The archeological excavations, however, done at Harappa and Moenjo Daro in present day Pakistan reveal the people in Indus Valley were no less advanced and culturally rich than the civilizations in Mesopotamia or Egypt. But many things remained unexplained and so remain till this day.  Even today there is no conclusive edict about the Indus script. There is also a school of thought which considers these signs as a depiction of certain figures only and no alphabets at all. Contrary to this there are many who believe the script is agglutinative and hieroglyphic, much older than the one found in Egypt and Sumer. The ancient Indus script was to some extent deciphered by famous Pakistani archeologist Dr. Ahmed Hassan Dani, yet a full understanding of the language is still a puzzle to all archeologists.

Fortunately new studies are on the way. Many excavations have been done in recent times especially by US and European teams. In their pursuit they have dug out places, some by chance, many by man’s inquisitive approach to find its anthropological origin and thus discovered many such sites where remains of ancient civilizations lie buried for centuries. This includes the Indus Valley Civilisation as well.

Researchers like Andrew Lawler hint on the changing views of scientists about the Indus. These views throw new light on how does IVC compare to its other contemporaries (Mesopotamia and Egypt) and of what might have happened to it all. These things are undergoing stark and important reconsideration, says Lawler. The scientists consider it to be “BORING NO MORE” and indeed the emerging new understanding of the Indus Civilisation, suggests that it might have been a power house of commerce and technology in the third millennium BC”.

In June last year, in a cover story Andrew Lawler (Science vol 320, p 1278-1285), says a fellow blogger Dr. Adil Najam (pakistaniat.com) in a post on his site, “Much has been written about the Indus Civilization including fascinating and detailed reports in the National Geographic etc. but the Science report is different because it highlights, how our scientific in this case archeological – knowledge on the subject is not only expanding, but changing. As says Lawler, “Boring No More, a trade savvy Indus Emerges.””

Striking new evidence from a host of excavations on both sides of the tense border that separates India and Pakistan has now definitively overturned that second class status. No longer is the Indus the plain cousin of Egypt and Mesopotamia during the third millennium BC. Archeologists now realize that the Indus diversified its grand neighbors, in land, area and population, surpassed them in many areas of engineering and technology and was an aggressive player during humanity’s first globalization 5000 years ago.

The old notion that the Indus, people were an insular, homogenous egalitarian brunch is being replaced by a view of diverse and dynamic society that stretched from the Arabian Sea to the foothills of Himalaya and was eager to do business with peoples from Afghanistan to Iraq. And the Indus people worried enough about the privileges of their elite to build the thick walls and to protect them.

“This idea that the Indus was dull and monolithic – that’s all nonsense”, says Louis Fram, another archeologist at the City University of New York. According to Fram, who has worked in Pakistan, there was a tremendous amount of variety.

“These people were aggressive traders, there is no doubt about it, adds [Gregory] Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania], who has found Indus style pottery made from Gujarat clay at a dig in Oman. Shehnaz Sheikh Vice Chancellor, Shah Bhitai University, takes the assertion a step further, arguing that “the Indus people were controlling the trade; they controlled the quarries, the trade routes and they knew where the markets were”. Thus ends Adal Najam his highly interesting post. But the story goes still further.

In 2000-2003, teams led by archeologist Andrea Cucina visited the area around Mehrgarh. There they found signs of human settlement dating back to a period 9000 years BC. Surprisingly they also found remains which show dental decay which might have been treated 8,000-9,000 years ago.

It is some of the earliest evidence of dentistry.

 

[Left: An example of modern-day dental work. Tiny holes found in teeth suggest even prehistoric man may have had to fear the dentist's drill].

“It is very tantalising to think they had such knowledge of health and cavities and medicine to do this” says Professor Andrea Cucina of the University of Missouri-Columbia

The people of that time and area were extremely sophisticated not only in controlling the anguish and pain to human body; they also cultivated crops and made intricate jewellery from shells, amethysts and turquoise. But before this discovery was made, no one was aware they also had dentistry skills.

Cucina, from the University of Missouri-Columbia made the discovery when he was cleaning the teeth from one of the men in year 2000.

Under a microscope, the scientists discovered the holes were too perfectly round to have been caused by bacteria. But they did see concentric grooves left by what they think was a drill with a tiny stone bit. Although no drill has been found, archaeologists discovered beads of the same 2.5mm diameter as the holes found in the teeth, indicating the people did have the capacity to do delicate work.

The physical anthropologist who carried out the examinations, Professor Cucina said the work could have been done to treat tooth decay, and suggested some plant or other material, which would have since decayed, could have been inserted into the hole.

The archaeologist discovered perfect tiny holes in two molar teeth from the remains of different men.

Through their breakthrough work, the two world renown archeologists (Jean-François Jarrige and Anrea Cucina) have enabled us know the Mehrgarh man, who has thus proved his advancement in the dental surgery right at the start of humanity on this planet. Researchers now agree that Indus Civilisation originally started to develop in Mehrgrah and its surroundings and these people later moved around the river Indus because of its fertile delta.

Now rivers have always been the centres to attract human settlements; as means of transport and above all a continuous source of nourishment as water has always been, now and then too a sustainer of life (human beings, animals and plants). This very fact seems to have motivated rather forced the people to migrate to much fertile lands around Indus which later turned into a highly developed Indus Valley Civilisation of Moenjo Daro and Harappa.

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Derawar Fort: The Symbol of Defiance and Defence

Derawar is a fortified structure – the true manifest of the massiveness and glory of the ancient times when technology was just toddling to know how to stand and walk. Even then the engineers of those bygone days were able to evolve a concept of strength – strength that lay in the huge walls which they thought should be the best solution for protection against vagaries of weather and evil eyes of their adversaries. The time proved their efficacy and the fort even after a span of more than 1100 years stands as fast as from the day one.

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THE GATEWAY TO CHOLISTAN

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WoP Research Desk

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Pakistan can rightly take pride in its legendary, colorful and traditional life style, a heritage that transcends since ages  into the psyche of its people, right from the prehistoric period.

The fossils found in the salt range talk about the homo-erectus (the early ‘man’ in the development of humanity’s social habitat and the ruins of the Indus Valley Civilization, starting right from Mehrgarh in Balochistan to Moenjo Daro and Harappa, respectively in Sind and Punjab provinces hint on emergence of civilisation on this planet right from Pakistan the land of eternity.

Should We Talk of Tourism under Terrorism?

                      

                                   by Nayyar Hashmey

           With most parts of Pakistan’s northern belt having fallen into terrorists’ grip, to many it sounds out of tune to talk about tourism. No wonder that I received a call from one of my readers after I had put up a post on WOP by Masood Ali Khan on “ Tourism,  A vista of opportunities for our ailing Economy”. But sanity demands that we should not obliviate ourselves of the very fact that tourism offers a healthy avenue where our youth cannot only find solace but also get economic benefits, for economic benefit is one of major factors which motivates our boys getting astray and fall into the hands of extremists.

         Our balance of payment hangs in the pawn, at the mercy of the IMF, so why not seriously reassess our dependence, living on doled out money by these lending agencies, who lend us this on Shylock’s terms. The days of bipolar world are over since years. hence no more aid, no more grants and no more special benefits of getting favors as an ally. So its high time we endeavor to get rid of these IMF and other lending agencies.

          Our government and its bureaucracy need to understand ‘God helps those who help themselves’. Why not then help ourselves, and explore all possibilities to generate our income from our own resources. Implementing measures of austerity and utilizing one of the most prospective, indigenous resource, our touristic wealth, we can do this. Why not then gear it up and see ourselves how quickly it helps us stand on our own feet. 

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

          Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) French poet.

 

Escalating war in `a graveyard of empires`: Afghanistan

The United States is planning to send an additional 17,000 troops to one of the world`s most battle-scarred nations – Afghanistan – long described as `a graveyard of empires`.

by Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS -First, it was the British Empire, and then the Soviet Union. So, will the United States be far behind?

“With his new order on Afghanistan, President (Barack) Obama has given substantial ground to what Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967 called ‘the madness of militarism’”, Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy, told IPS.

“That madness should be opposed in 2009,” said Solomon, author of ‘War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.’

The proposed surge in U.S. troops will bring the total to 60,000, while the combined forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), including troops from Germany, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, amount to over 32,000. When in full strength, U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan could reach close to 100,000 by the end of this year.

Still, in a TV interview Tuesday, Obama said he was “absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban (insurgency), and the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means.”

“If there is no military solution, why is the administration’s first set of decisions to continue drone attacks and increase ground troops?” Marilyn B. Young, a professor of history at New York University, told IPS.

She said the uncertainty around Afghan policy seems to be spreading even while the Obama administration announces an increase in troops. “This is one of the ways events seem to echo U.S. escalation in the Vietnam War,” said Young, author of several publications, including ‘Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn From the Past’.

On Tuesday, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released a report revealing that in 2008, there were 2,118 civilian casualties in Afghanistan, an increase of almost 40 percent over 2007.

Of these casualties, 55 percent of the overall death toll was attributed to anti-government forces, including the Taliban, and 39 percent to Afghan security and international military forces.

“This is of great concern to the United Nations,” the report said, pointing out that “this disquieting pattern demands that the parties to the conflict take all necessary measures to avoid the killing of innocent civilians.”

During his presidential campaign last year, Obama said the war in Iraq was a misguided war. The United States, he said, needs to pull out of Iraq, and at the same time, bolster its troops in Afghanistan, primarily to prevent the militant Islamic fundamentalist Taliban from regaining power and also to eliminate safe havens for terrorists.

But most political analysts point out that Afghanistan may turn out to be a bigger military quagmire for U.S. forces than Iraq. Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy said Obama’s moves on Afghanistan have “the quality of a moth toward a flame.”

In the short run, Obama is likely to be unharmed in domestic political terms. But the policy trajectory appears to be unsustainable in the medium-run, he added.

“Before the end of his first term, Obama is very likely to find himself in a vise, caught between a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and a political quandary at home that significantly erodes the enthusiasm of his electoral base while fueling Republican momentum,” Solomon argued.

Dr. Christine Fair, a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation and a former political officer with UNAMA in Kabul, told IPS she is doubtful that more troops will secure Afghanistan.

“Perhaps several years ago more troops would have been welcomed. My fear is that more troops means more civilian losses and further erosion of good will and support for the international presence,” Fair said.

In the short run, Obama is likely to be unharmed in domestic political terms. But the policy trajectory appears to be unsustainable in the medium-run, he added.

“Before the end of his first term, Obama is very likely to find himself in a vise, caught between a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and a political quandary at home that significantly erodes the enthusiasm of his electoral base while fueling Republican momentum,” Solomon argued.

Dr. Christine Fair, a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation and a former political officer with UNAMA in Kabul, told IPS she is doubtful that more troops will secure Afghanistan. 

In Afghanistan, Solomon argued, the U.S. president is proceeding down a path that can only be too steep and not steep enough.

The basic contradiction of his current position – asserting that the situation cannot be solved by military means yet taking action to try to solve the problem by military means – signifies that Obama is bargaining for short-term wiggle room at the expense of longer-term rationality, he added.

“In a very real sense, Obama is kicking a bloody can down the road, unable to think of any other way to confront circumstances that will grow worse with time in large measure because of his actions now,” he said.

Even while disputing some thematic aspects of the “war on terrorism” at times, Obama is reinvesting his political capital – and re-dedicating the Pentagon’s mission – on behalf of a U.S. war effort that is probably doomed to fail on its own terms, Solomon said.

“Reliance on violence is a chronic temptation for a commander-in-chief with the mighty U.S. military under its command. We’ve seen the results in Iraq – or, more precisely, the people of Iraq and many American soldiers have seen and suffered the results,” he added.

Courtesy: www.mathaba.net

Origin of Civilisation

Till recently it was taken as universal truth, that the Indus Valley Civilisation emerged after the Mesopotamians—somewhere between 3,000 –1,000 BCE. However, elaborate archeological work by researchers like Jarrige, Cucina and Dani totally altered this picture. Their works revealed the startling fact that the IVC people started building their cities much earlier than the Sumerians and Mesopotamians. Their studies traced the origin of IVC to excavations in Mehrgarh, Balochistan to a period as far back as 9, 000 years BCE. Image above: The Priest King from The Indus Valley Civilisation

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MAN’S JOURNEY FROM MEHRGARH TO MOENJO DARO & HARAPPA

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Samuel Huntington, (who died last year) in his treatise ‘Clash of Civilisations’ propounds a hypothesis of two different worlds, two civilizations opposing each other, and who, said he, sooner or later are going to clash against each other. Western civilization with its democratic institutions, liberalism and a respect of law is bound to come into conflict with Islamic civilization. A civilization based on tenets of Islam or the followers of Islam according to Huntington will be the next enemy of the West. Consequent to this hypothesis, a new charter for NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) which was principally constituted to fight out Communism, was chalked out. How far this concept is relevant in today’s world, is a debatable question. No wonder it’s being contested all over, but my present post is not about this clash of civilisations but civilisation itself.

Mehrgarh: The Neolithic Period (From 7th Mill. BC)

These houses were builyt by Mehgarh dwellers c. 8000 years BC

Here follows an account of Mehrgarh by pioneer French archeologist who explored the area from time to time, and was first to excavate the Mehrgarh site. Let us now see what does world’s top most researcher on Mehrgarh say about the archeological excavations at Mehrgarh — a breakthrough that bestows a totally singular position to Indus Valley Civilisation — the first civilized, urban settlement on face of this earth.

by C. Jarrige

In the fourth millennium and in the first half of the third, the Mehrgarh potters and those from other parts of Balochistan alike became known for producing very high quality ceramics which were either exported or copied in eastern Iran, southern Afghanistan, and even as far as present-day Tadjikistan, notably at the Sarazm site. These periods are also distinguished by the manufacture of human figurines of a high aesthetic quality, whose attributes seem to suggest references to an underlying mythology still unclear to us.

Nausharo

The Nausharo excavation, 6 km from Mehrgarh as the crow flies, revealed a dwelling-site contemporaneous and identical to the Mehrgarh, one between 3000 and 2500 BC and another, divided into three periods between 2500 and 1900 BC, characteristic of the urban civilization of the valley of the Indus, which is also referred to as the Harappan civilization, from the name of the eponymous site of Harappa. This excavation of Nausharo allows the Indus civilisation to be linked to the cultures which preceded it since the Neolithic and the ancient Chalcolithic times. The excavation of the Harappan layers led to the uncovering of a settlement which met the criteria of the urban civilization of the Indus, with discrete rectangular zones, and with the existence of baths and hydraulic features. The study of Harappan ceramics in Naushara has brought to light a clear stylistic evolution over time, thus contradicting the theories claiming that Harappan pottery had remained static for several centuries.

Starting from a period of about 2100 BC, which corresponds to phase-IV of Nausharo, ceramics and other objects begin to appear in the Bolan basin which are comparable to those from sites in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and the east of Iran. Some of these objects had been found previously, notably on the upper levels of the great civilization sites of the Indus, such as Mohenjo-daro and Chanhu-daro. It had been thought that these were in fact remains which indicated the arrival of invaders from the West and from the North-West. Thanks to the Nausharo dig and to the discovery of necropolises (the Mehrgarh VIII cemetery) and of various sites on the edge of Nausharo or Mehrgarh, it is now clear that the “exotic” objects belong to groups who have co-existed with the “Harappan” populations, evidently peaceably. It can even be asserted that all these objects are an indication of the development of very important trading activities whose agents between the Indus valley and Mesopotamia were groups who controlled the routes for inter-Iranian exchanges around 2000 BC.

Pirak

Between 1800 and 1900 BC, the urban civilization of the Indus disappeared to survive, in derivative forms, only in the territory of present-day India. The excavation of Pirak, a settlement of about ten hectares inhabited between 1800 and 600 BC, reveals the beginning of a new age. Several miniatures of horsemen and horses and of two-humped camels – animals unknown in the Indus civilization – symbolize important changes in society. The emergence of horsemen at Pirak, just like the discovery of horse skeletons at the time in the Swat in the north of Pakistan, is to be considered in the context of the arrival of new populations belonging, perhaps, to the very first Indo-Aryan groups mixing with a local community with an increasingly diversified agricultural economy. It has been noted that in fact the cultivation of rice, which demands the use of irrigation techniques, became predominant.

As for the structures where the interior walls are punctuated with rows of symmetrical marks, sometimes on four levels: these represent a style which was still found a few years ago in houses, particularly in Hindu areas, in this region. About 1200 BC, iron utensils and weapons would emerge.

Since the end of the expedition in 2000 to the Neolithic part of the Mehrgarh site, fieldwork has been halted to allow for deeper analysis of date and to write up publications. In 2003 there was an expedition to study the material at Mehrgarh, and the dig was scheduled to resume in 2004.

Concluded.

Courtesy: Guimet.com

Mehrgarh… The Lost Civilisation [2 of 4]

Although Mehrgarh was abandoned by the time of the emergence of the literate urbanized phase of the Indus Civilization, its development illustrates the development of the civilization’s subsistence patterns as well as its craft and trade specialization. Following its abandonment it was covered by alluvial silts until it was exposed following a flash flood in the 1970s. The French Archaeological Mission to Pakistan excavated the site for thirteen years between 1974 and 1986, and they resumed their work in 1996. The most recent trenches have astonishingly well preserved remains of mud brick structures proving the urban streak of this civilization.[Image above: Female figurine from Mehrgarh excavation ca.6000-3000 BC]

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INNOVATION RIGHT FROM THE START

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by Mahmood Mahmood

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•  The artifacts from Mehrgarh are far more advanced and developed as compared to those obtained from excavations in Turkey and Middle East especially Jericho.

• The most unique discovery is the first known origin of the dental surgery and related medicinal activities exercised in Mehrgarh area. The discovery proves the great innovative mind and developmental level of those people about 9000 years ago.

• Mehrgarh was also a centre of manufacture for various figurines and pottery that were distributed to surrounding regions. These products are of a high quality given the circumstances and the time they were fabricated.

• No other civilisation in any other part of the world existed then; what to speak of a level of perfection in the art and craft elsewhere.

Post Mumbai Conclusions: Tourism Not Terrorism

Building Peace: This file photo shows a Pakistani soldier greeting a BSF jawan on the occasion of Holi at the Attari – Wagah International Border. A powerful awakening among the masses on both sides is required for the successful India-Pak relationship.

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TOURISM NOT TERRORISM

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Dilnawaz

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The PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT under President Zardari started peace initiatives with India taking tentative steps to liberalise trade and tourism with India. Zardari doing a live webcast (his first ever) with English speaking Internet users in India and coining terms like “we are all half Indian / half Pakistani” was very optimistic.

In the time period between 6 September presidential inauguration and 26 / 11 Mumbai terrorist attacks, Zardari administration  was still struggling in its initial days inside Pakistan with terrorist attacks on Marriot and the worsening law-and order situation in the tribal belt and north west frontier province (NWFP). There was “made-in-Taliban” tag in the world media; which scared off most westerns.

However, the peace initiative was a rare opportunity to kindle the beacon of peace between India and Pakistan. The Indian leadership (barring Sonia and her son Rahul) is in their old age of retirement, hardly a material for pragmatic and dynamic leadership. The anti Pakistan lobby headed by fire breathing Parnab Mukherjee who the people of his own west Bengal have rejected a number of times, fails to take the hint and quit gracefully. The oxford educated bureaucrat Man Mohan Singh sounds like a Punjabi supervisor from a Russian Tractor factory rather than an accomplished economist that he used to be. The right-wing leadership in BJP Vajpai and Advani have become irrelevant and cannot function properly.

It is the young leadership of India (Sonia and Rahul) who can effectively talk with young Pakistani government ( Zardari, Gilani and Qureshi). The vigorous TV campaign for a Visit India on the European channels was highly successful in “Incredible India” promoting Indian tourism and culture till 26 / 11 attacks when suddenly British and American visitors got scared about Indian tourism.

The Pakistan government initiatives — we have learned through previous experience of Visit Pakistan Year 2007 which went up in smoke of chief justice movement and terrorist attacks after the Red Mosque siege — are most of the time riddled with bureaucratic red tape, half-hearted, half-baked and ill-conceived tourism departments.

Nevertheless, Zardari made a start, which every one thought might bring better results this time around, but it wasn’t to be. The hawks in Indian and Pakistani establishments and media started talking of Terrorism rather than Tourism and dark clouds of war started gathering over the whole subcontinent , thankfully the sane leadership of India (Sonia & Man-Mohan) and Pakistan (Zardari and Qureshi) saved the countries from the brink of war.

There are a few silver linings appearing on even the darkest of clouds. Tourism today is one of the biggest industries in the world; it brings employment, opportunities and equality to otherwise less-developed areas in India such as Rajasthan, even more so in Pakistan. The terrorist attacks came at a worst time for tourist industry in India when the tourist season was just starting after hot monsoon season.

Pakistan is the best-kept secret of tourism industry. After the 9 / 11 and Afghan war Pakistan became a dangerous destination for western tourists. The Himalayan valleys in northern areas, The Kite runner Festival of “Basant” in the ancient walled inner city of Lahore (capital of Punjab and the north-Indic culture), Pakistan cultural and religious tourism for Sikh religion and Sufi shrines and  K-2 mountain climbers disappeared from the tourism industry radar , these are still as good as any in the world. Pakistan has to showcase the Indus Valley and Ghandhara Buddhist civilizations, Basant festival, performing arts festival, truck art, chicken-tikka masaala cuisine, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh pilgrimage places to new markets.

The Peace Tourism discussion is about how ordinary Pakistanis and Indians can play a part in defining what is meant by new friendship initiative. The Pakistani government focused on cultural exchanges, peace cricket tours with India (which was cancelled by Indian hawks in their war posturing), festivals at Shiv Mandir in Katas Raj and Kali Mandir in Hinglaj Balochistan. Also, religious tourism, if opened, can bring Non-resident Indians (Sikhs especially) NRIs from Europe and America. Its high time Indians are allowed free access to Pakistani destinations.

Common Indians are not scared of terrorism threats that world media projects about Pakistan. They know that most of Pakistan (and India as well) is a peaceful destination and the people are friendly and are nostalgic about the communal harmony in pre-partition days from British India.

Entry visas at arrival for business, family and package tourists will be the first right step in normalizing the peace process and increasing people-to-people contacts between the two countries.

Millions of Indians will be eager to cross the Wahga border for a day trips to savour the culinary delights of Lahore Food Street and Basant and other Punjabi festivals. This nostalgia and the bond of friendship was shown in Indian cricket tour of Pakistan 2004 when thousands of passionate Indian cricket fans turned Pakistan tour into a festive occasion and places like Peshawar (NWFP capital), the birth place of Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor and the family home of Shah Rukh Khan, welcomed Indians with open hearts.

Everyone has his own ideas on South Asian future and identity, there are right and left wing views on secular, religious, urban and rural commoners and elites population diversities. Pakistan is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-religious society, which can fosters the concept of “unity in diversity” and “peace for friendship”, and this must be the key to “tourism for peace”. Pakistan tourism must focus on commonalities between the two countries so that Pakistani destinations become a permanent spot on the Indian tourism map.

Most Indians still have historical links with families, festivals, cities, food, culture, music and art of Pakistan. Pakistan can make it a year-long campaign. Institutions like PIA, already flying to Delhi and Mumbai, can become a calling card for Pakistani tourism and hospitality by increasing the number of flights to Indian cities. Private airlines from India and Pakistan can also share the frequencies in domestic network.

The shipping industry in both countries has already joined hands to promote trade and tourism. The Indian government terrorism assessment after 26 / 11can damage sea links between Mumbai-Karachi. State-run Pakistan TV and Dordarshan India should be allowed mutual reach in Pakistan, India and the Middle East. Organisations like South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA) and Pakistan India peoples forum for peace and democracy (PIPFPD) can spearhead the peace campaign. Major Pakistani satellite channels like Dawn TV, Indus Group, ARY, Geo and Jang. AAJ TV are already collaborating with Indian film and media industry to bridge the gaps between two estranged siblings. Will India reciprocate the Zardari peace initiatives remains to be seen?

If Indians and Pakistanis decide to take ‘peace initiative” Westerns will surely follow Indian and Pakistan tourism

The  writer is the editor of Bradistan Calling, a website in Bradford, UK (Little Pakistan). Image

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Indus Valley Civilisation: The Genesis of Pakistan!

A sculpted object from the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro, now placed in the Karachi Museum.

“NO GOLDEN TOMBS, NO FANCY ZUGGURATS. FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO CITY BUILDERS IN THE INDUS VALLEY MADE DEALS, NOT WAR, AND CREATED A STABLE, PEACEFUL, AND PROSPEROUS CULTURE.”

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by Shanti Menon

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The link for railway from Lahore to Multan in Pakistan is 4,600 years old. In truth, the rails were laid down in the middle of the nineteenth century, but to build the railway bed, British engineers smashed bricks from crumbling buildings and rubble heaps in a town called Harappa, halfway between the two cities. Back in 1856, Alexander Cunningham, director of the newly formed Archeological Survey of British India, thought the brick ruins were all related to nearby seventh-century Buddhist temples. Local legend told a different story: the brick mounds were the remnants of an ancient city, destroyed when its king committed incest with his niece. Neither Cunningham nor the locals were entirely correct. In small, desultory excavations a few years later, Cunningham found no temples or traces of kings, incestuous or otherwise. Instead he reported the recovery of some pottery, carved shell, and a badly damaged seal depicting a one-horned animal, bearing an inscription in an unfamiliar writing.

Gorby smarter than Obama

Soviet leader accepted defeat and brought his troops home from Afghanistan 20 years ago

 by ERIC MARGOLIS

 Twenty years ago this week, the last Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan. During the Soviet occupation (1979-1989), 1.5 million Afghans died at the hands of the Red Army and Afghan Communists. 

The new Soviet chairman, Mikhail Gorbachev, proved a leader of great humanity, decency and intellect. I rank him with Nelson Mandela. Gorbachev determined the Afghan war, begun by his dim predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev, and a coterie of party and KGB hardliners, could not be won. 

Gorbachev courageously accepted defeat and brought his soldiers home. Soon after, the Soviet Union, a bankrupt imperium held together by fear and repression, began to crumble. Gorbachev refused to employ force to hold the Soviet empire together. 

The new president of the bankrupt American imperium should heed Gorbachev’s wisdom. Barack Obama’s inauguration offered a perfect opportunity to pause the U.S.-led Afghan war and open talks with Afghans resisting foreign occupation (both the Soviets and U.S. branded them “terrorists.”)

Instead, Obama vowed to intensify the eight-year, $62-billion war. Ottawa’s cost: $600-800 million in 2009 alone. 

President Obama just declared he will send 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan on top of the 6,000 troops dispatched by George W. Bush. 

Another 13,000 will follow. Reinforcements are supposed to come from the U.S. Iraq garrison. But the Pentagon is trying to delay or thwart the drawdown from Iraq. 

OBAMA’S WAR 

Welcome to President Obama’s war. Obama just defined his goals in Afghanistan as: “Preventing it from being used as a launching pad for attacks on North America” and “defeating al-Qaida.”

 He also allowed that some sort of negotiations to split the Taliban might be tried.

 Both goals are patently bogus. The 9/11 tragedy was organized in Germany and Spain, allegedly by Saudis and Pakistanis. Attacks on New York, Washington, London, Madrid and Mumbai were plotted in apartments and houses, not the mountains of Afghanistan.

 If Obama plans to “crush” anti-U.S. groups in South Asia, he will have to invade Pakistan, a nation of 167 million. Al-Qaida never had more than 300 men and is today reduced to a handful hiding in Pakistan. Its primary role, as my new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?, explains, was as a guesthouse and data base for foreign mujahidin fighting the Soviets, not a worldwide “terrorist organization.”

 By expanding the Afghan war, Obama fuels the growing threat of a major explosion in Pakistan. Today, U.S. warplanes and CIA killer drones operate from three secret Pakistani air bases. Washington has rented 120,000 Pakistani troops for $100 million monthly (plus secret CIA payments) to support the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

PAKISTAN

 Pakistan’s government, a key American ally, is being paid by Washington to attack its own people, and allow U.S. forces to do the same. Pakistan is bankrupt. Its last U.S.-backed regime stole whatever money there was. Yet at some point, Pakistan’s rent-an-army is going to rebel and turn against the government that orders it to kill its own people.

 Our high expectations for Obama are fading fast. His administration seems set on continuing many of the illegal, repressive policies of the disgraced Bush White House it vowed to end: Torture, kidnapping, wiretapping, assassinations, constitutional infringements, denial of due process.

What happened to the Obama who was supposed to bring change? Leftover hardliners from the Bush days appear to be driving Obama’s foreign policy in the Mideast and Afghanistan.

 Soviet veterans of Afghanistan warn the U.S. and its dragooned allies face defeat there. I suspect Obama politely suggested to his hosts in Ottawa this week, “if you want to keep GM in Canada, keep your troops in Afghanistan.”

 The Obama White House cannot even articulate a coherent political strategy for Afghanistan. Its latest big idea is to kick out the hapless President Hamid Karzai and install a new puppet.

 Washington hopes U.S. troop reinforcements finally will bludgeon the Afghan national resistance into accepting American domination. Then the long-planned pipeline from the Caspian Basin across Afghanistan to Pakistan can finally be built. George W. Bush must be smiling.

Courtesy: http://canadiandimension.com. Writer is a Contributing Editor of the daily Toronto Sun. He can be reached at his site ericmargolis.com

Sufism and Pakistan

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Sufis are lovers of truth

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The message of Sufis, the mystics who touch our mind and soul, is universal. Because of truth, richness, and its down to earth approach, Sufi philosophy finds a following amongst elite as well as the masses – irrespective of color, creed or religion.

Though Sufis’ message of love reached almost every nook and corner in the subcontinent, it was particularly so in Pakistan where it spread to find big success with the common folk, yet the universality of Sufis’ message found support and following equally amongst the nobility.

Sufis’ message being part of people’s psyche now, rich tributes are paid to these noble souls at their birth or death anniversaries.  Involvement of common men in paying tributes is so deep, so vehement that these have taken the form of ecstatic celebrations, celebrations which have almost acquired the form of carnivals.

Every year many such festivals are celebrated across the whole of Pakistan.  The homage to these godly souls is so deep rooted that such occasions are perhaps the only places where true demonstration of secular gatherings is observed. Here one finds Muslims and non Muslims of different sects who otherwise will not offer prayers with each other, but in Sufi shrines at a particular Urs they would not only celebrate but dine, sleep and, pray together. Such is the force of Sufis’ following: these people feel themselves like children of same father, the patron saint under whose blessings they feel like brothers and sisters. Before partition, at such celebrations the Hindus and Sikhs in the area joined these celebrations with same enthusiasm and attachment as their Muslim counterparts because they believed the message was as much applicable to their lives as those of their Muslim followers.

SUFISM IS A BLEND OF ISLAM AND MYSTICISM

The mystic tradition of Sufism found home in Islam encompassing a diverse range of beliefs and practices dedicated to Allah and divine love to help a fellow man. Its not surprising, therefore, that Sufi orders associated with every branch of Islam exist.

It is widely believed though that Sufi thought emerged from the Middle East in the eighth century, yet its adherents are now found every where in the world.

Almost all traditional Sufi schools (orders) trace their “chains of transmission” back to the Prophet (PBUH) via his cousin and son-in-law Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, except the Naqshbandi order which traces its origin to Caliph Abu Bakr. From their point of view, the esoteric teaching was given to those who had the capacity to contain the direct experiential gnosis of God, and then passed on from teacher to student through centuries.

Sufi is the Arabic word for “wool”, in the sense of “cloak”, referring to the simple cloaks the original Sufis wore, but the Sufis use the composing letters of the words to express hidden meanings, and so the word could also be understood as “enlightenment.”

Sufism became organised and adopted a form and institution in the 12th and 13th centuries A.D.  The two great pioneers in this field were Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani and Hazrat Shahabuddin Suhrawardy.  By introducing the system of ‘silsila’ which was a sort of association / order, and takia / khankha, a lodge or hospice, they invested the movement with a sense of brotherhood and provided it with a meeting place.  The ‘silsila’ and the takia / khankha were the king-pins of the organization.  With a stream of selfless workers available and with no dearth of devoted and assiduous leadership, the movement made swift progress and spread far and wide.

The character of Sufi movement was such that it did not require official patronage or military protection.  It succeeded without both in a number of countries like Malaya, Indonesia, East and West Africa.  The same is true of their work in Pakistan.  In fact, power was a hindrance rather than a help to the progress of Sufi mission. Eminent Sheikh Nizamuddin refused to consider a proposal made by Mohammad Tughlaq to coordinate missionary activity with political expansion.” (Indian Muslim by Prof. M. Mujeeb)

THE SUFI SPIRIT

Sufism has universal appeal and its characteristics are universally acclaimed. Sufism on the whole is primarily concerned with direct personal experience, and as such may be compared to various forms of mysticism such as Zen Buddhism and Gnosticism. It negates rigidity and promotes free religious thought that emphasizes God’s love and mercy that sustains the whole universe. Sufism stresses the essence of faith rather than mere observance of rituals. It shuns wealthy, monarchic and bureaucratic infestations of big cities and detests false values based on pelf and power and charters to restore morality in its proper place.

THE SUFI TRADITIONS IN PAKISTAN

Pakistan and Sufism are inter-related, inter-woven and inseparable from each other.  If Pakistan’s beginning is traced back to the conquest of this sub-continent by Muslims armies, as is erroneously thought, then the whole sub-continent should have become Pakistan since Muslim arms were successful throughout the area.  But Pakistan emerged only in those territories where Sufism met with success.  Pakistan, therefore, can be described as the fruit of the Sufi movement.

Early in the 8th century A.D. when Mohammad Bin Qasim conquered Sind (which included most of Punjab), yet the general conversion to Islam in Pakistan, according to scholars, began on a sizeable scale two hundred years later from the 13th century.  This period starts with the arrival of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in the subcontinent followed by a large number of Chishti and Suhrawardy Sufis.

The great pioneers of the 13th century Sufi movement in the areas of present-day Pakistan were the four friends known as ‘Chahar Yar:’ Hazrat Fariduddin Masud Ganj Shakar of Pak Pattan (1174-1266), Hazrat Syed Jalaluddin Bukhari of Uch-Bahawalpur (1196-1294), Hazrat Bahauddin Zakaria of Multan (1170-1267) and Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar of Sehwan (1177-1274). It is said that 17 leading tribes of the Punjab accepted Islam at the hands of Hazrat Fariduddin Masud Ganj Shakar.

But the Sufis did not do their work in a hurry. They first set an example of highest probity by their personal acts and propagated the message of Islam in a simple, yet forceful manner without exerting any political or economic pressure so that the work of conversion continued for centuries throughout the Delhi Sultanate, down to the days of the British Raj.

Contrary to conventional Islam, music also played a significant role in spread of Islam through Sufi’s creed. Classic music is the only art where a synthesis between Hindu and Muslim artistic traditions took place in the Indian subcontinent. Sufis with their spiritual preoccupations also remained in the forefront of this synthesis. Khawaja Moeenuddin Chishti, the founder of the Chishtyia order in the subcontinent and his successor Khwaja Bakhtiyar Kaki, both listened to music as a spiritual stimulant. In the assemblies of Nizamuddim Auliya, Amir Khusro’s ghazals were sung along with the other pieces of music.

The Chishti tradition regarded music as an indispensable aid to ecstasy and a means to attain revelations through it. It relied on Persian verse as the content to musical composition but in some provinces it soon borrowed or adapted mixed Persian and Hindi wording.

It is said that the Sufi practice of listening music first took place in the Indo-Pak subcontinent and then passed on to rest of the Muslim world. Our Sufi poets such as Baba Farid, Shah Husain, Sultan Bahu, Shah Latif Bhitai, Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Khwaja Ghulam Farid, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh and Maulvi Ghulam Rasul continued the finest tradition of poetry and music. Still today, the shrines of these Sufi saints host classical music contests. Festivals and carnivals abound with dhamal, whirling in a ritual reverie. Men, and sometimes women, in bright traditional robes dance and shout around frantically following their own path to enlightenment. A traditional drum called dhol beats deafeningly and hypnotically, making everyone to dance to forget surrounding and tread in a voyage of ecstasy. Another popular genre of Sufi music is qawwali, the most important and widespread in the Khusrau tradition, which has remained alive for more than seven centuries.

SUFI FESTIVALS AND TOURISM

The fairs at Sufi shrines or Sufi saints (popularly called the Urs) generally mark the death anniversary of a saint. At every Urs, devotees assemble in large numbers and pay homage to the memory of a saint. Soul inspiring music with dhamaal (when devotees dance in ecstasy on beat of a drum) on such occasions takes the colour of a folk festival and appeals to all and sundry. It forms a part of the folk music carrying mystic messages (verses) of the Sufi or saint which throbs the heart of every one and people from all walks of life throng the dargah or mausoleum. The countryside of Punjab but not excluding the urban centres or metropolises, abound with Urses like the ones of Data Ganj Bakhsh, Hazrat Mian Mir and Shah Hussain in Lahore, Urs of Baba Farid Ganj Shakar in Pakpattan, Urs of Hazrat Bahaudin Zakria in Multan, Urs of Sakhi Sarwar Sultan in Dera Ghazi Khan, Urs of Hazrat Bulleh Shah in Kasur and Urs of Hazrat Imam Barri Lateef in Islamabad. A big fair is organized at Jandiala Sher Khan in the Sheikhupura district on the Mausoleum of Syed Waris Shah.

A great festival of lights, called Mela Chiraghan, is held in the last week of March, outside the Shalimar Gardens, Lahore, in the memory of Sufi poet Madhu Lal Hussain. Every year, no less than 500,000 people come from across the country and from abroad to attend the festival.

The touristic importance of these festivals is so strong that they need be incorporated in the overall tourism policy of the country. In the tourism year 2007 one of the slots was to organise Sufi Festivals in Multan and Sehwan. Such type of events directly relate to Islam’s eternal message of peace, tolerance and international human brotherhood promoted through the works of our Sufi saints. These festivals could be held in the month of September, in synchronization with the Urs of  our great Sufi Saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar which is held every year from Sep. 3rd  to Sep. 6th .

Multan is famous as the city of Peers and Shrines, and has some landmarks in this regard. Shams Tabriz’s Shrine is a beautiful tourist attraction. The sky-blue engravings and glazed red bricks further add beauty to this monument. Shah Rukh-e-Alam Shrine is popular for its large domes. The shrine was built during the period of Tughlaq. The Sheikh Yusuf Gardez shrine is the other place worth visiting.

Uch Sharif is another beautiful and the historical site. Located at the confluence of the two rivers Sutlej and Chenab, Uch Sharif is a wonderful tourist destination. Basically famous for its various beautiful shrines and tombs, the place offers another venue to host Sufi festival. Its beautiful shrines and tombs attract thousands of general tourists and people of Sufi following from almost every place in the world. Famous shrines in Uch Sharif include Hazrat Jalaluddin Surkh Bukhari, Makhdoom Jahanian Jahangasht, Hazrat Bahawal Haleem, Shaikh Saifuddin Ghazrooni and Bibi Jawandi.

Pakistan and sufism are inter-related, inter-woven and inseparable from each other.

Me Has Struck The Arrow Of Love, says Bulleh Shah, the Sufi Saint and Poet from Kasur. Me struck by the arrow of love, What should me, do ? Neither— do— me— live, nor— do— me die. Listen Ye to me! My ceaseless – outpourings, Me have angst, me – no peace by—the—night, nor—by day. Me cannot live – without my love Not for a moment. Me struck by the arrow of love, What should me, do ? The seething fire Of separation—unceasing ! Let someone take care Of my love. Me cannot be saved – without seeing? Me Struck by the arrow of love, What should me, do? Bulleh Shah was a Sufi who lived around 1680. Bulleh studied Islam and became a great scholar. However, on meeting his master, Inayat Shah he became absorbed in a passionate longing for the Divine. So great was his desire for union with God that he frequently exhibited unorthodox behavior such as weeping openly. Bulleh is now viewed as one of the greatest Sufis. His poetry richly portrays his divine experiences.

Data Ganj Bakhsh, the patron saint of Lahore

The Mazar of Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore

CELEBRATIONS of the 965th Urs of Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh concluded on 15th of Feb. 2009, as thousands of devotees bade farewell to the annual urs celebrations full of rich spiritual and cultural events.

Devotees gathered at the shrine of Data Sahib to participate in the three-day  celebrations including, Naat recitals, Qirat (recitation of Holy Quran), Qawwalis and spiritual gatherings addressed by noted ulema, mashaikhs and gaddi nasheens from spiritual centers and darbars across the country.

Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif inaugurated the Urs. The Urs was supervised by Auqaf and Religious Affairs Minister Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi and chairman religious affairs committee of the shrine Ishaq Dar and other officials, including Auqaf Secretary Khizar Hayat Gondal and DG Religious Affairs Auqaf Department Dr. Tahir Raza Bukhari, Director Admin Rizwan Sharif and others. 

At this occasion, WOP brings to its readers, a write-up by fellow blogger Raza Rumi who has two wonderful blogs, Lahore Nama and the Pak Tea House.

by Raza Rumi

Accompanying a visitor from the Mecca of Sufis, Delhi, I reconnected with the Data Darbar or the royal pavilion of the great saint of Lahore, Ali bin Usman Al Hajveri. This shrine is the oldest and perhaps the most vibrant cultural marker of the past one millennium in Lahore. The title of Ganj Bakhsh was bestowed by the saint of the saints Khwaja Moin ud din Chishti of Ajmere, whose ascendancy in the Chishtia Sufi order is recognised by all and sundry. Pilgrimage to Ajmere by itself is a matter of spiritual attainment for the majority of Muslims in the subcontinent. It is not difficult then to imagine what the stature of Lahore’s Data Darbar is in this esoteric yet real and lived Islam in South Asia. 

While Khwaja Moin ud din Chishti honoured the Lahori saint with the title “bestower of treasure,” ordinary folk on Lahore’s streets were more direct by naming the saint as Data, the one who facilitates the fulfilment of aspirations. 

Living nearly 11 centuries ago, Syed Ali bin Usman Al Hajveri was not a Lahori but a resident of Lahore’s cultural step-cousin, Ghazni, until he arrived in the then India and wandered in its northern part before settling in Lahore for the last 34 years of his life. This was the time when mystics from Central Asia, in their constant urge to discover new vistas of spiritual exploration, started to travel and settle in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. It remains a mystery as to why Data Ganj Bakhsh would have chosen Lahore as the final stop in his life long journey. Perhaps the secular interpretation could be that Lahore was an inevitable stopover for all the Central Asian and Turkic caravans and armies and provided the right kind of environment for a foreign mystic to amalgamate into. A little before Ganj Bakhsh’s arrival, Lahore had been resurrected from the earlier ravages of time by the Ghaznavid ruler Mahmood and his son Masood. 

Lahore’s fame had also spread deep into the rugged, mountainous climes of Central Asia. Its old fortified city, the banks of a gushing river and the motley collection of artisans, masons, artists, poets and musicians were all too well known. 

During the 34 years of his Lahore residence, Ali Hajveri became the most revered of dervishes whose inclusive and tolerant mystical path attracted the majority of its non-Muslim population. Let us not forget that the non-Muslim population was also a subject of a pernicious caste hierarchy where access to templar gods and clerical blessings was denied to a good number of the population. This was the beginning of a centuries’ long process of peaceful conversions. Islam’s egalitarianism and its larger message of equality before God was quite a magical idea for many, not to mention that the Sufi path did not require conversion per se. This is why Data Darbar has been a hub of inter-communal quests for spiritual attainment. 

Other than that, Ali Hajveri’s important contribution to the corpus of documented mystical thought is the treatise that he authored and left for posterity. Known as Kashf- al- Mahjub, or “Unveiling of the Hidden,” it is a monumental document striking for its communicative tone and systematic way of discussing mysticism.

Through the dynasties that were to follow Mahmood Ghaznavi’s controversial military campaigns, the primacy of Ali Hajveri’s shrine continued. Its centrality to the evolution of Muslim rulers meant that the origins of Islam were paradoxically not rooted in the capture of power. Voluntary conversions at Sufi khanqahs and dergahs were a constant process. The Sultans of Delhi and the Moghuls were all enamoured by the mythical might of the saint, and while the imperial grandeur continued, the ordinary Lahoris had already renamed Lahore as “Data ki Nagri”- Data’s city. 

Khawaja Moin ud din Chishti undertook 40 day long meditative sojourn at this shrine before he moved to Ajmere to carry on the Sufi mission of spreading love, tolerance and harmony and of re-emphasising the indivisible equality of man. The Moghul prince and heir apparent Dara Shikoh, like his great-grandfather Akbar, was also a true devotee of Data Ganj Bakhsh. 

The decline of the Moghul Empire did not impact the energy of the shrine. In fact, the formidable Punjabi leader, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, like his predecessors, invested in the upkeep and expansion of the shrine complex. The rulers dare not afford the wrath or displeasure of the saint, such has been the power of imagination. Therefore, it is but logical that Mian Shahbaz Sharif, during his first tenure as the chief minister of Punjab, initiated the mega project of Data Darbar’s physical renewal, expansion and “beautification” in the late nineties.

My visit on that night took me by surprise at the melee of the devotees. This was the first time that I actually experienced the chaotic enthusiasm of the thousands that had gathered on just a regular Thursday night. We entered as a matter of caution from the old Mela Ram street and walked to the shrine passing through the interesting web of narrow streets and by lanes with courtyards boasting a few ancient pipal trees. This was not an easy walk given the jam-packed streets around the shrine. We tried to enter the shrine by the golden gate erected by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1974 and after a little argument with the hordes of volunteers – razakars as they are called to maintain order – we reached the all-marble inner precincts of the shrine. 

Standing near the tomb is a fabulous experience, for it brings together the innate diversity of our cultures and faiths. From the absorbed mystics, the mazjoobs , to the green turbaned formal clerics, there are dozens of interesting followers all in the same compound. If at one end a naat khwan is reciting verse eulogising Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), at the other end one would find another person reciting some Punjabi folk tale in lyricised format. Sounds of zikr - organised remembrance of God – sessions are in progress, and not too far away a little group would be offering prayer in a more ritualistic manner. 

Men and women access the tomb from different sides and mercifully women are not denied entry unlike a few other shrines in India and Pakistan. Over the years, many verses in Persian have been engraved in white marble either as part of a government project or through individual philanthropic contributions. The most famous of these happens to be Moin ud din Chishti’s famous verse:

Ganj Baksh Faiz i Alam Mazhar i Noor i Khuda
Naqisa ra Pir i kamil, kamilan ra rahnuma

(Ganj Baksh is a manifestation of divine light and a bounty for all
For the lesser mortals he is the perfect guide and for the perfect, he is the leader). 

There is a little hamam that is believed to be an old source of water at the shrine and contains healing powers. Little trays full of salt are also to be found here and these are meant to be tasted by visitors for medicinal and spiritual benefaction. 

In Kashf al Mahjoob, Ali Hajveri writes on the essence of Sufism that places loving devotion of God at its core: “Sufism is the heart’s being, pure from the pollution of discord.” He further elaborates that, “love is concord and the lover has but one duty in the world, namely to keep the commandment of the beloved and if the object of desire is one how can discord arise?” And if one is striving to keep the heart free of discord and clear in the pursuit of the single most important priority, i.e., love for the creator, then love for all creation is but a natural consequence. 

About the Sufi attire of the patched frock, Ali Hajveri has a creative mystical interpretation to offer: its collar is annihilation of intercourse (with men), its two sleeves are observance and continence, its two gussets are poverty and purity, its belt is persistence in contemplation, its hem is tranquillity in (God’s) presence and its fringe is settlement in the abode of union. 

This translation by Nicholson may not do justice to the original Persian prose but it does covey to us the richness of metaphor and the light of imagination that can only emanate from the purest of hearts. 

Langar, the distribution of food, at the Sufi Khanqah (abode) is a centuries-old tradition. It allows devotees to eat together, feed the hungry and attend to an exhausted traveller and is a means of redistributing wealth. Data Darbar is also an important location, for it feeds thousands of people every day through the complex networks of langar, its financiers, distributors and organisers. 

Perhaps the greatest of the experiences at Data Darbar is to find oneself connected to a stream of humanity, shoulder to shoulder, with a shared sense of spirituality that cuts across ethnicity, sect, ritual and even religion at times. The serenity of the place despite the mayhem is also soothing. On less busy days, the interaction with the shrine becomes even more comforting.

In years that I have not visited Ganj-Baksh’s tomb, I have remained connected. It has little to do with the search for miracles and seeking petty, transient favours from divinity and God’s chosen few. It has to do with the pursuit of the purity, of an unpolluted being, free of “discord.” This uncanny feeling has been best defined in the words of the great saint: 

“To traverse distance is child’s play: henceforth pay visits by means of thought; it is not worthwhile to visit any person, and there is no virtue in bodily presence.”

Whether one visits Data Darbar or not while living in Lahore, it is not difficult to be connected. Lahore’s last millennium and its spiritual-cultural centrepiece – Data’s shrine – characterises us, whether we recognise it, or not.

Courtesy:www.razarumi.com

Pakistan, A Treasure Trove of Wonders. But do we care!

The magnificent architecture: of the Shrine of Hazrat Shah Rukn-e-Alam in Multan attracts visitors from almost every corner of the world

Nayyar Hashmey

The Indus Valley occupies a unique place on the world map as the birth place of civilisation. Previously, it was one of the four principal sites where humanity got its birth. However, after explorations done at Mehrgarh by French Archeologist J.F. Jarrige, with amazement learnt the world, of a highly startling fact that first urban settlement on this planet rose in c. 7000 BC in the Kachhi plain of Balochistan. Then the rise of Muslims in the early eighth century in the region yielded a new form of architecture that has the potential even today to attract people from all over the world.

With such prideful history and heritage the country has the right potential to become world’s choice as a top tourist destination.

Till 2006 Pakistan had a regular inflow of tourists. Though meager, yet with a very poor infra structure, no publicity, no brand image and to that a highly unprofessional approach by tourism authorities especially the Babu’s of our tourism ministry and its ancillary corporations, even that meager amount of inbound tourism was not bad (while visiting Pakistan; in 2006, the foreign tourists spent over one million US dollars). However, tourism met a serious jolt when the US and the EU countries put Pakistan on a negative advisory list (even though the country from day one has been aligned to the west in its war against terror). Ever since then the tourism sector has almost come to a halt. Surprisingly countries like Sri Lanka and India where terrorism also takes its toll were not at all put to such restriction.

Mehrgarh…The Lost Civilization [3 of 4]

Though Mehrgarh was abandoned at the time of the emergence of the literate urbanized phase of the Indus civilization around Moenjodaro, Harappa etc., the development illustrates its synchronization with the civilization’s subsistence patterns, as well as its craft and trade. It also shows that the sequence of civilization was not broken and the flow of civilization kept moving into the Indus Civilization. The similarity of Indus Civilization to Mehrgarh in many respects shows the linkages and relationships among the Mehrgarh and later periods, but the important thing is that between the Mehrgarh and Indus civilization in Punjab and Sind side respectively, Suleman Range and Kirthar Range separate the Balochistan Plateau and the other geographical areas. Image: Mehrgarh figurines]

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LINK BETWEEN OUR PAST AND PRESENT

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by Mahmood Mahmood

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There are indications that bones were used in making tools for farming, textile, and there is good amount of evidence on use of cotton even in that period. The skeletons found at the site indicated that the height of people of that era was larger than that of the later periods. The architecture of the area at that time was well developed. Rice was the staple food for those people and there were also indications of trade activities.

Most of the ruins at Mehrgarh are buried under alluvium deposits, though some structures could be seen eroding on the surface. Currently, the excavated remains at the site comprise a complex of large compartmental mud-brick structures. Function of these subdivided units, built of hand-formed plano-convex mud bricks, is still not clear but it is thought that many were used probably for storage, rather than residential purposes. A couple of mounds also contain formal cemeteries, parts of which have been excavated.

Mehrgarh…The Lost Civilization [4 of 4]

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MEHRGARH SAGA:

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THE DRIFT TOWARDS MAIN INDUS VALLEY CIVILISATION

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by Mahmood Mahmood

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One amazing bit of info about this town is that in 7000 BC it had a population of 25000 people, which was the number of people living in the entire Egypt in 7000BC. [8]

During excavations, the archaeologists discovered clay female figurines associated with fertility rites, and believed to have been worshipped by the natives. Similar figurines have surfaced in other archaeological sites in the province. Several of these statues are carved with necklaces, and have their hands on their breast or waist. Some have children on their laps.

The people of that era used to wear woolen or cotton clothes. Some of the deities had their braid on their back and shoulders. Most of the male statues wore turbans, which is still in vogue in Baluchistan. While the opinion of several archaeologists that several of the statuettes discovered at the site might have been children, there are many who link these terracotta figures to the religious beliefs of Mehrgarh people and the eon-old concept of the power of nature and female deities.

Moreover, terracotta figures of bulls have also been discovered at Mehrgarh pointing to the possible worship of animals or their exalted status as life-givers for the food they yielded. The figurines reveal the attire women possibly put upon; lace-like material round their waists and adorned their upper bodies with necklaces. Archaeologists are still clueless as to how they wove the material and whether they used cotton or wool to make their garments. [9]

The first use of cotton in the history of mankind has been found at Mehrgarh. This shows the deep rooted affiliation of Pakistan’s geography and economy to cotton since old ages. The local cotton which is the present day white gold for Pakistan’s economy has roots in the ancient past. Even today whenever there is good rain in the Suleman range, excellent quality of cotton is grown in the areas adjoining the Baluchistan range over the Suleman range.

The knowledge gained from Mehrgarh excavation is supported further by the nearby discoveries of Nausharo situated on the Kachi plain approximately 10 kilometers southwest of Mehrgarh, Nausharo… was excavated by the French team from 1980 to 1998. This site was first occupied at around 2800 BC before the Harappan period under an influence of the early farming culture of Baluchistan. The material culture of the site indicates that the site fell under Harappan influence or occupation by circa 2500 BC and reverted to the Baluchistan cultures by 2100 – 2000 BC. This is the period when new summer crops such as rice were introduced into the Kachi plain in peripheral regions where the Indus Civilization had formerly flourished.

Additionally, farming in this region involves domestication of the native cattle rather than sheep and goat, and the early layers are a ceramic, at odds with the arrival of a “package” from Southwest Asia. This region’s Neolithic probably developed locally.

The statements cited above show the tendency of the scholars to create confusion as the majority of the scholars are Western trained and interestingly whenever there is a mention of some historical evidence of the age old civilizations, they add a lot of ifs and buts. Same idea was floated by Mortimer and Wheeler in their book Indus Valley civilization written in 1950’s where they attributed the rise of Indus Valley Civilization to the Middle Eastern influences. The research at Mehrgarh was done decades later but the old passions die hard, the new evidence in Mehrgarh is not taken independently and the real place of Mehrgarh is denied due to lack of knowledge and wrong frames of reference.

Recent archaeological evidence especially from Mehrgarh has established that the Indus Civilization was essentially an indigenous development growing out of local cultures in an unbroken sequence from the Neolithic at the end of the eighth millennium BC, through the Chalcolithic (about 5000-3600 BC) and Early Harappan (about 3600-2600 BC) to the commencement of the Mature Harappan period in about 2550 BC.[10]

Mehrgarh has all the ingredients of indigenous and local civilization and symbolic expression of its originality, uniqueness to be placed as foremost place of human heritage and human endurance and struggle to survive in a permanently changing universe and globe.

That the domestication of animals began at Mehrgarh; the artifacts excavated from Mehrgarh fully substantiate this fact. The first pottery evidence is found in Mehrgarh.

The originality and the local and indigenous nature of Mehrgarh is beyond any doubt and there is need to accept it as such not on the bases of nationalistic or ethnic point of view but upon the bases of rational and logical scientific evidence which is in abundance in Mehrgarh. The continuous flow and development of Mehrgarh was entirely local in its scope, development, technological and symbolic expressions. No doubt around 6000 BC there was human activity in Middle East and some areas of Turkey but the developmental level of Mehrgarh in art, symbolism, nature control, and technology was far more developed and continuous as compared to the pastoral, grazing communities of the Middle East and Turkey.

From Mehrgarh the flow of civilization travelled to other areas of Pakistan in the fertile plains of Indus with more hospitable environment and relatively more refined conditions of the civilization taking inspiration and innovation to new heights from the local and independent source of Mehrgarh to its unique contours and expressions.

Indus civilization was most scattered and had a different scope and point of climax, but the uniqueness, originality of Mehrgarh will always hold the crown of being the pioneer in the journey of civilization in present day Pakistan’s past and hidden heritage!

Concluded.

Previous 1,  2, 3. 4

Source

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Footnotes:

1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7085/pdf/440755a.pdf
2. The development of the technique of carbon dating is the most scientific method to gauge the age of the artifacts. It determines the age of old artifacts as per the proportion of carbon in the artifacts
3. Personal observation and experience in Punjab, Pakistan.
4. Walker and Erlandson 1986.
5. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7085/pdf/440755a.pdf
6. This is proven by the examples quoted above in the article
7. http://www.answers.com/Mehrgarh
8. This is the first urban civilization of the world see http://www.harappa.com/indus/indus4.html
9. http://varnam.org/history/2004/10/mehrgarh.php
10. http://www.harappa.com/script/maha1.html

WOP Editor Speaks to Pakistani Spectator

Q & A WITH

GHAZALA KHAN:

The other day Ghazala Khan of Pakistani Spectator asked me if I could be available for an interview. I told her bloggers are mostly the people who do things mainly for passion, so she would be welcome for any such questioning session. Ghazla had a round of questions concerning this blog and me which she thinks is the pen behind this blog; it’s though as much an effort of my friends in the world of writing, photography, web formatting and above all my readers. Excerpts…

What made you enter the blogging world? Just an accident, a chance or an inspiration!

 Have visited many countries, firstly during my higher studies and later during my professional assignments. There are so many beautiful things there to see but Pakistan is unique. It has everything for everybody. Its beauty is original, untempered and as such attracts every mind. But people outside do not know this. My idea about ‘Wonders of Pakistan’ has been first of all to enable our own countrymen know the wonderous sites in their homeland and then to let the outside world know how beautiful, how wonderful and a hospitable country Pakistan is.

 Another motivating factor which necessitated / rather pushed me to launch this blog has been the discouraging and totally non professional approach of our government run establishments related to tourism. Many a time, I myself faced an indifferent, cold attitude from our various tourism outlets, so I decided to establish a platform, where people are able to learn a lot about our country; its rich history, heritage its mountains, rivers, art, everything.  

In what way do you think, Wonders of Pakistan is different?

We at WOP concentrate particularly on veracity of its contents. We try that each and every content that we insert, be it the history, heritage, art, and culture, tourism, every thing, is subjected to a strong testing ground, so overall quality editing is our forte. 

The top 7 wonders of Pakistan, in your opinion?

1. Mehrgarh
   
2. Karakorams
   
3. Deosai Plain
   
4. Moenjodaro
   
5. Taxila
   
6. KKH
   
7. Uch Sharif

The top 3 places in Pakistan for ‘just married’ I mean the honeymooners?

Honeymooners have both the honey and the moon so it shouldn’t matter much for them where to go but if you ask me then:

1. Shangrila Resort
   
2. Murree
   
3. A beach hut in Karachi

Only one characteristic you think has brought you success in life?

Ready to accept challenge.

The happiest and the gloomiest day of your life?

When I was informed by the title awarding committee of the Prague University of Technology that I was being conferred the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Food Sciences. That was the happiest.

The day Mohtarma Benazir was shot at in Rawlapindi:

Am neither a PPP wala, nor do I sympathize with their political philosophy (its another matter that in theory what they say is at the heart of every Pakistani but actions speak louder than words; which I do not find in case of present PPP leadership), the day I learnt that Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto has been shot in Rawalpindi, I was so grieved including my family that for complete two days we didn’t take any thing. These fits of gloom grip me sometimes even now.

Urdu Blogs seem to have a huge potential, when do you think they can really take on the online horizon in Pakistan?

 At the moment, mostly the Pakistani blogs are being put up in English; the reason being the problem with its script. No suitable software is available in Urdu as yet. The script being used is cumbersome and hard to read. (Even today there is an ad in Urdu daily newspaper from world’s largest search engine Google on copy rights of authors & writers but being in computer script of Urdu its hardly readable).

Many a time when I find something of interest in an Urdu blog, I have to skip because of the poor readability. Though some blogs do use the ‘nastaleeq’ and in such a case I definitely read the piece of my interest. Am not computer savvy but I do believe ‘nastaleeq’ is being used in MS picture format. Once a completely new and perfected script is evolved, Urdu blogs will definitely get more readership, for then it would be far easier to become popular because majority of people find it more convenient to read Urdu rather than English.

 If I ask you to pick 3 top travel destinations in the world, with no worries about how it’s paid for – what would you choose?

1.  The Taj Mahal in Agra, India
   
2. Nagara Falls in Niagara, Canada
   
3. Venice, the city on water (was there once, but still “Hae daikhnay ki cheez issay bar bar daikh!”). Venice is an Italian city.

Your favorite book and why?

History being my favorite subject, I mostly read books on history and of course a masterpiece in history, written by an American writer “The Rise and the Fall of Third Reich” is the book I liked most. William L. Shirer was the best selling author in mid sixties when he first published this book. I read it much later. Its style is so lucid and Shirer’s pen is so forceful and contents so interesting, that everything seems to proceed natural – it’s so absorbing you feel you are wandering in the streets of Hitler’s Germany. The day he enters the stage as a Nazi desperado after the end of WWI, goes through the great recession of 1930’s, the Reichstag Fire, waging the Second World War till the Nuremberg Trials. Shirer’s style is superb; while reading you feel you are a participant to the events of history he is describing in the book.

 And your favorite meal, dress, and sport?

Love sizzling chicken with rice done in Pakistani style. As for dress, I feel comfortable in western casual dress as well as shalwar qameez. About sports, frankly speaking, I do not have much interest in sports; instead I love to read books on history and travel.

 The first thing you notice about a person (whether you know him / her already or meeting for the first time?

Per se, I view the figure and then listen what he  / she has to say, for it’s the mind or thoughts which determine my assessment about the person am engaged in interaction or otherwise involved in one way or the other.

English blogs or Urdu Blogs, which one has a brighter future in Pakistan?

Already taken abbove.

How can Pakistani bloggers benefit from blogs financially?

 Blogs are an initial step to come into the world of publishing. Lately this medium of publication has become so strong in generating an independent, individualistic reader- viewership base that it has tempted even the giant publishing houses of the printed world, like New York Times, Washington Post, the weeklies Time and Newsweek, you name any and it will most probably be there on the web as a blog. But in essence it is a medium for those who want to write, what they want to write, not what they are asked or ordered to write. For such people, publication over a blog is the first step.

For writers, editors and publishers, weblogs offer a quick and free platform to express themselves. Once the people who are in the business or trade and start taking interest in the work of a particular writer, his value as a writer, analyst, editor, strategist is assessed, he or she can then market that skill to concerned business or trade through one’s own blog or through another whom one may think as stronger in marketing such a skill. Otherwise too, a writer can even launch a book through his own blog and market it too.

I personally foresee a tremendous potential on the financial side of blogging. As I already said, with internet getting high speed through new technologies, ISP charges getting down, internet usage is now further moving from desktops to mobile media like laptops, PDA’s and mobile phones. Message communication to focus groups and targeted readerships / viewers is more effective than other media. The role of President Obama’s weblogs and websites has been reported as one of the factors in his reaching the youth of America more effectively than his Republican rival John McCain.

Pakistani bloggers tend to remain somewhat self-centered and really don’t go out of their shells? Is it the oriental style of blogging, or are they still unsure which way to go about it?

Since I mostly view English blogs, whether Pakistani or foreign, I do not find much difference. Our bloggers are as loud, independent and bold to express their opinions, just like their western counterparts. Being self centered, ‘may be’ and I repeat ‘may be’ true for Urdu bloggers (as I said I do not view much of Urdu blogs) but Pakistani bloggers in English are not the inward looking, not just ensconced in their shells, no, no, I don’t think so.

 Where does Pakistani blogosphere stand right now?

Our blogosphere is more expressive and bolder than other media. As such it should be in the takeoff stage but it lacks professionalism. This too will come up gradually and will definitely be reflected in the PK bloggers by passage of time.

In this regard I wish to quote one instance. There is a site called PKKH (Pakistan ka Khuda Hafiz). Now this is a sentence uttered by our former dictator president Gen. (Retd). Pervaiz Musharraf, while he was announcing his resignation over Pakistani TV channels. If you go deep into the meaning of this sentence, it has connotations like “Goodbye forever Pakistan”.

Now this is something highly despisable. A dictator could say it because every dictator believes ‘après moi deluge’ but a site administrator ought to be careful in choosing a title. To be on the web doesn’t mean you can play with the wishes / sentiments of the people.

I sometime feel this site is perhaps being administered by a Hindutva guy because only such extremists can have sites like these. Even if the intention of the administrator who chose this title was sincere, yet, the title itself connotates a bad feeling for patriotic Pakistani nationalists.

Your top five favourite bloggers in Pakistan?

The following four:only:-

1. Pakistaniat.com
   
2. Rupeenews.com
   
3. Lahore nama / Pak Tea House
   
4. Chowk.com

 Have you ever been stunned by uniqueness of any blogger in Pakistani blogosphere?

It’s of course Adil Najam’s pakistaniat.com. Its uniqueness is its pakistaniat, its format and the contents.

 The future of blogging in Pakistan?

 Blogging is getting highly popular in Pakistan. The only problem is the speed. Since majority of net users do not have a high speed broadband facility (which is basically the technology for long term quality blogging), therefore, the high cost of broadband is a big deterrence. However, with net technologies getting more competitive, blogging may become as strong as other media (electronic as well as the hard print).

You have also got a blogging life, how has it directly affected both your personal and professional life?

 I do blogging whenever I have free time. I partly do it to satiate my passion for reading and writing, especially about the slugs I have chosen for my own blog. Secondly it’s also a part of my professional activity, so I fully enjoy my blogging time. My family too, is very responsive and cooperative in this regard.

And finally your future plans?

At the moment am financing all expenses of my blog (which is an e-magazine appearing every month on the web) from my own pocket. The writers and photographers, who contribute in WOP, too are doing this with a missionary zeal, but ultimately one has to stand on one’s own to sustain. I get a lot of requests from Pakistanis at home and abroad whether ‘Wonders of Pakistan’ is being printed in solid format which presently it is not.  I wish ‘Wonders of Pakistan’ could raise funds to meet its expenses through sponsorships from various stakeholders in tourism, history, heritage, hospitality, travel and similar activities and trades. Once we are successful, I would like that a magazine in hard format (printed on paper) comes up too. 

Then I get lot of mail from people in the US, Canada, the EU countries and Australia, who want to come to Pakistan, some want to see our culture, others want to delve in our history, there are others who just want to be here, this even at this moment now when we have this terrible menace called extremism with us.

I think we can have group visits too, provided our federal authorities can get us out of the negative advisory list.

Finally I would say through WOP, I intend to utilize our medium as the prime mover and shaker in developing and promoting the tourism potential of this country which is TREMENDOUS – if properly perceived and marketed.

Any Message for readers of our blog ‘The Pakistani Spectator’?

Be a proud Pakistani. All of us have great hopes for this country. Pakistan is developing and we certainly do have shortcomings. But they are all surmountable. We have a history of resilience right from the ancient times and we have a great future before us.

The legacy of our forefathers who demonstrated perseverance and a flair for innovation beacons us to a roadmap for Pakistan as a progressive, strong and great country. Let us work together, wherever we are, to make this a reality – within our life time. 

Obama wastes no time in finding his own war

  Former presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson smile as they intensify the 1960’s war in Vietnam.

Did they know the cost of that war for the people of the United States of America (what to speak of the cost for Vietnamese people)? The cost, as always, a war demands, in the form of newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.  

by Gwynne Dyer

You aren’t really the United States president until you’ve ordered an air-strike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now, having ordered two in his first week in office. But now that he has been blooded, can we talk a little about this expanded war he’s planning to fight in Afghanistan?

Does that sound harsh? Well, so is killing people, and all the more so because Obama must know that these remote-controlled Predator strikes usually kill not just the “bad guy,” whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. It also annoys Pakistan, whose territory the United States violated in order to carry out the killings.

It’s not a question of whether the intelligence on which the attacks were based was accurate (although sometimes it isn’t). The question is: Do these killings actually serve any useful purpose? The same question applies to the entire U.S. war in Afghanistan.

President Obama may be planning to shut Guantanamo, but the broader concept of a “war on terror” is still alive and well in Washington. Most of the people he has appointed to run his defence and foreign policies believe in it, and there is no sign that he himself questions it. Yet even 15 years ago, the notion would have been treated with contempt in every military staff college in the country.

That generation of American officers learned two things from their miserable experience in Vietnam. One was that going halfway around the world to fight a conventional military campaign against an ideology (communism then, Islamism now) was a truly stupid idea. The other was that no matter how strenuously the other side insists it is motivated by a world-spanning ideology, its real motives are mostly political and quite local (Vietnamese nationalism then, Iraqi and Afghan nationalism now).

Alas, that generation of officers has now retired, and the new generation of strategists, civilian as well as military, has to learn these lessons all over again. They are proving to be slow students, and if Obama follows their advice then Afghanistan may well prove to be his Vietnam.

The parallel with Vietnam is not all that far-fetched. Modest numbers of American troops have now been in Afghanistan for seven years, mostly in training roles quite similar to those of the U.S. military “advisers” whom presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent to South Vietnam in 1956-1963. The political job of creating a pro-Western, anti-Communist state was entrusted to America’s man in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the South Vietnamese army had the job of fighting the Communist rebels, the Viet Cong.

Unfortunately, neither Diem nor the South Vietnamese army had much success, and by the early 1960s the Viet Cong were clearly on the road to victory. So Kennedy authorized a group of South Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem (although he seemed shocked when they killed him). Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy soon afterwards, authorized a rapid expansion of the American troop commitment in Vietnam, first to 200,000 by the end of 1965, ultimately to half a million by 1968. The United States took over the war. And then lost it.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it’s because we are now at a similar juncture in America’s war in Afghanistan. Washington’s man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, and the Afghan army he theoretically commands, have failed to quell the insurrection, and are visibly losing ground.

So the talk in Washington now is all of replacing Karzai (although it will probably be done via elections, which are easily manipulated in Afghanistan), and the American troop commitment in the country is going up to 60,000. Various American allies also have troops in Afghanistan, just as they did in Vietnam, but it is the United States that is taking over the war.

We already know how this story ends. There is not a lot in common between presidents John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, but they were both ideological crusaders who got the United States mired in foreign wars it could not win and did not need to win.

They then bequeathed those wars to presidents who had ambitious reform agendas in domestic politics and little interest or experience in foreign affairs.

That bequest destroyed Lyndon Johnson, who took the rotten advice of the military and civilian advisers he inherited from Kennedy because there wasn’t much else on offer in Washington at the time. Obama is drifting into the same dangerous waters, and the rotten advice he is getting from strategists who believe in the “war on terror” could do the same for him.

He has figured out that Iraq was a foolish and unnecessary war, but he has not yet applied the same analysis to Afghanistan. The two questions he needs to ask himself are first: did Osama bin Laden want the United States to invade Afghanistan in response to 9/11? The answer to that one is: yes, of course he did.

And second: Of all the tens of thousands of people whom the United States has killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, would a single one have turned up in the United States to do harm if left unkilled? Answer: probably not. Other people might have turned up in the U.S. with evil intent, but not those guys.

So turning Afghanistan into a second Vietnam is probably the wrong strategy, isn’t it?

Courtesy: http://canadiandimension.com

Writer is a London based journalist. His new book, Climate Wars, has just been published in Canada by Random House.

The War on Terror is a Hoax

The most obvious indication that there are no terrorist cells is that not a single neocon has been assassinated.

 by Paul Craig Roberts 

(Counter Punch)

According to US government propaganda, terrorist cells are spread throughout America, making it necessary for the government to spy on all Americans and violate most other constitutional protections.  Former President Bush’s last words as he left office, was the warning that America would soon be struck again by Muslim terrorists.  

If America were infected with terrorists, we would not need the government to tell us.  We would know it from events.  As there are no events, the US government substitutes warnings in order to keep alive the fear that causes the public to accept pointless wars, the infringement of civil liberty, national ID cards, and inconveniences and harassments when they fly.

The most obvious indication that there are no terrorist cells is that not a single neocon has been assassinated.

I do not approve of assassinations, and am ashamed of my country’s government for engaging in political assassination.  The US and Israel have set a very bad example for al-Qaeda to follow.

The US deals with al-Qaeda and Taliban by assassinating their leaders, and Israel deals with Hamas by assassinating its leaders.  It is reasonable to assume that al-Qaeda would deal with the instigators and leaders of America’s wars in the Middle East in the same way. 

Today every al-Qaeda member is aware of the complicity of neoconservatives in the death and devastation inflicted on Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza.  Moreover, neocons are highly visible and are soft targets compared to Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.  Neocons have been identified in the media for years, and as everyone knows, multiple listings of their names are available online. 

Neocons do not have Secret Service protection.  Dreadful to contemplate, but it would be child’s play for al-Qaeda to assassinate any and every neocon.  Yet, neocons move around freely, a good indication that the US does not have a terrorist problem.

If, as neocons constantly allege, terrorists can smuggle nuclear weapons or dirty bombs into the US with which to wreak havoc upon our cities, terrorists can acquire weapons with which to assassinate any neocon or former government official.

Yet, the neocons, who are the Americans most hated by Muslims, remain unscathed. 

The “war on terror” is a hoax that fronts for American control of oil pipelines, the profits of the military-security complex, the assault on civil liberty by fomenters of a police state, and Israel’s territorial expansion.  

There were no al-Qaeda in Iraq until the Americans brought them there by invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who kept al Qaeda out of Iraq.  The Taliban is not a terrorist organization, but a movement attempting to unify Afghanistan under Muslim law.  The only Americans threatened by the Taliban are the Americans Bush sent to Afghanistan to kill Taliban and to impose a puppet state on the Afghan people.

Hamas is the democratically elected government of Palestine, or what little remains of Palestine after Israel’s illegal annexations.  Hamas is a terrorist organization in the same sense that the Israeli government and the US government are terrorist organizations.  In an effort to bring Hamas under Israeli hegemony, Israel employs terror bombing and assassinations against Palestinians.  Hamas replies to the Israeli terror with homemade and ineffectual rockets.

Hezbollah represents the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon, another area in the Middle East that Israel seeks for its territorial expansion.

The US brands Hamas and Hezbollah “terrorist organizations” for no other reason than the US is on Israel’s side of the conflict.  There is no objective basis for the US Department of State’s “finding” that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations.  It is merely a propagandistic declaration.

Americans and Israelis do not call their bombings of civilians terror. What Americans and Israelis call terror is the response of oppressed people who are stateless because their countries are ruled by puppets loyal to the oppressors.  These people, dispossessed of their own countries, have no State Departments, Defense Departments, seats in the United Nations, or voices in the mainstream media.  They can submit to foreign hegemony or resist by the limited means available to them.

The fact that Israel and the United States carry on endless propaganda to prevent this fundamental truth from being realized indicates that it is Israel and the US that are in the wrong and the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Afghans who are being wronged.

The retired American generals who serve as war propagandists for Fox “News” are forever claiming that Iran arms the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents and Hamas. But where are the arms?  To deal with American tanks, insurgents have to construct homemade explosive devices out of artillery shells.  After six years of conflict the insurgents still have no weapon against the American helicopter gunships.  Contrast this “arming” with the weaponry the US supplied to the Afghans three decades ago when they were fighting to drive out the Soviets.

The films of Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza show large numbers of Gazans fleeing from Israeli bombs or digging out the dead and maimed, and none of these people is armed.  A person would think that by now every Palestinian would be armed, every man, woman, and child.  Yet, all the films of the Israeli attack show an unarmed population.  Hamas has to construct homemade rockets that are little more than a sign of defiance.  If Hamas were armed by Iran, Israel’s assault on Gaza would have cost Israel its helicopter gunships, its tanks, and hundreds of lives of its soldiers.

Hamas is a small organization armed with small caliber rifles incapable of penetrating body armor.  Hamas is unable to stop small bands of Israeli settlers from descending on West Bank Palestinian villages, driving out the Palestinians, and appropriating their land. 

The great mystery is:  why after 60 years of oppression are the Palestinians still an unarmed people?  Clearly, the Muslim countries are complicit with Israel and the US in keeping the Palestinians unarmed.

The unsupported assertion that Iran supplies sophisticated arms to the Palestinians is like the unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  These assertions are propagandistic justifications for killing Arab civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in order to secure US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. 

–Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: CraigRoberts@yahoo.com

War on Plastic Bags

Plastic bags billow in the wind, they are a hazard in our daily life and pose serious dangers to wildlife and motorists alike.

·

REJECTING THE PLASTIC PLAGUE

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by Randeep Ramesh

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Plastic bags are a menace to our environment.Not only do they clog the municipal drains and disposal outlets, but also are breeding grounds for mosquitoes which cause and spread malaria and the dengue fevers. In India like in other countries such as Bangladesh and Bhutan, the poly bags have been banned but not in Pakistan.

Here in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, the cantonment authorities too introduced a ban last year. But it did not succeed as the alternative was a paper bag of very low grammage. The tenacity of these paper bags was so poor that they busted on the way to shoppers’ homes. Gradually the ban became ineffective and now again the poly bags are being used by shoppers in the cantonment as well. The damage to environment, however, continues. [Nayyar]

—

The global battle against plastic took a draconian turn recently when officials in Delhi announced that the penalty for carrying a polythene shopping bag would be five years in prison. Officials in India‘s capital have decided that the only way to stem the rising tide of rubbish is to completely outlaw the plastic shopping bag. According to an official note, the “use, storage and sale” of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned.

The new guideline means that customers, shopkeepers, hoteliers and hospital staff face a 100,000 rupee fine and a possible jail sentence for using non-biodegradable bags.

Delhi has been steadily filling up with plastic bags in recent years as the economy boomed and western-style shopping malls sprang up in the city.

There are no reliable figures on bag use but environmentalists say more than 10 million are used in the capital every day. Not only are the streets littered with them, they clog the drains and polythene takes hundreds of years to decompose.

To begin with, the ban will be lightly enforced, giving people time to switch to jute, cotton, recycled paper and compostable bags.

Officials say that it will be up to the court to decide on how harsh a sentence an offender might face.”Delhi has a population of 16 million which means we cannot enforce [the new law] overnight”, said J.K. Dadoo, Delhi’s top environment official.

“But we want people to understand that they will not get away with (using plastic bags), if they choose to defy the law repeatedly, then the court has the measures it deems necessary to fit.”

Civil servants said that punitive measures were needed after a law prohibiting all but the thinnest plastic bags – with sides no thicker than 0.04mm – was ignored.

Green groups welcomed the tough new measures. Shop-owners had long complained that no viable alternatives exist in India for plastic bags. However, the authorities appear to have been swayed by environmentalists who pointed out that used bags were clogging drains and so providing breeding grounds for malaria and dengue fever.

There is ample evidence that prohibition can work: poor countries such as Rwanda, Bhutan and Bangladesh have bans.

The first targets in Delhi will be the industrial units that manufacture the plastic bags in the capital, which officials say will be closed down.

Bangladesh was the first country to ban plastic bags in 2002 amid worries that they were blocking drains during the monsoon. Taiwan, Australia, Rwanda and Singapore have since moved to ban, discourage or promote reuse of plastic bags, hundreds of billions of which are handed out free each year.

Towns and cities in India, the US and UK have followed. Denmark and Ireland have both experimented with taxing plastic bags. Dublin said the tax, imposed in 2002, had reduced usage by more than 95 per cent.

—

Source:

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SUFISM can counter the Taleban?

Sufism is Islam expressed in the traditions and psyche of Muslims in the subcontinent, especially those of Pakistan.

by Barbara Plett

It’s one o’clock in the morning and the night is pounding with hypnotic rhythms, the air thick with the smoke of incense, laced with dope.

I’m squeezed into a corner of the upper courtyard at the shrine of Baba Shah Jamal in Lahore, famous for its Thursday night drumming sessions. It’s packed with young men, smoking, swaying to the music, and working themselves into a state of ecstasy. This isn’t how most Westerners imagine Pakistan, which has a reputation as a hotspot for Islamist extremism.

DEVOTIONAL SINGING

But this popular form of Sufi Islam is far more widespread than the Taleban’s version. It’s a potent brew of mysticism, folklore and a dose of hedonism.

Now some in the West have begun asking whether Pakistan’s Sufism could be mobilised to counter militant Islamist ideology and influence.

Lahore would be the place to start: it’s a city rich in Sufi tradition.

At the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh Hajveri, musicians and singers from across the country also gather weekly, to perform qawwali, or Islamic devotional singing.

Qawwali is seen as a key part of the journey to the divine, what Sufis call the continual remembrance of God.

“When you listen to other music, you will listen for a short time, but the qawwali goes straight inside,” says Ali Raza, a fourth generation Sufi singer.

“Even if you can’t understand the wording, you can feel the magic of the qawwali, this is spiritual music which directly touches your soul and mind as well.”

But Sufism is more than music. At a house in an affluent suburb of Lahore a group of women gathers weekly to practise the Sufi disciplines of chanting and meditation, meant to clear the mind and open the heart to God.

One by one the devotees recount how the sessions have helped them deal with problems and achieve greater peace and happiness. This more orthodox Sufism isn’t as widespread as the popular variety, but both are seen as native to South Asia

‘LOVE AND HARMONY’

“Islam came to this part of the world through Sufism,” says Ayeda Naqvi, a teacher of Islamic mysticism who’s taking part in the chanting.

“It was Sufis who came and spread the religious message of love and harmony and beauty, there were no swords, it was very different from the sharp edged Islam of the Middle East.

“And you can’t separate it from our culture, it’s in our music, it’s in our folklore, it’s in our architecture. We are a Sufi country, and yet there’s a struggle in Pakistan right now for the soul of Islam.”

That struggle is between Sufism and hard-line Wahhabism, the strict form of Sunni Islam followed by members of the Taleban and al-Qaeda.

It has gained ground in the tribal north-west, encouraged initially in the 1980s by the US and Saudi Arabia to help recruit Islamist warriors to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

But it’s alien to Pakistan’s Sufi heartland in the Punjab and Sindh provinces, says Sardar Aseff Ali, a cabinet minister and a Sufi.

“Wahhabism is a tribal form of Islam coming from the desert sands of Saudi Arabia,” he says. “This may be very attractive to the tribes in the frontier, but it will never find resonance in the established societies of Pakistan.”

So could Pakistan’s mystic, non-violent Islam be used as a defence against extremism?

An American think tank, the Rand Corporation, has advocated this, suggesting support for Sufism as an “open, intellectual interpretation of Islam”.

Devotees  carrying Chaddor to the shrine of Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalander of Sehwan Sharif in Sindh.

There is ample proof that Sufism remains a living tradition.

In the warren of Lahore’s back streets, a shrine is being built to a modern saint, Hafiz Iqbal, and his mentor, a mystic called Baba Hassan Din. They attract followers from all classes and walks of life.

‘ATROCITIES’

The architect is Kamil Khan Mumtaz. He describes in loving detail his traditional construction techniques and the spiritual principles they symbolise.

He shakes his head at stories of lovely old mosques and shrines pulled down and replaced by structures of concrete and glass at the orders of austere mullahs, and he’s horrified at atrocities committed in the name of religion by militant Islamists.

But he doubts that Sufism can be marshalled to resist Wahhabi radicalism, a phenomenon that he insists has political, not religious roots.

“The American think tanks should think again,” he says. “What you see [in Islamic extremism] is a response to what has happened in the modern world.

“There is a frustration, an anger, a rage against invaders, occupiers. Muslims ask themselves, what happened?

“We once ruled the world and now we’re enslaved. This is a power struggle, it is the oppressed who want to become the oppressors, this has nothing to do with Islam, and least of all to do with Sufism.”

Ayeda Naqvi, on the other hand, believes Sufism could play a political role to strengthen a tolerant Islamic identity in Pakistan. But she warns of the dangers of Western support.

“I think if it’s done it has to be done very quietly because a lot of people here are allergic to the West interfering,” she says.

“So even if it’s something good they’re doing, they need to be discreet because you don’t want Sufism to be labelled as a movement which is being pushed by the West to drown out the real puritanical Islam.”

Back at the Shah Jamal shrine I couldn’t feel further from puritanical Islam. The frenzied passion around me suggests that Pakistan’s Sufi shrines won’t be taken over by the Taleban any time soon.

But whether Sufism can be used to actively resist the spread of extremist Islam, or even whether it should be, is another question.

Courtesy: Text and Photographs BBC News, however the last picture by Umair Ghani, a Pakistani Photographer and Writer.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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3/3 Attacks in Lahore, Part II

Liberty Chowk, Lahore, Pakistan – The venue of 3/3 attacks on Sri Lankan Cricketers.

WHO? WHY? AND THE AFTERMATH

·

by Nayyar Hashmey

·

The attack on Sri Lankan cricketers on 3/3 in Lahore has raised many questions about our political setup running the affairs of the Punjab province.

Different analyses and versions by individuals, groups, think tanks and the media including the blogosphere are being put up at relevant forums.  But a very interesting and thought provoking pinup appeared on the pages of Pak Tea House blog “PTH” (pakteahouse.wordpress.com). The questions raised in this post had already been in the minds of different quarters not only in Pakistan but in India as well.

Naturally different scenarios are being constructed as to who could possibly these people have been, who indulged in this barbarism and who did mastermind the plot.

Interestingly many people in India have been pondering over such acts like the one on 26/11 in Mumbai and of 3/3 in Lahore. One such voice is of Arundhati Roy. Roy is a voice that has been highly vocal in her views on Kashmir, on minorities, on Hindutva extremists and on unilateral demonizing of Muslims in the Indian and the international media.

I therefore present first the views expressed by a contributor of the PTH, who has reproduced an article written by one Professor R. Vaidyanathan of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India. This is then followed by comments by the Pakistani contributor; and finally the comments by blogger himself (Raza Rumi) to which I fully subscribe as well.

This is then followed by Roy’s detailed viewpoint.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and activist who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and in 2002, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. This is being published courtesy outlookindia.com

It should be interesting for WOP readers that Roy expressed these views almost two months before Lahore attacks when whole of India was gripped in the fever of going for an attack on Pakistan.

PTH’s report continues…

The Pakistan People’s Party government has found what it feels is compelling evidence of a convergence of Al-Qaeda and Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to carry out the Lahore travesty.   While not ruling out the Tamil Tiger connection, the government has rounded up over 100 people all over Pakistan, especially in cities of Hyderabad, Rahim Yar Khan and Quetta.  The suspects said to be involved in this violence are identified as an Afghan citizen named Abdul Rahman,   an unidentified Uzbek citizen, one “Aslam” arrested from Hyderabad Sindh, who is said to be a RAW agent.

Four suspects have been taken into custody from Firdaus Market, Lahore, who, sources claim, have been positively identified by eye-witnesses including the driver of the car and the rickshaw that were snatched and then used in the travesty. It may be remembered that given a popular local TV channel’s convenient location nearby as well as close circuit TVs that are found in the back alleys of Liberty Market, all the terrorists are caught on tape and the government is very confident that they can crack the case.

If accusation of the involvement of Indian Raw is true, it just shows the mindlessness of the entire episode. Hindsight is 20/20.  It is said that Indian government had “prophetically” warned the Sri Lankan Cricket Team against touring Pakistan.  The Indian government had seen it as a slight by the Island nation which has faced enough terrorism and violence itself. It is possible that Sri Lanka was dragged into the whole mess because it dared to defy the might of India.

For reference and discussion we reproduce here an article widely circulated in the Indian media in the aftermath of Mumbai outrage which seems to have caught the imagination of policy makers in New Delhi:

Contd….. Part III

Destabilise Pakistan, says the Indian Professor, Part III

The Taj Mahal in Mumbai, India, which prompted the writer to express his views in the following report.

·

TWELVE STEPS TO SHOCK-AND-AWE PAKISTAN’S ECONOMY

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by R. Vaidyanathan

·

I did not anticipate the huge response my inbox received for the article last week (December 2/08) slamming Pakistan. Many of those who wrote in have sought concrete steps to tackle the Terror Central. The terror attack on world citizens at Mumbai has created revulsion and outrage all over the world.

IT IS IMPERATIVE  THAT INDIA SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY PROVIDED TO DESTABILISE PAKISTAN

A stable Pakistan is not in the interest of world peace, leave alone India. Army controls the country and owns its economy. A significant portion of its GDP is due to army-controlled entities (See Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy by Ayesha Siddiqa; OUP; 2007). One can easily say that Pakistan Economy and its Army / ISI are synonymous.

Unless this elementary fact is internalised, we are not going anywhere. This implies we should stop talking of a stable Pakistan since a stable Pakistan means multiple attacks on many more cities of India by that rogue organisation ISI, which is the core of the Pakistan Army and the heart of Pakistan’s economy.

Let us not even assume that Zardari is in control. Poor man – he did not trust his own investigators to probe his wife’s assassination – he wanted Scotland Yard (The author is wrong here too, it was former dictator- president of Pakistan who invited the Scotland Yard to conduct a probe into Benazir’s murder case; Zardari on the other hand has asked the UN team to investigate his wife’s murder case. Ed).

Now he blabbers that if his investigators are satisfied, then he will initiate action against terrorists sitting inside Pakistan. Periodically, the Pakistan Army likes to present some useful idiots (as Lenin would have called them) as elected representatives and we swoon over such events.

INDIA SHOULD TAKE THE FOLLOWING STEPS  TO DESTABILISE THE ECONOMY OF PAKISTAN:

Identify the major export items of Pakistan (like Basmati rice, carpets etc) and provide zero export tax or even subsidise them for export from India.

HURT PAKISTAN ON THE EXPORT FRONT:

Identify the major countries providing arms to Pakistan and arm twist them. Tell Brazil and Germany (currently planning to supply massive defense items to Pakistan) that it will impact their ability to invest in India.

TELL GERMANY THAT RETAIL LICENSE TO METRO WILL BE OFF AND OTHER EXISTING PROJECTS WILL BE IN JEOPARDY:

Incidentally,

after the arrival of Coke and Pepsi in China, the human rights violations of China are not talked about much by US government organs. Think it is a coincidence? Unless we use our markets to arm-twist arms exporters to Pakistan, we will not achieve our objectives.

Tell American companies that for every 5% increase in FDI limit for them; their government needs to reduce equipping Pakistan by $5 billion.

That is real politics, not whining. Let us remember that funds are in desperate search of emerging markets and not the other way about. Let us also remember that international economics is politics by another name.

Create assets to print / distribute their currency widely inside their country. To some extent, Telgi types can be used to outsource this activity. Or just drop their notes in remote areas.

Pressurise IMF to add additional conditionality to the loans given to them or at least do not vote for their loans.

CREATE ASSETS WITHIN PAKISTAN TO DESTABILISE KARACHI STOCK MARKET. it is already in shambles.

Cricket and Bollywood are the opium of the Indian middle classes. Both have been adequately manipulated / controlled by the D-company since the eighties. Chase the D-company money in cricket / Bollywood and punish by burning D-assets in India instead of trying to have them auctioned by the IT department when nobody comes to bid for it.

Provide for capital punishment to those who fund terror and help in that. We have the division in the finance ministry to monitor money laundering, etc. It is important that terror financing is taken seriously and fully integrated into money laundering monitoring systems and this division is provided with much larger budget and human resources. And it should coordinate with RAW.

Encourage and allow scientists/ academicians / elites of Pakistan to opt for Indian passport and widely publicise that fact since it will hurt their self-respect and dignity. There will be a long queue to get Indian passports — many will jump to get our passport — since they will not be stopped at international airports. It is rumored that Adnan Sami wants one. Do not give passports to all — make it a prized possession. Let it hurt the army and ISI controlled country.

THIS ONE STEP WILL DESTROY THEIR IDENTITY AND SELF CONFIDENCE:

Discourage companies from India from investing in Pakistan, particularly IT companies, till Pakistan stops exporting its own IT (international terrorism).

In all these, it is important that we do not bring in the domestic religious issues. The target is the terror central, namely Pakistan, and if there are elements helping them here then they also should be punished-irrespective of religious labels. If Pakistan is dismantled and the idea of Pakistan is gone, many of our domestic issues will also be sorted out.

WILL THE INDIAN ELITE GO FOR THE JUGULAR OR JUST LIGHT MORE CANDLES AND SCREAM AT THE FORMLESS / NAMELESS POLITICAL CLASS BEFORE TV CAMERAS?

It is going to be a long haul and may be in a decade or so, we can find a solution to our existential crisis of being attacked by barbarians from the West. We need to combine strategy and patience and completely throw to the dustbin the ‘Gujral Doctrine’ by that mumbling Prime Minister about treating younger brothers with equanimity.

The doctrine essentially suggests that if we are slapped on both the cheeks we should feel bad that we do not have a third cheek to show. He, according to security experts, seems to have dismantled our human intelligent assets inside Pakistan, which has resulted in the gory death of thousands of Indian citizens in the last few years. Such is our strategic thinking in this complex world since our political class is not adequately briefed and the elite don’t think through issues. Better to be simple in our talks and vicious in our actions rather than the other way.

HOPEFULLY, THIS NOVEMBER WILL CREATE A NEW VIBRANT INDIA CAPABLE OF TAKING CARE OF ITS OWN INTERESTS.

The writer is professor of finance and control, Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore, and can be reached at vaidya@iimb.ernet.in

Contd…..

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Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.

TO ALL WISH WE PEACE, Part I

 

They say patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.  But what can one do if scoundrels begin determining public policy?   The author of this article is supposedly a”responsible” member of the Indian society but it is clear that there is a complete loss of balance on part of “intellectuals” like this.   Whatever Pakistan’s flaws, you won’t find a professor from LUMS, IBA or GIKI writing drivel such as this.    It is, therefore, entirely possible that the outrage that was carried out in Lahore was ”revenge for Mumbai” and part of the greater game plan of de-stabilizing Pakistan as the writer of the article above suggests India must do.

What is worse, is that if this is true, unlike Mumbai attacks which were probably carried out by non-state actors, there could be a direct link to the state and establishment of India.

The end note by PTH to which we at Wonders of Pakistan fully subscribe to:-

We consider ourselves patriots of Pakistan but first and foremost we are human beings,

which is why we vociferously condemned the Mumbai massacre and stood in solidarity with our Indian friends.   We believe Pakistan must leave no stone unturned to catch the perpetrators of Mumbai massacre because

we strongly believe that any nationalism or patriotism that blinds us to our common humanity is not  worth having or worth fighting for.  And our love for Pakistan reinforces, instead of negating, our common humanity.

This is the reason why we started this blog and this is what keeps us going.     The outrages committed against India are not committed by us who want the same things as anyone else in the world.   They are committed by mindless terrorists who have no territorial loyalty to any nation state.    If tomorrow it turns out, and we hope and pray it doesn’t, that there was indeed an Indian connection to the violence in Lahore, we will not write articles like the one by the “responsible” Indian intellectual from IIM.   We will not call for retributions against the hapless and helpless Indian multitudes facing the same issues of poverty, backwardness and disease. This is a promise from us to all its Indian friends and readers.

To peace for all regardless of which side of the border you live.

Contd…. Part II

9 Is Not 11 [1 of 5]

AND NOVEMBER ISN’T SEPTEMBER

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by Arundhati Roy’

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We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11″. And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.

As tension in the region was building, US Senator John McCain warned Pakistan that if it didn’t act fast to arrest the ‘Bad Guys’ he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on ‘terrorist camps’ in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan and India isn’t America.

So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

It’s odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops. lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India’s richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara—one of Kashmir’s most ravaged districts.

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously means something’s going very badly wrong in this country.

If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre.

We’re told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That’s absolutely true. It’s an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically, one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said ‘Hungry, kya?’ (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I’m sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia.

But of course this isn’t that war. That one’s still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Lalgarh in West Bengal; in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa; and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities. That war isn’t on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let’s call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially ‘Islamist’ terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.

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9 Is Not 11 [2 of 5]

Muslims are not the only one in the gun sights of the Hindu Right, Dalits and Christians have also been the target of Hindutva extremists. In the picture above, a hapless Christian victim of Hindu violence looks on at a relief camp in Bhubaneshwar, India

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TERRORISTS, THEIRS AND OURS

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by Arundhati Roy

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Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way. Which is a crime in itself.

The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolster the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy, and believes that jehad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world.

Among the things he has said are:

“There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy.”

And, “India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir.”

But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera):

“We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire…we hacked, burned, set on fire…we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it…. I have just one last wish…let me be sentenced to death…. I don’t care if I’m hanged…just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay…. I will finish them off…let a few more of them die…at least twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand should die.”

And where, in Side A’s scheme of things, would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh bible, We, or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar ‘Guruji’, who became head of the RSS in 1944. It says:

“Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.”

Or:

“To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here…a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”

Of course, Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu Right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two-and-a-half months of violence which left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of whom now live in refugee camps.

All these years, Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which many believe is a front organisation for the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. He continued to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11, the UN imposed sanctions on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure, putting Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and continues to live the life of a respectable man in Gujarat.

A couple of years after the genocide, he left the VHP to join the Shiv Sena. Narendra Modi, Bajrangi’s former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat. So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India’s biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata. Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, has recently said, “Modi is God.” The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted.

A young activist of one of the many Hindu militant outfits in India

The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and seven million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee, current Leader of the Opposition L.K. Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.

And if that’s not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organisations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.

So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I’d pick Side B. We need context. Always.

In this nuclear subcontinent, that context is Partition. The Radcliffe Line which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain’s final, parting kick to us.

Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people—Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India—left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can’t seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths.

India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi’s predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India’s bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.

By 1990, they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992, Hindu mobs exhorted by L.K. Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it.

By 1998, the BJP was in power at  the the Centre.

(Left) Bajrang Dal flag with emblem of the Nazis

It shouldn’t surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is from Shimla (India) and L.K. Advani of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).

In much the same way as it did after the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express and the 2006 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the Government of India announced that it has ‘incontrovertible’ evidence that the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba backed by Pakistan’s ISI was behind the Mumbai strikes. The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies, the Lashkar operates in India through an organisation called the ‘Indian Mujahideen’. Two Indian nationals—Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a Special Police Officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Calcutta in West Bengal—have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks. So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy.

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9 is not 11 [3 of 5]

RELEASING FRANKENSTEINS

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by Arundhati Roy

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TERRORISM HAS GLOBAL DIMENSIONS, ITS AS MUCH IN PAKISTAN AS ITS ELSEWHERE

Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot-soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives, working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously. In today’s world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation-state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It’s almost impossible.

WORLD’S MOST DEADLY TERRORIST GROUP LTTE WAS TRAINED BY INDIA

In circumstances like these, air strikes to ‘take out’ terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not ‘take out’ the terrorists. And neither will war. (Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let’s try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighbouring Sri Lanka, one of the world’s most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.)

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America’s ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening towards civil war. As recruiting agents for America’s jehad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organisations. Having wired up these Frankenstein’s monsters and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to.Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the Homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently re-made.

A SUPER POWER NEVER HAS ALLIES, IT ONLY HAS AGENTS

Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan’s borders. Nobody, least of all the Pakistan government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India. If at this point India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India’s shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of ‘non-state actors’ with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbours. It’s hard to understand why those who steer India’s ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan’s mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it’s the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front.

The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at ‘ground zero’ kept up an endless stream of excited commentary. Over three days and three nights, we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men armed with guns and gadgets exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation. While they did this, they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality.

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America’s ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening toward civil war.

As recruiting agents for America’s jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistani Army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the U.S. expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade.

Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan’s borders.

Nobody, least of all the Pakistani government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs, and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world are mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistani government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India.

If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India’s shores, endangering us as never before.

If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of “non-state actors” with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbors.

It’s hard to understand why those who steer India’s ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan’s mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it’s the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front.

The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at “ground zero” kept up an endless stream of excited commentary.

Over three days and three nights we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men, armed with guns and gadgets, exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard, and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation.

While they did this, they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals, and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion, or nationality.

(Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. The U.S. and Israeli armies don’t hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan.)

But this was different. And it was on TV.

The boy-terrorists’ nonchalant willingness to kill – and be killed – mesmerized their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news.

Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that’s worth.

Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.)Throughout the standoff the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people, and inflict as much damage as they could, before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

When we say, “Nothing can justify terrorism,” what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it’s precious.

So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they’ve died, they’ve journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.

One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself “Imran Babar.” I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the “terror emails” that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don’t want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir.

“You’re surrounded,” the anchor told him. “You are definitely going to die. Why don’t you surrender?

“We die every day,” he replied in a strange, mechanical way. “It’s better to live one day as a lion and then die this way.” He didn’t seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, why didn’t it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?

Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don’t figure in their calculations except as collateral damage.

It has always been a part of, and often even the aim of, terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines. The blood of “martyrs” irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project.

A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theater, spectacle, and symbolism, and today the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as TV anchors were being condemned by other TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes was being magnified a thousand-fold by the TV broadcasts.

[Abovet] Former PM V.P. Singh: His death passed without a mention

Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least, there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Instead, we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed. (Is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?) We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation.

We had the death of former Prime Minster V. P. Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes, and the villain of upper caste Hindus pass without a mention.

We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir give us his version of George Bush’s famous “Why They Hate Us” speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim, hate Mumbai: “Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

His prescription: “The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever.”

Didn’t George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can’t seem to get away from.

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9 is not 11 [4 of 5]

Key BJP, RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal activists speak openly of how Narendra Modi blessed the anti-Muslim pogrom.

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A SHADOWY HISTORY OF SUSPICIOUS TERROR ATTACKS

by Arundhati Roy

 

Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state. It isn’t surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of ‘pickings’ is long gone. We’re now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.Dangerous, stupid television flash cards like the Police are Good, Politicians are Bad/ Chief Executives are Good, Chief Ministers are Bad/ Army is Good, Government is Bad/ India is Good, Pakistan is Bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.

Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that the business of terrorism is a hall of mirrors in which victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles. It’s an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the last 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we’re still learning. (If Kashmir won’t willingly integrate into India, it’s beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into Kashmir.)

It was after the 2001 Parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation. Eventually the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including S.A.R. Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Shaukat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offence. The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgement, the court acknowledged that there was no proof that Mohammad Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, “The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender. ” Even today we don’t really know who the terrorists that attacked Indian Parliament were and who they worked for.

More recently, on September 19 this year, we had the controversial ‘encounter’ at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008.

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THE ‘BRAVEHEARTS’ OF THE INDIAN LAW ENFORCING AGENCIES

An Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the Parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India’s many ‘encounter specialists’, known and rewarded for having summarily executed several ‘terrorists’. There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress Party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists, all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. In response, the BJP and L.K. Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a ‘Braveheart’ and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying it was ‘suicidal’ and calling them ‘anti-national’. Of course, there has been no inquiry.

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THE POLICE JUSTICE!

(Left) Hemant Karkare, The ATS Chief who was killed in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Karkare digged out the possible role of Sangh Privar behind the Malegaon tragedy. 

Only days after the Batla House event, another story about ‘terrorists’ surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to the court, the CBI said that a team from Delhi’s Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted 2 kg of RDX and two pistols on them, and then arrested them as ‘terrorists’ who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir). Ali and Qamar, who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.

This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts, arrested a Hindu preacher, Sadhvi Pragya; a self-styled godman, Swami Dayanand Pande; and Lt Col Prasad Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian army. All the arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist organisations, including a Hindu supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat. The Shiv Sena, the BJP and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS, and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that “Hindus could not be terrorists”. L.K. Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble-rousing speeches to huge gatherings, in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women. 

(Left) Hands in Glove Nirendra Modi & Praveen Togadiya

THE MALEGAON BLASTS

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On November 25, newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high-profile VHP chief Praveen Togadia’s possible role in the Malegaon blasts. The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai attacks. The chances are that the new chief, whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation. 

While the Sangh parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television channel, has stepped up to the plate.

He has taken to naming, demonising and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces. My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to the camera; “Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan,” he said, “I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting.” For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today amounts to incitement as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.

So according to a man aspiring to be India’s next prime minister, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police. This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake ‘encounters’. This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world and yet refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they’ve escaped being ‘encountered’ by our encounter specialists. A country where the line between the Underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.

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9 is not 11 [5 of 5]

Terror’s Proud Merchants: The VHP and the Bajrang Dal in Gujarat were indistinguishable from terror outfits, manufacturing and distributing bombs, rocket launchers and firearms across the state.

MONSTER IN THE MIRROR

by Arundhati Roy

How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them?

There are those who point out that U.S. strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse.

If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The U.S. military is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire.

(Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)

Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on U.S. allies/agents (including India) and U.S. interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11.

George W. Bush, the man who led the U.S. response to 9/11, is a despised figure not just internationally, but also by his own people.

Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the War on Terror?

Homeland Security has cost the U.S. government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It’s not that kind of homeland.

We have a hostile nuclear-weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbor;we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalize, will end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world.

If 10 men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India? Nor for that matter will any other quick fix.

Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they’re for people that governments don’t like. That’s why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They’re just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go.

Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It’s what they want.

What we’re experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet’s squelching under our feet. The only way to contain – it would be naive to say end – terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says “Justice,” the other “Civil War.” There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

Concluded.

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F r e e d o m is in the air

Rowan Laxton: Freedom in the Air

Rowan Laxton

       Mr Rowan Laxton watched the Jews pour napalm and brimstone on hapless children of Gaza on live TV. Oh bloody Jews, said he, and I am sure so would you. He was immediately arrested and charged with `inciting religious hatred`.

       by Israel Shamir

       (Leading Edge Publications)

     “Britons never shall be slaves”, claims the song. Never say “never”. They were so free that they could rhyme ‘the queen’ with ‘her fascist regime’ and ‘she ain’t no human being’, in the Sex Pistols song. But that was then, and anyway the queen had enough of a sense of humour to invite the Pistols to the Palace. Now, a British gentleman Mr Rowan Laxton watched the Jews pour napalm and brimstone on hapless children of Gaza on live TV. Oh bloody Jews, said he, and I am sure so would you. He was immediately arrested and charged with “inciting religious hatred”. Mr Laxton can be sentenced to seven years of jail. 

    Never mind that none of the Israeli top war criminals (Olmert, Barak, Livni) is religious. Multiple identities of Jews (class, race, religion, nation, state) are used to protect the lot from every side. I checked some blogs covering the story – right-wing bookworms are furious about Laxton. Incidentally, they do not mind to “incite religious hatred”: they freely refer to “Muslim savages” and “Islam’s demonstrable bloody-minded nihilism”. On the leftist sites Laxton is described as “racist”, and whoever defends his righteous anger is asked to move to a White Power site. These antiracists also disapprovingly mention Laxton’s marriage to a Muslim lady. Even his highly commendable wish to see the killer army going up in smoke is re-described as “desire to murder every Israeli teenager”. 

     Religious hatred laws are peculiar beasts. While Jews murder Christians and Muslims, or destroy churches and mosques, these laws remain dormant. But if you notice the murders, the laws wake up from their slumber. We reported that a church in Migdal ha-Emek was vandalised by Jews. A Russian newspaper carried this report. A Jewish representative in Russia appealed to the attorney general against the newspaper: such a report “incites religious hatred”. The attorney general rejected the Jewish claim, but have no doubt: this attack will make every newspaper in Russia think twice before they mention any misdeed or crime committed by Jews. And in this field, Russia is less inhibited than most. 

     Laxton had lost his important position in the Foreign Office, too, as his Jewish boss, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, is not as broad-minded as the queen. If Laxton were to say of a Jew that “he ain’t human being” he would be probably deported to Guantanamo. The very story of his arrest reminds us the horrors told of 1930s. A man sits in the fitness room, he sees mass murder being broadcast on TV live, he exclaims: bloody murderers; and his fellows call for the NKVD or the Gestapo. Not much of freedom is left for the once-proud Britons. They can’t even vent their anger in the gym. 

    The Gaza pictures you could see on your telly were already sanitised; you were spared the real horrors. But what you did see was strong enough to break the taboo. The Jews are not satisfied with killing, they also want everyone to keep his mouth shut about it. But it is not going to work. These prohibitions against speaking one’s mind are demonstrably unfair. 

    Sure, not every Jew bombed Gaza. 

    But not every German – hardly any German alive today – is connected to anything unseemly. 

    Still, it is perfectly permissible to nourish “healthy, virile hate” for Germans, in the words of Elie Wiesel. 

    Jews have no problem with writing (in the Jerusalem Post): “the Norwegians were the ones who rounded up Jews and robbed them before shipping them off to Auschwitz.” Somehow, nobody screamed: Wot! All Norwegians!? 

    The SA Jewish Board of Deputies’ David Saks did not mind writing: “the Palestinians are obsessed by – self willed prisoners of – the Islamist death cult”. Mr Ehud Barak, the Israeli Labour leader and Defence Minister, called them “virus”, and nobody objected. 

    But Palestinians are vilified by Jews on daily basis. 

    Americans routinely observe that the Swiss are a Nation of Cowards, Tax Cheats, And Fugitive Financiers – and no hate law of Switzerland has gone into action. 

    They also proposed to burn every Frenchman alive, and the French did not give a damn. 

    If Mr Laxton were to shout “Fuck Yanks!” – nobody would mind, not even the Yanks. 

    It appears that the Gaza war broke down some important protection valve the Jews used. Was it when they poured white phosphorus on the schools? Or when they employed their usual sophistry in order to prove that it is all right to kill civilians in Gaza, but it is crime to kill a Jew? Or when we learned that they block even macaroni from entering Gaza, in their drive to put Palestinians on a diet? 

    You would not notice it from reading your Jewish-owned newspaper, or by watching your Jewish-edited TV programme, but the divergence between public and official points of view has never been greater. Masses of Europeans, Americans and Russians are justifiably angry. They are angry because the economic crisis is about to destroy their way of life. They are angry because they saw the mass murder of Gaza. Both reasons of anger lead to the same culprit. There are more Jewish billionaires than of any other creed, race or nation. They have gotten more money from financial operations than anybody, and now they get even more from the state. Their preaching against racism blew up in their faces in Gaza. 

   The elites are aware of this pent-up anger. Recently in Davos, the Turkish Prime Minister told off the Israeli war criminal of a president, and flew home to a heroes welcome by thousands. Every prime minister, every president – including president Obama – will be received as a hero by multitudes if he tells the Jews where to get off. 

    The Jews do not know when to stop. It is true, they got to the top this way. The wildest dreams of the Elders of Zion have been realised. But while admittedly it is difficult to get to the top, it is nigh impossible to stay there forever. Now the Jews are already past the position the Catholic Church had got to when Voltaire called for squashing the slime (“Écrasez l’Infâme!”). There is freedom in the air. 

    In London, Caryl Churchill’s wonderful play Seven Jewish Children trod the forbidden path: she calls the Gaza oppressors ‘Jews’ instead of “Israelis”, politically incorrect though factually right, as non-Jewish Israelis did not participate in the onslaught. 

   The State Secretary Hilary Clinton dared to get offended by an insult given by a Jew. The new illegal mayor of Jerusalem, a boorish brutish nationalist atheist Jew, planned to level a Palestinian neighbourhood and to build a Jewish one on the top. Clinton mildly objected. He pooh-poohed her objections as “so much hot air’. Normally, an American official, even a state secretary would just give a small silly smile and say that she was misunderstood, as Condoleezza Rice did. Now, Hilary expressed full volume of her displeasure, and the little worm crawled back into his office. Meanwhile, Mme Clinton, who was rather disliked in the region, became the darling of the Middle East just by saying ’pasta’. 

   Elections can be won, fame can be achieved, problems can be solved this way. Even the economic crisis can be taken by the people in their stride. Britain needs a man like Mr Laxton, a man who gets furious watching bloody murder, and who dares to speak up his mind. 
www.israelshamir.net/English/Freedom.htm

Israeli Attacks on Ghaza (Action & Reaction)

Laxton was alleged to have been watching TV reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza as he used an exercise bike in a gym when he began the tirade

The following post comes from Israel Shamir.

 To apprise my readers about the writer and Rowan Laxton, here is a pin up on the two.

 Am giving this to enable our readers have a peep into the background of the gentlemen who expressed their thoughts on Israel’s recent acts of savagery in Gaza.

 I do give in many may consider this as being harsh on Israel, because in today’s world, opposing Israel’s aggressive policies vis-à-vis its adversaries, the Arabs (both the Muslims and the Christians) is equivalent to being anti-Semitic. It could also be on account of our being anti Israel merely because its a Jewish state which I think isn’t fair either. It, therefore, shouldn’t mean if anybody criticizes Israel’s Zionism, he should be termed racial and anti-Semitic, which happened in case of Rowan Laxton. 

     May be a lot of our readers do not know that all Israelis are not so myopic as the ruling Zionistic elite in Israel are, as there are also Jews in Israel who want to live in peace with their Arab neighbors.  Yet it’s the Zionists who believe in Israel which as a state they think should ultimately have the whole Arabian Peninsula under their domain. 

Israel Shamir

Israel Shamir, whose post now follows, is himself a Jew, is a radical spiritual and political thinker, Internet columnist and writer. His comments on current affairs and their deeper meaning are published on his site www.israelshamir.net and elsewhere. His works are also collected in three books, Galilee Flowers, Cabbala of Power and recently published Masters of Discourse available in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian etc. 

     A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, Shamir moved to Israel in 1969, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After the war, he turned to journalism and writing. In 1975, he joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he was living in Japan. After returning to Israel in 1980, Shamir wrote for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, and was the Knesset spokesman for the Israel Socialist Party (Mapam). 

     He has translated and annotated the cryptic works of S.Y. Agnon, the only Hebrew Nobel Prize winning writer, from the original Hebrew into Russian. In 2006 he published his mammoth annotated translation of a medieval Hebrew classic Sefer Yohassin (The Book of Lineage) and has also translated the Odyssey, and selected chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses. 

     And now about Rowan Laxton

     Rowan Laxton a Middle East expert and a high ranking official in Britain’s Foreign Office, was arrested after allegations that he launched a foul-mouthed anti-Semitic tirade.

     Laxton, 47, was watching TV reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza as he used an exercise bike in a gym. Stunned staff and gym members allegedly heard him shout: ‘F**king Israelis, f**king Jews’. It is alleged he also said Israeli soldiers should be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’.

    His rant reportedly continued even after he was approached by other gym users.

     Laxton, who is still working normally, is head of the South Asia Group at the Foreign Office, on a salary of around £70,000. He is responsible for all the UK’s diplomacy in that area and for briefing Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is Jewish. 

    Mr Laxton has worked extensively in the Middle East – is married to a Muslim woman (since 2000), and has been deputy ambassador to Afghanistan.

Note: There is an unsanitized Youtube video on the raid, courtesy Aljazeera TV.

IN THE NEWS

People Power Prevails: Deposed CJ Reinstated

Lahore, March 16, 2009

Deposed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is expected to be reinstated to his position as part of a series of steps to be taken by the ruling PPP to end a confrontation with the lawyers and opposition led by PML- N that had triggered a major political crisis.

The decision to reinstate the Chief Justice, who was removed from his office when former military ruler Parvez Musharraf imposed emergency in November 2007, was announced by the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani early this morning. The decision has been taken after due  consultations with PML-N Chief Mian Nawaz Sharif and Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, a  leading figure of the lawyers community, who spearheaded the movement to restore the deposed C.J.

PML-N spokesman Siddique-ul-Farooq told reporters that his party had been informed that Chaudhry was being reinstated through an executive order.

The decision was announced by Gilani during an address to the nation 5.50 PST in the morning today.

The move came after former prime minister and PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif defied restrictions imposed on him and led thousands of his supporters in Lahore to join a long march organised by lawyers and opposition parties to press the Pakistan People’s Party-led government to restore the deposed judges.

Spring in Hunza

Hunza, the mytical country mostly attired in white snow, undrapes its white cloakin spring. It is the time when its sensuous hilly contours become bare and like a magnet tempt all, to view the magnificent beauty of a youthful, vibrant and humming vale of Hunza. The indigenous population welcomes the naked beauty of their country-at its best in spring with an ongoing feeling of love, inspiration and fortitude.

Hunza, the land of fairytales, is like an Aphrodite dancing on the floor, a floor located right on the base of glorious Rakaposhi mountain, where the visitors hear the rivers roar in jubilation and excitement to appreciate Hunza’s dancing beauty. In an ecstasy they brush stones to pebbles. It is the time when a soft breeze murmurs to divulge the centuries old secrets, when the old pines embrace the clouds with a passion to swing the droplets on flexible twigs. A terrain of serenity, the eternal beauty that beholds onlookers for a second or two, oblivious of their worldly life.

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HUNZA

Where-time-stops-and-the fairies-tread

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WoP Research Desk

·

Hunza, the mythical country mostly attired in a white snow, undrapes its white gown in spring. It is the time when its sensuous hilly contours become bare and like a magnet tempt all, to view the magnificent beauty of a youthful, vibrant and humming vale of Hunza. The indigenous population welcomes the naked beauty of their country-at its best in spring with an ongoing feeling of love, inspiration and fortitude.

Do We Understand Tourism? Asks the Industry Guru

Masood Ali Khan

Immediate and aggressive marketing is needed to attract international tourists to Pakistan. New policies need be introduced to promote domestic tourism as well.

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PAKISTAN TOURISM

NEEDS AGGRESSIVE MARKETING

·

WoP research desk

·

The country having been engulfed by extremists, some Islamic, some nationalistic and others just anarchic, it seems quite odd to talk of things such as tourism. Yet there are people who have a passion to develop and promote tourism in Pakistan under all circumstances, all odds, and all challenges. (He cites examples of countries like India and Sri Lanka who equally have similar problems including terrorism, then asks why can’t we do this in Pakistan!)

Masood Ali Khan is one such person who believes in Pakistan’s tourism potential as a conviction.  In this second session we had with him, he further dilates upon different nuances of tourism, principal being heritage, historical, cultural, education, medical, and religious tourism. He says…

Immediate and aggressive marketing is needed to attract international tourists to Pakistan. New policies need be introduced to promote domestic tourism as well.

“Sadly, we do not take tourism in its true perspective,” says Masood Ali Khan, the Industry Guru and the former Managing Director of the PTDC, (Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation).

In heritage tourism, people come to see different heritage sites including the museums and other such places. Then there is sports tourism and the entertainment and event oriented tourism. This includes festivals like the carnival in Brazil, spring festival of Pakistan, and the Basant in Lahore which though, has been discontinued due to the killer string.

Popular Will: Pakistan being reshaped as never before

Scuffle berween a demonstrator and the police on 16th March 2009 in Lahore.

The decision to reinstate the chief justice is a fillip for democracy – and bad news for those waging war in Afghanistan

by Mohsin Hamid

The announcement on 16th of March (a few hours before the long march by the lawyers, the civil society and all major /  minor political parties was to start) the restoration of the chief justice of the Pakistani supreme court, is a victory for those who desire a more representative state in Pakistan. But it is a blow for Barack Obama, who appears intent on escalating American military involvement in Afghanistan.

The reason is simple: the US needs a Pakistani state that is significantly unrepresentative of the Pakistani people, because most Pakistanis are opposed to America’s war in Afghanistan, and the US cannot hope to succeed there without Pakistan’s support.

Pakistan is a vast and complicated country, and it is witnessing many confusing and contradictory developments. Among the most important of these, appears to be a narrative of increasing representativeness: despite itself, the Pakistani state is being shaped by the will of its citizens as never before.

The power of this narrative has been breathtaking, particularly over the past year and a half. In November 2007, General Musharraf, an unpopular president, was pressured into giving up his uniform. Three months later the army stood back and refused to facilitate the rigging of national elections, allowing Musharraf’s party to suffer a crushing defeat.

And in August 2008, Musharraf was removed from the presidency by an unprecedented alliance of the PPP – the Pakistan People’s party – and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), or PML-N. It was the first case in Pakistan’s history of a military strongman relinquishing power to democratically elected civilians without first being killed or plunging the nation into civil war.

And now, a mere half year later, an increasingly autocratic President Zardari has been forced to restore the chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry. The result is likely to be increased independence for the judiciary – an unwelcome development (to say the least) for a man as notoriously corrupt as Zardari – as well as a rolling back of the powers Musharraf had brought in to strengthen the executive at the expense of the legislature.

Sharif’s supporters burning tyres, as they shout pro Nawaz slogans and for restoration of the deposed judges. Tyre burning is a  typical style of showing public anger in Pakistan

Given Pakistan’s unpredictability, this promising narrative of representativeness could of course still be undermined. But for now, four related and powerful developments are propelling it along. The first is a decline in the army’s popularity after the rule of Musharraf, and in its morale after losses in the unpopular campaign against the Pakistani Taliban, which has made the military reluctant to intervene directly against the will of the people.

The second is a rapid expansion of the middle class due to economic growth and urbanisation. For much of this decade, the economy has performed almost as well as India’s, and roughly half the population now live in cities, towns and built-up borders of major roads that cut across the countryside and are home to traders rather than farmers.

The third is the complete transformation of the country’s media and communications industries, with dozens of independent television channels and tens of millions of new mobile phone connections creating, in effect, a giant electronic public forum.

And the fourth is the exhaustion of ideological cover: customary invocations of a threat from India and of the need to defend Islam are failing to explain the state’s willingness to use (and have America use) violence against its own people in large swaths of its own territory.

It was by ignoring this emerging climate in Pakistan that Zardari found himself in the embarrassing – and, for him, politically dangerous – position of needing to reverse course on the issue of the chief justice. Zardari was proceeding from the old-school assumption that he who controls the state controls Pakistan. As president, and with a hand-picked retainer as governor in the most populous province of Punjab, Zardari thought he could with impunity dismiss the provincial government of the PML-N when its insistence on the restoration of Chaudhry became too irritating.

But then something unprecedented happened. Civil society denounced the move. The media cried foul. Zardari’s low poll ratings collapsed. A minister in the national PPP government stepped down. Senior provincial bureaucrats resigned rather than act as directed by the governor to prevent a protest march led by Nawaz Sharif, the PML-N leader and former prime minister. Police officers in Punjab refused to follow orders.

(Left) Writer’s photo taken by Carolin Seeliger in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany

The march went ahead, and it grew in numbers by the thousands, advancing towards Islamabad. The top-down Pakistani state found itself facing a bottom-up revolt. Authority was flowing from something other than the will of a tyrant – a novel concept in Pakistan. Zardari was being told that the country now believed in certain rules, and even he would have to abide by them. Dismissing democratically elected provincial governments and undermining the judiciary was just not on. All of which must have come to Zardari, an inveterate rule-breaker, as quite a surprise.

Where all this will lead is uncertain. For Pakistan, if the will of the people can be harnessed to democratic institutions and to politicians who learn to respect the notion of shared power, there is reason for great hope. If not, today’s agitation could become tomorrow’s revolution. 

I have been inundated with congratulatory messages from Pakistani friends, many of them normally supporters of the Zardari-led PPP. It all feels like a birthday, and more than one person has said that today will be remembered as the day a truly democratic Pakistan was born. After the horror of this month’s terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, many Pakistanis are celebrating much-needed good news.

For President Zardari, recent events represent a significant defeat. He is favoured by the same foreign governments who favoured President Musharraf, and for the same reason: his willingness to resist popular outrage over the war in Afghanistan and its consequences for Pakistan. But Zardari is also like his predecessor in his propensity for undemocratic excesses. Now he, too, is discovering that in the new Pakistan he is less powerful than he had imagined.

For the rest of the world, and particularly the US, Britain and Nato, the choice is becoming increasingly stark. If a war fought by democracies for control of Afghanistan, a country of 30 million people, requires for its successful prosecution the undermining of democracy in Pakistan, a country of 170 million, is that really a price worth paying?

Courtesy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

BAD MANNERS – The idea of India versus the idea of Pakistan

by Mukul Kesavan

During the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2009, Pakistani writers experienced a special kind of Indian incivility. Both in casual conversation and in formal question-and-answer sessions, they were asked if they thought that Pakistan was a good idea, the implication being that it wasn’t. Mohammed Hanif, the author of a wonderful satirical novel about Zia’s Pakistan, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, responded to a variation on this question by saying, patiently, that debating the virtue of Pakistan’s founding idea was less important than coming to terms with the fact that Pakistan was a real country that had to be reckoned with.

The interesting thing is that this question is often asked by people who can be reasonably described as liberals. They don’t want the reality of Pakistan undone and they would be appalled to be clubbed with sangh parivar rhetoricians who attack Pakistan as a Muslim abomination. And yet, despite themselves, the question rises unbidden to their lips. It isn’t normal in polite society to ask someone to repudiate his national identity as a preliminary to conversation and yet, well-intentioned Indians do precisely that.

Part of the reason for this is that the last few years have seen India’s stock rise in the world at the same time as Pakistan’s reputation as a nation-state has declined. Pakistan’s co-option into the ‘war against terror’, its role in incubating terrorists and the ugly spectacle of the state’s impotence in places like the NWFP and Swat have raised large questions about the nature of Pakistan as a nation. In their role as amateur physicians, liberal, non-chauvinist Indians are happy to attribute Pakistan’s current problems to its founding idea, and their diagnosis makes that idea sound like original sin.

Why do they do this? If I were a Pakistani I might reach for the idea that Indians, sixty years after the event, aren’t reconciled to Partition, that the need to write an alternative (happy) ending for the story of Gandhian nationalism makes them brood unproductively on the wrongness of the world as it exists. And I wouldn’t be wholly wrong: there is an element of historical denial in Indian attitudes towards Pakistan. But the liberal Indian’s need to press his Pakistani counterpart to admit to the wrongness of Pakistan is rooted in other things.

It’s rooted, first and most importantly, in the difference in the way the nation is imagined in India and Pakistan. Instead of basing its nationalism on the idea of a homogeneous People (as every European nationalism did), the Congress built it on its claim to represent different sorts of people.

In contrast, Pakistani nationalism was derived from the classic European template, the principle of sameness, which in Pakistan’s case was a shared religious identity: the Romantic idea of a homeland for a People, the subcontinent’s Muslim People. Had India embraced the RSS’s dream of a Hindu rashtra and become a Hindusthan instead of Hindostan, India would have been Pakistan by a different name. But it didn’t so choose, and that choice had important consequences for the evolution of the two republics.

An Indian liberal’s understanding of democracy and secularism is often subtly, but fundamentally, different from that of the Pakistani liberal. The difference I’m talking about has little to do with language or culture: it is located squarely in politics. Six decades of experience as a pluralist democracy has left Indian liberals with a particular set of political reflexes and instincts that are different from those of the progressive Pakistani.

Take the statement that Pakistani civil society is broadly secular because its electorate, whenever it’s given a chance to vote, votes overwhelmingly for secular political parties like the Pakistan People’s Party or the Pakistan Muslim League and not for fundamentalist or Islamist or ulema-controlled organizations like the Jamaat-e-Islami.

There is a useful and important distinction to be made between parties that support the implementation of sharia law and parties that support a secular code of law. And it’s likely that a majority of Pakistanis would rather not live in the Dar-ul-Islam dreamt of by fundamentalist Muslim parties. But this doesn’t make a country’s politics ‘secular’, not in the Indian construction of that term.

For an Indian like me who thinks of himself as liberal, the Pakistani state and the politics it sanctions, the politics within which its democratic processes are contained, isn’t and can’t be secular because Pakistan announces itself as an Islamic republic. It isn’t secular in the same way that Israel isn’t secular because it was brought into being as a Jewish state and functions as one. In my political lexicon, the term ‘secular’ means, above all, that the state must not be owned by, or act on behalf of, a religious community. This means that political dispensations that call themselves Jewish or Islamic or Buddhist (as Sri Lanka does) are, by definition, incapable of nurturing a secular politics. They are majoritarian, denominational states, inimical to the pluralist democracy that Indians have come to equate with political secularism.

This reflexive scepticism about the secular potential of denominational states is rooted in India’s domestic politics. Historically, the most serious threat to the pluralist and secular idea of India written into the Indian Constitution has been Hindu majoritarianism. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh would like to reconstitute India as a Hindu state. This would be, like Israel, a constitutional democracy with minorities free to worship and vote and associate, but nonetheless a state defined by the culture, the priorities and the prejudices of its religious majority.

This is not to claim that India’s constitutional pluralism translates into secular institutions or automatically protects minorities from discrimination and prejudice. It is to argue that to have this backwardness, this discrimination, these prejudices institutionalized and given the force of law in a formally majoritarian state is the secular Indian’s worst nightmare.

Majoritarianism is an ideology that creates two classes of citizens — those considered ‘natural’ citizens (Jews in Israel, Muslims in Pakistan, Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka) and those who live under their protection (Arabs in Israel, Hindus in Pakistan, Tamils in Sri Lanka). No matter how earnestly such states enumerate the rights enjoyed by its minorities, they remain second-class citizens. For the secular Indian, the argument against majoritarianism in India is systematically subverted by the embrace of majoritarianism by its neighbours.

To look at the Sri Lankan and Pakistani flags is to see majoritarianism graphically proclaimed. The Sri Lankan flag has most of its surface area taken up by a Sinhala emblem, a rampant lion, while its minorities are represented by two thin stripes, one green (for Muslims), one orange for Tamils. The Pakistan flag is mainly green; the colour represents Islam as does the crescent-and-star device centred in the flag. The smaller white stripe stands for Pakistan’s religious minorities. Why is this important? It is important because states whose insignia and founding constitutions explicitly endorse a denominational affiliation create a dilemma for their ‘liberal’, ‘secular’ or ‘pluralist’ citizens.

The Indian liberal, even when he feels beleaguered by majoritarian mobilization or oppressed by its electoral success, knows that the Constitution is on his side. In his arguments against Hindutva, for example, he can invoke the Constitution because all the best lines in that charter were written for him. It is possible for a democratic pluralist or a liberal in India to be both politically correct and patriotic, to resist the state as it is by invoking the state as the Constitution lays down it should be.

But it’s hard for him to imagine how his Pakistani counterpart can reconcile liberal principles with the foundational idea of Pakistan, the idea of a Muslim homeland. Big ideas set limits on politics: no political party in Pakistan can challenge the illiberal, discriminatory idea of an Islamic republic and remain politically credible. This cuts both ways: it also follows that a Pakistani liberal will find it hard to be nationalist: to affirm the founding myth of Pakistan is to compromise his liberal values.

The case of Israel is a good example of the tension between liberal democratic values and the denominational nation- state. The recent bombing of Gaza and the slaughter of innocents were endorsed by every non-Arab Israeli party and by many who describe themselves as progressive or liberal. These liberals chose to be true to the Zionist ideal that underwrites Israel and to do this they had to park their principles.

Which brings us back to the rudeness of “do you think Pakistan was a good idea?” Indians oughtn’t ask this question because it’s rude and, given Pakistan’s current troubles, suggests a malicious satisfaction derived from its misfortunes. But it is important for Pakistanis to recognize that the motive behind it is a political anxiety, not Schadenfreude. The question springs from a need to be consistent in their view of the world: opposing majoritarianism within India necessarily implies rejecting it in the world. When they put the question, they are clumsily asking for reassurance that the pluralism enshrined in the idea of India has some resonance beyond its borders.

Source: www.wichaar.com/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Bulleh Shah: The Mystic Voice of Punjab

Me no believer—no believe in mosque

And me no pagan, no ritual no task

Me is no pure amongst the impure,

Me no believer—no believe in mosque

And me no pagan, no ritual no task

Me is no pure amongst the impure,

And me no Moses, no Pharaoh endure,

But Me no knoweth.

Who isseth Thee!

O’ Bulleya,

Me no knoweth,

Who issethMe!

by Umair Ghani

Farida Breuillac, a practicing Sufi from France, now living in Turkey, is sitting beside me on a stool in Lahore’s Regale Inn, discussing Sufism over a cup of desi tea. Dazzled as she is by the beauty and stark truth of Bulleh Shah’s verse, I recite to her the poetry of the great saint of Qasur, verse by verse as she whirls around in a trance.

A week later I was standing outside the Darbar or the shrine of Bulleh Shah in the heart of Qasur city. Dhol beats echoed loud in the air with chants of ‘Ya Ali’ and ‘Dam Mast Qalandar’ as a multitude throngs to the shrine of, one of the greatest Sufi souls of Punjab.

Bulleh Shah’s real name was Abdullah Shah, that later transformed into Bulleh Shah out of sheer reverence and affection of the common citizenry of Punjab who ardently adhered to his rebellious message of love, hope and wisdom.

Its widely believed he was born around 1680 at Uch Gilaniyan in Bahawalpur; later migrated to Malakwal and finally settled in Pandoke Bhatian, about 14 miles southeast of Qasur. It was here that Bulleh Shah got his formal education from Maulvi Ghulam Murtaza, who was the Imam of the main mosque in Qasur.

Later, after completion of his formal education Bulleh Shah started teaching at the same mosque, but spiritually he chose to follow the path of his mentor, Inayat Shah Qadri, who was a famous saint of the Qadirya chain of Sufis in Lahore. Bulleh’s rebellious yet highly rhythmic and appealing utterances attracted intense criticism from his family as well as friends; for his blindly following the Sufi order much different and opposite to that of the Syeds, [the Muslims who claim their lineage from the Holy Prophet Muhammad, PBUH] However, this criticism added even more spur to his rebellious mind. He revolted against those so called hierarchs of spirituality. Bulleh Shah remained steadfast to his master’s philosophy till his death in 1729.

Bulleh Shah’s attachment to his mentor’s philosophy was so strong that under the sheer spell of his devotion, he addressed his master as god, guide, lord, spouse, husband, beloved and friend. His teacher’s guidance made him experience the spiritual ecstasies and a vision that helped him explore the unfathomable realms of inner self. In this process of self realisation, he began his journey into a metaphysical learning process which was unique to have enabled him grasp the reality of things on one hand, and yet felt blessed and obsessed by revelations from within. The journey to the path laid down by his master continued to be so intense, so self sacrificing that rapture of being away from his spiritual master, the qualms, the torment his soul faced, never ceased till the end. So intense was this Ishq (a process to find God through an intense longing, fonding and attachment with one’s mentor) that he expressed the fire in him through these words.

He listeneth to my tale and lisseneth to my woe

Shah lnayat my guide my teacher is so,

He leads me to places high and low

Shah Inayat my Master honoureth me,

Gives riddance of wrangles and of me,

My master, my Shah is with me,

Then who can dare put strife to me,

Who dare anyone harm to me,

Shah Inayat graces me,

Gives riddance of wrangles and of me,

My master, my Shah is with Me.

Thus found Bulleh Shah’s spiritual quest in the finest expression of his poetry, the Kafis. His tone is satiric, razor sharp that acts like the precision of a surgeon’s lancet, his verses bleeding with pain, the anguish, the qualm of separation and unprecedented genius of his thought process, mercilessly cutting into the social norms, the taboos and established dogmas in the name of religion. He sets out his own aesthetics of the divine love, guidance, faith, virtuosity, love and forgiveness. Like all other Sufis, he preaches negation of the “self” while seeking unity with the divine. His poetry sets liberal standards with strong intonations of religious tolerance and communal harmony. Realizations of truth transformed Bulleh Shah into a true mystic. He purified his heart with the fountain of truth gushing deep inside his soul. Overwhelmed with an obsession of spiritual knowledge, like wine intoxicates the body and mind and thus becomes the principal driving force, Bulleh Shah heroically voiced his wisdom in his following verse.

Put fire to thy prayer rug

and break even thy water mug,

then quit even thy rosary

And let thy staff to the tug

Me tired of reading the Veda book,

Me tired of reading the Quran

And Me no kneeling, me no prostrating,

Nor me forehead down
For God liveth in holy Mecca

Nor he in Mathura resides
For only those who find Him

Who see the light with self besides.

With this verse Bulleh Shah stands tall in the Sufis’ lineage, a stalwart of the Sufis’ school of thought led by Mansoor who was penalized by clerics of the day, declaring his chantings of “Ana-al Haque” (I am the Truth, I am the God) as ‘Kufr’ (negation of God) oblivious of the ecstasies that torment and thus cleanse the soul of a Sufi or saint is a unique phenomenon hardly perceptible or understood by clerics and dogmatists; who go by mere words and not the meanings and context of a scripture. This happened with Mansoor Hallaj and this too happened with Bulleh Shah who met a similar torment to his soul, his inner self.

Bulleh Shah spent rest of his life in total self denial; he did not care at all of the concern and hostility that orthodox mullahs unleashed at him for his rebellious poetry. He danced ecstatically, fearlessly, perpetually and thus treaded the path of spiritual realization and atonement. He preached love and humanism with a firm rejection of any formal religious authority on the affairs of the people. So it was no surprise that on his death in 1758, he was denied a burial in Muslim cemetery and was thus laid to rest in isolation outside the main city of Qasur. But his massage of love, his fight against religious bigots, the traditional hierarchs of different theological schools in the subcontinent, made him a people’s wali or saint. That isolated grave is now a darbar where all including the clergy, the rich and the poor all throng to pay homage to that great soul of Punjab who treaded the path of Sufism, the non traditional mystic way of finding God and a solace for one’s soul.

Me the first, me is the last,

Me don’t know, no one else,

Me the wisest, no one else,

But Bulleya,

Me no knoweth

Who isseth Thee!

O’ Blleya,

Me no knoweth

who isseth Me!

Me know no secret, to me no religion,

Not one to me not known

From Adam and Eve, me not me was born

Me don’t know even the name me own

Me don’t know the people who bow and pray

Me don’t know the people who go astray

O’ Bulleya!

Me no knoweth who isseth Thee!

Me no knoweth who isseth Me!

Me no Arab, nor Lhori,

Me no Hindu, nor Nagauri,

Me no Turkic, nor Pishauri,

Me don’t live in infinity,

Yet, O’ Blleya!

Me no knoweth

Who isseth Thee!

Me no knoweth

Who isseth Me!

Credits: The  Photography by Umair Ghani, Bullah Shah painting by Saeed Art, Lahore.

From India with Love: See Pakistan!

by Rama Goswami

 

For all of us here in Pakistan, my blogger friend Rama Goswami has sent us a message from West Bengal in India. I am happy that the word of love spread by ‘Wonders of Pakistan’ is growing in India as well. Now we have a far more number of friends in our neighbourhood. The mission started with the help of such esteemed writers like Eric Margolis, John Maszka and Ron Jonson, Aijaz Zaka Syed respectively in North America and the UAE, and then my young friend Sidhu Saaheb in Delhi, India joined us in this friendship drive. I pray and hope that this number continues to grow till such time that this individual friendship turns into a friendship of nations as well.

And now the message from Rama Goswami who edits the blog Cuckoo’s Call. http://cuckooscall.blogspot.com

So says R.G.

It is vital, particularly so in the present context of “war on terrorism” and for the unfortunate association of terrorists with that country – that the people across the world need to know and see themselves the country and its people. They would then realise that everything they read, heard and conjectured about Pakistan – was a wrong – was a distorted image, an image much different from what they otherwise see through the tainted lenses of media and the state sponsored propaganda machines milling around the western world. The real Pakistan is much different. It’s a land of amazing human warmth and cultural / spiritual wealth that has the power to captivate anyone – of sensibility. After a visit to Pakistan, says Rama Swami, every sensible visitor would return as an ambassador of the country.

While reading posts from Pakistan, continues the writer, it struck me that someone like the Pakistani bloggers should be organising conducted tours of discerning people / groups from across the world. I remember the advertisements for cultural tours in magazines like New Yorker and Harper’s (or CAM, the Cambridge Alumni Magazine). The posts I see from Pakistan, establish that Pakistan is a prime candidate for similar tours.

Yesterday evening I was talking to Mick Douglas, a friend from Melbourne, who had organised an inter-cultural project in Karachi and Melbourne, highlighting the fabulous “mini-bus art” of Karachi. Mick agreed with me that aesthetics and art is impregnated in the daily lives and activities of the common people over there.

One comes across Visit Thailand Year, Visit Malaysia year, even Visit India Year. I don’t recall a Visit Pakistan Year. India organised several Festivals of India in different countries in the 1980s. I don’t know whether Festivals of Pakistan have taken place anywhere. It’s high time …

I would like to see a ’Come and See Pakistan’ movement, taken up by the people of Pakistan: civil society organisations, business and professional groups, artists, performers, sportspersons etc.

Pakistan is a very special country, a precious treasure in the world community. The world needs to start discovering this now, and thus be uplifted towards building a better world, a real Pakistan would then emerge out of the dark clouds that have overshadowed this beautiful land for a long time.

At the end of his post, R. G. has inserted a poem which with some minor additions, is being reproduced so that readers of WOP too have an opportunity to meet people with such beautiful minds like Rama Goswamy who think so sweet about our dear homeland.

                                    The Fairyland Pakistan

         Where the high mountains are …

Come and see that fairyland
A beautiful country of

Alice in the wonderland

Where people on the Indus soil

In the Cradle-of-Civilisation

Nestled in its delta, toil

And where the high mountains

Are like a fairyland,

A beautiful country

Of Alice

In the wonderland….

Where treasures of antique abound …

Where mystics, saints, poets the ordinary minds confound

Minds that simply go around …

but to people with the spirit,

The soul

To them offer they everything

To their goal.

The land of the Vedas and puranas

Where every one got Nirvanas

And where the high mountains

Are like a fairyland,
of Alice

In the wonderland

Where songs make

The ecstasy – resound …
where Sufis dance to make

The joys abound

And where the high mountains

Are like a fairyland,
of Alice in the wonderland

Come and see that country

A beautiful country

Called the fairyland

of Alice in the wonderland

Where textiles bedazzle and sway …

Where the friendliest people

So near

But so away …
Come and see that country

With the high mountains

Like a fairyland,
for Alice in the wonderland

Where feasts give you treat

Like emperors invite …
and offer you seat

Near to the heart

So come and see Pakistan,
A beautiful country.

Come and see Pakistan,

Come and see that country

With the high mountains

Like a fairyland,
for Alice in the wonderland

A beautiful country

Come and see Pakistan.

Islamistische Gewalt (Der Spiegel Article)

#

Nayyar Hashmey

• 
  

The Mumbai attacks of 26/11 will continue to haunt the whole world for a long time to come. As the reports emerge from different sources including the government circles in Islamabad, the mastermind of these attacks were of Pakistan origin, which India has been maintaining all the time. There have however been many contradictory reports too about the original perpetrators of this crime against humanity, particularly if you have read a series of posts by Professor Michel Chossudovsky, Ahmad Quraishi, Anand Patwardhan and lastly by Arundhati Roy. These were put up on the pages of WOP in Dec. 2008 to March 2009 issues of our e-magazine.

Aihaz Zaka Syed is a Senior Editor and columnist of the English daily Khaleej Times, published from Dubai. An award-winning journalist and widely published and read commentator, Aijaz comes from Hyderabad, India and has been with KT for more than seven years now. He writes a weekly column called View from Dubai; the column, looks at and comments on world affairs from a Middle Eastern and Arab-Muslim perspective.

Aijaz received the prestigious European Union’s Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize in 2007 for his writings on the Darfur conflict.

After the attacks took place, Aijaz took up his pen and composed his thoughts quite spontaneously on the massacre. Since this article was written just after the tragic incident on 26 November last year, naturally it carried a lot of anger and frustration.

Even then I wrote to Aijaz that we should be patient enough to wait for the results. In today’s world, the spying techniques have become so complicated and advanced that sometimes it becomes almost impossible for common people to sift the real from the synthesized facts. This, however, by no means should be taken as a certificate of any validity to the perpetrators of heinous acts against humanity. Murders, terrorists, extremists whosoever they maybe, which so ever country they may belong to, and to which so ever religion they may claim to adhere, their hot selling brand only is the “terror” in the name of religion, sect or a country. The ramifications of this scourge are so multifaceted and of international import that it’s almost impossible for a single country to combat terrorism. The international community, therefore needs to sit together to evolve a global strategy to fight out this menace. The human conscience cannot be left to the mercy of some lunatics, individuals, groups or organizations to topple the peaceful environment of the whole world.

This article is being put up on WOP pages for our German readers. Those who wish to read its English version may visit the blog site of author http://aijazsyed.wordpress.com/ where its original version in English is available too.

ISLAMISTISCHE GEWALT

“Die Muslime müssen gegen den Terror aufstehen”

Aijaz Zaka Syed

Kaum eine Woche vergeht, ohne dass islamistische Terroristen irgendwo auf der Welt zuschlagen. Wirkungsvoll gegen die Gewalt vorgehen können nur die Muslime selbst, glaubt der Journalist Aijaz Zaka Syed. Auf SPIEGEL ONLINE fordert er von seinen Glaubensgenossen mehr Engagement gegen den Terror.

In den drei Tagen, in denen wir am Fernseher dabei zuschauten, wie Mumbai vom Terror-Alptraum heimgesucht wurde, fragten mich meine Kinder immer wieder: “Wer sind diese Terroristen und warum tun sie das?” Jedes Mal wünschte ich mir, ich könnte ihnen eine überzeugende Antwort geben.

Was hätte ich ihnen sagen sollen? Zum einen war ich selbst ratlos, warum diese Leute Indiens finanzielles und kulturelles Zentrum erobert hatten und Menschen angriffen, die nichts mit ihnen zu tun und ihnen nichts getan hatten. Zum anderen war ich zu beschämt, ihnen zu sagen, dass diese Leute augenscheinlich Muslime waren und aus einem Land kamen, das im Namen des Islam gegründet wurde.

Eine verzweifelte Freundin, die ihr Leben dem Engagement für Araber und Muslime gewidmet hat, schrieb mir vor einigen Tagen: “Ich habe genug von den Arabern und Muslimen und der islamischen Militanz. Vergib mir, aber ich gebe auf.”

Ich konnte ihr nicht antworten – aber verstand ihren Schmerz. Sie ist in Mumbai aufgewachsen und ist verständlicherweise aufgebracht.

Meine Freundin schrieb weiter: “Die Muslime und der Islam haben ein Problem, das nur sie selbst lösen können. Sollten sie es nicht tun, wird sich die ganze Welt gegen sie wenden.”

Wenn sich schon unsere loyalsten Freunde so fühlen, dann stelle man sich erst mal die Empfindungen und Reaktionen des Rests der Welt vor. Kann man die Welt tadeln, falls sie sich gegen die Muslime stellt? Was ist zu erwarten, wenn kein einziger Tag mehr vergehen sollte, ohne dass der Name unserer Religion von Glaubensgenossen rund um die Welt in den Dreck gezogen wird?

Wie viele Unschuldige müssen im Namen des Islams sterben, bevor muslimische Führer und Staaten wirksame Schritte einleiten, um gegen die Verrückten vorzugehen, die uns mit ihrem nihilistischen Kult zerstören wollen?

Ich weiß, dass muslimische Führer – darunter jene in den höchsten Machträngen – in jüngster Zeit begonnen haben, sich gegen Extremisten auszusprechen. Das Dar ul-Ulum Deoband in Indien, eines der ältesten Bildungszentren der muslimischen Welt, hat im Juni bei einer großen Versammlung islamischer Gelehrter und Führer eine Fatwa (ein islamisches Rechtsgutachten, Anm. d. Red.) gegen Terrorismus veröffentlicht. Vergangenen Monat stellten sich rund 5000 Gelehrte bei einer Zusammenkunft im indischen Hyderabad hinter dieses Gutachten.

Die Organisation der Islamischen Konferenz sowie Saudi-Arabien haben zuletzt ähnlich vehement Angriffe gegen Unschuldige verurteilt. Muslimische Intellektuelle und Journalisten wie Tarik Ramadan – ein Enkel des Gründers der Muslimbruderschaft -, der Inder MJ Akbar und viele andere haben wiederholt gegen diese Verzerrung von islamischer Lehre und Geist protestiert.

Doch diese Rufe zur Besinnung im Interesse des Islams haben sich als einsame Stimmen herausgestellt. Wir müssen eindeutig mehr tun, um von der Welt gehört zu werden und diese beschämenden Attacken auf unschuldige Menschen im Namen der Religion zu stoppen.

Die große Ironie der Attacken von Mumbai liegt im Tod des Anti-Terror-Chefs Hemant Karkare und seiner Kollegen. Karkare war ein tapferer Offizier. Er hatte die Malegaon-Anschläge (dabei starben im September 2006 in Nordindien über 30 Menschen, überwiegend Muslime, Anm. d. Red.) und andere Terrorattacken der jüngeren Vergangenheit untersucht, die er Hindu-Extremisten zuschrieb – nicht muslimischen Gruppen wie Simi (Studenten der islamischen Bewegung Indiens). Karkare wurde von den Terroristen unweit des Cama-Krankenhauses in Mumbai umgebracht. Zweifellos wussten sie nicht, wer ihre wirklichen Freunde und Feinde sind.

Und bitteschön: Warum wird immer öfter Indien für diesen Irrsinn ausgewählt? Denken die Terroristen, dieser Staat sei ein reines Hindu-Land oder eine Anti-Muslim-Nation?

Wissen die Ignoranten, die in den sogenannten Dschihad geschickt werden, dass dieses großartige Land die weltweit größte muslimische Bevölkerungsgruppe beherbergt – fast doppelt so groß wie die Islamische Republik Pakistan? Indiens größter Superstar ist ein gebürtiger Muslim (der Bollywood-Schauspieler Shahrukh Khan, Anm. d. Red.), nicht zu vergessen zahllose erfolgreiche indische Muslime in anderen Branchen. Warum sind diese Menschen versessen darauf, die ganze Welt und sich selbst zu zerstören? Ist es das, was der Islam und der edle Prophet lehren?

Zu sagen, dass der Islam nichts mit Extremismus und Terrorismus zu tun habe, ist ja schön und gut. Wir können uns weiter mit dem Argument benebeln, dass diese Psychopathen uns nicht repräsentieren. Nur: Die Welt kann diese Argumentation schwer nachvollziehen, weil sie sieht, wie sich Extremisten immer stärker durchsetzen und in den Mittelpunkt drängen – während der Mainstream-Islam stumm bleibt.

Diese großartige Religion, die universelle Brüderlichkeit, Gleichheit, Frieden und Gerechtigkeit für alle predigt, ist von einer verrückten, winzigen Minderheit als Geisel genommen worden. Wie schon meine Bekannte sagt: Nur Muslime können dieses Problem lösen. Nur Muslime können diesen Anarchisten in ihrer Mitte entgegentreten. Nur sie können ihren Glauben den Klauen des Extremismus entreißen. Es ist jetzt nicht die Zeit, sich zu verstecken. Es ist an der Zeit, aufzustehen und Stellung zu beziehen. Denn die Terroristen werden weiter in unserem Namen agieren – solange, bis wir selbst für uns sprechen.

Dies ist keine Zeit zum Schweigen. Genug ist genug!

__________

Übersetzung: Florian Gathmann

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

The battle over Indian History

by Wendy Doniger

For years, some Hindus have argued that the 16th century mosque called the Babri Masjid (after the Mughal emperor Babur) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) in Ayodhya (the city where, according to the ancient poem called the Ramayana, Rama was born), though there is no evidence whatsoever that there has been ever a temple on that spot or that Rama was born there.

On December 6, 1992, as the police stood by and watched, leaders of the right-wing Hindu party called the BJP whipped a crowd of 200,000 into frenzy. Shouting “Death to the Muslims!” the mob attacked Babur’s mosque with sledgehammers. In the riots that followed, over a thousand people lost their lives, and many more died in reactive riots that broke out elsewhere in India. On the site today, nothing but vandalized ruins remains, and, in a dark corner of the large, empty space, a small shrine with a couple of oleograph pictures of Rama, where a Hindu priest performs a perfunctory ritual. Whether or not there ever was a Hindu temple there before, there is a temple, however makeshift, there now.

People are being killed in India today because of misreadings of the history of the Hindus. In all religions, myths that pass for history–not just casual misinformation, the stock in trade of the internet, but politically-driven, aggressive distortions of the past–can be deadly, and in India they incite violence not only against Muslims but against women, Christians, and the lower castes.

Myth has been called “the smoke of history,” and there is a desperate need for a history of the Hindus that distinguishes between the fire, the documented evidence, and the smoke; for mythic narratives become fires when they drive historical events rather than respond to them. Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat, sparked a revolution in India in 1857. We are what we imagine, as much as what we do.

Hindus in America, too, care how their history is taught to their children in American schools, and the voices of Hindu action groups ring out on the internet. Some of these groups, justifiably incensed by the disproportionate emphasis on the horrors of the caste system in American textbooks, and by the grotesque misrepresentation of Hindu deities in American commercialism, ricochet to the other extreme and demand that all references to the caste system be expunged from all American textbooks.

And so I tried to tell a more balanced story, in “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” to set the narrative of religion within the narrative of history, as a statue of a Hindu god is set in its base, to show how Hindu images, stories, and philosophies were inspired or configured by the events of the times, and how they changed as the times changed. There is no one Hindu view of karma, or of women, or of Muslims; there are so many different opinions (one reason why it’s a rather big book) that anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, “The Hindus believe. . . ,” is talking nonsense.

My narrative is alternative both to the histories promulgated by some contemporary Hindus on the political right in India and to those presented in most surveys in English–imperialist histories, all about the kings, ignoring ordinary people. But the texts tell us not just who was the ruler but who got enough to eat and who did not. And so my narrative is alternative in its inclusion of alternative people. How does one include the marginal as well as the mainstream Hindus in the story? The ancient texts, usually dismissed as the work of Brahmin males, in fact reveal a great deal about the lower castes, often very sympathetic to them and sometimes coded as narratives about dogs, standing for the people now generally called Dalits, formerly called Untouchables. The argument, for instance, that Dalits should be allowed to enter temples, an argument still violently disputed in parts of India today, can already be found, masked, in ancient stories about faithful dogs who should be allowed to enter heaven. So too, though Feminists often argue that Hindu women were entirely silenced, women’s voices–their ideas and attitudes and, above all, their stories–were often heard and recorded by the men who wrote down the texts.

Foreigners, too, made contributions to Hinduism from the very beginning. Once upon a time–about 50 million years ago –a triangular plate of land, moving fast (for a continent), broke off from Madagascar (a large island lying off the southeastern coast of Africa), and sailed across the Indian Ocean and smashed into the belly of Central Asia with such force that it squeezed the earth five miles up into the skies to form the Himalayan range and fused with Central Asia to become the Indian subcontinent. Or so the people who study plate tectonics nowadays tell us, and who am I to challenge them? Not just land but people came to India from Africa, much later; the winds that bring the monsoon rains to India each year also brought the first humans to peninsular India by sea from East Africa in around 50,000 BCE. And so from the very start India was a place made up of land and people from somewhere else. India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India (and just about everyone else).

The magnificent civilization of the Indus Valley (in present-day Pakistan) traded with Sumer, Crete, and Mesopotamian, before it came to a mysterious end in about 2000 BCE. At just about the same time, in the nearby Punjab, a very different culture entered India from the Northwest and created the great corpus of texts called the Vedas, the oldest texts of Hinduism. Other invaders– Greeks, Turks, Arabs, and British–made valuable contributions to the complex fabric of Hinduism.

We can trace certain important ideas throughout the centuries of this unbroken tradition. For example: A profound psychological understanding of addiction to material objects is evident throughout the history of Hinduism. Addiction was the concern not merely of kings or scholars but of ordinary people, like the proto-hippy and the gambler who are depicted in the Vedas (see excerpt). One reaction to this perceived danger was to control addiction through asceticism or renunciation. And so began an ongoing battle between a great tradition that always celebrated sensuality (think: elephants encrusted with rubies, temples that make rococo look like Danish modern, the Kama-sutra) and another that feared the excesses of the flesh and practiced meditation (think: Gandhi).

Some of the British, especially in the early colonial period, admired and celebrated the sensuality of Hinduism. Others, particularly but not only the later Protestant missionaries, despised what they regarded as Hindu excesses. Unfortunately, many educated Hindus took their cues from the second sort of Brit and became ashamed of the sensuous aspects of their own religion, aping the Victorians (who were, after all, very Victorian), becoming more Protestant than thou. It is not fair to blame the British for the Puritanical strain in Hinduism; it began much earlier. But they certainly made it a lot worse. And cultural influences of this sort, as much as the grand ideas, are part of what makes the history of the Hindus so fascinating.

http://www.vichaar.com/

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION – ITS NOW IRAN

After Iraq, its neocons Death Wish Part II.

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Eric Margolis

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As America struggles with its debt-ravaged economy and surging unemployment, Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program have again become an issue of major contention.

In recent weeks, Obama administration officials and the media issued a blizzard of contradictory claims over Iran’s alleged nuclear threat, leaving one wondering who is really in charge of US foreign policy?

This awkward question was underlined during British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s state visit to Washington. Britain is supposed to be America’s most important ally and partner in their `special relationship.’

Brown’s reception was dismal and Obama’s obvious lack of interest in Britain’s leader quite embarrassing. The British media slammed America’s cold reception as an `insult,’ and claimed Brown had been treated like the leader of a `minor African state.’ White House aides excused the huge diplomatic faux pas by claiming President Obama was worn out from dealing with the financial and economic crisis. I’m sure he is worn out, but this still does not bode well for the conduct of US foreign policy.

Much of the uproar over Iran’s so-far non-existent nuclear weapons must be seen as part of efforts by neocons to thwart President Obama’s proposed opening to Tehran, and to keep up the pressure for an American attack on Iran.

Israel’s American supporters and Israel’s government insist Iran has secret nuclear weapons program that the West has not yet detected. We heard the same claims from the same source about Iraq before 2003. Israel certainly knows about covert nuclear programs, having run one of the world’s largest and most productive ones.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lived up to her growing reputation for Mideast hawkishness by naming prominent Israel supporter Dennis Ross as her Special Advisor on Iran and the Gulf. This appointment suggests she may be more interested in building future domestic political support than securing balanced advice and even-handed action on the Mideast.

At least Ross is considered something of a moderate in the Israeli spectrum, having long been regarded as the Labor Party’s `man in Washington.’ During the Bush years, Israel’s centrist Laborites in Washington were replaced by partisans of the rightwing Likud Party, who quickly came to dominate administration Mideast policy.

In recent weeks, official Washington has been locked in confusion over Iran.

The new CIA director, Leon Panetta, said in an interview, `there is no question, they (Iran) are seeking that (nuclear weapons) capability.’

Pentagon chief Adm. Mike Mullen claimed Iran had `enough fissile material to build a bomb.’ Fox News trumpeted that Iran already had 50 nuclear weapons.

While the American Rome burns, here we go again with renewed hysteria over MWMD’s – Muslim Weapons of Mass Destruction. The war drums are again beating over Iran.

The czar of all 16 US intelligence agencies, Adm. Dennis Blair, stated Iran could have enough enriched uranium for one atomic weapon by 2010-2015. But he reaffirmed the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not have nuclear weapons and is not pursuing them. Defense Secretary Robert Gates backed up Blair. So did the UN nuclear agency.

Some of the confusion over Iran comes from misunderstanding nuclear enrichment, domestic politics, and recycled lurid scare stories from the days of Saddam Hussein and his `drones of death.’

Iran is producing low-grade uranium-235 (LEU), enriched to only 2.5%, to generate electricity. Tehran has this absolute right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT). Its centrifuge enrichment process at Nantaz is under 24-hour international inspection. Iran’s soon to open nuclear plant at Bushehr cannot produce nuclear weapons fuel. All of its spent fuel, which is under international safeguards, will be returned to supplier Russia.

Today, some 15 nations produce low grade enriched uranium 235(LEU-235) , including Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, and Japan. While visiting Japan’s defense ministry in Tokyo, I saw plans for an atomic weapon. Experts believe Japan could produce a nuclear warhead in within three months, if it so decided.

I also believe – though cannot prove – that Switzerland may have produced a few nuclear warheads in the early 1960’s and keeps them in one of its secret mountain forts as a sort of doomsday device.

Israel, India and Pakistan are all covert nuclear weapons powers and have refused to submit to international inspection. North Korea abrogated it.

Interestingly, rather than the much pilloried Iran, the original nuclear powers, it is the United States, USSR/Russia/ Britain, France and China, who are all in violation of the nuclear arms treaty. The NNPT called for all nuclear powers to rapidly eliminate their nuclear forces. President Dwight Eisenhower championed this position. Far from eliminating their nuclear forces, all of the nuclear powers have expanded and modernized them.

UN inspectors report Iran has produced 1,010 kg of 2-3% enriched uranium (LEU). Iran insists it is for energy generation. Theoretically that is enough for one atomic bomb.

But to make a nuclear weapon, U-235 must be enriched to over 90% in an elaborate, costly process. Iran is not doing so, say UN inspectors, though they have raised certain technical questions about Iran’s nuclear process. Some believe Iran may go up to `breakout position,’ that is, having the components to assemble a weapon on fairly short notice.

Highly enriched U-235 or plutonium must then be milled and shaped into a perfect ball or cylinder. Any surface imperfections will prevent achieving critical mass. Next, high explosive lenses must surround the core, and detonate at precisely the same millisecond. In the gun system, two cores must collide at very high speed. In some cases, a stream of neutrons are pumped into the device as it explodes.

This process is highly complex. Nuclear weapons cannot be deemed reliable unless they are tested. North Korea recently detonated a device that fizzled. Iran has never built or tested a nuclear weapon. Israel and South Africa jointly tested a nuclear weapon in 1979.

Even if Iran had the capability to fashion a complex nuclear weapon, it would be useless without delivery. Iran’s sole medium-range delivery system is its unreliable, inaccurate 1,500 km ranged Shahab-3. Miniaturizing and hardening nuclear warheads capable of flying atop a Shahab missile is another complex technological challenge.

It is inconceivable that Iran or anyone else would launch a single nuclear weapon. What if it didn’t go off? Imagine the embarrassment and the retaliation. Iran would need at least ten warheads and a reliable delivery system to be a credible nuclear power.

Israel, the primary target for any Iranian nuclear strike, has an indestructible triad of air, missile and sea-launched nuclear weapons pointed at Iran. An Israeli submarine with nuclear cruise missiles is on station off Iran’s coast.

Iran would be wiped off the map by even a few of Israel’s estimated 200 plus nuclear weapons. Iran is no likelier to use a nuke against its Gulf neighbors. The explosion would blanket Iran with radioactive dust and sand.

Finally, while Washington keeps invoking the specter of a nuclear armed Iran, India has quietly developed a large nuclear arsenal and will soon test an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to North America.

If Obama and his senior advisors are too bagged out to give a decent state dinner for Gordon Brown, how are they going to handle Tehran’s wily, ultra-difficult ayatollahs? Iran has cursed every US administration since Jimmy Carter.

Let’s hope President Obama has the good sense to make good on his promises to normalize relations with Iran. Kicking sand into Iran’s face at a time when the new president is expanding the war in Afghanistan and battling economic doom is a very bad idea.

________

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009.

Source: www.bigeye.com

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Defeat stalks Pakistan’s accidental president

A year of civilian rule in Pakistan has little to show for itself.

by James Lamont

Expectations ran high when President Asif Ali Zardari took power. Pervez Musharraf, his military predecessor, had lost his way as he wrestled with the constitution and the courts. The powerful and respected army watched its popularity sink as a mood of “Good riddance, Musharraf” took hold. A civilian alternative in the shape of the newly elected Pakistan People’s party promised stability, greater accountability and a step towards regional peace.

 But Mr Zardari, mocked by the Pakistani media for his Cheshire cat-like grin, cuts a demoralised figure. He has had to make a humiliating climb down in the face of protests by lawyers and the opposition. An Islamist insurgency is unchecked. The economy is weak; the country’s finances are propped up by an International Monetary Fund rescue package.

 The president’s tawdry track record speaks of inaction and wanting leadership. He needs to act fast and reassure his people and their international allies, who backed a return of civilian rule that he is up to the job.

Focusing minds is the preparation of a US aid package for Pakistan that puts it in the same class of recipient as Egypt and Israel. Washington was clearly distressed that the political leaders and legal establishment were engaged in riotous squabbling. Larger tasks are at hand, such as keeping the Taliban from the gates.

“Mr. 10 per cent”, as Mr Zardari was nicknamed during his late wife Benazir Bhutto’s time as prime minister, was already a curious choice of recipient for Barack Obama’s foreign policy largesse. But his choice of confrontation over compromise, risking violence in the capital city, hardens the view that he has a poor ear for political survival. Bad advice by trusted cronies to stand his ground was only overruled at the 11th hour by Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the powerful army chief, and anguished calls from Washington and London.

Even before his capitulation to lawyers and his arch rival, opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, Mr. Zardari’s government gave the impression of being unable to turn the tide. Above all, it was burdened by a fight against Islamist militants that it felt was unwinnable. The sense of defeat is now perilously close to home. Mr. Zardari is locked in a debilitating power struggle with Mr. Sharif.

The president’s reluctant restoration of Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhary, a chief justice sacked by Gen Musharraf, may lead to the Supreme Court stripping Mr. Zardari of enhanced powers he inherited from Gen. Musharraf.

The Bhutto brand is at low ebb. Voters brought the PPP-led government to power in a sympathy vote following the killing of the charismatic Ms. Bhutto. Since then, Mr Zardari has done little to disprove critics’ view that he was anything other than an accidental president.

 There are a few bright spots. One is that the military, which has ruled Pakistan for most of its 62 years, has stayed in its barracks. Gen. Kiyani appears in no hurry to take over the reins of government in spite of the dire run of events. A second is the promise of a more productive relationship with the US through the mediation of Richard Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But if he is to have any chance of turning his administration around, Mr. Zardari needs to put in place an able executive team and cut loose toadying cronies. Then he needs to address fast three points.

 First, the government must revitalise a slowing economy, bedevilled by investment deficits in sectors such as energy after years of neglect under Gen. Musharraf.

Second, Mr. Zardari needs to accelerate engagement with the US to extend government control of lost border areas.

 Third, a delayed donor conference is a chance to build consensus among international partners and articulate how the country might rise from the mire.

 Even meagre success would relieve the pressure at Mr. Zardari’s back. But he may not be up to it.

Source:

Reconciliation Urged in Pakistan Crisis

(Left) Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani

·

Pamela Constable

·

Pakistan’s ruling party, which narrowly survived a meltdown last month in the face of massive street demonstrations, is working to regroup and regain credibility despite the weakened position of its top leader, President Asif Ali Zardari.

Many Pakistanis hope Zardari, who was forced to capitulate to a coalition of opponents last month and reinstate a group of deposed senior judges, will rise above his personal defeat and reach out to forge a permanent reconciliation, especially with his arch rival, ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

“If we want to succeed against extremists and terrorists, we must get our house in order,” Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told the journalists. “I appeal to both the ruling party and the opposition to seek reconciliation. If we continue on the path of confrontation, it will do us great damage. We must strengthen democracy to have a strong foreign policy.”

But analysts and critics within Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party said they feared that the president, who has remained mostly silent and invisible since the crisis erupted, will resist mending fences with Sharif and leave Pakistan politically adrift at a time of severe threats from Islamist extremists and a gravely ailing economy.

Sharif, the leader of a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, threw his weight behind a national lawyers’ movement to restore the judges ousted by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, and ended up as the campaign’s triumphant champion. Sharif has said he would like to reconcile with his longtime adversary, though just mid March he was calling for a “revolution” against him.

As for Zardari, critics here described him as isolated, surrounded by a few hawkish advisers and unwilling to face facts. They noted that only under intense pressure from the army chief and the United States, a major source of economic and military aid, did the president agree to restore the judges and call off plans to forcibly thwart a mass protest scheduled by his opponents on 16^th last month in the capital.

“Mr. Zardari is in a bunker, and party workers feel disillusioned and disconnected. Our party has always been populist, but now it is dominated by power politics,” said Safdar Abbasy, a senator from the PPP who broke with the president last week after police began arresting opposition activists. “What Mr. Zardari needs to do is sit and reflect on the need for reconciliation and stability in our society. It is all up to him.”

Abbasy is one of half a dozen senior party members, including Sen. Raza Rabbani and former information minister Sherry Rehman, who resigned from their posts recently. The country’s leading opposition lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, is a lifelong PPP stalwart, but has never supported Zardari.

One thing the dissidents have in common is a strong devotion to the memory and ideals of Zardari’s late wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007. They view Zardari, a businessman with a reputation for corrupt dealings and a short temper, as a poor substitute who has damaged the party and the country.

In contrast, the star of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, once viewed as the president’s yes-man, has risen rapidly during the recent crisis. In private, he was reported to strongly oppose the government’s crackdown on the opposition. In public, he was the reassuring figure who appeared on television in wake of the proposed long march to announce that the judges would be restored and the ban on public rallies would be lifted. Now, some in PPP circles see Gillani as a potential savior of the party.

“While Zardari’s democratic credentials have been severely undermined, Gillani has gone from being seen as a puppet to looking like a statesman,” said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of security studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. If the judiciary reverses a constitutional amendment imposed under Musharraf that expanded presidential authority, it would reduce some executive powers and benefit the prime minister. Otherwise, Hussain said, “Zardari’s shadow will continue to color everything.”

One key difference between the two officials is over how to deal with Sharif. Zardari, whose family rivalry with Sharif goes back decades, engineered several judicial and executive actions last month to reduce Sharif’s political power, including imposing emergency rule on Punjab province, his stronghold.

Gillani, emphasizing the need for stability, has publicly called for those measures to be reversed, and Sharif has suggested that he would be willing to rejoin the governing coalition if the government drops its effort to control Punjab and implements a “Charter of Democracy” that Sharif signed with Bhutto before her death. However, Zardari is said to be resisting.

Analysts said that one lesson from the political crisis was the need to replace personality-driven politics with stronger civilian institutions. At a time when the nuclear-armed nation faces a growing menace from armed Islamist extremists, many Pakistanis and foreign observers were dismayed to see the country’s two political dynasties at each other’s throats again.

“This is the time to move away from the politics of individualism,” said Abbasy. “We have been struggling to build a parliamentary democracy for a long time, and the movement to restore the judiciary has changed the country’s psyche. Today Zardari may be president and tomorrow somebody else, but people want to make sure our institutions are strong.”

The best bulwark against the threat from extremist groups, analysts said, would be a unified government that included secular parties like the PPP and more religiously conservative parties like the Muslim League. But if the government remains weak and divided by partisan conflict, they said, it will offer violent Islamists another opportunity to exploit.

“Groups like the Taliban thrive in a vacuum of power,” said Iqbal Haider, a dissident PPP senator and lawyer. “Restoring the independent judiciary strengthens the government’s hand to confront terror. If we can also end this political polarization and implement the Charter of Democracy, it will further strengthen our ability to confront the fanatics in our midst”.

_______

Source:

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Losing the Horse

Zardari will not get a second chance

                by Zafar Hilaly 

Mr Zardari will not get a second chance. His past and present unpopularity make him an easy target. To make matters worse Washington is disillusioned. With him at the helm they felt they could ‘drone on’ without too much of an outcry. Now they know they can’t.

Mr. Zardari had no option but to agree to the restoration of the judges. Or, to be entirely accurate, he did have an option. He could have refused to restore the CJ and then jumped from the second floor of the Presidency when the 111 Brigade or the demonstrators came for him.

 Any fool knows that. So why are his minions trying to pass it off as an example of his statesmanship? Would it not be better to admit that Mr Zardari erred and inject a sliver of candour in the tissue of lies that has marked the government’s stance?

 Why did Mr Zardari wait till matters reached a pass that only abject surrender could bail him out? There are only two explanations: bad judgement or bad advice. If, the former, Mr Zardari is beyond redemption (in a democracy there is no room for on-the-job training); if the latter, heads should roll.

 Ayub Khan in a similar situation in 1965 acted decisively. He sacked ZAB, Aziz Ahmed and Nazir Ahmed, perhaps his closest advisers, for advising him that “Operation Gibraltar” in Kashmir would not lead to war with India.

 Of course, Mr. Zardari will do no such thing. He is street-smart but not wise. Besides, he prefers to be known as dost ka dost; that counts for more with him and his flock than being termed mulk ka dushman by some hack. But that is how he will be remembered if he continues to heed the counsel of his politically illiterate advisers or backs his own uninformed hunches.

 Today, Mr. Zardari is a political pariah, even more so than Musharraf on the morning of November 3, 2007. Nothing but boorishness was expected from a soldier; much greater were the expectations from the husband of Pakistan’s foremost democrat who should have learnt his politics at her feet. Were an election to be held today Mr. Zardari would be unelectable, such is the infamy he has earned.

 Instead of turning a crisis he inherited into an opportunity to win public acclaim, he traded it for a disaster. In sum, his performance on the judges’ issue has been one of mind-boggling ineptitude.

Some believe that nevertheless his hold on the PPP is vice-like because the PPP is a Bhutto malkiyat and Mr. Zardari commands it on behalf of Bilawal. Not so. Mr. Zardari is an accidental President and he is not a Bhutto.

 You don’t become a Bhutto by marrying one. The suffix ‘Bhutto’ tagged on to a name is not enough. Bilawal will discover this. To be a Bhutto you must act like one, think like one, and believe like one. Anyway, even a Bhutto has to win his spurs. Zulfikar did so by wiping the floor off his opponents in a fair election in 1971 and going to the scaffold bravely; Benazir did it by returning in 1986 and 2007 and staking her life on the restoration of democracy; in Mr. Zardari’s case, far from winning his spurs, he has lost his horse.

Mr. Zardari will not get a second chance. His past and present unpopularity make him an easy target. To make matters worse Washington is disillusioned. With him at the helm they felt they could ‘drone on’ without too much of an outcry. At least that is what Ambassador Haqqani assured them.

 Now they know they can’t. Their political cover has been blown. They have had to fall back for support on their old ally, the fauj which may wish to oblige but cannot with the same abandon it once did. The concept of Long Marches has changed all that. Wisely though Washington is now hedging its bets.

 Mr. Nawaz Sherif now bestrides the political stage like a colossus. The richest and most privileged man ever to champion the cause of the poor and underprivileged; who owns more land in London than most of his better off supporters do in the pauperised villages of Pakistan

. Sitting on his gold (leaf) encrusted sofa in Lahore, beside crystal vases filled with mellifluous flowers of all hues, with walls and floors reflecting the opulence and bad taste of a successful business buccaneer, he waxes on about the prospects of an impending revolution that will banish poverty and bring justice to the door step of the impoverished with no idea how incongruous is the setting or how outlandish he sounds.

 Surely he should at least look the part he claims to play. It may have cost a lot to keep Gandhi in poverty, as Sarajoni Naidu said, but it was worth it.

 Mr. Sharif’s panaceas for our problems are not novel: to reason with the extremists but, if they remain unreasonable, to seek the shelter of a verbose and diffuse Parliamentary Resolution; to espouse the tolerant, progressive Islam of Jinnah but when confronted by the opposition of bigots to take a time out, or pass the buck or better still keep mum; to support the American alliance but if politically inexpedient to guard his silence; to befriend the Government and at the same time to distance himself from them; to detach Mr. Gilani from Mr. Zardari but when confronted to deny any such motive; to defend the Supreme Court and, when necessary, attack it, etc, etc. The contradictions are profuse.

 When the Long (Container) March ended, and the CJ was restored and the time came to take stock what emerged was what we all knew, which is that the military remains the dominant force in Pakistani politics and that our politicians are as fork-tongued and as incompetent as any soldier when it comes to keeping promises or running the country.

Sadly, nothing has changed. Pakistan remains in a free fall mode. The only question is whether when Pakistan hits the ground we will be merely battered and bruised, or dead. Take your pick.

Source

Pakistan Needs A Coalition Government

                                 By Vivian Salama

The Current Discussion: With President Zardari forced to reverse his bans on political opponents, is Pakistan on the brink or is this a positive sign? What, if anything, can the West do to help maintain stability and democracy?

In less than one month, Pakistan’s government has conceded not once, but three times, to challengers both political and militant in nature. Those concessions have raised concerns about Pakistan’s vulnerability and its inability to suppress its growing militant problem or prevent violent disputes with the opposition.

The first concession came last month when, after more than a year-long offensive in the embattled Swat Valley, the military signed a cease fire with the Taliban, folding to the longtime demands of Islamic militants to implement Shari’a law in the region. Some of the region’s residents remain hopeful that the region will return to a Shari’a that was at one time a moderate, locally-based alternative to the country’s drawn-out federal legal proceedings. But the concession blatantly exposes the Pakistani military’s inability to prevent extremism from seeping into the heart of the country. Located a mere 160 kilometers from Islamabad, Taliban militants now stand at Pakistan’s front door. It is only a matter of time before they move in.

The second concession was on March 3rd, when at least 12 heavily armed militants staged a commando-style attack on a convoy carrying the Sri Lankan national cricket team, coaches and referees to the Gadaffi Stadium in Lahore. I will not explore the various conspiracy theories now floating around Pakistan about who is to blame for these atrocious attacks, which claimed the lives of six police officers and a driver. But I will point out that at the time this post was published, all the assailants remained at large. The scene of the crime, Liberty Square, is a heavily congested roundabout in the heart of Pakistan’s cultural capital. The attacks happened not in the evening like the Mumbai attacks, but during the morning rush hour. There is surveillance video shot by camera crews at television studios based in Liberty Square. The gunmen are reported to have been carrying large bags. British cricket referee Chris Broad has lashed out at the Pakistani government, saying that there was no sign of security at the time of the attacks. The fact that the gunmen got away and have thus far managed to avoid arrest is alarming.

 In an interview with opposition leader Nawaz Sharif days after the attacks, Sharif claimed that the government’s failure to ensure the security of the cricketers is the direct result of its preoccupation with politics and stifling the opposition.

 Finally, after the February 25th decision by Pakistan’s Supreme Court to ban Nawaz Sharif and his brother from elected office, President Asif Zardari’s decision to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry, the country’s Chief Justice, came as a surprise to many.

 The past fortnight has been particularly turbulent in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province and the PML-N stronghold. The highly anticipated cross country “long march” never made it to Islamabad as protesters had initially planned, but it found victory in Lahore. Many pundits pointing to “Punjab Power” as the source of the shake-up.

 President Zardari has never been popular. He was not popular even as the husband of Benazir Bhutto, when she was Prime Minister. As the leader of a civilian government, he is far more vulnerable to the will of the people than his military predecessor, the equally unpopular General Pervez Musharraf, who had the backing of the army.

 His decision to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry was indeed a positive step, but it is not the solution to Pakistan’s problems. A coalition government, similar to that agreed upon between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif just before Bhutto’s assassination, is now needed if Pakistan is to take a serious step against its increasingly dangerous militant problem. Pakistan’s current leadership must show that it is above petty politics by genuinely reaching out to the opposition, rather than making occasional concessions that ultimately expose its inner weaknesses.

Source

An Empty Tribal Belt? Pakistan Is Betraying Its Proud Tribesmen

 

by AHMED QURAISHI

 

An empty buffer zone is slowly emerging, separating Afghanistan and Pakistan’s populated areas. A half-million Pakistanis are in tents, homeless and no one is bothered. Is it an American conspiracy and a Pakistani complacency? The Pakistani media and politicians are criminally ignorant and busy in their own power games while a major strategic change is taking place inside and around their country.

This picture above saddened me no end. The proud tribesmen of Pakistan, those who beat the English and the Russians and fought their way to liberate half of the Indian occupied Kashmir are now facing an American conspiracy and a Pakistani complacency.

America’s Afghan blunders have resulted in expelling the proud Pakistani tribesmen from their homes and turned almost half a million of them into refugees in their own country.

If this wasn’t enough, here comes Pakistan to treat them as animals in the ‘tent cities’ built for them near Peshawar. And then come the Americans and the Indians to spread literature encouraging the Pashtun to demand a separate homeland called Pashtunistan.

For a year and a half, I have been explaining at AhmedQuraishi.com to Pakistanis, with original reporting and informed analysis, how Pakistan’s tribal belt was peaceful until 2005, and how ‘non-state actors’ in Washington DC have used the Afghan soil to create, arm and sustain insurgencies inside Pakistan that run from the Chinese-built Gwadar port in the south to the Chinese border in the north. The suicide bombings, the attacks and the destabilization is punishment for Pakistan for supporting the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan and for insisting to stick to Kashmir against the wishes of India, Washington’s new regional slave-soldier.

The anti-Pakistan insurgencies hide behind the covered faces of the so-called Pakistani Taliban who receive money and weapons from Afghanistan.

Now the Americans want to expand the process of more and more Pakistani tribesmen leaving their homes and escaping deeper inside Pakistan. The suspicion is that Washington wants to create a buffer zone between the U.S.-occupied Afghanistan and Pakistan, a zone inhabited by no one. All Pakistani tribes pushed out. The strategy is working. The number of these Pakistanis who have become refugees inside their own country is nearing half a million.

Pakistani media and journalists are playing an unfortunate role in helping the Americans by focusing on failed Pakistani politicians and their power games that are diverting the attention of the Pakistani public opinion from the important issue of the plight of these brave Pakistani tribesmen and how our government is silently abetting the Americans in humiliating them.

 I wrote recently in The News that Pakistan needs a Putin, a Pakistani nationalist who loves his homeland and his people and who is ruthless enough to do what’s right for all of us and for the homeland and liberate it from the clutches of the stooges of the Americans and the Brits. I hope he comes before it’s too late.

Originally posted at Ahmed Quraishi’s The Lounge. 

Source

Role of ‘Religion’ in violence

A Historic review of its Genesis

Dr. Syed Ehtisham

Organized religion is like organized crime, it preys on people’s weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators and is almost impossible to eradicate (Mike Hermann).

One does not have to agree with the above to see that religion is used more frequently to cause mayhem, than any other attribute of human kind.

     Examples of violence by the strong on the weak are many and come from the very earliest times of known history. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian, Arab, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian empires come easily to mind. World wars were fought for the resources of colonies. Post WWII, with weakening of the Colonial powers, the USA took up the role and intervened directly by naked aggression and through surrogates.

In Western countries, violence is attributed variously to fanaticism, clash of cultures, poverty, lack of education etc. Muslim residents of Western countries, by and large, condemn acts of violence against innocent people, but would want the people in the West to understand the reasons why a person would deliberately sacrifice his life.

 Jews were persecuted by followers of practically all religions. Romans persecuted Christians, and Muslims, after their fall from power, were subjugated by all comers including people of their own faith. But violence in the name of religion was first definitively documented in the late fifteenth century Papal Bull which authorized the king of Portugal “to attack, conquer and subdue Saracens, pagans and other non-believers who were inimical to Christ; to capture their goods and territories; to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to transfer their lands and properties to the king of Portugal and his successors”. 

The common thread that runs through all aggression is greed or fear that the new creed would supplant the old one and control the means of production. When resources were no longer at stake, diverse beliefs were tolerated as during the period of Muslim rule in India. The British did send preachers to “spread the word of God” and when natives killed an odd missionary, gunboats followed.

     Resistance to aggression against heavy odds is equally common.

            All animals practice aggression against their own kind, and against other kinds, to a greater or lesser degree. The complexity of the practice appears to be directly related to intelligence. Lower orders generally kill members of other species for food. Others may injure/wound rivals for the affections of a female or to control several comely ones, but generally do not kill them.

            Violence for greed is the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens.

All religions reacted to the prevailing milieu, and confronted the established order. They appealed mainly to the dis-empowered, the destitute and the poor. The rich, the powerful, and the learned had all the privileges already. They initially ignored the emergent creed, did not see any good reason for change, which would, in any case, affect their interests adversely. When the belief system gathered enough strength to challenge the established order, they tried to suppress the new forces with naked force, bribes and temptation, whatever would work. The prophet of Islam was offered riches, women, and positions of authority, if he would only give up his “pointless” preaching. They failed in every instance with all the prophets.

Religions initially attempted to eradicate social evils, and economic inequities. The ruling classes took measures to preserve their authority. They controlled the “administration, the legislature, and the judiciary”[i]. They treated the poor abominably. The ruled had no recourse. All the levers of power were in the hands of the ruling class. If they ran away and were caught, the punishment would be worse than death. If not caught, starvation would be the fate of most.

            It must be clearly understood that religion did not hit at the root of privilege. It only aimed at amelioration of the living conditions of the powerless. Private property remained sacrosanct. Slavery was not abolished; the owners were exhorted to treat them humanely. Women remained the underclass, though they were lulled with meaningless honors like the paradise is at the feet of mothers or that their word was law as in ancient India[ii].

            Having overcome the establishment, all religions organized their own hegemony. The adherents then proceeded to use the faith to advance their own cause. Hegemony inevitably develops a class structure. Jewish priests objected vehemently and violently to Jesus Christ bucking the trend; challenging their right to privileges and a life of luxury. Voodoo practitioners keep their hold on popular mind by subjecting the deviants to exorcism. Christian priests accumulated great wealth, land, and authority rivaling that of Kings, the Popes actually had their own country; vestiges can be seen even now in the Papal state in Rome. The clergy firmly aligned themselves with the landed gentry, supported the established order, exhorting the poor to obey the ruler, suffer deprivation cheerfully, palming them off with the lure that the Kingdom of heaven will be theirs, as long as they do as they are told in this life. It was symbiotic existence; feudal class supported the clergy and was legitimized by the latter.

Islam ordains that one should obey the ruler, as long the ruler does not interfere with the private practice of the faith.

 Among the divinely inspired religions, only Islam founded a political state in its early infancy. The late advent of a political control though did not prevent the followers of other belief systems from going forth, marauding and plundering in the name of the faith. Conspicuous in this behavior were the Christians. But first in the field of colonization in the name of their faith were the Muslims. Jihad, and proselytisation were among the core articles of the faith.

            Energized by the conviction that everlasting salvation lay in the true path, they managed to conquer most of the known world in a matter of a few decades.  They did not object if in the process riches, land, and women fell into their lap.

                     The vanquished did not surrender with out a fight. Resistance was in fact fierce. There is credible evidence that after the main battles, people fought on in guerrilla fashion [iii]. History is being repeated in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries. Not able to confront the aggressor directly they have developed a culture of suicide bombing and other such similar measures.           

With decline of Muslim power, Christian cast their covetous eyes on the riches of the East. Advent of the Industrial revolution in the same time frame made them invincibly potent. They went forth as traders for spices [iv] and paid in gold, as India did not need any handicraft they could produce.

___________________________

[i] These offices did not exist in their current form, but members of the ruling class did administer, make rules and sit on judgment.

[ii]  An ancient Indian lore has it that four brothers went hunting and found a stray but comely girl. They brought her back to serve their mother and told her that they had a gift for her. The mother said that she was too old for gifts and they were to share it among themselves. Gods blessed the polyandrous alliance with a unique concession. She would regain virginity after each cohabitation. Firaq Gorakhpuri’s rather irreverent verse;

“Hazar bar zamana edher say guzra hai

Nai nai si hai teri rah guzar phir bhi”

[iii] Nasim Hijazi was a prolific novelist of Urdu. He wrote numerous nostalgic tomes in which nubile girls in Spain invariably fell in love with Muslim warriors, converted to Islam and lived happily ever afterwards in which heroines chaffed at being forced to accept Islam and were forever on the look out to reconvert to the true faith. I have come across Christian equivalents as well of Nasim Hejazi novels.

[iv] Their fixation with spices can be easily understood. It was critical. Their own land was cold, relatively infertile and productive only during short summer months; they had to keep food for long periods of time. There was no refrigeration, natural ice and snow not being consistently reliable, food, especially fish, often went bad. Its odor had to be suppressed, hence the value of pungent spices.

Source:

Lambasting Islam is no solution

Toleration is the key 

by Balbhadra Rana

Novelist McEvan has said that he hates militant Islam. He has also defended his friend Martin Amis who has also expressed his dislike for Islam. McEvan says anyone who says something against militant Islam is branded a racist. This is true. Governments the world over have become extra-sensitive in dealing with their Muslim populace. They want to avoid anything that hurts their sentiments. This is because Osama bin Laden’s brand of Islam has many takers.

Let us discuss what McEvan and Amis say about Islam. We deal with Amis first. He says the militants have won the war of dominance and the moderates amongst Muslims have lost. Though there are many takers for the militant brand of Islam, it would be too early to say that the moderates have lost. Though ‘Ladenism’ has appealed to many, most Muslims the world over subscribe to moderate Islam. It is only that the hardliners grab more headlines.

Amis said Muslims would suffer till they bring their house into order. This is true. Muslims the world over are looked upon with suspicion. The relations of Muslims with their neighbours of other religions have been gradually spoiled. But when Amis says things like, ’strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan’, it is going too far. This will only swell the ranks of Laden’s followers.

McEvan says he detests Islam because of the way women are not given freedom and its non-acceptance of homosexuality. McEvan should look at Turkey and Jordan. Both have Muslim populations but the status of women there is good. Iraqi women too enjoyed a free life till Saddam Hussain was deposed. As far as homosexuality is concerned, it is only recently gay marriages were legalized in ultra liberal California. Homosexuality remains taboo even today in most countries of the world.

Though McEvan has full rights to say he hates militant Islam, he offers no solutions. His friend Amis provides extreme measures that will prove counter-productive. It must be kept in mind that Ladenism is a freak strand of Islam, subscribed to by a minuscule minority of Muslims. Muslims are citizens of the world too and followers of other religions should show understanding. Just criticizing the weaknesses of Islam as followed by some will only alienate the entire community. Gandhi’s teachings are very relevant today. His principles of tolerance hold the key to today’s incipient clash between religions.

Source

Watch the noise!

Entertainment, blessing or what!

       by Nayyar Hashmey

Following is a post on noise levels in our entertaining and spiritual world. We don’t take these noises seriously ignoring the very fact these high levels that seem to entertain us are a nuisance that affect us even more dangerously.

Why? Because mostly we associate noise with planes, trains, road traffic, construction sites or a factory. Rarely do we think about noise levels from recreational and religious activities. Actually, I think we spend so much effort mitigating the former, that we forget that the recreational / religious activities can also cause hearing damage. In fact, many amongst us inadvertently expose ourselves to high levels of noise during such activities. So you might be protected at work, but your activities might effect you….. 

What type of activities are we talking about? 

a) Music in clubs and concerts - I couldn’t agree more on this point. We go to clubs and concert halls and they have a band and all other gadgets. The rock concerts! You feel like stuffing tissues (though, probably not effective) in your ears. 

b) Sound in cinemas - Films nowadays rely on special effects and these are more likely to have higher noise levels with average levels of 78dB (A) over a 3 hour period. That’s like having a tractor in your house for 3 hours. 

c) Personal music systems - Well, I get really annoyed by people who have their mp3s on full blast to drown out the background noise on the train. Not only is it annoying for everyone else to listen to their music, but they’re getting ear damage. According to a study done in Australia, sound levels from their mp3s, was on average 79.8dB. 25% of listeners exceeded the Australian work exposure criterion of 85dB! 

d) Motor sports – If you are living in Singapore I have in mind the one in your city, when in coming Sep, a lot of Singaporeans (well, those who can afford the tickets!) will be exposed to noise from the vroom vroom. Those who can afford seats with the best views will definitely be exposed to noise from the revving, racing, and amplified music. The event organizers will be protected by their state of the art hearing protection, but I don’t think ear plugs for the patrons will be as effective. According to IOA, a spectator could be exposed to around 90 dB (A)!! 

e) Car stereo systems - You know who you are! Those of you who like to drive round with the window down and have your stereo on full blast, as if we didn’t know you were there. On full blast, it can go up to 104dB (A)!! 

f) Home TV – Nowadays the movies are being regularly aired on cable TV that has brought the cinema halls almost within the precincts of your living room. The special sound effects embedded in the movie thunder into your ears like a bomb shell. You aren’t given even fraction of a second to reduce those harsh and high sounds. The time you are able to do that through your remote device, the damage has already been done. 

g) The high blast sermons and speeches  - Here in Pakistan, there is another aspect to this noise problem. Being Muslims, we firmly believe the words of God from the holy book or the saying of Azan are a blessing for all of us, which indeed they are, not only for us but for every believer. However, the volume that detonates from loudspeakers is no more a blessing; they damage your hearing, and come upon your nerves. No wonder, by every passing day, we are getting short tempered, melancholic and every third person has fits of depression. 

I myself visit the mosque in our residential quarters. This is a small mosque, a beautiful structure indeed, but the Imam Sahib or his assistant would put the volume at such a high rate that sometimes one feels one is not listening to the blessing words of a call for prayer, the sound waves hammer your head. Now offering prayers means your communion with Almighty Allah which needs peace and tranquility but this is the very thing despised by the Mullah. One hears naats, speeches and recitations coming from minarets at a level that makes one feel there is a race going on between different mosques as to who has the highest volume. 

Many a time a boy will get hold of the mike and start relating names of the persons who have made donations to the mosque. And the boy would chant, “a four years old kid has donated rupee one to the mosque, see his  love for the mosque, see his jazba, see the sacrifice ha has made, all for the sake of ‘khidmat’ to the mosque” and this is repeated again and again on the mike. There is no time fixed for such announcements, it could be right at the time of your offering the prayers, could be just in the middle of the night or at any time the moulvi or his assistant may desire this. 

The volume is kept intentionally very high so that every one hears about the good deed being done by pious kids and sinners not listening to them, but they too will now be forced to listen as the volume is increased to maximum. There is no consideration that a poor student might be preparing for his exam, some ailing person is lying in the bed and needs peace, another person might be offering his / her prayers or reading the holy Quran, but Moulvi sahib would not bother that these high noises from the minarets or from Imam’s seat are doing exactly opposite to what is desired in our religion of peace.

Zardari: the godfather as president

                        Zalmay Khalilzad, the father of NRO

by Tariq Ali

Asif Ali Zardari – singled out by fate to become Benazir Bhutto’s husband and who, subsequently, did everything he could to prevent himself from being returned to obscurity – Asif Ali Zardari the President of Pakistan is the type of oily-mouthed hangers-on, never in short supply in Pakistan, who orchestrate a few celebratory shows and the ready tongues of old cronies (some now appointed ambassadors to western capitals) will speak of how democracy has been enhanced. 

Zardari’s close circle of friends, with whom he shared the spoils of power the last time around and who have remained loyal, refusing all inducements to turn state’s evidence in the corruption cases against him, will also be delighted. Small wonder then that definitions of democracy in Pakistan differ from person to person.

There were expressions of joy on the streets to mark the transference of power from a moth-eaten general to a worm-eaten politician. The affection felt in some quarters for the Bhutto family is non-transferable. If Benazir were still alive, Zardari would not have been given any official post. She had been considering two other senior politicians for the presidency. Had she been more democratically inclined she would never have treated her political party so scornfully, reducing it to the status of a family heirloom, bequeathed to her son, with her husband as the regent till the boy came of age. 

This, and this alone, has aided Zardari’s rise to the top. He was disliked by many of his wife’s closest supporters in the People’s Party (or the Bhutto Family Party, as it is referred to by disaffected members) even when she was alive. They blamed his greed and godfatherish behaviour to explain her fall from power on two previous occasions, which I always thought was slightly unfair. She knew. It was a joint enterprise. She was never one to regard politics alone as the consuming passion of her life and always envied the lifestyle and social behaviour of the very rich. And he was shameless in his endeavours to achieve that status. 

Today, he is the second richest person in the country, with estates and bank accounts littered on many continents, including a mansion in Surrey worth several million. Many of Benazir’s inner circle, sidelined by the new boss (Zardari did rub their noses in excrement by having his apolitical sister elected from Larkana, hitherto a pocket borough of the Bhutto family) actively hate him. Benazir’s uncle, Mumtaz Bhutto (head of the clan) has sharply denounced him. Some even encourage the grotesque view that he was in some way responsible for her death. This is foolish. He is only trying to fulfill her legacy. He was certainly charged with ordering the murder of his brother-in-law, Murtaza Bhutto, when Benazir was prime minister, but the case was never tried. 

In the country at large, his standing, always low, has sunk still further. The majority of Pakistan’s 190 million citizens may be poor, illiterate or semi-literate, but their instincts are usually sound. An opinion poll carried out by the New America Foundation some months ago revealed Zardari’s approval ratings at a low ebb – less than 14%. These figures confirm the view that he is the worst possible slice of Pakistan’s crumbly nationhood. The people have had no say in his election. Parliamentary cabals have already determined the result. I do not take too seriously the recent revelation that a psychiatrist had pronounced him suffering from acute dementia, incapable of recognizing his children due to a chronic loss of memory. This was, as is known, designed for the courtroom had he been prosecuted in London or Geneva for large-scale money-laundering and corruption. All that is in abeyance now, since he has been elevated into a crucial figure in the “war on terror”. 

Tariq Ali

A small mystery remained. Why did the US suddenly withdraw support from General Musharraf? An answer was provided on August 26 by Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times. The State Department, according to this report, was not in favour of an undignified and hasty departure, but unknown to them a hardcore neocon faction led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to the Security Council, was busy advising Asif Zardari in secret and helping him plan the campaign to oust the general: 

“Mr Khalilzad had spoken by telephone with Mr Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples party, until he was confronted about the unauthorised contacts, a senior United States official said, “Can I ask what sort of ‘advice and help’ you are providing?” … Mr. Boucher wrote in an angry email message to Mr Khalilzad. “What sort of channel is this? Governmental, private, personal?” Copies of the message were sent to others at the highest levels of the State Department; the message was provided to the New York Times by an administration official who had received a copy.”

Khalilzad is an inveterate factionalist and a master of intrigue. Having implanted Hamid Karzai in Kabul (with dire results as many in Washington now admit), he had been livid with Musharraf for refusing to give 100% support to his Afghan protégé. Khalilzad now saw an opportunity to punish Musharraf and simultaneously try and create a Pakistani equivalent of Karzai.

Zardari fitted the bill. He is perfectly suited to being a total creature of Washington. The Swiss government helpfully decided to release millions of dollars from Zardari’s bank accounts that had, till now, been frozen due to the pending corruption cases. Like his late wife, Zardari, too, is now being laundered, just like the money he made when last in office as minister for investment. This weakness will make him a pliant president of Pakistan. 

The majority of the population is deeply hostile to the US/Nato presence in Afghanistan. Almost 80% favour a negotiated settlement and withdrawal of all foreign troops. In September last year, a team of US commandos entered Pakistan “in search of terrorists” and 20 innocents were killed. Zardari was being tested. Now that he allows the US troops to enter the frontier province on “search-and-destroy” missions his career seems to be short-lived and the military might return in some shape or form. The High Command cannot afford to ignore the growing anger within its junior ranks at being forced to kill their own people.

The president of Pakistan was designed in the 1972 constitution as an ornamental figure. Military dictators subverted and altered the constitution to their advantage. Will Zardari revert to his late father-in-law’s constitution or preserve its existing powers? 

The country desperately needs a president capable of exercising some moral authority and serving as the conscience of the country. The banished and now restored chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, automatically comes to mind, as do the figures of Imran Khan and IA Rehman (the chairman of the Human Rights Commission), but the governing elite and its self-serving backers in Washington have always been blind to the real needs of this country. They should be careful. The sparks flying across the Afghan border might ignite a fire that is difficult to control.

Tariq Ali’s latest book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power, has been published by Simon and Schuster.

Source

South Asian Terrorism: All Roads Lead To The British Empire

The Indian North East

by Ramtanu Maitra

This is the first part of a three-part series. Next week:“ Baluchistan and FATA in Pakistan.”

The growing violence throughout Pakistan since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the Winter of 2001, the November 2008 attack on Mumbai, India, and many other smaller terrorist-directed killings in India, and the gruesome killing of at least 70 top Bangladeshi Army officers in a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed last month, were evidence that the terrorists have declared war against the sovereign nation-states in South Asia.

The only bright spot in this context is Sri Lanka, where a powerful terrorist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), better known as the Tamil Tigers, are about to lose their home base. That, however, may not end the LTTE terrorism, particularly since it is headquartered in London, where many South Asian terrorists are maintained in separate cages for future use by British intelligence, with the blessings of Her Majesty’s Service. 

Since none of the South Asian countries, where the terrorists are gaining ground, have, so far, shown the ability to evaluate, and thus, eliminate, the growth of this terrorism, it is necessary to know its genesis, and how it has affected the leaders of the South Asian nations to the detriment of their respective security. What is evident is that the South Asian terrorism has little to do with territorial disputes among nations, but everything to do with the past British colonial rule which poisoned the minds of the locals, so they have become disloyal to their own countries.

In this article, we will deal with the terrorism that continues to prosper in India’s northeast; and the terrorism in Sri Lanka, brought about by the British-induced ethnic animosity among its citizens. This history is the narration of a tragedy, since those who fought for independence in these South Asian nations, made enormous sacrifices to bring about their independence; many of those heroic figures turned out to be mental slaves of the British Empire, and pursued relentlessly the policies that the British had implemented to run their degenerate Empire. 

India’s Northeast 

Six decades after India wrested independence from its colonial rulers, its northeast region is a cauldron of trouble. Located in a highly strategic area, with land contiguous to five countries—Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and China—it is full of militant separatists, who take refuge in the neighboring countries under pressure from Indian security forces. Since most of these neighboring countries do not have the reach to control the border areas, the separatist groups have set up armed training camps, which, over the years, have attracted international drug and gun traffickers. As a result of such unrelenting terrorist actions, and violent demonstrations over the last five decades, this part of India remains today a dangerous place.

These secessionist groups were not created by New Delhi, although New Delhi failed to understand that the promotion of ethnic, sub-ethnic, and tribal identities were policies of the British, who had come to India to expand their empire. The British Empire survived, and then thrived, through identification, within the subcontinent, of various ethnic and sub-ethnic groups and their conflict points; and then, exploited those conflict points to keep the groups divided and hostile to each other.

India and the other South Asian nations failed to comprehend that it was suicidal to allow a degenerate colonial power to pursue such policies against their nations. As a result, they were carried out by New Delhi for two ostensible reasons: One, to appease the militants, and the other, to “allow them to keep” what they wanted— their sub-national ethnic identity. The policy deprived the majority of the people of the Northeast of the justification for identifying themselves as Indians.

The die was cast in the subversion of the sovereignty of an independent India by the British Raj in 1862, when it laid down the law of apartheid, to isolate “the tribal groups.” The British came into the area in the 1820s, following the Burmese conquest of Manipur and parts of Assam. The area had become unstable in the latter part of the 18^th Century, following the over-extension of the Burmese-based Ahom kingdom, which reached into Assam. The instability caused by the weakening of the Ahom kingdom prompted the Burmese to move to secure their western flank. But the Burmese action also helped to bring in the British. The British East India Company was lying in wait for the Ahom kingdom to disintegrate.

The Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26 ended with a British victory. By the terms of the peace treaty signed at Yandaboo on Feb. 24, 1826, the British annexed the whole of lower Assam and parts of upper Assam (now Arunachal Pradesh). The Treaty of Yandaboo provided the British with the foothold they needed to annex Northeast India, launch further campaigns to capture Burma’s vital coastal areas, and gain complete control of the territory from the Andaman Sea to the mouth of the Irrawaddy River. What were London’s motives in this venture? The British claimed that their occupation of the northeast region was required to protect the plains of Assam from “tribal outrages and depredations and to maintain law and order in the sub-mountainous region.” 

The ‘Apartheid Law’ 

Following annexation of Northeast India, the first strategy of the British East India Company toward the area was to set it up as a separate entity. At the outset, British strategy toward Northeast India was:

• to make sure that the tribal people remained separated from the plains people, and the economic interests of the British in the plains were not disturbed;

• to ensure that all tribal aspirations were ruthlessly curbed, by keeping the bogeyman of the plains people dangling in their faces; and,

• to ensure the tribal feudal order remained intact, with the paraphernalia of tribal chiefs and voodoo doctors kept in place. Part of this plan was carried out through the bribing of tribal chiefs with paltry gifts.

Lord Palmerston’s Zoo 

The British plan to cordon off the northeast tribal areas was part of its policy of setting up a multicultural human zoo, during the 1850s, under the premiership of Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston. Lord Palmerston, as Henry Temple was called, had three “friends”—the British Foreign Office, the Home Office, and Whitehall.

The apartheid program eliminated the Northeast Frontier Agency from the political map of India, and segregated the tribal population from Assam, as the British had done in southern Africa and would later do in Sudan. By 1875, British intentions became clear, even to those Englishmen who believed that the purpose of Mother England’s intervention in India, and the Northeast in particular, was to improve the conditions of the heathens. In an 1875 intelligence document, one operative wrote: “At this juncture, we find our local officers frankly declaring that our relations with the Nagas could not possibly be on a worse footing than they were then, and that the non-interference policy, which sounds excellent in theory, had utterly failed in practice.”

Apartheid also helped the British to function freely in this closed environment. Soon enough, the British Crown introduced another feature: It allowed Christian missionaries to proselytize among the tribal population and units of the Frontier Constabulary. The Land of the Nagas was identified as “virgin soil” for planting Christianity.

“Among a people so thoroughly primitive, and so independent of religious profession, we might reasonably expect missionary zeal would be most successful,” stated the 1875 document, as quoted in the “Descriptive Account of Assam,” by William Robinson and Angus Hamilton.

Missionaries were also encouraged to open government-aided schools in the Naga Hills. Between 1891 and 1901, the number of native Christians increased 128%. The chief proselytizers were the Welsh Presbyterians, headquartered in Khasi and the Jaintia Hills.

British Baptists were given the franchise of the Mizo (Lushai) and Naga Hills, and the Baptist mission was set up in 1836.

British Mindset Controlled New Delhi

Since India’s Independence in 1947, the Northeast has been split up into smaller and smaller states and autonomous regions. The divisions were made to accommodate the wishes of tribes and ethnic groups which want to assert their sub-national identity, and obtain an area where the diktat of their little coterie is recognized.

New Delhi has yet to comprehend that its policy of accepting and institutionalizing the superficial identities of these ethnic, linguistic, and tribal groups has ensured more irrational demands for even smaller states. Assam has been cut up into many states since Britain’s exit. The autonomous regions of Karbi Anglong, Bodo Autonomous Region, and Meghalaya were all part of pre-independence Assam. Citing the influx of Bengali Muslims since the 1947 formation of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971, the locals demand the ouster of these “foreigners” from their soil.

Two terrorist groups in Assam, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the National Democratic front of Bodoland (NDFB) (set up originally as the Bodo Security Force), are now practically demanding “ethnic cleansing” in their respective areas. To fund their movements, both the ULFA and the NDFB have been trafficking heroin and other narcotics, and indulging in killing sprees against other ethnic groups and against Delhi’s law-and-order machinery. Both these groups have also developed close links with other major guerrilla-terrorist groups operating in the area, including the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Muivah) and the People’s Liberation Army in Manipur. In 1972, Meghalaya was carved out of Assam through a peaceful process. Unfortunately, peace did not last long in this “abode of the clouds.” In 1979, the first violent demonstration against “foreigners” resulted in a number of deaths and arson. The “foreigners” in this case were Bengalis, Marwaris, Biharis, and Nepalis, many of whom had settled in Meghalaya decades ago. By 1990, firebrand groups such as the Federation of Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo People (FKJGP), and the Khasi Students’ Union (KSU) came to the fore, ostensibly to uphold the rights of the “hill people” from Khasi, Jaintia, and the Garo hills. Violence erupted in 1979, 1987, 1989, and 1990. The last violent terrorist acts were in 1992.

Similar “anti-foreigner” movements have sprouted up across the Northeast, from Arunachal Pradesh in the East and North, to Sikkim in the West, and Mizoram and Tripura in the South. Along the Myanmar border, the states of Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram remain unstable and extremely porous.

While New Delhi was busy maintaining the status quo in this area by telling the tribal and ethnic groups that India is not going to take away what the British Raj had given to them, Britain picked the Nagas as the most efficient warriors (also, a large number of them had been converted to Christianity by the Welsh missionaries), and began arming and funding them. The British connection to the NSCN existed from the early days of the Naga National Council. Angami Zapu Phizo, the mentor of both factions of the NSCN, had led the charge against the Indian government, spearheading well-organized guerrilla warfare. Phizo left Nagaland hiding in a coffin. He then turned up in 1963 in Britain, holding a Peruvian passport. It is strongly suspected that the British Baptist Church, which is very powerful in Nagaland, is the contact between British intelligence and the NSCN terrorists operating on the ground at the time. 

‘Dirty Bertie’ and the Nagas 

Once Phizo arrived in Britain, Lord Bertrand (“Dirty Bertie”) Russell, the atheist, courted Phizo, and became his new friend. Russell was deeply impressed with Phizo’s “earnestness” for a peaceful settlement. What, perhaps, impressed Russell the most is that Phizo had control over the militant Nagas, who had launched a movement in the mid-1950s under the Naga National Council (NNC) to secede from the Indian Republic. In a letter dated Feb. 12, 1963, Sir Bertrand told Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, “I find it hard to understand the difficulty of coming to an agreement which would put an end to the very painful occurrences incidental to the present policy of India.”

It is believed in some circles that New Delhi’s 1964 ceasefire with the Nagas might have been influenced by the letter from Russell that was handed to Nehru by Rev. Michael Scott. Scott later went to Nagaland as part of a peace mission, along with two senior Indian political leaders.

While Russell was pushing Nehru to make the Nagas an independent country through peaceful negotiations, British involvement in direct conflict continued. On Jan. 30, 1992, soldiers of the Assam Rifles arrested two British nationals along the Nagaland-Burma border. David Ward and Stephen Hill posed as members of BBC-TV, and were travelling in jeeps with Naga rebels carrying arms. Subsequent interrogation revealed that both were operatives of Naga Vigil, a U.K.-based group. Both Ward and Hill claimed that they started the organization while in jail, influenced by Phizo’s niece, Rano Soriza. Both have served six-year prison terms for various crimes in Britain. Naga Vigil petitioned for their release in the Guwahti High Court. Phizo’s niece took up the issue with then-Nagaland Chief Minister Vamuzo.

Contd….

SOURCE: Countercurrents.org

South Asian Terrorism: All Roads Lead To The British Empire (Part 2)

         Sri Lankan troops clamping on LTTE hideouts

Sri Lanka’s Violent Ethnic Strife

by Ramtanu Maitra

This is the second part of a three-part series. Next week:“ Baluchistan and FATA in Pakistan.”

In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tiger terrorist group is in its last throes. Ousted by the Sri Lankan Army from almost all of its “claimed” territories, the militants are now holding on to about 19 square kilometers of land, with about 70,000 Sri Lankan citizens, mostly of Tamil ethnic origin, as their hostages. It is evident that they will be totally routed by the end of this month.

While the U.S. Pacific Command personnel in contact with New Delhi are formulating an evacuation plan for the hostages, London and the European Union are trying to protect the last vestiges of Tiger territory by urging Colombo to work out a ceasefire with the terrorists.

The emergence of violent conflict between the Tamil Sri Lankans and the Sinhala Sri Lankans, which gave birth to the London-backed Tamil Tigers, was yet another product of the British colonial legacy. This ethnic conflict, which has engulfed this little island, and unleashed unlimited violence in the region for almost three decades, is, as in the case of Northeast India, due to the British mindset of the Sri Lankan and Indian leaders involved in “resolving “the crisis.

To begin with, Sri Lanka (then, Ceylon) had the misfortune to be colonized by three brutal European colonial powers—the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. Nonetheless, it is to the credit of the locals that they withstood these brutes and prevented the break-up of the country.

After the Dutch ceded Sri Lanka in the 1801 Peace of Amiens, it became Britain’s first crown colony. Immediately, the British colonials started setting up the chess pieces. The ruling Kandyan King, of Tamil ancestry, was ousted with the help of local chieftains of Tamil and Sinhala origin. The coup set up the British crown as the new King.

As part of the “divide and rule” policy, the British colonials promoted the Buddhist religion, resulting in the 1817 Uva rebellion. The Buddhist religion was given protection by the Crown, and the people were told that Christianity would not be imposed on the unwilling masses as had happened during Portuguese and Dutch rule. Following the quelling of the rebellion, the British did what they do best: They carried out one of the worst massacres of the 19^th Century, wiping out all able-bodied Sinhalese men from the Hill Country, and 80% of the native population of able-bodied, according to one report. The Kandyan Kingdom was the kingdom of both the Tamils and Sinhalas—both these groups came from India to settle on that island.

One specific impact of the British colonial presence was the emergence of English as the local language, undermining both the Sinhala and Tamil languages. According to one historian, the two most important effects observed during British rule were: one, by the start of 20th Century, the English language became the passport to getting employment; and those who had an English education became dominant in Britain’s handcrafted Sri Lankan society. Due to input of the Christian missionaries, more minority Tamils could read and write English, as opposed to the southern Sinhalese and Kandyan Sinhalese.

The other observed impact on Sri Lankan society of British colonial rule, was the reconstituting of the Legislative Assembly. The Assembly of 1921 had 12 Sinhalese and 10 non-Sinhalese, at a time when the Sinhalese constituted more than 70% of the population. Things changed in 1931, when, out of 61 seats, the Sinhalese won 38. This troubled the Tamils, because they had had special privileges under British, and never wanted to accept the dominance of the Sinhalese majority.

In addition, the British also brought to the island a million workers of Tamil ethnic background from Tamil Nadu, and made them indentured laborers in the Hill Country. This was in addition to the million Tamils already living in the provinces, and another million Mappilla Muslims, whose mother tongue is Tamil. Thus, the British sowed seeds of ethnic discord. During the colonial rule, the minority Tamils had a disproportionate representation in the bureaucracy.

The Role of British Assets in Independent Sri Lanka 

However, when in 1948, the British finally left the island, they left behind their assets, in powerful places, many of whom were educated at Oxford-Cambridge, and some of whom had adopted Christianity, on both sides of the ethnic divide London had so carefully created.

Instead of seizing the opportunity to build the nation and set about undoing the misdeeds they were forced to carry out under British rule, beginning in the 1950s, Sinhalese-dominated governments implemented public policies that would institutionalize the majority community’s dominance. Sinhala was declared to be the country’s sole official language; Buddhism was favored as the state religion; and the unitary nature of the state ensured Sinhalese political domination. Major Sinhalese-Tamil riots in 1956, 1981, and 1983 further heightened Tamil insecurities.

Meanwhile, the Tamils began to press for autonomy. Political parties, such as the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), utilized conventional means, which included participating in coalition governments. Militant Tamils, the LTTE, sought the creation of an independent Tamil state, referred to as Tamil Eelam, which would comprise the North and East of the country.

Throughout the 1980s, various Tamil rebel groups engaged in attacks against the Colombo government and its security apparatus. However, the situation worsened on that island because of the British mindset of New Delhi, which made a number of attempts to intervene in the violent Sri Lankan situation. Besides helping the Tamils to get armed training and intelligence, New Delhi, under late-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, deployed around 50,000 Indian peacekeepers (IPKF) in Tamil areas in Sri Lanka to help ensure peace. In return, the Sri Lankan government agreed to devolve power to the North and East through the creation of autonomous provincial councils.

Neither Colombo nor the Tamil militants were sincere about the deal; both were looking at the Indian troops as the barriers against their independent state. The failure of the Indian intervention led to more deaths and the assassination of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, and India’s Rajiv Gandhi, among many other high-level Sri Lankan officials, by the terrorist Tamil Tigers.

London: Break Up India into 100 Hong Kongs 

But, the British were in the middle of all this. Besides the fact that the LTTE was headquartered in London, and raising most of its illegitimate funds from Britain and its former colonies in Australia, South Africa, and Canada, within ten days of Gandhi’s death, Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, who would be assassinated by the LTTE in May 1993, forced the hasty departure from Sri Lanka of British High Commissioner David Gladstone. The charge was that Gladstone, a descendant of the Victorian-age Prime Minister William Gladstone, was interfering in local election politics. But he had also been criticized earlier for allegedly meeting with known drug traffickers in Sri Lanka. Gladstone, who had previously spent years in the Middle East, was a known British intelligence link to the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, which was involved in training both the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and the LTTE.

Britain’s continuing intent to break up India was also expressed openly in this political context. On May 26, 1991, only five days after the British-controlled LTTE-led assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the Times of London, the premier voice for the British Foreign Office, put forward this view in an editorial entitled “Home Truths”: “There are so many lessons to be learnt from sorrowing India, and most are being muttered too politely. The over-huge federation of almost 900 million people spreads across too many languages, cultures, religions, and castes. It has three times as many often incompatible and thus resentful people as the Soviet Union, which now faces the same bloody strains and ignored solutions as India. . . .

“The way forward for India, as for the Soviet Union, will be to say a great prize can go to any States and sub-States that maintain order without murders and riots. They should be allowed to disregard Delhi’s corrupt licensing restrictions, run their own economic policies, and bring in as much foreign investment and as many free-market principles as they like. Maybe India’s richest course from the beginning would have been to split into 100 Hong Kongs.

 

SOURCE: Countercurrents.org

9/11 and Mumabi Attacks were “Inside” Jobs (Part 1)

Pakistan’s former ISI Chief General Hamid Gul talks to ALEX JONES

Alex Jones: Well, ladies & gentlemen, out of the gates, we have Gen. Hamid Gul, and of course he was the head of Pakistani intelligence ISI back in the 1980’s, he went on CNN on one of their international programs and talked about the fact that he believed 9/11 was an inside job, and that the Mumbai attacks, formerly Bombay, were also an inside job.

Mumbai Attacks, an inside job

As you know, we have detailed that that was a False Flag attack, carried out by western intelligence, clearly, in India, as a pretext to start World War III between the two nations. There were also calls, the Pakistani government said were officially made, confirmed with the phone records, from the Indian Foreign Ministry, saying “we are going to attack you”, attempting to trick the Pakistanis into launching some type of attack, and that almost happened.

So, for the next thirty minutes I’m very honored to be joined by Gen. Hamid Gul, and General, joining us from Pakistan, thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Hamid Gul: You are welcome.

Alex Jones: Uh, just out of the gates, I was told by your son that you were not happy with the CNN interview, that they edited you. So, you’ve got the floor, sir. We’re not going to edit you. You are live, so tell the world what is really going on.

Hamid Gul: Well, at the moment, we have to look at this human — great human tragedy that took place in Bombay. I sympathize with India; they’ve been rocked very badly. And their response was a bit nervous. They want to go to war with Pakistan if Pakistan does not behave or does not hand over whoever they want from us. They have given a list of people.

But I think that there has been a long record of the Indians accusing Pakistan whenever something like this happens, and in the past they have turned out to be every time wrong. Of course Pakistan is willing to cooperate. And I think that is a very good position that President Zardari has taken, that “you provide the evidence and we will try them out; we will arrest them we will put them to trial, and you can come and watch, see, and let the international cameras come and see. And there shall be a transparent, open trial, and if that does not satisfy you, then what else will?”

So, this is the situation where we stand today: there is an ominous tack from India, and America seems to be partly patting them on the back, and asking Pakistan to do whatever India is demanding. Now this is an unfair position, because India is not like America. America demanded from Pakistan back in — after 9/11 to cooperate and hand over anybody that Pakistan could lay their hands on. Seven hundred or so people were caught in Pakistan, they were sent to Guantanamo Bay, to Baghram and to Kandahar jail. And nothing came out — Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was the only one who was tried in that case: all others have been let off.

So, to get innocent people like that, just because you accuse them, and you don’t even provide the evidence, you pick them up and shove them in jails, this is not on [misses ]. I think that this belittles the values that particularly democracies uphold, and they talk so much about. And so I think that my son-in-law putted it good enough, and today Pakistan backed down on some of the defunct organizations — in fact these were banned in the year 2002, immediately after 9/11, but there could be some maverick elements among them who would still — I won’t rule out, could carry out uhhh [bumper music begins in background]— in — uh, on their own or in conjunction with some other forces ["partic"??] that kind of atrocities. But we have to wait and see, how it goes.

Alex Jones: OK, Mr. — uh, Mr. Gul, General Hamid Gul, please stay with us. We’re gonna break and come back in a long segment, uh, plenty of time for you to break down what’s going on, the serious tensions, uh being, un being risen due to what happened a few weeks ago in India. Please stay with us.

Alex Jones: Reading from Wikipedia, “General Hamid Gul, served as director general of Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence, ISI, during ‘87-’89, mainly in the time when Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister of Pakistan. He was instrumental in the anti-Soviet support of the mujahideen in the Afghan War, ‘79 to ‘89, a pivotal time during the Cold War, and the estab — ” and it goes on. And we have him on line with us. We of course yesterday played the CNN, uh, TV interview that he did. This is live, and is not edited. Going back to him in Pakistan we’ve tried three different lines, this is the best one we have, we apologize our audio is not very loud to him, not very audible, and his back to us is very, very broken up. But we nevertheless have him joining us, we’re very thankful.

9/11 too, was an inside job, says the General & explains, how!

Uh, sir, continuing, on the CNN program, at least what they edited you to say, you talked about 9/11, the evidence being that nine eleven was an inside job, and the attacks in Bombay, now Mumbai, of a few weeks ago, that the evidence was, it was an inside job. Can you go over the evidence that you believe that these were
False Flag events, sir, and why these False Flag events are being staged.

Hamid Gul: Are you talking about 9/11?

Alex Jones: Yes, sir.

Hamid Gul: Well, I have my own reasons, you know, Rod Nordland was the CNN reporter here, I think he was based in Islamabad at that time, and he came to me immediately after 9/11, and his version that, uh, that I put out, it was given to the Newsweek, and unfortunately it was blocked, but it appeared on the internet, on the website of the Newsweek. And you can see it, I think it is dated 16th or 17th of September, 2001. [Note: the article is Prejudice In Pakistan: Why Is Islamabad Reluctant To Pressure Neighboring Afghanistan Into Turning Over Osama Bin Laden?, by Rod Nordland, dated 9/14/2001].

And in that I had said the same thing, and I still maintain that that’s my position. I have ["seven"??] reasons for it:

a. that 9/11 took place on the American soil, not a single person has been caught inside America, even though for doing such a job I think a huge amount of logistic support is required in the area where such operation is carried out.

b. Secondly, the air traffic control, when they saw the four aircraft were changing direction — going from east coast to west coast where they were headed, they started traveling in different directions. And it is quite amazing that for a very long period of time the air traffic control did not report this, nor did the US Air Force act in time. If, er, one were to calculate from the first flight, when it took off from Logan, till the first aircraft, and the solitary aircraft that took off was an F16 that took off from Langley, which is CIA headquarters, instead of one of the operational bases. So many of them are available in that area. And then a single aircraft never takes off, because we have been told that whenever the aircraft scramble they scramble in twos. And the time that it took was enormous. It took a hundred and twelve minutes! A hundred twelve minutes is a very long time in which to react. Was the US Air Force sleeping? And if it was sleeping, which heads will roll?

c. Second [NB: his third point] it was a huge intelligence failure, and no heads have been rolled, nobody has been taken to task, not a single person has resigned for this.

d. Thirdly, the air traffic control should have been rehashed, they should have been turned inside out, but nothing of the sort happened.

e. And finally, how come this is a coincidence that all transponders did not work, and it is not possible — and the direction is changed and it is not noticed?

f. Secondly, the US Air Force has the ability, because in the past whenever a plane has been hijacked, the record is that within seven minutes the US aircraft has been on the wing of the hijacked aircraft. In this case it — uh, it did not happen. The US alert system is so high, and it is so sophisticated, that if a missile were to take off from Moscow, and were to head toward New York, it takes about eighty minutes. And the US Air Force, and the missile systems, is supposed to intercept it within nine minutes — that means only Atlantic: around the Pacific it must stop that missile from coming in.

The system is in place, but it didn’t work, and nobody tried to question this.

g. Lastly, no inquiry has so far been held formally into the incident, and the whole world has been turned upside down, so many people have been killed, the American economy is going into a meltdown, and everything is gone wrong with the world, and yet no formal inquiry has been ordered by the US government. So I really don’t know. There are so many questions which hang in the balance.

h. And then to top it all, they say that [Obama Hamodu??(Hani Hanjour)] took the training by light aircraft in the army for six months, he could have maneuvered a jumbo 745 — uh, 757 from a height where it was traveling — that height was 9,000, and it came within seconds to a height of 1000, and then went straight into its target. Now this is not possible for a person who has been trained on a light aircraft to be able to do this.

Alex Jones: Yes, sir.

Hamid Gul: And there is no mention of the second aircraft, and so there are a number of things which remain unanswered.

Alex Jones: Yes, sir.

Hamid Gul: Whenever the journalists come, and visit me here, and I ask them these questions, that “why haven’t you taken the answers about this?”, and they say that “Patriotic Act comes in the way”, and we are not supposed to ask that question”.

Alex Jones: General — we are talking to General Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistani ISI, during the key period of fighting the Russians, he was also, before he was the head of ISI, one of the chiefs according to our media, running operations against the Russians. And of course working with the United States closely, as well as the Saudi Arabians, and the British. Y’know, if that’s incorrect, correct me.

And staging 9/11 has its motives

Uh, General Gul, what are the motives? We have the PNAC, with Dick Cheney saying we need a Pearl Harbor event, we have 44,000 US troops massing in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the days before 9/11, we have Bush on September 10, Newsweek reported ordering the launch of attacks the next week, we have, of course, the buildings being blown up with explosives, and all of the witnesses to that, now the government admits that Building 7 did fall in freefall, was not hit by a plane — specifically, sir, motives. Why would the Military Industrial Complex controlling the United States, why would they stage a 9/11 attack?

Hamid Gul: Well, I think there’s also the Cold War, when the — Reaganomics it was known as, the inflation was very high, and, domestic issues had to be addressed, but, uh, Bill Clinton, [two and hammose??] they really amassed a lot of money, American economy went booming, and he left a lot of money, and the — hard boys, Cold Warriors, when they came in they — they found that the situation was ready, they had money and they had resources, and they looked upon the conquest of the world, for which there was an opportunity window.

The Muslim world was lying prostrate, Russia was not still picking up from the — it’s foreign position, China was not ready yet, and therefore they looked upon it as an opportunity to go and do the [forming??]. And in this, I am a soldier, and I know that there has to be a single aim, but they mixed up the aims and they have botched up everything. First they said that they would go into such specific areas where there was no US presence before, as — such as the western Asia and South Asia — South Asia, where there was no American [???] present, and they wanted it there.

They had to keep the Chinese off from getting into the Middle East, they had to lay their hands on the energy tap of the world, which presently lies in the Middle East, but in future it will be in Central Asia, and so Afghanistan is the gateway to Central Asia, and finally to suppress any resistance, particularly which could threaten the state of Israel.

Now that is where they, instead of pursuing the American objectives, they started pursuing the Israeli objectives, and that is where they went wrong. You have to pick out a single aim, that is the first principle of war, and I don’t know why the generals and the politicians of America, they could be so naïve and so ignorant, that they started mixing aims, and they went into this war, without a buildup, without particular preparation, and without the American support behind them.

Because if they had gone to war, and asked for the support of the American people, they would never given them their support. So they had to create a pretext, and this was the pretext that they created.

Alex Jones: General, we’re gonna break in a second, and come back for the final segment. I’m hoping I can get you to stay a little longer, because I want you to speak unedited to the American people and the people of the world. I want to shift gears into Mumbai, what happened in India. Clearly the evidence of even the Indian intelligence chief, as you know, was saying that the Indian government was staging terror attacks on the train, an army captain was caught doing that and arrested, the chief of anti-terror was threatened, he was killed that day when it started in Mumbai, now they have caught an anti-terror police officer giving cell phones to the supposed terrorist that they’re saying came from Pakistan, we know the West is deeply in bed with some of the blocks of the former mujahideen, uh, can you speak to that?

General?

Hamid Gul: Can you hear me — I can’t hear you properly, can you hear me all right?

Alex Jones: Yes, sir, I can hear you. When we come back, we will s  — we will speak to what happened in India. Did you hear that?

Hamid Gul: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Alex Jones: Good. Why they are staging terror attacks there, the evidence of False Flag/Inside Job in India. So when we return after this quick break [music begins] with the former head of Pakistani intelligence, uh, General Hamid Gul, joining us from Pakistan. I am coming to you from Austin, Texas, hence the phone troubles. We will work on those, sir, during the break. My websites of course are InfoWars.com and PrisonPlanet.com.

Stay with us, we’ll be right back with this exclusive interview.

[break]

[bumper music: Leonard Cohen —
Everybody knows the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows — the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost

Contd…

General Hamid Gul former Chief ISI talks to Alex Jones (Part 2)

Pakistan’s former ISI Chief General Hamid Gul talks to ALEX JONES

Alex Jones: We are back live. It is Dec. 9th, 2008. Gen. Hamid Gul, one of the most famous members of the — and commanders of Pakistani intelligence, who worked in — with the United States in the whole operation against the Russians — was the commander of those operations — is our guest, with us graciously until forty after.

Anti terrorist force chief, who digged out the hand of certain police and the army officers in different terrorist activities, is killed

Uh, General, uh, not wasting any more time, I listed earlier the fact that Indian intelligence captains in the army have been caught in India staging bombings. That’s Indian news. Uh, that Indian intelligence and police have been caught giving cell phones to the supposed shooters. The police stood down, and only the anti-terror commanders that had said that India was staging terror, they were killed in the initiation of the attacks in Mumbai. That’s some of the evidence of Mumbai being an inside job. Namely, why do you believe Mumbai is a staged event two weeks ago, (A), and (B), what is the motive?

Hamid Gul: Well, the motive is very simple, that, uh, Americans want India to come on board with them in their War Against Terror, especially when they run out of troops in Afghanistan. The NATO allies are pulling out, they are dragging their feet, they are not prepared to fight there, but they want to make it an Indian cause, and they want nearly 150,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Principal Motive of this being an inside Job is to denuclearize Pakistan

That is one reason where there is an American motive. There is an Israeli motive, which is similar, that the Americans should not pull out of

Afghanistan just because they are short of troops, so they must have more troops there. Because if they go away without denuclearizing Pakistan, the state of Israel will remain under perpetual danger. So they have an innate fear that Americans will lose heart and pull out of this region, they’re already going out of Iraq. And if they were to go out of Afghanistan, Israel — this will be an unfinished agenda, and Israel will be at the losing end.

So, the NeoCons and the Zionists, they together want to hatch a conspiracy so that Obama gets trapped into a situation where for next four years he keep on sorting out this embroglio.

As far as the ability is concerned, which is the other element, can you imagine that people traveling from Karachi in two rickety boats, they can travel all the way to Bombay and then go into action immediately and fight a battle for seventy-two hours, and there are just ten of them, and in each group there were two? This is impossible. They were carrying so much of munitions with them, and that, uh, that munition lasted till fighting withstood the — crack troops of India for so long.

And you know that in Nariman House, the five Jewish hostages, they were killed by the Indian commandos. They were not killed by these people. So why would the Indian commandos kill them? And Israelis suppressed this information. It initially came out in one of the Indian dail — eh, Israeli dailies, but then it was suppressed.

So if you go by the record of the Indian accusations against Pakistan, in the past ten years, uh, 2001 on December 13, there was an attack on the Indian Lok Sabha [lower house of Parliament], and they blamed Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba for it, but it turned out that these were Indian Kashmiris themselves, and because India is causing so much atrocities in Kashmir, therefore there’s a good reason for them that they would — carry out something like that.

Then the — again in 2006, there was the Samjhota Express case, in which 68 passengers, mostly Pakistanis were killed, and this train was stopped at an obscure railway station in Haryana, and then doors were locked and the train was set on fire, and again this was proclaimed that it was Pakistani Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, and they had done it because they wanted to derail the peace process. But, uh, Marshal Purohit, Shrikant Purohit has been caught in it, and there are other Indian officers who are, uh, or were his accomplices, and he has a big net worth — they — took the RDX from the Deolali depot, which is a military depot —

Alex Jones: the explosives —

Hamid Gul: so one can say there is a deep penetration of the militant Hindus in military and intelligence organizations in India.

Militant Hindus wish to derail the peace process between India and Pakistan

So in this case, why would they not do that, because they want to again derail this process, and when Obama says that he will mediate on Kashmir, and there is a Kashmiri [music begins] political movement picking up momentum, and in this situation he says that he would, uh, send, uh, Bill Clinton as the mediator. Obviously the militants in India do not want this to happen and they had to preempt it.

So, Pakistan doesn’t gain, Pakistani ISI doesn’t gain anything from it. The next beneficiary is either the militant Hindu —

Alex Jones: Stay there, sir, we have to break.

Hamid Gul: who have their eye on the next election —

Alex Jones: we have to break —

[break]

Alex Jones: Well, ladies and gentlemen, a rare interview, extremely enlightening. We’re talking to the former head of Pakistani intelligence, the ISI. I want to thank Paul Watson, who will be on the line. He’s gonna pop in with a question or two. I want to thank, uh, Simon over in the UK for getting us this number. Thank Aaron for staying up late last night to get the producing job done to get this interview right here on the GCN Radio Network. Uh, General, continuing with motive, I have the headline here, “Pakistan Asserts ‘Hoax’ War Call Was Real — Press Minister fingers Indian High Commission as source of reports that threatening call was fake”.

As you know this was in most of the Pakistani papers. The government has the caller ID and the phone records, that the threatening call, saying that India was going to attack within minutes of the terrorist attacks beginning in Mumbai a few weeks ago, this provocative call within minutes saying India was going to attack Pakistan, attempting to get Pakistan to move troops to the border and have a conflict, and the media saying possible war between the two thermonuclear powers was narrowly averted. Can you speak to that?

Hamid Gul: Yes, indeed. I think the Americans and the Indians both have been very responsible about it, because Condoleezza Rice’s statement in America and in India when she went and visited Delhi. They were very threatening towards Pakistan, and it was sort of a dictation that “you have to satisfy India”. Now this is amazing, that Pakistan has to satisfy India. On what score? Indians have still to come out with the evidence. And as far as this one man whom they have caught, who knows that this is not a bogey, and that this man was loitering around somewhere. There’re plenty of Pakistanis who crossed the border illegally or legally, and he could have been picked up, and he’s become the front man for singing on those stories.

Conventional war, limited war, within the nuclear environment is not possible in the subcontinent.

So one doesn’t really know. It’s too early to start threatening war against Pakistan because Pakistan is a nuclear country, and if they brandish their power, conventional power, then I can assure you that as a soldier I will say that conventional war, limited war, within the nuclear environment is not possible in the subcontinent.

And if it comes to an exchange of nuclear weapons, then this becomes a Third World War. China cannot stay out. Russia will not stay out. Russia is already showing its belligerence towards the — America and Europe. And China of course is a very major economic power. They are a nuclear power, and if this thing happens in their back yard they will not accept it.

So this is a very dangerous situation. I think it is playing with the fire. So the whole thing is getting — could get out of hand. It is again, as I told you that the part of the unfinished agenda that the NeoCons had in their mind. And they think back now, “well, we carry it out, even though the Americans wanted a change.”

But let’s look at what change means. I mean Obama has not too very clearly enunciated what change would be. But one can assume that change means focusing on the domestic issues. There is an economic meltdown, the car industry is going sick, and many other things are happening inside America, the social welfare and the Medicare extra trust.

So as in all these things, there is a need for the new administration to focus entirely on the domestic issues —

Alex Jones: well, General —

Hamid Gul: and for that it will have to disengage externally.

Alex Jones: General — as you know, in the last three months, before Obama was even elected, he said Pakistan and Afghanistan would be his main focus. The strikes inside Pakistan — it’s clear that his change means what Zbigniew Brzezinski wants, shifting — uh, what the RAND Corporation has said they want, shifting the war out of the Middle East into Central Asia.

So I believe the change is gonna be these provocations. Look at the NeoCons, with Israeli and NATO-backed forces launching the sneak attack on the Russian held South Ossetia on 8/8/8. So it appears they are trying to launch a major — uh, larger than a theater war, as the RAND Corporation said a month ago, they want a major new war.

Hamid Gul: Yes, indeed you’re right, because this is an old theory, [weet ul josaperry??] theory, first put out by MacKinder and then by Mahan, who was an admiral in the US Navy, that this is the rimland, you’ve got to first control the rimland in Asia before you can strike in the heartland of Asia. So this heartland/rimland thing, I think it tricked into the story —

Alex Jones: geopolitical

Hamid Gul: it tricked into the picture that, if they have a conflict in the rimland, and they can control it, then it becomes so much easier to go into the heartland.

War on Terror is brinkmanship

This is really asking too much when America is really not in a very healthy economic condition. So I think that this is brinkmanship of the highest order, and if they enlarge the area of conflict in this war against terrorism, and if they prolong the period of conflict, then America will definitely lose.

Alex Jones: General —

Hamid Gul: Because I know that when you are fighting the [illevel of??] fighters, and then the area of conflict is enlarged, let’s say you extend it into the tribal areas of Pakistan, or it is pushed into Kashmir as well, so the [canna??] can be monitored and watched quite easily, then the area will become larger and the US simply does not have the troops. And there is not a moral cause strong enough for the American people to be mobilized behind it.

Alex Jones: So that’s why they staged

Hamid Gul: So I don’t know — this is pure madness to be thinking of such things at this time.

Alex Jones: So that’s why they need proxies like India to destabilize the region for the encirclement of Russia, and of course China, blocking those pipelines.

Now, sir, in the time we’ve got left, you worked with the United States and Saudi Arabia, with Israel, or at least Pakistan did, fighting the Russian invasion. Uh, of course, if these reports are incorrect, correct me, but you were one of the main commanders helping the mujahideen. You were the head of Pakistani intelligence right at the time you had the victory against the Russians.

It is reported here that al-Qaeda was founded by the new Secretary of Defense Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski, uh, or, or that they were the Wahabist fighting corps, and that they are now being used to try to bring down the Pakistani government and to try to stage attacks inside India. So can you speak with your particular expertise to that, and then, also the fact that they are now trying to list you as a terrorist, and then thirdly, did you ever meet Osama bin Laden? Is Osama bin Laden dead many years ago of kidney failure, as Benazir Bhutto said?

Hamid Gul: Well, uh, I was actually in charge of operations against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Americans were providing the logistic support, and the Saudis were sharing one half of the budget for this war. And it was a cheap war because in all — there was uh ten years that we were fighting the Russians, we spent not more than five billion dollars out of the American exchequers. So it was a very cheap war for the Americans to have defeated the Russians and rid the whole of the West of this Red Menace that they used to call.

So, at that time, Osama bin Laden and his, uh colleagues, they were admired and romanticised by the CIA operators. I had never met him then. I had nothing to do with him, because I was only busy training the Afghans. We had to win a war, we had a task on our hands, it was a very big task, and we were so occupied with the training only the Afghans. No other nation was trained by the ISI. I can vouch on that. Not a single person, not even a Pakistani was trained by them.

Osama bin Laden was — you know, I — had never met him, but to the — these people used to come and talk glowingly about him. I met Osama bin Laden after my retirement from the army, in 1993 December in Khartoum, and then again in year, uh, 1994 November when I was went — I was there invited by a Hassan bin-Turabi to an international conference, and during that conference, Osama invited us to a banquet. And it was all in an open place, and, uh, where there were many other people present. I, uh, he struck me as a pretty normal human being, not the bloodthirsty animal that he is being presented by the CIA now.

At that time no conversation between him and me took place. I don’t know whether he’s living or dead. But so far Ayman — Ayman al-Zawahiri has been given — eh, representing him in various interviews of Osama that have been put out.

So one doesn’t really know. But the last interview, which was a voice interview, in that the CIA and the other US intelligence agencies authenticated that it was Osama’s voice. So one doesn’t really know whether he is living or dead.

Alex Jones: Well, sir —

Hamid Gul: But even if he is not living, he is a symbol. Al-Qaeda is a franchise. Whoever created that, and for whatever reason they created, I think it wasn’t there until 1996 when he was lodged in Khartoum. Later on he was —

Alex Jones: General —

Hamid Gul: — invited by [later Afghan President] Burhanuddin Rabbani, who is now part of the Northern Alliance in Kabul, and he came over and he set up his headquarters in a place called Tora Bora near Jalalabad. But, uhhh, that’s where one started hearing of al-Qaeda and the activities

Alex Jones: Yes.

Hamid Gul: of Osama bin-Laden.

Alex Jones: General —

Hamid Gul: And also the fact that his commander was responsible for bringing the “Blackhawk down” in the fierce operation in Mogadishu where an American aircraft was brought down by a Stinger, which had probably been supplied in Afghanistan to Afghan mujahideen.

Alex Jones: OK, General —

Hamid Gul: Yes —

Contd…

General Hamid Gul, former ISI Chief talks to Alex Jones (Part 3)

Pakistan’s former ISI Chief General Hamid Gul talks to ALEX JONES

Alex Jones: General, I need to — in the time left here because we’ve only got a few minutes left with you here — uh, maybe five minutes and then we’re going to break and I don’t want to keep you any longer — we can perhaps have you back in the future.

Specifically, though, we know his CIA control name was Tim Osman, we know he was the bagman for a lot of the Saudi money and the Israeli money going in, I know that was compartmentalized and separate from Pakistani intelligence, from what I’ve read from different perspectives and US intelligence.

So — so I believe you. My whole point here is — is that al-Qaeda — al-CIAda didn’t carry out the attacks of 9/11 as you yourself have said. His first interview said that he didn’t do it. Then they produced these computer-morphed videos and fake audios that have been checked. And the Intel Center, headed up by Rumsfeld’s former lieutenant, the private group was caught putting the same video layer in with the original video. So it’s been proven that they’re creating these fake videos.

Hamid Gul: There is no doubt about it, that this video which was put out in November by George Bush and — and said this was Osama bin-Laden and was high cheekboned like the mongoloid features, he wasn’t as tall as Osama bin-Laden was. And one could clearly make out that this was doctored, and had been created on purpose to justify the attack on Afghanistan.

I think there are many things which are going wrong are being done on the behest of the government by the CIA which are not correct. The CIA used to be good when they were working with us. But I don’t know what happened thereafter. I think it was overarching ambition.

Alex Jones: Well, sir —

Hamid Gul: — or it is the fear that America will lose it’s clout. Whatever is the reason. Or perhaps it is the Israeli fear that they are surrounded by a sea of hostile enemies, who could, if the Americans don’t, uh, now at this point in time, the don’t deliver a fatal blow to all their enemies, then Israel will have a short shelf life, otherwise also because it is an artificial state, that they would, uh, probably not exist, or they would —

Palestine Issue never touched by US because of Israel

Alex Jones: General —

Hamid Gul: — have — fi —

Alex Jones: General: as you know, in the time we have left, they have over four hundred nukes, they have total dominance, no one could attack them with nukes, they have the anti-missile defense systems. I believe it’s a red herring that they want to start World War III, uh, for their “safety”. It’s World War III that will destroy Israel.

Hamid Gul: Yes, indeed, and I think this 2006 September experience, I think, if it is any indicator for them, when they —

Alex Jones: Hezbollah —

Hamid Gul: — went into southern Lebanon and they got such a buffeting at the hands of — of Hezbollah, I think they’ll not do something like that, because it would mean annihilation of Israel. And in any case Palestinian question is a very thorny question, and I do not know why the US administration is not addressing it differently —

Alex Jones: OK

Hamid Gul: — instead of these two different states there should be one Abrahamic state of Palestine.

Alex Jones: General!

Hamid Gul: Because all of the three religions which claim that they are divine religions they have been origined in Palestine, and I think that something new has been — has to be thought about.

Alex Jones: All right —

Hamid Gul: But unfortunately Bush administration in its very [?????????] it said that they would sort out this Palestinian issue by creating two states. After eight years we have gotten nowhere at all!

Alex Jones: All right General, we’re almost out of time, two final questions, and I’m gonna let you go, and you can — any websites, any books, any materials you’d like to point people at to see your side of the story, we’d love to see it. Two questions, let me give ‘em both to you and then answer them, please:

#1 — why are they trying to, now, list you as a terrorist, (A), when they admittedly worked with you (B) why do they always betray people like Saddam who they worked with and set up.

So (A) why are they trying to set you up, and (B) do you see the West staging more terror?

Hamid Gul: Yes, of — I think they are simply afraid of me because I worked with them, I understand them, I can measure them up and I talk loudly about it, I mak — mince no words, I pil — pull no punches, and they are afraid that I preempt whatever scheming they do. And I am — loud-voiced, there is no doubt about it. And I speak the truth, they are trying to frame me, there is no truth in it. If they had anything about me when I applied for a renewal of my VISA to America why did they not give it to me? Because if they have something, they are looking around for terrorists, while this terrorist wants to come over and visit America, nab me, interrogate me, take me to bar, take me to court, do whatever you like. It only shows that they have a mala fide.

As far as Saddam is concerned, it is a habit, it is a very bad habit. They cultivate friends who become, like Pervez Musharraf, dictators, and then they make use of them, and then they turn upon them and then infect [?] the nation because of their policies.

And, what was the last part of your question?

Alex Jones: All right, I’m gonna do a s —

Hamid Gul: was it in India/Pakistan relations?

Alex Jones: Sir, hold on one moment, General. John —

Hamid Gul: Ju —

Alex Jones: Ge — hold on, General — uh, General, hold on one moment because we’ve only got a few minutes left. John, skip this network break. For stations: I’m skipping, ’cause I’me gonna let him go in three minutes. I don’t want to hold him any longer, but I’m skipping this break, because this is too newsworthy.

Yes sir, I’d like you to answer that question, uh, about what do you think, knowing them, working with the globalists, the New World Order, in the past, when it was still America, before we were totally dominated, what do you think their next moves are probably — uh, most probable, (A).

False Mujahideen created to destabilize Pakistan

And then, finally, the attacks against the government in Pakistan, uh, using Muslim fronts. Does that appear to be the West trying to destabilize your government? They keep trying to kill the government, they killed Bhutto, they keep bombing government buildings, they keep bombing hotels, it appears the West is using false mujahideen to try to overthrow Pakistan.

Hamid Gul: No, Benazir was not killed by any of the terrorists. She was removed by the Americans, because she had violated her agreement, because they wanted to keep Pervez Musharraf there, and he slapped another [mustel???] on Pakistan. So she had become rebellious, and such a person, who is a popular leader of a third world country, the head of the largest political party, a woman whom they could not attack as fundamentalist because she was so westernized, therefore it was very important for them to remove her, because they have a mischievous plan which they want to put through.

So, they have installed instead Mr. Zardari, whom they can blackmail very easily, but they have allowed him to keep the powers of a dictator. And in fact he’s the one who’s calling all the shots in Pakistan, so as Pakistan is already completely destabilized politically.

Our po — um, uh be — judicial institution simply does not exist, because the judicial crisis recently dethroned Chief Justice of Pakistan —

Alex Jones: Yes — who is staging the terror attacks, because they’re clearly aimed at the government, or is that the government staging them as a pretext to crack down —

Neocons want to punish Pakistan coz Pak Army and ISI are a hindrance to ‘their’ war on terror

Hamid Gul: No, no, no — this is because it — [Lombostit???] was attacked, and I think that George Bush addressed his nation on radio immediately after that, said “this was part of our plan in War Against Terrorism”, because Pakistan army and Inter Services Intelligence were not fully cooperating, and because they did not consider it was their war, therefore they created this situation, where the terrorists out of sheer revenge — this is called Pakhtunwali. This is a tradition which has nothing to do with Islam. It is the Afghans holding to this tradition long before they became Muslim, and they are still carrying it on. When you take action against an Afghan, kill his daughter or his wife or his sister, he will take revenge no doubt what happens. He does not behave like a Muslim, or any other entity.

So this was a thing which was created. And of course Pakistan is now in a very difficult position. We only have a military which can control the institutions. And we have an ISI, but the Americans are almost every day attacking the ISI and attacking the military, saying this is not under the control of the political parties.

Alex Jones: Sir —

Hamid Gul: political powers.

Alex Jones: Sir — General —

Hamid Gul: But what is political power, when Parliament is sinecure? It does not work, it has no authority at all.

Alex Jones: General, going back to 9/11, Pakistani papers, BBC reported, New York Times reported, $100,000 was reportedly wired by Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, the head of Pakistani intelligence to the lead hijacker, who we know was a US government decoy, trained at US bases, that’s Newsweek, AP, Reuters. General Mahmood Ahmed, do you believe he was really controlled by the CIA, did he wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta?

Hamid Gul: Not at all. Mahmood is a friend of mine. I met him very recently in Lahore, and he categorically denies this. I think this is all disinformation, which has been adopted as a very sophisticated intelligence art.

In 5000 years nobody ever won a war in Afghanistan & Pashtunwali is a code of even before Islam

Alex Jones: So, just to be clear, we’re gonna let you go, we’re very thankful and respectful of your time, uh, you believe that the bombings and shootings and terror attacks that we’ve seen in the last few months in Pakistan are because the Predator drones and helicopters are killing weddings — you always notice it’s a wedding — that’s meant to stir up the people there, because it kills whole families, it’s a huge insult, and then of course they blow up NATO cars, of course they then attack the government. Is that what you’re saying?

Hamid Gul: It is retaliatory, and they will retaliate. I can tell you that Afghanistan nation is a fact that over 5,000 years, nobody has won against them, and I think that Americans cannot win, unless American intention is to stir up a Third World War at this point I think there’s no point in staying in Afghanistan. You should negotiate with the opposition. This is a national resistance now. It is no longer Taleban. Specific, it is the Afghan nation.

I approve of their position. They are resisting ferociously.

Alex Jones: General, how long can the Mayor of Kabul stay in power, and isn’t this really just about the West controlling the opium?

Hamid Gul: Well, he’s the puppet of Kabul, and he will not stay very long. I can assure you that, eh, he’s already started showing signs of nervousness. He wants to reach out to the Taleban, but Taleban won’t — eh, even throw a crumb at him. I can assure you the Taleban, or, any other resistance fighters, they will have nothing to do with —

Alex Jones: Well, Reuters is reporting, as you know, every major city is now encircled, and only a few cities are controlled by the US force.

Hamid Gul: I — I have no idea, but I think the Right is started coming out, like Robert Kagan’s article in the Washington Post on December 2nd, it, eh, echoes what is the [CFR] World At Risk Report. Uh, it is similar. They are focusing on Pakistan, because Pakistan’s nuclear capability is undigestible by State of Israel, and by India, therefore there is —

Alex Jones: All right —

Hamid Gul: every possibility that Pakistan becomes a target.

Alex Jones: In closing — in closing, and this is it, and we appreciate all your time — this hour’s over, two minutes, sir, I know you can’t predict the future, but do you see them staging a nuke attack? Do you see them staging more terror attacks? Do you see India sneak attacking? Uh, do you see a more radical government coming in after the staged events? What do you see happening, bad case scenario?

Hamid Gul: No, Indians are not so stupid. I think they are seeing thru the game, and these far Leftist parties, that is the Left Front, they are called, the Communist party of India, are very strong. India is slowly turning t’the world of its own problems. The Shine India, Shining India, Feel-good India, this is all make believe. I can tell you that this is a propaganda hype. I can tell you that India is in a miserable state. Their economy is dwindling. And four hundred millions are living on less that one dollar a day.

And this is beginning to have an effect because last year alone 108,000 farmers in India committed suicide. And this will not go on. Out of 608 districts in India, 231 are already in turmoil, and mostly under the control of Maoists and the Bhakti-lite.

Alex Jones: So they are collapsing?

Hamid Gul: Yes. So India itself has lots of problems of their own.

Alex Jones: You’re right. The GMO cotton made ‘em commit suicide, cause it destroyed their lives.

Well, General, General Hamid Gul, thank you so much for joining us. Any websites, any books, any materials you think people should read to learn more?

Hamid Gul: Thank you.

Alex Jones: Uh, any websites, any books, any materials you think people should read to learn more?

Hamid Gul: Oh, I don’t have a website, unfortunately, but I think you have a website. You can read all my talk.

Alex Jones: Absolutely. We’ll post the audio and a transcript at InfoWars.com. Let me say bye to you, as this hour ends, as we go to break, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be back with the second hour. Again I want to thank Gen. Hamid Gul. Uh, an amazing exclusive, folks, unedited live.

Source:

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the source and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and the source. WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Religion & violence (Part 2)

`

 

by Dr. Syed Ehtisham

Source

Europeans swooped down on the East, as well the Americas and found rich pickings everywhere. The idea of spreading Christianity was the inevitable excuse, but that did not keep them from using all kinds of measures and subterfuges, immoral in their own books, to subjugate the natives.

The English and other immigrants – the economic, religious, and political refugees, escaping starvation, discrimination and destitution in their home countries, were welcomed by the American natives, given shelter and food, and paid the debt back by gifting small pox infested blankets to their hosts[i].

Power and dominance lend legitimacy. No one talks about the genocide perpetrated by the English. It barely merits a footnote in history.

Europeans captured vast colonies and exploited the resources for their own ruling class. Remember, even at the height of their power, the ordinary British citizen often went without a job, food shelter or protection under the law. Debtor’s jails were bursting at the seams. Malnutrition was common and child labor universal. Twelve-hour days, six and a half days a week, was the norm. Bonded labor and serfdom were accepted facts of life; the lord of the manor owned the peasants body and soul, often taking his pleasure in female (and male) bodies. Prostitution was rife; physical punishment, beatings were permissible[ii].

The British were, and are, past masters at the art of divide and rule. They had honed their skill during European wars, and patronized Hindus and Muslims in turn. After the crusades, in which the British had played a leading role too, it was they who used the religious divide as an instrument of policy. They also promoted Shia-Sunni conflict[iii].

They had left festering wounds behind.  Chronic infections metamorphose into cancer. Kashmir and Arab-Israeli conflicts no longer need promotion and have spawned generations of “terrorists”[iv].

Post WWII, with the Empire gone they passed on the “torch” to the USA.

‘Religion’ & Violence (Part 3)

 

Pakistan’s Drift Towards Theoocracy

by Dr. Syed Ehtisham

         One has to consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (MGA) of Qadian, now in the Indian Punjab, in the context of the prevailing conditions in India in mid and late 18^th CE. Islam was under siege by Christian missionaries and Hindu revivalists. Punjab, which had been designated a battlefield by all comers and their Indian foes, had adopted a homogenous culture, in which mysticism and Sufism played a great part. In the census of 1881, men of religion had to run a vigorous campaign to persuade people to register as Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Moulvis, naturally, had to work the hardest, as Muslims had not recovered from the depredations visited on their faith and places of worship by Ranjit Singh-he had converted the Shahi mosque in Lahore into Royal stables.

          MGA was a learned man, and developed a thesis in defense of his religion. He developed a big following.

 He would not have merited even a footnote in history, if he had not had a ‘revelation’ that Jesus had not died on the cross, had in fact been rescued, helped to escape from Palestine and eventually arrived in Kashmir, and lived happily for a long time. It implied that he would appear again on earth. That was MGA himself, a Nabi, but not a Rasool – the former term denotes the status of one sent by god for guidance, renaissance as it were, the latter term the status of a messenger, with a new message.

         The ‘revelation’ denied the mainstream Islamic belief that Jesus had been lifted off the cross and replaced by a look alike. It also belied the Christian belief that he had died, and rose from the grave three days later.

         One rather remarkable tenet of the creed is armed Jihaad is not permitted, which suited the British just fine.

         He was greeted with a lot of ‘fatwas’, but continued to gain strength.

        MGA died in 1908, and was succeeded by a caliph, on whose death, MGA’s son Mirza Bashiruddin took over. This led to a split. One group accepted his teachings, but rejected the claim of “ Naboat”. They are called Lahori group. Both are called Ahmadis, after his last name.

        Like all small groups, they looked after each other, with missionary zeal.

       Jinnah nominated a member of the creed, Chaudhary Zafarullah Khan, as high court judge, to the Partition Council, and after independence, appointed him as Pakistan’s first foreign minister. Nobel Laureate Professor Abdus Salam had converted to the faith in his early life.

        The faith was, more or less, confined to the Punjab. I had not heard of it in post partition India, and was only vaguely made aware of them on arrival in Quetta. I was actually warned to brush off their advances, as they tried to entice students from the poorer sections of the population.

        Looking for a populist cause, and to gain a measure of legitimacy they had lost by opposing the creation of Pakistan, Islamists led by Maulana Maududi, started a violent campaign against them. The Punjab chief minister, Mian Mumtaz Daulatana, was in cahoots with Governor General Ghulam Muhammad, against PM Khwaja Nazimuddin, and saw in the disturbance an opportunity to destabilize the government. He kept the police from intervening. Riots exploded. Ghulam Muhammad declared martial law in Lahore, with Major General Azam Khan as ML administrator. Azam got the situation under control in twenty four hours.

       That gave the army the first taste of control over the civilians, from which the country has not recovered yet.

       The demand to declare Ahmadis ‘kafir’ faded, till in 1976, Zulfiqar Bhutto, in order to steal the thunder of the combined opposition of which Islamists were an important component, and who had derided him for drinking and womanizing, declared them non-Muslims, in addition to the ban on alcohol and change weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday.

       A lengthy enquiry, presided by CJ Munir and Justice Kayani followed. During the enquiry, Ulema of different sects could not agree on a definition of a Muslim.

       Islamist extremist bigots resurrect these anti-Ahmadiya and ant- Shia and anti-everything except anti-Wahhabi outrages, whenever they feel they need to revive their fortunes and revitalize their cadres.

Source: www.wichaar.com

“Obama’s Domino Theory”

The president sounds like he’s channeling Cheney or McCain — or a Cold War hawk afraid of international communism — when he talks about the war in Afghanistan.

Juan Cole

President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it this week is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting “al-Qaida” in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories.

Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble.

He acknowledged that we deserve a “straightforward answer” as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. “So let me be clear,” he said, “Al-Qaida and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. “And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban,” he said, “or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, “The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan,” and warned, “Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.”

This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the “Taliban” is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded “Taliban” only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or “killing” it.…

As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they “kill” it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public.

Obama’s dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the “killing” of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an “al-Qaida” victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president’s views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense.

Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington’s justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.”

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

_________

Source: http://www.salon.com

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Children of Darkness – Killing “Them”

Al-Qaeda – Who Else?

There is no proof, just circumstantial evidence, presumption… and we can`t think of anyone else, so: `al-Qaeda have launched several attacks`.

by David Edwards

On March 23, BBC online reported another bloody day in Iraq:

“It was the second bomb attack in Iraq on Monday, with an earlier explosion near the capital. Baghdad, killing at least eight people.

“The BBC’s Hugh Sykes, in Baghdad, says al-Qaeda have launched several attacks in Diyala since losing support in other parts of Iraq.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7959918.stm

The foe, naturally, was the global bad guy, “al-Qaeda”. Thirty years ago the BBC would have declared them “Communists” or “Marxists”. We wrote to the BBC’s “man in Baghdad” the same day:

Dear Hugh

Hope you’re well. A BBC online report today says:

“The BBC’s Hugh Sykes, in Baghdad, says al-Qaeda have launched several attacks in Diyala since losing support in other parts of Iraq.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7959918.stm

What is the evidence that al-Qaeda, rather than some other insurgent group, were behind the attacks, please?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Sykes replied the following day:

Hello David

No proof, but circumstantial evidence and reasonable presumption of AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] involvement – very much their modus operandum. Suicide attacks are their signature method, and this was a dramatic detonation suggesting a lot of explosive – again, very AQI.

And…who else would do this?

So, process of elimination, history of AQI attacks in Diyala etc.

And the logic of it Sunni Arab vs Iraqi Kurds. As a man in Jalawla told Reuters:

“Al-Qaida is targeting the Kurds because it believes that
we are involved in the political process and collaborating
with the Americans.”

Best wishes

Hugh

This was a speedy and amicable reply from Sykes. But we hesitate to call it serious journalism. “As a man in Jalawla told Reuters”! How to describe this level of evidence in response to a serious question on a matter of such importance?

Sykes wrote: “No proof, but circumstantial evidence and reasonable presumption of AQI involvement.”

And yet when we asked why the BBC had failed to report the use of banned weapons by US forces in their November 2004 assault on Falljuah, the BBC’s director of news, Helen Boaden, told us:

“We are committed to evidence-based journalism. We have not been able to establish that the US used banned chemical weapons and committed other atrocities against civilians in Falluja last November [2004]. Inquiries on the ground at the time and subsequently indicate that their use is unlikely to have occurred.” (Email forwarded by numerous Media Lens readers, July 13 onwards, 2005)

The BBC later accepted that such evidence did indeed exist.

Sykes also asked: “And…who else would do this?”

There is no proof, just circumstantial evidence, presumption… and we can’t think of anyone else, so: “al-Qaeda have launched several attacks”.

Sykes’s indifference to evidence is understandable. In a sense it is beside the point – enemies of the West are killing people, and enemies of the West are currently labelled “al-Qaeda”. It was ever thus. As Piero Gleijeses, professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, said of Guatemala in 1988:

“Just as the Indian was branded a savage beast to justify his exploitation, so those who sought social reform were branded communists to justify their persecution.” (Gleijeses, Politics and Culture in Guatemala, Michigan, 1988, p.392)

Sykes was simply stating a propaganda fact – the identity is defined by the action, not by the agent. Thirty second soundbites require Manichean propaganda: ‘We good, they bad.’

Venturing into the real world, we can speculate about, even investigate, the actual identities and motives of the suicide bombers.

On September 23, 2005, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington released a report that accused the US of “feeding the myth” of foreign fighters (i.e. al-Qaeda) in Iraq, who accounted for less than 10 per cent of a resistance then estimated at 30,000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/23/iraq.ewenmacaskill

In May 2007, the renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told Democracy Now!:

“I do know that within the last month, maybe four, four-and-a-half weeks ago, they [the Bush administration] made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, we go back to the al-Qaeda card, and we start talking about al-Qaeda. And the next thing you know, right after that, Bush went to the Southern Command — this was a month ago — and talked, mentioned al-Qaeda twenty-seven times in his speech…

“All of a sudden, the poor Iraqi Sunnis, I mean, they can’t do anything without al-Qaeda. It’s only al-Qaeda that’s dropping the bombs and causing mayhem. It’s not the Sunni and Shia insurgents or militias. And this policy just gets picked up [by the media], although there’s absolutely no empirical basis. Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple percent, and then they’re sort of leaderless in the sense that there’s no overall direction of the various foreign fighters. You could call them al-Qaeda. You can also call them jihadists and Salafists that want to die fighting the Americans or the occupiers in Iraq and they come across the border… there’s no attempt to suggest there’s any significant coordination of these groups by bin Laden or anybody else, and the press just goes gaga… It’s just amazing to me, you guys.” http://www.democracynow.org/2007/5/24/ seymour_hersh_u_s_indirectly_backed

Robert Pape, author of the book, Dying to Win: Why Suicide Terrorists Do It, wrote in 2006:

“Researching my book, which covered all 462 suicide bombings around the globe, I had colleagues scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and biographies of the Hizbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.

“What these suicide attackers – and their heirs today – shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation.” (Pape, ‘What we still don’t understand about Hizbollah,’ The Observer, August 6, 2006; http://www.guardian.co.uk /commentisfree/2006/aug/06/israel.syria

And so the answer to Sykes’s question: “And…who else would do this?”? Any number of people committed to “resisting a foreign occupation” for any number of political and religious reasons. How ugly, how obviously convenient, to lump all opposition together under the name of the West’s great bete noire, “al-Qaeda.”

That’s What Makes Us Different To Them

As we have noted before, journalists are highly evolved intellectual herd animals. They possess sophisticated sense organs capable of detecting minute changes in the propaganda environment. Commentators are currently well aware, for example, that the United States has declared a willingness to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan – the standard last resort when the costs of violence become so high that rational solutions are deemed preferable. No surprise, then, that the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting is able to perceive a level of complexity in that ruined country that so rarely features in reporting from Iraq:

“To add to the confusion we don’t even know who is our enemy and who is our ally. Taliban is a crude catch-all term which is of little help in Afghanistan’s immensely complex, fragmented politics of tribe, clan and region. These groupings judge how best to secure their position and shift their allegiances accordingly.” (Bunting, ‘Leaders have not shown the courage to explain what the war really means,’ The Guardian, March 23, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2009/mar/23/afghanistan-military-terrorism

Talking to the Taliban does not mean recognising their humanity, however. The BBC reported last month:

“The hospital at Camp Bastion, the UK’s main military base in Helmand, occasionally treats enemy forces that have been wounded.

“Ms Gibbons said treating them was no different to treating any other patient but added that medics needed to be more alert.

“‘At the end of the day he could have been a normal person,’ she said.

“‘The Geneva Convention requires us to give the same level of medical treatment as our forces.

“‘We probably wouldn’t get the same back but that’s what makes us different to them.’” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/ scotland/south_of_scotland/7912675.stm)

The BBC saw fit to publish this classic propaganda view of the enemy (no inverted commas required – they are the enemy of the state +and+ the BBC). Who would guess that Auntie Beeb is not Big Brother, but is ostensibly independent of state control?

The racist contempt is as deeply embedded as the reporting. Former BBC (now Al-Jazeera) reporter, Rageh Omaar, describes the BBC as “a white man’s club”. But there is much more to it than that, as Omaar explained to the Guardian in 2007:

“It’s the mentality. I’m in some ways guilty of this – I went to public school, I went to Oxford. I speak at a lot of schools with Somali kids and they say, ‘How do I become a journalist? We may be from the same community, but I don’t have your accent.’ So it’s a class thing rather than about being white necessarily. It’s much more subtle.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/2007/feb/15/broadcasting.bbc  

Writer is editor of the website http://www.medialens.org/

Contd…

Children of Darkness – Killing “them” (Part 2)

by David Edwards

   To be fair to the BBC, Rageh Omaar’s observation generalises: the whole of British journalism is a “white man’s club” dominated by the “class thing”. In March, media magnate Rupert Murdoch received the American Jewish Committee’s National Human Relations Award. The plaudits heaped on Murdoch recalled the words of the 4th century Buddhist poet, Aryasura:

“When virtue is given as a name to one devoid of virtue, it has a harsh and grating sound, as if it were contempt instead of praise.” (Aryasura, The Marvelous Companion, Dharma Publishing, 1983, p.127)

The man with so much influence over what the world knows and thinks gave an idea of his contribution to “human relations”:

“Hamas has been raining down rockets on Israeli civilians. Like all terrorist attacks, the aim is to spread fear within free societies, and to paralyze its leaders. This Israel cannot afford. I do not need to tell anyone in this room that no sovereign nation can sit by while its civilian population is attacked.” (http://www.ajc.org/site/c.ijITI2PHKoG/b.5018279/ k.7184/AJC_Honors_Rupert_Murdoch.htm)

David Bromwich, professor of literature at Yale university, puts the argument in perspective: “We are offered an analogy: what would Americans do if rockets were fired from Canada or Cuba?… [But] the rockets are assumed to come suddenly without cause. The choking of the Gaza Strip by land, sea, and air, the rejection by the US of the Palestinian Unity Government, the coup launched by Fatah and bankrolled by the US, which ended in the seizure of power by Hamas — all of this happened before the rockets fell from the sky. It is as if it belonged to a pre-historic time.” (http://www.zmag.org/zmag /viewArticle/20746) The idea that Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Palestinians was intended to stop rocket attacks is hard to reconcile with the fact that Israel deliberately provoked those attacks when it broke the ceasefire with its November 4, 2008 attack killing six people in Gaza. As we have discussed (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/ 09/090204_the_bbc_impartiality.php), darker motives are hidden beneath the declared need to act in self-defence.  The Los Angeles Times reported last week:

“The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. “‘This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness,’ a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter. ‘His message was clear: “This is a war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists.” The whole thing was turned into something very religious and messianic.’” (Richard Boudreaux, ‘Israeli army rabbis criticized for stance on Gaza assault – Some Israeli soldiers say military rabbis cast the offensive against Hamas rockets as a fight to expel non-Jews,’ Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2009;http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-israel-holywar25- 2009mar25,0,3336606.story?track=ntothtml)

The LA Times added:

“In testimony reported by Israeli news media and in interviews with The Times, Gaza veterans said rabbis advised army units to show the enemy no mercy and called for resettlement of the Palestinian enclave by Jews. “‘The rabbis were all over, in every unit,’ said Yehuda Shaul, a retired army officer whose human rights group, Breaking the Silence, has taken testimony from dozens of Gaza veterans. ‘It was quite well organized.’”

Little or none of this exists for the “white man’s club,” Murdoch included. He warned, instead, against the notion that Israel was in any way in the ascendancy:

“It’s true that Israel’s conventional superiority means it could flatten Gaza if it wanted. But the Israeli Defense Forces – unlike Hamas – are accountable to a democratically chosen government.  “No matter which party is in the majority, every Israeli government knows it will be held accountable by its people and by the world for the lives that are lost because of its decisions.”

And yet “the world”, notably the United States, allowed Israel to continue its massacre with impunity. He continued:

“Hamas knows that in some ways, dead Palestinians serve their purposes even better than dead Israelis. In the West we look at this and say, ‘It makes no sense.’ But it does make sense.  “If you are committed to Israel’s destruction, and if you believe that dead Palestinians help you score a propaganda victory, you do things like launch rockets from a Palestinian schoolyard. This ensures that when the Israelis do respond, it will likely lead to the death of an innocent Palestinian – no matter how many precautions Israeli soldiers take.”

As discussed in Part 1, “that’s what makes us different to them”. The Financial Times provided a reality check for Murdoch’s commentary, citing a “string of damning reports” published last week in Israeli newspapers of soldiers’ testimonies, including evidence that troops shot at unarmed civilians. Some reported that they had been issued with “lax rules of engagement that placed little value on the safety of Gazan civilians.” The FT reported:

“Among the incidents which the Israeli army said it would investigate were the shootings of a mother and her two children, who were ordered to leave their house but, misunderstanding the soldiers’ instructions, strayed into a ‘no-go’ zone where they were killed by sniper fire. A separate shooting of another Gaza woman was described by one soldier as “cold-blooded murder”.  “On Monday, a report by a UN human rights panel made fresh allegations, including the claim that Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians as human shields during the fighting. ‘Violations were committed on a daily basis, too numerous to list,’ said one of the report’s authors.” (Tobias Buck, ‘Israel dismissive as fury mounts,’ Financial Times, March 24, 2009)

This was reported in the same week that Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published details of the images Israeli soldiers are having printed on the shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of duty in the field:

“A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription ‘Better use Durex,’ next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, ‘1 shot, 2 kills.’ A ‘graduation’ shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, ‘No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.’” (http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072466.html)

Sociologist Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University, commented:

“This tendency is most strikingly evident among soldiers who encounter various situations in the territories on a daily basis. There is less meticulousness than in the past, and increasing callousness. There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him.” (Ibid)

Readers may feel it is unfair to focus on Murdoch. He is of the hard-right and, after all, there is a spectrum. As Murdoch’s employee, Rod Liddle, commented in the Times:

“Proper western liberal democracy is about accommodating all forms of fabulous stupidity, even the sort of stuff which comes from people who, if we’re honest, might feel more at home hunkering down in a cave somewhere in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. They hate us, implacably. It is a visceral loathing…”  (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/ columnists/rod_liddle/article5908258.ece)

Again, “that’s what makes us different to them”. We can easily take the Spectrum Test by turning once more to the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting, who comments from the more fragrant end of “proper western liberal democracy”. What is her take on the beasts in human form that are the Taliban?

“What is clear is that this is an easy war for the Taliban. They may lack military technology but they don’t need it; all they need is patience, men and weapons, and they have plenty of all three. They have none of the constraints imposed by European electorates on body counts; careless of their own men’s lives, they can use the deaths of opponents and civilians to their advantage.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2009/mar/23/afghanistan-military-terrorism)

The Murdoch view, in other words. This has been the one saving grace for all Third World opponents of high-tech Western firepower through the ages – they do not value life as highly as we do. We might think they are not having an “easy war” – we are blowing many thousands of them to kingdom come, after all – but this is merely to project our own human sensitivities onto the “children of darkness”. In truth, their indifference to the fate of their own people is probably beyond our powers of conception. In 2006, novelist Martin Amis described how Iran, “our natural enemy,” would be willing to accept a nuclear attack in order to realise its dark dreams:

“They feel they can absorb this hit and destroy Israel.” (Amis, This Week, October 12, 2006)

After all, what would a few million incinerated men, women and children mean to an “enemy” so “careless of their men’s lives”? They have no feeling for the people we currently slaughter in the thousands and hundreds of thousands – they would be unmoved by the addition of a few zeros. One does not need to be a highly paid therapist to perceive the actual projection: “They” could not care less for the lives of the people +we+ slaughter so casually. And so “they”, rather than we, are to blame. Corporal Matthew ‘Des’ Desmond of the UK’s 2nd Parachute Regiment described how he shot a Taliban fighter from two metres:

“There is no emotional attachment, you’d feel more anguish shooting a bunny rabbit.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008 /oct/26/military-afghanistan)

The comment was made, the Guardian noted, with a rueful smile.  How ironic – utterly unlike our “natural enemy”, we are united by a common indifference to their destruction.  Of course, “at the end of the day” he “could have been a normal person”. The British soldier, that is.

Iraq Epidemiologist Body Count

If there is a democratic constraint, it is on our body counts. Honest attempts to count the bodies of the “different” ones, the “children of darkness”, are perceived as threats to be attacked, smeared, denigrated and dismissed by “proper western liberal democracy”. Thus, some of the world’s greatest experts in the field of epidemiology find their careers joining a casualty count of hardball propaganda.  A BBC whistleblower wrote to us (asking to remain anonymous) quoting from one of our media alerts:

Dear Davids,  “Have journalists learnt nothing from recent history?”  The answer, I fear, is nothing.  I work at BBC World Service and this email was recently sent as a group to everyone.  “Chris Booth, Baghdad bureau chief, tells me the following two websites are a good point of reference for casualty figures in Iraq (classified by time period, nationality etc). Useful for graphics and cues (with attribution):  “www.icasualties.org for military casualties (also deals with Afghanistan)  “www.iraqbodycount.org for civilian casualties (NB this is not a definitive count, but a trusted estimate, so needs to be qualified).” It was from a producer. Unsurprising, unfortunately, that there is no mention of the ORB survey. Even given the recent update of the survey.  Anyway, I thought you’d find it interesting, depressing and perhaps useful.  Appreciate if you don’t mention my name.  best wishes  Name Withheld (Email to Media Lens, March 20, 2009)

No mention of the Opinion Research Business [ORB] survey reporting 1,033,000 deaths (January 2008, http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88), nor of the 2004 and 2006 Lancet studies. That the BBC’s Baghdad Bureau Chief can believe that Iraq Body Count offers an “estimate” of the death toll in Iraq is staggering. In fact, it offers a figure based on media reports of violent civilian deaths in a country where journalists, who have been targeted and killed in large numbers, have been unable to function during the awesome violence that has accompanied the occupation (data from morgues and government records have been added in recent years).  The IBC website team – which is as qualified to act as a primary source on the Iraqi death toll as we are – is “trusted” by the mainstream media because it offers an extremely low number, has a superficial veneer of academic rigour, and has not been subjected to the unrelenting attacks mounted on studies offering higher numbers.  Stephen Soldz, Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, notes:

“We have recently learned that Gilbert Burnham, the lead author of second Lancet study, has been sanctioned by Johns Hopkins for deviating from the approved IRB protocol and collecting the names of many survey respondents, a fact that was implicitly denied in numerous public pronouncements.” (http://www.zcommunications.org/ znet/viewArticle/20890)

This collecting of names potentially placed lives at risk, although it is thought that no one was in fact harmed. But Soldz argues that Burnham’s lapse means Lancet II’s estimate can no longer be trusted:

“If one major methodological detail was distorted, we simply cannot know whether other aspects of the study were carried out as stated.”

It is a bold leap of doubt to take on such an important issue. After all, a key finding of Johns Hopkins’ internal investigation, unmentioned by Soldz, took a different view:

“Inclusion of identifiers did not affect the results of the study.” (http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/ press_releases/2009/iraq_review.html)

We asked John Tirman, Executive Director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, for his opinion on March 18:

Hi John Hope you’re well. We exchanged some emails last year. I wonder if you agree with Stephen Soldz’s comments on the findings of the internal investigation by Johns Hopkins into the 2006 Lancet study on mortality in Iraq: “This error, and its possible coverup in subsequent public statements means that, in my opinion, we can no longer rely upon the Lancet II mortality estimates. If one major methodological detail was distorted, we simply cannot know whether other aspects of the study were carried out as stated. “Until and unless there is far greater detail on these methods, I do not feel that their estimate of 650,000 post-invasion surplus deaths can be trusted.” (http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20890) Isn’t that an irrational response, unless the misbehaviour affected the results? There’s no indication that it did. Gilbert Burnham was censured personally. The study wasn’t impugned.  What are your views (for quoting please)? Best wishes David

Tirman replied on March 19:

David, Yes, I agree with you, and the Hopkins statement makes clear that the confusion about identifiers (in Arabic) has nothing to do with the integrity of the methods and their implementation. In fact, the Hopkins review verified that the data was collected and entered properly, something several critics have harped on for 30 months. It’s now clear that the data and the analysis are solid. Of course, there could have been a sampling error, but that is always a risk; I don’t believe we can see one, and the main-street-bias folks are simply off kilter on this, as I’ve explained before. It is interesting how this small cadre of harpies persists the argue [sic] on diminishing grounds, when the IBC and DoD numbers, and the MoH/WHO survey, goes without critical comment. This tells us what they’re up to.  My own estimate, for what it’s worth, of the current figures, using the earlier surveys and the IBC trend line, is between 800,000 and 1.3 million dead as of January. The numbers of displaced, widows, etc., is supporting evidence.  Thanks for keeping up with this. Best, John

As Noam Chomsky has often noted, the propaganda system will embrace any level of idiocy and error, if it is in the best interests of power. Describe all attacks in Iraq as the result of “al-Qaeda”, for example, and no-one even notices. On the other hand, contributions that harm powerful interests trigger the most exhausting and exacting standards of scrutiny.  The two Lancet studies have been faced with exactly that, endlessly, and still their results and basic methodology have not been found wanting. We wonder how many similar studies, if subjected to a similar level of hostility and examination, would emerge spotless. The effect is powerful, particularly in the academic world, where any hint of political controversy is damaging. Perhaps because such conflagrations are quite rare, there is a tendency to assume that there must surely be +some+ fire amidst all that smoke. But that is often not the case in politics, where propaganda may well be unrelieved, cynical deceit.  The reality of the US-UK catastrophe in Iraq is, or could be, a major catastrophe for US-UK propaganda – for the lie of benevolence that gives policy free rein. And so an absolute torrent of mud has been directed at the Lancet studies. A clear cut victory has never been sought – the goal is simply increased confusion, additional doubt. The technical term: mud sticks! This is the power of flak, and one result, at least, is very clear – the courageous, compassionate, sincere and highly qualified lead authors of the Lancet reports have been, for the moment at least, silenced.

Suggested Action

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Write to Hugh Sykes at the BBC Email: hugh.sykes@bbc.co.uk Write to Steve Herrmann, BBC online editor Email: steve.herrmann@bbc.co.uk Write to Madeleine Bunting at the Guardian Email: m.bunting@guardian.co.uk Write to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian  Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk Please send a copy of your emails to us  Email: editor@medialens.org

This media alert will shortly be archived here:  http://www.medialens.org/alerts/09/090330_children_of_darkness.php A new Media Lens book, ‘Newspeak in the 21st Century,’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell will be published by Pluto Press in the autumn. John Pilger writes of the book: “Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth.” Please visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org

Concocted Plan Of Attack On White House Finalized

Pakistan’s enemies are preparing to deliver a decisive blow. Pakistan has suffered grievously on all counts and its very foundations have been jolted in the seven years of America’s occupation of Afghanistan. It is most unfortunate that in this gory plan, some of the political parties, western sponsored NGOs, intellectuals and writers have also contributed towards disinformation campaign and bringing bad name to Pakistan.

by ASIF HAROON RAJA

            I have been forewarning about the sinister designs of adversaries of Pakistan wanting to harm Pakistan for the last three years. What I had penned in 2006 about the dangerous ramifications of Indo-US-Afghan nexus based in Kabul has come true.

            Under the garb of friendship, Pakistan has been gradually and systematically weakened from within and destabilized through covert means employed by RAW, RAM [or NDS, the Karzai puppet intelligence], CIA duly complemented by Mossad and MI-6.

In the last seven years Pakistan has suffered grievously on all counts and its very foundations have been jolted. Mumbai episode on 26 November was the starting point for executing the final destructive phase against Pakistan. Sudden flurry of CIA controlled drone attacks and terrorist attacks in various parts of Pakistan are clear cut indications that our adversaries are now all set to deliver the decisive hammer. 

It is most unfortunate that in this gory plan, some of the political parties friendly to India, western sponsored NGOs, intellectuals and writers have also contributed towards disinformation campaign and bringing bad name to Pakistan. They have been more distressed on the peace deals signed in Swat and Bajaur and are writing copiously to paint the Islamists as demons and the main threat to existence of Pakistan. A willful effort is being made to derail Swat peace accord and to prevent Zardari from counter signing the peace deal.

One of the means adopted was to display a video footage of a 17-year girl publicly lashed by the bearded Taliban. The footage was repeatedly flashed on all TV channels throughout the day till late night on 4 April with a sinister purpose to defame the Taliban and Sharia laws. I will comment on its veracity separately but my sources have revealed that it was a fake video. A foreign funded NGO had furnished the clip to all concerned while majority of private electronic media channels funded from abroad played it up with vivacity and zest.

The women activists of MQM have taken the lead in condemning the incident by staging protest marches in Karachi. It is a classic case of painting white with a black brush.   

The U.S. and western media as well as the U.S. think tanks have been playing upon the theme of threat of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates to security of Pakistan as well as to U.S.A. George Bush had declared in July last year that any future attack on the U.S. homeland would come from FATA. The tribal belt was declared as the nursery of terrorists where terrorists and suicide bombers were indoctrinated, trained and launched into Afghanistan to target U.S.-Nato-Afghan forces. Giving strength to Karzai’s allegation of cross border terrorism, the U.S. sprinkled spice to this sizzling theme by adding that certain elements within the army and the ISI were linked with the Taliban and assisting them in movement across the border. FATA was declared as the most dangerous place and the hub centre of terrorism.

After the Mumbai attacks, India shamelessly joined the propagandists and alleged that Pakistan is the epicenter of terrorism and that the ISI was linked with Lashkar-e-Taiba that had executed the Mumbai carnage. The purported document provided to Pakistan is full of glaring loopholes but India is insisting that Pakistan must accept the trash as well-cooked piece of evidence and act. 

Cockeyed and baseless allegations hurled by U.S.A, India and Afghanistan in unison under a timed program have been made without furnishing any proof. Complaints of Pakistan against other agencies are ignored. Not a single story of massive sabotage and subversion undertaken against Pakistan from the Afghan soil has ever been published in the western and Indian newspapers. On the contrary any terrorist attack taking place in India or a western state was invariably pasted on Pakistani extremists and the ISI.

It was hoped that the new U.S. administration under Obama would put an end to negative propaganda warfare based on pack of lies to discredit Pakistan and its institutions but it has decided to adopt the old policy of Pakistan bashing. Obama too has projected FATA as the safe haven and main headquarters of Al-Qaeda and its leadership. He reiterated fears of Bush by asserting that Al-Qaeda based in FATA is planning to attack homeland of U.S.A and has accordingly framed the new Af-Pak strategy to destroy Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Obama and his team are brimming with confidence and exuberance to implement the new plan at the earliest.           

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Baitullah Mehsud who had never been targeted or condemned by U.S. and the West suddenly came in their bad books after he announced his allegiance to Mullah Omar and accepted him as the supreme leader in first week of March. He had probably taken this step in the light of Pak army having scored moral victories in Bajaur and Swat and compelling the militants to ink peace deals. The new Af-Pak strategy worked out by Obama Administration to conjointly round up the irreconcilable Islamist extremists on both sides of the Durand Line might also have prompted him to achieve unity between Afghan and Pak Taliban and confront the new challenge jointly.

Till this announcement, Mullah Omar led Taliban and Baitullah led Taliban were different entities and there was no nexus between them. In fact, Omar had conveyed his displeasure to Baitullah not to operate under the name of Taliban and bring a bad name to his outfit. Likewise, Gulbadin Hikmatyar leading Hizb-e-Islami operates independently in eastern and north eastern Afghanistan and also around Kandahar and Kabul. The U.S. has announced $5 million award for Baitullah’s head and drones have targeted his exclusive domain within South Waziristan (Jandola to Sarwakai), inhabited by Mehsuds, for the first time. Coming months will prove whether he has actually fallen from grace or it is a put up show to hoodwink Pakistan.

Unlike Omar, Osama or Zawahiri who remain underground, Baitullah has exposed himself on number of occasions and has been giving interviews to the media men. The ISI had twice provided six figure grid reference of his location to CIA, but it is strange that the U.S. took no interest. The drones reconnoitering every inch of the tribal belt have surprisingly failed to spot him. The U.S. has now agreed to carryout joint operation against him to get hold of him.    

Series of militant attacks took place in March at a time when peace deal with militants had been inked in Swat and Bajaur, Qazi courts have started functioning in Malakand Division, blatant bloodshed and destruction in the war torn regions have ended and there is an overall atmosphere of reconciliation and peace.. The suicide attacks in Jamrud on a mosque during Friday prayers on 27 March killing over 50 and injuring 120; suicide attack on a military convoy in Bannu killing 5 soldiers and 2 civilians and injuring 9 and a bloody clash in lower Dir on 29 March in which some senior officials were killed, together with a drone attack in Orakzai Agency on 01 April and suicide hit and a drone attack in North Waziristan on 4 April are aimed at disrupting peace in the Frontier province.

Two terrorists attacks in Lahore on 3^rd and 30^th March in Lahore were undertaken by the terrorists to give a loud message that terrorism has entered the heartland of Punjab. Another terrorist attack in posh locality of Islamabad on an FC camp on 4 April killing eight security personnel and a suicide attack on Imam bargah in Chakwal on 5 April killing 24 people are links of the same chain. Prior to each attack, the intelligence agencies had forewarned the security forces about entry of RAW agents in Lahore and in Islamabad. More attacks are expected in coming days. 

            Baitullah who had throughout this period remained in the background and was media shy suddenly came on the centre stage and claimed responsibility for most terrorist attacks which took place recently. These claims were made in spite of an unknown group calling itself Fidayeen-e-Islam owning up the responsibility for the attack on Police Training School in Lahore on 30 March and the mosque in Jamrud on 27^th March. The reason given for Baitullah’s offensive posture was the continuing drone attacks in FATA which in his view were taking place with connivance of the government.

To the surprise of many he brazenly stated what the two American presidents had earlier predicted that his group was planning a terrorist attack on White House that would amaze the world. He asserted that his men would teach a lesson to the Americans. The only thing he has not revealed is the date and time of attack, which I reckon should also have been made public to make the story more thrilling.

The people were still pondering over the statement of Baitullah when he hurled another salvo on 4 April by claiming responsibility for the terrorist attack by a gunman on an immigration centre in a small U.S. city on 3 April killing 13 people and then killed himself. He said that his accomplice has managed to escape and would hit another target soon. Investigations revealed that the gunman was Vietnamese origin which lay to rest the boastful claim of Baitullah.

            Unless Baitullah is a nitwit and weird, why on earth should he disclose his hostile intentions before hand and alert the prey he intends to hit. Prior disclosure may stand to reason if the attacker uses it as a ploy to frighten the adversary which he never intends to target. The Taliban based in Pakistan and Afghanistan are local based and have so far not demonstrated any capability to strike a target outside their respective spheres of influence. It is only the mythical Al-Qaeda which possesses the long arm to hit out anywhere in the world.

Even so-called Al-Qaeda operatives have not been able to strike any target in U.S.A after 9/11 because of the massive fool proof security arrangements laid around U.S.A. Therefore it will be childish to take Baitullah’s threat seriously.

            If he is really serious to perform the miraculous act of attacking the most secured fortress of White House, logically he should not have divulged his intentions beforehand. By doing so he has alerted the already highly sensitive U.S. leadership suffering from acute paranoia and given them a just cause to hone their weapons more feverishly and preemptively destroy their deadly foes in their home ground and thus nip the evil in the bud. Till now the threat perception highlighted by U.S.A was based on assumptions. Now that their adversary has come out in the open with his future hostile intentions and brandished his sword and specified the target within U.S.A, it gives a ready made excuse to belligerent U.S. to once again put the Bush policy of preemption into action.

            It is incomprehensible as to why Baitullah should send his suicide squads across the seven seas to teach U.S.A a lesson when he has host of lucrative targets within his immediate reach in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and easy reach in Middle East or Europe. Even South Korea which has a large concentration of U.S. military is much closer than U.S.A. His affiliate Al-Qaeda has already hit targets in Turkey, Spain, UK and Indonesia and is active in Africa.

Possible reasons that come to one’s mind are: One, the incident would not become as earth shaking as 9/11 if it is committed outside U.S.A. Two, after announcement of head money, Baitullah has felt that his days are numbered and in desperation has thrown caution to the wind without comprehending its implications. Three, he has suddenly become extrovert and bigheaded and wants to gain publicity and fame.  

            Those who believe that he is CIA man now argue that he has deliberately given this statement to allay this impression. They say that when Clinton had visited Islamabad in March 2000 and had refused to shake hands or have a photo session with Gen Musharraf, it was purposely done to convey a message that he was in bad books of U.S.A whereas in actuality he was not and it was a ploy to build up his image among the Pakistanis. After all, plan of attacking and occupying Afghanistan had been finalized way back in 1997. For Afghan venture someone like Gen Musharraf totally dedicated to the U.S. cause and anti-Islamist extremists fitted well into U.S. scheme of things. 

Nawaz Sharif had defied U.S. pressure and carried out nuclear tests; he had introduced Sharia laws in Lower House and was generally soft towards rightist religious parties. He was certainly not the right choice and therefore had to be got rid of to promote U.S. agenda with the active assistance of friendly and pliable president holding all state powers.

Approaching days would prove whether Baitullah is planted or genuine but one thing is certain; the concocted plan of attack on White House or an equally sensitive target in Washington has been finalized by vested groups to make it a justifiable excuse to attack Pakistan. If the U.S. hopes to win war in Afghanistan by undermining premier institutions of Pakistan, it is sadly mistaken. All its high sounding plans would come to a naught and it would have to exit in disgrace. If it commits the blunder of attacking Pakistan as suggested to it by India and Israel, it would undoubtedly cause massive destruction to this already badly mauled country but in the process it would sink in the third quagmire. 

Pakistan has relatively better means to defend itself when pushed against the wall. Its already depleting economy would not be able to sustain war on three fronts and would perish in this region. Another crop of Islamists would rise from the debris of ruined Pakistan to carry forward the message of Allah that God is Great and none else.

 The writer is a Rawalpindi based security, defense and political freelance analyst. Email: ah.raja@yahoo.com

Courtesy: WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

 

Dueling Partners: Pakistan and America

Tariq Ali, The firebrand student leader of yesteryears, a source of enlightenment, guide and a teacher for today’s generation

An Interview with Tariq Ali

Interviewer: Wajahat Ali, Editor, GOATMILK: An intellectual playground 

Illustrator: Emmanuel Sliva

A country once callously shrugged off as India’s “lesser” neighbor now commands global attention and scrutiny as the next, crucial battleground in the never ending “war on terror. A much respected and prolific commentator, author and critic Tariq Ali observes in his new book “The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power,” the selfish, inequitable relationship between both countries has far reaching, historical roots directly contributing to the tenuous geopolitical stability of modern day Central Asia. 

In this exclusive interview, Tariq Ali, a seasoned journalist and Pakistani insider, focuses on all major players, including the US Administration, Zardari, Bhutto, Musharraf, the Pakistani military, and a self centered and oppressive elite as prime contributors to Pakistan’s current volatility. 

W. Ali: 

Let’s start with a quotation from a PPP [Pakistan People’s Party] spokesman, Farah Naz Ispahani, who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

“Zardari is the best hope for Pakistan. Mr. Zardari suffered 11 years in prison on politically motivated charges without having been convicted. He went on to lead his party to victory in democratic elections and then skillfully helped to craft a viable democratic coalition. As president he will lead our nation decisively forward in its transition to a stable democracy.”

What’s your response to that quote? 

Tariq Ali: 

My response to that quote is that it’s fantasy politics. The only reason Zardari is where he is, is because of whom he was married to [Benazir Bhutto.] It is well known - even within People’s Party circles – that had Benazir Bhutto survived he would’ve had no role whatsoever within the government. He is a figure who was wanted in Swiss courts for money laundering and corruption. He is someone who has, over the years, utilized his wife’s Prime Minister-ship on two occasions to become one of the richest people in the country. And to present him as the best hope for Pakistan is an incredibly sad reflection on the state of Pakistan. 

W. Ali: 

At the same time we’re seeing Obama’s intention to continue working work with Zardari, though US officials are also meeting the other guy Nawaz Sharif. My question is why at all did the US warm up to a man with such a dubious past? 

Tariq Ali:

Well because they put him in power. They did a deal with his wife. They hoped he would fulfill the terms of that deal. It would be very surprising given that Pakistan is supposedly a crucial ally in this so called “war against terror” that they would not work with Zardari. I hope Obama and had McCain been the president – both were aware of his checkered track record and the fact he is not very popular in the country.

It has to be remembered he was elected indirectly by the parliament and the national assembly. Were there to be direct elections of the presidency in Pakistan and were they to be free, it is unlikely Zardari would win. That’s the first point. The second point is that as far as the US is concerned essentially there is only one serious institution in Pakistan and that is the Pakistan army. They have done business with this institution for a long period of time, and the Pentagon knows fully well this is the only institution that they need and on which they have to rely in that country. So, officially, Zardari will be the official president, but the main force of the country remains the army.

W. Ali: 

Aren’t we seeing some tension right now? Zardari remains mostly silent on America’s offensive, which kills civilian people more than it does the al-Qaeda guys especially the pilot-less drones which carry out multiple missile attacks in FATA. Pakistan said US didn’t ask their permission. General Kiyani had harsh words for US, and America pretty much said they will do what they have to do to battle extremism. How will this tension play out between the Pakistani military, the United States and Zardari? 

Tariq Ali: 

Well, I think the tension is between the US and the Pakistan military. Zardari will probably be the fall guy, that is if the tension mounts and were there to be something as foolish and irrational as a US troops entering Pakistan, then the military would be forced to resist. So then what Zardari wants or doesn’t want or what deal he made is completely irrelevant, because at that point the army would be in charge.

You know the way the largest 5 star hotel in Islamabad, the Marriott, was blown sky high. It was incredibly well coordinated. I’ve been to that hotel. The security there is incredible. So how that has happened, it remains to be seen. But certainly they’ve created the impression that Pakistan is becoming ungovernable.

W. Ali: 

Steven Hadley, the head of the NSA, made an interesting comment: “Pakistan is not equipped to combat the militant threat.” He said this officially. What is the repercussion of that? Do you believe it first of all, and does Pakistan need outside help? 

Tariq Ali:

No, I think if the Pakistani military wished to do it they could certainly crush the organizations. But then again it is something controversial within the army. A) these people are citizens of Pakistan; B) every time the army has engaged action against them a lot of innocents have died; C) whenever the military has attempted to do this, it has created tension inside the military especially amongst the ordinary soldier and junior officers who say they don’t like killing their own people.

So, there is a problem with the Pakistani military doing this. However, were the US to go in and try to do it, they’ve met similar results: they’ve killed innocents, women; children have died. People not connected in anyway to the militants have died. Presumably, I assume we have no real information that some jihadis have died as well. But to transform the North-West Frontier of Pakistan into a large killing field isn’t going to help anyone. Essentially what we are seeing is spillage from the Afghan war, a war that has gone badly wrong. And a war which is being supported by consensual politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties of the US; a war which the politicians contending to power have not paid serious attention to.

W. Ali:

Several say that Central Asia, and not Iraq, is the major hot zone right now and needs to be contained. What can be done to destabilize the Taliban who are resurgent both in Afghanistan and now Pakistan? Isn’t any type of offensive going to cause a significant reaction in the form of violence for both countries? 

Tariq Ali:

Well, look; I don’t accept that Iraq is quiet. There still are the US raids that kill lot of innocents in that country. And the notion that even Petraeus isn’t saying that the surge is succeeding for all time to come, that there is still a great deal of unrest. The majority of Iraqis don’t want foreign bases there at all. It’s not that Iraq is being pacified successfully; it would be an illusion to imagine that.

However, it is true that the presidential contenders are concentrating on Afghanistan. But here we have a classic situation, a military occupation led by NATO, led by the US, which is killing too many civilians in its bombing raids. I mean even [Afghan President] Karzai has said too many civilians are being killed. Secondly, you have Hamid Karzai and his cronies running Afghanistan. A situation in which Karzai’s brother is reputed to be the country’s largest drug smuggler and arms bearer. [A situation] in which the people around Karzai are milking the country, milking the money coming in, milking the foreign agencies; growing rich at the expense of the bulk of the population, which has made the occupation very unpopular for all these reasons.

The result of this has been a big rise in Pashtun nationalism. And this rise in Pashtun nationalism takes the form at the moment of swelling the ranks of the old Taliban, which is why it is being called the neo-Taliban by many, many British observers on the ground. They see the composition and character of this organization has changed as a result of the NATO occupation, that is what is going on and the support for the neo-Taliban is increasing every single day. In order to confront this, it is no use that the US and the West say it is the fault of Pakistan.

I’m not saying the Pakistani state is exempt from all blame, it probably isn’t. But the central issue is the war inside Afghanistan going badly wrong and expanding this war into Pakistan won’t help matters; it would make it much worse. Pakistan is much larger country than Afghanistan, it is a country of 200 million strong with nuclear weapons, so it’s foolish to try to destabilize this country.

W. Ali: 

Here’s a question many don’t ask. Talk to me about the future response of China and Russia. They are bordering countries that have a vested interest. What should we see, strategically, as their next move in the region? 

Tariq Ali: 

The NATO officials, including the NATO Secretary General, are very open with what they say. They say we’re in Afghanistan for geo political reasons and military reasons. This is a strategically open country which borders China, Central Asia, i.e. Russia and Iran: three crucial countries for the US for different reasons and that there is no way we’re leaving here. This has been said, by the way, publicly and written about that the occupation is not about good governance or even about destroying Al Qaeda or wiping out Al Qaeda.

In effect, we know the Western countries and Western agents are talking to Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan regularly to try and see if a deal can be sorted out. The Taliban is refusing to play ball until the foreign troops withdraw. Behind all this is a view to try to create a government which would accept foreign military bases in Afghanistan in perpetuity – which no one wants. I mean Karzai has agreed to that but he is not the most popular figure in the country and were Western troops not there he would fall very quickly and that is the problem. And Russia and China is very angry, and so is Iran at the notion that Afghanistan could be occupied permanently or semi permanently. They have been talking to each other about it and the Chinese have made this very clear to the Pakistani military as well

W. Ali: 

In your book, it seems to imply that since the beginning of Pakistan’s nation-state, Jinnah and his advisors have been following a policy dictated by the US, in the sense that in their relationship, the US has been the one giving the orders and Pakistan has been the one following it. Has this been the case from the beginning and is this what has led to our current situation? This type of mentality? 

Tariq Ali:

What I argue in my book is that for the first two to three years, it was the Pakistani elite which was pursuing the United States. Because most of the people in charge of Pakistan for its first 10 years were people who collaborated with the British, politically and militarily. And once the British left Pakistan, they were desperate for someone else to replace [them]. I cite chapter and verse of the pleas made to the United States in ’47, ’48, ’49, but turned down by the US, who regarded India as a much more important power.

Then, with the heightening of the cold war, and the Indians becoming the central players in the Non-Aligned Movement, then Pakistan was, more or less, taken over by Washington and incorporated in all the security beds along with Iran and Turkey.

Since that time, the Pakistani military has been a very prominent player in the country’s politics. And I sort of argue in my book that Pakistan, being on the flight path of American power from the ‘50s onwards, has actually wrecked the organic development of politics in that country, leading to one crisis after another.

Now, after the end of the Cold War, the US abandoned both Afghanistan and Pakistan and left them to their own devices. That was the period in which Benazir Bhutto pushed through the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the Pakistan army got what they called a strategic depth, because without logistic support, there’s no way a ragtag army like the Taliban could have taken Kabul. This is a well-trained force, including many Pakistani officers and soldiers.

Now, with 9/11, the US is back in the region again and the Pakistani military, which had gotten used to taking some of its own decisions, had to cow tow to them. And this is what began to create the tensions inside the country. During the time when the Pakistanis were strong, staunch allies in the war against the Russians, as is well known, that is the time that all these jihadi groups were spawned by the state and sent in to fight in Afghanistan.

W. Ali: 

We both know the Pakistani mentality when they’re talking about whoever is running the country, they say, “At least he’s the lesser goonda [thug/gangster] than the other.” That seems to be the psyche of the people. Explain to me how Pakistani people can rise up and restore a semblance of a functioning democracy. Or is it impossible? Should we not expect this in the near future? 

Tariq Ali:

I don’t think so. I think that one of the things you pointed out, a side of Pakistan, which was very under covered in the Western media for a variety of reasons, was the big constitutional movement led by lawyers to demand the separation of the judiciary from the government, as exists in the US Constitution. This movement grew and grew and grew. And Musharraf’s strike against the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on two separate occasions just fueled this movement.

In its initial stages, this movement was crushed, not by the Army but by Zardari, who split the Supreme Court, refused to accept the Chief Justice back and got some of the other chief judges of the Supreme Court, who had also been sacked, to break ranks and come back. So this movement suffered a very heavy blow at Zardari’s hands.

But what it showed was a desire on the part of the people for a different order. And there is no doubt in my mind that that is what the people of Pakistan want. But unfortunately, the political parties on top who represent them are corrupt to the core. Most of them – all the major parties – are corrupt.

Now you have a situation, again which I haven’t seen reported in the Western media, that the party of the Bhutto family, the PPP as its official name is, is negotiating behind the scenes with these politicians from Gujarat, who were the lynchpin of the Musharraf regime, pleading with them for a coalition so that they can get rid of the Muslim League Sharif brothers’ government in the Punjab. So it’s back to business as usual in that country and it is extremely depressing because the country is at a critical state at the moment.

W. Ali: 

It is disappointing that we have the same players. You mentioned Nawaz Sharif in Punjab, who now seems to be spearheading democracy even though his record doesn’t reflect that. And we have Zardari and the PPP, again another feudal dynasty. And we have the Pakistan military. Are these the three players who the US has to play with now? 

Tariq Ali:

They are the three players. There’s no one else on that level in the country. By the way, Nawaz Sharif is not a feudal guy at all. He represents urban business interests. That has always been. They are not a landed family. The PPP still has a great number of landlords in them, especially from Sindh, but not exclusively. And the Army – these are the three players in Pakistan. You know, there’s no good wishing… of course I wish there were others. These are the people there at the moment and so whoever is talking to Pakistan has to talk to them. You can’t avoid it.

W. Ali: 

A statement made by many in the West, and also many Pakistani expats is, “See, we should have kept Musharraf. If we had Musharraf, this wouldn’t have happened. Even though he wasn’t the best, at least he fought against the extremists.” What’s the truth in that statement? What’s the legacy of Musharraf in your opinion? 

Tariq Ali:

Well, I think the legacy of Musharraf is very mixed. It’s not the case at all that he could deal with the militants. Essentially he reached an agreement with them. “Don’t hit us and we won’t hit you.” After the three attempts on Musharraf’s life, that’s basically what happened. These people were called in and were told, “Keep away from us and we will keep away from you and maybe the time will come when we will need you again to do something else.” So the notion that Musharraf was very effective in this regard was, of course, completely false. Secondly, once Musharraf had imposed a state of emergency on the country, just to remove the judiciary from the Supreme Court, his standing completely fell. There was no one who wanted him to stay on. His own power base in the Army no longer existed, because he had been compelled to leave the Army and get out of his uniform. So he was led to be stranded. The only people who kept him in power was the United States. And John Negroponte said that he wanted Musharraf to stay in power at least as long as Bush was in the White House.

But then behind the scenes, a big factional struggle erupted within the American establishment with Cheney’s office and (Zalmay) Khalizad negotiating directly with Zardari, sidelining Musharraf and helping organize the campaign which removed him without informing the State Department, which created real anger. If you read Richard Boucher’s e-mail of Khalizad, it’s very clear that he was very angry at what was being done.

I think the reason Khalizad got rid of Musharraf was that Musharraf and Khalizad’s protégé in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, loathed each other. Musharraf made no secret of it. And Khalizad probably felt that in Zardari, he could have another Karzai figure. Because given the charges against Zardari in a number of foreign courts and his assets abroad, he is a perfect creature for the United States because they can control him.

W. Ali: 

You have an interesting quotation in your book, which says, “Pakistan has a permanent insecurity complex regarding India.” How do you define that and how will that play out in current affairs, which are very volatile of course? 

Tariq Ali:

I mean the fact is the Pakistani elite certainly has [an inferiority complex.] Interestingly enough, the last big opinion poll survey in Pakistan carried out by the New America Foundation found that a majority of people regarded the United States as the biggest danger to world peace and only 11 percent of the population regarded India as the enemy. This represents, as far as India is concerned, a massive shift, which I think is very positive. My argument is that Pakistan should shift from Washington time to South Asia time. The future of the subcontinent requires a degree of commonality and collaboration between all the South Asian powers to build that region and help solve some of its problems. That is what needs to be done.

But this permanent enmity with India is dangerous. It’s dangerous for India and Pakistan as nuclear powers. War that is fought between them could easily generate into a nuclear conflict leading to millions and millions of deaths. I think this is recognized now by both sides.

W. Ali:

Last question. Let’s discuss the rise of “fundamentalism” in Pakistan. Pakistan is a religious country. People do espouse religious and spiritual beliefs. How do you see the role of religion being played in Pakistan and how should it be played? 

Tariq Ali:

I think that Pakistan as a Muslim state is beyond dispute. The bulk of its population are Muslim. But the fact is that the dominant image of Pakistan in the West is that of jihadi terrorists threatening to take over the nuclear facilities is just wrong. The bulk of the country is not in favor of jihadi terrorism. It’s been made clear in election after election.

The religion of people in the countryside in the Punjab, in Sindh is essentially still, to a large extent, a reflection of Sufi existentialism, of each one finding the Creator as an individual, general hostility to organized religion as such, which is still strong in the countryside. It’s your middle and upper-middle classes, like those in India and, not to mention, the United States, who become very religious, attracted to religiosity, joining the Tablighi Jamaat organizations.

But the common people don’t show any signs of that. A tiny minority is attracted to jihadi terrorism, but given the size of the country, this is infinitesimal. So the real problem that confronts Pakistan is not a big rise of religion, but the total and complete failure of a corrupt and callous Pakistani elite to do anything for its people.

The education system is languishing. The health system barely works. There are problems of shelter. There are now large problems of feeding the population with the price of wheat extremely high. We have the UN statistics which tell that malnutrition has reached such levels that 60% of Pakistani kids born are being born stunted. This is the real problem confronting the country.

Unless we have a government that is capable of dealing with this, the country will continue to be in crisis. There is real anger now at the gap between the haves and the have nots, between rich and poor in the country. And it spills over into violence at the slightest excuse. People are really angry now about this. 

Courtesy: http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/dueling-partners-pakistan-and-america-an-interview-with-tariq-ali/

Punja Sahib: The Miracle at Hassan Abdal

The word Punja is derived from punj, meaning five, a reference to the five fingers of the hand or the hand itself. Second, Sikhs use the word Sahib for the names of sacred personalities, places or books, just as we Muslims use the word Sharif such as Mecca Sharif, Quran Sharif, Kaa’ba Sharif etc. And like all legends and folklore, the story of Punja Sahib sounds like a mixture of beliefs, facts and fiction – fiction to the non-believer, that is. There are different versions of the story that one hears or reads, but a distinct common thread runs through all of them.

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BABA WALI KANDHARI, BHAI MARDANA AND THE HOLY SPRING OF HASSAN ABDAL

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by Mast Qalandar

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Most Pakistanis know Hassan Abdal as a town that houses the well-known Cadet College, the first to be built in Pakistan in the early 1950s. Other than that, Hassan Abdal hardly arouses any interest among Pakistanis. It is a non-descript dusty little town, 25 miles from Islamabad, situated along the National Highway, almost encroaching upon it. The town is haphazardly built like most rural towns in Pakistan.

It is a town that you just pass through while going from Islamabad to Peshawar or Abbottabad and the Northern Areas or, if you need to, you stop at one of the filling stations and tyre shops that add to the ugly clutter along the roadside. You don’t normally visit Hassan Abdal —unless, of course, you happen to be a Sikh.

For Sikhs, Hassan Abdal has special significance — and a special place in their hearts. It houses the imprint of the hand or punja believed to be that of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion. This makes Punja Sahib one of the three holiest shrines of Sikh religion — the other two being the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India and Nankana Sahib in Sheikhupura, Pakistan.

Jatta ayi Vaisakhi

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BAISAKH: A MONTH OF FESTIVITIES

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It’s already the mid of April. In the west, the first day of this month starts with a funny thing called the First April Fools day. The day might be  a day of befooling others with fun and jokes, however, here in the east it brings endless tales of happiness but mostly sad stories, accidents and tragedies out of this nonsensical fools day on first of this month.

In contrast to this rather funny yet sad start in western culture, here in the orient this month augurs a season of festival and festivities; as it’s the very month when crops are ready for harvesting.

The seeds in the stalks are ripe, the fields have a golden hue and it’s the time when whole of Punjab thunders with chanting of “FaslaN di muk gyi rakhi, Jatta ayi vaisakhi” for the month coincides with the eastern calendar month of baisakh. And Baisakh is the month when farmers have the fruits of their toils, the harvest ready for storage or sale, when they get a return on their investment like purchases of seeds, fertilizers and above all the hard labor to make their sowing efforts turn into healthy crop.

Once the produce is filled into bags or stored as dhairis in the open or in the hand made silos made out of thatched grass and terracotta mud, or is straightaway sold to the buyers in grain markets nearby the countryside, it is the time to merry making, time to rejoice. Melas i.e. fairs and festivals are a common scene in these days. The principal occasion of these events is Baisakhi mela or the harvest festival. It’s the time when farmers sing and dance to their full zest and spirit.

But the month of April carries another significance as well. It was on the 13^{th of} April, 1699 that Guru Gobind Singh gave new guidelines and a new identity, Khalsa , to the Sikh religion, at the Baisakhi (Spring) festival at Anandpur. To commemorate and celebrate this festival with our Sikh brethren, WOP brings three different posts in this issue. The first two are inserted now. The third one will follow later.

 The three day celebrations of Baisakhi have strated  today, the 13th of April, 2009,at Gurdwara Punja Sahib, Hassan Abdal. On this happy occasion, all of us at W.O.P. send our Sikh brethren Heartiest Greetings.

Sher-e-Punjab Maharaja Ranjit Singh

This story here though is apocryphal, yet it continues to be told by the Punjabis to this day because it has the answer to the questions why Ranjit Singh was able to unite Punjabi Mussulmans, Hindus and Sikhs and create one and the only kingdom in the history of the Punjab. Another anecdote, equally apocryphal and even more popular, illustrates the second reason why Ranjit Singh succeeded in the face of heavy odds: his single minded pursuit of power. It is said that once his Muslim wife, Mohran, remarked on his ugliness—he was dark, pitted with small pox and blind of one eye [‘exactly like an old mouse with grey whiskers and one eye’—Emily Eden]. ‘Where were your Highness when God was distributing beauty?’ ‘I had gone to find myself a kingdom,’ replied the monarch.

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MAHARAJA RANJIT SINGH: EMBODIMENT OF SECULAR SIKH RULE

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by Khushwant Singh

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On this auspicious occasion [of Baisakhi] when Sikhs from all corners of the globe would converge on a beautiful gurdwara in Hassan Abdal – the holy place where the miracle of rock took place, here is what Khushwant Singh writes on the life and time of the man who ordered construction of this most beautiful and the second holiest shrine of Sikhism in Pakistan.

The famous Indian author in his book ‘Ranjit Singh’, Maharaja of the Punjab, depicts the persona of this man in following words:-

A calligraphist who had spent many years making a copy of the holy Koran and had failed to get any of the Muslim princes of Hindustan to give him an adequate price for his labours turned up at Lahore to try and sell it to the Foreign Minister, Fakeer Azizuddin. The Fakeer praised the work but expressed his inability to pay for it. The argument was overheard by Ranjit Singh who summoned the calligraphist to his presence. The Maharaja respectfully pressed the holy book against his forehead and then scrutinized the writing with his single eye. He was impressed with the excellence of the work and bought the Koran for his private collection.  Some time later Fakeer Azizuddin asked him why he had paid such a price for a book for which he as a Sikh, would have no use. Ranjit Singh replied: ‘God intended me to look upon all religions with one eye; that is why he took away the light from the other.’

What`s crazier, believing the U.S. orchestrated 9/11 or that Saddam did?

by Jack Hunter      
(Charleston City Paper)

9/11 Truthers and similar groups don`t concern me half as much as the conspiracy theorists in our media and government, who have the power to start wars, end lives, and damage nations, based on their own self-aggrandizing-fantasies.

When discussing politics, if there’s one thing that sends people running for the hills, it’s conspiracy theories — or worse, conspiracy theorists.

As with those who are deemed “racist” or “isolationist,” conspiracy theorists are automatically dismissed by polite society, not necessarily because they are wrong, but because of the nature of their arguments. And because their ideas and opinions are outside of consensus politics or the mainstream media, conspiracy theorists lack credibility simply for being outside the realm of respectability.

Take, for example, what is commonly known as the 9/11 Truth Movement, a collection of conspiracy theories that claim the terrorist attacks in 2001 were orchestrated by the U.S. government. Watching 9/11 Truth videos online like “Loose Change” or “Zeitgeist” raises many interesting questions, and might cause even the most reasonable of folks to at least question the conventional wisdom on the subject. Yet, by and large, the 9/11 Truth conspiracy remains a fringe movement, taken seriously by few and laughed at by most.

But if 9/11 “Truthers” are wacky for believing the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by Uncle Sam, what about the conspiracy theorists who tried to convince Americans that 9/11 was orchestrated by Saddam Hussein? Consider the following from The Weekly Standard’s cover story “Case Closed” written by Stephen F. Hayes in November of 2003: “Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda — perhaps even for Mohamed Atta — according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by The Weekly Standard.”

After the memo Hayes cited was immediately and entirely dismissed by the Department of Defense and virtually every intelligence official, Newsweek decided to investigate Hayes’ claim further, concluding “the memo doesn’t actually contain much ‘new’ intelligence at all. Instead, it mostly recycles shards of old, raw data that were first assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts whom [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J.] Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda ‘connection’ in order to better justify a U.S. invasion.”

Hayes went on to write a book called The Connection based on the same false memo, and as the Bush administration went on to make the same case that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney told the Rocky Mountain News that Hayes’ Weekly Standard article was the “best source of information” on collaboration between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Of course, this was all fantasy. It was a conspiracy — not between Saddam and Osama — but amongst the Bush White House and their media allies to construct a “connection” between Hussein and Al-Qaeda that had never existed, an irrefutable fact reflected by every piece of U.S. intelligence before the invasion of Iraq — and proven again after it. Yet today, you will still find the random conspiracy kook who still believes that Saddam was behind 9/11.

So what is the difference between conspiracy theorists who believe the U.S. government orchestrated 9/11 and those who believe Saddam Hussein did? For starters, the 9/11 Truth conspiracists have arguably more circumstantial evidence for their case than men like Hayes or Cheney ever did for theirs. But the most significant difference is that while 9/11 Truthers are relegated to the internet with no mainstream media support, 9/11 Saddam Hussein conspiracists like Hayes were the media and worked in conjunction with the government to perpetrate their fraud.

While I try to keep an open mind, I do not believe the U.S. government orchestrated 9/11 precisely because I don’t believe our government is competent enough to pull off such an elaborate scheme, and if they did, it would certainly be too incompetent to cover it up.

But 9/11 Truthers and similar groups don’t concern me half as much as the conspiracy theorists in our media and government, who have the power to start wars, end lives, and damage nations, based on their own self-aggrandizing-fantasies.

And if I had to choose, there’s something much more healthy and patriotic about those who take their distrust of government to what some might consider a ridiculous degree, than those whose unquestioning trust in government is not only unhealthy — but completely ridiculous.

Source: http://www.mathaba.net/rss/?x=619535

US Drones don’t sting, they just kill

A drone on tarmac

Gen. Pervez Musharraf was still ruling this country when some whispers in the news came about a mysterious object that was downed by the tribals or as some said by the Taliban in FATA, but the Pakistani military didn’t comment on the incident either knowingly or unknowingly, as the COAS in those days was still the same Gen Pervaiz Musharraf who had almost issued a blank cheque to the then president George W. Bush with an understanding that the Americans could do anything in this country either covertly or even overtly, provided his dictatorship is not touched. No wonder then that the US who champions the cause of democracy and human values termed Musharraf’s emergency rule in Pakistan, as well as the brute dismissal of C. J. Iftikhar Chaudhary as Pakistan’s internal matter. 

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ITS THE KILLER MACHINES MAN, DOING THE JOB IN PAKISTAN

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Ex dictator, President Gen Pervaiz Musharraf was still ruling the roost in this land of the pure, when a news flashed in the media about some strange object that had been shot by the Taliban or common tribal’s in the FATA region of Pakistan. The fact whether this strange object crashed on its own (due to some technical reason) or was indeed shot down by the locals in the Pakistan’s tribal lands could not be established. One could see however the picture of scrap which could hardly hint on what this strange object or device could be.

Killer Drones: definition, images

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WHAT IS A DRONE?

A pilot less aircraft operated by remote control

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Definition of a drone as given in the free online dictionary is as under:-

1. A male bee, especially a honey bee, that is characteristically stingless, performs no work, and produces no honey. Its only function is to mate with the queen bee.

2. A pilotless aircraft operated by remote control.

So the reason these pilotless aircrafts have been named as drones is probably due to their physical shape which is highly similar to drones, i.e. the male bees.

DIFFERENT PARTS OF A DRONE

^{Above picture has been taken from a net source (Google Images), It shows different parts of a drone. On the sideline and the header are names of  al-Qaeda top operatives who have been  killed bythe CIA..}

DO THEY OPERATE FROM AFGHANISTAN OR PAKISTAN?

^{In the beginning and to some extent even till this day the Government of Pakistan has been denying that these drones fly from a Pakistani base, but then Google earth clearly shows the Shamsi air base in Balochistan from where these drones are flying and attacking among others, the  innocent Pakistani civilians as well.}

^{Here is a pic that Google earth has put on the net showing the location in Pakistan. You can see in complete detail this location by visiting the Google earth site.}

^{Readers who are inetrested to get further ews on this subject may vusit the blogsite CHUP!http://changinguppakistan.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/google-earth-reveals-secret-cia-drone-base/}

^{And finally, here now is a video showing how these drones are being used in war and peace. As technology advances, so does the perfection to rescue as well as kill the humans.}

^—

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Filling the Skies with Assassins

As Hollywood’s special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator in the cyber war movie somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May. Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven’t waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, drones that will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. 

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TERMINATOR PLANET : LAUNCHING THE DRONE WARS

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by Tom Engelhardt

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In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a “terminator,” back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet’s time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future machine war — of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape — are unforgettable.

Since then, as Hollywood’s special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don’t mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven’t waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. They’re even wondering about just how to program human ethics,maybe even American ethics, into them.

Okay, it may never happen, but it should still make you blink that out there in America are people eager to bring the fifth iteration of Terminator not to local multiplexes, but to the skies of our perfectly real world — and that the Pentagon is already funding them to do so.

AN ARMS RACE OF ONE

Now, keep our present drones, those MQ-1 Predators and more advanced MQ-9 Reapers, in mind for a moment. Remember that, as you read, they’re cruising Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani skies looking for potential “targets,” and in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, are employing what Centcom commander General David Petraeus calls “the right of last resort” to take out “threats” (as well as tribes people who just happen to be in the vicinity). And bear with me while I offer you a little potted history of the modern arms race.

Think of it as starting in the early years of the twentieth century when Imperial Britain, industrial juggernaut and colonial upstart Germany, and Imperial Japan all began to plan and build new generations of massive battleships or (followed by “super-dreadnoughts”) and so joined in a fierce naval arms race. That race took a leap onto land and into the skies in World War I when scientists and war planners began churning out techno-marvels of death and destruction meant to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western front.

Are U.S. drones bolstering Pakistani extremists?

 Last year U.S. military operations crossed another threshold in Pakistan. For the first time, a Predator ‘drone’ fired missiles into Bannu area in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), away from the seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas where it conducts raids with impunity.          

Attacking the self-governing and semi-autonomous FATA on the Afghan border, is one thing, but targeting the North West Frontier Province, or settled areas, is quite another. The people apprehend, this and similar acts if not stopped by Zardari government, the drone raids would escalate to settled areas including the metro cities like Lahore and Karachi as well. In other words it will no more be a war on terror but a war on Pakistan itself.

 

 by JONATHAN S. LANDAY

 

Even as the Obama administration launches new drone attacks into Pakistan’s remote tribal areas, concerns are growing among U.S. intelligence and military officials that the strikes are bolstering the Islamic insurgency by prompting Islamist radicals to disperse into the country’s heartland.

Al-Qaida, Taliban and other militants who’ve been relocating to Pakistan’s overcrowded and impoverished cities may be harder to find and stop from staging terrorist attacks, the officials said.

Moreover, they said, the strikes by the missile-firing drones are a recruiting boon for extremists because of the unintended civilian casualties that have prompted widespread anger against the U.S.

“Putting these guys on the run forces a lot of good things to happen,” said a senior U.S. defense official who requested anonymity because the drone operations, run by the CIA and the Air Force, are top-secret. “It gives you more targeting opportunities. The downside is that you get a much more dispersed target set and they go to places where we are not operating.”

U.S. drone attacks “may have hurt more than they have helped,” said a U.S. military official who’s been deeply involved in counterterrorism operations. The official, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, called the drone operations a “recruiting windfall for the Pakistani Taliban.”

“A significant number of bad actors aren’t where they used to be,” but have moved to “places where we can’t get at them the way we could,” he added.

As a result of the drone attacks, insurgent activities are “more dispersed in Pakistan and focusing on Pakistani targets,” said Christine Fair of the RAND Corp., a policy institute that advises the Pentagon. “So we have shifted the costs.”

President Barack Obama for now has embraced the drone strikes, which U.S. officials said have killed up to one dozen important al-Qaida operatives.

“If we have a high-value target within our sights, after consulting with Pakistan, we’re going after them,” Obama said in a March 29 interview with CBS News.

Several U.S. intelligence, military officials and independent experts, however, said that they’re especially worried by an influx of extremists from the tribal areas into the slums of Karachi. The capital of southern Sindh Province, with a population of at least 12 million, is Pakistan’s financial center and main port as well as the entry point for most of the supplies bound for U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Many militants are thought to have taken refuge among Karachi’s estimated 3.5 million Pashtuns, the ethnic group comprising the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their presence is stoking tensions with other groups in the southern city, which has a long history of communal bloodshed and terrorism, including against Western targets.

“The who’s who of extremism is present in Karachi,” said Faisal Ali Subzwari, a Sindh government minister. “There are many areas where police and (paramilitary) Rangers cannot even dare to enter. It is a safe haven for those who want a hiding place.”

Subzwari, whose Mohajir Quami Movement represents immigrants from India and has repeatedly warned of the “Talibanization” of Karachi, said that part of his own constituency is one of these “no-go” areas.

U.S. officials have long identified Karachi as the headquarters of the Afghan Taliban’s fundraising committee, and many top militants were educated at the Binori Mosque, a key center of radical Islamic ideology. A “feeder” network of militant seminaries in Karachi supplies young suicide bombers, they said.

An upheaval in Karachi, home to Pakistan’s stock exchange and other financial institutions, would be catastrophic for a country that has only avoided bankruptcy with a $7.6 billion International Monetary Fund emergency credit line. Financial activities, as well as imports and exports for both Pakistan and landlocked Afghanistan, could be paralyzed, as could supplies for U.S.-led NATO forces in the region.

Concerns over “blowback” from the drone strikes is fueling a debate in the Obama administration over whether they should be extended from the Federally Administered Tribal Area, the region bordering eastern Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding, to Baluchistan Province, the alleged refuge of the Afghan Taliban leadership, U.S. officials said.

Proponents of the drone strikes cite the killing of key al-Qaida operatives and the disruption of the terrorist network’s ability to plot new attacks; opponents, said to include some senior administration officials, fear that the operations are too destabilizing for nuclear-armed Pakistan and are doing nothing to halt the insurgencies tearing through the country and Afghanistan

“There is no uniform opinion on this,” the senior defense official said. “You have some concerns that they are causing a ripple effect, that the consequences are too large for Pakistan to absorb.”

Several U.S. officials argued that it would be easier for U.S. and Pakistani authorities, including the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, to track down militants who leave the remote border region for the cities. They pointed out that senior al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody were found in Pakistani urban areas.

Critics, however, noted that the ISI and the Pakistani military can’t be relied on to cooperate, because while they’ve turned over foreign militants, some former and current ISI and army officers are believed to support Afghan and Pakistani groups.

There have been dozens of drone strikes in the past year, the most recent killing 13 people in the tribal region of North Waziristan. The next day, a top Pakistani Taliban leader threatened to launch two suicide attacks every week unless the strikes stop. His threat followed a series of suicide bombings in the heartland province of Punjab.

A senior Pakistani official reiterated the government’s opposition to the drone operations after talks in Islamabad with Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“They (drone strikes) are counterproductive,” said Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. “My view is they are causing collateral damage, my view is that they are alienating people, my view is that they are working to the advantage of the extremists. We (Pakistan and the U.S.) have agreed to disagree on this

Source: McClatchy Newspapers, Wshington

Britain: Big Brother spy drones may soon hover over your home

Armed with heat-seeking cameras, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles would hover hundreds of feet in the air, gathering intelligence and watching suspects.

by Fiona Macrae
(Daily Mail)

Pilotless planes used to track the Taliban could soon be hovering over our streets, it has emerged.

Remote-controlled drones are already used widely by the military. Now officials believe they are likely to become ‘increasingly useful’ for police and other sneakers.

Armed with heat-seeking cameras, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles would hover hundreds of feet in the air, gathering intelligence and watching suspects.

In theory, their advantages are clear. They are cheaper and quieter than conventional helicopters, can circle their target for hours without refuelling – and they don’t get bored on long surveillance missions.

However, their use is likely to further fuel concerns about our march towards a Big Brother state. Britain already has more CCTV cameras than the rest of Europe put together.

More than four million closed-circuit TV cameras cover the streets; cars are monitored using cameras that check registration plates and a new law will see footage taken of shoppers buying alcohol.

The plan to deploy ‘spy in the sky’ planes is outlined in the Home Office’s latest Science and Innovation Strategy. It says: ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are likely to be an increasingly useful tool for police in the future, potentially reducing the number of dangerous situations the police may have to enter and also providing evidence for prosecutions and support police operations in “real time”.’

Two years ago, Tony McNulty, then a Home Office minister, acknowledged that scientists were exploring the use of UAV technology for a ‘range of policing and security applications’.

They could be used by MI5 to watch a suspect’s address for long periods or track a car for miles.

The drones could also help officers plan raids in locations that are hard to reach, to record and monitor accidents or to spot speeding offences or reckless or uninsured drivers.

Ministers are liaising with the Civil Aviation Authority about the introduction of UAVs, some of which measure as little as 2ft across.

But the document cautions: ‘We need to investigate how such vehicles could be used, and their ability to provide high-quality evidence for convictions.’

There are also safety concerns surrounding the planes. Those used by the military are prone to crashes on takeoff and landing. Many have been lost over battlefields.

A trial by Merseyside police, of £30,000 remote-controlled miniature helicopters with still, video or infra-red cameras, highlighted more mundane problems related to battery life and the effects of bad weather on flights.

Mark Wallace, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: ‘I think a lot of people would be concerned at the Home Office looking to use technology more generally associated with the tribal borders of Pakistan and the fight against terror over British towns to watch the British public.

‘It is not necessarily as glamorous or as high-tech, but a bobby snapping cuffs on a criminal is the most productive approach.’ 

Source:

Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji & His Message for Humanity

The hallow around this face  enlightens the whole world of Sikhism

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Nayyar Hashmey

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This week the 539th birthday celebrations of the founder of the Sikh religion, Baba Guru Nanak will start with a deep devotion and fervor in different parts of Punjab, Pakistan. Members of the Sikh community from around the globe will attend the five days religious ritual with great enthusiasm and pay homage to the great Sufi poet of Punjab, who changed the lives of millions of people through his message of love, peace, and devotion to God, tranquility and equality for the mankind.

Every year in November, the authorities in Pakistan make special arrangements for the occasion to provide transport and lodgings for thousands of guests from abroad. Pakistan Railways induct special train schedules for Indian Sikhs to attend the celebrations on Pakistani side of the Punjab and then return home safely. PIA, the national airline also scedules special flights from various destinations to Lahore for devotees from all over the world.

The man to whom all this homage being paid, all these celebrations being held; was born in a Hindu farming  family  at a place which was then a tiny remote village  called  Talwandi Rai in Sheikhupura district, 160  kilometers from  Lahore, the capital of the province.  Though originally an  unknown spot in the vast expanse of  Punjab, Rai Talwandi  attained a special status after the birth of the Great Guru, not only for the followers of the  Sikh religion but also for  Hindus and Muslims. Gradually it  turned into a town,  became a tehsil of Sheikhupura  district and now is a district  headquarters itself.

I remember my first journey to Nankana Sahib in early  eighties. The road from Sheikhupura to Nankana was a  narrow countryside road and after every kilometer there  were so many sudden bumps and jumps that one could  hardly call it a road. But now a, fully carpeted highway  takes  you from Sheikhupura to Nankana Sahib turning  your  journey into a happy comfortable ride, more so to a place  blessed as the birthplace of the Great Guru. The place got  its name changed from Talwandi Rai to Nankana  in  recognition of the teaching and services for humanity by Sat Guru, Nanak Dev Ji during his life time.

Gurdwara Janam Asthan, the birthplace of the founder of Sikh faith in Nankana Sahib is the center of spiritual zeal for Sikhs scattered all over the globe. Every year, this month, the faithful converge to pay homage to the spiritual Guru, whose message is still relevant in fast changing times.

While glancing over the life of the Guru, I learnt that he had started to tread on path of his Creator from the time he was just a child. The Maulvi to whom he was sent to learn vernacular knowledge, told his father, Nanak didn’t need any teaching for he knew what others did not. Later, in his boyhood, when his father sent him to make certain purchasing deals for the business, Nanak spent the money to feed the Sadhus. When asked by his father about the deal he was to make out of money given to him, Said Sat Guru, “Bapu, I made a Sacha Sauda”. Now this word Sacha Sauda means a true deal but I never knew its connotations except that it was a small railway station between Faisalabad and Lahore which I had to cross every time I took an express train during my travels from the then Lyallpur to Lahore.

The true meanings of this “true deal” were revealed to me when I started reading about the life of the Great Guru. I learnt this was the place where the Guru had struck this saccha sauda, the true deal in his boyhood days. It’s now a pretty bustling town near Nankane Sahib and a unique, impressive Gurdawara building under the same name stands here.

After having struck the real deal of his life, the Guru underwent a process of enlightenment which all men of God experience in their life. Soon Guru’s world-changing movement spread all over Punjab, the target audience was the poor peasants of rural areas.

Nanak Dev used the rhythm of Punjabi poetry and soothing Sufi music to pass on his message of love. He stood against social evils and promoted the equality of every one, without any discrimination of color, creed, race or sex. Baba Nanak was the first one who fought for the rights of the women. 

The Sikh code was revolutionary because it guaranteed food and a living place for every human being without any discrimination. Gurdwaras, where Sikhs offer worship remain open 24 hours for everyone with arrangement of free food. “You can’t find any Sikh as a beggar simply because of the teachings of Baba Nanak Ji,” said once Chaudhry Anwar Aziz, a Michigan university law graduate, former politician and a federal minister, who served in successive governments. Interestingly, Baba Guru Nanak Ji never compiled the Sikh code of practice and rituals that came after his death.

The vastly traveled founder of Sikh religion Baba Guru Nanak also performed the Hajj and paid homage to the holy prophet Muhammad (PBUH) at Medina. His close associate and lifetime friend Sufi musician, Bhai Mardana was a Muslim minstrel, who spent his life with him as a follower. The teachings of Guru Nanak Ji had great resemblance and commonalities with Islamic teachings and philosophy. Being a child from a Hindu family, the lifestyle and jargon of Nanak Ji was influenced also by typical Hindu traditions that overlapped the ideological contradictions with Hinduism, yet many in India believe Sikhism to be an offshoot of Hinduism. But, in fact it is a religion which like Islam doesn’t believe in idolatry and has an absolute faith in oneness of Rabb, the Creator and Nourisher of all of us.

Guru Nanak Dev spent his last decade in a village called Kartarpur Sahib, in Narowal district on the lush green banks of the river Ravi. Before he died he announced that Sikhism had been completed. According to mythology, immediately after his announcement of the completion of Sikhism, he passed away. There was a brawl over his last rituals, his Muslim followers wanted to bury him and his Hindu followers insisted that they should cremate his body. While, the scuffle was going on, suddenly the enraged followers came to know that the body of Nanak ji had disappeared mysteriously and a lot of roses had taken its place.

To settle the dispute both groups distributed the roses, the Muslims buried and Hindus cremated these flowers. At Darbar Sahib Kartarpur there is a marble clad grave outside the complex and inside a crematorium, both stand in veneration to the great Sufi poet and founder of new progressive religion of Sikhism.

The Sikh code of teachings was compiled after Baba Nanak Ji, and nine successors of the great Guru shaped the contours of this new religion. Finally the tenth guru Gobind announced the compilation of the Sikh scripture and holy book the Granth Sahib. Guru Gobind Ji, the great warrior of his times, converted pure Sufi movement into the militant group and introduced five K’s. He also declared that Granth Sahib will be considered a living Guru after him, and that no one be appointed his successor. The Granth Sahib contains the work of three great Muslim Sufi poets, Baba Farid Shaker Ganj, Hazrat Mian Meer and Waris Shah.

Their work makes up 33 percent of the book. The Granth Sahib is considered an eternal living guru; hence at every Sikh place of worship, the Gurdawara, a spacious room is earmarked as an abode of the holy Granth Sahib.

The essence of Nanak’s teachings are found relevant in today’s world,  when he insists upon all men:-

Realize your unity with all.

Love God. Love God in man.

Sing love of God. Repeat His Name.

Sing His glory.

Love God as the lotus loves water,

the bird Chatak loves rain, as wife loves husband.

Make divine love thy pen and thy heart the writer.

Repeat His Name, you live; if you forget, you die.

Open your heart to Him.

Seek a communion (with Him), sink into His arms;

and you will feel the divine embrace.

To end my wandering thoughts, an humble tribute to the Sufi, the Poet and the Messiah from Punjab, I quote one of his hymns – a beautiful summary of his teachings, a nirvana particularly for today’s anguished world.

Love saints of every faith, put away your pride

Remember Essence of religion, throw away the trite

In meekness and sympathy,

Not the fine clothes, Not the Yogi’s garb and ashes,

Not the blowing of horns, Nor the shaven heads,

Nor prayers and the corns, Nor recitations and tortures,

Not ascetic ways, long departures

But a life of goodness and purification,

Amid the world’s temptations,

Seek eternal glorification.

_________

Photo Credits: 1: On top by Sobha Singh, 2: In the middle from Wikipedia, 3: Bottom from Punjabi Press

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Living With Nuclear Weapons

Disarmament -the Obama style

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Milan Vodicka

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Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that Barack Obama would speak about me during his address in my hometown last week. He devoted a full half-sentence to me. It was when he said that some people would have a sceptical view of his call for a world without nuclear weapons.

Since Obama was short on specifics, allow me to fill in the gaps in his vision with some minor details.

First, rogue states and other troublemakers should swear to abandon any thoughts of nuclear weapons. We can begin with Comrade Kim Jong-il.

Second, Israel should be persuaded to lay down its nuclear arms before its loving neighbours. In other words, it ought to give up the nukes that are its guarantor of deterrence and survival.

Third, Iran should be persuaded that if Israel doesn’t have a bomb, Tehran doesn’t need one either.

Human wave attacks, such as those employed in the Iran-Iraq war, will suffice. Fourth, it is necessary to talk with Pakistan, which has targeted nuclear weapons against India’s bombs. At the same time, a conversation should be had with India, which has the bomb because Pakistan has it.

Fifth, we should drink a shot of vodka with Russia because without nuclear weapons, Moscow will be left with nothing but memories of its superpower status, and it might be fearful of China, which is gaining in power and is overcrowded while Siberia is empty and rich in natural resources.

Sixth, we should share a cognac with the French and a whisky with the Brits. They may not be afraid of China, but without any nuclear capacity, their Great Power status will be a forgotten chapter in history.

Seventh, we should play Chinese opera with China, which will think that all of this disarmament talk is just a ploy to undermine everyone else, because America already has better weapons.

Eighth, we need to turn back the clock and pretend that we don’t know how to build nuclear weapons.

Seriously, I don’t mean to suggest that we should just drop the idea of disarmament; I merely have some practical objections. For the most part, I completely understand President Obama: America is a pragmatic country precisely because it has free time for the hobby-horse of idealism. And President Obama wants a great idea. The world needs one since we’ve lived so long without one.

Nuclear weapons, whether used by terrorists or nuts, are actually the greatest threat to civilisation today. No one knows what to do about them. Ronald Reagan wanted to eliminate them. George W. Bush wanted to take preventive action by locking up every potential suspect. President Obama wants to pull the nuclear carpet out from underfoot.

But we should keep certain facts in mind. The Cold War didn’t escalate
into a hot one because there were nuclear weapons and the certainty of mutual destruction. Yes, we live in a different era.

But what will happen when someone secretly builds a bomb? Will that person rule the world? What will 
others do?

I know why Barack Obama chose Prague as the place to present his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. It’s the capital of a country where wars have begun and ended, from the Thirty Years War to World War II. And Obama is right when he says that one nuclear weapon detonated in one city, whether New York or Prague, could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And he is correct when he says that people are entitled to live without fear.

So I’m crossing my fingers that President Obama will succeed. But living in Prague — the city where great wars have begun and ended — has taught me to feel safer with nuclear weapons than without them.

________

Milan Vodicka writes for the Czech daily MF DNES © IHT

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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The Ox, the Race and the Thrill

ADRENALINE RUSH

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Umair Ghani

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From cave paintings of the ancient age to the modern agricultural practices, ox and bull still remain the object of immense interest; value and proud possession of village folk. Of all the domesticated beasts, ox along with the horse is man’s best companion and his most trusted possession.

Bulls appear on ancient seals (like the ones excavated from the Indus Valley archeological sites) as well as the paintings and sculptures discovered and recovered from excavations elsewhere in the world.

Ancient agrarian civilizations had always set their prime focus on activities that particularly included the sports, on either the horses or the oxen. Whereas horse was the proud possession of nobility, ox enjoyed the patronage of common men. For the masses, this docile beast was a means to earn bread (through cultivation) and for transport. But the most preferred pursuit for entertainment by rural folk has always been the humble domesticated beast, the ox for its race and the thrill.

The common festivities patronized by rural folk in particular have always been the village carnivals (WOP already covered one such carnival in its Sep. 2008 issue) or the melas, where not only the oxen, the cows, the bulls and buffaloes are brought for sale and purchase but also for one of the most thrilling entertainments in our rural districts. Along with equestrian sports, oxen race is the second most popular game after tent pegging (the sport of the kings and generals) which offers a magnificent display, the thrill and the pageantry at its best.

Adil Najam described the drama of an oxen race in his equally thrill filled essay “Adrenaline Rush”.

“This is an event,” says Adil “that pushes the animals as well as the jockeys literally to the edge of their physical prowess that demands amazing control, concentration and courage. It’s quite simply, a sight to behold and an experience that gets your adrenaline rushing as fast as that of the men and the beast on centre stage”.

Its there at the race trek that oxen / or the bullocks are carried to, the area (usually a large field) with great pomp and show. The owners demonstrate an air of pride in their possession and walk at a pace, in complete synchronization of the gait of the beast they are taking along. The cattle (oxen or the bullock) are ushered on to the trek at a slow pace so as to familiarize the animal with the ground surface and the environment. The crowd starts gathering along the boundary.

Once the animals are right on the race trek, a thunderous clapping and shouting welcomes the participants (the animals and their proud owners). Dhole beats follow the clapping, roars and chants set the mood of the crowd. Every body sits or stands enthusiastically awaiting the approaching thrill.

Here on the village field, not only is the owner’s pride at stake but also the entire village is eager to hear the news ‘who won the race’. And if it’s your party that won, this is the time for you to rejoice, to celebrate and to boo you rivals.

By passage of time these races are also getting professional. It’s the special breeds now that are now reared for the racing events only. No more are these docile beast now sent out to farming or other chores so common in our rural economy. The animals are fed on specially prepared protein and vitamin rich ‘wanda’ (the cattle feed) and are kept in relatively comfortable rather luxurious conditions. A strict regime on injuries or any other health hazard by regular vet visits is strictly enforced. The bull muscles are also invigorated and physically strengthened through regular massage and other exercises.

For a typical race in a circle, wooden planks are tied to the pair of the oxen; the jockey stands on the plank and then pushes the pair to run on the oval track. That being the main part of race training. In some parts of Punjab and Sindh, instead of wooden plank, a cart is attached to the bull. Carts for this purpose are specially crafted, carved and painted in vibrant colours.

Not very long ago, the village carnivals aka mela madis were a regular feature in Central Punjab and Sindh. However, the urbanization especially of our rural districts has limited these activities to some more remote parts of the country. Urbanization and over-industrialization offered more lucrative ventures to the people in rural societies, so many traditional sports including the oxen races started vanishing from the scene. To further discourage the people to indulge in these simple, home grown enjoying moments of fun and frolic, came also the NGO’s and animal rights activists who argued that such races were cruel sports that tormented the animals for humans’ luscious enjoyment only.

“Bullocks and oxen are not the horses, argue these activists. They are meek and gentle creatures already worn out from a hard day’s labour, even then they are forced to run. Many a time chillies are thrown into their eyes or even pushed into the arses, jabbing them in their privates with naked sticks; lashing them with steel whips and forcing alcohol down their throats”. Then the difference in the height and weight of one bullock can exert a tremendous amount of pressure on the other bullock, no wonder, that muscular injuries are common in case of these racing bulls. Such injuries are mostly caused through lashing and poking of sticks to make the animals run faster which sometimes cripples them and may even cause their death as well.

Another uglier aspect is the gambling, which unfortunately in some areas, has become a regular feature. To this comes the loss of losing face as the defeated party has to surrender the pair of bullocks to the victor, an aspect which in our rural culture is often taken as a loss of honour and pride and that too just before his rival. This and similar aspects are discouraging enthusiasts to loose interest in this simple, indigenous and thrill filled activity

To add fuel to the fire, reports of inhuman treatment to these humble animal-beings further motivated the people not to frequent such melas where the oxen races were the prime show of the event. To further discourage these races, reports were published by Vet groups hyped up by the media [who out of fierce competition to solicit prime sponsorships are now ‘blood’ thirsty for “Breaking news”]. Animals get frequent heart arrests during these races causing instant deaths on the fields, cautioned these reports. Barring some scattered incidents reported by them, they generalized the whole situation to turn a gentle, peaceful, entertaining event to a cruel game. No body doubts; some scattered events might have occurred in some scattered places, away from the general masses, yet to deprive the common man of a healthy, gentle and peaceful way of enjoyment is a cruelty in itself. No one especially a person who loves the animal and the sport can even think of being so cruel to their humble yet prideful animal beings. Yet these reports start pouring in, marring the very beauty of the game.

However, with all the good, bad and the ugly aspects, in the world of oxen sports, the race still goes on. To quote Adil Najam once again:

“Pairs of oxen, racing against each other in a fast paced high drama, a heart pounding racing event, an absolute spectacle that rivals any car racing event.”

_______

Photo Credits: 1: on top by Nadeem Khawar 2: in the middle by Imran Waheed, 3 & 4: bottom by Umair Ghani

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The SSP, who revolutionised the minds and souls

Do not speak a word that pains,
For in everyone the true Lord reigns,
Do not break the hearts to whirl,
For each man’s heart, is a priceless pearl.

♦

Umair Ghani

♦

Please don’t get struck by the caption of this post, am not talking of anything like some SSP from our law enforcing agencies. I’m rather going to put up a post about an SSP, the Sufi, the Saint and the Poet of Punjab, Hazrat Baba Farid-ud-din Masud Ganj-Shakkar.

Hazrat Ji, commonly known as Baba Farid was a Sufi preacher, saint and a poet, belonging to the Chishtia Order of Sufis.

Baba Farid is generally recognized as the first major poet of the Punjabi language and is one of the pivotal saints of the Punjab. Revered by Muslims and Hindus alike, he is also considered one of the fifteen Sikh Bhagats within Sikhism and his works form part of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh sacred scripture.

Baba Farid’s ancestors hailed from a town called Aush, south of Ferghana [Babur's hometown]. Baba Ji’s grandfather left Kabul and took refuge in Lahore under the Ghaznavid Sultan in 1125, but tired of Lahore’s courtly atmosphere he moved to Kasur where Sultan appointed him as Qazi. He, however, soon left Kasur and settled in Kothiwal.

He was born on the first day of Ramzan in 1173 in the city of Kothiwal, near Dipalpur in West Punjab. He was given this name after the great Sufi poet Farid-ud-Din Attar.

Baba Ji’s birth place is now called Pak Pattan; but its original name as recorded in history books was Ajodhan, which is said to be an important center of ancient India. The present city of Pak Pattan lies on the banks of the river Sutlej. People going across the river would generally clean or purify themselves before stepping on the ferryboat, so the old name was replaced with Pak Pattan.

Baba Farid’s father’ was Sheikh Jamaluddin Suleiman. His mother, Kulsum Bibi [some scholars mentioned Karsam Khatoon] was a God-fearing lady.

The name Ganj Shakar has an interesting tale. Baba Farid’s parents took extreme care that their child offered regular prayers and got an insightful religious education. The parents kept sweets under his pillow as a reward for the prayers their son offered. It was an incentive to keep him going that way. One day his mother found out that there were no more sweets in the house.

Fearing that their child would not pray without the promised prize the parents decided to collect some pebbles and place them under Baba Farid’s prayer mat. Farid woke and went straight to his prayer-mat, the moment he finished the prayers and reached for the prize his mother shouted, “No, sonny, they are not sweets; your father has gone to the bazaar to bring them.”

“But they are sweets,” said Baba Farid and placed them in his mouth one by one.

“No!” the mother shouted again.

But the child kept munching sweets and to his mother’s astonishment found them sweeter than before.

The bewildered parents witnessed a miracle. From that day, Sheikh Farid came to be known as Ganj-e-Shakar [the store-house of sweets]. Allah had kept child’s faith intact.

YOU are my protection
O Lord, my salvation
Grant to Sheikh Farid
Thy blessing
Of thy adoration

O Lord

Farid shifted to Multan for higher studies. Multan fascinated renowned scholars from Iran and Baghdad as a center of learning. That’s where Baba Farid met his spiritual guide Hazrat Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki. He took Farid along with him to Delhi where they met Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, the greatest name among the Sufis of all times.

Farid endured severe penance and asceticism under Khwaja Qutbuddin’s training. He went through strenuous physical exercises and suffered pain and hunger, and narrated his experiences in a number of his verses:

So says Farid
My bread is of wood
And hunger is my sauce
Those who eat the rich food
Do suffer from a fatal mood and

The severe agonies

Balban, the King at Delhi warmly greeted Baba Farid and introduced him to his family; Balban’s daughter was married to Baba Farid and the gifts for the marriage were distributed among the poor and fakirs. A town called Faridkot still exists in Indian Punjab.

After a short stay at Faridkot, he returned to Pak Pattan. It was here that Baba Ji breathed his last in 1266, on the fifth day of the month of Muharram. He was buried outside the town of Pak Pattan at a place called Martyr’s Grave. He was a matchless saint of God. His torch of Sufi thought was carried by his successor and subsequently by Bhagat Kabir, Guru Nanak, and many others.

Baba Sheikh Farid Shakarganj is quite truly regarded as the founder of Punjabi poetry. His verse goes deep into the soul, and induces in man the vision of the ideal life, a rising emotion in the heart, more purified than before.

Many of his verses are included in the Garanth Sahib. His message is not contracted or sectarian, but has a wide humanitarian base. In an age marked by great brutality in its social and political organizations, Baba Farid brought the touch of humanity and righteousness to all who came to seek his blessings, or to lay before him, the agony of their suffering hearts:

Rise Oh! Farid! Do your ablution

and say the prayers of morning to thy Lord,

Behead the head that does not bow before the Lord of us all.

Photo Credit

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Linguistic Bigotry: The Great Debate – I

NeechaN di ashnai koloN faiz kisay nahiN paya
kikar te angoor chRahia har gosha zakhmaya

(No one can benefit from people with lowly mentality. If the grapes’s vine is wrapped on a ‘kikkar’ tree, every bunch [of grapes] is damaged)

·

A GREAT MEDIUM VS. THE LANGUAGE OF FIVE RIVERS 

·

·

 Note for WoP readers: Dr. Syed Ehtisham is a writer and analyst who frequently contributes to one of my favorite website www.wichaar.com

 Dr. Syed Ehtisham circulated this note among APPNA’ e-mail lists. He did not name the person but according to investigation by Dr.Manzur Ejaz, the said person was Dr. Arif Muslim and the Dr. outraged Dr. Ghazala Qazi who read Mian Mohammad’s verses for him:-

NeechaN di ashnai koloN faiz kisay nahiN paya
kikar te angoor chRahia har gosha zakhmaya

(No one can benefit from people with lowly mentality. If the grapes’s vine is wrapped on a ‘kikkar’ tree, every bunch [of grapes] is damaged)

And now the note from Dr. Syed Ehtisham……

Linguistic Bigotry: The Great Debate – II

NeechaN di ashnai koloN faiz kisay nahiN paya
kikar te angoor chRahia har gosha zakhmaya

(No one can benefit from people with lowly mentality. If the grapes’s vine is wrapped on a ‘kikkar’ tree, every bunch [of grapes] is damaged)

·

A GREAT MEDIUM VS.THE LANGUAGE OF FIVE RIVERS

·

[Response to Linguistic Bigotry]

·

by Dr. Manzur Ejaz and Omar Ali

·

 One common characteristic among all kinds of bigots is their combination of ignorance and arrogance. A Pakistani-American physician, Dr. Arif Muslim proved this once more by saying that Punjabi language is “jaisai GhoRae, gadhe, billi aur Kuttae ki boli, waisae hi Punjabi boli.”

The emotional shock one feels is that this bigot is placing the great thinkers, linguists and poets of Punjabi language, Baba Farid, Guru Nanak, Shah Hussain,  Demodar Das, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Mian Mohammad, Khawaja Farid and others, as well as a over a hundred million Punjabis, in the category of lowly animals. Whatever they wrote and whatever they speak everyday in millions of homes, turns out to be “GhoRae, gadhe, billi aur Kuttae ki boli.”

We should not make this an ethnic issue because the person who reported and protested the bigotry is an Urdu speaking physician himself. One can find such bigots among so-called educated Punjabis as well. In fact, these remarks would never be made in such a cavalier fashion if educated Punjabis had not encouraged and abetted such ignorance for decades. However, these remarks do demand a response to set the record straight.

Two True Stories

While on his mission Lieutenant Commander Butch O’Hare, knew very well his plane was going to be terribly short of fuel, but he laid aside all thoughts of personal safety, he dove into the formation of Japanese planes. Wing-mounted 50 caliber’s blazed as he charged in, attacking one surprised enemy plane and then another. Butch wove in and out of the now broken formation and fired at as many planes as possible until all his ammunition was finally spent. Undaunted, he continued the assault. He dove at the planes, trying to clip a wing or tail in hopes of damaging as many enemy planes as possible, rendering them unfit to fly. 

·

·

by anonymous

·

Note for WoP readers: My friend Umair Ghani has mailed me two true stories. Could be that many amongst you have already read them, but many may not have. I am also the one who read it for the first time, though years ago I read about this Mafiosi boss Al Capone and later also saw the movie “Godfather” which was  filmed on his life. Marlon Brando played the Godfather’s role. It won awards as well. And now the stories… [Nayyar]

Khota Qabar & the story of a lost battle

The city of Balakot in the morning

·

FROM BREILLEY TO BALAKOT

 · 

by Mast Qalandar

·

I must have passed by this place countless times on my way to Abbottabad and back and was always intrigued by its name. Khota Qabar! Donkey’s grave, that is. Why, I wondered, so much reverence for a donkey? Khota Qabar:

Khota Qabar lies on the Karakoram Highway about 60 miles north of Islamabad and 7 miles short of Abbottabad. It is precisely where the road starts climbing into the mountains of Mansehra and onwards into the picturesque Kaghan valley and the Northern Areas. I always knew it as a place where truck drivers coming up from the planes stopped to cool their engines and top up the radiators with cold water from a nearby stream to ready their vehicles for the climb ahead. Because of the presence of truck drivers a couple of khokha restaurants have sprouted at this spot and are doing a thriving business.

It is so small a place that you won’t find it on any map of Pakistan. However, to my pleasant surprise, a Google search turned up the following information onKhota Qabar or Khote di Qabar: latitude 34.09; longitude 73.17; elevation 3,251 feet.

I was impressed — with Google, that is.

Like many other places and things in life I took this place for granted and never enquired how or why it came to be so named. But when I did – only recently – I uncovered a fascinating story behind it. A story of a man and his mission.

The story begins, of all the places, in Rai Breilley, a town in present day Uttar Pardesh, India (renowned for being the constituency of Nehru-Gandhi family), and ends in the mountains of Balakot, a town in the far North of Pakistan.

It is the story of a man named Syed Ahmed. He was born in Rai Brailey in 1786. He was a deeply religious man. His life mission was to usher in, once again, the glorious Islamic past. He wanted to establish an Islamic state on the pattern of the early caliphate, first, in the subcontinent and then, possibly, in the rest of the world. To achieve this he decided to wage a jihad against the “infidels” who ruled the subcontinent then. Thus, he became one of the earliest, if not the first, native Jihadi of the subcontinent.

This was the time when the Mughal rule in India had virtually ceased to exist. The Mughal Empire stretched barely beyond the modern city of Delhi. The dominant powers of the time were the British Empire, represented by the East India Company, which controlled most of the Northern India, the Marhatta Empire to the south, the Sikh Empire in the North-West and Kashmir, and hundreds of minor kings, maharajas and Nawabs in various parts of the land.

Syed Ahmed understood that it was not feasible to fight the British. They were better organized, better equipped and in firm control of most of Northern India. He, therefore, decided to emigrate to what is today NWFP in Pakistan and wage a jihad from there. After beating the Sikhs in the NWFP and Kashmir, he imagined, he could then take on the British.

His choice of NWFP as a launching pad for jihad was based on the assumptions that it was predominantly a Muslim area bordering on another Muslim state, Afghanistan; that its people had a reputation of being good warriors and that they were unhappy with the Sikh rule and ready to take up arms against them.

(Right) The stone plate depicting the final resting place of Shah Ismail Shaheed

Armed with these assumptions and total faith in his mission and trust in God, Syed Ahmed and his devotees left their homes and families (Syed Sahib left behind his two wives) and embarked on a difficult and circuitous journey to Peshawar via Sindh, Quetta, Qandhar and Kabul. Among his companions was also Shah Ismail, a grandson of Shah Waliullah of Delhi.

(Left) Gravestone: Syed Ahmed Shaheed’s mazaar in Balakot

After reaching Peshawar, Syed Sahib tried to enter into alliances with the local chiefs and khans, often unreliable, to gain their support for his Jihad. He managed to raise an “army” of mujahideen who engaged in a few skirmishes with the Sikhs and also launched nighttime raids on a few towns, notably AkoRa Khattak and Hazro. But these skirmishes and raids did not yield any strategic gains.

Most narratives on the subject, at least the one’s I have perused, even though rich in trivia, are incoherent and terribly confusing. Cutting through the web of confusion, however, one finds that Syed Ahmed Brelvi, moving from place to place for 4-5 years in the Frontier province turned up at Balakot sometime in the first quarter of 1831. He was 46. In the process he also acquired a third wife, a young woman from Chitral, named Fatima.

Syed Sahib’s strategy was to defeat the Sikhs at Balakot and then march on to Kashmir next door. His starry-eyed optimism is evident from one of his last letters he wrote to the Nawab of Tonk in India, who, as a gesture of support and sympathy, was housing Syed Sahib’s two wives as guests on his estate. The letter was written on 25 April 1831 (translation and paraphrasing is mine):

“I am in the mountains of Pakhli (name of the area). The people here have welcomed us with warmth and hospitality and have given us a place to stay. They have also promised to support us in the jihad. For the time being I am camped in the town of Balakot, which is located in the Kunhar pass. The army of the infidels [kuffars] is camped not too far from us. Since Balakot is located at a secure place (surrounded by hills and bounded by the river), God willing, the infidels will not be able to reach us. Of course, we may choose to advance and enter into a battle at our own initiative. And this we intend to do in the next two or three days. With the help of God, we will be victorious. If we win this battle, and, God willing, we will, then we will occupy all the land alongside the Jehlum River including the kingdom of Kashmir. Please pray, day and night, for our victory.”

Obviously, Syed Sahib believed in and greatly relied upon divine help and miracles.

Hari Singh was the governor of Kashmir and NWFP at the time, representing Maharaja Ranjit Singh who sat in Lahore. He was a clever and ruthless administrator. His forces under the command of Sher Singh lay in wait for the mujahideen at Muzaffarabad. Their contingents had already moved to occupy the hilltop, known as Mitti Kot, overlooking the town of Balakot.

Syed Sahib, in his plans, expected the Sikhs to come down from their perch at Mitti Kot and attack the mujahideen. He, therefore, had the paddy fields, which lay between the town and the hills, flooded hoping that the advancing Sikhs would get mired in them and the Mujahideen could then pick them like sitting ducks — literally. But the Sikhs had their own plans. They did not move and waited, instead, for the mujahideen to make the first move.

The mujahideen obliged on May 6, 1831. It was a Friday. A bizarre incident occurred that morning that precipitated the battle. While the mujahideen were still having breakfast and, at the same time, keeping a wary eye on the movement of the enemy at Mitti Kot, one of them, Syed Chiragh Ali from Patiala, suddenly expressed a desire to eat kheer (rice pudding).

Since kheer was not on the menu that morning, Chiragh Ali fetched the necessary wherewithal and set about preparing kheer for himself. (It sounds bizarre, but as the Punjabi saying goes: shouq da koi mul naeen or fulfilling a whim has no price – nor a time.)

While Chiragh Ali was stirring the pot and nervously looking at the Sikhs on the hilltop, something came over him and he shouted, “There! I see a beautiful hoor (houri) dressed in red. She is calling me!” He threw away the ladle with which he was stirring the pot, and declared that he would eat only from the hands of the hoor. With this announcement he charged headlong at the hill, shouting Allah-o-Akbar. It all happened so suddenly that before anyone could realize what was happening, Chiragh Ali was in the middle of the paddy fields, struggling to run successfully in the mud. The Sikhs who must have been watching the scene with some amusement picked him in the sights of their rifles and shot him — dead in the mud. According to the narrative, Syed Chiragh Ali was the first martyr of the battle of Balakot.

What followed the shooting was total chaos and confusion. Syed Sahib, abandoning his earlier plan, ordered his men to attack. The mujahideen rushed forward and they, too, got mired in the muddy fields. The Sikhs then made their move. In a battle that lasted most of the day, amidst shouts of Allah-o-Akbar and Wahe guruji ka khalsa, wahe guruji ki fateh, Syed Ahmed and Shah Ismail were killed along with many mujahideen. The number of dead mujahideen varies, depending on the source one uses, from 300 to 1300. Whatever the numbers, however, the mujahideen had met their Waterloo at Balakot.

Nearly two centuries later, on October 6, 2005, an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale shook and flattened the town of Balakot. Miraculously, however, it spared the graves of Syed Ahmed Shaheed and Shah Ismail Shaheed. Perhaps, as a reminder that miracles do happen but one cannot rely upon them!

What about Khota Qabar? Why was Khota Qabar so named?

On their way to Balkot the mujahideen camped somewhere near present day Abbottabad. The Sikhs, in order to choke the mujahideen’s supply lines, posted troops on the hills overlooking the road that led through a gorge to Abbottabad. The mujahideen, sensing the risk of sending convoys through the gorge, cleverly, hired the services of a donkey without a handler to carry their supplies. Yes. Just one donkey.

Even though the donkey has, for some reason, become a metaphor of stupidity in our part of the world, it is not stupid. One of the unique traits of the donkey is that once he carries a load to a destination he memorizes the route and does not need the help of a handler to go back to where he came from. Just a light kick in the back sends him trudging quietly to his destination. So, unknown to the Sikhs, this dutiful donkey trudged back and forth in the darkness of night carrying supplies to the mujhideen.

It wasn’t long before the Sikhs found out who the secret courier was. They shot him dead one night when he was carrying a load of goods through the gorge. The mujahideen mourned the loss of the donkey and honored him by burying him respectfully in a grave. The place came to be known as Khota Qabar. The grave may not have survived but the name did. Only a couple of years ago someone decided to change the name to Muslimabad!

But the people in the area still know the place by its old name. And so does Google!

The above story, except the part on Khota Qabar, which is anecdotal, is based on the following books:  1. Syed Ahmed Shaheed – Mujahid-e-kabir by Ghulam Rasool Mehr, 1981 2. Roedad-e-Mujahideen-e-Hind by Muhammad Khawas Khan, 1983

—

Photo Credits: Title photo by Ishtiaque, remaining by writer. Mast Qalandar is a Pakistani writer based in Islamabad.

This post first appeared in Adil Najam’s pakistaniat.comwebsite.

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Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.  

 We at Wonders of Pakistan use copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

 

Obama, the Democratic “War President” (updated)

 

by Eric Margolis

We uploaded the following post by Eric Margolis in our July, 2008 issue.

We are putting up the same now on these pages once again. Why? so that our readers who missed it then, can view it now. But even those of you who read it already, will find the views expressed by the writer as valid today as they were a year before.

You may find it also for its relevancy in today’s turbulent conditions which prevail now in the northern parts of Pakistan, and the province of Balochistan where an insurgency is slowly taking up the form of almost a ‘liberation’ struggle.

After reading this article, go to the next one by Ahmad Quraishi where too, you may find something between the lines…

NOW THAT our democratically elected Prime Minister is on a visit to the United States, he has on his schedule a meeting with the US President, George Walker Bush. However much before his journey, voices started coming up from Washington for a strong action, a terminology which in US administration’s political jargon means a war. War against whom? Against US’s most allied ally in the world – Pakistan. Many political pundits & strategists in Pentagon put forward the thesis that Pakistan is not doing enough to curb the activities of Taliban in its federally administered tribal areas (FATA).

Many in this country believe that it’s only the Bush administration which is putting pressure on Pakistan to do more. Surprisingly a more serious voice has come from Democratic Party’s nominee Sen. Barack Obama who said once he is elected he might attack Pakistan in FATA to flush out Taliban in the region and thus secure a safe position for ISAF troops in Afghanistan.

It’s in this scenario that noted columnist and analyst Eric Margolis evaluates Obama’s statement and the effect it might have on the already explosive situation in the region. So says Eric Margolis…

Barack Obama Wants

 

to withdraw US troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan, which he calls the real front on the “war on terror.” He also has repeated threats to attack Pakistan “if necessary.”

One understands

Obama’s need to sound macho. Rival John McCain has been beating his chest, proclaiming, “I know how to win wars.” Polls show Americans trust McCain three to one over Obama as a war leader. Unfortunately, recent US presidents seem to require small military conflicts to prove their political virility.

But Obama

has long called the US-led occupation of Afghanistan a “good war,” a view most Americans and Canadians share. They see Afghanistan – and now Pakistan – as hotbeds of al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists which must be eradicated.

It is distressing

to see Obama succumb to the blitz of war propaganda over Afghanistan and adopt George Bush’s faux terminology of terrorism. Before Obama urges widening America’s war there, he should consider:

• Al-Qaida never numbered more than 300 men. There are hardly any left in Afghanistan. Survivors scattered into Pakistan. Finding them is police and intelligence work, not a job for thousands more western troops.

• US policy towards Afghanistan is driven by energy geopolitics. Pacification of rebellious Pashtun tribesmen is necessary in order to build energy pipelines south from the Caspian Basin. That is the primary strategic mission of US and Canadian troops.

• Taliban fighters are not “terrorists.” Taliban was founded as a fundamentalist Muslim religious movement of Pashtun tribesmen to fight banditry, rape, drugs, and Afghan Communists. Taliban received millions in US aid until four months before 9/11. It had no part in 9/11 and knew nothing about them. The US overthrow of Taliban resulted in the Communists resuming control over half of Afghanistan. Under US occupation, Afghanistan has become a narco-state that supplies over 90% of the world’s heroin.

• Pashtun tribes comprise half of Afghanistan’s population, and 15% of neighboring Pakistan’s people. The western powers are involved in an old-fashioned, colonial-style pacification campaign against the Pashtun Taliban. Imperial Britain, the Soviets, and now the US and its allies all employed the same classical colonial strategy: using puppet rulers, local mercenary troops, and lavish bribes to enforce their will. Afghans who resist get bombed.

• Before urging expansion of the Afghan war, Obama should total up the bill for America’s military misadventures. As of last January, according to the Pentagon and data revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars cost 72,043 American battlefield casualties. Veteran’s Administration hospitals have treated 263,909 veterans from these wars and registered over 245,000 disability claims.

No one knows how many Iraqis and Afghans have been killed. The number could be over one million. Just last week over 50 Afghans in a wedding party were killed by a US air strike. But without the constant use of massive air power, including B-1 bombers, the US could not maintain its occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan.

• According to a Democratic Congressional committee report, the two wars will cost $1.6 trillion by the end of 2008, or $16,500 per US family of four – not counting the cost of borrowing money to pay for the wars.

Obama and McCain believe Afghan resistance can be crushed by more brute force. They are wrong. More western troops and more bombed villages will mean fiercer Afghan resistance.

The war is now seeping into Pakistan, a nation of 165 million. Obama’s threats to attack Pakistan and go after its nuclear arsenal are reckless and extremely dangerous. He appears headed over the same cliff as those would-be “war presidents, Bush and McCain. As the head of NATO recently admitted, political settlement, not bombs, is the only way to end the unnecessary Afghan war.

Is Obama beginning to fall under the influence of the same military-petroleum complex that guided Bush’s imperial-minded presidency? Could Pakistan become a disaster for the Democrats as Iraq was for Republicans?

Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. Copyright © 2008 Eric Margolis

Fana: When the ego gets annihilated

ANUP TANEJA Sufi thought is centered around the two fundamental doctrines of the Transcendent Unity of Being or wahdut al-wujud and the universal or perfect man, al-insan al-kamil. The concept of fana or annihilation of ego is at the very heart of Sufi theosophy. Among all species, a human being has the potential of evolving to the highest level of consciousness and becoming a siddha or saint, one who has attained spiritual perfection through sadhana. According to S H Nasr: “To become a saint in Islam is to realise all the possibilities of the human state, to become the universal man. The mystic quest is none other than the realisation of this state, which is also union with God, for the universal man is the mirror in which are reflected all the divine names and qualities.” How to attain the exalted state of ahsan-ut-taqwim, of becoming the total of all the divine names and qualities and to rise to the stature of al-insan al-kamil? Sufi mystic Abu Yazid Bistami explained that a seeker could attain to lofty spiritual heights in meditation through fana. As soon as an individual emerges from the state of deep sleep, ego arises spontaneously and along with it the gross, physical universe becomes manifest with its concomitant joys and sorrows. ‘I am the body’ thought is experienced in the dream state as well but in the dream state the ‘i’ (ego) identifies itself with the astral body and the universe is perceived at an astral level. The ‘i’ gets considerably thinned out in deep sleep though not completely annihilated. Though an individual loses awareness of the external universe in deep sleep and is free from all worldly problems, it is a state of total ignorance, devoid of any spiritual enlightenment. It is only in the supra-causal state of consciousness that the Self or pure, undifferentiated Consciousness is realised. The ‘i am the body’ thought then gives way to `I am That’ (ana’l huqq) thought. It is akin to a drop of water falling into a river and losing its separate entity. Realisation then dawns upon the seeker that absolute Consciousness assumes limitations in the form of time and space, becomes differentiated, and projects the seeker as the wondrous universe by becoming the ego with myriad names and forms. She is in fact both the seer and the seen; the knower and the known; and the hearer and the heard. Thus with the annihilation of the ego (fana) through deep meditation, vast expanses of the inner spiritual realm are opened before the seeker. Sufism thus represents the esoteric dimension of Islam where spiritual evolution is sought through inner transformation of heart as opposed to the dogmatic theology and formalism of religion. It spreads the message of divine love and selfless service. Among the galaxy of sufi mystics who had risen to the stature of al-insan al-kamil, the names of Shaikhs Muin-ud-Din Chishti, Nizam-ud-Din Auliya and Farid-ud-Din Ganj Shakar (Baba Farid) stand out prominently. Their dargahs or tombs have become objects of veneration and places of pilgrimage for the devout owing allegiance to different religious belief systems. Indeed, these holy places stand as epitomes of communal harmony and universal love and brotherhood. They symbolise the pluralistic nature of our society. The writer is editor, Indian Historical Review. Source: The Times of India _______

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The “New Great Game” in Eurasia is being fought in its “Buffer Zones

Note: The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are two of the overlapping alliances that outline “Eurasia” as a political entity.

 

Moldova: Caught between NATO and Russia?

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

 

On April 7, 2009 in Moldova’s capital Chisinau, supporters of the Liberal Party of Moldova, the Liberal-Democratic Party of Moldova, and the Our Moldova Alliance ignited violent protests in response to the results of Moldova’s parliamentary elections. They respectively won 13.14%, 12.43%, and 9.77% of the total vote, while the ruling party, the Communist Party of Moldova won 49.48% of the vote. The Christian-Democratic People’s Party of Moldova also won 3.03% of the vote. While international observers have said that no irregularities were seen in the parliamentary elections, the three main opposition parties said that it was rigged and, in an all too familiar modus operandi, started violent protests.

The current crisis in Moldova, a former constituent republic of what was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), is part of the same continuum of geo-strategic events and crises in Eurasia extending from Asia to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. It is one of two types of regime change: 

1. “Colour revolutions” characterized by political struggles and civil strife invariably triggered through U.S.-NATO interference and covert intelligence operations: Lebanon, Burma (Myanmar), Ukraine, the former Yugoslavia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tibet, and Georgia. 

2. Outright military intervention: Afghanistan and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. 

“Self-determination” is a factor in all these conflicts. ”Self-determination,” “Democracy,” and “Governance” are used as a pretext for outright military intervention (e.g., Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq) or interference as in the case of the “colour revolutions” unleashed in Eurasia. 

The Struggle for Eurasia’s Buffer Zones: From the Balkans and Central Asia to Southeast Asia 

In Ukraine, this contest, starting in 2004, has almost geographically polarized the Slavic nation into two halves. The Orangist forces, led by the corrupt Viktor Yushchenko (who would become president) and Yulia Tymoshenko (who would become premier), dominate the Western Ukraine and the Party of the Regions and its political allies dominate the Crimea, Southern Ukraine in general, and Eastern Ukraine. The threat of Ukraine dividing into two states looms over the country as a result of this.

In Lebanon, events unfolded in 2005 within the framework of the so-called “Cedar Revolution” and led to the political and violent face-offs between the March 14 Alliance and the Lebanese National Opposition. Both sides have aligned themselves with outside players and powers, but their objectives should be measured by their independent freedom of choice from these outside powers, the source of their decision making, and why they have sided with outside powers. The popular and legitimate demands of the Lebanese people in 2005 were harnessed and translated into what has become a parliamentary majority by only a few sets by the March 14 Alliance. The March 14 Alliance’s goals are not in the best interest of Lebanon, but are in the interests of their own political leaders as has been the case of most Lebanese politicians. 

In Burma, the contest was played out, in 2007, between the so-called pro-democracy forces led by Buddhist monks and the Burmese government, which is a military junta closely allied to the People’s Republic of China. The clashes were totally misrepresented by the media in Australia, the E.U., the U.S., and Canada, amongst other places.  

In Georgia this struggle started in 2003 with the Rose Revolution and has been fought out since between Mikheil Saakashvili and the Georgian National Opposition on the political front. Militarily it has translated into conflict with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, with the intervention of Russia as a combatant.

In the Balkans, the struggle over Kosovo is another front in this geo-strategic struggle. The struggle for securing Kosovo is part of a wider venture to control the entire former Yugoslavia and the Balkans, which in panoramic terms are part of the mammoth struggle over Eurasia. The background to the situation in Kosovo is tied to the division and foreign sponsored civil strife of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, later the military attacks against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the 2000 colour revolution in the Serbian half of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the separation of Montenegro in 2006 from the Union of Serbia and Montenegro (a restructured configuration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), and finally the declaration of Kosovar independence in 2008.
 
In all these colour revolutions there is a factor that is missing: “informed” consent from the public. If the majority of the people supporting the Rose Revolution knew what its underlying motivations were and to what it would equate, it simply would not have happened. In fact there are members of the Georgian National Opposition we were supporters of the Rose Revolution when it was sparked, but realized the fraud behind it. It should also be pointed out that there were those in Georgia who also joined the opposition forces because of self-serving interests too. In Lebanon the case is similar, Michel Aoun and the Free Patriotic Movement supported the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon with the March 14 Alliance, but refused to join them in political alliance.

Although not part of Eurasia, the conflict zone in Darfur, Sudan is also a consequence of the same pattern and modus operandi. While there is a humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the underlying causes of the conflict have been manipulated.  The reason for this tragedy, in which the Sudanese people are the victims, is intimately related to economic and strategic interests.

The U.S. and the E.U. are behind the fighting and instability in Darfur and have assisted in the training, financing, and arming of forces opposing the Sudanese government. They demonize the Sudanese government and place all blame squarely on its shoulders while they fuel the conflict in order to move in and control Sudan. In this context, NATO is anxious to get its boots on the ground in Darfur in so-called peacekeeping missions.

Russia, Iran, and China oppose U.S. and E.U. pushes to intervene in Sudan. This is the reason why Russia and China oppose U.S., British, and French efforts to internationalize Sudan’s domestic problems and the reason why Iran led an international parliamentary delegation to Khartoum in a show of solidarity when an arrest warrant was issued by the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) for Omar Hassan Ahmed Al-Basher, the president of Sudan, which is politically motivated and part of a manipulated discourse. If the I.C.C. was truly impartial, by the same token, it would have sent arrest warrants out for George W. Bush Jr., Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Condolezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and a whole set of other leaders too, a long time ago.

Contd….

Source : Global Research

The “New Great Game” in Eurasia is being fought in its “Buffer Zones” (Part 2)

The 2004 electoral map of Ukraine (Source: GlobalSecurity.org)

The Rivalry for Eurasia: The Periphery versus Eurasian Powers

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

In each one of these struggles, there is rivalry between a distinctly “Eurasian base of power” and a “Peripheral base of power” that is dominated by Western Europe and the United States. In other words, the struggle opposes Eurasia to the Ocean-based powers of the Periphery. It is in this context that Eurasian powers have always been strong in regards to land power or their armies, while the Peripheral Powers have had superior navies. This is why Britain and Japan had powerful navies historically and why the U.S., on a global scale, has the largest navy. A look at China and Russia will show that they have had and continue to have large and powerful land forces.

Crowds can be worked on any ideals, but power is exercised on the basis of motives. With the proliferation of these colour revolutions in geographically and culturally diverse places, conflict can no longer be seen in the historic, and manufactured, East versus West lens of the Cold War era. To tag the opposing sides in Ukraine as pro-Russian / anti-Russian or pro-Western / anti-Western and in Lebanon as pro-Syrian / anti-Syrian or pro-Western / anti-Western does not recognize the reality and geo-political complexity of the Eurasian environment. It does not also recognize the indigenous dimension or facet of the colour revolutions. The demands and desires of crowds is a factor, but the objectives of the leaders in these rings should be the basis of any critical evaluation.

The geographic list of places given is where fluctuating battles on the basis of political manipulation are taking place. Offensive geo-strategic penetration by the Peripheral Powers and defensive geo-strategic attempts by the Eurasian Powers to roll-back these penetrative pushes is taking place in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The battle-fronts are in Eurasia with Eurasian Powers themselves being the ultimate prizes for the Peripheral Powers.

Lebanon is being contested over in a match that has the indigenous elites allied with the Periphery or Eurasia. The Peripheral Powers, which include Israel and NATO as agents, consider Lebanon as a geo-political hub that can be used to penetrate into Syria, isolate Iran, and to further marginalize the Palestinians. Control over Lebanon is also a means for Israel to secure its strategic foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Control of Lebanon would also threaten the interests of Russia and China in the long-term too because of the petro-politics of the energy corridor in the Levant. This is one of the reasons that the Russians, along with Iran and Syria, provided supportive military intelligence to the Lebanese Resistance when Lebanon was being attacked by Israel in 2006.

The resentment of the Lebanese towards the past presence of Syria in northern Lebanon is legitimate, but there should be no mistake the Cedar Revolution was used as a cover by individuals and interests who are the anti-theses of popular sovereignty. If the leaders of the March 14 Alliance had the power to do so and could, they would quash any opposition to them by force. This does not by virtue epitomize the Lebanese National Opposition as exemplary either. Nabih Berri, the leader of the Amal Movement, is someone who has been known for his corruption in the past. The motives of the general population and the motives of political leaders are very different. The narrative that has been given about the sentiments for the rallies of the Cedar Revolution, in a popular sense may be true, but the motives for its political aspects are not. 

The real narrative behind the so-called democratic uprising, or Saffron Revolution, in Burma is similar. It was originally the result of an expression of public anger over rising prices, which were a result of sanctions by Peripheral Powers like the U.S., the E.U., Japan, and Australia against Burma. Without denying or overlooking the authoritarian nature of the Burmese military government, the destabilization of Burma is motivated by geo-strategic objectives to install a government that would be opposed to Chinese national interests and energy security. 

The democratic or undemocratic nature of such a government is not the real issue. International relations are about unprincipled realpolitik, albeit masked realpolitik. The real issue is the encirclement of China and the obstruction of Chinese attempts to create a secure energy route to the Middle East and Africa bypassing areas controlled by the U.S. Navy and its allies, such as Singapore and Taiwan. This is what China has been attempting to do by building ports and bases in the Indian Ocean that provide a securer route. Burma is essential to this formula.

Concluded.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an independent writer based in Ottawa, specializing in geopolitical issues. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Source: Global Research

Taliban are coming?

·

THE TALIBAN ARE COMING! THE TALIBAN ARE COMING!

by Eric Margolis

French troops in Afghanistan were just rocketed by Taliban.

Last week, a bunch of lightly-armed Pashtun tribesmen rode down from the Malakand region on motorbikes and in pickup trucks and briefly swaggered around Buner, only 100 km from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

Hysteria erupted in Washington. Hillary Clinton, still struggling through foreign affairs 101, warned that these scruffy tribesmen were a global threat.

Pakistan’s generals dutifully followed Washington’s orders by attacking the tribal miscreants in Buner, who failed to obey the American raj.

For context, may I immodestly refer Mrs. Clinton to page 30 of my book, War at the Top of the World?

“In the first quarter of the 20th century … two wonderfully colourful figures emerged from the barren mountains of the North-West Frontier. First was a fiery holy man with a wonderful name, the Fakir of Ipi. The old fakir rallied the Pashtun tribes against the infidel and came within a turban’s length of taking Peshawar from the British, who spent a decade chasing the elusive fakir through the mountains of Waziristan.

“Then, a fearsome figure, the ‘Mad Mullah’ (as the British press branded him), who rode down from the Malakand Pass at the head of 20,000 savage horsemen, determined to put the impious city of Peshawar (the main British imperial base) to the sword.”

Plus ca change: A century later, western imperial forces are again chasing unruly Pashtun tribesmen on the wild North-West Frontier. Today, they’re called terrorists.

Pashtun (a.k.a. Pathan) frontier tribes — collectively mislabelled “Taliban” by western media — are up in arms again because they are being bombed by U.S. Predator drones and attacked by the Pakistani army, which the U.S. rents for $1.5 billion US annually, to support its widening war in Afghanistan. Pashtun civilian casualties — collateral damage in Pentagonspeak — are rising fast.

The primary cause of the growing rebellion in North-West Frontier is the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which is rapidly spreading into Pakistan. Most Pakistanis see the Afghan Taliban and their own rebellious Pashtun as heroes fighting western domination, and scorn their own isolated leaders in Islamabad as working for the Yankee dollar.

A Taliba (girl) learns how to read and write

THE PASHTUNS

Even the British Imperial Raj’s most junior officer knew it was foolhardy to provoke warlike Pashtun. But Washington has done just this. Still, the Pashtun “Taliban” have no influence outside their North-West Frontier and are not about to take over the rest of Pakistan.

But Washington’s ham-handed tactics in Afghanistan and Pakistan are creating a bigger storm: A national revolution in Pakistan against the western-backed feudal oligarchy that has ruled it since 1947.

Pakistan is among the world’s poorest nations. Half its people are illiterate. Most subsist on $1.13 daily. The feudal landowning elite, only 0.5% of the population, holds over 90% of national wealth. Corruption engulfs everything. Democracy is a sham; the legal system a cruel joke.

Islamic law, however draconian, offers the only justice that cannot be bought. Growing resistance movements in North-West Frontier and Baluchistan call for national leadership that represents Pakistan rather than western interests. Pakistanis are humiliated by being forced by the U.S. and Britain to wage war against their own people under the pretext of “fighting Islamic terrorism.”

Everyone now asks, “are Pakistan’s nuclear weapons safe?” Yes. They are heavily guarded by crack army units and the intelligence service and will remain so unless the army splits in a power struggle. Pakistan’s nukes cannot be armed without special security codes.

My esteemed colleague and regional expert, Arnaud de Borchgrave, warns Pakistan could become another Iran. I’m not so sure. Islamic parties have never commanded much support. But Pakistan is headed into very dangerous waters.

As for the U.S.-led crusade in Afghanistan and North-West Frontier, recall the words of Victorian poet of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling: “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”

Eric Margolis is a columnist for the Toronto Sun. His web site is foreigncorrespondent.com.

______

Source: Smirking Chimp

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Who’s Winning the War?

 

Pakistanis Say “NO!” to Terrorism

                 by Kalsoom

A fellow blogger has a pertinent message for all of us. The blog CHUP virtually means ‘silent’. But this silent blogger has a silence which sages term as gold. The word CHUP itself though is an abbreviation of Changing up Pakistan and that‘s great for most of us in this latest buzz of the internet world are all trying to do the same. In this regard I say well done Kalsoom and keep it up! 

And now the message with a detailed report on latest situation in Buner and Swat….

 If you were to peripherally read the media headlines in the last few weeks, you may believe one or more of the following:

1. Pakistan is or will become a failed state  
2. The Taliban is winning the war against the military, and 
3. The militants’ influence is slowly seeping into the country’s urban areas.

         It is always easier to accept negative news at face value, because, let’s face it – that’s what sells. But what is really going on?

         Currently, the Pakistani military is engaged in an offensive against militants in Buner district, the area just 70 miles from the capital where Taliban fighters consolidated control late last month. According to CNN, security forces will likely advance to Swat in the coming days. The military’s immediate goal though is to clear Taliban militants from Pir Baba, an important religious shrine in Buner. However, according to the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the military have accused the Taliban of “holding 2,000 villagers as human shields” to halt the military’s onslaught into the area. BBC’s correspondent says they have not yet verified this claim.

         According to the BBC, security forces are fighting against the Taliban in four of Buner’s six sub-districts – militants are in control of the remaining two districts. A resident in Buner told Reuters, “There’s been heavy firing going on since morning. It is very scary. Troops are using heavy artillery and gunships.” GEO Television reported Monday that seven militants “including an important commander Afsar Hameed” were killed in today’s offensive and Dawn reported that 80 militants [as of Sunday] have been killed in the Buner military operation. However, reported the BBC’s Syed Shoaib Hassan, although security forces appear to have the upper hand, “the militants are resisting fiercely and it may be sometime before the forces can take complete control of Buner.”

         In an interview with CNN last Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Fareed Zakaria that Pakistan “has started regaining control of parts of NWFP that were recently taken over by the Taliban.” However, although the Defense Secretary noted, “I think the movement of the Taliban so close to Islamabad was a real wake-up call for them,” Zakaria, in a Newsweek commentary, wrote Monday , “Even now, after allowing the Taliban to get within 60 miles of the capital, the Pakistani military has deployed only a few thousand troops to confront them, leaving the bulk of its million-man Army in the east, presumably in case India suddenly invades. And when the Army does attack the Taliban, as it did a couple of years ago in the same Swat Valley, it bombs, declares victory and withdraws—and the jihadists return.”

         Haider Mullick, however, presented a different and more positive perspective in his Newsweek article, “Where Pakistan is Winning.” According to Mullick, the situation is not as dire as it seems, and, while the military is barely holding off militants in some places, “in others it has recently notched up a string of surprising successes—victories that offer a way forward for the nation as a whole.” Ground Zero for this turnaround, he wrote, is Bajaur, which was until recently a militant stronghold. Although the military’s immediate response was “disastrous,” with a policy of out-terrorizing the terrorists, ultimately alienating the population, General Khan, who took over last fall, “realized he needed a new approach, one that emphasized holding and building areas after freeing them of Taliban gunmen.”

Mullick wrote,

         He began eating and bunking with his men to improve morale, and seeking the counsel of his officers—not a common practice in the hierarchical Pakistani military—on how best to engage the enemy and attract local support. In August 2008 he launched Operation Shirdil (”lion heart”), similar to the U.S. “surge” strategy in Iraq. Khan encouraged his troops to work with local tribes, shrewdly dividing pro-Taliban from pro-government elements, and, to gain legitimacy, backed tribal militias and sought the acquiescence of local jirgas (tribal councils).

         One officer told Mullick, ”We finally learned the value of killing none and producing a thousand friendly tribesmen that do the killing for you.” The relative success of Gen. Khan’s Bajaur approach is now being replicated elsewhere in Pakistan. In Swat, the Army is marching in Bajaur veterans, and one senior military officer noted, “We’re seeing troops that have tasted success. They know what victory should look like.” However, added the author, “The Bajaur formula is not guaranteed to work elsewhere: more urbanized Pashtuns, for example, may prove less willing to cooperate than their tribal cousins because of the reduced clout of jirgas in populous areas. The Pakistani military has also seen its advances rolled back before.”

         At this time, we can never be truly certain of who is winning, particularly since both sides, the military and the militants, are not just fighting a tangible offensive, but are also trying win a war of perceptions. As the numerous media reports roll in, it is important to look beyond the headlines and remember what is realistic. According to Dawn’s Cyril Almeida, we do know that the rise of militancy is a more dangerous problem than it was five, six, or even seven years ago. However, he noted, “Even if they number in the tens of thousands, the militants today can’t really overrun the country and knock over the state. What they can do though is push us into a low-level equilibrium, where violence is endemic, security scarce, the economy is in the doldrums and quality of life is on the wane.” That in itself is obviously a very dangerous development.

        So what do we need to do? As I have stated again and again, the government must adopt a nationwide counterinsurgency strategy to bolster the military’s offensive on the ground. Given that the Taliban have a relatively sophisticated communications apparatus, their propaganda must be matched and countered by a national strategic communications strategy, ultimately selling the war to the people and swaying the masses further against these militants. Pakistan’s police forces and Frontier Corps must also be better trained and bolstered. The CS Monitor cited RAND’s Christine Fair who asserted, “We have to invest in the police…The police are thoroughly exposed, they are poorly equipped, they are outgunned, they are undermanned, they are poorly trained, and they are sitting ducks for the insurgents.” These forces need financial and security assurances – for themselves and for their families.

        The youth’s response to this volatile security situation has been especially refreshing. On Saturday, Dawn’s Nosheen Abbas wrote, “The youth of Islamabad is not sitting idle in the face of growing religious extremism and Talibanization in some areas of Pakistan. Even if individually some are trying to combat ‘Talibanisation’ in a manner they deem fit; and some are even finding creative avenues.” Abbas Saleem Khan, who organized a protest in Islamabad against the Taliban, told her, “By not joining in, you are literally giving the Taliban a free pass to allow them to walk into your streets and homes and tell you how to conduct your daily affairs. The heart of the matter is that we will stand up against the Taliban and steer this country towards the vision it was created for.”  Nosheen Abbas also cited Amna Mawaz, a university student, who plans to raise awareness through theater, noting, “I figured after attending protests and seminars that no one will listen to you if you give a lecture but rather through something entertaining like theater. I think if you keep it light and yet have a meaning one can spread awareness about extremism.” On social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, young Pakistanis have established groups, organized rallies, and mobilized others to speak out against extremism.

         So, get involved in the debate. And, if you need musical motivation, there is a song by Zameer called, “Mind Over Murder.” Zameer, a Pakistani-Canadian, wrote the song to condemn extremism. He told PakMusic, “An extreme belief can create very tangible and devastating results for the innocent…This song stems from a desire on my part to speak out against the senseless loss of life that terrorist acts result in.”

Writer is the blog editor of  CHUP! – Changing Up Pakistan. “Chup,” means “Quiet” in Urdu. It aims to provide awareness on the pertinent issues facing Pakistan.

Punja Sahib: The Miracle that Refused to Happen

 

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THE MIRACLE THAT REFUSED TO HAPPEN

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by Mast  Qalandar

·

This story was meant to be a part of the post on Punja Sahib that appeared on these very pages last month. But I had left it out lest I make the post too lengthy. The post on Punja Sahib stayed on the Discussions Board for a day or two and then disappeared, I thought, forever. But I was intrigued to see recently that it had somehow climbed into the “Top Hits”. I don’t know how to interpret this climb, nor would I want to read too much into it. Is it, perhaps, the result of random hits signifying nothing? Nevertheless, it did make me look up the old story and post this one as a sequel to it.

 

Here is the story. On the night of October 29, 1922 a special train left Amritsar, headed towards Peshawar. Among the passengers on board were a number of Sikh prisoners who were being shipped to Attock Fort to serve their prison sentence of two and half years each.These prisoners, and hundreds of others like them, were summarily tried and convicted by the British administration for participating in a non-violent agitation sparked by the Gurdawara Reform Movement at the time. The Reformists wanted to rid the gurdawaras and their shrines of the control of the hereditary “mahants” (somewhat akin to the Muslim gaddi nashins) who had started misusing their positions for personal gains. The British administration, for some reason, seemed to take the side of the mahants and would arrest and punish the protesting Sikhs, often beating them inhumanly, even for minor violations. This provoked more protests, and large-scale arrests and convictions followed

Because of the clear injustice meted out to them, the prisoners aroused widespread sympathy among the Sikh community and became instant heroes.The train from Amritsar arrived at Rawalpindi on the morning of 30 October. After the change of the crew and servicing of the engine, it steamed out of Rawalpindi station with the instructions that it was not to stop until it reached Attock. Hassan Abdal, the home of Punja Sahib, fell on the train route and ordinary trains routinely stopped here.

The word reached the Sikh community at Punja Sahib that the Sikh prisoners would be passing through Hassan Abdal on their way to Attock Fort. This caused a great deal of excitement in the community and they decided that the least they could do was to be present at the station and serve the prisoners a quick meal on the train. So, they had the food prepared and took it to the train station ahead of the expected arrival time of the train.

The stationmaster, when he saw all this excitement at his otherwise sleepy little station, informed the Sikhs that the train was not scheduled to stop at Hassan Abdal and, therefore, there was no point of bringing food to the station. The Sikhs implored him to stop the train just long enough for them to serve food to the prisoners. But their entreaties failed. The train will not stop at Hassan Abdal, they were told bluntly. “All right then”, said a strapping young Karam Singh, barely 30, who was among the leaders of the crowd, “We will stop the train!” and added, “if Baba Nanak could stop that massive rock rolling down the hill with one hand, can’t we, so many, stop a train?” Another young man, twenty four year old Partap Singh, chimed in, “Yes, we can, and we will.”

At about ten o’clock, on a crisp and cloudless morning typical of Potohar autumn season, the train emerged from the Margalla pass spewing out clouds of black smoke. When the Sikhs at the station noticed the smoke, a joyous shout went up in the crowd, “Bole so nihal.. sat sri akaal” and many of them, led by Karam Singh, jumped on to the tracks and squatted there cross-legged. Next to Karam Singh sat young Partap Singh followed by others – both men and women. They were convinced in their mind that the train would, somehow, stop.

Approaching the station, the driver noticed from a distance people squatting on the tracks. He simply could not believe his eyes. He was under orders not to stop the train in any circumstances. He blew the whistle long and hard but to no effect. No one budged. He blew the whistle again, and again – and yet again. No one moved. The train continued hurtling towards the station. The horrified driver simply closed his eyes. The vacuum lever (controlling the braking system) dropped from his hands, the wheels screeched against the tracks sending out showers of sparks. There was a loud thud and the train came to a halt – but not before hitting the first man and pushing him into the others raising a mound of mangled bodies. The station was instantly engulfed in shrieks, groans and shouts mingled with the huffing and hissing of the angry steam engine, which, it seemed, was angry at his path being obstructed.

Every one at the station rushed to help, but Karam Singh, who lay mangled and dying, stopped his rescuers by saying: “Serve the food to the hungry prisoners first and then help me”. It took one and a half hours before the tracks were cleared and the prisoners fed (I wonder if they were able to eat) and the train resumed its journey. Bhai Karam Singh died within few hours while Bhai Partap Singh died the next day. It is not known how many others died later but many people were severely injured.

As I said in my post on Khota Qabar, the Story of a Lost Battle, miracles do happen but you cannot rely upon them.

___________

Tailpiece: On 15 April, 2007, at the Vesakhi festival at Punja Sahib, the Pakistani federal minister for religious affairs announced to the Sikh pilgrims that the government of Pakistan would build a memorial at Hassan Abdal in memory of the train tragedy that occurred there on October 30, 1922. Commemorating resistance to injustice is, I believe, a good idea.

Mast Qalandar is a Pakistani Writer living in Islamabad.

Note: The story is based on the information gleaned from Internet sources and so are the pictures. This post first appeared in Adil Najam’s pakistaniat.com website.

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War is a Racket

What would have General Butler said on the current War on Terror

[Note for WoP Readers: Before I put up a report filed by Tom at his website, I reproduce below some paragraphs from General Butler’s book ’War is a Racket’. The book was published in 1935 by Round Table Press, Inc., New York. Reader's Digest condensed it as a book supplement, with an introduction by Lowell Thomas, who praised Butler's "...moral as well as physical courage... "

 "Hans Schmidt, in his 1987 biography of Butler, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History, offers the following assessment: "Much of War is a Racket was stock antiwar, anti-imperialist idiom, part of an American tradition dating back to the eighteenth century. Butler's particular contribution was his recantation, denouncing war on moral grounds after having been a warrior hero and spending most of his life as a military insider. The theme remained vigorously patriotic and nationalistic, decrying imperialism as a disgrace rooted in the greed of a privileged few." 

I have excerpted some paragraphs from this marvelous book written by that great American genius. I have made some minor changes here and there to render currency to his prophetic words in modern times. If I hadn’t done so, even then the stark truth about the wars as revealed by Butler would have remained as valid today as it was in 1935. Nayyar]

WAR IS A RACKET. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars, pounds or rupees and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In any war, a mere handful garner the profits of the conflict. A new set of millionaires and billionaires are made. That many admit their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsify their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them ever dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of wars (whether conventional or non conventional, like the present war on terror) nations acquire additional territory or hegemony, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired hegemony promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung money out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war on terror as it is today, I must face it and speak out.

All of them who prompt this war are trying to escalate their passion for blood, money and lives. Not the people – not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

Then, to save that US citizens are in danger, insecure in their homes or in offices, through the power of media the whole world is being brainwashed to hate Islam and to go for a war – a war that is going to cost billions of dollars, many thousands of lives of Americans, and many more physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men. How many people in uniform or otherwise will have the same fate on the opposite side, no one knows.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit – fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Modern combat air craft and drone Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war in Pakistan. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Billions of dollars are being spent on war efforts in Afghanistan and now Pakistan. The American people will pay the price of these wars in dollars and the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the lives of their near and dear ones, and many a time with their own ones. Keep aside the authenticity of the war and causality figures we are being fed,  keep aside the fear psychosis the Bush Cheney cabal has goaded into the mind of a common US citizen, just look into the simple human reaction, the people on each side of the war are losing , with flesh, blood and life. If the mightiest nation in the world can go for a war on another nation, what should the poor people who are losing every thing do? This and some similar questions are being asked by Tom in his following article. Being a large sized document, I am putting up his post in a set of three parts.     Continue reading…

Text excerpts from the book ‘War is a Racket’ courtesy The Scuttlebutt & Small Chow

Destroying Pakistan To Make It Safe

Swat: From Heaven To Hell.

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KEEP KICKING HORNET’S NESTS AROUND THE GLOBE

As war in the vale of splendor, of musical fountains, lush green valleys and paradise like lakes, intensifies day by day, the big question still remains: who are these people fighting the state administration in Swat, Dir, Buner and other parts of Malakand Division: Are they the real mujahids of Islam fighting in the name and the cause of Allah to spread the message of holy Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W)?Are they the mercenaries named Taliban by the US and Western media and called militants / insurgents by Pakistan.

Dacoits, marauders and looters who put dreadful masks on their faces like robbers in a horror movie, perpetrate their crimes, act /s and disappear.

Are they working on agenda set by their foreign masters just to destabilize Pakistan?

Are they the people who sincerely want Shariah laws in Swat which was being practiced in the valley since centuries?

Are they the symbol of what a typical text book would define as ‘anarchists’?

Lot of questions haunt the nation of Pakistan today. No reply firmly fits these gangs turned into armies. WoP will shortly put up a series of posts on the subject. This will encompass some replies to this & other questions as well. Some further posts will also be coming  from Prof. Chossudovsky and his colleagues at the Centre for Globalization. These posts would enable our readers come to some conclusions, for these conclusions will empower the Pakistani public at large as well as our readers abroad to see through the crystal ball.

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by Eric Margolis

·

The US keeps kicking hornet’s nests around the globe and wondering why it continues getting stung.

The latest example: Pakistan’s once beautiful Swat Valley has been turned into a battlefield. Last week, Pakistan finally bowed to Washington’s angry demands to unleash its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) – who are collectively mislabeled “Taliban” in the west. They are not the Afghan Taliban, but it’s convenient for the western media and Pentagon to slap that label on them.

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $1.2 billion annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan’s political and military leadership, and block $5.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan’s turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier and crushed attempts to reestablish Islamic Law and autonomy. Many people in the region want Islamic law because in utterly corrupt Pakistan it represents the only honest and swift judicial system. The only other “law” available has to be bought.

Pakistan’s army and air force claimed to have killed 1,000 “terrorists” (read: mostly civilians) and almost emptied the valley of its inhabitants. UN sources now say the operation has created close to 2 million refugees.

Pakistan’s armed forces, who are being paid by the US to fight Pashtun tribes, have scored a brilliant victory against their own people. Too bad Pakistan’s military does not manage to do as well in wars against India. Blasting civilians at home, however, is much safer and more profitable.

Unable to pacify Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes (again, lumped together as “Taliban”), a deeply frustrated Washington has begun tearing Pakistan apart in an effort to end Pashtun resistance in both nations. CIA drone aircraft have so far killed over 700 Pakistani Pashtun. Only 6% were militants, according to Pakistan’s media, the rest civilians.

Pashtuns, also improperly called Pathan, are the world’s largest tribal people. Fifteen million live in Afghanistan, forming half its population. Twenty-six million live right across the border in Pakistan.

Up to three million Afghan Pashtun are refugees in Pakistan.

True to their strategy of divide and rule, Britain’s imperialists split the Pashtuns by an artificial border, the Durand Line (which became today’s Afghan-Pak border). Pashtuns reject this artificial border.

Many Pashtun tribes agreed to join Pakistan in 1947 provided much of their homeland remain autonomous and free of government troops. Pashtun Swat, where Islamic Sharia law was in force, only joined Pakistan in 1969 after assurances of autonomy and religious freedom.

As Pakistan’s Pashtun increasingly aided Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, US “Predator” drones began attacking them. Washington forced Islamabad to violate its own constitution by sending troops into Pashtun lands. The result was the current explosion of Pashtun anger.

I have been to war with Pashtuns and have seen their legendary courage, strong sense of honor, and determination. They are also hugely quarrelsome, feuding, prickly, and notorious for seeking revenge.

One learns never threaten a Pashtun or give him ultimatums. These mountain warriors defied the US by refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden because he was a hero of the anti-Soviet war and their guest. Doing would have violated their ancient code of “Pashtunwali” that still guides them.

Now, Washington’s ham-handed policies and last week’s Swat atrocity threaten to ignite Pakistan’s second worst nightmare after invasion by India: that its 26 million Pashtun will secede and join Afghanistan’s Pashtun to form an independent Pashtun state, Pashtunistan.

This would render Pakistan asunder, probably provoke its restive Baluchi tribes to secede, and might tempt mighty India to intervene military, risking nuclear war with beleaguered Pakistan.

The Pashtuns of Northwest Frontier have no intention or capability of moving into Pakistan’s other provinces, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. They just want to be left alone. Alarms of a “Taliban takeover of Pakistan” are driven by ignorance or propaganda.

Lowland Pakistanis have repeatedly rejected militant Islamic parties. Many have little love for Pashtun, whom they regard as mountain rustics best avoided. Pakistan’s Islamist parties have traditionally won less than 10% of the national vote.

Nor are Pakistan’s well-guarded nuclear weapons a danger – at least not yet. Alarms about Pakistan’s nukes come from neoconservative fabricators worried about Israel.

The real danger is in the US acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad’s military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like US-occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless.

If this continues, at some point nationalistic Pakistani soldiers may rebel against the corrupt generals and politicians on Washington’s payroll.

Equally ominous, a poor people’s uprising spreading across Pakistan – also mislabeled “Taliban” – threatens a radical national rebellion similar to India’s spreading Maoist Naxalite rebellion.

As in Iraq, ignorance and military arrogance continue to drive US Afghan policy. Obama’s people have no more understanding what they are getting into in “Afpak” than did the Bush administration. They will learn the hard way.

______

Source

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada. He is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.Copyright © 2009 Eric Margolis

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Cheney’s Chief Assassin Is Now Obama’s Commander in Afghanistan

Victoria Clarke (Pentagon Spokeswoman) listens as Gen. Stan McChrystal talks of conduct of Gulf  War.

Nowadays almost everyday, some US newspaper or a TV channel lambasts the Pakistani nukes. The anchors of the cable networks, different writers, and reporters lament the possible takeover of Pakistani nuclear arsenal by religious extremists whom the media and the US establishment sometimes term as the “Taliban” another time as “al-Qaeda”..

Then there are so many other channels who air their programmes nationally as well as globally, numerous think tanks and defense research establishments spread all over United States. All of them in a chorus harp on the same tune “Pakistani nukes are under a constant threat of being taken over by extremists”.

These pundits are dreading their target audiences, viewers and the readers, of the dangers this world might be facing should these weapons fall into the hands of these mad extremists. The whole drama has been scripted with such finesse, such perfection it looks like a bumper thriller, a horror movie from the Hollywood. Beyond all this hype, however, all this propaganda being thrown into eyes of the world, a well articulated stratagem has been devised – to turn this script into a hard, physical, ruthless act of modern nuclear assault not by the mad mullahs but by the world’s most advanced, high tech task force.

According to a leading US TV channel, America is now set to take over Pakistani nukes before they could fall into the hands of the mullahs fighting the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To accomplish the task the JSOC which is headquartered at Fort Bragg in North Carolina has been commandeered to get on the job. Its central unit has been tasked and trained to pounce upon the “terrorists” when it’s ‘ordered’ to. This unit is now stationed in Afghanistan along the tribal belt bordering the North Western frontier of Pakistan.

The second task (the real one in fact) is to take over the control of “foreign” nuclear assets. In the scenario that has been made to prevail first in the FATA and now in Swat, Buner, and other areas of Malakand Division of Pakistan, you could easily put in “Pakistan” instead of “foreign”.

The unit is now awaiting the final orders from the US President to do its job for which it has specially been trained in Nevada.

President Obama has himself oft repeated that in case there was a danger to Pakistani nukes, the US administration had all the options open.

Viewed in this context, posting of Gen. Stan McChrystal in Afghanistan enables us draw certain conclusions but out of these ‘certains’ one stands supreme. Shouldn’t we too, have a look on the options available to us??

Who is Gen. Stan McChrystal?

by James Petras

Obama’s appointment of General Stanley McChrystal reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war.

“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath

to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980s.

Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan.

McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance.  The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects.

McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the ‘direct action’ forces of the ‘Special Missions Units.  ‘Direct Action’ operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in ‘propaganda of the dead’, assassinating local leaders to ‘teach’ the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama’s appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country.

The deteriorating position of the US is manifest in the tightening circle around all the roads leading in and out of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul as well as the expansion of Taliban control and influence throughout the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Obama’s inability to recruit new NATO reinforcements means that the White House’s only chance to advance its military driven empire is to escalate the number of US troops and to increase the kill ratio among any and all suspected civilians in territories controlled by the Afghan armed resistance.

The White House and the Pentagon claim that the appointment of McChrystal was due to the ‘complexities’ of the situation on the ground and the need for a ‘change in strategy’. ‘Complexity’ is a euphemism for the increased mass opposition to the US, complicating traditional carpet ‘bombing and military sweep’ operations. The new strategy practiced by McChrystal involves large scale, long term ‘special operations’ to devastate and kill the local social networks and community leaders, which provide the support system for the armed resistance.

Obama’s decision to prevent the release of scores of photographs documenting the torture of prisoners by US troops and ‘interrogators’ (especially under command of the ‘Special Forces’), is directly related to his appointment of McChrystal whose ‘SOT’ forces were highly implicated in widespread torture in Iraq. Equally important, under McChrystal’s command the DELTA, SEAL and Special Operations Teams will have a bigger role in the new ‘counter-insurgency strategy’. Obama’s claim that the publication of these photographs will adversely affect the ‘troops’ has a particular meaning: The graphic exposure of McChrystal’s modus operendi for the past 5 years under President Bush will undermine his effectiveness in carrying out the same operations under Obama.

Obama’s decision to re-start the secret ‘military tribunals’ of foreign political prisoners, held at the Guantanamo prison camp, is not merely a replay of the Bush-Cheney policies, which Obama had condemned and vowed to eliminate during his presidential campaign, but part of his larger policy of militarization and coincides with his approval of the major secret police surveillance operations conducted against US citizens.

Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism – the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy – at the center of US foreign policy. Obama’s quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities. All of this will be committed by the Obama Administraton in the quest to ‘empty the lake (displace entire populations) to catch the fish (armed insurgents and activists)’.

Obama’s restoration of all of the most notorious Bush Era policies and the appointment of Bush’s most brutal commander is based on his total embrace of the ideology of military-driven empire building. Once one believes (as Obama does) that US power and expansion are based on military conquests and counter-insurgency, all other ideological, diplomatic, moral and economic considerations will be subordinated to militarism. By focusing all resources on successful military conquest, scant attention is paid to the costs borne by the people targeted for conquest or to the US treasury and domestic American economy. This has been clear from the start: In the midst of a major recession/depression with millions of Americans losing their employment and homes, President Obama increased the military budget by 4% – taking it beyond $800 billion dollars.

Obama’s embrace of militarism is obvious from his decision to expand the Afghan war despite NATO’s refusal to commit any more combat troops. It is obvious in his appointment of the most hard-line and notorious Special Forces General from the Bush-Cheney era to head the military command in subduing Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan.

It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace.  Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as ‘Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice’.

______

Source: The Axis of Logic

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.

Memorial Day Letter from a Vietnam Vet

AP PHOTO: Bill Perry, left, a disabled American veteran from Levittown, Pa. , kisses Nguyen Thi Hong, from Bien Hoa, Vietnam, as she is pushed in a wheelchair followed by Nguyen Van Quy, right, from Thai Binh, Vietnam, also wheelchair bound, as they arrive in New York, Monday June 18, 2007. Nguyen Thi Hong and Nguyen Van Quy are Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, a spraying chemical used during the Vietnam war. Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange received little encouragement from a federal appeals panel when they sought to reinstate their claim that U.S. companies committed war crimes by making the toxic chemical defoliant available for use in the Vietnam War.

“People need to see what war really is, not the Hollywood version”

by Mike Whitney

Charlie Ehlen is a former Marine now living in Glenmora, Louisiana

Originally, Memorial Day was created to honor Union troops who had died during the “Civil War” but, eventually it was expanded to include all American troops killed in action. At first, it was called Decoration Day and was the traditional day for the running of the Indianapolis 500. Monday through Friday was Race Day. Now, we’ve changed all that so we get a long weekend and businesses can have special holiday sales and make a quick buck. Ain’t America great?

I just finished an article about “Rolling Thunder”, a patriotic group of ex-vets who ride their motorcycles to Washington DC every year to honor the men who died in Vietnam. The article tells how the group “lost their way” in recent years and turned into a pro-war group. The article repeats the myth that vets were spit when they got back from Nam. This is total CRAP! As a veteran of the Marine Corps and Vietnam, I never had any such experience, nor did ANY veteran I’ve ever talked to. It’s a lie, plain and simple.

Another myth is that all Vietnam vets are drugged out criminals who lost all sense of morality.

That’s just more BS. We were not all criminals.

The same crap is being spread about Arabic people today. Why? Because, like the “deranged Vietnam vet” of the 70′s they’re an easy target to blame and abuse. It’s just another way of reinforcing stereotypes and building support for the war.

We don’t see that every person we kill in a foreign country creates more radicals who hate us. It’s like Vietnam all over again, only worse. America is just too bloody stupid to figure it out. We ever learn from our mistakes.

People need to see what war really is, not the Hollywood version. They need to know what it smells like on a battlefield, although that’s impossible to transmit through TV or the movies

Having survived a tour in Vietnam, I’d like for all of these armchair generals and cheerleaders to see what war is really like– the sights, the sounds, and the smells. That would cure them fast!

War is the most pornographic thing humans have ever devised. Trust me on this. Unless you’ve been in a war, you’ll never, really understand what it’s like. It’s beyond your wildest dreams….or nightmares. It’s just something you have to experience yourself. Then you’ll hate it much as I do.

On this Memorial Day holiday, we need to remember not just the troops who have died in our wars, past and present, but all the people who’ve been killed or maimed from war.

semper fi charlie ehlen

_______

Mike Whitney

Source: http://www.smirkingchimp.com

The Post-LTTE Sri Lanka: Challenges and Tasks Ahead

Mahinda Rajapaksa, the man who successfully eliminated the world’s most dreaded terrorist organization.

by Dr Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra

Aftermath of the demise of one of the world’s most dreaded terrorist organisations, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), the challenges before Sri Lanka are manifold, which include the issues of post-war rehabilitation, reconciliation and reintegration. The terror machine being vanquished to the last with the killing of its leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran and his top aides including his son, Charles Anthony, the most gruelling task before Rajapaksa will be three fold. First, it is the protection of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the government managed camps. Second, it is the issue of their rehabilitation. Third, and most important from a long term perspective, bringing back to the minority Tamils the sense of dignity and unity with Sinhalese dominated Sri Lankan nation state.

In the government managed camps there are more than 2,00,000 people languishing as there is an urgent need for food, shelter and medicine all of which are in short supply. The government itself has admitted that the camps are overcrowded, and in the last days of the war, the UN has estimated further 40,000 -60,000 IDPs were huddled into these camps, particularly in the camp at Manik Farm in Vavuniya. In May 2009 so far the UN Central Emergency Response Fund has allocated just over $ 11 million to deal with the humanitarian situation in the war-torn country.

The more pressing concern of the government must be the rehabilitation of the IDPs. This is no doubt a mammoth task which the Sri Lankan government must undertake. The government has reportedly stated 80 per cent of the IDPs will return to their homes by the end 2009. An ambitious target indeed, but it needs to be seen how far the dream of the displaced to return would be fulfilled as the obstacles against their return are manifold. Their homes have been completely devastated by the war.

(Left) Whether conventional or a modern war, guerrilla attack or an ambush, children face more anguish, more trauma than do their elders.

For many people particularly the women and children the trauma is much deeper as they have lost their sole bread earner to the bullets of either the LTTE or the army. Among the IDPs living in the camps, there are about 55,000 children below the age of 18, many of whom are malnourished. They are also traumatised by the horrors of war and many of them who fought forcibly under the banner of LTTE suffer psychological trauma.

The UN apprehends the volatile situation may turn to a human catastrophe unless Colombo addresses the humanitarian issues swiftly. The other crucial issue is that of harmony and reintegration of the Tamils into the Sri Lankan society. As the international news pour in, there are already violent incidents breaking out between the diaspora Tamils and Sinhalese in different parts of the world. The government of Sri Lanka must take immediate steps to heal the pangs of suffering of the Tamils. Though it is understandable that the Sri Lankan media terms the defeat of LTTE and killing of its leader Prabhakaran a victory of Sri Lanka and showered praise on Rajpaksa as his cut-outs are displayed throughout the nation with enthusiastic supporters displaying national flag, in the post-LTTE phase it appears a national challenge before the government as to how it addresses the concerns of the minority Tamils, which constitute 18 per cent of the population.

The routing of the LTTE which at a time controlled about 15,000 square kilometre in the north east of the island nation, and which was at war with the government for about 26 years resulting in the death of more than 50,000 people, could be a cherished as one of the historic triumph for the Rajpaksa government. However, now in the post-LTTE phase will test the acumen and efficiency of the government in establishing rapport with all the minorities including Tamils to build a strong, united and prosperous Sri Lanka.

The displaced who witnessed the horrors of war from close not only need rehabilitation and resettlement but also reintegration in the framework of the wider, inclusive island nation state. While speaking before the parliament on the 19 May 2009 the beaming president, Mahinda Rajpaksa declared victory over LTTE. He also admitted the uphill task to accommodate diverse aspirations including the Tamil aspirations. While speaking part of speech in Tamil language the President tried to assuage the Tamil sentiment by invoking national unity. He further stated the defeat of LTTE no way entails the defeat of Tamils in Sri Lanka. These high spirited words need to be carefully weighed in coming months against their practice on the ground.

It needs to be seen how far the Rajapaksa government concedes political space to the Tamils in the overall ambit of the unitary Sri Lankan state. In this context, the Amendment 13 of 1987 to the constitution which provided Tamil a national language status, which aimed at addressing the Tamil concerns can be studied and utilised. Similarly, the Norwegian brokered peace deal which talked about internal autonomy to the Tamils within the Sri Lankan state can be considered. Beyond the past agreements and resolutions, the government can also meet the moderate Tamil leaders to devise novel mechanisms to address the minority concerns.

The LTTE might have been destroyed by the military might of the Sri Lankan army but it is the right time the government addresses the concerns of Tamils by appealing to broader themes of reconciliation and harmony in order to win their hearts. Any failure on part of the government to address the concerns might witness the emergence of LTTE like organisations with much more vengeance. There are fears expressed in some quarters that the scattered LTTE might resort to suicide and guerrilla attacks unless the issue of Tamils is not addressed with due urgency.

The most urgent issue before the Sri Lankan government at present, hence, is to address the issue of the displaced and then gradually move towards the political sphere to accommodate the minority concerns within the framework of unitary sovereign state. The government needs to display the political will which it displayed in destroying the LTTE to address the concerns of all its citizens including the minorities. The war ravaged nation must be supported by the international community in its efforts in nation building.

The writer is a research fellow at the Centre for Central Eurasian Studies, University of Mumbai, India.

Source

The Pressure of an Expanding War

Trying to escape the war: People frantically running away from battle zones in Swat. Almost 2 million people are rendered homeless living in tents and some with their relatives.

Going for Broke

Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding

by Tom Engelhardt

Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal’s appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It’s heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as “the big muddy.”

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of Vice President Cheney’s office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”)

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there,Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” Since some of the task force’s men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.

In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld’s effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak — that is, expanded — war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a “key advocate… of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.” This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of “new thinking and new approaches” — to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s words – that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington’s growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

Hagiography

And here’s the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.

We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him “a rising star” in the Army and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’”

It’s no different today in what’s left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is “assembling an all-star team” and that McChrystal himself is “a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army.” Is that all?

When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, “A General Steps from the Shadows,” that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.

Among other things, it described the general as “an ascetic who… usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod… [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists… [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians…” and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.” “If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal… I think of no body fat.”

From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the “elite” world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.

Above all, as we’re told here and elsewhere, what’s so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is “more aggressive” than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring “a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war.” The general, we’re assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to “take the gloves off” on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), “the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.”

Think of McChrystal’s appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won’t be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post’s Ignatius even compares McChrystal’s boss Petraeus and Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to “two headstrong bulls in a small paddock.” He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage — far more ominous than he means it to be:

“Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he’s marching his presidency into the ‘graveyard of empires’ anyway.”

McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

An Expanding Af-Pak War

Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:

1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a “surge” of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a“civilian surge” of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn’t be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.

In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region’s “desert of death.” When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the “largest such project in the world in a combat setting.”

2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a “targeted” assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks — the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 — have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:

“According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed ‘at least 25 militants.’ In the local media, the dead were simply described as ’29 tribesmen present there.’ That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors.”

David Kilcullen, a key advisor to Petraeus during the Iraq “surge” months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. (“Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly ‘precision.’”) As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.”

3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.

4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports — hotly denied by Holbrooke and others — broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to “undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the Government.” Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to “figurehead” status, while a “chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers” not provided for in the Afghan Constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.

No gloating in Sri Lanka

Death of the Tigers

History teaches it’s imperative that the government should be magnanimous in victory

by Eric Margolis

The standard wisdom has it that conventional armies can’t win guerilla wars

The decisive defeat last week of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers shows there are important exceptions to this general rule. Chechnya, Angola and Ukraine in the 1950s were other examples of isolated guerilla movements that eventually were crushed by greatly superior forces with no concern for civilian casualties.

I’ve followed Sri Lanka’s bitter civil war between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils since it began 26 years ago.

As with those endless disputes between Israelis and Arabs, Indians and Pakistanis, Turks and Armenians, I have great sympathy for both sides and watch these conflicts with deep sorrow.

Oppression of the island’s 3.8 million Hindu Tamils by extremists from the 17 million strong Sinhalese Buddhist majority sparked civil war in the early 1980s. Britain lit the fuse for this conflict by putting minority Tamils in many plum positions, part of its divide and rule policy.

Sri Lanka’s Tamils are part of the ancient Dravidian race that once dominated India before being driven south by lighter-skinned Indo-European invaders. They are part of a rich, 2,000-year-old culture; Tamil is one of India’s classical languages.

Sixty-six million Tamils live in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and six million across southern India. Tamils are found from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean. Canada has become a safe haven for many Tamils.

A portly Tamil militant with no military experience, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, founded and led a guerilla force, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in a struggle for an independent homeland in eastern Sri Lanka. He soon became a renowned military leader, cult leader and even an unlikely sex symbol for Tamils everywhere.

Crossfire

Tamil moderates seeking peace were caught in a crossfire between government forces and the ferocious Tigers. Prabhakaran ruthlessly wiped out all rivals and Tamils seeking compromise. The Tigers, drawn from poor peasants and tea pickers, became one of the world’s most formidable fighting forces, repeatedly defeating the heavily armed Sri Lankan army and even the mighty Indian army when it tried to intervene in the war.

As a former soldier and war correspondent, I marveled at the courage, determination and tactical proficiency of the Tigers, who even had their own tiny navy.

Their suicidal courage, use of suicide bombers and attacks on civilian targets led them to be branded terrorists by many nations, including the U.S. and Canada. India’s late prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was killed in 1991 by a female Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.

Tamils are not “terrorists.” Nor are their opponents, the Sinhalese. Charges by Tamils that Sri Lanka’s government is practising genocide are wildly overstated. This has been an ugly civil war with constant atrocities committed by both sides. Aside from small arms, the Tamil’s primary weapons were often bombs on their bodies. This was a poor man’s struggle against massive firepower and modern weapons.

The Tigers were hemmed in relentlessly by superior forces. Government forces finally cornered the Tigers on the northeast coast and ground them down with heavy artillery, tanks and air strikes. The Tigers fought to the bitter end until leader Prabhakaran was killed.

The Tigers finally were defeated because they ran out of space to manoeuvre. Money, men and arms for the Tigers from the outside world had to run a Sri Lankan and Indian naval blockade. The world turned against Sri Lanka’s Tamils. Up to 100,000 people died in the war.

Power Sharing

History teaches it’s imperative that Sri Lanka’s government in Colombo avoid triumphalism or revenge and be magnanimous in victory. Tamils should be afforded a high level of autonomy — as in India — and power sharing in Colombo. There should be no prosecutions of Tiger leaders.

Unless Colombo is generous in victory, it risks rekindling a low-level insurrection. If Sri Lanka’s Tamils are subjected to a Carthaginian Peace, there is a risk that India’s millions of sympathetic Tamils could become the source of new woes on the beautiful island of Sri Lanka.

Source: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/

Eric Margolis is a columnist for the Toronto Sun. His web site is foreigncorrespondent.com.

Advice From A Pakhtun Patriot of Pakistan

TO ALL PAKISTANIS: It has to be unambiguously said that, at present, it is the admirable level of patriotism of the Pakhtuns that is saving Pakistan from a very ugly situation. However, aspects like these are never permanent and should not be taken as granted. We must remember that the Bengalis were perfectly patriotic Pakistanis too but are now very patriotic Bangladeshis after events pushed them away from Pakistan.

We must learn from our own history and rectify the overall national situation through good statecraft, backed by a strong military before time actually runs out on Pakistan. It is clear that blazing guns, tanks and gunship helicopters alone will not retrieve the situation for our homeland unless unprecedented and bold political and developmental initiatives are taken.  The Pakistani nation must understand clearly that the target of any internal or external force that is interested in weakening and disintegrating Pakistan is none other than the Pakistan Army itself. When, and if ever, those forces achieve the aim of neutralizing the Pakistan Army the disintegration of Pakistan would be a natural corollary.

by MASOOD SHARIF KHAN KHATTAK

The military operation in Swat, launched with a lot of fanfare, has entered its third week now. The army will, undoubtedly, roll over the disturbed areas and it shall look as if the militants have been completely wiped out. But then this is where reality takes over from the apparent.

It is a known fact that unconventional forces / insurgents never put up a pitched battle against an advancing and angry regular army. They wait for the army to tire itself through days of operations incited by sporadic acts of violence, ambushes, raids, etc., in the entire disturbed area so that the army extends itself, dissipates its resources and extends its lines of communications thus opening itself to more attacks in terms of raids, ambushes and other violent acts.

For the insurgents this can take days, weeks, months or even years. They have all the time in the world to fight when they want to and wherever it suits their purpose. This is what the Pakistan Army needs to guard against. It should locate itself in the disturbed areas in order to help the civil structure take root again rather than tire itself running after shadows over inhospitable terrain.

We must understand that the Pakistan Army, Navy and the Air Force are Pakistan’s first as well as last line of defence. Now that we are in the grip of  internal disorders the armed forces, essentially the army, have become our last line of defence. What will happen if this institution somehow suffers back-breaking defeats and the insurgents are able to control large tracts of the country? Must Pakistan let that happen? The answer is an obvious NO. But when the army is deployed to fight a seemingly endless insurgency of the intensity that we are today witnessing, all on its own, the results have to be detrimental.

We need to now understand that military actions that cause disruption to normal civic life in the country will always be something that favours the militants. Today, the entire country is in a state of siege. The question that begs an answer is regarding who actually is winning this war, the state or the militants? Most people would say that the militants seem to have the upper hand because the state is getting more and more stuck in quicksand and is steadily losing its ability to maintain its writ. Under the garb of security the sycophants have bottled up the leadership at the local level, the provincial and the federal level so that then they themselves can rule on behalf of the actual rulers at all levels.

Time is, indeed, running out for Pakistan. It is never going to be enough to throw the Pakistan Army into an endless cycle of counterinsurgency operations and then hope for a turn around. What will be of help are political actions at all levels aimed at providing a normal civic life to the citizens of Pakistan whether they live in small remotely located villages or in the bigger cities. The army should then form the punch under which the launching of those initiatives is possible – a punch that builds confidence in the population of the disturbed areas to carry on living in their homes because of just the simple presence of the army in the area.

Under the cover of that punch the revival of the civil machinery in all disturbed areas must take place immediately and when the population of an area realizes that the state of Pakistan is there to make life better for them in terms of civic amenities, schools and colleges for their coming generations, hospitals to provide them health care when they need it most, the state would have attained a decisive victory.

While dealing with the present crisis the Pakistan Army’s deterrent potential and its military balance needs to be kept intact in order to save Pakistan’s integrity from suffering a grievous blow. Most Pakistanis would agree that today, when Pakistan is in the grip of intense militancy, the Pakistan Army is the last hope to keep Pakistan intact. The Pakistani nation must understand clearly that the target of any internal or external force that is interested in weakening and disintegrating Pakistan is none other than the Pakistan Army itself. When, and if ever, those forces achieve the aim of neutralizing the Pakistan Army the disintegration of Pakistan would be a natural corollary. Therefore, people who matter have to join heads and hands immediately in order to make Pakistan cohesive all over again.

It has to be unambiguously said that, at present, it is the admirable level of patriotism of the Pakhtuns that is saving Pakistan from a very ugly situation. However, aspects like these are never permanent and should not be taken as granted. We must remember that the Bengalis were perfectly patriotic Pakistanis too but are now very patriotic Bangladeshis after events pushed them away from Pakistan. We must learn from our own history and rectify the overall national situation through good statecraft backed by a strong military before time actually runs out on Pakistan. It is clear that blazing guns, tanks and gunship helicopters alone will not retrieve the situation for Pakistan unless unprecedented and bold political and developmental initiatives are taken.

The writer is a former director-general of the Intelligence Bureau and former vice-president of the PPPParliamentarians. Email: masoodsharifkhattak@gmail.com

Source: AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists © 2007-2009

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The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL. Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

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PENTAGON LOSES

MOTHER OF ALL WEAPONS

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by Jeffrey St. Clair

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Note for WoP readers: As I mentioned in an earlier note, the US media day and night, cry wolf over possibility of Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of extremists (like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Mujahideen or Islamic insurgents, the terminology mostly used for yesterday’s friends of the United States called the enemies today). In spite of the fact that the Pakistani nukes are being kept under a strict command and control authority, which amongst other things ensures not even a bit of information is leaked out, or equipment or its component being “taken hold of” as our American friends maintain, the strict codification, does not allow any misuse of such equipment by unauthorized or unwanted elements. These are the steps which every nuclear state takes and take it must. Nuclear equipments are no ordinary toys to be played with by every Tom, Dick and Harry as and when one may wish.

Seen in this context, it should be interesting that the country making such a big blah blah about our nukes under danger has herself lost many of its nuclear “things” including the world’s deadliest weapon, the hydrogen bomb which happened as late as in 1958. Being a matter of highly serious import the fact was a closely guarded secret. After declassification of the secret documents, the case has now come on the surface.

Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch details this story. Not a Sci-fiction, but a real life sory of atomic weapons having gone lost in the Savannah River in Georgia, USA. Nobody knows what may happen to these monsters of destruction i.e. will they remain dormant or completely dead or one day may detonate cusing damage of immense proportions!! [Nayyar]

WoP’s SOS To All Its Readers

URGENT: Help Hamza

An innocent Pakistani lad needs your immediate help

We appeal to our fellow Pakistanis, our friends, and all our readers to help Hamza Khan pay for his fourth surgery. It needs to be done within the next three days from today, Monday June 1, 2009.  Five-year-old Hamza was playing by the roadside when bullets from a gun went through his stomach, liver and intestines. Little Hamza was caught in an armed attack by a group of people on a lawyer in Peshawar on Feb. 5, 2009. Thanks to the initiative of Mr. Rahimullah Yousafzai, Editor The News Peshawar, Pakistanis from across the country stepped forward to help Hamza. His father, 28-year-old Ahmadzada, at one point thanked the director of Pakistan Bait-ul-Maal when no more funds were needed [read the story below]. But now doctors have recommended a fourth surgery on the little kid. An amount of PKR 70,000 is required immediately to pay the bills at PIMS Hospital in Islamabad. Please help anyway you can. Ahmadzada and his wife can be contacted directly on his cell number is 0346.566.7290. Visitors are also allowed to meet Hamza. Please read the brief report below, published by The News in February, to understand the nature of Hamza’s injuries. – Wonders of Pakistan.

By SYED INAYAT ALI SHAH

Sunday, May 03, 2009

The News International.
http://wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com/

PESHAWAR, Pakistan—Thanks to the generosity of kind-hearted Pakistanis, five-year-old Hamza has been brought back to health and is now convalescing at home after receiving quality medical treatment.

He was injured while going to a shop on the Ring Road here on February 5, 2009. It so happened that a lawyer was attacked by his rivals and little Hamza happened to be there. He suffered multiple bullet injuries and doctors at the Lady Reading Hospital twice operated upon him.

However, Hamza couldn’t recover fully. Doctors recommended that he should be shifted to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad for specialized treatment.

Hamza’s father, Ahmadzada, had by then exhausted all means. The 28-year-old rickshaw driver had shifted to the city from his native Tangi area in Charsadda district two months ago and had no money to treat his only son.

Talking to The News, he said he had rented a one-room house for Rs 1,500 per month on the Ring Road for his family that included his wife, two-year-old daughter Ayesha and Hamza.

On the fateful day when his son was injured, he was out for work and a kind elder named Haji Shaukat shifted his wounded son to hospital.

Someone suggested to him that he should make an appeal through a newspaper to seek financial help for Hamza’s treatment. The appeal was published in The News, Islamabad,[courtesy of editor, The News Peshawar Mr. Rahimullah Yousafzai] and soon he was receiving phone calls from all over Pakistan. “I got about 100 phone calls. All of them wanted to help me pay for Hamza’s treatment,” he recalled.

A military officer based in Kamra helped Hamza to get admitted to the PIMS. Every arrangement for transporting him and his father to Islamabad had been made and a philanthropist, who didn’t want to publicize his name and deed, paid all medical bills.

Subsequently, donations poured in from many known and unknown people. They included the staff at the Army Para Training School in Peshawar, a Pakistani family living in the US, a woman journalist from Islamabad and a number of young students. Some brought toys for Hamza, others left cash at his bedside.

The staff at the Governor House, Peshawar, the office of the Advocate General, NWFP, and the Pakistan Baitul Mal, Islamabad, also got in touch with Ahmadzada and offered help. It was heart-warming to hear Ahmadzada telling the lady who called from the Pakistan Baitul Mal that he had received enough financial support and didn’t need more. He advised her to provide support to other deserving patients.

Despite being poor, Ahmadzada showed the way to others. “All I can do is to pray all my life for those who helped me in this hour of need. I had no means to get Hamza treated,” he remarked.

Ahmadzada was full of praise for the doctors who helped in the treatment of his son at the PIMS. In particular, he named Dr Zaheer Abbasi and Dr Sibghatullah Afridi.

When contacted, Dr Zaheer Abbasi said Hamza was brought to the PIMS in a precarious condition, as his stomach, liver and intestines were damaged due to bullet injuries. “Now he is in a stable condition and has been sent home.”

Bush’s Shocking Biblical Prophecy

God Wants to “Erase” Mid-East Enemies “Before a New Age Begins”

Even during the presidency of former president of the United States of America, there was a widespread feeling that the policies adopted by Bush and his cohorts (mostly the neonons) were based on a concept of their Christian belief that they were commandeered by God Almighty to put the world into order, (something very similar to bin Laden & Company who have exactly the same notions about Islam).

On defeating and disintegrating the Soviet Union in the mountains of Afghanistan, US acquired the status of world’s sole super power, and this further reinforced their  belief that it was (and is) their Christian duty to mould the world according to a “holy” pattern. The 9/11 episode, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan & its present escalation into Pakistan are all a part of the same psyche i.e. the whimsical philosophy that Islam is West’s enemy now, which stands for satanic values— is going to annihilate the world and the political Messiah of the free world is now ordained to introduce a new world order. Interestingly the NWO was originally introduced by Bush sr. who is also a Skull and Bone Member.

Irony is that even after the White House has become “democratic” its whole establishment is still being run by the same neocons, who hold this theme of reforming the world, still supreme. (Ed)

by Clive Hamilton

Former US president George W. Bush explained to French Pres. Chirac that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated.

The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence former President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

There can be little doubt now that the then President Bush’s reason

for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfillment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse but it did inflame suspicions across the Muslim world that the United States is on a crusade against Islam.

There is a curious coda to this story. While a senior at Yale University George W. Bush was a member of the exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones society. His father, George H.W. Bush had also been a “Bonesman”, as indeed had his father. Skull & Bones’ initiates are assigned or take on nicknames. And what was George Bush Senior’s nickname? “Magog”.

Clive Hamilton is a Visiting Professor at Yale University He can be reached at: mail@clivehamilton.net.au.

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Obama’s Kennedy Moment in Afghanistan

Rober Gates (Left). Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Right) Obama’s new physician for Afghans’ ills.

LESSONS NOT LEARNED

·

by Jeff Stein

·

I had to laugh when I heard about our new ambassador to Afghanistan say, “every poll will show that 90 percent of the people firmly reject the Taliban.”You can’t make this stuff up. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mister-t/1367083435/

Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry may be a great warrior, a very smart guy, and turn out to be a very fine ambassador. But that’s a bunch of baloney.

As Jere Van Dyke, a reporter who’s spent enough time on the ground in Afghanistan — including as a hostage — to qualify as an expert, said in a radio interview the other day, the average villager can’t tell the difference between NATO troops and the Russians, the last guys who tried to quell the Jihadis.

“We’re in a very dangerous situation now,” he said on all-news KCBS.

“They’re not against the U.S., they’re not against NATO, but if you go out into the villages, what they will tell you is that they really don’t know the difference, in their minds, between the Soviets and the West — they’re infidels, they’re invaders.’

We’ve already killed more civilians than the Taliban has, Van Dyke noted. Their 20,000 fighters have fought 50,000 air-supported NATO troops to a draw.

That’s some hearts-and-minds program.

While Eikenberry is in Kabul, he should drive up the road from the Pentagon and see Rufus Phillips.

Phillips was a CIA man who spent more time in South Vietnam than Ho Chi Minh. Not draining cocktails in Saigon with well-pressed colonels, either — in the villages.

Phillips ran something called the Hamlet Evaluation Survey, which crunched all sorts of numbers about how the war was going.

And he knew it was b.s.

In 1963 he had the guts to tell the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, that his generals in Vietnam were cooking the books. The fancy stats showing the villagers on our side, served up by the Saigon command, were inflated — made up, he told Kennedy.

Younger Army officers who told the truth were having their careers ruined. U.S. military advisors who complained about corrupt South Vietnamese officers were being sent home.

It was “a remarkable moment in the American bureaucracy, a moment of intellectual honesty,” the late, great David Halberstam wrote in “The Best and the Brightest,” his monumental account of White House advisors who turned a low level counterinsurgency into a big-unit war with almost 600,000 troops, only to see victory slip away.

Does the number sound familiar?

It’s the figure Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., who holds the Pentagon’s purse strings, picked for winning in Afghanistan.

“That’s what I estimate it would take in a country that size to get it under control,” Murtha said just a few weeks ago in an interview with the Associated Press.

Yet later, he sounded just as certain that President Obama’s plan for just 4,000more troops – police advisors — was just fine. That would bring the U.S. expedition to about 60,000 – not counting the kids joy-sticking Predators over Afghanistan from a trailer outside Las Vegas.

“They got realistic goals, I think,” Murtha said, according to Bloomberg News. “Train the Afghans and then get the hell out of there. I couldn’t have written it any better myself.”

Try writing the ending, Congressman.

To be fair, Murtha epitomizes the national hand-wringing over the war. Few people really know which way to go.

Anybody who says this is easy is nuts.

Sixty thousand? Six hundred thousand? Murtha can’t have it both ways. As the A.P. pointed out, he “chairs the powerful subcommittee that funds the military” – and he is, let’s not forget, a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam.

I’m a Vietnam veteran, too, but that doesn’t mean I’m a font of wisdom about Afghanistan. But Murtha’s first number — 600,000 – doesn’t sound like the right way to go. It sounds exactly like the wrong way to go.

When the end came in Saigon, two million soldiers, sailors and marines had served in Southeast Asia.

The parallels with Vietnam are really eerie: corrupt leader, untrustworthy police and army, provincial officials shipping heroin, villagers with their fingers to the wind, enemy forces striking from across the border.

Sounds like Michael Moriarty‘s monologue in “Who”ll Stop the Rain,” doesn’t it?

One of the revisionist theories about Vietnam is that we could have won if, as late as 1963, we had kept a lid on our military effort, with Green Berets, the CIA, and economic aid workers out in the boonies working their magic.

We’ll never know, of course, because Kennedy was killed as he stood on the precipice of a decision about Vietnam. But we do know that what came next, surge by surge, was wrong.

Is 60,000 too few, 600,000 too many, for Afghanistan? Not fast enough? Pick your poison.

So this is President Barack Obama’s 1963 moment. The roof started to cave in Saigon, when Kennedy had only 16,000 advisors in-country.

Who will be Obama’s Rufus Phillips? Who will give him the facts — not the balderdash Eikenberry served up.

The president might start with Richard Holbrooke, who cut his teeth with the State Department in Vietnam in 1962.

Don’t laugh: The president’s point man on Afghanistan — and suddenly much more, according to The Washington Independent‘s Spencer Ackerman — wrote the forward to Phillips’s last book, “Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned.”

______

Source

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The Breaking Up of INDIA is approaching fast…

The Eurasian Landmass

View from India

[Note for WoP readers: This article by Bharat Varma, editor Indian Defense Review was published in Security Research Review and was re-edited by a fellow blogger HK of GeoploticalNWO. In order to apprise you of the mindset of such Indian hawks and how do they exacerbate the already tense relations between India and Pakistan, I am putting up this post to keep you abreast of all such developments in our neighborhood.

It is also intended to keep you aware of the thought process this Indian edition of neocons; who nowadays chimes like a parrot and uses the language and terminology of US neocons (who are inherently Islamo-phobic) against Pakistan. The US neoconservatives use terms like failed state, rogue nation, country of sleaze, artificial state etc. only when they wish a country to go strictly after their diktat. As reported by Shamus Cooke in his essay Mexico, Pakistan, and the So-Called “Failed State”, Washington’s War on “Narco-Terrorism” Pakistan too is a target of this propaganda hype.

Our Indie brothers’ with their current honeymoon with the US now, too in cohort are playing up the hype i.e. Pakistan is going to disintegrate and therefore this is the most opportune time to arm-twist her by getting into the footsteps of the American Raj but as Arundhati Roy, the true voice of India ” says, 9 is not 11 and  November isn’t September”. Nayyar]

FAILED STATES

India is ringed by failed / failing states.

• Pakistan
• Nepal
• Bangladesh
• Myanmar

Failed / failing states export instability, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, arms and drugs.

CHINA

In addition, on our North, we face China, the guru that influences / or uses other countries as proxy mentioned earlier in every possible way to weigh India down.

Capabilities are more important than perceived intentions, as China has demonstrated not only to India but also to the world. It has intelligently diverted international focus away from itself to North Korea, Pakistan and countries like Iran. For example, in the six country nuclear talks with North Korea, it is Beijing that calls the shots. It can switch on or off the negotiations at its will.

PAKISTAN

Since its creation, Pakistan has perpetually been resorting to war and export of terrorism to appropriate more Indian territory. Pakistan faces a negative profile of indoctrinated and unemployed youth trained in Islamic Jehad Factory against us. The obsession to harm us ultimately allured Pakistan to become rent-a–state country. It lives on others money. Despite being broke, Islamabad continues to fuel anti-India activities through Nepal and Bangladesh with impunity. India remains the target and operating ground for Islamic fundamentalists and terrorist groups orchestrated by ISI.New Delhi needs to evolve an alternative strategy to comprehensively defeat the adversary’s nefarious activities that poses military, nuclear and demographic inversion threats. This is a do-able proposition provided our elders can think beyond the overwhelming burden created by the inherited fault line.

New Delhi needs to move on three axes simultaneously

• New Delhi –West Asia,
• New Delhi-Southeast Asia and
• New Delhi-Central Asia.

Out of the three, the most critical is the New Delhi-Kabul-Tehran-Moscow axis, on two counts. First, for centuries this is the route of invasions and will remain so.

Second, as the second largest consumer of oil and gas in Asia, and as one of the engines that will power the world economy, energy security is the most critical factor in India’s national security calculus.

This resource rich territory will fall prey to Pak sponsored Talibanisation if India and other countries do not preempt it.’

It may be prudent for American capital to join hands with the Indians in a JV.

This will in turn check the destructive influence of Islamabad and balance the Chinese strategic thrust.

NEPAL / MAOISTS

Nepal continues to slip into the Chinese sphere of influence due to counter-productive policy by New Delhi.

In Nepal, the Maoists have a sizeable influence in 45 of the 75 districts, their most formidable presence being in mid-western Nepal. The Maoists have linked up with the Peoples War Group (PWG) in India. The latter in a bid to expand its influence has carved a corridor encompassing the states of Andhra Pradesh–Madhya Pradesh–Chhatisgarh–Orissa–West Bengal–Jharkhand–Bihar as shown in the map.

This corridor that has been formed with ease depicts the Indian Fault Line with stark clarity on ground.

· Combine the bleak picture above with Bangladesh and Myanmar borders and the Indian Fault Line engulfs most of the eastern half of the Union

. Insurgency in varying degrees impacts on the Northeast with the exception of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh and has trans-border dimensions with Myanmar and Bangladesh.
The 21 to 65 km wide and 200 km long narrow Siliguri corridor between Nepal and Bangladesh is delicately poised when also considering China in the north. This corridor threatened by Kamtapuri insurgency and demographic inversion by Bangladesh can cut off the only land link to the Indian Northeast and in such an eventuality supplies will have to be maintained by air.

Consequently, Bhutan may also slip into the Chinese sphere of influence.

There is already a nexus between Maoists in Nepal and ULFA in Assam and is being enlarged to include PWG in India and Islamic terrorist groups in Bangladesh. With Dacca’s geographical interface with five Indian states i.e. West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram; Indian security stands threatened by: demographic assault, arms and drug smuggling, and safe havens for Indian insurgent groups.

Islamic groups in Bangladesh under ISI tutelage, Saudi finance, and China’s patronage, have become more vicious, thus adding another dimension to India’s security headache.

If a vertical line from Central Uttar Pradesh southwards to Eastern Andhra Pradesh were drawn, it would lead to an ineluctable observation that India ’s Eastern Half is in turmoil. The Western Half is not only relatively progressive and peaceful but also generates most of the wealth along with the South

Just imagine the result if the Eastern Half along with Kashmir can be put in order through development and bold counter-measures, to ensure the requisite peace and stability, conducive to generation of wealth.

The BATTLE OF THE PORTS… India Vs. China, US Vs. ???

acorn.nationalinterest.in

The 218-km road connecting Delaram (on the Kandahar-Herat highway) to Zaranj, on the border with Iran has been completed.

It will provide landlocked Afghanistan an alternative access to the sea, the Iranian port of Chahbahar, allowing it to break free from Pakistan’s traditional stranglehold.

It remains to be seen if Iran will prove to be a better neighbour than Pakistan.

For Afghanistan, this is an opportunity to regain better access to the Indian market that it lost in 1947. For India, it is an opportunity to regain better access to Central Asia that it too lost in 1947.

Zaranj-Delaram Route

US MILITARY SUPPLY ROUTE TO AFGHANISTAN

The Taliban have all but shut down the Pakistan supply route to Afghanistan. Russian routes are an option. The other option is to use the Iranian port of Chahbahar. The Indian government has spent over $1 billion to construct a multi-lane highway from the western Afghan city of Heart to the Iranian border to meet up with the road from Chahbahar. Some form of political deal with the regime in Tehran would enable the US and NATO to redirect most, if not all, the traffic that currently goes to Karachi—providing they retain control over Herat.

China also has a Plan

http://gawadarinnltd.com/page_1161468194468.html

in fact, Gwadar enjoys the status of a third Deep Sea Port of Pakistan which has a special significance with reference to trade links with Central Asian Countries, Persian Gulf, East Africa, United Arab Emirates and North Western India.

The Gwadar project came about as a result of a Sino-Pakistan agreement in March 2002, under which China Harbor Construction Corporation will build the port.

Beijing has provided $198 million for the first phase of the project and Islamabad’s contribution has been $ 50 million. The scope of phase-1 includes construction of three multi-purpose berths each 200 meters long and capable of handling vessels up to 30,000 DWT.

By virtue of its excellent location, Gwadar port is also visualized to become a regional hub serving incoming and outgoing commercial traffic of the Middle Eastern and Gulf countries, the Xinjiang province of China, Iran in the west and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the south and east.

The Pakistan Karakorum Highway

According to some sources, Beijing also intends to take advantage of Gwadar’s accessible international trade routes to Central Asian republics and Xinjiang. The plan envisages extending China’s east-west railway from the border city of Kashi to Peshawar.

The incoming and outgoing cargo from Gwadar can then be delivered to China through the shortest route from Karachi to Peshawar. The same road and rail network can also be used for the supply of oil from the Gulf to the western provinces of China.

Additionally, China could also gain rail and road access to Iran through Pakistan’s internal road and rail network. Use of Gwadar port by China should accelerate the growth and development of the port and the hinterland and enhance its overall commercial and strategic value.

India is helping develop the Chabahar port and that would give it access to the oil and gas resources in Iran and the Central Asian states, in this it is competing with the Chinese which is building the Gwadar port, in Pakistani Baluchistan.

Iran plans to use Chabahar for transhipment to Afghanistan and Central Asia while reserving the port of Bandar Abbas as a major hub mainly for trade with Russia and Europe.

The Ancient China-Pakistan Route

India, Iran and Afghanistan have signed an agreement to give Indian goods, heading for Central Asia and Afghanistan, preferential treatment and tariff reductions at Chabahar.

Work on the Chabahar-Melak-Zaranj-Dilaram route from Iran to Afghanistan is in progress. Iran with Indian aid is upgrading the Chabahar-Melak road and constructing a bridge on the route to Zaranj. India’s BRO is laying the 213-kilometer Zaranj-Dilaram road. It is a part of its USD 750 million aid package to Afghanistan.

The advantages that Chabahar has, compared to Gwadar are the greater political stability and security of the Iranian hinterland and the hostility and mistrust that the Pakistani Balochis hold against the Punjabi dominated Pakistani Federal government. The Balochis consider Sino-Pak initiative at Gwadar as a strategy from Islamabad to deny the province its deserved share of development pie. They also look with suspicion on the settlement of more and more non-Balochis in the port area.

The Chabahar port project is Iran’s chance to end its US sponsored economic isolation and benefit from the resurgent Indian economy. Along with Bandar Abbas, Chabahar is the Iranian entrepot on the North – South corridor. A strategic partnership between India, Iran and Russia to establish a multi-modal transport link connecting Mumbai with St. Petersburg. Providing Europe and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia access to Asia and vice-versa.

Source: Geoplotical NWO

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Energy security, diplomacy and pipeline corridors…all over EURASIA

The probability that the United States President Barack Obama’s Muslim speech on June 4 from Cairo will not contain specifics, has come true. Most wise men underscored that the charismatic statesman would stick to values rather than waste breath on substance.

True, that is a safe route for a great orator like Obama. Values resonate in Obama’s magnificent voice. Grand speeches, after all, can hardly be a good platform for policy-making.

However, substance, fresh substance, and lots of it – that’s what Middle Easterners impatiently sought to hear from the youthful president. With native Levantine wisdom dipped in wit, prominent columnist Rami Khouri wrote, “No offense, but nobody in the Middle East really cares about Obama’s ancestors or youth years, or his views on other religions. What we care about – and what the US president should explain on this trip – is whether the US government believes that habeas corpus and the Fourth Geneva Convention, for example, apply with equal force to Arabs as well as to Israelis…..and to American Forces worldwide….and about the ICC double standards…..”

Equally, for southwest Asians tuning into the Cairo speech, the big question is what the US president could offer by way of renewed momentum to his AfPak strategy, which vacillates between failure and avoidance of failure. What the US needs is a grand idea that can decisively propel the AfPak strategy over the barren, stony, steep ridge onto the lush green valley that lies beyond. Cairo could just be the platform from where to introduce such an idea.

It didn’t happen, but the idea exists. It has been around and may seem a hackneyed idea but it is still a workable one, which, if fleshed out, could potentially become a solid underpinning of the AfPak strategy. The fantastic thing about it is that in a manner of speaking, it is also a “Muslim idea”, as it engages the US with two countries in the topmost rungs of the Islamic world.

It is not only cost-effective but also eminently profitable, as it concerns the priceless commodity of natural gas. Most important, it creates a geostrategic matrix involving some of the key countries that can make all the difference between success and failure of the AfPak strategy – Iran, Pakistan, India and China.

The time has come for the US to take a serious look at the idea that it should be the promoter of a natural gas pipeline project leading from Iran’s gigantic, untapped South Pars fields to Pakistan and further on to India and possibly extending all the way to China’s heavily populated southeastern provinces.

As the US’s direct engagement of  Iran gets going after the presidential election in Iran later this month, Obama will come across the dilemma of prompting Iran to think on the “right track”: how to make Iran a “stakeholder” in the region? Offering hot dogs to Iranian diplomats at garden parties on Independence Day in the sprawling American chancelleries is one way of doing it, but Iranians have sharp bazaar instincts and are unlikely to be impressed. Releasing spare parts for Iran’s aging fleet of Boeing aircraft could be another way, or the opening of an Interest Section in the Iranian capital, but Persians aren’t rabbits nibbling at carrots. Persians settle only for grandiloquent, sweeping conceptions.

No doubt, the moveable feast of US-Iran engagement needs a tantalizing confidence-building measure as an “appetizer”. Iran’s archaic energy sector could just provide the right quarter. Iran’s oil industry desperately needs technology and modernization. And income from oil is Iran’s lifeline. Iran’s managerial cadres and technocrats have a high opinion of American oil technology. Big Oil needs no introduction to Iran, either. The Chinese would say this is a “win-win” situation.

Provided, of course, Big Oil moves fast. The Europeans are ahead of it, and so are the Russians. The race for Iran’s South Pars promises to be a photo-finish. As a perceptive American expert put it, the signing event of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project in Tehran on May 24 by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari “illustrates the obsolescence and, increasingly, the futility of an ‘isolation’ policy that tries to keep Iranian gas locked in the ground”.

Russia’s Gazprom is poised to join the Iran-Pakistan project, no matter the US sanctions. “We are ready to join as soon as we receive an offer,” Russia’s Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yanovsky said. That offer may well be made to the Russians on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit meeting scheduled to take place in Yekaterinburg in Russia on June 15, which brings together the leaders of Iran, Pakistan and Russia (and China and India). The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline meshes with the grand idea that former Russian president Vladimir Putin (now premier) floated four years ago – a SCO “energy club”.

Gazprom executives have done their homework. According to Kommersant newspaper, Gazprom can act as a contractor for the pipeline construction work and as the operator of the pipeline even after its completion. Also, Gazprom is keen to get access to gas volumes from South Pars which it could then sell to India.

Russia is keen that Iranian gas is diverted to the Asian market. Kommersant quoted a Russian official as saying, “This project is advantageous to Moscow since its realization would carry Iranian gas toward South Asian markets so that in the near future it would not compete with Russian gas to Europe.” Moscow is enormously experienced in the gas market. It anticipates that gas demand in the Asian market is bound to go up exponentially once the current recession is over.

In political terms, Moscow visualizes that once the US engages Iran directly in the very near future, the enforceability of US sanctions will dissipate overnight and therefore, it is necessary to strike ahead of potential Western competitors.

To be sure, from the US perspective, there is a lot more to the South Pars area than highly lucrative business. The Iran-Pakistan pipeline project is one of those rare business deals where geostrategy comes into play from day one. Consider the following.

Making Iran a stakeholder in regional stability will immeasurably strengthen the hand of the US’s AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke when he negotiates a “grand bargain” with Tehran for Afghanistan’s stabilization. In short, the gas pipeline project can be a vital component of Holbrooke’s “regional initiative”. Diplomacy gains in momentum when it deals with tangibles.

Holbrooke should also speak to the Indians to shed their reservations about participating in this project. Delhi is presently holding back for two or three reasons, which seem tenuous at best. One, Indians are wary of having anything to do with a capital-intensive project that involves Pakistan. They say Pakistanis are an unpredictable lot and might cut off the gas supplies, which could put in jeopardy billions of dollars worth of downstream investments in the Indian economy.

They say the ground situation in the Pakistani province of Balochistan through which the pipeline passes is highly volatile and disruptions in supplies can ensue. Finally, Indians are ostensibly unhappy with the price structure offered by Tehran. At the back of it all, there are unspoken considerations. First, Delhi is upset that Tehran retracted on a massive gas deal that Delhi thought it had wrapped up in 2004.

Second, Delhi is petrified as to what Washington would think if it stepped out of line and dealt with Iran so long as the US-Iran standoff continued. Then, there is the increasingly influential pro-Israel lobby within the Indian establishment. On top of it all, there are powerful Indian energy conglomerates that are the driving force behind the government’s energy policies and who fear the price for gas in India’s opaque gas market will be affected once Iranian gas enters the Indian grid.

But Obama can easily wade through this South Asian mumbo-jumbo. Arguably, he is the only man under the sun today who can do so. The Indian strategic community would be hard-pressed to say “nyet” if he proposed. Therefore, Washington should step forward as the guarantor of an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project. At one stroke, that takes care of the Indian elite’s angst.

Obama should tell Indians that the huge gas pipeline project is the right thing to do for stabilizing the India-Pakistan relationship and for putting it on a predictable footing. The relationship is inherently brittle because it lacks content. Content engenders mutuality of interests, creates leverages and locks partnerships. Washington’s regional policies stand to gain if the India-Pakistan relationship is stabilized and therefore, Obama is an interested party.

Big Oil should also play a part in the project on the lines Gazprom offered. In fact, one of the biggest energy markets in the world opens up in the Indian sub-continent in terms of activities such as developing a South Asian gas grid, retail trade and petrochemical industries.

China will be eager to join the South Asian gas pipeline project. In strategic terms, the US has an opportunity to get Iran, Pakistan, India and China on board on one single project. The strategic implications for US regional policies are far-reaching. The Cold War experience on the European theater is that mega-pipeline projects can act as stabilizers in East-West relations.

If German policies toward Russia are transforming so visibly today, the principal reason is the bond that ties them together via energy deals. The proposed North Stream project will accentuate the trend in German-Russian ties; Russian-Italian relations gain from the South Stream and Russian-Turkish relations from the Blue Stream pipeline.

In the ultimate analysis, the answer to South Asian region’s severe instability lies in economic development. An editorial in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper said: “Fears have been expressed that the turmoil in Balochistan will threaten the security of the pipeline since a great length of the 1,000 kilometers inside Pakistan passes through that province which borders Iran. Islamabad could convert this factor to its advantage if it can ensure that in the construction of the pipeline indigenous labor is hired and the gains of the economic activity generated by projects of such magnitude are focused on Balochistan for the benefit of its poverty stricken people.”

Obama would know that according to hearsay, the troublesome, one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar got onto a motorbike and rode into the night towards these very same poverty stricken people of Balochistan for shelter when he was driven out of Kandahar in the winter of 2001.

The US’s regional policies must, therefore, refocus. Whereas today India and Pakistan are locked in a deathly dance – with Indians determined to become the pre-eminent military and nuclear power in the region and Pakistanis ensuring that doesn’t happen – Obama can gently initiate them into the Third Way.

No American president in living memory has had Obama’s measure of humanism. Cairo could have been the platform from where Obama spelt out an “AfPak dream”, to use the words of Dr Martin Luther King….

This is the time for Islamabad to exploit Washington’s desperation. Sec Def Robert Gates is pleading Asia to support America’s failed Afghan project, while his colleague the U.S. Treasury Secretary is begging China to continue financing the U.S. government. The Americans are behind a Sunni militant group fighting for secession in Iran’s Baluchistan and another ethnic militia in Pakistan’s Balochistan. The U.S. media leak on American weapons going to Afghan militants is a cover-up meant to hide what the Pakistani Army has discovered in Swat, that terrorists are using sophisticated American [and Indian] weapons to kill Pakistanis. Islamabad needs to end the American highhandedness, beginning with limiting CIA outposts in Pakistan.

—The latest scare story on Pakistan’s nukes is a breath of fresh air. Instead of the unnamed sources, which have been the basis for the anti-Pakistan demonization campaign in the U.S. media, this time we have no less than President Obama’s point man on South Asia, M. Bruce Riedel, coming out with an op-ed that leaves little mystery in the debate over whether Washington is exploiting terrorism to target Islamabad’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

Mr. Riedel is one of the key proponents of the theory that the Pakistani military needs to be transformed into a little more than a glorified local police force watching out for U.S. interests. It is pointless to counter the arguments of such determined imperialists who are shamelessly interfering in Pakistan. What is more important at this stage is to understand how our supposed ally has taken us for a ride and how we need to exploit the new American desperation in the region to get a better deal than the one currently in hand.

There is a growing body of evidence that the U.S. is supporting terrorism in our region to further its strategic objectives. In Iran, a secretive sectarian group is trying to rally the people of Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan province for secession from Tehran. In Pakistan’s Balochistan, an ethnic group has risen from the dead to campaign for secession. The only thing common to both groups is that they emerged after the U.S. landed in Afghanistan and turned that poor country into a source of region-wide destabilization. So much for fighting terror.

The Pakistani military has also admitted over the weekend what Pakistan’s pro-U.S. government has been hiding for months. The weapons that the terrorists – the fake Pakistani Taliban – are using to kill Pakistanis are coming primarily from U.S. and India. The Pakistani military leadership first confronted Adm. Mullen and CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes about this in a secret meeting in Rawalpindi last July. As in all insurgencies, the terrorists in our northwestern belt are a mix of local elements bolstered by professional fighters from U.S.-controlled Afghanistan. The Pakistani military has squeezed these terrorists so hard now that there is little doubt where the support for this anti-Pakistan terror campaign is coming from. To avoid embarrassment, Washington quickly ‘leaked’ a story that U.S. weapons meant for the Afghan army have reached insurgents. The timing of the leak conveniently coincides with the Pakistani army catching the American double game pants down.

Some members of the Karzai puppet regime have privately confirmed to Pakistani officials that they are incapable of stopping Indian terrorist activities on Afghan soil.

None of this will stop unless Pakistan firmly puts the leash on CIA outposts inside Pakistan. There is no question that CIA and Pakistani spy agencies were allies during the 1980s. But let us not forget that the CIA station in Pakistan recruited twelve insiders and used them to plan sabotage from within before being busted by chance in 1978.

Now the U.S. strategic interest in the region is largely divergent from that of Pakistan’s. U.S. officials, like Mr. Riedel, have little respect or appreciation for Pakistan’s right to have its own national security perspective and not rely on U.S. think tanks to adopt one. Today, Pakistan is paying for the blank check that our government and intelligence agencies gave the Americans on the ground in Balochistan and the tribal belt.

America is desperate in Afghanistan. U.S. officials have launched a fresh charm offensive to pacify the alienated Pakistanis. A panicked and bankrupt Washington is also trying to scare Asia into doling out money to save America’s failed occupation in Afghanistan. This is the time for Islamabad to demand Washington cease all the propaganda about Pakistan’s nukes, about the fabled ten billion dollars in aid, and stop turning the world against Pakistan. The elected government needs to muster some guts to confront Washington on this instead of leaving all the tough talk to Pakistani military leadership.

There is a golden opportunity out there to put a leash on CIA activities in Pakistan which we had consented to after 9/11. The American goal posts have shifted. Pakistan is no longer bound by the same deal….

__________

Source

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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The Appalling TRUTH must be told

Benjamin Netanyahoo

As much as seven months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Administration was deeply involved in planning and mobilizing for the invasion and military occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the activity was remotely related to Osama bin Laden or counterterrorism of any stripe.

This is the fundamental truth, it is beyond dispute, and it is fully documented.

The incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were premeditated, hegemonic wars of conquest and territorial occupation, to gain the geostrategic control of Middle Eastern energy resources. Bald acts of unprovoked military aggression; they are direct violations of the charter of the United Nations. The wars are therefore international crimes, but they were not undertaken until the horror of September 11, 2001 provided a CIA/DIA/MOSSAD/MI6 spectacular smokescreen. A fraudulent label–the “war on terror”—was concocted to disguise the premeditated violence, and it was quickly unleashed…..

Obama has admitted that the U.S. was involved in the Iranian coup in 1953.

When will the U.S. admit that the U.S. was not only “involved”, but - as documented by the New York Times - Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950′s posed as Communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president (see also this essay)?

And when will America admit that – as confirmed by a former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence – that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

And when will we admit that – as confirmed by recently declassified documents – in the 1960′s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. If you view no other links in this article, please read the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings?

Because the important admission is not that the U.S. helped with a coup, but that America and virtually all other powerful nations throughout history have used “false flag terror” as means to political ends…..as well as the use of the infamous White House Murder INC, for decades and multiple False Flag attacks as well…..

Posted by HK Source:

Sikh Community Waiting for Justice

A Sikh woman who was widowed during the 1984 riots, at a demonstration near the Parliament House in Delhi.

Remembering 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots

by Zaheer-ul-Hassan

Few days back hundred of e-letters arrived in my mail box and all these were in particular response to my article “Pitching Sikhs against Muslims “. One email out of these so many, was so moving that I almost felt compelled to present it before my readers as well as to the attention of worthy Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh.

The characters of the email have been changed for obvious reasons.

The email unveils the tragic plight of eighty years old Mrs. Balwant Singh of Amritsar, who is still waiting for her 12 years old Balbir Singh, who went to bazaar for buying bread (Chappaties) for her but, was shot by the soldier of the Indian army.

The poor old lady doesn’t know that her son proceeded to bliss and would never come back .When somebody invites the respectable lady, she says “Mera Balbir aaway ga Te phair akkathay khaNwaN ge“  (let my Balibir come and we will have meal together). After this she picks up the photograph of her son and starts kissing him madly. At times, starts crying or giggling suddenly.

The email sender further added that “condition of Balwant Kaur made me sad and sob”. Till the time I stayed there, she kept on asking “Puttar go to Bazaar and call my Balbir. May be he will listen to your call and come. After such a long time, he too may be burning with a longing as I am”.

The email made my day sad too and reminded me the never-ending saga of  Indian state terror against minorities. The Indian excessiveness almost touches barbarism. A famous Indian Sikh scholar Balbir Singh Sooch tersely remarks “Individual terrorism has always an end but the state terrorism ends never.” If terrorists don’t wish to be humans they should better be with the State.”

Lt Col Prohit and his comrades are the exact translation of the mentioned quotation. These terrorists were involved in storming militancy with the support of their mother agency RAW.

Indian government and their intelligence agencies have always tried to divert the world attention from their internal communal violence by targeting neighbouring states like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Recently, The Indian Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh showed his concern over displacement of 35 Sikhs of Pakistani nationality living in Orakzai Agency. They were allegedly asked by Taliban militants to pay “Jaziya” for their protection otherwise leave the agency.

Strange enough, the Indian Prime Minister did n’t forget to talk about those 35 Sikhs of Orakzai Agency but  Manmohan Jee seems to have no concern for those two million Sikh families who were victimized on June 6, 1984. The wounds of those innocent Sikhs become afresh on June 6th, every year which have ever lasting effect on lives of the grieved families. There is no end to their sufferings. No one knows when Indian government will be able to reign in the notorious RAW from playing with the lives of minorities, be they the Sikhs, the Muslims, Christians or the Dalits.

Its no more a secret now that the extremist Hindus are backed by wicked politicians of ruling party. They are making every effort to eliminate the Sikhs by using tactics of creating hatred between Muslims and the Sikhs. The prime objectives of such government agencies always revolves around machinations that could generate rifts between these two communities which could provide a chance to extremist Hindus of killing two birds with one stone.

Historically too, Hindus had been the principal beneficiary of 1947 partition riots. They prepared the plot to eliminate Sikh and Muslim communities because of their self generated fear of emergence of two more future states i.e. Muslim Bengal and Khalistan.

Hindu extremists always have had strong desires to convert India into a “Maha Bharat “, which in other words would be a pure Hindu State.

To achieve their goal, the extremist Hindu groups present in the CBI and RAW are facilitating the Hindutva gangs and militant outfits who strongly believe that either minorities living in India should convert themselves to Hinduism or just leave India. No wonder that the Indian intelligence agencies are always on the move to defame Sikhs and others minorities.

I wouldn’t have known all about this, had I not read the book “Soft target” written by two Canadian Journalists (Mr. Zuhair Kashmeri & Brian McAndrew). The authors very vividly revealed RAW conspiracy against Sikhs. The book unveils how did the Indian intelligence blew its own Air India plane out of the skies over international waters, just to denigrate the Sikh nation and to muffle their voice for reclamation of lost Sikh Sovereignty.

In this tragic act of terrorism in the air, 329 people mostly Canadians were murdered through bombing. The whole act was planned and implemented by RAW in June 1985. The blowing of the aircraft was planned in tune with the first anniversary of Golden Temple and Holocaust of Sikhs.

Brij Mohan Lal and Surinder Malik were the two intelligence guys who were posted in Canada at that time. The former Chief of Indian Intelligence Bureau was the mastermind & was an active member of the RSS, involved in the Air India Plane bombing. His mission was to sabotage & defame the Sikhs in Canada and the world. Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was the agency that did a tremendous job of raising the curtain to show the real script editors and actors of this tragic drama. The Canadian agency chased the culprits’ right to the Indian embassy and consulates and ultimately alleged Ripudaman Singh Malik, 58, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, 55 who were indicted by the Canadian judge from the charges of murder of 331 persons of Air India Bombing.

It was thus proved that the Indian security forces and its intelligence agencies were involved in slaughter of Sikh nationals of Canada with a view to suppress their demands of Khalistan. Another climax in the history of Indian brutality against Sikhs was the Operation Blue Star.

The operation was conducted against Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple from 4- 6 June 1984. Simultaneously at the time military attacked on Harmindar Sahib, 38 other Sikh temples were also embattled throughout the Eastern Punjab. Over 20,000 Sikhs were murdered.

The assault on Golden Temple was without any warning. Heavy artillery, tanks, Howitzer guns, and other mechanized weapons were used against innocent Sikhs. Surprisingly, the attack coincided with the religious celebrations on the occasion of the birthday of the Fifth Guru of the Sikhs, Guru Arjan Dev Ji, who too was martyred while defending the dignity of the Sikhs.

Two main conclusions can easily be drawn from this macabre orchestration of the events, firstly: to humiliate the highest spiritual leadership of Sikhs and secondly to terrorize, crush the Sikh nation, humiliate and desecrate their dignity and their places of worship, the places from which every Sikh draws inspirations and finally to kill forever the struggle for Khalistan. As reported by the Amnesty International on May 28, 2008 over the last 14 years more than 250,000 Sikhs have been exterminated / tortured by Indian governments. The report further mentions that there were gross violations of human rights, including in Nandigram, in west Bengal, Kashmir and other parts of India. It is worth noting here that since 1989 Indian forces and the Indian intelligence have also murdered more than 200,000 innocent Muslims including Kashmiris. 6,300 women have been raped in various overt and covert operations through state sponsored terrorism.

The Sikhs even to this day clamor for the government to take action against EX Union Minister Jagdish Tytler, but Indian intelligence the RAW and the CBI with their totally biased investigations have declared him neat and clean. Then again in 2000, while the former US President Clinton visited India, these two state organs of Indian Union planned riots against Sikhs in which 38 Sikhs were killed and the blame was thrown on local Muslims.

However, to the good luck of the Muslims, the Sikh leaders smelt the rat when they came to know the actual plan and thus rejected the trick of blaming Muslims for anti-Sikh riots. It was fortunate for the Sikhs who read between the lines, how the incident was masterminded and by whom and for the Muslims as Sikhs never got up against Muslims in India.

But viewed in the overall context, the Hindutva politicians have been conspiring not only against Muslims but also toward the Sikh nation as a whole. This breed of Hindu fanatics came out of their camouflaged secularism when they played their “Bloody Holly’ with the Sikhs when late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was murdered. The notorious former Minister (with his special fathom for all non Hindu communities in India) Tytler sent an email to all local Hindu leaders demanding that Khoon Ka Badla Khoon Se LaiNge “ (now there will be blood for blood). So a mayhem was started, Sikhs were murdered, their properties looted, women raped, innocents children and Sikhs dragged out of their houses and killed. Sikh’s shops / houses were looted and then burnt. Conservative estimates tell that over 3,000 (some quote as high as 5000+) Sikhs were killed in just three days.

The worst episode took place on June 6, 1984. What an irony that Manmohan Sing (himself a Sikh) failed to provide justice and has never tried to even console the sufferings his community underwent in those days. The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose name means “one who is a loved from the core of one’s heart” should know there are many like Mrs. Balwant Singh who are still waiting for their Manmohans on meals; without knowing that they are no more there, thanks to the mayhem generated by Tytler and Co. but definitely abetted by the Indian Army and security forces.

These poor, innocent families are waiting for the justice from so called secular government which unfortunately herself is found involved in elimination of Sikhs but the enthusiasm, sincerity, and loyalty of Sikh nationalists towards their cause does show that emergence of Kahlistan is sure to come one day, sooner or later on the world map and as  my Sikh brethren say Wah-e-Guru ka Khalsa, Wah-e-Guru ki Fateh….

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too, are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

Source

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Operation Rah-e-Rast and the Sikh Community of Pakistan

With Tears in their Eyes and Flowers in their Hands, the people of Pakistan, Paid Tributes to Those Great Sons of the Land, the National heroes…

Sad at their Loss, which can never be Redeemed, Yet the Pride was on Every face; for the Shaheeds have a Noble Cause, of saving their motherland. Such men are not born every day. They belong to that rare class of humanity, who set exmples.

They are the ones who set precedents, Najam Riaz, Bilal Zafar, Abid Malik and all those unnamed officers and soldiers of Pakistani armed forces, the men of law enforcement who lost teir lives for the motherland are the unprescdented heroes of this nation.

Note from WOP: Normally I avoid including posts on these pages which have the faintest possibility of creating further rift between two neighboring states; India and Pakistan. But I have included this particular one just because I was approached last week by a young blogger friend from India, who too was worried about the Sikh community living in Orakzai Agency since generations. These Sikhs of our tribal belt had been living peacefully even at the height of communal tensions in the subcontinent when followers of one faith were going after the throats of those of opposite faiths.

My blogger friend was much worried also about Jaziya having been demanded from these Sikhs and on non compliance were either threatened with life or to leave the area.

I told my Indian friend that this alleged report of jaziya as maintained by the Indian press can be replied neither in negative nor in the positive for these so called Taliban, the kind of stuff that has been coming up in our north, has multi-dimensional designs, colors and masks. There are hard core militants who want that strict Islamic code be implemented forthwith. Then there is another class who are mullahs turned into warlords who take pride in exhibiting extreme brutality, like beheading the innocent people, hanging their heads on tree trunks, looting the properties of locals irrespective of their being a Muslim or otherwise. Most of these are remnants of the Afghan brand of US Jihad against the former Soviet Union.

Then there is the third type who are illiterate or semi literate, frustrated gang of tribesmen who have taken up to guns to show their muscle power and extract as much benefit, strength and power as they can through the barrel of a gun. But surprisingly there is the fourth type also who have put on Dracula type masks, pose themselves as Taliban and demand that they should be obeyed, by every one, the local people, the civil administration as well as by the state. Actually it is they who have forced the federal government in Islamabad to launch an army operation to establish the writ of the state.

As the facts are emerging now, none from this last named group originates from Pakistan. Some have been identified as Afghans, some the Uzbeks, Tajiks  and some from a neighboring country as well. There are some pix of such persons on some sites. One is here. But this shouldn’t mean per se that these are the people sent by India to Pakistan. It could also be the case that these people have been planted by a third force which would not want friendly relations to foster between India and Pakistan.

Coming back to the army operation in Swat and adjoining areas, It is understood that in an army operation there are many chances that civilian population may come under fire, hence the majority of the people including these Sikh brethren from tribal areas had to flee their homes, as did the Muslim population in the area.

But one thing which I do assert here is: that all of us are proud of our country (as much as we do as Muslims) but that doesn’t debar any other Pakistani of his Pakistaniat even though he is not a Muslim. So if those gangsters who claim to be Muslims (though only by names) demanded protection money from our Sikh brethren in the north, could be true as well, for gangsters do not differentiate between religions nor do they respect their own one which they profess to be the strong adherents of.

In this very context, perhaps I can mention about two Pakistanis (and they are not Muslims) one is Retd. Justice Rana Bhagwan Das who along with Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary refused to take oath under a dictator president and in spite of many lucrative offers did not budge from his stand. Second is Dr. Giyan Chand, of Swat who is the only physician left in the valley. He too was asked to leave but he declined, saying ”If I leave, who will look after these people who have been left helpless in Swat”.

As I salute those brave soldiers of Pakistan Armed Forces, the Shaheeds, the many unnamed soldiers who gave their life for the sacred soil of Pakistan, along with them I salute these two great living sons of Pakistan, Justice Retd. Rana Bhagwan Das and Dr. Gyan Chand of Swat.

At the end, I reproduce the last SMS sent by Captain Bilal Zafar before he was martyred in Swat. He had sent this to his friends and family members. So texted Captain Bilal Zafar Shaheed….

When Bullets are being shot

And the Guns Roaring

In the Thunder of Cannons

And Bombs Exploding

There are Those

Who just don’t stop

Knowing that

They are surrounded by death

Knowing that They would leave their Wives widow…And Children orphan

Yet they keep on moving Coz…

Something is thumping their hearts Running in their veins

The Honour, The Valour and an Undying Love for the Homeland

Death over Surrender, Death over Disgrace

That’s the Pakistan Army,

Afwaj-e-Pakistan Zindabad,

Pakistan Paindabad

Capt. Bilal Zafar, Najam Riaz, Abid Malik and all unnamed soldiers, the men of law enforcement who lost their lives for the motherland, you are our unprecedented Heroes, The Legend and a Model for every Pakistani.

With your sacrifice you have made us proud of being Pakistani.

P. S.

All our Sikh brethren who were forced to leave their homes have specially been accommodated in the hostel of Gurdwara Punja Sahib where almost all facilities are being provided to them.

There was a newspaper announcement from all these Sikhs in the Gurdwara Punjab Sahib whereby they thanked the Govt. of Pakistan for providing maximum facilities to them.

The post from Zaheer-ul-Hassan follows….

Youtube video: Courtesy: pakarmychannel.blogspot.com

Obama Can`t Reach Muslim World Via Jewish Media That Censors His Speeches

Obama`s handlers cannot reach thinking, progressive and intelligent Muslims with rhetoric censored by pro-Zionist media whilst independent Muslim media are reluctant even to carry his speeches for the reason that they are disrespected and ignored by those claiming to advocate positive `change` whilst doing little to show it in practice

The Jewish financier George Soros spent a large slice of his wealth trying to ensure a victory for the Democrats at the previous U.S. election in supporting Kerry against Bush. At the time Mathaba analysts knew only too well he’d be wasting his money unless he embarked upon a value campaign via the Internet, something that Republican Libertarian Ron Paul’s supporters understood and made good use of.

We contacted Soros and offered him advice for his efforts to be successful, but fell upon deaf ears. Soros evidently does not listen to independent media and perhaps despises it, since we are more critical of him and the effects of his financial activities upon millions of people while he takes with one hand and gives back a part with the other. So, we shed few tears when he lost a major slice of his wealth in the misguided attempt to rely upon advertising in U.S. establishment newspapers and interviews on CNN.

Obama came to power in large part due to the efforts and support of our brothers and sisters within the Nation of Islam within the United States and the respect with which he was held by most of the Black leadership within the United States, who trusted him that he is “Black but cannot talk Black, but he’ll come around once he is in power”. He will quickly lose that support once the real policies on the ground and the effects of continued misuse of American people’s money are evident in the coming months.

Independent and alternative media from the outset, long before Obama took office, took note of Obama’s friends – for “if you don’t know the character of a man, look at his friends” to paraphrase a Japanese proverb. It was noted clearly that his friends, controllers, financiers are the same circle that has been behind every U.S. President in recent history, and which have an absolute unconditional support for Israel, “a bastion of democracy, human rights and freedom in the midst of a barbarous Arab and Muslim region”.

Therefore we can all expect much more of the same: Jewish-Zionist control of media within the United States and beyond, to the point of censoring “Obama’s attempts to reach out to Muslims”, and yet intelligent, thinking or progressive Muslims will not feel sorry for him and blame that censorship on others. If Obama is his own man, he’ll be reaching out to those very independent media outlets that have correctly and against all established authority at the time, warning against inappropriate 9/11 response, against the Iraq proposed invasion. We did so not just from the outset, but warned against it well ahead of these disastrous blunders. We paid high prices for it, and have subsequently been proved more than correct and vindicated.

Were any of us get thanked for what could have saved the U.S. and the world untold human misery, loss of life and squandered billions? No. Were we hailed for our correct predictions after analysis of U.S. and banking economics of the current collapse of Anglo-American capitalism? No. We predicted this more than a decade ahead and warned anyone who would listen, but no one believed us then when there was time. Now, of course, is too late.

Cuba, a nation and people that has suffered untold suffering due to decades of unjust and immoral blockades and sanctions imposed upon it by the United States of America has reached out to independent and alternative media with solidarity, and kind words of support. This vindicates those who talk of socialism, democracy and human rights backed by deeds, rather than by those who churn out Hollywood movies and take the very opposite actions to words spoken and broadcast via western news agencies.

Are we going to publish here, the words that were censored about Palestinians from Obama’s speech – censored either by CQ Transcriptions, or Associated Press (AP), or Yahoo, or by all three, or by other quarters or individuals that any of these simply trust – similar to the twisting of the words of Iranian President Ahmedinejad who was reported and is still quoted to have said Israel needs to be “wiped off the map” when he said no such thing? No we are not going to. Why not? Because, unless we had a reporter there in Cairo witnessing his speech and recording it, or Obama`s office themselves contact us, we have no way of knowing what else was censored and nor will we believe it. Nor do we want to spend money researching which western news agency is responsible. All western news agencies have lost all credibility anyhow.

We are much better off concentrating our limited resources on ensuring that the news from Cuba, which is censored in western media, reaches western ears, than trying to ensure U.S. propaganda voiced by what may yet turn out to be an evident Coconut President reaches the ears of those who really need to see good actions of the world’s Great Satan. Actions putting its own wrongs right first within its own borders, lifting sanctions and compensating wronged people’s such as the Cubans, and in punishing those who violated human rights, democracy and the laws of all religions on an illegal occupation base on Cuban soil. What greater contrast is there than between the Free Territory in the Americas and that nasty cancerous monster that the United States has always been known as in the region, and more recently much further abroad?

If Obama is genuine, then he’ll make unconditional donations to those long-time independent media resources that have always stood with the truth, and given hope a chance against all odds. If the poor citizens of the world can do so, then he surely can. For that is exactly what he needs to do if it is expected that Africans (who are by the way majority Muslims) and others around the world both Muslim and non-Muslim are going to put aside their healthy scepticism and sound experience of leopards not changing their spots. Then and only then, may we think that perhaps it really is possible for a Black man to remain Black after reaching the White House.

Source: Mathaba

Open borders key to peace, prosperity

Borders should not be a means to wage war or to expand territories. No conquests. No capturing of capitals. No threatening but the will to resolve issues peacefully for peace brings prosperity. War brings destruction, creates hate and a perpetual erosion of human values. When we talk of open borders, we do not sideline the problems, what we think is the economic interaction of a magnitude where interdependency will become a compulsion for both Pakistan and India to find acceptable and honourable solution to their problems. We have lived with the conflicts and wars and war-like conditions so far and did not achieve anything other than instability and uncertainty in all fields. So, why not give the other and better option a chance. And given the conditions we are in, why not give ourselves and our generations a chance.

·

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

 ·

by Abdul Baqi

·

Though we have been living in an abnormal environment, since our very beginning as a nation 62 years ago; never before were we as aware of ourselves as we are today. What we should have done or not is clear to us today, and we have certainly started doing different things.

 Yet, the impressions of past are not allowing some of us to accept the change. Almost all politico-religious parties one way or the other are stressing on halting the military operation. They want the government to start dialogue with the militants again. The other job of the government that has earned it opposition is the trade agreement with Afghanistan. Many writers and analysts are warning the government against the bad outcome that would result if the trade agreement includes India.

The military operation was the last instrument left with the government after the Swat agreement failed to materialize due to the rigidity shown by the local Taliban on everything mutually agreed upon. They wanted to implement their own Shariah through their own Qazis, their own administration. They had also marched into the adjoining areas after ‘conquering’ Swat. Besides, they had started speaking with utmost contempt against the constitution and democracy. If this was allowed to take place, it would have meant Talibanization of Pakistan within months. All this was enough to shake not only Pakistan but the entire world. And all this was enough to give logic to the military operation.  An abnormal opposition could not be tackled otherwise.

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Air Raid Victim Tells Obama to Leave Afghanistan

Sobering footage speaks to the dire situation on the ground in the wake of last month’s US airstrikes.

by Z. P. Heller

Here is a face of the war in Afghanistan. Najibullah, an air raid victim from the Malwand district of Kandahar, points to where three bombs shattered his home during a recent US airstrike. His message to President Obama: Withdraw US forces from Afghanistan at once. “They’re going to leave anyway,” Najibullah says. “It’s better for them to leave Afghanistan on their own terms now rather than later. To leave our country voluntarily. We’re all deformed, people are missing fingers. Look at my finger.” He points to a missing index finger on his right hand. “Some people are missing eyes, some people are missing legs. Some are missing their arms. They destroyed the whole nation.”

This exclusive footage, which Brave New Foundation released today as part of the soon-to-be-released fourth segment of Rethink Afghanistan, stands as an unflinching testament to the rampant devastation wrought by recent US airstrikes in Afghanistan. It should be seen by everyone who attempts to write off the civilian casualties of this war with the dehumanizing phrase “collateral damage.” It should be seen by everyone in Congress considering whether to escalate this quagmire with $96.7 billion in supplemental wartime spending. And it should be seen by Gen. Stanley McChrystal as he submits his review of US strategy in Afghanistan–the fifth review this year–and tries to pretend the war in Afghanistan is not a quagmire that’s destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians like Najibullah.

Here’s how Chris Hedges assessed this dire situation:

We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown into a girl’s face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.

Raw images like those seen in this video, though disturbing, are necessary to drive home exactly what’s at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The civilian death toll has skyrocketed due to Predator drone attacks and airstrikes such as the Farah province bombing that killed 143 Afghans last month (including 96 women and children). And we must also consider how the survivors of such attacks like Najibullah can go on living. Forced to flee their war-ravaged homes to seek shelter in IDP camps, they are left with no food, water, or medicine for their families. They have only the clothes on their backs, hatred for the United States, and desperation that leads them to support Taliban extremists who use these bombings as a recruiting tool.

We must stop speaking the language of war. Rather than perpetuating a cycle of catastrophic violence with 21,000 more troops and $96.7 billion in wartime spending, we must acknowledge this war’s victims, negotiate a peace, and set an exit strategy to leave.

ZP Heller is the editorial director of Brave New Films. He has written for The American Prospect, AlterNet, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Huffington Post, covering everything from politics to pop culture.

Memo to Obama : No one wins in a war

Afghan child waiting to see doctor: DOD photo.

After having just read an article by John Pilger on Hiroshima, continuing with Howard Zinn’s reflections on the futility of war is almost a necessity we found ourselves more and more appalled by images of war, whether they are the visual backdrop on non-reflective TV news reports or the falsely proud war veterans parading in our local streets. Howard Zinn makes absolute sense when he says that no one wins a war.

by Howard Zinn

BARACK OBAMA continues to argue about war in spite of that olive branch he waived to the Muslim world in Cairo. But before making that epochal speech, Obama ordered to send more troops to fight and “win” in Afghanistan.

For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one “wins” in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Nine-year-old Wazir Hammond rests against a wall of sandbags that protect the hospital against rockets, shelling and bombs. He requires a prosthesis refitting every six months. Photo courtesy Robert Semeniuk

Did we “win” by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people – mostly civilians – died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Did we “win” in Vietnam? We were forced to withdraw, but only after 2 million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.

Did we win in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, with only a few hundred US casualties, but perhaps 100,000 Iraqis died. And the consequences were deadly for the United States: Saddam was still in power, which led the United States to enforce economic sanctions. That move led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to UN officials, and set the stage for another war.

In Afghanistan, the United States declared “victory” over the Taliban. Now the Taliban is back, and attacks are increasing. The recent US military death count in Afghanistan exceeds that in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce “victory”? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?

The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.

Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000, a terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a “war on terror.”

Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.

Yes, Al Qaeda – a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics – was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. “We had to do something,” you heard people say.

Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 – exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.

Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: “He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner.” The doctor attending him said: “The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?”

We should be asking our president : Is our war in Afghanistan ending terrorism, or provoking it? And is not war itself terrorism?

Title Photo: Courtesy AllAmericanPatriots

Howard Zinn is author of ” A Power Governments cannot Suppress” published by City Lights Books.

Source

Robert Semeniuk, Kabul, 1996

At the orthopedic centre of Wazir Hospital, nine-year-old Wazir Hammond rests against a wall of sandbags that protect the hospital againstYes,  rockets, shelling and bombs. He requires a prosthesis refitting every six months. More than a hundred people, most of them civilians, are killed and maimed every month by land mines in Afghanistan.

The Taliban in Afghanistan ‘will never be defeated’

‘Colonel Imam’, the Pakistani agent who trained Mullah Omar and the warlords to fight the Soviets, says the US must negotiate with its enemies.

I first read Christina Lamb’s book “Waiting for Allah: Pakistan’s struggle for democracy‎” which she wrote during the anti-Soviet Afghan war and later updated it during the 1990’s. Though one could not agree with all what she wrote in that book yet there were many naked facts about our society, about our bigoted political elite and their Machiavellian tactics to play with the people’s wishes. And obviously she included in this elite our generals as well.

She completed that book on an assignment from the London’s Financial Times.  Later we heard about her in relation to Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto and now she is back again with a very candid interview with Col. Imam, who says The Taliban of Afghanistan will ‘never be defeated’. ‘Colonel Imam’, the Pakistani agent who trained Mullah Omar and the warlords to fight the Soviets, says the US must negotiate with its enemies.

by Christina Lamb

THE Pakistani intelligence agent who trained Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, to fight has warned that Nato forces will never overpower their enemies in Afghanistan and should talk to them rather than sacrifice more lives.

“You can never win the war in Afghanistan,” said so-called “Colonel Imam”, who ran a training programme for the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union’s occupation from 1979 to 1989, then helped to form the Taliban.

“I have worked with these people since the 1970s and I tell you they will never be defeated. Anyone who has come here has got stuck. The more you kill, the more they will expand.”

A tall, bearded figure, whose real name is Amir Sultan Tarar, he trained at Fort Bragg, the US army base where America’s Special Forces are stationed.

During the late 1970s and 1980s he controlled CIA-funded training camps for 95,000 Afghans and often accompanied his students on missions.

After the Soviet defeat and the collapse of communism, he was invited to the White House by the first President George Bush and was given a piece of the Berlin Wall with a brass plaque inscribed: “To the one who dealt the first blow.”

Today western intelligence agencies believe Imam is among a group of renegade officers from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) who continued to help the Taliban after Pakistan turned against them following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

United Nations officials and Afghanistan’s intelligence service have reported sightings of him in the Afghan provinces of Helmand and Uruzgan. It is a charge he shrugs off, claiming that at 65 he has not worked for almost eight years.

“I wish I could do it but they don’t need me any more,” he says. “My students are far ahead of me now. They are giving a lesson to the world. I am very proud of them.”

Although he expresses great admiration for the British military (”far more gallant than the Americans”), Imam says that in sending troops to Helmand, Britain had forgotten its previous wars in Afghanistan.

In particular, he chides, they should have remembered the battle of Maiwand in 1880, in which 2,500 British troops took on 25,000 Afghans and suffered a devastating defeat.

“When people in Helmand heard the British were coming back, the cry went up all over: ‘Remember Maiwand? Our old enemy has come to the same area where they were once defeated to take revenge’. Then everyone, Taliban and nonTaliban, joined together. They told me on the phone, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make sure the Brits don’t have an easy time’.”

His comments come as the number of British soldiers killed by enemy action in Afghanistan has risen to 137, one more than the number who have died in Iraq.

According to Imam, Helmand is particularly difficult because of the character of the people. “They couldn’t care less about loss of property or loss of life,” he said.

It is unlikely that anybody alive today knows the Afghans as well as Imam. All the key figures were trained in his camps, from the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panj-shir, to warlords such as Gul-buddin Hekmatyar, his “naughtiest” student. “It was a matter of pride for me that my students later became big commanders,” he said.

“The Afghan is a very cunning soldier,” he added. “He picks things up very quickly and never forgets. As a Pakistani unit commander I’d be training my men for six months and maybe they would remember 70%. But in Afghanistan teenagers came, had only three days’ weapon training and they remembered 100%. In just 15 days they mastered the Stinger [the shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile].”

Omar passed through his camps in 1985. “He was a simple man, a small commander leading a maximum of 40 people and didn’t have much weaponry,” Imam recalled.

One of Imam’s biggest backers was Congressman Charlie Wilson, the Texan who was instrumental in securing funding for Operation Cyclone, the CIA programme to supply arms with which the mujaheddin would fight the Soviet troops.

“He used to dance with happiness at seeing our training camps,” said Imam.

Within 10 years the Russians had been forced out. “Total expenditure just $5 billion and not a single American life,” said Imam. “Now the Americans are spending hundreds of billions and losing hundreds of lives.”

The last time he saw Wilson was after the 1988 Geneva accords on the Soviet withdrawal. Imam told him: “You’re abandoning the Afghans. They need financial support for rehabilitation.” Wilson replied: “Dollars don’t grow on trees.” “Do Afghan youth grow on trees?” asked Imam. “Over 1.5m Afghans have died.”

Furious at the American betrayal and devastated by the resulting infighting in the Afghan resistance, he became close to Omar. “I love him,” he said. “He brought peace to Afghanistan.”

Imam was Pakistan’s consul-general in Herat when the Taliban captured the city in 1995 from Ismail Khan, the mujaheddin commander, who claims the ISI agent oversaw the whole Taliban operation. From there he guided the Taliban as they took over the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad and eventually captured Kabul.

Like many Pakistanis he refuses to believe the September 11 attacks were carried out by Osama Bin Laden. “An operation like that needs ground support,” he said. “I have no doubt it was carried out by the Americans to give a bad name to the Taliban government as an excuse to topple it.”

When General Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, agreed to American pressure to cut ties to the Taliban, the colonel was outraged.

Recalled to Islamabad, he told Musharraf: “You cannot defeat these people, they are well trained, they have a lot of ammunition and the more you kill, the more supporters will come.”

Today he adds: “It was the blunder of his life and because of it we are all doomed.”

Imam left Afghanistan when the US bombing of the country ceased in 2001 and claims he has not returned. “I can go any time on my old routes, even the Americans cannot stop me, but there is no need,” he said. “I have friends roaming all over there. At times they give me a call, they like to hear my voice.

“I’m quite happy with the current situation because the Americans are trapped there. The Taliban will not win but in the end the enemy will tire, like the Russians.”

He has offered to find the Americans a way out: “We can give them a face-saving solution but they must change their strategy.”

First, he says, they must spend billions on reconstruction. Then they must open talks with Omar rather than the so-called moderate Taliban with whom negotiations are under way.

“When are you people going to understand there are no number two Taliban?” he asked. “Those who break away from mainstream Taliban have no place in society. You may make deals in Dubai or Saudi Arabia, but when they come back to Afghanistan and people know they have compromised with the Americans, they are finished.

“In Afghanistan the only man who can make a decision and people listen is Mullah Omar. He’s a very reasonable man. He would listen and work for the interests of his country.”

He insisted the Taliban leader was not in Pakistan: “He’s in the hills of Uruzgan, his home province. If there’s a requirement he will listen to me, but why should I get him involved in a risky situation?”

Imam said he had watched with horror as fighting spread into Pakistan and had been shocked to see his fellow officers having to fight against their own countrymen in the Swat district.

“These are not Taliban, they are tribals,” he said. “Mullah Omar told them time and time again not to fight against Pakistan. They are fighting against the government of Pakistan because it is supporting the enemies of Islam. Everybody knows our government is supporting the US drone attacks in our own area.

“This is an American plan to make us a subjugated country and have an excuse to get our nukes. Everybody, your prime minister, President Obama, all go, ‘Oh, the nuclear weapons are unsafe’. I say you’re making them unsafe. When you were not in the region there was no problem.”

The call for prayer brings our interview to an end. Before he goes he has one last warning: “I tell you when my nation rises up it is not Afghanistan, not Iraq. There will be tremendous killing.”

________

Source

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Sino Indian Border Vibrations: Viewpoint from India

To solve the Sino-Indian boundary problem, China-Russia border agreement can be a model, feel Chinese scholars

by D. S. Rajan

Latest state-controlled media articles in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) indicate a hardening of Beijing’s position on the Sino-Indian border issue. It could be a signal towards possible adoption of a corresponding tough line on the issue at government levels in China, having implications for future state to state relations between the two sides. The significance of what has been conveyed by Beijing through the articles, deserve full attention of the analysts and policy makers in India for obvious reasons.

Such fresh media attention by all indications seem to be in response to the very recent trends noticed by China in India concerning the boundary problem – firm stand being taken by leaders, for e.g. ruling out a compromise on India’s sovereignty over its borders by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh (9 June 2009), plans to reinforce military and equipment in the border, e.g. SU-30 MK 1 aircraft and additional 60000 Indian troops to the border and the rise in the level of allegations on the increase in Chinese border intrusions.

First catching attention is a rather strongly worded article in the Global Times, affiliated to the Party organ People’s Daily. Referring to India’s dispatch of around 60000 troops to the Sino-Indian border ‘in last few days’, it asserted (People’s Daily Online, English, 11 June 2009) that such ‘tough posture’ by the new government of Dr. Manmohan Singh, cannot make China to ‘cave in’. Describing the expectations of the Indian politicians that the PRC would defer to their country on territorial disputes in return for India’s not joining US and Japan in encircling China, as a ‘wishful thinking’, the article asserted that China would not make any compromise in its border issues with India. Sounding a note of warning, it remarked that India could not afford the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.

Comments on the border issue in the latest Chinese language media are also noteworthy for certain influential opinions and recommendations contained in them. Referring to the issue, Professor Li Wei of the International Relations Institute of Fudan University in Shanghai, has found (Global Times, Chinese, 10 June 2009, quoting ‘Beijing Zhen Bao) that in China’s foreign relations, ties with India remain the ‘most complicated’ one and that there is maximum potential for the ‘eruption of a clash’ between the two nations. He has added that ‘McMahon line’, rejected by the Chinese, has been a key factor responsible for the unsuccessful several rounds of Sino-Indian border talks.

Striking a different note, Professor Wang Weihua of the Shanghai Institute of International Studies has ruled out (China broadcasting net, Chinese, 10 July 2009) a Sino-Indian border war by saying that a war option is not under the PRC’s consideration as it is not prepared to solve the boundary issue through use of force. This contrasts with an earlier assessment in China on a ‘partial war’ with India on the boundary question (Reference SAAG Paper No.2939 dated 24 November 2008, www.southasiaanalysis.org).

Professor Zhou Shixin of the Shanghai International Studies University, along with Professor Wang Weihua feel (China broadcasting net, Chinese, 10 July 2008) that the issue of ‘Southern Tibet’ (as the Chinese call Arunachal) can be solved through “Heixiazi’ formula which settled the Sino-Russian border. (It may be recalled that China and Russia reached an agreement in July 2008, after about 40 years of border talks, under which the latter returned to China two territories stretching 174 sq kms, located at the confluence of the rivers, Ussuri in Russia and Heilong in China, and occupied by it since 1929 – Tarabarov island, called Yinlong by the Chinese and half of Bolshoy Ussuriysky island, called Heixiazi by the Chinese). While it is to be checked whether or not such a recommendation has been seen before, India needs to closely examine it from the point of view of its desirable stance in future negotiations with China. A question arises – do the Chinese expect India to return Tawang to them, as Russians did in the case of Heixizi?

Certain other themes in the latest coverage by the Chinese media, though old, deserve attention due to their reiteration. They include past Chinese allegations that Tawang is under Indian occupation since 1951 and that a lot of Indian migrants had moved to China’s “Southern Tibet” since then as well as their remarks that talks on the boundary issue will continue for a long time. On the last point mentioned, the coverage has something to say in addition. Plan to dispatch 60000 more troops to the border, are India’s strategic moves belying any Chinese hope to solve the boundary issue within a short time, says a comment (China broadcasting net, 10 June 2009). It has quoted Prof Zhou Shixin as saying that India does not have the will to return ‘Southern Tibet’ to China and the latter is also not thinking about abandoning its claim on that territory. As such, Sino-Indian border talks will go on, but India will feel greater political pressure from China even though the former enjoys the temporary advantage of   occupying ‘Southern Tibet’. Such a pressure will affect India’s position in South Asia, Professor Zhou has observed further.

Addressing the question as to why India keeps its ties with China ‘sour’, a lengthy evaluation  (Qing Cankao, Chinese- Reference for Youth- 10 June 2009), traces four contributing factors – the continuing influence of the half century old Sino-Indian war on Indians who are unable to accept their country’s defeat, China’s economic superiority with its GDP three times more than that of India, provocation by the West which wants to prevent the rise of China by encouraging India to oppose China and lastly, China-Pakistan relations in which case the Indians believe that without China’s help, it would not have been possible for Pakistan  to oppose India for a long time and possess nuclear weapons and advanced military equipment. It at the same time compliments the Indian government for its stand in last few years in favour of having more cooperation with China.

It is difficult to say whether the Chinese media pronouncements on the border issue, are only a posture or convey a deeper meaning in terms of China’s policy towards India at this juncture. Any Chinese move to reinforce their military on its border with India, in retaliation of the latter’s additional troop induction into the area, will definitely have consequences for both the sides. New Delhi and Beijing need to work towards cooling the emerging unfriendly atmosphere; that would demand diplomacy at each side, more vigorous than before, capable of reducing any border tension.

(The writer is Director of the Chennai Centre for China Studies, Chennai, India.Email:dsrajan@gmail.com)

Source

China: “India is a Paper Tiger and Will be Trounced if it Uses Force Against China”, Experts Warn

(To be read with our preceding post titled: Sino Indian Border Vibrations

by  D. S. Rajan

Beijing’s official response to the Indian Prime Minister’s statement on Arunachal (9 June 2009) and India’s reported moves to dispatch additional troops to the Sino-Indian border, remains so far muted with no provocation to New Delhi. In contrast, the comments on the subject appearing in the country’s state-controlled media have been sarcastic with a rather threatening tone, towards India.

The PRC Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Qin Gang (11 June 2009), while reiterating that the Sino-Indian border has never been formally demarcated, has stated that China wants a ‘just and rational’ solution to the border issue through talks with India. He has hoped that both sides would follow the consensus and principles agreed upon and protect together the stability and security of the border region.

The authoritative Global Times, affiliated to the Party organ People’s Daily, has on the other hand, been choosing a hard-hitting line towards India. Following its article, “India’s Unwise Military Moves” (People’s Daily Online, English, 11 June 2009), it has published a highly provocative comment (Global Times, Chinese, 12 June 2009) entitled “India is a paper tiger, its use of force will be trounced, say experts”, which needs a close examination. The comment alleged that Indian politicians have always been seen adopting a contradictory stand on China – advocating cooperation on one side and creating incidents on the other as well as declaring support to ‘one-China policy’ on one side and supporting the Dalai Lama “clique” for more than half a century on the other. It singled out the actions of Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in this connection by referring to his visit to the disputed territory in the Eastern sector of the Sino-Indian border soon after his visit to China and his statement on 9 June 2009, that India would not compromise on the border question.

Declaring that China is not ‘afraid’ of the dispatch of 60,000 additional troops to the border, the Global Times write-up has listed India’s real motives for provoking China – raise the bogey of ‘security threat’ to the border for diverting the attention of Indians from the daily sharpening internal clashes in the country, maintain India’s big brother status in the region and tell the US and other powers that it can play an important role in their attempts to ‘contain’ China.

Reiterating China’s stand that it does not recognise the McMahon line, and that it wants to solve the border problem through peaceful and friendly talks, the article has said that India’s actions in the border like sending additional troops, improving firepower and building airfields only hint at New Delhi’s efforts to ‘legalise its territorial occupation’. It has concluded by saying that it is laughable for Mr. Manmohan Singh to talk about preparedness to deal with the ‘security threat’ from China, while simultaneously calling for strengthening of relations with China in the international arena.

The ‘paper tiger’ language takes one to the past, when Mao termed the ‘imperialists’ as a paper tiger, to which Khrushchev responded by saying that ‘paper tiger has nuclear teeth’. This exchange had then ideological and policy connotations. Is it the same situation now? Has Beijing started to reassess India’s role in policy terms? It is anybody’s guess, but to say the least, the epithets in the Global Times look very unfriendly to India, not to mention their criticisms against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by name.

How to interpret the apparent mixed signals emanating from China? Beijing’s official caution would only mean that it wants no escalation of tensions with India on the border issue. Qin Gang’s press comments above, illustrate this point. On the other hand, China has strategic concerns and hence its use of the state-controlled media to convey the same to India. Such a methodology is not unknown to other nations including India.

Of immediate concern to India, would be any signal, which may point to the Chinese military moves in the border in retaliation to steps being taken by it. The fact, however, is that China has already strengthened its military and logistic system in the borders and India’s latest steps are only in response to that.

Caught in a circle, both India and China should now jointly work towards diffusing any border tension, in the overall interest of bilateral relations. The good atmosphere, marked by trade jump and the ‘shared vision for the 21st century’, should not be allowed to get eroded through any radical step by each side.

(The writer is  Director of the Chennai Centre for China Studies, Chennai, India. Email:d srajan@gmail.com)

Source

Are Pakistani Taliban the ‘Khawarij’ of today?

The psycho-analysis of groups such as the Pakistani Taliban or cults shows the very maniac nature of such people, their sects, groups or lashkars, all a manifestation of what we see nowadays in the modus operandi of the so called Tehrik-e-Taliban, Pakistan and their ideological masters like Sufi Muhammad, who neither accept the constitution of Pakistan, nor do they believe in the national political structure and even challenge the majority of Islamic scholars.

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‘TALIBAN’-THE MISNOMER

LET’s CALL THEM “KHAWAARIJ”

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by Aftab Ahmad Khan

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A Note from WoP: For readers who may not be well  conversant with the early periods of Islamic history, here is a brief on the conspirators called the ‘Khawarij’.

After the ‘wisaal’ of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), his trusted companions and followers (the first four) were elected caliphs through a consensus of all Muslims. However, at the end of the caliphate of Hazrat Umar, there arose a group of extremists who disputed first the caliphate of Hazrat Uthman (under self concocted pretexts and prejudices), in favour of Hazrat Ali but later turned against him as well.

Being extremists in interpretations of Islam, which they believed correct as against the majority of Muslims (whom they equated with the infidels) they were called the Khawarij. In the following post Aftab Ahmad Khan discusses the origin of this group, their mindset and their perilous role in any Islamic society. After quoting Ayaat from the Holy Qur’an, the writer concludes that these so called Taliban of Pakistan are actually a cult (not the knowledge seekers which the word Taliban connotates) and thus are akin to the Khawarij of the early period of Islam.

Pakistan’s Master Spy Hamid Gul once again on Blogosphere

Exclusive: How ISI Kept CIA At Bay As Recounted By Hamid Gul

Note from WoP: Ahmad Quraishi is a blogger, anchor and an analyst. During the reign of Gen. Pervaiz Musharaf, he used to host on the state run PTV, a talk show called ‘Worldview from Islamabad’. In those days I gathered from his boyish appearance and typical American accent that he was one of those young guys, the Pakistani Americans, who sometimes temporarily start working in Pakistan or those with a determinative mind, do get also settled permanently in the homeland. But from his blog I learnt that he spent a good amount of his early life in the Middle East.

Now as a blogger I don’t like Ahmed Quraishi (AQ). You may spontaneously ask why?

Here is my reply:-

-          I don’t like Ahmed Quraishi (AQ) because he is a man who openly advocates dictatorship, perhaps this is the reason he is always full of praise for Gen Pervaiz Musharraf whom most Pakistanis call Busharraf. And I think the major reason of our predicaments emanate from the policies adopted by the ex General, particularly with his utterance of “Yes Sir” to George W. Bush after the 9/11incident (when the latter launched his war on terror with the same euphoria the other super power had done in Afghanistan). The ex dictator obliged Bush’s wishes to the extent of humiliation not only of his own person but also of Pakistan as a nation and as a state.

-          Through his policies, we Pakistanis who helped US disintegrate her arch enemy were forcibly involved in a war which was not our war. We thought we were doing this as a US ally and to say in the words of late president Gen. Ayub as ”US’s most allied ally” but as Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer, very aptly says “the super powers don’t have allies, they  only need agents”. So we became US agent in America’s anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan and later through the courtesy AQ’s favourite Gen. Busharraf once again US agent against Afghanistan. In his candid style, Gen Hamid Gul makes some startling revelations in his recent interview on this subject as well, particularly how the whole scenario was orchestrated to install military dictatorship for the 4^th time, with the overthrow of the civilian political structure in the country.

Coming back to AQ once again: In spite of his views that I oppose specially for a free, independent and democratic Pakistan, there are many things which I love in him:

1. He is a Pucca Pakistani and his passion for this country, a passion which made lot of us (and I include myself among them) leave the high-perk jobs abroad, all the glamour of the western world, and the amenities of an ultra modern life, a secured future and all other benefits which accrue to the residents of a welfare state; left all this and settled down permanently in a country where even after 63 years of independence are in a fix, whether we are just Muslims and that’s good enough or we are first Pakistani and we may be Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs or Christians and the common bondage that makes us survive as Pakistanis (as was defined by the Qaid at the time this country was created).

2. I am the one who believes in this country not only because it is a Muslim country but also because it’s my country. My roots are deeply embedded in its soil. My culture, my origin, my genesis, my whole being,  all are derived from its soil, and that’s what makes me love AQ, for he believes in the same ideals as mine.

But once again there are many things that I don’t like in him. I don’t like his anti-India stance and his association with this website called PKKH (though I do owe my thanks to them for putting up the recent interview they had with Pakistan’s Master Spy, Gen. Hamid Gul).

Now this PKKH (Pakistan Ka Khuda Hafiz) literally can also mean Goodbye to Pakistan. These are also the last words, uttered by the ex dictator Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf when he offered his resignation as president of Pakistan. God knows better whether it was a Dua’ (prayer) to the Almighty to protect Pakistan or a sarcastic remark (which his body language fully demonstrated) while he was delivering the last and final sermon to the people of Pakistan viz: now that am leaving, either me could have protected this land or only God can protect Pakistan and none else. But options are open, you take your choice.

With all my likes and dislikes for AQ and PKKH, two days back I saw on WordPress homepage the news about interview they had with Gen Hamid Gul. Continue reading…..

In April 2009 issue, (here , here and here ) of this magazine, I inserted a post carrying General’s interview which he gave to Alex Jones, one of America’s independent and most poignant Radio and TV host, here (.  So when I read the news about episode 3 of this interview he gave to AQ, I thought it best to put this on pages of WoP; for you to share with me the thoughts of the former head of our Inter Services Intelligence Agency (the ISI).

The interview comprises of seven Youtube videos. The first three are on your screen now, and the remaining four on the next post.

Once again, all what has been said by AQ or General Hamid Gul, are their own views. I as editor of WoP neither do necessarily subscribe to the views expressed nor hold any responsibility in this regard.

Nayyar

Pakistan’s Master Spy Gen. Hamid Gul once again on Blogosphere (Remaining Part)

The former Pakistan intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, probably is the most hated Pakistani general in the West’s mainstream media. Interestingly, his views about the US are no different than the views of the two celebrated Zionist American Jews, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and professor Noam Chomsky.

“America is the world’s greatest terrorist state,” – Noam Chomsky, in his speech at MIT criticizing US invasion of Afghanistan.

“America has no friends, only interests,” Henry Kissinger on US foreign policy.

While Henry Kissinger has always been darling of western media – professor Chomsky, who is son of Zionist Jewish parents – lived in a Jewish settlement in Palestine and doesn’t believe Israel as an illegal entity – is demonized by Zionist-regime’s foot-soldiers like David Horowitz, who in his September 26, 2001 FrontPage magazine article, The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky wrote: “Without Question, the most devious, the most dishonest and – in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis – the most treacherous intellectual in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky.”

That’s why General Hamid Gul is hated by the West’s mainstream media.

In an interview with Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI editor-at-large on September 14, 2001, Hamid Gul pointed finger at Bush administration and Israel for masterminding the 9/11 events: “The U.S. spends $40 billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That’s $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don’t believe it. Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves.” Continuereading…

In this context – the Zionists’ definition of “freedom of speech” is best described by Noam Chomsky in the review of D. Norman Finkelstein’s book ‘The Holocaust Industry’: “Only a Jew can write such a book and get it published.” Dr. Noeman Finkelstein quoted his late mother in the Foreward of the same book: “It’s not an accident that Jews invented the word chutzpah.” Currently, the Canadians are witnessing a similar charade in the case of Henrymakow.com Vs the Zionist Lobby (B’nai B’rith, Canadian Jewish Congress and four other Zionist organizations) - being heard by a Tribunal, referred by Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC). The website, which is owned by Henry Makow, son of Holocaust survivors, for spreading hatred toward his fellow Jews!

On the death of Pakistan’s COAS General Asif Nawaz on January 8, 1993 – General Hamid Gul was the most senior Army officer, but he was by-passed by General Abdul Waheed under Washington’s instructions to Pakistani president Ghulam Ishaq Khan – for his “pro-Islamic leanings”.  Continue reading…

In 2008, the US targeted Hamid Gul as a terrorist, claiming that he has ties with Al-Qaeda and Taliban. I remember his response to a frustrated western reporter who asked him every time some Afghan pinpoints Osama Bin Laden’s whereabout – American forces fail to find him there. “In Pakhtun villages we even recognize the dogs from the neighboring villages. Then how come no one knows the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden – unless they’re making fool of Americans for money!”

Recently,  Hamid Gul was interviewed (watch the remaining 4 videos here) on “Loud & Clear From Islamabad”,  the second and the final part). In the interview he details Islamabad’s submission to American cause – earning public anger and enmity of Pashtun in the neighboring Afghanistan. He assures paranoid foreigners that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is quite safe under military control and will never be allowed to fall in the hands of the so-called “terrorists” and he blames Israel for Washington and London blackmailing Pakistan through insurgency and the local sell-out politicians and some high officials in Asif Zardari’s government.

This intro on Gen. Hamid Gul contributed by Rehmat’s World.

Strategic Planning for Pakistan’s nukes…..

Hundreds of Tribes with Flags to come….courtesy of the Pentagon’s Killers

This post by a fellow blogger was uploaded at the end of last month. But interestingly the views expressed by the editor have come so close to events in Pakistan, one is compelled to seriously evaluate the advice he has furnished to our leaders especially the incumbent president and the leader in waiting Mian Nawaz Sharif, who of late appears to have softened his stand on democracy and the biased US policy towards Pakistan.

This post contibuted by: http://geoplotical.blogspot.com/

Every movement in history has a direction, a quantum, a modus operandi. According to the father of the philosophy of war Carl Von Clausewitz everything in strategy moves slowly, imperceptibly, subtly, somewhat mysteriously and sometimes invisibly. The greatness of a military commander or statesman lies in assessing these strategic movements.

The USA inherited a historical situation in the shape of 9/11. At this point in time it was not making history if we agree that 9/11 was the work of Al Qaeda for which so far the USA has failed to furnish any solid evidence. After 9/11 when the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, her leaders and key military commanders were making history. They had a certain plan in mind. The stated objectives of these plans were the elimination of al-Qaeda. The unstated objective was the de-nuclearisation of Pakistan. This scribe has continuously held this position consistently in articles published in Nation from September 2001, all through 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and till 2009.

A May 2009 article, on Gwadar, by Robert D. Kaplan, Pakistan’s Fatal Shore, in The Atlantic, references on Baloch separatist websites (see here), provides a map of “Greater Balochistan” probably reflective of the thinking of the “Balkanise Pakistan” lobby that is increasingly coming out into the open.

The US strategic plan followed the following distinct phases:

1. An initial maneuver occupying Afghanistan in 2001.

2. Establishing and consolidating US military bases near the Afghan Pakistan border. Most prominent being the Khost, Jalalabad, Sharan and Kunar US bases. Some military bases like Dasht I Margo in Nimroz and three other bases in Kandahar, Badakhshan and Logar were so secret that their construction was not even advertised. Even in case of sensitive areas the contracts were awarded to the US Government owned Shaw Inc and the CIA proxy operated Dyncorps Corporation. Patriotic Afghans trained in USSR were removed from Afghan Intelligence because they would not agree to be a party to USA’s dirty game in between 2001 and 2007.Similarly many patriotic Afghan officers trained in USSR were removed from the Afghan military establishment.

3. Cultivating closeness to various tribes in ethnic groups on the Pakistan Afghan border by awarding them lucrative construction and logistic sub contracts.

4. Forcing the Pakistani military to act against the FATA tribes thus destabilising Pakistan’s north western area close to the strategic heartland of Peshawar-Islamabad-Lahore where Pakistan’s political and military nucleus is located.

5. Creating a situation where mysterious insurgencies would erupt in various parts of Pakistan including FATA, Swat and Balochistan.

6. Carrying forward urban terrorism into Punjab through various proxies.

Now it appears that the strategic plan is entering its final stage of launching a strategic coup de grace to Pakistan. These may be assessed as follows :–

• US military buildup in Afghanistan and launching of an offensive against Taliban with an aim of pushing them into Pakistan.

• Simultaneously pressurising the Pakistan Army into launching an operation in Waziristan. Thus Pakistan Army gets severely bogged down and hundreds of thousands of refugees enter Pakistan’s NWFP and Balochistan provinces. Infiltrators and fifth columnists being a heavy promiscuous mixture of this movement.

• Since 2001 the USA has spent a great fortune collecting information on Pakistan’s strategic nuclear assets. It appears that in 2009 it has sufficient data to launch a covert operation. (In this regard, the interview given by Pakistan’s former ISI Chief gave to Ahmed Quraishi, wherein he clearly affirmed how the ex president General Pervaiz Musharraf sold out Pakistan’s interests and under this deal, CIA was given extra ordinary access to Pakistan’s top intelligence matters).

• The covert nuclear operation could have a civilian and a military part. The civilian part may involve an attack on Pakistan’s non-military nuclear reactors like Chashma and KANUPP. The military covert operation could involve an attack on any of Pakistan’s strategic nuclear groups anywhere in Pakistan. Once this type of attack is done the USA with its NATO lackeys like Britain, France and Germany would go to the UN and maneuver an international resolution demanding denuclearization of Pakistan. The international opinion may be so strong that Pakistan’s government may capitulate.

• Once Pakistan is de-nuclearised, the USA would encourage Pakistan’s Balkanisation into a Baloch US satellite , a city state of MQM in Karachi, a Pakhtunistan badly bombed and in tatters and a Punjab stripped of nuclear potential , kicked and bullied by India. A Northern Area republic which will be a US lackey unless China decides to call the US bluff by occupying the Northern Area.

  What is the answer to this:

  - An immediate clean break with USA/NATO and closing all NATO/US supply lines to Afghanistan.

  - Mining and barbed wiring the Afghan Pakistan Border.

  - Allowing the FATA agencies to import goods for Afghanistan duty free and scrapping the old Afghan Transit Trade Accord thus economically boosting the FATA.

  -  A military alliance with China with a Chinese Naval base at Gwadar

  .  A rapprochement with Russia and offering the Russians free port facilities at Gwadar.

  -  Creation of a maritime province in Gwadar and Lasbela districts insulating these areas from the Baloch Sardars on payroll of US intelligence.

- Creation of a Pashtun Province in the Pashtun districts of Balochistan with Quetta as its capital.

- Cancelling all mineral concessions to all European/Australian/American companies in Balochistan and grant all mineral concessions to Chinese companies.

Everything is not inevitable in history. The ablest navigators can defeat the worst sea storms. Pakistan needs strategic and political vision. It may be necessary to have a military government to do all this in case the civilians prove inept.

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Posted by HK

Related to tis post you can watch a video by PakNationalists here

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Muslim Children and Sex Education

Call for state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers

Iftikhar Ahmad

Muslim parents teach their children to respect their teachers. From a very young age, we are taught that Islam teaches us that after our parents, our teachers are most deserving of respect. With this background on image of a teacher in Islamic societies, it must be an extremely confusing time for the Muslim parent in Leytonstone, London. For up to 30 parents may face prosecution for withdrawing their children from school, disobeying the teachers in the school, simply to secure a decent moral upbringing for their children. The school had decided to have a week of lessons about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history.

Part of this was a special adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet retitled Romeo and Julian as well as fairy tales and stories changed to show men falling in love with men. Rather than filling the heads of impressionable boys and girls with fatuous drivel about gay penguins, schools should be ashamed of the fact that they are sending children out into the world barely able to read, write and add up properly. Muslim children are leaving schools without learning their cultural roots and linguistic skills.

The action was being taken against the parents as part of a policy of ‘promoting tolerance’. So why not tolerate parents, who, for sincerely-held reasons, consider their children too young to be taught about gay relationships? This isn’t education, it’s cultural fascism. A record number of pupils persistently played truant in 2006-07, with around 272,950 pupils persistently absent in 2007, missing more than 20% of school. We rarely see councils prosecute the parents of these persistent truants. Yet, the parents who removed their children as a one-off to protect their morality may be prosecuted!

If the local council does decide to go through with a prosecution, it would be in line with the government’s approach to the Muslim community. Muslims who believe homosexuality is a sin would be labelled as extremists. Liberal totalitarianism is a growing phenomenon in Britain and the west in general but many people will be shocked that the school can override a parent’s view of what’s appropriate or inappropriate to teach their children.

This latest episode should be a wake up call for Muslim parents. Muslim parents MUST explain our moral standards to schools and be prepared to take steps to protect our children’s morals and values from a growing agenda to impose liberal values upon them.

This is an eye opening for those Muslim parents who keep on sending their children to state schools to be mis-educated and de-educated by non-Muslim monolingual teachers.

The solution of all the problems facing Muslim children is state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers. Those state schools where Muslim children are in majority may be designated as Muslim community schools. Bilingual Muslim children need state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods.

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Source:

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What’s Pakistan being taken for?

President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh line up for a family photo at the SCO summit in Yekaterinburg. –Reuters Photo

by Ayaz Amir

Being the key to America’s salvation in Afghanistan, our govt. is jumping with joy on peanuts being offered once again

Pakistan is the key to America’s salvation in Afghanistan. Without the Pakistan army actively engaged in the border regions called FATA, American and NATO forces in Afghanistan would be hard-pressed to sustain their ground. Any innocent could be forgiven for thinking that given this crucial role some gratitude and some ungrudging help would come Pakistan’s way. But what the United States is pleased to offer in the shape of the Kerry-Lugar bill is peanuts: 1.5 billion dollars a year, for five years.

This is being dressed up as an act of unparalleled generosity, which is scarcely surprising given that those who give, even if very little, are apt to flatter themselves by making it appear more than it is. But what is surprising is that we are proving to be the chumps that we always tend to be when dealing with America. Instead of looking cynically at the Kerry-Lugar bill and running a fine comb through it, we are behaving like a latter-day Uncle Tom, grateful for the small change (in relative terms) we are about to get, almost like a tip for services rendered. America’s military effort in Afghanistan costs upwards of 60 billion dollars a year. This is the backdrop against which to see our 1.5 billion dollars, which don’t seem like an awful lot then.

Our sons are spilling their blood in America’s cause & in reward we are for Americans, worth a doormat!

In Swat, Dir and parts of Buner our army has suffered heavy casualties. If the US military had suffered a quarter of these casualties in the two months or so since the Swat operation started, there would have been a storm in Washington. But since it is Pakistan’s ‘peasant’ army suffering these losses it is a different matter altogether. Washington, however, is not to blame. If we remain chumps when it comes to bargaining with the US, the fault is not in our stars but us. Other countries will not put a proper value on us or what we do unless we first put a proper value on ourselves. If we go about with hangdog looks, our leaders ever so grateful for the smallest attention they get, we shouldn’t be surprised if others treat us like a doormat.

We ought to learn how to conduct ourselves with greater national dignity

If Richard Holbrooke or his kind assume the airs of civilian field marshals the moment they step on Pakistani soil it is because we allow them this freedom. If we invite being patronised we will be patronised. This doesn’t mean that to prove ourselves we be rude, sullen or belligerent. Recent events in Iran are diminishing the attraction of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a role model. But it does underline the importance of acquiring some self-respect. Once we have that, the world will see us through different eyes despite our troubles.

In truth we have forsaken the right to call Iqbal our national poet. What commonality is there between his poetry and our way of life? The way our leaders conduct themselves — fawning when they should know better not to, listening to lectures when they should have the wit and understanding to educate foreigners about the reality of Pakistan and its neighbourhood — shows no sympathy or connection with Iqbal. There should be no commemoration of Iqbal Day and no changing of the guard at his tomb — betwixt Lahore’s great mosque and the imposing façade of Akbar’s fort — until we learn to conduct ourselves with greater national dignity.

But war against terrorism is our war as well!

There is no shortage of fools in this country who in a spirit of absurd patriotism say we shouldn’t be seeking American assistance. Stalin was not above seeking American assistance during the Second World War. Britain could not have fought the same war without the help of America’s Lend-Lease Programme.

To assure themselves a complete victory in Afghanistan the Americans, without Pakistan’s active support, cannot win

We are engaged in a war which has two dimensions to it. It is our war because religious extremism unchecked would have devoured the meaning of Pakistan. With the Taliban triumphant we could have become a Somalia or a Sudan but not anything like the Pakistan our founding fathers were trying to create. But it is also America’s war. We didn’t ask America to jump into Afghanistan but for reasons of its own it did. And now it is stuck there, the seemingly quick victory of 2001 turning into an extended nightmare. To assure themselves a complete victory in Afghanistan the Americans, without Pakistan’s active support, cannot win. This they are now admitting themselves. The utmost they can hope for is a partial victory, or something that can be sold as victory: a gradual withdrawal, as in Iraq, without too much loss of face. This aim is unachievable without the open-ended help of the Pakistan army this side of the Durand Line.

We deserve fewer lectures and more actual help. We should demand trade not aid

Given these huge stakes, what’s wrong with Pakistan asking not to be taken for granted? The Kerry-Lugar bill with its absurd conditionalities, we should not accept. We should engage with the US, learn how to make the most of its friendship, but we should be playing a smarter game of poker. We should ask for — nay, insist on — trade concessions, on favoured access to the American market. Our textile industry, our largest industry, is near death point. It badly needs reviving. So what if the US is in recession? Which other country in the world is fighting America’s war the way we are? Britain has not more than two-plus brigades in Afghanistan. The focus of our entire army is now on the western front. We deserve fewer lectures and more actual help.

We should insist on a cancellation of all our American debt and insist on much, much more than the pittance now going through the US Congress. What if the Indian lobby on the Hill flexes its muscles? We should turn around and ask it to fight the battle of Afghanistan on its own. This should not mean ending the fight against the Taliban. That we cannot afford because the alternative is unthinkable. But it should certainly mean doing things on our own and cutting the American presence in Pakistan down to size. The Americans are onto a good thing. They want to eat their cake and have it too. We should be pressing our own point of view.

Instead of our present ambassador in Washington, we need someone more in tune with the new realities emerging after the Pak Army’s operations on  our northern borders

This, however, would require a different man in Washington than the smooth-talker we have. Haqqani is a very clever man who has always put himself first. Anyone wishing to learn the timeless art of self-promotion can do no better than learn at his feet. Too often he sounds like an American appendage, an extension of the State Department, no doubt an asset in American eyes but a bit of a liability for us. We need someone more in tune with the new realities emerging after the Pakistan Army’s rethink about Swat, FATA and the threat from the Taliban, someone who can make a slightly different pitch, pander less to American prejudices and make out a better case for Pakistan than the peanuts packaged in the Kerry-Lugar bill.

We shouldn’t be punching above our weight. We tried doing that in Afghanistan and were hoisted on our own petard. Punching above one’s international weight is a British specialty, a compensation for loss of glory and empire. But we shouldn’t be under-punching either, as President Asif Ali Zardari manages to do every time he ventures abroad.

Vis-à-vis his Indian counterpart, the president himself couldn’t counter Manmohan Singh, what a pity!

Ayaz Amir

As if his previous misadventures in the verbal field were not enough we now have the spectacle of him being trumped by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In Yekaterinburg (Russia) the first thing Singh said to him (in remarks obviously rehearsed beforehand) was, “My mandate is to tell you that Pakistani territory should not be used for terrorism against India.” Zardari could have countered with a suitable reply such as that his concern was to see that Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar were not used as staging posts for subversion against Pakistan. But that would have required other gifts than he has.

(The picture of Zardari on the occasion leaves him looking like a chastened schoolboy in the presence of a senior professor.)

It is in our interest to seek good ties with India, just as it is in India’s interest to have a better relationship with Pakistan. The drumbeats of jihad should be a thing of the past but this shouldn’t mean kneeling over in the other direction and giving the impression that we are supplicants for peace and dialogue. Peace with India, yes, but on a reciprocal basis and, preferably, without any more lectures on terrorism.

Tailpiece: The army chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, has grown on the job and is definitely a more confident man than when he took over from Musharraf. The Malakand operation and preparations for an assault on Waziristan have to a large extent rehabilitated the army’s image, badly tarnished by Musharraf’s policies. But it would be a pity if any of this went to Kayani’s head. We need good and able military commanders. But we’ve had enough of military saviours and can do without more in the future. And, perhaps, we can do without army chiefs trying to become F-16 aces. A flight through the clouds of Waziristan — a final victory lap, so to speak — may be in order once Baitullah Mehsud is beaten. Before that it would look a bit like President George Bush’s landing on the flight deck of the USS Constellation with a banner at the back proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” when, as events in Iraq were to prove, the mission had barely started.

The writer is a Mmeber of the Punjab Provincial Assembly and also a member of the Pakistan Muslim League (N). He can be reached via e-mail: winlust@yahoo.com

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Urdu Column: Manto and Dostoyesvsky

Dostoevsky in 1863. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fyodor Dostoevsky a genius but to call him so may indeed be an understatement. Decade after decade, his literary brilliance continues to capture the hearts and minds of millions. Because of his legacy and intense, storied commentaries on religion, philosophy, and psychology, Dostoyevsky may have been one of the most important and influential writers that ever lived. After all, it was Einstein that said: “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.”

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MANTO AND DOSTOYEVSKY

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Note for WoP readers: The other day while going through the morning edition of daily Jang Lahore, I came across a column by Ata-ul-Haq Qasmi. I was very much touched by innocence on one hand of the great Russian writer Dostoyevsky but learnt also about his gamble mania, which even his beloved wife Anna could not make him leave. Am sorry the non Urdu people of WoP wouldn’t be able to enjoy its contents. Even if it’s translated in English may be it looses its charm.

Changing the Way We Have Been

President Barack Obama announcing his policy on Afghanistan – Pakistan situation particularly over Taliban Issue.

by Amir Ayaz

The stakes couldn’t be higher nor the opportunity hidden in this hour of seeming distress more promising.

Provided we don’t prove exceptionally unlucky once more-or exceptionally stupid – the crisis in which we find ourselves is an opportunity to change the face of Pakistan, change our direction and our established modes of thinking and make up for all the lost years-years lost to mediocre leadership, both civil and military.

It is not us who have created this moment of opportunity. Indeed it lay not in our power to do so. It has come our way through a combination of factors: America’s presence in Afghanistan; the growing Taliban threat within Pakistan; and Barack Obama as US president.

It is Obama’s approach to Afghanistan which has enhanced Pakistan’s importance-crucial to any American success in Afghanistan-anything that enables the US to make a half-dignified exit from there.

On its own, the US is in no position to commit the kind of resources and troops that could bend Afghanistan to its will. For that it needs the active engagement of Pakistan’s 600, 000 strong army. Which should explain the Obama administration’s desperation to get the Pakistan army involved in seriously fighting the Taliban.

For reasons we need not go into here, the army was reluctant to take on the Taliban. And this is how things would have remained had it not been for the Swat Taliban’s ineffable stupidity. Their aggressiveness, when a quieter posture would have suited their interests better, left the army with no choice but to shake off its lassitude and commence serious hostilities.

American pressure also played a part. But by itself this pressure, without the unerring folly of the Swat Taliban, would not have created the tipping point which led to the Swat operation.

The leadership of the Swat Taliban can now rue the consequences of their belligerence. A thousand drone attacks could not have done to them what an aroused Pakistan army is now doing.

If the Pakistan army’s will to fight which it had sadly lost, now stands restored, it is because of these bearded warriors. The Pakistani nation owes them a debt of gratitude. As does the CIA and 
the Pentagon.

But we will be kidding ourselves if we think that what we are in is a passing storm. The Swat Taleban are on the run but they haven’t been eliminated. Which means that the army will have to remain in Malakand division for a long time. Everything is negotiable except Pakistan’s unity and integrity. There cannot be space in Pakistan for any independent emirate, which is what South Waziristan to all intents and purposes presently is.

So we are in this for the long haul. This is not going to be a summer’s campaign. The Taleban are not about to vanish overnight and the US too is not about to disappear from Afghanistan in a hurry. In truth, Pakistan is the new Cambodia, which requires some explaining.

At the height of the Vietnam War, the Americans said that there was no defeating the Viet Cong unless Cambodia, through which Viet Cong supply routes passed, was secured. The Americans went into Cambodia but the Viet Cong were not defeated. Forty years later Cambodia has still not recovered from what the US did to it.

Pakistan is not a soft state like Cambodia. Still, those at the helm of affairs will need to be extra careful, to ensure that Pakistan doesn’t go the Cambodia’s way.

Ideally, the civilian government should be in effective control of events. Actually, not least because of the vacuum resulting from Zardari’s inadequacy and Prime Minister Gilani’s various limitations, it is the army which is calling the shots, making the army chief, Gen Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, the first among equals in the present setup. Small wonder if the Americans increasingly turn to him in important matters.

This is not Kayani’s fault. Even so, it bears remembering that we have paid dearly for Bonapartism before and there is no reason to think the consequences are going to be any different if we succumb to its temptations once again. Even with inadequacy a hundred times greater than Zardari’s, the truth still holds that the Pakistan army acts best when it remains within its own sphere. The moment it steps outside that magic circle it invites disaster and ignominy. There is no more enduring lesson in our history than this.

There’s more to nation-building than merely seizing power. And there’s more to war than merely being on the winning side.
In the present context, defeating the Taliban will never be enough unless the causes which led to their rise in the first place are eliminated.

The army has to be re-educated. Pakistan’s strategic depth lies not in the spaces of any other country but in its own capacity to build a functioning nation.

With India for the foreseeable future we will have an uneasy relationship. It is not easy living with an elephant as your neighbour. But the old notion of India being enemy number one has been overtaken by events. In fact both countries need to grow up. There is no sense any more in keeping our strike formations pointed at each other. India’s tanks are only good for Pakistan.

Our tanks are only good for India. There’s no sense in this deployment.

Both countries have nuclear weapons. What more do we need for deterrence? In the new Pakistan that we should be creating there should be no room for armed warriors dedicated to the liberation of Kashmir by force. Thus Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Hafiz Muhammad Saeed may have had their uses once upon a time but not any more. Their time is past. The ‘jihadi’ mindset cannot be divided into separate categories. It is of a piece. ‘Jihad’ can’t be good for one border and bad for another. It doesn’t happen that way. It was the genie of jihad which mutated into the Taliban. If we are now up in arms against the Taliban, we will have to bid a final farewell to the original genie.

Ayaz Amir

There are so many other jihads, more real than the ones consuming our energies in the past, awaiting our attention: against poverty, ignorance and disease. The Pakistan of our dreams will not be realised unless these are fought.

We need to go back to the Constitution as it was in 1977. We don’t need to turn Pakistan into any kind of permissive Babylon. That just won’t do. But in social terms we need to make Pakistan a freer place. Too many taboos, too many social restrictions, are not good for the spirit of any nation.

All this needn’t remain a utopian ideal. Just as steel is forged in the heat of fire, in the stress and storm of the present conflict against the Taliban our best minds should be thinking about how best to rethink the direction of Pakistan.

(Ayaz Amir is distinguished Pakistani commentator and member of national assembly (parliament).

Obama Siren Song To The Sceptical Muslim World

U.S. President Barack Obama delivers his speech at Cairo University on June 4.

by Eric Margolis

President Barack Obama came into office with an enormous reservoir of goodwill in the Muslim world. This was an asset no amount of American money or making nice could buy. But in recent weeks, he seems to have squandered a large part of this bounty.

After eight years of relentless hostility by the Bush/Cheney administration, the Muslim world greeted the advent of President Barack Obama with enormous hope and enthusiasm.

President Obama’s masterfully written, artfully delivered recent speech in Cairo was filled with precisely what the Muslim world had been waiting to hear: an intelligent, respectful American leader calling for normalized relations with the Muslim world, including former `betes noires’ Iran and Syria, cooperation, and  genuine US support for democracy and human rights.

But the Muslim world was not as charmed by Obama’s silver-tongued oratory as many Americans have been. The general response was, `actions speak louder than words.  Where are the actions?’

Unfortunately, rather than a newly friendly, helpful United States promoting democracy and human rights,  many Muslims saw the Obama administration expanding the war in Afghanistan that he could easily have ended, or at least put on hold upon taking office.

They saw the US-rented Pakistani Army create 3 million refugees in its Swat offensive against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen. The continuing US occupation of Iraq that many believe will never end.  CIA’s covert campaign to destabilize Iran and Syria, and Washington’s continuing machinations in Somalia.

They listened to the US Congress applaud like trained circus seals Israel’s refusal to cease building illegal settlements or to respect the basic human rights of Palestinians.  They heard US neoconservatives baying for war against Iran.

The Muslim world listened to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu demand Palestinians recognize Israel  as a Jewish state, thus delegitimizing that nation’s 20% Christian and Muslim minority, and negating any right to return by millions of Palestinian refugees. Netanyahu insisted Palestine would remain sealed from the outside by Israeli security forces. Jerusalem would remain entirely in Israel’s hands.  Israeli would continue expanding its existing settlements.

These facts unfortunately speak a lot louder than the president’s mellifluous oratory.

We would like to give the new president the benefit of the doubt. He has been in office only five months and will need a lot more time to begin repairing the catastrophic damage inflicted by the Bush administration on US interests and standing in the Muslim world and Europe. He must confront powerful Washington lobbies that have been entrenched for decades.

However, the White House’s recent actions seem disconnected from the new president’s promises.

Exhibit A: Obama unfortunately chose Egypt, of all places, from which to deliver his message to the Muslim world of amity, democracy and human rights.

Egypt’s US-backed military dictator, President Husni Mubarak,  has held power for 27 years and is grooming his son, North Korean-style,  to replace him. A third of the Arab world’s people live in Egypt.  Rather than setting a progressive, democratic example for the Mideast, Egypt has is deeply repressive and out of step with the times.

Egypt’s human rights record is lamentable, as even senior US officials have complained.  Its prisons are notorious for abuse and torture.  The Bush administration routinely sent captives to Egypt for outsourced torture.

A far-too large army, corrupt oligarchy and ferocious secret police provide the foundation of the Mubarak regime’s power.  The CIA simply replaced one `pharaoh,’ the late, unlamented Anwar Sadat, with another, Husni Mubarak.  However, capable and clever he may be, Mubarak remains an autocrat who crushes all opposition and only tolerates yes-men.

Yet Egypt is America’s most important Muslim ally, along with Saudi Arabia.  Is this what Obama means when he calls for democracy and human rights?  He should have given his speech from democratic Indonesia, or the progressive United Arab Emirates and Qatar rather than Egypt, a pillar of America’s Mideast Raj.  Or, he could have ordered Egypt to transform itself into a democracy, the way Muslim Indonesia did.

Who, one wonders, is advising the president on the Mideast and Afghanistan?

Exhibit B: Lebanon’s 7 June parliamentary elections.  A US/French/Saudi-backed coalition of Sunni, Christians, and Druze was pitted against a Syrian-Iranian backed Hezbullah-led coalition that included Armenians and a Christian splinter faction.

Late last month, US Vice President Joseph Biden went to Lebanon and openly threatened to cut off all US aid to that nation of 3.9 million if the democratically-elected Hezbullah coalition won. Hillary Clinton made similar crude threats.  Is this the kinder, gentler, more thoughtful Obama way? Even Dick Cheney kept his threats private.

Imagine the uproar if the Saudi crown prince came to the US just before elections and threatened to raise oil prices if Democrats won.

The United States, Saudi Arabia and France spent hundreds of millions of dollars bribing Lebanon’s venal politicians and buying votes. The US has been mucking around like this in Lebanon since 1957, often with disastrous results.

Iran spread some money around as well. Nothing new about that: Lebanon’s elections often are determined by who bought the most voters and politicians.

All the western `baksheesh’ and some fancy vote rigging helped the US-backed March 14 coalition, headed by Saad Hariri, win 71 seats.  The Hezbullah-led coalition won only a surprisingly small 57 seats.  This left fragmented Lebanon just where it was before this sleazy election.  The vote results reeked of fraud.  But Washington hailed Lebanon’s vote.

Is this what Obama means by promoting good government and democracy in the Muslim world?

Exhibit C:  Iran just had a hotly contested democratic election for president.  The incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was blasted on TV by his opponents and subject to barrages of public criticism.  There is not a single other Arab ally of the US, Lebanon excepted,  where  such feisty democratic behavior would be tolerated, and even less than would permit an honest vote.

Opponents in Iran are calling foul, claiming Ahmadinejad’s victory was rigged, but, so far, with little hard proof.  However, imperfect, Iran’s elections tend to be much fairer than those of their Arab neighbors or Pakistan.

Many Muslims and non-Muslims alike see Obama as an honest, decent, well-intentioned leader. But they are wondering if he has so far failed to impose his will on the entrenched financial-military-industrial, complex of which President Dwight Eisenhower warned, that remains the real power in Washington.

There is so much positive work President Obama could achieve in the Muslim world – but, so far, he certainly is not doing it.  The song from Washington remains the same.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009

U.S. scientists use flying radar system to study earthquakes

The device, the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar is currently being used on a human-piloted plane, mounted on the plane shoots long-wavelength radar beams at features on the ground and measures the reflections.

After the tragic earthquake that hit the picturesque valleys of Azad Kashmir and Kaghan, succeeding the tremors that shook the capital resulting in crumbling down of Margalla Towers in Islamabad, the people learnt that the areas fall directly on the fault line.

The consequent loss of human life and damage to almost everything important for sustaining life in affected areas, the Pakistanis learnt for the first time what a terrible earthquake can do to us. Accordingly an interest arose in the hitherto unknown or scantly known field of seismography.

It is said that the knowledge of seismography has seen lot of advancement in last few decades, yet it’s still not possible despite the advances in the science and technology of these fault lines, to predict or forecast an occurrence of earthquake / s in a particular city, region or a country.

But efforts indeed have been going on involving experiments using different techniques to enable us predict the possibility of an earthquake in a particular topographic area or zone.

UAVSAR is such project, which is funded and managed by the Earth Science Technology Office. It has developed a new remote sensing instrument to measure and monitor various changing features on Earth’s surface. Built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UAVSAR was designed to fly on an uninhabited, remote-piloted aircraft such as the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk. Currently, it is being flown on demonstration and science flights aboard the NASA Gulfstream III, a piloted airplane.

UAVSAR is a fully-polarimetric L-band (24 centimeter wavelength) synthetic aperture radar with an actively scanned antenna that can be electronically steered to point at its target. The instrument is flown on repeat pass missions over an area of interest and the images are compared to determine what has changed in the intervening time – a process called repeat pass interferometry.

The key challenge in obtaining repeat pass interferometry measurements is ensuring that the airplane and the instrument make the repeat trip as close to the original flight line as possible.

The UAVSAR system utilizes real-time GPS to determine the aircraft’s position to within 30 centimeters. A precision autopilot developed at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center uses the GPS data to control the aircraft’s flight path to within 5 meters. The GPS / Autopilot system, coupled with the UAVSAR’s electronically steered antenna, enables repeated airborne measurements that can detect millimeter-scale changes in the topography.

The UAVSAR instrument has the potential to measure and monitor a wide range of rapidly changing features on Earth – from rapidly moving glaciers and changes in ice thickness to seismic activity and vegetation. The system is also well-suited for use as an airborne test bed for future radar technologies and algorithms.

Scientists are now using the new radar imaging system on the belly of a Gulfstream jet to track California’s earthquake faults.

Flying over California’s complicated network of faults, the system has started collecting some of the most detailed images yet of the Earth’s surface shifting and straining with seismic energy, says the Los Angeles Times, quoting scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Los Angeles.

“This will show us where the faults are active,” said Andrea Donnellan, a JPL geophysicist who is one of the project’s principal investigators. “Where the ground is moving tells us what’s going on at depth.”

The data from this project could help scientists figure out where the risk of earthquake activity is highest, though the data will never be so specific as to predict a day, location and magnitude of a quake, she said.

“This will help us with the five- to 10-year time horizons,” Donnellan said. “We can see hot spot maps and … figure out whereto target our retrofitting.”

Based at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, the plane flies about 45,000 feet above the ground along GPS-guided trajectories.

The project will map faults across about 70 percent of California, including a wide swath of Southern California, said the project’s chief scientist, Scott Hensley.

It also will fly for other projects, such as studying glacier motion in Greenland. The first images were collected in December, but have not yet been fully processed.

Developing the technology, modifying the plane and collecting data for the first year will cost about 30 million dollars, Hensley said.

Satellites operated by other countries have collected radar data on surface deformation for years, but most don’t use the long-wavelength radar that enables the NASA device to penetrate vegetation and focus more on the hard ground surface, said Paul R. Lundgren, another principal investigator on the project.

A plane is also able to fly much closer to the ground than a satellite orbiting in space, improving the resolution by a factor of 10, he said.

Source: Mathaba.net

The World doesn’t have a Pakistan nukes problem … It has a David Albright problem

It is high time the mainstream media should deal with David Albright for what he is (a third-rate reporter and analyst), and what he isn’t (a former U.N. weapons inspector, doctor, nuclear physicist or nuclear expert). It is time for David Albright, the accidental inspector, to exit stage right for issues pertaining to nuclear weapons and their potential proliferation are simply too serious to be handled by amateurs and dilettantes.

• 
  

PETER LEE

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As AFP tells us, the Institute for Science and International Security just published a report on Pakistan’s nuclear program that seems designed to pour gasoline on the “the Pakistani nuclear program is outta control” story.

And, when you look at the story, there isn’t a whole lot of there there.

The commercial [satellite] images reveal a major expansion of a chemical plant complex near Dera Ghazi Kahn that produces uranium hexalfuoride and uranium metal, materials used to produce nuclear weapons.

Big whoop, I must say. The Pakistanis love their nuclear weapons, and it’s not surprising—as a sovereign state outside the NPT—they might decide to make some more.

The only conceivable takeaway from this report is muddled alarmism, which ISIS obligingly provides.

Given turmoil in Pakistan with the army waging war against Taliban militants in the northwest, the ISIS said the “security of its nuclear assets remains in question.”

“An expansion in nuclear weapons production capabilities needlessly complicates efforts to improve the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets,” it said.

I don’t get it. How are things suddenly more complicated by an expansion in capacity?

Washington, apparently believing that it doesn’t have enough on its plate with al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban, is suddenly awash with dramatic plans to add a self-created problem to the mix: a quixotic effort to wrest Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Army if the situation deteriorates.

You know what it smells like to me?

It smells like an effort by some to put a radical U.S. nuclear counterproliferation doctrine on the table now, so when it’s the end of the year and it’s time to deal with that other Muslim country with the destabilizing nuclear capability—you know, the one on the other side of Afghanistan, the one that the Israelis are so upset about—public opinion has been primed to accept the idea that some combination of air strikes, special ops, and insertion of U.S. forces is needed to save the world from an Islamic nuclear program that’s…outta control!

A crisis in Pakistan—and high-profile U.S. handwringing over those dangerous Muslim nukes—might be the best thing that happens to Benjamin Netanyahu this year.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I don’t think we have a Pakistan nukes problem.

We have a reckless and cynical fearmongering problem that should ring alarm bells for anybody who remembers the Iraq war.

In a small way, I think we also have a David Albright problem.

ISIS is run by David Albright.

Scott Ritter delivered a devastating rip job on Albright in Truthdig last year, entitled The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was.

He characterized Albright as a dilettante wannabe nuclear weapons guy, who has self-promoted himself, his honorary doctorate, and his institute using the flimsiest of pretexts.

More importantly, Ritter identifies Albright’s key credential as a willingness to offer up uninformed and tendentious alarmism when the situation demands it.

Ritter’s conclusion sums up his feelings about Albright’s role in the nuclear non-proliferation debate:

Albright, operating under the guise of his creation, ISIS, has a track record of inserting hype and speculation about matters of great sensitivity in a manner which skews the debate toward the worst-case scenario. Over time Albright often moderates his position, but the original sensationalism still remains, serving the purpose of imprinting a negative image in the psyche of public opinion. This must stop. It is high time the mainstream media began dealing with David Albright for what he is (a third-rate reporter and analyst), and what he isn’t (a former U.N. weapons inspector, doctor, nuclear physicist or nuclear expert). It is time for David Albright, the accidental inspector, to exit stage right. Issues pertaining to nuclear weapons and their potential proliferation are simply too serious to be handled by amateurs and dilettantes.

Amen to that.

_________

Peter Lee is a business man who has spent thirty years observing, analyzing, and writing on Asian affairs.

Source: Counterpunch

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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‘Yankees Go Home’, Chant the Women of Afghanistan

An Afghan woman shouts with anger and grief against US led missile bombings that killed children in front of  her destroyed home in Azizabad village, (Shindand district) of Herat province in Afghanistan (Photo)

The Afghan women’s association fighting for justice and rights calls for U.S. troops to withdraw, saying they are occupying the country under misused slogans of liberation and democracy.+

What’s the Story?

“In 2001, the U.S. and its allies occupied Afghanistan under the beautiful slogans of ‘war on terror,’ ‘women’s rights,’ ‘liberation’ and ‘democracy,’” says Afghan rights activist Zoya in an interview published on PINKtank, a blog run by the grassroots peace and justice movement CODEPINK. “But when they installed the brutal and criminal warlords after the fall of the Taliban, everyone knew that Afghanistan had once again become a chessboard for world powers.”

“The plight of our people, and especially of women, has been misused to legitimize the foreign military presence in our country,” adds the activist, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity.

Citing the U.S. government’s lack of support for democratic organizations and the extreme poverty, insecurity, and dearth of women’s rights still facing regular Afghans, Zoya proposes several solutions.

U.S. and NATO troops should immediately withdraw from Afghanistan, sanctions should be imposed on any foreign government that supports the Taliban, foreign governments should halt funds to warlords and drug lords fighting the Taliban, and warlords should be prosecuted in international courts for crimes against humanity, specifies Zoya.

The United States, she continues, “has given billions of dollars” to the Afghan Northern Alliance, which the BBC News describes as a “disparate group of rebel movements united only in their desire to topple the ruling Taliban.” The money has gone into the pockets of warlords and drug lords, says the activist.

In the interview, Zoya also explains her history with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an organization she joined at 14 and found to be “the most serious, honest, radical, anti-fundamentalist, democratic organization fighting for justice and women’s rights” in her country. (Read the full interview with Zoya below.)

U.S. Urged to Put Women and Children Front and Center

The human rights of Afghan women and girls must be central to any future U.S. foreign policy to gain peace and stability in the region, warns Dr. Sima Samar, chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

According to a report by the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), Samar says: “People want accountability, transparency in the flow of aid to Afghanistan, and justice — not impunity and support for those who violate human rights.”

As President Barack Obama’s administration concluded a review of U.S. policies toward Afghanistan in late March, Samar echoed Zoya’s belief that, “for victory to be achieved, the U.S. must not re-arm the warlords who have terrorized the people, especially the women and girls.”

FMF recently launched a campaign to “galvanize women’s groups, campus and community activists, as well as ordinary citizens to help Afghan women and girls.”

New U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan

President Obama recently unveiled a new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan that will employ “a broader approach aimed at disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” reports Reuters.

Specifically, the president ordered an additional 17,000 U.S. soldiers to the beleaguered nation to supplement the 38,000 U.S. soldiers and 42,000 NATO troops already there.

The Obama administration has also “urged the international community to give more aid to Afghanistan to build infrastructure, expand its military and police, and ensure security for elections this year,” notes the Washington Post.

Many peace and rights groups have expressed their staunch opposition to the military “surge” in Afghanistan.

Says the women’s rights group MADRE: “Each year that the occupation drags on, more Afghan civilians are killed. In 2008 alone, more than 2,100 civilians were killed, a 40 percent jump over 2007.“

Get the Voices from the Ground

Women who lost their faily members weep after US air strikes, that killed more than 100 peole in Azizabad.

To document the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan as the military and political strategy shifts in coming months, OneWorld.net has teamed up with the U.S.-based ethnic media network New America Media to present the new blog Afghan Watch.

The blog offers insights and analysis on the policy, politics, and on-the-ground realities of life in Afghanistan at a crucial moment in that country’s history. The contributors are aid workers and researchers, policy experts and community organizers, Afghans and non-Afghans, in the United States and in Afghanistan.

US worsening Afghan-Pakistan Situation!

For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest the need for drastic revision of US strategic thinking.

- Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the US military footprint.

- The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

- It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already enflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

- India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan – in the intelligence, economic and political arenas – that chills Islamabad.

- Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

- Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the US is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with Al-Qaeda against the US military.

- The US had every reason to strike back at the Al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives – to force the Taliban to yield up Al-Qaeda over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

- The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the US war raging on the Afghan border. US policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations – the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

- The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

- Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the US. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But US policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that – something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule – not what Pakistan needs – will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad’s basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.

In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, US forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.

It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education – areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.

Al-Qaeda’s threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the US presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures. If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for US policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a US recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

The Writer  Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including “The Future of Political Islam.”

Tribune Media Services

Michael Jackson Dead

United States pop star Michael Jackson has been reported dead by U.S. media.

United States Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Los Angeles Times.

GlobalGrind.com and TMZ.com first reported his death. The United States pop star was aged 50. The reports said Jackson suffered a cardiac arrest earlier in the afternoon and that paramedics were unable to revive him.

The same reports say that when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never managed to obtain a pulse.

Jackson is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince “Blanket” Michael Jackson II. Jackson had 13 number one hits during his solo career, Global Grind reports.

There have been concerns about Jackson’s health in recent years but the promoters of the London concerts, AEG Live, said in March that Jackson had passed a four-and-a-half hour physical examination with independent doctors.

Jackson – who started out as a child star in the band The Jackson 5 more than 40 years ago – has lived as a virtual recluse since his acquittal in 2005 on charges of child molestation.

The Jackson clan gathered at UCLA Medical Center, where Jackson was taken by ambulance. Media converged on the hospital as CNN debated the merits of “Thriller,” and the news spread like wildfire on Facebook and Twitter: #p start Michael Jackson has been reported dead by U.S. media.

Source:

The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters

Charisma and the Imperial Presidency

Note from WoP: Other day, while watching the interview president Obama gave to Anwar Iqbal of Dawn TV, I was tremendously impressed by president’s eloquence, the days he spent in Pakistan, the friends he had from Karachi and Hyderabad, whom he so nostalgically remembered, his experience of cooking daal (lentils) and qeema (chopped meat), the popular Pakistani  dishes, his excellent relations with Pakistani Americans, the role they are playing in US economy and lastly Pak US relations, I was so impressed, so delighted, I felt like saying well done brother Obama, You won our hearts.

But that’s where Obama’s charm as a statesman and his charisma as an astute politician, is at its best. It was same in Cairo when he sent his message to the Muslim world waiving his Olive branch to Muslims all around the world. But when it comes to action, Obama’s charming persona, his most befitting, most moving choice of words, his articulation, his perfect command over what the president is communicating comes to end.

by Tom Engelhardt

Let’s face it, even Bo is photogenic, charismatic. He’s a camera hound. And as for Barack, Michelle, Sasha, and Malia — keep in mind that we’re now in a first name culture — they all glow on screen.`

Before a camera they can do no wrong. And the president himself, well, if you didn’t watch his speech in Cairo, you should have. The guy’s impressive. Truly. He can speak to multiple audiences — Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, as well as a staggering range of Americans — and somehow just about everyone comes away hearing something they like, feeling he’s somehow on their side. And it doesn’t even feel like pandering. It feels like thoughtfulness. It feels like intelligence.

For all I know — and the test of this is still a long, treacherous way off — Barack Obama may turn out to be the best pure politician we’ve seen since at least Ronald Reagan, if not Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He seems to have Roosevelt’s same unreadable ability to listen and make you believe he’s with you (no matter what he’s actually going to do), which is a skill not to be whistled at.

Right now, he and his people are picking off the last Republican moderates via a little party-switching and some well-crafted appointments, and so driving that party and its conservative base absolutely nuts, if not into extreme southern isolation. In this sense, his first Supreme Court pick was little short of a political stroke of brilliance, whatever she turns out to do on the bench. Whether the opposition “wins” (which they won’t) or loses in any attempt to block her nomination, they stand to further alienate a key voting bloc, Hispanics. Now 9% of voters, Hispanics went for Obama in the last election by a staggering 35-point margin. Next time their heft might even bring solidly red-state Texas closer to in-play status in the two-party system. In other words, the president has left his opponents in a situation where they can’t win for losing.

Mix Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan…

All this is little short of amazing, particularly if put into even the most modest historical context.

If, in a Star-Trekkian mode — hand me the “red matter,” Mr. Spock! — you could transport yourself back to early 2003 and tell just about any American what’s coming, you might have found yourself institutionalized. If you had said that the new norm would be a black president with Reagan-like popularity, Kennedy-like charisma, and Roosevelt-like skills in the political arena, leading a majority Democratic Congress in search of universal health care, solutions to global warming, energy conservation, and bullet trains, your listener might, at best, have responded with his or her own joke: “A priest, a rabbi, and a penguin walk into a bar…”

After all, back then, before two “hurricanes” – the invasion of Iraq and Katrina — began the process of turning our American world upside down, the Bush administration seemed to be riding ever higher globally and the Republican Party even higher than that at home. Back then, the neocons were consumed with imperial dreams of shock-and-awe-style eternal global conquest and domination (“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”); and the President’s “brain,” Karl Rove, now exiled to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, was convinced that he was nailing down a domestic Pax Republicana for generations to come.

And at that moment, who would have denied that things would turn out just that way? So don’t let anyone tell you that history doesn’t have its surprises. A black guy with the middle name of “Hussein,” a liberal Chicago politician from — in a phrase Republicans then regularly spit out, as if saying “Democratic” was too much effort — the “Democrat Party”? I don’t think so.

And yet, in mid-June 2009, less than five months into the Obama presidency, can you even remember that era before the dawn of time when people were wondering what it would be like for an African-American family to inhabit the White House? Would American voters allow it? Could Americans take it?

You betcha!

Being President

All that said, let’s not forget reality. Barack Obama did not win an election to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the YMCA, or the Ford Foundation. He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States which means that he is head honcho for the globe’s single great garrison state which now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war.

He is today the proprietor of — to speak only of the region extending from North Africa to the Chinese border that the Bush loyalists used to call “the Greater Middle East” — American bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military material (or all of the above) at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and Iraqi Kurdistan), Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan (where the U.S. military and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities), and a major Air Force facility on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Some U.S. bases in these countries are microscopic and solitary, but others like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq, are gigantic installations in a web of embedded bases. According to an expert on the subject, Chalmers Johnson, the Pentagon’s most recent official count of U.S. “sites” (i.e. bases) abroad is 761, but that does not include “espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude — e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan.”

In January when he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the largest embassy on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely referred to as 1,000 “diplomats.” Recent news reports indicate that such a project wasn’t just an aberration of the Bush era. Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house “a large military and intelligence contingent,” will be constructed by the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns are added in, it may turn out be the first billion-dollar embassy. Each of these command centers will, assumedly, anchor the American presence in the Greater Middle East.

Barack Obama is also now the commander-in-chief of 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, which regularly patrol the planet’s sea lanes. He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community (yes, that’s what our intelligence crew like to call themselves) of at least 16 squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other’s throats. They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more. (Imagine a power so obsessively consumed by the very idea of “intelligence” that it is willing to support 16 sizeable separate outfits doing such work, and that’s not even counting various smaller offices dedicated to intelligence activities.)

The new president will preside over a country which now ponies up almost half the world’s total military expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon budget will be marginally higher than the last staggering one from the Bush years at $664 billion. (The real figure, once military funds stowed away in places like the Department of Energy are included, is actually significantly larger.)

He now inhabits a Washington in which deep-thinking consists of a pundit like Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution whining that these bloated sums are, in fact, too little to “maintain” U.S. forces (a budgetary increase of 7-8% per year for the next decade would, he claims, be just adequate); in which forward-looking means Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reorienting military spending toward preparations for fighting one, two, many Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-box, futuristic thinking means letting the blue-skies crew at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) loose on far-out problems like how to turn“programmable matter” into future Transformer-like weapons of war.

While Obama enthusiasts can take pride in the appointment of some out-of-the-box thinkers in domestic areas, including energy, health, and the science of the environment, in two crucial areas his appointments are pure old-line Washington and have been so from the first post-election transitional moments. His key economic players and advisors are largely a crew of former Clintonistas, or Clintonista wannabes or protégés like Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. They are distinctly inside-the-boxers, some of them responsible for the thinking that, in the 1990s, led directly to this catastrophic economic moment.

As for foreign policy, had the November election results been reversed, Obama’s top team of today could just as easily have been appointed by Senator John McCain. National Security Advisor James Jones was actually a McCain friend, Gates someone he admired, and Hillary Clinton a figure he could well have picked for a top post after a narrow election victory, had he decided to reach out to the Democrats. As a group, Obama’s key foreign policy figures and advisors are traditional players in the national security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of American power, thinking globally in familiar ways.

General Manhunter

And let’s be careful not to put all of this in the passive voice either when it comes to the new president. In both of these areas, he may have felt somewhat unsure of himself and so slotted in the old guard around him as a kind of political protection. Nonetheless, this hasn’t just happened to him. He didn’t just inherit the presidency. He went for it. And he isn’t just sitting atop it. He’s actively using it. He’s wielding power. In foreign policy terms, he’s settling in — and despite his Cairo speech and various hints of change on subjects like relations with Iran, in largely predictable ways.

(Left) Obama’s New Man in Kabul, Gen. Stan McChrystal

He may, for example, have declared a sunshine policy when it comes to transparency in government, but in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death. He’s just appointed a general, Stanley A. McChrystal, as his Afghan commander. From 2003-2008, McChrystal ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted assassination program on a large scale. It was, for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds of enemies were assassinated: al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni insurgents, and Sadrists (not to speak of others, since informers always settle scores and turn over their own personal enemies as well).

Although he’s now being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and “protect” the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is “counter-terrorism.“ He spoke the right words to Congress during his recent confirmation hearings, but pay no attention.

The team he’s now assembling in Washington to lead his operations in Afghanistan (and someday maybe Pakistan) tells you what you really need to know. It’s filled with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work. At the same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox News, an extra 1,000 special operations troops are now being “quietly” dispatched to Afghanistan, bringing the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind that it’s been the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, who have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into Afghanistan 21,000 troops and advisors (as well as those special ops forces), ever more civilian diplomats and advisors, and ever larger infusions of money, there is now to be a command surge as well. General McChrystal, according to a recent New York Times article, has “been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans… [He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Like the new mega-embassy in Pakistan, this figure — the Spartans, after all, only needed 300 warriors at Thermopylae — tells us a great deal about the top-heavy manner in which the planet’s super-garrison state fights its wars.

So, this is now truly Obama’s war, about to be run by his chosen general, a figure from the dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine president’s men an ever bloodier secret campaign of so-called counter-terror (though it’s essence is likely to be terror, pure and simple), as befits an imperial power trying to hang on to the Eastern reaches of the Greater Middle East.

The new crew aren’t counterinsurgency warriors, but — a term that has only recently entered our press – “manhunters.“ And don’t forget, President Obama is now presiding over an expanding war in which “manhunters” engaging in systematic assassination programs will not only be on the ground but, thanks to the CIA’s escalating program of targeted assassination by robot aircraft, in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands.

For those who care to remember, it was into counter-terrorism and an orgy of manhunting, abuse, and killing that the Vietnam era version of “counterinsurgency” dissolved as well.

India and Pakistan – Apologies should be genuine

On common ground – Why Only Amritsar and Lahore!

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by Tridivesh Singh Maini

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Recently, Kuldip Nayar, while speaking at a seminar in Amritsar, proposed that the Punjab assemblies of both India and Pakistan pass separate resolutions condemning the barbaric crimes committed during Partition. But a few issues need to be considered. First, why only the Punjab assemblies? Why shouldn’t the parliaments of both India and Pakistan apologise? Unless of course Nayar feels that Partition conditioned only the two Punjabs. And why shouldn’t there be an apology for the partition of Bengal?

Secondly, if it comes to apologies, bigger crimes have been perpetrated on citizens of both countries by their respective governments — the events of 1984 and those in Gujarat in 2002 — apart from other blunders that caused suffering to every Indian and Pakistani in some form or the other. Not passing resolutions on these would qualify for “double standards”.

Two things may help more than an apology. First, as has been the demand of many (including Nayar himself), allowing people over a certain age to visit their old homes. I met a gentleman called Manmohan Sethi, who was born in what became Pakistan. Sethi introduces himself as “Pedaishi Pakistani, rehaishi Hindustan (Born a Pakistani, resident of Hindustan)”. While applying for his visa at the Pakistani High Commission a few years ago, Sethi was asked “Who are your hosts?” He had replied, “My soil.” In Pakistan, he was hosted by strangers. This visit helped him realise that people wanted peace and now he is working in his own way — by composing music — to promote peace.

Secondly, it is more important for individuals who have deeply ingrained biases to interact with people from the other side. An 80-year-old Lahori, Mirza Nasir-ud-Din — who had rescued non-Muslims during Partition — visited Mumbai a few years later. When a group of Hindus who had killed and looted Muslims during Partition were introduced to him, they cried and sought his forgiveness for their acts.

The crux of the matter is that interaction is pivotal and apologies should be genuine and not dictated. There is no substitute for spontaneity in the subcontinent.

Source: Lahorenama

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Its Great Game once again – now in Pakistan

US weapons have mysteriously landed in the hands of terrorists in Pakistan. Now we have the Al Qaeda leadership freely accessing the foreign media in Afghanistan saying it would use Pakistani nukes against America. What is the US up to with Al Qaeda? Post-9/11 the world has had a memory lapse over the US-Al Qaeda connections – especially when Sudan offered Bin Laden to the US – but the latter allowed the Al Qaeda leader to move to Afghanistan.

By SHIREEN M. MAZARI

Pakistanis cannot be allowed to savor joy and success peacefully. Just when the nation was tumultuously enjoying the magical victory of our cricket team, the hard reality of our hostile environment post-9/11 clouded over us once again.

For anyone who thought the US was not targeting our nuclear assets, the screaming headlines from the Afghan-based Al Qaeda leadership’s interview to Al Jazeera brought the issue to the forefront once again with claims that Al Qaeda would use our nuclear assets against the US if they could. The absurdity of the statement notwithstanding, it can be explained only if seen as part of the campaign to legitimize a US/NATO takeover of our nuclear assets since our security prevents the US from taking them out physically.

We have also seen US weapons mysteriously land in the hands of militants in Pakistan – now we have the Al Qaeda leadership freely having access to the foreign media in Afghanistan. What is the US up to with Al Qaeda? Post-9/11 the world has had a memory lapse over the US-Al Qaeda connections – especially when Sudan offered Bin Laden to the US – but the latter allowed the Al Qaeda leader to move to Afghanistan!

While our military has become embroiled in a “war” that cannot be won by conventional military means, the US continues to play dangerous games with Pakistan – and at multiple levels. The drone attacks continue under Obama since the first one he ordered three days after his inauguration as US president – which killed 15 Pakistanis. In fact just as the present government has gone the extra mile in ceding ground to the US in Pakistan, the Obama administration has expanded the drone policy and according to Jeremy Scahill in the first 99 days of 2009 more than 150 Pakistanis have been killed in these attacks.

His estimate is that since 2006 and up to April 2009 drones have killed 687 Pakistanis – apart from the identifiable militants. That comes to about 38 civilian deaths a month just from these drone attacks.

Nor is this all. The New York Times gave an interesting account of US military operations within Pakistan including US Special Forces commando raids in FATA across the international Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Even more of a wakeup call of US intent should be the $.9 billion of the first year ‘largesse’ under the Kerry-Lugar Bill that has been earmarked for the construction of the new US embassy in Islamabad – a huge fortress right behind the presidency and the prime minister’s secretariat. If Iraq is anything to go by we may soon have US private security companies like the notorious Blackwater plus hundreds of other contractors. While US human intelligence will not gain in quality we will have a meddling US presence across our state institutions and civil society which will be damaging in the long term to our national wellbeing.

We are already read of the CIA chief visiting us followed by Obama’s special representative general James Jones who is currently in Islamabad. Like CIA chief he too will be visiting India and the general thrust seems to be to push Pakistan into accepting an Indian military presence in Afghanistan. Interestingly General Jones also has strong ties to US business including Boeing and Chevron. Meanwhile there is no let down on focusing on our nuclear assets, which is why Prime Minister Gilani was compelled to finally, after a year of silent tolerance, demand that the US stop using a discriminatory approach towards Pakistan’s nuclear program, including the search for civilian nuclear power.

But there is discrimination and the new line of attack that has been opened is the Al Qaeda statement – following the numerous US official and media statements expressing “fear” of US nukes falling into militant hands! Surely just as the discovery of US/Israeli arms on militants in Pakistan raised serious questions as to the role/linkages of outside forces to militant outfits within Pakistan, so the new development is hardly without its linkage to an overall plan against our nuclear assets. Once again, the fact is that unless the Pakistan military is weakened from within, the assets cannot be accessed at all. Hence the need of the US to get the military bogged down in a conventional battle against unconventional foes in Swat and FATA – without any overarching political strategy visible from the government.

Ironically, while plots against our nuclear assets continue, it is developments in other countries that reveal the lack of strong security measures at nuclear installations in these places. On 22nd June, anti-nuclear activists managed to break through security at the German Unterweser nuclear power plant and actually scaled the dome of the plant. More disturbing has been the story, now surprisingly blocked out, about the Indian nuclear scientist Lokanathan Mahalingam, who disappeared or was abducted, and was later found dead from the Kali river. Mahalingam had also disappeared ten years earlier while he was working at another sensitive Indian nuclear location – the Kalpakkam nuclear complex.

India’s nuclear and missile security has revealed many shortcomings and in 2006 Dr. Tiwari involved in space research was also shot dead.

There have been stories of an underground network of Hindu extremists and Indian scientists involved in technology transfers to and from India and Israel. Indian scientists were also discovered at Iran’s Bushehr plant. So it is strange as to why the US and the IAEA continue to keep silent over India’s possible private proliferation rings as well as the weak safety of its nuclear and missile installations and sites? Equally puzzling is official Pakistani silence on these issues.

It is similar to the questionable manner in which our official institutions declare that there are Indians/US links to militant outfits in Pakistan, but then fail to give details or to take up these issues with the countries concerned. What is the Pakistani state playing at or fearful of? Is it not time the nation was told about the sources of funding and weapons for the militants in specific terms to give credibility to these allegations? Or will all the “militants” be “killed” before we can learn crucial facts about US double dealing and Indian destabilization of Pakistan. That is why arrest and trial of the militant leadership in anti-terror courts, rather than their killing, is essential for our nation and state’s long term security.

As for India, while Pakistan is also under pressure to resume the bilateral dialogue, our seeming haste seems to have sent the wrong signals to India. That is why we saw the sheer bad behavior on the part of India’s Manmohan Singh towards President Zardari in Russia. Too bad the latter was unable to respond in kind. But we can still send the correct message to the Indians by refusing to have a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the NAM conference in Egypt.

Dialogue is certainly desirable but only when the intent of the two sides is honest in terms of conflict resolution. So far the Indian intent is clearly not focused on this aspect. So perhaps it would be good to wait till India realizes the need to move towards conflict resolution with Pakistan in a holistic fashion. It may take pleasure in our leadership’s refusal to bring up the K word but without any movement on Kashmir, the dialogue will eventually run aground as always. For Pakistan it is also essential to know its maximalist and minimalist positions in clear terms – both, of necessity, being premised on giving Kashmiris their right to self-determination.

Things are moving fast, and there is a crucial need for the Pakistani state to step back and look at the larger picture so that inclusive policies can be formulated to deal with the threat of extremism, militancy on a long term basis by denying them space in our society; and to protect our nation and its nuclear assets from US designs.

Finally, it is sad to see that while the Pakistani state has seemingly abandoned the Kashmiris in Occupied Kashmir, these brave people continue to rally round Pakistan in a most instinctive way. So it was with the T20 World Cup where the Kashmiris in Occupied Kashmir joined the Pakistani nation in celebrating the Pakistani victory. Did anyone else in our neighborhood do the same?

AmedQuraishi.com / The News International.

Does it Matter if Michael Jackson, Princess Diana Were Muslim?

RPK Addresses The Issue of Asian Muslim Inferiority Complex. We say Asian (including Arab), because this strange phenomena of looking for endorsement by Western Stars is a primarily if not exclusively Asian phenomena which reveals an insecurity and inferiority complex.

WHAT IS THERE TO BE PROUD OF?

So, does it really matter whether Lady Diana became a Muslim before she died? Would Islam benefit if Prince Charles or the Queen herself became a Muslim? Does this really enhance the image of Islam, as most Muslims believe it would?

by Raja Petra Kamarudin

There are many who are pleased with the revelation brought on by the death of Michael Jackson. This is of course the revelation that he may have converted to Islam. These happy people were also pleased that Cassius Clay became a Muslim (and is now called Muhammad Ali) and in most likelihood Princes Diana and astronaut Neil Armstrong did as well — although I don’t think these personalities concerned actually publicly said so.

Why is it so important to Muslims that these superstars converted to Islam? So they died as Muslims. Or maybe they never became Muslims and died as Jews or Christians or whatever. Does it really matter one way or another what religion they professed before they died? What is it to us anyway? Would it not be their business more than ours?

I suppose to some this would be very meaningful. To know that extremely important people like Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Princes Diana and Neil Armstrong may have all become Muslims gives us that feeling of winning. This proves that we were right all along. And everyone likes to feel that he or she was right and enjoy the satisfaction of being able to say, “I told you so!”

Would it mean anything to Muslims if one million poor and starving Africans converted to Islam? Probably not and we really don’t care if it were 100 million poor and starving Africans who had converted. It is not the numbers that count. We don’t care about quantity. We are concerned about the ‘quality’ of the converts.

One million or even 100 million poor and starving Africans converting to Islam is not something to be proud of. But if Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, was to become a Muslim then that is cause to celebrate with the slaughter of 100 camels and 300 sheep. That proves beyond any shadow of doubt that Islam is the correct religion and it further proves that I was right all along in subscribing to Islam. Hey, even Prince Charles agrees with me and Prince Charles is no ordinary human being.

This ‘we won’ and ‘we were right all along’ is not only a Muslim obsession but also an obsession of all religions. So before you take this as a cue to start your Islam-bashing please note that the word ‘Islam’ can be replaced with the word ‘Christianity’, ‘Hinduism’ or whatever. No religion is exempted from this ‘competitive spirit’ and the obsession to ‘prove itself’ by the converts it attracts — and the higher the profile of the convert the higher your win and the stronger your message of being ‘right’.

Instead of harping on the number of new converts you are able to attract and the high profile or high quality of these converts, I would rather focus on the high quality of your existing practitioners and ask whether they are doing justice to the religion they are supposed to be professing. What does it matter if Queen Elizabeth herself converted to Islam if the rest of the five million or so Muslims in Britain leave much to be desired as far as their conduct is concerned.

Why are properties in non-white areas in Britain lower than in an all-white area? Well, basically this is because in a non-white area the crime rate is very high. Even your car insurance is higher if you live and park your car in these ‘black’ areas — especially if you don’t own a garage and park your car on the street.

RPK

Granted, not all the non-whites are Muslims. Some are Christians, Hindus, or whatever. Nevertheless, if that particular Briton happens to be a Muslim rather than a Jew, Christian or Hindu, you can safely bet that that person would be non-white rather than white. So, while not all non-whites are Muslims, most Muslims are non-white. And the crime rate is higher in non-white areas (as it is in ‘white’ council areas).

So, does it really matter whether Lady Diana became a Muslim before she died? Would Islam benefit if Prince Charles or the Queen herself became a Muslim? Does this really enhance the image of Islam, as most Muslims believe it would? What would really enhance the image of Islam would be if property in non-white areas are exactly the same price as property in the white areas and your car insurance is not loaded because you live and park your car in a non-white area.

If Michael Jackson really did die a Muslim then well and fine. Good for him. It does not do anything for me anyway. The same as far as Lady Di is concerned and for the rest of the British Royal Family as well. The fact that these high profile people became Muslims does not add value to Islam. What would add value to Islam would be when you buy a car in Britain and you don’t end up paying double the insurance premium because you live in a high-crime rate ‘Muslim’ neighbourhood’ or that your home is cheaper in value because all your neighbours are non-white Muslims.

Now that would make me real proud indeed.

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Source: Mathaba

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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The obsession to `Muslimize` MJ

In 2006 it was also rumored that Michael Jackson embraced Islam but it was later denied. Yet the 2008 news were never denied

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By Kazi Mahmood

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A rather fantastic event hit the earth on the 25th of June in the US and it was here, at Kuala Lumpur the 26th of June in the early hours of the morning. The news of Micheal Jackson’s death hit the Internet with blogs and other twitter users carrying the story which grew like wild fires. At World Future Online, we published the story as early as 7 am in the morning and we followed it with another story on the reported conversion to Islam of MJ. Here we tell you more on the Muslim obsession to have MJ as a Muslim and why is this is very important to this community of 1.5 billion people.

 

The Muslims are sometimes accused of being thirsty for big names to join the list of those who embraced Islam in the course of their successful carreer. MJ had a larger than life success as a singer, a genius that the world will not see for a long time with the kind of musical phenomenon that we might not see again, unless the prophetized ‘Dajjal’ appear.

 

At the begining of his meteorical rise, MJ gave some Muslim thinkers reasons to fear that the ‘Dajjal’s coming was near. The reference to the ‘Dajjal’ was due to the 1982 global record sale of the Album ‘Thriller’ that took the world by storm and for ever changed the way the music industry looked at itself and was looked upon by the world.

Then came other albums, including Bad which sold very well and made MJ look like the number one dominant force in the music world. His aura, the magnetic appeal and his charismatic character turned him into a world musical giant. This again forced some people in the Musilm world to be weary. The idea that ‘Dajjal’, the anti-Christ for the Christian world and the anti-Muslim ogre for the Muslims, was on his way to earth. Dajjal will be a one eyed (perhaps biased?) singer who will capture the world with his power to deliver a music that mankind has never heard before.

Jermain Jackson on the right with Micheal holding an umbrella

With the concert ‘We are the World’ the image of Micheal Jackson took a sudden change as all the fears were torn apart. In this concert, with its background and the reasons for MJ to be involved in this project portrayed a very different Micheal Jackson. He became more fragile, human and down to earth and this made him more popular in Africa, Arabia and the Asian continent where he captured the people with his aura and charisma. The vulnerable Micheal showed his heart with ‘We are the World’ and this doused the fears of the 666 number appearing soon for many Muslims.

 

It is to be noted that Africa, Asia and Arabia has large populations of Muslims and the popularity of Micheal Jackson among the Muslims is uncomparable. Not a single Muslim star could reach the iconic height that MJ reached with his Muslim followers/supporters and this will probably remain as such for generations. ‘We are the World’ showed that Micheal wanted to save the world not destroy it and that he was a gentle, kind human being and never a threat to other people.

 

The charges against Micheal Jackson brought up by the families of the children who were his companions in his dream land sent a wave of pity across the world. The American justice system had much more to lose than to win with the accusations made against the man without a childhood. The entire world now knows that MJ wanted to be in the company of kids only to feel the same joy that they felt being at Dream Land. There’s nothing else to it and the families that made millions out of their accusations have nothing else to gain but the shame of having given a bad time to MJ. That is the global impression of people when you read blogs and other articles by people online and offline.

 

About his conversion to Islam, the news came as a sound of good tidings in the ears of the Muslims, battered in the war on terror and accused of being ‘extreme’ while their Prophet and their Holy Al-Quraan both suffered the ill-doings of bad intentioned non-believers. MJ a Muslim? The impact is huge. It is even bigger than Muhammad Ali becoming a Muslim in his tender age after he won the Olympic Gold Medal for the US in the 1960′s.

Muhammad Ali created a wave of joy in the Muslim world when he became a Muslim, abandoning the name Cassius Clay for his Muslim one. His successes and his ups and downs became that of the Muslim communities world wide. The fact that MJ is said to have converted to Islam too became a part and parcel of the Muslims who follows the news and are interested in MJ.

Great Muslim names have today paid their reverence to Micheal Jacson on his untimely death, a death that has made many people cry on the Television during interviews with TV presenters including Larry King who spoke to close friends of MJ. And most of them cried live on TV or said later on that they could not stop crying. Their heart broken and their hopes dashed, they loved MJ too much to have lost him so soon.

 

Nevertheless, for the Muslims, it is like a sort of blessing in disguise and when Jermain said the word ‘Allah’ during the official declaration of MJ’s death, it was a light in the tunnel for the millions of Muslims who are living in state of war, war caused by their enemies who are today head quartered in no other place than the Pentagon! The news of MJ becoming a Muslims had spread like wild fires in November last year. In 2006 it was also rumored that he embraced Islam but it was later denied. Yet the 2008 news were never denied.

 

The impact of the MJ’s death on his followers will inevitably bring some of them to consider the fact that Jermain is a Muslim and that perhaps MJ converted to Islam. The same impact was seen with Lady Diana Spencer after her passing in 1997. Though 911 will remain the greatest impact on non-Muslims who embraced Islam after that deadly event, the role MJ’s reported conversion and Jermain’s confirmed conversion will play in the future. This will be of great importance to Muslims and also to non-Muslims as the latter folks will see a new light, a new way to understand Islam despite the massive anti-Islam campaigns by the American Neo-Cons and the Jews.

Source: Mathaba

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Muslims’ obsession with celebrity Islam

Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on the moon. The rumour mills declared him a Muslim, though it was later denied  by his office of any such move by world’s first astronaut to have entered the world of Islam

Note from WoP: Though an obsession to claim celebrities entering their respective realms of belief, the Hindus, Christians, Jews and others too have such a phenomena, its more visible, more pronounced amongst Muslims.The recent death of Michael Jackson, the singer who became a legend in his lifetime, has once again highlighted this weakness, which Raja Petra Kamarudin so rightly calls an ‘inferiority complex’ of Asian Muslims. In our previous posts (here and here ), we highlighted this weakness amongst Muslims and now the third and the final post on this series is before you. It’s quite an old one though (it dates back to 1999), yet we have put it up on these pages to apprise you fully about this phenomena most obvious, most particular amongst us, Muslims. [Nayyar]

by Zafar Bangash

‘Have you heard, Chelsea Clinton is about to become a Muslim?’ This is now commonly heard among Muslims, especially in the US. ‘Yes. And if it had not been for that terrible car crash, princess Diana would have married Dodi and she, too, would have embraced Islam. Then there would have been Muslim heirs to the British throne.’ This theory concludes that there must have been a plot to eliminate Diana to preclude such a possibility.

(Left) Chelsea Clinton

Whatever the truth about the plotand, it is difficult to know precisely there is nothing inherently wrong in Chelsea, or indeed princess Diana, showing interest in Islam. Chelsea certainly had obtained an English translation of the Qur’an, but it would be premature to assume from this that she was becoming a Muslim. As for Diana’s interest in Islam, the less said the better, although one would be hard-pressed to convince those who thrive on gossip. The issue here is not whether these ladies were or are really interested in Islam. The more pertinent question is the Muslims’ obsession with celebrities embracing Islam. Unfortunately there are Muslims who have reduced Islam’s validity to such high-profile events. As the Qur’an mentions in many ayaat, it is Allah who provides guidance to whomever He wills, and for those who reject the Truth, a terrible punishment awaits.

The obsession with celebrities is not new. The most fantastic story was spun around Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, beginning in early 1983. We at Crescent International received phone-calls and letters from Muslims around the world inquiring about Armstrong’s conversion. The story was imaginative and rather fascinating: after returning from his moon journey in July 1969, Armstrong went on a world tour. It was claimed that when he arrived in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, he heard the adhan being called out. Intrigued by the sound, he inquired about it and was told that this was the Muslim call to prayer. He is reported to have said that he had heard the same sound when he landed on the moon. This led him to embrace Islam!

When this story reached fever pitch, and we were inundated with calls and letters from around the world, we contacted Armstrong’s office in Ohio. This writer personally spoke to his secretary, who revealed that although Mr. Armstrong had great respect for Islam, he had not become a Muslim and that the adhan story was pure fiction. She also said that the many calls and letters from Muslims from different parts of the world had intrigued her. She in fact offered to send a letter confirming our conversation and even requested that we publicise the facts to put the affair to rest.

Armstrong’s secretary did write to us confirming that her boss had not embraced Islam. This, however, was not enough for some Muslims. Later still, some journalists arranged a conference call through the US embassy in Delhi to talk to Neil Armstrong personally and to hear from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, that he had not become a Muslim. Only then did the story come to some sort of an end, perhaps much to the disappointment of the hero-worshipping Muslims.

Yusuf Islam, former Cat Stevens (right) before converting to Islam, (left) after embracing Islam

Some Muslims have spun similar stories about Yusuf Islam, formerly the singer Cat Stevens. To his credit, wherever Yusuf Islam has lectured, he has told Muslims to worship only Allah and not humans. This message, unfortunately, seems lost on many Muslims. It is interesting to note that Yusuf Islam did not discover the deen of Allah through the effort of any Muslim but by reading the Qur’an himself. He says that his own brother (a non-Muslim) gave him an English translation of the Qur’an. He did not read it for about three years. Then one day, he picked it and was fascinated. This is how he was led to Islam. Allah says in the noble Qur’an, He guides whomever He wills. Yusuf Islam is one of them, alhamdulillah.

There are many well-known personalities in the world who have embraced Islam but there are countless non-celebrities – so-called ‘ordinary people’ – who have also embraced it. Islam’s validity and strength are not dependent only on celebrities. In the early days of Islam, the noble Messenger of Allah, upon whom be peace, went to all the chiefs of the various tribes in Makkah. The majority, including two of his uncles Abu Jahl and Abu Lahab – did not pay heed. Many of the downtrodden – Bilal and others – embraced Islam. The tribal chiefs became implaccable enemies of Islam but it still triumphed because Allah willed it so. There are many downtrodden people in North America, Europe and other places who have entered the fold of Islam. Islam is enriched by the presence of the diverse groups of people who have entered its fold. All too often such people are looked down upon by born Muslims, for racist, classist or nationalist reasons. This is entirely counter to Islam. It is the quality of these individuals, not their status in life that matters.

If Muslims truly want to see the miracle of Islam and the Qur’an in contemporary history, then they should ponder over the transformation that people undergo when they become Muslims. This is especially true of those who had previously committed heinous crimes. Many inmates in US prisons who embrace Islam become the most decent, civilised and God-fearing individuals. Despite the brutal regime in many US institutions, prison wardens readily admit the great transformation of these individuals when they become Muslims. It is to this aspect that Muslims need to pay attention. Further, Muslims must themselves live according to the tenets of Islam. It is embarrassing to constantly hear that Islam is the best religion but Muslims the worst followers. The challenge facing Muslims today is to present a model of the decent individual who is caring and compassionate and who provides inspiration by his or her own example.

Source:

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Killing fields in Swat Valley: militants and the army – face to face

Amid all the confusion surrounding the Pakistan army’s month-long campaign against the Taliban or whoever they are fighting in Swat and Malakand, the only certainty is that it has created nearly 2.5 million refugees, dubbed internally displaced persons (IDP).

by Waseem Shehzad

Before the launch of army operations on April 26, people were ordered to leave their homes immediately. As hundreds of thousands of people streamed out of their towns and villages, most with little except the clothes on their backs, the government announced they would be housed in camps set up for this purpose and looked after well until the area was cleared of militants. Appeals for help have also been made to international donors. United Nations officials have confirmed that there are 1.5 million new refugees bringing the total to 2 million with half a million already from Bajaur. On May 21, an international donors’ conference in Islamabad reportedly pledged $224 million for the IDP’s. Already cynics are saying much of the aid money, if it ever materializes, will end up in the pockets of corrupt officials as happened following the October 2005 earthquake disaster.

A month into the operation, not all refugees have been registered. This is not merely the result of bureaucratic incompetence; reports from the area indicate that some of the most corrupt officials notorious for stealing money and resources have again been put in charge of such operations. They had stolen millions of dollars during the decades-long Afghan refugee saga; now they are applying that experience with even greater vigor to stealing from their own people. Frustration is quickly giving way to anger as people find themselves without food, water or proper shelter in the sweltering heat that reaches 42–45ºC during the day. Several deaths have already occurred in the camps and if the conditions continue to deteriorate, disease will quickly spread. As temperatures soar, so will tempers and while most people appear supportive of military action so far, this can quickly dissipate as their miseries multiply.

A Pakistani soldier on patrol in the Swat Valley’s main town Of Mingora Photo: EPA

A fertile breeding ground for militants will be the thousands of students who have been unable to complete their exams because of fighting. This will prevent them from securing admission in universities next September. In a country with already a low literacy rate and youth unable to secure admission into universities, frustration will build up. This together with civilian casualties because of military operations has the potential to lay the foundations for a future uprising and more bloodletting.

The military operation is concentrated in Swat, Shangla, Lower Dir and Buner. Imam dheri, the madrassa run by Maulana Fazlullah, head of the militants and son-in-law of Maulana Sufi Muhammad, as well as Peochar, the militants’ headquarters, have also been bombed. None of the militant leaders, however — Sufi Muhammad, Fazlullah, Muslim Khan, Shah Dawran, Mehmood Khan and Ibne Amin — has been killed. While Sufi Muhammad is believed to be hiding in Chakdarra, the rest are said to be in Peochar, a locality surrounded by dense forests, where several training camps are located. Sufi Muhammad’s son-in-law and one of his 12 sons were killed in an air strike but the rest are still at large.

(Left) Innocence of Swat, displaced from its paradise, on  way to the tent village near Mardan

According to the military, Pakistani commando units were dropped on hills in Niag Darra, Karo Darra and Turmang Darra areas surrounding Peochar on May 12. Some 1200 troops backed by tanks and artillery reached Turmang Darra in upper Dir but Mingora, the main town in Swat, remains under Taliban control (though later reports coming from ISPR speak of certain major points of the city to have been cleared of the militants).

There are also believed to be nearly 10,000 residents still trapped there. Troops have also taken up positions on rooftops along the Timergara-Peshawar road. The military claims to have killed 1,000 militants, a figure that is difficult to verify since journalists and independent observers are barred from the area. There is widespread skepticism that the figure is not only exaggerated but that most of the casualties may be civilians. Further, if 1,000 militants are dead, at least four times as many must have been wounded, a standard ratio in battlefield casualties. Given that the Taliban’s total strength is estimated at 4,000 to 5,000, the question is: who is fighting the military that has deployed 15,000 troops backed by artillery, tanks and helicopter gunships?

Despite claiming that fighting the militants is Pakistan’s “problem”, the reality is, it has been forced by the Americans at gun point. There is nothing new in this. Unable to withstand US pressure, successive Pakistani rulers are forced to act in return for a fistful of dollars that often proves disastrous for the country. Between 2004 and 2006, a similar policy was forced on Pakistan in Waziristan that turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Since early 2006, American drones have been attacking Pakistani villages, especially in North and South Waziristan that has killed 800 villagers and only 14 militants, according to the New York Times (May 11/09).

Publicly, Pakistani officials protest such attacks and say they are not helpful but it is widely known that the drones take off from Pakistani airfields. In case of Swat operations, these were forced on Pakistan by the Americans under the threat that if the Pakistan military did not take action, the Americans would move in.

The spectre of American ground troops attacking and killing Pakistani villagers would have created an explosive situation that would quickly have led to an insurrection throughout the rest of Pakistan. Neither the Americans nor the Pakistanis could have contained that situation. But is the present approach any better?

There is little doubt that initially the Pakistan army will make some gains against the militants but what exactly is its overall plan? It is easy to launch an operation but ending it will not be in its control. How long will this operation last: two months, two years or decades and what will be the consequences of such action? What guarantee is there that this will not create more militants resulting in future attacks throughout the country, including the capital Islamabad?

It was the commando assault on the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in July 2007 in which some 1,400 students, most of them girls from Swat and Dir, were killed that created the mess in Swat. The longer the Swat operation lasts, the greater the likelihood that militancy will spread to the rest of Pakistan. There are already disturbing signs of trouble in Karachi where the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), notorious for criminal behavior throughout much of its history, is getting ready for a fight with the Pashtuns (Pathans). The MQM that claims to represent the interests of the muhajirs (immigrants from India in 1947) brands them as “outsiders” by labeling them as Taliban! Militant groups are also well entrenched in areas like Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan and lower Punjab because of a vast network of madrassas. Under pressure from the US, the army may have gotten involved in a problem from hell.

Pakistan’s tragedy is that it has no leaders of stature or vision. Asif Ali Zardari, the country’s president, is not fit even to run a cinema from where he made his debut into business, much less running a country as complex as Pakistan. He entered politics only because of his marriage to Benazir Bhutto, a story of intrigue in itself. Her murder in December 2007 opened the way for Zardari to become president. A venal character, he is widely despised as Mr. Ten percent. The rest of the political leadership as well as the military do not offer much hope either. The army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani is projected as a professional soldier, and he may well be, but the fact that he is seen as too close to the Americans — Admiral Mike Mullen, the US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff calls him a friend and has publicly stated that he has great confidence in him — is worrying. When the Americans say they like someone that is a sure sign of trouble. They are nobody’s friends.

Three persons seem to exert great influence on decision-making in Pakistan: Kiyani as army chief, the most powerful man in the country; Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington Hussain Haqqani; and advisor for internal  security, Rehman Malik . Haqqani is very close to the American neocons whose agenda he seems to be pushing in Pakistan, while Malik is reportedly working for British intelligence, MI6. The rest of the political crowd is made up of self-serving feudal lords and industrial barons whose sole purpose in life has been to steal the country’s wealth. How can Pakistan make progress with such people at the helm of affairs?

The ruling elite seem to blunder into one crisis after another without displaying the slightest hint how to solve any problems. Under their control, Pakistan’s problems have become more intractable. They have two overriding concerns: to stay in power by appeasing the Americans; and to continue to use that to plunder the country’s resources. A more incompetent bunch would be hard to imagine.

May Allah (SWT) help Pakistan but  even He may have turned His back on these absolute despots.

Source:

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too, are also the sole responsibility of the author(s).

The IDP’s of Swat and our Super Rich

by Nayyar Hashmey

There are individuals, families, cartels, feudal landlords in Pakistan – who have amassed huge amounts of wealth, some legally but unfairly, others illegally as well as unfairly and many pounced upon the national exchequer merely because of absence of representative institutions, the institutions that could check the largesse of people in power. If they just could visualize, had there been no Pakistan, could they have ever been able to do this? For here in this land they have had no competition from a multitude of counterparts in the form of competitors in business, politics and other walks of life, were they to compete then in a huge sub continental market. They must thank this country that enabled them get rich so soon so easily.

It is time now they bring in their billions of dollars rotting in Swiss and offshore banks. Nobody asks them to distribute it amongst the poor of Pakistan but we only beg of them to bring this money and other assets back to Pakistan to whom it belongs. Even if they donate a chunk of their wealth to the poor and needy, the IDP’s of Swat, the refugees without the refuge of a home in their own homeland, it would definitely ameliorate the pathetic conditions our brothers, our pleasant faced, ever smiling hosts from the paradise of Swat are in, nowadays. This will be a proof of their love for Pakistan; love for their vote bank that brought them into power. Rest of their billions can remain within Pakistani banks as part of the national reserves.

Believe it or not but am certain, we won’t be needing to move around with a begging bowl in our hands. They should know the bitterest fact that beggars are never the choosers. Whatever they receive, whether in form of loans, grants, by the shylocks of world’s financial empires or the so called friends of Pakistan, it’s always tied with certain ‘terms and conditions’.

These terms are sometimes directly specified but mostly they are, not specified but implied. And in our case these terms are mostly one sided i.e. suiting the donors, why then opt for a money that ‘clips our wings’. I know it’s difficult especially for the people who became super rich through shortcuts (including large land holdings, blackmailing, indulging in drug businesses, over profiteering with monopolies offered to them through protections at the cost of consumers and other dubious means.

(Left) Bill Gates, the IT Wizard turned billionaire – has donated half of his income fror welfare.

Perhaps that’s the reason we don’t have amongst us the Bill Gates who through sheer intellect, and hard work make billions of dollars and then dole out half of that for welfare of poor and needy.

Can’t they learn even from Abdul Sattar Edhi who proudly says, even if I have to beg I will beg it from my own people, my own country. Why should I go to others when I have millions of Pakistanis who dole out part of their incomes (and they are mostly in the middle and lower income brackets of the society) and he says his people, the rich, the poor Pakistani brethren never disappoint him. They fill the begging bowl not of a beggar but of a derwaish, a living saint, a fakir who has devoted himself to serve, serve and serve.

If Pakistani expatriates, the Pakistani Diaspora, the common Pakistanis can do it, why can’t they and this includes the Zardaris, Sharifs, Chaudharis, Hotis, the billionaires in business and the feudal lords of Punjab and Sindh, the civil and military bureaucrats turned tycoons. They can learn something at least from this old man in Kurta, pajama with a white beard, a true Mujahid amongst us!

How to Deal with America’s Empire of Bases

Map shows US Bases in the Middle East. Pakistan on the right side (coloured in red like all other countries where US bases are located) is shown to have four; in Pasni, Dalbandin, Jacobabad and Shamsi. The last one is an air base from where the US reaper drones are reported to take off and hit the Taliban hideouts but cause more collateral damage than hitting the militants.

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A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR GARRISONED LANDS

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by Chalmers Johnson

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The U.S. Empire of Bases — at $102 billion a year already the world’s costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don’t occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.

Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9th Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing 18 occupants, wounding at least 55, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is still going ahead with the purchase.

Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in our already bloated military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy — a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country. Instead these so-called embassies will actually be walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials, and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include roof-top helicopter pads for quick get-aways.

While it may be comforting for State Department employees working in dangerous places to know that they have some physical protection, it must also be obvious to them, as well as the people in the countries where they serve, that they will now be visibly part of an in-your-face American imperial presence. We shouldn’t be surprised when militants attacking the U.S. find

one of our base-like embassies, however heavily guarded, an easier target than a large military base.

And what is being done about those military bases anyway — now close to 800 of them dotted across the globe in other people’s countries? Even as Congress and the Obama administration wrangle over the cost of bank bailouts, a new health plan, pollution controls, and other much needed domestic expenditures, no one suggests that closing some of these unpopular, expensive imperial enclaves might be a good way to save some money.

Instead, they are evidently about to become even more expensive. On June 23rd, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet Republic which, back in February 2009, announced that it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan War), has been persuaded to let us stay. But here’s the catch: In return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners. All this because the Obama administration, having committed itself to a widening war in the region, is convinced it needs this base to store and trans-ship supplies to Afghanistan.

I suspect this development will not go unnoticed in other countries where Americans are also unpopular occupiers. For example, the Ecuadorians have told us to leave Manta Air Base by this November. Of course, they have their pride to consider, not to speak of the fact that they don’t like American soldiers mucking about in Colombia and Peru. Nonetheless, they could probably use a spot more money.

And what about the Japanese who, for more than 57 years, have been paying big bucks to host American bases on their soil? Recently, they reached a deal with Washington to move some American Marines from bases on Okinawa to the U.S. territory of Guam. In the process, however, they were forced to shell out not only for the cost of the Marines’ removal, but also to build new facilities on Guam for their arrival. Is it possible that they will now take a cue from the government of Kyrgyzstan and just tell the Americans to get out and pay for it themselves? Or might they at least stop funding the same American military personnel who regularly rape Japanese women (at the rate of about two per month) and make life miserable for whoever lives near the 38 U.S. bases on Okinawa. This is certainly what the Okinawans have been hoping and praying for ever since we arrived in 1945.

In fact, I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: cash in now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the U.S. Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country, and so — on the analogy of a financial bubble or a pyramid scheme — if you’re an investor, it’s better to get your money out while you still can.

This is, of course, something that has occurred to the Chinese and other financiers of the American national debt. Only they’re cashing in quietly and slowly in order not to tank the dollar while they’re still holding onto such a bundle of them. Make no mistake, though: whether we’re being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire and all the bases that go with it will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it.

Count on this, future generations of Americans traveling abroad decades from now won’t find the landscape dotted with near-billion-dollar “embassies.”

Chalmers Johnson is the author of The Blowback Trilogy – Blowback(2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis (2006). Check out a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson about the U.S. Empire of Bases by clicking here.

Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson

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Couyrtesy: TomDispatch.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Think, Americans: What’s Better, Tomahawks Or Michael Jackson?

Michael Jackson: It didn’t take weapons to launch America’s cultural supremacy in the digital age.

They say Muslim nations want war with America. Can you explain why an American like Michael Jackson became hugely popular across Middle East and Central Asia despite the hatred for America’s foreign policy and military involvements in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan? Anti-Americanism is a lie used by Washington to lead the American people into unnecessary wars and create new enemies. Washington needs to learn from Jackson, Stallone, Madonna, and Tom Cruise. They took America to places where its military and politicians couldn’t.

by AHMED QURAISHI

Two things made America more influential and awe inspiring than any other nation on the face of the earth: cowboy movies and Michael Jackson.

Long before the American Tomahawks, B-52s and the rest of the American weapons used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, Michael Jackson entered the houses of the nations across the Middle East and Central Asia.

Cover to Michael Jackson’s 1971′s - Got to Be There

Some say these Muslim nations want war with America. That’s typical Langley hogwash. Long before Karen Hughes and Don Rumsfeld came up with kooky concepts of public diplomacy, and long before Pentagon and State Department established offices for outreach to Muslims, this icon of modern American culture was welcomed in a region that knew little about American culture or simply didn’t care.

America didn’t need men with twisted minds and Darth-Vader plans for global domination to open the doors for American supremacy [this is for you, Richard Perle]. It happened anyway thanks to Jackson, Stallone and Madonna.

I was ten years old, growing up in the Middle East with kids who were Iraqis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Iranians, Palestinians, Yemenis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Syrians, Turks, Sudanese and Afghans. And I distinctly remember how in 1982 and 1983 Michael Jackson burst on the scene, to a great and an enthusiastic welcome never accorded to an American before.

Michael Jackson portrai

Those who knew one face of America – Reagan at the time – and vehemently hated it became crazy about another American face. I am sure they could never reconcile this contradiction deep in their hearts. But it was there, the two sides coexisting side by side.

Aside from our region, Michael’s music opened the doors of the Soviet Union and China to everything American, not to mention Africa, East Asia and the rest of the world. Before his album, Thriller, for example, only members of the elite in some of these nations knew the truth: that there is another side to America besides imperialism, a good side.

It seems so ordinary now. But, really, think about it; closed and proud societies warmly welcoming a completely new and alien culture of a country whose foreign policy was viewed suspiciously by many.

Right about the same time as Michael’s Thriller and the moonwalk, there came Sylvester Stallone with his accent, Tom Cruise with Top Gun, and then ‘USA for Africa’: forty-five American singers joining in a song for the victims of the African drought. The song, We Are The World, gave the world this amazing message about an American nation striving to help the needy.  Even the best American diplomats and the best image consultants couldn’t buy the goodwill that these ordinary good Americans created for their nation.

Cover of Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix

This is the lesson that America desperately needs to learn today. Jackson almost launched America’s cultural supremacy in the digital age. CIA or the US military used it, not caused it. So who is the real asset?

Enough of US government using Hollywood celebrities to get back at China like Stephen Spielberg did when he canceled a contract for Beijing Olympics last year in a theatrical move to politicize Tibet; and enough of the US government using YouTube and Twitter as political tools in its not-so-innocent battle with Iran.

The Americans need to bring that time back when they came together for something like ‘USA for Africa’, an effort devoid of any political mileage, like the search for cheap oil in African jungles, which is what they’re doing now.

This ugly and militarized side of America has eclipsed everything else in the past decade. Let’s remember that Washington’s entire might in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t and couldn’t generate the kind of real goodwill that America received with Jackson’s death.

Your Jacksons are far more appealing than your Tomahawks. Get it. Or beat it.

Sure, while this was happening, CIA was secretly supporting terrorist militias in Latin America and Africa, pushing Iraq to declare war against Iran, destabilizing governments and exploiting the pure passion and the blood of the Afghans to settle an American score with the Soviets.  America’s governments were doing dirty things. But it was the good side of America that the people of the world preferred, the one that was really launched by Michael Jackson and others. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union didn’t exactly crumble thanks only to America’s gung-ho politicians or military strategists. They crumbled because of the enduring power of the image that Jackson and Madonna and Tom Cruise and Stallone and others spread worldwide. [Continued below the picture].

Credits: Text & title pic: AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists Last 3 photogaphs: http://www.solarnavigator.net/

Setting Waziristan Ablaze

Tribesmen gather during a protest against military operation in North Waziristan, [Photo January 24, 2008]. Pakistani forces cleared militant strongholds from three areas in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border. According to military sources 40 militants and eight soldiers were killed in the fighting. In North Waziristan where militants are also active, about 2,500 tribesmen protested against the military’s attacks in South Waziristan. Photo by

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by Roedad Khan

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Note for WoP readers: The extremism in Pakistan especially in the name of sharia’h, jihad, solidarity with Pashtun brethren in Afghanistan, whatever you may call, by whomsoever and whatsoever reason, cannot be exonerated. Yet the way the Zardari government opens a new front in Waziristan too, cannot be called a wise step. The logic of such a move when the military is already tied up in Swat, Dir and Bajaur (from where the news of partial victory do emanate but no confirmed reports that the areas have completely been flushed out of the insurgents) cannot be appreciated on whatsoever ground or reason.

Same block, same chips : India’s fix

L.K. Advani – dreams shattered

Very few (and I include myself amongst that very few) have a gut feeling that BJP will come back.

It is a painful experience to witness rise and fall of a substitute to family-run congress. Congress, too has been in much bad shape than BJP after the death of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 but thanks to lucky stars….Sonia Gandhi did it. The lady who was termed as foreigner has ultimately become the spine of Indian politics and is a virtual prime minister cum kingmaker. We still do not know how a simple house wife with having no knowledge of characterless politics of India- rises to this platform. We will perhaps never know, who are policy makers behind the curtains.

Coming back to BJP- gone is the era when we all used to enjoy oratory of A.B Vajpayee though I remember, even then we did not like Advani. Not only his low morale oration but also due to his body language. If today he is calling BJP secular and giving reference of Muslims in his party, tomorrow he is chalking out plans with RSS. He never openly condemns Bajrang dal and its likes but covertly defends them.

Had it been A.B Vajpayee - things would have been different- at least he looks and sounds like a man of character which Advani never looks and sounds besides his age and stature in BJP. Big blunders in the party have started happening and once again our famous Indian trait is coming up -Jealous!

Whereas BJP could have used crystal clear persona of Sushma Swaraj and her likes, they sidelined her and suffered shameful results. Sushma could have done control the damage which BJP did with ‘LOVE WITH MODI’.

(Left) Nirendra Modi, self styled icon of anti-Muslim, anti-Christian wave

This is golden time for BJP to look within and start some ground job. Most important is that they should understand they are not the self-styled sole representatives of Hindus. Like Togadia, they cannot make themselves icons of anti Muslim, anti Christian wave. This was dangerous line then and its this time as well. Congress manages to play with MNS as it played with J.S. Bhindrawala in Punjab but I wish them luck this time. Then it was bloodshed of thousands innocents – though it did not matter to Congress even then and may not even now.

(Right) The Queen (but not the British)

India is right now in the hands of a party which is famous for a loyalty-based, family-based and money-based business of politics. If you see the tri-colouric map, almost half of India is being ruled right now by families and this reminds me of India 50-70 years back. Common man is waiting for that wave- when such parties and people will be made accountable for all the smart money they have put in Swiss banks.

Common man of India is waiting for that wave – when India will not be known for it’s corruption, when there will be equal law for every one, when exploitation of poor will not lead to mass suicides. Imagine what will be the future of a country- where farmers are committing suicides en block.

My problem is that common man is waiting and waiting- doing little to raise voice. Sometimes I do think about naxals – are they doing the right thing when they raise voice against discrimination? Because in India- you have only ONE way to make your voice heard – VIOLENCE!

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India’s role in Afghanistan, a propaganda

T h e  B i g F a r t

I do not know why Indians and Pakistanis do not see their own countrymen, in shape of politicians, who are selling them out. Swiss banks are full of those cuts and bribes. I do not know why a propaganda is required but this is true that propaganda is right being done, was done and I am sure will be done. India too is not clean and clear with its LOVE FOR USA. Nuclear treaty was favored in such a way and the manner in which it was done, puts everyone by surprise and I am sure we will never know how and why congress got support [SP Support ] in parliament for this.

For every big FART happening in DELHI- Pakistan is named within 2-3 hrs and same is story of Pakistan. I think these are deliberate attempts to confuse people and let them not think on main issues.

Main issue is common man- not the damn nuclear arsenal. Main issue is poverty, education which no politician wants to talk about. Main issue is hunger, water, energy which is not on any agenda because there may be less money…but yes we want to buy guns and arms…because there is big money in it.

India and Pakistan have fought wars and have enjoyed lot of experiments….I do not see that at least lesson has been learnt. I do not want to accuse anyone or defend anyone here…but what I am saying is….where this whole puppet show will take us. USA is paying PAK to fight ‘his’ war of terror. USA cannot fight in Afghanistan because it has not that courage to stand against Afghan…no one has perhaps. Moreover – USA cannot handle bodybags…but life of a PAK and IND soldier is cheaper than US army man.

I read that INDIA is doing something in AFGHANISTAN – I always wanted to know one thing. If India is fighting a proxy war with PAK there – and as you said that Mosad and Raw, CIA is active there….what PAKISTAN army is doing ?

What journalists are doing ? Why not PAKISTAN raise this issue in UN or blast this issue in international media ?

This is same way of INVISIBLE HAND India used to say while Punjab was burning. ISI or Pak army may be behind that…but India could never make a strong representation in UN or in international media about it. Why ?

In Last- it is still better that both either sort things or fight it out….it is better option than being a puppet in hands of B. Obama.

Source: the hindblogger

The Phenomenology of Trilingualism in Punjab

by Mirza Athar Baig

The meeting starts with all too familiar notes of welcome in English by the chair, the agenda is presented, discussion begins, grave matters are analyzed and considered opinions are put forward only to be countered by different opinions. Workable solutions are sought, proposals are given, suggestions are submitted, either to be partially accepted or totally rejected, but all in English and above all in English.

A series of incomprehensible administrative and inter-subjective rigidity starts prevailing in the meeting and then as if involuntarily a stray remark in Urdu slips through the mouth of the chair. Picking up the lingual clue instantaneously, one of the worthy members, hitherto rather incommunicative, hurls his barrage of opinions, analyses and arguments. Another member follows suit, and very soon it is an all out Urdu in the meeting. Strangely enough, the body language of the worthy members is changed too, and even more strangely, hitherto unknown, almost hidden aspects of the agenda items start dawning upon the participants.

They are on the threshold of making important decisions, but lunch time arrives, and they rise for some suitable food for body, now that they have enough food for thought, but thought processes inevitably continue, but now in Punjabi. There are vehemently conspiratorial conversations going on among the groups of twos and threes, with derisive remarks about fellow members being shared and avidly relished. The wisdom of the agenda items is being questioned in highly impertinent Punjabi idiom. Opinions are again being consolidated, arguments chiseled, analyses wrought, only to be presented once again in Urdu, in the post lunch session, for the express purpose of being finalized, documented and drafted, and of course in English.

A professor of Punjabi language and literature counsels his son, a tenth grade student, in carefully worded Urdu, about the absolute importance of English as an international language of higher learning, and indispensable for any academic progress in the fields of science and engineering. He further advises his son in Urdu, never to use Urdu in his new English medium school, where use of any other language except English is banned as a matter of policy. After this paternal, worldly wise exercise in pedagogy, the professor gives a call to a colleague and discusses the prospects of the forthcoming conference on lamentable state of Punjabi language in Punjab, in the perspective of Punjab and the Raj. They share heart rending episodes reflecting upon the criminal neglect of the state education and cultural policy makers which are systematically pushing Punjabi and the concomitant Punjabi culture to extinction. ‘Just imagine’, he says in a hoarse voice, ‘the crying shame of it. It is not permissible to talk in Punjabi in Punjab Assembly’.

A maid servant belonging to a Punjabi village insists on talking to her upper class urban mistress in Urdu, not because of any service requirement, but for the thrill of it. Trying her tongue at Urdu, vaguely transforms her sense of being, a fleeting kick may be, but elevating still. The matron too, encourages the lingual perversity of her maid. The utterly Punjabi words of the village girl, solemnly interspersed in otherwise identifiable Urdu, create an effect so droll, that the Bibi sahib laughs and laughs. What a piece of good luck indeed, having a servant hard working and so terribly funny too.

These are just a few glimpses from the socio-lingual cultural scenario of the present day Punjabi existence. Phenomenologically speaking, the tri-lingualism, or multilingualism if you like, inherent here in the typical life world of a Punjabi, is a far cry from  other varieties  of multilingualism identifiable at the global level, for instance the bilingualism of the Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean speaking immigrants to English speaking America, not only because the Punjabis are no immigrants in Punjab, but because the inter-lingual and intra- lingual modes of their cultural existence are far more complex, than for instance, those of a Spanish speaking Mexican in California, because whereas the lingual predicaments of the latter may be understandable through the application of the ‘culture affiliation hypothesis’, or the minority group-affiliation hypothesis, proposed by the cross cultural psychologist, the tri-lingual mess of the Punjabis requires for more varied conceptual tools for its proper comprehension.

One such tool, or tool kit rather is of course that of post-colonial theory, where it is almost a matter of universal agreement that languages of the colonizer and that of the colonized come to be diversely influenced by a traumatized and ambivalent process of reciprocal dissemination through colonial encounter. That something in the same category can be identified as one of the major factors of historical causality underlying the present day Punjabi tri-lingualism, is perhaps a fairly well established fact. Post colonial literary writers, from their own perspective of literary creativity, have adopted different working policies while dealing with the question of employing native and colonial languages as a medium of literary expression. Ngugi Wa Thiongo, the Kenyan writer for example, adopting a policy of total abrogation, stopped writing in English the language of the colonial heritage, and started writing in his native Gikuyu language, as he writes in his book “Decolonising the mind” (1956).

Salman Rushdie, another postcolonial writer in the essay “Imaginary Homeland”, however, assumes a posture more of appropriation using another piece of postcolonial jargon, and is in favor of working in new Englishes so that they could become therapeutic acts of resistance, and could lead to a remaking of a colonial language capable of reflecting the complexity of our postcolonial experience.

These postcolonial insights regarding the role of English in postcolonial literary situations, and others to, as the issue has been so extensively explored in post colonial writings, do explicate to some extent the contemporary trilingual scenario of Punjab, but they fall short of explaining a far more fundamental question at least from the vantage point of philosophy and cross cultural cognitive psychology. And this is a question which is related to the impact of a trilingual confusion as it can be gleaned from the phenomenological anecdotal accounts given at the beginning of this account, on the cognitive profile of the Punjabi mind. Simply speaking, one would like to ask, does this sociolinguistic cultural condition affect in any way the cognitive faculties of the Punjabi subjects.

At this stage it would be perhaps more interesting to place the issue in the wider perspective of cross-cultural psychology of language. David Matsumoto, a well known scholar in this field after critically analyzing a lot of research conducted on the relation between lexicon, syntax and grammar, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics, of different languages and the cognitive peculiarities of their native speakers, remarks:

“These observations make it clear, that the people of different cultures, structure the world around them differently, at least in the language they use to describe the world”.

Matsumoto’s remarks are in line with the famous and rather controversial hypothesis, the so called Sapir Whorf hypothesis, named after the pioneering teacher and student pair of American anthropologists. Their position on the issue is not only based on extensive empirical evidence but is philosophically profound too. As Edward Sapir puts:

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activities as ordinarily understood, but very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society”. Edward Sapir (The status of linguistics as a science).

The same position is further fortified with far more deeper implications by Benjamin Lee Whorf:

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.’ (Language, Thoughts and Reality pp. 212-214)

Controversy revolving around the empirical validity of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been fairly wide ranging, due to its far-reaching implications. Since the initiation of the hypothesis in 1930’s, many a piece of research work has been published, for and against it. It would be obviously beyond the scope of this piece of writing to attempt even at a summary of the intellectual legacy, but it would be relevant to refer to Matsumoto’s assessment of present bottom line position of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In his opinion the support for Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is weaker in the area of lexical difference between languages, but in his words

‘A less studied area that of syntactic and grammatical differences between languages provides strong evidence for the claim that languages influence cognition. Perhaps even stronger evidence will be found in future studies of how the pragmatic systems of different languages influence speakers’ thought processes’.

It is this feature of language called pragmatics, referring ‘to the system of rules governing how language is used and understood in given social contexts’, which is most relevant for understanding the conceptual exigencies of the issue at hand, the trilingual ambience of the present day Punjab. When applied, it generates a question about a historic-cultural specificity. What is the system of rules which governs the use of Punjabi, Urdu and English and how it is to be understood in the social context of Punjab. In other words can Sapir-Whorf hypothesis shed some light on this issue? The answer, obviously could hardly be settled through mere speculation, but would involve a lot of rigorous research with well defined methodology, something which perhaps has never been attempted. A battery of tests will have to be devised to evaluate the performance of the members of different subclasses of Punjabis, and to determine how far their faculties of thinking, conceptualization, problem solving, inductive reasoning, creativity, innovative thinking, and may be philosophizing come to be affected by the hidden and sometime not all too hidden determinants of their trilingual cultural hybrid. Till that wishfully anticipated occasion it would be advantageous for our present concerns to try to benefit a bit more from some research, conducted on similar lines that is on the bilingualism of the immigrants especially in the US.

The Tragedy of Robert McNamara Does Not End With Vietnam

Robert McNamara, as Secretary Defence under Lyndon B. Johnson, was the chief architect of US war policy that resulted in death of tens of thousans of US soldiers and many more Vietnamese inthe Vietnam war.

by Will Bunch

Robert McNamara died today Monday, the 6th of  July 2009 at age 93. As Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and more notably Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, it was McNamara who oversaw America’s tragic military buildup in Vietnam. That made McNamara — right up until today’s news — a vivid anti-icon to those Baby Boomers who opposed the war — and I think you can make the case that his death is that of the most historical significance of the slew of recent “celebrity” passings, no matter how many millions of people are gathering outside the Staples Center to remember the Gloved One.

Bob McNamara was not a great man. He was a man with great intelligence that didn’t prevent him from executing a plan that led to the unnecessary slaughter — for reasons that remain hard to fully comprehend — of tens of thousands of Americans and many more Vietnamese. He spent next four decades trying to come to terms with the banality of evil, with the horror of what he and those around him had done, but even his unusually candid apologies never seemed to go far enough:

The secretary of defense was a key figure in decisions to escalate the war between 1961 and 1965, and he readily concedes that the assumptions upon which he and his colleagues acted were badly flawed. They approached Vietnam, he recalls, with “sparse knowledge, scant experience and simplistic assumptions.” Victims of their own “innocence and confidence,” they foolishly viewed communism as monolithic, knew nothing about Indochina, and were “simple-minded” regarding the historical relationship between China and Vietnam. They badly misjudged Ho Chi Minh’s nationalism and consistently overestimated South Vietnam’s ability to survive. Regarding the key decisions of 1965, he admits he should have anticipated that bombing North Vietnam would lead to requests for ground troops. He concedes there should have been a public debate on the July 1965 decision for war. Over and over he acknowledges that he should have examined the unexamined assumptions, asked the unasked questions, and explored the readily dismissed alternatives.

The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy — because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed “best and brightest” in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our policy-makers knew nothing or cared little about the long history and convoluted ethnic and religious politics of Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no plan for the proper military follow-up to a period of “shock and awe” bombing. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we totally misjudged the “nationalism” of the people who lived there and how they would react to a long American occupation. And perhaps most importantly, In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no real “public debate“ as we marched headlong and foolishly into 2003 — with way too many “unexamined assumptions,” “unasked questions,” and “readily dismissed alternatives.”

I actually spoke, very briefly, on the phone with McNamara in early 2003 in an effort to interview him for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I am a reporter. Like a few other journalists in that critical hour, I was hoping some of his tragically acquired wisdom might infuse the tepid pre-war discussions, and like all other reporters in those pre-war months, he told me he was holding off on commenting (as noted in the link above, he had a lot to say in 2006…when it was too late). That was a damned shame — even though I can’t imagine it would have tipped the rigged scales.

(Right)  Late Rober McNamara, a recent photo

Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, it’s hard not to imagine there wasn’t some higher purpose to McNamara’s longevity. You could argue that it was a cosmic punishment, of sorts, to live so many years with the searing memories of so many who died so horrifically because of his misguided decisions from the comforts of his big desk at the Pentagon. Or you argue that he was still here in the early 2000s as a kind of a warped prophet, a flesh-and-blood monument to the folly of militarism. If that is true, then the fact that America refused to pay any attention is Robert McNamara’s greatest tragedy of all.

Source:

The writer Will Bunch is Author of the book “Tear Down This Myth”

Time Has Come For Pakistan To Decide

Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani and the US General face to face

by PETER CHAMBERLIN

The trusted watch-keepers of the world have turned their hearts to midnight plunder, while they carried-out their duty standing guard over mankind, who blissfully, unaware, continued to sleep.  Morning rapidly approaches and the householders are sure to demand an accounting.

The exploding world economy and the expanding war are but symptoms of the great mental sickness that afflicts society, waves of warning of the tsunamis that lie directly ahead.  The dominant ideas and ideology that drive our world are all collapsing around us, falling from the weight of their own corruption and immoral baggage.

In the ongoing warfare of ideas, the selfish immorality of the old order is proving to be its downfall, as it meets the impenetrable resistance of the higher ideals of selflessness and human compassion.  When the heart of the people is exposed to the emotionally crippling images of the children of war, then and thereafter, their only concern becomes the ending of the scourge of war.

Human nature is naturally compassionate, no matter how much the person has changed from the innocence of their youth.  Even evil men must feel the heart’s emotional tugging at their consciences, no matter how deeply they have buried it, at the sight of such a suffering little one.  Knowing that you and your government did this to these children and thousands more just like them, just like your own children that you so dearly love.  We are the authors of what you see.

For God so loved the world that he sent us all sons and daughters, to melt our cold hearts and to expose our buried consciences.  Human suffering is probably the most powerful motivation for good on this earth.  It moves men to take-up arms to avenge it.  It motivates others to offer their own lives that others might suffer less.

Humankind has the means to save itself from itself, just as surely as it has the means to cause its own extinction, all that separates the two is the gulf of choice and human freewill.  Those of us who believe in a higher power, The One who created all things both great and small, know for certain that mankind will one day rise to the challenge before him.  We know that the promise of eventual world peace is a solid truth, just waiting for enough people to understand and choose to reach out with us.  Peace is truly just a handshake away, all that is lacking is the will to effect change and the desire to leave this world a better place.

The only question is how long before we as a people begin to care about our fellow man?  This is the one factor that determines how much the suffering will intensify before we arrive at our predetermined solution.  Efforts spent shoring-up the old collapsing political/economic structure only add to the suffering by adding to the length of the suffering and wasting limited resources in futile attempts to repair the rotten, immoral order that compelled mankind’s sprint to self-destruction.

This sort of thing makes it hard to win hearts and minds

Military adventures, intended to deflect the coming collapse merely increase our national guilt for having failed in our voluntary task of standing watch at the ramparts of freedom, guarding the rights of God’s creation with one arm, while we killed and indiscriminately erased both people and human rights with the other strong arm.  Our military became our means of plundering our brothers’ resources and rights, because we were trusted it to defend our friends against foreign aggressors.

We reach-out our hand to both friend and foe, expecting commerce, while preparing to wage covert war upon them.  We buy our friends in the world, the rest we simply intimidate or secretly undermine.  From behind the shield of nearly omnipotent military power we have bribed and browbeat the world into submission to our ideas, our ideology, our economic schemes.  Our cutthroat system of buying, selling and extorting our friends based solely on profit instead of need, therefore it is designed to weed-out everyone (regardless of their needs) who don’t have the cash to meet they need.  The “haves and have-nots” exclusionary economic system is about to be crushed under the impending weight of the hungry misery it spreads far and wide.

The immorality of the current system will bring forth a new moral economic system from the violence of the old one dying.  Each war or epidemic of violence that wracks the nations is a cry for help, as a segment of society explodes as a result of the local contradictions.

The war on Pakistan is a case in point.  Here we have compelled our most faithful ally to engage in full-scale civil war as the means to salvage our failing economic order, by way of seizing the Caspian oil and gas reserves.  We have forced Pakistan onto a path towards its own destruction as a feeble-minded calculated gamble to avert our own deserved dissolution. It seems only logical that a nation which feeds its own insatiable appetite for more of everything by depriving the poorest of the poor nations of the little that they have to call their own, would seek to avert its own profit loss by spreading death and suffering amongst the very people who have time and again proven to be among its best friends.

History has proven that some of America’s most trusted friends and allies have been the recipients of her most insidious and deadly intrigues. Pakistani leaders are delusional if they think that their friendship with the United States is stronger than that of Italy, or Germany.

The CIA turned Pakistan into the “epicenter of terrorism” for a reason.   That reason went way beyond the mission against the Soviets, or else the training camps would have been shut-down and some attempt would have been made to clean-up the mess they had made when the Russians left Afghanistan.  The CIA kept the camps and the madrassas running, turning-out thousands of good jihadis.  By relying on the factor of “deniability,” they put the training camps in Pakistani hands.   This should have been understood by Pakistan’s leaders for what it was, a euphemistic way to express the reality that the Army and the ISI were always intended to be America’s scapegoat.  That time has come.

America has turned the tables on Pakistan. Just as Pakistan has used their proxy army, the local Taliban to stage running battles (some were for real), in order to fool the United States about Pakistani intentions in the war on terror, the new administration is using their own creation, the “Pakistani Taliban” (TTP), to call the Army’s bluff about its latest war in its tribal region.  The generals can no longer get away with merely chasing the local Taliban from one agency into another, or anything less than waging total war in all of FATA and the NWFP.  Pakistan’s “double-game” is over, while America’s double-games have barely begun.

Gen. Kayani has been trying to follow in Musharraf’s footsteps, running a limited pretend all-out war production, even following the same order of the previous war on Waziristan, tribal jirgas, lashkars, economic siege, etc.  The General’s neatly dressed, never dirty, determined-looking soldiers faithfully posed for countless publicity shots, putting on a great show for the international circus media.  Army spokesmen claim to have killed 1,500 terrorists in Malakand and elsewhere, always taking place beyond the range of the camera’s lens.  There are no “embedded reporters” in Pakistan.  The only news coming out of the region is approved after passing through several layers of filtering by the controlling governments there, especially by the one all-controlling super government.  If Pakistan is really out to get Mehsud, as Kayani boasted, then it is because that is what Obama wants Pakistan to do.

(Right) Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani with former COAS, Gen. (R) Pervez Musharraf

The Predator strikes are the Pakistani strategy, intended to ease their citizenry into a renewed fight in S. Waziristan.  (SEE: Paramilitary Pretense, Who Controls the Predators?) The last two attempts to carry the operation into the militant home base were met by fierce resistance on the ground, as well as in Pakistan’s streets.  The people became so enraged that this path of slowly boiling Pakistan’s “frogs” became the only feasible alternative.  This theory means that Mehsud is either an asset of the ISI or their CIA bosses. And the regular terror attacks upon Shiites and their shrines, even attacks on outposts of the Frontier Corp are likely the work of the ISI, just as the militants have been claiming in various interviews.  As unlikely as this all seems, no other theory explains the curious behavior of Pakistan’s government and military and mountains of circumstantial evidence linking the ISI to the militants.

“So while Pakistan’s dysfunction is entirely Pakistan’s fault, American naivete cannot get a pass because Pakistan is a basket case. In the Age of Obama, America has to do better. Anyone that was really interested in debilitating the Punjabi-dominated, Hindu-hating, right-leaning, military-dominated Pakistani establishment would have to be recklessly foolish if it went and helped rebrand the Pakistan army in the wake of eight years of Musharraf and a devastating and humiliating defeat at the hands of the country’s lawyers. Yet that’s exactly what President Zardari has done since the May 8 offensive was launched into Swat. The Swat offensive has helped rehabilitate the image of the military.”

(Right) Mullah Nazir, the Taliban commander in South Waziristan and a chieftain in the Ahmedzai Wazir tribe.

If Pakistan was really pursuing a policy of “divide and rule” in its negotiations with Mullah Nazir, seeking to separate the powerful warlord from Baitullah Mehsud before launching a new war in S. Waziristan against him, then the Army would not have allowed the continuing Predator attacks on Nazir to take place, or go unanswered.  None of this happened.  If they were serious about overtures made to the Wana warlord then they most certainly would not have shelled his offices.

Obama is driving the former enemies together.  This is Langley’s intention.  Mullah Nazir has not been the sole target of drone attacks for the past year to thwart Pakistan’s peace initiatives with the militants (since Washington controls everything Islamabad does), the reason is much more sinister than that.

If the United States government was truly at odds with the Army over American attacks upon Pakistani citizens, carried-out in order to sabotage Pakistan’s war plans, then there would be swift reprisals, because such an affront to Pakistan’s sovereignty would be far worse than merely “counter-productive.”  Everything is going according to the Imperial game plan–American drones attack all pro-Pakistani militant leaders, ignoring everyone who is killing Pakistanis.  The targeted leaders coalesce into a powerful, motivated union.

The generous benefactors of Maulana Fazlullah and his TNSM forces were sponsors of state terrorism, directed mostly at girls’ schools and CD shops in the North West Region.  Their murderous rampage and deceptive Shariah pacts forced Army intervention.  Predator attacks upon Mullah Nazir intensify, until he begins to fight back, forcing the Army to scrap plans to divide the Taliban as a means to avoid a massive tribal war, focusing only on Mehsud.  Meanwhile, some unknown outfit bombs Shia mosques and shopping areas (Nazir blames the attacks upon the Army), stoking the war in Kurram.  Bahadur honors his pact with Nazir and Mehsud; he fights back, forcing the Army to broaden their planned offensive to include N. Waziristan against their better judgment.

*Never once, do the generals complain, or offer resistance to American violations of sovereignty. Instead, they follow the orders of their American masters, while the President of Pakistan continues to represent the President of the United States, instead of his own people, who are being killed by the dozens and the hundreds by the good old USA!

Hard as they may try to set their own course, Pakistan’s generals have surrendered their souls to the devil when they plotted with American generals to deceive their countrymen into passively, even enthusiastically accepting the new war.  The war in Waziristan (both North and South) will be fought on Obama’s terms.

According to Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas:

“It was thus obvious that the confrontation between the militants and the military in North Waziristan would escalate because the US is unlikely to give up its policy of using drones to target militants positions.”

In other words, for the first time, one of the silent generals dared to explain the Army’s position. ISI concerns about “shaping the battlefield” and confining the war in Wana to Mehsud didn’t amount to a hill of beans to Petraeus and Mullen, Obama insists that Pakistan go against the generals’ better judgment and incite a “tribal uprising.”

The attacks in N. Waziristan by Gul Bahadur and the artillery strikes upon Nazir’s headquarters, both a bi-product of the Predator prevarications, as well as the recent assassination of Pakistan’s other “ace in the hole, Qari Zainuddin, have destroyed Pakistan’s last chance to restore the writ of the state without resorting to all-out civil war.  Either Gen. Kayani submits entirely to Obama’s will, including the planned submission to Indian domination afterwards, or he stands-up to the United States, meaning he stops the drone attacks and reveals the entire ugly scenario that the CIA cannot allow anyone to reveal. * “Al Qaida” is fake.  The war on terror is a fraud.  The fraud is a plan for world war.  And we all know that neither Gen. Kayani, nor any other Pakistani official will ever reveal the “great game” or the plot to destroy the Islamic Republic.

The United States corporacracy is a monstrous devouring beast and “Islamist terror” is her illegitimate offspring.

Mr. Chamberlin is an American journalist who runs ThereAreNoSunglasses Weblog, Building An American Resistance Movement. This column is reproduced by permission. He can be reached at peterchamberlin@naharnet.com

© 2007-2009. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists

Mr. Qadhafi’s Half Truth

President Muammar Qadhafi of Libya has always been an idiosyncretic persona. When he calls Pakistanis fanatic Muslims, he stoops to the mainstream media in the west, who likewise consider all Pakistanis as fanatic Muslims. Devout Muslims yes, but they are not fanatic Mr. Qadhafi. The Libyan leader should know that Islam no doubt is a very strong factor in the life and polity of Pakistanis as a whole. But to say that religion is the only factor which determines the nationhood of Pakistan is not the whole truth. Pakistan as a country has historically been inhabited by the people living around the great Indus River and its civilization. These people were living here even before the advent of Islam.  – AFP photo

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A TANGLED WEB OF REGIONAL CHALLENGES

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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A Note for WOP Readers: It’s almost a month now that the Washington Times published an article by the Libyan Leader carrying his views on Pakistan and its status as a nuclear power. Why am bringing it under discussion now? Because I saw it a few days ago.

It appears though that the article has been written all in sincerity, yet while commenting on various issues especially the one on this country’s very reason of creation, its raison d’ etre, the Libyan head of state appears to falter and consequently draws conclusions which negate facts of history as well as the contemporary situation in Pakistan.

Titled as Pakistan Quagmire, writes the Libyan leader:-

“The West, particularly America, and Israel never wished Pakistan to have a nuclear bomb. But on May 28, 1998, they woke up to the fact that Pakistan had indeed become a nuclear state and their intelligence services failed to anticipate the detonation of a nuclear device by Pakistan. Countless books, articles and speeches called the Pakistani nuclear bomb, the “Islamic bomb; “as loaded a term as any; as many considered it a doomsday weapon directed against their interests.”

Mr. Qadhafi is very right in his assessment of the west and Israel that they never wanted Pakistan to go nuclear. As a matter of fact they still don’t. But his calling the nuclear bomb ‘made in Pakistan’ as an Islamic bomb itself shows the very biased nature of such a statement, or is he so naïve to profess ignorance on western media’s campaign who have made it a habit to use this term as a slant against Pakistan!

Obama talking peace, dropping bombs – in Pakistan

Hard Rain Keeps Falling

“I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it.”

– Bob Dylan

by CHRIS FLOYD

While the usual gaggle of sycophants and media hive-minders — along with some ordinarily perspicacious analysts — tell us that Barack Obama literally changed the course of human history by disgorging a great load of thrice-chewed cud about nuclear disarmament in the first week of April, in Prague, this year, the high-tech drone war the great hero of peace is waging inside the sovereign territory of America’s ally, Pakistan, is helping drive tens of thousands of people from their homes and killing civilians almost daily.

I.

Obama’s speech in Prague was a bold, creative, world-shaking, epochal address whose full import will only be understood many years hence by future historians, then declared no less than Juan Cole. But the good professor seems to have mislaid his laser pointer — the sharp-focused beam that just a week ago skewered Obama for his outright lies and Cheneyesque manipulations in announcing his “comprehensive strategy” to escalate and expand the “Af-Pak War”. Indeed, just two days before Obama’s pseudo-epiphany in Prague, Cole was accurately delineating the folly and falsehoods permeating Obama’s Afghanistan policies.

Yet like so many, Cole seemed dazzled by Obama’s nuclear boilerplate, hailing the president as “among the more creative and bold leaders the world has seen in the past half-century.” (Admittedly, that is a mighty low bar.) Cole even found some reason to hope that that Obama would follow the logic of his disarmament rhetoric and somehow force Israel to give up its arsenal of nuclear weapons. But there was nothing in Obama’s speech that had not been said dozens if not hundreds of times before by American presidents from both parties, going back decades: We pledge “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Nuclear proliferation must be stopped. Rogue states can’t have nuclear bombs. We will work with the Russians to reduce our stockpiles. What president has ever said otherwise? Has there ever been a U.S. president since the atomic evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who has not made an impassioned plea to rid the world of these terrible weapons?

And of course, the brute fact is that the United States is bound by solemn treaty to work toward the reduction and eventual elimination of its nuclear arsenal. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obliges the government of the United States “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures” to bring about complete nuclear disarmament in the world. Obama’s “bold,” “new” vision is, quite simply, part of his job description; or rather, a legal requirement for his office.

But what celebrants dazzled by Obama’s assertion that he is “committed” (that great weasel-word of the high and mighty) to doing what he is obligated to do, failed to notice — or at least failed to highlight — were Obama’s other well-worn bromides in the speech: the ones where he makes the ritual declaration of America’s continuing readiness to whip out the nukes at a moment’s notice — and to carry on with the decades-long, ever-expanding boondoggle of the “missile defense shield.” As The Times reports:

“Mr Obama said: ‘Make no mistake: as long as these weapons exist, we will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defence to our allies.’

“He added that the continued threat from Iran, as well as the North Korean test launch, underlined the need for the missile shield that the US, much to the dismay of Moscow, plans to base in the Czech Republic and Poland.”

In other words, as long as any other nation has nuclear weapons, the United States will keep its own nukes primed and ready and rarin’ to go. And of course, as long as the United States retains its weapons, then other nations will also keep their arsenals, in the never-to-be-discounted event that they might become an “adversary” of the United States or one of its allies. This neat little dynamic means that we will never see “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” — no matter how many world-shaking, epoch-making speeches are delivered in the shadow of Kafka’s Castle.

The “missile shield” is of course another spur to nuclear proliferation, as the United States steadily rings the globe with an advanced weapons system that can just as easily be used for offensive operations as for its putative “defense” function. Come to think of it, it is actually only effective as an offensive system, because, despite decades of war pork and rigged tests, the missile “shield” is singularly unable to shoot down incoming missiles. Again, if some nuclear-armed nation was installing such a system on your frontier, you might want to hang on to your own nukes too — or get some if you didn’t have any yet.

Epochal epiphanies and kairotic events should be made of sterner stuff. That old hard rain is still looming on the horizon.

II.

“Gordon added after a pause: ‘It has often happened in history that a lofty ideal has degenerated into crude materialism. Thus Greece gave way to Rome, and the Russian Enlightenment has become the Russian Revolution. There is a great difference between the two periods. Blok says somewhere: “We, the children of Russia’s terrible years.” Blok meant this in a metaphorical, figurative sense. The children were not children, but the sons, the heirs, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible but sent from above, apocalyptic; that’s quite different. Now the metaphorical has become literal, children are children and the terrors are terrible, and there you have the difference.’”

– Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

*The hard rain of nuclear war remains metaphorical (except for the remaining survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan). But there is another hard rain of death — death without metaphor, the thing itself — falling on the villages of Pakistan from the literally faceless, literally soulless remote-control drones of the American military. In undeclared, unsanctioned acts of war, they are sent across the border to fire heavy missiles, usually on undefended villages, and almost always on residential areas.

(Right) Drone attacks continue in Pakistan causing more collateral damage  than hitting or killing the extremists

The targets — we are told — are “militants” of various stripes, but of course the robot drones — often controlled by “pilots” safely ensconced on military bases thousands of miles away, often in the leafy suburbs of the Homeland itself — cannot climb down out of the sky, walk through the ruins, and identify the dead. Pakistanis on the ground can see the bodies, however; they are the ones pulling out the viscera-smeared corpses of women and children — and innocent men as well; contrary to the near-universal belief among America’s bipartisan Terror Warriors, every adult male of Muslim background is not a terrorist, and their deaths by drone do not automatically constitute a successful “kill” of a militant.

In considering the ramifications of Obama’s escalation of the drone war, we understandably tend to focus on the individual attacks themselves: pinpoint, quickly in, quickly out, over and done with. And even if we denounce the inevitable “collateral damage” when a house or group of houses is destroyed, or when the wrong target is struck, the small scale of each individual attack still leaves the impression of a contained, localized phenomenon. But this is a gross distortion of the reality. For the purpose and nature of a terrorist attack is not just the destruction of an immediate target; the point is to engender widespread fear and chaos: Where will the next strike come? When will it come? Who will die next time?

(And make no mistake: a drone assault on an isolated, defenseless village is a quintessential terrorist attack, designed to induce terror, punish the enemy and force change by deadly violence. It is in no way comparable to any traditional notion of honorable combat. It is simply industrialized, corporatized, computerized slaughter.)

So the effects of Obama’s drone war are not limited to the few houses destroyed here and there. The attacks have spawned, or greatly added to, a humanitarian catastrophe that remains largely hidden from the world — and certainly from the well-wadded Western “liberals” who cheer Obama’s savvy toughness in the “good war” on the Af-Pak front. As The Times reports, almost a million people have been driven from their homes in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas to escape the American drones, and the bombs of Washington’s Pakistani proxies:

“American drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack, 13 people were killed. The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.

(Right) The Internally displaced persons (IDP’s) who have been forced to live in camps near Mardan, due to Pakistan Army’s operation in Swat, Dir and Bajaur.

“As many as 1m people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army (Its more than 3 millions now after the Swat operation started in the last week of May this year Ed.)….

“So far 546,000 have registered as internally displaced people (IDPs) according to figures provided by Rabia Ali, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Maqbool Shah Roghani, administrator for IDPs at the Commission for Afghan Refugees. The commissioner’s office says there are thousands more unregistered people who have taken refuge with relatives and friends or who are in rented accommodation.

“Jamil Amjad, the commissioner in charge of the refugees, says the government is running short of resources to feed and shelter such large numbers. A fortnight ago two refugees were killed and six injured in clashes with police during protests over shortages of water, food and tents.

“On the road outside Kacha Garhi camp, eight-year-old Zafarullah and his little brother are among a number of children begging for coins and scraps. ‘I want to go back to my village and school,’ he said.

(Left) A child from Swat (part of an IDP family) weeps in anguish on way to a camp near Maedan

“With the attacks increasing, refugees have little hope of returning home and conditions in the camps are worsening as summer is very much there and the temperatures soar.”

Much of the worst damage has been done by Pakistani forces urged by their funders in Washington to step up attacks on their countrymen. The Times again:

“Baksha Zeb lost everything when his village, Anayat Kalay in Bajaur, was demolished by Pakistani forces. His eight-year-old son is a kidney patient needing dialysis and he has been left with no means to pay. ‘Our houses have been flattened, our cattle killed and our farms and crops destroyed,’ he complained. ‘There is not a single structure in my village still standing. There is no way we can go back.’

“He sold his taxi to pay for food for his family and treatment for his son but the money has almost run out. ‘God bestowed me with a son after 15 years of marriage,’ he said. ‘Now I have no job and I don’t know how we will survive.’

“Pakistani forces say they have killed 1,500 militants since launching the anti Taliban operations in Bajaur. Locals who fled claim that only civilians were killed. Zeb said he saw dozens of his friends and relatives killed. Villagers were forced to leave bodies unburied as they fled.”

*In the political schizophrenia induced in a state forced to serve a foreign master’s interests as well as its own, the Pakistani government has alternated between savage attacks in Washington’s service and sudden truces and peace deals with militant groups. But even when the local bombs stop falling, the American drones keep sailing across the border in ever-increasing numbers, keeping the people of the region locked in fear and on the run.

[Coffins of the victims of a missile attack in north west Pakistan]

As each passing week of the American drone campaign brings yet another harvest of civilian deaths, more and more Pakistanis are radicalized, and the government — the nuclear-armed government — grows ever more shaky. If the state structure in Pakistan ultimately breaks apart from the pressures of the Terror War, its nuclear arsenal will be up for grabs. Thus the attacks ordered by Obama in Pakistan are escalating the threat of exactly the kind of nuclear instability that he decried in Prague.

“I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard….”

Chris Floyd is an American writer and frequent contributor to Counterpunch. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.

Chiniot: The City and its Mosque

The magnificient Prayer Hall of the Mosque

by Najma Khan

In the days of the Raj, the British officials used to record all matters of a district in the special gazettes. These were the dossiers of information on almost every subject. A glance on the District Gazetteer of Jhang in those days describes the district in following words “the surface of the district presents three levels on the extreme west the high sand dunes of the Thal, in the centre the two low-lying river valleys and on the extreme east a portion of the Sandal Bar”.

Jhang historically has been the district and Chiniot, a tehsil town or sub district of Jhang. The people of Chinot had always been demanding a district status for their town or merge it as a tehsil of Faisalabad, as distance wise the town was much nearer to Faisalabad than Jhang. Then compared to Jhang, it had and still has more arts and crafts as well as trade and architectural splendors unique to the city of Chiniot. This always made the people to demand for a proper recognition of their town which was historically and culturally better placed to claim the status of a district itself.

A further dig into the ancient history reveals importance of Chiniot especially during the period of the Mughals as the city stood at a prestigious pedestal, being an inter-provincial trade centre. Its craftsmen were scattered all over the Hindostan contributing to the marvelous architecture of imperial Mughal buildings spread over Agra, Delhi and Lahore.

Situated on the left bank of the river Chenab, the city then could be considered the richest jewel set in one of the picturesque valleys in the area. Even today, it stands on a rock related to an outcrop of rocks barely two miles away where the Chenab pierces its way through and in the process splits up into two giving rise to an island of unsurpassed beauty and grandeur.  A grove of date palms provides cool shade.

To view the rising sun from any of the surrounding rocks is an unforgettable experience in itself.

Birth of a city named Chiniot

As the story goes, in ancient times, a Hindu princess by the name of Chandanvatti, used to visit the banks of Chenab. Fascinated by the romance that prevailed almost all the time on the river bank, she decided to build a city along the river itself. So a city was built and it was named Chand Niyot after the beautiful princess whose brainchild this city was. Winds of times carried ancient whispers to our age as we come to recognize Chand Niyot now as Chiniot.

The credibility of this legend though, is yet to be tested, but its romance – is alluring. Being an ancient city, its earliest record of existence suggests that it may have been the cradle of some ancient civilized urbanity under a Sanskrit name. A reference in Rig-Veda by some scholars implies a city name now known as Chiniot. The city is said to have been mentioned in the Ramayana too and subsequently by Alberuni in his Kitab-ul-Hind.  It is also mentioned by history writers as depicted in certain stone structures in the reign of Moryan Kings as well.

In the 7^th century AD, the city is reported to have come under the administration of Brahmin Chach, one of the ancestors of Raja Dahir, who was later defeated by Muhammad Bin Qasim. Chiniot was among five provinces ruled by the young Muslim commander in early 8^th century AD.

The Shahi Mosque

Main enterance of the mosque as viewed from the prayer hall

Today, the city is world renown for its splendid architecture and the amazing craft of its artisans. Some 160 km west of Lahore, Chiniot offers many buildings of historic magnificence and import.  Amongst all those, the Shahi Mosque stands aloft with its glorious past and sheer beauty with intricate floral patterns which make the mosque much distinct from many such similar buildings. To a great extent, its architectural design resembles the Grand Shahi Mosque of Delhi, India.

Not much is known about the origin of the Mosque. Though called as Shahi Mosque [imperial], yet it is not known with certainty that the mosque was constructed on the orders of any emperor. It is, however, generally believed that the Mosque was built by Nawab Saad Ullah Khan of Chiniot [Grand Wazir in Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s court].

Saad Ullah Khan lived in Pataraki, a secluded village on the banks of river Chenab nine miles away from the main Chiniot city.  His father Ameer Bakhsh was very poor and passed away on the very evening his son Saad Ullah was born. For the early part of his life, Saad Ullah lived in orphanage, passed through extreme poverty and deprivation, then moved to Lahore after the death of his mother and started as a fakir seeking alms near Lahore’s Wazir Khan Mosque to pay for his educational expenses. Very soon the people of Lahore started to recognize him as Hafiz of the Holy Quran and a public speaker who could captivate the masses listen him for hours. His wisdom and vision led him to the court of Emperor Shah Jahan and he won the Emperor’s favor by his honest counseling and skilful articulation in certain court matters. In the year 1645, this poor orphan of Pataraki was invited, through a Shahi Farman (royal decree) to take over the office of Wazir-e-Azam [Grand Wazir].

(Left) Interior: decoration on marble

It seems that Saad Ullah Khan decided to build this mosque in Chiniot to offer his gratitude to the Almighty for this grand reward. The construction began in 1646 and continued till 1655. Maulvi Noor Ahmed Chishti recorded the building of this mosque in Tehqiqat-e-Chishti in 1867 and mentions that Sang-e-Surkh [red stone] was used, but this suggests he never visited the mosque himself for the mosque is built of a stone called Sang-e-Abadi [Abbri in some records].

The mosque is set on a single storey podium some 15.6 ft above the ground. An exceedingly handsome edifice of hewn stone obtained from adjoining hills decorates its external façade. The internal court has an ablution pool and three domes over a prayer hall. Three domes stand out like the petals of a crown and four minarets in all corners of the mosque give impression of a floral bouquet. This design can also be seen in Jamia Mosque Dehli [built around 1644] and also on the arches of Lal Qila. It clearly suggests that Shahi Mosque’s construction began somewhere around 1646. Many believe that this mosque was built by Wazir Khan but he died in 1641.

(Left)  The minaret at sunset

The mosque stretches 108.6 ft East-West and 97.87 ft North-South excluding the stairs. On the eastern side of the mosque, the stairs measure a little above 20ft and on the northern side around 12.6 ft. long rows of side rooms [four in the north and five on the south] of vast courtyard measure 28.9 x 26.3 x 9.6 ft. the vast prayer hall has four rows of 8 pillars each. Every part of the ceiling falling between the pillars is decorated with magnificent design and color.

The vast courtyard measures 70.5 x 71.2 ft with an 18.8 ft square ablution pool. There’s no door in the southern part of the mosque like the one in Jamia Masjid Delhi. A narrow stairway in the south east leads to the roof above where three giant domes stand majestically surrounded by four minarets originally built in Sang-e-Larzan [the trembling stone]. They used to sway slightly with the strong wind, but during their restoration and renovation, they have been replaced by ordinary stone.

As the British came to replace the mighty Mughals, much of Chiniot’s glorious architectural treasures suffered neglect and many were taken over as private residences, so the city lost much of its old grandeur yet the Shahi Mosque of Chiniot still retained much of its past magnificence to relate the tales of the splendors the city once had.

All Photographs shot on location by Umair Ghani

WOP is intending to bring out a printed version of its special issue in 4 colour offset on Distt. Chiniot. The issue will particularly carry stories on Chiniot’s history, heritage, culture, arts and crafts, Chinioti families in trade & industry and above all on its artisans. If you have anything to share with us (texts, photographs incl. family portraits of historical value), please contact us.

Paramilitary Pretense, Who Controls the Predators?

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BY PETER CHAMBERLIN

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(Left) In an exclusive interview to As-Sahab, an Islamic website, Mullah Nazir of South Waziristan gives his version of ‘Pakistani Taliban phenomena.

’In a world where all the Western media and most of the foreign press has proven that it cannot be trusted to tell the truth we cannot possibly know who our soldiers are fighting in Pakistan or why.  Every news source gives another version of the “official truth” as determined by the powers that be.  We know that we are witnessing at least one strategic “great game” unfolding in the region, more likely, there are multiple psychological warfare operations playing-out in Pakistan’s western region.

Both the US and the Pakistani Government lie about Taliban

When both, the American and the Pakisani government regularly lie about the Taliban that they fight and others that they want to fight, then it makes as much sense to find reports by someone who has interviewed the accused militants themselves.  The following quotes [in dark blue] are from Pakistani Taliban TTP leader Maulvi Nazir, taken from an interview with him on the Islamic site As-Sahab.

Should we ever believe the word of a “terrorist/freedom fighter,” for that matter, should we ever believe words crafted by psy-operators?  Whatever the truth about this man’s words, the As-Sahab interview is a rare opportunity to peer into the mind of a TTP leader.

At 34, Mulla Nazeer Ahmad is representative of the new Taliban, just like his teammates Nek Mohammad, Baitullah Mehsud, Maulana Fazlullah and the Dadullah brothers.

Why do most of the Taliban commanders use titles such as Mullah, Maulvi or Maulana? Who trains them?

This is the new Taliban, most of them bearing the honorary title of  “Mullah, Maulvi or Maulana,” because they are graduates of the *radical Saudi/US Sunni madrassas where, from an early age, they are brainwashed, by studying radicalized texts, such as the disinformative “Jihadi textbooks*” which were produced for the CIA by the University of Nebraska’s Afghanistan Department. )Tutored in the guerilla sciences in the CIA/ISI training camps which were built for “jihad” against the Soviet occupation forces, too young to participate themselves, these “extremist” radicalized boys were *ticking time bombs, awaiting the next jihad.

Here in the tribal areas, the Mujahideen are content with war. When there is no war, they start depressing. We are not afraid of war. War has raised the spirits of the Mujahideen.

This second-generation militant army was set into play as part of the long-range plans of the first extremist American president and vice president, Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., by the same two out-of-control spy agencies who had trained and armed their brothers and fathers in the eighties. *The continuity of their plan determined US foreign policy for the next thirty years.)  In 1996 a second extremist American president set these mujahedeen veterans and trainees loose upon the people of the former Yugoslavia.  Again, in 2001, a third extremist American administration called forth the militant militia, this time to play act the part of a mythic Islamic army of superpower stature.  From the remnants of the final battle of the Cold War arose “al Qaida,” the threatening slayer of superpowers.

This interview with Pakistani Taliban leader Nazir or ”Nazeer” offers a unique glimpse into this “enemy” conjured-up by the CIA and the Pakistani secret service ISI, to represent all of the Islamic world in this apocalyptic Republican production of a “clash of civilizations.” In contradiction to every story on the unfolding war against Pakistan that is carried by the subservient American, Pakistani, Indian and British presses, Nazir tries to set the record straight on who he is and who his men are fighting, before the Obama escalation gets underway and every unofficial news story gets swept away by the Western news filters.

Maulvi Nazir should know the truth about recent CIA/ISI collaboration in the war on terror, since he has lately been the focus of a psychological warfare operation known as the “Taliban split.”  For the past year he has been a special target of the most expensive manhunt in history, with Predator drones sweeping the land in “open season” hunts on Pakistani Taliban leaders. Dozens of remote controlled hunter/killers have prowled the skies over S. Waziristan trying to get a Hellfire missile shot at this slippery leader (they wounded him once).

Mullah Nazir denies he is working for Pakistan’s ISI

In the interview, Nazir dispels the manufactured myth that he has been working with the Pakistani Army to separate the “moderate Taliban” from the unreconcilable “al Qaida” types.  He claims that the dispute within the Pakistani Taliban between himself and Baitullah Mehsud was brought about by the ISI to split the movement.  He denies that the Taliban have attacked anyone other than military forces, or that they were part of the group that attacked Mumbai, alluding to another militant group at work in the area.

We do not know the Mujahideen who sacrificed their lives in India, but we lament our loss that why we could not go forth ourselves to lay down our lives there. The sacrifice they offered was a very great one. It lofted the spirits of the Mujahideen. We pray for them and consider them to be sincere with Allah. As for India, it should know that immense numbers of the Mujahideen lie awaiting for them here in the tribal areas and inside Pakistan. If it proceeds to attack, then let it be aware that Allah willing, we are fully able to answer back and too ready to give away our lives..

Terms Jihad in Kashmir as wrong coz both governments i.e. of India and Pakistan are Kufr (the infidels)

He rejects the separate peace deal that was signed between the TNSM militant group led by Maulana Fazlullah and the ANP led government of the NWFP, prior to military operation in Swat, Dir & Bajaur as a deception to divide the organization. He rejects the militant groups waging war against India in Kashmir as tools of ISI.

This is an affair being run by the ISI and it is ludicrous to hope that the Shariah or Islam shall come this way. Thus the Jihad through which the ISI has put people into deception can bear no fruit. Our advice to those of our brothers is that they should support us here and join forces with us. We offer sacrifices to establish the Shariah and the law of Allah. The Kashmiri Jihad does not help us forward in achieving our objectives. There is a law of kufr in India and a law given by the British in Pakistan. One of these two brands of kufr shall prevail in Kashmir. It isn’t Islam that would reign…and so our sacrifices will go in vain.

It is our sincere advice to those of our Mujahid brothers that they should renounce servitude to the ISI.

TTP funded by India, Russia or Israel?

Nazir refutes local conspiracy theories that claim his group works for, or is funded by India, Russia or Israel (but he fails to mention Iran).

These tribes have done Jihad against the British and the Soviets before this, and we simply are Mujahideen. This propaganda against us is absolutely false. We have risen for Jihad and are giving sacrifices to establish the rule of Shariah. The assertions that we have come from India and that MOSAD finances us are a stratagem of the ISI. We haven’t received money from anyone and have been Mujahideen from old times. These tribes have been sacrificing since the British era and are laying down their lives to this day. We fight with them in Afghanistan too and are enemies of the occupation forces there. This propaganda is utterly false and groundless. Anyone who is in doubt should come here and observe us and have a look at the state of affairs…and then come to a decision about who gives us money…is it India or someone else? Pakistan has put the people in deception that India or perhaps Russia finances us. Come on! We have warred Russia before this! And we are enemies to India and MOSAD.

He says that the terror attacks against other Muslims at local markets and mosques are the work of the government or someone hired by the government.

Actually, it is the ISI that does operations in mosques, not the Mujahideen. They are enemies to us and so they scare people about us being thugs and things like that. We are Mujahideen and we never carry out martyrdom operations in the vicinity of Muslims. It is the Army upon which we execute such operations. The Army is our target because it has aided the Americans. We do carry out martyrdom operations throughout Pakistan but we renounce and condemn those of them in mosques and marketplaces. It is our enemy that does it.

Drone attacks conducted with an understanding and support of the Government of Pakistan

Nazir claims that all the “spies” who were executed lately for planting tracking devices for Predator drone attacks worked for the ISI. Nazir also contends that the whole public uproar over the Predator attacks is a stage-managed production, since the ISI already controls the targeting of the drones by planting these SIM-card transmitters.

Pakistan has misled the common people that America carries out these attacks and we cannot do anything to stop them. All the spies that we have caught turned out to be employees of Pakistan. The location-tracking SIMs that they used, had been provided by Pakistan. We have also released their video clips. The spyware and intelligence is fully associated with the Army. A couple of days ago, an American CIA officer confessed that Pakistan’s airbases are being used for these attacks and that Pakistan itself is involved in them. They have even threatened us themselves that it is we who are striking you and that either you should renounce Jihad or we would attack. The assertion that America is behind this and we are helpless is only meant to deceive the public. All these attacks that have happened and are still happening are the work of Pakistan.

The entire drama generated in the international media over these ongoing drone attacks has been intended to raise Americans’ temperatures and to agitate the Pakistani people into embracing a war against the American and Pakistani-created “Taliban.”  It is extremely difficult to understand why individuals within the Pakistani government and military would participate in this plot to dismember Pakistan. The pay-off must have been irresistible.  It should be obvious by now that a large segment of Pakistan’s leaders work for the American government.

The purpose of the “Taliban split” psyop was to convince the people of Pakistan and the United States that there was a growing division between our governments, especially between our spy agencies.  We were supposed to believe that the Taliban were exclusively a Pakistani creation, forgetting that the entire operation was CIA from start to finish, in order to create a straw man foil to America’s role of hero, as it led a Western crusade to end this international “terrorist” operation.  Pakistan was to be our patsy in a genocidal operation, intended to sacrifice India and Pakistan to save the gods of Wall Street.

Washington is Playing a Deeper Game with China

There is more to the Xinjiang riots. Its not only the Uighur Muslims vs. Han Chinese but the pipelines which (will) bring crude from oil rich Eurasian lands to China. Since these oil lines pass through Xinjiang, a destabilization of the region is a convenient course for US Neocons to rock the boat of Chinese economy.

by F. William Engdahl

Note for WoP Readers: Most probably you have completed reading Matthew’s sarcastic remarks on Muslims’ reaction towards Xinjiang riots. I wished to further dilate upon this subject point by point, but then I saw article by William Engdahl at Global Research site. Global Research is a Non Profit Organization headed by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky (from where sometimes I reproduce for you, dear readers, articles of topical interest).

I saw Engdahl’s post and found that whatever (rather more than I could) I wished to say in response to Matthew’s post, has already been covered by Bill Engdahl, who has done an excellent job by elucidating all those points, particularly exposing Washington’s machinations in pushing up propaganda against the PRC which is squarely aimed to emotionalize the Muslim world in a way that Xinjaing riots could form the focal point in destabilizing China – a possibility which could hit right at China’s energy supplies thus crippling its economy – an Action Replay of the Soviet demise through Afghan proxies, to be only replaced this time by the Uighurs of Xinjiang. Engdahl’s informative, well articulated and thoroughly investigative post now follows….

After the tragic events of July 5 in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, it would be useful to look more closely into the actual role of the US Government’s ”independent“ NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). All indications are that the US Government, once more acting through its “private” Non-Governmental Organization, the NED, is massively intervening into the internal politics of China.The reasons for Washington’s intervention into Xinjiang affairs seems to have little to do with concerns over alleged human rights abuses by Beijing authorities against Uyghur people. It seems rather to have very much to do with the strategic geopolitical location of Xinjiang on the Eurasian landmass and its strategic importance for China’s future economic and energy cooperation with Russia, Kazakhastan and other Central Asia states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Liu Huiling, a Han Chinese patient, who was injured during ethnic clashes recuperates at People’s Hospital in Urumqi, western China’s Xinjiang province, Wednesday, July 8, 2009. Ethnic clashes have paralyzed Urumqi over the past several days, with minority Uighur and Han Chinese mobs roaming the streets and attacking each other. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

The major organization internationally calling for protests in front of Chinese embassies around the world is the Washington, D.C.-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC).

The WUC manages to finance a staff, a very fancy website in English, and has a very close relation to the US Congress-funded NED. According to published reports by the NED itself, the World Uyghur Congress receives $215,000.00 annually from the National Endowment for Democracy for “human rights research and advocacy projects.” The president of the WUC is an exile Uyghur who describes herself as a “laundress turned millionaire,” Rebiya Kadeer, who also serves as president of the Washington D.C.-based Uyghur American Association, another Uyghur human rights organization which receives significant funding from the US Government via the National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED was intimately involved in financial support to various organizations behind the Lhasa ”Crimson Revolution“ in March 2008, as well as the Saffron Revolution in Burma/Myanmar and virtually every regime change destabilization in eastern Europe over the past years from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Kyrgystan to Teheran in the aftermath of the recent elections.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in a published interview in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

A boy runs next to an overturned car just outside the Uighurs neighbourhood in Urumqi on July 8, 2009. (REUTERS/ Nir Elias) # #

The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The NED money is channelled through four “core foundations”. These are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to Obama’s Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the US Chamber of Commerce.

The salient question is what has the NED been actively doing that might have encouraged the unrest in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and what is the Obama Administration policy in terms of supporting or denouncing such NED-financed intervention into sovereign politics of states which Washington deems a target for pressure? The answers must be found soon, but one major step to help clarify Washington policy under the new Obama Administration would be for a full disclosure by the NED, the US State Department and NGO’s linked to the US Government, of their involvement, if at all, in encouraging Uyghur separatism or unrest. Is it mere coincidence that the Uyghur riots take place only days following the historic meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?

Uyghur exile organizations, China and Geopolitics

On May 18 this year, the US-government’s in-house “private” NGO, the NED, according to the official WUC website, hosted a seminal human rights conference entitled East Turkestan: 60 Years under Communist Chinese Rule, along with a curious NGO with the name, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO).

The Honorary President and founder of the UNPO is one Erkin Alptekin, an exile Uyghur who founded UNPO while working for the US Information Agency’s official propaganda organization, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as Director of their Uygur Division and Assistant Director of the Nationalities Services.

Will it be another war, this time, by the Uighur Muslims against Chinese Infidels; strategized, trained and financed by the Pentagon?

Alptekin also founded the World Uyghur Congress at the same time, in 1991, while he was with the US Information Agency. The official mission of the USIA when Alptekin founded the World Uyghur Congress in 1991 was “to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics in promotion of the [USA] national interest…” Alptekin was the first president of WUC, and, according to the official WUC website, is a “close friend of the Dalai Lama.”

Closer examination reveals that UNPO is in turn to be an American geopolitical strategist’s dream organization. It was formed, as noted, in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing and most of the land area of Eurasia was in political and economic chaos. Since 2002 its Director General has been Archduke Karl von Habsburg of Austria who lists his (unrecognized by Austria or Hungary) title as “Prince Imperial of Austria and Royal Prince of Hungary.”

Among the UNPO principles, is the right to ‘self-determination’ for the 57 diverse population groups who, by some opaque process not made public, have been admitted as official UNPO members with their own distinct flags, with a total population of some 150 million peoples and headquarters in the Hague, Netherlands.

UNPO members range from Kosovo which “joined” when it was fully part of then Yugoslavia in 1991. It includes the “Aboriginals of Australia” who were listed as founding members along with Kosovo. It includes the Buffalo River Dene Nation Indians of northern Canada.

The select UNPO members also include Tibet which is listed as a founding member. It also includes other explosive geopolitical areas as the Crimean Tartars, the Greek Minority in Romania, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (in Russia), the Democratic Movement of Burma, and the gulf enclave adjacent to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and which just happens to hold rights to some of the world’s largest offshore oil fields leased to Condi Rice’s old firm, Chevron Oil. Further geopolitical hotspots which have been granted elite recognition by the UNPO membership include the large section of northern Iran which designates itself as Southern Azerbaijan, as well as something that calls itself Iranian Kurdistan.

In April 2008 according to the website of the UNPO, the US Congress’ NED sponsored a “leadership training” seminar for the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) together with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. Over 50 Uyghurs from around the world together with prominent academics, government representatives and members of the civil society gathered in Berlin Germany to discuss “Self-Determination under International Law.” What they discussed privately is not known. Rebiya Kadeer gave the keynote address.

The suspicious timing of the Xinjiang riots

The current outbreak of riots and unrest in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in the northwest part of China, exploded on July 5 local time.

According to the website of the World Uyghur Congress, the “trigger” for the riots was an alleged violent attack on June 26 in China’s southern Guangdong Province at a toy factory where the WUC alleges that Han Chinese workers attacked and beat to death two Uyghur workers for allegedly raping or sexually molesting two Han Chinese women workers in the factory. On July 1, the Munich arm of the WUC issued a worldwide call for protest demonstrations against Chinese embassies and consulates for the alleged Guangdong attack, despite the fact they admitted the details of the incident were unsubstantiated and filled with allegations and dubious reports.

According to a press release they issued, it was that June 26 alleged attack that gave the WUC the grounds to issue their worldwide call to action.

On July 5, a Sunday in Xinjiang but still the USA Independence Day, July 4, in Washington, the WUC in Washington claimed that Han Chinese armed soldiers seized any Uyghur they found on the streets and according to official Chinese news reports, widespread riots and burning of cars along the streets of Urumqi broke out resulting over the following three days in over 140 deaths.

Unrest in Xinjiang: Where’s the Muslim outrage?

Xinjiang Riots and the Muslim World

by Matthew Clark

Note for WoP Readers: The riots between the Han Chinese and the Uighurs or Xinjiang Muslims, erupted in the first week of this month and resulted in more than 184 deaths. Without going to be investigative on who did what to whom, reports received were contradictory and they had to be; the Chinese have had their own version and in contrast the other version was that of the western media, who of late have made it a habit to exploit the Muslims’ sentiments – to their own advantage.

The post that follows is from Matthew Clark. In his article, which was published originally in the Christian Science Monitor, Matthew laments Muslims’ apathy towards their fellow Muslim brothers suffering at the hands of Han Chinese. In response to Clark’s observations I wrote to him via the blog site where his articles reappeared and I reproduce my comments as follows:-

Clark,

Muslims are not reacting over what happened in Xinjiang province of China because the games played by respective US administrations to make Muslims fight their wars and then leave them in lurch as it happened in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, in Chechnya and as it is now happening in Pakistan, the machinations, the orchestrated happenings, all have convinced Muslims that in every matter US governments have their own vested interests.

The Muslim populations world wide have seen how the Pentagon used Muslims’ sentiments to grind its own axe, all the time, by all US administrations, and at all times it were the Muslims who suffered in the long run. Your article on the plight of Uighur Muslims is not based on any sympathy for the Muslims, it is just an effort by the US to bleed China as she bled Soviet Russia, made the Afghans to lay their lives for America’s cause, which was termed as a war of Islam vs. the Infidels and now too, again the US is indirectly playing the same game under the garb of Muslims’ plight under a Chinese rule.

Muslims very well know now how the US propagandists and psy ops specialists converted Muslim youth into Zealots to fight against the Soviets and then turn their offsprings into Frankensteins.

And this Rebia Kadeer of WUC is running an NGO which is funded by the Pentagon, how can then Muslims stand-up to side with the Uighurs when they know ultimately it is the Uighurs who will first fight the US war against China and ultimately the same Uighars will be punished being Muslims as the clash of civilizations is still in progress, the Neocons who want an NWO be introduced are still in their place, how can you expect Muslims to be fooled again and again. Muslim governments may be a stooge of the US presidents but the Muslims in general the common Muslims on the street now very well understand how were/are these games  played where Muslims were/will be a pawn in the great game and nothing else???

And now the article from Matthew.

Paramilitary police officers patrol on the main street in Urumqi, western China’s Xinjiang province. (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)

Muslims around the world have largely remained silent about last week’s deadly riots between Han Chinese and Uighurs. What makes this case of ‘oppression’ of Muslims different than others?

Shhhh! I think I just heard a pin drop.

Nope. It’s just more deafening silence from the Muslim Street in the wake of last week’s ethnic riot that killed more than 184 in China’s restive Xinjiang Province, home to the Uighurs, a Muslim minority group.

According to the Chinese government, the majority of the victims in the riot were Han Chinese, attacked by Uighurs who’ve complained for decades about being marginalized, abused, neglected, and oppressed ever since former Communist leader Mao Zedong launched a campaign to flood Xinjiang with Han Chinese in 1960s. But many of the victims were Uighurs, too, and thousands of Uighurs were arrested as a result of the melee. Many could face execution.

China also closed mosques last week – just one of many strict limits on freedom of expression in Xinjiang.

It’s the kind of stuff that would arouse passionate protests if a Western country were the one cracking down. (Remember the apoplectic protests over the Danish cartoon of Prophet Muhammad?)

But there were no Chinese flags burned in Karachi. No effigies of Hu Jintao smoldered in Cairo. No “Death to China” chants echoed through the streets of Tehran.

Not that the Monitor would ever be in favor of such protests against any country. But why does it seem as though there such a different response for China?

The Uighurs’ “spiritual mother,” Rebiya Kadeer (profiled here by the Monitor’s Beijing Bureau Chief Peter Ford), has some ideas.

“So far the Islamic world is silent about the Uighurs’ suffering because the Chinese authorities have been very successful in [their] propaganda to the Muslim world … that the Uighurs are extremely pro-west Muslims – that they are modern Muslims, not genuine Muslims,” she said at a press conference Monday in Washington.

Ms. Kadeer contrasted a lack of action from Muslim countries with the support Uighurs get from Western democracies and called on Muslim nations to do more.

Turkey drops the G-word

Days later, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called the situation “genocide” and thousands of Turks protested China’s treatment of Uighurs on Sunday. Turks share ethnic and cultural bonds with the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, so the support in Turkey goes beyond sympathy for fellow Muslims allegedly being oppressed by non-believers.

Iran’s clerics speak out

Iranian critics are starting to get into the act, too.

Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, a high-level cleric, demanded that Iran’s foreign ministry quickly condemn what he described as the Chinese government’s “horrible” backing of “racist Han Chinese.”

The news website Tabnak, backed by, Mohsen Rezai, conservative challenger of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused the government of hypocrisy in ignoring violence against fellow Muslims: “When Israel was striking Gaza, state radio and television aired round-the-clock reports and analyses about the massacre of Muslims, but now only short reports are heard. . . . During the Israeli invasion of Gaza, nearly 1,000 died in 20 days – or 50 per day. In China’s riots, nearly 100 Muslims were killed in a day. Our government is silent regarding clear carnage.”

But, by and large, the Muslim Street has been just as silent.

A plea from the Palestinian territories

“Muslims around the world have an absolute religious, moral, and human duty to identify with their oppressed brothers and sisters in [Xinjiang],” journalist Khalid Amayreh in an opinion piece on Islam Online, comparing the Uighurs’ plight to that of the Palestinians. “Muslims, as the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, must never betray or abandon other Muslims, especially in time of distress. Unfortunately, however, Muslim states and Muslim peoples alike have been largely silent in the face of these atrocities in [Xinjiang].”

Will this change? We’ll see.

Source: http://www.instablogs.com/

Enough. This senseless folly in Afghanistan must stop

Fifteen British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan in the last ten days, bringing the total to 179 and surpassing the number of UK deaths in Iraq. The troop “surge” which was meant to pacify Helmand province has become a nightmare for the British army. This unwinnable war must stop now. All British troops must be withdrawn to prevent any more futile deaths, and to stop the carnage suffered by the Afghan people. [Derek Wall, A British blogger and a green activist]

by Peter Preston

When something you’re doing is going badly wrong, the options are always limited. You can carry on, spade sinking deeper into the mire; you can take your shovel somewhere else; or you can take heed of the solid 42% demanding withdrawal in today’s Guardian/ICM poll – and just stop digging. There’s no “indefinite” hope left around Afghanistan for Nato troops now. There are 184 young British lives lost, and counting. Inescapably, the long overdue moment to stop has arrived – because none of the reasons for ploughing on makes the slightest sense.

But surely this war is about destroying “an incubator of terrorism” and thus “about the future of Britain itself”? Thank you, foreign secretary. Surely “denying Helmand to the Taliban in the long term” will help “defeat this vicious insurgency and prevent the return of al-Qaida”? Thank you, prime minister. I haven’t the heart to quote Barack Obama on the twin towers and “impunity” in similar vein. So much intelligent promise, such a grisly mistake.

The world is full of places where al-Qaida can hide and operate. Somalia, Sudan, twisting back streets from Jakarta to Casablanca. You don’t need the full military monty to wreak death and destruction. A few deluded kids from Bradford will serve quite as well. And, anyway, to quote Gordon Brown again: “Three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by our British authorities have links to al-Qaida in Pakistan.” Downing Street’s “crucible of terrorism” is somewhere east of the Durand Line. Our soldiers are fighting and dying in the wrong country – and that’s the idiocy that has got to stop.

In fact, in so many ways, Afghanistan isn’t a country at all: think five major ethnic groups, six major languages, and dozens of local district tongues; think an agglomeration of city states and fiefdoms that remind you of Europe’s hundred years’ war; think sadly about sophisticated, clever, resilient people, good at handling 21st-century weaponry in a society whose structures haven’t made it past 1400 yet. It’s a sideshow, a hopeless sideshow. It is also – as Farzana Shaikh makes clear in her brilliant new book, Making Sense of Pakistan – just another victim of the batty, contorted rivalry between New Delhi and Islamabad for subcontinental influence.

Why suppose that clearing the Taliban out of Helmand for a few weeks or months will solve any problems – as opposed to cost many more lives? While their fighters can flit back to Pakistan, it’s a mug’s game – but a mug’s game, too, if they merely stay in Pakistan and run their schemes from there. The crucial mistake, made almost unthinkingly by both Brown and Obama, is to conflate that infinitely porous border, with its caves, ravines and hiding holes, into the heart of the problem. It’s not. It is merely an area of extreme military difficulty, a reason why “search and destroy” doesn’t find much to destroy. The real problem lies far deeper than that.

Pakistan, as Shaikh argues eloquently, is an uncertain construct of a country, an idea that hasn’t quite worked, a would-be democracy where (25 years ago) the army got extreme religion in order to make itself more like a legitimate government – and where its military schemers literally invented the Taliban, first to drive the Russians out of the place next door, and then to keep Indian influence there at bay. (The obsession that keeps this nation together is India, India.)

But can the plotters who invented the Taliban now see their benighted baby die? Yes, they can. That is happening already inside Pakistan as the army finally abandons its reservations and moves wholeheartedly into action after the recapture of Swat. The people of Pakistan overwhelmingly know now who their enemy is. They want the bombings and killings that target them, in their streets and homes, stopped. And if, with a lot of help from New Delhi and a lot of active diplomacy from Washington, the historically lethal confrontation with India can be pushed into history, what is there left for the Taliban inside Afghanistan, a puppet state without its old puppet masters?

They can rule, to be sure: but only until the foe that has destroyed countless regimes before them – Afghanistan itself, intractable, restless, chaotic, ungovernable – destroys them, too. If Taliban land is cordoned off, isolated, consigned to its own devices, then it won’t survive for long. And if the Pakistani army, without constant western intervention, is left to do what it has to do, then Islamabad opinion will stay focused on its own future, under so much threat from within.

The true war on terror, as we glimpsed on the streets of Tehran a couple of weeks ago, is about hearts and minds, not soldiers dead in a ditch. The hearts and the minds that matter here are Pakistani ones. And the bloodiest delusion of the lot is to think that small surges in Helmand far away can win anything but yet more blood.

Source: wichaar.com

Sino-Indian Border Vibrations: Viewpoint China

T H E   D I S P U T E

·

The Chinese have two major claims on what India deems its own territory. One claim, in the western sector, is on Aksai Chin in the northeastern section of Ladakh District in Jammu and Kashmir.

The other claim is in the eastern sector over a region included in the British-designated North-East Frontier Agency, the disputed part of which India renamed Arunachal Pradesh and made a state. Several sections of the 2,200-mile border remain under dispute between the two Asian giants. India wants a Chinese-controlled section of Kashmir the size of Switzerland. China claims parts of Tibet what India calls its state of Arunachal Pradesh covering an area three times that size.

·

W H Y    IT   M A T T E R S

·

Because it’s China and India. Simply put, any spat between the two nations matters. Together, they account for 38 percent of the world’s population, and in 50 years, they’ll account for half of the world’s gross domestic product. And don’t forget, both have nukes. Bad relations between China and India are bad for everyone. Also, any shift in Sino-Indian relations over Kashmir could affect Pakistan, another nuclear state.

·

BAD RELATIONS BETWEEN CHINA & INDIA ARE BAD FOR EVERYONE

·

by Zhuhu Shanshan

·

An online poll conducted by huanqiu.com on June 10 shows that 90 percent of participants believe India poses a big threat to China after India announced it would dispatch 60,000 troops to the border with China.

The red inked line in subcontinent’s north west and the other in the north east are the two areas which stand in dispute between the two big neighbors in Asia.

The tension along the disputed border between the two countries has escalated in the last few weeks after India’s latest military move. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh claimed that despite cooperative India-China relations, his government would make no concessions to China on territorial disputes.

The Indian government’s tough stance has won applause among Indian extremists, but it’s not well-received in China.

About 74 percent people in the poll by huanqiu.com believed China should not maintain the friendly relations with India anymore after its military provocation. And more than 65 percent of people taking part in the poll believed India’s actions were harmful to bilateral ties and it is more harmful to India.

India’s military moves could cast a shadow over bilateral relations, said Dai Xun, an expert in military affairs, who described India’s actions as “plundering a burning house”, when the international community was focused on a reported nuclear test in the DPRK, destroying the mutual trust between neighboring countries.

An expert in the Asia-pacific region, Sun Shihai, with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told the Global Times that the two countries share a lot of mutual interests, so India has to cooperate with China; but India also needs to show its “will and resolution” to both domestic politicians and the international community.

“It (additional deployment) is not helpful t o resolve the border dispute, and could easily cause regional tension,” Sun said.

In 1962, India and China fought a brief war over the 3,500 km Himalayan border area. The two countries later signed a treaty and agreed to maintain “peace and tranquility” along the disputed frontier, but since then have made little progress.

This report was originally published by The Global Times in June 2009.

—

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US Predator strikes in Pakistan: Observations

Drone War Escalates; 365 Dead So Far in ‘09, Study Says

If you’ve been following the American drone war in Pakistan, you probably have a vague sense that the unmanned armada has been striking more frequently, and with greater lethality this year. The following study by the Long War Journal shows just how deadly, and just how fast-paced, the drone attacks have become: 31 reported strikes this year, compared to 36 in all of 2008; 365 already killed in 2009, as opposed to 316 last year. .

Of course, this is all based on media accounts of the attacks — and those reports are often sourced from Pakistani intelligence officials, who may have either dubious motives or limited information. Still, this study is definitely worth a look — especially to see which Taliban factions are facing the brunt of the American unmanned assault. [Photo: USAF] Source: Danger Room

by BILL ROGGIO AND ALEXANDER MAYER

The dramatically increased use of covert US air power to target al Qaeda and Taliban assets in Pakistan’s lawless tribal zones has sparked a controversy in the US and abroad. Critics of the airstrikes, which are carried out by unmanned Predator attack aircraft, contend that the actions violate Pakistan’s sovereignty, kill innocent civilians, and make enemies of Pakistani tribesmen. Proponents of the airstrikes say that they are necessary to prevent the next major attack against the West and to disrupt al Qaeda and the Taliban’s operations directed against Coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Whatever the case may be, the directive to ramp up the air campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas has been issued, first by President George Bush in the summer of 2008, and continued by President Barack Obama only days after his inauguration.

A look at the publicly available data on the US air campaign in Pakistan shows a marked increase in the frequency in attacks since 2008. These attacks are also becoming increasingly lethal. A little more than one in five of the strikes have killed a High Value Target. And an overwhelming number of strikes – nearly 90 percent – have taken place against al Qaeda and Taliban targets in North and South Waziristan.

Frequency of US strikes trending upward

Since mid-2008, the United States has dramatically increased the frequency of its airstrikes against al Qaeda and Taliban forces based in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Agencies.

Beginning in August 2008, the US began stepping up strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda elements in the tribal agencies. There were 28 airstrikes in the tribal agencies between August and December 2008 – nearly double the total number of airstrikes in the previous four years combined (the first recorded Predator strike in the tribal agencies took place in June 2004). There was one recorded strike in 2004, one in 2005, three in 2006, and five in 2007. [see Chart 1, Number of US Airstrikes]

In 2009, the frequency of Predator strikes in Pakistan has continued to trend upwards. There have already been 31 Predator strikes in Pakistan this year (as of July 18) – nearly matching the total of 36 strikes for all of 2008.

Charts on the number of US airstrikes inside Pakistan per year, the frequency of strikes in 2008 and 2009, the number of deaths in 2008 and 2009, a distribution of strikes by tribal agencies, and the territories targeted. Click image to view.

If airstrikes continue at the current rate, the number of strikes in 2009 could more than double the dramatic increase in Predator activity seen in 2008.

Increasing lethality of airstrikes

The lethality of Predator strikes inside the tribal agencies has also increased during 2009. Using low-end estimates of casualties (including Taliban, al Qaeda, and civilian) from US strikes inside Pakistan, we have determined that airstrikes resulted in 317 deaths during 2008. Already, the airstrikes in 2009 have surpassed that total, with 365 killed in 2009 as of July 18.

With the exception of October 2008, which had the highest monthly total for both number of airstrikes (10) and number of casualties (99), June and July of 2009 have been the most lethal months since the US airstrike campaign began in 2004 (85 and 70 killed, respectively).

Another indicator of the increasing lethality of US airstrikes inside Pakistan is the rising average number killed per attack. So far in 2009, the average casualty rate has been 11.77 killed per strike, compared to 8.81 in 2008.

High Value Targets statistics

Since the first recorded US Predator strike inside Pakistan in June 2004, the US has killed a total of 22 High Value Targets (HVTs), which include some of the high- and mid-level Taliban and al Qaeda leadership in the tribal agencies.

Some of the most important al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed by US airstrikes include: Abu Jihad al Masri, the chief of al Qaeda’s intelligence council; Abu Sulayman Jazairi, the chief of al Qaeda’s external operations branch; Khalid Habib, the commander of al Qaeda’s paramilitary Shadow Army; Osama al Kini, the head of al Qaeda’s operations in Pakistan; Abu Laith al Libi, the commander of Brigade 055; Abu Khabab al Masri, the chief of al Qaeda’s WMD program; Abu Hamza Rabai, al Qaeda’s operations chief in Pakistan; and Nek Mohammed, the leader of the Taliban in South Waziristan.

Despite these successes, many of the airstrikes have failed to kill senior al Qaeda leaders. On aggregate, since 2004 the US has killed a High Value Target in only 17 out of 76 airstrikes (22%). Of these 22 High Value Targets killed since 2004, nine should be considered top tier commanders. In 14 strikes, the US reportedly attempted to target a specific Taliban or al Qaeda leader (or leaders), but failed to kill the intended target. These strikes have included two failed attempts to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri – who is thought to be hiding somewhere in the Taliban-controlled areas of the tribal agencies – as well as two attempts to take out Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, who is based in South Waziristan. It was not possible to determine if High Value Targets were targeted in the remaining 45 strikes.

There are two reasons for this seemingly low ratio of High Value Targets killed per airstrike. First, the information on the targets is obtained from open sources, such as the media, so it is not always evident who or what was the target of a specific the attack; second, not all of the airstrikes have targeted al Qaeda and Taliban HVTs.

One major objective of the air campaign has been to disrupt al Qaeda’s network and prevent the group from striking at the US and her allies. Al Qaeda and Taliban training camps that are used by al Qaeda’s external operations branch have been a primary target. The external operations branch is tasked with carrying out attacks in the US, Europe, and India, and against other allies of the West outside the Afghan-Pakistan region. Al Qaeda operatives known to have lived in the West and holding foreign passports have been killed in several Predator strikes. One such strike on a al Qaeda in South Waziristan on Aug. 30, 2008 killed two Canadian passport holders as they trained in an al Qaeda camp.

The US has also targeted the senior leadership of al Qaeda’s external network. For instance, Abu Sulayman Jazairi, the former chief of al Qaeda’s external operations branch, was killed in a strike on May 14, 2008

Another major objective has been to disrupt the Taliban and al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban in Afghanistan receive significant support from within Pakistan, and the US has an interest in preventing nuclear Pakistan from becoming a failed state. Taliban groups that are very active against Coalition forces in Afghanistan, such as the Haqqani Network and Mullah Nazir, have flourished in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. Several large Taliban training camps that are known to train fighters for the Afghan front were the target of attacks.

One such attack took place in the Kurram tribal agency on Feb. 16, 2009. More than 30 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters were killed after airstrikes targeted a a training camp in the Sarpal region of Kurram. The camp was run by Bahram Khan Kochi, a commander of Taliban forces operating inside Afghanistan.

Locations of strikes

The vast majority of US airstrikes (88.2%) have been aimed at targets in North and South Waziristan, the heartland of the Taliban and the origin of the Taliban’s expansion throughout the tribal agencies and the Northwest Frontier Province.

Fully half (50.0%) of all strikes have been in South Waziristan. The area around Wana, the largest town in South Waziristan, has been hit by 11 US Predator drone strikes. Targets in North Waziristan have accounted for another 38.2% of all airstrikes. The North Waziristan town of Miramshah (and its surrounding villages) has been the recipient of 12 US strikes.

Areas controlled by Taliban leaders Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Nazir have been the most frequently targeted (19 strikes each). Eight of the last 10 strikes have targeted Baitullah’s forces. The Haqqani Network has also been a major target, having been struck 13 times. The territories of various other Taliban commanders have also been hit several times, including that of Hafiz Gul Badhar (4), Hakeemullah Mehsud (4), and Faqir Mohammad (3). A region administered by Abu Kasha al Iraqi, an al Qaeda operative who is active in North Waziristan, was attacked 6 times.

The US has recently been expanding its area of operations, however, directing Predator strikes in other nearby districts, including Bajaur, Kurram, and Orakzai. Two of the strikes have occurred in the Jani Khel region in Bannu, outside the tribal agencies. Al Qaeda’s Shura Majlis is known to have met in Jani Khel in the past.

Kifayatullah Anikhel

A Taliban commander under Baitullah Mehsud.
Date killed: July 7, 2009

Mufti Noor Wali

Suicide bomber trainer for the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Date killed: July 3, 2009

Khwaz Ali Mehsud

A senior deputy to Baitullah Mehsud.
Date killed: June 23, 2009

Abdullah Hamas al Filistini

A senior al Qaeda trainer.
Date killed: April 1, 2009

Osama al Kini

(aka Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam)
Al Qaeda’s external operations chief who was wanted for the 1998 bombings against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Date killed: January 1, 2009

Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan

A senior aide to Osama al Kini who was wanted for the 1998 bombings against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Date killed: January 1, 2009.

Abdullah Azzam al Saudi

Served a liaison between al Qaeda and the Taliban operating in Pakistan’s northwest. Azzam facilitated al Qaeda’s external operations network. He also served as a recruiter and trainer for al Qaeda
Date killed: November 19, 2008

Abu Jihad al Masri

The leader of the Egyptian Islamic Group and the chief of al Qaeda’s intelligence branch, and directed al Qaeda’s intelligence shura. He directed al Qaeda’s external operations in Egypt.
Date killed: October 31, 2008

Khalid Habib

The commander of the Lashkar al Zil or the Shadow Army, al Qaeda’s paramilitary forces in Pakistan’s northwest and Afghanistan.
Date killed: October 16, 2008

Abu al Hasan al Rimi

A senior al Qaeda operative.
Date killed: October 2008 – exact date unknown

Abu Wafa al Saudi

An al Qaeda commander and logistician.
Date killed: September 4, 2008

Abu Khabab al Masri

The chief of al Qaeda’s weapons of mass destruction program and a master bomb maker.
Date killed: July 28, 2008

Abu Mohammad Ibrahim bin Abi al Faraj al Masri

A religious leader, close to Abu Khabab al Masri.
Date killed: July 28, 2008

Abdul Wahhab al Masri

A senior aide to Abu Khabab al Masri.
Date killed: July 28, 2008

Abu Islam al Masri

Aide to Abu Khabab al Masri.
Date killed: July 28, 2008

Abu Sulayman Jazairi

The chief of al Qaeda’s external network. Jazairi was a senior trainer, an explosives expert, and an operational commander tasked with planning attacks on the West.
Date killed: March 16, 2008

Dr. Arshad Waheed (aka Sheikh Moaz)

A mid-level al Qaeda leader.
Date killed: May 14, 2008

Abu Laith al Libi

Senior military commander in Afghanistan and the leader of the reformed Brigade 055 in al Qaeda’s paramilitary Shadow Army.
Date killed: January 29, 2008

Liaquat Hussain

Second-in-command of the Bajaur TNSM.
Date killed: October 30, 2006

Imam Asad

Camp commander for the Black Guard, al Qaeda’s elite bodyguard for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri. Asad was a Chechen with close links to Shamil Basayev.
Date killed: March 1, 2006

Abu Hamza Rabia

Al Qaeda’s operational commander. He was involved with two assassination plots against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Date killed: December 1, 2005

Nek Mohammed

A senior Taliban commander in South Waziristan who had links to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
Date killed: June 18, 2004

Read more: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/07/us_predator_strikes_3.php#ixzz0LuJayGLR

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

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CIA Claims of Cancelled Campaign are Hogwash

[Note for WoP readers: As the resistance in Afghanistan grows up day be day [About a few days back, CNN in its headline news informed viewers that the current month so far has been the deadliest in Afghanistan. More number of US and British soldiers have died in Helmand province and elsewhere than in Iraq.

It appears Washington’s policy makers are shifting the burden of their setbacks in Afghanistan to Pakistan. Consequently drone attacks in Pakistani borderlands have been intensified as well. First were the reapers. Predators were primarily used in Afghanistan only but now these deadly machines are also in operation in Pakistan as well.

One can though give some element of doubt to US policy makers of “droning” Pakistani borderlands but who knows these assassins in the air bomb the hardcore militants or common civilians. In our last post some estimates on civilian vs. militants’ causalities were provided. A simple glance shows the number of civilian deaths far exceeds the number of militants.

It is understandable to some extent as the US officials themselves admit they gather the data on whereabouts of militants or the Al-Qaedists as they say is either based on media inputs or the common populace in the area. In both cases the wisdom of such a policy can be judged as nothing but fallacy.

The stark naked fact which people sitting in the glass houses of Washington D.C. are unable to understand these attacks are turning more and more youth not only in the FATA regions but also in the hitherto neutral or anti militants – anti-Taliban (the Pakistani brand) areas of Pakistan as well. According to recent reports, in the southern Punjab too, many youth have joined the ranks of militant groups, some of whom have also reportedly been involved in the suicide bombing attacks at Manawan Police Training Centre and a Rescue Centre in Lahore.

Question arises whom do these drone attacks benefit and till when? Does the US president want to bomb every home, every city to flush out terrorists?

If the State Department is banking upon the views held by a totally incompetent, impotent and an imbecile bunch of  Pakitani  nincompoops in Washington and Islamabad, then it is high time they revise their policy for they are falling into the same paranoia which the previous US administrations had in the Korean and Vietnamese wars. US is bound to loose this war as it lost the previous two wars. Interestingly, in the post WWII era, the only war it won was against the Soviets which it did with an active and solitary participation of the very people it is bombing now day and bight.

Tragedy of this whole scenario is that in the name of terrorism, so many lives will be lost, of Pakistanis, Afghans and the US, British and other nations’. Soldiers will be killed for a war which has no end.

At the end of my note, a few words from Chris Hedges (follows next) and Eric Margolis (following post):-

So says Chris Hedges: we’re in a quagmire in Afghanistan, and that we are, by meeting violence with violence, creating more problems for ourselves than we are solving:

India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan’s primary concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit Afghanistan. And the government’s well-publicized battle with the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.

The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle. It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy, al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France’s Lyon and London’s Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not need Afghanistan, and neither do we.

And Eric Margolis ends his finest piece on the subject as do I:

Dropping 2,000-pound bombs on apartment buildings in Gaza or Predator raids on Pakistan's tribal territory are as much murder as exploding car bombs or suicide bombers. Nayyar]…

The U.S. has been trying to kill al-Qaida personnel (real and imagined) since the Clinton administration. These efforts continue under President Barack Obama. Claims by Congress it was never informed are hogwash.

by Eric Margolis

.

CIA director Leon Panetta just told Congress he cancelled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders. The CIA campaign, authorized in 2001, had not yet become operational, claimed Panetta.

I respect Panetta, but his claim is humbug. The U.S. has been trying to kill al-Qaida personnel (real and imagined) since the Clinton administration. These efforts continue under President Barack Obama. Claims by Congress it was never informed are hogwash.

The CIA and Pentagon have been in the assassination business since the early 1950s, using American hit teams or third parties. For example, a CIA-organized attempt to assassinate Lebanon’s leading Shia cleric, Muhammad Fadlallah, using a truck bomb, failed, but killed 83 civilians and wounded 240.

In 1975, I was approached to join the Church Committee of the U.S. Congress investigating CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Add to America’s hit list Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan’s Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Chile’s Marxist leaders and, very likely, Yasser Arafat.

Libya’s Moammar Qadhafi led me by the hand through the ruins of his private quarters, showing me where a 2,000-pound U.S. bomb hit his bedroom, killing his infant daughter. Most Pakistanis believe, rightly or wrongly, the U.S. played a role in the assassination of President Zia ul-Haq.

To quote Josef Stalin’s favourite saying, “No man. No problem.”

Assassination was outlawed in the U.S. in 1976, but that did not stop attempts by its last three administrations to emulate Israel’s Mossad in the “targeted killing” of enemies. The George W. Bush administration, and now the Obama White House, sidestepped American law by saying the U.S. was at war, and thus legally killing “enemy combatants.” But Congress never declared war.

War Without Purpose

U.S. marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, trying to push into Garmser, in Helmand province, Afghanistan. As war intensifies, so do the casualties on both sides. Nobody knows how many more will be sacrificed on the altar of this endless war becoming terror itself, especially for the non combatant civilians who have nothing to do with the war games being fought in the area.

Before you go to the main post by Chris Hedges, here is a brief note from www.brusselstribunal.org/

The occupation is not about “security” for the Afghan people, any more than the occupation in Iraq is about “security” for the Iraqi people. Hiring of intelligence staff won’t help the present‘unintelligent’ US-NATO activities.

Nor will the present U.S. bombing campaign in Pakistan bring them “democracy” — the many “apologies” for killing civilians ring hollow.

Too many innocent civilians have suffered murder for this U.S.-NATO “security” in the so-called “War on Terror.” In the last two months, civilian deaths have multiplied exponentially. US contempt for life is evident.

by Chris Hedges

Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners, build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals.

Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.

The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26 Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling the number of wounded and killed.

In June, the tally of incidents involving roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000 by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and greater futility.

We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.

We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the Where’s Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.

No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we “liberating” the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don’t know what we are doing.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, announced recently that coalition forces must make a “cultural shift” in Afghanistan. He said they should move away from their normal combat orientation and toward protecting civilians. He understands that airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of civilians, are a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban. The goal is lofty but the reality of war defies its implementation. NATO forces will always call in close air support when they are under attack. This is what troops under fire do.

They do not have the luxury of canvassing the local population first. They ask questions later. The May 4 aerial attack on Farah province, which killed dozens of civilians, violated standing orders about airstrikes. So did the air assault in Kandahar province last week in which four civilians were killed and 13 were wounded. The NATO strike targeted a village in the Shawalikot district. Wounded villagers at a hospital in the provincial capital told AP that attack helicopters started bombarding their homes at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. One man said his 3-year-old granddaughter was killed. Combat creates its own rules, and civilians are almost always the losers.

China may attack India by 2012

A leading defence expert has projected that China will attack India by 2012 to divert the attention of its own people from “unprecedented” internal dissent, growing unemployment and financial problems that are threatening the hold of Communists in that country.

The Times of India

“China will launch an attack on India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India the final lesson, thereby ensuring Chinese supremacy in Asia in this century,” Bharat Verma, Editor of the Indian Defence Review, has said.

Verma said the recession has “shut the Chinese exports shop”, creating an “unprecedented internal social unrest” which in turn, was severely threatening the grip of the Communists over the society.

Among other reasons for this assessment, were rising unemployment, flight of capital worth billions of dollars, depletion of its foreign exchange reserves and growing internal dissent, Verma said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of the premier defence journal. In addition to this, “The growing irrelevance of Pakistan, their right hand that operates against India on their behest, is increasing the Chinese nervousness,” he said, adding that US President Barak Obama’s Af-Pak policy was primarily Pak-Af policy that has “intelligently set the thief to catch the thief”.

Verma said Beijing was “already rattled, with its proxy Pakistan now literally embroiled in a civil war, losing its sheen against India.” “Above all, it is worried over the growing alliance of India with the US and the West, because the alliance has the potential to create a technologically superior counterpoise.

“All these three concerns of Chinese Communists are best addressed by waging a war against pacifist India to achieve multiple strategic objectives,” he said.

While China “covertly allowed” North Korea to test underground nuclear explosion and carry out missile trials, it was also “increasing its naval presence in South China Sea to coerce into submission those opposing its claim on the Sprately Islands,” the defence expert said. He said it would be “unwise” at this point of time for a recession-hit China to move against the Western interests, including Japan.

“Therefore, the most attractive option is to attack a soft target like India and forcibly occupy its territory in the Northeast,” Verma said. But India is “least prepared” on ground to face the Chinese threat, he says and asks a series of questions on how will India respond to repulse the Chinese game plan or whether Indian leadership would be able to “take the heat of war”.

“Is Indian military equipped to face the two-front wars by Beijing and Islamabad? Is the Indian civil administration geared to meet the internal security challenges that the external actors will sponsor simultaneously through their doctrine of unrestricted warfare? “The answers are an unequivocal ‘no’. Pacifist India is not ready by a long shot either on the internal or the external front,” the defence journal editor says. In view of the “imminent threat” posed by China, “the quickest way to swing out of pacifism to a state of assertion is by injecting military thinking in the civil administration to build the sinews. That will enormously increase the deliverables on ground – from Lalgarh to Tawang,” he says.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

Posted: July 23, 2009

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Wall Street Journal Cheers on Obama’s Drone War on Pakistan: “Unmanned Bombs Away”

July 26, 2009 by Jeremy Scahill

Source: Rebel Reports

WSJ editors attack journalists who report on civilian deaths. Instead, they say, we should all just shut up and listen to U.S. intelligence agencies.

The Wall Street Journal is officially in love with President Obama’s undeclared air war inside of Pakistan’s borders. In an unsigned editorial, the paper enthusiastically endorses Obama’s use of predator drones to bomb areas throughout Pakistan. The WSJ editors praises the administration, saying “to its credit, [the White House] has stepped up the use of Predators.” The editors declare: “When Pakistan’s government can exercise sovereignty over all its territory, there will be no need for Predator strikes. In the meantime, unmanned bombs away.”

The paper accurately notes some of the reasons for opposing drone strikes: “the belief that the attacks cause wide-scale casualties among noncombatants, thereby embittering local populations and losing hearts and minds.” The WSJ also accurately reports:

Lord Bingham, until recently Britain’s senior law lord, has recently said UAV strikes may be “beyond the pale” and potentially on a par with cluster bombs and landmines. Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says “the Predator [drone] strikes have an entirely negative effect on Pakistani stability.” He adds, “We should be cutting strikes back pretty substantially.”

But Bingham and Kilcullen are naive fools, according to the WSJ editors. Moreover, they are fools who have been suckered by evil un-embedded reporters. “If you glean your information from wire reports — which depend on stringers who are rarely eyewitnesses,” the editors quip, “the argument [against drone attacks] seems almost plausible.” Right, these “stringers” who often risk their lives to reveal the human toll of U.S. bombings are far less credible than the fat cat editors of the WSJ (some of whom are probably in the Hamptons having servants clip their toe nails or mix their Martinis as I write this).

The WSJ editors descend from their thrones to mingle among the mortals and teach us the error of our ways:

Supporters of a religious party Tanzim-e-Islami rallying against U. S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The banners in Urdu demand on Zardari regime to either leave the government or get Drone attacks stopped.

Yet anyone familiar with Predator technology knows how misleading those reports can be. Unlike fighter jets or cruise missiles, Predators can loiter over their targets for more than 20 hours, take photos in which men, women and children can be clearly distinguished (burqas can be visible from 20,000 feet) and deliver laser-guided munitions with low explosive yields. This minimizes the risks of the “collateral damage” that often comes from 500-pound bombs. Far from being “beyond the pale,” drones have made war-fighting more humane.

Ah, yes, that famous humane war we have all been waiting for. Finally!

The WSJ editors then reveal the highly independent, impeccable source for their information: “A U.S. intelligence summary we’ve seen corrects the record of various media reports claiming high casualties from the Predator strikes.” Wow. Remember when the Bush administration was correcting all those errors about Saddam’s WMDs? Not surprisingly, the WSJ states that “In each of the strikes in 2009 that are described by the intelligence summary, the report says no women or children were killed. Moreover, we know of planned drone attacks that were aborted when Predator cameras spied their presence.”

The WSJ wants this U.S. “intelligence” shared with the American public and the world, arguing, “We understand there will always be issues concerning sources and methods. But critics of the drone attacks, especially Pakistani critics, have become increasingly vocal in their opposition. They deserve to know about the terrorist calamities they’ve been spared thanks to these unmanned flights over their territory.”

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Source

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“Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies”

After US Strikes, Afghans Describe “Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies;”

How many innocent civilians will die before the US changes its approach to the ongoing war in Afghanistan. This is an old but not very old essay on cruelty of the war in Afghanistan.

by Jeremy Scahill

As President Barack Obama dispatched some 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan, anger started rising in the western province of Farah, the scene of a US bombing massacre that possibly killed as many as 130 Afghans, including 13 members of one family. At least six houses were bombed and among the dead and wounded were women and children.

As of this writing reports indicate some people remain buried in rubble. The US airstrikes happened just hours after Obama had met with US-backed president Hamid Karzai, hundreds of Afghans—perhaps as many as 2,000— poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting “Death to America.”

The protesters demanded a US withdrawal from Afghanistan.In Washington, Karzai said he and the US occupation forces should operate from a “higher platform of morality,” saying, “We must be conducting this war as better human beings,” and recognize that “force won’t buy you obedience.” And yet, his security forces opened fire on the demonstrators, reportedly wounding five people.

According to The New York Times:

As President Barack Obama prepares to send some 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan, anger is rising in the western province of Farah, the scene of a US bombing massacre that may have killed as many as 130 Afghans, including 13 members of one family. At least six houses were bombed and among the dead and wounded are women and children. As of this writing reports indicate some people remain buried in rubble. The US airstrikes happened on Monday and Tuesday. Just hours after Obama met with US-backed president Hamid Karzai Wednesday, hundreds of Afghans—perhaps as many as 2,000— poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting “Death to America.” The protesters demanded a US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In Washington, the US installed Karzai said at the time that the US occupation forces should operate from a “higher platform of morality,” saying, “We must be conducting this war as better human beings,” and recognize that “force won’t buy you obedience.” And yet, his security forces opened fire on the demonstrators, reportedly wounding five people.

According to The New York Times:

In a phone call played on a loudspeaker to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. Afghan lawmakers immediately called for an agreement regulating foreign military operations in the country.“The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred,” Mr. Farahi said. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.”

Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.

The US airstrikes hit villages in two areas of Farah province last May. The extent of the deaths only came to public light because local people brought 20-30 corpses to the provincial capital. If the estimates of 130 dead are confirmed, it would reportedly be the single largest number of deaths caused by a US bombing since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially “apologized” Wednesday for the civilian deaths and Obama reportedly conveyed similar sentiments to Karzai when they met in person, later in the day Clinton’s spokesperson, Robert Wood, framed her apology as being based on preliminary information and, according to AP, said they “were offered as a gesture, before all the facts of the incident are known.” By day’s end, the Pentagon was seeking to blame the Taliban for “staging” the massacre to blame it on the US. Last night, NBC News’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said military sources told him Taliban fighters used grenades to kill three families to “stage” a massacre and then blame it on the US.

The senior US military and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, spoke in general terms: “We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of the civilian casualties,” he said. McKiernan left the specific details of the spin to unnamed officials.

According to The Washington Post,

“A U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that ‘the Taliban went to a concerted effort to make it look like the U.S. airstrikes caused this. The official did not offer evidence to support the claim, and could not say what had caused the deaths.” Meanwhile, according to the Associated Press, a senior Defense official who did not want to be identified “said late Wednesday that Marine special operations forces believe the Afghan civilians were killed by grenades hurled by Taliban militants, who then loaded some of the bodies into a vehicle and drove them around the village, claiming the dead were victims of an American airstrike. A second U.S. official said a senior Taliban commander is believed to have ordered the grenade attack.”

As the AP reported, “it was the first time the Taliban has used grenades in this way.”

While the Pentagon spins its story, the International Committee of the Red Cross has stated bluntly that US airstrikes hit civilian houses and revealed that an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead. “We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike,” said the ICRC’s head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker. “We are deeply concerned by these events. Tribal elders in the villages called the ICRC during the fighting to report civilian casualties and ask for help. As soon as we heard of the attacks we contacted all sides to warn them that there were civilians and injured people in the area.”

Read the entire ICRC statement here.

The Times, meanwhile, interviewed local people who contradict the unnamed US Defense officials’ version of events:

Villagers reached by telephone said many were killed by aerial bombing. Muhammad Jan, a farmer, said fighting had broken out in his village, Shiwan, and another, Granai, in the Bala Baluk district. An hour after it stopped, the planes came, he said.In Granai, he said, women and children had sought shelter in orchards and houses. “Six houses were bombed and destroyed completely, and people in the houses still remain under the rubble,” he said, “and now I am working with other villagers trying to excavate the dead bodies.”

He said that villagers, crazed with grief, were collecting mangled bodies in blankets and shawls and piling them on three tractors. People were still missing, he said.

Mr. Agha, who lives in Granai, said the bombing started at 5 p.m. on Monday and lasted until late into the night. “People were rushing to go to their relatives’ houses, where they believed they would be safe, but they were hit on the way,” he said.

In her earlier statement regarding the bombing, Clinton told Hamid Karzai “there will be a joint investigation by your government and ours.”

But before that investigation began, the Pentagon was already using its unnamed officials to blame the Taliban. It also bears remembering that the US track record of thoroughly “investigating” US massacres is pathetic. The UN said there was convincing evidence that last year’s US attack on the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan killed 90 civilians, but the military only acknowledged 30 civilian deaths.

Standing between Hamid Karzai and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari both of whom were in Washington for a tripartite meeting, , Obama said the US would “make every effort” to avoid civilian deaths in both countries (which are regularly bombed by the US). But as he was making those remarks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived in Kabul the very next week “to make sure that preparations were moving forward for the troop increase and that soldiers and Marines were getting the equipment they needed.”

Jessica Barry, a spokesperson for the ICRC said, “With more troops coming in, there is a risk that civilians will be more and more vulnerable.”

Writer Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Note: To update the post, some minor changes done in the text.

Posted: July 25, 2009

Source: Rebel Reports/www.alternet.com

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From Iraq to Afghanistan, US Wars Not Going According to Plan

Protesters brandished a plethora of handcrafted signs and banners reading: “Obama it’s your war now,” “America is losing its soul in Gaza,” “U.S. out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan NOW,” “College not combat,” “Hey Obama take a stand, U.S. out of Afghanistan” and “OK Democrats, now stop the war.” Bill Hackwel

by William Pfaff

Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was in Washington this week to consult with Barack Obama and American military and political officials, three weeks after the Status of Forces Agreement concerning U.S. forces in Iraq came into effect.

On the same day, in Iraq, tension was reported to be increasing between the Americans, whose combat forces were supposed to evacuate Baghdad and other cities at the end of June, and the Iraqi military and security forces, who were supposed to take over the Americans’ responsibilities.

American commanders complain that the Iraq authorities have greatly reduced the number of joint patrols, supposed to continue, and in other ways “clearly are signaling that we are no longer wanted” — according to an American officer quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Iraqi commanders have told the Americans no longer to run patrols, and not to conduct raids on suspect locations, without coordinating them with the Iraqis.

A foreign diplomat in Baghdad has said that the Iraqis are determined to show that they are now in charge, in the run-up to national elections next year. Robert Gates, the U.S. Defense secretary, says that the situation is not bad. However, attacks have sharply increased in recent days, and some observers insist that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government must do more to reconcile the former ruling Sunni minority if sectarian conflict is not to break out again.

The Iraqi prime minister is playing the nationalist card, a dangerous one to play when the Sunnis also have sectarian revindications, and a lot of grievances. Washington itself has a hand to play in this game, with 130,000 troops (and at least as many contract forces) still in the country, whom Barack Obama has promised to withdraw, and the American public wants withdrawn — and a demagogic American right, for whom national failure means treason.

This is not the way this war was supposed to end. For younger readers: Six years ago the American intervention was supposed to end in a multi-party democratic government, an ally of Israel against the supposed menace of Iran, the strategic base and headquarters for the U.S. as dominant actor in a “New Middle East,” and a permanent and secure source of oil for the United States. None of this has happened. Iran is the principal beneficiary.

Move to another front: Pakistan-Afghanistan. Here there was also supposed to be a straightforward job to do: drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan, into their refuges in the semi-inaccessible Tribal Areas of the Pakistan border. There, the Pakistan army, with American urging and help, would defeat and disarm them, asserting Pakistani national control over the region, as well as U.S.-NATO success in Afghanistan.

What actually is happening is unsurprising. Pakistan continues to look after its own national interests, as it has always defined them. This means that the separate radical religious and tribal movements that make up the Taliban continue to be considered an asset to Pakistan in its long-term struggle with India, in defense of its own security, and in order to recover Muslim-populated Kashmir, which India controls.

The “K”  word (the vale of Kashmir) in the Himalayan region continues to mar relations between two nuclear neighbours in South Asia.

The Taliban have also been for Pakistan an important instrument (originally supplied and financed by the United States — but there’s no time to go into that now, although the fact should be kept in mind), in keeping Afghanistan out of hostile hands in Pakistan’s equally long-term effort to control that country as providing Pakistan strategic depth and an additional Muslim bulwark against the threat of India.

Pakistan has made it clear now to Washington — to those who can read between the lines — that it wants no American troops inside Pakistan and no more collateral-damage bombing, and considers the American war in Afghanistan a futile and destructive effort, against whose consequences Pakistan must protect itself.

The growing opinion in Europe is that Afghanistan is the United States’ “new Vietnam.” The truth is that it is worse than Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the United States had a clearly identified enemy, supported by a responsible Communist state in North Vietnam with its government in Hanoi. The U.S. had a theory about what it was doing: suppressing the insurrection in the South, and bombing North Vietnam until the government stopped the war. All of this was, in principle, possible.

However the U.S. acted on a nonsensical theory about the world “going Communist” if the U.S. didn’t win, just as today the U.S. has an even more nonsensical theory about radical Islam conquering Muslim Asia and all of Europe, and then attacking the U.S., if Washington fails.

Unlike the Viet Cong, the Taliban are not a disciplined force acting under some government’s orders, and have neither the intention nor means to attack anybody outside Central Asia. They are motivated by nationalism, today focused against the United States, and by a desire to propagate their form of Islam.

In that respect it’s a war of ideas, which the United States has no theory about how to “win.” There is no way to make the Taliban surrender. At most they will temporarily fade away when U.S. and NATO forces begin to fade away, and fight again another day. There is no Taliban government to bomb. And there is no way to “make” Afghanistan a democratic ally of the United States. The “no’s” have it.

________

Source: Mathaba / (c) 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc. #

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Are We at (Robot) War in Pakistan?

It’s almost Shakespearean. But since we’re in the 21st century instead of the 16th, we seal our pact with the king by sending machines, not human assassins.

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by Noah Shachtman

Washington and Islamabad are “drawing up a fresh list of terrorist targets for Predator drone strikes“ in Pakistan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Militants crossing the border into Afghanistan would still be in the drones’ bullseyes, just like before. But Pakistani officials are also “seeking to broaden the scope of the program to target extremists who have carried out attacks against Pakistanis.”

If that’s the case, isn’t America, for all intents and purposes, at war in Pakistan? Only in this war, it’s our flying robots doing most of the fighting?

Crossing a border to chase militants is one thing — an organic expansion of a pre-existing conflict. This feels like a different matter: a commitment to the Pakistanis to put down their internal rebellion. It’s certainly linked to the first conflict (the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban have officially teamed up). But it’s not the same as the original fight — the one that started in Afghanistan.

Note: I’m not suggesting that we are at war with Pakistan, its people, or its government. But it seems pretty clear that the U.S. is almost (if not already) at war in Pakistan, against a whole series of militant networks.

UPDATE: It’s important to note that all of these militant groups share training, money, gear, and goons. So it’s natural to hop from one to the other — to keep on moving an inch further down this insurgent playing field. But travel one inch after another, and, eventually, you’re a mile down the road. Or, as Spencer Ackerman puts it: “Here’s where you feel like the frog who went for a leisurely dip in the warm stockpot bath and suddenly finds himself boiling,” he writes. “The American people are being asked to recommit in a major way to the Afghanistan war. It’s untenable to commit to a Pakistan war without their consent.”

“The American military has to be really, really careful about mission creep,” Jim Arkedis warns. “The military, as the Pentagon thinks it believes, can’t kill its way out of this problem, but this expanded target list only perpetuates the mindset that we can.”

I’d be curious to hear what you guys think. Drop me a line, or sound off, in the comments.

The latest drone strike went down yesterday — an attack on the network of Pakistani militant leader Baitullah Mehsud that killed at least eight. Continue readig…

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians.

Mehsud is the main suspect behind the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Her widower, Asif Ali Zadari, is now president of Pakistan — and, according to the Journal, a prime supporter of the unmanned strikes.

Which leads Slate’s William Saletan to wonder: “Are we buying his support by sending our drones to avenge his wife’s death?”

It’s almost Shakespearean. But since we’re in the 21st century instead of the 16th, we seal our pact with the king by sending machines, not human assassins, to bring heaven’s wrath on the warlord who slew his beloved. And this time, the wrath really does come from heaven. Put yourself in Zardari’s shoes. You’re being offered the chance to destroy your enemy with a power unknown to history’s greatest kings and generals: a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunting party.
Would you refuse?

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

[Photo: USAF]

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Source: Danger Room, Posted July 26, 2009

Empire’s Paranoia About the Pashtuns [1 of 3]

The ongoing hysteria about lightly settled, mountainous Pashtun tribal lands in Pakistan or or near the ill-defined Afghan border might seem unique to our imperial moment. So imagine our surprise when Juan Cole tells us it actually has a history more than a century old. And there’s nothing like a little history lesson, there, to put the strange hysterias of our moment into perspective? So who better to offer a little history lesson in imperial delusions of grandeur and peril? If you feel like a more extensive lesson in what to make of the gamut of issues where the U.S. and the Muslim world meet, or rather collide, don’t miss what he says. It’s a continual eye-opener. [In the image above: Winston Churchill in the Hussars just before he saw action in Pakistan].

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A CENTURY OF FRENZY OVER THE NORTH-WEST FRONTIER

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by Juan Cole

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First a Note from WoP: The Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan (FATA) have either, traditionally been autonomous or semi-autonomous region. Before the British, Pathan chieftains had their sway and prior to Mughals, the Pathan dynasty of Lodhis ruled the subcontinent. Later during the Mughal and the successive Punjab kingdom of Raja Ranjit Singh even, the Pashtun chieftains exercised their might though they either remained as satraps of the Delhi Darbar or were completely autonomous. During these epochal periods of history, they sometimes aligned themselves with the rulers in Delhi and other time with the man occupying the throne in Kabul. However, in the heydays of these empires, they retained their autonomous/quasi autonomous status in one form or another.

When the British expanded their rule, after the end of the Sikh kingdom of Lahore (which was the only region in the subcontinent which last of all, finally annexed to the Delhi Darbar), even during British rule, in spite of the best military maneuvering (a part of the great game played then between the British and the Tsarist Russia) the British could not subdue the whole of Pashtun borderlands.  Excepting the garrison towns of Peshawar, Kohat, Nowshera and Bannu, where every morning Union Jack was unfurled at all the cantonments, the areas beyond the garrisons, were completely autonomous and most of the time at war with Gora lords of the Delhi Darbar.

After various episodes of war and peace between tribes of the frontier and the central authority in Delhi, ultimately the parties agreed to maintain a status quo but now and then skirmishes always did take place.

In 1947, when British were to pack up, two independent states emerged on the landscape of Hindostan. The people of the North West frontier decided through a referendum to join the newly established state of Muslim Pakistan.

Qaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a statesman that he was, had the vision to assure at the very outset that all tribesmen inhabiting the PAKISTANI borderlands will enjoy an autonomous status within the state of Pakistan. Central Govt. will not interfere with the local customs and they will continue to have their tribal jirgas according to Pakhtunvali, the traditional Pathan code of life, and ever since they have enjoyed this status as loyal citizens of Pakistan.

Before 2001, one never heard of a single suicide attack from any area in the tribal agencies or FATA (as they are administratively called). There was never any trace of an Islamic Zealot from the Pashtun tribal belt of Pakistan nor was there any thing called Taliban or some Mujahid /s plotting to bomb some embassy, some building, fortress or army convoys in Pakistan, India or any where else in the world.

The plane hijackings were initiated and undertaken by Palestinian guerrillas in the sixties and suicide bombings were also initiated either by LTTE insurgents in Sri Lanka or the Palestinians in the Mideast peninsula.

Such things have entered in our borderlands only after 2001, when the neoconservatives under the senior Bush and later by his son Bush junior unleashed their all out offensive against Muslims under the banner of the so called clash of civilizations.

An outfall of these activities especially in Afghanistan has been the Pakistani borderlands. Unfortunately the militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan has taken many nuances some very ugly indeed. The ulterior motives of wars for control of energy and its transmission lines have made this area a hot bed of geopolitical endeavors, military ventures, adventures and misadventures.

It is in this context that you will find Juan Cole’s post as a highly interesting and thought provoking read. Its an eye opener for all actors on the great Asian stage, the Afghans, the Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, Russians but above all for our American friends in the Pentagon and the State Department. [Nayyar]

Funniest Thing Published by a News Magazine in the History of News Magazines

Holy Christ, this is a Newsweek “web exclusive” .

Gerald Herbert / AP

Swallow your milk

by Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Stand In

Why Obama should make George W. Bush his Mideast envoy.

By Gregory Levey

On Sunday, George Mitchell, President Obama’s Middle East envoy, arrived in Israel to confer with its leaders. Also visiting this week are Defense Secretary Robert Gates, national-security adviser James Jones, and Gulf States envoy Dennis Ross. It’s a full-court press on the Israelis, and the American wish list is long. They want Israel to stop expanding settlements; to stop building Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; and for hawks in the government to chill out while the U.S. is negotiating with Iran. And yet, odds are, they’ll come back to Washington empty-handed, for reasons having to do as much with atmospherics as policy: Team Obama just doesn’t have Israel’s full trust.

But there is someone who does—someone who could use a job, someone who argued straightforwardly for a Palestinian state, and yet someone who has the implicit admiration and regard of Israel. President Obama needs a new envoy to the region who can get results—and George W. Bush is his man.

Words fail me.

I do have this, however, which sums up my thoughts on the matter pretty well …

The Writer Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

Source: Posted  July 30, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

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Empire’s Paranoia About the Pashtuns [2 of 3]

FRONTIER WARD and WATCH

by Juan Cole

On a recent research trip to the India Office archives in London to plunge into British military memoirs of the Waziristan campaigns in the first half of the twentieth century, I was overcome by a vivid sense of déjà vu. The British in India fought three wars with Afghanistan, losing the first two decisively, and barely achieving a draw in the third in 1919. Among the Afghan king Amanullah’s demands during the third war were that the Pashtun tribes of the frontier be allowed to give him their fealty and that Britain permit Afghanistan to conduct a sovereign foreign policy. He lost on the first demand, but won on the second and soon signed a treaty of friendship with the newly established Soviet Union.

Empire’s Paranoia About the Pashtuns [3 of 3]

E Battery Royal Horse Artillery escaping from the overwhelming Afghan attack at the Battle of Maiwand.

A PARANOID VIEW OF THE PASHTUNS, THEN AND NOW

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by Juan Cole

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On July 21, 1921, a “correspondent” for the Allahabad Pioneer — as anonymous as he was vehement — explained how some firefights in Waziristan might indeed be consequential for Western civilization.

He attacked “Irresponsible Criticism” of the military budget required to face down the Mahsud tribe. He asked, “What is India’s strategical position in the world today?” It was a leading question. “Along hundreds of miles of her border,” he then warned darkly in a mammoth run-on sentence, “are scores of thousands of hardy fighters trained to war and rapine from their very birth, never for an instant forgetful of the soft wealth of India’s plains, all of whom would descend to harry them tomorrow if they thought the venture safe, some of whom are determinedly at war with us even now.”

Note that he does not explain the challenge posed by the Pashtun tribes in terms of typical military considerations, which would require attention to the exact numbers, training, equipment, tactics and logistics of the fighters, and which would have revealed them as no significant threat to the Indian plains, however hard they were to control in their own territory. The “correspondent” instead ridicules urban “pen-pushers,” who little appreciate the “heavy task” of “frontier ward and watch.”

Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for US until 9/11

Former FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, Sibel Edmonds exposes in her interview. how FBI officials too are involved in operations no less shoddier than their other counterpart, the chief spy agency of the United States of America.

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”

These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.

As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

Control of Central Asia

The goals of the American ’statesmen’directing these activities included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.

The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia ( Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.

Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.

In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)

According to Sibel:

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

Uighurs

Sibel was recently asked to write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that “our fingerprint is all over it.”

Of course, Sibel isn’t the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:

“were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China.”

And also that:

“Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia.”

In a separate interview, Margolis said:

“That illustrates Henry Kissinger’s bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.

The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden’s collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this.”

Rogues Gallery

Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she published eighteen photos, titled “Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,” of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called ‘President-in-exile’ of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called ‘government-in-exile’ was ‘established‘ on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.

Also featured in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery was ‘former’ spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumentalin the establishment of Turani’s ‘government-in-exile’ of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his “ Xinjiang Project” for Rand Corp is apparently the blueprint for Turani’s government-in-exile. Sibel has openly stated her contempt for Mr. Fuller.

Susurluk

The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.

Sibel states that “a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered ‘certain’ aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs).

One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chief of Counter-Terrorism for Turkey’s intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery. Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel’s gallery, Marc Grossmanwas Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman’s underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel into the spying ring.

The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.

Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo

Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel’s gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated $25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.

US interests also converged with those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.

Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.

State Secrets

Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony.

In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting ” ’sensitive diplomatic relations,’ protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia…” This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.

As Sibel says in the interview:

I have information about things that our government has lied to us about… those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.

Summary

The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.

It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.

The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.

Source: Inforwars.com Posted: August, 3, 2009. Cross posted Against All Enemies

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

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CIA’s Illegal Operations in Central Asia Using Islam & Madrassas

Sibel Edmonds

Court Documents Shed Light on CIA Illegal Operations in Central Asia Using Islam & Madrassas

Sibel Deniz Edmonds is a former FBI translator who says she saw evidence of “criminal activities involving U.S. officials. She grew up in Iran and  Turkey, later worked for the FBI, witnessing serious misconduct among her co-workers, and discovering that senior State Department and Pentagon officials were seemingly involved in corruption and Turkish elements of the nuclear black market.

Sibel is a former FBI linguist and the founder of the National Security Whistleblower Coalition. It’s a group made of former employees of law enforcement, intelligence agencies and the military. They push for reforms of whistleblower protections and increased accountability for government agencies.

Last year Sibel spoke with Worldview producer Jonah Meadows and explained what an FBI employee is supposed to do when she witnesses criminal activity on the job.

Last yea, during an immigration court case involving Turkish Islamic Leader, Fetullah Gulen, US prosecutors exposed an illegal, covert, CIA operation involving the intentional Islamization of Central Asia. This operation has been ongoing since the fall of the Soviet Union in an ongoing Cold War to control the vast energy resources of the region – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – estimated to be worth $3 trillion.

Court Case

The scene for these dramatic disclosures was an application for a Green Card in the Eastern District Court in Philadelphia by “controversial Islamic scholar” Fetullah Gulen. Gulen, who has been living in the United States since 1998, argued that he qualified for the Green Card as “an extraordinarily talented academic.”

The court case was covered extensively by the Turkish press. Leading Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported:

“Gülen’s financial resources were detailed in the public prosecutor’s arguments, which claimed that Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Turkish government, and the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, were behind the Gülen movement. It stated that some businessmen in Ankara donated 10 to 70 percent of their annual income to the movement and that it corresponded to $20,000 to $300,000 per year per person. It added that one businessman in Istanbul donated $4-5 million each year and that young people graduating from Gülen’s schools donated between $2,000 and $5,000 each year.”

Another leading Turkish newspaper reported (translated byRastibini)

Among the reasons given by the US State Department’s attorneys as to why Gülen’s permanent residence application was refused, is the suspicion of CIA financing of his movement.
[ . . . ]
“There is even CIA suspicion”

“Because of the large amount of money that Gülen’s movement uses to finance his projects, there are claims that he has secret agreements with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkic governments. There are suspicions that the CIA is a co-payer in financing these projects,” claimed the attorneys.
[ . . . ]
Among the documents that the state attorneys presented, there are claims about the Gülen movement’s financial structure and it was emphasized that the movement’s economic power reached $25 billion. “Schools, newspapers, universities, unions, television channels . . . The relationship among these are being debated. There is no transparency in their work,” claimed the attorneys.”

Who is Gulen?

Fetullah Gulen is “a 67-year-old Turkish Sufi cleric, author and theoretician,” according to a recent profile in the UK’s Prospect magazine. Prospect ran a public poll last month to find the world’s greatest living intellectual. Gulen ‘won’ the poll after his newspapers alerted readers to the poll’s existence. Gulen is also the leader of the so-called ‘Gulen Movement’ which claims to have seven million followers worldwide. The Gulen Movement has extensive business interests, including “publishing activities (books, newspapers, and magazines), construction, healthcare, and education.”

Gulen and the CIA

The fact that the prosecutors in the court cite documents that claim that Gulen has been financed in part by the CIA is remarkable for a number of reasons, even though there have been strong suspicions about the CIA’s involvement in the Gulen Movement for years. The Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, has repeatedly taken action against the Gulen movement for acting as a front organization for the CIA. In December 2002, Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported:

“Russian secret service claims: Turkish religious brotherhood works for CIA

The FSB, the Russian intelligence organization formerly called the KGB, has claimed that the ‘Nurcus’ religious brotherhood in Turkey has engaged in espionage on behalf of the CIA through the companies and foundations it has founded. FSB head Nikolay Patrushev has mentioned the names of these companies and foundations, saying, ‘The brotherhood engages in anti-Russian activities via two companies, Serhad and Eflak, as well as foundations such as Toros, Tolerans and Ufuk.’ Patrushev has accused the brotherhood of conducting pan-Turkish propaganda, of trying to convert Russian youths to Islam by sowing the seeds of enmity, and of engaging in certain lobbying activities. These companies and foundations have turned up in the internet site of Fethullah Gulen [alleged leader of the Nurcu religious community currently living in the United States who is a defendant in several court cases in Turkey, accused of engaging in anti-secularist activities.]“”

Russia has banned all of Gulen’s madrassas, and in April of this year, banned the Nurcu Movement completely.

Gulen’s Madrassas

The Gulen Movement founded madrassas all over the world in the 1990′s, most of them in the newly independent Turkic republics of Central Asia – Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – and Russia.

These madrassas appear to be used as a front for enabling CIA and State Department officials to operate undercover in the region, with many of the teachers operating under diplomatic passports.

Why Central Asia?

Central Asia, with its vast energy wealth, is of major interest to US oil and gas companies. The region is also of key strategic interest in the ‘Great Game’ as Russia, China and the US compete for dwindling energy supplies. The US government has been using Turkey as a proxy to gain control over Central Asia via Pan-Turkic nationalism and religion.

Sibel Edmonds Case

Twenty six people wrote reference letters supporting Gulen’s application for a Green Card – most notably ex-CIA agent George Fidas, former Turkish ambassador Morton Abramowitz, and former CIA Deputy Director Graham Fuller who appears in Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery.

I called Sibel Edmonds to comment on the latest revelations. She said:

You’ve got to look at the big picture. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the super powers began to fight over control of Central Asia, particularly the oil and gas wealth, as well as the strategic value of the region.

Given the history, and the distrust of the West, the US realized that it couldn’t get direct control, and therefore would need to use a proxy to gain control quickly and effectively. Turkey was the perfect proxy; a NATO ally and a puppet regime. Turkey shares the same heritage/race as the entire population of Central Asia, the same language (Turkic), the same religion (Sunni Islam), and of course, the strategic location and proximity.

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

This is why I have been saying repeatedly that these illegal covert operations by the Turks and certain US persons dates back to 1996, and involves terrorist activities, narcotics, weapons smuggling and money laundering, converging around the same operations and involving the same actors.

And I want to emphasize that this is “illegal” because most, if not all, of the funding for these operations is not congressionally approved funding, but it comes from illegal activities.

And one last thing, take a look at the people in the State Secrets Privilege Gallery on my website and you will see how these individuals can be traced to the following; Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – and the activities involving these countries.

Many of the people in Sibel’s State Secrets Privilege Gallery are closely connected to Gulen, and each other, as well as the operations that Sibel mentions. Many of them have actively advocated for using Muslims to further their own needs – from Turkistan to Albania and Central Asia.

Marc Grossman, former State Department #3 and former Turkish ambassador, and one of the key named individuals in Sibel’s case, is currently receiving $1.2 million per annum from Ihlas Holding, a Gulen-linked Turkish conglomerate. Sibel has previously referred to Ihlas as ‘semi-legitimate‘ and ‘alleged shady‘ - and emphasized that Grossman’s current payoff is a result of services performed while he was in office.

Grossman’s predecessor as ambassador in Turkey was Morton Abramowitz - in fact, Grossman actually worked under Abramowitz in Ankara for a number of years. During that period, the US opened an espionage investigation into activities at the embassy involving Major Douglas Dickerson, a weapons procurement specialist for Central Asia. Dickerson and his wife, an FBI translator, later became famous when they tried to recruit Sibel to spy for this criminal network.

Abramowitz, who is not listed in Sibel’s State Secrets Privilege Gallery, wrote a letter in support of Gulen for his immigration case. He has long advocated the use of Islamic fighters in furtherance of US interests, including the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets and the Kosovo Liberation Army during the war in the Balkans, acting as an advisor to the Kosovar Albanians.

Another player from Sibel’s Gallery is Enver Yusuf Turani - Prime Minister of East Turkistan, a ‘country’ recognized by only one country, the United States. East Turkistan, aka Xinjiang, is officially a part of China, and home to the Uyghur people and the “Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement,” a UN-nominated terrorist organization “funded mainly by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and received training, support and personnel from both the al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan.” In fact, the Uyghurs constitute a significant percentage of detainees – at least 22 – at Guantanamo Bay since 2001. Five of those have been set free, and were eventually sent to Albania, amid much controversy.

According to TurkPulse:

“One of the main tools Washington is using in this affair in order to get Turkey involved in the Xinjiang affair is some Turkish Americans, primarily the Fetullah Gulen team who are prosecuted in absentia in Turkey for trying to found a theocratic State order in this country because he runs his activities from the United States, his protégé. Another Turk used in this affair is Enver Yusuf Turani, who is the self styled Foreign and Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government in exile. He has been an American citizen since 1998. Enver Yusuf is in close cooperation with Fetullah Gulen… Their activities for the government in exile are based on a report entitled “the Xinjiang Project” drafted by Graham Fuller in 1998 for the Rand Corporation and revised in 2003 under the title “the Xinjiang Problem.” It emphasises the importance of the Xinjiang Autonomous region in encircling China and provides a strategy for it.”

In fact, Abramowitz and Fuller were key players in the establishment of ‘East Turkistan,’

“proclaiming the government in exile within 4-5 months, starting in May (2004) and completing the proclamation in mid- September. The ceremony was held at Capitol Hill under American flags in Washington.”

Two others from Sibel’s gallery, Sabri Sayari and Alan Makovsky, have been similarly involved with Gulen, Fuller, and Abramowitz – co-authoring books and articles, making joint appearances, dinners etc.

Illegal Operations
Earlier I quoted Sibel saying

“And I want to emphasize that this is “illegal” because most, if not all, of the funding for these operations is not congressionally approved funding, but it comes from illegal activities.”

Where does this funding come from? Narcotics trafficking, nuclear black market, weapons smuggling, and terrorist activities. As Sibel makes clear in her The Highjacking of a Nation article, the management of the heroin industry from the farms in Afghanistan to the streets of London and elsewhere “requires highly sophisticated networks,” from the protection of the convoys from Afghanistan through Central Asia to their final destination, to the laundering of the billions of dollars in proceeds in Central Asian casinos and financial institutions in Dubai and Cyprus. “So, who are the real lords of Afghanistan’s poppy fields?” Sibel asks. The heroin trade finances al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but they aren’t the real lords of the poppy fields. Journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia “ and other similar books about these issues recently noted onDemocracy Now that a “cartel” controls Afghanistan’s heroin, which supplies 93% of global heroin supply.

Sibel has been trying to tell us about these operations for years, but has been gagged by the State Secrets Privilege which was invoked citing certain ‘sensitive foreign diplomatic and business relationships.’ These ‘sensitive relationships’ have now been exposed to a degree, thanks to the immigration case against Mr Gulen – one of the Turkish operatives who have been fronting for the CIA in the Islamization of Central Asia, incorporating drug trafficking, money laundering, and the nuclear black market, and the convergence with terrorism.

One Last Question

At the end of our interview, Sibel asked me to leave you with this question:

“After 911, the US Government engaged in mock investigations and shut down many small Islamic charities and organizations, giving the appearance of action in the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ Why did they harbor, support and resource Fethullah Gulen’s $25 billion madrassa-and-mosque-establishment efforts throughout the Central Asian region and the Balkans?”

————

Source: http://lukery.blogspot.com/ Posted: August 3, 2009 Cross-posted at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

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VITEZ PRAVDA

Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall 1875-1936 Novelist, Journalist and a Muslim scholar, was born William Pickthall in  London, to an Anglican clergyman. He spent his formative years in rural Suffolk and was a contemporary of Winston Churchill at Harrow, the famous private school, and had ambitions to join the army or the Foreign Service. During intervals of living a sedentary life in Suffolk, Pickthall traveled extensively in the Arab world and Turkey. In 1917, Pickthall announced his conversion to Islam and soon became a leader among the emerging band of British Muslims. His translation of the holy Quran is widely read because of its simple, easy to understand style in English.

Dear Readers:

Please don’t get confused from the title. Actually it’s a saying in Russian that means “Truth Always Triumphs”. This proverb resounds in my mind every time I view the machinations of respective US administrations, particularly the one that preceded the current incumbent of White House [Barack Husain Obama], for the administration led by Bush the Junior wove such an intricate web of blatant lies, conspiratorial concealments and highly scientific near to truth “untruths” through the publicity mills that it can rightly be called lies, lies and lies. It’s another matter though that successive US administrations also made and to a large extent, are still using this propaganda machine to make the world believe in the truth and the only truth they want them to believe. This machinery is run on highly scientific lines and sometimes the targeted groups, communities and even states start believing their “untruth” as the “whole truth”.

The two posts that now come up on these pages; reveal the highly dubious Machiavellian modus operandi of the US State Department and the Pentagon. But before I put up these sensational disclosures (for these are from the horse’s mouth), here are two personal accounts of how do these propaganda mills operate and get desired result / s.

The first one pertains to my college days. One day, all of us, the students of the college, were handed over a beautifully bound, finely printed copy of the holy Quran. Six months prior to getting this beautiful gift, I didn’t know anything of the Quranic teachings except a memorization of Islamic prayer (the Namaz) and some chapters of the holy book, but all in Arabic. Out of my eagerness to know more about Islam and the Quran, from a local bookshop I procured a paperback edition, which a British convert, Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall had translated from Arabic into English. Reading Marmaduke’s English text of Quran ‘The Meaning of the Glorious Quran’ was a totally different experience, as I could understand each and every word, unlike my previous experience of reading Quran in Arabic, a plain parrot like reading of the text not understanding even a single word of what it was all about.

After reading the ‘Glorious Quran’ I did comprehend to a good extent the great message brought to us by the holy prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Naturally I was fascinated to receive such a beautifully bound copy of this magnificent book, all free of cost. My happiness knew no bounds. Being young and inquisitive, however, we all were eager to know about that unknown philanthropist, who gifted us the holy book, so precious, so costly, yet completely gratis. Later when on a scholarship I went to Austria for post graduate studies at the Tech. Univ. of Vienna, did I learn that such copies were actually procured by US secret services and distributed by some of their front men (like Fethullah Gülin of Turkey in present times) to win the goodwill of the younger generation in Muslim countries.

From what I learn of the court proceedings in case of Fethullah Gülin for permanent residence in the United States (as narrated by Sibel in the upcoming posts), it all seems to me an ‘Action Replay’ of what the US secret service did in the cold war era.

The second case relates to books written by the late Maulana Abul A’ala Maudoodi, founder of Pakistan’s Jamat-e-Islami and this pertains to one of the most lucid, easy to understand translations and explanation of Quranic text in Urdu (and which I frequently read even today) for Maulana Maudoodi was no ordinary Mullah but a true Islamic scholar). But interestingly my fellow students, who were either the followers or the sympathizers of the Jamat used to boast the popularity of Maulana’s books in the United States. Much to my surprise, it later transpired that these books too were imported by some front men into the United States and God knows what did they do with these books but money did come into Jamat’s kitty.

But why did they do so? Because, at that time, the Jamat was spearheading the movement all over Pakistan to fight “the Soviet Infidels” whereas Americans, the believers in God, as they would say are the Ahl-e-Kitab (those who follow religion based on holy scriptures, which Quran too approved as a holy book revealed to his messenger and prophet, the Jesus Christ. No wonder then that Jamat was the most pampered component of our political elite during late Gen. Zia-ul-Haque’s Martial Law and during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan its militant wing closely collaborated with Gulbeddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan.

Whether the J.I. Pakistan knew about the money coming from abroad was from US secret service agencies or not, I cannot affirm, there were though reports in the Pakistani press those days that the Jamat was being funded by America. The Jamat, however, denied receiving any funds from US state agencies and challenged the authorities to prove this in the court, but of course Govt. Law Department could never prove this as money was coming in as legal sale proceeds of Maulana’s books under the laws of Pakistan. Though such news were rampant in Pakistan in those days (during the cold war between the US and its arch enemy, the former Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics), am not in a position to confirm the veracity of this news, as I never had any link with any political group nor any intelligence network anywhere, but as the facts are coming to light day by day (and Sibel’s interviews are the latest in such disclosures), one starts giving credence to such events of the cold war period.

Last year, when I started this site, I had the privilege of access to research materials like those of  Eric Margolis, John Maszka, Michel Chossudovsky and so many others, who offered complete support to put up their views and their independent, unbiased and above all truthful analysis of events on these pages, which I have been sharing with you my dear readers, each time they write on this and other contemporary issues.

Governments come and governments go, so do their administrations. New societies are born, generations come and generations go, but during all such events, happenings and different episodes of our life, what matters, what remains, what never dies and should never be allowed to die is the truth and truth alone, for truth always triumphs and as they say in Russian Vitez Pravda!

Nayyar

P. S.

The writer does appreciate Jamat’s current policy of opposing US hegemonism, but what has been described above, is based on writer’s own assertion of events, as they unfolded during different phases of Pakistan’s history. If somebody wants to put Jamat’s viewpoint on the subject, the pages of Wonders of Pakistan are available for asserting their views as well.

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Ataturk’s Turkish Republic in Danger

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SECULARISTS OUTFOXED IN TURKEY’S QUIET REVOLUTION

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Turkey is in the middle of a political crisis that has pitted the Islamic-rooted civilian government against the military, following reports of an alleged move by military leaders to overthrow the government.

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Note for WoP Readers: Turkey’s current experiment i.e. a blend of modern secularist Turkey with Islam (not in religious sense but purely a politico-administrative one) is what best suits the Islamic world.

Unfortunately Islam in the beginning was given the shape of a ‘fundamental’ Islam by the Mullahs who to a major extent even use it today as an ideological weapon, for it brings ordinary Muslims to their fold. Later it were the British who with their governmental hold, intensified the religious sentiments of the mainstream to retain their grip over people who were in every regard different to them (color, creed, region, language, culture, and above everything the soil itself), so they had to strengthen divisions between different regions, different religions, different castes, and clans and that’s exactly what they did.

On demise of the Empire, Americans took over and did further havoc to our strongly religious roots (which had however, always been humane, and liberal). A major factor that has always been rife in the soil of Pakistan to accept and absorb so many faiths, so many religions, so many cultures before it came finally to the fold of Islam.

In our recent history too, we did never experience a single case of Sunni Shia murders or Islamic Madrassas creating students who would take bombs and explode these devices destroying innocent men and property, even turning their own bodies to smithereens. All this is a product of US specialists of the N.W.O., a legacy of which we are now experiencing in today’s Pakistan.

The following post by Ameen Izzadeen is an excellent sum up of what is happening in present day Turkey but am only afraid that it may not turn up one day like Turkey indeed  becoming an Islamic state, yet her Islam not originating from its own roots and instead emanates from the womb of Am-Brits neo-imperialism. Should this be the case, I only visualize  once they would disengage themselves from Turkish Islam, the phenomena of destabilizing the oil rich Muslim world (as it did in Iraq, in Afghanistan and is now doing in Pakistan) completes its full circle. The supra-religionists of Turkey may then start repenting one day as did our brothers in the Jamat-e-Islami of Pakistan who too aligned themselves once with the US mission of dismembering the Soviets (and who now themselves feel how mercilessly they were / have been misused against the Soviet infidels in the name of Islam).

Another aspect which irks my mind is Mr. Fethullah Gülen, the Turkic multibillionaire who is spearheading the Gülen movement. If one would believe what Sibel Edmonds says in her interviews, he is a CIA man and this has been disclosed during court proceedings in which Gülen’s application for a Green Card has been rejected on basis of the evidence produced in the court. [Nayyar]

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Ameen Izzadeen

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Ameen Izzadeen was in Turkey last month meeting journalists, civil society leaders and political activists, reports on the country’s changing socio-political scenario.

Is Turkey facing a military coup? No way, says a journalist whom I met in Istanbul, Turkey’s most populous city which reminds visitors and citizens of the country’s glorious Islamic past.

During my conversation with journalists, academics, political activists and businessmen, I was shocked to hear them criticise Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey. A few years ago, none dared criticize him in public or in conversation with outsiders.

Things are changing in Turkey. History is being rewritten. Even the last Ottoman sultans whom the Kemalists — supporters of Mustafa Kemal and Turkey’s secular system — blamed for all the ills of Turkey in the early 20th century are being hailed as “good and honest leaders”. Media freedom has undergone a qualitative and quantitative change for the better. They are daring to speak now.”The army won’t be able to topple the government,” the journalist said. “If it does, it knows there will be public uprising and street protests,” he said.

“Can I quote you,” I asked him.
“No problem, go ahead,” he said.

But I told him that I would not mention his name, because I did not want any harm befall him.

A highly respected leader of the Fethullah Gülen movement, which emphasizes Islam’s universal love and tries to make Islam compatible with the country’s secular order, told me that a “quiet revolution is taking place” in Turkey, hundreds years ago a superpower reverently addressed as the Great Ottoman Empire.

[Below right, Fethullah Gülen, a name shrouded in the mist of espionage (labelled a CIA man), Wealth (he is a multibillionaire), Fame (highly respected and acclaimed as a leader of Islamic renaissance in Turkey), Sufism (reported to be a follower of Bediuzzaman Said Norsi & Maulana Rumi)].

 

 The revolution is: A government elected by the people is daring to look into the eyes of the “deep state”, which, in Turkish political terminology, means a state within a state, while more and more people are discovering their Islamic roots, which the secular elite have been trying to erase for the past 86 years.

Turkey, where democracy had been often disturbed by regular military coups since the Republic was set up in 1923, is moving towards more democracy, with the government sending a message to the military that its role as a state within the state is ending.

Very little is known about Ataturk’s family background or what his faith was. Was he a Muslim or a Donmeh, a word used for a member of a secretive Turkish society? Donmehs are the descendants of the Ottoman era Jews who, along with their leader Sabbatai Zevi, converted to Islam in 1666 and took Muslim names but secretly followed their Jewish rituals. The orthodox Jewry, however, has condemned the Donmehs as heretic because they worshipped Sabbatai Zevi as the messiah and an incarnation of God.

[Left, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,founder of modern Turkey. Was he a Donmeh? [Donmehs are Turkish Jews who accepted Islam during Ottomans’ rule, but secretly practiced Jewism. Though they have Muslim names, they worship Sabbatai Zewi, their leader whom they consider an incarnation of God. Orthodox Jewry declared them heretic].

“It is very difficult to identify a Donmeh in today’s Turkey because they have well assimilated into Turkish society and there is no difference between a Donmeh and a highly westernized Turkish Muslim,” a journalist from Turkey’s Cihan News Agency said. But he declined to answer my question whether Ataturk was a Donmeh.

A Google search, however, produced a number of web articles on Ataturk’s alleged Jewish links.

Ataturk was an officer in the Ottoman Army. Hailing from Salonika, the birthplace of Donmehs, he was one of the commanders who defeated the British and the French forces during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. Later, he joined the Young Turk rebellion and played a key role in the military coup that overthrew Sultan Abdul Hameed II at a time when Western powers such as Britain and Zionists had deeply penetrated into the corridors of power in Istanbul. The Zionists were particularly angry with the Sultan, for he refused to meet the father of the Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, when he visited Istanbul in 1901. The Zionists also tried to pay him money and buy Jerusalem, which was then under Ottoman rule.

The Sultan told one of his officials, “Advise Dr. Herzl not to take any further steps in his (Zionist) project. I cannot give away even a handful of the soil of this land (Palestine) for it is not my own, it belongs to the entire Islamic nation. The Islamic nation fought jihad for the sake of this land and had watered it with their blood.

The Jews may keep their money and millions. If the Islamic Khilafah (state) is one day destroyed then they will be able to take Palestine without a price! But while I am alive, I would rather push a sword into my body than see the land of Palestine cut and given away from the Islamic State. This is something that will not be. I will not start cutting our bodies while we are alive.”

[Left, the young Sultan Abdul Hameed II: Portrayed as a vicious tyrant, Turks are rediscovering their history. ManyTurks now believe the Sultan was an honest & pious leader who became the victim of British & Zionist sinister schemes].

This part of history has failed to find its way into Turkey’s curriculum. Instead, officially recognized history books are full of blame for Sultan Abdul Hameed. They have painted him as a vicious tyrant. But senior journalists and academics whom I met during my week-long visit to Turkey say things are changing and people are beginning to see Sultan Abdul Hameed as an honest and pious leader and as a victim of the British and Zionist sinister schemes.

Ataturk later abolished the Caliphate (Sultanate) and with the help of the rival parliament in Ankara, he became the founder President of the Turkish Republic in 1923. He changed the country’s Islamic character and confined Islam to mosques. Thousands of Islamic scholars were either banished or killed. The Arabic script was replaced with the Latin alphabet — a move that made 99 percent of the Turkish population illiterate overnight. The move, however, helped the westernized elite to dominate politics and covet top positions in public administration and the military. Eighty six years after the setting up of the republic, the elite who still continue to live with their erroneous belief that Turkey belongs to them feel threatened. The signs are ominous.

During my stay in Turkey last week together with veteran Sri Lankan journalist Latheef Farook on an invitation from the Cihan News Agency, a major political upheaval was taking place after a newspaper exposed a secret military document that gave details of a plot to overthrow the civilian government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and discredit the popular Fethullah Gülen movement, which is regarded as the power behind Turkey’s current Islamic renaissance.

The exposé came against the backdrop of the arrest of several ex-military and civil servants last year for their alleged role in a plan to topple the democratically-elected government of Erdogan, who is the leader of the AK Party (Justice and Development Party). Erdoagan’s Islamic credentials are an anathema to the deep state, which feels it is fast losing its place in Turkish politics.

Erdogan, who, as a teenage boy, sold lemonade and sesame bread on Turkish streets before he graduated from Istanbul’s Marmara University, was a hard line Islamist. In the past, the military has toppled several Islamic-leaning governments. Former prime minister Adnan Menderes was tried in a military court and hanged. Another popular Islamic-leaning president, Turgut Ozal, died mysteriously. The official version was he died of a heart attack. But others say he was poisoned.

A controversial poem by Erdogan ruffled many feathers a few years ago and continues to hang over his administration like Damocles’ sword. Here are the first lines of that poem.

“The mosques are our barracks
The domes our helmets
The minarets our bayonets and
The faithful our soldiers…”

Of late, largely due to the influence of the Gülen movement, Erdogan has distanced himself from his hardline Islamic views and is taking Turkey towards more democracy in an effort to gain full membership of the European Union. His moves towards more democracy have apparently irked the secular elite, for whom more democracy means more Islam. The secularists accuse him of having a secret agenda to turn Turkey into a religious state. But Erdogan is emerging strong. He is presiding over a government that has made Turkey one of the fastest growing economies of the world.

Last month, his government dared to arrest Colonel Dursun Cicek, who allegedly signed the military document that called for the toppling of Erdogan’s government. Later, a court in Istanbul ordered his release, pending further investigations. In another move, parliament passed legislation to curb the powers of the military court in civil matters. The government said that such a measure was necessary to meet EU membership requirements.

These moves have added to the tension between Erdogan’s government and the military, the self-assumed guardian of the secularist system.

Contd…

_______

Source: Sunday Times, Posted: August 8, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Secularists outfoxed in Turkey’s quiet revolution

Ataturk’s Mausoleum in the capital, Ankara.

CHANGING FACE OF TURKEY

Will it be real? Will it be green, or just another color revolution to meet Empire’s undiluted lust for energy!

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Ameen Izzadeen

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Young couples smooching in public, midnight discos, belly-shaking scantily-dressed female dancers, mini skirts, tight jeans and alcohol remind a visitor to the Turkish capital Ankara that he is not in a conservative Muslim country. Though the call for prayer five times a day blares from the loudspeakers of Ankara’s grand mosque, the general impression is that Islam, the religion of 99 percent of the Turkish people, is not standing as tall as the 88-metre minarets of the mosque, which is one of the largest in the world.

In the marketplace of Ankara, searching for Islam appears to be a task tougher than finding a needle in a haystack, though a few women in head scarves remind a visitor that Muslims also live in Turkey, which for more than six hundred years had been the standard bearer of the Islamic caliphate till it lost its Islamic identity in political coups and schemes engineered by the West and the Zionists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Why is Ankara like a liberal western city, in contrast to Istanbul, my first port of call during a week-long visit to this historic country, courtesy the Cihan News Agency? My Turkish friend tells me that it is because Ankara is the spring of secularism. It is from here that secularism flowed to other parts of the country. It is virtually a secularist colony. To find Islam, one has to penetrate the wall the secularists have built preventing Islam from coming into public life. 

“You know, during Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) time, Arabia was like the present day Turkey. The good and the evil existed side by side. But eventually good triumphed over evil. This will happen in Turkey soon,” my friend, a practising Muslim, said. 

Elsewhere in Ankara, on June 25, the first day of the Islamic month of Rajab, at a guesthouse run by members of the Fethullah Gülen movement, more than one hundred fasting men gathered in a big hall waiting for the call for prayer at dusk. After breaking their fast, they prayed Maghrib (the Muslim prayer at dusk) and listened to the recitation of Quran by a senior member before they held a meeting. At the end of the meeting, they played a DVD on a big white screen. It showed a man in turban and black robe over his western suit giving a sermon from a mosque pulpit. During the sermon he broke down and wept. So did the congregation. It is this man, Fethullah Gülen who is bringing Islam back to Turkey’s secular society. He says he is no opponent of the secular system. He believes Islam can co-exist with secularism,

Islam is compatible with democracy and Islam is complementary to modernity. He condemns terrorism and advocates peace through patience and dialogue. For Mr. Gülen, modernity does not mean blind adoption of everything west. His interpretation of modernity comes with respect for human life, decent behaviour, human values and personal integrity. 

According to Turkish academics Bulent Aras and Omer Caha, Mr. Gülen seeks to construct a Turkish-style Islam, rekindle the Ottoman glory, Islamize Turkish nationalism, recreate a legitimate link between the state and religion, and emphasize democracy and tolerance. So some call him a modern Ottoman.

Secularism entered Turkey and entrenched itself largely as a result of two factors – one internal and the other external. The internal factor emerged during the early 20th century in the form of pressure exerted by the Young Turks led by pro-Western elites who were riding high then because of a series of humiliation the Ottoman Empire had suffered in wars with Russia and other European powers. They believed Islam was the cause of many ills that befell the empire. The external factor was conditions imposed by the victors of World War I. The July 24, 1923 Lausanne Treaty — which Turkey was forced to negotiate to retain at least a truncated part of the vast Ottoman territory — required the republic’s first government to take measures to protect minority rights. In other words, this treaty ended the special place Islam enjoyed in Turkey during the Ottoman period and even briefly after its collapse. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic introduced a series of laws banishing Islam from public life. 

Eighty-six years of secularism may have protected the minorities, who form a mere one percent of the Turkish population or less than that, but the policy has done more harm to Muslims. Even today, Muslim women do not have the right to wear head scarves to schools, both public and private, or to any government office. Girl students removing their headscarves at the gates of universities are a common sight in Turkey. Last year, the Islamic-rooted government led by the AK (Justice and Development) Party passed legislation to permit the headscarf in universities and public offices. The law was approved by President Abdullah Gul, who was one time the foreign minister of the AKP government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But the secularists took the matter before the Constitutional Court which held the law unconstitutional.  

[Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city. Once the Byzantine capital; it later became a symbol & seat of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul is also called the city of mosques. It connects world’s largest continent i.e. Asia with Europe].

If Ankara is the fort of secularism, Istanbul appears to be the door to Islam’s return. It is here, we saw mosques brimming over with the faithful. Men and women attend prayers at Sultanahmet (Blue) mosque, Sultan Fatih and Sulemaniyeh mosques. The crowd was unbelievably large at the Abu Ayub al-Ansari mosque – a mosque that houses the tomb of the companion who shared his house with the prophet when he came to Medina as a refugee. In this city of mosques, more mosques are being built. Turkey has some 85,000 mosques. Headscarf-clad women, young and old, are rampant at shopping malls. People seem to be fast discovering Islam – albeit a Turkish version, a moderate version. 

The Gülen movement’s stamp is visible in the rise of Islam. Mr. Gülen, some say is a Sufi, a mystic. But he denies he is one, though his teachings have incorporated the fundamentals of Sufism, which is a form of Islam based on extreme love for God and all his creatures. Some say he has founded a new tariqah, a new Sufi order, but he denies this also, though it is no secret he has been influenced by the works of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, a religious scholar who resisted Ataturk’s moves to confine Islam to mosques and spent much of his life in jail. The Bediuzzaman, a title which means ‘wonder of the time’, authored the Risale-i Nur Collection, a 6,000-page commentary on Quran. Although he also denied he was a Sufi, he was a great admirer of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. The Bediuzzaman not only studied Islam but also excelled in natural sciences. 

Similarly, Mr. Gülen, who now lives in the United States, is well versed in Islamic studies as well as modern philosophies. He was included in the Newsweek magazine’s list of the 21st century’s top one hundred intellectuals. The irony is that some of his critics from the secular camp say he is a CIA agent.

[Right, Fethullah Gülen, leader of the Gülen Movement in Turkey]

Born on April 27, 1941, Mr. Gülen has more than five million active followers across Turkey, a country of 76 million people. Among his followers are university students, journalists, professionals and businessmen. They claim they are the modern version of the prophet’s companions (Sahabas).

They run schools, universities, hostels, student homes, charity groups, newspapers including Turkey’s largest-selling newspaper (Zaman), television stations (both local and foreign) and Islamic banks. Their overseas schools in 140 countries, including Sri Lanka, are open to both Muslim and non-Muslim students and Gülen followers say every student is treated equally and every belief system given equal prominence.

These activities are winning the Gülen movement more converts but the group has become a problem for the secularists, including the military. The secularists and top generals in the military believe they are the guardians of Turkey’s secular system and regard every Islamist as an enemy of the secular state. But very little have the secularists gathered in the form of evidence to ban the Gülen movement, though Mr. Gülen had been charged with sedition in the past.

However, last month, a newspaper published an alleged military document which gave details of a plan to discredit the Gülen movement and the AK Party. The plan envisaged planting of bombs and explosives in AK party offices and Gülen movement hostels and setting the stage for a military takeover and the banning of the Gülen movement.

Critics say the Gülen movement members and Islamists, especially the AKP supporters, are quietly infiltrating the military and the courts, two institutions dominated by the secularists, with the intention of turning Turkey into an Islamic state one day. They say Mr. Gülen’s message of tolerance and forgiveness is only skin deep beyond which lies a grandiose scheme of Islamisation.

________

Source: Sunday Times, Posted: August 8, 2009

 Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers. Constraints include comments judged to be in violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.

Fanaticism and us

[Bishop John Joseph of Faisalabad. The Reverend Bishop was an embodiment of gentleness, piety and faith. His love for Pakistan was as strong as was his love for his Lord Jesus Christ’s message for humanity]

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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The Gojra incident should be an eye opener for all of us. The extremism we see in Pakistan of today is a phenomenon quite foreign to this land and its people, for these very people accepted the Sufis, saints and the reformers from all regions, all shades and hues, all walks of life. So large hearted have these people been that they welcomed every religion, every philosophy and every thought.

Starting from the days of Harrapa and Moenjo-Daro, the period of Mahabharta, the epic period of Hinduism, followed by Buddhism which prospered in the Gandhara valley of Pakistan and finally Islam, the soil of Pakistan has been a fertile rich ground, not only to provide food for body but for thought too.

The transitions of different philosophies and religions during different periods of history finally culminated in transcendence of Islam which is the religion now practiced by a majority of its people, a religion which by itself is a message of peace.

From my boyhood days, I remember a Hindu friend of my elder brother used to visit us at home. Our dad welcomed all of them. Mom and sisters used to prepare meals for us and we all used to dine together around a big dinner napkin as was customary in those days. We never had any feel of an untouchable Hindu amongst us. (I recall he belonged to the community called Dalits in India and scheduled castes in Pakistan). My elder sister used to have a Christian friend named Catherine. Though my father was a devout Punjabi Muslim and my mother, a Pashtun of Kohat, they never ever taught us in terms of Muslims as “haters” of Non Muslims. My father was such a regular and firmly practicing Muslim that his friends used to call him “Maulvi” (though I know from heart of his hearts, he never liked to be called a “Maulvi”).

As the movie screen of my boyhood days flickers on my present frame of mind, I vividly recall another incident. I was once in our Mohalla mosque, offering prayers as usual. After the ‘Namaaz’ I questioned the Imam whether we as Muslims could use our left hand as well to prepare morsels (when it was too big and a hard piece of bread as they did in our villages in those days). The Imam was furious that how a 12 years old boy could ask him a question. Naturally, he didn’t answer me and the other ‘Namaazis’ too scolded me. I came home and told my father what had happened. In reply, my father recited some couplets from a Punjabi Sufi poet and explained this to me in plain Punjabi “Puttar Ji, Rabb maseetaN wich naeeN labhda. Rabb te saadhay dillaN wich wasda ai”. You cannot find God in mosques, for He lives in the hearts of the faithful and true believers”.

Unfortunately, the Maulvis became too forceful during late General Zia-ul-Haque’s regime. This was the time, the Shia Muslims also started exercising their presence being felt and hence militant outfits like Sipah-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and so many other lashkars and sipahs mushroomed all over Pakistan but particularly so in Punjab. However, militancy amongst these groups remained always confined to attacks on Shia Muslims and vice versa. Consequently a strong Shia militant group “Sipah-e-Muhammad” also emerged on the scene during those days. This phenomenon started and progressed under Zia-ul-Haque’s rule and then successively under the premierships of Mian Nawaz Sharif and Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto. However, never did these outfits, during the high frequency of clashes between two sects of Islam target any non Muslim community of Pakistan.

If one digs out the history of these militant groups, these seem to have originated and sponsored, by foreign elements initially from Iran, then Saudia and Iraq. Unfortunately these forces were abetted by local hands including the military regimes (firstly by Zia-ul-Haque and later by Musharraf  Pervez). Interestingly these groups continued to exercise their militant attacks even during the civilians’ rule. The abetment of such groups during military regimes is understandable because no military dictator wants the issues of common man’s interest to be discussed on streets (as public representative institutions are usually banned in non civilian setups). However, no matter it was a military rule or that of civilians, clashes remained restricted to ‘Muslims vs. Muslims’ only. That target could be non Muslim communities of Pakistan too, is quite a later day phenomenon. And this phenomenon appears more to be a “gift” of the Afghan war which created so many religious zealots who were either groomed in the “nurseries” of the NWFP or imported into Pakistan from the Central Asian Republics. Who nurtured them then, or does it now, no one knows!

In the wake of Gojra killings, (mostly of Christian community) a good news has indeed been coming from our north that the mastermind of so many suicide attacks in Pakistan, the head of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan Baitullah Mehsood has been killed along with his wife, driver and some other fellows who were in his company at the time of attack. In the backdrop of this good news even, my heart weeps for that noble soul, the Reverend John Joseph of Faisalabad.

I met the Reverend Bishop for the first time, when he was invited by us at the Rotary Club of Faisalabad (I was an active Rotarian then). I thought the he would be in typical  iconic attire of Bishops, will be serious looking, protocolean and self centered, but much to my amazement, I saw a  youngish looking man, in typical Shalwar Qameez with a shawl on his shoulders. And this John Joseph not only was a Christian leader and a missionary, he was a hardcore Pakistani too and that’s what made me fond of having a frequent discourse with him.

Once when he came to a Rotarians’ meeting, I asked the Reverend Bishop in my plain folkish Punjabi “Bishop Ji, tuseeN John wi o, te Joseph wi o,eh kis taraN? And his reply came in “thaith”  Punjabi, “Hashmey Ji, tuseen jo wi samajh lao, maeN tuhaday lyi Jaan aaN”, I’m your life and so you are for me, a typical Punjabi style of expressing respect, love and affection for each other. That was my dear John, the Reverend, my life but alas! That noble soul, the Pucca Pakistani, too was sacrificed on the altar of religious fanaticism.

As I put up now the post that follows, my heart weeps for that Pakistani patriot, that noble soul named John Joseph, not a Muslim but still a proud Pakistani like all of us.

At the end, a word of alarm! On website where the PCP appears, I happened to see a piece by one Nazeer Bhatti (I didn’t read much of this though) but it advocates dividing Pakistan on the lines suggested by Ralph Peters and so many others of his likes, specially the lobbies in Washington D.C. and Pentagon as well as in many other think tanks, who are wanting to fragment Pakistan  to meet the grand strategic designs  of the Neocons for a new world order (which of late has been renamed as Project for a New American Century PNAC). I shall put up some more posts on the PNAC very soon.

The other day, I even saw another website named “Divide Pakistan”. For them and the likes of Mr. Nazeer Bhatti I would only say one thing, ‘the land of Pakistan has been a cohesive unit not since 1947, it has been so through the ages, ages which are spread not over centuries but many millennia. This is a land of the people, who introduced the Homo sapiens what the ‘civilized’ way of life is. Its a gift of God to all of us, all Pakistanis (irrespective of color, caste, creed or region) and it will remain so Insha’ Allah. Balochistan, Punjab, Sindh and NWFP (Pakhtun khawah)   have been a contiguous region not only geographically but economically as well. They together form a coherent and conjoined state and all are interdependent. Those who think in its fragmentation, they do no service to their own cause nor to that of our federation as a nation state.

They might be playing in the hands of the forces who have set it as their agenda to dismember Pakistan, but this is a warning to them from all Pakistani patriots: whosoever conspires against this state is harboring to meet the agenda set by the forces of neo-imperialism. And they will ultimately be eliminated by those very sources and forces they are working for. What these neos did with the Mujahideen and the Taliban (through puppet regimes like those of Pervez Musharraf and Hamid Karzai, what they did to Pervez Musharraf and may do the same to their man in Kabul should be an eye opener for such Pakistani friends. Irony though is that Zardari regime too, appears to be towing the same line as adopted by the former dictator i.e. blindly doing what neo-imperialists would want them to do in this region.

Next: Alienating Pakistan’s Patriots…

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Alienating Pakistan’s Patriots

A Christian couple sit outside their destroyed home, a day after the Christian community was attacked in Gojra town, located in Pakistan’s Punjab province Photo: REUTERS

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by Abbas Kassar

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“We the Christians of Pakistan feel ourselves unsafe in our own land because of the religious extremism which is at its climax in the country. The religious extremism which happened to be limited has now spread to common Muslims. Pakistan has become hard place to live for minorities.” This was stated by Christian leaders representing Christian community of Pakistan while addressing news conference at Hyderabad press club on Wednesday. These leaders reverend Bishop Max John Rodrex, Bishop Rafiq Masih, Father John Murad and father Daniel Fayyaz demanded abolition of all blasphemous laws because these laws also sometimes are used by Muslims against Muslims; but in individual cases while in case of Christians if there is any case against an individual the whole village becomes the target of attack and destruction.

The Christian leaders said there was no doubt the majority of Muslims are nice people but few extremists commit attacks and nowadays whole Christian settlements are on their target which they said was an open evidence of terrorism.

They said minorities in Pakistan were peaceful and patriot who were living in the region since centuries. The Christians fought valiantly during successive wars to defend the motherland and their role as such could not be forgotten. However, they said the few blasphemy laws: section 295-B and C of Pakistan Penal Code were discriminatory against minorities particularly the Christians in Pakistan.

They added that Federal Shariat Court has held the one / s accused of blasphemy will be given punishment of no less than death (295/C). There is life sentence for those accused of desecrating the holy Quran (under section 295/B) and (under section 298/A.B) to those accused of blasphemy against Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). They lamented that under this law many settlements of Christians were razed to ground and not only the properties of Christians have been damaged but their honor also spoilt.

“The blasphemy laws continue to hang on the head of Christians like sword”. Our beloved leader reverend Bishop John Joseph was martyred under this very law and hundreds of people of our community have been made a target,” they added.

They said in past few years 500 homes along with many copies of the holy Bible were burnt in Shanti Nagar, many innocent Christians and their homes were burnt to ashes in Rahimyar Khan and the Church of Bahawalpur, along with those of Islamabad, Mari, Texila, Karachi, Bannu, Daska, Sangla Hill and two churches burnt in Sukkur. They lamented that not a single accused has so far been arrested or punished. They said in few days back Christians’ homes were burnt, men, women and children killed, in addition top the women raped and properties damaged in Teesar Town Karachi, Baheniwala district Qasur, and now Korian village near Gojra where 68 homes of Christians have been burnt, 7 including women and animals burnt alive. They said in many cases the Muslims settle their score with Christians by attacking their villages, burn their homes and innocent men, women and children by misusing the blasphemy laws.

They said ” we Christians respect all religions as we and Muslims believe in one God and no Pakistani Christian could ever think of committing blasphemy, nor desecrate the holy Quran, nor could they speak anything insulting. No Christian in Pakistan could ever think of committing blasphemy. They alleged that in Gojra the administration watched the action against Christians like silent spectator. They made appeal to the provincial and federal governments to take action against the forces involved in attacks on Christians, to arrest them and to punish them so that no one in future can misuse the laws. They asked for ending the sense of deprivation among Christians of Pakistan and to give them the sense of existence. “We demand equal treatment to our community” said the leading members of the Christian community in Pakistan.

They announced that all Christian schools which had observed three days mourning will open from today. To a question on demand for separate Christian province they said if they were given equal rights and treatment there won’t be any need for separate homeland for Christians in Pakistan. To another question Bishop Rafiq Masih said, the incidents against Christian community have increased during past 15 months since PPP took over. To a question on role of Mr. Shahbaz Bhatti, Reverend Rafiq Masih said that the federal minister was not representing Christians in central government. He is a hand picked individual  of the ruling party and follows their policies and has failed to provide much needed protection to Christian community in Pakistan.

Outside the Hyderabad Press Club, Christians from various areas of Hyderabad city including those of Wahdat colony, GOR, Latifabad and other areas took out a rally from their respective colonies, Mohallas and towns towards press club where they chanted slogans for protection of the Christian community. The rally was led by Inayet Masih, Master Saleem, Younis Gill, Sooba Bhatti and others. They condemned the recent attack on Christians in Gojra and demanded arrest and punishment to the assailants. The participants of the rally blocked Miran Muhammad Shah road for an hour by staging a sit in before the press club.

Courtesy Pakistan Christian Post Posted: August 10, 2009 Cross posted: Pak Tea House

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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EXCLUSIVE: Drone Strike Was Not Meant For Mehsud

CIA Stunned – Americans Led To Strike Wrong Target.

The drone strike that resulted in the death of Pakistan’s most wanted terrorist is believed to be a result of deliberately planted false intelligence, sources in South Waziristan have confirmed, according to a report published by the Pakistani news website PKKH.

PKKH reported that rival militants close to Qari Zainuddin Mehsud tipped off suspected local CIA informers about the presence of a ‘high value afghan Taliban target’ in a house in South Waziristan.

Qari Zainuddin, who was reported to have been killed on orders of Baitullah Mehsud, the very second day he exposed Baitullah’s designs to fight against Pakistan.

Qari Zainuddin, a former aide of Baitullah Mehsud, accused Baitullah Mehsud in June of waging terrorism against Pakistan with help from foreign intelligence operatives belonging to India, Israel and the United States.  Zainuddin was gunned down in his office the next day and Baitullah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the killing.

[Right, Baitullah and his predecessor Abdullah Mehsud were protected by CIA and provided active support by India's and Karzai's spy agents].

Pakistani officials have privately accused elements within the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan of supporting the so-called Pakistani Taliban as punishment for Pakistan’s perceived support for the Afghan Taliban.

In what appears to be a successful attempt to extract revenge by those loyal to Qari Zainuddin, false intelligence was deliberately fed to a number of local informers working for the Americans in Afghanistan.  Hours later, a CIA operated drone guided by a physically dropped electronic homing device attacked and destroyed the house which the Americans believed was occupied by what they thought was anti-US Afghan Taliban.

Various reports have also surfaced in recent months disclosing the extent of support Baitullah Mehsud received from India and Israel, using Afghanistan as a base for training and arming anti-Pakistan terrorists.  US army and NATO issued rifles and communication equipment has been seized from captured militants and TTP safe houses, and captured terrorists have often spoken of training by Indian nationals in Afghanistan.

The Americans were concentrating on Taliban and Qaeda forces that attack American and coalition troops in Afghanistan but were ignoring militants operating in Pakistan, a senior Pakistani official in the administration that oversees the tribal region told TIME Magazine last year.

“The Americans are not interested in our bad guys,” the official said, referring in particular to Baitullah Mehsud.

Other sources within the Pakistani intelligence community firmly believe that Baitullah Mehsud was being protected by US Drones, warning him of Pakistan Army’s action and movements in advance.

It appears the Americans have finally heeded to the long-standing demand of the Pakistani security services, even if unintentionally.

Courtesy Brasstacks & PKKH, Posted: August 11, 2009 Cross posted: PakNationalists

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The Good and the Bad Taliban

Qari Zainuddin, second from right, with his bodyguards. An assassin loyal to the Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, killed Mr. Zainuddin on 23rd June this year. Photo courtesy: Ishtiaq Mahsud/Associated Press

The death of a ‘bad Taliban’

by Tahir Ali

The death of Pakistan’s Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in an American drone attack has once again brought to the fore the differences between the ‘good Taliban’ and the ‘bad Taliban’. Tahir Ali analyses the differences and conflicts within the Taliban, which is facing intensive military operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“The Taliban’s Jihad against foreign forces in Afghanistan will not be affected if a Pakistani Taliban leader is killed on the other side of the Durand Line (which divides Afghanistan and Pakistan),” said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s spokesperson in Afghanistan, in the wake of reports that Pakistan Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud was killed.

Pakistan Taliban Deputy Commander Hakimullah Mahsud (left) speaking just after his gunmen tried to shoot down an unidentified aircraft overhead. Photo courtesy

Zabiullah’s assessment is right, as the death of Mehsud might be a big blow to the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, but not to the Afghan Taliban.

There were differences of opinion between the chiefs of the Taliban in the two countries earlier. Mullah Omer, the head of Afghan Taliban, has good relations with some elements in Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence and he doesn’t want unrest in Pakistan.

But Baitullah Mehsud, along with his deputy Hakimullah Mehsud, carried out a number of attacks against ISI installations in Pakistan. Mehsud felt that there was no difference between the fight against Pakistani security forces and the fight against the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s forces in Afghanistan, as both are following same agenda.

His men preferred fighting in Pakistan instead of Afghanistan — they termed Pakistani forces the ‘near enemy’ while NATO forces were branded the ‘far enemy’.

Pakistani Taliban elements can be broadly divided into two groups, the ‘good Taliban’ and the ‘bad Taliban’. A number of Pakistani politicians are of the view that Pakistan should promote the ‘good Taliban’ for its own interest rather than that of the United States.

‘Good Taliban’ are those who never target Pakistani military and their focus remains on Afghanistan, while the ‘bad Taliban’ mainly attack Pakistani government installations and often seek refuge across the border.

The relations between the ‘good Taliban’ and the Pakistan government are based on the theory of ‘mutual non-interference in each other’s affairs’.

Qari Zainuddin Mehsud, the head of the anti-Baitullah group, is an example of this group. He enjoyed the support of state agencies, confronted Baitullah Mehsud and openly supported the Jihad in Afghanistan against NATO forces. However, Zainuddin Mehsud could not oppose Baitullah for a long time, as he was killed by his guard on June 23 this year.

Mullah Omer, one of the world’s most wanted men, has good ties with Mullah Nazir, who has great influence over the agency’s Wazir-dominated areas. South Waziristan is broadly divided into two parts — Mehsud-built and Wazir-built. Mehsud is the largest tribe comprising 60 per cent of the population that lives in Sarokai, Kaniguram, Makin, Shakatoi and Sararogha, while 35 per cent of the populations is made up of Wazirs who are dominant in Wana, the headquarters of the agency, and its environs.

Mullah Nazir, a ‘good Talib’, enjoys good relations with the Pakistan government. His followers never attack security forces in the area and the army reciprocates by not disturbing his fighters while they cross the Durand Line. In 2006, Taliban forces in this part were also fighting against Pakistani security forces, under the leadership of commander Haji Omer, the cousin of slain Taliban commander Naik Muhammad.

Naik Muhammad had initiated an armed struggle against the Pakistani forces in South Waziristan. He later signed a peace agreement with the government but the accord was sabotaged when he was killed during a drone attack in 2004.

Haji Omer, popularly known for harbouring foreign militants, especially Uzbeks, succeeded Naik Muhammad. The aggressive Uzbeks carried out attacks against the security forces and local chieftains, which dampened the Taliban’s popularity in the area. The Taliban elements in Afghanistan were concerned about this development, as they often crossed over to Pakistan, especially during winter.

When the public opinion against Haji Omer and the Uzbeks became stronger, Mullah Omer appointed Mullah Nazir, his blue-eyed boy, as the head of all Taliban factions in Wana and its surroundings. The newly appointed head of Taliban started cleansing operation against Uzbeks and their host Haji Omer — they were ousted in March 2007.

Incidentally, Haji Omer and Uzbek militants were welcomed by Baitullah Mehsud, drawing the ire of both Mullah Omer and Mullah Nazir.

Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the head of the Taliban faction in neighbouring North Waziristan, follows a similar policy of opposing Jihad within Pakistan and focusing on the fight inside Afghanistan.

Gul Bahadur, a ‘good Talib’, enjoys the support of government agencies and of Mullah Omer. Maulana Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of senior Afghan Jihadi Jalaluddin Haqqani, follows the same policy.

In 2006, when fighting erupted between Pakistani security forces and the Taliban at North Waziristan, Mullah Dadullah, a dreaded Afghan Taliban commander, brokered a peace deal between the two parties. Dadullah, who was killed later, wanted Waziristan to be a safe haven for Taliban fighters, and didn’t want clashes with Pakistani security forces.

Gul Bahadur Wazir, the head of the Taliban in North Waziristan, initially fought against Pakistani security forces, but signed a peace deal with the government in 2006. However, in 2007, he broke the agreement, only to re-enter into a peace deal with the government. In June 2009, he again withdrew from the deal.

After Baitullah Mehsud’s death, the state agencies are trying to create a rift in the Baitullah-led TTP, over the issue of leadership. State-owned media also carried some baseless reports that Hakimullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman, both likely successors of Mehsud, have killed each other.

Some ‘good Taliban’ commanders, backed by Pakistani agencies, are trying to appoint some pro-government commander as the head of TTP. But members of the al-Qaeda and the Punjabi Taliban, who have good contacts with the TTP, have rushed to the area to appoint the new chief.

Hakimullah Mehsud is the strongest contender for the slot but Mufti Waliur Rehman is also not far behind in the race to succeed Baitullah.

According to a report, the ISI provided the Central Intelligence Agency with the requisite information needed to strike Baitullah Mehsud, as he was a ‘bad Talib’. But will Pakistan help the CIA target other wanted militants, including Mullah Nazir, Hafiz Gul Bahadur or Sirajuddin Haqqani, who are considered ‘good Talibans’?

Courtesy: rediff.com, Posted August 10, 2009.

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Afghan elections: 80% puppetry, 20% political drama

“Despite these sham elections, eventually the Pashtuns will kick out the Yankees, just as they did to the Soviets,” says an analyst on Afghan affairs

by Ben Tanosborn

In less than two weeks, Afghanistan will hold its second presidential elections since the United States occupied that country in November 2001.

Democratic elections, we deem them to be, although many Afghans and foreigners alike consider the process more of an American coronation of another vassal-monarch from that celebrated dynasty: the House of Dollar. Of course, the title is one of president; Zahir Shah being the last king, one never to lay claim to the throne since deposed in 1973 — now dead for two years.

As much as I have always been drawn to both culture and history from that part of the world, I have never visited the land, and have known but a few Afghans that I never considered being representative of that nation; all from the upper class, either university students or well-off professionals choosing their own exile. And during the last six years in which I have extended notes and commentary in my columns about this rugged, exotic (to me) land, I have relied greatly on briefings/discussions by/with my European journalist friend, Mingo, whose judgment and impartiality I trust, an unquestionable Afghanphile who has spent almost eight years of the last decade in that country, speaks fluent Dari and has innumerable friends and connections throughout that land.

“Americans’ ill-placed honor,” Mingo tells me, “may force the White House, Pentagon and Congress to stay on with this war in the manner they did with Vietnam four decades ago; but your stay in Afghanistan, if that’s the path Obama chooses, will be as painful or worse . . . and eventually, just as they did to the Russians, the Pashtun will kick you out.”

Americans shouldn’t count on a round one victory for Pres. Hamid Karzai on August 20; that is, unless the turnout in the southern Pashtun region is very strong, or the fraud that has been perpetrated in voter registration was deeply rigged to favor the present leader, more so than any of the other 35 candidates. As far as Mingo sees it, corruption is so pervasive in government — at both federal and provincial levels — that some voters could end up going to the polls several times. But whether Karzai comes out the victor, or one of his top two rivals — former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and ex-finance minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai — is able to muster a coalition to dethrone him, the country will remain in the “good hands of corruption” that seems to be part of everyone’s life, and one of the fundamental reasons for the rebellion of so many Afghans against the West and those amongst them who benefit from the occupiers’ presence.

Mingo is convinced that, overwhelmingly, the population looks back with nostalgia at the days of peace and Islamic justice, sharia, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

During the past half century, Afghans have been exposed to both the preaching and the practices of three distinct political philosophies: socialism “Soviet Union -style,” fundamentalist Islam from the Taliban, and that democratic capitalism espoused by the West — more specifically, American capitalism. To Mingo, their choice and loyalty may be split from time to time, but the latter clearly emerges as a poor third choice.

So if Americans insist in staying there, it is to secure their own interests . . . and not the overall interests of the Afghan people, no matter how many places Americans help secure in schools for women, or how much is spent in public relations when Afghans’ eyes and ears are tuned to the number of civilian casualties our military inflicts in the process of killing the Taliban. Not a pretty picture, particularly when compared to the Russian “collateral experience” there . . . and from a military with such accurate weaponry as the Pentagon claims. And, of course, sartorial Hamid Karzai is always caught in the middle, defending the occupiers, yet trying to appear to his people as their ombudsman.

The White House, Pentagon and even the Afghan government may downplay the concerns expressed by think-tanks — the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) topping them all — as to how significant the presence of the Taliban is in most parts of Afghanistan. But casualties that both America and other NATO members are likely to suffer will eventually tell it all. And, Mingo claims, the 2007 plan of the Taliban to have this geometric progression in hostilities in their campaign to retake the country by 2011 is running like clockwork. So far, their overall strategy and nature of their tactics are proving them to be right on the money.

But if our CIA is inefficient or derelict in bringing this reality to the White House, Israel’s Mossad is not, and they have their Zionist marionettes in the top slots of the appropriate committees of the US Senate trying to get the White House to double (or triple) the number of Afghan forces in the next two years, at whatever cost “they” (a Senate that obviously will work for AIPAC and not the interests of the American people) would be willing to fund, perhaps as much as $30 billion in the next two years. Yep, Israel can count on Senators Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, to get the job done. And a Rahm Emanuel at the White House is ready to cram it down the president’s throat!

But a 400,000 or 500,000 Afghan combined military-police force won’t stop the Taliban, says Mingo, and most of such “trained force” is likely to defect to the Taliban, at the proper time, against their nation’s puppet regime.

Is America’s military presence in Afghanistan one of economic and military interests, or is it just Americans’ instinct to ask “how high” when the Israelis ask them to jump? A rather easy but embarrassing question that needs to be asked!

© 2009 Ben Tanosborn

Ben Tanosborn, columnist, poet and writer, resides in Vancouver, Washington (USA), where he is principal of a business consulting firm. Contact him at ben@tanosborn.com

Source : online journal.com Cross posted at: Mathaba.net Posted: August 14, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Happy Independence Day

Subsequent to my last year’s Independence Day message; we have had many things, many events, many happenings to dishearten us. There were the suicide bombings in Holiday Inn at Islamabad, at different places in Lahore and Peshawar. There were numerous such attacks in other cities, yet the biggest jolt was displacement of almost 3 million Pakistanis from Swat (a consequence of Operation Rah-e-Rast which was launched by Pakistani’s armed forces to flush out the terrorists from the valley).

Good news is the centuries old resilience of Pakistani people to fight out all odds at all times, and that has demonstrated  our will, our determination and our endurance to face all challenges posed by internal as well as external forces. The valiant civil and armed forces of Pakistan have successfully repulsed the anti-Pakistan militants and our patriotic Pashtun brethren are returning to their paradise once again. The planted warlord of the so called TTP Baitullah Mehsud is dead. Judiciary too has ultimately won its battle against the establishment of the military dictators as well as of civil detractors; a historical landmark in Pakistan.

This picture by Umair Ghani is a symbol of the resilience shown by our people. A misty morning which some times gets foggy, but then clears up to form a beautiful, romantic mist, turning gradually into a shining, beautiful morning in Pakistan.

Dear Readers, Pakistan is my Ishq and I believe yours too. Personally my greatest regret : I only have one life to lose for Pakistan. My passion, my love for this land called Pakistan is eternal, “Jaese muhabbat, Ishq  lafani hae, waese hi maira, apka Pakistan bhi lafani hae, INSHA ALLAH.. [ Nayyar ]

HAPPY Independence Day to all my readers.

Posted: August 14, 2009

HappyIdependence Day India

Happy Independence Day to all our Indian readers! May this day enable the two nations sit around a table and sort out all outstanding issues between them, turning this subcontinent into a zone of peace and tranquility, such that it becomes a model for other nations to emulate.

My good wishes, as they say in Hindi “Shubh KamanayaiN” go to my friends Sudhusaaheb, Mayank Austen Soofi and Ramaswami, who have kindled the light of friendship between our two countries by inserting excellent content in their respective weblogs.

Pakistan Zindabad

India Pakistan Dosti Paindabad

Pakistan, a Suicidal Nation in the Crosshairs

First a comment from a blogger friend (eideard.wordpress.com).

The North Carolina security contractor Blackwater Worldwide has changed its name to Xe, a company memo says. Company President Gary Jackson said in a memo that the company has been reorganizing for several months to “create unique brand identities for its products and services,”

As part of its rebranding, the company is jettisoning the name Blackwater and its red-and-black bear-claw logo.

Blackwater was involved in several controversies over its security work in Iraq on behalf of the U.S. government. There were high-profile investigations into alleged gun smuggling and the shooting of civilians in Baghdad.

Robert Passikoff, president of the New York marketing research firm Brand Keys Inc., said “There’s an old

saying about brands: ‘When you can’t change the product, you change the packaging.’”

A mercenary thug by any other name…

Sleazy bastards. The right-wing politicians in bed with them could care less about the name. They’ll still roll over and spout greenbacks whenever they’re asked.

Destroying ourselves with a little help from the US

Shireen M Mazari

The chaos that is spreading within the country is frightening and a result of bad or lack of governance on one hand and the US intrusions and questionable activities in Pakistan on the other.In the first instance, there is no civilian governance infrastructure to take over and govern the “cleared” areas inMalakand – but then there is no governance even in more central parts of the country. That is why we have had the despicable attack on the poor and marginalised Christians in Gojra – once again under the shameful and protective guise of the Blasphemy Law. Never has a Law been so abused to wreak violence on our minorities’ whom the Founder of the Nation, Quaid-i-Azam, declared as equal citizens in the state of Pakistan. Clearly, there is so much hatred, intolerance and violence endemic within us that we do not need any Taliban to kill and harm our less fortunate fellow citizens. And where were the government and the law and order institutions when all this barbarism was being carried out?

As Pakistanis we must hang our heads once again in shame; but the main concern for us should not be simply our image internationally but what we are becoming within our own society. That is what should be of primary concern for the leadership. That is why in many previous columns I have been pointing to the dangers of bringing our marginalised population within the mainstream and delivering justice to the people so that they all have a stake in the system and the state – be they the marginalised Madrassah students or the marginalised minorities’. Otherwise extremism and violence will fester – Taliban or no Taliban – and as a desperate measure sending in the military will only aggravate not resolve the problem. And one has yet to talk of Balochistan where targeted killings continue while politicians continue to talk rather than act despite a seeming political consensus on what needs to be done. Why a beginning towards reconciliation cannot be made by declaring a general amnesty for all political prisoners and exiles only our bizarre ruling elites’ mindsets can understand but we are on a precipice here.

However, the other cause for chaos can be resolved more readily – that of the growing intrusiveness and questionable role of the US within Pakistan. For some time now one has been raising questions about the strange US presence in areas around Tarbela and in Peshawar. Then there was the news of the assassination squads controlled by the US Department of Defence rather than the CIA, of which the new US commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal was a central actor. This information helped to link up differing pieces of a growing puzzle about the increasing US personnel in Pakistan. A cause for concern, given these developments, is the US plan to spend $1 billion to expand its presence in Islamabad – especially, since central to this plan is the importation of almost 400 Marines with hundreds of APCs. There is absolutely no logic to this, but who will tell our rulers who seem hell-bent on kowtowing before Washington? Incidentally already the US contingent in Pakistan is way over the sanctioned strength of 350 but does anyone in the corridors of power in Pakistan care?

Nor is the US Marines presence restricted to Islamabad. As some of us had been writing much earlier, they had been spotted in and around Tarbela also – where our military’s Special Operation Task Force is located. It now transpires that there are already 300 plus US military personnel in this area – the so-called “trainers”. Of course, given the poor counter insurgency record of the US, heaven knows what training they will impart to our much better trained army! Also, if they were only “trainers” why would the US buy a large plot of land around Tarbela and send twenty large containers there according to an investigative Asia Times Online report (3August 2009).

As if all these US military and undercover officials crawling all over the sensitive parts of the country were not enough, it appears that the US is also using private covert setups to further a dubious and threatening agenda within Pakistan. The centre of these suspicious covert operations is Peshawar, and the central organisation is Creative Associates International Inc. (CAII – as opposed to CIA), which refers to itself as an NGO on its website but on further investigation it transpires that the organisation is registered as a private incorporated company in Washington D.C – not an NGO! A 27 July 2009 report by Sarwar and Yousafzai for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reveals that CAII has been terrifying the residents of University Town Peshawar because of its US security guards – ostensibly from that notorious US security contractor Blackwater (now renamed Xe Worldwide) whose employees already face charges of murder, arms smuggling and child prostitution in Iraq.

What is very suspicious is that CAII’s website shows no identification of its owners although its staff is identified. Also, although it is supposed to be a private corporation, all its work around the world is totally funded by USAid and the US government and the projects are all in sensitive areas only – Sri Lanka, Gaza, Angola, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. CAII is working supposedly on a strange-sounding project in FATA – FATA Development Programme Government to Community. In reality, its staff goes around escorted by the killer Blackwater guards, meeting militants and other suspect people being sought by the Pakistani authorities in FATA and the Peshawar environs. Of the 30 job openings listed on its website presently, at least half are for Pakistan.

During the latter half of July, a US citizen, Craig Davis, was arrested from the CAII house in Peshawar, his visa cancelled and deported. Interestingly, when a journalist sought to verify this information from the US embassy, its spokesperson first declared that Davis had nothing to do with the US embassy but then stated that the embassy knew nothing about this man. So if they knew nothing of the man’s existence, how was it known that he did not work for the US embassy?

The point is, clearly there is a threatening US agenda including seeking out our nuclear sites and assassinating people thereby adding to our chaos and violence. But the question is: who has allowed us to be confronted with such a dubious and large US covert and overt presence in Pakistan? Some believe that during the previous regime, certain segments of certain institutions had orders from the top to allow this dangerous US infiltration into Pakistan but no one else was informed. However, now who is responsible for the continuing presence of these people in sensitive areas where they are also terrorising the local populations?

(Left) “A Dollar trap for Pakistani Job seekers”

When we as a society are facing our own problems of violence and terrorism, we can hardly afford to have such a volatile US presence here which will only aggravate our problems of violence and law and order. It is also sad to learn that Blackwater has been able to recruit dozens of retired commandos from the Pakistan army and elite police force through its local subcontractors according to the DPA report. Are Pakistanis so willing to knowingly act against their nation for dollars?

With increasing information about the dangerous US presence in Pakistan, it is not difficult to connect the dots also – with our nuclear assets, the institution of the military and the remaining strands of stability being the targets. Unless someone can stop the rot, it is only a matter of time before the US forces cross over physically on the ground from across Afghanistan. They may not get the triggers they plan on seizing but they can trigger a push towards total anarchy. Our rulers are certainly in self-destruct mode aided and abetted by the US.

The writer is a defence analyst. Email: callstr@hotmail.com

Source: therearenosunglasses Posted: August 16, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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American NGO Covers For Blackwater In Pakistan?

Blackwater in New Orleans

Reports suggest Pakistan has expelled a US Blackwater mercenary, but Pakistanis ask, ’Who rules our streets, the Pakistani government or the Americans?’ And who let them in?

In May, a US diplomat was caught arranging a meeting between a suspected Indian spy and senior Pakistani officials in the privacy of her house.  In June when Pakistani officials confronted Washington with evidence that terrorists in Pakistan were using sophisticated American weapons, US media quickly leaked stories about American weapons missing from the US-trained Afghan army.  And now reports confirm that the dirty secret arm of the US government – the mercenaries of Blackwater – have infiltrated sensitive regions of Pakistan.  Blackwater works as an extension of the US military and CIA, taking care of dirty jobs that the US government cannot associate itself with in faraway strategic places.  The question: Who let them in? And who deported one of them, if at all?

by AHMED QURAISHI

Last month a group of concerned Pakistani citizens in Peshawar wrote to the federal interior ministry to complain about the suspicious activities of a group of shadowy Americans in a rented house in their neighborhood, the upscale University Town area of Peshawar.

An NGO calling itself Creative Associates International, Inc. leased the house.  CAII, as it is known by its acronym, is a Washington DC-based private firm.  According to its Web site, the company describes itself as “a privately-owned non-governmental organization that addresses urgent challenges facing societies today …Creative views change as an opportunity to improve, transform and renew …”

The description makes no sense.  It is more or less a perfect cover for the American NGO’s real work: espionage.

The incorporated NGO is more of a humanitarian front that alternates sometimes for undercover US intelligence operations in critical regions, including Angola, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Gaza, and Pakistan. Of the 36 new job openings, the company’s Web site shows that half of them are in Pakistan today.  Pakistan is also at the heart of the now combined desperate effort by the White House-military-CIA to avert a looming American defeat in Afghanistan by shifting the war to its next-door neighbor.

In Peshawar, CAII, opened an office to work on projects in the nearby tribal agencies of Pakistan. All of these projects, interestingly, are linked to the US government.  CAII’s other projects outside Pakistan, are also linked to the US government.  In short, this NGO is not an NGO.  It is closely linked to the US government.

In Peshawar, CAII told Pakistani authorities it needed to hire security guards for protection. The security guards, it turns out, were none other than Blackwater’s military-trained hired guns.  They were used the CAII cover to conduct a range of covert activities in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Continue reading…

In the video above, the anchor of a TV channel details the origin and functioning of Blackwater, to its viewers in Urdu. The organization, a contractor of the US military, came into limelight when their inhuman treatment to Iraqi prisoners especially those in Abu Ghuraib Jail were exposed by a committed journalist.

The infamous Blackwater private security firm operates as an extension of the US military and CIA, taking care of dirty jobs that the US government cannot associate itself with in faraway strategic places. Blackwater is anything but a security firm.  It is a mercenary army of several thousand hired soldiers.

Pakistani security officials apparently became alarmed by reports that Blackwater was operating from the office of CAII on Chinar Road, University Town in Peshawar. The man in charge of the office, allegedly an American by the name of Craig Davis according to a report in Jang, Pakistan’s largest Urdu language daily, was arrested and accused of establishing contacts with ‘the enemies of Pakistan’ in areas adjoining Afghanistan.  His visa has been cancelled, the office sealed, and Mr. Davis reportedly expelled back to the United States.

It is not clear when Mr. Davis was deported and whether there are other members of the staff expelled along with him. When I contacted the US Embassy over the weekend, spokesman Richard Snelsire’s first reaction was, “No embassy official has been deported.”  This defensive answer is similar to the guilt-induced reactions of US embassy staffers in Baghdad and Kabul at the presence of mercenaries working for US military and CIA.

I said to Mr. Snelsire that I did not ask about an embassy official being expelled. He said he heard these reports and ‘checked around’ with the embassy officials but no one knew about this. “It’s baseless.”

So I asked him, “Is Blackwater operating in Pakistan, in Peshawar?”

“Not to my knowledge.”  Fair enough.  The US embassies in Baghdad and Kabul never acknowledged Blackwater’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan either. This is part of low-level frictions between the diplomats at the US Department of State and those in Pentagon and CIA.  The people at State have reportedly made it clear they will not acknowledge or accept responsibility for the activities of special operations agents operating in friendly countries without the knowledge of those countries and in violation of their sovereignty.  Reports have suggested that sometimes even the US ambassador is unaware of what his government’s mercenaries do in a target country.

Official Pakistani sources are yet to confirm if one or more US citizens were expelled recently.  The government is also reluctant in making public whatever evidence there might be about Blackwater operations inside Pakistan.  But it is clear that something unusual was happening in the Peshawar office of an American NGO.  There is also strong suspicion that Blackwater was operating from the said office.

There are other things happening in Pakistan that are linked to the Americans and that increase the chances of Blackwater’s presence here.

These include:

1.       One of the largest US embassies – or military and intelligence command outposts – in the world is being built in Islamabad as I write this at a cost of approximately one billion US dollars. This is the biggest sign of an expansion in US meddling in Pakistan and a desire to use this country as a base for regional operations.  Interestingly, US covert meddling inside Pakistan and nearby countries is already taking place, including in Russia’s backyard, in Iran, and in China’s Xinjiang.

2.      A large number of retired Pakistani military officers, academics and even journalists have been quietly recruited at generous compensations by several US government agencies.  These influential Pakistanis are supposed to provide information, analysis, contacts and help in pleading the case for US interests in the Pakistani media, in subtle ways.  Pakistanis would be surprised that some prominent names well known to television audiences are in this list. Continue reading…

[Right: The American NGO that works for US government has almost half of its international vacancies in Pakistan. Three weeks back, its director in Peshawar was found contacting anti-Pakistan elements in the Pak-Afghan border area].

3.      CIA and possibly Blackwater have established a network of informers in the tribal belt and Balochistan; there have also been reports of non-Pakistanis sighted close to sensitive military areas in the country. Considering the intensity and frequency of terrorist acts inside Pakistan in the past four years, there is every possibility that all sorts of saboteurs are having a field day in Pakistan.

4.      Members of separatist and ethnic political parties have been cultivated by various US government agencies and quietly taken for visits to Washington and the CENTCOM offices in Florida.

The possibility of the existence of mercenary activities in Pakistan is strengthened by the following events:

5.      Pakistani officials have in recent months collected piles of evidence that suggests that terrorists wreaking havoc inside Pakistan have been and continue to receive state of the art weapons and a continuous supply of money and trainers from unknown but highly organized sources inside Afghanistan.  A significant number of these weapons is of American and Israeli manufacture.  Indians have also been known to supply third-party weapons to terrorists inside Pakistan.

6.      Some Pakistani intelligence analysts have stumbled on circumstantial evidence that links the CIA to anti-Pakistan terror activities that may not be in the knowledge of all departments of the US government. One thing is for sure, that CIA’s operations in Afghanistan are in the hands of dangerous elements that are prone to rogue-ish behavior.

7.      In May, a US woman diplomat was caught arranging a quiet [read 'secret'] meeting between a low-level Indian diplomat and several senior Pakistani government officials.  An address in Islamabad – 152 Margalla Road – was identified as a venue where the secret meeting took place. The American diplomat in question knew there was no chance the Indian would get to meet the Pakistanis in normal circumstances.  Nor was it possible to do this during a high visibility event.  After the incident, Pakistan Foreign Office issued a terse statement warning all government officials to refrain from such direct contact with foreign diplomats in unofficial settings without prior intimation to their departments.

8.     Pakistani suspicions about American foul play inside Pakistan are not new.  On July 12, 2008 in a secret meeting in Rawalpindi between military and intelligence officials from the two countries these concerns were openly aired. The Americans accused ISI of maintain contacts with the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani answer was that normal low-level contacts are maintained with all parties in the area. NATO and the Kabul regime were doing the same thing in Afghanistan. In return, the Pakistanis laid out evidence, including photographs, showing known terrorists meeting Indian and pro-US Kabul regime officials. Was the United States supporting these anti-Pakistan activities is the question that was posed to the US military and CIA.

9.      Further back into history, in 1978 the ISI broke a spy ring made up of Pakistani technicians working for the nascent Pakistani nuclear program who were recruited by CIA.  Pakistan chose not to raise the issue publicly but did so privately at the highest level in Washington.

Now there are reports that the Zardari-Gilani government is consulting Pakistan’s Naval headquarters on a proposal to construct a US navy base on the coast of Balochistan.  When things have reached this level of American meddling in Pakistan, Blackwater seems like a small issue.  Some Pakistani analysts are of the view that elements within the Pakistani security establishment need to be very careful about where they intend to draw the red line for CIA operations in and around Pakistan.

The video above, courtesy, The Nation, Jeremy Scahill explains what’s Backwater and how does it operate. Jeremy Scahill (born c. 1974) is an American investigative journalist with expertise on a number of global issues, most notably the recent rise of private military companies.^] He is the author of the international best-seller Blackwater:The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. The book won the George Polk Book Award. He serves as a correspondent for the U.S. radio and TV program Democracy Now!.

This video shows a Blackwater trainer giving a “motivational” speech to Iraqi police; thinking they are lazy stuff. Here in this video, he prepares them to shoot on their targets without the slightest consideration for their country, their religion or anything else. The video proves per se the modus operandi of such military contractors and therefore their undesirable presence in Pakistan.

Courtesy: AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists, Posted: August 16, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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In world’s largest democracy, even today, an Indian Muslim is not allowed to buy a property in Mumbai

Bollywood star Emran Hashmi says no house for him in Mumbai because he’s a Muslim

by Kingshuk Nag

The government of the day shouts from the rooftops that it wants to build an inclusive society. The Constitution of India guarantees equal rights for all its citizens. Yet, actor Emran Hashmi is unable to buy a property in Mumbai’s Pali Hills because he is a Muslim.

Well, nobody tells him that he is being denied the right to buy the flat because he is a Muslim, but for obvious reasons the housing society denies him a no-objection certificate.

“Do I look like a terrorist?” asks Hashmi and nobody has any answer. He may not be any great-shakes actor but certainly nobody has a right to deny him a house just because of his religion. Some friends tell me do not get alarmed, this is not a new phenomenon in Mumbai. Regularly, non-vegetarians are denied flats in housing societies controlled by vegeterian governing bodies. Why should Emran make an issue out of it? He is not being denied a flat because he is a Muslim but because he is assumed to be a non-vegetarian. This is a specious argument because in all probability the denial has to do more with his faith. I am alarmed not because I have any sympathy for this actor but because of different reasons.

Since the early nineties — and this is one thing which Narendra Modi cannot be blamed for starting — there has been religious segregation in the entire new city of Ahmedabad, which came up on the western bank of the Sabarmati river. Muslims could not buy or rent out houses/flats in these parts except in a particular mixed locality called Paldi.

You could be the richest businessman or a top-grade doctor or architect, but if you were a Muslim you just could not live in these areas. There were only two exceptions to my knowledge. One a brave NGO activist (with a Christian wife) used to live on the 10th floor of an apartment complex. The other was the chief PRO (who was a lady) of a top company whose Jain promoter had defied all norms to allot her a flat in a housing complex in the Hindu neighbourhood.

There was a third exception: there was a Muslim housing society in Navrangpura where many prosperous Muslims used to live. I remember having once asked Ahmedabad’s then police commissioner P C Pande (who as the police chief during the riots of 2002 took much flak but I asked this of him earlier on) what he thought about this arrangement. “It’s unfortunate and ominous. It has the potential to destablise society.” And that’s what happened.

The Muslims finding themselves denied an opportunity to stay in these upcoming areas congregated in a place called Juhapura. This was an exclusive Muslim area. With passage of time no Hindu went to Juhapura and common folk started talking of a “border” (shades of India-Pakistan) that demarcated Juhapura from the rest of western Ahmedabad.

The Hindus having no knowledge about Juhapura or its denizens started having apprehensions about the state of affairs there. “There is a lot of arms and ammunitions in Juhapaura, terrorists are hiding there,” said someone and as the voices became shrill many started believing this. Naturally because they had no clue about Juhapura. While the Muslims were getting demonised as a result of these wrong beliefs, nobody asked why Muslims were being denied residence in these upcoming areas. No media reports, no NGO studies, no study by sociologists, no minority commission, no government inquiry, absloutely nothing on the subject.

The end result is there for everybody to see: Gujarat 2002, which not only brought untold miseries on the Muslims of the state but damaged the image of the state and the country internationally. It brought forth a series of reprisal attacks in other parts of the country like the blasts in Mumbai in 2003. A lot of Muslims started wondering whether India was their country at all and if it was so, why were they treated as second-class citizens. Godhra may have provided the spark to Gujarat 2002 (like the greased bullets did to the Revolt of 1857), but its genesis was much earlier. The segragation that begun in the early 1990s had much to do with it. That’s why I am alarmed about the Emran Hashmi incident. If this becomes the trend, God save Mumbai.

Text Source: : Times of India, Photo Source : www.topnews.in/ Posted: August 17, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Ex-ISI Chief Says Purpose of New Afghan Intelligence Agency RAMA Is ‘to destabilize Pakistan

Lt. Gen. Retired Hamid Gul

by Jeremy R. Hammond

[Note for WoP readers: Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan’s ISI, has been a key player of once the US-Pakistani covert operations in Afghanistan. At that time all three actors on the Afghan stage, the US, Pakistan and the Mujahideen, were all united against the Soviets.

Gen. Hamid Gul’s views on US involvement in Afghanistan during the Afghan resistance, the Pakistani support to the Mujahideen, the 9/11 tragedy (which he quite frequently refers to “as an inside job”) are already well known. We covered his two previous sessions, one with Alex Jones (here, here, here and the other with Ahmed Quraishi already in our issues of April and June 2009.

The most startling part, however, of his current interview to Jeremy R. Hammond of Foreign Policy Journal is his disclosure on record production of opium in today’s Afghanistan, right under the nose of US and NATO forces as well as the puppet regime of Hamid Karzai, all going unchecked!

When he describes the involvement of President’s brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, who is also the governor of Kandahar province, his wheeling dealing in poppy trade, one cannot overlook the role of White House staffers in propping up a regime that from head to toe is smeared in the sleaze of Afghanistan’s narco trade.

Another sensation is his statement that heroin is being smuggled out of Afghanistan in jet aircrafts as well. Now this is a very serious issue; not even a warlord or a narco smuggler would dare or afford to indulge in such an operation. Obviously this can happen only under the protection and or with the connivance of the regime in power. Question now arises: who benefits from this large scale production and smuggling of poppy thing from Afghanistan, the Taliban or the regime or the forces that oppose them? Go through the following post and you will get the answer from none else than General Gul himself. Nayyar]

In his current interview with Foreign Policy Journal, retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul responds to charges that he supports terrorism, discusses 9/11 and ulterior motives for the war on Afghanistan, claims that the U.S., Israel, and India are behind efforts to destabilize Pakistan, and charges the U.S. and its allies with responsibility for the lucrative Afghan drug trade.

Retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was the Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from 1987 to 1989, during which time he worked closely with the CIA to provide support for the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Though once deemed a close ally of the United States, in more recent years his name has been the subject of considerable controversy. He has been outspoken with the claim that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were an “inside job”. He has been called “the most dangerous man in Pakistan”, and the U.S. government has accused him of supporting the Taliban, even recommending him to the United Nations Security Council for inclusion on the list of international terrorists.

In an exclusive interview with Foreign Policy Journal, I asked the former ISI chief what his response was to these allegations. He replied, “Well, it’s laughable I would say, because I’ve worked with the CIA and I know they were never so bad as they are now.” He said this was “a pity for the American people” since the CIA is supposed to act “as the eyes and ears” of the country. As for the charge of him supporting the Taliban, “it is utterly baseless. I have no contact with the Taliban, nor with Osama bin Laden and his colleagues.” He added, “I have no means, I have no way that I could support them, that I could help them.”

After the Clinton administration’s failed attempt to assassinate Osama bin Laden in 1998, some U.S. officials alleged that bin Laden had been tipped off by someone in Pakistan to the fact that the U.S. was able to track his movements through his satellite phone. Counter-terrorism advisor to the National Security Council Richard Clarke said, “I have reason to believe that a retired head of the ISI was able to pass information along to Al Qaeda that the attack was coming.” And some have speculated that this “retired head of the ISI” was none other than Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul.

When I put this charge to him, General Gul pointed out to me that he had retired from the ISI on June 1, 1989, and from the army in January, 1992. “Did you share this information with the ISI?” he asked. “And why haven’t you taken the ISI to task for parting this information to its ex-head?” The U.S. had not informed the Pakistan army chief, Jehangir Karamat, of its intentions, he said. So how could he have learned of the plan to be able to warn bin Laden? “Do I have a mole in the CIA? If that is the case, then they should look into the CIA to carry out a probe, find out the mole, rather than trying to charge me. I think these are all baseless charges, and there’s no truth in it…. And if they feel that their failures are to be rubbed off on somebody else, then I think they’re the ones who are guilty, not me.”

General Gul turned our conversation to the subject of 9/11 and the war on Afghanistan. “You know, my position is very clear,” he said. “It’s a moral position that I have taken. And I say that America has launched this aggression without sufficient reasons. They haven’t even proved the case that 9/11 was done by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.” He argued that “There are many unanswered questions about 9/11,” citing examples such as the failure to intercept any of the four planes after it had become clear that they had been hijacked. He questioned how Mohammed Atta, “who had had training on a light aircraft in Miami for six months” could have maneuvered a jumbo jet “so accurately” to hit his target (Atta was reportedly the hijacker in control of American Airlines Flight 11, which was the first plane to hit its target, striking the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 am). And he made reference to the flight that hit the Pentagon and the maneuver its pilot had performed, dropping thousands of feet while doing a near 360 degree turn before plowing into its target. “And then, above all,” he added, “why have no heads been rolled? The FBI, the CIA, the air traffic control — why have they not been put to question, put to task?” Describing the 9/11 Commission as a “cover up”, the general added, “I think the American people have been made fools of. I have my sympathies with them. I like Americans. I like America. I appreciate them. I’ve gone there several times.”

At this point in our discussion, General Gul explained how both the U.S. and United Kingdom stopped granting him an entry visa. He said after he was banned from the U.K., “I wrote a letter to the British government, through the High Commissioner here in Islamabad, asking ‘Why do you think that — if I’m a security risk, then it is paradoxical that you should exclude me from your jurisdiction. You should rather nab me, interrogate me, haul me up, take me to the court, whatever you like. I mean, why are you excluding me from the U.K., it’s not understandable.’ I did not receive a reply to that.” He says he sent a second letter inviting the U.K. to send someone to question him in Pakistan, if they had questions about him they wanted to know. If the U.S. wants to include him on the list of international terrorists, Gul reasons, “I am still prepared to let them grant me the visa. And I will go…. If they think that there is something very seriously wrong with me, why don’t you give me the visa and catch me then?”

Some Soul Searching: Pakistani Nationalism and Schooling

The national education system in Pakistan need be based on our psyche, our cultural heritage, our religion but notwithstanding the true spirit of Pakistani nationalism

·

OUR IDENTITY CRISIS

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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More than half a century has passed since Pakistan came into being. In the life of nations, its said its just trickle of time. However, people who believe in their nation’s resilience do not take it as an act of providence, to develop their societies, their nations, their states in centuries. For them years, months and even days count. They seize every moment in their life to gauge the output as they translate it into progress every hour, every day, every year. No surprise then that their “Time is Money”.

In contrast to this, we as a nation have developed the norm to venture upon that rarest of commodity called time. No wonder why after more than sixty years, we still struggle to find a raison d’etre for our nationhood.

Oblivious of our national goals, we indulge ourselves in trivialities. Many of our youth, when they ask ‘why Pakistan’ our thinkers, our opinion makers and our think tanks are unable to explain our younger generation the genesis of Pakistan. Our history books too, put forward the hackneyed phrases on brute majority of Hindus (which though partially correct but not the genesis of this nation) in British India. Though a fact that time, it’s no more tenable now. Almost same number of Muslims lives even to this day under the same brute majority of Hindus in present day India.

Then many of our religious scholars, ascribe to the theory of first Muslim, second Pakistani, a concept which was strengthened during General Zia’s dictatorial regime and been highly invigorated through history books mostly compiled by writers who believed or still believe in an Islamic revival based on the pattern of Muslim empires that existed before the arrival and colonization of the subcontinent by the British.

These and similar thematic approaches skepticised from the very outset, the legitimacy of Pakistani nationhood. Unfortunately the torch bearers of our education system did also not lag behind in exacerbating the educational philosophy which still remains dissiparious and goalless. Sometimes they played with the idea of countrywide education in respective mother tongue of each province, another time they started swimming along the maxim of every thing, every time every where Urdu and only Urdu.

Ever since independence, barring few English medium schools [which were mostly run by Christian missionaries then], the mainstream educational establishments continued mother tongue as the primary medium of instruction. This system seemed to have worked well till late 1960’s. However in the seventies of the past century our educational wizards came up with the novel idea of unilingual [Urdu] concept of instructing the Pakistani kids in their elementary schools.

With introduction of a unilingual concept the students were now being instructed right from the kindergarten to secondary classes in Urdu [especially in Punjab ]. While making this decision they totally ignored the fact that Urdu had never been the mother tongue of more than 6-7 percent Pakistanis. A great majority of Pakistani school kids used their respective mother tongues as medium of general discourse in their mohallas, in streets especially amongst their buddies. Naturally conflicts arose in the tender minds of young Pakistanis, who adopted a speech pattern which is neither standard Urdu nor compatible with the intonation and stress patterns of their mother tongue spoken for centuries by dwellers of the Indus valley lands called Pakistan. This further resulted in ambiguity and confusion and most of our children have started speaking language which is neither Urdu nor the mother tongue.

Having surmised the confusion as not enough, in the 1990’s other fits gripped our education wizards; chief affliction in this regard being adoption of English as a medium right from kindergarten and onward. In the beginning it was restricted to some selected schools in the private sector but shortly afterwards; these so called English schools started proliferating like mushrooms. Ever since then one finds such schools in every major city or town. These schools are scattered in city slums as well as in posh areas.

This English-mania even overwhelmed the Government of Pakistan who decided that the government run elementary schools will also use English as medium of instruction ignoring the fact that such a large number of teachers who can speak English and teach English to kindergarteners does not exist. A decision like this being self contradictory and ambiguous causes as much damage to our teaching methodology as has been the adoption of Urdu as medium of instruction at the elementary level of our education.

Speaking of English albeit its comprehension at primary level does not go hand in  hand with the linguistic pattern  of our students as they will have to give extra time in mastering English which they will do at the expense of other disciplines. Such contradictory policies based on imported schools of thought have not only debarred us to work out a system which is down to earth Pakistani and which bears the linguistic as well as socio-cultural nuances of Pakistani society at large.

QUESTION ARISES WHAT SHOULD BE DONE :

Let us take the concept of nationhood. Putting too much stress on religiousness of our nationhood, we have landed nowhere. With start of the new millennium this was the very religiousness of our youth which was hijacked by the forces that be, to turn out youth into human time bombs.

Now as Muslim we no doubt belong to the great nation of Islam, the Muslim umma. The latter, however, is not confined to a single country but scattered all over the globe. And when an Egyptian, a Malaysian or a Moroccan can be a Muslim at the same time, why can’t we the Pakistanis be Pakistani and Muslim at the same time. Even a Christian born in Pakistan can be a good Pakistani and a good Christian at the same timer. So it’s high time that we come out of the false pretense of first Muslim, second Pakistani. We must be, first Pakistani first Muslim

The founder of the nation, Qaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah had the vision to stress this very concept of Pakistani nationhood when he said…

Now if we want to make this great state of Pakistan happy and prosperous, we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well being of the people, and specially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in cooperation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second or last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges and obligations, there will be no end to your progress.

I cannot emphasize it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community — will vanish. You are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to  any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with business of the state.

Taking a cue from these words of our great Qaid, once the ideology of first Pakistani first Muslim firmly saddles into the minds of our younger generation, they will themselves find the answer to ‘Why Pakistan’.

This approach further ensures that every Pakistani belongs to his / her motherland, so no one needs to borrow the fear of a religion or a country to fortify his / her sense of belongingness to Pakistan. And we should not forget the fact that the areas which now constitute Pakistan were essentially distinct from the Indian mainland linguistically as well as culturally.

Arrival of Indian Muslims with different linguistic and cultural heritage did not and cannot change the real character of Pakistan. And as a mother rears up her children, the real ones and the adopted, the Pakistani motherland owes its adopted children as much love as it does to its own children.

AND NOW THE EDUCATION

The national education system in Pakistan has to be based on our psyche, our cultural heritage, our religion but notwithstanding the true spirit of Pakistani nationalism. The myth of one medium, be it Urdu, English or be it the provincial vernacular tongue – needs to be discarded for once and all.

[Right: A YOUNG Pakistani carrying national flag on Pakistan Independence Day in Islamabad]

Pakistan comprises of four different linguistic patterns. We should adopt a medium for elementary education based on the language of that particular province. Mother tongue makes a kid to think natural, behave natural and allows the children to grow up in their normal, natural style. Adoption of a language other than mother tongue distorts the very personal, individualistic traits in the children for a child starts speaking a language by composing the words simultaneously in the mother tongue and then another one. This creates ambiguity and confusion in his / her mind.

Once the child has undergone 4-5 years of academic gestation, it is then able to compose independently in other languages too. Hence we should adopt a medium which is the mother tongue of the child. Later the instructions could be gradually converged into Urdu as well as English.  This will not only produce Pucca Pakistanis but also would make our pupils fully confident of meeting the intellectual standards attained by a developed nation.

—

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My Impressions of a Living Sufi – I

Professor  Ahmad Rafique Akhtar

by Farrah Karamat Raja

A true Sufi unifies all diversities, he is able to solve all puzzles. He unveils the mystery and shows the truth behind the veil.

“The Most Beautiful and Bounteous Allah”

I never thought of writing upon Sufism. It was not my interest, but I was interested in life and people. Studying people and the life has been my hobby. So questions coming about life took me to a living Sufi, an answer in himself.

There is no other Truth but God. The Sufi, the teacher am mentioning may not live for ever, and I will also die, but this Truth will live because it is Eternal, it is infinite; all bodies will decay but spirit will grow.

My approach in this regard is to relate my discovery as honestly as I can.

Impressions and Inspirations

is all we get, first through mind then through heart.

Impressions and Inspirations we receive,

The Impressions and Inspirations we leave.

AND

TRUTH NEEDS NO PRIOJECTION

IT SPEAKS FOR ITSELF.

Time is the best test.

I and my words will be lost (may be)

But footsteps of the teacher will never

because they are not his

they were already made

centuries ago,

When Adam stepped on this earth

And started to move towards God.

My teacher’s, My Guru’s footsteps will always remain for coming generations to follow.

I owe my special thanks to my teacher, for tolerating me and my questions.

I am thankful to you as well my dear readers

and so minute I am

and minutest is my thanks to Allah,

but I know when it comes down it expands

So when it comes down to me

It is the Biggest Blessing

So to Allah,

All the thanks.

Contd….

(The Preface of the book, mystery behind the mystic, written on Prof. Ahmad Rafique Akhtar,  by Farrah Karamat Raja).

My Impressions of a Living Sufi – II

THE TEACHER

by Farrah Karamat Raja

I was beautiful, successful, independent, free and highly appreciated but I was not happy, in fact I was dead. Yes! I had buried myself in books, studies, creative writing, sometimes painting, fashion parties, lipsticks, styles and all that, but I knew I was dead. I wasn’t alive. But I had to live. Hamlet had a course of avenging but I had none. Life was without any purpose. I agreed with Macbeth life was a tale told by a stupid. I had read minds, emotions, thoughts, passions, love, I had been practically in all this but there was no clarity, or order, complete obscurity and chaos. I kept on dragging my dead self, I put some order by praying five times a day and in extreme depressions when I was in a state of complete horror at the emptiness of life and nothingness of human being, I read Quran the only medicine which was keeping me in the society.

I was afraid I knew some day I will end in some mental hospital, electric shocks, and pincers, nobody will listen. I was horrified at the core of my being. I was all alone, isolated, with almost no communication because I knew I will end in there, in the hospital. There were people every where but they were skeletons, instead of seeing their faces and dresses I always had a vision of their skeletons, all were dead bodies like me clad in beautiful textile designs and expensive make ups. I felt I don’t belong to this country. I don’t belong to Islam I wanted to be a nun in a convent, or I wanted to run away in search of peace like Buddha, or I wanted to runaway to New York, where I had no identity, a lot of work, roaming like vagabonds perhaps drinking, sometimes or taking hashish, totally lost, no recognition of self. But I could do nothing out of this because I was scared and afraid so I pretended to be sane. Though my mother was quite suspicious of me, when at one o’clock of night, I recited Holy Quran, and kept doing that till morning. I had extreme feelings of hollowness and to find some purpose in life. I had a string of Quran and prayer of five times to find order and peace of mind.

I asked non-sense questions, obscure, chaotic. How could anyone understand or answer my chaotic questions, asked out of obscurity of life? To my all questions he had one answer “call my teacher”. I damn cared about the teacher. I had met so many writers, poets, educationists, my own teachers, they were my intellectual friends but nobody could satisfy me. I wanted to discover the magic and he was referring me to another person again and again. He insisted so much that I thought of making a call to that man. What good a person do on a telephone, Idea seemed quite stupid to me. Mr. Bilal was so confident and so sure “just make a call and it will be a three minute call and you will see”. I liked one thing about his teacher. He was a man of literature, a professor. I liked it. I was looking forward to discuss nothingness…, of Sartre with him. The man, his teacher, lived some where near Pindi.

I called him three times but he was not available. After a few days I called Mr. Bilal. He told me that his teacher was here and I should talk to him. In a few seconds the teacher was on the line.

Hello ! I heard a sparkling voice.

I : Asslam-o-Alaicum

Teacher : Walaicum Assalam

(a pause, he waited for me to speak)

I : Sir ! I am Farrah Karamat and I’ve done masters in English literature and (long silence) Mr. Bilal gave me your number, and asked me to call you.

He :   Yes! Then

I :   Sir, then you are supposed to talk.

He :   What ? (There was a surprise).

I :   Sir, Mr. Bilal said that I will just have to tell you my name and you will do the rest of the talking.

He :   This time a cheerful laughter was heard and then all at once said seriously, “There is no point talking to you Farrah, you are so strong minded and stubborn. You think so much and you never consider any suggestions. You do what ever you think is right. You have strong liking and disliking. When you have got some idea then it almost appears in your dream and you feel you are right, your digestive system is highly sensitive. You‘ve less appetite, sometimes you sleep less even”.

I wanted to interrupt him in the middle but he gave me no space. Finally he recommended me Tasbeehat, as Mr. Bilal did also, and said these will bring peace to you:

ya Salaam, ya Mumin, Ya Allah               300 times

ya Rahman, ya Rahim, ya Karim             300 times

Ya Wali, ya Nasir                                          300 times

 

“God bless you” and the phone ended.

I kept staring at the telephone. His voice and words were fresh and alive in my mind. The very first idea that hit my mind was that Bilal would have briefed him about me. I immediately called Bilal and said him so. I couldn’t understand it. I kept on thinking the whole night. In the morning I was definite the man is an expert of examining personalities out of voices.

It was so surprising, how could he do this, he has some jin or what? I kept on thinking. I discussed it with my colleagues and when I returned home I called my friends but the thing which perplexed me most was how could he know the colour of my dreams, my fantasies, shadows of my thoughts, but how come he understand, knots of pain in my stomach, or my revenges and how can he understand my digestive system and all this in a second. He spoke to me for two minutes only and he described me “myself”.

I was determined to see this person. I went there with my friend. It was a nice place; women and men were sitting in separate rooms. And all of them had an educated, sophisticated and modern look.

Mr. Bilal had a long list of appointments, the teacher seemed quite a busy and sophisticated person, and he was inside the closed room. Mr. Bilal had a cordless telephone in his hand, which kept ringing again and again. He had printed appointment paper on which he was writing schedule and fixing time. Teacher was too much busy. We waited almost for two hours.

I was too much anxious to see the person, I was restless, and impatient; I had no problem, or issue to discuss but I wanted to discover him. Finally our turn came of seeing him but he got up for Namaz.

I said to my friend I think this man hates my chemistry that’s why he ignored so much on telephone and now he is delaying the meeting. My friend could not understand this cosmic connection, chemistry and delay. She only gave me a vague look and said, “you are very impatient. He is a big thing that’s why so many people are here. He is so busy”. “Yes! How much big ? I want to discover”, was my determined answer.

A man came out from the room, tall, fair, well built with a beard and he went to offer Nmaaz in the room, I impatiently asked Mr. Bilal, is he the teacher? He said “No”. Another man came, simple, ordinary, this time I didn’t bother to have a look at him. He said, “Asslam-o-Alaikom” and went to another room. Bilal told me he was the teacher. I blinked my eyes, so ordinary and simple, he doesn’t seem to belong to this aristocratic place but there was something in the air around him, which commanded grace.

Finally we got the turn. Mr. Bilal told us to go inside, we could go separately or together as we would like to. We went together. I don’t know why I put off my shoes outside the door, may be because of his respect, he was a spiritual teacher, but I was not sure then. But when I went inside the room I was bewildered, he was sitting behind – a big modern, sophisticated table, burgundy in colour  with cordless telephone sets,  white curtains, room was carpeted, sofas, luxury office seats and he was sitting in an expensive revolving comfortable office chair. Office did not give the look of a Sufi or a mystic. It was rather an office of a big businessman. To me the place seemed to be a room of psychological clinic with complete privacy, a proud doctor sitting on the other side of a large table, which had expensive mirror on it. But there was harmony and calm and peace, it had a soothing effect. I thought he is going to play some hypnosis now but I was speechless, my brain was clear though. I had nothing to say to him. He asked me my name. I told him Farrah. He told me that I am suffering from deep depression and almost the same things he had told me the previous day on telephone. I said to him, “Sir, I called you yesterday”. There was another surprise for me, his memory was excellent, and I heard a brilliant chuckle.

“Oh ! so that was you”. He called Mr. Bilal and asked him to bring his pen and paper; he wrote my name on that. The things he said were absolutely right but I had disgust, so he is just a man of numerology. Now he was attentive to my friend. Her name is also Farha, she started to describe her problem, she thought she had a jin, or black magic after her, in the half way she broke into tears and sobs, rest of her story was completed by Sir Rafique. Yet the analysis he made of her was excellent, true facts, the root causes of her personal complexes, her personality clashes, her personality riot, and confusion, he was speaking and she was saying yes!  yes! yes! and yes! and I was bewildered. Then he gave her Tasbeeh as well and said “God bless you”. We got up to leave, “Listen “ then all of a sudden he said, my hand was at the door knob, we turned to round to face him, he said, (Aurat wali ho sakti hae)”Woman can be a complete mystic”. I was stunned – this question was in my conscious but I had no intention to discuss it with him. But I had a long debate on the topic with my literature friends, and I had convinced them that there is a biological hindrance and woman cannot be a complete mystic.

He was able to scan my mind and thoughts of past.

And we came out. We looked at each other in surprise, but then there was sure trust, deep trust, confidence and high hope – she was lost in the analysis because for the first time she had discovered the truth about herself and the artificiality of the so called warm security and love, for the first time she had got a formula to understand herself. But to me the matter was different, I was not sure about the man, however, I was extremely happy. I had a big smile for no reason and I was impressed by his excellent memory.

He had a spell in his personality. That commanded respect and obedience yet gave the freedom, to think and to blink. There was friendliness and trust in the air. I discovered all this at least after twelve hours before that I was convincing myself he is some ordinary palmist, who knows numerology.

The man was indigestible. I talked to him thrice as well but I don’t remember the talk, it was made out of so much excitement and confusion. I discussed with my colleagues and friends again. There was something in the man, I was trusting him but I didn’t want to trust him. I decided to see him once gain. And my question on the very outset was, I want to know why I am trusting you ? Give me the reason. He laughed and said, “you don’t know the answer to this simple question?” You are trusting me because you are at a point in your life where you need to trust some one either in me or someone else. It’s not that I am trustworthy; it’s your need that is making you to trust me.

We went under a covenant, covenant of friendship, or student – teacher relationship, he was listening like a grandfather listens to the story of his little grandchild. He was not investigating, he was not interested in anything more than I said, he put no question. I spoke to him with complete ease, he understood all the matters. I said less but he understood more. His view and angle of looking at things was very objective and scientific. His approach to my self destruction, or to my clash with the society and myself was so harmonizing, in that very meeting he tied the wires to right switches, the contradictions, clashes and conflicts which I had in my very own self and among and between my own thoughts, mind and heart were resolved. He was speaking with full ease and comfort, he had extensive knowledge regarding history, humanity, psychology, myth, literature, art, religion, God, human beings, he knew me individually and fully, I must confess. He knew me better than I knew myself.

There were no surprises now because I was ready for them. He was subjective yet scientific, he was abstract yet concrete, he was ordinary and common, yet uncommon and special. The rarest person I have ever discovered.

Things begin to ease between us; I was light hearted, free spirited rather cheered up. His presence was like a soothing fragrance of some flowering tree in a city polluted with foul smells of all sorts. While talking he took out his Tasbeeh and laid that on table, it was not the ordinary one, something struck to my mind. I had seen that somewhere before, it was of wood, disc shaped, heavy beads, I remembered my dream and I hurriedly searched for a thick mole on his right cheek but it was not that thick as in my dream, it was not at the cheek either, it was near the lips, mole of Venus. I related my dream to him but he paid less attention. When I came out the first thing I said to Mr. Bilal was he is the man I saw in my dream. When I saw the dream in those days I was doing the Tasbeehat, which Mr. Bilal had recommended. It was about a week when I saw a man in my dream, roaming along with people in a simple room of a village house.

I want to see him but there is another person who says, “time is over” and he tries to close the door. I am standing there in distress when the man says “No let her in,” and the person opens the door for me. He does not speak to me much, he is saying some words on his Tasbeeh, it was clear and the mole was clear. He asks the servant to serve me with food and send me to some of his assistants. He retires in another room for his rest and prayer. I go to his assistant along with people. The man blows on a paper and it flies away with fire, I feel so pleased and I say to myself”. “Yes! I know he will make me rid of my dilemmas”. I related this dream to my Pir Sahib as well. After listening to it he smiled and gave me his personal Tasbeeh. When I asked him the significance of dream he said, soon you will meet a dear one of Allah”. I had not met Professor Ahmad Rafique then. What else a person can do other than showing a surprise that he gave me his Tasbeeh as a due because he knew professor Ahmad Rafique will recommend me Tasbeehat to do.

Well in that very meeting I was bound with him. I accepted him as my spiritual teacher, but I was not that much convinced. I told myself I will speak less and listen more. He told me, always to be at a distance, never try to be close to him or look for a father, or a brother, a beloved or a teacher in him. It is just a simple relationship between two human beings. He said “Never be involved in me – I’ve no involvements other than God, always guard yourself against me. I am a man and you are a woman. Turn your love towards God. He alone is worthy of love and worship, but don’t make his faces or create His hands or feet. Obey the laws of Shariah and rest of the things are fine. If you want to come for knowledge you are welcome as a student”.

My answer was, “Had I been a boy, I would never have left your place”.

His immediate reply was, nobody did, have a look in the next room. That was filled with young students.

I came back alive and fresh, full of thoughts,

ideas and ambitions. I felt if this was a process of regeneration, he is the source of energy, zest and power.

For Sir Rafique I don’t have any degrees or words, for what he is. He is concrete but his deed abstract, his body is of matter but his mind metaphysical, his language scientific, thought subjective, lives in common beings, serves common beings but he is not existing in this time alone; present, past, future are one entity for him, he is centuries ahead, his heart made of flesh but not red, it is absolute purity achieved by killing the desires, wishes, ambitions of heart, he is alive for the duties assigned to him, he is disinterested in human beings but interested in their problems . In desires and aspirations, he is a statue, Statue of peace.

Yes, he looks like a statue of peace, Simple and ordinary man. He can sit in a room and none will notice him, not more than a statue. He is a doctor. Yes, he examines ailing spirits, wounded hearts, wrecked brains, he scans them masterly, expertly, his patients are haunted human beings, haunted by air-conditioned bedrooms, painted nails and lips, haunted by the colour of money and model of cars , sophisticated tones  of telephones and mobiles, tired of luxury voyages, and honeymoon spots, frustrated from their own success, distort, faithless, people trying to escape their roots, identities, sick from relatives, bonds and bounds, husbands hating wives, wives hating husbands, yet forced to live together, wives want men to lick their feet and husbands want them to be true, honest sincere maids rather pets, yet both betraying, young folks, not trusting their parents, parents without having any trust in their own off springs, men of management, officials, students, teachers, writers, rich, poor, middle class all were there,  on thing was common in all of them , may be they had over confidence and trust in themselves, as I had or they had no confidence in themselves, may be they did not trust the family, friends and society around but they had trust and confidence in one person, Sir Ahmad Rafique.

One by one they pass by him, he examines and prescribes, his memory is excellent, yet his senses par excellence. He was visiting Lahore after six months yet he remembered every individual, with individual problems.

His sixth sense is so sharp and miraculous, in Dec 1995 my cousin visited me, he was extremely depressed over a lost love. I suggested him to speak to Sir Rafique. Light was off at that time, so we were sitting in a candle light. It was about 9.30. I made a call to him. He was sounding very fresh, cheerful, carefree and alive, at the very moment light came, I put off the candle with my hand.

He said, I am smelling a very strange and a smoky smell.

I : (I was surprised at his sharp sense but I wanted to test him further. I instead of saying I had just put off the candle). I said, what Sir, what smell?

He : A very sharp and strange smell with a little smoke in the air.

I : What Sir? (in surprise) I insisted again!

(I think he didn’t like my pretence, he changed the topic).

He : How are you?

I : Fine Sir, I just wanted to say Asslamo-Alaicum, Howe are you?

He : “Allah ka Shukr hae” I am fine and God bless you. The telephone was out.

I looked at my mother and my cousin asking for their opinions, they were surprised too. My mother said he is a man of God. Such people can know of such things and indeed the professor Sir Amad Rafique Akhtar is a man of God and knows of such things as he derives the power to know things from Allah Almighty and none else.

This post is based on the first two chapters of a biography of Professor Ahmad Rafique Akhtar, written by Farrah Karamat Raja. The book titled ‘Mystery behind the Mystic’ has been published by Sang-e-Meel Publications, 25, Shahrah-e-Pakistan (Lower Mall), Lahore.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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“God bless you” and the phone ended.

I kept staring at the telephone. His voice and words were fresh and alive in my mind. The very first idea that hit my mind was that Bilal would have briefed him about me. I immediately called Bilal and said him so. I couldn’t understand it. I kept on thinking the whole night. In the morning I was definite the man is an expert of examining personalities out of voices.

It was so surprising, how could he do this, he has some jin or what? I kept on thinking. I discussed it with my colleagues and when I returned home I called my friends but the thing which perplexed me most was how could he know the colour of my dreams, my fantasies, shadows of my thoughts, but how come he understand, knots of pain in my stomach, or my revenges and how can he understand my digestive system and all this in a second. He spoke to me for two minutes only and he described me “myself”.

I was determined to see this person. I went there with my friend. It was a nice place; women and men were sitting in separate rooms. And all of them had an educated, sophisticated and modern look.

Mr. Bilal had a long list of appointments, the teacher seemed quite a busy and sophisticated person, and he was inside the closed room. Mr. Bilal had a cordless telephone in his hand, which kept ringing again and again. He had printed appointment paper on which he was writing schedule and fixing time. Teacher was too much busy. We waited almost for two hours.

I was too much anxious to see the person, I was restless, and impatient; I had no problem, or issue to discuss but I wanted to discover him. Finally our turn came of seeing him but he got up for Namaz.

I said to my friend I think this man hates my chemistry that’s why he ignored so much on telephone and now he is delaying the meeting. My friend could not understand this cosmic connection, chemistry and delay. She only gave me a vague look and said, “you are very impatient. He is a big thing that’s why so many people are here. He is so busy”. “Yes! How much big ? I want to discover”, was my determined answer.

A man came out from the room, tall, fair, well built with a beard and he went to offer Nmaaz in the room, I impatiently asked Mr. Bilal, is he the teacher? He said “No”. Another man came, simple, ordinary, this time I didn’t bother to have a look at him. He said, “Asslam-o-Alaikom” and went to another room. Bilal told me he was the teacher. I blinked my eyes, so ordinary and simple, he doesn’t seem to belong to this aristocratic place but there was something in the air around him, which commanded grace.

Finally we got the turn. Mr. Bilal told us to go inside, we could go separately or together as we would like to. We went together. I don’t know why I put off my shoes outside the door, may be because of his respect, he was a spiritual teacher, but I was not sure then. But when I went inside the room I was bewildered, he was sitting behind – a big modern, sophisticated table, burgundy in colour with cordless telephone sets, white curtains, room was carpeted, sofas, luxury office seats and he was sitting in an expensive revolving comfortable office chair. Office did not give the look of a Sufi or a mystic. It was rather an office of a big businessman. To me the place seemed to be a room of psychological clinic with complete privacy, a proud doctor sitting on the other side of a large table, which had expensive mirror on it. But there was harmony and calm and peace, it had a soothing effect. I thought he is going to play some hypnosis now but I was speechless, my brain was clear though. I had nothing to say to him. He asked me my name. I told him Farrah. He told me that I am suffering from deep depression and almost the same things he had told me the previous day on telephone. I said to him, “Sir, I called you yesterday”. There was another surprise for me, his memory was excellent, and I heard a brilliant chuckle.

“Oh ! so that was you”. He called Mr. Bilal and asked him to bring his pen and paper; he wrote my name on that. The things he said were absolutely right but I had disgust, so he is just a man of numerology. Now he was attentive to my friend. Her name is also Farha, she started to describe her problem, she thought she had a jin, or black magic after her, in the half way she broke into tears and sobs, rest of her story was completed by Sir Rafique. Yet the analysis he made of her was excellent, true facts, the root causes of her personal complexes, her personality clashes, her personality riot, and confusion, he was speaking and she was saying yes! yes! yes! and yes! and I was bewildered. Then he gave her Tasbeeh as well and said “God bless you”. We got up to leave, “Listen “ then all of a sudden he said, my hand was at the door knob, we turned to round to face him, he said, (Aurat wali ho sakti hae)”Woman can be a complete mystic”. I was stunned – this question was in my conscious but I had no intention to discuss it with him. But I had a long debate on the topic with my literature friends, and I had convinced them that there is a biological hindrance and woman cannot be a complete mystic.

He was able to scan my mind and thoughts of past.

And we came out. We looked at each other in surprise, but then there was sure trust, deep trust, confidence and high hope – she was lost in the analysis because for the first time she had discovered the truth about herself and the artificiality of the so called warm security and love, for the first time she had got a formula to understand herself. But to me the matter was different, I was not sure about the man, however, I was extremely happy. I had a big smile for no reason and I was impressed by his excellent memory.

He had a spell in his personality. That commanded respect and obedience yet gave the freedom, to think and to blink. There was friendliness and trust in the air. I discovered all this at least after twelve hours before that I was convincing myself he is some ordinary palmist, who knows numerology.

The man was indigestible. I talked to him thrice as well but I don’t remember the talk, it was made out of so much excitement and confusion. I discussed with my colleagues and friends again. There was something in the man, I was trusting him but I didn’t want to trust him. I decided to see him once gain. And my question on the very outset was, I want to know why I am trusting you ? Give me the reason. He laughed and said, “you don’t know the answer to this simple question?” You are trusting me because you are at a point in your life where you need to trust some one either in me or someone else. It’s not that I am trustworthy; it’s your need that is making you to trust me.

We went under a covenant, covenant of friendship, or student – teacher relationship, he was listening like a grandfather listens to the story of his little grandchild. He was not investigating, he was not interested in anything more than I said, he put no question. I spoke to him with complete ease, he understood all the matters. I said less but he understood more. His view and angle of looking at things was very objective and scientific. His approach to my self destruction, or to my clash with the society and myself was so harmonizing, in that very meeting he tied the wires to right switches, the contradictions, clashes and conflicts which I had in my very own self and among and between my own thoughts, mind and heart were resolved. He was speaking with full ease and comfort, he had extensive knowledge regarding history, humanity, psychology, myth, literature, art, religion, God, human beings, he knew me individually and fully, I must confess. He knew me better than I knew myself.

There were no surprises now because I was ready for them. He was subjective yet scientific, he was abstract yet concrete, he was ordinary and common, yet uncommon and special. The rarest person I have ever discovered.

Things begin to ease between us; I was light hearted, free spirited rather cheered up. His presence was like a soothing fragrance of some flowering tree in a city polluted with foul smells of all sorts. While talking he took out his Tasbeeh and laid that on table, it was not the ordinary one, something struck to my mind. I had seen that somewhere before, it was of wood, disc shaped, heavy beads, I remembered my dream and I hurriedly searched for a thick mole on his right cheek but it was not that thick as in my dream, it was not at the cheek either, it was near the lips, mole of Venus. I related my dream to him but he paid less attention. When I came out the first thing I said to Mr. Bilal was he is the man I saw in my dream. When I saw the dream in those days I was doing the Tasbeehat, which Mr. Bilal had recommended. It was about a week when I saw a man in my dream, roaming along with people in a simple room of a village house. I want to see him but there is another person who says, “time is over” and he tries to close the door. I am standing there in distress when the man says “No let her in,” and the person opens the door for me. He does not speak to me much, he is saying some words on his Tasbeeh, it was clear and the mole was clear. He asks the servant to serve me with food and send me to some of his assistants. He retires in another room for his rest and prayer. I go to his assistant along with people. The man blows on a paper and it flies away with fire, I feel so pleased and I say to myself”. “Yes! I know he will make me rid of my dilemmas”. I related this dream to my Pir Sahib as well. After listening to it he smiled and gave me his personal Tasbeeh. When I asked him the significance of dream he said, soon you will meet a dear one of Allah”. I had not met Professor Ahmad Rafique then. What else a person can do other than showing a surprise that he gave me his Tasbeeh as a due because he knew professor Ahmad Rafique will recommend me Tasbeehat to do.

Well in that very meeting I was bound with him. I accepted him as my spiritual teacher, but I was not that much convinced. I told myself I will speak less and listen more. He told me, always to be at a distance, never try to be close to him or look for a father, or a brother, a beloved or a teacher in him. It is just a simple relationship between two human beings. He said “Never be involved in me – I’ve no involvements other than God, always guard yourself against me. I am a man and you are a woman. Turn your love towards God. He alone is worthy of love and worship, but don’t make his faces or create His hands or feet. Obey the laws of Shariah and rest of the things are fine. If you want to come for knowledge you are welcome as a student”.

My answer was, “Had I been a boy, I would never have left your place”.

His immediate reply was, nobody did, have a look in the next room. That was filled with young students.

I came back alive and fresh, full of thoughts,

ideas and ambitions. I felt if this was a process of regeneration, he is the source of energy, zest and power.

For Sir Rafique I don’t have any degrees or words, for what he is. He is concrete but his deed abstract, his body is of matter but his mind metaphysical, his language scientific, thought subjective, lives in common beings, serves common beings but he is not existing in this time alone; present, past, future are one entity for him, he is centuries ahead, his heart made of flesh but not red, it is absolute purity achieved by killing the desires, wishes, ambitions of heart, he is alive for the duties assigned to him, he is disinterested in human beings but interested in their problems . In desires and aspirations, he is a statue, Statue of peace.

Yes, he looks like a statue of peace, Simple and ordinary man. He can sit in a room and none will notice him, not more than a statue. He is a doctor. Yes, he examines ailing spirits, wounded hearts, wrecked brains, he scans them masterly, expertly, his patients are haunted human beings, haunted by air-conditioned bedrooms, painted nails and lips, haunted by the colour of money and model of cars , sophisticated tones of telephones and mobiles, tired of luxury voyages, and honeymoon spots, frustrated from their own success, distort, faithless, people trying to escape their roots, identities, sick from relatives, bonds and bounds, husbands hating wives, wives hating husbands, yet forced to live together, wives want men to lick their feet and husbands want them to be true, honest sincere maids rather pets, yet both betraying, young folks, not trusting their parents, parents without having any trust in their own off springs, men of management, officials, students, teachers, writers, rich, poor, middle class all were there, on thing was common in all of them , may be they had over confidence and trust in themselves, as I had or they had no confidence in themselves, may be they did not trust the family, friends and society around but they had trust and confidence in one person, Sir Ahmad Rafique.

One by one they pass by him, he examines and prescribes, his memory is excellent, yet his senses par excellence. He was visiting Lahore after six months yet he remembered every individual, with individual problems.

His sixth sense is so sharp and miraculous, in Dec 1995 my cousin visited me, he was extremely depressed over a lost love. I suggested him to speak to Sir Rafique. Light was off at that time, so we were sitting in a candle light. It was about 9.30. I made a call to him. He was sounding very fresh, cheerful, carefree and alive, at the very moment light came, I put off the candle with my hand.

“Afghan drug trafficking brings US $50 billion a year”

The US is not going to stop the production of drugs in Afghanistan as it covers the costs of their military presence there, says Gen. Mahmut Gareev, a former commander during the USSR’s operations in Afghanistan.

In backdrop of news being flashed on US media that opium production has gone down in Afghanistan and lot of drum beating on elections being fair and free in Afghanistan, here is an interview by former Commander of Russian forces in Afghanistan.

RT: General, you were in Afghanistan when the Soviet troops were there. In your opinion, what was the most difficult task that our troops faced in that country, what was the hardest thing for them to accomplish?

Mahmut Gareev: For Soviet troops, the most difficult thing was uncertainty of their status. Immediately after our paratroopers landed in Kabul, Marshal Sokolov, Chief of the Defense Ministry’s Task Force, said at the meeting of unit commanders, “We haven’t come here to fight. Do not engage in any hostilities. Establish garrisons, carry on combat training and be vigilant. That is all.”

But the very next day, then-Minister of Defense Colonel Rafi came running to him. Panic-stricken, he said there was a rebellion in Gerat, and the rebels had disarmed the army command and seized the artillery. He begged for urgent help. Well, we didn’t come to fight, did we? The situation was getting catastrophic: if the same happened in two or three other places that would mean that the government and the army were defeated and disarmed by rebels in front of Soviet troops. So, Sokolov ordered a battalion dispatched to Gerat for that being one and only case, but then it became a habit, with units being sent here and there.

The idea that troops would not engage in the fighting had been naïve from the very beginning. How can one ever go to a country where the people are in a civil war and stand aside? It had been clear since the very beginning that going there and staying away from the fight would be impossible.

Essentially, we went there without any goal or program. What to do, what objectives to pursue? I still hear arguments about whether the troops accomplished their objectives or not. There were no objectives, such as occupying an area or to defeat somebody. That uncertainty of our status made everything, including the task of helping the Afghan army, extremely difficult.

RT: They mention decisive movements, quick actions and a large army presence but that is exactly what the US and the coalition forces did and they are still failing to accomplish their task, they are still stuck in the same battles that the Soviet troops were stuck in. What’s the difference, what is their mistake?

M.G.: They’re repeating our mistake. At the moment, the number of American, British and other troops in Afghanistan is almost equal to what we had in the 40th division, which is about 100 thousand. 42 countries are involved. But they’re having great difficulties in solving problems. NATO forces are very difficult to manage. Six months ago they made a decision to move one squadron from the north of Afghanistan to the south where the British troops are stationed. It was discussed in Bundestag. Half a year later – the decision has been made, but the squadron still remains where they were before. Actually, they themselves admit that if drugs were smuggled past them, they wouldn’t interfere. Why? That’s another tough question. Now, what if Russia was to act selfishly and play in geopolitics – just like our opponents are used to doing? They got us involved in the war in Afghanistan and immediately began to provide help for those rebels, the Mujahideen. We could do the same now – we could support the rebels and fight against Americans. But it’s not even in our people’s minds. No one is going to do that.

When I was there in 1989 and 1990, the production of drugs almost ceased, apart from in certain areas. Since then, it has increased by 44 per cent. And all of the drug traffic goes through the city of Osh where we want to establish our base, Termes or other places.

90 per cent of drugs from Afghanistan go to former Soviet republics. 80 per cent of the world’s drugs are produced in Afghanistan. They’ve outdone the South American countries, such as Columbia. Thirty thousand young people in Russia die from drug use every year. And, sadly, some of the leaders of the CIS countries don’t really want to interfere. In other words, there are too many people who make money on this.

I don’t make anything up. Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan brings them about 50 billion dollars a year – which fully covers the expenses tied to keeping their troops there. Essentially, they are not going to interfere and stop the production of drugs. They engage in military action only when they are attacked. They don’t have any planned military action to eliminate the Mujahideen. Rather, they want to make the situation more unstable and help the Taliban to be more active. They even started negotiations with them, trying to direct them to the Central-Asian republics, to destabilize the whole region and set up their bases there.

One would think – right now, Russia is interested in cooperation with America. During Obama’s visit, there was talk about providing air and ground corridors for Americans to supply their troops in Afghanistan. And some journalists even say now that it’s good for Russia that Americans are in Afghanistan; that we need to help them because they are there to restrain the Mujahideen and keep them from attacking us. That’s right – it’s just that the problem is that they don’t do anything of the kind.

RT: If the Soviet troops hadn’t left Afghanistan in 1989, do you think that the country would be different now. How would this presence of Soviet troops have affected Afghanistan’s present?

M.G.: Not so long ago, Najibullah made national reconciliation the foundation of his policy. It had had results before. There was really no need for the Soviet troops to remain in Afghanistan after 1990. Our troops left on the 15th of February. I arrived there with my group on the 7th. Although Gromov said that there were no soldiers left there after he left, but what about us? I met with the leaders of our main divisions, specialists, advisors. We all stayed there – and we were all Soviet soldiers at the time. I guess he said it for some political reason. The Soviet troops left and the Najibullah regime actually grew stronger. The thing is, while the Soviet troops were there, the 7 or 8 rebel groups had one common enemy, the Soviet troops. They joined forces to fight against it. When the troops left, there was no common enemy left, so, they started to fight with each other. Najibullah used this craftily in turning them against the other. He did it to remain in power even without the Soviet troops. The troops left and Russia had a change of leadership. And what happened? General Rudskoy went to Afghanistan and got in touch with the Mujahideen – those we fought against, those, who held him captive. Kozyrev also took their side.

But take democracy, for example, and the principle to support the countries with democratic processes underway. In Afghanistan, all women were made to wear burqas; it’s forbidden for them to attend school or work. The Taliban have set up a reactionary regime. What kind of democracy is this? By the way, this happened after the Mujahideen came to power. Flawed as it was and even with elements of totalitarianism, the regime suggested by Najibullah was far more progressive.

RT: You mentioned democracy. Do you think that in Afghanistan, a country torn by civil wars and being in the middle of a political chaos, the democracy is possible, that the elections had a chance to be free, fair and represent the will of the Afghan people?

M.G.: Do you know the place where democracy was born? In the garden of Eden, when God brought Adam to Eve and said – “choose anyone you like”. Really, it hasn’t changed much since then. Of course, it was impossible for Afghanistan to hold adequate elections that would, on top of that, reflect the real declaration of the will of the people. The situation is as follows. The Pushtuns are the people that mainly form the state. The Taliban threatened people to stop them voting and promised severe punishments for those who might want to participate. The intelligentsia is scared stiff too. The only people able to vote in the elections were those from regions that are not controlled by the Taliban, but protected by NATO troops.

Those were the people who voted, whereas others were not able to. So, there were no adequate and full-fledged declaration of the people’s will. On the other hand, you can’t bring the country’s leadership over from the States and tell those people that this person would rule. Courtesy demands to at least say that that person was elected. At least on the surface, the election should appear legitimate and one could always refer to it saying that the leader was elected. How he was elected – that’s another chapter of the story. No one asks questions like this in our time anymore. Everyone knows exactly how things are done. Of course, the Americans would like Karzai, who they established there, to remain in power – or Abdullah, who has already been the Foreign Minister twice. They are fine with either. But, 10 percent of the population are Uzbeks. There are also Tajiks, Turkmen and others. In such unstable circumstances, a lot depends on their choice too. So, Americans made moves to attract the votes of those people to support Karzai.

The worst case scenario for them will be if other opponents come together and put forward someone to oppose Karzai. Then, quite different forces could come to power and will gradually move away from obeying the Americans.

Source: Russia Today

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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August 14, 2009 – What was there to Celebrate?

by Roedad Khan

[Note for WoP readers: Last month the Pakistani nation celebrated its independence, on the august day of 14^th August from the yoke of the British Raj and from the machinations of All India Congress to exercise its hegemony over the politics of an undivided subcontinent, because the AIC then considered itself as the sole successor to the British colonizers; without a just inclusion of the second largest community in undivided India.

We had a great dream at that time to shape our new country as a model Islamic state, a state that would prove the world why we as a nation demanded the partition of the subcontinent then called British India.

Once I was reading a small piece of conversation reported in an Urdu magazine. It was a dialogue between a Muslim and a Sikh before partition. The Sikh asked his Musalman friend, Yar (buddy) why do you demand a separate land and the Muslim guy replies. “We demand for a separate homeland because we are going to create a nation where there will be justice, where there will be an egalitarian state which will look after its citizens like mother nurtures its children. Nobody will sleep hungry in our Pakistan; none will be jobless, and there will be no difference between the rich and the poor because in Islam a poor Bedouin of Arabia could ask the mighty Caliph Omar why he had two shawls with him? As an individual even though a Caliph, he had no right to get an extra shawl, says the Bedouin. “Haven’t you usurped upon the state treasury and indulged into a sin committed against the nation of Islam?

And the mighty Caliph humbly says, the second shawl belongs to my son (as the son too got his due shawl from the Baitul-Maal or the state treasury) like any other citizen of the state. This is the model we are going to adopt, and implement in our polity, in our governance and you will see what we will have after we get our Pakistan.

The man who narrates this incident, then many years after Pakistan’s creation, asks himself. Why my dreams have been shattered. If I see my Sikh friend now, my head will go down in shame for what we have now is not what we thought and fought for!

Dear readers: it’s in this context that I put up the following post from Roedad Khan. RK is the man who saw the birth of Pakistan when he was quite young. He is a Pashtun and a Pakistani like all of us. Every single word he utters is a word which comes out of the heart of a patriot. And what he says finally is a message to all Pakistanis: To ponder over the question once again why did we fail in our mission and can’t we as a nation expose those very players who did their sinister parts in this game of shattering our dreams? Nayyar]

On August 14, 1947, over a century and a half of British rule in India came to an end. The Union Jack was lowered for the last time. I saw the sun set on the British Empire in the sub-continent. I witnessed its dissolution and emergence of two independent sovereign countries.

I was born in slavery. On August 14, thanks to the iron will and determination of Mr. Jinnah, I was proud citizen of a sovereign, independent country – a country I could live for and die for. It was a wondrous moment. Cheers rang out and many wept. But where are the words to convey the intoxication of that triumphal moment. It is not just that we had a great leader who seemed to embody all our hopes, all our aspirations. We had entered a new era, blissfully unaware how the pendulum of history will swing. Mr. Jinnah could not have foreseen what would happen when he passed his flaming torch into the hands of his successors or how venal those hands could be.

Many nations in the past have attempted to develop democratic institutions, only to lose them when they took their liberties and political institutions for granted, and failed to comprehend the threat posed by a powerful military establishment. Pakistan is a classic example. Born at midnight as a sovereign, independent, democratic country, today it is neither sovereign, nor independent, nor even democratic. Today it is not just a “rentier state”, not just a client state. It is a slave state, ill-led, ill-governed by a power-hungry junta and a puppet government set up by Washington.

62 years after independence, are we really free? Are the people masters in their own house? The kind of Pakistan we have today has lost its manhood and is a ghost of its former self. Our entire political system has been pulled into a black hole caused by periodic army intervention and prolonged army rule. Today if Pakistan were to look into a mirror, it won’t recognize itself. The contrast between Pakistan in 1947 – idealistic, democratic, progressive, optimistic, and Pakistan today – leaderless, rudderless, violent, besieged, corrupt, uncertain about its future – could not be sharper or more disheartening. If you want to know how a people can survive despite their government, well, visit Pakistan.

What was there to celebrate? There was absolutely no reason to celebrate! But there are myriad reasons to reflect. We lost half the country in a suicidal civil war in 1971. Like the Bourbons of France we have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Today Pakistan is dangerously at war with itself once again. The Federation is united only by a ‘rope of sand’. 62 years after independence, we have a disjointed, dysfunctional, lopsided, hybrid, artificial, political system – a non-sovereign rubber stamp parliament, a weak and ineffective Prime Minister, appointed by a powerful accidental President.

As we look back at all the squandered decades, it is sad to think that for Pakistan it has been a period of unrelieved decline and the dream has turned sour. Once we were the envy of the developing world. That is now the stuff of nostalgia. The corrupt, especially those occupying the commanding heights of power, are doing breathtakingly well, while the large mass of people is struggling hard just to keep its head above water.

What has become of the nation? Its core institutions? The militarized state has destroyed the foundations of all our political institutions. The army has been enthroned as the new elite. The level of fawning and jockeying to be merely noticed and smiled upon by any pretender in uniform speaks of a nation that is loudly pleading to be crushed underfoot. Today we feel ourselves unable to look our children in the eye, for the shame of what we did, and didn’t do during the last 62 years. For the shame of what we allowed to happen? This is an eerie period, the heart of the nation appears to stop beating, while its body remains suspended in a void. Today the Supreme Court, the Guardian of the Constitution, is the only ray of hope in the darkness that surrounds us. After years of subservience, it is on its feet and holding its head high. Sadly, inspite of a strong and independent judiciary, the present corrupt order may survive because both the Presidency and the parliament are dysfunctional and out of sync with the spirit of the times.

The sovereignty of the people is a myth. To apply the adjective Sovereign to the people in Pakistan is a tragic farce. Whatever the constitutional position, in the final analysis, de facto sovereignty in Pakistan resides neither in the electorate, nor the Parliament, nor the judiciary, nor even the constitution which has superiority over all the institutions it creates. It resides, where the coercive power resides. It is ‘pouvoir occulte’ which is the ultimate authority in the decision making process in Pakistan. Even when an elected government is in power, as is the case today, it is the army which is the ultimate authority in decision-making. It decides when to abrogate the constitution, when it should be held in abeyance, when an elected government should be sacked and when democracy should be given a chance.

The independence of Pakistan is a myth. By succumbing to American pressure, we managed to secure a temporary reprieve. But at what price? Today Pakistan is splattered with American fortresses, seriously compromising our internal and external sovereignty. American security personnel stationed on our soil move in and out of the country without any let or hindrance. Pakistan has become a launching pad for military operations against neighbouring Muslim countries. We have been drawn into somebody else’s war without understanding its true dimension or ultimate objectives. Nuclear Pakistan has been turned into an ‘American lackey’, currently engaged in a proxy war against its own people.

Parliament is one of the chief instruments of our democracy. Today, it is cowed, timid, a virtual paralytic, over-paid and under-employed. Parliamentary membership is the key to material success, a passport and a license to loot and plunder. No wonder, it is not a check on the arbitrariness of the executive and nobody takes it seriously. Today it is the weakest of the three pillars of state. It has suffered a steady diminution of power and prestige. Its image is tarnished and has been turned into a fig-leaf for unconstitutional and illegal practices.

To no nation has fate been more malignant than to Pakistan. With few exceptions, Pakistan has long been saddled with poor, even malevolent, leadership: predatory kleptocrats, military dictators, political illiterates and carpet-baggers. With all her shortcomings, Benazir Bhutto had undoubted leadership qualities – charisma, courage, political acumen and articulation. After her tragic assassination, Mr. Zardari’s sudden ascension to the Presidency caused panic among the people. God help us all! “In a President character is everything”, Peggy Noonan wrote in her assessment of Ronald Reagan. “A President does not have to be brilliant. Harry Truman was not brilliant and he helped save Western Europe from Stalin. He does not have to be clever, you can hire clever… but you cannot rent a strong moral sense. You can’t acquire it in the presidency. You carry it with you”. If a President has credibility, if he is believable, if he has integrity, nothing else matters. If he has no integrity, if he has no credibility, if there is a gap between what he says and what he does, nothing else matters and he cannot govern.

Today we need a leader who has the vision, the skill, and the courage to pull Pakistan together as one nation and inspire the people. We need a President whose hands are clean and has the capability to steer the ship of state through the rockiest shoals our country has ever known. Our nation has the heart of a lion. But who is there to give it the roar? Pakistan is not a case of failed state. It is a case of failed leadership.

Today failure is the most often heard expression in Pakistan. Some say we are at the last quarter of an hour. “These are times that try men’s souls. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country, but he who serves it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman”. It is not enough to sit back and let history slowly evolve. To settle back into your cold-hearted acceptance of the status quo is not an option.

The present leadership is taking Pakistan to a perilous place. The course they are on leads downhill. This is a delicate time, full of hope and trepidation in equal measure. Today it is a political and moral imperative for all patriotic Pakistanis to fight for our core values, to resist foreign intervention in our internal affairs and to destroy the roots of evil that afflicts Pakistan. That would be the best way to celebrate our independence.

Source: The News International

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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EU Foreign Ministers Condemn NATO

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands for an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan of the sort insisted on by President Barack Obama. She, however, is facing tough opposition from rival Social Democrats.

German Opposition Attacks Merkel on Afghanistan;
Kunduz Residents Furious at West

A Taliban-set roadside bomb hit a German convoy in Kunduz province on Saturday, likely in vengeance for the NATO air strike on hijacked fuel trucks that killed so many locals. Four German soldiers were lightly injured. On Sunday morning, another US soldier was killed, in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban are becoming increasingly proficient in laying roadside bombs and have been running rings around Western troops who deploy conventional warfare tactics.

CBS reports on Gen. McChrystal’s visit to the site of the Kunduz blast and his admission that civilians and children were harmed.

Is it just me, or is this a startling headline? – “EU nations slam NATO air strike in Afghanistan”! France, Spain and even Italy attacked the bombing (aren’t they, like, in NATO?)

Eux.TV reports on the EU foreign ministers’ call for Afghanistan policy to evolve from being military to being focused on development aid.

I don’t know. You can’t really do reconstruction aid in a country that lacks security. We saw that in Iraq.

. Politicians in the Social Democrat Party were scathing on the bombing, criticizing the center-right government of incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel, which they say did not inform parliament quickly enough of the incident, and saying that the bombing violated the new rules on aerial bombardment agreed to for Afghanistan. The SPD wants a timetable for German withdrawal from Afghanistan, while Merkel stands for an open-ended commitment of the sort insisted on by President Barack Obama. The Kunduz air strike is a much bigger deal in Europe and Afghanistan than it is in the US. The Potsdam district attorney’s office is even considering filing criminal charges against the German colonel who ordered the air strike.

Abdul Matin Sarfaraz reports from Kunduz Province that locals are now saying that the NATO bombing of two hijacked fuel trucks killed more that 150 civilians and left 20 others wounded. Some 15 children were among the dead.Villagers told the visiting reporter that the Taliban had left the site after inviting the villagers to take the petroleum in the trucks, which had become hopelessly mired in a riverbed. They showed him 50 graves of dead civilians. He adds, “A 50-year-old woman bitterly cried while standing in front of her ruined house. She said her three sons, husband and a grandson perished in the bombardment.”

Kunduz residents are furious. This weekend, an NYT reporter and his translator appear to have been kidnapped when they went out to the site of the bombing. One Afghan pundit remarked dryly that when the US recently announced a new strategy in Afghanistan, no one suspected it would be . . . mass murder.

The intrepid Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports that the German colonel who called down the 500-pound bomb on the fuel trucks did so on the basis of aerial surveillance footage and a single local informant; as a result, he assumed that the dozens of figures around the truck were Taliban. In fact, the Taliban had dragooned civilians into helping them attempt to move the fuel trucks out of the river, and then had announced that the villagers could just have the petroleum. The decision went against the spirit, at least, of the new policy announced by Gen. McChrystal, that aerial bombings would not be conducted on the basis of a single informant’s report.

Aljazeerah English reports on the rage in Kunduz against the foreign troops and the Afghanistan government’s weakness. Kunduz, a northern mixed province of 1.5 million, has only 1,000 policemen. One-third of it is under Taliban control (which is to say, the Pashtun-majority districts are almost entirely controlled by the Taliban).

Meanwhile, fears that the Aug. 20 election in Afghanistan was fraudulent are stirring tensions that could come to haunt NATO troops. The Times of London reports today that in the southern district of Shorabak, where tribal leaders decided to support rival candidate Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s brother had the polls closed and then stuffed ballots were sent to Kabul giving Hamid Karzai 100% of the votes. This incident, denied by the president’s brother, is one of thousands of irregularities being reported to the authorities. One Afghan newspaper is now openly calling the election a “farce” (mazhakah)

The Kunduz bombing gone awry, and perhaps also the disappointing election, seems to have provoked an outburst of frankness among European politicians so far unmatched in the counterparts in the Obama administration. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has now admitted that the UK has plans to cut the number of British troops in Afghanistan from 9,000 to 4,500 over the next 3 to 5 years. Canada has already announced that its forces will be out of Afghanistan by 2012 (which will leave a significant security gap in Qandahar province that Britain may be signaling it declines to fill).

One reason for the British decision to begin going home is Whitehall’s despair over convincing its NATO allies to increase their troop levels in Afghanistan, or to show willingness to send those troops to the Pashtun south where most of the hard fighting and dying is. Most NATO forces in Afghanistan view themselves more as peace keepers and aid workers than as as war fighters (though it should not be forgotten that French, Polish, Italian, and other NATO troops have fought and died in Afghanistan).

European publics are opposed to the Afghanistan mission by increasingly large margins, and it is not impossible that in 5 years, the US will find itself almost alone there among Western powers. Were the NATO members to gradually desert Obama there, it might even have the effect of breaking up NATO or much damaging its effectiveness. Even now, the bickering over who is providing what support is not edifying.

Source: Informed Comment Posted: Sep. 7th, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Taliban and the bogey of terrorism

IMPERIAL FORCES HAVE CHANGED TALIBAN INTO NATIONALISTIC MOVEMENT

by Charles Ferndale

On Newsnight (Aug 20, 2009 ) while being interviewed by Gaven Esler, the US general incharge of the Afghan war, David Petraeus, said that the war was “not a war of choice”. Afghanistan has not been an important planning area for any attacks on western countries and the Taliban have shown no inclination to conduct war against NATO countries outside Afghanistan (so far, but we seem to be doing our best to change their practices). They are freedom-fighters who want us out of their country. Would we be killing them if there were no oil and gas around the Caspian sea?

General Petraeus said that the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 were planned in Afghanistan. This remark is disingenuous. Osama bin Laden may have been in Afghanistan at the time of the attacks, but had he been in Washington, New York, London, Paris or Hamburg, his whereabouts would have made no difference to the outcome. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks resided in Germany, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and were trained (in part) in flying schools set up (some allege, for this very purpose) by the CIA in Florida, US.

Gordon Brown said two days ago that 75 per cent of the terrorist attacks planned against Britain so far have been planned in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Another dishonest statement. Mr Brown has no idea what terrorist attacks on Britain have been planned so he cannot know what percentage were planned in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The most he can ever claim to know is what percent of the terrorist attacks planned, and known to our intelligence services, originated from one of those two countries. How many such plans does he know about? Is it 75 per cent of one, two, three, or four plans? How many were there? We are not told and we don’t ask. Why are our journalists so lazy as to allow these fraudulent justifications for the war in Afghanistan to go unchallenged?

And what about the convenient disjunction in the claims of our officials — that the terrorist plots were planned in Afghanistan or in Pakistan? Well, which country was it? Does Brown think we don’t care? If none were planned in Afghanistan, then what relevance have those plans to our presence there? For the existence of any such plans to afford us grounds for killing thousands of Afghans in their own country, it would have to be shown (minimally) that such plots could never be hatched elsewhere. Clearly that cannot be shown. So, even if such plans might have exited, or might occur in future, their existence, or possible existence, offer no grounds for our belligerent presence in Afghanistan; any more than their known past occurrence in Britain, France, Germany, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and America would justify the mass killing of the nationals of those countries by anyone’s armed forces. Would the Taliban be justified in bombing London just because our politicians are aggressive, dishonest, opportunists?

Over the last few days, two honest British journalists have at last mentioned that during the eight years of our presence in Afghanistan, there has been no improvement whatever in the appalling conditions under which most Afghans live. Perhaps that was news to them, but it is not news to any Afghan, nor to anyone who knows the region well. Despite the billions of dollars that have poured into Afghanistan since 2001 (which has promptly poured straight out again), no help has been given to the poor there. Actually the condition of the poor has got much worse since 2001, which is why, contrary to yet more dishonest statements by our officials, a great many Afghans support the Taliban.

The only reliable experience Afghans have had of most NATO powers is that they break their promises (under Mullah Omar, the Taliban did not break their promises). So why should the NATO powers ever be trusted? And the plight of poor Afghan women (outside of the privileged families located mainly in Kabul) has also got worse since the Taliban were overthrown (hard as this may be for us liberals to believe). But did we not invade to liberate them? John Simpson, two days ago, was honest enough to say that had the money spent on the Afghan war been spent on the poor, there would be no war there. At last we see a glimmer of truth in the self-serving, meticulously disseminated, ‘fog’ of war. The fog exists in Europe and America, not in Afghanistan. The Afghans have a perfectly clear, close-up, view of what we are up to: and what they see is not pretty. They must think foreigners are all fools or liars.

When challenged on the failure of the NATO powers to do anything to help ordinary Afghans, the usual response from officials in the NATO countries is that the Taliban always prevent developmental projects from being implemented. They call it ‘the security situation’. But the claim is another lie. There are huge areas of Afghanistan suffering the agonies, deformities, diseases and deaths caused by poverty, but those areas are untroubled by the Taliban. Nevertheless, they have not seen a dime since 2001. These areas are free from the troublesome Taliban, so anyone could visit them safely and confirm the truth of what I have just said, and so prove that what British and American officials are saying is false; but few do.

Western officials talk little of the fact that when the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001 opium production in Helmand was eliminated completely. Newspapers allege, repeatedly, that the Taliban are financing themselves with sales of heroin. The western media’s favourite estimate of the profit made by the Taliban from heroin sales is $100 million a year. First question: how do they know? Second question: which Taliban make this money? The so-called Taliban no longer have a unified command (we saw to that). There are at least fourteen different groups being called ‘Taliban’. Is the dope trade run like a welfare state, with fair shares for all? NATO officials are probably the source of most claims about the drug trade in Afghanistan. Can they be trusted? I don’t think so.

Simultaneously with claims that the drug trade is run by the ‘Taliban’, we are told that it is run by Karzai’s ‘war lords’. But Karzai is America’s man. So could it be that the drug trade is financing America’s men (as it did during the Vietnam war and during the illegal, American-run, Contra war against the elected Sandanista government of Nicaragua)? In any case, can these commentators have it both ways? Is the drug trade financing both sides? Maybe, maybe not. None of these obvious and reasonable questions is ever asked in public in Britain. Why not? Is the British public content to be told highly improbable stories?

Oh, how tiresome it is to be misinformed routinely by the country’s supposed leaders and by lazy journalists. And what hope is there for countries in which the electorate tolerate, as their leaders, people who only ever seem to lie.

The writer has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University, and the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. He divides his time between the UK and Pakistan. Email: charlesferndale@ yahoo.co.uk

Source: Lost Identity Posted: Sep. 7th, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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US plans for ‘imperial’ presence in Pakistan

Barack Obama may be poles-apart from Bush on so many other things but shares his perception of fighting the enemy on its terrain. — Photo by AP

by Karamatullah K. Ghori

Pardon the Pakistani news media going gaga over Washington’s plans to beef up, extraordinarily, its diplomatic presence in Pakistan. The plans are staggering and stupendous, for want of more descriptive adjectives. But they are, for the record, just geared to Washington’s diplomatic stake in Pakistan, lest the Pakistanis routinely clobbered in the ‘civilised western world’ for their outbursts of emotions over supposedly petty little things.

‘The Americans are coming, and coming big,’ according to media pundits in Pakistan. And none should blame them for going over the top because the figures being bandied about are, to say the very least, flabbergasting.

What’s on the drawing boards in Washington and Islamabad are the blue prints for vastly increasing the number of American personnel manning one of the most important diplomatic presence in the 21st century for the Americans in Pakistan. Apparently, Washington feels that its battery of 750 men and women stocking the American Embassy in Islamabad is far too inadequate to cope with the job on their hands. They need to be given a big injection to inflate their muscles. The magic potion said to be brewing would add at least another thousand people on what’s being described as a ‘war footing.’ That would take US diplomatic presence in Islamabad way above the current largest American diplomatic mission in Beijing, China; the number there stands at a paltry 1450.

The US Congress agrees with the mandarins at the State Department and has allocated 940 million dollars for the embassy in Islamabad and a number of American consulates, particularly those in Karachi and Peshawar. The fortress-like new consulate on Karachi’s Arabian Sea is spread over six acres of prime land, given to them at a throw-away price, of course. What are friends for, after all, and the Americans, don’t forget, have powerful friends in very high places in Pakistan.

(Meanwhile, US ambassador Anne Patterson, reacting to media reports, has said that the number of Marines in the new embassy would be less than 20. They would be accommodated in a bomb-proof facility. At present the embassy has 250 regular staff, 200 visiting American staff and 1,000 local personnel. Another 500 would be added in next three years.)

The government of Pakistan is obviously chipping into these plans with a magnanimity that our ruling elite is so well-known for, as far as their overseas ‘friends’ are concerned. They may be tight-fisted and niggardly to their own people but for minders and mentors from the world beyond Pakistan, sky is the limit.

Little wonder, therefore, that a huge parcel of 18 acres of prime land in Islamabad’s exclusive diplomatic enclave has been ‘sold’ to the American Embassy for just one billion rupees, a fraction of its market worth. What is 18 acres between friends; peanuts when you think of how magnanimously Pervez Musharraf presented the whole of Pakistan to his American mentors over just a phone call from Colin Powell. It was a friendly transaction between two soldiers.

So the fortress in Islamabad, when built, will dwarf the mini-fortress of Karachi. It will be a city in its own right, a typical American enclave on Pakistan’s soil, with its own residential colony for the staff and all the requisite paraphernalia of entertainment and security to convey the American sense in spades to its denizens.

But wait. The Pakistani pundits have nothing to grudge the Americans their plans to replicate their America on a little patch of Pakistan. What worries them is what’s at the core of these huge plans of expansion, and what kind of people are coming in droves to Karachi, Islamabad and Peshawar with the obvious intent to cover all the bases in Pakistan.

Pakistan can’t seem to get rid of its perennial problem of being hyphenated with this or that of its neighbours in Washington’s esteem. It was India until not too long ago when American relations with India were taken to another, high, pedestal, with Pakistan left in a limbo to search its own station in American evaluation.

For a moment Pakistan thought it had jettisoned, for good, its hyphenated syndrome. But that feeling didn’t last long. The US is immersed deep into its Afghan adventure and Pakistan is back in its role of a key, front-line, ally. Hence Pakistan can’t be separated from Afghanistan; hence it must play out to the hilt its role of a soldier in a forward trench whose mission is to pull Washington’s chestnut out of the Afghan fire.

It doesn’t matter how Pakistan got involved in the Bush war on terror, or how Musharraf succumbed to the pressure. The ground reality, no matter how tart or unpalatable to a lot of Pakistanis, is that Pakistan is up to its eyeballs into America’s war and must pay the price of the follies of its rulers, past and present.

The US drew a seminal lesson from its involvement in World War II and that’s that America can best be protected, if not insulated from the outside world, by drawing its lines of defence in far off lands, in places wherever a threat to US security or its quest for global dominance may occur and must be pre-empted with maximum force.

The American wars in Korea and Vietnam were triggered by this policy of offence-being-the-best-defence. George W. Bush, an ardent practitioner of Pax Americana couldn’t be more articulate than coining the shibboleth of ‘taking the war to the enemy.’ The invasion of Afghanistan, on the heels of 9/11 was justified on this premise, besides being a prop to Bush’s dream of an imperial America holding the world in its thrall.

Barack Obama may be poles-apart from Bush on so many other things but shares his perception of fighting the enemy on its terrain. Add to it his own vision of winning the war in Afghanistan at any cost. So no price is too high once you commit yourself to achieving a goal; and Obama has his heart set on ferreting out victory of any sort in Afghanistan after having lost the one in Iraq.

But wars can’t be won cheap. They require elaborate logistics. Pakistan has become a cockpit of conflict and chaos spawned by its involvement in the Afghan imbroglio. So Pakistan must be primed to deliver according to Washington’s expectations. Logistics must be so arranged as to deal with Pakistan’s chaotic and turbulent scenario according to Washington’s master-plan for the area.

The logistics involve the building of fortresses bristling with hi-tech gadgetry that keeps the troublesome Pakistanis, or the Pakistani Taliban and their ilk, at a safe distance. That’s an essential tool of 21st century imperialistic reach. In the olden days of imperialism they used to occupy whole countries and convert them into colonies. Technological sophistication and advancement has offered better alternatives, dispensing with the archaic practice of outright colonies to intimidate the locals. Hence the logic and imperative for modern-day fortresses like the ones springing up from one end of Pakistan to another.

Those who have followed the American adventure in Iraq know what havoc mercenary American defence contractors wreaked there. Blackwater was a principal mercenary outfit to which the State Department outsourced its obligations in Iraq. Its gung-ho mercenaries raped and murdered Iraqis at will to such an extent that even the supine government of Noori Al-Maliki was forced to impel Washington to pull Blackwater’s notorious murderers out of Iraq.

The same Blackwater is now getting ready to replicate its Iraqi tactics in Pakistan and some of its operatives are already believed to be in action in Peshawar and its environs. The word has gone out that the Americans are keen to buy Peshawar’s lone 5-star hotel in order to accommodate the likes of Blackwater in luxury for special operations within Pakistan and beyond, in Afghanistan, of course.

The State Department has obviously drawn no lessons from its skewed Iraqi operations and seems willing to retry them in Pakistan. One shudders to think of the fallout of a lethal confrontation between the rogues of Blackwater, running berserk across the troubled North West Frontier Region just as they did in Iraq, and the trigger-happy Pakistani Taliban to whom these provocative aliens would be like red rag to an enraged bull.

The US is a global power charged with a self-anointed mission to fight wherever necessary to keep the terrorists away from its shores. Its history of such messianic adventures not only justifies war by any means but also sanctifies its actions. The question troubling the Pakistani minds is why should their rulers be so blind to this deadly game being played out on the Pakistani turf?

K_K_ghori@yahoo.com

Courtesy: DAWN.COM

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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TALKING TO THE TALIBAN

[Note for WoP readers: Early last year Graeme Smith filed a detailed story for Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/). The sum up of Graeme’s coverage was his final work called “Talking to the Taliban”.

Not only did Graeme compile a fact based study but also produced a set of videos for his newspaper readers. In conclusion Graeme proved that the ultimate solution to war in Afghanistan was nothing more nothing less but to talk to the Taliban (and when he mentions the Taliban, it is the Taliban of Afghanistan and not of Pakistan).

Graeme’s work was done last year; therefore, naturally did his figures pertain to year 2007 only, to update that work, therefore, I have appended here a report prepared by the CSIS which looks up into the current state of war in Afghanistan.

And this report depicts even a still grimmer picture of what’s happening in Afghanistan.

Conclusion:

US and other allies either will have to talk to the Taliban or otherwise devise a strategy to gradually withdraw from Afghanistan.

P. S.

I have not touched here the Taliban phenomena in Pakistan for I believe the Talbanisation in Pakistan’s north is an outfall of what’s happening in present day Afghanistan. Baitullah Mehsud  (the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan chief) is dead  and the remaining planted Taliban fighting against the writ of the state, are loosening their grip. Very soon they will have to pack up, but if the situation in Afghanistan remains in a war like sate, things can turn up much messier in Pakistan as well. Nayyar]

*

by GRAEME SMITH

*

I’ve been working with a researcher in Kandahar since September of 2006, meeting with him regularly for long sessions of tea and talk. He’s a close friend of The Globe and Mail translators in the city. I often send him on fact-finding trips to places that would be off-limits for anybody without strong connections to the insurgency, and over many months he has learned basic journalism skills. This project involved tasks at which he’s already proven reliable: Find a specific person, point a camera at them, ask questions from a list and, most challengingly, listen to the answers and formulate further questions. He’s still learning the art of follow-up questioning, but otherwise he appeared to be fairly disciplined about obeying the rules described below.

The Taliban researcher was asked:

• To find small groups of Taliban and try to speak with them individually. They don’t need to show their faces or give their names. (Persuading the insurgents to speak by themselves proved difficult, and clusters of three or four interviews often contain answers that echo each other, as apparently Taliban waited to hear what their comrades would say.)

• To visit as many districts as possible. (He visited five: Zhari, Panjwai, Maywand, Arghandab and Daman. Access to each district was negotiated by him and a Globe and Mail translator.)

• Ask a standard list of 20 questions, in the same order every time. (He largely followed this request, with a few exceptions: He sometimes felt it would be dangerous to push insurgents for answers about their loyalty to Mullah Omar, for instance.)

• Try to get enough elaboration that the interview lasts a minimum of 10 minutes. (This improved during the course of the project, with durations varying from four to 15 minutes.)

The researcher’s work was supervised by a long-time translator for The Globe and Mail, who watched the videos and did the rough translations.

I debriefed the researcher as he returned from his visits to the districts. A professional service was contracted to provide a second verbatim transcript in English, with coding for subtitles, so that we could publish all the material online.

The interviews began in August of 2007 and finished in November. In months that followed, the videos were circulated privately among sources in Kandahar and Kabul to gather opinions about the authenticity of the material and reaction to the Taliban statements.

Face to face with the foot soldiers

He looks like an ordinary Afghan in ragged clothes. He says he’s young, 24 or 25 years old, but his eyes seem older. Somebody he knows, or loves, was killed by a bomb dropped from the sky, he says. The government tried to destroy his farm. His tribe has feuded with the government in recent years, and he feels pushed to the edge of a society that ranks among the poorest in the world.

So he lives by the gun. He cradles the weapon in his arms, saying he will follow the tradition of his ancestors who battled foreign armies. He is not only a Taliban foot soldier, he says. He belongs to the mujahedeen, the holy warriors, who fight any infidel who tries to invade Afghanistan.

He does not care where the foreigners come from. Maybe he knows the word Canada, but he cannot point to the country on a map. When he squints down his rifle at Canadian soldiers, he cannot imagine the faraway land that gave birth to those helmeted figures. He only wants to drive them away. He fervently believes that expelling the foreigners will set things right in his troubled country.

This portrait of an average Taliban fighter emerges from groundbreaking research by The Globe and Mail in Kandahar. The newspaper’s staff, working with a freelance researcher, gained unprecedented access to insurgent groups in five districts of Kandahar province, and finished the dangerous assignment with 42 video recordings of fighters answering a standardized list of questions.

It’s not a scientific survey, but it’s the first public attempt to look at the Taliban in a systematic way.

The translation of the interviews, 517 pages long, suggests the Taliban are more complicated than might be guessed from their usual depiction as religious warriors; they are fierce and frightening, but proud and occasionally poetic. They use the language of radical Islam, but their message often consists of nothing more than xenophobia and a desire to protect their way of life.

Uneducated and inarticulate, they mumble their way through monosyllabic answers and avoid hard questions. When asked about money, for instance, the fighters reveal few details about their sources of financing. With repeated questioning, they do eventually open up, however, about their political dreams and the economic rationale for the war. They even dare to question their own leadership.

“These people are the heart of the problem,” said a former mujahedeen commander in Kandahar who reviewed the interview footage. “These are the people you need to deal with: the guys with the guns.”

PORTRAIT OF AN INSURGENT

Strong patterns stood out in the fighters’ answers, some of which will be explored in more detail in The Globe’s series on the insurgents over the coming week.

• Almost a third of respondents claimed that at least one family member had died in aerial bombings in recent years. Many also described themselves as fighting to defend Afghan villagers from air strikes by foreign troops.

• Most of them admitted a personal role in the illegal opium industry, and half of them said their poppy fields had been targeted by government eradication efforts, suggesting they suffer more eradication than other Afghan farmers. Several of them voiced frustration that the government officials take bribes for turning a blind eye to the drug trade while punishing poor opium growers.

• They claimed origins in 19 different Pashtun tribes, but the largest numbers came from Kandahar tribes that have been disenfranchised by the current government. No foreigners or non-Pashtuns were encountered during the survey, supporting the impression that such fighters are extremely rare.

• Few of them claimed to be fighting a global jihad; most described their goal as the return of a stricter Islamic government in Afghanistan.

• They showed deep ignorance about the world, even making serious errors in their telling of Afghanistan’s recent history. None of the fighters appeared to know anything about Canada; faced with a multiple-choice question, only one of them correctly guessed that Canada is located north of the United States.

• Perhaps most surprisingly, 24 of the fighters said it doesn’t matter whether Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar returns to power as the head of Afghanistan’s government. Most claimed to be fighting for principles, not a leader.

Trying to understand the insurgency has become a daily topic of conversation in Afghanistan, as the growing violence increases demands for a negotiated peace.

Some analysts say the opinions of front-line Taliban fighters aren’t relevant in a feudal society where people usually obey their leaders, but others point to indications that the insurgency’s momentum no longer comes from its top organizers. It’s sometimes labelled a “franchise” expansion model, in which groups of Afghans who don’t feel a strong allegiance to Mullah Omar decide to join the insurgency for their own reasons.

“I think the answers of ordinary Taliban do matter, in the context of how strong are their beliefs and how motivated they are,” said Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and other books on Islamic extremism in the region. “But it’s most important in the context of, ‘Can you divide the Taliban, and talk to more moderate ones?’ “

Many kinds of negotiations with the Taliban have sprung up as the insurgents assert their presence in the outlying districts. Aid agencies and cellphone companies regularly negotiate safe passage of their workers across Taliban territory, and negotiations with kidnappers have become chillingly frequent.

Canada’s government publicly refuses to talk with the Taliban, but the Dutch military makes such discussions an explicit part of its strategy in Uruzganprovince. The British have tried, and so far failed, to negotiate local deals that will pacify Helmand province.

President Hamid Karzai issued a public plea last year for one-on-one talks with Mullah Omar, and the United Nations’s internal trend forecasting describes a negotiated political solution as the single thing most likely to dampen the conflict in the foreseeable future.

Uncertainty hangs over all such negotiations, however, because, at the most basic level, the Taliban remain a mystery. Few analysts are willing to predict whether an average fighter would lay down his weapons, and under what circumstances.

Two Western security officials who reviewed The Globe’s survey said the sample reflects the fact that foreign extremists do not have a significant role in the Kandahar insurgency. That could make negotiation more feasible; local Afghan insurgents have a reputation for being more flexible in their allegiance than the Arab or Central Asian extremists who sometimes appear on the battlefield.

“Their goals really aren’t global jihad, and their connections with al-Qaeda aren’t very strong,” one security official said.

FOLLOW THE LEADER?

The insurgents’ apparent lack of loyalty to Mullah Omar might also be interpreted as a positive sign. The Globe’s researcher initially refused to ask the question — “If foreigners leave Afghanistan, would you accept a government without Mullah Omar?” — because he feared the insurgents would threaten him for questioning the importance of the reclusive leader who calls himself Commander of the Faithful. But among the 32 insurgents who answered the question, 24 of them said they would be willing to accept different leadership under certain conditions.

Those conditions varied: The most common demands were for an “Islamic leader” who would enforce “Islamic laws.” The Taliban did not clearly define how such a leader and laws would be different from the present Muslim President and Afghanistan’s current system of laws based on Islamic teachings.

A few suggested that replacing Mullah Omar would require a decision by the leader himself, or even a sign from God. Another fighter declared that a president of Afghanistan would only be acceptable “if that person is like Mullah Omar.” Others said that only the Taliban elders are qualified to choose Afghanistan’s leader.

But some said they’re not demanding a Taliban government at all. “We are not saying that it should be our government,” he said. “But we want only a Muslim king.”

Even Mr. Karzai, whose troops are fighting the Taliban, was sometimes considered acceptable if the foreign troops leave. “If it is Karzai or Mullah Omar it doesn’t matter,” one said.

Other fighters vehemently disagreed, saying Mr. Karzai is a “slave” of foreign powers.

This variety of opinion among the insurgents has been viewed as a weakness by their opponents. A spokesman for Mr. Karzai has said he’s hoping to sow confusion in the Taliban ranks by pushing the issue of negotiations.

One of the insurgents admitted it’s a topic of debate among his comrades: “We have those who want peace and those who want to fight,” he said.

Their uncertainty about the importance of Mullah Omar may spring from an understanding that he’s not deeply engaged in the day-to-day workings of the insurgency, a senior United Nations official said. The Taliban know their one-eyed master remains isolated somewhere far from the battlefields, he suggested, and this serves as another weak point that might be exploited by negotiators.

But a lack of central authority could also make the Taliban more dangerous, a security analyst said, if their own leaders can’t stop them from fighting.

“They’re not loyal to Mullah Omar, yes, but is that a good thing?” the analyst said. “Because maybe a Taliban leader cuts a deal, but he can’t deliver the fighters because they’re too fanatical.”

A former Afghan government official said the Taliban’s lack of zeal for their leader reflects the same kind of false humility they displayed from 1994 to 1996, when they took power under the guise of a temporary regime. “It’s a trick,” he said. “It’s crap. You can’t believe them.”

The Taliban also seemed skeptical about the Afghan government as a negotiating partner. Several referred to the early days of the Karzai administration, in which some Taliban tried to join the new government but ended up in detention. Mr. Karzai must take orders from the U.S. forces, the insurgents said, and the Americans don’t want to negotiate.

Nor did there appear to be much desire for peace talks among the insurgents. None admitted any willingness to accept money, work, property or immunity from prosecution in exchange for a ceasefire. Only a handful of them added that they’re willing to stop fighting if they get the order from their superiors.

“I personally believe that negotiations are inevitable,” said Thomas Johnson, director of the culture and conflict studies program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and a leading expert on the Pashtun tribal areas.

“The problem of course is finding people willing to negotiate,” Mr. Johnson said. “Pashtuns generally will not negotiate when they sense they are winning. Hence, you see that the Taliban are ‘willing’ to negotiate, but only after international forces leave the country.”

WHY THEY FIGHT

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization says insurgent attacks increased 64 per cent from 2006 to 2007, and very few of the Taliban surveyed showed any sign of respecting the military strength of the Canadians and their allies. Many claimed the foreign troops lack personal courage, and repeatedly told stories of battle that mocked their opponents.

“They are cowardly people,” a fighter said. “If you take away their tanks and airplanes, they are nothing against Muslims.”

They also seemed offended by the suggestion that peace could be bought for a price. Many spoke about the corruption of the Afghan government, and tried to set themselves apart from the regime by claiming their loyalty could not be purchased.

“Even if you give me so much money that I can’t spend it in my entire lifetime, I will not stop,” said one. Another promised to continue fighting even if offered “a million million.”

Their ferocity usually had a limited focus, however. A few talked about global jihad — “This is a world war” — but most of them gave their fight a narrow definition, usually aiming their rage at the foreign troops and their political opponents within the borders of Afghanistan.

“Why are you fighting against this government?” The Globe’s researcher asked a 25-year-old former driver. “Because they are with the non-Muslims,” he replied. “If there were no non-Muslims, we would not fight with them, because one Muslim does not fight with another Muslim. But when we are fighting an Afghan soldier, it is because they are in an American convoy.”

“If they weren’t in a convoy with Americans, you wouldn’t fight with them?” he was asked.

“No,” he said. “Then we wouldn’t fight.”

Some of the most revealing dialogue in the interviews happens when the Taliban stray from the original list of questions. Spontaneously, without prompting, two of them spoke out against the modern way of life that has started to appear in the bustling streets of Kabul. It’s unlikely that these poor foot soldiers had much personal experience in the capital, hundreds of kilometres away, but they obviously had heard stories about how the city has changed since the fall of the Taliban regime.

“There are some things forbidden by Islam and the Koran, like alcohol, adultery and cinemas,” said a 27-year-old farmer, with a belt of machine-gun bullets draped around his neck. “Why don’t they stop these things which are clearly going on in Kabul and some other provinces? Instead they beat those who are poor.”

Another man also singled out movies as a source of moral corruption. Street vendors in Afghanistan have started a black-market trade in recent years, selling video discs of Indian movies and hardcore pornography — sometimes alongside Taliban propaganda videos that denounce the same foreign influences.

“They are enthusiastic about the dollar and cinemas,” a fighter said. “That’s why we are fighting them.”

The comments often reflect a deeply insular view of the world, and a revisionist history that would be unrecognizable to an outsider. Many of the fighters would have been too young to fight alongside the Taliban as they conquered the capital in 1996, and they seem to be repeating a legendary version of the old regime as a way of stoking their own ambitions.

“In the time of the Taliban, they captured all Afghanistan; only one corner remained out of our grasp,” said a young man with bushy eyebrows visible between his black turban and the black scarf wrapped around his face. He guessed his age at 21 and said he had been a religious student since he was 6.

“Thus all the world’s non-Muslims were afraid of us and afraid of the Taliban capturing all of Afghanistan,” he said. “It would be a centre of Islamic government for the whole world. So they started a campaign against us and destroyed our government.”

None of the Taliban mention Sept. 11, 2001, in their explanations of the war. Nor do they talk about many other things that muddy their claims of moral superiority: the hundreds of civilians who have died in the conflict, a majority of them killed by the insurgents; the Afghans addicted to the opium that grows in their fields; and the prosperity that people have started to enjoy in the northern regions of Afghanistan that are not plagued by insurgency.

Things are much simpler for the Taliban.

“We are people of war,” a fighter said, “and we want an Islamic government.”

End of Part-I

Courtesy: Afghanistan – The True Story / Globe and Mail Posted: Sep. 10th, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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KILLING AMERICA’S KIDS

Cpl. Matthew Phillips (U.S. Army)

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by Fred Reed

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[Note for WoP readers: Before you go to the following post by Fred Reed, here is a news item by Associated Press reporting death of Matthew B. Phillips. Matthew had plans to go fishing with his dad when he returned from Afghanistan in a few weeks.

The 27-year-old Army corporal was one of nine soldiers - and one of two from Georgia - killed in an insurgent raid on an American outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The Pentagon announced the deaths shortly afterwards. Family members said Phillips spent Christmas planning his own funeral so his loved ones wouldn't have to worry about it. He had been married just two years to his wife, Eve.

"I'd always tell him, 'You're going to be fine, you're coming home, the odds are with you,'" his father, Michael Phillips of Dawsonville, said. Matthew Phillips' sister, Mary Nix of San Antonio, gave birth to a son the day before she learned of her brother's death. She renamed the baby Matthew after hearing the news.

The Pentagon listed Matthew Phillips' hometown as Jasper. His wife lives in Cumming. But Phillips also has ties to Hall County. His father said he attended both Flowery Branch Elementary School and Johnson High School, and his mother taught at Spout Springs Elementary School.

This and similar news coming from Afghanistan should be a turning point (for policy makers in Washington) which made Fred to pen down his highly thought provoking post which now follows. Nayyar]

The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit. To quote one of many accounts on the web:

BEFORE

Joshua Bernard
Somewhere there is a picture of me, looking almost exactly the same.

“Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard’s family is feeling right now, and that Curley’s ‘lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right – but judgment and common decency.’”

I thought a long time before writing about this matter, and was not pleasant to be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless Secretary, I too was a Marine Lance Corporal of twenty-one years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally blind following my (I think) thirteenth trip to eye surgery as a result of an identical foreign policy.

Big fucking deal. Shit happens. At this point I’m comfortable and doing fine. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. The other kid is dead.

But that bothers me. And all of this perhaps gives me a certain insight into the matter that not all reporters have, nor all editors. It also makes me poisonously, bottle-throwing angry to think about another chilly professional bureaucrat, the Second Coming of McNamara, with less combat experience than Tinkerbell, sending kids to croak in weird places having nothing to do with the US.

But Gates. The words “decency” and “unconscionable” coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. “Intelligence” agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, STASI, SAVAK – they’re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.

Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?

AFTER

It could almost make you turn against the war. Some 6,000 American kids have died like this, the photographs carefully hidden by the press. The Pentagon has killed many, many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the number of permanently disabled Americans is far higher. Today I find a column on Antiwar.com by Joe Galloway, whom I remember from UPI Saigon, entitled The War in Afghanistan is Not Worth Another American Life. I agree. Nor another Afghan life. They did nothing. Another headline notes that the Kondor Legion, the USAF, killed ninety-five Afghans in another witless air strike. These days, we are the Nazis.

Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping acquiescent ignorant beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of this. It remembers its disaster in Asia. The generals of today learned nothing military from Vietnam – they are fighting the same kind of war as stupidly as before – but they learned something more important: Their most dangerous enemy is the America public. You. Me. Defeating the Taliban isn’t particularly important, or even desirable. (No war means fewer promotions and fewer contracts). But while the Taliban cannot possibly defeat the Pentagon, the American public can.

Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling somnolent inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.

In wars, there are many enlightening things to see. For example, the Marine with a third of his face and half a lung, going ku-kuk-kuk as red gunk rolls out of his mouth and he drowns in his blood. Ruined or dying teenagers whimpering the trinity of the badly wounded, Mother, wife, and water. The brain-shot guy jerking like an epileptic as he tries not to die. Ever see brain tissue from gunshot? I have. It makes a pink spew across the ground. Like strawberry chiffon.

Gates does not want you to see this. You would puke, buy a bottle of bourbon, and take to the streets. He knows it. CBS could end these wars in a week if it aired what really happens. Gates cannot afford to let the dam break. PR is all. Thus Bush forbade the photographing of coffins coming home, and the CIA ferociously resists the publication of photographs of torture. Professional sadists do things to people that would make you gag.

Then there are the enlisted men. In these hobbyist wars, and to an extent even in peacetime, it is crucial to keep the enlisteds from thinking. In some three decades of covering the military, I saw this constantly. If I went to Afghanistan today as a correspondent, I could argue in private about the war with the colonel. If I suggested to the troops that they were being suckered, the colonel would go crazy. Next to keeping the public quiescent, keeping the troops (and potential recruits) bamboozled is vital. If a high-school kid saw what awaited, if he saw the cartilage glistening in wrecked joints, he wouldn’t sign.

Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still…slowly…moving, the dead children, the…never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.

Julie Jacobson sounds like that modern-day rarity, a reporter, as distinguished from a volunteer flack. Bless her. I used to wonder whether women could hack it as combat correspondents. I no longer do. (There are lots of them.) I used to refer to smarmy over-groomed bloodthirsty office warts as pussies, saying that they lacked balls. The anatomical reference no longer works. I note that Jacobson has more combat time than the aggregate for Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Obama, Biden, Gonzalez, Clinton, Perle, Abrams, Kristol, Feith, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, George Will, Dershowitz, and Gates. These men, if the word is appropriate, killed that kid. Jacobson just caught them in the act.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well and A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be. His latest book is Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle. Visi his blog.

Copyright © 2009 Fred Reed

Courtesy: Fred on Everything Posted: September 9th, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

The Sneaking US Occupation Of Islamabad -I-

Note for WoP readers: Before you go to the main post by the noted Pakistani analyst and a political activist, Dr. Shireen M. Mazari, here is a Youtube video being put up courtesy Inforwars.com (http://www.infowars.com/madsen-on-rt-u-s-contractors-in-pakistan-are-u-s-troops-next/). The caption of the video reads:

Madsen on RT: U.S. Contractors in Pakistan. Are U.S. Troops Next?

Russia Today
September 8, 2009

Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen discusses a new recruitment process to bring private military contractors into Pakistan.

And on Wayne Madsen Report (http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/) there is a brief note on the reported expansion of the US Embassy in Islamabad. It says…..

Pakistanis charge U.S. expands security presence in Pakistan. Jang, Sep. 6 — “The expansion of the US Embassy in Islamabad, extraordinary increase in the mysterious activities of the US officers, and the movement of vehicles without number plates on the roads of Islamabad, have caused concern to the patriotic Pakistanis . . .

Gen (ret) Aslam Beg said: “The establishment of a military cantonment in the name of expansion of the US Embassy is a big blow to the national sovereignty. Everybody knows that the foreign embassies are used for espionage purposes and they also buy loyalty of people. . . one should think as to why the military cantonment is being set up 500 m. away from the President’s House and Prime Minister’s House in the name of the expansion of the US Embassy.

It will be a big US spy center and its marines and the FBI will also be stationed there, while the Blackwater assassins will carry out such activities as the assassins of Hassan Bin Sabah.” URL n/a.

Contd….

The Sneaking US Occupation Of Islamabad -II-

Pakistan was reported to have expelled the head of an American NGO providing cover to Blackwater operations on Pakistani soil.  Now this deported American, Crag Davis, is back in Pakistan.  And he is not alone.  Close to 2,000 Hummers have arrived at a Pakistani port that are not destined for Afghanistan.  The world’s biggest US embassy is under construction in Islamabad.  As if this is not enough, the US embassy has hired a huge number of houses across the Pakistani capital to serve as unofficial local franchises.  Welcome to the silent American occupation of Pakistan, with the blessing of the elected Pakistani politicians and a silent Pakistani military.

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SHIREEN M. MAZARI

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Before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was given orders to the contrary, press reports of August 6 show that its spokesman, Mr. Basit, on August 5, at the Karachi Press Club, had already given out the fact of the 1,000 US Marines coming to Pakistan for the protection of the new, imperial US embassy in Islamabad.

Now we are seeing houses being barricaded for US personnel all across the capital and we know of the 300 plus ‘military trainers’ already ensconced in Tarbela.

In addition we have the notorious Blackwater (now hiding under a new label, Xe Worldwide) and the rather obvious CIA front-company, Creative Associates International, Inc. (CAII), operating not only in Peshawar but now in Islamabad also it transpires – and a recent reflection of this was the sealing off of the road in Super Market [a stone throw away from the houses of senior Pakistani officials] last week right in front of a school!

Whatever the US embassy gives out or the terrified Pakistani leadership echoes, the reality is that there is a questionable and increasingly threatening US armed presence in Pakistan and this may be augmented soon by an ISAF/NATO presence.  Incidentally, to add to the suspicions of the US presence, reports are coming in of around 3,000 Hummer vehicles, fully loaded, awaiting transportation from Port Qasim.

Will some of these go to the Pentagon’s assassination squads, who may take up residence in some of the barricaded Islamabad houses and with whom the present US commander in Afghanistan was directly associated? Ordinary officials at Pakistani airports have also been muttering their concerns over chartered flights flying in Americans whose entry is not recorded – even the flight crews are not checked for visas and so there is now no record-keeping of exactly how many Americans are coming into or going out of Pakistan.  Incidentally the CAII’s Craig Davis who was deported has now returned to Peshawar! And let us not be fooled by the cry that numbers reflect friendship since we know what numbers meant to Soviet satellites.

Govt. Selling Pakistan’s Agri Land To Foreigners

Now another threat, in the making for some time, is becoming more overt.  Pakistan’s precious and fertile agricultural land is up for grabs to the highest foreign bidder.  Pakistan is not alone in being targeted thus by rich countries with little or no food resources.  The UN has already condemned this purchase of agricultural land as a form of neo-colonialism.  Over the past five years in a hardly-noticed wave of investment, rich agricultural land and forests in poor countries are being snapped up by buyers from cash-rich countries.  Leading this grab of poor country resources are the rapidly industrialising states and the oil-rich countries who have, between 2006-2009, either directly through governments or through sovereign wealth funds and companies, already grabbed or are in the process of grabbing between 37 to 49 million acres of developing countries’ farmland (a July 2009 report by Robert Schubert of Food and Water Watch).

Wealthy countries like Japan and South Korea are acquiring farmlands abroad for food security while oil-rich countries are seeking cheap water and cultivated crops to be shipped home. The land buyers from the oil-rich arid countries are seeking water as much as land because by buying or leasing land with sufficient water, they can divert their own domestic irrigation water to municipal water supplies.

The foreign land purchases destabilize food security since land given to foreign investors cannot be used to produce food for local communities – the foreign investors’ intent being to take the food back to their own food-scarce countries. Many of the land purchases comprise tens of thousands of acres which are then turned into single-crop farms – and these dwarf the small-scale farms common in the developing world, where nearly nine out of ten farms (85 per cent) are less than five acres. Such land grabs have now been recognised as harming the local communities by dislodging smallholder farmers, aggravating rural poverty and food insecurity.

With Gulf countries importing 60 per cent of their food on average, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are leading the investments into Asia and Africa to secure supplies of cereals, meat and vegetables. The rise in demand for food imports for the GCC comes at a time when exportable agricultural surplus worldwide has declined.

How does all this impact Pakistan? Pakistan has rich agricultural land and adequate water although the latter’s distribution has been subject to political machinations. There has also been a seemingly deliberate effort by successive ruling elites to undermine the country’s agricultural potential and nowhere is this more brazenly evident than at present with power outages preventing crucial water supply through tubewells; and many rich lands being converted into housing colonies! Then we have had artificially created sugar and wheat shortages – ‘artificial’ because for the last few years our wheat and sugarcane crops have been bountiful. As for the wonderful local fruit, that is also being diverted to feed external populations through exports that are not only depriving the locals of their land’s bounty but also raising local prices so only the rich elite can consume what is left.

Now it has come out that we are selling land to the Gulf states, thereby undermining our local agriculture further.  Abraaj Capital and other UAE entities have acquired 800,000 acres of farmland in Pakistan (we have learnt no lessons from the sale of the KESC and the PTCL).  Qatar Livestock is investing $1 billion in corporate farms in Pakistan. But all this produce will be taken out, so the argument that this foreign investment will bring in new technologies into our agricultural sector does not hold. In any case, one does not have to sell one’s land to foreign forces to acquire new technology which is available in the open market and the government can help local farmers acquire it.

Not surprisingly, the Gulf countries are pleased with Pakistan’s rulers bending over backwards to accommodate their needs at the expense of the ordinary Pakistani – for none of the food produced on these lands will be available cheaply for Pakistanis; it will go to feed the Gulf populations.  Gulf countries are happy because their imported food bill will cost 20-25 per cent less, positively impacting on their present high inflation rate. We may import this food from them for a price, just as our government has now decided to import sugar from the UAE. Of course the UAE itself imports sugar so the absurdity should be abundantly clear to all, including our profiteers!

In the visibly servile mindset of our leaders, instead of offering incentives on a similar scale to local farmers, Islamabad is offering legal and tax concessions, with legislative cover, to foreign investors in the form of specialized agricultural and livestock ‘free zones’ and may also introduce legislation to exempt such investors from government-imposed tax bans. The most worrisome aspect of such wheeling-dealing is the government’s decision to develop a new security force of 100,000 men spread across the four provinces to ensure stability of the Arab investments. This will cost the Pakistani state around $2 billion in terms of training and salaries and the real fear is that this force will be used to forcibly eject local small farmers from their lands. Concerns have been further heightened because no labour laws will be applicable to corporate agricultural companies and there will be no sales tax or customs duties on import of agricultural machinery by these investors. Nor will their dividends be taxed and 100 per cent remittances of capital and profits will be permitted. So where is there even an iota of advantage for the ordinary Pakistani as opposed to the rulers?

With the US increasingly occupying Pakistan with their covert and overt armed presence, and the Gulf states taking over our rich agricultural lands our rulers are voluntarily making us a colony again – as we were under the British who used our men to fight their wars and our cheap labor to ship the finished produce back to Britain!

Have we come full circle after 62 years of our creation?

______________

This article first appeared in The News International on Aug. 26, 2009.  Dr. Mazari can be reached at callstr@hotmail.com

Source: pakalert.wordpress.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Obama`s Afghanistan War: When Will It End and Can the U.S. Win?

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by ASHAHED M. MUHAMMAD

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When launched on October 7, 2001, the goals of the War in Afghanistan, dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom,” were to locate, capture or kill Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the members of his leadership cadre and end the Taliban regime’s stronghold in the region, striking a decisive blow in the Bush administration’s infamous global “War on Terror.”

While many members of Al-Qaeda’s command staff have been captured or killed, and many Taliban members neutralized, Osama bin Laden remains on the loose, suspected of being somewhere in a mountainous remote Pakistani region. Al Qaeda has evolved, spreading to several areas across the globe. The Taliban appears able to strike U.S. military forces at will, and public support for the war is rapidly falling.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released September 1 found that 57 percent of the American people are opposed to the war, up 11 points since April.

Last month was the deadliest for U.S. military personnel since the war began eight years ago and pressure is rising on Pres. Barack Obama and top U.S. military officials to find a quick solution to a very complex problem. Some critics on the left and the right are calling on him to withdraw from Afghanistan completely, while others, including military officials, are suggesting recalibration of troop levels and force deployment.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently described the situation as “serious and deteriorating.” U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander of the U.S. Forces in Afghanistan said the situation in Afghanistan requires a “revised implementation strategy.” Even conservative commentator George Will in an opinion piece appearing in the Sept.1 Washington Post suggested “rapidly reversing the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan.”

“What the last eight years have shown us is that what we need is not a new military strategy, but a new strategy altogether,” said Clare Moen of the War Resisters League and editor-in-chief of their official publication, WIN magazine. “Sending in more troops has not been working. We just finished the deadliest month in the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan,” she added.

Ms. Moen’s group, an 84-year-old nonviolent anti-war organization, plans major anti-war action in cities across the U.S. on October 5 to protest the War in Afghanistan and demand an immediate withdrawal of troops. She said many protesters may have even voted for Pres. Obama in the November 2008 election.

“A lot of people who voted for Obama were hoping that he would reverse a lot of Bush’s policies, specifically on occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, but I’m not sure their hopes were necessarily founded in reality,” said Ms. Moen.

Responding via e-mail from France to questions presented by The Final Call, author, political commentator and co-founder of the online news magazine Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah wrote, “During the campaign, Obama promised to escalate the war in Afghanistan and spread it to Pakistan. By all accounts he is keeping that promise. More bombs, more violence, more displaced people will not produce the conditions for peace. Rather, it will expand the circle of suffering and those willing to take up arms in defense of what they experience as a foreign invasion. So sadly I do see the worst yet to come.”

Obama’s war?

Pres. Obama, immediately upon taking office, said Afghanistan was a “necessary war” and while he has ordered an increase in troop levels and has attempted to work with cooperative allies within Afghanistan and Pakistan to succeed, conflict rages.

On Sept. 2 Afghanistan’s deputy chief of intelligence, Abdullah Laghmani was assassinated after a suicide bombing attack just east of the country’s capital of Kabul. According to the AP a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, claimed responsibility for the assassination.

The results from the recently held Afghan presidential election are still in dispute, with the announcement delayed because of allegations of voter fraud. Even after the results are announced, analysts say the Afghan government is weak and the drug trade threatens what little stability there is.

“Most often, the central government is criticized for its high level of corruption. To me, that is not the most critical problem. The main problem is that it is weak,” wrote DePaul University political science professor Patrick Callahan in an e-mailed response to The Final Call. “Historically, power in Afghanistan has been highly decentralized. There was a government in Kabul, the capital city, but real control over what happened on the ground rested in tribal leaders and warlords. That is layered on sharp ethnic differences in different parts of the country. In fact, it is misleading to think of Afghanistan as a country or a nation. It is a territory containing several nations and falling woefully short of having the coherence we ordinarily associate with the word ‘country,’” he added.

Though poppy cultivation and opium production has gone down, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2009,” its executive director, Antonio Maria Costa still sees narcotics trafficking as a major problem in the region. According to the report, poppy cultivation dropped 22 percent and opium production by 10 percent and there has been a 33 percent drop in the area of land devoted to poppy cultivation, the report said.

“The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market. For the second year in a row, cultivation, production, work-force, prices, revenues, exports and its GDP share are all down, while the number of poppy-free provinces and drug seizures continue to rise. Yet, Afghan drugs still have catastrophic consequences. They fund criminals, insurgents, and terrorists in Afghanistan and abroad. Collusion with corrupt government officials keeps undermining public trust, security, and the law,” said Mr. Costa.

War without end

Robert T. Starks, political science professor at Northeastern Illinois University described Afghanistan as “almost ungovernable” and pointed out that if Pres. Obama continues to ramp up troop levels in an effort to stay the course, he runs the risk of a prolonged conflict appearing to be without end. As the American bodies continue to pile up, public support will continue to decline. However, the major issue, according to Prof. Starks, is the financial drain the war is having on a faltering American economy.

“Economically, this country cannot afford to continue that war.” said Prof. Starks. “The last thing he wants to do is to have a repeat of what went on in Vietnam, that type of long range fight going on in Afghanistan,” said Prof. Starks.

For Pres. Obama and the multinational forces in the region, the bad news keeps on coming.

According to media reports, a NATO air strike in Afghanistan on Sept. 4 caused at least 90 civilian casualties. Constant drone attacks with Hellfire missiles have taken the lives of hundreds of non-combatants in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has not helped matters with locals whom the multinational forces are ostensibly seeking to enlist for support.

A top defense aide to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown resigned on Sept. 3 over disagreements regarding the government’s Afghanistan policy and involvement. According to a recent poll in London’s Daily Telegraph 66 percent of Brits are against the war. Fifty-two British soldiers have been killed in the conflict within the last two months. With four months left, 2009 has already been the deadliest year for troops in Afghanistan. There are currently about 68,000 American troops engaged in combat operations there.

Despite those realities on the ground, Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a Sept. 3 press briefing alongside Adm. Mullen at the Pentagon, reiterated his support for Pres. Obama’s strategy while acknowledging faltering support.

“I don’t believe that the war is slipping through the administration’s fingers. And I think it’s important—first of all, the nation has been at war for eight years. The fact that Americans would be tired of having their sons and daughters at risk and in battle is not surprising,” said Sec. Gates. He also cautioned against determining the success or failure of the military operation based on what may be considered a limited perspective.

“I think what’s important to remember is, the president’s decisions were only made at the—on this strategy were only made at the very end of March. Our new commander (Gen. McChrystal) appeared on the scene in June. We still do not have all of the forces the president has authorized in Afghanistan yet, and we still do not have all the civilian surge that the president has authorized and insisted upon in Afghanistan yet,” said Sec. Gates.

Prof. Starks said in spite of what the generals are saying, the reality is that Pres. Obama is going to be forced to consider a withdrawal “sooner rather than later.”

Leading Islamic scholar Imam Zaid Shakir of the Zaytuna Institute, a non-profit, educational religious institute and school based in Berkeley, California agreed. His advice to Pres. Obama would be “blame it on Bush and get out.”

“It’s an unwinnable war, it has nothing to do with stopping terrorists, in fact, if anything, it is going to create more animosity towards this country and it is going to create more people who have reasons to seek revenge against this country,” said Imam Shakir. Pres. Obama should not be deterred by the possibility of being called weak by the right wing, he added.

“It takes more strength to do the right thing. Sometimes it takes more strength to walk away from a fight you shouldn’t be involved in than to display a false sense of macho and a false sense of courage by engaging in that fight. It takes more courage to defy the warmongers, it takes more courage to defy the militarists, it takes more courage to stand up to admit that you made a mistake,” said Imam Shakir.

The writer Ashahed M. Muhammad is Assistant Editor of FinalCall.com

Source: Mathaba.net

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Birds of Lahore – Sustainers of City’s Biodiversity

Though an ancient city; over the years Lahore has considerably expanded. Along these modern additions, the ancient monuments, old gardens, trees, graveyards and traditional bungalows having attached gardens, large expanses of lawn and old roadside trees some of which can still be seen, are gradually disappearing. These green areas and old endemic trees of Lahore are home to many resident bird species as well as many summer, winter and transit migrants. Thus Lahore is a hub of a variety of bird species. [In the image above Blue Rock Pigeon and Common House sparrow (male) (Scientific Names:Columba livia and Passer domesticus) perch on a water bowl pit on th roof of an old building in the inner city of Lahore].

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LAHORE IS A HUB OF  VARIETY OF BIRD SPECIES

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by Uzma Saeed

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Lahore the city of gardens is heart of Pakistan. The city has seen the heydays of the Mughals, Sikhs and the British; all left their footprints on the history and cultural mosaic of the city. Resultantly Lahore is a treasure-trove of monuments, historical relics and remains which these nations have left in this historical metropolis of Punjab

According to a survey done in the year 2006 the population of this city is counted as 10 million inhabitants thus in terms of population it ranks as the second largest city of Pakistan and 15th largest in South Asia.

Though an ancient city; over the years Lahore has considerably expanded. However, along these modern additions, the ancient monuments, old gardens, trees, graveyards and traditional bungalows having attached gardens, large expanses of lawn and old roadside trees some of them can still be seen, are gradually disappearing. These green areas and old endemic trees of Lahore are home to many resident bird species as well as many summer, winter and transit migrants. Thus Lahore is a hub of a variety of bird species.

In urban Lahore, there are areas which can truly be classified as places of breeding, nesting and roosting for several bird species. The grounds of different habitats such as Lahore Zoo and the Lawrence Garden, Mayo and Jinnah Gardens, GOR, Jallo Park, Kinnaird College, Aitchison College and many others are home to various bird species.

Flames From AFGHANISTAN Ignite PAKISTAN

A Pakistani volunteer extinguishes fire following a car bomb blast in Peshawar’s Pipal Mandi. Many Pakistanis believe the bombings, suicide attacks and other acts of  terrorism are a spillover of what is happening in neighboring Afghanistan.

Eric Margolis

The eight-year war in Afghanistan has now set Pakistan on fire. What began in 2001 as a supposedly limited American anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan has now become a spreading regional conflict.

Pakistan’s army just launched a major ground and air offensive against rebellious Pashtun tribes in wild South Waziristan which Islamabad claims is the epicenter of the growing insurgency against the US-backed government of Asif Ali Zardari.

(Above) Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, standing on American props, faces tough times as he tries to maneuver out of the mess the country is facing now.

It’s likely the rebellious Pashtun tribesmen will simply fade into the mountains, leaving the army stuck garrisoning major towns and trying to protect roads. A similar uprising in Kashmir has tied down 500,000 Indian soldiers and paramilitary police.

Washington, by contrast, is delighted. It has long been a key US goal to press Pakistan’s tough army into fighting both Pashtun rebels in Pakistan, and the Pashtun Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistan has long hesitated doing so, loathe to wage war on its own tribal people. The US is paying most of the bills for the Waziristan offensive.

Washington has been urging Pakistan’s governments to attack South Waziristan, not the least because these formerly autonomous tribal badlands are believed to be sheltering al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Bombings and shootings have been rocking Pakistan, a complex, unstable nation of 167 million, including a recent brazen attack on army HQ in Rawalpindi and a massive bombing of Peshawar’s exotic Khyber Bazaar.

Meanwhile, the feeble, deeply unpopular US-installed government in Islamabad faces an increasingly rancorous confrontation with the military and angry opposition groups who accuse it of betraying Pakistan’s national interests.

Like the proverbial bull in the china shop, the Obama administration and US Congress chose this explosive time to try to impose yet another layer of American control over Pakistan. This heavy-handed action comes at a time when Nobel peace prize winner Barack Obama considers sending thousands more US troops to Afghanistan.

Tragically, US policy in the Muslim world continues to be too often driven by arrogance, ignorance, and special interest groups.

The current Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, advanced with President Barack Obama’s blessing, is ham-handed dollar diplomacy at its worst.   Pakistan, bankrupted by corruption, feudal landlords, and the previous Musharraf military regime, is being offered US $7.5 billion over five years – but with outrageous strings attached.

Washington denies any strings are involved. But few in South Asia believe the cash-strapped US is handing over $7.5 billion for the sake of altruism.

The US wants to build a mammoth new embassy for 1,000 personnel in Islamabad, the second largest after its Baghdad fortress-embassy. New personnel are needed, claims Washington, to monitor the $7.5 billion in aid. So US mercenaries (aka `contractors’) are being brought in to protect US interests and personnel.   New US bases may also be in the cards.  Most of this new aid will go right into the pockets of the pro-western ruling establishment, about 1% of the population.

Washington is also reportedly demanding some form of indirect veto power over promotions in Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence agency, ISI. This crude attempt to exert more US influence over Pakistan’s 617,000-man military has enraged the armed forces and set off alarm bells.

It’s all part of Washington’s `Afpak’ strategy to clamp tighter control over restive Pakistan and make use of its armed forces and spies in Afghanistan. Seizing control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the key to its national defense against a much more powerful India, is the other key US objective. Many Pakistanis believe the US is bent on tearing apart Pakistan in order to seize its nuclear arsenal.

Ninety percent of Pakistanis oppose the US-led war in Afghanistan, and see Taliban and its allies as national resistance to western occupation. But, at the same time, many non-Pashtun Pakistanis strongly oppose the tribal rebellion in Northwest Frontier Province and want the army to crack down on the wild men of the Northwest Frontier. Interestingly, the British Raj had similar problems with these warlike tribesmen a century ago.

In an alarming development, violent attacks on Pakistan’s government are coming not only from once autonomous Pashtun tribes (wrongly called `Taliban’) in Northwest Frontier Province,  but, increasingly, in the biggest province, Punjab.  Recently, the intemperate US Ambassador in Islamabad, in a fit of imperial hubris, actually called for air attacks on Pashtun leaders in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan province.

Washington does not even bother to ask the impotent Islamabad government’s permission to launch air attacks inside Pakistan.   Pakistan’s government is only informed after the attacks, which often cause heavy civilian casualties.

Along comes the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Big Bribe as most irate Pakistanis accuse President Asif Ali Zardari’s government of being American hirelings. Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, has been dogged for decades by charges of egregious corruption. His senior aides in Pakistan and Washington are also being denounced as foreign stooges by what’s left of Pakistan’s media not yet under government control. We heard similar accusations against the US-backed governments of Iran and Egypt.

Washington seems unaware of the fury its heavy-handed, counter-productive policies have whipped up in Pakistan. Like the Bush administration in Iraq, the Obama administration keeps listening to Washington-based neoconservatives, military hawks, and `experts’ who tell it just what it wants to hear, not the hard facts.

As a result, Pakistan’s military, the nation’s premier institution, is being pushed to the point of revolt. Against the backdrop of bombings and shootings come rumors the heads of Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence may be replaced by the Zardari government. My Pakistani military and intelligence sources report growing unrest in the middle ranks against the pro-US leadership.

Pakistanis are calling for the removal of the Zardari regime’s strongman, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, a former policeman. He was even refused entry into military HQ in Rawalpindi last week.

There are rising calls for the head of Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, my old friend Hussain Haqqani, who is accused of being too close to the Americans. One suspects the adroit Haqqani might become Washington’s preferred Pakistani leader if Asif Zardari’s government crumbles or is ousted.

The possibility of a military coup against the discredited Zardari regime grows. But Pakistan is dependent on US money, and deeply fears India. Can its generals afford to break with patron Washington?

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009

Photo Credits: Top: www.afp.com/, Middle: phirwohee.wordpress.com/, Bottom www.expressindia.com/

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La Patrie en Danger. Time to Speak

Every once in a while I feel despair over the plight of our country. We are hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear or do anything to avert it. For years I have been ranting like Nietzsche’s fool with a lantern: It is coming. It is coming. I do not know where and how. We stand on a volcano. We feel it tremble, we hear it roar, how and when and where it will burst, and who will be destroyed by its eruption, it is beyond the ken of mortals to discern.

by Roedad Khan

Our country is in deep, deep trouble. The people must understand the full extent of the danger that threatens this country. Today say Pakistan and what comes to mind: Anarchy from within, irresistible pressure from without, a country cracking up under American pressure, a proxy war, American military intervention, pervasive fear and frequent bomb explosions. No country can survive when its dream spill over; when its rulers seem more concerned about perpetuating themselves and protecting their power and their ill-gotten wealth than protecting the country and its people.

The American footprint in our country is growing larger and heavier by the day. Nuclear Pakistan is now an American colony and is used as a doormat on which the US can wipe its bloodstained boots. American military personnel cross and re-cross our border without let or hindrance. Their drones violate our air space with the agreement of our government and kill innocent men, women and children. No questions asked. No public outrage. No protest demonstrations. No self-respecting country, big or small, would tolerate such intrusions. “You may come to the moment”, Churchill said, “When you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves”. For us that moment has come.

Farewell our dreams, our sublime illusions, our hopes, our independence and our sovereignty. Today the survival of the country, its hard–won democracy, its independent judiciary, its liberties all are on the line. No one is safe, and perhaps no place on earth more closely resembles Hobbes’s description of a state of nature in which life is “nasty, brutish and short”.

Today Pakistan is rudderless and sliding into darkness. It is like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can’t stretch out your hand to prevent them. Such is the feeling conjured up by corrupt, inept rulers of Pakistan as it enters a period of great uncertainty and sinks deeper and deeper into the quagmire. I reproduce below some lines, relevant to our situation today, from an unknown writer about a railway accident:

Who is in charge of the clattering train,
And the pace is hot, and the points are near,
And Sleep has deadened the driver’s ear,
And the signals flash through the night in vain,
For Death is in charge of the clattering train.

Isn’t it a great tragedy that at a time when statesmanship of a very high order is the need of the hour, the fate of 170 million Pakistanis is in the hands of Mr. Zardari and hordes of weak-kneed triflers, mountebanks and charlatans begrimed with corruption? Were politics in our country burdened with such notions as shame, integrity, accountability, Rule of Law, independent judiciary, and last but not least, inviolability and supremacy of the constitution, all of them including Musharraf, would be in jail today.

“These are times that try men’s souls. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country, but he who serves it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman”. We live in a beautiful country, but robber barons – people who have no respect for our independence, our freedom, our institutions have taken it over.

A testing time, critical to his Presidency, is now upon Mr. Zardari. He has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Today the only person in Islamabad willing to defend him is no other than Zardari himself. He alone is responsible for the mess we are in today because it is he who drives the train. He is aware that his good star has finally deserted him. The Goddess of Destiny has made up her mind. Destiny has trapped him at last. If Zardari left tomorrow, it would be morning once again in Pakistan.

Here in Islamabad there is nothing but the nauseating stench of resignation. With everyday passing, the tide of hope recedes, revealing the unpleasant mud that the souls of slaves are made of. Is it our destiny that there must always be darkness at high noon, there must always be a line of shadow against the sun? We need people who will stand up and say: Enough! Enough! This is not acceptable in the 21st century. Why is the better sort of the nation so silent today? Why have the intellectuals adopted ‘the genre of silence’? Why is there no public outrage? Why is there no loud protest? “Where are the men to be found who will dare to speak up”, as Voltaire said. The creative intellectuals have been driven to ramshackle ivory towers or bought off. Show me an educated man with a silver spoon in Pakistan today, and I will show you a man without a spine. So when will somebody pose a finger at Zardari and say: “J’accuse”.

It is time to wakeup. Let Pakistan be Pakistan again. Let it be the dream it used to be – a dream that is almost dead today. All those who see the perils of the future must draw together and take resolute measures to put Pakistan back on the rails before Tsunami catches up and hits us all. The longer we allow the waters to rise, the greater the catastrophe that will follow the bursting of the dam. Our window of opportunity is getting narrower and narrow by the day. It will, no doubt, be an uphill struggle to redeem our democracy and fashion it once again into a vessel to be proud of.

At a time like this, people detest those who remain passive, who keep silent and love only those who fight, who dare. In this transcendent struggle, neutrality is not an option. You’re either with the people or against them. It is as simple as that. One thing is clear. The day is not far off when status quo will shift, corrupt, inept rulers will get their just deserts, and people will once again believe in the “power of the powerless”.

Pakistan is a case of failed leadership, not failed state. Until we get the right kind of leadership, Pakistan will continue to oscillate between long periods of authoritarianism and bouts of corrupt and sham democracy. I am a short – term pessimist but a long – term optimist. I have this palpable feeling that the Maoist prescription – things have to get worse before they could get better – is being tested in Pakistan today.

The view from the presidency, however, is clearly rosier than from where most Pakistanis sit. From my perspective, this is the darkest moment in our history. I know that an unusual agitation is pervading the people, but what it will exactly result in, I am unable to say. “I can detect the near approach of the storm. I can hear the moaning of the hurricane, but I can’t say when or where it will break forth”. How will this crisis pan out? Either this is a cyclical crisis in the system and it will soon resolve itself, or else it is a crisis of the system and we will soon witness the passage of one epoch to another.

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What happened today?

Today is the first of the month – a day where people get salaries, plan for the month ahead, pay bills, pay their children’s school fees.

Today on the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway, a couple of suicide bombers detonated their jackets near the police checkpost on the Babu Sabu interchange. The attack happened after the two were stopped. The attack saw both suicide bombers killed. 15 people are reportedly injured, which includes several police officers. The attackers are reported to have been less than 20 years old.

The Motorway also saw an attack on October 24, when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden car near the Lillah interchange, killing one police officer.

Today in Rawalpindi, Pakistan - a planted bomb exploded suicide bomber detonated a bomb laden motorcycle, killing 30 people and injuring 40.  25 people (this is an unconfirmed number as the death toll keeps rising) and injuring 30. Eyewitness reports gathered by Pakistani news channels say that there were several military officers who were at the National Bank of Pakistan collecting their salaries, and that the blast took place in the parking lot. The area is one of those ‘highly sensitive’ ones – the Pearl Continental hotel was next door and the Army’s General Head Quarters a few kilometers away. Schools have been closed in the city.

Today in Pakistan, the Government is obsessed not with the security situation in the country, not with the military operation in Waziristan, but with aid conditions in the Kerry-Lugar/Berman bill and the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance.

Today in Rawalpindi and Lahore, as families try and get news and innocent people die and are injured, as news channels scramble for visuals, as the empty condemnations from political leaders pour in, as the country’s ever-increasing sense of fear grows, everything is in short supply: leadership, effective governance, security and stability.

These news items courtesy: zeitgeistpolitics.wordpress.com

The Boston Brahmin

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, advocating the KLB – promoting ZHQ – via the KLB

by Anjum Niaz

Note for WoP Readers: My nephew Jibran, off and on sends me some very interesting pieces. This one he says was received by him from Dr. Badr Dhanani.

Written by a freelance journalist with over twenty years of experience in national and international reporting, Anjum tells us how the games of politics are being played in this country, particularly at a time the whole country is burning, bomb attacks, suicide bombings, explosions and what not. A situation perhaps  similar to the times when Rome was burning and an autocrat king was playing his flute.

I was once in Rome, but I did not do what the Romans do, yet I did at least have a VISIT to the roof top, I was told was the place from where Nero looked at burning Rome but went on playing his flute. Well, Nero was a king but in this 21 century we have democratic rulers who are worse than the Neros of ancient Rome. What these kings, and their loved ones, the princes of today are doing, can be gauged from following story Anjum has sent us courtesy Jibran courtesy his friend Dr. Badr Dhanani… [Nayyar]

The Boston Brahmin

Since all the worthy columnists have exhausted the KLB, the new name for the Kerry-Lugar Bill, I have nothing remarkable to add to their sound and fury. Let’s instead turn to a small housekeeping matter like: is Foreign Minister Qureshi’s son working for Senator Kerry? Zain H Qureshi’s (ZHQ) business card is circulating the cyberspace these days. It says that he is a legislative fellow in Kerry’s Washington DC office. When I called up Kerry’s office and asked for Qureshi, the voice at the other end immediately said, “He does not work for us”. The woman appeared primed for such a question. She said she had received a similar query earlier that day.

Incidentally the cell number on ZHQ’s call card has been disconnected; while the mail box belonging to “Zain Qureshi” was “full!” So, I couldn’t get to him.

After a number of phone calls to Senator Kerry’s office, I finally found out from one of Kerry’s male staffers that ZHQ did indeed work for Kerry but had now left. Why has ZHQ gone into hiding? Did he do something wrong? Yes. And the Foreign Office finds itself between a rock and a hard place. How can it condone its boss’s act of getting his son a job with Kerry when the KLB talks were at a critical stage? Even if fate smiles upon ZHQ because he’s the favoured son of our foreign minister and the doors of the high and mighty in Washington open up for him, we have the right to know whenever the son’s job compromises his dad’s position. More importantly if it is in direct conflict with Pakistan’s interests.

Would you not call this a conflict of interest? Should the foreign minister resign? And if Zardari cannot afford to let him go, then the FM must seek a public apology. The Boston Brahmin, Senator Kerry is complicit in this act. Boston Brahmins are New England’s aristocracy like the Makhdooms of Multan, i.e. Shah Mahmood Qureshi and his tribe. These guys claim to fame is blue-blooded ancestry, wealth, influence and the right to rule. He said the following during his 2004 presidential campaign: “There’s a great passage in the Bible that says, ‘What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead.’ And I think everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith.”

Senator Kerry must practice what he preaches. Would he have given ZHQ the time of the day had the young man not been the son of Pakistan’s foreign minister?Why do the good folks fighting Pakistan’s case in Washington DC become the usual suspects? In Musharraf’s time it was Dr Nasim Ashraf. One wondered whether the Maryland-based millionaire doctor’s heart bled for Pakistan or for Musharraf or for himself. Today, Ambassador Husain Haqqani is under fire from certain Pakistani quarters who accuse him of working for Washington and not Islamabad. Haqqani is hitting back via email messages to anyone wondering what’s cooking in Washington. Yours truly is one of the unlucky recipients. Surely our ambassador must have known that his boss’s son was working for Kerry. Good counselling from Haqqani to Qureshi would perhaps have saved the latter the embarrassment he is facing today?

Another glaring example of how the Democrats are enticing the Pakistani leaders is the recent banner headline: “Zardari far ahead in popularity.” According to Democracy International, an affiliate of the Democratic Party of America, Zardari is ahead of Nawaz Sharif in the popularity contest. To anyone with an iota of intelligence, the timing of this screamer is suspect. What has Zardari achieved in recent days for “51 per cent” of Pakistanis to suddenly fall in love with him? His jiyalas, one fears, would declare October 1, the day the survey was announced, as the President’s Day – the day of the great revelation. Declaring it a public holiday perhaps?And when the polls go against the sitting president, these foreign busybodies are kicked out of Pakistan. Gen Musharraf asked IRI (the International Republican Institute), an affiliate of the Republican Party to wind up their office in Pakistan and leave when he got bad ratings from them. Not sure if indeed it was IRI that offended Musharraf, I called up their office in Washington. “What is your column about?” asked Lisa (I couldn’t catch her last name) from the press section. I told her politely that it was not possible for me to provide her details of my column. “If you can’t tell me what your column is about then I can’t help you,” she replied sternly. This is just a small example of how Masonic these polling outfits are. They think they have the writ to go around Pakistan poking their noses into our affairs, but when it comes to asking a simple question like if Musharraf asked them to wind up their office in 2008, they get so cagey.

Sadly, the epicentre of our knowledge is the received wisdom from such dodgy polls conducted by Democracy International and the International Republican Institute (IRI). Hey, where’s Gallup Pakistan? Have we become so incompetent or doped that we can’t even conduct popularity polls in our own country and must therefore rely on America?

We are the opium-eaters. We swallow whatever comes from Washington. While the Democrats tell us that Pakistanis love Zardari because of KLB, the Republicans via their polling affiliate the IRI sing a different tune. Their August polls conclude that “Pakistanis continue to hold onto the opinion that conditions in the country are problematic and President Zardari is perceived as being responsible.” If this does not sound confusing enough to an ordinary Pakistani trying to work out the popularity ratings of Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, have another go. According to September 9 report in the Christian Science Monitor, “Zardari’s popularity sags – will it undermine Pakistan’s fight with Taliban?”

 

Here’s another twister from the Los Angeles Times. The headline reads: “Zardari at fault for low rating?” This gem was published on August 31. “Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is aware that his popularity has sunk to new lows at a time when his arch rival Nawaz Sharif — who heads the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) — is boasting high popularity, a media report said. He is widely viewed in Pakistani society not as a helmsman, but a bystander. It’s an image that is largely of Zardari’s own making, say analysts who contend that he has failed to forge any kind of connection with the Pakistani public. Last but not the least is the recent poll by the Pew Research Centre, a Washington-based institute, which says that “less than a third of Pakistanis have a favourable opinion of Mr Zardari. The president was widely reviled after being accused of demanding kickbacks while he served in Benazir Bhutto’s Cabinet in the late 1980s and again starting in 1993.”

Give us a break! If by now we don’t get it that the US is using these polls as a weapon for manipulation of third world dictators (Gen Musharraf) and corrupt rulers then Pakistan, I’m afraid to say, is going down the tube fast.

Conflict of interest, eh? Here’s yet one more example. Do you know how many Pakistani parliamentarians and cabinet ministers hold foreign nationalities, including our president?

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Noam Chomsky: no change in US ‘Mafia principle’

Top American intellectual sees no significant change of US foreign policy under Obama.

by Mamoon Alabbasi

As civilised people across the world breathed a sigh of relief to see the back of former US president George W. Bush, top American intellectual Noam Chomsky warned against assuming or expecting significant changes in the basis of Washington’s foreign policy under President Barack Obama.

During two lectures organised by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, Chomsky cited numerous examples of the driving doctrines behind US foreign policy since the end of World War II.

“As Obama came into office, Condoleezza Rice predicted that he would follow the policies of Bush’s second term, and that is pretty much what happened, apart from a different rhetorical style,” he said.

“But it is wise to attend to deeds, not rhetoric. Deeds commonly tell a different story,” he added.

“There is basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that we if can control Middle East energy resources, then we can control the world,” explained Chomsky.

Chomsky said that a leading doctrine of US foreign policy during the period of its global dominance is what he termed as “the Mafia principle.”

“The Godfather does not tolerate ’successful defiance’. It is too dangerous. It must therefore be stamped out so that others understand that disobedience is not an option,” said Chomsky.

Because the US sees “successful defiance” of Washington as a “virus” that will “spread contagion,” he explained.

Iran

The US had feared this “virus” of independent thought from Washington by Tehran and therefore acted to overthrow the Iranian parliamentary democracy in 1953.

“The goal in 1953 was to retain control of Iranian resources,” said Chomsky.

However, “in 1979 the (Iranian) virus emerged again. The US at first sought to sponsor a military coup; when that failed, it turned to support Saddam Hussein’s merciless invasion (of Iran).”

“The torture of Iran continued without a break and still does, with sanctions and other means,” said Chomsky.

“The US continued, without a break, its torture of Iranians,” he stressed.

Nuclear attack

Chomsky mocked the idea presented by mainstream media that a future-nuclear-armed Iran may attack already-nuclear-armed Israel.

“The chance of Iran launching a missile attack, nuclear or not, is about at the level of an asteroid hitting the earth — unless, of course, the ruling clerics have a fanatic death wish and want to see Iran instantly incinerated along with them,” said Chomsky, stressing that this is not the case.

Chomsky further explained that the presence of US anti-missile weapons in Israel are really meant for preparing a possible attack on Iran, and not for self-defence, as it is often presented.

“The systems are advertised as defense against an Iranian attack. But …the purpose of the US interception systems, if they ever work, is to prevent any retaliation to a US or Israeli attack on Iran — that is, to eliminate any Iranian deterrent,” said Chomsky.

Iraq

Chomsky reminded the audience of America’s backing of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during and even after Iraq’s war with Iran.

“The Reaganite love affair with Saddam did not end after the (Iran-Iraq) war. In 1989, Iraqi nuclear engineers were invited to the United States, then under Gorge Bush I, to receive advanced weapons’ training,” said Chomsky.

This support continued while Saddam was committing atrocities against his own people, until he fell out of US favour when in 1990 he invaded Kuwait, an even closer alley of Washington.

“In 1990, Saddam defied, or more likely misunderstood orders, and he quickly shifted from favourite friend to the reincarnation of Hitler,” Chomsky added.

Then the people of Iraq were subjected to “genocidal” US-backed sanctions.

Chomsky explained that although the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was launched under many false pretexts and lies, was a ” major crime”, many critics of the invasion – including Obama – viewed it as merely as “a mistake” or a “strategic blunder”.

“It’s probably what the German general staff was telling Hitler after Stalingrad,” he said

“There’s nothing principled about it. It wasn’t a strategic blunder: it was a major crime,” he added.

Chomsky credited the holding of elections in Iraq in 2005 to popular Iraqi demand, despite initial US objection.

The US military, he argued, could kill as many Iraqi insurgents as it wished, but it was more difficult to shoot at non-violent protesters in the streets out on the open, which meant Washington at times had to give in to public Iraqi pressure.

But despite being pressured to announce a withdrawal from Iraq, the US continues to seek a long term presence in the country.

The US mega-embassy in Baghdad is to be expanded under Obama, noted Chomsky.

Optimism

Chomsky stressed that public pressure in the ‘West’ can make a positive difference for people suffering from the aggression of ‘Western’ governments.

“There is a lot of comparison between opposition to the Iraq war with opposition to the Vietnam war, but people tend to forget that at first there was almost no opposition to the Vietnam war,” said Chomsky.

“In the Iraq war, there were massive international protests before it officially stated… and it had an effect. The United Sates could not use the tactics used in Vietnam: there was no saturation bombing by B52s, so there was no chemical warfare – (the Iraq war was) horrible enough, but it could have been a lot worse,” he said.

“And furthermore, the Bush administration had to back down on its war aims, step by step,” he added.

“It had to allow elections, which it did not want to do: mainly a victory for non-Iraqi protests. They could kill insurgents; they couldn’t deal hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. Their hands were tied by the domestic constraints. They finally had to abandon – officially at least – virtually all the war aims,” said Chomsky.

“As late as November 2007, the US was still insisting that the ‘Status of Forces Agreement’ allow for an indefinite US military presence and privileged access to Iraq’s resources by US investors – well they didn’t get that on paper at least. They had to back down. OK, Iraq is a horror story but it could have been a lot worse,” he said

“So yes, protests can do something. When there is no protest and no attention, a power just goes wild, just like in Cambodia and northern Louse,” he added.

Turkey

Chomsky said that Turkey could become a “significant independent actor” in the region, if it chooses to.

“Turkey has to make some internal decisions: is it going to face west and try to get accepted by the European Union or is it going to face reality and recognise that Europeans are so racist that they are never going to allow it in?,” said Chomsky.

The Europeans “keep raising the barrier on Turkish entry to the EU,” he explained.

But Chomsky said Turkey did become an independent actor in March 2003 when it followed its public opinion and did not take part in the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Turkey took notice of the wishes of the overwhelming majority of its population, which opposed the invasion.

But ‘New Europe’ was led by Berlusconi of Italy and Aznar of Spain, who rejected the views of their populations – which strongly objected to the Iraq war – and preferred to follow Bush, noted Chomsky.

So, in that sense Turkey was more democratic than states that took part in the war, which in turn infuriated the US.

Today, Chomsky added, Turkey is also acting independently by refusing to take part in the US-Israeli military exercises.

Fear factor

Chomsky explained that although ‘Western’ government use “the maxim of Thucydides” (‘the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must’), their peoples are hurled via the “fear factor”.

Via cooperate media and complicit intellectuals, the public is led to believe that all the crimes and atrocities committed by their governments is either “self defence” or “humanitarian intervention”.

NATO

Chomsky noted that Obama has escalated Bush’s war in Afghanistan, using NATO.

NATO is also seen as reinforcing US control over energy supplies.

But the US also used NATO to keep Europe under control.

“From the earliest post-World War days, it was understood that Western Europe might choose to follow an independent course,” said Chomsky.”NATO was partially intended to counter this serious threat,” he added.

Middle East oil

Chomsky explained that Middle East oil reserves were understood to be “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history,” the most “strategically important area in the world,” in Eisenhower’s words.

Control of Middle East oil would provide the United States with “substantial control of the world.”

This meant that the US “must support harsh and brutal regimes and block democracy and development” in the Middle East.”

Somalia

Chomsky tackled the origins of the Somali piracy issue.

“Piracy is not nice, but where did it come from?”

Chomsky explained that one of the immediate reasons for piracy is European counties and others are simply “destroying Somalia’s territorial waters by dumping toxic waste – probably nuclear waste – and also by overfishing.”

“What happens to the fishermen in Somalia? They become pirates. And then we’re all upset about the piracy, not about having created the situation,” said Chomsky.

Chomsky went on to cite another example of harming Somalia.

“One of the great achievements of the war on terror, which was greatly hailed in the press when it was announced, was closing down an Islamic charity – Barakat – which was identified as supporting terrorists.

“A couple of months later… the (US) government quietly recognised that they were wrong, and the press may have had a couple of lines about it – but meanwhile, it was a major blow against Somalia. Somalia doesn’t have much of an economy but a lot of it was supported by this charity: not just giving money but running banks and businesses, and so on.

“It was a significant part of the economy of Somalia…closing it down… was another contributing factor to the breaking down of a very weak society…and there are other examples.”

Darfur

Chomsky also touched on Sudan’s Darfur region.

“There are terrible things going on in Darfur, but in comparison with the region they don’t amount to a lot unfortunately – like what’s going on in eastern Congo is incomparably worse than in Darfur.

“But Darfur is a very popular topic for Western humanists because you can blame it on an enemy – you have to distort a lot but you can blame it on ‘Arabs’, ‘bad guys’,” he explained.

“What about saving eastern Cong where maybe 20 times as many people have been killed? Well, that gets kind of tricky … for people who… are using minerals from eastern Congo that obtained by multinationals sponsoring militias which slaughter and kill and get the minerals,” he said.

Or the fact that Rwanda is simply the worst of the many agents and it is a US alley, he added.

Goldstone’s Gaza report

Chomsky appeared to have agreed with Israel that the Goldstone report on the Gaza war was bias, only he saw it as biased in favour of Israel.

The Goldstone report had acknowledged Israel’s right to self-defence, although it denounced the method this was conducted.

Chomsky stressed that the right to self-defence does not mean resorting to military force before “exhausting peaceful means”, something Israel did not even contemplate doing.

In fact, Chomsky points out, it was Israel who broke the ceasefire with Hamas and refused to extend it, as continuing the siege of Gaza itself is an act of war.

As for the current stalled Mideast peace process, Chomsky said that despite adopting a tougher tone towards Israel than that of Bush, Obama made no real effort to pressure Israel to live up to its obligations.

In the absence of the threat of cutting US aid for Israel, there is no compelling reason why Tel Aviv should listen to Washington.

What can be done?

Chomsky stressed that despite all the obstacles, public pressure can and does make a difference for the better, urging people to continue activism and spreading knowledge.

“There is no reason to be pessimistic, just realistic.”

Chomsky noted that public opinion in the US and Britain is increasingly becoming more aware of the crimes committed by Israel.

“Public opinion is shifting substantially.”

And this is where a difference can be made, because Israel will not change its policies without pressure from the ‘West’.

“There is a lot to do in Western countries…primarily in the US.”

Chomsky also stressed the importance of taking legal action in ‘Western’ countries against companies breaking international law via illegitimate dealings with Israel, citing the possible involvement of British Gas in Israeli theft of natural gas off the coast of Gaza, as one example that should be investigated.

In conclusion of one of the lectures, Chomsky quoted Antonio Gramsci who famously called for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

Mamoon Alabbasi can be reached via: alabbasi@middle-east-online.com

source: Middle East Online Cross potted at: Nasir Khan Blog

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Balochistan Gold Reserves – Exclusive Report

The Reko Diq project is a large copper-gold porphyry resource located in the dry desert conditions of southwest Pakistan within the remote and sparsely populated province of Balochistan. It is a giant copper and gold project in Chaghi. The main license (EL5) is held jointly by the Government of Balochistan (25%), Antofagasta Minerals (37.5%) and Barrick Gold (37.5%). Actually Barrick has a 50% interest in Tethyan Copper Company (the other 50% is owned by Antofagasta plc), which has a 75% interest in the Reko Diq project and associated mineral interests (for a resulting 37.5% interest in Reko Diq).

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THE BIGGEST CONSPIRACY AGAINST PAKISTAN

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by Naveed Taj Ghouri

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Reko Diq has world’s largest copper reserves. It is also one of the biggest Gold reserves in the world. Its estimated value is around US$100 billion and it’s just a surface estimate. The international conspiracy roots behind US invasion in Balochistan through drone attacks and Jewish Mining Company Barrick Gold!

Will Pakistan be fragmented? Viewpoint Sri Lanka – I

Will Pakistan, the only Muslim nuclear country, be fragmented as it was done in case of Iraq? This is the common fear among Pakistanis, not quite unfounded, in view of the forces -United States, Europe and Israel, which turned Iraq and Afghanistan into slaughterhouses, and are responsible for the deepening quagmire unfolding in Pakistan, Pakistanis fear that the US led war on Islam and Muslims, under the guise of fighting war on terrorism, Al-Qaeda and Taliban, is extended to Pakistan. They are putting the Pakistani government of quislings against Pakistanis threatening the very survival of Pakistan. India remains an active partner in this US led conspiracy to destabilize yet another Muslim country.

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WILL PAKISTAN, THE ONLY MUSLIM NUCLEAR OUNTRY,

BE FRAGMENTED AS IT WAS DONE IN CASE OF IRAQ?

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by Latheed Farook

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Will Pakistan, the only Muslim nuclear country, be fragmented as it was done in case of Iraq?

This is the common fear among Pakistanis, not quite unfounded, in view of the forces -United States, Europe and Israel, which turned Iraq and Afghanistan into slaughterhouses, and are responsible for the deepening quagmire unfolding in Pakistan.

Pakistanis fear that the US led war on Islam and Muslims, under the guise of fighting war on terrorism, Al-Qaeda and Taliban, is extended to Pakistan .They are putting the Pakistani government of quislings against Pakistanis threatening the very survival of Pakistan. India remains an active partner in this US led conspiracy to destabilize yet another Muslim country.

Will Pakistan be fragmented? Viewpoint Sri Lanka – II

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The dossier handed over to the Indian government also mentions an India-funded training camp in Kandahar where Baloch insurgents, particularly those from Bugti clan, are being trained and provided arms and ammunition for sabotage activities in the Pakistani province of Balochistan. Although the information given to India is being kept highly secret, broad outlines of the dossier available with Dawn reveal details of Indian contacts with those involved in attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team and the Manawan police station”.

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INDIAN DESIGN TO DESTABILISE  AND, PERHAPS, FURTHER DIVIDE PAKISTAN

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by Latheef Farook

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It is common knowledge that India wanted to destabilize and partition Pakistan from the day it came into being in 1947. India played a crucial role in breaking up Pakistan and creating Bangladesh in its eastern wing facilitated by the blunders of the Pakistani’s ruling elite.

India, hand in glove with American installed Hamid Karzai’s puppet regime, has 14 consulates in Afghanistan from which RAW operates and the US has turned a blind eye. Pakistan has stockpiles of evidence against Indian consulates in Afghanistan used to fund terrorism in Pakistan through Baitullah Mehsud’s TTP as well as Brahamdagh Bugti and his Baloch Liberation Army-BLA.

According to DAWN, a dossier containing proof of India’s involvement in “subversive activities” in Pakistan was handed over by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh during their meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh in July 2009.The dossier, broadly covering the Indian connection in terror financing in Pakistan, is also said to list the safe houses being run by RAW in Afghanistan where terrorists are trained and launched for missions in Pakistan.

WITHOUT ANY LET OR HINDRANCE

202 Blackwater Personnel Arrive In Islamabad?

More US military personnel arrive in Islamabad.  Is the PPP government seeking US support against a possible Pakistani military action against the unpopular pro-US government in Pakistan? There is a serious concern that the principals in the Pakistani government might be colluding with the US government to create a strong but discreet private US security cordon in the Pakistani capital capable of thwarting a possible collapse of the Zardari government.

by Nisar Mehdi

Foreigners affiliated with the notorious private military contractor Blackwater, later renamed as Xe Services LLC, arrived in Islamabad on Tuesday through a PIA flight, sources told TheNation.

“Of the 274 passengers, who boarded Pakistan’s national flag carrier-PIA, flight PK-786 from Heathrow Airport UK, 202 were foreigners but they were fluently speaking Urdu language,” disclosed the sources.

The officials on duty at Shaheed Benazir International Airport Islamabad said, “We had instructions to allow the foreigners entry without custom procedure.”

The sources said that the plane reached Islamabad airport at 4:08am PST, and they had received official instructions from the authorities not to inspect any of them and clear them immediately from the airport.

An official of PIA confirmed that the PIA flight PK-786 from Heathrow reached Islamabad at its destination at 04:08 am and said that the plane had the capacity of 358 passengers but total 274 passengers travelled on the flight.

He declined to comment the presence of large number of foreigners in the flight saying that they had no information in this regard.

Former Chief of Army Staff Mirza Aslam Baig has accused former President Pervez Musharraf of giving Blackwater a green signal to carry out its terrorist operations in the cities of Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Quetta.

According to a August 20, 2009 report in the New York Times by Mark Mazzetti, the Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret programme to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al-Qaeda.

“Blackwater employees hired to guard American diplomats in Iraq were accused of using excessive force on several occasions, including shootings in Baghdad in 2007 in which 17 civilians were killed. Iraqi officials have since refused to give the company an operating licence,” wrote Mazzetti.

“Several current and former government officials interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing details of a still classified programme,” the NYT reported.

The newspaper report said that despite publicly breaking with it, the State Department continued to award the company, formerly known as Blackwater, more than $400 million in contracts to fly its diplomats around Iraq, guard them in Afghanistan, and train security forces in anti-terrorism tactics at its remote camp in North Carolina.

Every indication suggests that the US Embassy in Islamabad, which is being expanded into the world’s largest US embassy, has brought in Blackwater without clearance from Pakistani security authorities and with direct help from the unpopular pro-US government in Islamabad.

Originally published in the Nation, Wednesday, 4 November 2009.Cross posted at AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists

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Islamabad: The contours of a changed, unwritten script Situation

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.

Shaheen Sehbai Discusses the “Script Writers” in Pakistan, As If They Were Not In Washington

In a week of intense behind the scenes political and diplomatic activity in the federal capital, key new lines have been added to the so called ‘script’, the unofficial, unwritten roadmap drawn up and preserved in the minds of the concerned people, to get rid of the despicable grip on the country of a few powerful highly placed individuals and their friends.

After my meetings with most of the main stakeholders in the present system during the last few days, including top people sitting in the Presidency, the PM House, Senate, National Assembly, Raiwind, the highly charged drawing rooms of Islamabad and the excited corridors ruled by career bureaucrats, the broad contours of the script have become identifiable. This assessment will purely be an analysis and conclusions drawn up by a journalist, but it will have many elements which have either come directly from the people I have met or from circles associated intimately with the real wielders of powers, political and non-political. Even before I started writing these lines, some elements of the new script had started becoming visible publicly.

The key indicators now out in the open include the shocking debacle for PPP on the NRO; the somersault of the MQM to oppose the NRO; a direct demand by Mr. Altaf Hussain asking President Zardari to resign; the extra confidence in Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani to practically take over matters in his own hands; the emergence of Nawaz Sharif from his friendly opposition bunker; the significant stand taken by Fata MPs; the calm and cool but ever persuasive demeanour of the army chief to discuss “matters of national security” with the prime minister (not the president); the nervousness in some camps over the “messages and ideas” Lady Hillary Clinton has taken back to Washington; and the unusual multi-country tour of our ISI chief, starting with Saudi Arabia, which some government spokespersons hilariously described as a visit in which he had taken a message to the Saudi King from President Zardari.

In the previous script the role of the judiciary and the superior courts was well defined but before that stage could arrive the presidential edifice crumbled under the weight of just a couple of smart political moves by pro-establishment forces. So a calculated fine-tuning had to be done.

What has already happened is known but what is likely to come is more important. All stakeholders agree, and this I can claim after meeting almost all of them in the last few days in Islamabad and Lahore, that President Asif Ali Zardari will have to either step down with dignity, hand over his presidential powers to the PM through a fast-track constitutional amendments process, or become a figure head and stay within his bunker for as long as he does not create any nuisance.

Some apologists for the presidency have already publicly indicated that Mr. Zardari is seriously thinking about this course because that would keep him in the top most position, immune to the unpleasant hardships of defending himself in civil courts, a process he has endured for years, and wait for his time to strike back as a relevant PPP leader, with the active aid and presence of son Bilawal and daughters Bakhtawar and Assefa.

This could be the easier way out for him but it involves humiliation and embarrassment on a daily basis as his cronies and confidants, those who do not get away from the country in time, will be dragged in cases and in the media, presenting before the entertained nation a spectacle which Mr. Zardari would not like. They will be paying for their sins, of course.

So my analysis is that he will fight back. Some who still have access to him claim that he has expressed these defiant views many a time saying he would never resign and if someone wanted to remove him, he should send an ambulance because he would not walk out on his own two feet.

But this fighting spirit and belligerent posture, although part of his psyche and state of mind, will not be beneficial politically. It is almost certain, and a senior Sindhi politician who knows the PPP and Sindh like the back of his own right hand, openly admits, that for Zardari there would be no “Sindh Card”, as it was available to Benazir Bhutto.

In fact when I asked the Sindhi politician what may happen in Sindh, and the heart of PPP country, if Zardari and his 12 friends were removed from their offices, the answer was: “Only these 13 people will protest, no one else will.” He explained that there are no PPP cadres with fires in their belly left in the interior of Sindh who would rise for Zardari. There is a growing sense of hatred because the Zardari clan has taken over all what was loved by the Bhutto jiyalas. “If today Nawaz Sharif stages a public meeting in Larkana, the country will be surprised at the turnout,” the mainstream Sindhi politician belonging to the PPP told me.

So chances for Mr Zardari to rekindle his political fortunes, once he gives up his powers or if he resigns, are genuinely limited. The PPP would split into factions with the bulk going to a collective committee of PPP stalwarts, seniors and juniors who have remained, or have been kept, on the sidelines by the Zardari coterie. This will also bring the much-needed democracy and openness in the party, breaking the shackles of feudal hold.

This PPP committee, contours of which are already shaping up, have strong arguments to describe the Zardari-led PPP era, which started with the 2008 elections. These arguments start with the failures of Mr. Zardari ever since he presented the will of Benazir Bhutto to the PPP CEC. All that the CEC members have done ever since is to take his decisions and policies with a pinch of bitter salt but have gone along because the party had won seats in the name of Benazir Bhutto and they had got a chance to rule after years of wilderness. The corrupt among the party made a mad rush to make money because they realized that this set up will not last long, hence the stigma of corruption not only stuck but intensified.

The Zardari era, the argument goes, consists of broken promises, colossal mistakes in assessing the mood of the people, taking decisions with arrogance, taking on the establishment and institutions which were needed to survive, taking gigantic U-turns when under pressure and smiling about them, claiming unabashedly as if it was a considered policy (like the restoration of judges, sacking and restoration of the Punjab government of PML-N, surrender on the Kerry Lugar Bill and eventually running away from the NRO).

Conversely, if it has been any sign for anyone to read, the PM has always been making politically correct statements, never making a commitment which he knew he would not be able to deliver and most importantly, he has received the “asheerbaad” (blessings) of those who matter on all critical junctures. This is no longer true for Mr. Zardari.

So when the judges were to be restored, the Army Chief called on the PM to deliver the quiet message. When the March 15 decision was taken General Kayani called Aitzaz Ahsan to inform Nawaz Sharif. When the Supreme Court was about to give the initial short order on the PCO judges case, the meeting between General Kayani and Aitzaz Ahsan was considered necessary. When things were getting out of hand on the Kerry Lugar Bill, a similar meeting between Shahbaz Sharif and Chaudhry Nisar was held. The army chief also met the chief ministers of NWFP and Balochistan. When NRO erupted on the face of Mr. Zardari, another meeting between the Army Chief and the PM was essential on Monday night so that the right message was conveyed. And it was. Then we saw the surrender.

These were domestic developments but the most important external factor which has now been added to the miseries of the presidency is the conclusion Hillary Clinton is believed to have drawn after her eye-opening three-day visit to Pakistan. She was actually on a fact-finding mission as the diplomatic channels in Pakistan and Washington had never informed her about the real situation. When the KLB exploded, State Department was taken aback and when Hillary saw with her own eyes and heard the people, her entire perceptions changed. Her almost three-hour meeting with General Kayani may have sealed many fates.

A shift in Washington’s policy, statements and emphasis would now be expected. She already took pains to ensure that none of her public and private utterances gave the impression that she was supporting any particular individual or any particular coalition government. She talked about the process of democracy and the people of Pakistan and that means faces can change but the Pak-US ties will stay.

The scriptwriters interpret this as a signal that Washington is no longer interested in protecting or prolonging Mr. Zardari’s rule, if the people of Pakistan do not so wish. An official in the presidency quietly whispered in my ear that Mr. Zardari has reached the point in just one year which General Musharraf took eight years to reach, vis-a-vis the American support. “It is now for him to survive, the Americans have pulled the rug.”

((Left) Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani of Pakistan: Will he be able to deliver where his party boss and the president miserably failed??

On the domestic front again, the focus and all eyes would soon shift to the PM House where an hitherto out-shadowed PM was trying to cope and survive. Now the responsibility of making and owning all decisions would be his. Delivering results people expect from a sovereign parliament and a powerful PM under the amended constitution will be an onerous burden on Mr. Yusuf Raza Gilani.

My interactions with a broad spectrum of important people reveal that Mr. Gilani has not yet prepared himself to shoulder this responsibility. His administrative team is pretty weak and there is a growing sense of disconnect between the people around Mr. Gilani and the rest of the top echelons of bureaucracy.

A senior bureaucrat told me the recent mass scale reshuffle in the officialdom by PM Gilani has made many officials nervous. They do not have direct and free access to the PM and a coterie of sorts is also beginning to surround the PM, like the one around the president. But this group is of professionals and civil servants who want to keep the PM under their thumb. It would be a big challenge for Mr. Gilani to get a competent and effective team if he were to take charge and show the difference to the nation between a powerful PM and a one-man show which went wrong. He would have to sack high profile ministers, change cronies controlling the state organizations like the Pakistan Steel Mills, PSO, PIA, KESC and many others tainted with corruption.

Text Source: There are no sunglasses Photo Source: on top: http://blogs.stripes.com/blogs/stripes

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari: Observers believe his erstwhile patrons in Washington, as well as the stakeholders in the Pakistani establishment have started distancing themselves from the beleaguered president.

Pakistan: Of Terrorism & Tipplers

Pakistan, rightly or wrongly, is generally described as an “exporter” of terrorism. Now it is trying to export something different – its famous Murree Beer produced at the nearly 150-year-old Murree brewery, Pakistan’s sole producer of beer. Making beer and whiskey in a Muslim country, where 97 per cent of the population is officially banned from enjoying its products, it has never been an easy business and amid the upsurge of militant violence of the last two years that has seen the Taliban attacking targets across the country, setting fire to girls’ schools and even banning the sale of videos and DVDs, common sense might suggest that the fortunes of this establishment, which celebrates its 150th anniversary next year, might be on the wane. Yet the opposite is happening: sales are booming – embarrassingly so. [Image above: The vintage photo of the brewery at the Murree hill station].

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AFTER  150 YEARS, BUSINESS IS BOOMING

at Pakistan’s only beer and whisky firm

Andrew Buncombe finds out why

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Note for WoP Readers: Though quite unfortunate, of late Pakistan, has earned a bad name as a country that has a number of nurseries to breed terrorism. It may not be the whole truth to brand Pakistan as country exporting terrorism, yet we cannot put all the blame on US, India or for that matter on any other country. Some splinter groups indeed are active in our land that have developed this as a creed, but by and large the spirit of Pakistani nation has always been and still is tolerance. The testimony to this spirit are some landmarks and symbols which still stand today—as much—alive, as much—dominating our urban canvas as they were before the birth of our Islamic Republic.

One such symbol is a statue that stands on the Mall, alongside the old Punjab University campus in Lahore. This statue stands as proudly as it used to during my student days and much beyond. I member whenever we crossed over the Mall to visit Tollinton Market where there was a small & cozy Milk Bar (which was famous for its milk shakes and if am not forgetting, was named Capri Milk Bar). On our way to the bar and back an impressive landmark of Lahore stood there as majestically as it stands today.

This landmark is the statue of Dr. Alfred Woolner, perhaps the only one at a public place in Lahore now.

[Alfred Cooper Woolner May 1878 - January 7, 1936, was a noted Sanskrit scholar and professor as well as the Vice Chancellor of Punjab University, Lahore. He died in Lahore].

Interestingly, here in Lahore, the DHA [Defence Housing Authority] had erected a statue in that posh colony to venerate the soldiers of Pakistan. Since the fundamentalists took it as something of idolatry [“Butt prarasti”, as they call it], one night they vandalized that statue and now one does not find any semblance of this memorial. Yet despite the wave of extremism that has gripped this country like an evil storm (a manifest of which have been burning of schools and closing down the barber shops in the paradise like valley of Swat), the statue of Alfred stands there and nobody has even thought of desecrating this landmark.

Another landmark which stands testimony to our spirit of accommodation is the famous Murree Brewery in Rawalpindi. The enterprise is doing regular business, we are told by Andrew Buncombe, even though in Pakistan [being a Muslim country] liquors are completely banned.

And as columnist Swaaraj Chauhan notes, right or wrong, Pakistan is generally described as an “exporter” of terrorism but now it is trying to export something different – its famous Murree beer produced at the nearly 150-year-old Murree brewery. So beer not terrorism from Pakistan. We say Amen, Swaraaj Sahib…. [Nayyar]

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STILL BREWING IN A DRY LAND

by Andrew Buncombe

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Pakistan, rightly or wrongly, is generally described as an “exporter” of terrorism. Now it is trying to export something different – its famous Murree beer produced at the nearly 150-year-old Murree brewery, Pakistan’s sole producer of beer.

“Understandably, making beer and whiskey in a Muslim country, where 97 per cent of the population is officially banned from enjoying its products, has never been an easy business,” reports The Independent.

“And amid the upsurge of militant violence of the last two years that has seen the Taliban attacking targets across the country, setting fire to girls’ schools and even banning the sale of videos and DVDs, common sense might suggest that the fortunes of this establishment, which celebrates its 150th anniversary next year, might be on the wane. Yet the opposite is happening: sales are booming – embarrassingly so.

Who’s Been Held Accountable for the Crimes of Bush’s “War on Terror”? Four Italians … Sort of

by Joshua Holland

Certanly not those wo ran our shadowy network of secret prisons, nor their superiors who created it.

I may be wrong, but setting aside a handful of low-level prison guards convicted for brutalizing or killing detainees, I think that despite many well documented violations of both international and various countries’ domestic laws committed in the “war on terror”, the total number of people who have been prosecuted — not counting those tried in absentia — is now 4 (correct me in the comments if I’m overlooking something!).

All were Italians. Two were convicted yesterday in an Italian court and sentenced to three-year terms for kidnapping a man named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr off the streets of a liberal democracy, depriving him of any semblance of due process despite its fully functional judiciary and sending  him to a country that would torture him for information they believed he was holding.

His wife, Ghali Nabila, at trial: Continue reading

(Left) Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer with AlterNet.

“I found him wasted, skinny — so skinny — his hair had turned white, he had a hearing aid,” Ms. Nabila said, recounting her husband’s condition between prison stays in 2004.

Wearing a veil that revealed only her eyes, Ms. Nabila at first said she “didn’t want to talk about” any abuse against her husband in prison. But advised by prosecutors that she had no choice, she told the court in tears: “He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beat up, especially around his ears. He was subjected to electroshocks to many body parts.”

“To his genitals?” the prosecutors asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

This was by no means an isolated incident. The CIA, with its shadowy network of secret prisons, was somewhat routinely flying suspected terrorists to allied countries that would torture them on its behalf. And while some may have been captured on the battlefield others were kidnapped off the ground of a number of countries.

Presumably, the two Italians will serve at least part of those sentences, but one never knows. Two others pled guilty to related offenses in 2007; one received a sentence of one-year-plus, which was later suspended; the other was fined.

23 American intelligence agents were also convicted in absentia. In the future, they won’t be able to take European holidays for fear of arrest, but they don’t have to worry about being expedited to Italy. They won’t actually face any punishment for their crimes.

And who knows? Maybe that’s just given that their superiors seem to have complete impunity. One of those convicted admitted that the agents had “broken the law,” but insisted they were being hung out to dry by superiors who weren’t touched by the investigation and who can still go skiing in Val d’Isère if they choose to:

… we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this,” said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson.

DeSousa says the U.S. “abandoned and betrayed” her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison.

Whatever the case, there’s another, historical aspect to this story that I think is worth noting. 70 years ago, the United States, victorious in World War II, was instrumental in rebuilding its erstwhile European foes, including Italy, as liberal democracies.

During the postwar era of the “liberal consensus” in Washington, the U.S. was also the driving force in creating a set of institutions — notably the UN, but others as well — dedicated to the idea that some rights are universal and that all states should conform to a set of international laws that enshrine that principle.

The effort was driven in part by the horrors of the two World Wars, but also by geo-politics; advancing the human rights regime offered a bounty of opportunities to shame the “communist bloc” (especially when applied as selectively as possible, which it generally was).

While Americans pretty much take it for granted that our government would never turn over U.S. citizens for prosecution, the principle of universal jurisdiction means that individual can’t hide behind national borders for serious violations of human rights law. And while the Italian court prosecuted the agents under domestic law, the principle is the key thing — the whole point is to prevent people from violating basic human rights with impunity.

So while 70 years ago, Italy was under a fascist dictatorship that had no regard for ideas like human rights, and 60 years ago the U.S. government — packed with liberal FDR vets and anti-Communist crusaders — was advancing the idea that nobody was above punishment, the tables have now turned. It’s our intelligence agents kidnapping people off the streets without trial and getting away with it.

All of which brings to mind some of the theory about how super-powers behave as their influence waxes and wanes. Here’s a few graphs from something I wrote a few years back, when Bush was laughing at the idea of being constrained by the rule of law:

A hegemonic state is one with enough relative power to shape the international system. Scholars have identified a pattern — a story arc — common to hegemonic powers and the U.S. fits the theory to a tee.

According to Hegemonic Stability Theory, as a great state rises to prominence, it is a “generous” or “benevolent” power — a rising hegemon. It uses its power to create a system that is conducive to its own interests, but that also benefits lesser states. Think about the Romans building roads and aqueducts throughout the empire, or the Brits clearing the shipping channels of pirates, or the U.S. creating the Bretton-Woods system after World War II. All of those efforts were inspired by self-interest, but also created benefits for others.

Then there’s the “selfish” hegemon — a hegemon in decline. A falling power spends too much on security, its leaders become obsessed with preserving its position and it stops focusing on mutually beneficial goals and starts looking out for itself. Inevitably, this leads other states to combine forces to check its power, and the country is replaced by a new, rising hegemon that is more attractive to other states to follow than the “me-first” policies of the falling star.

The irony I noted then is that we hold ourselves above the international legal regime we helped create from a position of power, but ultimately the fact that we do so undermines that very power …

The key to America’s six-decade run [as the world’s leading super-power] was that we disguised our relentless pursuit of our “national interests” with great skill. We kept our iron fist covered in a velvet glove. As an old professor of mine used to say, the definition of real power is the ability to make people do what you want them to do while believing it was their idea in the first place. We’ve lost that power.

Source: AlterNet

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Why Hotels When You Have Belaire, Mr. President ??

President Zarari owns one of the choicest properties in the heart of Manhattan, lying empty. And yet he spent thousands of dollars of Pakistani public’s money staying at hotels during his official visits to the United States. An opposition politician, Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, waved this story during a heated debate in the Parliament today.

by A. GILL & LAURA WELLS

Earlier this year, during his visit to New York, President Asif Ali Zardari stayed in a $6,000 per night Presidential Suite of the Roosevelt Hotel.

[Left: President Zardari's luxury apartment is on Floor 37 of this Manhattan building.  The Nation has copies of 60 documents that prove Mr. Zardari's ownership of this multimillion-dollar piece of real estate.]

The 3,900 square feet suite has 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, formal living and dining areas, and a wrap-around terrace. In addition, he stayed at a $5,000 per night Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington DC. Even more money was wasted on the army of ministers and his son who accompanied him.

The question that is raised is why did a President of a country on war, with hundreds of thousands internally displaced refugees, and a country on the verge of defaulting, stay in a $6,000 per night suite? Why couldn’t he stay in a $600 per night luxury suite available at the same hotel; or even better, why couldn’t he stay in his vacant luxury apartment?

To this day, nobody knows the exact nature of Asif Zardari’s assets. The Nation is in possession of over 60 copies of at least one such property’s documents. The authentic copies of the legal property documents have Mr. Zardari’s signature, bank information and other pertinent information available on them.

The property is situated in the posh Upper East Manhattan, New York. The 72nd street to be precise. It’s a luxury apartment on the 37th floor with a stunning view of the river and the city. It is a part of the Belaire Condominiums. These luxury full service condominiums include amenities like a fabulous health club and glass enclosed heated lap pool.

Fit for a king or the President of Pakistan!

Courtesy: This news item was first published in the daily Nation, Lahore, & was cross posted also at AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists

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Rebranding the Long War: BALOCHISTAN is the ULTIMATE PRIZE Part 1 of 3

President Barack Obama makes remarks in the Grand Foyer of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 6, 2009, after meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, left, and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Note for WoP Readers: In series that follows now, Pepe Escober details the great game being played by Washington to encircle Balochistan (in other words a balkanization of Pakistan). A part of this series is also a post by WoP on this so called Af-Pak strategy and another one by HK on ‘AfPak is all about the New Great Game for the control of Eurasia’.

A matter of special interest & concern to us Pakistanis in this regard is: whether an independent Balochistan will really be “independent” under American yoke? Agreed injustice has been done to Balochistan by almost all the governments. Many a time army actions were also undertaken which no saner elements in this country would condone or support; for to quell civil unrests, army actions are bound to fail. We have already seen such army actions failing in India controlled Kashmir, how could these succeed in Balochistan or elsewhere in the country!

What we need at the moment is a new social contract between federation of Pakistan and all its provinces, but particularly the province of Balochistan. Essential part of this contract should be a special economic package as well as provincial autonomy to the province. Factually speaking Pakistan needs to be fully functional federation and not a hotchpotch of loosely combined provinces under a strong centre. In the present structure, provinces always need to look up to the central government for financial grants and on core issues, have no “independence” of action on provincial levels.

A word of advice to our Balochi brethren too: “Independence” in feudal run societies is a myth. We have seen this in the larger contexts of India, Pakistan and in so many other countries. In such “independence” what the countries get are brown Sahibs replacing the white ones. For the masses, nothing changes except faces!

Why not struggle jointly to get rid of this “Sahibism”. Let the people decide their own destinies!  [Nayyar]

REBRANDING THE LONG WAR

Obama does his Bush impression

Pepe Escobar

The “lasting commitment” Washington war-time summit / photo-op between United States President Barack Obama and the AfPak twins, “Af” President Hamid Karzai and “Pak” President Asif Ali Zardari in May 2009 was far from being an urgent meeting to discuss ways to prevent the end of civilization as we know it. It had been all about the meticulous rebranding of the Pentagon’s “Long War”. In Obama’s own words, the “lasting commitment” is above all to “defeat al-Qaeda”. As an afterthought, the president added, “But also to support the democratically elected, sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.” To have George W Bush’s man in Kabul and former premier Benazir Bhutto’s widower defined as “sovereign”, one would be excused for believing Bush is still in the White House.

“Change” said Obama before his elections. But has he changed the Bush policies!!

In yet another deployment of his impeccable democratic credentials, Karzai just picked as one of his vice presidential running mates none other than former Jamiat-e-Islami top commander and former first vice president Mohammad Fahim, a suspected drug warlord and armed militia-friendly veteran whom Human Rights Watch deplores as a systematic human-rights abuser. Faheem is Tajik; Karzai is Pashtun (from a minor tribe). Karzai badly wanted the Tajiks to win a second presidential term.

Possibly moved by the obligatory “deep regret” expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai refrained from throwing a tantrum in Washington concerning the latest “precise” US air strike in ultra-remote Farah province in western Afghanistan which, according to local sources, had incinerated almost over 100 Afghans, 70% of them women and children. Context is key: it was the inept, corrupt, dysfunctional Karzai administration – monopolized by warlords and bandits – which made so much easier the return of the Taliban in full force.

OBAMA’S OPIUM WAR

By now it’s clear that the upcoming, Pentagon-enabled, summer surge in the “Af” section of Obama’s war in AfPak will be deployed essentially as Obama’s new opium war. In a spicy historic reversal, the British Empire (which practically annexed Afghanistan) wanted the Chinese to be hooked on its opium, while now the American empire wants Afghans to stop cultivating it.

The strategy boils down to devastating the Pashtun-cultivated poppy fields in southern Helmand province - the opium capital of the world. In practice, this will be yet another indiscriminate war against Pashtun peasants, who have been cultivating poppies for centuries. Needless to say, thousands will migrate to the anti-occupation rainbow coalition / motley crew branded as “Taliban”.

Destroying the only source of income for scores of poor Afghans means, in Pentagon spin, “to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money”, which also happens to be the “main source of money” for a collection of wily, US-friendly warlords who will not resign themselves to being left blowing in the wind.

The strategy is also oblivious to the fact that the Taliban themselves receive scores of funding from pious Gulf petro-monarchy millionaires as well as from sections in Saudi Arabia – the same Saudi Arabia that Pentagon supremo Robert Gates is now actively courting to … abandon the Taliban. Since the Obama inauguration in January, Washington’s heavy pressure over Islamabad has been relentless: forget about your enemy India, we want you to fight “our” war against the Taliban and “al-Qaeda”.

Thus, expect any Pashtun opium farmer or peasant who brandishes his ax, dagger, matchlock or rusty Lee-Enfield rifle at the ultra-high tech incoming US troops to be branded a “terrorist”. Welcome to yet one more chapter of the indeed long Pentagon war against the worlds poorest.

YOU’RE FINISHED BECAUSE I SAID SO

As for the “Pak” component of AfPak, it is pure counter-insurgency (COIN). As such, His Master’s Voice has got to be Central Command commander and surging General David “I’m always positioning myself for 2012″ Petraeus.

Enter the Pentagon’s relentless PR campaign. Last week, Gates warned the US Senate Appropriations Committee that without the approval of a US$400 million-worth Pakistan Counter-insurgency Capability Fund (itself part of a humongous, extra $83.5 billion Obama wants to continue prosecuting his wars), and under the “unique authority” of Petraeus, the Pakistani government itself could collapse. The State Department was in tune: Clinton said Pakistan might collapse within six months.

Anyone is excused for believing this tactic – just gimme the money and shut up – is still Bush “war on terror” territory; that’s because it is (the same extraordinary powers, with the State Department duly bypassed, just as with the Bush administration). The final song, of course, remains the same: the Pentagon running the show, very tight with the Pakistani army.

For US domestic consumption purposes, Pentagon tactics are a mix of obfuscation and paranoia. For instance, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell says, about Pakistan, “This is not a war zone for the US military.” But then Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – who’s been to Pakistan twice in the past three weeks – says the Taliban in AfPak overall “threaten our national interests in the region and our safety here at home”.

He was echoing both Clinton and Gates, who had said that the Taliban are an “existential threat” to Pakistan. Finally, Petraeus closes the scare tactics circle – stressing in a letter to the House Armed Services Committee that if the Pakistani Army does not prevail over the Taliban in two weeks, the Pakistani government may collapse.

That unveils the core of Pentagon’s and David “COIN” Petraeus’ thinking: they know that for long-term US designs what’s best is yet another military dictatorship. Zardari’s government is – rightfully – considered a sham (as Washington starts courting another dubious quantity, former premier Nawaz Sharif). Petraeus’ “superior” man (his own word) couldn’t be anyone but Army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kiani.

And that’s exactly how Obama put it in his 100-day press conference stressing the “strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation” and reducing Zardari to smithereens (“very fragile” government, lacking “the capacity to deliver basic services” and without “the support and the loyalty of their people”). Judging by his body language, Obama must have repeated the same litany to Zardari, live in Washington.

The money quote still is Obama’s appraisal of Pakistan: “We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”

THE SWAT CLASS STRUGGLE

In this complex neo-colonial scenario Pakistan’s “Talibanization” – the raging craze in Washington – looks and feels more like a diversionary scare tactic. (Please see , Asia Times Online, May 1, 2009. ) On the same topic, a report in the Pakistani daily Dawn about the specter of Talibanization of Karachi shows it has more to do with ethnic turbulence between Pashtuns and the Urdu-speaking, Indian-origin majority than about Karachi Pashtuns embracing the Taliban way.

The original Obama administration AfPak strategy, as everyone remembers, was essentially a drone war in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) coupled with a surge in Afghanistan. But the best and the brightest in Washington did not factor in an opportunist Taliban counter-surge.

The wily Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM – Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law), led by Sufi Muhammad, managed to regiment Swat valley landless peasants to fight for their rights and “economic redistribution” against the usual wealthy, greedy, feudal landlords who happened to double as local politicians and government officials.

It’s as if the very parochial Taliban had been paying attention to what goes on across South America … Essentially, it was the appropriation of good old class struggle that led to the Taliban getting the upper hand. Islamabad was finally forced to agree on establishing Nizam-e-Adl (Islamic jurisprudence) in the Swat valley.

Source: This post was originally published in the weblog “therearenosunglasses” . The earlier parts of this report were published in “asiatimesonline”. For sake of continuity, we have reproduced these pages here, courtesy these two websites.

End of Part-I

Continued…

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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AfPak is all about the New Great Game for the control of Eurasia

by HK

“The horror … the horror.” General Stanley McChrystal, the Pentagon supremo in Afghanistan, is being massively sold in the US as a Zen warrior – a 21st-century stalwart incarnation of the “best and the brightest”. But he may be a warrior intellectual more like Colonel Kurz than Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. He led an elite death squad in Iraq and, for all of his Confucius-meets-counter-insurgency social engineering schemes, still appears not to understand what Pashtuns are really all about.

McChrystal remains bemused about why, in Afghanistan, most young Pashtuns decide to become Taliban. Because Kabul is immensely corrupt; because the Americans have bombed their houses or killed their families and friends; because they can improve their social status. They simply won’t sell out for (devalued) American dollars. Their infinite drive is geared towards throwing the occupiers out – and re-establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, governed by sharia law. In this sense, McChrystal’s soldiers are the new Soviets, no different from the Red Army that waged war in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

McChrystal – with all his “secure the population” talk – cannot possibly level with the American public about the Taliban. Afghans know that if you don’t mess with the Taliban, the Taliban don’t mess with you. If you’re an opium poppy grower, the Taliban just collect a little bit of tax on it.

[Eight: Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Commander of the ISAF and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America].

Conquering Pashtun hearts and minds Westmoreland, sorry, McChrystal-style is a no-win proposition. There’s nothing McChrystal’s non-Pashto speaking soldiers can say or do to counteract a simple Taliban-to-villager one-liner “we’re in a jihad to throw out the foreigners”.

As for the Taliban/al-Qaeda nexus, the Taliban nowadays simply don’t need al-Qaeda, and vice-versa. Al-Qaeda is closely linked with Pakistani outfits, not Afghan, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. If McChrystal wants to find al-Qaeda jihadis, he should set up shop in Karachi, not in the Hindu Kush. [??? Ed]

Over the summer of 2009 alone, 20,000 US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops, practicing the iron dogma of “clear, hold and build”, were able to secure only a third of desert Helmand province. The Taliban control at least 11 provinces in Afghanistan. It’s easy to do the math on what it would take to “secure” the other 10 provinces, not to mention the whole country until, well, 2050, as the British high command has been speculating. No wonder Washington is drowning in numbers – rife with speculation that McChrystal wants 500,000 boots on the ground before 2015. If Confucian McChrystal doesn’t get them, goodbye counter-insurgency; it’s back to a devastating hell from above drone missile war.

If you break it, you control it

The Pentagon as well as NATO will never be cheerleaders for a strong, stable and really independent Pakistan. Washington pressure over Islamabad will never be less than relentless. And then there’s the return of the repressed: the chilling Pentagon fear that Islamabad might one day become a full Chinese client state.

Think-tankers in their comfy leather chairs do entertain the dream of the Pakistani state unraveling for good – victim of a clash within the military of Punjabis against Pashtuns. So what’s in it for the US in terms of balkanization of AfPak? Quite some juicy prospects – chief of all neutralizing the also relentless Chinese drive for direct land access, from Xinjiang and across Pakistan, to the Arabian Sea (via the port of Gwadar, in Balochistan province).

Washington’s rationale for occupying Afghanistan – never spelled out behind the cover story of “fighting Islamic extremism” - is pure Pentagon full spectrum dominance: to better spy on both China and Russia with forward outposts of the empire of bases; to engage in Pipelineistan, via the Trans-Afghan (TAPI) pipeline, if it ever gets built; and to have a controlling hand in the Afghan narco-trade via assorted warlords. Cheap heroin is literally flooding Russia, Iran and Eastern Europe. Not by accident, Moscow regards opium / heroin as the key issue to be tackled in Afghanistan, not Islamic fundamentalism.

The Changing Zbig, then President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski visiting ‘his boy’, Osama Bin Laden, in training with the Pakistan Army, 1981. Photo originally scanned from the New York Village Voice. Photo credited to the Sygma/Corbis Agency, Paris.

As for those think-tankers, they do remain incorrigible. Last week at a Rand-sponsored Afghanistan bash in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, former president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who gave the Soviets their Vietnam in Afghanistan, announced that he had advised the George W Bush administration to invade Afghanistan in 2001; but he also told then Pentagon supremo, Donald Rumsfeld, that the Pentagon should not stay on “as an alien force”. That’s exactly what the Pentagon is right now.

And yet, Zbigniew believes the US should not leave Afghanistan; it should “use all our leverage” to force NATO to fulfill the mission – whatever that is. Not surprisingly, Zbigniew couldn’t help revealing what the heart of the “mission” really is: Pipelineistan, that is, to build TAPI by any means necessary.

China, India and Russia may agree that a regional – and not an American – solution to Afghanistan may be the only way to go, but still can’t agree on how to formalize a proposal which would be offered in the cadre of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Li Qinggong, the number two at the China Council for National Security Policy Studies, has been a key voice of this proposal. Washington, not surprisingly, wants to remain unilateral.

It all harks back to a 1997 Brookings Institution publication by Geoffrey Kemp and Robert Harkavy,Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East, in which they identify an (in capital letters) “energy strategic ellipse” with a key node in the Caspian and another in the Persian Gulf, concentrating over 70% of global oil reserves and over 40% of natural gas reserves. The study stressed that the resources in these zones of “low demographic pressure” would be “threatened” by the pressure of billions living in the poor regions of South Asia. Thus the control of the Muslim Central Asian “stans” as well as Afghanistan would be essential as a wall against both China and India.

So all along the watchtower, the princes of war keep their view. That spells balkanization all along. It’s full spectrum dominance against the Asian energy security grid. The Pentagon well knows that AfPak is the key land bridge between Iran to the west and China and India to the east; and that Iran has all the energy that both China and India need. The last thing full spectrum dominance wants is to have the AfPak theater subjected to more influence from Russia, China and Iran.

There could not be a more graphic illustration of empire of chaos logic in action than the AfPak theater. While the McChrystal show amuses the galleries, what’s really at stake for Washington is how to orchestrate a progressive encirclement of Russia, China and Iran. And the name of the game is not really AfPak – even with all the breaking up and balkanization it may entail. It’s all about the New Great Game for the control of Eurasia.

Source: GeoPloticalNWO

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Rebranding the Long War: BALOCHISTAN is the ULTIMATE PRIZE Part 2 of 3

Balochistan province of Pakistan: Prize to be won of the AFPAK War. Observers believe its aimed to balkanize Pakistan.

REBRANDING THE LONG WAR

Obama does his Bush impression

Pepe Escobar

So what happened in Swat is that it moved beyond a – corrupt – state, and neo-colonial control. Washington’s enemy suddenly swelled to part of the 1.3 million people in the area whose only means of protection are armed militias – what the West bundles up as “Taliban”.

It’s always crucial to remember that the “Taliban” have all sorts of agendas, from armed resistance to US occupation in Afghanistan to armed resistance to Pakistani army incursions. What they all want is basically the end of Washington’s drone war, the end of Pakistan’s support for the “war on terror” in AfPak, or at least for the inept, corrupt Pakistani state to leave them alone.

It’s true that during the period the   Pakistani Taliban were hyperactive in Swat, Dir and Bajaur, the public opinion as a whole had shot up to around 95% against the Taliban because Sufi Muhammad said democracy is an infidel thing; and because videos of Taliban floggings for the fist time were all over Pakistani media.

But the solution obviously was and is not the war. It should be, for instance, a concerted, long-term government policy to defuse the network of at least 45,000 madrassas (seminaries) with nearly 2 million students all over the country. And to defuse anti-democratic, sectarian outfits like Lashkar-e Tayyaba and Sipah-e Sahaba.

It won’t happen. And Washington does not care. What matters for the Pentagon is that the minute any sectarian outfit or bandit gang decides to collude with the Pentagon, it’s not “Taliban” anymore; it magically morphs into a “Concerned Local Citizens” outfit. By the same token any form of resistance to foreign interference or Predator hell from above bombing is inevitably branded “Taliban”.

Left to its own devices, the Pentagon solution would probably be some form of ethnic cleansing. Predictably, what Obama and the Pentagon are in fact doing – part of their cozying up with the Pakistani army – is to side with the feudal landlords and force a return to the classic Pakistani status quo of immense social inequality. Thus virtually every local who did not become a refugee (as many as 5000,000 did, leading to a huge humanitarian crisis) was duly branded a “terrorist”. In any such battle zone, the locals are caught between a rock (the Taliban) and a hard place (the US-supported Pakistani military).

The Pentagon does not do “collateral damage”. The only consideration is the US Army becoming partially exposed in neighboring Afghanistan. After all, the key AfPak equation for the Pentagon is how to re-supply US troops involved in OCO (“overseas contingency operations”).

The tragedy in Pakistan’s north is bound to get bloodier. As Steve Clemons from The Washington Note blog has learned in a conference in Doha, Obama and Petraeus are forcing the Pakistani army to crush Taliban. Once again the imperial “fire on your own people” logic. Predictably, Zardari and the Pakistani army are still against it. But if they accept – that would be a tangible result from the Washington photo-op of May 2009 – the prize is a lot of money and loads of precious helicopter gun ships. (Kerry Lugar Bill, the prize basket, is more aptly being termed as a bribe; and if the Zardari-Gilani duo does proceed with the KLB, all money is bound to go into pockets of the ruling elite and may be of some generals in the defence establishment. Ed)

Madmen on the loose

The Obama administration not only has rebranded the Bush “global war on terror” (GWOT) as the subtly Orwellian “overseas contingency operations” (OCO). The key component of OCO – the AfPak front – is now being actively rebranded, and sold, not as an American war but a Pakistani war.

Zardari plays his pitiful bit part; alongside Obama, the Pentagon and the State Department, he has been convincing Pakistani public opinion to fight Washington’s OCO, defending the Predator bombing of Pashtun civilians in Pakistani land. It ain’t easy: at least 20% of Pakistani army soldiers are Pashtun – now forced to fight their own Pashtun cousins.

As for the “Af” element of AfPak, the war against occupation in Afghanistan has “disappeared” from the narrative to the benefit of this Pakistani “holy war” against Talibanization. What has not disappeared, of course, is US bombing of Afghan peasants (with attached Hillary “regrets”) plus the Predator war in FATA.

The question is: How far will the Obama, the Pentagon and Zardari collusion go in terms of wiping out any form of resistance to the US occupation of Afghanistan and the drone war against Pashtun peasants in FATA?

The relentless warnings on the collapse of Pakistan may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Were it to happen, the balkanization of Pakistan would do wonders for the Pentagon’s long-term strategy in the “arc of instability”.

From a Pentagon dream scenario point of view, the balkanization of Pakistan would mean dismantling a “Terrorist Central” capable of contaminating other parts of the Muslim world, from Indian Kashmir to the Central Asian “stans”. It would “free” India from its enemy Pakistan so India can work very closely with Washington as an effective counter power to the relentless rise of China.

And most of all, this still has to do with the greatest prize – Balochistan, as we’ll see in the next part of this report. Desert Balochistan, in southwest Pakistan, is where Washington and Islamabad clash head on. From a Washington perspective, Balochistan has to be thrown into chaos. That’s about the only way to stop the construction of the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline, also known as the “peace pipeline”, which would traverses Balochistan.

In a dream Washington scenario of balkanization of Pakistan, the US could swiftly take over Balochistan’s immense natural wealth, and promote the strategic port of Gwadar in Balochistan not to the benefit of the IPI pipeline, but the perennially troubled Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline – Caspian gas wealth flowing under US, and not Russian or Iranian, control.

As for the Taliban, whether in FATA or Swat or anywhere else, they are no threat to the US. Usman Khalid, secretary general of the Rifah party in Pakistan, has nailed it, “The population dread the Taliban-style rule but they dread being split into four countries and to go under Indian suzerainty even more. The Taliban appear to be the lesser evil just as they were in Afghanistan.”

History once again does repeat itself as farce: in fact the only sticking point between the Taliban and Washington is still the same as in August 2001 – pipeline transit fees. Washington wouldn’t give a damn about sharia law as long as the US could control pipelines crossing Afghanistan and Balochistan.

Yes, Pipelineistan rules. What’s a few ragged Pashtun or Balochis in Washington’s way when the New Great Game in Eurasia can offer so many opportunities?

End of  Part -II

Continued…

Source: This post was originally published in the weblog“therearenosunglasses” . The earlier parts of this report were published in“asiatimesonline”. For sake of continuity, we have reproduced these pages here, courtesy these two websites.

Next: Balochistan, the ultimate prize

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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BALOCHISTAN is the ULTIMATE PRIZE Part 3 of 3

Extended AfPak War under Obama: Slouching towards Balkanization

Balochistan is the ultimate prize

Pepe Escobar

It’s a classic case of calm before the storm. The AfPak chapter of Obama’s brand new OCO (“Overseas Contingency Operations”), formerly GWOT (“global war on terror”) does not imply only a surge in the Pashtun Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). A surge in Balochistan as well may be virtually inevitable.

Balochistan is totally under the radar of Western corporate media. But not the Pentagon’s. An immense desert comprising almost 48% of Pakistan’s area, rich in uranium and copper, potentially very rich in oil, and producing more than one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas, it accounts for less than 4% of Pakistan’s 173 million citizens. Balochis are the majority, followed by Pashtuns. Quetta, the provincial capital, is considered Taliban Central by the Pentagon, which for all its high-tech wizardry mysteriously has not been able to locate Quetta resident “The Shadow”, historic Taliban emir Mullah Omar himself.

With an estimated cost of $7.4-billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) project would transport Iranian natural gas south to the Asian subcontinent.

Strategically, Balochistan is mouth-watering: east of Iran, south of Afghanistan, and boasting three Arabian sea ports, including Gwadar, practically at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.

Gwadar – a port built by China – is the absolute key. It is the essential node in the crucial, ongoing, and still virtual Pipelineistan war between IPI and TAPI. IPI is the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the “peace pipeline”, which is planned to cross from Iranian to Pakistani Balochistan – an anathema to Washington. TAPI is the perennially troubled, US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline, which is planned to cross western Afghanistan via Herat and branch out to Kandahar and Gwadar.

One way or another, it will all depend on local grievances being taken very seriously. Islamabad pays a pittance in royalties for the Balochis, and development aid is negligible; Balochistan is treated as a backwater. Gwadar as the new Dubai would not necessarily mean local Balochis benefiting from the boom; in many cases they could even be stripped of their local land.

To top it all, there’s the New Great Game in Eurasia fact that Pakistan is a key pivot to both NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), of which Pakistan is an observer. So whoever “wins” Balochistan incorporates Pakistan as a key transit corridor to either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field or a great deal of the Caspian wealth of “gas republic” Turkmenistan.

The cavalry to the rescue

Now imagine thousands of mobile US troops – backed by supreme air power and hardcore artillery – pouring into this desert across the immense, 800-kilometer-long, empty southern Afghanistan-Balochistan border. These are Obama’s surge troops who will be in theory destroying opium crops in Helmand province in Afghanistan. They will also try to establish a meaningful presence in the ultra-remote, southwest Afghanistan, Baloch-majority province of Nimruz. It would take nothing for them to hit Pakistani Balochistan in hot pursuit of Taliban bands. And this would certainly be a prelude for a de facto US invasion of Balochistan.

What would the Balochis do? That’s a very complex question.

Balochistan is of course tribal – just as the FATA. Local tribal chiefs can be as backward as Islamabad is neglectful (and they are not exactly paragons of human rights either). A parallel could be made with the Swat valley.

Most Baloch tribes bow to Islamabad’s authority – except, first and foremost, the Bugti. And then there’s the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) – which both Washington and London brand as a terrorist group. Its leader is Brahamdagh Bugti, operating out of Kandahar (only two hours away from Quetta).

In a recent Pakistani TV interview he could not be more sectarian, stressing the BLA is getting ready to attack non-Balochis. The Balochis are inclined to consider the BLA as a resistance group. But Islamabad denies it, saying their support is not beyond 10% of the provincial population.

It does not help that Islamabad tends to be not only neglectful but heavy-handed; in August 2006, Musharraf’s troops killed ultra-respected local leader Nawab Akbar Bugti, a former provincial governor.

[Right: Nawab Akbar Bugti. Bugti was killed in an explosion. Many Baloch believe he was killed by Pakistan's ex Dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf]

There’s ample controversy on whether the BLA is being hijacked by foreign intelligence agencies – everyone from the CIA and the British MI6 to the Israeli Mossad. In a 2006 visit to Iran, I was prevented from going to Sistan-Balochistan in southeast Iran because, according to Tehran’s version, infiltrated CIA from Pakistani Balochistan were involved in covert, cross-border attacks. And it’s no secret to anyone in the region that since 9/11 the US virtually controls the Baloch air bases in Dalbandin and Panjgur.

In October 2001, while I was waiting for an opening to cross to Kandahar from Quetta, and apart from tracking the whereabouts of President Hamid Karzai and his brother, I spent quite some time with a number of BLA associates and sympathizers. They described themselves as “progressive, nationalist, anti-imperialist” (and that makes them difficult to be co-opted by the US). They were heavily critical of “Punjabi chauvinism”, and always insisted the region’s resources belong to Balochis first; that was the rationale for attacks on gas pipelines.

Stressing an atrocious, provincial literacy rate of only 16% (“It’s government policy to keep Balochistan backward”), they resented the fact that most people still lacked drinking water. They claimed support from at least 70% of the Baloch population (“Whenever the BLA fires a rocket, it’s the talk of the bazaars”). They also claimed to be united, and in coordination with Iranian Balochis. And they insisted that “Pakistan had turned Balochistan into a US cantonment, which affected a lot the relationship between the Afghan and Baloch peoples”.

As a whole, not only BLA sympathizers but the Balochis in general are adamant: although prepared to remain within a Pakistani confederation, they want infinitely more autonomy.

Game on

How crucial Balochistan is to Washington can be assessed by the study “Baloch Nationalism and the Politics of Energy Resources: the Changing Context of Separatism in Pakistan” by Robert Wirsing of the US Army think-tank Strategic Studies Institute. Predictably, it all revolves around Pipelineistan.

China – which built Gwadar and needs gas from Iran – must be sidelined by all means necessary. The added paranoid Pentagon component is that China could turn Gwadar into a naval base and thus “threaten” the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

The only acceptable scenario for the Pentagon would be for the US to take over Gwadar. Once again, that would be a prime confluence of Pipelineistan and the US empire of bases.

Not only in terms of blocking the IPI pipeline and using Gwadar for TAPI, control of Gwadar would open the mouth-watering opportunity of a long land route across Balochistan into Helmand, Nimruz, Kandahar or, better yet, all of these three provinces in southwest Afghanistan. From a Pentagon/NATO perspective, after the “loss” of the Khyber Pass, that would be the ideal supply route for Western troops in the perennial, now rebranded, GWOT (“global war on terror”).

During the Asif Ali Zardari administration in Islamabad the BLA, though still a fringe group with a political wing and a military wing, has been regrouping and rearming, while the current chief minister of Balochistan, Nawab Raisani, is suspected of being a CIA asset (there’s no conclusive proof). There’s fear in Islamabad that the government has taken its eye off the Balochistan ball – and that the BLA may be effectively used by the US for balkanization purposes. But Islamabad still seems not to have listened to the key Baloch grievance: we want to profit from our natural wealth, and we want autonomy.

So what’s gonna be the future of “Dubai” Gwadar? IPI or TAPI? The die is cast. Under the radar of the Obama/Karzai/Zardari photo-op in Washington, all’s still to play in this crucial front in the New Great Game in Eurasia.

Concluded…

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Source: Text: Therearenosunglasses Title Image: http://oolaah.com/?p=3934 This IPI Map courtesy: persian-farsi.ucoz.ru/publ/4-1-0-59

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Do Foreign countries Interfere in Pakistan?

Note for WoP readers: In the post that follows, Dr. Khurshid Alam brings under discussion the usual propaganda launched by almost every government in Pakistan against India of interfering in the internal affairs of Pakistan. Similar allegations are thrown by the Indians against Pakistan.

One may or may not agree with views expressed by Dr. Khurhsid but the need to bring such burning issues under discussion has never been so strong as it is now. Unfortunately all governments without a single exception, have had an ostrich-like attitude and thus have been throwing the issues of national import down to a carpet underlay, a tendency, and a mindset that has brought this land to its present impasse.

Its in this context that I put up this post on these pages. I would welcome your comments be they in favour or against. The idea is not to create a forum of allegations and counter allegations but to find tangible solution / s to our national malaise; on peoples’ level and to prove: ‘where governments fail, peoples do triumph! [Nayyar]

Dr. Khurshid Alam

Our public is constantly being bombarded by our official media about interference of certain countries in our internal affairs. This is some thing I always hear since the early 19 60’s when I started knowing a bit of political process.

Were our rulers honest, then it should ‘nt have worried us too much, as no damage could be done to us, due to the intrinsic strength of our country. However, where our enemy failed; our leaders did succeed in damaging it. Let me explain:-

We are constantly being told that India and Afghanistan are the two culprits. Foreign countries usually interfere when there are breaches in a country’s physical or political body, or if the country is a source of threat to others, but the national interest is always the top priority. No country interferes in another country unless its national interest is involved.

These sorts of statements are usually employed as a ploy to divert the attention of the public from internal problems or, when the unpopular governments need a breathing space, last but not the least if there is total incompetence of the rulers. One must put this fact in mind, any country with sensible leaders will have to think 10 times, to destabilise a neighbouring state. A destabilised neighbour has always its fallout. To have a knock off-balance country on the border is a matter of great concern for all neighbours.

Pakistan is always pointing out fingers to India and Afghanistan. I have been involved in politics as a student and later on since the early sixties but have, noticed it to the contrary. It is better to analyse these points rationally.

Let us take first Afghanistan. Durand line is a bone of contentions between the two countries since Pakistan came into existence. The very name of the line stinks foul. This line has bisected the physical body of a nation, separating brother from brother. It is so un-natural in its character and not justifiable by any rational mind. It is a colonial remnant.

Pakistan took up this matter with Afghanistan diplomatically in its early days. Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar and Sardar Hashim signed a pact, but was sabotaged by Ch. Khaliquz Zaman, so this agreement never saw the daylight.

After this initial diplomatic failure, Pakistan resorted to vicious tactics, to create circumstances, which will force Afghanistan to yield to pressure. We never missed a single chance, till they were successful to bring Hizbies followed by Taliban into power. Even they refused to accept it. Pakistan nakedly and brazenly interfered in Afghanistan. Now what we are facing is fallout of a destabilised country on its western border. The source of blood let in Pukhtoon belt, is the brood of Durand line. Aim, to kneel down Afghanistan. As far as I can see; Afghanistan being a small landlocked country, was never and is not a military threat to Pakistan, even in it’s present shape, it is a truncated state and economically can be easily gagged by Pakistan.

Let me not be ashamed or hesitant to say that in my opinion there is no moral, historical and logical reason that, Durand Line should exist. Pakistan or India was not a party to this issue; the parties involved were British and the Afghans.

During my exhaustive sessions with top political leaders, civil servants and journalists of India, I bluntly discussed this issue and my Indian friends always said “The Indian national interest lies in a stable Pakistan”. They consider Pakistan as a wall of sandbags on its western border. Bay Bandas Shastri; a freedom fighter told me in late seventies that even a weaker government in Pakistan is not in the interest of India, as it will attract the international players. India will be the last to have them on its western border.

Let’s take Iran now, it had extremely closed relations with us, till our interest clashed with Iran in Afghanistan and we opted for Saudis’ Hizbies, a Wahabi school of thought. So I have no idea, where is the threat? Certainly not from outside.

We have always been ruled by dictators, civilian or military. There was and is no change in their mind make-up.

All sorts of masters ruled Pakistan, as if it was and is their inherited property. With hardly any exception they plundered and still plunder the country, loot and nepotism are the norms. Moneys are spent beyond the means of this nation. Foreign tours are conducted in royal style. No delegation was ever less than hundred.

Mr Z.A. Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif took Indhra Gandhi and Bill Clinton by surprise by the sheer size of their delegations. Mrs. Gandhi had to apologise to Bhutto that as they were not expecting such a huge delegation after such a big war they have to send members to Delhi for stay due to lack of accommodation in Shimla.

Palatial structures were built without infra structure, in the name of institutions without institution. None was less than a 5 star hotel. Every one ruled according to his whims and to earn as much as he could. Elections were money oriented, to keep out the less privileged class and that became the most profiteering business in the country.

Bonaparte’s ran the country. Most of the time the constitution was not there, but when the 1973 constitutions was framed, on several occasions it was kept on ice and then amended so many times that it is beyond recognition now.

This attitude has resulted in huge breeches in the political body of the country. The gulf between poor and rich has widened and so between provinces. The federating units have been robbed of their historical, cultural rights and their natural resources. The foreign aid and loans and grants are mainly spent in Punjab and Karachi.

Our military budget is not debatable in the house. The sixth biggest army in the world is maintained by this nation, who forced themselves on the people four times, ruled the country for 35 years with an iron fist. Even the short spells of civilian rule were engineered by the armed forces.

During Musharraf’s regime, a white elephant, in the name of intelligence establishment was created, mainly to harass its own people. Picked any citizen anywhere and handed over to Americans. The sovereignty of the country was sold in open market for few petty sums of dollars.

May I ask; who created conducive environments for the outside forces to interfere in our internal affairs. Whenever there are breaches in the political body, a vacuum arises. It is the law of the nature, in a vacuum, foreign forces do suck in.

Our rulers provided opportunity to others; to interfere in our internal problems due to politico-economical instability and meddling in others’ affairs. Apart from the neighbouring countries even some influential magnets far away, were invited to solve our political problems. It started since the days of Liaquat Ali khan, when the Americans were given the undeniable right to use our land and facilities for any purpose, they wished.

India had the same problem on its eastern border after independence; i.e. its north east frontier area but they dealt with it immediately. We are still having N.W.F.P. because of an adamant and a bullish attitude of Nawaz Sharif who is using Hazara as a trump Card. It will be suicidal for us, if our nationalist leaders don’t show any flexibility on this issue. If I am asked I will have no objection to let the two districts of Haripur and Abbot Abad go and in return get our two lost districts; Mianwali and Attock back. The present demarcation was inherited by Pakistan from British. We support the right of Seraiki and Potohar, on the same basis. But that will need constitutional changes in the power of upper house. As it comes to Pukhtoons’ rights, they are all united. Our fear is not without foundation of last 62 years.

We should shut ourselves to Indian phobia; it is a tool in the hands of our rulers to rob us. During Zia rule we were physically involved in four places in India, Kashmir, East Punjab, Gujarat and Assam. Our involvement in the Muslim dominated provinces in China is an open secret, thanks to the ideology of Pakistan.

As for Afghanistan, it is in shambles. Thanks to ISI and Pakistani establishment. They are not in a position to physically interfere in Pakistan. If government allegations are true, then they are justified to send back the arms and ammunitions sent by Pakistan to the warlords there.

But to give up their national resolve, to give up their national right should not be expected from Afghans. In spite of all odds they are the proudest nation one can think of.

In the history of Afghans there has never been absolute monarchy. It was always a decentralised cultural monarchy.

I as a Pukhtoon will never ever give the right to Mian Nawaz Sharif to name my motherland. He himself is a Kashmiri living in Punjab. He is welcome to take Mehtab Abasi and share with him his Raiwand Estate. In case he fails to obstruct our demand then we have the right to demand to change the name of Pakistan.

I salute the nationalist forces in Punjab and appreciate their close ties with east Punjab but Mian Sahib should be taught the difference between nationalism and fascism.

I appeal to sensible Pakistani citizen to ponder over these issues and differentiate between made in Pakistan and made in India.

As for Baluchistan insurgency; it is a gift of Pakistani rulers, what they sowed, so do they reap now, for to every action there is equal and opposite reaction. At the moment it is not equal, but the process is waiting for our follies.

Enough is enough. If my death is some one’s life, let him die. The democrats of Punjab must rise above personal gains to protect the federation and harness this power-intoxicated elephant. We do realise it cannot survive without power. If a new federation with east Punjab is about to be mature then I feel we should not object to it, as it will be more natural.

Text Source: Wichaar.com

Note: For sake of continuity, comprehension, and para-wise sequencing, certain parts of this post have been edited.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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A WAR OF DRONES: Why Military Dreams Fail — and Why It Doesn’t Matter

Bombs are offloaded from a Reaper. Drone data will provide “the option to arrest the individual, talk … [or] take them out with a Hellfire missile,” a military official says. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

[Note for WoP Readers: In a series on US drones, targeting Al-Qaeda terrorists but mostly hitting civilians; I put up on this blog, some posts form different sources and writers. This one is the latest from my friend Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com.

Question at the moment is not to ask for a justification of these attacks, but to see who is being killed. Yet PRIYA SATIA in the Nation ventures to ask the objectivity of these sexy weapons:-

"Attack of the Drones," a homage to the lesser of the Star Wars trilogies, is the headline of choice in reports on the One Good Thing to come out of the "war on terror": very cool gadgets. With the media stoking laddish pleasure in "weapons porn" (Newsweek's phrase), we might be forgiven for forgetting that this "greatest, weirdest, coolest hardware in the American arsenal" has neither brought the war to a swifter end nor enabled the capture of archenemy Osama bin Laden.

Let us see what, are others saying in this regard. Peter Bergen & Katherine Tiedemann, of the New America Foundation report that about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations have been killed--including two heads of Uzbek terrorist groups allied with al-Qaeda, and Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban--in addition to hundreds of lower-level militants. [1]

But the number of civilian deaths caused by these drones is an important issue because in the charged political atmosphere of today’s Pakistan, where anti-Americanism is rampant, the drone program is a particular cause of anger among those who see it as an infringement on Pakistan’s sovereignty. A poll in August found that only 9 percent of Pakistanis favored the strikes, while two-thirds opposed them.

And the third input came from the New York Times, where the counterinsurgency experts David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, wrote: drone strikes had “killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent.” In other words, in their analysis, 98 percent of those killed in drone attacks were civilians. Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor widely regarded as the dean of terrorism pertinently remarks, “We are deluding ourselves if we think in and of itself the drone program is going to be the answer.”

He points out that the U.S. airstrike that killed the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not exactly shut down the organization. Following Zarqawi’s death, violence in Iraq accelerated.

While there is little doubt that the strikes have disrupted al Qaeda’s operations, the larger question is to what extent they may have increased the appeal of militant groups and undermined the Pakistani state. This is ultimately a lot more worrisome than anything that could happen in Afghanistan,

Given that drone strikes remain an important tool to disrupt al Qaeda and Taliban operations and to kill the leaders of these organizations, but they also consistently kill Pakistani civilians, angering the population and prompting violent acts of revenge from the Pakistani Taliban.

I have cited above, the opinion of analysts and experts on these deadly drones to highlight as most Pakistanis consider these attacks harmful for Pakistan, but its heartening to learn that independent media journalists, and analysts consider these attacks as much damaging for ultimate US interests, as they are for Pakistan.

I do agree there are some splinter groups who are fighting not only against the State of Pakistan but also the people as well. Their targeting and killing so many people in various terror acts e.g. shooting at the Sri Lankan Cricket team in Lahore, suicide attacks on Manawan Police Centre, at FIA offices in Lahore and a Rescue Centre) has angered the people against these religious goons and murderers as much as they are angry over US drones killing innocent Pakistanis in the FATA region and elsewhere. But to use it as a pretext to launch a large scale war on Pakistan’s own citizens is as much condemnable as are the deadly drone attacks by US Air Force. [Nayyar]

Drone Race to a Known Future

Why Military Dreams Fail — and Why It Doesn’t Matter

Tom Engelhardt

For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here’s the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago — 2006 to be exact — the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky’s the limit.

Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones — the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) — whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available.

Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a “pilot” back in good ol’ Langley, VA, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to “stare” via 12 video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles.

What we’re talking about here is the gaze of the gods, updated in corporate labs for the modern American war-fighter — a gaze that can be focused on whatever runs, walks, crawls, or creeps just about anywhere on the planet 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away.

And what’s true of video capacity will be no less true of the next generation of drone sensors — and, of course, of drone weaponry like that “5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread” meant in some near-robotic future to replace the present 100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger or Predator C, the next generation drone under development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable, since we’re still in the robotics equivalent of the age of the “horseless carriage,” as Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us.

(Just hold your hats, for instance, when the first nano-drones make it onto the scene! They will, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, be able to “fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”)

And here’s another flash from the drone development front: the Navy wants in. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, reports Jason Paur of Wired’s Danger Room blog, is looking for “a robotic attack aircraft that can land and take off from a carrier.” Fortunately, according to Paur, the X-47B, which theoretically should be able to do just that, is to make its first test flight before year’s end. It could be checking out those carrier decks by 2011, and fully operational by 2025.

[Right: An Israeli army Heron unmanned drone aircraft, used for surveillance missions, flies during a display at the Palmahim Air Force Base, Israel. The unmanned spy planes will be supplied to the German Air Force that will see action in Afghanistan early next year. Photo Courtesy: Associated Press]

Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for the high seas where they are called unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). In fact, Israel — along with the U.S. leading the way on drones — will reportedly soon launch the first of its USVs off the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The U.S. can’t be far behind and it seems that, like their airborne cousins, these ships, too, will be weaponized.

Taking the Measure of a Slam-Dunk Weapons System

Robot war. It just couldn’t be cooler, could it? Especially if the only blood you spill is the other guy’s, since our “pilots” are flying those planes from thousands of miles away. Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his first nine months, President Obama has authorized more drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the Bush administration did in its last three years in office and is now considering upping their use in areas of rural Afghanistan where U.S. troops will be scarce.

In Washington, drones are even considered the “de-escalatory” option for the Afghan War by some critics, while CIA Director Leon Panetta, whose agency runs our drone war in Pakistan, has hailed them as “the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership.” Among the few people who don’t adore them here are hard-core war-fighters who don’t want an armada of robot planes standing in the way of sending in oodles more troops.The vice president, however, is a drone-atic. He loves ‘em to death and reportedly wants to up their missions, especially in Pakistan, rather than go the oodles route.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone bandwagon early. He has long been pressing the Air Force to invest ever less in expensive manned aircraft — he’s called the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter aircraft — and ever more in the robotic kind. After all, they’re so lean, mean, and high-tech sexy — for Newsweek, they fall into the category of“weapons porn” – that what’s not to like?

Okay, maybe there’s the odd scrooge around like Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who recently complained to the press that the U.S. program might involve war crimes under international law: “We need the United States to be more up front and say, ‘OK, we’re willing to discuss some aspects of this program,’ otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.”

But as Christmas approaches, somebody’s always going to say, “Bah, humbug!” And let’s face it, just about everyone who matters to the mainstream media swears that the drones are just so much more “precise” in their “extrajudicial executions” than traditional air methods, which can be so messy. Better yet, when nothing in Afghanistan or Pakistan seems to be working out, the drones are actually doing the job. They’re reportedly knocking off the bad guys right and left. At least 13 senior al-Qaeda leaders and one senior Taliban leader (aka “high-value targets”) have been killed by the drones, according to the Long War Journal, and many more foot soldiers have been taken out as well.

And they’re not just the obvious slam-dunk weapons system for our present problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they’re potentially the royal path to the future when it comes to war-fighting, which is surely something else to be excited about.

The Wonder Weapons Succeed — at Home

So why am I not excited — other than the fact that the drones are also killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort?

And here’s another factor that dulls my excitement just a tad — if the history of air warfare has shown one thing, it’s this: it never breaks populations. Rather, it only increases their sense of unity, as in London during the Blitz under Winston Churchill, in Germany under Adolf Hitler, Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and of course (though we never put ourselves in such company, being the exceptions to all history), the United States after 9/11 under George W. Bush. Why should the peoples of rural Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands be any different?

Oh, and there’s just one more reason that comes to mind: it so happens that I can see the future when it comes to drones, and it’s dismal. I’m no prophet — it’s only that I’ve already lived through so much of that future. In fact, we all have.

[To catch a TomDispatch audio interview on wonder accompanying this piece, click here]

Christian Janitor Sacrifices His Life To Save Hundreds of Muslim Girls

“Pervez Masih is now a legend to us,” says 20-year-old Sumaya Ahsan, a student of the International Islamic University, Islamabad. “Because he saved our lives, and our friends’ lives.”

by Ivan Watson, CNN

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) – Life is slowly getting back to normal at the women’s campus of Islamabad’s International Islamic University.

The young women who study here chatter on the school’s well-manicured lawns, their brightly-colored scarves and Pakistani dresses blowing in the wind on a sunny autumn day. Barely three weeks ago, this quiet place of learning, was the scene of a nightmare. On October 20, two suicide bombers launched nearly simultaneous attacks on both the men’s and women’s side of the campus.

Afsheen Zafar, 20, is in mourning. Three of her classmates, girls she describes as “shining stars,” were killed on that terrible day. Still, she says the carnage could have been much worse if not for the actions of a lowly janitor, who was also killed. ”If he didn’t stop the suicide attacker, there could have been great, great destruction,” Zafar says. ”He’s now a legend to us,” says another 20-year-old student named Sumaya Ahsan. “Because he saved our lives, our friends’ lives.”

The improvised family of Pervez Masih, a Christian janitor, who helped save hundreds of Muslim girls from a suicide bomber, is in mourning. “My hero is  dead now,”says Masih’s 70 years old mother, Kurshaid Siqqique.

The janitor’s name was Pervaiz Masih.

According to eyewitness accounts, the attacker approached disguised in women’s clothing. He shot the guard on duty, and then approached the cafeteria, which was packed with hundreds of female students.

Masih intercepted the bomber in the doorway, however, and the bomber self-detonated right outside the crowded hall, spraying many of his explosive vest’s arsenal of ball bearings out into the parking lot instead of into the cafeteria.

“Between 300 to 400 girls were sitting in there,” said Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik, the rector of the university. “[Pervez Masih] rose above the barriers of caste, creed and sectarian terrorism. Despite being a Christian, he sacrificed his life to save the Muslim girls.”

Masih was a member of Pakistan’s Christian minority, traditionally one of the poorest communities in the country.

When the attacker struck, Masih had been on the job for less than a week, earning barely $60 a month.

Masih lived with seven other family members, in a single room in a crowded apartment house in the city of Rawalpindi. Until the attack his mother, 70-year old Kurshaid Siddique, worked as a cleaning lady at a nearby house to help make ends meet. Now, she makes a daily pilgrimage to the cemetery where Masih is buried.

Siddique is inconsolable. Asked if she was proud that some people were calling her son a hero, Siddique waved a hand in the air dismissively, answering, “My hero is dead now.”

She pulls out a framed photo of her son, pictured wearing a button down white shirt and a thick mustache. When Masih’s three-year-old daughter Diya sees his photo, she reaches for it, saying, “Mama, I want that picture.”

From time to time, Diya turns to her mother and repeats one word, “Papa.”

The Islamic University offered to give Diya a free education and employ Masih’s widow, Shaheen Pervaiz.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has promised to award Masih’s family 1 million rupees (about $12,000) for his bravery.

“He is a national hero because he saved the life of many girls,” said Shahbaz Bhatti, minister of minorities in the Pakistani government. “As a Christian, a person of minority, he stood in front of the Taliban to protect the university.”

But the grave of this national hero is a sorry sight. It is located in the poorer, garbage-strewn Christian half of a neighborhood cemetery, less then three feet from a muddy road Masih’s mother and widow visit every day. One of his sisters crosses herself, then stoops down to pick up an empty pack of cigarettes someone threw onto the little mound of earth.

The family had to borrow money to pay for Masih’s funeral and they are now behind on paying the rent. If the government money comes through, Masih’s mother would like to decorate her son’s grave.

“I would like him to have his name in cement with a nice poetry verse,” she says. “And there should be a fence surrounding his grave.

Credits: This report was originally published at the CNN website and later cross posted at the Instablogs site by Shazil. Youtube Courtesy CNN and Saddlesmania

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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I met the Qalander, Sufi & a Saint [1 of 4]

The house was simple, neat and tidy, so was his wife. The man surprised me, he was so casual and least bothered that an outsider is in the home, but he spoke with closed eyes, he opened them rarely and when he did they were red. His eyes seemed to me full of devotion, an intoxication of love for God, but his voice was coarse and style like; who cares. I remembered the reading from “Fuwad-ul-Fawad” about Hazrat Marouf Kirkhi, that angels will bring a man tied in chains made of Noor [4], his eyes will be closed with intoxication of love – of Allah. Allah will order the angels take him to heaven and he will say, “I‘ve not loved Thee and prayed Thee for the sake of Heaven”.

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MET THE QALANDER, SUFI AND A SAINT

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by Farah Karamat Raja 

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[Note for WoP readers: A month back my elder brother left for his heavenly abode. A friend of him, who has been a director at the World Bank Dr. Fateh Muhammad Chaudhary came to offer condolence. While he was with us, we were discussing arrangements for Chehlum [1]. There were differences over arrangements as one group was absolutely against holding such a function at all. They took Chehlum as a mere show off – nothing to do with Islam. But the second strongly believes in Zikr [2]and recitations which it believes are a tribute to the departed soul / s.

I met the Qalander, Sufi & a Saint [2 of 4]

Qalander was speaking from the heart and from mood. It was difficult to understand from which time and space he was talking and on which depth he had plunged right now. There was incoherency in ideas and language was abrupt English, Persian, Urdu and Punjabi, all in same breath. He was very wise in not seeing people, I thought, because after meeting him I understood why Sufis are so secretive? Because they can’t communicate to all and sundry, no one but a Sufi can understand them.

He asserted strongly on the obstinate stubbornness of love for God, the claim and obstinate demand of God. How much impossible and unimaginable it seems that a human being, a finite self insists on having the infinity and demands him constantly. And he claimed that God loves this obstinate stubbornness of human being. Man should stand firm, it is a way not of comfort but pangs and pains, of kicks and scolds, of punches and hurt, of decay and perish. Yet only before God. And as far as this world is concerned, he claims, the man in the way of God is so ordinary one, he is King of Kings; independent and forceful nothing can damage him or escape from him.

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MET THE QALANDER, SUFI AND A SAINT

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by Farrah Karamat Raja

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He said I don’t meet people – it’s only because of Imtiaz Bukhari that I’ve allowed you. In the normal routine, I should have asked for your questions of the interview. But instead, in a discourteous and coarse voice, he started questioning me. He spoke in sophisticated and polished English though, more sophisticated Urdu and rather more sophisticated Punjabi and Persian as well. Not only did he speak all these languages with finesse and a real Sufi mind but also recited the most difficult verses from all the four languages and he quoted “Hadith” as well.

I met the Qalander, Sufi & a Saint [3 of 4]

Qalandar is a free spirit, he has no wordly shackles and they are different from all ordinary human nature. In popular folk beliefs its considered that one Qalandar possess the power of hundred Walis (saints). Qalandars discard the lower human nature and fly to their Lord. Qalandars can seem to be strange or act or dress strange. Their personality is different and sometimes bizarre, but in reality a Qalandar is in Jazb, a secret reality intoxicated in the love of God and Divine Figures, messengers and saints. They closely resembles to wandering ascetics in their outward modes and sometime in their fierce madness due to intoxication into ‘other reality’. Often time they are give special vision and hidden mysteries of reality are made known to them. Some define Qalandars as an itinerant sufi, a wandering dervish, who learns and teaches during his travels and wandering.

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MET THE QALANDER, SUFI AND A SAINT

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by Farah Karamat Raja

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Now the gate keeper was in the way of Sufism too, he was furious, full of wrath, abusing at the top of his voice calling names to wives, daughters etc. of the imprisoned person that I am the one working so hard, toiling in the way of God but Ali Maula and Hussain have paid no attention to me, have not accepted my “Salam” even and had visited this son of…. He was madly striking his “danda” on the iron bars. The prisoner was more scared, thought he, I want to be saved but Ali Maula and Hussain are playing games with me.

I met the Qalander, Sufi & a Saint [4 of 4]

There are five basic principles for the follower of the Holy Prophet (P.B.U.H). One who is in search of God, curbs one’s self to come out of “the self” to break the magnetism of existence, continuous bowing in God’s love and be perished in His love. He claims I’m in love with God and it is a non communicable thing

This love is tempestuous, victorious and triumphant. It gives grace, independence and grandeur of a King.

Then with closed eyes, his track changed, he said person loves God and He loves perishable pain and pangs. He gives Wah! Wah!

“Ranjish Hi Sahi, Dil Hi Dukhanay Ke Liye Aa

Aa Phir Se Mujhe Chhorh Kay Janay Ke Liye Aa”.

I looked at Imtiaz Bukhari, the Qalander was in his mood. Then he was transported from despondency to fulfillment:

“Ku Baku Phael Gyi Baat Shanasai Ki,

Uss Ne Khushbu Ki Tarah Mairi Pazeerai Ki”

He was uttering these verses at much farthest and loftiest levels. Of course the poet of these verses had not touched those levels, but he the Qalander, was reading them in another context and the beauty and dimension of these verses was never ending and it was ever-growing.

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MET THE QALANDER, SUFI AND A SAINT

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by Farah Karamat Raja

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He stated there are five basic principles for the follower ofthe Holy Prophet (P.B.U.H).  One who is in search of God, curbs one’s self to come out of “the self” to break the magnetism of existence, continuous bowing in God’s love and be perished in His love.

He claims I’m in love with God and it is a non communicable thing. This love is tempestuous, victorious and triumphant. It gives grace, independence and grandeur of a King.

Then with closed eyes, his track changed, he said person loves God and He loves perishable pain and pangs. He gives Wah! Wah!

“Ranjish Hi Sahi, Dil Hi Dukhanay Ke Liye Aa

Aa Phir Se Mujhe Chhorh Kay Janay Ke Liye Aa”.

I looked at Imtiaz Bukhari, the Qalander was in his mood. Then he was transported from despondency to fulfillment:

“Ku Baku Phael Gyi Baat Shanasai Ki,

Uss Ne Khushbu Ki Tarah Mairi Pazeerai Ki”

He was uttering these verses at much farthest and loftiest levels. Of course the poet of these verses had not touched those levels, but he the Qalander, was reading them in another context and the beauty and dimension of these verses was never ending and it was ever-growing.

“We abetted the anti-state elements in the Balochistan province of Pakistan” says the Indian Analyst

Reports say the Indian Intelligence Agency, RAW is working hand in glove with Brahmdagh Bugti on his mission for “liberation” of Balochistan.

by Nayyar Hashmey

First my comment on a brief that appeared on the I, Me, Myself Blog edited by Sidhu Saaheb (of India) and I reproduce.

I have read with an amazing interest the abstract of article by Mr. Mohan Guruswamy. Having seen this brief, I linked up to Tribune’s online edition and read the complete story. It was an interesting yet quite alarming, an eye opening report. Although Mr. M.G. laments the policy having been abandoned by the successive Janta party government, yet he thinks it should not have been.

I personally do not wish that such type of articles should come up on this blog or similar ones who espouse the wishes (with deep sincerity) and endeavor to create an environment of friendship and goodwill between the two of us. As it appears to me like two kids quarrelling together while playing the walnuts game; in which the one who is able to throw more nuts in the pit wins the game. However, more so it happens, that one of the kids gets moody and starts pissing into pit, thus spoiling the game altogether.

Well that’s the way the kids are born to be, care free, moody and without any lust. But things get really nasty when states or their writers, strategists and policy makers start thinking and behaving like kids, yet not with the innocence the kids have while playing their games.

The theory or planning M.G. has or may be having in his mind, could be good one theoretically, but practically states need to behave more maturely. (And this applies to our country as well).

While M.G. mentions the policy of Indira Gandhi as very “realpolitical” he should not forget there are so many people in Pakistan of the like of M.G. thinking something similar about India.

Although I personally have a strong interest in politics, yet I do not think politics of aggrandizement between India and Pakistan is going to do any good to either of us. And as far as his mentioning about Balochistan, well we do have an anti Punjab feeling there, however this anti Punjab factor is more of an exercise of obtaining  their due rights out of the central exchequer and I being a Punjabi do think our Balochi brethren are 101 percent justified in their demand. But this does not mean that Balochistan is going to secede or wishes to secede from Pakistan. M.G. should know that the four provinces of Pakistan are not only geographically coherent but also culturally and economically as well. The Indus civilization which prospered in Harrapa and Moenjo Daro actually originated in Balochistan, so through centuries Punjab, Sind, Balochistan and Pakhtun Khwah have been interconnected, historically, geographically as well as economically.

I have many a times been to Balochistan. I even once traveled in my small Suzuki FX (Mehran) car from Lahore to Quetta crossing all the way from Multan, to Dera Ghazi Khan, Lora Lai, Ziarat and Quetta. The people there are very friendly and hospitable but they are ‘anti-centric’ as much as anybody in Pakistan, who belongs to the common citizenry, could be. The politicians (civil as well as military guys) have plundered this country and in this regard the common citizens of Pakistan whether from Punjab, NWFP, Sind or Balochistan have equally suffered at the hands of this selected lot of elitist families.

M.G. might plan what he may wish to, but such policies will not bring any good either to Pakistan or to India for in such a case

“One of the two will be forced to piss in the pit”and we shouldn’t forget both have got nuclear ingredients in the piss, so “BEWARE BROTHERS”!

And now the second part of my comments to M.G.’s report…

Yesterday, when I came across this brief, particularly in the backdrop of news coming from Balochistan, and then a statement by Prime Minister Gilani today that GOP have proof of India’s involvement in the insurgency going on in our north and in Balochistan, and now Waziristan too, I decided to see the complete report once again. Though governments do propagandize such issues putting all blame on a foreign hand (which unfortunately both governments equally indulge into), I think if there is at all a proof, our authorities must take up this issue with the Indians. But, as they say in Punjabi, they should also move a stick under their own charpoy to see why a foreign hand succeeds in buying out loyalties of local elements against their own people and their own country. Putting everything on India or Israel means our government is helpless, which means losing a war without fighting a war. People should know what is happening in our north and in Balochistan, who is doing what or otherwise it must not talk about involvement of a foreign hand in our affairs

Here is the link to Mr. Guruswami’s report, which was originally published in the Tribune India online.

In his article M.G. admits that during late Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s premiership, Indians were training certain people to undertake anti-state activities in the province of Balochistan and this training was given in the Indian state of Rajasthan. In later part of his diatribe the author laments that the successive Janata Dal government (Mrs. Indira Gandhi had lost those elections) thwarted this plan and instead, the then Indian foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee adopted an altogether opposite policy, of appeasement towards Pakistan.

The writer further elaborates the late Mme Indira Gandhi’s plans to train such anti-state actors to undertake 5^th column activities in the other two provinces of Pakistan too i.e. Sind and the NWFP. Here the writer maintains that according to Mrs. Indira Gandhi time was ripe to truncate Pakistan hence to train such saboteurs who could work for independent states of Pashtunistan and Sind against the dominance of Punjabis in the federated structure of Pakistan was the most opportune moment. The writer feels sorry for the J.D.’s policy who upon defeat of Mrs. Indira Gandhi had abandoned this policy of destabilizing Pakistan.

While putting down my comments on this article, I too felt so sorry that in a beautiful country such as India where I have some very sweet friends active on the blogosphere, doing their best in furthering friendship and goodwill between the two of us, there are still such people who think by destabilizing Pakistan India will automatically be stabilized.

Contrary to this, I believe, a stable Pakistan is as much in the interest of India as a stable India is in the interest of Pakistan. Unfortunately in the cold war era, we in Pakistan blindly aligned ourselves with the United States. In those days we were flying in the high airs of forging Commonwealth of Muslim nations, where Pakistan will be the major player and thus dwarf India both politically as well as ideologically. Since this stance suited the US as well, therefore, they offered their full fledged “Asheervaad” to our successive regimes. And as our stars would have it, these were mostly the military regimes.

With American blessings, we got oblivious of the very fact that in international relations there is no such phenomenon as friendship or brotherhood, on the contrary, it is nothing but deals, “the give and take” relationships. Americans gave us arms and ammunitions and hyped up our Islamic fervor or rather Islamic megalomania. The entrapment of Pakistan by US reached its zenith during Zia-ul-Haq’s regime when we became a pawn in the great game played by Uncle Sam in the mountains of Afghanistan when Russian bear was prowling to defeat the US designs. We aided the Americans by training the Afghans to fight against the US arch enemy the Soviets, laying down their lives for the American cause. Having defeated the Soviets, what did we or the Afghans get, is an open secret now.

Interestingly, it is now the Indians who are getting the American” Asheervaad” to turn India into a super power. In our case, it was the Islamic fervor and in India’s case, it is the super power syndrome that is afflicting India now. Unfortunately the Indians too appear to be falling in the same trap and that too quite willingly (just as the Pakistanis did in the cold war periods). Presently Pakistan is a peripheral state while India is a regional power (which indeed India is). But the Americans are patting up the backs of India to acquire a super power status (politically, militarily as well as economically) and not confine itself to a regional power status. The formula seems to be working with as much precision as it did in case of Pakistan.

There is nothing wrong with that. India does have the potential to take up such role. But am only afraid of the time when India will be indeed a super power because that would be the time Uncle Sam might be thinking quite opposite of what he is thinking now. For in that case CIA again has its own plans, to cut India to size. And one may agree or not, India itself has so many areas where there are comfortable turfs to launch insurgencies. The best thing, therefore, for both countries should be to stop thinking in terms of destabilizing each other and look forward to a common south Asian approach. Later this could include China as well. If neocons can visualize a new American century for the world, why not we chalk out a new Asian century!

Photo Courtesy: Outlookindia.com

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India: Hungry for global power, or just plain hungry?

by Bruce Watson

Since 2001, Goldman Sachs (GS) has been touting the wonders of the rapidly advancing BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — as the global economic powerhouses of the coming decades. Citigroup (C) recently jumped on the bandwagon with a report that noted the growing economic influence of China and India and highlighted stocks poised to take advantage of their newfound prosperity.

The growing excitement over BRIC obscures a key problem in India. Although the country is enjoying more prosperity than ever, it continues to have severe problems with feeding its population. In India, 46 percent of children up to age three are malnourished, according to a report from the Institute of Development Studies, and an average of 2,000 to 3,000 children die of starvation every day. Overall, 25 percent of India’s citizens don’t get enough to eat on a daily basis; this is a higher percentage than sub-Saharan Africa.

Starvation offers an interesting glimpse into the demographics of India’s economic boom of the last five years. While the ranks of the country’s middle class have swollen, the benefits of this advancement have fallen on a narrow segment of the population: 400 million Indians have moved out of relative poverty since 1985 — they now make at least $5 per day — but 880 million Indians still live on less than $2 per day.

Many analysts claim that the country’s economic woes lie in traditional notions of caste, community, religion, and region, which encourage a fractured, divisive cultural perspective. The malnutrition study noted that women and those of lower castes were routinely excluded from programs designed to decrease hunger; other studies have determined that India’s 150 million Muslims are given reduced access to education and government employment. In various Indian regions, issues of violence, population growth, and political power also affect the citizens’ ability to enter the middle class.

While part of India’s failure to feed its citizens is a function of traditional prejudices, it also reflects a lack of combined political will: India’s various cultural and geographical groups vie with the country’s centralized government for resources, power, and cultural identification. For many Indians, this fracturing has led to an exaggerated self-reliance and a lack of political involvement.

Contrast that with China, where a centralized totalitarian government has effectively dealt with hunger. In 2001, both countries committed to halve the number of their malnourished citizens by 2015. China has reached its target, but India, at its current rate of progress, won’t achieve this goal before 2043.

India’s lower castes aren’t the only group to be undermined by the boom years. Even its middle class, ostensibly the beneficiaries of the country’s economic surge, finds itself done in by the country’s shifting fortunes. Reporting on a rise in suicide among middle-class Indians, The Times of India notes that upwardly mobile professionals often lose touch with their traditional communities while still lacking the upper classes’ financial cushion in tough times. The same government that fails to guarantee food to its poorest citizens is not effectively reaching out to some of its wealthiest.

India’s malnutrition woes offer an important warning. Early childhood malnutrition is directly connected to a host of lifelong problems, including low IQ and antisocial behavior, studies have shown. That means that India’s next generation of workers — today’s children — may become a drain on the economy. Can India sustain its impressive year-over-year economic growth if its children are going hungry?

Courtesy: http://www.dailyfinance.com/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Cry, beloved Pakistan

Above is a painting (courtesy: www.slingsby.co.za/paintings.htm). It depicts separation, self gratification / self destruction, when there is perpetual poverty and things are going down at a terrible pace. WERE WE DESTINED FOR THIS???

by Roedad Khan

With General Musharraf’s exit, we thought we had reached the summit. Alas! The ascent of one ridge simply revealed the next daunting challenge.

Before he left the stage in disgrace, Musharraf turned over the car keys to those who had robbed and plundered this country. Mr. Jinnah could not have foreseen the tragic decline of Pakistan, when he passed his flaming torch into the hands of his successors. Sixty-two years after Jinnah gave us a great country; little men mired in corruption have captured political power and destroyed his legacy. Our rulers, both elected and un-elected, have done to Pakistan what the successors of Lenin did to Soviet Union. “Lenin founded our state”, Stalin said, after a stormy session with Marshal Zhukov. The German army was at the gate of Moscow. “And we have …it up. Lenin left us a great heritage and we, his successors, have shitted it all up”. Isn’t this what we have done to Jinnah’s Pakistan?

At a time when the country is at war, Mr. Zardari spends almost his entire existence in the confines of a bunker. Mortally afraid of his own people and the sword of NRO hanging over his head, he is more concerned about protecting himself and his power, rather than protecting the country or the people of Pakistan. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but no elected president in history has fallen this far this fast.

This country is in deep, deep trouble. Tremendous responsibility rests on the shoulders of our military leadership. Senior military officers involved in decision-making are smart people, but they too live in a very rarefied environment, hardly ever meet common citizens and, as the American say, do not have the daily pulse of the people in their face. Is it any wonder that with a civil war raging and suicide bombers blowing up themselves and causing havoc all over the country, decision-making is flawed, there is no one to provide leadership, no one to inspire the people and no one to govern 170 million people? Today, you can’t fail to see the rising specter of a fragile Pakistan helplessly stumbling into catastrophe.

The country is trembling with anxiety. Mr. Jinnah’s unworthy successors have pushed us to despair. They have infused our life with war, terror and death. As I look back at our irrecoverable past and contemplate the tragedy of a lost future with a deep sense of loss, I am smitten by a sacred rage. It is hard to be happy these days. Like dinosaurs, disaster and frustration roam the country’s political landscape. Talk today is of a vanished dignity, of a nation diminished in ways not previously imaginable. It is almost as if no one wants to acknowledge a sad end to what once seemed like a beautiful dream. It speaks volumes for the failure of our rulers who squandered Jinnah’s legacy and turned his dream into a nightmare.

In Pakistan, we still live in those aristocratic Victorian days when, as Disraeli said, “the world was for the few, and the very few.” The rich are getting richer and the poorer are getting poorer. Two realms, civil and military, exist side by side, in a schizophrenic rift that shows no sign of re healing. Today we have an elected parliament, a democratic government, multiple political parties, a reasonably free press and all the other trappings of democracy. But all these are mere symbols which hide the reality of the power situation and play no role in determining policy decisions. How meaningful is our democratic order when real decisions are made elsewhere?

The country is at war with itself. The battle in Waziristan is a war of choice, not of necessity. Wars of necessity must meet two tests: national interest and a lack of viable alternative to the use of force to protect those interests. World War II was a war of necessity. The Iraq War, on the other hand, is a war of choice. If the war in Waziristan were a war of necessity, it would justify any level of effort – but it’s not.

Isn’t it tragic that for the first time in the history of Pakistan, air power is being used on the orders of an elected government against our own people in Waziristan? Air power was first used by the British against Mehsud tribesmen in 1925. Pink’s war, as it was called, involved air-to-ground bombardment and strafing carried out by the Royal Air Force, under Wing Commander, Richard Charles Montagu Pink. Bristol Fighters and de Havilland DH9s from numbers 5, 27 and 60 squadrons were deployed to the airstrips at Miranshah and Tank.

Air power was last used by the British against the Mehsud and Wazir tribesmen in the 40s. Jinnah condemned it on the floor of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and described it as inhuman and barbaric. There was also uproar in the House of Commons and questions were asked. A heated debate followed. Today, there is no protest, no public outrage. A deathly silence prevails.

Air power is the wrong instrument for achieving imprecise objectives based on unrealistic goals. It destroys human habitations, inflicts unacceptable collateral damage and causes easily avoidable human misery. During the Vietnam War, there was a phrase that came to symbolise the entire misbegotten adventure: “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” It was said at first with sincerity, then repeated with irony, and finally with despair. Sadly, a similar suicidal drama is being enacted in democratic Pakistan against the Mehsud tribesmen. An elected government must never use its army or air force against its own people. It invariably leads to an army takeover.

In these harsh and difficult political times, the question of leadership is at the centre of our national concerns. The times cry out for leadership of high order. At the heart of the leadership is the leader’s character. Pakistan is a nation of teahouse politicians — midgets with no commitment to principles and no values. Can anyone of our leaders face the court like Nelson Mandela and say, “whatever sentence your Worship sees fit to impose upon me, may it rest assured that when my sentence has been completed, I will still be moved, as men are always moved, by their consciences. And when I come out from serving my sentence, I will take up again, as best I can, the struggle for the rights of my people.” Can anyone of our leaders face a judge and declare that he always cherished the ideal of an independent, democratic, corruption–free Pakistan? Mandela didn’t flinch. He did not waver and run away. He made no deal. He stood his ground and won. That is the stuff that leaders are made of. Pakistan, I maintain, is a case of failed leadership, not a case of failed state.

“There is a time to laugh,” the Bible tells us, “and a time to weep.” This is a time to weep for the country we love. Pakistan is descending into chaos and caught between a hard place and many rocks. The political arena seems more like a forum of mass entertainment than a place of serious deliberation. The parliament, the chief instrument of democracy, is cowed, timid, a virtual paralytic, over-paid and under-employed, totally insensitive to the sufferings of the people it claims to represent.

Today all the symptoms which one had ever met within history, previous to great changes and revolutions, exist in Pakistan. The country appears to be adrift. Pakistan is sliding into anarchy. Nobody knows where it was headed without popular leadership to guide or direct it. The social contract between the rulers and ruled has collapsed. Fundamental issues of far-reaching significance are churning beneath the placid surface of life. The Zardari government is a vacuum presiding over chaos. Politics no less than nature abhors a vacuum. If the politicians don’t get their act together quickly, I shudder to think what might rush into this void.

Tailpiece: Two mountains have met, and not even a ridiculous mouse has emerged!

Text Courtesy: thenews.com.pk/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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TOURISM and the Extremist Threat

Despite finishing the Taliban, the core conservative ideology may survive and keep suffocating the country. Such an ideology will not allow the economy to grow in many new areas in which Pakistan has a lot of potential. Tourism is one such sector, but it needs an open society where everyone is welcome

by Dr Manzur Ejaz

Sitting at Frankfurt airport, waiting for my flight to Delhi, I indulged in conversation with an American couple, both in their 70s, who were on their way to see the Taj Mahal. The retired executive of a big corporation was treating his wife to see this world marvel. Similarly, standing at a small bazaar in Jodhpur, a city in Rajasthan, India, I saw hordes of Western tourists, all there to see a city that is no different than Sahiwal or Sargodha other than an old palace, a common sight in Rajasthan.

Everyone knows that proliferation of religious extremism and jihadists have scared away foreign capital and potential tourists who can bring billions of dollars to Pakistani coffers. Leaving aside the old story, the problem is that Pakistan’s permanent establishment is trying its best to protect its core faith-centric ideology, which is the reason for all the trouble Pakistan now faces.

A recent issue of the fake “The Dawn”, not the Karachi-based respected daily, by a group of fifth columnists and ‘patriotic’ journalists was circulated on the internet. The fifth columnists included some enlightened opinion-makers. The short list of ‘patriots’ included the ones who are still sticking to the ideology and foreign policy that has brought the country to the brink of collapse. Most observers believe that circulation of such a list, through a fake newspaper, was the work of the intelligence agencies, notorious for triggering such malicious propaganda stunts.

Of course the Pakistani military is fighting the Taliban with full force. Despite the cynical view in some circles about its sincerity, it is easy to see why the military has to finish such a force. The military, as a group along with its industrial complex — the largest in the country — is at the top of the beneficiaries of the Pakistani state. Therefore the military’s interests are directly threatened if the Pakistani state is endangered. Using jihadists for proxy wars was another matter but when its own interests are at stake, the military is not going to be a bystander. Therefore the military action against the Taliban is very real and most probably will succeed, though it may take some time.

Despite the crusade against the Taliban and some other extremist groups, it seems that the military is trying to hold on to its own core ideology that has evolved during the last 60 years. The key components of this core ideology comprise an anti-India obsession and the use of religion as the state ideology. Both are linked: Muslim identity is deemed essential to fight Hindu India and vice versa. An anti-India religious identity has been made so pivotal that to fight the Taliban, the military has to dub them as Indian agents. This may be partially true, but everyone knows who created and trained the Taliban.

In this backdrop, the danger is that despite finishing the Taliban, the core conservative ideology may survive and keep suffocating the country. Such an ideology will not allow the economy to grow in many new areas in which Pakistan has a lot of potential. Tourism is one such sector, but it needs an open society where everyone is welcome.

Beyond Jaisalmer, in the remote part of the desert, small businesses run by Muslims and others have established entertainment resorts. The resorts offer a nightly stay in comfortable huts and tents along with entertainment programmes in the evening. Such resorts have provided hundreds of jobs to the local artists and common people. This has become an economic bonanza for the desert people. But it is possible only because of the openness of the Indian state. This is the reason that Western tourists flock to Rajasthan and other Indian states resulting in mammoth growth of hotel and other related industries.

Tourism is just one of the industries that can only prosper in an open atmosphere. As a matter of fact, industrial growth as a whole requires a religiously neutral setup.

The writer can be reached at manzurejaz@yahoo.com

Text Source: Courtesy Wichaar.com Title Pic: Courtesy: http://gordonbrentingram.ca/

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Tourism in Pakistan: A French doctor takes 6,000-Mile ride

The “Foxy Shahzadi”, or Beetle Princess, is the most distinctive car from Lahore to Lyons. Its body is covered in a psychedelic array of flowers, waterfalls and the faces of famous Pakistanis. The idea by Dr. Vincent Loos behind this 6,000-mile trip is to promote the “soft side” of Pakistan. “We want to show the world it’s not just about terrorism,” says Loos. Travelling by Foxy, as Beetles are affectionately known in Pakistan, Loos is paying homage to a local motoring cult. Dozens of well-maintained Beetles ply the streets. (Mine, in a cool grey, is Betsy, a proud 1967 model.)Photograph: Tanveer Shahzad/Dawn newspaper

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FROM PAKISTAN TO PARIS, BY VW BEETLE

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by Declan Walsh

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Note for WoP readers: In spite of terrorism there are still many rays of hope for tourism in Pakistan. One of the kind now comes from a French doctor who got the novel idea of projecting a soft image of Pakistan. A foxy named Shahzadi (the princess) is the car which is on road again: Dr. Vincent Loos of the “Doctors without Frontiers” was in Pakistan for the last 3 years. He describes his VW beetle ride from Islamabad to Paris and his sojourn in Lahore in following words:-

IQBAL: THE POET OF THE EAST

I was in Lahore on 9^th of November 2009, the 132^nd birth anniversary of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), the poet-philosopher who is ranked among the greatest literary and philosophical figures of the 20th century. Iqbal belongs to the illustrious line of poet-philosophers exemplified by Rumi, Hafiz, Jami and Khayyam in the Islamic tradition, and Milton, and Goethe in the European tradition. From all of these, however, he differs in one important respect. As a Western-educated Indian Muslim he was equally conversant with the philosophies of the East and the West.

Carrying a portrait of the Qaid, Allama Iqbal and the message “Maañ ki Dua, Jannat ki Hawa” proudly comes the “princess” to Lahore].

In the words of Hermann Hesse, the great German writer, he “belongs to three domains of the spirit or intellect, the sources of his tremendous work: the worlds of India, of Islam, and of Western thought.” As an eloquent writer and speaker, who was of academic distinction and equally at home with Urdu, Persian, Arabic and English, he well qualified to interpret the East to the West and vice versa. This is exemplified by one of his early books of Persian poetry, Payam-i Mashriq (Message of the East: 1923), subtitled: In reply to the German Philosopher, Goethe.

Thus it is that although Iqbal addresses his message first and foremost to the Muslims of the world, and particularly to his compatriots, he speaks to all of mankind. His distinguished Hindu fellow- poet Rabindranath Tagore, said on hearing of Iqbal’s death: “India, whose place in the world is too narrow, can ill afford to miss a poet whose poetry had such universal value.” Iqbal wrote his incomparably beautiful and moving poetry in both Urdu and Persian, and much of it is known by heart by millions of people in Pakistan, India, Iran and elsewhere.

His philosophical writings in prose are mostly in English, the foremost of which is entitled: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), one of the truly outstanding books on the subject ever published, Iqbal Academy UK wrote at its website. There can be no better introduction of Iqbal than his poetry. Some of the Persian poems of Iqbal are the most sublime pieces of Persian poetry. In his mathnawi, Pas chibayad kard ay Aqwam-e- Sharq, he addresses himself to the Eastern nations and it indicates that his keen eyes had an all-inclusive view of the entire Muslim world.

Iqbal greatly identified with the Iranian nation — and one of his famous poems is dedicated to the people of Iran which begins with the following verse:

I am burning like a tulip’s lamp on your path, O youth of Iran, I swear by my own life and yours.

And he says:

The man is coming who shall break the chains of the slaves, I have seen him through the cracks in the walls of your prison.

—

Well, Dr. Vincent should still be on his way to Paris. He has already described his foxy journey from Pakistan to Iran, Turkey and then finally when he enters Europe on way to his homeland, I am pretty sure we will have more updates from him till he reaches Lyons.

Back home in Pakistan we witness a rapid decline in our tourism activity, so is the hotel and hospitality business which bears the maximum brunt of this decline. All sorts of catering and lodging, be they the road side stalls or five star hotels, small rental rooms or elite guest houses, all segments are having a strong pull on their resources. Owners of different tourism related businesses in the country feel that it will be a long long time till the industry can get back to normal. People are scared, they say and are reluctant to come to Pakistan.

But thanks to people like John Bradley, Bernadette Speet and now Dr. Vincent Loos who love this country and its potential for tourism; they visit this war ravaged land taking all risks we Pakistanis are used to take in these testing times. (John was already here in Lahore and we put up an interview in our August 2008 issue. Another of this series from Bernadette Speet, a Dutch lady cyclist will be put up on these pages sometime during next month).

And now the news item that appeared in daily Dawn, Karachi and some other local and foreign newspapers. This one is courtesy Guardian of London, UK.

Note: You can also follow Loos’s trip on artonwheelstour.canalblog.com [Nayyar]

—

Low-key is good in Islamabad these days, where the threat of Taliban suicide bombings has filled Pakistan‘s capital with checkposts, blast walls and a queasy air of anxiety. But one proudly conspicuous car rolled through the streets last week – a 25-year-old Volkswagen Beetle, painted in an explosion of trippy colours. At the wheel was a defiant doctor, Vincent Loos, headed for Paris.

“My dream was to return by road,” says the 39-year-old Frenchman, who has just finished three years’ work at a local hospital. Doctors without borders indeed – or perhaps doctors without sense. Only six months ago his ride was a dust-smeared wreck, collapsed at the bottom of an Islamabad street waiting for a final trip to the scrapyard. Loos, an intensive care specialist, restored the car to full health, then hired an artist to paint in the local style known as “truck art”.

Now the “Foxy Shahzadi”, or Beetle Princess, is the most distinctive car from Lahore to Lyons. The body is covered in a psychedelic array of flowers, waterfalls and the faces of famous Pakistanis. The idea behind the 6,000-mile trip is to promote the “soft side” of Pakistan. “We want to show the world it’s not just about terrorism,” says Loos.

Travelling by Foxy, as Beetles are affectionately known in Pakistan, Loos is paying homage to a local motoring cult. Dozens of well-maintained Beetles ply the streets. (Mine, in a cool grey, is Betsy, a proud 1967 model.)

The Beetle came to Pakistan in the 1950s with army officers and bureaucrats returning from postings abroad. The appeal has endured – Mubashir Hasan, a finance minister from the 1970s, still drives his around Lahore. Romano Karim of Islamabad’s VW club estimates about 500 “Foxies” travel Pakistan’s roads. “Cute, quirky, cheap spare parts – it’s the ideal car,” he says.

The French doctor’s Foxy should reach Paris sometime this week. His team is equipped with an ample stock of spare parts and a line of Urdu poetry inscribed on the bonnet: “Every mother’s prayer is a breeze from paradise.”

—

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Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults. 

We at Wonders of Pakistan use copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

Anarkali: Fact or fiction?

by Shahid Husain

It is now believed that Anarkali was in her forties or older when she was suspected of having an affair with the heir apparent, Prince Salim, who was then in the thirtieth year of his life and father to at least three sons from numerous wives. Salim’s father, the otherwise enlightened Emperor Akbar, found out and ordered Anarkali to be buried alive.

Why? Because she was Akbar’s concubine too, and the mother of 27-year-old Danial (Salim’s youngest brother) — at least according to the British traveller William Finch, who visited Lahore in 1608, three years after Prince Salim ascended the throne as Emperor Jahangir. “The King (Jahangir), in token of his love, commands a sumptuous tomb to be built of stone in the midst of a four-square garden richly walled, with a gate and diverse rooms over it,” wrote William Finch. His travelogue survived, along with accounts by fellow travellers and later historians. So did the tomb itself.

Finch probably didn’t make up the story by himself, because the basic incident is corroborated by other sources, too. However, he almost certainly messed up some details, because there are two discrepancies in his account. Firstly, Akbar was not in Lahore in 1599, the year when Anarkali is supposed to have been executed. Secondly, the court historian had already recorded several years ago that Danial’s mother had died a natural death. The honorifics bestowed upon her should indicate that she didn’t fall from grace. Could it be that Finch’s imagination was tainted with preconceived notions of that East as the land of arbitrary punishments, forbidden love and weird feelings all incomprehensible to a foreigner? There seems to be some interplay between fact and fiction here, and this is how semi-historical legends come into being. Historical evidence in such cases calls for a careful evaluation.

How come it is commonly thought that there is no historical evidence whatsoever for the Anarkali incident? This is a valid question. Ironically, the historical side of this incident got eclipsed in the 1920s due to a mistake of dramatist Imtiaz Ali Taj, who was at that time a student in Government College Lahore and a participant in the activities of the college dramatic club. He had seen the tomb of Anarkali (not very far from his college), but by his own confession never looked into a book of history containing references to this incident — which should mean that he didn’t get hold of the standard English translation of the Akbarnama and certain other primary sources. It is not a cardinal sin for a playwright to be ignorant of history, and Taj was more honest than judgmental in his preface where he stated that as far as he knew, the story had no foundation in history and that he didn’t have a clue about its historical sources. That the preface to a stage play overshadowed the primary sources of history is a sad comment on a society where intellectualism is usually left in the hands of pseudo-intellectuals.

The playwright’s imagination transformed this bizarre tale into a story of youthful love. The stage play Anarkali, which was first printed in the 1920s and reprinted a decade afterwards with some revisions, gave birth to the legend that culminated many films later in the unforgettable Mughal-i-Azam (recently re-released in a full-colour version). Back in the 1920s and ‘30s, Taj’s play raised a hue and cry about historical inaccuracies but was saved by a lukewarm felicitation from Allama Iqbal (an old friend of the playwright’s father Mumtaz Ali) and a ferociously witty essay by the playwright’s senior college friend, Patras Bukhari.

Taj deprives the story of its Mughal complexity and interjects elements of a college boy’s fantasy. In this drama, a young prince takes fancy to a girl far below his rank, and the girl’s jealous friend starts blackmailing the prince with nothing more than a threat to inform his father. One can understand that such blackmails could be a harrowing thought for college boys (and one shouldn’t be surprised if Taj originally found the plot for his drama in the common room gossip at his college), but a Mughal prince could certainly not have to worry about threats from a slave girl.

The Akbarnama, the official court history of Akbar, records an incident where Akbar became angry with Salim for some reason and sent a noble to admonish him. Salim, however, complained that the noble spoke too harshly and Akbar ordered the tongue of the noble to be cut off, disregarding the fact that the unlucky man was acting on the orders of Akbar himself. If such could be the fate of a high-ranking noble caught in crossfire between the king and the prince, then imagine a slave girl.

Between the play of Taj and its cinematic offshoots, we achieved a glorious oversimplification of our history. Akbar and Salim, who each had at least 20 wives and over a thousand concubines in recorded history, become strictly monogamous in these modern-day fantasies (Taj came from the family that pioneered feminism in the Muslim society of Northern India). Anarkali, as portrayed in the play named after her, is a concoction of the girl next door, a virtuous housemaid and some kindhearted nautch girl from Lahore ’s red light area. The crown prince behaves unmistakably like a college student confused about defining his personal problems against the ambivalence that was in the air of South Asian cities like Lahore during and after the First World War.

Taj himself never flaunted his script as an outstanding achievement — in his preface to the second edition he makes an uncanny remark to the effect that he feels ashamed of his product when he looks at the plays written in other languages, but proud when he compares it to what exists in Urdu. The plot itself is such stuff as bad films are made of, and indeed the two earlier movies by the same title, while trying to follow Taj closely, make unbearable viewing today despite their irresistible soundtracks. Who can remain untouched by such remarkable songs as Yeh Zindagi ussi ki hai, by Lata or Sada hoon apne pyar ki by Noor Jahan, but then who can suffer the old-timer Sudheer trying to act out a wimp.

A third treatment of the Anarkali legend comes down to us in the 1962 film Mughal-i-Azam. Completely breaking away from Imtiaz Ali Taj, the makers of the film used the Anarkali incident to serve a well-defined political agenda. By projecting Akbar as an example of a Muslim king who didn’t subscribe to the two-nation theory, they apparently hoped to lure the ruling majority of modern-day India into taking a more sympathetic view of Muslim history. This agenda also moderates the subtext. If Akbar is identified with the spirit of unification in India and Salim is a hasty but well-meaning entity who endeavours to break away, then the conflict between them mirrors the inherent political tension dominating the region, especially around the time when the film was first conceived in the late 1940s.

In terms of pure drama, the film evokes a powerful intrigue about contradicting passions between larger-than- life characters. A believable palace intrigue by a conniving vamp replaces the blackmail plot of the earlier films. A mild flavour of Mughal brutality is introduced where, in the course of the story, both Salim and Akbar attempt arbitrary executions — although in the tradition of the Indian cinema the victims are saved by chance. Salim’s intended victim is the jealous vamp, who survives when Salim’s dagger misses her. Akbar’s intended victim is none other than Anarkali, whom Akbar secretly leads out of her grave because he is honour-bound by an earlier promise to her mother. Such generosity would be very unbecoming, if not congenitally impossible, of the historical Akbar, but it is consistent with the character in the movie, gels with the rest of the plot as well as with the political agenda and therefore comes out well in the theatre.

The contemporary William Finch didn’t mention any effort on part of Salim to save Anarkali’s life. Any such thing would have been not only unlikely but also highly inappropriate on Salim’s part, given his background. Taking up arms against father is no way for a son to prove his love for a woman in the feudal patriarchy where these characters were coming from. It would be dishonour, and worse than death, for a woman to be known as the cause of combat between father and son. However, these values would not appeal to the young men and women in a civilized world, and hence in Mughal-i-Azam, Salim wages a full-scale war against Akbar in order to save the girl. The ensuing battle has no roots in reality but originates from the need to absolve the guilty male conscience. Of course, Anarkali eventually offers her own life to save her man who doesn’t even know about this bargain, hence making it more convenient for him to have a clear conscience. At the level of subtext, the war in the film represents the larger than life conflicts in the modern Indian society.

The dramatic achievement of Mughal-i-Azam is that it brings out the major confrontations from within the characters themselves. However, the priorities all belong to the male cast and the only woman who has a mind of her own is the vamp. Anarkali, the heroine, doesn’t have a life of her own, she is confirmed as inferior to the vamp in wit and literary refinement, and at no point gives us reason to suspect that her intelligence matches that of her lover. Her crowning grace is an extraordinary moral courage to stand by her man even at the risk of her own life. In fact, risking her life seems to be her usual mode of existence. She is the perfect toy — a female robot intricately programmed to please her man, and she comes with an in-built self-destruct menu in case things get out of hand for the user.

Here is the ultimate male fantasy, then. The mature woman from the harem of Akbar, who risked death for a fling with a younger man almost the same age as her grown up son, is eventually transformed into a nubile young girl. Her moral eccentricities are removed; her daftness stays though she must place it at the disposal of her man.

Credits:Text: wichaar.com Photo:Umer Farooq Kalson

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Folk Tales of Pakistan: Sohni Mahiwal

Sohni, “the beautiful” with her pitcher, as visualized by a  painter

 

• It’s dark and the river is in flood

• There is water all around me

• How am I going to meet Mahiwal?

• If I keep going, I will surely drown

• And if I turn back

• I would be going back on my promise

• And letting Mahiwal down

I beg you (O pitcher!), with folded hands,
Help me meet my Mahiwal
You always did it, please do it tonight, too

·

I WISH, I TOO, WERE BACKED IN THE FIRE OF LOVE

·

by Mast Qalandar

·

Pakistan, like every other culture, has its share of folklore. In fact, a very generous share — particularly of the love tales

Folklore is a mixture of beliefs, facts and fiction. The stories are told and retold by successive generations, embellished by poets, sung and celebrated by common folks and enacted and filmed by entertainment industry. Over time, the facts and fiction get so interwoven that often it becomes difficult to separate one from the other.

It is always a poet, though, that immortalizes a love story. But a poet chooses to sing a particular story, and not the other, because of its inherent beauty and poignancy. While the Persian poet, Nizami, introduced Layla-Majnun to the world, Shakespeare immortalized Romeo and Juliet. Waris Shah cried a river over Heer and made her a household name in Pakistan and Northern India, and Sohni and Mahiwal first captured the imagination of Fazal Shah and, through his poetry, got embedded into popular imagination.

I chose the story of Sohni and Mahiwal for this post because I find it so touching, so tragic, and so real. Even though Sohni and Mahiwal lived, loved and died, relatively recently there is no one consistent account of their story. However, there is an unmistakable common thread that runs through the different versions.

Sifting through different accounts and glossing over some, here is, briefly, what I could gather of this beautiful and enduring story:

Sometime during the late Mughal period, there lived in a town on the banks of the Chenab, or one of its branches, a potter (kumhar) named Tulla. (The town is identified either as present day Gujrat or one of the nearby towns.) Tulla was a master craftsman and his earthenware was bought and sold throughout Northern India and even exported to Central Asia. To the potter and his wife was born a daughter. She was such a beautiful child that they named her Sohni, meaning beautiful in Punjabi.

Sohni spent her childhood playing and observing things in her father’s workshop. She watched clay kneaded and molded on the wheel into different shaped pots and pitchers, dried in the sun, and then fired and baked. Sohni grew up not only into a beautiful, young woman but also an accomplished artist who made floral designs on the pots and pitchers that came off her father’s wheel.

Sohni’s town was located on the trading route between Delhi and Central Asia, and trading caravans often made a stopover here. One such caravan that stopped here included a young, handsome trader from Bukhara, named Izzat Baig. While checking out the merchandise in town, Izzat Baig came upon Tulla’s workshop where he spotted Sohni sitting in a corner of the workshop painting floral designs on the pots. Izzat Baig was taken by Sohni’s rustic beauty and charm and couldn’t take his eyes off her. In order to linger at the workshop, he started purchasing random pieces of pottery. He returned the next day and made some more purchases at Tulla’s shop. His purchases were a pretext to be around Sohni for as long as he could. This became Izzat Baig’s routine until he had squandered most of his money.

When the time came for his caravan to leave, Izzat Baig found it impossible to leave Sohni’s town. He told his companions to leave, and that he would follow later. He took up permanent residence in the town and would visit Sohni at her father’s shop on one pretext or the other. Sohni also began to feel the heat of Izzat Baig’s love and gradually began to melt. The two started meeting secretly.

Izzat Baig soon ran out of money and started taking up odd jobs with different people, including Sohni’s father. One such job was that of grazing people’s cattle — mainly buffaloes. Because of his newfound occupation people started calling him Mahiwal, a short variation of Majhan-wala or the buffalo-man. That name stayed with him for the rest of his life — and thereafter.

Sohni and Mahiwal’s clandestine meetings soon became the talk of the town. When Sohni’s father came to know about the affair he hurriedly arranged Sohni’s marriage with one of her cousins, also a potter, and, ignoring Sohni’s protests and entreaties, bundled her off to her new home in a village somewhere on the other side of the river.

Mahiwal was devastated. He left town and became a wanderer, searching for Sohni’s whereabouts. Eventually, he found her house and managed to meet her in the guise of a beggar and gave her his new address — a hut across the river. Sohni’s husband, meanwhile, discovering that he could not win Sohni’s heart no matter what he did to please her, started spending more time away from home on business trips. Taking advantage of her husband’s absence, Sohni started meeting Mahiwal regularly. She would swim across the river at night with the help of a large water pitcher (gharra), a common swimming aid in the villages even today. They would spend most of the night together in Mahiwal’s hut and Sohni would swim back home before the crack of dawn. On reaching her side of the river, she would hide the pitcher in a bush to be used for her next trip the following night.

One day, Sohni’s sister-in-law (her husband’s sister) came visiting. Suspecting something unusual about Sohni’s nocturnal movements, she started spying on her. She followed Sohni one night, and saw her take out the pitcher from the bush, wade into the river and swim across. She reported the matter to her mother (Sohni’s mother-in-law). Both of them, rather than informing Sohni’s husband, decided to get rid of Sohni. This, they believed, was the only way to save their family’s honor. The sister-in-law quietly took out Sohni’s pitcher from the bush and replaced it with sun-dried, unbaked pitcher.

As usual, Sohni set out at night for her meeting with Mahiwal, picked the pitcher from the bush, as she always did, and entered the river. It was a stormy night. The river was in high flood. Sohni was soon engulfed in water. She discovered, to her horror, that the pitcher had begun to dissolve and disintegrate.

What shall she do now? Different thoughts rushed through Sohni’s mind. Abandon the trip? Or continue trying to swim without the help of a pitcher — and drown? Her inner struggle at this point is best expressed in a saraiki song made memorable by Pathanay Khan in his inimitable voice: Sohni gharray nu aakhdi aj mainu yaar mila gharrya

Roughly translated and paraphrased the song runs as follows:

Sohni (addressing the pitcher):

It’s dark and the river is in flood
There is water all around me
How am I going to meet Mahiwal?

If I keep going, I will surely drown
And if I turn back
I would be going back on my promise
And letting Mahiwal down

I beg you (O pitcher!), with folded hands,
Help me meet my Mahiwal
You always did it, please do it tonight, too

(The pitcher replies):

I wish I, too, were baked in the fire of love, like you are
But I am not. I apologize; I cannot help

Hearing Sohni’s cries, Mahiwal, from the other side, jumped into the river to save her. He barely managed to reach her. As the story goes, their bodies were washed ashore, and were found the next day, lying next to each other.

With their death, Sohni and Mahiwal entered into the world of legends and lore. And, in their death the sinners became saints.

—

The writer Mast Qalandar describes himself as a dabbler in everything – history, culture, education, poetry, armchair politics and, when sufficiently provoked, religion. He has lived mostly in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar and also in several nooks and corners of Pakistan. Currently he divides his time between Islamabad and New York. The story recounted here is one of the four popular tragic romances of the Sindh, and Punjab. Sohni lived in Punjab (now Pakistan) followed by Heer Ranjha, Mirza Sahiba and Sassi Punnun. The story is one of the most prominent examples of medieval poetic legends in thePunjabi, Seraiki and Sindhi languages.

Sourcce, Image

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Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers. Constraints include comments judged to be in violation of WoP Comments Policy.We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.

 We at Wonders of Pakistan use copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

Arundhati Roy – On Human Costs of India’s Economic Growth, Kashmir & Other Issues

Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India’s Economic Growth, the View of Obama from New Delhi, and Escalating US Attacks in Af-Pak

Note for WoP readers: In March ‘09 issue (here and here) of WoP we brought to you a detailed essay on 26/11 attacks in Mumbai by Arundhati Roy, India‘s most independent writer who has won the Booker Prize for her novel, The God of Small Things, and in 2002, was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Roy is also a well known activist for social and economic justice.

In our current issue, we bring now courtesy ‘Democracy now’ an interview from this world renowned figure of literature. While reading the transcribed text, however, often you may note a repetition which might seem disturbing but in audiovisual sessions, such repetitions are indeed necessary. Since I am reproducing the transcribed text done by ‘Democracy Now’ editorial staff in verbatim, therefore, every thing has been put up as was asked and replied in this session. [Nayyar]

To listen to original radio interview follow the link to Democracy now at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/28/author_arundhati_roy_on_conflicts_and

We’re joined from the Indian capital of New Delhi by the Booker Prize-winning novelist, political essayist and global justice activist Arundhati Roy. Her books include the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things and her latest essay collection, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. We speak to Roy about India’s conflict with Maoist rebels, the occupation of Kashmir, ongoing Indian-Pakistani tensions, Obama’s war in “Af-Pak,” and more

Guest:

Arundhati Roy, world-renowned Indian author and global justice activist. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997. Since then she has written numerous essays on war, climate change and the dangers of free market development in India. Her new book, published in September this year, by Haymarket Books, is called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. But first an adapted introduction to the book from Tomdispatch.com.

Under the caption, Is Democracy Melting? writes Tom:

So you, as a citizen, want to run for a seat in the House of Representatives? Well, you may be too late. Back in 1990, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website of the Center for Responsive Politics, the average cost of a winning campaign for the House was $407,556. Pocket change for your average citizen. But that was so twentieth century. The average cost for winning a House seat in 2008: almost $1.4 million. Keep in mind, as well, that most of those House seats don’t change hands, because in the American democratic system of the twenty-first century, incumbents basically don’t lose, they retire or die.

In 2008, 403 incumbents ran for seats in the House and 380 of them won. Just to run a losing race last year would have cost you, on average, $492,928, almost $100,000 more than it cost to win in 1990.  As for becoming a Senator? Not in your wildest dreams, unless you have some really good pals in pharmaceuticals and health care ($236,022,031 in lobbying paid out in 2008), insurance ($153,694,224), or oil and gas ($131,978,521). A winning senatorial seat came in at a nifty $8,531,267 and a losing seat at $4,130,078 in 2008. In other words, you don’t have a hope in hell of being a loser in the American Congressional system, and what does that make you?

Of course, if you’re a young, red-blooded American, you may have set your sights a little higher. So you want to be president? In that case, just to be safe for 2012, you probably should consider raising somewhere in the range of one billion dollars. After all, the 2008 campaign cost Barack Obama’s team approximately $730 million and the price of a place at the table just keeps going up. Of course, it helps to know the right people. Last year, the total lobbying bill, including money that went out for electoral campaigns and for lobbying Congress and federal agencies, came to $3.3 billion and almost 9 months into 2009, another $1.63 billion has already gone out without an election in sight.

Let’s face it. At the national level, this is what American democracy comes down to today, and this is what George W. Bush & Co. were so infernally proud to export by force of arms to Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why we need to think about the questions that Arundhati Roy — to my mind, a heroic figure in a rather unheroic age — raises about democracy globally in an essay adapted from the introduction to her latest book. That book, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, has just been published (with one essay included that originally appeared at TomDispatch). Let’s face it, she’s just one of those authors — I count Eduardo Galeano as another — who must be read. Need I say more? Tom

A M Y  G O O D  M A N: We turn to a woman the New York Times calls India’s most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence, Arundhati Roy, world-renowned Indian author and global justice activist. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997. She has a new book; it’s called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. An adapted introduction to the book is posted at tomdispatch.com, called “What Have We Done to Democracy?” Arundhati Roy joins us now from New Delhi, India, on the country’s biggest national holiday of the year.

Arundhati, we welcome you to Democracy Now! And as you listen to this report from the streets of G-20 by our producer Steve Martinez, talk about globalization and what has happened to democracy.

A R U N D H A T I  R O Y: Well, that’s a huge subject, Amy. And I think my book—in my book, I discuss it in some detail in terms of what’s happening to India. But as we know now, because of the way the global economy is linked, countries are not—you know, the political systems in countries are also linked, so democracies are linked to dictatorships and military occupations and so on. We know that. We know that some of the main military occupations in the world today are actually administered by democracies: Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir.

But what I think is beginning to be very clear now is that we see now that democracy is sort of fused into the free market, or to the idea of the free market. And so, its imagination has been limited to the idea of profit. And democracy, a few years ago, maybe, you know, even twenty-five years ago, was something that, let’s say, a country like America feared, which was why democracies were being toppled all over the place, like in Chile and so on. But now wars are being waged to restore—to place democracy, because democracy serves the free market, and each of the institutions in democracy, like you look at India, you know, whether it’s the Supreme—whether it’s the courts or whether it’s the media or whether it’s all the other institutions of democracy, they’ve been sort of hollowed out, and just their shells have been replaced, and we play out this charade. And it’s much more complicated for people to understand what’s going on, because there’s so much shadow play.

But really we are facing a crisis. And that’s what I ask. You know, is there life after democracy? And what kind of life will it be? Because democracy has been hollowed out and made meaningless. And when I say “democracy,” I’m not talking about the ideal. You know, I’m not saying that countries that live in dictatorships and under military occupation should not fight for democracy, because the early years of democracy are important and heady. And then we see a strange metastasis taking over.

A M Y  G O O D M A N: We’re talking to Arundhati Roy. She’s joining us from New Delhi, India, the world-renowned author, global justice activist. Her book The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, well known all over the world. Now she has written a new book. Today we will talk about it for the first time in the United States in a national broadcast, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. We’ll be back with her for the rest of the hour in a minute.

[break]

A M Y   G O O D M A N: We continue with Arundhati Roy, speaking to us from New Delhi, India, talking about India, war and globalization. I’m here with co-host Anjali Kamat. Anjali?

A N J A L I  K A M A T: The Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers met in New York Sunday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting but failed to agree on a timetable for negotiations. Talks continue to be stalled by the fallout of the November 2008 attack on Mumbai that killed 163 people. India blames Pakistani militants for the attack and has emphasized the need for Pakistan to prosecute those responsible. The Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna told reporters he raised these concerns with his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi.

S. M .  K R I S H N A: As you are aware, we do have serious and continuing concerns about terrorist and extremist groups in Pakistan, which are—which are a national security risk for us and for our people. Foreign Minister Qureshi conveyed to me the seriousness of his government in bringing to book, through their legal process, those responsible for the terrorist outrage in Mumbai ten months ago.

A N J A L I  K A M A T: Meanwhile, inside India, the focus has shifted to a different adversary. The stage is set for a major domestic military offensive against an armed group that the Indian prime minister has repeatedly called the country’s, quote, “gravest internal security threat.”

Operation Green Hunt will reportedly send between 75,000 and 100,000 troops to areas seen as Maoist strongholds in central and eastern India. In June, India labeled the Naxalite group, the Communist Party of India—Maoist—a terrorist organization, and earlier this month India’s home minister came to the United States to share counterterror strategies.

The Indian government blames the deaths of nearly 600 people this year on Maoist violence and claims that Maoist rebels are active in twenty out of the twenty-eight states in the country. The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh outlined the threat to a conference of state police chiefs earlier this month.

P R I M E M I N I S T E R  M A N M O H A N  S I N G H: In many ways, the left-wing extremism poses perhaps the gravest internal security threat our country faces. We have discussed this in the last five years. And I would like to state, frankly, that we have not achieved as much success as we would have liked in containing this menace.

A M Y  G O O D M A N: Well, to help make sense of what’s unfolding inside the world’s largest democracy, we continue with the Booker Prize award-winning novelist, political essayist, global justice activist Arundhati Roy. She won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize in 2002. She’s the author of a number of collection of essays and the novel The God of Small Things. Her latest book is called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.

Can you make sense, Arundhati, of what is happening inside India for an audience around the world?

A R U N D H A T I  R O Y: Well, let me just pick up on what Anjali was talking about just now, about the assault that’s planned on the so-called Maoists in central India. You know, when September 11 happened, I think some of us had already said that a time would come when poverty would be sort of collapsed and converge into terrorism. And this is exactly what’s happened. The poorest people in this country today are being called terrorists.

And what you have is a huge swath of forest in eastern and central India, spreading from West Bengal through the states of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh. And in these forests live indigenous people. And also in these forests are the biggest deposits of bauxite and iron ore and so on, which huge multinational companies now want to get their hands on. So there’s an MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] on every mountain, on every forest and river in this area.

And about in 2005, let’s say, in central India, the day after the MoU was signed with the biggest sort of corporation in India, Tatas, the government also announced the formation of the Salwa Judum, which is a sort of people’s militia, which is armed and is meant to fight the Maoists in the forest. But the thing is, all this, the Salwa Judum as well as the Maoists, they’re all indigenous people.

And in, let’s say, Chhattisgarh, something like the Salwa Judum has been a very cruel militia, you know, burning villages, raping women, burning food crops. I was there recently. Something like 640 villages have been burned. Out of the 350,000, first about 50,000 people moved into roadside police camps, from where this militia was raised by the government.

And the rest are simply missing. You know, some are living in cities, you know, eking out a living. Others are just hiding in the forest, coming out, trying to sow their crops, and yet getting, you know, those crops burnt down, their villages burnt down. So there is a sort of civil war raging.

And now, I remember traveling in Orissa a few years ago, when there were not any Maoists, but there were huge sort of mining companies coming in to mine the bauxite. And yet, they kept—all the newspapers kept saying the Maoists are here, the Maoists are here, because it was a way of allowing the government to do a kind of military-style repression. Of course, now they’re openly saying that they want to call out the paramilitary. (Same strategy seems to have been adopted in Balochistan province of Pakistan where there are mineral deposits as well as gas and oil reserves, Ed.).

And if you look at—for example, if you look at the trajectory of somebody like Chidambaram, who’s India’s home minister, he—you know, he’s a lawyer from Harvard. He was the lawyer for Enron, which pulled off the biggest scam in the history of—corporate scam in the history of India. We’re still suffering from that deal. After that, he was on the board of governors of what is today the biggest mining corporation in the world, called Vedanta, which is mining in Orissa. The day he became finance minister, he resigned from Vedanta. When he was the finance minister, in an interview he said that he would like 85 percent of India to live in cities, which means moving something like 500 million people. That’s the kind of vision that he has.

And now he’s the home minister, calling out the paramilitary, calling out the police, and really forcibly trying to move people out of their lands and homes. And anyone who resisted, whether they’re a Maoist or not a Maoist, are being labeled Maoist. People are being picked up, tortured. There are some laws that have been passed which should not exist in any democracy, laws which make somebody like me saying what I’m saying now to you is a criminal offense, for which I could just be jailed. Even sort of thinking an anti-government thought has become illegal. And we’re talking about, you know, as you said, 75,000 to 100,000 security personnel going to war against people who, since independence, which was more than sixty years ago, have no schools, no hospitals, no running water, nothing. And now, now they’re being—now they’re being killed or imprisoned or just criminalized. You know, it’s like if you’re not in the Salwa Judum camp, then you’re a Maoist, and we can kill you. And they are openly celebrating the Sri Lanka solution to terrorism, to terrorism.

The Pot Calls The Kettle Black

According to reports, a few years back the British arms firm EADS paid over 2 billion pound sterling of secret contract kickbacks to high Saudi officials, one of whom was a close associate of the Bush family.

Eric Margolis

Not so long ago, Hamid Karzai, the US-installed president of Afghanistan, used to be hailed by Washington and the US media as a noble democrat and statesman.

But as things in Afghanistan went from bad to worse, and Taliban gained strength and popularity, Washington directed its ire at Karzai, who had almost no power of his own and was forced to rely on the US, the Tajik-Uzbek-Communist Northern Alliance, and assorted drug-dealing warlords.

After some of Karzai’s henchmen became over-zealous in rigging Afghanistan’s last already rigged election, Washington exploded in anger and frustration, blaming its wayward puppet for the growing mess in the Hindu Kush.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was sent to Kabul last fortnight like an angry super-nanny to give Hamid Karzai a sound spanking for being such a corrupt bad boy.

Just as Karzai’s second inauguration ceremony was getting under way, Mrs. Clinton commanded Karzai reduce rampant corruption in Afghanistan so Washington could justify sending more troops. Karzai had recently suffered similar public humiliation from visiting US Senator, John Kerry.

Mrs. Clinton, we recall, was the former first lady of Arkansas, a state whose high ethics and good governance stands as a model of probity to third world miscreants.

Perhaps she brought election monitors from Chicago, where the dead regularly rise to vote for the Democratic Party machine. From Ohio, where funny voting machines allegedly helped George Bush win re-election, or from those bastions of Athenian democracy, New Jersey and Florida. They have so much to teach wayward Afghans about clean politics.

Like nearly all third world nations, Afghanistan is corrupt. But compared to his western critics and accusers, poor Hamid Karzai is a mere beggar in the Kabul bazaar.

For example, take Britain’s indignant prime minister, Gordon Brown, who imperiously commanded Karzai to root out corruption.

PM Brown knows about corruption. It was Imperial Britain, after all, that gave rise to the delightful African term for bribery, `the white man’s handshake.’

Three years ago, Exchequer Chancellor Brown and boss Tony Blair quashed Britain’s biggest ever criminal investigation by its Serious Fraud Office into accusation the British arms firm EADS paid over 2 billion pound sterling of secret contract kickbacks to high Saudi officials, one of whom was a close associate of the Bush family. The European Union even rebuked Britain for its `tolerance of corruption.’

France’s president, Nicholas Sarkozy, also blasted Karzai over corruption. Sarko’s rebuke came right after a major judicial investigation of three thieving but useful African dictators who had stashed away billions of swag in France was quashed – at Sarkozy’s orders, claimed the opposition.

One of the parties, Teodorin Obiang, son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, recently spent $35 million on a Malibu, California mansion and $33 million on a private jet.   Another, Gabon’s late Omar Bongo, is said to be France’s single largest property owner. Wags in Paris call the chic Avenue Victor Hugo, the `Avenue Bongo.’

Next, Transparency International, a respected NGO monitoring state corruption, published its annual honesty survey.   It was an eye-opener.

New Zealand was named the world’s least corrupt nation. Canada was eighth most honest, and least corrupt nation in the Western Hemisphere. Hats off to Canada.

Embarrassingly, the United States ranked a miserable 19th. The report noted, `the US Congress is most affected by corruption.’ Mark Twains described Congress as, `America’s native criminal class.’

Western Europe and Japan were way ahead of the US. America’s ally Israel ranked a sorry 32nd. Other US Mideast allies had awful scores, but the Gulf emirates Qatar and the UAE, came in way ahead of the rest of the Mideast in honesty– including Israel.

An important Los Angeles Times investigation reports hundreds of millions of dollars, a full third of CIA’s foreign budget, has been going in payoffs to Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI.

American `black’ programs deliver more tens of millions to Pakistan’s ruling People’s Party and leader, Asif Zardari, known to all Pakistanis as `Mr. 10%,’ and other senior Pakistani politicians, generals, and media figures.

Critics are now calling Pakistan, `Rent-a-Stan.’

Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, has been dogged for decades by serious corruption charges. He denies them and claims they are all politically motivated.  Benazir Bhutto told me her husband was the victim of political persecution.

Adding to the pressure on Zardari, his own legal officials released a shocking list of 8,000 politicians and officials, many from his own People’s Party, who had benefited from an amnesty for past corruption and other serious crimes. Included on the list were Zardari and his strongman, Interior Minister Rehman Malik.

The amnesty was engineered by the US and former dictator Pervez Musharraf in an effort to fashion joint rule between Benazir Bhutto and the then discredited Musharraf.   Most of the pardoned criminals hailed from Sindh Province, the home of Zardari’s People’s Party.

The US has given Pakistan more than $15 billion over the past eight years to support the Afghan War, not counting huge   bounties for capturing or killing suspected enemies, and `black’ payments.

In Iraq, some estimates say $10 billion delivered to that nation’s US-installed regime are missing. American `contractors’ and large corporations in Iraq are accused of gargantuan fraud. Pallets of US $100 dollar bills vanished into thin air. And on it goes.

Ironically, across the Muslim world, the same western powers scourging Karzai are seen as major sources of corruption, keeping repressive regime in power by buying dictators, generals, and politicians.

Many Afghans support Taliban because it is seen as an enemy of corruption and an enforcer of justice, however harsh.  In Palestine and Lebanon, Hamas and Hezbullah enjoy wide popularity and respect for the very same reason.

The Transparency report finds, to no surprise, that places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Nigeria are the world’s most corrupt nations. But it must be remembered that citizens of these benighted nations pay no income taxes. So each government official levies his own little personal taxes. What we call corruption is inevitable and normal.

President Karzai will of course establish an anti-corruption commission. Some big turbans will be prosecuted to please Washington. But this charade will fool no one but US voters.

Most Afghans see Karzai as a US puppet. But maybe the exasperated puppet will turn on his string-pullers, open real peace talks with Taliban, and demand the USA and its allies pull their occupation army out of Afghanistan.  That, of course, could very well be a life-ending gamble for Karzai.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009, Photo: http://www.soxfirst.com/50226711/bae_bribery_fallout.php

Pakistani readers of this blog are invited to read an Urdu column by Nazir Leghari, a PPP loyalist who has aptly described the plight of the people of Pakistan under the presidency of Mr. Asif Ali Zardari.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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OBAMA DOES A LOUIS XVI

Barack is good at propagandizing for an attack on Iran, and he has dutifully expanded the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but a peacenik he is not. Says writer Paul Joseph Watson.

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Eric S. Margolis

Americans would not have won independence from Great Britain without generous military and financial support from France and its monarch, Louis XVI.

But France spent itself into bankruptcy supporting the American colonists. France’s financial ruin was a major cause of the ensuing French Revolution that cost the unfortunate Louis his head.

Wars are hugely expensive. Money plays as great a role in them as soldiers and weapons.

US Congressman David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has come up with a novel idea:  Americans should pay for the wars they are currently waging.

Obey’s proposal, which is backed by other congressmen of both parties, sounds startling – until one realizes that both the Bush and Obama administrations have never properly financed their foreign wars by forcing Americans to pay for them through higher taxes.

Instead, Washington has deferred the $1 trillion to date costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by simply adding them to the national debt, and paying interest on the balance owing. President Lyndon conducted similar financial slight of hand with the Vietnam War, inflicting serious injury and instability on the US economy.

Few Americans feel the real financial costs of these wars. Future generations will get stuck with the bill.

But this kind of deceptive national accounting is becoming increasingly difficult in the face of President Barack Obama’s $1.4 trillion deficit this year, and his imminent decision to send some 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan.

Each American soldier in Afghanistan costs at least $1 million per annum, according to the US Congress Research Service. Thirty thousand more US troops will thus cost $30 billion in additional war costs on top of the $200 billion annual cost of garrisoning Iraq and Afghanistan – now the second most expensive wars in US history.

Much of this money will have to be borrowed from China and Japan.

Obey and his allies want to impose a graduated surtax on Americans of 1-5%, depending on their income level, to fund the actual costs of what are now Obama’s wars. Otherwise, warns Obey, the huge cost of sending keeping up to 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan will `destroy the other things we are trying to do in our economy.’ Chief among which is health care.

In a clear choice between guns or butter, Obey estimates ten years of war in Afghanistan will cost the same $900 million as providing a comprehensive health plan for all Americans.

Unfortunately, chances of a war surtax passing Congress are nil. While the Afghan and Iraq wars are increasingly unpopular among Americans, a tax increase at a time of over 10% unemployment will ignite the same kind of furious reaction that met President Obama’s proposed national health plan, and endanger Democrats facing midterm elections.

As the Obama administration appears set to escalate the war in Afghanistan, the real costs of Afghanistan and Iraq are still being concealed from the public and Congress.

A billion here; a billion there; suddenly, we are taking about real money.

The $200 billion annual cost for both wars is only a part of the growing expenses faced by Washington.

The annual bill for US intelligence, which employs over 200,000 people, has doubled to $75 billion, in large part to support foreign wars and operations against anti-US Muslim groups.

Costs of occupying Afghanistan rose to $300 billion this year, and will increase sharply next year. Operations in Iraq will total $684 billion in 2009. President Barack Obama’s plans to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by 2011 may encounter serious delays and snags as resistance resumes and the underground Ba’ath Party become more active.

Washington spends $25 billion funding foreign armies, the bulk of which goes to the Mideast, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.   Aid to Islamabad will rise to $15 billion over the next five years, including secret `black’ payments.

The US supports 168,000 `contractors’ in Iraq, many of them gunmen. CIA runs 74,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan.  The new fortified, 104-acre US Embassy in Baghdad will cost $700 million; the new embassy in Islamabad, $800 million. Islamic militants call them `crusader castles.’

Add to these costs the expense of maintaining fleets in the Gulf and Indian Ocean, and military bases in the Gulf and Diego Garcia to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; hugely expensive military airlift; $400 per gallon fuel delivered to US forces in Afghanistan; and, of course, financial inducements to many smaller nations to send handfuls of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. Also an important part of the annual $93 billion in veterans’ benefits.

Thus the real costs of Afghanistan and Iraq are much higher than $200 billion annually. Yet President Obama, heedless of such costs, appears determined to expand the Afghan War. It seems clear that Obama has fallen increasingly under the influence of America’s powerful military-industrial-financial complex and neoconservative war party.  In short, the same calculus of forces that guided the Bush administration.

Even America’s mighty economy cannot for long support waging wars across the Muslim world. Unaffordable wars have been the ruin of many an empire and the American Raj seems headed in the same direction as Noble Peace Prize winner Barack Obama plunges ever deeper into the Afghan quagmire.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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The Real Conspirators

There are so many conspiracy theories for what is happening to us that at times it becomes difficult to keep track of them. USA, West, Israel, and India most commonly get referred to in those conspiracy theories. The conspiracy syndrome is not just limited to uneducated, very often educated and elite are also vocal champions of such theories.

Ahsan Iqbal

Conspiracy theories – Escapist’s Heaven

If we analyze the psychology of conspiracy theory syndrome, it can be safely said that it provides a safe refuge for finding an explanation for all the negative events and outcomes, which we don’t like and about which we are not willing to do anything in order to bring a positive change.

These theories are escapists’ heaven providing comfort, catharses, and solace to the pain of mind and soul. What they conceal and block is the path of introspection. The believers in conspiracy theories find all the faults and responsibilities with conspirators, who are villains, and view themselves as victims of treachery, who are innocent, hence throwing all the blame on the conspirators for their sufferings.

The first cardinal principle of diplomacy is that each nation is entitled to act in its own best national interest. Therefore, to expect that any other nation will watch some other nation’s interest is contrary to this basic axiom of international politics. The nations may cooperate but they do so to the extent that their national interests converge. Therefore, what is a national interest for one nation may well look like a conspiracy to another nation or society beyond its shared interest. In Pakistan, thanks to a long history of dictatorships, we have developed a strong culture for conspiracy theories, as lack of information and disempowerment, become key drivers of this culture. We seldom try to analyze the root causes of our problems.

After 62 years, if we are still mired in poverty, under development, and political instability with little sovereignty, who has afflicted these wounds on our soul and body? Before we fix responsibility, we should draw wisdom from history of rise and fall of nations and societies.

The literature on this subject throws many explanations for development and decline of nations. Some of these factors are unique while others are general in nature. The law of history is that sovereignty, prosperity, and development have neither been bestowed upon nations in charity nor in aid. Dignity, prosperity and progress are earned and manufactured by the nations through the work of the following seven factors; i) leadership and vision, ii) knowledge and skills, iii) justice and peace, iv) governance and merit, v) enterprise and hard work, vi) integrity and trust vii) team work and synergy.

No matter what circumstances nations may face or resources they are gifted with, it is the work of the above seven factors that determines their prospects and rendezvous with destiny.

Where Pakistan is today and where it will be tomorrow, it only reflects the choices we make as a nation. The difference between a successful person or a nation and an unsuccessful person or nation is in its belief and outlook. Successful individuals and groups take responsibility for what they are while unsuccessful individuals and groups try to blame circumstances and others for their failures. The public discourse in any society plays very important role. It helps in understanding its agenda and also drives its future. Therefore, it should be of paramount concern to any society how the agenda of its public discourse is shaped.

If we believe that all our problems are due to some sinister conspiracies being hatched against us by others then the logical implication of this thinking is that others are being unfair and devilish with us. This argument shuts the lens for introspection and objectivity in analyzing the past, present, and future. In order to understand why we are where we are, it is important that we analyze our situation in the light of the seven above mentioned factors of progress and development.

Vision and Leadership

The first factor is vision and leadership. Both vision and leadership are part and parcel of each other. Leadership without vision is a journey in circles and vision without leadership remains an abstract reality. All small and big success stories are born out of a compelling and a shared vision and a committed and a competent leadership. Vision is what determines what an organization or society is going to try to accomplish. Without a clear vision any society will be pulled in many different directions and nullify its effort.

The story of Pakistan’s creation is itself a proof of this principle. It was the vision of freedom, democracy, prosperity, and social justice in accordance with the principles of Islam that galvanized the Muslims of South Asia to launch Pakistan movement, and the dynamic and competent leadership of the Quaid-e-Azam made this dream come true. Unfortunately, after early death of Mr. Jinnah, strong civil and military bureaucracy hijacked the state as political institutions were weak and in early formative stage. This led to blurring of our founding vision, giving rise to parochial thinking and politics.

Our military dictators ruled for over thirty three years playing havoc with rule of law and institutional governance in the country, which led to weakening to federation and unequal distribution of wealth across regions and groups further denting the founding vision of state. Our judges granted legitimacy to the dictators, our bureaucrats served them, and there were always willing politicians to join them while the people accepted it as their destiny. Was this some conspiracy against us or our collective failure to resist most glaring deviations from our founding vision?

Knowledge and Skills

The second factor is knowledge and skills. Societies, which understood the importance of human resources and invested in developing strong intellectual and human capital, have always performed well. Development is the process by which human beings become aware of opportunities and challenges, formulate responses, make decisions, and initiate organized actions. This process follows the sequence from knowledge to inspiration to action. Human beings acquire knowledge, they become aware of opportunities and challenges. When that knowledge matures, they acquire a motivation or inspiration to translate that knowledge into action. No matter how great the opportunity or how dire the necessity, without that knowledge no adaptive response occurs. In earlier stages of development, land and minerals constituted the principle resources for development. Knowledge was rudimentary. Human beings were valued mainly for their physical labour. Today, information and knowledge have become increasingly important inputs to the development process. All economic activities are becoming more knowledge-intensive. In this context, where do we stand, we are rated at 141st position in the Human Development Index out of 172 nations and sixth out of seven South Asian countries. Our education system from primary to tertiary levels is in a mess with multi-class system with lowest budgetary allocations in the world. Has any country ever stopped us from providing our children best education and from producing quality scientific research in our universities? If almost half of our population is illiterate and we have worst form of class based education apartheid with purposeless education without offering the marketable skills then who is to be blamed?

Justice and Peace

The third factor is justice and peace. Martin Luther King said, True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice. Justice and peace are preconditions for an enabling environment that can attract investments and talent for the development of any society. Absence of justice means no rule of law and without rule of law societies become jungles in which might is right, leading to chaos and anarchy. Under such circumstances, society fails to produce stability and order as necessary conditions of progress. If we are mired with inequality, injustice, and strife today whose fault is it? In all those countries, which we call as conspirators, sitting heads of governments can be put to trial but we are finding it difficult to initiate legal proceedings against former president General Musharraf.

Governance and Merit

The fourth factor is governance and merit. Governance can be described as the process and capability of a society to set and achieve its goals. Good governance has 8 major characteristics. It is participatory, merit based, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive and follows the rule of law. It assures that corruption is minimized, and the voices of the most vulnerable in society are heard in decision-making. It is also responsive to the present and future needs of society. While good governance helps build confidence of local and foreign investors in the economy merit recognition guarantees best standards of performance. According to World Governance Indicators Pakistan’s ranking is 162 out of 179 countries even behind Afghanistan. If we have failed to establish good governance in our country, according to the above criteria, is it not entirely our own doing and choice? There is no evidence of any foreign hand involved in enforcing poor governance on us.

Enterprise and Hard work

The fifth factor is enterprise and hard work. Strong and stable societies are built on successful economies and no economy can prosper without entrepreneurial spirit and hard work. There is enough empirical evidence to suggest that societies that exhibit higher levels of entrepreneurial effort are more innovative and successful. Likewise, there is no substitute for hard work. In Quran, Allah says, Man will only get for which he strives. Has any foreign country ever asked us not to harness entrepreneurial skills of our people and to not work harder in our offices, educational institutions, factories, and professions?

Integrity and Trust

The sixth factor is integrity and trust. Development has two dimensions, hardware and software. While physical infrastructure lays the foundation it is ethics and values infrastructure of any society, shaping social attitudes and social capital, which determines its level of success.

Following Fukuyama, this social capital can be defined as the set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permits them to cooperate with one another. Obviously the level of trust capital is key for fostering cooperation and comfort. Trust is developed among members of group through mutual respect, honest transactions and tolerance. How much integrity and honesty is there in our work and dealings? Has any conspiring nation ever asked us to indulge in adulteration, be unfair in measures, and not be honest in our dealings and transactions?

Teamwork and Synergy

The seventh factor is teamwork and synergy. As Henry Ford said, coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success. High performing organizations and societies are good at transforming individual excellence of their members into collective competence in a way that combined effect is greater than sum of individual effort, which means there is harmony and positive synergy in the system. It is said that in the new economy the basic unit of work is team rather an individual, which means group dynamics of nations have become critical for their success. How good are we in collaborative modes? Has any foreign power forced us to be divided on parochial lines and not to work together as a united nation and communities?

If we look at the above seven factors, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to find out that we alone are responsible for our failures. No one is conspiring against us as we are guilty of conspiring against ourselves. Instead of blaming others we need to focus on our shortcomings and take responsibility for our destiny. This is the only way forward to become a dignified, a strong, and a prosperous nation.

The writer is an MNA and former minister of education.

Source: wichaar.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Lessons and Challenges for Pakistan

Hassan Abbas

Pakistan has faced enormous challenges in 2009. It has been confronted with the growing menace of terrorism — ranging from militancy in the Swat valley to insurgency in parts of the Pashtun-dominated Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. Dozens of suicide bombers have targeted urban centres of Pakistan, killing civilians and security forces alike. Police and law enforcement have lost hundreds of their personnel in this battle this year alone. The fact that even Pakistan army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi and the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) offices in Lahore and Peshawar were also attacked indicate that terrorists consider them their arch enemy. Somehow, the significance of these developments has not been fully recognised in India.

Pakistani public opinion about the identity of militants and terrorists has transformed into a great degree. The earlier denial and misperception that ‘outsiders are doing all this’ has given way to acceptance of the fact that country’s internal dynamics are largely responsible for the rise of violence. There is also an understanding that religious extremism has played a gruesome role in all of this. People increasingly acknowledge that domestic and foreign policy mistakes of 1980s and 1990s are coming back to haunt the country.

Many Pakistanis, however, also believe that India leaves no stone unturned in making things more difficult for Pakistan whenever it can. Alleged Indian interference in Baluchistan for instance is often referred to in this regard. The matter was even mentioned in the joint statement issued after the Prime Ministers of the two countries met at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in August 2009. More recently, Pakistani security forces operating in South Waziristan have also hinted that they have found some evidence of Indian support to militants in FATA. Whether true or false, the real issue is the widespread Pakistani belief that India is involved in destabilising Pakistan.

Pakistan’s response to Mumbai attacks must be understood in this context. The initial Pakistani public reaction to the attacks was one of shock and alarm. Pakistanis became distressed, however, when the electronic media started showing clips from live Indian television channel transmissions declaring that Pakistan was the culprit. Once the facts of the case started getting disseminated, especially about the identity of Mohammad Ajmal ‘Kasab’ — the lone surviving member of the terrorist group that created havoc in Mumbai — there was initially disbelief in Pakistan. Pakistan’s various media channels wasted no time in sending their investigative teams to Faridkot, ‘Kasab’s’ hometown in Punjab. To Pakistani journalists’ credit, they confirmed ‘Kasab’s’ nationality and exposed his links to Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, the Pakistani militant group known for its activities in the Kashmir region. Despite delay and reluctance on the part of Pakistan’s government to acknowledge this connection, the independent media fulfilled its professional responsibility without fear or favour.

Consequently, Pakistan deputed some of its finest law enforcement officials in the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to spearhead the investigations. Despite concerns about LET’s old connections with security agencies of the country, the political leadership acted quite swiftly. The arrest of important suspects like Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai terror attacks, would not have been possible without the help from country’s intelligence services, too. The clamp-down on the Jamaat-ud Dawa, the charity cum proselytising group associated with LET, all across the country was no small job as well. Since then, Pakistan and India have exchanged many dossiers containing their respective investigations and questions for the other side. India legitimately expects quick progress in this case and it is in Pakistan’s interest to proceed in the matter in a transparent fashion. It is worth remembering, though, that any law enforcement organisation’s evidence-gathering exercise, as per standard legal guidelines, takes time. Indian law enforcement has also taken many months to investigate and prepare the case for prosecution in Indian courts.

Pakistan has an ideal opportunity to show to India that it is fully committed to defeat terrorism in all its shapes and forms. Political rhetoric for public consumption on the subject, both in India and Pakistan, should not be allowed to disrupt honest and professional investigations of the Mumbai attacks. All other disputes between the two countries should be dealt with and tackled separately from this case and no quid pro quo arrangement or expectation should come in the way of giving an exemplary punishment to those responsible for this crime against humanity. This includes all who are to be found involved in planning, facilitating, or orchestrating the atrocity. My opinion on this is not a minority view in Pakistan. Pakistani writers, journalists and politicians have said this repeatedly. President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, and prominent political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain are all on record supporting such an outcome. A renowned Pakistani lawyer and writer Babar Sattar very aptly says: “It is not the Pakistani identity of Ajmal ‘Kasab’ that makes Pakistan guilty of having a hand in Mumbai. But it is the misguided inclination to hide unflattering truth born of false pride and misperceived patriotism that could make us complicit.”

Pakistan is learning the hard way that religious extremists and militants of all stripes are bad for the country. There is no such thing as ‘Good Taliban’ or ‘Bad Taliban.’ Those who have distorted religious ideals and are involved in brainwashing many youngsters in Pakistan are looking to expand their space in the country. Lack of education and economic distress strengthen their role in society further. Pakistan is currently taking unprecedented military action against these forces, but it will not be able to defeat these forces of darkness comprehensively without regional stability and help from India. A good beginning in this direction can be more interaction and cooperation between the civilian law enforcement agencies of the two countries.

No one can deny that both countries have produced fanatics of one kind or the other and insurgencies of various intensities are brewing in various parts of both the countries. The longer the South Asian peace process remains frozen, more extensive will be the damaging impact of extremism and mutual mistrust.

Dr. Hassan Abbas is a Bernard Schwartz fellow at the Asia Society and senior adviser at the Belfer Centre, Harvard Kennedy School. He is also the author of Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism.

Source: Text: wichaar.com Photo: changinguppakistan

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The NWFP: Total war, partial leaders

Chief of the Awami National Party (ANP), Asfandyar Wali Khan with President Asif Ali Zardari (L), in Islamabad.

“Rough waters are the true test of leadership. In calm seas every ship has a good captain.” (Swedish proverb)

Dr. Mohammad Taqi

In Firdausi’s Shahnameh, King Gustasap sets up his son Asfandyar to fight against, lose to and be slain at the hands of mighty Rustam.

Khan Abdul Wali Khan never wished anything of the sort for his son Asfandyar Wali Khan, the current president of the ruling Awami National Party (ANP) in the NWFP, Pakistan.

In fact, till he himself was active in politics, the elder Khan kept Asfandyar Khan away from the party affairs. Perhaps he was acutely aware that unlike Asfandyar of the Persian mythology, his elder son had not bathed in the pool of invincibility and at best would be lackluster at the helm.

Fast-forward to 2005 and an internal coup within the ANP toppled Begum Nasim Wali Khan, the party’s de facto leader from 1990 till then, and thrust the burden of total – de facto and de jure -leadership upon Asfandyar Khan.

With Wali Khan bedridden, Begum Wali being widely unpopular and the political waters calm, he appeared to be a good captain at the time. We were in, though, for a rude awakening come 2008.

Ever since Asfandyar Khan took the now infamous helicopter flight, after narrowly escaping a suicide bombing, he has been an utter disappointment to the people of NWFP.

Never known for his political acumen, personal charisma, intellect, oratory or inspirational qualities, his only qualification for the job was his lineage.

He claimed – and opted - to carry the mantle of his father and grandfather, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who had faced bullets and batons in almost a century-long struggle, without once appearing unnerved.

Whether they were attempts at his life by the Pashtun Maoists, firing at his Liaquat Bagh rally in Z A Bhutto era or the 1988 bombing of Badshah Khan’s funeral procession in Jalalabad, the late Wali Khan inspired confidence in the party’s rank and file.

Among the Pashtun leaders on the Afghan side of the Durand Line, the late Presidents Daud Khan and Dr. Muhammad Najibullah stand out for leading from the front.

Dr. Najibullah surprised his friends and foes alike when he rushed to lead the Jalalabad garrison after it came under a massive attack by the Mujahidin in March 1989. He prevailed! In 1990, he took to the airwaves within a couple of hours after the attempted coup was launched against him, knowing full well that the Kabul television station was under attack by the air force rebels led by Gen. Shahnawaz Tanai.

In the western hemisphere, Winston Churchill remains the gold standard of leadership style and conduct in wartime, against which the present-day leaders are measured. The civil and military leaders emulate his wartime speeches and frequent visits to the frontline till date.

General Ashfaq Kiyani’s visits to the civilian population in Mingora and Peshawar, and multiple morale-boosting speeches to the soldiers in South Waziristan and the policemen in Peshawar, are in same honorable tradition.

ANP itself has glorious examples from its rank and file, who have been sacrificing lives and property consistently for the last two years. And among leaders, from an aging Afzal Khan Lala to the martyred young lawmaker Alamzeb Khan, the party has displayed courage, which is unmatched in the recent Pashtun-Afghan history.

Bashir Ahmed Bilour and Mian Iftikhar Hussain - the provincial Senior and Information Ministers, respectively – rushing to console and condole with the people of the NWFP are the brave new face of the ANP. But even they cannot answer the question being asked by people of the NWFP: where is the president of the ANP?

The party stalwarts, workers and common people alike, are baffled by this lack of leadership on his part. The party ministers are struggling to answer the media questions regarding his whereabouts. His clandestine visits to Europe and then to Malaysia at the height of the Swat crisis were a huge embarrassment to the party.

There have been rumors about his health, within and outside the party circles. Party leaders themselves have complained of having difficulty reaching him even by phone.

Chief Minister of the NWFP, Amir Haider Hoti, apparently is putting up an effort but is clearly out of his league in dealing with the existential threat to the province. Statements by him and several of his lawmakers pointing the finger of blame in five different directions suggest that they are completely clueless.

Of course no one wants Asfandyar Khan to risk his life in a reckless manner and there is no doubt that a suicide attack can shatter anyone’s resolve and potentially cause post-traumatic stress disorder. But at a juncture when the people of the NWFP, especially Peshawar, are facing such bombings daily, he is not just anyone.

He is the leader for whom the party constitution was changed to allow him a third term as the president. The people of the NWFP gave Asfandyar Khan an electoral support that even his father, uncle, grandfather and granduncle did not get in any election since 1937.

People of the NWFP and the tribal areas need to hear from him directly. Whether it is through periodic high security personal visits or frequent televised addresses, he must guide the masses. Absentee leadership is sending wrong message to both his friends and foes. In a war where symbols of strength like GHQ are being targeted a perception of weakness shatters the morale of the nation.

If health or psychological issues are at play here then he needs to come clean and take the party cadres into confidence. In western democracies it is a common practice for an important leader to make his health records public and retiring from a public office on account of health reasons is perfectly understandable.

Inaction and silence is not an option for Asfandyar Khan at a time when people need him the most. He must use this relative lull before the next barrage of bombings and must come forth to:

- Clearly pinpoint and identify the enemy. If a foreign hand is at play, he must expose it

- Spell-out the war goals for his party and the people at large

- Support the civilian and military forces

- Spearhead the reconstruction effort in the areas where the enemy has been routed

Only a dignified and sophisticated reach-out effort on Asfandyar Khan’s part – with a judicious use of electronic and print media – can clear the fog of confusion engulfing the province.

The NWFP and indeed Pakistan is at total war. Total war demands a leader’s total commitment; there is no room for partial leaders in such times. Asfandyar Khan’s only options now are to lead from the front or make room for his replacement.

Author teaches and practices medicine at the University of Florida and can be reached at mazdaki@me.com

Source: Text: wichaar.com Photo: GETTY IMAGES

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The “Muslim” Problem: Clarity in the Age of the Anti-Muslim Industrial Complex

Killer… Muslim… Terrorist… Islamic…

Preacher Moss

A while ago, a good friend and fellow thinker Sakiya Sandifer asked me to compose an article on the recent and tragic shootings at Fort Hood military base. As I watched the news, the words “killer,” “Muslim,” “terrorist,” and “Islamic” seemed to roll across the screen as it made its way in the context of conversation being offered by the journalist. It appeared, in a continuing trend that the media was looking to take the actions of alleged “Muslim” gunman’s act of terror, and immediately try to connect his actions to a fundamentalist, violent, radical, but extremely profitable and marketable form of Islam. I affectionately call this making doe on the “Muslim Problem.” For those who are new to this…Welcome to the world of the Anti-Muslim Industrial Complex (AMI Complex) my friends…or maybe not.

If you want to know what the “Muslim Problem” is, I would submit to you as Example A, an interview conducted by CNN morning host, John Roberts in the time following the shooting. Roberts interviewed someone who worked with alleged shooter, Nidal Hassan. What was puzzling about the interview was the interviewee, who hadn’t seen, nor spoken to Hassan in nearly five years.

Roberts, oblivious to the fact the interviewee really had not contact matter, made the situation worse by asking the interviewer if he had noticed the shooter exhibiting radical Islamic characteristics or behavior.

The invited guest simply answered the question by informing Roberts that he had no contact with Hassan in five years, and wouldn’t know what he was up to. I’m glad this guy got it because Roberts was caught up in the AMI Complex. The problem here extends well beyond the Roberts’ desperation to make this a terror plot of radical Islamists, and attaching Islam as the culprit in this situation. It’s more important than that. This attitude illuminates the present strategy in place that makes it not only acceptable to do this, but is sadly, mainstream in its nature. It is indicative of the Anti-Muslim Industrial Complex, AMI Complex for short.

Now, if you want to know what this term means, you have to invest in the history of business, and the business of profiling for profit. Stop here if you can’t think beyond the mid 70’s, because you’ll learn as great as America, and its citizens are, on the extreme that’s how dysfunctional and sinister they can be as well. Scratch that. It’s all the dynamic of human existence. The AMI Complex is easy to understand if you can reason that any Industrial complex, despite what you put in front of it, uses innovation to create profitability for the market, and its shareholders.

The Anti-Muslim Industrial Complex is no different except that the geniuses of this market have innovated on fear, intolerance, intimidation, and distortion of information to grow their market. They then maintain their market by presenting their “systemic solutions” to deal with the problems. They are a culture of experts on the problems they produce. Let’s face it hating on the Muslim image has become big business, just as terrorists have found they can make money, and expand their opportunities by attacking the U.S. Government.  These terrorists would include Al-Qaeda, the KKK, militias, and those who religious folks that actively pray for President Obama’s assassination, and the uninformed chants of the uninsured, “I don’t want healthcare reform, because I don’t want government interfering with my Medicare.” I give it up to the Healthcare Industrial Complex, that’s a classic. The hits just keep coming.

For a minute, let’s examine Nidal Hasssan. There are those who would say that his religion made him commit these horrible acts. Here’s a question. What ever happened to the idea of “crazy?” It’s still happens you know. Check this out. Nidal Hassan chose a career in mental heath industry. Anyone knows that the Mental Un-Health Industrial Complex has a market, and mission that makes mental illness profitable. Prozac anyone? Could it be possible that Hassan made the short walk from physician to client? I say, “yep.”

Would anyone be surprised, or care, if a drug dealer somehow wound up hooked on drugs? How about a doctor that prescribes medication, Oh My God! getting hooked on prescription drugs. Did you ever hear about the white kids that hung with black kids, and wound up calling themselves niggers? Let’s stop choking the “proverbial chicken” here and fess up.

The level of defense contracts, celebrity punditry, profiling, and other actionable negatives against the Muslim Image, and the concept of Islam as a religion of terrorist, as opposed to submission to God, is PROFITABLE for everyone…that’s not Muslim. IF Muslims ever find a way to get in on the AMI Complex, and make money off their negative image, we’d be able to build more mosques than there are McDonalds. Seriously, the AMI Complex is profitable. It’s comparable in a way that the industries that produce hair products for black people are profitable…for everyone who isn’t black, and doesn’t have black hair.

Let’s get back to facts and reason. The recently executed John Allen Muhammad never got full value in the AMI Complex, because he wasn’t the right kind of Muslim. He was Muslim but by all accounts wanted to kill his wife, not attack the United States. He was of no value to the Anti-Muslim Industrial Complex. According to market segmentation, he was a just a crazy nigger that wound up going into the “Prison Industrial Complex.”

And now for my dismount…

As far as Nidal Hassan’s situation, he was a troubled individual. His peers in the military knew it, documented it, but didn’t fully address it as a mental health issue. Being real, isn’t mental health their business? I mean psychiatrists have to have psychiatrists to keep each other in check; so I’m not sure what went astray in this situation. The cost of looking the other way, or possibly just the Muslim way, cost the lives and well-being of innocent people, and their families.

I’m Muslim, but I ain’t crazy. If I were crazy, wouldn’t it make sense to address my mental state versus my religious beliefs? Oops forgot. I’m not the right kind of Muslim (Black) so I don’t have significant value to the AMI Complex Folks either.

This idea of a profitable market for treating Muslims, and Islam in a negative way should not be new to anyone that understands, and has a faint grasp of historical context. The tendencies of any selfish and non-humane Industrial Complex, regardless of the noun you put out in front of it, are dangerous. Let me refresh your memory.

Drug laws of the mid-eighties gave rise to mass arrests and mandatory sentencing to insure deliverance of inmates for the “Prison Industrial Complex.

Manipulators of education initiatives conspired to guarantee a poorly trained workforce feeding the “Cheap Labor Industrial Complex.”

The constant and healthy doses of fear of invasion, and more terrorist acts helped fuel the billions of dollars to feed the “Military Industrial Complex.”

The devaluing of Africans as objects rather than human beings, or creations of God gave the permissible oppression to grow the “Slavery Industrial Complex.”

In closing, I grieve at the senseless loss of life, and health attributed to Hassan’s actions. After due process, if he’s guilty he should be punished, and will be. The one thing we can’t lose is our sensibility to look comprehensively at the situations in front of us. To do this we would acquiesce that inside all of we to harbor a/an (place your type of complex here) Industrial Complex.

The truth my brothers and sisters, when you really think about it…It’s not that COMPLEX at all.  Oh and hey, if you every one think I’m losing my mind, you’re free to join me.

P.S.- I wonder what new complex will claim Tiger Woods’ latest situation. Let’s just wait and see hmmm.

Source: Mathaba.net

Editor’s note: This guest post is by Preacher Moss a.k.a “Undercover Muslim”. He can be reached on Twitter & Facebook on his Facebook Page here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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The NOBEL peace prize should be “pulled” from OBOMBA

by HK

The United States is in the midst of the most serious unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, and US President Barack Obama is following George W Bush in lavishing trillions of dollars on a few big banks. American taxpayers got nothing. Now, they get the cherry in the cheesecake; Obama escalating his war in Afghanistan. A Vietnam-lite – with a tentative expiry date, July 2011, for the start of a withdrawal….See http://wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/the-obama-puppet-the-worlds-least-powerful-man/

The much-hyped Obama speech on Tuesday night at West Point – edited by the president himself up to the last minute – was a clever rehash of the white man’s burden, sketching a progressive narrative for US national security clad in the glorious robes of “the noble struggle for freedom”.

On a more pedestrian level, history does repeat itself – as farce. With Obama’s surge-lite, US plus North Atlantic Treaty Organization occupation troops in Afghanistan will reach in the first half of 2010 the level of the Soviet occupation at its peak in the first half of the 1980s. And all this formidable firepower to fight no more than 25,000 Afghan Taliban – with only 3,000 fully weaponized.

Each soldier of the new Obama surge (a word he did not pronounce in his speech except when he referred to a “civilian surge”) will cost US$1 million – though the Pentagon insists it is only half a million.

REAL MEN GO TO RIADH

Obama still says Afghanistan is a “war of necessity” - because of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Wrong. The Bush administration had planned to attack Afghanist an even before 9/11. See Get Osama! Now! Or else … August 30, 2001.

“War of necessity” is a polite remix of the same old neo-conservative “war on terror”; blame it on the “towelheads” and exploit public ignorance and fear. That’s how al-Qaeda was equated with the Taliban and how Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, according to the neo-con gang. For all his lofty rhetoric, Obama is still pulling a Bush, not making any distinction between al-Qaeda – an Arab jihadi outfit whose objective is a global caliphate – and the Taliban – indigenous Afghans who want an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan but would have no qualms in doing business with the US, as they did during the Bill Clinton years when the US badly wanted to build a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. On top of it, Obama cannot admit that the “Pak” neo-Taliban now exist because of the US occupation of “Af”.

Taking pains to distance his new policy from the Vietnam trauma, Obama stressed, “Unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan.” Wrong. If the official narrative of 9/11 holds, the hijackers were trained in Western Europe and perfected their skills in the US.

And even while he still emphasizes the drive to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda and deny it a “safe haven”, Obama is fully contradicting his own national security advisor, General James Jones, who has admitted that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda jihadis in Afghanistan.

The myth of al-Qaeda has to be exposed. How could al-Qaeda pull off 9/11 but be incapable of mounting a single significant attack inside Saudi Arabia? That’s because al-Qaeda is essentially a thinly disguised brigade of Saudi intelligence. The US wants to win “the war on terror”? Why not send special forces to Saudi Arabia instead of Afghanistan and knock the Wahhabis – the root of it all – out of  power?

Obama could at least have noticed what notorious Afghan mujahid, former Saudi protege, former Central Intelligence Agency darling and current American public enemy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, told al-Jazeera. He stressed, “The Taliban government came to an end in Afghanistan due to the wrong strategy of al-Qaeda.”This is a graphic illustration of the current, total split between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, both “Af” and “Pak”. The Afghan Taliban, starting with their historical leader, Mullah Omar, have learned from their big mistake – and are not allowing al-Qaeda Arabs to fester inside Afghanistan. Equally, the rise of neo-Talibanistan on both sides of the border does not necessarily translate into a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda jihadis are harbored by a handful of selected, paid-up tribals which the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence, if it really wanted, could pinpoint in a flash. Obama also bought in the Pentagon premise that America can re-colonize Afghanistan with counter-insurgency.

In General David “I’m always positioning myself to 2012″ Petraeus’ own counter-insurgency doctrine, the proportion of soldiers to natives must be 20 or 25 per 1,000 Afghans. Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal have now got 30,000 more. Inevitably the generals – just like in Vietnam, whether Obama likes it or not – will ask for a lot more till they get what they really want; at least 660,000 soldiers, plus all the extras. At present the US has about 70,000 troops in Afghanistan.

That would imply the reinstatement of the draft in the US. And that’s trillions of dollars more the US does not have and will have to borrow … from China.

And what would that buy in the end? The mighty Soviet red army used every single counter-insurgency trick in the book during the 1980s. They killed a million Afghans. They turned five million into refugees. They lost 15,000 soldiers. They virtually bankrupted the Soviet Union. They gave up. And they left.

WHAT ABOUT THE NEW GREAT GAME?

So why is the US still in Afghanistan? Facing the camera, as if addressing “the Afghan people”, the president said, “we have no interest in occupying your country”. But he could not possibly tell it like it really is to American prime-time TV viewers.

For corporate America, Afghanistan means nothing; it’s the fifth-poorest country in the world, tribal and definitely not a consumer society. But for US Big Oil and the Pentagon, Afghanistan has a lot of mojo.

For Big Oil, the holy grail is access to Turkmenistan natural gas from the Caspian Sea - Pipelineistan at the heart of the new great game in Eurasia, avoiding both Russia and Iran. But there’s no way to build the hugely strategic TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline – crossing Helmand province, and then Pakistan’s Balochistan province – with Afghanistan mired in chaos, thanks to the pitiful performance of the US/NATO occupation.

There’s a hand in surveying / controlling the $4 billion-a-year drug trade, directly and indirectly. Since the beginning of the US / NATO occupation, Afghanistan became a de facto narco-state, producing 92% of the world’s heroin under a bunch of transnational narco-terrorist cartels.

And there’s the full spectrum dominance Pentagon agenda - Afghanistan as part of the worldwide US empire of bases, monitoring strategic competitors China and Russia at their doorstep.

Obama simply ignored that there is an ultra-high-stakes new great game in Eurasia going on. So because of all that Obama did not say at West Point, Americans are being sold a “war of necessity” draining a trillion dollars that could be used to reduce unemployment and really help the US economy.

WE ALSO KNOW HOW TO SURGE

The Taliban will inevitably come up with their own, finely tuned, counter-surge. Even surge-less, and up against tons of Petraeus’ counter-insurgency schemes, they recently captured Nuristan province. And remember Obama’s summer surge in Helmand province? Well, Helmand is still the opium capital of the world.

In his speech, Obama tried by all means to convey the impression that the Afghan war can be controlled from Washington. It simply can’t.

For all his pledges of “partnership with Pakistan” (mentioned 21 times in the speech) Obama could not possibly admit his surge-lite will destabilize Pakistan even more. Instead, he could turn over the whole war to Pakistan.

Unlike the Obama-approved July 2011 date for the (possible) beginning of a withdrawal, subject to “conditions on the ground”, this real exit strategy would have to come up with a fixed timetable for a complete withdrawal attached. That would be the go-ahead for Islamabad to do what neither the Soviets nor the Americans could do – sit down with all the relevant tribal locals and negotiate through a series of jirgas (tribal councils).

Obama bets on what he calls “transition to Afghan responsibility”. That’s a mirage. The Pakistani intelligence establishment – which still regards Afghanistan as its “strategic depth” in the bigger picture of a conflict with India – will never allow it to happen strictly under Afghan terms. That may not be fair to Afghans, but these are the facts on the ground.

Virtually everyone in rural Afghanistan considers - correctly – that President Hamid Karzai is the occupation president. Karzai, who can barely hold on to his throne in Kabul, was imposed in December 2001 on King Zahir Shah by Bush proconsul Zalmay Khalilzad after a heated argument, and recently ratified in an American-style, blatantly stolen election. The American way is not the Afghan way. The tried-and-tested Afghan way for centuries has been the loya jirga – a grand tribal council where everyone joins, debates and a consensus is finally reached.

So the endgame in Afghanistan cannot be much different from a power-sharing coalition, with the Taliban as the strongest party. Why? One just has to examine the history of guerrilla warfare since the 19th century – or take a look back at Vietnam. The guerrillas who are the fiercest fighters against foreigners always prevail. And even with the Taliban sharing power in Kabul, Afghanistan’s powerful neighbors – Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, India – will make sure there won’t be chaos spilling over across their borders.

This is an Asian issue that has to be solved by Asians; that’s the rationale for a solution to be developed inside the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Meanwhile, there’s reality. The full spectrum dominance Pentagon gets what it wanted – for now. Call it the revenge of the generals. Who wins, apart from them? Australian armchair warrior David Kilcullen, an adviser and ghostwriter for Petraeus and McChrystal and who is a demi-god for Washington warmongers. Some light neo-cons – certainly not former vice president Dick Cheney, who’s been blasting Obama’s “weakness”. And overall, all subscribers to the Pentagon concept of the “long war”.

Two weeks before going to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama sells his new Vietnam-lite to the world out of a US military academy. George Orwell, we salute you. War is indeed peace.

See http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/12/deadly-liar-and-manipulator.html
Also See“Finish the Job”: Obama Reignites “War on Terrorism” With Massive Afghanistan Surge: …

In a speech that echoed, word for word, the now time-honored criminal 9/11/ “war on terrorism” and “security” falsehoods of the Bush-Cheney administration, Obama is sending yet another “surge” of 30,000 US troops to the slaughter.

Obama also promised, in the most bellicose fashion, to escalate the endless manufactured war against “violent extremism”, by sending American military-intelligence forces to every corner of the world where terrorists have a “foothold”.

The criminal lie of 9/11, of “America under attack”, is the eternal pretext for imperial force. …

Clear-eyed observers warned since his ascension to power years ago that Obama has been a lifelong corporate “centrist” and accomodationist who will change nothing except for the style with which destruction is delivered. In fact, the manipulative Obama and his unsavory administration (of unsavory elites) has deepened every crisis, from the world war to the rape of the world economy.

Obama has wholeheartedly presided over the massive global financial destabilization begun during Bush-Cheney, the continued militarization of the US homeland, and new waves of government-sanctioned looting on behalf of elite / Wall Street powers, disguised as health care reform and other false “reforms”.

See Obama’s War: Why is the largest military machine on the planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan

Source:

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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The Obama Puppet – The world’s least powerful man



Paul Craig Roberts

It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s.

Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so. The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can’t do anything about it.

President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.

Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.” And the mere president has to say, “Yes, Sir!”

Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can’t override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can’t afford both the “war on terror” and “socialized medicine.”

The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can’t afford it.

The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby “getting entitlements under control.”

Entitlements is a right-wing word used to cast aspersion on the few things that the government did, in the distant past, for citizens. Social Security and Medicare, for example, are denigrated as “entitlements.” The right-wing goes on endlessly about Social Security and Medicare as if they were welfare give-aways to shiftless people who refuse to look after themselves, whereas in actual fact citizens are vastly overcharged for the meager benefits with a 15% tax on their wages and salaries.

Indeed, for decades now the federal government has been funding its wars and military budgets with the surplus revenues collected by the Social Security tax on labor.

To claim, as the right-wing does, that we can’t afford the only thing in the entire budget that has consistently produced a revenue surplus indicates that the real agenda is to drive the mere citizen into the ground.

The real entitlements are never mentioned. The “defense” budget is an entitlement for the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned us 50 years ago. A person has to be crazy to believe that the United States, “the world’s only superpower,” protected by oceans on its East and West and by puppet states on its North and South, needs a “defense” budget larger than the military spending of the rest of the world combined.

The military budget is nothing but an entitlement for the military/security complex. To hide this fact, the entitlement is disguised as protection against “enemies” and passed through the Pentagon.

I say cut out the middleman and simply allocate a percentage of the federal budget to the military/security complex. This way we won’t have to concoct reasons for invading other countries and go to war in order for the military/security complex to get its entitlement. It would be a lot cheaper just to give them the money outright, and it would save a lot of lives and grief at home and abroad.

The US invasion of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with American national interests. It had to do with armaments profits and with eliminating an obstacle to Israeli territorial expansion. The cost of the war, aside from the $3 trillion, was over 4,000 dead Americans, over 30,000 wounded and maimed Americans, tens of thousands of broken American marriages and lost careers, one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and a destroyed country.

All of this was done for the profits of the military/security complex and to make paranoid Israel, armed with 200 nuclear weapons, feel “secure.”

My proposal would make the military/security complex even more wealthy as the companies would get the money without having to produce the weapons. Instead, all the money could go for multi-million dollar bonuses and dividend payouts to shareholders. No one, at home or abroad, would have to be killed, and the taxpayer would be better off.

No American national interest is served by the war in Afghanistan. As the former UK Ambassador Craig Murray disclosed, the purpose of the war is to protect Unocal’s interest in the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. The cost of the war is many times greater than Unocal’s investment in the pipeline.

The obvious solution is to buy out Unocal and give the pipeline to the Afghans as partial compensation for the destruction we have inflicted on that country and its population, and bring the troops home.

The reason my sensible solutions cannot be effected is that the lobbies think that their entitlements would not survive if they were made obvious. They think that if the American people knew that the wars were being fought to enrich the armaments and oil industries, the people would put a halt to the wars.

In actual fact, the American people have no say about what “their” government does. Polls of the public show that half or more of the American people do not support the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and do not support President Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Yet, the occupations and wars continue.

According to General Stanley McChrystal, the additional 40,000 troops are enough to stalemate the war, that is, to keep in going forever, the ideal situation for the armaments lobby.

The people want health care, but the government does not listen.

The people want jobs, but Wall Street wants higher priced stocks and forces American firms to offshore the jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.

The American people have no effect on anything. They can affect nothing. They have become irrelevant like Obama. And they will remain irrelevant as long as organized interest groups can purchase the US government.

The inability of the American democracy to produce any results that the voters want is a demonstrated fact. The total unresponsiveness of government to the people is conservatism’s contribution to American democracy. Some years ago there was an effort to put government back into the hands of the people by constraining the ability of organized interest groups to pour enormous amounts of money into political campaigns and, thus, obligate the elected official to those whose money elected him. Conservatives said that any restraints would be a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

The same “protectors” of “free speech” had no objection to the Israel Lobby’s passage of the “hate speech” bill, which has criminalized criticism of Israel’s genocidal treatment of the Palestinians and continuing theft of their lands.

In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups.

Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a “terrorist event.”

The Republicans are grooming Palin. Our first female president, following our first black president, will complete the transition to an American police state by arresting critics and protesters of Washington’s immoral foreign and domestic policies, and she will complete the destruction of America’s reputation abroad.

Russia’s Putin has already compared the US to Nazi Germany, and the Chinese premier has likened the US to an irresponsible, profligate debtor.

Increasingly the rest of the world sees the US as the sole source of all of its problems. Germany has lost the chief of its armed forces and its defense minister, because the US convinced or pressured, by hook or crook, the German government to violate its Constitution and to send troops to fight for Unocal’s interest in Afghanistan. The Germans had pretended that their troops were not really fighting, but were engaged in a “peace-keeping operation.” This more or less worked until the Germans called in an air strike that murdered 100 women and children lined up for a fuel allotment.

The British are investigating their leading criminal, former prime minister Tony Blair, and his deception of his own cabinet in order to do Bush’s bidding and provide some cover for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq. The UK investigators have been denied the ability to bring criminal charges, but the issue of war based entirely on orchestrated deception and lies is getting a hearing. It will reverberate throughout the world, and the world will note that there is no corresponding investigation in the US, the country that originated the False War.

Meanwhile, the US investment banks, which have wrecked the financial stability of many governments, including that of the US, continue to control, as they have done since the Clinton administration, US economic and financial policy. The world has suffered terribly from the Wall Street gangsters, and now looks upon America with a critical eye.

The United States no longer commands the respect it enjoyed under President Ronald Reagan or President George Herbert Walker Bush. World polls show that the US and its puppet master are regarded as the two greatest threats to peace. Washington and Israel outrank on the most dangerous list the crazy regime in North Korea.

The world is beginning to see America as a country that needs to go away. When the dollar is over-inflated by a Washington unable to pay its bills, will the world be motivated by greed and try to save us in order to save its investments, or will it say, thank God, good riddance.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, was published by Random House in March, 2008.

Text Source: Photo Source:

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Afghanistan and Pakistan: Not Just About Al Qaeda Any More

On their way out? US troops in Afghanistan Photo: AP

·

Adele Stan

·

A senior administration official explains to AlterNet why the Pakistan mission has broadened.

Listening to the president’s speech last night, you may have come away thinking that the U.S. mission in South Asia was largely about depriving al Qaeda its bases of operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Our overarching goal remains the same:  to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future,” said President Barack Obama.

This is the mission Congress authorized President George W. Bush to pursue in 2001.

Yet if you listened to the subtext of the speech, you might find that the mission has changed. In fact, you might say that the mission in Afghanistan is as much about creating stability in Pakistan — a nuclear power that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell yesterday referred to as a nearly failed state — as it is about Afghanistan. Last night, a senior administration official confirmed to AlterNet that the U.S. mission to Pakistan has broadened.

From the president’s speech:

In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over.  Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear.  America is also providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development.  We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting.  And going forward, the Pakistan people must know America will remain a strong supporter of Pakistan’s security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent, so that the great potential of its people can be unleashed.

In truth, the largest threat to the U.S. from Pakistan is not al Qaeda, or even, as the president suggested, the “cancer” of extremism spilling over the Pakistan border from Afghanistan. The real threat is Pakistan’s homegrown extremists, who have always been there, and with the shakiness of Pakistan’s democracy, have been emboldened. Bomb attacks on civilians by Pakistani Taliban and its allies in cities across Pakistan reached a fever pitch in October and early November.  Yet the attacks appear to have been fueled, in part, by U.S. military policy in the region.

Drone attacks on villages in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Provinces — attacks that appear to be part of a covert U.S. program — have enraged local Pashtun leaders. After a bomb attack in a Peshawar bazaar killed more than 100 on October 28, a Pashtun-language banner was unfurled that condemned the purchase of a local luxury hotel by the U.S. for use as a consulate by equating the U.S. government with the mercenary force that provides security for U.S. aid projects in the region. “Handing the Pearl Continental to Blackwater is a grave injustice,” the banner read, according to Assam Ahmed of the Christian Science Monitor. This leads to the trickiness of the U.S. relationship with Pakistan.

For many years, the U.S. has been held in low esteem by the Pakistani people. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the U.S. armed Pakistan to the teeth, and helped solidify the position of the despotic dictator, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Then, once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the U.S. abandoned Pakistan, its democracy in tatters.

As the U.S. has pressed the Pakistani military to pursue extremists within its borders, the blowback has fallen on the Pakistani people, as the Taliban and its allies unleashed terror on civilian populations. The Obama administration appears to be hoping to balance the cost to the Pakistani people for the war on extremists with a broader mission that includes greater economic and development assistance to Pakistan, by the U.S. and the international community.

“What we realized,” a senior administration official told AlterNet, “is that while narrow efforts to address some of the immediate security threats are critical, if we really want to achieve our overall goal, we need … to help Pakistan overcome a whole series of economic and security challenges that undermine its stability. You know, it’s overall Pakistani stability that’s in our interest.”

Another senior official cited the recent visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Pakistan as part of that broadened mission. During her visit, Clinton conducted town-hall meetings in Lahore and Islamabad, where she got an earful about the apparent U.S. role in Pakistani counter-insurgency operations. Clinton also forcefully and publicly condemned the attack on the Peshawar bazaar, which occurred during her stay in Pakistan.

Despite the skepticism Clinton faced, the official said, her visit led to a “significant uptick” in positive “perceptions of America.” In addition to such public diplomacy, said the official, “we’re working on a new assistance strategy to address Pakistan’s very significant needs in terms of energy, water and economic reform to help the Pakistani people.” The combined approach of “people-to-people” outreach, development aid should lead to “decreasing the appeal of extremists if we are able to help the Pakistani government and people with some of their major needs,” the official said.

While it may be tempting to deride the new policy as “mission creep,” it’s hard to see how the U.S. mission in Pakistan and Afghanistan could have remained static, as conditions on the ground have not, and have deteriorated largely due to the neglect of the region by the Bush administration.

The development and public diplomacy aspect of the U.S. approach to Pakistan seems wise. I remain deeply concerned, however, about unforeseen outcomes in the war against Pakistani extremists.

Source: AlterNet

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Blackwater Founder: Fatcat, Hired-Gun, Mercenary, Spook, Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy

Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater security firm (recently renamed Xe), at the company’s Virginia offices. Photograph by Nigel Parry.

ADAM CIRALSKY

Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)

In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien, has become the screenwriters’ darling. In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp.) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder. On the Fox series 24, Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince, whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for use against U.S. targets.

But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence. (Full disclosure: In the 1990s, before becoming a journalist for CBS and then NBC News, I was a C.I.A. attorney. My contract was not renewed, under contentious circumstances.)

But Prince, with a new administration in power, and foes closing in, is finally coming in from the cold. This past fall, though he infrequently grants interviews, he decided it was time to tell his side of the story—to respond to the array of accusations, to reveal exactly what he has been doing in the shadows of the U.S. government, and to present his rationale. He also hoped to convey why he’s going to walk away from it all.

To that end, he invited Vanity Fair to his training camp in North Carolina, to his Virginia offices, and to his Afghan outposts. It seemed like a propitious time to tag along.

Split Personality

Erik Prince can be a difficult man to wrap your mind around—an amalgam of contradictory caricatures. He has been branded a “Christian supremacist” who sanctions the murder of Iraqi civilians, yet he has built mosques at his overseas bases and supports a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan. He and his family have long backed conservative causes, funded right-wing political candidates, and befriended evangelicals, but he calls himself a libertarian and is a practicing Roman Catholic. Sometimes considered arrogant and reclusive—Howard Hughes without the O.C.D.—he nonetheless enters competitions that combine mountain-biking, beach running, ocean kayaking, and rappelling.

The common denominator is a relentless intensity that seems to have no Off switch. Seated in the back of a Boeing 777 en route to Afghanistan, Prince leafs throughDefense News while the film Taken beams from the in-flight entertainment system. In the movie, Liam Neeson plays a retired C.I.A. officer who mounts an aggressive rescue effort after his daughter is kidnapped in Paris. Neeson’s character warns his daughter’s captors:

If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills … skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you [don’t] let my daughter go now … I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

Prince comments, “I used that movie as a teaching tool for my girls.” (The father of seven, Prince remarried after his first wife died of cancer in 2003.) “I wanted them to understand the dangers out there. And I wanted them to know how I would respond.”

You can’t escape the impression that Prince sees himself as somehow destined, his mission anointed. It comes out even in the most personal of stories. During the flight, he tells of being in Kabul in September 2008 and receiving a two a.m. call from his wife, Joanna. Prince’s son Charlie, one year old at the time, had fallen into the family swimming pool. Charlie’s brother Christian, then 12, pulled him out of the water, purple and motionless, and successfully performed CPR. Christian and three siblings, it turns out, had recently received Red Cross certification at the Blackwater training camp.

But there are intimations of a higher power at work as the story continues. Desperate to get home, Prince scrapped one itinerary, which called for a stay-over at the Marriott in Islamabad, and found a direct flight. That night, at the time Prince would have been checking in, terrorists struck the hotel with a truck bomb, killing more than 50. Prince says simply, “Christian saved Charlie’s life and Charlie saved mine.” At times, his sense of his own place in history can border on the evangelical. When pressed about suggestions that he’s a mercenary—a term he loathes—he rattles off the names of other freelance military figures, even citing Lafayette, the colonists’ ally during the Revolutionary War.

Prince’s default mode is one of readiness. He is clenched-jawed and tightly wound. He cannot stand down. Waiting in the security line at Dulles airport just hours before, Prince had delivered a little homily: “Every time an American goes through security, I want them to pause for a moment and think, What is my government doing to inconvenience the terrorists? Rendition teams, Predator drones, assassination squads. That’s all part of it.”

Such brazenness is not lost on a listener, nor is the fact that Prince himself is quite familiar with some of these tactics. In fact Prince, like other contractors, has drawn fire for running a company that some call a “body shop”—many of its staffers having departed military or intelligence posts to take similar jobs at much higher salaries, paid mainly by Uncle Sam. And to get those jobs done—protecting, defending, and killing, if required—Prince has had to employ the services of some decorated vets as well as some ruthless types, snipers and spies among them.

Erik Prince flies coach internationally. It’s not just economical (“Why should I pay for business? Fly coach, you arrive at the same time”) but also less likely to draw undue attention. He considers himself a marked man. Prince describes the diplomats and dignitaries Blackwater protects as “Al Jazeera–worthy,” meaning that, in his view, “bin Laden and his acolytes would love to kill them in a spectacular fashion and have it broadcast on televisions worldwide.”

Stepping off the plane at Kabul’s international airport, Prince is treated as if he, too, were Al Jazeera–worthy. He is immediately shuffled into a waiting car and driven 50 yards to a second vehicle, a beat-up minivan that is native to the core: animal pelts on the dashboard, prayer card dangling from the rearview mirror. Blackwater’s special-projects team is responsible for Prince’s security in-country, and except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans. They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers. They remove Prince’s sunglasses, fit him out with body armor, and have him change into Afghan garb. Prince is issued a homing beacon that will track his movements, and a cell phone with its speed dial programmed for Blackwater’s tactical-operations center.

Continue reading Page 2, 3 & 4

See related articles posted on 9 & 16. Aug. 6 & 9. Sep. & 5.Nov. 2009 of this e-zine.

Courtesy: Therearenosunglasses and Vanityfair

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Erik Prince Quitting Blackwater to Teach High School History and Economics

Eric Prince: Founder of Blackwater (renamed XE)

Alex Seitz-Wald Think Progress

Xe (formerly Blackwater) founder and CEO Erik Prince is cutting ties with the company. A spokeswoman for the company said today that Prince will relinquish involvement in its day-to-day operations and give up some of his ownership rights. The company has been shelling out $2 million a month in legal fees to cope with a slew of federal investigations and civil lawsuits stemming from, among other incidents, the “unprovoked and unjustified” killing of 17 Iraqi civilians. Prince told Vanity Fair that after years of serving his country, “someone threw me under the bus”:

Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq. … Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. … “I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions. … But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus. … I’m an easy target.”

Prince said he is instead “going to teach high school.” “History and economics,” he said. “I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

And here now is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill on the notorious Eric Prince. The entire segment can be viewed here:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id…Visit: http://firedoglake.com (Video: Courtesy: http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/)

Source: Alternet

See related articles posted on 9 & 16. Aug. 6 & 9. Sep. 5. Nov. & 4. Dec. 2009 of this e-zine.

For related videos, go to http://allisonkilkenny.wordpress.com/

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More Arrests in America`s War on Islam

Mathaba Analyst Stephen Lendman takes a further look at Obama`s ongoing `War Against Islam` and its assault on human rights at home and abroad

by Stephen Lendman

A November 24 “hatemail” underscores the issue, titled “Muslims in America – violent clashing of cultures, basic incompatibility of Western thought and Muslim theocracy,” then quoting Denver radio talk show host Peter Boyles (know.com) saying:

“Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

Not Jews, not Christians, not Hindus, not Buddhists, or persons from any of the lesser known religions, just Muslims with no understanding that Islam teaches love, not hate; peace, not violence; charity, not selfishness; and tolerance, not terrorism; or that Islam, Christianity and Judaism have common roots.

Yet according to Pat Robertson, Monday, November 9 on his 700 Club:

“Islam is a violent – I was going to say religion – but it’s not a religion. It’s a political system. It’s a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination.”

After the Fort Hood tragedy, the American Family Association (the “family values” anti-gay, pro-life, Islamophobic group) called for a ban on Muslims in the military, saying:

“This is not Islamophobia, it is Islamo-realism. The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security.”

Given America’s war on Islam, the nation’s 6.5 million Muslims wonder if their turn is next.

It never ends, and on November 23, New York Times writer Andrea Elliott headlined, “Charges Detail Road to Terror for 20 in US,” then continued saying:

“Federal officials on Monday unsealed terrorism-related charges against men they say were key actors in a recruitment effort that led roughly 20 young Americans to join a violent insurgent group (Al-Shabaab) in Somalia with ties to Al Qaeda.” More on Al-Shabaab below.

Eight new suspects were charged in “one of the most extensive domestic terrorism investigations since” 9/11. Some have been arrested. Others remain at large, including “several believed to be still fighting” against the US-backed government and African Union paramilitary peacekeepers in Somalia. More on that as well.

On November 23, a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release headlined, “Terror Charges Unsealed in Minneapolis Against Eight Men, Justice Department Announces,” then continued saying:

Terrorism offenses were against eight defendants, charged with “providing financial support to those who traveled to Somalia to fight on behalf of al-Shabaab, a designated foreign terrorist organization; attending terrorist training camps operated by al-Shabaab; and fighting on behalf of al-Shabaab.”

Through indictments or criminal complaints, 14 so far have been charged “in connection with….the recruitment of persons from US communities to train with or fight on behalf of extremist groups in Somalia. Four….previously pleaded guilty and await sentencing.”

According to court documents, from September 2007 – October 2009, about 20 young Somali Americans left Minneapolis for Somalia to train with Al-Shabaab, and many fought with it against Ethiopian forces, “African Union troops, and the internationally-supported Transitional Federal Government (TFG).”

After “raising money” in America and working with “alleged co-conspirators in Somalia, six men went there in December 2007.” On arrival, they “allegedly stayed at safe-houses….and attended an al-Shabaab training camp (where they were instructed in) small arms, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and military-style tactics. Allegedly, (they were also) indoctrinated with anti-Ethiopian, anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Western beliefs.”

On October 29, 2008, one man, Shirwa Ahmed (known as Shirwa), “took part in one of five simultaneous suicide attacks on targets in northern Somalia. (He) drove an explosive-laden Toyota truck into an office of the Puntland Intelligence Service in Bossasso, Puntland. Other targets included a second (Puntland office), the Presidential Palace, the United Nations Development Program office and the Ethiopian Trade Mission in Hargeisa.” About 20 people were killed.

On November 23, three charging documents included:

(1) a five-count indictment charging Mahamud Said Omar with terrorism, saying he’s a Somali citizen who became a permanent US resident in 1994; that he “conspired with others to provide financial assistance as well as personnel to terrorists and foreign terrorist organizations;” and that he “allegedly visited an al-Shabaab safe-house and provided hundreds of dollars to fund the purchase of AK-47 rifles for men from Minneapolis.” Omar is in custody in the Netherlands from where his extradition is sought.

(2) a “second superseding indictment charging Ahmed Ali Omar, Khalid Abshir, Zakaria Maruf, Mohammed Hassan and Mustafa Salat with terrorism-related offenses;” in summer 2009, “these men were charged with conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim and injure people outside the United States; possessing and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence; and solicitation to commit a crime of violence;” none are in custody; all are believed to be living outside America.

(3) on October 9, 2009, “a criminal complaint was filed, charging Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax and Abdiweli Yassin Isse with conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons outside the United States;” in three interrogations, Faarax denied all charges; Faarax and Isse aren’t in custody and are believed to be living outside America.

The DOJ said four men pleaded guilty, including:

– on February 18, 2009, Kamal Said Hassan to “one count of providing material support to terrorists and one count of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization;” on August 12, 2009 to “one count of making false statements to the FBI;” Hassan is in custody awaiting sentencing;

– on April 24, 2009, Abdifatah Yusuf Isse “entered a guilty plea to one count of providing material support to terrorists;”

– on July 28, 2009, Salah Osman Ahmed “entered a guilty plea to one count of providing material support to terrorists;” both men are in custody awaiting sentencing;

– on November 2, 2009, Adarus Abdulle Ali “pleaded guilty to an information charging him with one count of perjury for making false statements to a federal grand jury in December 2008;” he was released pending a sentencing hearing;

– on October 13, 2009, Abdow Munye Abdow was indicted on two counts of “making false statements to the FBI;” he’s been released pending trial; and

– on November 19, 2009, Omer Abdi Mohamed “was arrested on charges that he conspired to provide material support to terrorists; that he provided material support to terrorists; and that he conspired to kill, kidnap, maim and injure persons outside the United States.”

The Philadelphia Five

On the same day, November 23, the Philadelphia Inquirer headlined, “5 accused of trying to buy Stinger missiles,” then continuing saying:

“The FBI terrorism task force in Philadelphia has arrested five (Muslim) men of Lebanese origin, following an extensive international undercover sting in which one of the men allegedly tried to purchase 100 Stinger missiles designed to shoot down aircraft,” meant for the “Resistance,” implying Palestinians to be used against Israelis.

According to an affidavit by FBI Supervisory Agent Samuel Smemo Jr. of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an undercover agent supposedly met Dani Nemr Tarraf, one of the accused, in Slovakia in May where he allegedly asked for missiles able to “take down an F-16″ and 250 M4 Carbine machine guns.

A same day DOJ press release “announced arrests in a case involving a conspiracy to procure weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles.”

Charged was Dani Nemr Tarraf “with conspiring to acquire anti-aircraft missiles (FIM-92 Stingers) and conspiring to possess machine guns (approximately 10,000 Colt M4 Carbines). In addition, Tarraf and other defendants – including Douri Nemr Tarraf, Hassan Mohamad Komeiha, and Hussein Ali Asfour – were charged with conspiring to transport stolen goods. Dani Nemr Tarraf and Ali Fadel Yahfoufi were (also) charged with conspiring to commit passport fraud.”

Numerous previous articles by this writer exposed fraudulent DOJ charges against Muslim men and one woman. Paid informants entrapped them. Each time there was no plot, no crime, or an intention to commit one. Charges were baseless against innocent victims who were targeted, persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, kept in isolation, denied bail, restricted on their right to counsel, tried on secret evidence and bogus charges, convicted by intimidated juries, then given long prison terms for their faith, ethnicity, activism, charity, prominence, and mostly for being Muslims in America at the wrong time.

(Poor Dr. AafiaSiddiqui still lingers in a US prison, and mind it she was not in the United Sates while she was illegally lifted froma street here in Pakistan. Ed.)

Examples include:

– the “Fort Dix Five,” for planning to wage war against the US Army at the New Jersey base;

– Yassin Aref and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain for seeking a missile to use against the Pakistani ambassador in New York;

– the Newburgh, NY 4 for wanting stinger missiles to down New York-based Air National Guard jets and blow up New York synagogues;

– the North Carolina 7 for plotting war against the Marines at Quantico, VA;

– Najibullah Zazi for planning to bomb one or more major New York sites on or around September 11, 2009;

– Miami’s Liberty City Seven for plotting to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and a Miami FBI building;

– Tariq Mehanna charged with “conspiracy to provide support to terrorists” after he refused to be an FBI paid informant against other Muslim men in his community;

– Aafia Siddiqui, called “Al Qaeda woman” for planning a mass casualty attack with radiological, chemical, and/or biological weapons against one of more of the following targets – the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building, Wall Street, and the animal disease center on Plum Island; and

– numerous other innocent victims falsely accused in America’s war on Islam.

Later, look for evidence to exonerate the Minneapolis and Philadelphia suspects, manipulated by undercover or paid informants to look guilty when, in fact, they’re innocent.

Al-Shabaab

On the Horn of Africa, Somalia is strategically adjacent to the Red Sea, Suez Canal, and vital commercial waterways, and with neighboring Sudan is valued for its potential oil and gas reserves that America, China, India and other nations covet. In December 2006, Washington-backed Ethiopian forces unseated the governing Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), installing a Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in its place. Thousands were killed. Over a million became refugees.

The Ethopians withdrew in January 2009 following an agreement between the TFG and the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) – a UIC coalition with other opposition forces – yet fighting continues with America backing TRG / African Union forces to keep Islamists from regaining power. UIC members aren’t terrorists or connected to Al Qaeda. They’re freedom fighters, struggling to liberate their country and end years of conflict, divisions and instability.

As James Petras explained:

“The UIC was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs.

The UIC is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians. Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation.”

Mogadishu traders initially set it up to bring order to the city’s insecurity and end clan divisions after years of instability, civil war, and no stable government in most parts of the country.

Al-Shabaab and other opposition forces continue the struggle. Stratfor, a leading online geopolitical intelligence publisher describes it as follows:

“After Ethiopian forces beat back the Supreme Islamic Courts Council (SICC) in 2007, (its) armed wings dissolved into the ungoverned savannah in the south, (and) the Mogadishu underground and safe zones in central Somalia. They eventually re-formed under the leadership of Aden Farah Ayro….and Sheikh Hassan Turki….assumed the name al Shabaab and sought to continue the fight against the new Somalian government and its Ethiopian backers with an insurgency-style approach. Portions of al Shabaab have also been known to call themselves the Mujahideen Youth Movement (MYM).”

“The group’s core leadership comprises senior militants (some linked to Al Qaeda), while its rank-and-file membership is (made up) largely (of) untrained Somalian youths. Al Shabaab is estimated to have 6,000 to 7,000 members.”

Operationally, it’s fairly new, but as “the SICC’s militant wing, it gained notoriety before the SICC took over Mogadishu in June 2006….”

The US National Counterrorism Center says that:

“Since the end of 2006, (Al-Shabaab) led a violent  insurgency, using guerrilla warfare and terrorist tactics against the continued Ethiopian presence in Somalia, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, and (NGOs).”

As a result, on February 29, 2008, the US State Department designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (as amended) and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Section 1(b) of Executive Order 13224 (as amended).

On Al Jazeera, One Al-Shabaab leader, Sheikh Muktar Robow, welcomed the news, saying:

“Al-Shabaab feels honored to be included on the list. We are good Muslims and the Americans are infidels. We are on the right path.” In their eyes, they’re freedom fighters against foreign invaders and the western-backed government, loathed for its complicity, corruption, and warlord-committed massacres and other crimes.

The New York Times says Al-Shabaab:

“is nominally led by Sheikh Mohamed Mukhtar Abdirahman (Abu Zubeyr), though experts say a core group of senior leaders guide its actions. The group is divided into three geographical units: Bay and Bokool regions, led by Mukhtar Robow (Abu Mansur), the group’s spokesman; south-central Somalia and Mogadishu; and Puntland and Somaliland.”

“A fourth unit, which controls the Juba Valley, is led by Hassan Abdillahi Hersi (Turki), who is not considered to be a (group) member, but is closely aligned with it. These regional units ‘appear to operate independently of one another, and there is often evidence of friction between them,’ according to a December 2008 UN Monitoring Group report.”

“Experts strongly caution that there is little the United States can do to weaken Shabaab.” They say US-launched air strikes and support for a loathed government “only increased (its) popular support….”

Former UIC shura council leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys now heads his own group, Hisbul Islam, allied with Al-Shabaab and others against TRG/African Union Forces. On November 5, the independent news web site, Garowe Online (garowonline.com), reported him saying that:

“his group (and Al-Shabaab are) fighting to liberate the Somali people and impose Islamic Sharia law….We told (Mogadishu) businessmen to join the war….(urged them) to contribute in rebuilding the destroyed roads in Mogadishu,” help restore stability in the country, and support its liberation.

Like the US-funded, armed and trained Afghan mujaheddin (Islamist guerrillas Ronald Reagan called “freedom fighters”) and the country’s current Taliban resistance, Al-Shabaab, Hisbul Islam, and other Islamist fighters want Somalia freed from the US-backed TFG government and African Union paramilitaries.

Insurgency defeated Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and let the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) consolidate power in 2006 before Ethiopian invaders ousted them. According to Sheikh Mukhtar Robow, non-Somali Islamic fighters have joined them. Washington calls them terrorists, the usual designation for anyone against imperial aggression and dominance.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, was published by Random House in March, 2008.

Source: Text  Mathaba.net Title Image  http://current.com/

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Pakistan military moving to undercut Zardari over his close U.S. ties

Suspicions by Pakistan’s powerful army that the country’s civilian leadership is growing too close to the United States are fueling a political crisis that analysts believe threatens the survival of the government and could divert attention from the battle against Islamic extremists.

Saeed Shah

Military officials believe that secretly taped conversations between Pakistani President Asif Zardari and his ambassador in Washington, prove that it was at Zardari’s insistence that a $1.5 billion U.S. aid package passed by Congress in September contained several provisions that angered the Pakistani military. The military publicly protested the aid package last month.

“The reaction (from the military) was not so much to what was in the bill but to the thought that the government was trying to create a civilian-to-civilian dialogue (with Washington),” said a senior Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The army has ruled Pakistan for most of its existence, with civilian rule returning only last year.

Now the military is responding by pressing a confrontation with Zardari over the expiration of a legal amnesty for politicians that benefited many members of Zardari’s government, including the president himself and his ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani.

The amnesty, known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), wiped away long-standing charges against politicians and bureaucrats who served between 1986 and 1999. But the Supreme Court ruled that the measure, which had been decreed in October 2007 by then President Pervez Musharraf, was unconstitutional, and it will come to an end on Saturday.

That will expose serving ministers and senior aides to prosecution over cases that range from corruption to murder — including Zardari, who was charged with taking kickbacks when his wife, the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, served as the country’s prime minister.

Most here argue that Zardari, who is head of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, will still have legal immunity as president. But analysts believe the military is behind a campaign to oust Zardari and, with the help of sympathetic media and opposition politicians, is using the end of the amnesty as an opportunity to strike. While dislodging the president will be tough, it is possible that he’ll be forced to transfer most of his powers to the prime minister through a constitutional amendment.

Suspicions in the president’s camp about an attempt to isolate him were heightened when the law ministry released a list of amnesty beneficiaries that featured those close to the president, including his top aide and several cabinet ministers, but none of the allies of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

At the center of the civil-military conflict is the relationship between Zardari’s government and Washington, with the Pakistani army resentful of the close ties and the government’s agreement with some U.S. security policies that don’t fit with the military’s view.

The political confrontation came to the fore with the passage of the $1.5 billion U.S. aid package, which insisted on civilian control of the armed forces and threatened to cut off assistance if there were a coup. The legislation also demanded that Pakistan crack down on extremist groups that were previously considered close to the country’s army.

A military spy agency recorded Zardari and Haqqani discussing the legislation. Knowledgeable civilian and military officials, who spoke only if they were not identified by name, said the recordings captured the two discussing how to strengthen democratic institutions in Pakistan.

Even when there have been civilian governments in Islamabad, the military has viewed sensitive foreign and security policies as its purview. In particular, the military jealously guards its role in relations with India, Afghanistan and the United States, as well as the policy toward the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Zardari, however, has intruded in all those areas since taking office. He’s reached out to traditional enemy India, improved relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai — usually seen in Pakistan as dangerously close to India — and agreed with the U.S. that Pakistan must eliminate extremist groups on its soil — the same Islamic militants that the military previously used to fight proxy wars in India and Afghanistan.

Zardari also unsuccessfully tried to place the main military spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, under civilian control, and he offered a “no first use” policy on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to India.

“The army does not like too much civilian interference in their internal affairs,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a defense commentator and author of Military, State and Society in Pakistan. “The military thinks that the Pakistan government wants to use this (U.S.) law to somehow interfere in the affairs of the military.”

“Zardari is perceived as too dependent on or too pro the United States, and sometimes not quite in agreement with the strategic view of the army,” said Arif Nizami, a political analyst and former newspaper editor.

The law ministry’s list of amnesty beneficiaries contained over 8,000 names, including bureaucrats and party workers, on charges ranging from murder to embezzlement.

The list includes Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Ports Minister Babar Khan Ghauri, Overseas Pakistanis Minister Farooq Sattar, the governor of Sindh province,Ishratul Ebad, and the president’s top aide, Salman Farooqui.

Also on the list are the high commissioner to London, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, and the ambassador to Washington, Haqqani — who both deny taking advantage of the amnesty. Haqqani has sued to have his name removed from the list.

Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.

Source: Text:  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/ Title Image: pkonweb.com/…/

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The Pakistani Taliban’s War on School children

The main enetrance to the International Islamic Uiverity in Islamabad. In last week of October 2009, the university came under attack by 2 suicide bombers who detonated their vests at the Islamic jurisprudence faculty and women’s cafeteria. Five Pakistanis were killed in the blasts and 29 more were reported wounded.

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EDUCATION UNDER SIEGE

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CHRISTOPHER ALLBRITTON

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Every morning, Sarim Zaidi, 17, puts on his school uniform, straightens his tie and hops into the car his parents provide for him to go to the Imperial International School and College in Islamabad, an upscale private institution. After his driver drops him off, he goes through metal detectors, winds his way around barbed wire, glances nervously at the armed guard on the roof and flashes his ID badge before finally entering a classroom.

Across town, in a poorer section of Islamabad, Hamza Baig, 14, also smartens up his school uniform, but at the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation Boys College, a government school, there are no armed guards. There is only a lonely doorman behind a flimsily padlocked gate. He is armed with a stick.

These are examples of how kids go to school in Pakistan nowadays, owing to a ferocious campaign of violence by the Pakistani Taliban against schools all over the country that has left parents panicking, students uneasy and educators worried about whether they’re doing enough to protect kids in the middle of a war. Schools have been turned into fortresses, and some students have made attending class an act of defiance.(See pictures of the tensions roiling Pakistan.)

The numbers show the extent of the war on education by the Pakistani Taliban. At least 473 schools across Swat and Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been destroyed over the past two years.

Militants recently blew up a 12-room state-run high school and health clinic for boys in Hangu district, a small area nestled on the border of North Waziristan and the North-West Frontier Province. And they routinely blow up girls’ schools in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Province. Three have been destroyed in the past two weeks.(See pictures of suicide-bomb attacks in Islamabad.)

The targeting of schools — especially girls’ and co-educational institutions — had long been restricted to the tribal belt in the northwest of the country. But the government offensive against militants in South Waziristan has changed that. A double-suicide attack on the International Islamic University in Islamabad in October sent government officials and parents in cities into a frenzy. Across the country, schools were told to close and security measures quickly improvised. Up to 30 million public and private students from pre-kindergarten through high school were affected, according to the latest figures from the Pakistan Ministry of Education.

Fear and agnst grips these smiling faces when there are news of attacks on schools and colleges. During last two years at least 473 schools have been destroyed in Swat & FATA region of Pakistan by militants of  the Tehrik-e-Taliban, Pakistan (TTP).

Up to 220,000 institutions felt the impact. “We were just asked to shut down,” says Huma Ali, who runs a private elementary school in Karachi. “We thought it was a precautionary measure. But as time went by, we found out there was a threat to the schools.”

Private schools were told to raise their walls, install barbed wire, sandbags and closed-circuit TV cameras and hire armed guards. Some even went so far as to put snipers on their roofs. Schools like Ali’s can afford such measures, she says. But government schools are out of luck. The federal government is doing little, critics say, to help pay for the extra security measures it says are necessary for schools to remain open.

The contrast is stark. At the government-run Islamabad Model College for Boys, an aged and unarmed doorman provides security. If someone hopped over the walls out of sight of the guard, no one would know. At the end of the school day, anxious fathers crowd around the gate, collect their children and scurry toward a traffic jam of cars choking the street. A suicide bomber would find it a tempting target.

The school has 1,500 students grades 1-12. If something happens, says Atiq ur-Rahman, a chemistry teacher, the school is ill equipped to protect its students. “We don’t even have a security guard equipped with weapons,” he says. He says he can’t handle a dangerous situation and that the students and staff feel vulnerable. If a suicide bomber targeted the school, “we could only request him not to explode.”

The Taliban’s campaign against schools, however, seems quixotic. On the one hand, the militants are well known to oppose educating girls. On the other, attacking boys’ schools seems to be further alienating the populace. Not that the government has been able to capitalize on this; its tight-fisted response to paying for school security — in essence, it doesn’t — has angered parents and teachers alike. One judge on the influential Lahore High Court dismissed a petition from the Private School Owners Association for more government help by saying schools should arrange for their own security. “Everything should not be left to the government,” said Justice Mian Saqib Nisar. “Every citizen should play his due role for the betterment of the society. I would impose a fine if such frivolous petitions were filed in the future.” No one from the Ministry of Education was available to comment for this story.

Ur-Rahman, the chemistry teacher, has a list of ideas to beef up security, ranging from hiring more trained security guards to adding CCTV cameras, but he doesn’t expect any of them to happen because the school can’t pay for them and the government isn’t willing to pick up the tab, he says. “It shouldn’t put the [responsibility for] funding on the college for everything,” he says.

The situation’s impact on the kids has been noticeable. “We’ve heard people say, ‘My daughter didn’t want to go to school today. She had a bad dream — she thinks something bad is going to happen today,” says Huma Ali in Karachi. “Kids … as old as my younger daughter, who is 5½, now when they hear the word danger, they’ve been taught to drop everything, drop down into their knees and go into a duck position,” says Sanam Thariani, who works with Ali. “I just think that’s really sad that a 5-year-old has to know that.”

Ruhab Zehra Zaidi, the 13-year-old sister of Sarim Zaidi, says she’s very scared at the Islamabad Model College for Girls and finds it hard to study her favorite subject, math. “Anything can happen at any time,” she says, her big eyes widening further. “This disturbs my studies very much.” “I am upset about all this terrorism,” says Hamza Baig with intensity. The teenager from the Overseas boys college wants to make sure his words are clear: “We feel very scared when going to school, thinking today may be our last.” Like many students, Baig stayed home for weeks at a time after the attack on the International Islamic University.

Perhaps most poignant, the situation has affected how kids play. At Ali’s school, the students are not allowed to play in the courtyard anymore because of fear that someone might toss a bomb over the wall. But staying home isn’t an option. “I am ready to die for my country,” says Sarim Zaidi, with a determination both uncommon and tragic for a 17-year-old who merely wants to go to school.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943639,00.html#ixzz0YrMD3DOX

& http://wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/christian-janitor-sacrifices-his-life-to-save-hundreds-of-muslim-girls/

Credits: This article was originally published at the http://www.time.com/ and later cross posted at the Instablogs site by Shehzad.

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Why the world’s largest military machine is unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan

The U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

JUST HOW POWERFUL IS THE US MILITARY TODAY?

Sara Flounders

Why is the largest military machine on this planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan, in a war that has lasted longer than World War II or Vietnam ?

Afghanistan ranks among the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world today. It has one of the shortest life expectancy rates, highest infant mortality rates and the lowest rates of literacy.

The total U.S. military budget has more than doubled from the beginning of this war in 2001 to the $680 billion budget signed by President Barack Obama Oct. 28. The U.S. military budget today is larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. The U.S. arsenal has the most advanced high-tech weapons.

The funds and troop commitment to Afghanistan have grown with every year of occupation. Last January another 20,000 troops were sent; now there is intense pressure on President Obama to add an additional 40,000 troops. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. More than three times as many forces are currently in Afghanistan when NATO forces and military contractors are counted.

Eight years ago, after an initial massive air bombardment and a quick, brutal invasion, every voice in the media was effusive with assurances that Afghanistan would be quickly transformed and modernized, and the women of Afghanistan liberated. There were assurances of schools, roads, potable water, health care, thriving industry and Western-style democracy. A new Marshall Plan was in store.

Was it only due to racist and callous disregard that none of this happened?

[Right: Soldier of Blackwater aka Xe Army. The US military is investigating a group of military contractors who shot and wounded two Afghan civilians in Kabul. A senior source in the contracting industry said that, while off duty, the four contractors were drinking before the accident.

In Iraq , how could conditions be worse than during the 13 years of starvation sanctions the U.S. imposed after the 1991 war? Today more than a third of the population has died, is disabled, internally displaced and/or refugees. Fear, violence against women and sectarian divisions have shredded the fabric of society.

Previously a broad current in Pakistan looked to the West for development funds and modernization. Now they are embittered and outraged at U.S. arrogance after whole provinces were forcibly evacuated and bombarded in the hunt for Al Qaeda.

U.S. occupation forces are actually incapable of carrying out a modernization program. They are capable only of massive destruction, daily insults and atrocities. That is why the U.S. is unable to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan or Iraq . That is what fuels the resistance.

Today every effort meant to demonstrate the power and strength of U.S. imperialism instead confirms its growing weakness and its systemic inability to be a force for human progress on any level.

COLLABORATORS AND WARLORDS

Part of U.S. imperialism’s problem is that its occupation forces are required to rely on the most corrupt, venal and discredited warlords. The only interest these competing military thugs have is in pocketing funds for reconstruction and development. Entire government ministries, their payrolls and their projects have been found to be total fiction. Billions allocated for schools, water and road construction have gone directly into the warlords’ pockets. Hundreds of news articles, congressional inquiries and U.N. reports have exposed just how all-pervasive corruption is.

In Iraq the U.S. occupation depends on the same type of corrupt collaborators. For example, a BBC investigation reported that $23 billion had been lost, stolen or not properly accounted for in Iraq . A U.S. gag order prevented discussion of the allegations. (June 10, 2008)

[Left: Hazem al-Shalaan, Defense Minister from June 2004 until May 2005 under the Iraqi Interim Government of Ayad Allawi. A collaborator of the US Occupation Force in Iraq, ho along with his associates siphoned off $1.2 billion out of Irqai defense ministry funds].

Part of the BBC search for the missing billions focused on Hazem al-Shalaan, who lived in London until he was appointed minister of defense in 2004. He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2 billion out of the Iraqi defense ministry.

But the deeper and more intractable problem is not the local corrupt collaborators. It is the very structure of the Pentagon and the U.S. government. It is a problem that Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general in Afghanistan , or President Obama cannot change or solve.

It is the problem of an imperialist military built solely to serve the profit system.

CONTRACTOR INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

All U.S. aid, both military and what is labeled civilian, is funneled through thousands and thousands of contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. None of these U.S. corporate middlemen are even slightly interested in the development of Afghanistan or Iraq . Their only immediate aim is to turn a hefty superprofit as quickly as possible, with as much skim and double billing as possible. For a fee they will provide everything from hired guns, such as Blackwater mercenaries, to food service workers, mechanics, maintenance workers and long-distance truck drivers.

These hired hands also do jobs not connected to servicing the occupation. All reconstruction and infrastructure projects of water purification, sewage treatment, electrical generation, health clinics and road clearance are parceled out piecemeal. Whether these projects ever open or function properly is of little interest or concern. Billing is all that counts.

In past wars, most of these jobs were carried out by the U.S. military. The ratio of contractors to active-duty troops is now more than 1-to-1 in both Iraq and Afghanistan . During the Vietnam War it was 1-to-6.

In 2007 the Associated Press put the number in Iraq alone at 180,000: The United States has assembled an imposing industrial army in Iraq that is larger than its uniformed fighting force and is responsible for such a broad swath of responsibilities that the military might not be able to operate without its private-sector partners. (Sept. 20, 2007)

The total was 190,000 by August 2008. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 18, 2008)

Some corporations have become synonymous with war profiteering, such as Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater in Iraq , and Louis Berger Group, BearingPoint and DynCorp International in Afghanistan .

Every part of the U.S. occupation has been contracted out at the highest rate of profit, with no coordination, no oversight, almost no public bids. Few of the desperately needed supplies reach the dislocated population

There are now so many pigs at the trough that U.S. forces are no longer able to carry out the broader policy objectives of the U.S. ruling class. The U.S military has even lost count, by tens of thousands, of the numbers of contractors, where they are or what they are doing except being paid.

LOSING COUNT OF MERCENARIES

The danger of an empire becoming dependent on mercenary forces to fight unpopular wars has been understood since the days of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago.

A bipartisan Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting was created last year to examine government contracting for reconstruction, logistics and security operations and to recommend reforms. However, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the commission, explained at a Nov. 2 hearing that there is no single source for a clear, complete and accurate picture of contractor numbers, locations, contracts and cost. (AFP, Nov. 2)

[Thibault said] the Pentagon in April counted about 160,000 contractors mainly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, but Central Command recorded more than 242,000 contractors a month earlier. The stunning difference of 82,000 contractors was based on very different counts in Afghanistan . The difference alone is far greater than the 60,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Thibault continued: How can contractors be properly managed if we are not sure how many there are, where they are and what are they doing? The lack of an accurate count invites waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money and undermines the achievement of U.S. mission objectives. The Nov. 2 Federal Times reported that Tibault also asked: How can we assure taxpayers that they are not paying for ghost employees?

This has become an unsolvable contradiction in imperialist wars for profit, markets and imperialist domination. Bourgeois academics, think tanks and policy analysts are becoming increasingly concerned.

Thomas Friedman, syndicated columnist and multimillionaire who is deeply committed to the long-term interests of U.S. imperialism, describes the dangers of a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions. (New York Times, Nov. 3)

OUTSOURCING WAR

Friedman hastens to explain that he is not against outsourcing. His concern is the pattern of outsourcing key tasks, with money and instructions changing hands multiple times in a foreign country. That only invites abuse and corruption. Friedman quoted Allison Stanger, author of One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, who told him: Contractors provide security for key personnel and sites, including our embassies; feed, clothe and house our troops; train army and police units; and even oversee other contractors. Without a multinational contractor force to fill the gap, we would need a draft to execute these twin interventions.

That is the real reason for the contracted military forces. The Pentagon does not have enough soldiers, and they don’t have enough collaborators or allies to fight their wars.

According to the Congressional Research Service, contractors in 2009 account for 48 percent of the Department of Defense workforce in Iraq and 57 percent in Afghanistan . Thousands of other contractors work for corporate-funded charities and numerous government agencies. The U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development make even more extensive use of them; 80 percent of the State Department budget is for contractors and grants.

Contractors are supposedly not combat troops, although almost 1,800 U.S. contractors have been killed since 9/11. (U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 30) Of course there are no records on the thousands of Afghans and Iraqis killed working for U.S. corporate contractors, or the many thousands of peoples from other oppressed nations who are shipped in to handle the most dangerous jobs.

Contracting is a way of hiding not only the casualties, but also the actual size of the U.S. occupation force. Fearful of domestic opposition, the government intentionally lists the figures for the total number of forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as far less than the real numbers.

A SYSTEM RUN ON COST OVERRUNS

Cost overruns and war profiteering are hardly limited to Iraq , Afghanistan or active theaters of war. They are the very fabric of the U.S. war machine and the underpinning of the U.S. economy.

When President Obama signed the largest military budget in history Oct. 28 he stated: The Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has looked into 96 major defense projects from the last year, and found cost overruns that totaled $296 billion. This was on a total 2009 military budget of $651 billion. So almost half of the billions of dollars handed over to military corporations are cost overruns!

This is at a time when millions of workers face long-term systemic unemployment and massive foreclosures.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have now cost more than $1 trillion. The feeble health care reform bill that squeaked through the House, and might not survive Senate revisions next year, is scheduled to cost $1.1 trillion over a 10-year period.

The bloated, increasingly dysfunctional, for-profit U.S. military machine is unable to solve the problems or rebuild the infrastructure in Afghanistan or Iraq , and it is unable to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure in the U.S. It is unable to meet the needs of people anywhere.

It is absorbing the greatest share of the planet’s resources and a majority of the U.S. national budget. This unsustainable combination will sooner or later give rise to new resistance here and around the world.

Sara Flounders is a national co-director of the anti-war group International ANSWER

Source :Text: www.globalresearch.ca Title Image: Sana News

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China wins struggle for Pipelinestan

A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington’s interest in Central Asian fuel sources– natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political Right in the US actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order. If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead China has landed the big bid to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to Beijing.

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EUROPEAN PIPE DREAMS SHATTERED

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by Juan Cole

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[Note for WoP readers: Here is the latest piece, brief but very much to the point - from Juan Cole of Informed Comment. Sometimes, a few words are good enough to pass on your message and they just hit the right chord.

The symphony of life does not need bombs and missiles to strike this chord; it is just the plain, truthful words, short, to the point and life becomes vibrant… Juan Cole has done exactly that…. Nayyar]

Turkmenistan Gas is now flowing to China Overland

With one flick of a switch, Russia’s long-standing dominance and near monopoly over Central Asian natural-gas exports officially came to an end on Monday.

The Turkmenistan-China pipeline, which will carry natural gas from eastern Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan into China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, went on line on December 14 during an inauguration ceremony attended by regional leaders. It marks the first time in more than a decade that a pipeline has been constructed to pump gas out of the region, and is the biggest effort to date to export Central Asian gas without using Russian routes.

Eyeball to Eyeball in Quetta –Will Obama cross Pakistan’s red line?

If the US went ahead with its plan to launch drone strikes in Quetta, that would be ‘the end of the road’ in the fight against extremist groups,’ said a senior Pakistani official.—File photo

[Note for WoP readers: A fellow blogger Moin Ansari of Pakistanledger.com in a recent post sums up the events as they unfold before us these days.

The mainstream media in the west is nowadays full of stories about Pakistan. This country, we are told is under the grip of Taliban extremists and, therefore, the democracy, the country and the whole state of Pakistan is going to crumble at the feet of these religious zealots. The scenario built portrays Pakistan in such a case will go into the hands of fanatics, and so will its nuclear arsenal and these fanatics can play with the lives of the whole human race. This propaganda is being woven with such a finesse that the majority of the western populations, who otherwise too do not get much time to seriously ponder over real situation, a situation which could enable them sift facts from falsehoods and thus become a prey to such propaganda in a perfect way.

A blogger from America (An average American patriot) has also expressed similar views. So are the views also of readers of that blog. I wrote to that blogger and reproduce here my comments: “When you guys in the west, start ringing alarm bells on Pakistani nukes (falling into the hands of the so called Taliban) we in Pakistan, do not take such bells as a mere ‘alarm’ but something still worse. However, this worse has a more probability to come from our friends in the west than these homegrown renegades.

We have on record the US Secretary of State saying one day, that she foresees a real danger of Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of Taliban, but after a few days same SOS ensures the people in the US as well as in Pakistan that Pakistan is fully capable to safeguard its nuclear sites from the Taliban. This is something which puts the US role in this whole affair of nukes into certain amount of doubt.

We very well know, rather we do more than the people in the west, that nukes are no playthings which by a mere run of a gun could be looted upon by some renegades, be they the Taliban (whatever hue and color they may have) or somebody else. There is almost a foolproof system of command and control. As I already said, we in Pakistan know the terribly destructive nature of such devices more than anybody else, because being a relatively small country we cannot afford destruction either on our own soil or somewhere else. Then what is happening in Pakistan is a good amount of lesson for us too.

The extremism whether promoted by foreign powers or by inside forces, is no way acceptable to the people of this land. By and large this land called Pakistan has been more open to different beliefs, different ethnicities and different politico religious philosophies. Three major religions in the subcontinent took roots in this part of the subcontinent because people were more open to newer ideas, newer beliefs.

We are very confident and going along the psyche of our people, the resilience during different ups and down of our history is an ample proof to justify this confidence, that by the grace of Almighty Allah we will be able to defend ourselves from the scourge of neo-imperialism, religious fanaticism and the renegatories prevailing nowadays in this land. .

Unfortunately the religious extremism that we see now in Pakistan is a product of Mullahism which had a state protection during ex dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s period and which had then the full blessings of US administrations in those days. However, this got exacerbated as an outfall of the Afghan war. Prior to Sep. 2001 not a single Mullah could dare order a suicide attack. As a matter of fact the people in Pakistan had heard of the suicide attacks only from places like the Middle East and Sri Lanka, never could such a thing happen in Pakistan then. The war in Afghanistan after 9/11 tragedy spilled over the zealots fighting against the former infidels of Soviet Union who infiltrated into the Pakistani borderlands, causing a havoc to our daily life, particularly in the northern part of this country.

We in Pakistan are of a firm opinion that once the US and NATO forces leave Afghanistan, the so called Taliban will have neither the ground nor the zeal to continue fighting against the state and people of Pakistan.

As far the nukes, we do believe come what may, these will remain intact until and unless US, Russia or China involve themselves in taking a control of Pak nukes on whatever pretext they may do so. Such a possibility, howsoever remote, will put so many questions the answers to which are hardly to be found at present.

As far the hoax that Mullah Omer is in Quetta, this and similar lies are spread every now and then. The idea behind the whole exercise is to practically demonstrate once again “that Pakistan is not doing enough to nab the enemies of America, which now are being termed as enemies of Pakistan as well. Unfortunately certain factions of the so called Taliban too have subscribed to this disinformation and thus have further aggravated the situation. It is something which strengthens the U.S. propaganda mill.

In spite of all these factors, however, we do believe: once the peace in Afghanistan is restored, there will be gradually peace in Pakistan as well. But seeing the things from the angle of the Great Game players, there seems to be hardly a chance that US will vacate Afghanistan, until and unless the Obama administration can see how the Afghan war will ultimately increase the body bags from the war front called Afghanistan. This is an aspect which my friend Fred Reed beautifully depicted in an earlier post titled “Killing America’s kids”. Nayyar]

Eyeball to Eyeball in Quetta

Will Obama cross Pakistan’s red line?

by Moin Ansari

Facing a defeat in Afghanistan and an imminent takeover of Kabul by the Taliban, U.S. is dispatching 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. They will reach Kabul early next year. To hedge its bets, the U.S. is pressuring Pakistan to take action against the so called Quetta Shura. While most news reports say Mr. Obama is leaning against strikes into Pakistan, Mr. Anwar Iqbal’s sensational reporting in the Dawn once again paints the picture of Armageddon. This is not the first effort by  Anwar Iqbal to selectively use the American wording and portray a dark picture for Pakistan and Pakistanis.

Mr. Obama is regurgitating his campaign promises of taking out Al-Qeada leaders. However, this time around he has expanded now to include the “Taliban” also in his policy on Afghan-Pakistan situation. His commanders, Admiral Mike Mullen and General Patraeus have already publicly proclaimed that Mr. Haqqani and Hikmatyar and even Mullah Omar are in Quetta. This repetition of a campaign promise is more of response to a specific question – not an enunciation of a new policy. Hounded by US journalists who are ready to pounce on the president for broken campaign promises – what else is a US president supposed to say? Certainly he cannot say that if the actionable intelligence is available, he would not attack America’s enemies.

Is then a US drone attack on Quetta imminent? Can the US attack the civilian population of a city of 800,000 with absolute impunity? Or is this just an empty threat coming from the frustrated Commander in Chief of an army that has lost 80% of the territory of Afghanistan?

1. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Demands by the United States for Pakistan to crack down on the strongest Taliban warrior in Afghanistan, Siraj Haqqani, whose fighters pose the biggest threat to American forces, have been rebuffed by the Pakistani military, according to Pakistani military officials and diplomats. [New York Times]

2. Mr. Obama made the statement when he was reminded that for almost a year, officials in his administration had been saying that the Taliban leadership was now somewhere in Quetta and yet he was reluctant to call in drones to target those leaders. ‘Well I don’t want to comment on certain sensitive aspects to our efforts in this border region. I think it is fair to say, number one, that my principle – and I articulated this in the campaign – is – if we’ve got actual war intelligence on high-ranking Al Qaeda leaders, or for that matter high-ranking Taliban leaders who are directing actions against US troops –then we will take action. [Dawn]

3. NEW YORK: A senior Pakistani official told Los Angeles Times if the US went ahead with its plan to launch drone strikes in Quetta then it would be ‘the end of the road’ for the US-Pakistan cooperation in the fight against extremist groups. [Dawn]

Pakistan is a nuclear armed nation. The US is a superpower with vast resources at its disposal. However Obama has been unable to quell the violence in Afghanistan, and has pushed the war into Pakistan. Not a day goes by when there is not an explosion in Pakistan. The Obama frustration at the incompetence of his Generals is viscerally visible in his bluster towards Pakistan.

America cannot win the war in Afghanistan without Pakistan. The US cannot end the war in Afghanistan by starting one in Pakistan. The US media frenzy seems to indicate that by jettisoning a dozen people out of Quetta, the Afghan war will come to a swift end. Nothing could be farther than the truth. The elimination of Laden, Haqqani, Hikmatyar, even if they were present in Quetta would not make any difference in Afghanistan. The 38 insurgent groups who are fighting the occupation are a loose confederation of autonomous bands. Eliminating some of the named leaders accomplishes nothing, except win a propaganda war for Mr. Obama.

The US is bent upon increasing pressure on Pakistan and raising the stakes. The strategy is of course reminiscent of Richard Armitage’s threat to Pervez Musharraf of bombing Pakistan back to the stone ages. Of course that was not the first threat to Pakistan. Henry Kissinger threatened Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto with a dire consequence if he continued to pursue a nuclear program, which is why many in Pakistan believe that his judicial hanging was an American orchestration, and most Zia-ul-Haq fans in Pakistan including his son Ejaz-ul-Haq, too blame the US for “case of the exploding mangos” which killed President Zia-ul-Haq in a plane explosion.

SO, IS THE US EXPEDITING AN IRANIAN TYPE ANTI-US REVOLUTION IN PAKISTAN?

In the 1980’s the US presence in Iran was ubiquitous. It was micro-managing all of Iran but the people there rejected that interference and installed a theocracy eliminating all American influences. Today Pakistan too is being ruled by a US compliant government, a government that has no credibility with the people. The daily drone bombing in FATA is creating terror, which is being exacerbated by Indian interference in Pakistan. To see through the crystal ball, we are presenting three stories, one from the LA Times, the other from Pakistani daily Dawn and the third one from The New York Times.

NEW YORK: A senior Pakistani official told Los Angeles Times if the US went ahead with its plan to launch drone strikes in Quetta then it would be ‘the end of the road’ for the US-Pakistan cooperation in the fight against extremist groups.

‘We are not a banana republic,’ said the official involved in discussions on security issues with the Obama administration. The official bristled at the suggestion that Pakistan had been reluctant to target militants in Quetta, saying US assertions about the city’s role as a sanctuary had been exaggerated. ‘We keep hearing that there is a shadow government in Quetta, but we have never been given actionable intelligence.

Pakistan is prepared to pursue Taliban leaders, including Omar, even when the intelligence is imprecise,’ he said. ‘Even if a compound 1km by 1km is identified, we will go and find him.’ But, he added, ‘for the past two years we haven’t heard anything more.’ [Pak cautions US against Quetta strikes by Masood Haider Tuesday, 15 Dec, 2009]

Afghanistan is developing into a political proxy war between India and Pakistan.

With 30,000 more United States troops on their way to Afghanistan, it is getting clearer now that they will not suffice and that larger challenges loom. Afghanistan is also increasingly developing into a political proxy war between India and Pakistan.

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HOW FAR A DESTABLISED PAKISTAN SUITS INDIA!

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by Francesco Sisci

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Pakistan, which backed the mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980’s and offered a safe haven, a breeding ground to the Taliban in the 1990’s, is now looking askance at the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, which it sees as pro-India. Conversely, India has fond memories of the time when Kabul was firmly under Moscow’s hands and out of Islamabad’s fist – and worries that the present American strategy will hand Kabul back to Pakistan.

India is also worried about US’s diplomatic warming with China, the latter being Pakistan’s long-time ally. US President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Beijing was a major success – despite some criticism – and set in motion a higher phase in bilateral ties.

Moreover, China is pressing in around India. It backed the peace process between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Colombo government this year, thus gaining new leverage in Sri Lanka. Nepal’s neo-Maoists are fashionably pro-Chinese, and sympathy for the Chinese government can be found in the neo-Maoist rebels active in about a third of India’s territory.

Further, on the eastern front, there is Myanmar, where New Delhi may gain ground but Beijing’s interests are firmly entrenched. If the new American policies in Afghanistan let Islamabad increase its clout in Kabul, New Delhi could rightly feel it is caught in a vice in which China – with American help – is pressing the levers.

However, this perception might be wrong. Afghanistan and Pakistan are not unstable domino tiles that can be moved at will in a careful balance of weights and counterweights, as in old political power games. Pakistan and Afghanistan are part of a more complex balancing act that is both domestic and international and in which we also find China and India. It is no mystery that the Afghanistan wound has festered to the point of poisoning Pakistan’s body.

Parts of Pakistan are subject to tribal rule, That is, tribes straddling the border have brought their rule to Pakistan, and Islamabad, vying for its own state legitimacy, has to cope with them. In other words, Afghanistan’s falling apart puts Pakistan in jeopardy, as the latter could also crumble, split between tribal and national interests: Pashtuns versus Punjabis or Sindhi or Balochi. The problem has become so big that the real issue now is no longer to simply stabilize Afghanistan, but to also stabilize Pakistan and prevent its fall into anarchy, as many pundits see it as an almost failing state. Thinking of Pakistan as a failing state does not help its recovery, and it further fuels the flames of chaos.

From the simple view of looking for a power play, India should rejoice in the weakening or even the disappearance of its major regional rival, Pakistan. If Pakistan fails, its large territory could fall under New Delhi’s brotherly embrace, as happened with Bangladesh. Thus, modern India could recover de facto the borders of the former British Indian Empire. It would be a major geopolitical victory for New Delhi – or would it?

The “new India” with Pakistan would add some 180 millions Muslims. Adding the some 145 million Muslims in Bangladesh and about 160 millions Muslims in India proper, the subcontinent has about half a billion Muslims out of a total population of 1.5 billion. That is, one-third of the total population of a united subcontinent would be Muslim and planted with the seeds of radicalism born out of the long Afghan war and the despair at the loss of a “pure” Pakistani state.

The objective weight of Islam and extremist Islam would be bound to increase in New Delhi, even if it managed to keep Pakistan and Bangladesh separate from the rest of the body of the potential Indian union. This could easily incense already inflammable radical Hindu nationalist parties, presently backing or defending frequent, violent anti-Muslim or anti-Christian protests in India.

In other words, more radical Muslims would create space for more radical Hindu nationalists, which could then start a vicious circle of tension. These would not be the only elements of the dangerous powder keg. Neo-Maoist guerrillas threaten a third of the territory and would also be rallied by growing religious confrontations; differences from north (Indo-European) and south (Dravidian) India could flare, spiced by caste and pro-independence struggles.

In other words, the fall of Pakistan – even if we were naive enough to believe that it could be managed in an orderly way – would inevitably bring about massive destabilization in India, home to about one-fourth of the world’s population. The world – scared enough of the destabilization of Afghanistan, home of 44 million Muslims – would be confronting the nightmare of the destabilization of some 500 million Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. Is New Delhi ready for it? Hardly. China may have reasons for supporting Pakistan to contain India, but India could be totally destabilized by the destabilization of Pakistan. India has more to lose than China out of the loss of Pakistan – it could jeopardize its own country.

Thus, New Delhi has an objective interest in stabilizing Pakistan. In other words, to forestall its own destabilization, India should help stabilize Pakistan. This could be something new in Indian politics – it could propel India out of 60 years of zero-sum politics with Pakistan and help India and Pakistan find common political ground for the subcontinent.

Within this general logic, India and Pakistan have a common interest in envisaging a political solution for Afghanistan. Will they do it? Will they understand the long – and medium term dangers of a narrow geopolitical vision?

Certainly, America, with troops on the ground and eager to withdraw them, and neighboring China, with a restive Islamic minority of its own and concerned about ensuring peace and development at its borders to guarantee its own, have a keen interest in finding a political solution in Afghanistan.

This solution is bound to consider the broad, long-term interests of India, Pakistan and the subcontinent. All of them need economic development, thus market stability and freedom as well as political and social peace as preconditions to cure their own domestic grievances.

If one experience can be drawn from the past 30 years of Chinese development, it is that for three decades Beijing has decided to shelve – partly or totally – its geopolitical gripes and ambitions in order to achieve the higher goal of economic development. That approach by itself cast all geopolitics in a different light. This ought to be also the recipe for Afghanistan, Pakistan and the whole Indian subcontinent.

Francesco Sisci is the Asia Editor of La Stampa.

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Source:

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The Truth about America & Pakistan [1 of 5]

Soon after Richard Nixon was elected president in November 1968, Dr. Glenn Olds met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The popular Bhutto knew China’s Chou En-Lai with whom he had studied in Moscow. Dr. Olds traveled on Nixon’s behalf to ask that Bhutto intercede with China. As a young foreign minister for President Ayub Khan, Bhutto forged stronger Pakistani ties with China after the Sino-Indian war of 1962. That relationship led to a large number of Sino-Pakistan industrial and military projects. When he signed the Sino-Pakistan Boundary Agreement of March 1963, Bhutto emerged as one of the most visible Pakistanis on the world stage. By the 1968 meeting in Yugoslavia, the politically ambitious Bhutto had been arrested and released by Ayub, sparking political unrest that led to Ayub’s resignation and Bhutto’s ascendancy to the presidency in December 1971 and prime minister in 1973.

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AMERICA NEEDS PAKISTAN’S HELP — AGAIN

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by Jeff Gates

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Ordinary Americans need the assistance of Islamabad now more than at any time in the past six decades. That aid lies not in combating “Islamo-fascism” but in countering the influence inside the U.S. of Israeli war-planners known for their expertise at provoking extremism.

To grasp what must be done requires a review of three related developments. First is a policy-making legacy from the era of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Second is a little known account of an Israeli attempt to corrupt policy-making in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population. Third is confirmation that, by its steady growth in influence over the past six decades, Israel is now shaping U.S. policy to advance a Judeo-fascist agenda.

Afghan War Costs 101

Iraq war costs may be declining. But Afghan war costs are rising sharply. It’s not a wash: the United States’ overall war costs are still increasing, as they have virtually every year since 2002. Can the U.S. Treasury sustain the open-ended spending?

$ 57, 077.60

SURGING BY THE MINUTE

First a note by Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com:

Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, put the matter this way recently: “[N]ext to Antarctica, Afghanistan is probably the most incommodious place, from a logistics point of view, to be trying to fight a war… It’s landlocked and rugged, and the road network is much, much thinner than in Iraq. Fewer airports, different geography.”  In other words, we might as well be fighting on the moon.  In translation, this means at least one thing: don’t believe any of the figures coming out of the White House or the Pentagon about what this war is going to cost.

As Jo Comerford, executive director of the National Priorities Project points out below, the president’s $30 billion figure for getting those 30,000-plus new surge troops into Afghanistan is going to prove a “through-the-basement estimate.”  As for the dates for getting them in and beginning to get them out?  Well, it’s grain-of-salt time there, too. According to Steven Mufson and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, some of the fuel storage facilities being built to support the surge troops won’t even be completed by the time the first of them are scheduled to leave the country, 18 months from now.

And keep in mind the endless, and endlessly vulnerable, supply lines on which so much of that fuel — and almost everything else the U.S. military has to have to survive — travels.  Along those mountainous roads, trucks are “lost,” or Taliban-commandeered, or bribes are paid for passage, or some are simply destroyed in what can only be thought of as an underreported supply-line war.  All of this adds immeasurably to the staggering expense of the project. According to August Cole of the Wall Street Journal, in fuel terms alone, to support a single soldier in Afghanistan costs between $200,000 and $350,000 a year.

And while we’re at it: don’t expect all those surging troops to make it into Afghanistan any time soon.  In the heroic tales of presidential surge deliberations (based on copious White House leaks) that appeared soon after the president’s West Point speech, much was made of how Obama himself had insisted on speeding up the plan to get the extra troops in place.  All would arrive, the White House said, within six months.  That was quickly changed to approximately eight months.  Now, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, deputy commander of American and NATO forces there, has just announced that it will take nine to eleven months (or maybe even “up to a year”), and that’s if none of the factors that could go wrong do — something not worth putting your money on when it comes to the Afghan War.

If all this leaves you with lingering worries about the success of both the surge and the war, you can put them to rest, however.  NBC’s Richard Engel found a “military schematic,” a single chart from the office of the Joint Chiefs, that offers a visual representation of the military’s full surge/counterinsurgency strategy.  It has to be seen to be believed.  (Just click here.)  It lays out as a flow chart (or perhaps overflow chart would be the more accurate description) just how our war will achieve success.  What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?  It’s hard to imagine.  In the meantime, let Comerford give you a little lesson in the economics of the Afghan War, and what we could have done with that low-ball figure of $30 billion, had we chosen not to fight a war on the moon. Tom

by Jo Comerford

$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind — just for a minute or so.

After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.

Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60.  That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.

By the way, add up the yearly salary of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.

But perhaps this isn’t a time to quibble. After all, a job is a job, especially in the United States, which has lost seven million jobs since December 2007, while reporting record-high numbers of people seeking assistance to feed themselves and/or their families. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 36 million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on food stamps.

On the other hand, given the woeful inadequacy of that “safety net,” we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that’s roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people. Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.

For purposes of comparison, $30 billion — remember, just the Pentagon-estimated cost of a 30,000-person troop surge — is equal to 80% of the total U.S. 2010 budget for international affairs, which includes monies for development and humanitarian assistance. On the domestic front, $30 billion could double the funding (at 2010 levels) for the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Or think of the surge this way: if the United States decided to send just 29,900 extra soldiers to Afghanistan, 100 short of the present official total, it could double the amount of money — $100 million — it has allocated to assist refugees and returnees from Afghanistan through the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Leaving aside the fact that the United States already accounts for 45% of total global military spending, the $30 billion surge cost alone would place us in the top-ten for global military spending, sandwiched between Italy and Saudi Arabia. Spent instead on “soft security” measures within Afghanistan, $30 billion could easilybuild, furnish and equip enough schools for the entire nation.

Continuing this nod to the absurd for just one more moment, if you received a silver dollar every second, it would take you 960 years to haul in that $30 billion. Not that anyone could hold so much money. Together, the coins would weigh nearly 120,000 tons, or more than the poundage of 21,000 Asian elephants, an aircraft carrier, or the Washington Monument. Converted to dollar bills and laid end-to-end, $30 billion would reach 2.9 million miles or 120 times around the Earth.

One more thing, that $30 billion isn’t even the real cost of Obama’s surge. It’s just a minimum, through-the-basement estimate. If you were to throw in all the bases being built, private contractors hired, extra civilians sent in, and the staggering costs of training a larger Afghan army and police force (a key goal of the surge), the figure would surely be startlingly higher. In fact, total Afghanistan War spending for 2010 is now expected to exceed $102.9 billion, doubling last year’s Afghan spending. Thought of another way, it breaks down to $12 million per hour in taxpayer dollars for one year. That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran’s benefits, from hospital stays to education.

In Afghan terms, our upcoming single year of war costs represents nearly five times that country’s gross domestic product or $3,623.70 for every Afghan woman, man, and child. Given that the average annual salary for an Afghan soldier is $2,880 and many Afghans seek employment in the military purely out of economic desperation, this might be a wise investment — especially since the Taliban is able to pay considerably more for its new recruits. In fact, recent increases in much-needed Afghan recruits appear to correlate with the promise of a pay raise.

All of this is, of course, so much fantasy, since we know just where that $30-plus billion will be going.  In 2010, total Afghanistan War spending since November 2001 will exceed $325 billion, which equals the combined annual military spending of Great Britain, China, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.  If we had never launched an invasion of Afghanistan or stayed on fighting all these years, those war costs, evenly distributed in this country, would have meant a $2,298.80 dividend per U.S. taxpayer.

Even as we calculate the annual cost of war, the tens of thousands of Asian elephants in the room are all pointing to $1 trillion in total war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan.  The current escalation in Afghanistan coincides with that rapidly-approaching milestone. In fact, thanks to Peter Baker’s recent New York Times report on the presidential deliberations that led to the surge announcement, we know that the trillion-dollar number for both wars may be a gross underestimate. The Office of Management and Budget sent President Obama a memo, Baker tells us, suggesting that adding General McChrystal’s surge to ongoing war costs, over the next 10 years, could mean — forget Iraq — a trillion dollar Afghan War.

At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations’ military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today’s dollars cost $709.9 billion — or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we’re still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan.

________________________

Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee’s justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.

[Note: Jo would like to acknowledge the analysis and numbers crunching of Chris Hellman and Mary Orisich, members of the National Priorities Project's research team, without whom this piece would not have been possible.]

Copyright 2009 Jo Comerford

Source: TomDispatch.com

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British Policy on the North-West Frontier of India 1877-1947

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A SUITABLE PRECEDENT FOR THE MODERN DAY FATA?

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by Dr Christian Tripodi

DIFFERING STRATEGIC REALITIES

The issue of contemporary relevance is of course complicated by the fact that, as always, there are few if any discrete ‘lessons’ from history; it is rare for the prevailing strategic, political and cultural conditions of one era to be replicated in another. In stark contrast to today, British colonial policy-makers enjoyed control of much of the sub-continent, access to comparatively vast human resources, an aura of permanence, the credibility provided by overwhelming military strength and an administrative infrastructure that provided the necessary apparatus for tribal interaction.

But the greatest difference between the British colonial experience of the North-West Frontier to that of today lies in the fundamentally differing strategic picture. Whereas the activities of Al-Qa’ida and Pakistani militants within the present day Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has significant strategic implications both regionally and internationally, for British India, despite the logic of conventional wisdom, the tribal agencies of the North-West Frontier mattered relatively little in any conventional strategic sense. And the importance of this to the question posed lies in the fact that strategic appreciations decided tribal policies which in turn dictated the methods used; methods which contemporary policy-makers now examine for potential utility.

COLONIAL VIEW OF THE NORTH-WEST FRONTIER

How exactly then did the tribal areas of the Afghan-Indian border figure in British strategic appreciations? Despite well publicised concerns, on the part of the military especially, as to a Russian invasion of British India through the North-West Frontier, thus dictating firm control over the tribal lands of that region, the threat of a physical Russian invasion was to all intents and purposes a chimera, albeit one which policy-makers, dealing in the realm of potentialities as they were, had to account for. Rather, the true threat to British India was perceived to lie within India itself; a popular uprising that would have the potential, directly or indirectly, to make the British position there untenable.

Russia might still pose a threat insofar that an advance to the borders of British India could inspire dissidents within to challenge British rule, hence two interventions in Afghanistan by Britain in 1839-42 and 1878-81 respectively designed to forestall such an advance. But if the threat to British India came from an ‘internal enemy’ comprised of some 300 million Indians rather than via actual physical invasion through the North-West Frontier, and if the tribes themselves posed no existential threat to British India, (despite several large scale armed uprisings on their part) then it becomes clear as to how British policy-makers over time began to view the volatile tribal regions of the North-West Frontier not so much a threat to India’s defence, but as a very real drain on its resources, an appreciation that would be central to shaping the British response to tribal matters.

Fundamentally, the tribes of the North-West Frontier Province posed a danger not so much through their military capability but their potential, over time, to absorb scarce military and fiscal resources for little perceptible return in terms of control or adjustment of their behaviour. As time progressed therefore, particularly post 1900, there developed an essentially laissez faire policy of administration. The government became unwilling to expend resources on a barren and largely uninhabitable backwater – the reverse of today’s strategic appreciation of the region – with the result that development policies were curtailed and the Indian army’s role in tribal affairs was limited to coercion and little else.

Relations between the tribes and the GOI were managed almost exclusively by combination of a small cadre of political agents, a system of Government service through native militia and Khassadar units and the payment of allowances to guarantee good behaviour. In return for this light administrative ‘touch’, the tribal agencies remained largely autonomous and free from the paraphernalia of colonial rule – courts, police and taxation. Despite outbreaks of violence, some huge in scale such as in 1897, 1919-21 and 1936-7, the system worked relatively well and if the accusation could be levelled at the British that they never exerted any real control over the tribal areas, the response would simply have been that, firstly, control was unnecessary and that secondly, the financial implications of trying to achieve such a state of affairs would have been entirely counterproductive with respect to India as a whole.

Of course, the British were able to develop some sophisticated techniques designed to facilitate a degree of influence within the tribal agencies. The use of political agents, a small number of specialists often ex-military and fluent in Pashtu, in order to manage relations with those tribes inhabiting the individual agencies, availed the British of an unobtrusive but relatively effective method of keeping the lines of communication open between the authorities and tribal groupings. These individuals disbursed allowances to tribal leaders, handled requests on the part of tribesmen, requested the apprehension and punishment of miscreants on behalf of the authorities, commanded local Khassadar units and kept the Government apprised of tribal sentiments and potential disturbances.

When required, they would also act as political advisors to those military commanders tasked with mounting punitive raids into tribal areas. Good ‘politicals’ were of immense value to the Government and, if blessed with the requisite experience, stamina and personality could exert influence far out of proportion either to the cost of their employment or their numbers involved. The military, too, developed a certain degree of expertise in this particularly testing environment. Over the duration of the British presence on the Frontier, the Indian Army, by virtue of its repeated exposure to tribal Lashkars and the difficult terrain, became pre-eminent in the practice of mountain warfare. Its mixture of native and British units generally proved equal to anything that even the most combative of tribes, such as the Afridis, Wazirs or Mahsuds, could produce.

WEAKNESSES IN THE BRITISH COLONIAL MODEL

However, the combination of skilful ‘political’ and professional, learned military hid a number of weaknesses, both conceptual and physical, in the British approach. To begin with, the beau ideal of the vastly experienced, all knowing political agent was in many cases precisely that; an ideal rather than a reality. Limited time in post, suspicions on the part of policy-makers and the military as to his true loyalty – tribe or Government – and a reluctance on the part of that Government to become engaged in any meaningful sense with the indigenous tribes robbed the political agent of much of his potential utility as an instrument of progressive policy. An often highly fractious civil-military relationship further complicated matters. The aforementioned suspicion of the political’s true loyalties was frequently writ large in the minds of military officers, while in return the political considered his military counterparts to be often entirely ignorant of the nuances and delicacies of Government-tribal relations.

The latter point is an interesting one, for it challenges the popular assumption that Imperial militaries, and those of Britain in particular, were characterised by an institutional grasp of their environment – people, customs and language especially. On the Frontier, however, it is dubious as to whether the military at large devoted any real attentions to its surroundings save for tactical and operational considerations. Despite the fact that battalions might spend years on the Frontier, Officers and men displayed apparently limited inclination to learn about the tribal society within which they moved and while the Pashtun may have been admired as a warrior, there appeared to be scant regard for his system of government or his culture as a whole.

Certainly, while many officers and men spoke Urdu and Hindustani, the number of those able to speak Pashtu was limited and observers were sometimes struck by the limitations in the military’s grasp of tribal affairs, one going so far as to comment that, ‘[T]he average Army officer knows practically nothing about the tribal area, the people who inhabit it, their language and the way that they are controlled’. Of course, there were those within the military who displayed a firm grasp of such matters but to be fair, any institutional aversion to a deeper understanding of the tribal environment was in many ways simply a product of the Army’s role. Tasked with national defence rather than influence building, only really entering the tribal areas in a punitive or preventative role, and often perceiving skirmishes as ideal training opportunities, there was little encouragement for the military to pay heed to the tribes unless actually fighting them.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

The fundamental point, however, was not necessarily that British methods were possessed of inherent weaknesses. Any system of administration in an environment as testing as the North-West Frontier was and is bound to have its weaknesses exposed, as the contemporary Pakistani experience has illustrated. Rather, the point to be made is that those weaknesses had little effect in real terms because the British were afforded the luxury of being able, over time, to marginalise the tribal areas within their own strategic considerations. They could afford to persevere with a ‘hands off’ system of control and administration that was fully acknowledged to be faulty and lacking in imagination but which sufficed in the face of institutional conservatism; a state of affairs that one would presumably wish to avoid today.

This conservatism prevailed subsequent to the British departure from India. Post 1947, utilising the same basic structures of colonial administration – political agents, native militias and allowances reinforcing the basic concept of tribal autonomy – and similarly afforded the luxury of a laissez faire approach to frontier matters, the Pakistani Government was rewarded with stability within the tribal agencies. However, the flood of radical elements into that region during the Afghan-Soviet war since 1980, a trend that has only accelerated since the coalition invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and the increasingly ambitious political agenda of certain of those elements has only highlighted the weaknesses of what is to all intents and purposes the British colonial system, in the face of a radically changed strategic environment.

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Requiem for Freedom

Religion must be reinterpreted, not to make it acceptable to the rest of the world but to breathe life into the Muslim world itself. –Photo by Reuters

by Ayesha Siddiqa

One is often asked whether or not Pakistan will survive the current crisis. You tell them that, yes, Pakistan will survive. After all, territories don’t grow feet to walk away with. There is a sigh of relief and those asking the question happily walk away despite one’s attempts to draw their attention to the fact that there is something fundamentally changed about Pakistan.

In fact, there are some seriously sad things happening around us that do not grab people’s attention because all they are bothered about is the survival of the physical. Saving the soul is not an idea that catches the public’s attention.

I wonder how many people notice the rapidly changing world around them. Suicide attacks and bomb blasts add to the din created by those who are busy establishing a new brand of nationalism which has no shade of tolerance, pluralism or multi-polarity. There are young bloggers who believe that all forms of dissent especially those that challenge their version of nationalism must be silenced. One would not be surprised if they use uncivil methods to achieve their objective.

Another set of people believes that killing is justified as long as it happens in other countries. Conceptually, there is no difference between the thinking of this lot and others who have been murdering innocent people in this and other countries. After all, terrorism is a byproduct of extremism.

Two decades after Zia-ul-Haq the general is still remembered for changing the nature of state and society. We have not even begun to think about the generation that is being fed on erroneous dreams of attaining national and civilisational glory through brute force. They are being fed tales of Pakistan and the Mujahideen defeating the communist superpower. They hope to perform a similar feat.

Just imagine what will happen inside Pakistan after the US forces begin to withdraw in 2011 — in fact, how about a withdrawal from Afghanistan accompanied by a drastic reduction in America’s financial power which is already happening? This is not to say that the Americans should remain there but that there are elements who will don the victor’s mantle and trample on the rest of society in Afghanistan, and try to do the same in the rest of the world. Choosing sides is no longer an easy task.

Such people, who subscribe to the ideology of Hameed Gul — Pakistan’s indigenous version of Osama bin Laden — see the battle in terms of a clash of civilisations. From the point of view of such people, the world is back to the days of the Crusades except that this time it is the Muslim world up in arms against all other civilisations. Therefore, an American withdrawal would be tantamount to the supremacy of one race over another. Sadly, they are not alone in their adventure.

It is sadder to observe some of those, who were formerly from what was deemed as the liberal left in Pakistan, arguing that the Taliban should not be pushed until the Americans are out. Such an argument is made without recalling that the partnership between the liberal left and the extreme right in Iran was at the cost of the former.

The left represented by Ali Shariati didn’t realise how fast it was taken over and swallowed by its partners.

Mention must also be made of the centrist liberals in Pakistan who believe that the right can and must be eliminated. In a nutshell there is a general lack of imagination in creating alternative ideological narratives that are easily comprehensible and can be acted upon. No wonder the Sufi-pop music beat has not caught up with ordinary people.

However, my lament is not just for Pakistan but for the rest of the world as well where labels and ideologies entrap people. Terms like ‘Islamophobia,’ ‘Islamofascism’ and others represent the absolute absence of imagination. Or perhaps this is an easier method to keep the ordinary population engaged and look the other way while the corporate world saps states and societies.

It is interesting to read blogs on the Internet or get email messages from ordinary folk who believe that the only problem with the world is Islam and its ideology.

Such emails are welcome because at least there are some who would like to engage rather than get enraged without communicating with those on the other side of the ideological divide. Their comments reflect ignorance of their own religious history.

The other Semitic religions (even others) have had their fair share of their own version of the Taliban. The Taliban, for example, would envy what transpired between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland.

It is not that one religious ideology is inferior or superior to others. But bloodshed becomes the fate of societies once religions are monopolised by the ruling elite or used to enhance the power of some versus others. The killing of Jews by those that converted to Christianity is another good example of the abuse of religion for the sake of power.

An understanding of their own religious histories by adherents of other faiths would perhaps help them sympathise with Muslims who are at the moment caught between an angry world and an unimaginative religious interpretation and discourse by their own priestly class. A religion that came about to bring a social transformation must not fall prey to those who don’t understand its basic spirit and use it for their narrow power interests.

At this time religion must be reinterpreted, not to make it acceptable to the rest of the world but to breathe life into the Muslim world itself. The fact that this will improve relations with other communities is something that will follow naturally. To present the current crisis as a Judeo-Christian onslaught against Islam or vice versa is criminal. States and societies must understand that such an argument is a trap which can only take the common people towards disaster. As for Pakistan, I hope my readers can empathise with my lament for a country that is receding very fast like the dim lights dotting a distant shore. I don’t see this one being rescued. However, a new one where there is room for all to coexist must be imagined.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst. She can be reached at ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

Source: Dawn.com Cross posted at: Instablogs.com

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FED UP WITH KARZAI? TRY ZARDARI

Eric Margolis

Washington is finally getting some of the democracy it has long been calling for in Pakistan. The result is a disaster for US “Afpak” policy.

The Obama administration is fast discovering that its man in Islamabad, President Asif Ali Zardari, may be an even bigger ethical and managerial liability than its overseer in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai.

Over the years, I’ve met every Pakistani leader save the current one, President Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. But I’ve written for decades about corruption charges that relentlessly dog him. At one point, I was threatened with having acid thrown in my face if I kept writing about the Bhutto-Zardari’s financial scandals.

Asif Ali Zardari became known to one and all as “Mr. 10%” from the time when he was a minister in his wife’s government, in charge of approving government contracts. Critics say the 10% and other brazen kickbacks produced millions for the Zardari-Bhutto family.

But Benazir Bhutto repeatedly insisted to me that she and her husband – who was tortured and jailed for years on corruption charges – were innocent, victims of political persecution in Pakistan’s utterly corrupt legal system where “justice” goes to the biggest payer of bribes, and politicians use courts to punish their rivals. Small wonder so many Pakistanis are calling for far more honest and swifter, if more draconian,  Islamic justice.

In 2008, Washington sought to rescue Musharraf’s foundering   dictatorship by convincing the popular Benazir Bhutto, who had exiled herself to Dubai, to front for him as democratic window-dressing for continued military rule. Her price: amnesty for a long list of corruption charges against her and her husband. The US and Britain quietly arranged the amnesty for the Bhuttos and thousands of their indicted supporters (and other political figures).

Benazir confided in me she had a secret plan to oust Musharraf once she got back into power. Just before her assassination, Benazir also told me jealous associates of Musharraf were gunning for her.

Asif Zardari then inherited Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party; the nation’s largest, as a sort of personal property.  He became president, thanks to strong US and British political and financial support. His rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was regarded by the western powers as insufficiently supportive of the war in Afghanistan, and too independent-minded.

Zardari repaid America’s support by facilitating the US war in Afghanistan, and allowed the Pentagon to keep using Pakistan’s bases and military personnel, without which the war in Afghanistan could not be prosecuted. Washington promised Pakistan’s elite, pro-western leadership at least $8 billion.

That sleazy deal has now come unstuck thanks to Pakistan’s newest, rather improbable democratic hero, Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. As chief justice of the Supreme Court under Musharraf, Chaudhry was expected to rubber stamp government decisions.

Instead, Justice Chaudhry began enforcing the law by reinstating the dismissed corruption charges and examining the legality of Musharraf’s self-appointed second term.

Musharraf had Justice Chaudhry kicked off the bench. He, and a score of fellow judges who would not toe the line, were placed under house arrest. Some were beaten. Their pensions were cancelled.

Shamefully, Washington and London, who claim to be waging war in Afghanistan to bring it democracy, gave Musharraf a green light to purge Pakistan’s judiciary.

But the ebbing of Zardari’s power has resulted in the reinstatement by parliament of Justice Chaudhry, who promptly reinstated all the old charges. For the first time, Pakistan was tasting the true institutions of democracy at work.   Its US-engineered regime is running scared.

Zardari has presidential immunity against criminal charges. But his chief lieutenants face prosecution, notably regime strongman, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, and Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar. Both are key supporters and facilitators of US military operations in Afghanistan, America’s use of Pakistani bases, and Pakistan’s war against its own rebellious Pashtun tribesmen (aka “Taliban”).   Malik is due in court on 2 January, 2010 and is banned from leaving Pakistan.

Opposition parties are demanding Zardari and senior aides resign. Islamabad is in an uproar just when Washington needs Pakistan’s government to intensify the war against the so-called Pakistani Taliban and support President Barack Obama’s expanded war in Afghanistan. Washington is also intensifying drone attacks inside Pakistan, that are provoking fierce public outrage against the US, and weighing air attacks on Baluchistan Province.

Skeletons are dancing out of Zardari’s closets: $63 million in illegal kickbacks and commissions allegedly hidden in Swiss bank accounts; accusation of laundering $13.7 million in Switzerland and charges of kickback on helicopter and warplane deals. In 2003, Swiss magistrates found Zardari and Bhutto guilty of money laundering, sentencing then to a six month suspended jail term, a fine of $50,000, and ordered them to repay $11 million to Pakistan’s government.

Zardari’s has an estimated personal fortune of $2 billion; luxurious properties in the US, France, Spain and Britain, and on it goes.   Amazingly, he avoided trial in Switzerland by claiming mental illness.

In 2008, Gen. Musharraf had all charges against the Bhuttos dropped as part of the US-engineered plan for a diumverate with Benazir.

The Bhuttos remain one of the largest feudal landowners in a desperately poor nation where annual income is US$1,027 and illiteracy over 50%. Pakistan has been ruled since its creation in 1947 by either callous feudal landlords, who bought and sold politicians like bags of Basmati rice, or by generals.

It appears that Zardari’s days as Washington’s man in Islamabad are numbered.   Anti-American fury is surging, with popular claims that Pakistan has been “occupied” by the US, treated like a third rate banana republic, and is run by corrupt, US-installed stooges and crooks. Shades of Iran under the Shah, and Egypt under Sadat.

Many Pakistanis blame the current bloody wave of bombings in their nation on US mercenaries from Xe (formerly Blackwater), and old foe India staging attacks in revenge for decades of bombings in Kashmir, Punjab and its eastern hill states by Pakistani intelligence.

Most Pakistanis believe Washington is bent on tearing apart their unstable nation to seize its nuclear weapons.

In the process of prosecuting its occupation of relatively insignificant Afghanistan, the US has turned Pakistan, a nation of great strategic importance, into a bitter foe.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009 Source: ericmargolis.com

Related Posts: I. Pakistan military moving to undercut Zardari over his close U.S. ties II. Why Hotels When You Have Belaire, Mr. President ?? . III. Islamabad: The contours of a changed, unwritten script Situation

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Why War Will Take No Holiday in 2010

In Nightmares Begin Responsibilities

by Tom Engelhardt

Excuse the gloom in the holiday season, but I feel like we’re all locked inside a malign version of the movie Groundhog Day.You remember, the one in which the characters are forced to relive the same 24 hours endlessly.  Put more personally, TomDispatch started in November 2001 as an email to friends in response to the first moments of our latest Afghan War.  More than eight years later… well, you know the story.

Worse yet, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll indicates that a startling 58% of Americans, otherwise in a mighty gloomy mood, support the president’s latest “surge” in Afghanistan which will extend that war into the dismal future.  And worse than that, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, from the point of view of official Washington, next year won’t really count for much.  The crucial decisions on both wars will evidently leapfrog 2010.  So, on that score, we might as well just mark the year off on our calendars now.

2010: pure loss.  But before I go into the details, let me try this another way.

In his 1937 short story with an unforgettable title — “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” — Delmore Schwartz’s unnamed narrator imagines himself “as if” in a “motion picture theatre.”  He’s watching a silent film — already then a long-gone form — “an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps.”  It’s not any movie, however, but one about his parents’ awkward, uncertain courtship, and there comes a moment when his character suddenly leaps up in the crowded theater of his dream life and shouts at the flickering images of his still undecided (future) parents:  “Don’t do it.  It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.  Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

For just an instant, that is, he’s willing to obliterate himself, his very being, in order to stop a nightmare he knows will otherwise occur.

This unnerving fictional moment, which I want you to hold in abeyance for a while, came to my mind recently — in the context of TomDispatch.

BOMBING AGHANISTAN BACK TO STONE AGE

Our endless wars are nightmares.  Few enough would disagree with that, even, I suspect, among the supportive 58% in that poll or the 54% who “approve of the president’s performance as commander-in-chief.”  If only we could wake up.

I was reminded of our strange dream-state recently when I reread the article that sparked the creation of what became TomDispatch.  I first stumbled across it in the fall of 2001, after the Towers came down in my hometown, after that acrid smell of burning made its way to my neighborhood and into everything, after I traveled to “Ground Zero” (as it was already being called) to view those vast otherworldly shards of destruction via nearby side streets, after I spent weeks reading the ever narrower, ever more war-oriented news coverage in this country, and after I watched George W. Bush and Company mainlining fear directly into the American bloodstream, selling the eternal terror of terror and the president’s Global War on Terror that so conveniently went with it.

It was obvious that war was on the way, and that the men (and woman) who were leading us into it had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans.  Somewhere in that period, probably in late October 2001, a friend sent me a piece by an Afghan-American living in California that spurred me to modest action.

His name was Tamim Ansary and he posted it online on September 16^th, just five days after the attacks on New York and Washington, having listened to right-wing talk radio rev up to an instant fever pitch about “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age.”  His piece went viral and finally reached me — I was hardly online in those days — by email sometime in October after the Bush administration had begun the bombing campaign in Afghanistan that preceded its invasion-by-proxy of that country.

Ansary wrote “as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden,” and yet his piece was a desperate warning against the American war to come.  He wrote with passion and conviction, with knowledge of Afghanistan and a kind of imagery that was otherwise not then part of our American world:

“We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely.”

It was the image of our bombs only “stirring the rubble” that stunned me.  I had been reading the papers for weeks and had seen nothing like it.  It seemed to catch the forgotten nightmare of the Afghan past as well as the nightmare to come at a moment when the only nightmare on the American mind was our own.  Our own chosen imagery was then playing out in repeated public rites in which we hailed ourselves as the planet’s greatest victims, survivors, and dominators, while leaving no roles for others in our about-to-be-global drama — except, of course, for greatest Evildoer (which Osama bin Laden filled magnificently).  It wasn’t only our foreign policy that was switching onto the “unilateral” track, so was our imagery.

Small wonder, then, that the strangeness of that single image moved me to gather the email addresses of a small group of friends and relatives, copy the piece into an email, add a note above it indicating that it was a must-read, and with that modest gesture, quite unbeknownst to me, launch TomDispatch.com.

Ansary, an Afghan who had been living here for 35 years, wasn’t thinking only of Afghan lives and nightmares, however.  He had American lives and nightmares in mind as well.  He wrote about Americans dying, about the dangers of Pakistan, and especially about bin Laden’s dream — to draw this country’s military into the backlands of Islam and start a war of civilizations — while pleading against an invasion that, even on September 16^th, was unstoppable.  Of bin Laden, he wrote:

“It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.  Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?”

IN THE BIGGEST DREAMS, THE LARGEST MISCALCULATIONS

Well, yes, as it turned out, someone did have the “belly” for just that — and far more.  One thing you can still say about the various characters who made up the Bush administration, including George’s one-percent-doctrine vice president, all those neocons ominously stashed away in the Pentagon, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who, within five hours of the attack on the Pentagon, was already urging aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq):  they were thinking geo-strategically.  They had the globe, the whole damn thing, in their sights.  They were also desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do.  They believed that the mightiest, most advanced military force on the planet could shock-and-awe anyone into submission, and quite unilaterally at that.

As still unrepentant Cold Warriors, even with the Soviet Union a decade gone, they were still eager to roll back Russia’s borders and influence, especially in oil-rich Central Asia, and so turn that rump empire into a second- or third-rate state of no future importance to the U.S.  They were eager to encircle Iran with bases and take down the mullahs. (As the infamous neocon quip of that moment went:  “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.  Real men want to go to Tehran.”)  With a president and vice president who were former energy company execs and a national security adviser for whom Chevron had named a double-hulled oil tanker, they tended to be riveted by energy flows and how to control them.

They had their minds, that is, on a very big picture — nothing less than the creation of a future Pax Americana abroad and Pax Republicana at home.  And they truly believed that Pax could be established at the tip of a cruise missile.  Having been shocked-and-awed themselves on 9/11, they were more than ready to return the favor, to use that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century” as an excuse to do their damnedest, including, as they bragged at the time, targeting up to 60 countries, mostly in what they liked to call “the arc of instability” (essentially the oil heartlands of the planet) where terrorists were supposed to operate at will.  Nothing, that is, was too grandiose for them.

They clearly saw the chance of a lifetime and grabbed it like the opportunists they were, and at first, it looked like they were right on the mark.  Two “victories” were the result, each accomplished in a matter of weeks within less than a year-and-a-half of each other.  The Taliban were gone in nanoseconds; bin Laden almost in their grasp and driven underground; Saddam Hussein swept into the dustbin of history.  It seemed — to them above all — like a miracle of modern military power.  Who could now withstand them?  The answer was obvious: no one.

The rag-tag oppositional forces left in Afghanistan and Iraq were like so many flies to be swatted away.  So they sent their viceroys into Kabul and Baghdad to clean things up, which, especially in the case of Iraq, meant disbanding that country’s military, privatizing its economy, and opening up the oil industry of one of the most energy-rich regions on the planet to the mighty transnational (and significantly American) oil giants.  In the meantime, the Pentagon would build massive military bases and prepare to garrison both countries till hell froze over.  The official documents they wrote for, and sometimes in the name of, the newly “liberated” Iraqis read like fever-dream versions of nineteenth century imperial fantasies.

When reality up and bit them hard, they were already looking to the future.  They were going to crush Syria, drive Iran to its knees, make OPEC and the Saudis grovel (with the help of increased Iraqi oil output), bring China to heel, and, oh yes, get the terrorists, too.

What a dream!  What a miscalculation!  What a nightmare for the rest of us!  Hundreds of thousands (or more) now dead, millions of refugees, ongoing war, a region — those very oil heartlands — destabilized, and of course the massive draining of American resources in two major wars (and various minor conflicts) on which almost a trillion dollars has already been spent and another trillion could easily go down the drain.

And where are we eight years later?  The Chinese, the Russians, the Malaysians, and others have picked up those energy dreams and, in Iraq and elsewhere, translated them into success without spending a cent on war. The Russians are back in Central Asia.  The Chinese are now sending Central Asian natural gas China-wards through a newly opened pipeline.  Meanwhile, the American oil giants have ended up with few of the spoils.  The American Army is a wreck and two minority insurgencies with but tens of thousands of relatively lightly armed guerrillas have made a mockery of that military’s supposed power to shock and awe anybody.  The latest laugh-fest being that insurgents have, according to the Wall Street Journal, hacked into the most advanced weaponry the Pentagon has, the video feeds from its latest drone aircraft, with a $26 piece of off-the-shelf Russian software.  In other words, while, at the cost of multimillions, Americans were capable of looking at battlefield scenes fit for destruction from distant Langley, Virginia, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, or various secret sites in the Greater Middle East, so were Iraqi, and possibly Afghan, guerrillas and terrorists on their laptops for nada.

Eight years later, the Bush administration’s dreams of a Pax Americana and its domestic twin are in that dustbin of history along with Saddam Hussein.  And all the big ideas that went with our two disastrous wars seem to have been sluiced down the drain as well.  And yet, in both countries, the giant bases remain like permanent scars on the land, as do the wars.  No dust heap of history for them.  Not yet, anyway.  Our wars are instead to proceed without rhyme or reason.  And among those deciding U.S. policy, military and civilian, none (I have no doubt) have placed a call to Tamim Ansary, wherever he may be.  It doesn’t pay to be right in our world.

I don’t want to claim, of course, that no reasons are offered any more in explanation of our wars:  There’s Osama bin Laden, for starters, as President Obama reminded us recently.  No one in our world knows where he is, or even, at this point, if he is.  But if he still exists, he must be dancing a jig.  With possibly fewer than 100 operatives in Afghanistan and another few hundred in Pakistan (according to the best calculations of the Obama administration), he’s somehow managed to bog imperial America down in the tribal backlands of Central (and increasingly South) Asia.

Beyond the damage inflicted on 9/11, he’s already helped drain the United States of nearly a trillion dollars in war costs and counting.  His “presence” seems to insure that, sometime in the near future, the Obama administration will further compound the folly of the last eight years by attempting to completely destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan with air attacks on its restive province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban leadership is supposedly hiding.

If back in 2002 or 2003 you had presented such a scenario — a few hundred terrorists tying us up in a trillion-dollar war — you would have been laughed out of the country; yet it’s safe to say that what’s happening now represents, for bin Laden, triumph on a level that the attacks of 9/11, no matter how televisually spectacular, could never come close to.  And here’s the worst of it in this holiday season, peering into the murk of 2010, all I can see is signs of endless war.  As for peacemaking or de-escalation next year, fugged about it.

2010: A YEAR OF NO SIGNIFICANCE

Just to take our wars one at a time:

In Afghanistan, here’s what we know.  The president is surging at least 30,000 troops into that country, reportedly accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 private contractors, and an extra crew of civilian employees of the U.S. government as well.  What initially was announced as a six-month surge is now expected to last 11-12 months (if things “line up perfectly,” according to the general in charge).  That means the surge itself will probably still be underway next November.  Fittingly, then, the Obama administration has made it clear that it won’t even consider beginning what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called a “thorough review of how we’re doing” in Afghanistan until December 2010, a process that, based on the last set of presidential deliberations, could last months.  Put another way, war in the present escalated form is simply what’s on the books for 2010.  Period.

Moreover, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry recently assured Afghans that July 2011, the date the president mentioned for beginning a withdrawal of American forces, is not “a deadline” of any sort.  According to Thomas Day of the McClatchy newspapers, he insisted, in fact, “that a strong American military presence will remain in Afghanistan long after July 2011.”

In Iraq, on the other hand, the war is officially ending.  In the last months of the Bush administration, the U.S. negotiated an agreement with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to withdraw all its “combat troops” by August 2010 and the rest of its troops by the end of 2011.  Ever since, on both counts, fudging has been the order of the day.  To begin with, all troops are, in a sense, “combat” troops, but it soon became clear that some of those now defined as such might be conveniently relabeled “advisors” or “trainers.”  This has left a good deal of flexibility as to just who has to be withdrawn by this coming August.  As for “all” the troops, although next to no media attention has been paid, the weaving and bobbing has begun there, too.  While visiting Iraq recently, Gates managed to sideline 2010 as a date of significance, while angling for an unending, if smaller scale, occupation of that country.  Under the headline, “Gates Expects New Sanctions on Iran,” for instance, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times reported this:

“The defense secretary also spoke about America’s involvement in Iraq, saying that the administration expects that some United States forces might remain in an advisory capacity in Iraq after 2011, the deadline for all American troops to withdraw from the country.  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to see agreements between ourselves and the Iraqis that continue a “train, equip and advise” role beyond the end of 2011,’ Mr. Gates said.  He added, ‘I suspect as we get on through 2010 and begin approaching 2011, the Iraqis themselves will probably have an interest in this.’”

So scratch 2010 when it comes to Washington’s Iraq plans, and for 2012, start imagining thousands, or even tens of thousands of American “advisors” and “mentors” (not, heaven forbid, “combat troops”) on a few of those giant bases the Pentagon built.  Keep an eye, in particular, on massive Balad Air Base – since the U.S. quite consciously never helped the Iraqi military build up a real air force of its own — and the monster base complex, Camp Victory, on the edge of Baghdad.  Only if those are turned over to the Iraqis would an American “withdrawal” seem a plausible reality.  (Keep in mind as well that the Bush administration in its planning for the occupation of Iraq in 2003 always expected to withdraw all but perhaps 30,000 American troops who were to be garrisoned on out-of-the-way American-built bases for the long haul.)

And when Gates says such things, it’s no small matter.  After all, what’s now being called “Obama’s war” might at least as reasonably be called “Gates’s war,” as might the war in Iraq that Obama is ostensibly ending.  In both countries, Washington’s basic policy was set in the last months of the Bush administration when Gates, then as now secretary of defense, was already ascendant.  The first 11,000 troops of “Obama’s” surge were, for instance, dispatched by the Bush administration, even if they only left for Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama presidency.

Similarly, the new Pentagon budget — a Gates-supervised document in its planning stages before Obama arrived — is larger than the last Bush-era budget, and that’s without the supplemental bill for Afghan surge funding, now estimated at $30-$40 billion (and likely to rise), that will be submitted to Congress sometime next year.  The “new” military strategy for fighting our wars, counterinsurgency (or COIN), isn’t an Obama-era creation either.  It’s the baby of Bush’s favorite general and Iraq surge commander David Petraeus.  Advanced to the post of Centcom commander by Bush, he is now the key military figure who oversees both our wars in the Greater Middle East.  In other words, in war policy the continuity between the post-Cheney Bush era and the Obama one is striking, not to say overwhelming, and given the fact that Gates and Petraeus hold such crucial posts, that’s hardly surprising, just depressing as hell.

These are men already preparing for “the next war” and, in that sense, Afghanistan is also our main laboratory for the weaponry and concepts that will animate our future conflicts.  Its skies and villages are the testing grounds for endless war, American-style.

FULL DRONE AHEAD

So here’s my fantasy this holiday season.  If I could return to the movie theater of those early post-9/11 days, I’d like to stand up in that well-packed place and shout:  “Don’t do it.  It’s not too late to change your minds.  Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, impoverishment, death, and a population whose character will be monstrous.”

I’d like, that is, to obliterate TomDispatch — for without the Afghan invasion and war, the one that, all these years later, only grows wider, my website would never have existed.

And yet, here’s the saddest thing:  I know full well that its future is assured as long as I care to do it.  Our American way of life is a way of war.  War and more war.  2010, a snap.  2011, no problem.  2012, 2013, Ambassador Eikenberry guarantees it. 2018, 2025, 2047?  Don’t worry, we already have one nifty bomber (advanced battlefield surveillance system, dogfighting drone) on the drawing boards for you!

Even without the geopolitical thinkers of the Bush administration, even without the necessary set of rationales, war has a force of its own.  Especially in our country, it has its own powerful set of interests, its lobbies and enthusiasts, its powerful weapons makers, its law makers, planners, and dreamers.  It has its own head of steam.  After a while, it seems, it doesn’t need explanations to keep itself going.  It’s self-propelled.

None of what’s happening in the world of American war may make much sense any more, not even in terms Washington’s foreign policy power brokers understand, but no matter.  They — and so all of us — are already in the grip of a nightmare, and nothing, it seems, can wake us.  So, for the last days of this year, as for the days that preceded them, as for all the days of next year, it’s full drone ahead and damn the torpedoes.  That’s our American world, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.

Perhaps, though, it’s worth keeping one modest thought in mind:

In nightmares, too, begin responsibilities.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note on further reading: If you want to know more about Tom Engelhardt and his views on contemporary issues, see his following posts that we  already uploaded on these pages and check out the first part of a two-part interview Nick Turse did with him back in 2006, “The Imperial Press and Me.”]

1. Filling the Skies with Assassins 2. Questions to Ask in the Dead of Night 3. The Pressure of an Expanding War 4. The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters 5. A WAR OF DRONES: Why Military Dreams Fail — and Why It Doesn’t Matter

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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WISHING YOU A MERRY X MAS

The image above has been captured by Nadeem Khawar with a shooting accuracy and sharp sense which is typical of Nadeem’s creativity in photo art which he so beautifully describes as “an art of capturing action, thrill and the speed as if it were still and a still image as if it has life”. No wonder innovation and adeptness have become a hallmark of his on location shoots.

BUT! this image is not just a wish to send you my best greetings for

A Merry Xmas and

A Happy New Year

It also marks the very sense, the resilience and the will of the people of Pakistan to overcome their current predicaments, the challenges and the  crises and hit the mark as a tent pegger would do this on a tent pegging field. For it is the will, the thrill and the speed that makes him run and win.

The Truth about America & Pakistan [2 of 5]

Be not deceived by Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name or by the fact that he spent several childhood years in Indonesia. His political career is a product of a Westside Chicago Ashkenazi network with roots that trace directly back to organized crime of the 1920s. Top fundraiser Penny Pritzker traces her family lineage to grandfather Abe and great-grandfather Nicholas who served as lawyers for organized crime. She declined a nomination as Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Cabinet, a post typically offered to top fundraisers. Her confirmation hearings could have proved a political embarrassment by reminding us of the suspect origins of “our” latest president. Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva aptly described this high-profile product of the Chicago Outfit as “the first Jewish president.” Plus his Vice President, only a heartbeat from the reins of power, is the reliably obsequious Joe “I am a Zionist” Biden.

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ZIONIST DOMINANCE IN THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY

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by Jeff Gates

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Be not deceived by Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name or by the fact that he spent several childhood years in Indonesia. His political career is a product of a Westside Chicago Ashkenazi network with roots that trace directly back to organized crime of the 1920s.

Imperial U.S. vs Political Islam

AMERICA’S NEW CRUSADE

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by Rodrigue Tremblay

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I am as intolerant of imperialistic designs on the part of other nations as I was of such designs on the part of Germany. The choice is between two ideals; on the one hand, the ideal of democracy, which represents the rights of free peoples everywhere to govern themselves, and, the ideal of imperialism which seeks to dominate by force and unjust power, an ideal which is by no means dead and which is earnestly [sought] in many quarters still.

– U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, July 1919

Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.

– The Qur’an (9:5), Islam’s holy book

We are fighting them (the terrorists) over there so that we won’t have to fight them here at home.

– Former U.S. President George W. Bush’s political slogan

I, like any head of state, reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.

– U.S. President Barack Obama, December 10, 2009

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest…and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war.

– Plato, ancient Greek philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.)

In the political movie Charlie Wilson’s War about the Soviet-Afghanistan war, the hero states,

“America does not fight religious wars.” Is this possibly wrong, dead wrong?

In fact, is it not possible that since September 11, 2001, a new type of “holy war” may have begun? This time, the new crusade with strong religious overtones pits fundamentalist Christian America and its allies, against political Islam and the Islamist al Qaeda terrorist organization.

On September 16, 2001, then President George W. Bush set the tone when he said: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take awhile.”

On December 1, 2009 Nobel “Peace” laureate Barack Obama, president of the United States since January 20, 2009, decided to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, President George W. Bush. He announced a policy of stepping up the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan-Pashtunistan. He announced an escalation in the military occupation of Afghanistan by sending extra American troops in that Muslim country, putting the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan at more than 100,000.

Not satisfied in using the same vocabulary as George W. Bush, Barack Obama pushed the symbolism by adopting Bush’s practice of announcing policies surrounded by more than 4,000 students dressed as soldiers at the West Point Academy. This was all too reminiscent of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s fatal decision in 1965 to acquiesce to the request from U.S. commanders to enlarge the Vietnam war by sending scores of additional U.S. soldiers to that Asiatic country.

America seems to be in a constant need of a foreign enemy. First, it was the British. Then it was the Indigenous peoples. Then it was the Mexicans. Then it was the Spanish. Then it was the Filipinos. Then it was the Japanese. Then it was the Germans. Then it was the Italians. Then it was the Koreans. Then it was the Cubans. Then it was the Vietnamese. Then it was the Soviets. Then it was the Iraqis. Then it was the Islamists. Then it was the Taliban. And, once the current conflict in Pashtunistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan is over, it will possibly be the Iranians, the Chinese, the Russians…etc.!

The reason for such a permanent-war mentality is most likely related to the U.S. military-industrial complex, an enormous beast that must be fed regularly hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars, to sustain itself.

In the months following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the high echelons at the Pentagon were busy designing a new post-cold-war strategy designed to keep the U.S. war machine humming. Paul Wolfowitz, then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in the George H. Bush administration, wrote a memorandum titled “The Defense Policy Guidance 1992-1994”, which was dated February 18, 1992. The new so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine was a blueprint to “set the nation’s [military] direction for the next century.” This new neocon military doctrine called for the replacement of the policy of “containment” with one of military “preemption” and international “unilateralism”, in effect, discarding the United Nations Charter that forbids such international behavior.

The Pentagon’s overall goal was to establish, through military force, a “one-Superpower World”. The more immediate objectives of the new U.S. neocon doctrine was to “…preserve U.S. and Western access to the [Middle East and Southwest Asia] region’s oil”, and, as stated in an April 16, 1992 addendum, to contribute “to the security of Israel and to maintaining the qualitative edge that is critical to Israel’s security”.

Because of some opposition within the U.S. Government, the new policy did not become immediately effective. But the objective remained.

For instance, in September 2000, under the auspices of “The Project for the New American Century”, a new strategic document was issued and was entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Strategy: Forces and Resources For a New Century”. The same goals expressed in the 1992 document were reiterated.

The belief was expressed that the kind of military transformation the (neocon) planners were considering required “some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”, to make it possible to sell the plan to the American public.

They were either very prescient or very lucky, because exactly one year later, they were served with the “New Pearl Harbor” they had been openly hoping for. Indeed, the Islamist terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, turned out to have been a bonanza for the American military-industrial complex. The military planners’ wish for a “New Pearl Harbor”, was fulfilled at the right time.

It is important to remember that from 2001 to 2005, Paul Wolfowitz served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration, reporting to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In this capacity, he was well positioned to implement his own Wolfowitz doctrine that later morphed into the George W. Bush Doctrine.

For the time being, this is the “doctrine” that newly-elected President Barack Obama continues to implement in the Pashtunistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan corridor. As a politician, Barack Obama may be new at the job, but the policy he is being asked to implement was crafted long before he even set foot in Washington D.C.

Another possible reason why the United States is so often involved in foreign wars, besides its obvious aim of imposing a New American Empire on the world, may be due to the strong influence of religion in the United States. Just as for some aggressive Islamic countries, the U.S. is also the most religious of all first world countries. Researchers have found strong positive correlations between a nation’s religious belief and high levels of domestic stress and anxiety, and other indicators of social dysfunction such as homicides, the proportion of people incarcerated, infant mortality, drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births and abortions, corruption, large income inequalities, economic and social insecurity…etc.

It is possible that wars serve as an emotional outlet that allows some Americans to forget about their nation’s domestic problems. I suppose more research would be necessary on this issue. Indeed, is it possible that foreign wars, including wars of aggression, are a way for the American elites to deflect attention from domestic social problems and, as such, are a convenient pretext to direct tax money to defense expenditures rather than to social programs? The issue deserves at least to be raised. This could explain why U.S. foreign policy is so devoid of fundamental morality.

U.S. politicians who become president understand this American proclivity for war. They know that the best way to popularity is to be seen as a “war president”. A president who does not start a war abroad or who does not enlarge one already in progress is open to criticism and is likely to suffer politically. He must be seen less as a president than as “commander-in-chief”, in effect, as an emperor. How could this be, when the framers of the U.S. Constitution attempted precisely to avoid that?

Indeed, Article One (the War Powers Clause) of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress, and not the President, the authority to declare war.

Since World War II, however, this central article of the U.S. Constitution has been circumvented by having Congress give the President a blanket authorization to deploy troops abroad for euphemistically called “police actions“, without an explicit or formal congressional declaration of war. The term was first used by President Harry S. Truman to describe the Korean War.

This artifice has done a lot to trivialize the act of war. It also contributed much in the transfer of the powers of war and peace from the legislative branch to the executive branch. In doing so, it has reinforced the role of the U.S. president as a commander-in-chief or as a de facto emperor. Only a formal constitutional amendment could restore, in practice, the framers’ initial intent.

All said, it is easy to understand why when political faces change in Washington D.C., policies do not necessarily change. This push toward empire on the part of the United States can also explain why there is resentment and an anti-Americanism movement abroad.

Rodrigue Tremblay is a Canadian economist who lives in Montreal; he can be reached at: rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com. Check Dr. Tremblay’s coming book The Code for Global Ethics. Read other articles by Rodrigue, or visit Rodrigue’s website.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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America Needs Pakistan’s Help — Again [3 of 5]

Ordinary Americans simply do not know the scope of the current criminality. Americans are not stupid; we’re just badly misinformed—and purposefully so. Our system of informed choice steadily atrophied as a transnational criminal syndicate steadily gained dominance in mainstream media. The depth of this corruption suggests the potential for a dramatic change in U.S. politics as Americans identify its common source. The U.S. and Pakistan share a common enemy in those who are adept at displacing facts with what a targeted population can be deceived to believe. To prevail in this sophisticated form of Information Age warfare, we must fight as allies to rid our nations from the influence of those who would have us hate each other in order to advance their extremist agenda.

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WAR ON PAKISTAN

GAME THEORY WARFARE

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by Jeff Gates

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The destabilization of Pakistan began with the December 2007 murder of Benazir Bhutto after Mark Siegel, her Ashkenazi biographer and lobbyist, assured U.S. diplomats that her return was “the only possible way we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.” That advice is consistent with how Israel wages game theory warfare.

See: How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf signed his own political death warrant, when he announced that resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict was essential to resolve conflicts in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. Should Barack Obama concede the truth of that long-obvious fact, Zionist extremists may well ensure that his presidency is brought to an abrupt end too.

America Needs Pakistan’s Help — Again [4 of 5]

As that finance-fixated mindset morphed into the “Washington” consensus, the U.S.-dominated international financial institutions imbedded this narrow worldview in law worldwide. As with ordinary Russians, ordinary Indians see their rising prosperity dominated by a caste oligarchy that steadily amasses outsized wealth along with disproportionate political influence. As wealth concentrates, democracies become unworkable; as income concentrates, markets become unsustainable. Those profiled in Guilt By Association and the forthcoming Criminal State series are skilled in displacing facts with what targeted populations can be deceived to believe. Today’s money-myopic “consensus” traces its roots to a subculture within a subculture within a subculture whose belief in the unbridled pursuit of money preempts all other values.

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THE ISRAEL/INDIA ALLIANCE

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by Jeff Gates

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In August 2008, Ashkenazim General David Kezerashvili returned to his native Georgia from Tel Aviv to lead an assault on separatists in South Ossetia with the support of Tel Aviv-provided arms and military training provided by Israel Defense Forces. That crisis ignited Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, key members of the Quartet (along with the EU and the UN) pledged to resolve the six-decade Israel-Palestine conflict.

Little was reported in mainstream media about the Israeli interest in a pipeline across Georgia meant to move Caspian oil through Turkey and on to Eurasia with Tel Aviv a profit-extracting intermediary undercutting Russia’s oil industry. Nor did mainstream media report on the self-reinforcing nature of serial well-timed crises that emerged in a compressed time frame.

Greetings – 2010

HAPPY NEW YEAR

This lonely kingfisher perching on a tree shoot in Jinnah Garden, Lahore, Pakistan sends us all a message that 2010 will indeed be a happy new year, free from terrorism, neo-imperialism, hegemonies, and a world full of cackles from children playing in the open, without any fear of bomb blasts or a suicide attack. That the new year will usher us into a new era of peace and harmony where humanity everywhere in the world will have the chance to do its best in creating a heaven on this not so lonely planet.

A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM WONDERS OF PAKISTAN TO OUR WRITERS, READERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS!

Thank you all for another successful though eventful; some very happy, some sad and some terribly ugly events, but this is life. Surrendering to forces of evil and finding some recluse is what those very forces wish us to. But life never stops and forces of good will continue to nurture this world with all their goodness which is its due and therefore we look forward to a brighter, lucrative 2010 with you!

Dearest colleagues, loveliest friends, readers, writers and photographers!

With the New Year peeping around the corner, everybody is feeling the holiday cheer and getting in an auspicious and festive mood. We feel that the holiday is in the air. Every passing day is bringing us closer and closer to the long-awaited peace and harmony promising to give us positive emotions, miraculous experiences and fabulous adventures.

We all get super excited about new goals and horizons this coming year will definitely bring along. When looking ahead to the future with hopes and desires, we reflect on our achievements and proudly say: we have been working very hard and are fully satisfied with what we have achieved.

Yet, our performance would not have been what it is without the support, commitment and talent of our writers and photographers. We owe much of our impressive success to their amazing work, vast experience and profound knowledge. We are tremendously grateful to them all for their unwavering faith in our mission and the very strong link they create with our readers. And dear readers, we are tremendously grateful to you all for your unwavering faith in our mission and the appreciation you have for our content.

May this New Year 2010 bring you and your families all the very best that is out there and all the love and happiness you deserve! May joy and peace fill every day of your life throughout the year and always! We wish you all the success and luck in this world.

We have done a lot of interaction together. We can do still more and even better as friendship and true cooperation are something we cherish in our hearts!

Once again wishing you a Happy New Year.

Photograph: White-throated kingfisher by Nadeem Khawar

Higher Power of Drones: the Automatized Killing Technology

Are Drones in the current war risk free for us?

Brooke Gladstone

OTM or on the media is a radio network which explores how the media ‘sausage’ is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. Its Editor Brooke Gladstone had a session with P.W. Singer, the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century whereby Singer explains how far are these robotic killers risk free for the people who fight the war by sitting in their offices at a US base enjoying the killings with their ‘joysticks’.

While there were only a handful of U.S. unmanned aerial drones in 2003, there are now some 7,000 that the military relies on for many of its objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century explains that these robots are hardly risk-free and have a profound impact both at home and abroad.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The unmanned drones that were recurring characters in David Rohde’s captivity narrative are sources of fear and loathing in the region. Their numbers have soared from just a handful at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 to over 7,000 now, used both for surveillance and assassination of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. The drones are maintained by U.S. government employees in the Middle East, but they’re operated from as far away as the American West. And it’s that literal disconnection from the battlefield that has made them such a newly popular part of our military strategy – popular, that is, in the United States.

In the Middle East they’re reviled because they don’t just kill al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Despite their supposed precision, they also regularly kill civilians. Pakistan’s leading newspaper has declared America enemy number one largely because of the drones, which is why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during her visit to Pakistan, faced questions like this:

PAKISTANI WOMAN: The drone attacks are being carried out in our country, causing so much collateral damage. What does Madame or America, in general, plans to do about that?

[APPLAUSE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Clinton said she wouldn’t discuss any specifics of our methods or technologies, but in the war of ideas, ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, spent years researching the implications of drone technology. He says they’re a powerful symbol of U.S. foreign policy, but what they symbolize here bears no resemblance to what they represent over there.

P.W. SINGER: I remember meeting with a newspaper editor in Lebanon. There was a drone flying over right at that moment. And he described how our use of this technology showed how we were, quote, “cowards” afraid to fight, and that all they had to do to defeat us was just to kill a very small number of our soldiers.

The message we think we are sending may be completely different than the message that’s being received on the ground.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Generally, these drones are considered a wonderful idea here. They are, by their nature, antiseptic and casualty-free, at least with regard to American soldiers.

P.W. SINGER: Exactly. I remember interviewing one military officer who described the appeal of these systems being that he didn’t have to worry about sending a letter to someone’s mother if things went wrong, and the use of these unmanned systems have been very effective by the things that we measure as being important to us.

So, the strikes into Pakistan, we’ve killed more than 20 top al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and, more importantly, we’ve done it in a way that we didn’t have to send American troops or American pilots into harm’s way.

Also on the civilian casualty side, they are far more accurate than the old modes of war. You know, compare the civilian casualties during the bombing raids back in World War II.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what are then the hidden costs here that we generally don’t hear about in the media?

P.W. SINGER: What we’ve seen is among some of these remote units that are operating from places like in Nevada levels of combat stress that are as high as for some of the units physically deployed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why?

P.W. SINGER: There’re lots of different theories on this. A bomber pilot used to fly in, drop the bomb, fly away. An operator of a predator drone, for example, will see the target up close for hours and hours and hours, drop the bomb, and then, most importantly, then see the aftereffect. But remember, it’s not just watching someone else die.

I remember interviewing an NCO in the Air Force. She started to bang the table with her hand, recounting what it felt like to watch American soldiers die in front of her, on the screen. And then this leads to the second thing. Right after that, you walk outside and you’re not at war. It’s like shift work – individuals each day waking up, driving into work, going to war for 12 hours, coming back home, years on end.

So it’s not just that you’re killing and watching people die and it’s grinding. It’s that then 20 minutes later, as one guy put it to me, your wife is mad at you for showing up late to your kid’s soccer practice.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’ve said that these images are becoming a perverse form of entertainment.

P.W. SINGER: You and I can go online right now, go onto a site like YouTube and watch video of combat. The soldiers call it “war porn.” It’s the idea that we can watch more but experience less when it comes to our wars. One of the things I talk about in my book is an experience of getting an email where the title line of the email said, “Watch This.” In this case, the “watch this” was of a predator drone strike. Hellfire missile goes in, hits the target, and you could then watch the bodies riding the crest of the explosion. And that video clip had been set to the pop song, “I Just Want to Fly,” by the band Sugar Ray.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You dove nose-deep into the whole world of roboticized warfare for your book, and you’ve said it’s the warfare of the future. What’s your thinking as we get more accustomed to using this kind of technology? Do you expect that we will finally have a public conversation or a way of limiting the technology or a series of safeguards?

P.W. SINGER: I hope so, and that was one of the points of doing the book. And the parallels that people make out there to what’s happening right now to give a sense of history is they say, you know, this is a lot like the introduction of the horseless carriage back in 1909, or Bill Gates said, you know, we’re at robotics right now where we are with computers around 1980. Other people say, no, no, no, it’s like the invention of the atomic bomb.

These are technologies that didn’t just affect what happened in war. They changed our entire world. And it would be great if the public was part of that discussion and debate as to how it’s going to change our world.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you so much.

P.W. SINGER: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: P.W. Singer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. This is On the Media from NPR.

Source: www.onthemedia.org

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America Needs Pakistan’s Help — Again [5 of 5]

As manipulated impressions become the mental building blocks to create a plausible culprit from an Islamic nation, here again a pre-staging is underway in the U.S. Keep in mind that repeated reports of Iraqi WMD created a generally accepted “consensus” truth—regardless of the facts. In a similar fashion, oft-repeated reports of the threat of Iranian WMD have steadily created the impression of a nuclear weapons capability with no basis in fact. But facts are not the point when pre-staging an Evil Doer. The point is what a targeted population can be induced to believe. Five Muslim students in the U.S. traveled to Pakistan in mid-December, setting off a flurry of reports about the threat of “homegrown terrorism.” Every report mentioned the recent shootings at Fort Hood, Texas by a Muslim psychiatrist. A series of other incidents helped enhance the plausibility of a violent event traceable to the requisite Islamic Evil Doer.

• Two presidents of the United States of America. One former, one current. 

• Both, product of US dynamism, foresight and global power, one murdered during his presidency and the other!

• Will have a similar ending?

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WILL ISRAEL ASSASSINATE BARACK OBAMA?

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by Jeff Gates

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To assassinate an American president with impunity requires pre-staging. For Israel to succeed would require an Evil Doer on whom the deed could plausibly be blamed. The emerging fact patterns suggest that such pre-staging is well underway and that a Pakistani could be the perceived culprit. The recent history of Evil Doer branding offers insight into what to expect.

The Central Asian dawn… Viewpoint India

The politics of the vast deserts and steppes of Central Asia will significantly determine the contours of any durable Afghan settlement. The implications for South Asia’s security will be far-reaching, too.

by M.K. Bhadrakumar

Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century traveller, described the Hindu Kush ranges as the “slayer of the Indians,” as people from the “land of India” mostly perished in the snowy heights of extreme cold. The ranges that run through Afghanistan did indeed split the Indian historical consciousness about that country.

When policymakers in New Delhi grappled with the Mujahideen takeover in Afghanistan, it suddenly dawned on them how little they knew about the tribes that inhabited the northern side of the Hindu Kush. It was those tribes who won the tight race for Kabul against the Pashtun Mujahideen groups during the dramatic “transfer of power” in 1992 by the communist regime headed by Najibullah, and New Delhi had on its hands the unenviable “post-Soviet” task of establishing a narrative suitable for a new dawn in the region’s ancient history.

The point is, the geopolitics of Afghanistan always had two halves. Which, of course, posed a major challenge to U.S. President Barack Obama when he crafted the new Afghan strategy. Equally, for regional powers like India or Uzbekistan, the dichotomy came in the way of creating a common space that would open the vistas of a regional initiative. Viewed from Delhi and Tashkent, the “great game” in the Hindu Kush mountains assumed different shades. Some things do not easily change in life — even for an aspiring regional power. Even today, Indian discourses on Afghanistan run a predictable course. Has the U.S. administration finally woken up to the harsh reality of the Pakistani military’s doublespeak in the fight against terrorism? If so, will it turn the screw on its single most crucial partner in the fight?

From this point, the angst deepens somewhat. Will the U.S. finally abandon the willing suspension of disbelief about the Pakistani military’s passion for its strategic asset, the Taliban, and realise instead that New Delhi is Washington’s sole “natural ally” in the region in the fight against terrorism? And, therefore, will the U.S. allow itself the privilege of India’s cooperation in “stabilising” Pakistan? This range of issues more or less hogs the quaint Indian approach toward the Afghan problem in the seminar circuits in Delhi where one hears the thesis being rolled out ad nauseam like a repeatedly-vulcanised rubber tyre not possessing its original tensile strength any more.

Meanwhile, the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush leading to the vast Central Asia are preparing for a new dawn in the region’s history. To be sure, the politics of the vast deserts and steppes of Central Asia that span the space between the Caucasus in the west and Xinjiang in the east will significantly determine the contours of any durable Afghan settlement. The downstream implications for South Asian security will be far-reaching too.

[Map on left: Major Influences that affect South Asian stability, map source: War and Escalation in South Asia –Rand]. Click on the image to have a larger view of the map].

THERE ARE THREE ASPECTS TO THE EMERGING CENTRAL ASIAN SECURITY THAT ARE OF INTEREST TO INDIA.

One, China is venturing out as a provider of regional security and stability — supplementing Russia’s traditional role. The opening of the 1,833-km gas pipeline on December 14 connecting the energy fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to Xinjiang with an annual capacity of 40 billion cubic metres resets not only China but also the world community’s terms of engagement with the region. The pipeline becomes part of China’s 7,000-km long East-West trunk route that feeds its booming centres of production on the eastern seaboard and will provide half of China’s present gas consumption.

Such a vital economic lifeline requires security guarantee and China is going about that task in its usual way by creating “win-win” situations with its Central Asian partners. In sharp contrast to the predatory instincts of western companies that zero in on the region’s huge untapped mineral resources and rare earths, China is stepping in with a comprehensive engagement plan based on equity and mutual trust and partnership that promises uplift of the Central Asian economies from their post-Soviet trough.

From Beijing’s perspective, the security of Central Asia (and Afghanistan) becomes integral to Xinjiang’s stability, apart from China’s overall energy security, which heavily depends at present on the extended supply routes via the U.S-controlled Malacca Straits that can prove a choke point. Flush with surplus capital, China, therefore, is showing the will to invest in Central Asia’s prosperity and stability and thereby create a matrix of mutual dependence. The West cannot cope with this audacity. The London-based Economist Intelligence Unit estimates an 8 per cent growth rate for China’s economy, whereas overall contractions of 2 and 4 per cent are forecast for the U.S. and the Euro-zone economies.

Two, the West would have ideally liked a clash of interests between China and Russia in Central Asia. But the emerging paradigm is instead pointing in the direction of a convergence of mutual interests. With the global downturn and the deep economic recession plus the sharp fall in energy export revenues, Moscow is accepting China’s investments as the only realistic way out for the development of the vast Russian Far East and Siberia as well as Central Asia. In May, President Dmitry Medvedev openly called for a tandem approach by Moscow and Beijing to the RFE and Siberia’s development, on the one hand, and the resuscitation of China’s dilapidated northeastern industrial base, on the other.

Russia is pleased that Central Asia has no pressing need for alternative U.S.-backed gas pipelines headed for Europe. Russia and China have a shared interest in keeping the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the U.S. out of Central Asia. Both harbour misgivings about a hidden U.S. agenda of keeping open-ended military presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and of manipulating Islamist elements as instruments of geopolitics. Both search for ways to influence a swift “Afghanisation” of the war that paves the way for the vacation of foreign occupation.

Three, a U.S. attempt to draw the Central Asian states into the AfPak is indeed apparent. The day after the commissioning of China’s Central Asia pipeline, the U.S. State department stated in a testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “The [Central Asian] region is at the fulcrum of key U.S. security, economic, and political interests. It demands attention and respect and our most diligent efforts … any examination of U.S. policy towards Central Asia must start with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan … We [the Obama administration] have begun to establish high-level mechanisms with each country in Central Asia, featuring a structured annual dialogue to strengthen ties and build practical cooperation.”

Never before has the U.S. Central Asia policy been framed in such priority terms. It doesn’t need much ingenuity to estimate that the U.S. “surge” on Kandahar, which is projected in terms of the Taliban challenge, can be seen in a broader perspective. A recent study by the influential Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington says:

“Kandahar is the key road connection between the new Pakistani port of Gwadar and Afghanistan and, beyond that, all Central Asia, Europe, and much of the Middle East. Pakistan began the development of Gwadar with aid from China and has now engaged Singapore for the second phase of work … On Gwadar, the interests of the U.S, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are aligned …

With Kandahar now in its eye, the U.S. should plan to build on future success there by making the opening to Gwadar a high priority … Pentagon officials estimate the cost of upgrading this connection at about $1 billion.” Obviously, any U.S. contingency plan would need to overcome the regional powers’ “more specific interests and competitive inclinations that obstruct” the U.S. grand design. The CSIS report names China, India, Iran and Russia and flags the “sustained insecurity in Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Kashmir, and other parts of Eurasia” as the challenge to the overall U.S. strategy.

Clearly, these new templates in regional security underscore that India’s normalisation with China increasingly assumes a regional dimension. This needs to be seriously factored in as the two countries sit down for the next phase of relations. As the distinguished former Indian diplomat and respected China scholar, Ambassador C.V. Ranganathan, put it recently, “Our shared neighbourhood should come on the agenda of serious discussions extending to concentric circles of expanding the dialogue to include all the primary parties affected by the situation in the AfPak region.”

China has remarkably transformed in the past quarter century. All indications are that it has no inclination to fish in the troubled India-Pakistan waters. On the contrary, as a Xinhua commentary pointed out last week, “For solving the dispute over the Mumbai attacks [of 26 November 2008], India and Pakistan should count on bilateral efforts to reduce tension rather than allow the situation being further complicated by other issues such as the U.S.-led Afghan War.” Plainly put, the China discourses of our strategic community are caught in a time warp. Stereotyped thinking should not impede new pathways from being opened in strengthening regional security.

The writer is a former Indian diplomat.

Source: Text: http://www.thehindu.com map: rupeenews.com/…/

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Things we learned in 2009

Barack H. Obama, the U.S. President despite of American power and influence being on decline around the world, declares yet again that, “No world order that elevates one nation… over another will succeed.” It seems lost on the American President that he was not elected to create or perfect a world order, but to elevate the interests of the United States.

Eric Margolis

*America is beset by airport chaos after a 23-year old Nigerian tried to bring down a Northwest-Delta flight to Detroit with an underwear explosive device (UED).

More attacks may be expected as those wars grind on.  Distressingly, many of these outrages were done by educated young men.  In Britain, medical doctors were actually involved. Such is the anti-western fury among some Muslims, particularly in Pakistan.

CNN’s Larry King asked me on his show last Saturday if there is any end in sight to terrorist attacks against American targets.   My politically incorrect response:  with the US so deeply involved in the affairs of the Third World, we have to expect more attacks.

It may have been no coincidence that US air strikes had killed a reported 50 or more Yemeni tribesmen just before the Detroit incident. Yemen, in my view, is the Afghanistan of Arabia.

US military forces are currently engaged in combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, West Africa, the Philippines and, likely, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.   Blowback is inevitable.

In 1991, I was aboard a Lufthansa airliner bound from Frankfurt to Cairo.   A young Ethiopian smuggled aboard a pistol and hijacked us on a long ordeal– first to north Germany, then to New York City. He planned to crash the Airbus A310 jumbo into Wall Street.  Fortunately, the FBI talked him down and he surrendered.  Unfortunately, the lesson that a hijacked airliner would make an excellent guided missile was quickly forgotten – until 9/11.

The hijacker got his gun through very tight German security by secreting it under his hat.  Security agents who were checking us with metal-detecting wands forgot to pass one over his head.   Airport security cannot be airtight, particularly at rush periods, unless we adopt Israeli-style security which is highly effective but hugely time-consuming.  I don’t think North American air travel could handle such onerous security.

Our lesson from this latest scare:  if we can afford to spend $200 billion per annum alone in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be able to afford two air marshals on larger passenger jets.  Pat downs will become mandatory.

More and more people will decide to drive, or avoid travel altogether.  Bad news for the suffering airline industry.

Having said all this, we must remember than Osama bin Laden has been trying to give America a national nervous breakdown.  We should not overreact and certainly not panic.  Personally, I am more worried about germs and viruses aboard commercial aircraft than bombs.

*The global recession that began in America in 2008 was triggered by run amok speculation, failure of government supervision, and massive fraud by accounting and credit rating agencies. The global banking system came within hours of total collapse.

America’s and Britain’s economies were artificially juiced up and distorted by the narcotic of cheap, easy credit. Both are now experiencing painful withdrawal from credit addiction. It’s an ugly sight.  Their leaders still call for more massive debt to supposedly cure the disaster caused by too much debt.  Interestingly, Canada’s “stuffy, boring” banking system turned out to be the industrial world’s most solid.

The financial fraud and reckless gambling that ignited the worst recession since the 1930’s began under the Clinton administration, then ran rampant during George W. Bush’s two terms.  Federal regulators, media, Congress and three presidents were suborned by Wall Street.  Finance became America’s leading industry.  Parasitism replaced production.

Millions are out of work.  America is crushed by trillions in debt. US global power has taken a staggering beating.  Yet the perpetrators of this biggest crime in modern US history and the politicians that allowed it to occur remain unpunished.  Wall Street churns obscene, government-financed profits while small investors lost billions. Taxpayer money went to rescue Wall Street nabobs ordering $350 bottles of wine while people on main street America could not pay their medical bills.

The big money houses should have been broken up by federal trust busters.  Instead, the surviving big banks now control 40% of all deposits in America.

*President Barack Obama does not walk on water. To worldwide disappointment, his foreign policy is floundering. Obama’s promise to solve the Mideast mess, America’s largest overseas headache, was scorned by Israel, which refused to stop colonizing Palestinian land. Israel made Obama look like a weakling and amateur who is clearly not in command of US Mideast policy.

Those who hoped the US would change course under Obama to play a positive, cooperative, non-imperial role in world affairs were profoundly dismayed.

We see continued occupation of Iraq, the expanded, trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan, military operations in Africa and now Yemen.  The White House stonewalling on releasing torture documents, failure to prosecute the Bush era’s torturers and kidnappers, refusal to end domestic surveillance and continued violations of the Geneva Convention.

Almost nothing has been done to end the idiotic blockade of Cuba, which infuriated Latin Americans. We trade with Communist Vietnam but not Communist Cuba.

Military spending has risen from US $667 billion under Bush to $734 billion under Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama. Add an astounding $49.8 billion more for intelligence.

The US is bankrupt and living on credit from China. But Washington’s national security juggernaut keeps rolling on, finding new enemies around every sand dune.

*Pakistan is fast becoming a huge, very dangerous problem.  The isolated, corrupt, US-backed government in Islamabad is crumbling.  The Afghan war is fast spreading into Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal zones.

The Pentagon can’t wage war in Afghanistan without total Pakistani cooperation.  But 95% of Pakistanis oppose the US-led war.  Their nation of 168 million seems about to erupt into truly dangerous chaos while India gets ever more deeply involved in Afghanistan.

Washington’s $15 billion effort to buy its way out of trouble in Pakistan won’t work.  Obama has truly stuck is head in the proverbial hornet’s nest.  He could have withdrawn it, but chose, instead, to go deeper. The president has only himself and his neocon advisors to blame.

What he and we should have learned is that waging wars without clear strategic or political purpose in the middle of nowhere is a fool’s errand, and a very dangerous, expensive one. Afghanistan, graveyard of empires, may also become the graveyard of Obama’s presidency.

Copyright: Eric S. Margolis 2009

Source: ericmargolis.com Title Image: biggovernment.com/…/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Thar’s Plight – 1

Thari women carrying hand potted clay pitchers. To fetch water, they need to cover long distances, sometimes miles away from their homes.

Nayyar Hashmey

We are watching breaking news on cable every day and they are all full of suicide attacks, bombings, burning, looting and other acts of sabotage in Pakistan. To this, comes another array of news on murder of Pakistani civilians by flying assassins of US army. But we hear little about a district in our far south. The district I mean is the one that has an ongoing history of plights, the district of Tharparkar in Sindh which borders the Rajasthan state of India.

In November 2009 issue (on 26^th November) we posted an essay http://wondersofpakistan.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/tourism-and-the-extremist-threat/ titled ‘Tourism and the External Threat’. There was a brief mention of Thar and the Indian state of Rajasthan and that made me to delve somewhat more deeply into the miserable life of the people inhabiting this sandy district of Sindh, Pakistan.

Historically Thar is a land of romance, adventure and a place where nature has always been at its best. Notwithstanding the sandy and desert look which could be harsh and wild as well, for a traveler visiting this romance packed land may no doubt be full of adventure and a fascinating experience, yet thanks to an ongoing step-motherly treatment by our provincial as well as federal setups; the inhabitants here experience back breaking adventures every day. The vast land though gifted by mother nature in many ways, and inhabited by hardworking people, Tharis have to toil every day for water and food. The women travel long distances, sometimes even miles away from their homes merely to carry water from wells which are scanty in this desert locale.

Even water that is brought sometimes by a hard day’s labor is not free of infestation and carries pollutants like high fluoride content and other impurities. Resultantly the Tharis and their kids suffer from many ailments especially water born diseases like gastroenteritis, bone deformation and similar maladies.

There is a serious lack of livelihood means too.

Day and night we condemn Israel but this small state has turned its desert into a fruit garden. The Jaffa oranges are a variety that is famous for its sweet, fresh and tangy taste. Even the neighboring Rajasthan in India has become an important hub of international tourism. Interestingly our part of this former Rajputana is more beautiful and has ample chances of becoming a tourist paradise. Dr. Manzur Ejaz of Wichaar.com who was recently in India describes, in his above mentioned post, the aspects of tourism in Pakistan in following words:

Tourism is a sector, where Pakistan has a lot of potential, but to develop tourism in the country and let the people reap advantages from this sustainable source of revenue, we need an open society where everyone is welcome.

Taking his comments further on tourism in Rajasthan, a state next door neighbour of our Tharparkar, says Dr. Manzur Ejaz:

“Tharparkar has similar terrain, culture yet a more luring landscape than its Indian counterpart. Standing at a small bazaar in Jodhpur, a city in Rajasthan, India, I saw hordes of Western tourists, all there to see a city that is no different than Sahiwal or Sargodha other than an old palace, a common sight in Rajasthan.

The road infrastructure is better in Rajasthan than most parts of Utter Pradesh, with new highways and roads connecting even remote parts. Most of the major cities like Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Bikaner are just old beaten down towns with some new life in the largest city Jaipur.

Some of the tourist destinations are tiny cities like Chichawatni — the neighbouring town to Harappa — with nothing much to see except a castle in need of serious repair. And yet, Rajasthan and many other parts of India have become the preferred destination for tourists. It will not be surprising if the statistics show that revenue from tourism has become the bread and butter of many states like Rajasthan.

Most parts of Pakistan have equally good or better road infrastructure than Rajasthan but lack in every other facility that tourists seek. “

With this picture of Thar in Indian Rajasthan where tourism abounds, and tourism related activities bring changes and prosperity to the life of those desert people, Pakistan’s Thar is far more natural and beautiful than its Indian counterpart, due to neglect by our concerned authorities, the people here are forced to lead a wretched life – not much different from the way their forefathers lived in primitive ages.

Fortunately, now we have Sindh as well as in Islamabad a party that derives its main support from Sindh claiming itself as the flag bearer of the interests of the land of Sindh.

Just this month, in the wake of NRO issue, a provincial cabinet minister in Sindh, threatened that in case the judicial killing of the PPP [in other words, if a move was aimed to dislodge the PPP from power], was aimed at, his party might consider using the Sindh card.

Quite unfortunate that a politician from Sindh threatens the establishment with Sindh card, I would have been more pleased had the same minister threatened to use the Sindh card for development of Tharparkar which has been under historical neglect by all governments. Had the worthy minister threatened for development of Sindh particularly Tharparkar, I’m sure people from other provinces too would have definitely welcomed the use of Sindh card; for it would have benefitted a part of our country which is one of the most neglected ones. It’s a misfortune that we have leaders in this God given land who use this or that card only for their petty political interests and not those of the people in whose name they collect votes and occupy the covetous seats in the federal or provincial cabinets. Such cards are used only to perpetuate their rule, the benefits for masses of their constituencies being their least priority.

With such remarks of mine, its possible that many of my friends from Sindh may reply “Ada, ham to chahatay haen lekan hamain kam krne nhin diya jata’.

In Musharraf’s regime, Sindh had a Chief Minister who was elected from Thar. He is a Sindhi Wadera and a doctor too, but alas that doctor chief minister too has had no remedies for ailments faced by his constituency. Whether it is the Q-leaguers or the PPP walas, they speak a lot against Kalabagh Dam, and for the rights of Sindh but none have ever talked of development in Tharparkar. Its high time now that the PPP ministers, be they in Sindh or at the centre, force their respective governments to earmark special funds for development of this least developed area in the country.

With a surge of terrorism having ripped the whole of Pakistan, and where Balochistan is almost on the verge of revolt, NWFP under a continuous spate of violence, suicide bombings and other subversive activities [what to speak of drone attacks that are killing our civilian population [with some where over and somewhere covert support, of our federal government in Islamabad] whole of Pakistan is boiling with anger. Having at the same time feelings of anguish and frustration, they feel themselves at the mercy of an impotent coterie who are good talkers but bad doers.

The problems of security, poverty and economic disparity are eating up our social fabric while Neros of the day are playing their sweet flutes. While the country is burning, this horrific music coming out of the flutes of scoundrels in governance, the day should not be faraway when ‘commoners’ might come on streets, snatch everything from the marquises of the day. History tells us it happened just two centuries ago in France. Could be, this time it is Pakistan’s turn to open a similar page in our history.

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Next: Thar’s plight, last week’s editorial by Dawn. Images: Dry-net.org

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Army reworks war doctrine for Pakistan, China

India’s Army Chief Gen Deepak Kapoor says, the Indian military is ready to fight Pakistan and China simultaneously, as quoted by an India daily.

Rajat Pandit

NEW DELHI: The Army is now revising its five-year-old doctrine to effectively meet the challenges of a possible `two-front war’ with China and Pakistan, deal with asymmetric and fourth-generation warfare, enhance strategic reach and joint operations with IAF and Navy.

Work on the new war doctrine — to reflect the reconfiguration of threat perceptions and security challenges — is already underway under the aegis of Shimla-based Army Training Command, headed by Lt-General A S Lamba, said sources.

It comes in the backdrop of the 1.13-million strong Army having practised — through several wargames over the last five years — its `pro-active’ war strategy to mobilise fast and strike hard to pulverise the enemy.

This `cold start strategy’, under a NBC (nuclear-chemical-biological) overhang, emerged from the `harsh lessons’ learnt during Operation Parakram, where it took Army’s strike formations almost a month to mobilise at the `border launch pads’ after the December 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament.

This gave ample opportunity to Pakistan to shore up its defences as well as adequate time to the international community, primarily the US, to intervene. The lack of clear directives from the then NDA government only made matters worse.

“A major leap in our approach to conduct of operations (since then) has been the successful firming-up of the cold start strategy (to be able to go to war promptly),” said Army chief General Deepak Kapoor, at a closed-door seminar on Tuesday.

The plan now is to launch self-contained and highly-mobile `battle groups’, with Russian-origin T-90S tanks and upgraded T-72 M1 tanks at their core, adequately backed by air cover and artillery fire assaults, for rapid thrusts into enemy territory within 96 hours.

Gen Kapoor identified five thrust areas that will drive the new doctrine. One, even as the armed forces prepare for their primary task of conventional wars, they must also factor in the eventuality of `a two-front war’ breaking out.

In tune with this, after acquiring a greater offensive punch along the entire western front with Pakistan by the creation of a new South-Western Army Command in 2005, India is now taking steps — albeit belatedly — to strategically counter the stark military asymmetry with China in the eastern sector. There is now “a proportionate focus towards the western and north-eastern fronts”, said Gen Kapoor.

Two, the Army needs to `optimise’ its capability to effectively counter `both military and non-military facets’ of asymmetric and sub-conventional threats like WMD terrorism, cyber warfare, electronic warfare and information warfare.

Three, the armed forces have to substantially enhance their strategic reach and out-of-area capabilities to protect India’s geo-political interests stretching from Persian Gulf to Malacca Strait.

“This would enable us to protect our island territories; as also give assistance to the littoral states in the Indian Ocean Region,” said Gen Kapoor.

Four, interdependence and operational synergy among Army, Navy and IAF must become the essence of strategic planning and execution in future wars. “For this, joint operations, strategic and space-based capability, ballistic missile defence and amphibious, air-borne and air-land operations must be addressed comprehensively,” he said.

And five, India must strive to achieve a technological edge over its adversaries. “Harnessing and exploitation of technology also includes integration of network centricity, decision-support systems, information warfare and electronic warfare into our operational plans,” he added.

Apart from analysing the evolving military strategy and doctrines of China and Pakistan, the Army is also studying the lessons learnt from the US-launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and their relevance to India.

Source: TimesofIndia.com Cross posted at: Wichaar.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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A time for peace

How are we to interpret a recent statement by the Indian army chief General Deepak Kapoor that his country can take on both Pakistan and China simultaneously? –Photo by Reuters

Pakistan has often been ruled by generals and it is no secret that our armed forces wield considerable influence over civilian administrations as well, but how can we interpret a recent statement by the Indian army chief Gen. Deepak Kapur that his country can take both Pakistan and China simultaneously.

Nowhere is the military’s say greater than in the sphere of foreign policy vis-à-vis hostile neighbours or ostensible allies that sometimes try to dictate terms to Islamabad. But India’s history is different, and it has made much over the years of its democratic credentials and a system under which the armed forces are wholly answerable to the government of the day. So how then are we to interpret a recent statement by the Indian army chief that his country can take on both Pakistan and China simultaneously?

He even suggested that a “limited war under a nuclear overhang” is possible in South Asia. Is this Gen Kapoor’s personal opinion or is he articulating government policy? What precisely is the nature of this new “offensive” nuclear doctrine and why is it needed in the first place? And could it be that Indian generals, as opposed to elected politicians, are now calling the shots where regional policy is concerned?

Islamabad’s rejoinders have been stern, and perhaps never more so than on Saturday when CJCSC Gen Tariq Majeed warned against “outlandish … strategic postulations”, adding that Gen Kapoor “knows very well what the … Pakistani armed forces can pull off”. It seems that the government in India, or perhaps its military, is upping the ante for no plausible reason. Despite the hope offered by the Sharm el-Sheikh talks last July, there has been little or no movement on resuming the composite dialogue between Pakistan and India despite Islamabad’s stress on cooperation rather than animosity.

New Delhi ought to note that the Pakistan Army is engaged in an all-out assault on the militants who are our mutual enemies. Raising the temperature, hinting at war no less, serves no constructive purpose whatsoever at this critical juncture. It should be obvious that there can be no winners in a nuclear conflict between the two countries — both will be wiped out, that much is guaranteed. The time has come to put the horrors of Mumbai behind us and work collectively towards peace in South Asia.

Source: DAWN.COM

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China, Willing to Spend, Wins a Trove of Afghan Copper

A delegation from the state-owned Chinese company, China Metallurgical Group Corporation, visited the site of a copper mine in Aynak, a former al-Qaeda stronghold southeast of Kabul, in 2007.

Michael Wines

KABUL, Afghanistan — Behind an electrified fence, blast-resistant sandbags and 53 National Police outposts, the Afghan surge is well under way.

But the foot soldiers in a bowl-shaped valley about 20 miles southeast of Kabul are not fighting the Taliban, or even carrying guns. They are preparing to extract copper from one of the richest untapped deposits on earth. And they are Chinese, undertaking by far the largest foreign investment project in war-torn Afghanistan.

Two years ago, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, bid $3.4 billion — $1 billion more than any of its competitors from Canada, Europe, Russia, the United States and Kazakhstan — for the rights to mine deposits near the village of Aynak. Over the next 25 years, it plans to extract about 11 million tons of copper — an amount equal to one-third of all the known copper reserves in China.

While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.

S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said that skeptics might wonder whether Washington and NATO had conducted “an unacknowledged preparatory phase for the Chinese economic penetration of Afghanistan.”

“We do the heavy lifting,” he said. “And they pick the fruit.”

The reality is more complicated than that. The Chinese bid far more for the mining rights to the Aynak project and promised to invest hundreds of millions more in associated infrastructure projects than other bidders. It is a risky venture that has not yet proved to be economical, and it has already been dogged by allegations of bribery.

But the Aynak investment underscores how China’s leaders, flush with money and in control of both the government and major industries, meld strategy, business and statecraft into a seamless whole. In a single move, Beijing strengthened its hold on a vital resource, engineered the single largest investment in Afghan history, promised to create thousands of new Afghan jobs and established itself as the Afghan government’s pre-eminent business partner and single largest source of tax payments.

AN ODD GLOBAL PAIRING

Afghanistan is not the only place where the United States and China find themselves so oddly juxtaposed in the post-9/11 world. China is investing more in extracting Iraqi oil than American companies are. It has reached long-term arrangements to buy gas from Iran, even as the government there comes under the threat of Western sanctions for its nuclear program. China has also become a dominant investor in Pakistan and volatile parts of Africa.

But it is in Afghanistan where China’s willingness to take risks for commercial and diplomatic gain are most striking.

China Metallurgical Group, often called M.C.C., will build a 400-megawatt generating plant to power both the copper mine and blackout-prone Kabul. M.C.C. will dig a new coal mine to feed the plant’s generators. It will build a smelter to refine copper ore, and a railroad to carry coal to the power plant and copper back to China. If the terms of its contract are to be believed, M.C.C. will also build schools, roads, even mosques for the Afghans.

The sweeping agreement has some experts rubbing their eyes in disbelief. “It’s almost as if the Chinese promised too much,” said one international expert who, like some others interviewed, refused to be identified for fear of alienating the Afghans or the Chinese.

But even if elements of the agreement fall through, the Chinese have already positioned themselves as generous, eager partners of the Afghan government and long-term players in the country’s future. All without firing a shot.

Nurzaman Stanikzai was a mujahedeen guy in the 1980s, using American-supplied arms to help drive the Red Army from his homeland. Today he is a contractor for M.C.C., building the Aynak mine’s electric fence, blast wall, workers’ dormitories and a road to Kabul.

“The Chinese are much wiser. When we went to talk to the local people, they wore civilian clothing, and they were very friendly,” he said recently during a long chat in his Kabul apartment. “The Americans — not as good. When they come there, they have their uniforms, their rifles and such, and they are not as friendly.”

American troops do not, in a narrow sense, protect the Chinese. The United States Army stations about 2,000 troops in Logar Province, where Aynak is located. But an Army spokesman said they generally patrolled well south of the mine area and had not provided direct security for Chinese investors or mine workers.

The Afghan National Police, which does protect the mine, was largely built and trained with American money. The 1,500 guards the police have posted in and around Aynak are special recruits not drawn from the main force, according to Maj. Gen. Sayed Kamal, who heads the National Police.

But the conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment. And there is no sense that either government objects to that reality. As diplomats and soldiers alike stress, the war in Afghanistan was never motivated by commercial prospects. Had an American company won Aynak, some Afghans noted wryly, critics inevitably would have accused the United States of waging war to seize the country’s mineral wealth. Moreover, if China succeeds in developing Aynak and generating revenue for the Kabul government, that helps achieve an American goal.

“To the extent that the Chinese bring Afghanistan up to speed and start paying a billion dollars a year in royalties,” a Western government official who has followed the Aynak project said, “that would mean that Afghanistan is on a firmer ground to start paying for its own security.”

CHINA STAYS OUT OF WAR EFFORT

The Chinese, meanwhile, have rebuffed requests to join the Afghan war effort, saying that national policy forbids military action abroad except as part of a peacekeeping force. Instead, China’s foreign policy is based on commerce. Its state-owned companies have been snapping up energy and mineral resources worldwide for years now, often by overwhelming competitors with lavish offers.

In 2006, for example, another state-owned goliath known as C.M.E.C. swept bidding for one of the world’s largest known iron ore deposits, in Gabon, by offering to build a 360-mile railroad to the nearly inaccessible mine site, two hydroelectric dams to power the mine and a deepwater ocean port to export the mined ore.

Such splurges are both national strategy — China’s goal is to control long-term access to critical commodities — and a matter of necessity if Beijing is to keep its industrial empire running. With 700 to 1,000 steel mills to feed, China is the world’s largest importer of iron ore. Similarly, China already imports 40 percent of the world’s copper.

If the Aynak venture differs from those in the past, both international and Afghan experts say, it is because it appears to be as much a strategic coup as a commercial one.

OPPORTUNITY IN SOUTHWEST ASIA

The United States views Southwest Asia mostly as a security threat. China sees it as an opportunity. Decades of military cooperation with Pakistan, which shares India as a rival, have flowered into an economic alliance. A Chinese-built deepwater port in Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Gulf of Oman, is expected eventually to carry Middle Eastern oil and gas over the western Himalayas into China.

Afghanistan, which borders both Iran and Pakistan, drew scant attention from China until the middle of this decade.

Aynak’s riches had been known since Alexander the Great’s armies forged copper there 2,300 years ago. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, its geologists took core samples and mapped the Aynak deposit, but were never able to begin mining.

The Soviets were succeeded by Osama bin Laden, who used Aynak as a training camp while planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. After the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, Afghan geologists rescued the Soviet surveys of Aynak and hid them until exploration could resume.

That exploration — a detailed overflight of much of the country by American surveyors in mid decade — showed Afghanistan to be far richer in oil, natural gas, iron, copper and coal than anyone had imagined. Aynak, in particular, was judged a world-class copper deposit, not just huge but of unusually rich quality, and the government chose it as the first major mineral concession to be auctioned to developers.

To minimize corruption, the Afghan government decided, on the advice of American advisers, to ask the World Bank and a Colorado geological consulting firm to help oversee the bidding. A report last month in The Washington Post quoted an American official as charging that the Chinese swayed the bid with $20 million or more in bribes to the mining minister, Muhammad Ibrahim Adel, who was recently dismissed from the Afghan government in part because of the allegations. Mr. Adel has denied the charge.

Foreign experts say that the possibility of bribery in Afghanistan, one of the world’s most corrupt nations, can hardly be ruled out. But they also say that the Chinese bid was so clearly superior to others that any bribe money may have been incidental to the outcome.

“This was not a backroom deal. This was not Adel, sitting in Beijing, cooking this up,” said one of several international experts interviewed for this article. “This was thoroughly vetted by the governments of the day.”

A. Rahman Ashraf is a veteran geologist and senior adviser on mining to Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. Mr. Ashraf intervened in 2002 to stop Aynak’s mining rights from being sold under the table to a Korean bidder.

“Our wish was that this process must be very transparent,” he said of Aynak, “because this is the first time. If it is not transparent, then nobody comes to the others.”

China won the bid, he said, for good reason: it offered a package deal, from power plants to railroads to smelters to coal mines, that no other bidder could match. And it promised to staff the entire venture with Afghan laborers and managers — many of whom must be trained from scratch in a country with little mining expertise.

“After five years, it’s only Afghan engineers,” he said. “Only in administration do the Chinese stay.”

Indeed, outside experts here say, the striking aspect of China’s Aynak venture is the degree to which it left competitors in the dust. Increasingly, the world’s richest remaining mineral deposits are in hostile territory — malarial jungles, combat zones, unstable nations that possess mineral riches but no realistic way to get them to market.

With government money and backing behind them, China’s state-run giants take risks in places that even the largest private behemoths will not tolerate, and they can add sweeteners — from railroads to mosques — that ordinary mining firms are ill equipped to provide.

“The Chinese have sort of raised the bar. They’ve taken it beyond the scope of just an extractive operation,” the Western official said. “The Chinese are willing to step up and take a long-term strategic approach. If it takes 5 or 10 years, at least they have a beachhead.”

The wild card, of course, is that no outsiders can know how much of China’s Aynak venture is in fact brilliant strategy, and how much is merely a potentially ruinous business deal by an overzealous corporation. Beijing’s corporate strategy is as opaque as it is overwhelming.

China Metallurgical, a Fortune Global 500 company that has so many subsidiaries that they are mostly identified by numbers, is a signal example. The corporation reports to the top level of the Chinese government. Big foreign investments like the one at Aynak require blessing at an equally high level. M.C.C. has huge and productive investments around the world.

Yet hardly all those ventures are successes. An M.C.C. copper mine in Pakistan is widely said to have serious environmental problems. A Pakistan lead mine has been dogged by conflict, including a suicide bombing that killed 29; residents accuse the company’s Chinese work force of stealing local jobs. In Papua New Guinea, 14 Chinese workers at an M.C.C. nickel mine were injured in May in a pitched battle with local people who rioted over what they called intolerable working conditions.

That bid in 2006 for the iron mine in Gabon? Four years after C.M.E.C. struck its deal, the bargain appears to be unwinding over hints of corruption and global objections to a dam that would destroy Kongou Falls, one of central Africa’s most treasured waterfalls.

WAS TOO MUCH PROMISED?

Not surprisingly, that record leads skeptics to suggest that in Afghanistan, M.C.C. may have overpromised and, later, will underdeliver.

In interviews here, some experts said that M.C.C.’s Aynak bid was so munificent that the company might be forced to renegotiate lavish payments of copper royalties to the Afghan government. Others predicted that the company would be forced to shift parts of the vast project, like the yet-to-be-built railroad, to international donors.

Still others said the company’s initial environmental efforts already badly lagged behind the promise in its winning bid to strictly adhere to the Equator Principles and World Bank benchmarks — the gold standards for environmentally sensitive projects.

China Metallurgical is not talking. Its officials not only refused to be interviewed for this article, but also sought to prohibit a journalist even from photographing the mine site from afar.

But the company clearly is undeterred. The Afghan government is seeking bids for its second great mineral project, a behemoth called Hajigak that is said to contain 60 billion tons of iron ore. There are seven finalists — all companies from India and China. M.C.C. is one of them.

Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.

Source: thenytimes.com Cross posted: Wichaar.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Luck Must Go

Let there be peace, here, there and everywhere

Zafar Hilaly

India has also commenced the process of taking on board Kashmiri groups fighting for independence in discussions on the future of Kashmir. These are nascent but welcome steps. Nevertheless, they are not enough. India should restart the composite dialogue process

Even the most foolish must know by now that the greater the turmoil, the higher the casualties, the more intense the indignation, the larger the media coverage, the deeper is the satisfaction that terrorists derive from their actions. And, as happens so often, an unwitting accomplice of the terrorists is their enemy. Today it is America and tomorrow perhaps India too. Only the Israelis have done better than America in antagonising an entire religion, nay civilisation.

Seeking revenge, rather than justice, the US has waged war on Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia and is about to do so in Pakistan and perhaps Yemen. In its search for a handful of terrorists, the US has destroyed countries and caused the death and dislocation of millions. Not content, Washington is preparing to wreak havoc in Pakistan. Harassed and on the run, Al Qaeda terrorists are the quarry, and so is the leadership of the Taliban — an assortment of hitherto defeated, demoralised and unpopular antediluvian fundos that have prospered, gained respect and, to a large extent, become popular as a result of a lethal mix of American folly and Afghan xenophobia.

The misguided crusade begun by the doltish Bush against militant Islam continues under the stewardship of the opportunistic Obama. Soon America may be joined by India. The latter’s fanciful doctrines, such as ‘Cold Start’ and ‘Three Front War’, are reminiscent of Cheney’s ‘One Percent’ and the Petraeus’s ‘Surge’ theories. Spawned in the military classrooms of India’s indolent soldiers, they are being trotted out for airing as lynchpins of Indian military strategy. Presumably, the Indian establishment will indulge these military fantasies if another attack is mounted by terrorists whose provenance is traced to Pakistan. This only provides further incentive to the lashkars and jaishes, which seek to profit from the turmoil, to launch yet another attack on India. Encouraging a war that the enemy craves for is surely the height of folly.

America’s war in Afghanistan is not going well. Robert Taber summed up why America will lose in Afghanistan, “The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog’s disadvantages: too much to defend, too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.” The same fate awaits an Indian incursion into Pakistan.

At best, Pakistan may be destroyed but never defeated. The true war would only begin once the fighting is over. Indian gains on the battlefield will be lost in the blood lust that would ensue as entire religions and populations collide. And this would happen even if a nuclear conflict is avoided.

The US and India would do better to heed to the desire of their respective populations which, in the case of the former, shows a steady erosion of support for the war in Afghanistan and a decisive shift in favour of an American withdrawal and in case of the latter, was revealed by what a recent poll conducted by two media houses of India and Pakistan discovered. Only a tiny minority, 17 percent in India and 8 percent in Pakistan, it discovered, are opposed to the idea of consigning their hostility to the dustbin of history. An overwhelming 66 percent of those polled in India and 72 percent in Pakistan said that they desire a peaceful relationship between the two countries.
These encouraging results were supported by the observations of an eminent Indian doctor holidaying in Indonesia whose contacts with most segments of Indian society are intense. “Indians do not buy their government’s line that the regime in Pakistan or the people were involved in the attack on Mumbai. They favour greater people-to-people contacts and are appalled at what the public in Pakistan were being subjected to at the hands of the terrorists. They genuinely wish that Pakistan is able to tide over the crisis and defeat terrorism. They feel that India must help where it can,” he wrote.
Of course, the next al Qaeda sortie from Pakistan may drown such friendly sentiments, at least that is what the terrorists count on. Manmohan Singh, who has dragged his feet in engaging with Pakistan after Mumbai, may find himself compelled to let the desire for revenge replace reasoned judgment. America too may seize on the additional pressure another Mumbai would exert on Pakistan’s brittle regime to obtain Islamabad’s concurrence for American forces to fan out looking for jihadists in Pakistan. That, of course, would be a recipe for disaster. A Pakistan invaded, weakened, divided and even defeated might bring temporary relief, but eventually permanent ruin to India. There seems no reason for India to play fortune’s fool. India and Pakistan can determine their own fate although time is not on their side.

Following their unsuccessful attempt to blow up Margaret Thatcher and other members of the British Cabinet at a hotel in Britain in 1984, the Irish Republican Army called the police to say, “Today we were unlucky. But remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” The Nigerian student Omer Farooq Abdulmuttallab caught trying to blow up an American airliner over the Atlantic might have said the same thing, and so too other suicide bombers prevented by luck or good intelligence from reaching their targets. But luck, like chance, is a fickle friend. Eventually it runs out.

Manmohan Singh has begun what could prove to be the first step in a long process of the demilitarisation of Kashmir by withdrawing 30,000 Indian forces from Indian Kashmir. Pakistan has reciprocated by transferring an equal number of her forces to the Western border with Afghanistan. Sensibly, India has also commenced the process of taking on board Kashmiri groups fighting for independence in discussions on the future of Kashmir. These are nascent but welcome steps. Nevertheless, they are not enough. India should restart the composite dialogue process, conclude a number of agreements that await signature and begin once again the process of building confidence.

Because how far India and Pakistan are down the path of peace will determine their response to the next terrorist attack. Hopefully, negotiations would have advanced far enough to ensure that they can make their own ‘luck’ and not let the terrorists do so. In fact, the object should be to banish luck as a determining factor in relations. That surely is also the mandate that their respective peoples have given to two democratically elected governments. It is not ordained that the poisonous, clinging ivy of the terrorist should smother and suffocate the tree of peace. “We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets,” rightly said Karl Popper.

________________________

The writer is a former ambassador. Source: There are no sunglasses

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The Lost Lessons of History

by Tom Degan

President Obama came to town that night – or was as close to my town as any president is ever likely to get. As far as anyone can tell, the last sitting president to visit Goshen, NY was Ulysses S Grant in the 1870′s.

During the nineteenth century Goshen was a drinking man’s town and Grant was not unknown for his libations. The old bastard probably felt right at home here – as I would have, too, I’m sure. He would stay at a place called the Occidental Hotel which used to occupy a prominent spot in the center of the village. In that bygone era it was the place to stay when you passed through town. Sadly, after decades of neglect, the old building was torched by its owner in an insurance scam in 1983. Today it is a weed-infested vacant lot.

George Washington came through town during the Revolutionary war (His famous Headquarters was close by in Newburgh). His time spent here was over a decade before he assumed office, however. Gerald Ford came here in the 1990′s to inspect a meat-packing plant less than a half mile down Route 17M from where I now sit – but that was about twenty years after he left the White House.

Although he wasn’t stepping foot in this town, Barack Obama was at West Point that night, which is located here in Orange County, just twenty-nine miles away. The worst kept secret in Washington that morning was the fact that he is going to announce a plan to increase the number of troops serving in Afghanistan by thirty to thirty-five thousand which he did. Well, what the hey! It appears that this president (ofall presidents!) has failed to learn some basic history lessons.

TAKE THIS TO THE BANK:

We will lose the war in Afghanistan. Just as in Iraq, every serviceman and woman who has died there has died for no reason. Russia and merrie old England learned this lesson a long time ago. You would think….Never mind.

Suffice to say, on my best day I do not receive one tenth of the information that President Obama receives. I don’t read any of the Presidential Daily Briefings that are placed on his desk every morning. Obviously he is in possession of a wealth of intelligence that you and I are just not privy to. Maybe we should be giving him the benefit of the doubt - and I have been doing just that, I promise you. But from my vantage point it appears to me that this president has failed to learn the lessons that have been passed onto us down the decades by the administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson – lessons involving bold action in times of economic crisis (more on that another day) and the utter folly of waging wars that cannot be won.

I want to believe in this president. He is the chief executive I worked harder to elect than any other in my lifetime. I realize that it is simply far too early in this administration to write a final assessment of his term of office. That being said, my confidence in the Obama White House is ebbing rapidly. Where in the hell is all of this change I could believe in? Is the Bush Mob still in charge? What gives?

NOTE TO THE RIGHT WING:

No, I am still exceedingly grateful that John McCain and Fascist Barbie did not win the election last year. Have another sip.

The irony underlying this entire mess is the fact that Obama had a tiny window of opportunity during his first week or so in office where he could have ended this thing with the stroke of a pen.

Remember, this was not his war. The only reason we invaded Afghanistan to begin with (on the surface, at least) was to kill or capture Osama bin Ladin, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks - that was it. When every opportunity to do so had been badly blundered due to the incompetence of George W. Bush and company, they changed the nature of the mission for no other reason than to save their hideous faces.

It had nothing to do with bin Ladin, they assured us. It was all about “nation building”. Nation building!

And that is where we find ourselves at the miserable present. Before the sun sets this afternoon, another American kid (or more) will be sacrificed on the alter of stupidity for no other reason than to prop up a government which has been identified by the organization, Transparency International, as the second most corrupt in the world. Congratulations to Somalia for taking home the gold. Whoopee!

Whatever the future brings, American involvement in Afghanistan is going to end tragically. We should do now what we should have done forty years ago and get out while the getting is bad - as opposed to catastrophic. Barack Obama would be wise to heed the suggestion Senator George Aiken of Vermont gave to President Johnson so long ago – which LBJ failed to act on: Declare victory and get the hell out of there.

What we have here is a classic case of American ethno-centricism. Afghanistan is not a nation that is likely to embrace an idea as historically foreign to them as democracy any time soon (And when I say “any time soon” I am speaking in terms of the next one-thousand years – give or take a few centuries). How can a country be expected to enter the twenty-first century when that same country has yet to experience all of the modern wonders of the nineteenth? This is a really bad idea.

“And it’s – ONE! TWO! THREE! – What are we fighting for?“

Country Joe and the Fish

Well, hey there! Come to think of it, that’s a damned good question when you get right down to it: Just what the fuck are we fighting for? Let us examine the possibilities, shall we?

American interests? It can’t be that! Given the fact that Afghanistan’s only export seems to be opium, and taking into consideration our fabulously successful war on drugs….Nah! It couldn’t be that!

Freedom and democracy? Tee! Hee! Hee! I’m sorry, I was just kidding! The Afghan people are now living under the rule of a “leader” who is only in power because he stole the recent election. Hamid Karzai is many things – you’ll get no argument from me there! - Thomas Jefferson he ain’t. Trust me on that. Let this be etched in stone: Any country that views its women as inferior beings not worthy of basic human rights is a country not worth one drop of anyone’s blood. NEXT….

Aiding a developing nation? In order for a country to be classified “developing”, a bit of “development” should at least be moderately apparent. Afghanistan is stuck in the fifth century and seems intent on remaining there.

What are we fighting for?

Let me rephrase that: What are the children of the poor and working classes fighting for? Between you and me, I’ve only known one person in combat in the last seven years. I don’t know him anymore. He was killed when a roadside bomb was detonated in front of the vehicle in which he was a passenger. His name was Irving Medina. He was twenty-two.

What was  Irving Medina fighting for?

Is it politics? Could it be that Obama has been told by his advisers that to pull out now would be political suicide, making his chance of winning in 2012 more difficult than it needs to be? If that’s the case, he’s as bad as all the rest of them. I suppose that this might be a good argument for limiting presidents to one term. Does he rationally believe that beating the GOP in three years is going to be that much of a challenge? Only a year ago, these geniuses actually believed that giving the VP nomination to an idiot like Sarah Palin was a really neat idea! Given the direction they are now hellbent on going, defeating them in three years is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel, are you kidding me?

It is now apparent that the invaluable lessons of history are truly lost. At the very least they have been lost on Barack Obama - that much is painfully obvious. He is about to commit a blunder so horrific, it may very well prove to be the undoing of his presidency. Somewhere in the eternal void, Lyndon Johnson must be sighing.

What exactly are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn!

Writer blogs at: Tom Degan

AFTERTHOUGHT

Half way through the president’s speech that night, I turned off the lights and went to bed. I had seen that movie before. I didn’t care to see it again, thanks just the same.

______________________

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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USA is targeting CHINA through Yemen

The head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, dropped in at Sana’a, the Yemeni capital last Saturday and vowed to Saleh increased American aid to fight al-Qaeda.

You cannot fight China without occupying Yemen…..

by HK

A year ago, Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh made the startling revelation that his country’s security forces apprehended a group of Islamists linked to the Israeli intelligence forces. “A terrorist cell was apprehended and will be referred to the courts for its links with the Israeli intelligence services,” he promised.

Saleh added, “You will hear about the trial proceedings.” Nothing was ever heard and the trail went cold. Welcome to the magical land of Yemen, where in the womb of time the Arabian Nights were played out.

Combine Yemen with the mystique of Islam, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Israeli intelligence and you get a heady mix. The head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, dropped in at the capital, Sana’a, on Saturday and vowed to Saleh increased American aid to fight al-Qaeda. United States President Barack Obama promptly echoed Petraeus’ promise, assuring that the US would step up intelligence-sharing and training of Yemeni forces and perhaps carry out joint attacks against militants in the region.

ANOTHER AFGHANISTAN?

Many accounts say that Obama, who is widely regarded as a gifted and intelligent politician, is blundering into a catastrophic mistake by starting another war that could turn out to be as bloody and chaotic and unwinnable as Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, on the face of it, Obama does seem erratic. The parallels with Afghanistan are striking. There has been an attempt to destroy a US plane by a Nigerian student who says he received training in Yemen. And America wants to go to war.

Yemen, too, is a land of wonderfully beautiful rugged mountains that could be a guerilla paradise. Yemenis are a hospitable lot, like Afghan tribesmen, but as Irish journalist Patrick Cockurn recollects, while they are generous to passing strangers, they “deem the laws of hospitality to lapse when the stranger leaves their tribal territory, at which time he becomes ‘a good back to shoot at’.” Surely, there is romance in the air – almost like in the Hindu Kush. Fiercely nationalistic, almost every Yemeni has a gun. Yemen is also, like Afghanistan, a land of conflicting authorities, and with foreign intervention, a little civil war is waiting to flare up.

[Left] Obama at Mid-Pacific Country Club, in Kailua, Hawaii. While playing golf what else has the president on mind?Is Obama so incredibly forgetful of his own December 1 speech outlining his Afghan strategy that he violated his own canons? Certainly not. Obama is a smart man. The intervention in Yemen will go down as one of the smartest moves that he ever made for perpetuating the US’s global hegemony. It is America’s answer to China’s surge.

A cursory look at the map of region will show that Yemen is one of the most strategic lands adjoining waters of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. It flanks Saudi Arabia and Oman, which are vital American protectorates. In effect, Uncle Sam is “marking territory” – like a dog on a lamppost. Russia has been toying with the idea of reopening its Soviet-era base in Aden. Well, the US has pipped Moscow in the race.

The US has signaled that the odyssey doesn’t end with Yemen. It is also moving into Somalia and Kenya. With that, the US establishes its military presence in an entire unbroken stretch of real estate all along the Indian Ocean’s western rim. Chinese officials have of late spoken of their need to establish a naval base in the region. The US has now foreclosed China’s options. The only country with a coastline that is available for China to set up a naval base in the region will be Iran. All other countries have a Western military presence.

The American intervention in Yemen is not going to be on the pattern of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama will ensure he doesn’t receive any body bags of American servicemen serving in Yemen. That is what the American public expects from him. He will only deploy drone aircraft and special forces and “focus on providing intelligence and training to help Yemen counter al-Qaeda militants”, according to the US military. Obama’s main core objective will be to establish an enduring military presence in Yemen. This serves many purposes.

A NEW GREAT GAME BEGINS

First, the US move has to be viewed against the historic backdrop of the Shi’ite awakening in the region. The Shi’ites (mostly of the Zaidi group) have been traditionally suppressed in Yemen. Shi’ite uprisings have been a recurring theme in Yemen’s history. There has been a deliberate attempt to minimize the percentage of Shi’ites in Yemen, but they could be anywhere up to 45%.

More importantly, in the northern part of the country, they constitute the majority. What bothers the US and moderate Sunni Arab states – and Israel – is that the Believing Youth Organization led by Hussein Badr al-Houthi, which is entrenched in northern Yemen, is modeled after Hezbollah in Lebanon in all respects – politically, economically, socially and culturally.

Yemenis are an intelligent people and are famous in the Arabian Peninsula for their democratic temperament. The Yemeni Shi’ite empowerment on a Hezbollah-model would have far-reaching regional implications. Next-door Oman, which is a key American base, is predominantly Shi’ite. Even more sensitive is the likelihood of the dangerous idea of Shi’ite empowerment spreading to Saudi Arabia’s highly restive Shi’ite regions adjoining Yemen, which on top of it all, also happen to be the reservoir of the country’s fabulous oil wealth.

Saudi Arabia is entering a highly sensitive phase of political transition as a new generation is set to take over the leadership in Riyadh, and the palace intrigues and fault lines within the royal family are likely to get exacerbated. To put it mildly, given the vast scale of institutionalized Shi’ite persecution in Saudi Arabia by the Wahhabi establishment, Shi’ite empowerment is a veritable minefield that Riyadh is petrified about at this juncture. Its threshold of patience is wearing thin, as the recent uncharacteristic resort to military power against the north Yemeni Shi’ite communities bordering Saudi Arabia testifies.

The US faces a classic dilemma. It is all right for Obama to highlight the need of reform in Muslim societies – as he did eloquently in his Cairo speech last June. But democratization in the Yemeni context – ironically, in the Arab context – would involve Shi’ite empowerment. After the searing experience in Iraq, Washington is literally perched like a cat on a hot tin roof. It would much rather be aligned with the repressive, autocratic government of Saleh than let the genie of reform out of the bottle in the oil rich-region in which it has profound interests.

Obama has an erudite mind and he is not unaware that what Yemen desperately needs is reform, but he simply doesn’t want to think about it. The paradox he faces is that with all its imperfections, Iran happens to be the only “democratic” system operating in that entire region.

Iran’s shadow over the Yemeni Shi’ite consciousness worries the US to no end. Simply put, in the ideological struggle going on in the region, Obama finds himself with the ultra-conservative and brutally autocratic oligarchies that constitute the ruling class in the region. Conceivably, he isn’t finding it easy. If his own memoirs are to be believed, there could be times when the vague recollections of his childhood in Indonesia and his precious memories of his own mother, who from all accounts was a free-wheeling intellectual and humanist, must be stalking him in the White House corridors.

ISRAEL MOVES IN

But Obama is first and foremost a realist. Emotions and personal beliefs drain away and strategic considerations weigh uppermost when he works in the Oval Office. With the military presence in Yemen, the US has tightened the cordon around Iran. In the event of a military attack on Iran, Yemen could be put to use as a springboard by the Israelis. These are weighty considerations for Obama.

The fact is that no one is in control as a Yemeni authority. It is a cakewalk for the formidable Israeli intelligence to carve out a niche in Yemen – just as it did in northern Iraq under somewhat comparable circumstances.

Islamism doesn’t deter Israel at all. Saleh couldn’t have been far off the mark when he alleged last year that Israeli intelligence had been exposed as having kept links with Yemeni Islamists. The point is, Yemeni Islamists are a highly fragmented lot and no one is sure who owes what sort of allegiance to whom. Israeli intelligence operates marvelously in such twilight zones when the horizon is lacerated with the blood of the vanishing sun.

Israel will find a toehold in Yemen to be a god-sent gift insofar as it registers its presence in the Arabian Peninsula. This is a dream come true for Israel, whose effectiveness as a regional power has always been seriously handicapped by its lack of access to the Persian Gulf region. The overarching US military presence helps Israel politically to consolidate its Yemeni chapter.

Without doubt, Petraeus is moving on Yemen in tandem with Israel (and Britain). But the “pro-West” Arab states with their rentier mentality have no choice except to remain as mute spectators on the sidelines.

Some among them may actually acquiesce with the Israeli security presence in the region as a safer bet than the spread of the dangerous ideas of Shi’ite empowerment emanating out of Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah. Also, at some stage, Israeli intelligence will begin to infiltrate the extremist Sunni outfits in Yemen, which are commonly known as affiliates of al-Qaeda. That is, if it hasn’t done that already. Any such link makes Israel an invaluable ally for the US in its fight against al-Qaeda. In sum, infinite possibilities exist in the paradigm that is taking shape in the Muslim world abutting into the strategic Persian Gulf.

IT’S ALL ABOUT CHINA

Most important, however, for US global strategies will be the massive gain of control of the port of Aden in Yemen. Britain can vouchsafe that Aden is the gateway to Asia. Control of Aden and the Malacca Strait will put the US in an unassailable position in the “great game” of the Indian Ocean. The sea lanes of the Indian Ocean are literally the jugular veins of China’s economy. By controlling them, Washington sends a strong message to Beijing that any notions by the latter that the US is a declining power in Asia would be nothing more than an extravagant indulgence in fantasy.

In the Indian Ocean region, China is increasingly coming under pressure. India is a natural ally of the US in the Indian Ocean region. Both disfavor any significant Chinese naval presence. India is mediating a rapprochement between Washington and Colombo that would help roll back Chinese influence in Sri Lanka. The US has taken a u-turn in its Myanmar policy and is engaging the regime there with the primary intent of eroding China’s influence with the military rulers. The Chinese strategy aimed at strengthening influence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar so as to open a new transportation route towards the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and Africa, where it has begun contesting traditional Western economic dominance.

China is keen to whittle down its dependence on the Malacca Strait for its commerce with Europe and West Asia. The US, on the contrary, is determined that China remains vulnerable to the choke point between Indonesia and Malaysia.

An engrossing struggle is breaking out. The US is unhappy with China’s efforts to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf through the Central Asian region and Pakistan. Slowly but steadily, Washington is tightening the noose around the neck of the Pakistani elites – civilian and military – and forcing them to make a strategic choice between the US and China. This will put those elites in an unenviable dilemma. Like their Indian counterparts, they are inherently “pro-Western” (even when they are “anti-American”) and if the Chinese connection is important for Islamabad, that is primarily because it balances perceived Indian hegemony.

The existential questions with which the Pakistani elites are grappling are apparent. They are seeking answers from Obama. Can Obama maintain a balanced relationship vis-a-vis Pakistan and India? Or, will Obama lapse back to the George W Bush era strategy of building up India as the pre-eminent power in the Indian Ocean under whose shadow Pakistan will have to learn to live?

US-INDIA-ISRAEL AXIS

On the other hand, the Indian elites are in no compromising mood. Delhi was on a roll during the Bush days. Now, after the initial misgivings about Obama’s political philosophy, Delhi is concluding that he is all but a clone of his illustrious predecessor as regards the broad contours of the US’s global strategy – of which containment of China is a core template.

The comfort level is palpably rising in Delhi with regard to the Obama presidency. Delhi takes the surge of the Israeli lobby in Washington as the litmus test for the Obama presidency. The surge suits Delhi, since the Jewish lobby was always a helpful ally in cultivating influence in the US Congress, media and the rabble-rousing think-tankers as well as successive administrations. And all this is happening at a time when the India-Israel security relationship is gaining greater momentum.

United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates is due to visit Delhi in the coming days. The Obama administration is reportedly adopting an increasingly accommodative attitude toward India’s longstanding quest for “dual-use” technology from the US. If so, a massive avenue of military cooperation is about to open between the two countries, which will make India a serious challenger to China’s growing military prowess. It is a win-win situation as the great Indian arms bazaar offers highly lucrative business for American companies.

Clearly, a cozy three-way US-Israel-India alliance provides the underpinning for all the maneuvering that is going on. It will have significance for the security of the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. Last year, India formalized a naval presence in Oman.

All-in-all, terrorism experts are counting the trees and missing the wood when they analyze the US foray into Yemen in the limited terms of hunting down al-Qaeda. The hard reality is that Obama, whose main plank used to be “change”, has careened away and increasingly defaults to the global strategies of the Bush era. The freshness of the Obama magic is dissipating. Traces of the “revisionism” in his foreign policy orientation are beginning to surface. We can see them already with regard to Iran, Afghanistan, the Middle East and the Israel-Palestine problem, Central Asia and towards China and Russia.

Arguably, this sort of “return of the native” by Obama was inevitable. For one thing, he is but a creature of his circumstances. As someone put it brilliantly, Obama’s presidency is like driving a train rather than a car: a train cannot be “steered”, the driver can at best set its speed, but ultimately, it must run on its tracks.

Besides, history has no instances of a declining world power meekly accepting its destiny and walking into the sunset. The US cannot give up on its global dominance without putting up a real fight. And the reality of all such momentous struggles is that they cannot be fought piece-meal. You cannot fight China without occupying Yemen.

Source: Geoplotical.blogspot.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Late Syed Tahir Ahmad Shah, Part 1 of 2

Syed Tahir Ahmad Shah speaking to office bearers of city PPP prior to a meeting that was held to pay homage to Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed  on her 1st death anniversary at the TMA Hall in Faisalabad.

LATE SYED TAHIR AHMAD SHAH

A brief on Shah Ji’s contribution to Faisalabad’s political life

Nayyar Hashmey

With a heavy heart, with trembling fingers, I write these notes. Notes on the life of a political worker, a campaigner of human rights, voice of the poor, a beacon of hope for the downtrodden of the great textile metropolis of Pakistan.But let me correct. He was not only a messiah for the downtrodden, the rich too came to him like ordinary “Sa-ils” (complainants) and he extended his helping hand to all; irrespective of their caste, creed or color, as his only criterion was that person coming to him is right, no matter wronged by the law enforcers, by social lords of our society or by somebody with the might of money and power.

S H A H J i [as late Syed Tahir Ahmad Shah was popularly called] entered politics in 1964, when he contested elections of a basic democracy in the then Lyallpur city (now Faisalabad).  These so called basic democracies were created by Pakistan’s first military dictator “Field Martial” Ayub Khan. These B.D.’s were meant to protect and prolong the late Field Martial’s dictatorial regime in the country. But to dictator’s chagrin, there were certain individuals who stood dauntless to contest these elections on the very issue of doing away with the system of choosing people’s representatives through B.D’s.  (These basic democracies were designed with the sole purpose of serving as an electoral college for the presidency).

Shah Ji, as member of the delegation that received PLO leader Yasir Arafat on his visit to Pakistan. In the picture, the Palestinian leader is on the left, next to him in centre, is late Mr. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and just behind Mr. Bhutto, on his left is Syed Tahir Ahmad Shah.

Late Tahir Ahmad Shah, one of the very few of such stalwarts, was ready to face the erstwhile dictator’s wrath. A big surprise for the residents of Lyallpur city was his opposition to the city’s Conventional Muslim League which was a party of the president F. M. Ayub Khan. However, to the satisfaction of his constituency, he openly declared that if elected, he would support Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah for country’s presidency. He won the elections and openly displayed a mini “Laltaen” (a kerosene lamp or lantern) on his chest. Lantern was the election symbol of Mader-e-Millat Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah.

In those days it was next to impossible to speak against the “Field Martial” what to speak of a political campaign and that too against a dictator sitting in the guise of country’s president. But campaigned he did, it’s another matter that due to machinations of Pakistan’s first military dictator, she lost the elections. Mass scale rigging involving stuffing the ballot boxes with bogus votes, harassing the supporters of Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah including sending them to jails under trumped up charges, torturing the political workers in state interrogation centres, was done to silence the opposition.

Later under mass protests, the same Ayub Khan could not confront the people, (according to him, he himself heard his kids chanting the slogan “Ayub Kutta haey, haey” [down with Ayub Khan]. Instead of holding general elections, the dictator handed over the power to country’s army chief Gen Yahya Khan, who then became the second Martial Law Administrator of Pakistan. Gen. Yahya Khan held the popular elections by which Pakistan Peoples Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, won the largest number of seats in West Pakistan, but in East Pakistan (present Bangladesh), Sh. Mujib-ur-Rehman’s Awami League had a landslide victory. As a result of the highhandedness of West Pakistani politicians led by Gen, Yahya, East Pakistan revolted and with the active help of Indian Army, extracted independence. Since Syed Tahir Ahmad Shah had contested the elections to the Punjab Provincial Assembly, he was not much involved in the national politics, but on provincial level, he was highly active on Punjab’s political front.

As an MPA, (Member of the Provincial Assembly) he actively participated in the mass protests against Gen. Yahya Khan. Many times elected as an MPA from Faisalabad, he did his best to secure peoples’ rights for his constituency. Due to his relentless struggle for the people of Faisalabad, he was frequently referred to as “Sher-e-Faisalabad” (the Lion of Faisalabad).

In 1977, the Peoples Party government was dislodged from power and Gen. Zia-ul-Haque, after a coup d’état, took over power, and donned the cap of (self appointed) country’s third Martial Law Administrator. During Zia-ul-Haque’s military rule, the then Martial Law Administrator of Faisalabad undertook a grand drive to remove encroachments in the city. The move though was well intended, yet took an ugly turn, when people of a poor locality in the city’s slum areas, were thrown out by force to a far off deserted place, outside of the city of Faisalabad. Being harsh cold month of winter, the poor men along with their families, were shivering in the bitter cold. Having no house, no roof over their heads, they were forced to spend their days in utter misery. They have had no sanitation in the slums (Katchi Abadis) either, but had roof over their heads, offering them some protection at least of a home).

Having been invited by the effectees to see their abject condition, their helplessness (they were facing at the hands of the authorities) Shah Ji, the very second day called on the office of city’s Martial Law Administrator. There he explained the awful condition the poor of the city were thrown into. “Beware! Mr. Tahir Shah, you are no more an MPA now to speak like this”, said Brig. Younus, the Martial law Administrator. “But Brig. Sahib, I am still the same Tahir Shah, who always fights for the poor of the city”. Shah Ji’s voice was so forceful that the Brigadier ultimately asked him a list of evictees so that the city administration could provide emergency shelters to the people till a newly developed residential colony with all the basic amenities like proper housing, clean potable water and sanitation could be provided to them. Today, a well managed residential estate stands on the location and residents of the area pay tributes to Shah Ji’s noble soul in this regard.

In 1985, the general, who had in the meanwhile donned the office of the president of the country, held country-wide general elections. Shah Ji was again elected to the Punjab Provincial Assembly and served his constituency in the second term also. In addition to his active role in formulation of law in the provincial legislature, he got schemes approved for girls’ schools and colleges in his constituency, apart from construction of many new roads in the city. Though he lost the 1988 elections, in 1990 he was again back to the Punjab Assembly. In 1994 too, he was again elected as an MPA and also served as a Minister in the Punjab cabinet.

In successive years, Shah Ji got disillusioned from squabbles in the party (Punjab PPP). Though he did continue to take part in general welfare and social work for the people of Faisalabad, yet some nouveau riche having grabbed party’s top positions, who thus tried to steer party’s policies according to their vested interest,  he got disgusted. Such people having a constant fear from party’s veterans sidetracked the old guard, which disappointed party’s senior leadership including Shah Ji. Nevertheless, he remained active in offering help to city’s poor and needy, till his last breath.

Even though he was seriously sick, he kept his spirits high. His illness did not daunt him from listening to their problems. Till his last moments he kept contacting different peoples, authorities and concerned individuals to get the problems of his fellow citizens redressed.

And now two more notes (adapted) from my diary:-

You did Well My Brother! Ever you will live in my heart!

If people in the city they feel saddened at the news of your tragic and untimely death, they are lying.

The truth is that they actually feel much more than that.

They feel terribly devastated! They feel utterly orphaned!

Surely how can it be that you have left all of them so soon, so suddenly!

You who was so determined to be a voice of the voiceless!

You who was ever ready to face the wrath of dictators and their cronies for the sake of your city’s long suffering people!

You who decided it was just not enough to be a successful politician and realized that it would be more rewarding for you to be something more!

You who decided to stand up in thanas and the Katchehris!

You Shah Ji, a mortal blend of flesh and bones was the great pillar of justice for the suppressed and repressed dwellers of Faisalabad!

I just cannot believe it. I cannot accept it that you have suddenly been taken away from us.

Ah death has done it again! Death has decided to show its jealous ugly face and rob from us a brave and a determined hero of the poor, the have-nots of Faisalabad.

I recall how you used to like sharing jokes with us and pulling up some pranks

I remember how you helped the residents of slums to stand up against the oppressive implementation of law against the poor!

How you fought alongside other democrats and never flinched to call spade a spade.

And now I have to face the reality of your passing away!

And now I have to say ‘so long Bhai Ji!’

Ah I just cannot accept this but death has left me with no choice

except to say that ‘You did well and go well Shah Ji!’

May your dauntless and activist soul rest in blissful peace!!!

May the city you loved so much, thank you and ensure that your life was not in vain!

So then until final victory, do rest in peace!

My dauntless Bhai, I love you and I miss you Bhai, I miss you Bhai!

Next : His Last Act

U.S. to continue drone attacks despite Pakistan`s disagreement: senator

The United States will continue the “effective“ drone attacks in northwest Pakistan`s tribal region near the Afghan border even if it has no agreement with Pakistan, a U.S. senator said here Friday

At least 70 more Drone attacks in 2010

ISLAMABAD, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) — Addressing a press conference in Islamabad, visiting Senator John McCain said the U.S. congressional delegation came to show the solidity and sympathy to the victims of the terror attacks in Pakistan but the strikes with unmanned aircraft will not stop as the U.S. needs to root out extremism from the region.

“We are always with Pakistan and the people of Pakistan and our relationship does not have time limitation,” McCain said.

He said the use of drone strikes against suspected Taliban militants in Pakistan is an effective part of the U.S. strategy.

Referring the recent diplomat issue, the senator said the U.S. will try to deploy the qualified diplomats to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan to help address the diplomatic concerns by the Pakistani government.

The delegation appreciated Pakistan’s role in the war against extremism and militancy and assured full support in taking this war to the logical end.

In a meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Thursday, McCain said that there were some differences between Pakistan and the U.S. regarding drone attacks but both countries have the same views against terrorism and democratic values.

Referring to Obama’s new Afghan strategy, Zardari said that Pakistan has legitimate interests in promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan and urged that U.S. must remain sensitive to Pakistan’s core national interests and concerns.

The U.S had stepped up attacks inside Pakistan’s tribal areas last year and the new year started with early morning strike.

Pakistan opposes the strikes but Washington believes that al-Qaeda remnants and Taliban militants are planning attacks across the border in Afghanistan.

Political analyst Farrukh Salim told Xinhua that 17 drone attacks were carried out against areas in Pakistan in 2008, 43 carried out in 2009 and in 2010 more than 70 drone attacks are expected.

“Such attacks always trigger violence, suicide attacks and casualties in Pakistan. So more drone attacks means more violence in Pakistan,” Salim said. #

Late Syed Tahir Ahmad Shah, Part 2 of 2

Syed Tahir Ahmad Shah during his youth days

AND HIS LAST ACT!

(adaptation)

He played his last act
a hero’s act was his last act
On Saturday the 26^th of September 2009
Shah Ji bathed for the last time
Dressed for leaving the last time
Bade farewell to his children and wife for the last time

He spoke his last words asking about his beloved city
it were to be his last words
He struggled to meet his medic
But never did he meet
And when he finally did
He was happy
Sadly it was to be his last time

He smiled, joked and laughed with everyone for the last time

He spoke of nothing but his city, his people

He spoke of city’s suffering

He spoke of people suffering

He spoke about his battles with the people in power

He spoke of the battle to preserve the honour of the poor

He spoke about the battles he had been in

Little did we know, it was to be his last act

He looked for his friends

They talked and argued about politics, about people, about birds

They joked, laughed and laughed

He seemed so happy, too happy, his last act

I shall never forget

Shall forever be humbled

When he hunted for me

“Bhai, you may not know…thank you so much, I am most thankful!”

I may never really know why

For he did not say why

But he was thankful.

He did seem thankful.

And I am thankful that I met him before his last act

He talked with most of us for the last time

He did really enjoyable talk, but at the same time

Solving issues, helping all, you and me, every one’s, who needed his help

His powerful words did magic to everybody.

And he talked and seemed so satisfied,

we’ll never know why

for this was his last act

He bade a few farewell for the last time

And left alone, to journey alone

That was the last time

Next we saw was his remains

laid out

On the charpoy

For me

Seeing him lying there

Lying fresh as ever, a face fresh as ever, ready to offer a helping hand

To every one, the poor and the needy,

I remembered the days I had spent with him

remembering him helping his city fellows

remembering the time we had with him

which was the time we were with him always

remembering how strong he was in nerves, spirit and physique

how courageous he had been

how fearless he had been

how gentle he was with those he loved

how respectful he was to those that respected

how uncompromising he was with those that despised or put him down

remembering the work he did for people’s rights

remembering the selfless service he gave to the people

remembering his personal and political achievements,

ALL FOR THE CITY

ALL FOR THE PEOPLE

it seemed so ironic that he should die so

life itself seemed so unfair

It deem seem so meaningless

It seemed so unfair too

That one such as he could have left so sudden

I could see the futility of personal battles

I could see the many missed chances

To know, to understand, to appreciate

Yes, his was the person,

loved and cherished and missed by strangers too

That he would have achieved this much among us

And received this little decoration for this much

But now as I listen to accolades

Of achievements I can only dream of

Of courage I could never match

Of intellect and skill I can only admire

Of fearlessness that resides in few

And a strong will that took him from mother’s lap

all the way to the people’s man

It did not matter now

It really did not matter

It simply mattered not

I was comforted that he had done more

I am comforted that he had done more

More than some of us who shall live longer than him

May all of us be comforted

May his loved ones be proud

He may have acted his last

He may have spoken his last

He may have fought his last

But his achievements will last

I pray he went to a place of peace

Where good deeds are repaid eternally.

May your soul rest in peace Shah Ji

Thar’s Plight – 2

The water from wells is said to have dangerously high levels of salts while studies have confirmed that underground wells in parts of the region have amounts of fluoride far above safety levels. —Photo by Aroosa Masroor

Thars’ thirst for clean water

Dawn Editorial

THE lack of access to clean drinking water and proper health facilities has made the residents of Thar vulnerable to disease. Though this sad state of affairs is not unfamiliar to many in Pakistan the situation in Sindh’s Tharparkar district is particularly alarming.

The residents of this arid, under-developed and remote area of the country have no option but to draw water from wells or store rainwater.The water from wells is said to have dangerously high levels of salts while studies have confirmed that underground wells in parts of the region have amounts of fluoride far above safety levels. Also, experts have warned that storing rainwater may lead to epidemics of gastroenteritis and other water-borne ailments. The effect of drinking impure water has led to health conditions such as bone deformity amongst the residents of Thar. The problem is so widespread that in some villages nearly every family has a member suffering from such ailments. Some Tharis have been suffering for the last three decades, yet this health disorder was first diagnosed in 2004. Sadly, the local health authorities are mostly in the dark about the plight of the affected persons.

It is time the authorities turned their attention to this forsaken area. Apart from disease, parts of Thar have been declared calamity-hit due to drought and hunger. The Sindh health department recently took action when reports emerged in the media of ailments afflicting children in fishing villages on the outskirts of Karachi. Similar action must be taken in Thar. In the short term the government needs to provide Tharis with immediate medical attention. In the long term the provision of a dependable supply of clean drinking water to the area and the establishment of functioning medical facilities in Thar must be made the priority of the provincial and federal governments.

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Pentagon’s Full spectrum dominance

EMPIRE RELOADED

Pepe Escober

HONG KONG – One’s got to hand it to failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab. He is the real Man of the Year. With a single twitch of his lower parts, the now iconic young Nigerian single-handedly not only forced the Barack Obama administration to unleash tight airport security measures, a new virtual striptease craze bound to bolster the fortunes of selected players in the security industry; but he also managed to place no fewer than 675 million Muslims (plus sundry Nigerian and even Cuban Christians) on a Cyclopean terror list of 10 “prone to terrorism countries”. [1]

That’s quite a feat for an apparently trained-in-Yemen jihadi charged by a US grand jury – no irony intended – with “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction”. But weren’t WMDs supposed to be buried in Iraq?

IT’S PEARL HARBOR TIME

As much as 9/11 was the “Pearl Harbor” dreamed of by the neo-conservatives to unleash the American Eagle - which started with the bombing of Afghanistan and morphed into the disastrous invasion of Iraq – Abdulmuttalab’s failed attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day in the skies above Detroit is a godsend mini-Pearl Harbor destined to advance the Pentagon‘s “full spectrum dominance” doctrine.

Yemen could not be a more strategically mouth-watering proposition – with Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, the Gulf of Aden to the south leading to the Arabian Sea, and on the other side, in Africa, Somalia.

As far as the Pentagon’s “full spectrum dominance” goes, Yemen falls right into the Pentagon net alongside Somali pirates and the new bogeyman, al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula (AQAP), when it comes to the militarization of a key strategic oil chokepoint, the Bab el-Mandab, no matter the avalanche of denials from the Barack Obama administration of any intention to put US boots on the ground in Yemen.

The Strait of Bab el-Mandab between Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea is a key strategic oil chokepoint between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, linking the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, through which flows at least 3.5 million barrels of oil a day towards the US, Europe and Asia.

Plus, from Washington’s point of view, there’s the potential of oil reserves lying in Yemen near Saudi Arabia at the Masila Basin and the Shabwa Basin, which could in the not too distant future fall nicely into US Big Oil’s lap, unlike Iraq’s. (See Iraq’s oil auction hits the jackpot Asia Times Online, December 16, 2009).

So it’s no surprise that Obama, on the record, had to expand the never-say-die “war on terror” – the cover narrative for “full spectrum dominance”. According to Obama, AfPak is still “the epicenter of al-Qaeda”, but the Yemen chapter is a “more serious problem”. Thus comes into play still one more rehash of the same old narrative: a fragile dictator, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh (in absolute power since 1978) needs America to defeat the terrorists (AQAP).

In practice, the Obama administration has just wallowed in the mire of an Arab Afghanistan, propping up Saleh against the Southern Movement, an unlikely, popular-based alliance of socialists and Islamic conservatives led by a former jihadi, Tariq al-Fadhli, and now characterized as a full nationalist movement. In addition, the Saleh regime is fighting a Shi’ite rebellion in north Yemen. Saleh is Sunni. The rebels are Shi’ite. Saleh is obviously backed by the Wahhabi Saudi regime. Yemen’s current oil, by the way, is crucially in the south.

[Left: Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh with former US president George W. Bush]

Saleh predictably will dub all his enemies as “al-Qaeda” and call the cavalry – US Special Forces and legions of counter-intelligence operatives. Not to mention the drones. Few noted that last December 17, Obama ordered the bombing of suspected al-Qaeda positions in Yemen with cruise missiles, an attack in which 49 civilians were reported to have been killed, according to Agence France-Presse. Welcome to yet one more sinister Arab-Afghan amalgam.

United States intelligence admits there are no more than 200 al-Qaeda jihadis in southern Yemen (that certainly beats those 100 in Afghanistan). What AQAP basically wants is to bring down US-propped dictators such as Saleh, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the House of Saud – a popular agenda across much of the Middle East. So Obama may go to Cairo and talk about democracy in the Muslim world as much as he wants; what the Arab street registers is Obama playing the same old empire game of supporting yet another dictator.

IT’S THE OIL…

“Full spectrum dominance” as applied to Yemen may be – as it always is – about the containment of China, as in threatening China’s oil imports (6% of its total) from Port Sudan on the Red Sea, just north of the Bab el-Mandab.

But even if the US eventually controls the port of Aden – the gateway to Asia via the Indian Ocean – China will relentlessly continue to evolve its complex strategy of avoiding chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, or indeed the Bab el-Mandab (See China plays Pipelineistan Asia Times Online, December 24).

The idea of “full spectrum dominance” is about threatening to cut energy flows not only to China but even to the European Union (EU) or anyone for that matter who crosses Washington’s policy makers. And it’s as much about Saudi Arabia as about China. As Saudi oil exports also have to negotiate the Bab el-Mandab, US “interest” in Yemen means a graphic warning to the House of Saud: don’t even think of trading oil in euros or in a basket of currencies including the Chinese yuan.

It also is about isolating Iran – as in using a Sunni dictator to fight a Shi’ite rebellion and in militarizing a useful battleground alongside ally Saudi Arabia. In Washington’s scenario, the winners should be the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s Mossad, and the losers should be China, Russia and Iran. The turbulent Yemeni street was not consulted and certainly has ideas of its own.

Obama is packaging his strategy as a “war on al-Qaeda”. It’s not a war. And even if the counter-insurgency gang in the Pentagon conducts it, it’s destined to fail. Meanwhile, there’s not the remotest chance in sight of a real US withdrawal from Iraq, the end of the AfPak war, or a viable, non-apartheid Palestinian state.

Now that would be a real, concerted counter-terrorist operation, to finish once and for all with the ghost of all those “al-Qaedas”. It won’t happen. The name of the game is “full spectrum dominance” and empire reloaded. Fasten your body scanners; the decade promises a bumpy ride.It also is about isolating Iran – as in using a Sunni dictator to fight a Shi’ite rebellion and in militarizing a useful battleground alongside ally Saudi Arabia. In Washington’s scenario, the winners should be the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s Mossad, and the losers should be China, Russia and Iran. The turbulent Yemeni street was not consulted and certainly has ideas of its own.

Obama is packaging his strategy as a “war on al-Qaeda”. It’s not a war. And even if the counter-insurgency gang in the Pentagon conducts it, it’s destined to fail. Meanwhile, there’s not the remotest chance in sight of a real US withdrawal from Iraq, the end of the AfPak war, or a viable, non-apartheid Palestinian state.

Now that would be a real, concerted counter-terrorist operation, to finish once and for all with the ghost of all those “al-Qaedas”. It won’t happen. The name of the game is “full spectrum dominance” and empire reloaded. Fasten your body scanners; the decade promises a bumpy ride.

_________________

[1] The countries are Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen, plus “state sponsors of terrorism” Iran, Syria, Libya and Cuba.

Source: GeoploticalNWO

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Irans’ Nuclear Programme: Never Mind the Facts, Let’s Have a War…

Tc oerce Iran, is Obama using same tactics as used by George W. Bush?

Finian Cunningham

A missile test-fired by Iran last December was reported on the BBC World Service as being “capable of striking Israel”.

The choice of words was not unusual. On previous occasions when Iran has test-fired a long-range rocket, the BBC and other western news media dutifully inform us that the said device is “capable of striking Israel”. The well-worn phrase is so reliably heard in these news bulletins that its use betrays a coded script. The not-too subliminal implications are that Iran is: a) a hostile state; b) doing something illegal in test-firing a long-range missile; and c) gearing up to deliver on its alleged threat to wipe out the state of Israel.

Within hours of these reports, the US government weighed in with the pious accusation that the test-firing “undermines Iran’s claims of peaceful intentions”.

This is a propaganda system at work: the choice of words and framework of logic designed to condition people into accepting certain options. In this case, the pre-determined option is a unilateral military strike on Iran either by the US or Israel. In that event, it will of course be reported by the BBC and other western media as a “pre-emptive” military measure to “prevent” Iran from attacking western interests in the region. Reported too, no doubt, will be the “collateral damage” of civilian casualties – unfortunate victims in an otherwise “just cause” to bring a “hardline regime” to abide by “international norms”. This is classic thought engineering that British political essayist George Orwell exposed so brilliantly – the official use of sanitised words to cover the sordid truth.

So let’s rewind and play back the news with some pertinent facts and context that are routinely omitted in western media reporting.

Iran has test-fired a long-range missile – within its sovereign borders. The US and its western allies carry out such weapons testing all the time, as is their sovereign right. One of the US’ allies, Israel, has a stockpile of nuclear weapons in contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This same ally has previously committed acts of aggression (war crimes) by launching air attacks on neighbouring countries. Israel, with overt approval from Washington, has repeatedly said that it is prepared to militarily strike Iran “soon”.

The US itself has warned several times that it reserves the right to use a military option in its relations with Iran. The US is waging illegal wars in three of Iran’s neighbours: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. A dynamic of fear and distrust between Gulf countries is fuelling a regional arms race. This dynamic is being pushed by the US with, what should be, obvious self-serving interests (massive arms sales, geopolitical influence) that are instead disguised by its bogeyman illusion of Iran, which, unfortunately, Gulf states appear to buy into. All told, these facts actually do “undermine US claims of peaceful intentions”.

Here are some other facts that the western media curiously underplay. Iran is not at war with any country, although it is routinely accused in the western media, without supporting evidence, of covert subversion across the region. Iran is conducting a nuclear energy programme, which it has repeatedly said is for civilian power supply. After a decade of close monitoring by UN inspectors, which would never be permitted in its territory by the US or its western allies, the inspectors have reiterated that there is no evidence of Iran building a nuclear weapon. Nevertheless, this conclusion does not restrain Washington and London in their dogged assertion that Tehran is building nuclear weapons (cue more arms sales).

Given these facts, the test-firing by Iran of a long-range missile is far from being a quasi-criminal act laden with hostile intentions. It is the action of a country that needs to show it can defend itself amid relentless provocations from proven and much more greatly armed aggressors, whose arsenal also includes a propaganda system that Nazi spinmeister Joseph Goebbels would have marvelled at.

Source: Global Research

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OSAMA 10. THE US: 0.

This, this, this, this…..this is a Crusade. This is a war against terrorism. (former US president George W. Bush)

Eric Margolis

Dodge City meeting Arabian Nights once again…

To better understand why Osama bin Laden is so far winning his struggle to oust the western powers from the Muslim world, let us go back to 1986, when I was covering the anti-Soviet war in then almost unknown Afghanistan.

I called on the grandly titled “Afghan Information Center” in Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar was a wild and dangerous place. I called it,  “Dodge City meets the Arabian Nights” in my book on Afghanistan, `War at the Top of the World.”

The information center turned out to be a drab little office filled with mimeographed pamphlets and piles of dusty books.

The director was a short, thin man in a torn sweater named Abdullah Azzam. We spoke at length of the anti-Soviet jihad (struggle) in Afghanistan being waged by Afghan and Arab mujahideen.

Then, Azzam told me, `when we have driven the Communist imperialists from Afghanistan, we will go on and drive the American imperialists from Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world.’

I was absolutely floored. Except for Communists, a notorious bunch of liars, I had never heard anyone call my beloved America an imperialist power. In those days, the US appeared the acme of good – in large part because its rival, the Soviet Union, looked so wicked.

But after the USSR collapsed, absolute power absolutely corrupted Washington’s ruling circles and drove them to seek “full spectrum domination” of the globe and its energy resources rather than a cooperative new world order.

Sheik Abdullah Azzam was the teacher and spiritual mentor of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam gave bin Laden the blueprint for his later war against the west.

Azzam was murdered in 1989, likely by a western intelligence service. His pupil, Osama, launched a seemingly Quixotic mission to overthrow the western-backed dictatorships and monarchies that misruled the Muslim world, and drive western power from the region.

Bin Laden proclaimed his grand strategy in the 1990’s. He would oust the modern `Crusaders’ by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America’s Achilles’ heel.

Bloody attacks would enrage the US and lure it into one quagmire after another.

Bin Laden & Azzam, their phantoms still haunt Washington

Bin Laden was dismissed by western intelligence as a crackpot and “enragé.”

But both the dim-witted President Gorge W. Bush and the intelligent President Barack Obama fell right into Osama’s carefully-laid trap.

Today, Osama’s words haunt us as we witness hysteria and chaos engulf America’s air travel system, the war party in Washington demands the US invade Yemen, and the drums beat for war against Iran.

[Left: Considered dead since long, Osama's phantom still haunts the men in White House].

US airport security officials will be even more panicked when they learn a jihadist recently tried to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s interior minister, Prince Nayef, by detonating a bomb secreted in his rectum. Will we soon bend and spread for security– just like in prisons?

The American colossus continues to stumble ever deeper into the Muslim world’s violent, tangled affairs at a time when Washington is bankrupt and only runs on Chinese loans. In 2009, the US deficit was US $1.4 trillion.  But Washington managed to spend $200 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by loading the costs onto the national credit card.

American soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. US   Special Forces, air units and CIA mercenaries are involved in combat operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, North Africa and the Philippines. A new US base at Djibouti is launching raids into Yemen, Somalia and northern Kenya. US forces aided the failed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006.   New US bases are planned in oil-producing West Africa and also in Colombia.

The Red Sea littoral is America’s next major headache. Somalia’s anti-western Shebab movement controls much of that nation’s south and center. Yemen is a hotbed of jihadist activity that increasingly threatens neighboring Saudi Arabia, a vital American ally. Somali pirates could turn from plunder to striking at other western interests.

As soon as the US or its satraps crush one anti-western jihadist group, another springs up somewhere else.

Washington engineering the break up of oil rich Muslim States

Washington is quietly engineering the breakup of troubled Sudan, Africa’s largest nation, in order to dominate South Sudan’s important oil resources and undermine the regime in Khartoum which Washington has marked for termination.

[Left: President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt].

Even Egypt is growing shaky. The US-backed Mubarak military dictatorship that has ruled the Arab world’s most populous nation with an iron hand since 1981 faces a succession struggle once the 82-year old pharaoh is gone.

Al-Qaida is no longer the tiny organization founded by Osama bin Laden that never numbered more than 300 hard core members. It has morphed into a worldwide movement of like-minded but independent, revolutionary, anti-American groups that share Osama’s militant philosophy. This is precisely the kind of `asymmetrical warfare’ the Pentagon has so long feared.

Ominously, a 2006 World Public Opinion poll showed large majorities in four leading Muslim nations that are key US allies, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Indonesia (a third of the Muslim world’s population),  believe the US is determined to destroy or undermine Islam. They support attacks on American targets. This was an ominous warning for the United States.

Remember all the claims by the Bush administration that Osama bin Laden was on the run, or out of business? He is still very much in business, and so far making his western enemies look foolish and bumbling.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

Source: Ericmargolis.com

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The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning

China’s economy had a stunning rebound: It grew nearly 8% in the second quarter of 2009, and is a stunning turnaround also for the Asian powerhouse that offers some hope for the rest of the world.

James Petras

Asian capitalism, notably China and South Korea are competing with the US for global power.  Asian global power is driven by dynamic economic growth, while the US pursues a strategy of military-driven empire building.

One Day’s Read of the Financial Times

Even a cursory read of a single issue of the Financial Times (December 28, 2009) illustrates the divergent strategies toward empire building.  On page one, the lead article on the US is on its expanding military conflicts and its ‘war on terror’, entitled “Obama Demands Review of Terror List”.  In contrast, there are two page-one articles on China, which describe China’s launching of the world’s fastest long-distance passenger train service and China’s decision to maintain its currency pegged to the US dollar as a mechanism to promote its robust export sector. While Obama turns the US focus on a fourth battle front (Yemen) in the ‘war on terror’ (after Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), the Financial Times reports on the same page that a South Korean consortium has won a $20.4 billion dollar contract to develop civilian nuclear power plants for the United Arab Emirates, beating its US and European competitors.

On page two of the FT there is a longer article elaborating on the new Chinese rail system, highlighting its superiority over the US rail service:  The Chinese ultra-modern train takes passengers between two major cities, 1,100 kilometers, in less than 3 hours whereas the US Amtrack ‘Express’ takes 3½ hours to cover 300 kilometers between Boston and New York.  While the US passenger rail system deteriorates from lack of investment and maintenance, China has spent $17 billion dollars constructing its express line.  China plans to construct 18,000 kilometers of new track for its ultra-modern system by 2012, while the US will spend an equivalent amount in financing its  ‘military surge’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as opening a new war front in Yemen.

China builds a transport system linking producers and labor markets from the interior provinces with the manufacturing centers and ports on the coast, while on page 4 the Financial Times describes how the US is welded to its policy of confronting the ‘Islamist threat’ with an endless ‘war on terror’.  The decades-long wars and occupations of Moslem countries have diverted hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds to a militarist policy with no benefit to the US, while China modernizes its civilian economy.

While the White House and Congress subsidize and pander to the militarist-colonial state of Israel with its insignificant resource base and market, alienating 1.5 billion Moslems (Financial Times – page 7), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 10 fold over the past 26 years (FT – page 9).  While the US allocated over $1.4 trillion dollars to Wall Street and the military, increasing the fiscal and current account deficits, doubling unemployment and perpetuating the recession (FT – page 12), the Chinese government releases a stimulus package directed at its domestic manufacturing and construction sectorre-igniting inked economies’.

While the US was spending over $60 billion dollars on internal policing and multiplying the number and size of its‘homeland’ security agencies in pursuit of potential ‘terrorists’, China was investing $25 billion dollars in ‘cementing its energy trading relations’ with Russia (FT – page 3).

The story told by the articles and headlines in a single day’s issue of the Financial Times reflects a deeper reality, one that illustrates the great divide in the world today.  The Asian countries, led by China, are reaching world power status on the basis of their massive domestic and foreign investments in manufacturing, transportation, technology and mining and mineral processing.  In contrast, the US is a declining world power with a deteriorating society resulting from its military-driven empire building and its financial-speculative centered economy:

1.      Washington pursues minor military clients in Asia; while China expands its trading and investment agreements with major economic partners – Russia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.

2.      Washington drains the domestic economy to finance overseas wars.  China extracts minerals and energy resources to create its domestic job market in manufacturing.

3.      The US invests in military technology to target local insurgents challenging US client regimes; Chinainvests in civilian technology to create competitive exports.

4.      China begins to restructure its economy toward developing the country’s interior and allocates greater social spending to redress its gross imbalances and inequalities while the US rescues and reinforces the parasitical financial sector, which plundered industries (strips assets via mergers and acquisitions) and speculates on financial objectives with no impact on employment, productivity or competitiveness.

5.      The US multiplies wars and troop build-ups in the Middle East, South Asia, the Horn of Africa and Caribbean; China provides investments and loans of over $25 billion dollars in building infrastructure, mineral extraction, energy production and assembly plants in Africa.

6.    China signs multi-billion dollar trade and investment agreements with Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia, securing access to strategic energy, mineral and agricultural resources; Washington provides $6 billion in military aid to Colombia, secures seven military bases from President Uribe (to threaten Venezuela), backs a military coup in tiny Honduras and denounces Brazil and Bolivia for diversifying its economic ties with Iran.

7.    China increases economic relations with dynamic Latin American economies, incorporating over 80% of the continent’s population; the US partners with the failed state of Mexico, which has the worst economic performance in the hemisphere and where powerful drug cartels control wide regions and penetrate deep into the state apparatus.

Conclusion

China is not an exceptional capitalist country. Under Chinese capitalism, labor is exploited; inequalities in wealth and access to services are rampant; peasant-farmers are displaced by mega-dam projects and Chinese companies recklessly extract minerals and other natural resources in the Third World.  However, China has created scores of millions of manufacturing jobs, reduced poverty faster and for more people in the shortest time span in history. Its banks mostly finance production.  China doesn’t bomb, invade or ravage other countries. In contrast, US capitalism has been harnessed to a monstrous global military machine that drains the domestic economy and lowers the domestic standard of living in order to fund its never-ending foreign wars.  Finance, real estate and commercial capital undermine the manufacturing sector, drawing profits from speculation and cheap imports.

China invests in petroleum-rich countries; the US attacks them.  China sells plates and bowls for Afghan wedding feasts; US drone aircraft bomb the celebrations.  China invests in extractive industries, but, unlike European colonialists, it builds railroads, ports, airfields and provides easy credit.  China does not finance and arm ethnic wars and ‘color rebellions’ like the US CIA.

China self-finances its own growth, trade and transportation system; the US sinks under a multi trillion dollar debt to finance its endless wars, bail out its Wall Street banks and prop up other non-productive sectors while many millions remain without jobs.

China will grow and exercise power through the market; the US will engage in endless wars on its road to bankruptcy and internal decay.  China’s diversified growth is linked to dynamic economic partners; US militarism has tied itself to narco-states, warlord regimes, the overseers of banana republics and the last and worst bona fide racist colonial regime, Israel.

China entices the world’s consumers.  US global wars provoke terrorists here and abroad.

China may encounter crises and even workers rebellions, but it has the economic resources to accommodate them.  The US is in crisis and may face domestic rebellion, but it has depleted its credit and its factories are all abroad and its overseas bases and military installations are liabilities, not assets.  There are fewer factories in theUS to re-employ its desperate workers: A social upheaval could see the American workers occupying the empty shells of its former factories.

To become a ‘normal state’ we have to start all over: Close all investment banks and military bases abroad and return to America.  We have to begin the long march toward rebuilding industry to serve our domestic needs, to living within our own natural environment and forsake empire building in favor of constructing a democratic socialist republic.

When will we pick up the Financial Times or any other daily and read about our own high-speed rail line carrying American passengers from New York to Boston in less than one hour? When will our own factories supply our hardware stores? When will we build wind, solar and ocean-based energy generators? When will we abandon our military bases and let the world’s warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists face the justice of their own people?

Will we ever read about these in the Financial Times?

In China, it all started with a revolution…

_________________

Source: Global Research, Title Image: stephenbrammer

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U.S. spending in Afghanistan plagued by poor U.S. oversight

Afghanistan began rebuilding its electrical grid but without a concrete plan for how to approach such a complex effort, says the watchdog agency.

Of six projects under way in 2009, only one has been completed on time.

Marisa Taylor

WASHINGTON — The U.S. has spent more than $732 million to improve Afghanistan’s electrical grid since 2002, but delays and rising costs have plagued many of the projects in part because of poor oversight by the American government, a watchdog agency reports.

Of six projects under way in 2009, only one has been completed on time.

In the report released Friday, auditors with the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed poor communication between U.S. officials and the two companies that are working on the majority of the projects.

While the U.S. Agency for International Development has relied on the companies, Louis Berger and Black & Veatch, for updates on projects, “that reporting has not always been timely or sufficient,” the auditors said.

The companies also had trouble meeting deadlines for projects because of dangerous conditions.

In addition, Afghanistan began rebuilding its electrical grid without a concrete plan for how to approach such a complex effort, the auditors said.

In 2006, the USAID awarded the two U.S. companies a five-year, $1.4 billion joint contract to build many of the roads and energy projects that now are under way in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s electrical capacity has increased in the last eight years from 430 megawatts to more than 1,028 megawatts, a significant achievement in a country in which only about 6 percent of rural citizens have electricity, the auditors said.

However, it’s unclear whether Afghanistan will be able to operate the system without foreign aid, they said.

One major hurdle is collecting enough money to keep the grid running, the report said. The reason: systemic corruption.

Afghans are more likely to try to bribe officials or rely on personal favors to connect to the system because of the country’s byzantine bureaucracy. To get electricity legitimately, Afghans have to obtain as many as 25 signatures.

Friday’s report came after another watchdog, the inspector general for the USAID, last fall found cost overruns and delays in two power plant projects overseen by Louis Berger and Black & Veatch.

In one case, a $300 million Kabul generating plant might not be able to operate to capacity because the Afghanistan government can’t afford the diesel fuel to power it, which auditors said indicated poor planning by the U.S. government.

Auditors also blame lackluster oversight for about $40 million in cost overruns on the Kabul project. The U.S. government still can’t calculate how much was lost on other projects because of inefficiency and waste, the officials said.

The audits confirm a McClatchy report in October that delays and cost overruns had plagued projects by Louis Berger and Black & Veatch.

The companies and the USAID say they’ve since taken steps to improve their oversight.

Afghanistan Reconstruction Inspector General Arnold Fields told McClatchy that his agency should have been created before 2008 so that waste and fraud could have been better detected.

The U.S. government “should have been more aggressive years ago,” he said. “We’re behind in terms of providing the oversight.”

His agency currently has 41 ongoing investigations.

_________________

Source: McClatchy Newspapers

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Why I hold a jihad at the White House – Washington Post

Mohammad Ali Salih

Today’s Washington Post has a powerful piece written by an Arab journalist assigned to D.C. by his outlet.  He has lived here since about 1980.  Here is an excerpt from his piece entitled Why I hold a jihad at the White House .

“But after watching Obama in the White House for a year, I have come to believe that he is a typical politician who makes promises in order to be elected and, once elected, starts planning to be reelected. This may explain why he doesn’t seem to have the courage to peacefully engage the Muslim world or to end the injustice the United States inflicts on Muslims in the name of its “war on terrorism.”…

“I believe Obama’s basic problem with the Muslim world is his inability to understand — or perhaps his denial — that the Koran tells Muslims to stand up against injustice, particularly if they are treated unfairly by non-Muslims, which stands out in the form of blatant military occupations.”

The writer, a journalist in Washington, is a correspondent for Arabic newspapers and magazines in the Middle East. His e-mail address is comment@mohammadalisalih.com.

Source: Veterans Today

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I am the Resistance

We love our family. We love our country. We seek a better future. We are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of justice and freedom.

Never Before Campaign

This post was published on the weblog that I so frequently read ‘There are no sun glasses’, edited by world renown writer and analyst Peter Chamberlain. It has a message and a video that depicts a highly moving piece on Palestinians’ will to resist the occupation of their land by Israel. Message is so powerful there is no need to offer any further comment.

Whenever there is injustice, there are people fighting it with every possible means. We have seen it so many times before: the oppressed rise up, the oppressor dehumanizes them calling them such names as “terrorists”, “saboteurs”, “death loving” extremists… It is only normal that the oppressor will always lie to justify his actions and its crimes. What is different in the case of Palestine, is that the Israeli regime has built an effective media and communications networks and campaigns to distort the image of the Palestinian resistance, and that a large portion of the world has believed the Israeli line and hence adopted it.

It is our duty to remember and remind the world that the Palestinian freedom fighter is a man, a woman, like any other. He loves his family. She loves her country. They seek a better future. They are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of justice and freedom. They waited for the world to lift the blatant injustice that has befallen them since 1948. They expected the world to understand when they took up arms to lift this injustice themselves. Now, they don’t care what anyone else calls them. They do not seek anyone’s permission, just like any resistance movement. They believe that their cause will be triumphant because it is a cause for justice and humanity. They are merely fulfilling their duty to make the day of justice in Palestine come sooner. So should we.

Note: Most of the photos used in this video are by Mr. Ahmad Mesleh, Palestine onwww.uruknet.info?p=62233

Source: There are no sunglasses

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The Empire Seeking the Dictator’s Return

Commando Musharraf Come Back : Where is Your Punch

[It should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention, just what is going on in Pakistani politics.  In the same manner in which Musharraf was replaced by the Bhutto/Zardari puppets, the way is being prepared for Musharraf to return. Mismanagement of the American terror war has demonstrated the futility of civilian rule in Pakistan, exactly how it was planned.  Steps taken before Operation Rah e-Rast, such as enabling the ANP Party to set-up its Shariah courts in Swat, forced the people to accept a new Army offensive in the tribal areas that they refused to accept in the past.  The killing of Benazir and the neutering of her husband made the people think that perhaps the dictatorship of Musharraf and the generals was not really that bad.  The Pakistani people, just like their American counterparts, have all been played for fools and will receive the fool's reward, unless we all reject military rule.]

Musharraf summons aides to Abu Dhabi

* His Aide says former president (Musharraf) will be urged to seek PML-Q unification

ISLAMABAD: Former president Gen (r) Pervez Musharraf has invited his aides to Abu Dhabi for consultations on his future role in the country’s politics and to consider the schedule of his return to Pakistan.

A number of Musharraf’s associates, including Ghulam Sarwar Khan, Ameer Muqam, Lala Nisar, Hamid Nasir Chattha, Barrister Saif and Nisar Memon have arrived in the United Arab Emirates, while some other PML-Q members like Sher Afgan Niazi and Raza Hayat Hiraj are on their way to the UAE.

Sources said Musharraf had also contacted PML-Q dissident leaders from Sindh, including Sheikh Maqbool, inviting them to meet him in UAE.

“Sheikh Maqbool has refused to meet Musharraf, but another PML-Q dissident leader from Sindh, Jam Karam Ali, has accepted Musharraf’s invitation,” the sources said.

Unification: The sources said some PML-Q leaders who were still associated with the Chaudhrys would ask Musharraf to use his influence to reunite the PML-Q.

“Musharraf will be advised to ask the like-minded group to bury the beef with the Chaudhrys so that a unified PML-Q could be formed again to serve Musharraf’s political ambitions,” a PML-Q leader told Daily Times. Meanwhile, the Chaudhry brothers have decided in principle to keep themselves away from the political ambitions of the former president. “Though a young woman parliamentarian of PML-Q, who is considered to be the staunchest supporter of Musharraf and gets furious when someone lambastes the former president’s performance in parliament, is trying her best to bridge the gulf between the Chaudhrys and Musharraf,” another PML-Q parliamentarian said.

And here yet  is another pertinent comment by fellow blogger The Pakistani Spectator:

Quiz : Who said these golden lines About Bugti: “You won’t know what hit you.”

The mood of the public want to greet Musharraf at the airport, and they promise that he won’t know what hit him. Rotten tomatoes, rotten eggs, shoes, abuses and insults will all over the place, that’s for sure. Even you won’ t see the lota league coming over with some shields for the guy, to whom they promised to elect 20 times in the uniform.

Hey Musharraf come back. Though court has asked you to come or send over your lawyers, but a commando should come over himself and fight his battle. Come with clenched fists and punch the air and go straight to Supreme Court and then entertain us with your shock, when you hear the verdict.

Source:  Text: There are no sunglasses & The Pakistani Spectator

Title Image: Time.com

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General Gambit

General /s Comeback?

Peter Chamberlin

The war for the future of the human race is more about truth –vs- lies, than it is about a physical contest between hostile adversaries.  The strangest part of it all is that no one is seeking absolute vindication in this war of perceptions as either a liar or a “truth” teller.  No one wants to pin down the other side for telling obvious lies.  Why is that?  Everybody has something to hide in the war on terror.

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State. – Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels

Dig too deeply, or expose the most dangerous lies strung together to tie-up the world in a state of permanent limited war, and the flimsy alliances and “coalitions of the willing” begin to fall apart.  The utter hypocrisy of the entire “war on terror” brings to the front all the worst traits of mankind, in an endeavor that is the most stupendous fraud ever perpetuated upon the human race.

FIGHT TERRORISTS TO SIMULTANEOUSLY CREATE MORE TERRORISTS  IS THE CREED OF THE CURRENT WAR ON TERROR

The weavers of the lies at the root of the war have created a paradoxical production that is manifested in our mission, fighting terror while simultaneously creating terrorists.  We wage war on an open-ended battlefield, where the “enemy” is always allowed an escape route, pursuing an ultra-violent strategy that is guaranteed to convert the survivor relatives of murdered militants into terrorists themselves.  The world is being engulfed with a wave of not-undeserved anti-Americanism and America has no plans to change the behavior of our leaders who have created the situation in the first place.

Anger at America within the Pakistani military is the direct cause of the war on terror.  Military defectors and veterans form the hardcore center in all of the outfits involved in starting the war.  This is because American leaders have chosen the Pakistani people to be their primary source of cannon fodder in America’s many aggressions, over the past thirty years, and payback time has arrived for some of them.

The wave of hatred came at us on September 11, 2001 because of past criminal American interactions with the Islamic world.  We built an international army of mercenaries in secret, to fight both friend and foe in illegal, undeclared, wars of aggression, without civilian control or oversight.  We used and abused the Muslim Umma in this manner for our own purposes up until the turning point came, since then, everything has been payback.  The war to defeat the radical extremists that we have created has been a series of attempts to preempt further reactions to our abuse of Muslim men as our militant foot soldiers, as well as their families, who have suffered in our retribution.

Obama has accepted responsibility for carrying on this war, which has been completely blamed on Bush.  The liberal press refuses to lay the blame for this war squarely at the feet of the Democratic Party for starting this with their interventionist policies throughout the world.  This war belongs to them as much as it does to Reagan and both Bushes.  (SEE:  BILL CLINTON: FIRST NEOCON PRESIDENT)  It was Jimmie Carter who armed the first Muslim mujahedeen in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.  It was Bill Clinton who hired mostly Pakistani, but also Iranian veterans of Carter and Reagan’s Afghan “holy war,” to send them off to fight the Serbians in Yugoslavia.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton touches the Western Wall, during a visit to the Old City of Jerusalem.

It was Jimmie Carter who armed the first Muslim mujahedeen in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.  It was Bill Clinton who hired mostly Pakistani, but also Iranian veterans of Carter and Reagan’s Afghan “holy war,” to send them off to fight the Serbians in Yugoslavia.

The future of the human race will be determined by the decisions that this Democratic administration will make.  Will Obama listen to the millions of voices of reason and end this God-forsaken war, or will he continue the modern-day Crusades, intended to remake the Middle East into a safe place for radical Zionists, by eliminating several million angry Muslims?  If Obama chooses to secretly send a new wave of Muslim mercenaries into the Middle East and Central Asia, then he will be choosing the losing side in this struggle for the soul of humankind.  More than anything else, the war on terror is a gigantic flashing sign, telling us that we have to change our ways.

Right: Will Barack Obama be the instrument of historic change that he promised in his pre-election speeches?

Pakistan is in flames today because everyone refuses to sort-out the truth from the lies in the contest taking place there, even the Pakistanis themselves.   In order for the world to keep on spinning, without upsetting all the “apple carts” in every corner of every kingdom, world opinion must accept the lie—that Pakistan has created the Frankenstein monster of international terrorism on its own, and American forces are only there to clean it all up.  The world accepts the next lie—that the American hand in creating the Afghan mujahedeen (who are at the center of every “Islamist” outfit) was a benevolent one, intended only to “rid the world of the menace of Communism,” and that support for Muslim extremists is a thing of the past.  We must accept—that menace that later grew out of this effort was not America’s, or the CIA’s fault, even if the agency has once again been given the benefit of the doubt in its endless string of “mistakes.”

WILL THE CURRENT PAKISTANI SITUATION BE THE DEATH OF THE UNITED STATES?

The Pakistani situation will be the death of the United States, if we do not face-up to the truth of what we have done there and the forces that have arisen as a result.  The forced conversion of Muslim holy warriors into “Islamist” mercenaries to fight for Clinton and the Democrat-led interventionists has not been without repercussions.  The merger of fanatic Shiite and Sunni Islamists into a mercenary army fighting for the “great Satan” in Yugoslavia produced simmering resentments, especially amongst the Sunnis, who had mostly been drawn from Pakistan’s sectarian Sunni outfits.

The movement of Sunni veterans of the Bosnian and Croatian wars into the struggle in Kashmir, where the United States was blamed for Pakistan’s defeat at Kargil, moved some of the extremists who fought and lost there to plot their revenge against us for this latest slap in the face, following our long history of abuse.  September 11 was their payback for that abuse, but mostly for dishonoring Islam and “betrayal” at Kargil.

It is here where the whole narrative gets sticky, because Kargil was Gen. Musharraf’s gambit, and according to the official version of events, it was lost because most of the Pakistani Air Force was grounded due to American anti-nuclear sanctions, which denied them vital spare parts for their F-16s.

WAS 9/11, AN OUTFALL OF PAKISTAN’S KARGIL DEBACLE?

The 9/11 attacks were the work of a bunch of pissed-off Afghan veterans, though American leaders like to call them “al Qaida.”  The most important players were ex-military men, primarily Pakistani Air Force veterans.  Amjad Farooqi and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were allegedly both Pakistani Air Force personnel, both had fought in Bosnia, both had manned the hilltop outposts in Kargil in 1999, both were acquaintances of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, both belonged to the anti-Indian Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and both trained at the Khawar Zilli camps in Afghanistan’s Khost, which was also one of the targets of Clinton’s cruise missile strikes.   Bin Laden’s boys were also at Kargil, though, at that time, they called themselves the Al-Badar Brigade and Tehrik-i-Jihad, under the banner of the International Islamic Front.  Bin Laden allegedly dug the hilltop fortifications used by the paramilitary infiltrators at Kargil.  The Stinger missiles that they used to defend these positions from the Indian Air Force came from Afghanistan, courtesy of the USA (the ISI refused to return the leftover missiles, as agreed on).

After Clinton’s cruise missile strikes, group leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil subsequently said that HUM would take revenge on the United States.

“The USA has struck us with Tomahawk cruise missiles at only two places, but we will hit back at them everywhere in the world, wherever we find them. We have started a holy war against the US and they will hardly find a tree to take shelter beneath it.”

At that time, the militants were all united under the Taliban, which has always been under the Pak. Army’s thumb, via the ISI and CIA network.  The militants of HUM could not act without ISI permission.  No matter how much Musharraf and the other generals wanted their own retribution for imaginary American crimes at Kargil that would have seemed too much like cutting their own throats.  But there were other ramifications that arose from the defeat at Kargil which had entered the equation and had to be considered.

The failure of the generals’ gambit forced a severe rethink of the military’s situation. Even though Pakistan had established its own nuclear deterrent to Indian aggression, the attack at Kargil was going to force some kind of Indian retaliation.  Pakistan could not afford to resort to nuclear war to defend against an overwhelming Indian attack, given their F-16 problems and now that India had acquired laser-guided munitions.  Gen. Musharraf knew that Pakistan needed American help, to avert the coming Indian attack.  On October 11, 1999, Gen. Musharraf and his co-conspirators overthrew the democratic government of Pakistan.

WAS LT. GEN. MEHMUD AHMAD INVOLVED IN THE 9/11 TRAGEDY?

This newfound sense of total power, and with that total responsibility for Pakistan’s fate, may have moved him to make a fatal decision to lend covert support to the plot to draw America into Afghanistan.  Since the Army commander of the Kargil operation was Lt. Gen. Mehmud Ahmad, and it has been reported since then that telephone intercepts pegged Gen. Ahmad as the man who had Omar Sheikh wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, who was also the roommate of Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Hamburg, Germany, then it does seem quite plausible.

But surely, all of this has been apparent to American military and intelligence bureaus for a long time, after all, all of the key militants in the plots are nearly all either dead now or rotting in some hell-hole, while the generals who secretly supported the militants became America’s top allies in the fight to erase our past mistakes.  They were our partners in the militants’ creation, rightly, they should be part of the militants’ end.

But nothing ended, except for the lives of a lot of militants and regular Pakistani civilians.  The plan was successful, in that it bogged American forces down in a state of endless war in the center of the world’s energy basket, but that was exactly what our leaders have wanted, all along.  Which leads us to the next assumption, that Pakistan’s generals were only doing what American generals wanted them to do, just as they had done for the past thirty years or more.

Even though nuclear war between the two eternal antagonists was impossible, conventional war was ruled-out because of America’s presence in the region, which successfully restrained India’s forces.  With Israel’s help, a covert war within Pakistan was then begun, following the pattern set by Pakistani “ultras,” otherwise known as paramilitaries, militants, or simply terrorists.

The ball of retribution was set in motion, opening the door for other Pakistani militant groups, organized by other military veterans of Kargil; this time from the Pak. Army.  The Lashkar e-Taiba (LET) outfit was headed by Special Forces commando Ilyas Kashmiri. Possibly with the aid of Dawood Ibrahim’s criminal underworld, LET attacked the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13, 2001.

The same combination of Lashkar and underworld forces was later repeated in the 2008 Mumbai attack, if reports based on forced confessions from lone terrorist Ajmal Kasab can be believed.  The question being pondered today is—Was that operation was actually carried-out by Pakistan, or whether it was a duplication of the earlier attack in a “false flag” operation meant to advance the agenda of the American/Indian partnership?  The ongoing controversy over American/Lashkar e-Taiba spy David Headley may give the answer.  Since the US has partnered with both sides in this conflict and is obviously pitting one side against the other, this question will probably go unanswered until the violent resolution that one side (probably the big dog’s side) has planned plays-out.

The victor in all of this drama will determine the fate of the human race, whether that is to be a martial reshaping of the planet, or the struggling of the survivors is anyone’s guess at this point.  All that I really know is, that all of these lies must come to an end and let the chips fall where they may.  All we can do is to keep investigating and exposing whatever we find, no matter what we find.

The truth must prevail.

Source:There are no sunglasses

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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There is only one way to save Haiti

A view of the badly damaged presidential palace – the center portion formerly 3 stories tall – after an earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on January 13, 2010. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz) #

Eric Margolis

The scenes of horror and chaos that followed Haiti’s devastating earthquake were a stark reminder of that tormented nation’s gravest problem: it has no functioning government. Nor has it had one for the past decade

When the giant quake struck last week, police, firemen, and emergency service workers simply vanished. There was no one to repair damaged power stations, water works or the phone system. No one to take charge.

Haiti has become the Somalia of our hemisphere.

Few nations  I know have suffered such misfortune as poor, wretched Haiti. Blessed with fecundity by nature, Haiti went in less than one century from being the richest nation in the western hemisphere to the poorest.

Haiti is ravaged each year by powerful storms ,  hurricanes, and floods. It is afflicted by the direst poverty. Many Haitians suffer a wide range of diseases from filthy water, insect-born diseases like malaria and dengue fever and debilitating parasitic infections. HIV, typhoid, and severe nutritional deficiencies are common.

Now comes Haiti’s biggest earthquake in 250 years.

Port-au-Prince lies in ruins, tens of thousands are dead and     over a million homeless.   The huge international rescue effort now underway has so far been severely hampered by the lack of government infrastructure or services and the absence of any form of disaster planning.   The countryside is filled with ruined towns and hamlets that have yet to be discovered.

Residents search for survivors among the debris after the earthquake that hit the capital on January 13, 2010. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz) #

The National Palace, where a Haitian friend and I were once crazy enough to crash a dinner party given by the dreaded dictator, Francois Duvalier, aka “Papa Doc,” has collapsed.

“Papa Doc” caught us – but laughed at our escapade instead of having his dreaded secret police, the “Ton-Ton Macoutes,” shoot us on the spot.  Duvalier, who died in 1971, ruled Haiti through a unique combination of terror and voodoo sorcery. He was high priest of Haiti’s voodoo (properly, Hongan) religion. Some Haitians believe “Papa Doc” will yet rise from his grave.

Our old hangout, the charming gingerbread Olofsson Hotel,  the scene of Graham Green’s delightful book, `The Comedians,’ is heavily damaged.   Its bar, presided over by the legendary “Cesar,” was Port-au-Princes leading watering hole and hotbed of intrigue and gossip.

Seedy Port–au-Prince always looked half ruined. Today, the damage is almost complete.   Haiti is an island destroyed by  human folly and crime as well as natural disasters.

France acquired Haiti in 1697. After wiping out the native Arawak people,  France imported a million black slaves from West Africa to work the island’s sugar, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, and indigo plantations. Haiti’s slaves suffered frightful brutality in the French plantations and in slaver’s ships.

The greatest bourgeois fortunes of Bordeaux were built on slavery, not fine wine.

Haiti’s amazingly rich soil produced four crops a year. In 1780, the total value of Haiti’s exports to Europe exceeded those of Spain’s silver and gold-producing Latin American colonies, or the entire British West Indies plantation system.

Today, Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Even before the quake, it was  impossible to walk in downtown Port-au-Prince without being swarmed by desperate, diseased beggars.

In the late 1700’s, Haiti’s slaves revolted, led by a brilliant black general, Toussaint Louverture. After fierce fighting, he was tricked by a false peace offer by the French and died in prison.   Toussaint’s  lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, finally defeated Napoleon’s troops and liberated Haiti in 1804. Haiti became the Western Hemisphere’s second republic, after the new-born United States.

But the rival leaders of the liberation soon fell out. Christophe, driven mad by syphilis, finally shot himself in the head with a silver bullet in a massive but useless citadel he had built atop a mountain above Cap Haitien.

For the next century, Haiti was ruled by a feuding mulatto minority and petty dictators who  did nothing for the people. Peasants cut down all the trees for charcoal, denuding the mountainous island. Rains then swept away all of Haiti’s rich topsoil, leaving denuded hillsides and dead earth.

Washington, actually fearing a German takeover of Haiti,  sent the US Marine Corps to occupy it from 1915 to 1934. Though sometimes brutal, the US occupation is looked back on by many Haitians as their “golden age.” The Marine Corps proved a fair, efficient, honest administrator and builder. This era was the only time when things worked in Haiti.

Then, after endless coups, came Francois Duvalier, a mild-mannered country doctor who quickly turned into one of the century’s most frightening despots. “Papa Doc” imposed a reign of witchcraft and terror. After his death in 1971, his inept son, aka “Baby Doc,” took power, but soon lost it. More chaos ensued. In 2004, the US invaded Haiti and  threw out an elected but inept leftist government.

It was rather ironic that President Obama called on former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to head a national fundraising drive for Haiti considering the first had ordered the invasion of Haiti, and the latter achieved such a triumph in rebuilding New Orleans. On top of this, the truly enlightened Rev. Pat Robertson, who speaks for millions of fundamentalist Christians, blamed the earthquake on a supposed, three-century old pact with devil made by Haiti’s anti-French revolutionaries.

Nor was Paris pleased. A French aircraft carrying a full operating theater was not allowed to land so that US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton could fly in and make a speech.

The US, Canada, France and other nations continue to rush  aid to Haiti. Food and medical help are essential, but Haiti also must have an effective government that cares for its desperate people.   Otherwise, Haiti will again fall into the abyss the next time a major natural disaster occurs.

Haiti really needs is to be again temporarily administered by a great power like the US or France.   The UN should declare Haiti a protectorate of one or more of the great powers.

This column despises all forms of imperialism. But genuine humanitarian intervention is different. US administration of Haiti may be necessary and the only recourse for this benighted nation that cannot seem to govern itself.

A small, mostly Brazilian UN contingent has achieved little.   Most Haitians, I think, would welcome long-term US humanitarian administration. France also has a special responsibility to Haiti.

This writer, a former soldier, prefers to see the US military saving rather than taking lives.   Watching the US 82^nd Airborne Division arrive in Port-au-Prince filled me with pride.    That is what America is about, not bombing  Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

The US will waste over $1.02 trillion this year on military operations in those nations.  It can certainly afford a few hundred million dollars to rescue Haiti. But much more will be needed.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

Source: Text: Ericmargolis.com Images: Boston.com

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Haiti & its capital: The history, the city and the scenes of death & destruction

An injured woman is helped after being rescued on January 13, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital . (THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/Getty Images)

HORRIFIC, GRAINY GLIMPSES AT DEATH, DESPAIR & DESTRUCTION

·

Nayyar Hashmey

·

The earthquake that brought death and destruction to the Haitian capital Port au Prince, made me recall what happened in our own country some four years ago.

But what has happened there in Haiti is even worse than what happened here in Pakistan. The city has almost been razed to the ground. What is left are nothing but cracked, buildings, shaken structures and fallen houses. Death and destruction prevails in the city. Haitian officials fear 100, 000-200, 00 0 deaths in this heaviest blow to life and property of the people in this small Caribbean state of South America.

The victims: A group of people look silently at a pile of bodies lying on the street

Haiti is said to be the poorest country in the western hemisphere in Americas. The current natural disaster would further put the country into extreme poverty. In the wake of this disaster which is not man made, it is our moral obligation to share our money, our time, our feelings and our acts with the people of Haiti and do in our individual capacity, whatever way we can Yet the maximum burden of course needs to be borne by Haiti’s next door neighbor in northern hemisphere i.e. the United States of America.

The quake destroyed buildings in the streets of Port-Au-Prince, on January 12^th , 2010. (Tequila Minsky for The New York Times) #

In the post that follows Eric Margolis describes what has happened there, and has a suggestion for the government of the United States to help the people of Haiti by sending US soldiers to aid in the rescue work there. I do agree with Eric that now the US soldiers should no more be the soldiers of- or on war but of peace. If at all they have to wage wars than they should better wage wars on hunger, poverty and economic well being of the humanity in the US itself as well as in other parts of the world. I’m only afraid, however, of the time when normalcy is restored in Haiti, whether the generals who direct these soldiers would not be tempted to once again order them to turn into soldiers of militaristic wars for which they are paid, trained and designed for…..

Next: There is only one way to save Haiti

________

Image Source: Image at the top and bottom boston.com, the one in the middle: daily mail on line

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Haiti’s Tragic History Is Entwined with the Story of America – I

This Slave Ship called Jesus Of Lubeck was a German-built carrack of 700 tons displacement. Orginally built as a  trading ship, she was bought by Henry VIII of England, converted to a warship & in 1564 was leased as an armed slave-ship to Captain John Hawkins

Robert Parry

In announcing the U.S. response to Haiti’s devastating earthquake, President Obama noted the two countries’ historic ties. But few Americans know that sad story.

Announcing emergency help for Haiti after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, President Barack Obama noted America’s historic ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation, but few Americans understand how important Haiti’s contribution to U.S. history was.

In modern times, when Haiti does intrude on U.S. consciousness, it’s usually because of some natural disaster or a violent political upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of crushing poverty.

However, more than two centuries ago, Haiti represented one of the most important neighbors of the new American Republic and played a central role in enabling the United States to expand westward. If not for Haiti, the course of U.S. history could have been very different, with the United States possibly never expanding much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

In the 1700s, then-called St. Domingue and covering the western third of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti was a French colony that rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere. Relying on a ruthless exploitation of African slaves, French plantations there produced nearly one-half the world’s coffee and sugar.

Many of the great cities of France owe their grandeur to the wealth that was extracted from Haiti and its slaves. But the human price was unspeakably high. The French had devised a fiendishly cruel slave system that imported enslaved Africans for work in the fields with accounting procedures for their amortization. They were literally worked to death.

The American colonists may have rebelled against Great Britain over issues such as representation in Parliament and arbitrary actions by King George III. But black Haitians confronted a brutal system of slavery. An infamous French method of executing a troublesome slave was to insert a gunpowder charge into his rectum and then detonate the explosive.

So, as the American colonies fought for their freedom in the 1770s and as that inspiration against tyranny spread to France in the 1780s, the repercussions would eventually reach Haiti, where the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity” resonated with special force. Slaves demanded that the concepts of freedom be applied universally.

When the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.

Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels – known as the “Black Jacobins” – gained the sympathy of the American Federalist Party and particularly Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself. Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution for the new nation.

CONSPIRACIES

But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s new freedom.

Despite Hamilton’s sympathies, some Founders, including Thomas Jefferson who owned 180 slaves and owed his political strength to agrarian interests, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in St. Domingue. “If something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.

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Source: Alternet.org

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Haiti’s Tragic History Is Entwined with the Story of America – II

Battle on Santo Domingo, a painting by January Suchodolski depicting a struggle between Polish troops in French service and the Haitian rebels

Robert Parry

Through secret diplomatic channels, Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to starvation.”

But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force, Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.

In May 1801, Jefferson picked up the first inklings of Napoleon’s other agenda. Alarmed at the prospect of a major European power controlling New Orleans and thus the mouth of the strategic Mississippi River, Jefferson backpedaled on his commitment to Napoleon, retreating to a posture of neutrality.

Still – terrified at the prospect of a successful republic organized by freed African slaves – Jefferson took no action to block Napoleon’s thrust into the New World.

[Right: Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States]

In 1802, a French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure.

L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in.

Napoleon, however, broke his word. Jealous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.

FOILED PLANS

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army – already decimated by disease – was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery.

Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign.

The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon – denied his foothold in the New World – agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson. Ironically, the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement, had been made possible despite Jefferson’s misguided collaboration with Napoleon.

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book,The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.

But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters … went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.”

The loss of L’Ouverture’s leadership dealt a severe blow to Haiti’s prospects, according to Jefferson scholar Paul Finkelman of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Go to the 3^rd & final part

Source: Text: Alternet.org Images: Wikipedia.com

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Haiti’s Tragic History Is Entwined with the Story of America – III

Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743-1803), the Haitian general who led revolt against French colonial rule in Haiti.

Robert Parry

“Had Toussaint lived, it’s very likely that he would have remained in power long enough to put the nation on a firm footing, to establish an order of succession,” Finkelman told me in an interview. “The entire subsequent history of Haiti might have been different.”

Instead, the island nation continued a downward spiral.

In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French and a counterrevolution, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island.

Though the Haitian resistance had blunted Napoleon’s planned penetration of the North American mainland, Jefferson reacted to the shocking bloodshed in Haiti by imposing a stiff economic embargo on the island nation. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.

JEFFERSON’S BLEMISH

For some scholars, Jefferson’s vengeful policy toward Haiti – like his personal ownership of slaves – represented an ugly blemish on his legacy as a historic advocate of freedom. Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery.

In the 1820s, the former President proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

Jefferson’s deportation scheme never was taken very seriously and American slavery would continue for another four decades until it was ended by the Civil War. The official hostility of the United States toward Haiti extended almost as long, ending in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln finally granted diplomatic recognition.

By then, however, Haiti’s destructive patterns of political violence and economic chaos had been long established – continuing up to the present time. Personal and political connections between Haiti’s light-skinned elite and power centers of Washington also have lasted through today.

Recent Republican administrations have been particularly hostile to the popular will of the impoverished Haitian masses. When leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was twice elected by overwhelming margins, he was ousted both times – first during the presidency of George H.W. Bush and again under President George W. Bush.

Washington’s conventional wisdom on Haiti holds that the country is a hopeless basket case that would best be governed by business-oriented technocrats who would take their marching orders from the United States.

However, the Haitian people have a different perspective. Unlike most Americans who have no idea about their historic debt to Haiti, many Haitians know this history quite well. The bitter memories of Jefferson and Napoleon still feed the distrust that Haitians of all classes feel toward the outside world.

“In Haiti, we became the first black independent country,” Aristide once told me in an interview. “We understand, as we still understand, it wasn’t easy for them – American, French and others – to accept our independence.”

Source: Text: Alternet.org Illustration on top: Life.com

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Obama Jan. 2009-Jan. 2010: A year of fallen hopes

Even Obama’s European Allies disillusioned?

Gavin Hewitt

#

Inauguration day last year broke cold. Way before dawn there were thousands on the streets, huddled in blankets like homeless people.

The cold was biting, but they would not be deterred – they wanted a vantage point on history. Many were African Americans who could scarcely believe that the day had come when a black man was occupying the White House. I found others, too, from across the globe, drawn there by the belief that America could be different, that under Barack Obama it would live up to its high ideals.

It was inevitable that disappointment would follow. Such is the reality of power. The Europeans had fallen for Obama. It was partly because he was not George Bush. It was also because they wanted America to be a place that fitted their dreams.

Earlier, in 2008, I had stood in the Tiergarten in Berlin and watched tens of thousands of Germans listen to a man who was still only a candidate. For Obama it was a rather leaden speech, too draped in history to inspire the crowd. But later that night there were still people waiting outside his hotel for a glimpse of a man they wanted to be Kennedy. To many Europeans Obama was full of possibility.

The French too had swooned. They loved Obama’s style; his youth, his elegance, his mixed background. I remember watching when Obama first visited the Elysee Palace. Sarkozy was left standing on the steps for a good seven or eight minutes while the Obama motorcade threaded its way towards them. The president of France would have done it for few other leaders.

France and Germany. In the poisonous build-up towards the war in Iraq, they had become the “weasels”. I recall opening a paper in New York and seeing that the faces of the French and German ministers at the UN had been replaced with those of weasels. Donald Rumsfeld famously sneered at “old Europe”.

So a year ago a new dawn broke. Almost immediately Europe nominated Obama for a peace prize. It was a gift for good intentions.

Yet shortly after that Europe experienced Obama’s detached cool. There was no rush to get European leaders to the White House. They were vying with each other for an invite, but Obama’s world view was not Europe-centred.

In April 2009 the American president came to Prague, at the heart of Europe. It was a message of co-operation. “We affirm our shared values, which are stronger than any force that could drive us apart.” Co-operation had to be shared with other nations and institutions. Europeans had hankered after this.

Then Obama offered the dream of a world free of nuclear weapons. He spoke of America’s commitment “to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons”.

And then reality set in. The nuclear-free world remains but a dream. Afghanistan was going badly. President Obama faced a painful choice: to commit more troops or to scale back. While he agonised, Europe waited. When the American administration finally backed a surge of troops, Europe hesitated. Sure, countries like Italy stepped up. Others made a gesture because they did not want to alienate Obama, but the French and Germans have still to decide what they will do. To some Europeans the Obama world came to resemble much of what went before.

And then there was Copenhagen. Europeans believed they had set the agenda, they had been out in front over climate change. However, in the chaos of the conference they saw Obama do a deal with the Chinese and other emerging “giants”. Europe was marginalised and felt excluded.

And the struggle against extremism did not disappear with the demise of a Republican president. President Obama’s rhetoric was different, but fighting terrorism was as challenging as ever. Guantanamo Bay remained open. There was no sign that Islamists were in retreat.

Some Europeans had hoped for a breakthrough in the Middle East. It has not happened. The president criticised the Israelis, but they continued building in East Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank.

The president offered to speak to Iran. The Europeans liked that, but it has not delivered results.

So the love affair has cooled, but it is not over. Europeans like Obama’s belief in consultation, in working with allies. His multilateral approach is popular. It remains true that most European leaders still want to be photographed with the president, but underlying everything is a basic reality: residents of the White House have to protect American interests first – and that did not change a year ago.

Source: bbc.co.uk

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Environmental Crisis and Self-Destructive Imperialism

With our current bad habits, would we be able to save our planet! African nuclear scientist Jamal.S.Shrair throws light on this very pertinent issue of the day and warns on where to we are heading.

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Jamal S. Shrair

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The present environmental crisis was triggered by the industrial revolution. As the industrial age started to progress the problem became visible, but it was simply ignored. From the beginning of the industrial revolution until the last two decades of the 20th century, we paid no attention to the pollution of our common home. The only important things were maximum profit and minimum loss, industrial expansion, especially that of the military industries which served the aims of colonialism, irrational ideological struggle, hegemony, power politics, etc.

The lack of a rational economic order is certainly the primary cause of the problem:

The resources of the planet are unwisely exploited, the motivation being to make as much profit as possible within the shortest possible time, while waste is being dumped wherever it is the cheapest to do so, such as in the oceans. There is no doubt that with a small fraction of what we have already wasted from the resources of the planet, the entire present world population could have prospered and enjoyed a very high standard of living if only we possessed – and practised – a higher level of social consciousness than we have done in the past one hundred years. As an example, the total military expenditure in the USA and former USSR in the 1980s alone (!) reached one trillion USD.

Now, however, there are urgent steps which should be taken to ameliorate the environmental crisis. Firstly, productive methods and activities, including the way of life in all advanced and the developing nations must change. We still only have this planet to live on, which has a finite space and mostly non-renewable resources. The earth cannot provide an unlimited number of individuals with a good material life. Therefore, irrational material growth and unrestricted demographic growth ultimately imply a lower standard of living. Secondly, population growth in the developing countries which the developed countries also worry about, must slow down and may be finally stopped altogether, aided by increased economic prosperity.

PRIORITIES

In our time, market forces should play a secondary role, not a primary one. We cannot afford to let them operate freely, because the environmental issue is outside the interest and the domain of the market forces. Local and global planning is what we need and should be the priority. Long-term goals must be specified and short-term goals made consistent with them.

The specification of production techniques, entailing the materials used, must meet environmental protection requirements. In other words, an integrated technological program to protect our environment must be put into practice so that we can attack the problems, not retroactively, but proactively by thinking about waste before thinking about production.

There is a crying need for new technologies, different materials, new laws and regulations, strictly implemented by local governments. We have to encourage the development of, and investment in, environmentally friendly power, regardless of the costs.

But, we must not give undue weight to the possibility of scientific and technological advances alone when it comes to solving the problems of the environment. Such developments would probably come too late to avert environmental disasters: in the final analysis, any technological advances would merely delay crisis, rather than avoid it, if no fundamental changes in the values of society were to take place. The issue requires more than technical solutions.

THE BIG POLLUTERS

The biggest polluters in the world, are also the ones who hold both the political power and the practical tools for solving most of the basic problems related to the issue of the environment in their countries and the world as a whole. Yet, they are also the ones who are not yet willing to implement or even sign any environmental agreement.

Those biggest polluters do not want to cut their poisonous gas emissions even to the same level as some developing countries. The target they set for their poisonous gas emissions cuts (or rather, the one they promise) is absolutely worth nothing since most environmental scientists have stated clearly that if the degradation of the environment is to stop, then at least a 50% reduction is required of the world’s total emissions.

Instead, therefore, worldwide emissions are still rising.

Those nations are well known, and include all members of the United Nations Security Council. They therefore have a veto power on anything decided by other nations, even if the entire world was to unite around a resolution, as often happens in the General Assembly, it is overturned in the so-called Security Council.

After almost two hundred years of capital accumulation — to a great extent as the result of exploitations and colonization — the developed countries want the developing countries, who are victims of those rich countries pollution, to stop developing their economies! They also expect those developing nations who are now going through the same industrial process as that undergone by the now-developed countries (e.g. China, India, Brazil) to do it in costly and environmentally-friendly fashion, and without the cushion of wealth that colonialism and neo-colonialism gave those now-wealthy nations.

“Get rid of your buses so that the developed countries can have more cars!” they cry, whilst hiding from all environmental statistics the pollution caused by their own Military Industrial Complex which has waged huge wars in many parts of the world, causing untold environmental disaster. Can that not be called the new imperialism?

It would be more accurate to call it self-destructive imperialism, because in a few decades, the degradation of the environment will affect advanced countries just as much as developing ones. The Lobbyist groups of the bourgeoisie of the big polluting nations and the industrialists argue that the environmental issue is exaggerated and it is beyond human control (not man-made!), and they also claim that if there were fundamental changes in society, productivity and output would decrease, which is not in the interest of the people.

Thus, finding a real solution to the environmental crisis under the present economic order is a hopeless task. All these conferences and summits are nothing more than a show business. Even if binding climate agreements can be achieved at these summits they would not be either effective or practically implemented. For example, where is the Kyoto Protocol now? The USA signed it, and Bush upon election, tore it up.

NEW SOCIO ECONOMIC ORDER

It is now becoming increasingly clear every passing day that the present socio-economic order cannot solve the basic problems of our time whether they be social, political or environmental problems. Even the material progress that has been achieved under capitalism is not uniformly distributed at the national or international levels. The absolute majority of humanity is still destitute, living in absolute poverty. More than three billion people live on less than two USD a day. And another one billion is on the brink of starvation. Around 50,000 children die EACH DAY, unreported by the news media.

There would be no harmonious development in any region of the world if one believed one needed only to take consideration of narrow economic questions. The present economic crisis and the financial volatility in the world markets are further proofs that Laissez-faire politics alone is not enough to help developing countries or even developed ones. Therefore, the basic principle that laissez-faire is not a correct policy in our time has established itself. There will be further crashes, turmoil and catastrophes if social and ecological questions are not taken into consideration.

DIRE WARNINGS

The global situation is deteriorating dangerously: there are a number of crises confronting mankind, such as rapid population growth in the third world and rising food prices accelerated by diversion of production of food crops toward bio-fuel crops, deteriorating environment, widespread misery, malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable energy resources and escalating military conflicts in different parts of the world. Though the many proxy wars of the past have come to an end, these have been replaced by a few large scale direct military operations, mainly by the U.S. and its allies.

All these major issues are fundamentally interlinked and depend upon each other. More importantly, the severity of these crises is increasing with time and these crises are in a process of interaction where they might well produce unexpected catastrophes.

The developed nations of the world have to realize that our world needs global and not just local stability and that requires a global strategy. Global stability can become reality only if there will be global equilibrium — equitable distribution of wealth and income worldwide — where the income of the developing countries is substantially improved, both in absolute terms and also relative to the developed nations.

Otherwise, the huge gaps and inequalities in today’s world between the developed and developing countries will continue to grow larger. The outcome in a few decades will be nothing less than a total and irreversible disaster. The global system can no longer tolerate such selfish behaviour, irrational and unrestricted material growth in one section of the planet which is inhabited by only 20% or less of the present world population.

Therefore, we must question the economic model that exists today in the advanced countries, and whether it can be copied by the developing countries in order to develop their economies and reach the same standard of living. This is really a rhetorical question, because this model has been imposed and also it is a precondition not only by the multinational corporations that want to invest in developing countries but also by the “International Monetary Fund / World Bank” for granting loans.

However, a theoretical model showed that if the present world population will reach a Gross National Product per capita equal to that of present-day U.S. Americans, with the same economic model the total pollution load on the environment would be more than 20 times its present values. Can the natural systems of the earth support an intrusion of that magnitude?

CONCLUSION

There can be no doubt even in the mind of the most conservative capitalist that the present economic order has not only failed to prevent or even brought about the outbreak of wars and conflicts among and within the nations of the world, where peace and security should necessarily reign in order to insure the basic requirements for real social development and fundamental human rights, but that this system has also failed miserably to protect our beautiful planet Earth from the dangers of different kinds of pollutions by not creating and maintaining harmony between nature and development.

The secret of nature in all its forms is where the future of the world lies, and if we destroy it due to the absence of a rational economic and social order, we destroy the future of life on earth.

The writer Jamal S. Amar Shrair, whose article as above(edited by Mathaba) is an MSc in High Energy Physics & PhD in Surface Physics and Electron Devices at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He  has written a paper entitled “Can Solid-State Nuclear Fusion Reactor Be the Ultimate Green Energy Solution?” which can be downloaded here[.doc].

Source: Mathaba.net

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There is a way to help avoid heart disease & diabetes: You are what you eat!

“If the truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never, ever exist and if it does exist it need never, ever progress.”

Kathy Freston

#

A plant-based diet is both preventative and healing, whereas a diet high in animal protein is destructive to our health.

So says Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who was a researcher and clinician at the Cleveland Clinic for over 35 years. In 1991, Dr. Esselstyn served as the president of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, and organized the 1st National Conference on the Elimination and Prevention of Heart Disease. In 2005, he became the 1st recipient of the Benjamin Spock Award for Compassion in Medicine. Dr. Esselstyn is also an Olympic gold medalist in rowing, and he was awarded the Bronze Star as an army surgeon in Vietnam.

In this series of interviews I’ve conducted with extraordinary nutritional researchers and medical doctors, I’ve sought to understand the link between diet and the most common and dreaded diseases that are prevalent in our culture. What I’m hearing over and over is that a plant-based diet is both preventative and healing, whereas a diet high in animal protein is destructive to our health – this is the case with cancer, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

The great news is that there is very real hope in shifting the course of our health. What is becoming very apparent through various peer reviewed studies is that by changing our diet – eliminating that which causes havoc in the body (animal protein) and adding in plant based proteins and eating lots of vegetables, legumes, beans, and whole grains, we can not only prevent disease, but also heal from it once it is already in motion. Following is a fascinating conversation I had on diet and heart health.

KF: What exactly is coronary heart disease?

CE: Coronary heart disease is the leading killer of women and men in western civilization. It is predicted to become the #1 global disease burden by 2020.

It consists of an inflammatory buildup of blockages in arteries to the heart muscle. These blockages are made of fat, cholesterol, calcium, and inflammatory cells. Blockages can become severe enough to cause symptoms such as shortness of breath or chest pain (angina). When blockages suddenly become complete, the portion of heart muscle fed by that blocked artery is now deprived of oxygen and nutrients, thus it is injured or now dies. This is a heart attack. The patient may survive or succumb if the event is accompanied by a fatal heart rhythm.

KF: Who develops heart disease?

CE: Everyone eating the typical western diet. In autopsy studies of our GI’s who died in the Vietnam and Korean wars almost 80% at an average age of 20 years, had disease that could be seen without a microscope. Forty years later in 1999, a study of young persons between the ages of 16-34 years who have died of accidents, homicides and suicides, finds the disease is now ubiquitous.

KF: What is the cause of the disease?

CE: It is the typical diet of processed oils, dairy, and meat which destroys the lifejacket of our blood vessels known as our endothelial cells. This cell layer is a one cell thick lining of all of our blood vessels. Endothelial cells manufacture a magical protective molecule of gas called nitric oxide, which protects our blood vessels. It keeps our blood flowing smoothly, it is the strongest dilator (widener), of our blood vessels, it inhibits the formation of blockages (plaques), and it inhibits inflammation.

KF: With such natural protection, why do we ever develop heart disease?

CE: Every western meal of processed vegetable oils, dairy products, and meat (including chicken and fish) injures these endothelial cells. As individuals consume theses damaging products throughout their lives, they have fewer functioning endothelial cells remaining and thus less of the protective nitric oxide. Without enough nitric oxide the plaque blockages build up and grow creating eventually heart disease and strokes.

KF: Can it be stopped or even reversed?

CE: Yes. First we must look at the lessons learned from cultures where there is a virtual absence of coronary artery heart disease such as rural China, the Papua Highlands of New Guinea, Central Africa, and the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico. Their nutrition is plant based without oil.

Beginning in 1985 I initiated a study of seriously ill coronary artery disease patients. Their nutrition became plant based without oil. Their cholesterol levels plummeted. Their angina disappeared. Their weight dropped. I have reported this study at 5 years, 12 years, and 16 years, in the peer reviewed scientific literature and again beyond 20 years in my book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. In some of the patients we had follow up angiograms (x-rays) of previously blocked arteries demonstrating striking disease reversal, which is a testament to my often quoted statement “The truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist and if it does exist it need never progress.” The greatest gift to these patients is the increasing recognition that they are the locus of control for their disease – not some pill or procedure. They have made themselves heart attack proof and lose the greatest fear of all heart patients and their families – when will the next heart attack occur?

KF: What about drugs, stents, and heart bypass surgery?

CE: Admittedly in the midst of a heart attack a stent or bypass may be live saving, however, for the remaining 90% studies confirm that they do not prevent future heart attacks or prolong life. They are associated with significant complications such as hemorrhage, heart attack, stroke, cognitive decline, depression, and death. The benefits erode with the passage of time as the stents and bypasses may themselves develop blockage.

Some drugs may decrease blood pressure and the heart workload. Others interfere with clotting which helps a stent remain open. Statin drugs lower cholesterol. None of these drugs or interventions addresses the basic causation of disease and not surprisingly the disease progresses with the need for more drugs, stents, and repeat bypasses.

KF: Why aren’t physicians using nutrition therapy?

CE: Most physicians have no training or understanding of the power of nutrition. In a busy practice they would not have the time for it. It is my belief that physicians must accord the plant based lifestyle transition its due. Every patient with cardiovascular disease should be referred to a physician or nurse practitioner with the knowledge and expertise in these counseling skills.

KF: But I understand physicians don’t believe patients will make this transition. How come?

CE: Nutrition counseling is a skill which physicians don’t possess. Of all the encounters a patient with cardiovascular disease experiences, perhaps the least time and lowest priority is nutritional counseling. I see many patients with heart disease who recount that nutrition was never even mentioned. It is therefore unlikely that the patient feels that nutrition is important.

KF: What is that you do differently?

CE: In an intensive 5 hour counseling session for a group of heart patients, my first priority is to eliminate the mystery of what causes their disease. It has not been stress, or genes. It is their western diet of processed oil, dairy, and meat. Hypertension, diabetes, and smoking must be controlled but food trumps all. I spend at least an hour defining the protective role of endothelial cells and nitric oxide functioning as the ultimate guardians of our blood vessels. They quickly understand that their lifetime of ingesting these harmful products has totally overwhelmed and destroyed their endothelium to an extent where it is unable to protect them. They fully grasp that they must forever eliminate ingesting foods that will further destroy their already compromised endothelium. They understand heart disease is a food borne illness.

Contd…

Source: Alternet.org

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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There is a way to help avoid heart disease & diabetes: You are what you eat! II

“If the truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never, ever exist and if it does exist it need never, ever progress.”

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Kathy Freston

• 
  

KF: Where is the good news?

CE: The patients understand that they can halt their disease. They are presented with my scientific articles demonstrating reversal of disease. They learn that anginal chest pain may diminish or disappear within 10-14 days in some patients while others may take longer. We share our data confirming reversal of carotid artery disease to the brain, coronary artery disease of the heart, peripheral vascular disease in the extremities, and the reversal of erectile dysfunction. They are made to appreciate how rapidly and powerfully the endothelial function may be restored. The most significant message in our counseling is patient awareness that they are empowered to be the locus of control of their disease.

KF: What is your take on the present management of heart disease through drug stents and bypass surgery?

CE: It is expensive, dangerous, and ineffective. None of these approaches addresses the factors that cause the disease. A doctor would never treat poison ivy without advising the patient to avoid exposure to poison ivy plants. Sadly the usual treatment of cardiovascular disease almost never includes hours of patient counseling so they may completely eliminate the foods which are injuring their endothelium. Stents may block, bypass veins shut down, drug doses increase, and blood vessel disease worsens. The present cost of this non-treatment of heart disease is unsustainable even in our wealthy nation.

KF: Dr. Esselstyn, are you a threat to the stenting and bypass industry?

CE: Not really. Stents and bypass surgery in an emergency setting are absolutely lifesaving. However, for non-emergency situations an intensive lifestyle trial of 3-6 months would eliminate the need for most interventions. It is of interest that when physicians and some interventional cardiologists themselves develop the disease they come knocking at my door.

KF: Why do you think this information on diet and heart disease is not more widely known? Is someone or something blocking your message?

CE: The government, drug industry, and some of my own profession. The USDA every five years produces a food triangle which promotes the very foods which guarantee that millions of Americans will perish.

The drug industry has a $21 billion dollar income from statin drugs alone. The stent manufacturers make billions more. Neither of these industries would want this epidemic resolved.

Physicians who perform stents and bypass surgery earn millions and are hardly clamoring for fewer patients.

KF: Any final thoughts?

CE: When people learn to eat plant based to eliminate heart disease it could inaugurate a seismic revolution in health. Other diseases that resolve include obesity, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks, gall stones, diverticulitis, asthma, osteoporosis, allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and a marked decrease in the common western cancers of breast, prostate, colon, endometrial, ovarian, and pancreatic.

Kathy Freston is a health and wellness expert and a New York Times best-selling author. Her latest book is The Quantum Wellness Cleanse: A 21 Day Essential Guide to Healing Your Body, Mind and Spirit. Freston promotes a body/mind/spirit approach to health and happiness that includes a concentration on healthy diet, emotional introspection, spiritual practice, and loving relationships. Kathy’s recent television appearances include The Oprah Winfrey Show, Ellen, The View and Good Morning America.

Concluded.

Source: Alternet.org

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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U.S. confirms what it had denied for months: Blackwater is in Pakistan

Gates in Pakistan: US Defence Secretary Robert Gates confirms during his current visit to Pakistan that  Blackwater a.k.a Xe is operating in Pakistan.

• 
  

Jeremy Scahill

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No sooner did Defense Secretary Gates admit during a visit to Islamabad that Blackwater is in the country, than the Pentagon rushed to “clarify” his remarks.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that Blackwater is operating in Pakistan. In an interview on Express TV, Gates, who was visiting Islamabad, said, “They [Blackwater and another private security firm, DynCorp] are operating as individual companies here in Pakistan,” according to a DoD transcript of the interview. “There are rules concerning the contracting companies. If they’re contracting with us or with the State Department here in Pakistan, then there are very clear rules set forth by the State Department and by ourselves.”

Today, the country’s senior minister for the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Bashir Bilour, also acknowledged that the company is operating in Pakistan’s frontier areas. Bilour told Pakistan’s Express News TV that Blackwater’s activities were taking place with the “consent and permission” of the Pakistani government, saying he had discussed the issue with officials at the US Consulate in Peshawar, who told him that Blackwater was training Pakistani forces.

When Gates was asked what the US response would be if the Pakistani parliament passed a law banning private security companies, Gates said, “If it’s Pakistani law, we will absolutely comply.”

As Gates’s comments began to make huge news in Pakistan, US defense officials tried to retract his statement. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Defense officials tried to clarify the comment Thursday night, telling reporters that Mr. Gates had been speaking about contractor oversight more generally and that the Pentagon didn’t employ Xe in Pakistan.”

[Left: Bashir Bilour, Senior minister in the NWFP government also confirms Blackwater presence in the frontier province of Pakistan].

Bilour’s statements are consistent with what a former Blackwater executive and a US military intelligence source told me in December — that Blackwater is working on a subcontract for Kestral, a Pakistani security and logistics firm. That contract, say my sources, is technically with the Pakistani government, which helps cloak Blackwater’s presence. From my article in The Nation:

Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. “Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship,” he said. “They’ve met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another.” Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.

[Right: Blackwater founder & former CEO of the notorious mercenary army, Eric Prince].

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral’s forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as “frontier scouts”). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater “is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral’s folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they’re having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they’re executing the job,” he said.

“You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas.” He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. “You’ve got BW guys that are assisting…and they’re all going to want to go on the jobs–so they’re going to go with them,” he said. “So, the things that you’re seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that–in some of those cases, you’re going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house.” Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. “That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, ‘Hey, no, we don’t have any Westerners doing this. It’s all local and our people are doing it.’ But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work.”

When I tried to get confirmation of Blackwater’s work with Kestral, I was bounced around from agency to agency. Eventually, a spokesman for the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny that Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. “We cannot help you,” said department spokesman David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. “You’ll have to contact the companies directly.” Blackwater’s spokesman Mark Corallo said the company has “no operations of any kind” in Pakistan other than one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to my inquiries.

Kestral’s lobbyist, former assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, would not provide comment on the contract either. Noriega, according to federal lobby records, was recently hired by Kestral to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues “regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States.”

All of this appears to be a contradiction of previous statements made by the Defense Department, by Blackwater, by the Pakistani government and by the US Embassy in Islamabad, all of whom claimed Blackwater was not in the country. In September the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, denied Blackwater’s presence in the country, stating bluntly, “Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan.” In December in The Nation, after I reported on Blackwater’s work for JSOC and Kestral in Pakistan, the Pentagon did not issue any clear public denials, and instead tried to pass the buck to the State Department, which in turn passed it to the US Embassy, which in turn issued an unsigned statement saying the story was false. Shortly after my story came out in The Nation, ABC News reported that in 2006, “12 Blackwater “tactical action operatives” were recruited for a secret raid into Pakistan by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, according to a military intelligence planner. The target of the planned raid, code-named Vibrant Fury, was a suspected al Qaeda training camp, according to the planner.”

In Pakistan, there appears to be egg on the face of the country’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who has said on numerous occasions that he would resign if it is proven that Blackwater is operating inside Pakistan. Today, Express TV rebroadcast Malik saying in November, “There is no Blackwater.”

What’s that old saying? “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

Source: Alternet.org

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USA, Global fatigue and trust deficit

At times I feel that we’re exhausted, sitting on the sidewalk, applauding the inevitable as Team China marches by.

Arnaud de Borchgrave

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 (UPI) — The 9.2 magnitude earthquake that triggered the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami claimed some 230,000 lives in 13 countries. But the Port-au-Prince 7.0 quake may exceed that toll in one small country. Haiti’s capital will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, like German and Japanese cities after World War II. For a city of 3 million that was designed to handle a mere 50,000, there was little modern infrastructure to begin with. But it will still cost billions.

Fighting two trillion-dollar wars abroad while millions are jobless at home doesn’t make much sense to well over half the American people. How many favor something closer to home has not been polled.

There is a growing chorus of geopolitical deep thinkers and intellectuals who favor a strategic retreat from the imperial posture of the Cold War, where we are now fighting terrorist cells on a planetary scale, and a reassessment of priorities. One of the Democratic Party’s champion fundraisers, speaking privately, said, “At times I feel that we’re exhausted, sitting on the sidewalk, applauding the inevitable as Team China marches by.”

We are now saddled with a dysfunctional system of government that raises the key question for the 21st century: Have we allowed ourselves to become ungovernable with a Congress that seems prone to micromanage everything into unworkable policies, courtesy of a system that has moved from no child left behind to no lobbyist left behind.

No fewer than 108 congressional committees and subcommittees claim oversight on the Homeland Security Department, up from 88 in 2004. Countless reports have recommended a single point of congressional contact for DHS. But DHS is still required to produce more than 500 annual reports in addition to more than 6,000 individual requests for information per year. Scores of DHS employees are employed full time catering to Congress. The British, German and French governments would have ground to a halt under a similar deluge of parliamentary requests.

If we’re going to be successful in Afghanistan, a long-term commitment of five to 10 years is an essential prerequisite. Pakistan does not believe today’s America will sustain such an undertaking, notwithstanding repeated pledges about the long haul commitment from national security adviser James L. Jones, frequent travelers to Pakistan Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen and CENTCOM Commander Gen. David J. Petraeus, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and this week from Defense Secretary Bob Gates.

From his 27 years in the CIA where he is still the only one to rise from level-entry recruit to director, Gates remembers vividly the era of close cooperation with Pakistan when he was deputy director of the CIA. It was that partnership, which included Saudi Intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, that forced the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan in February 1989 and heralded the downfall of the Soviet empire nine months later. It also led Osama bin Laden to believe that his Arab mujahedin recruits toppled one evil empire and that he had a shot at toppling the remaining one — imperial America.

Gates disagreed strenuously with the subsequent shabby treatment of our Pakistani ally, including painful economic and military sanctions, as punishment for their secret nuclear weapons program. A whole generation of Pakistani officers was banned from U.S. military facilities and staff colleges. This triggered a long-lasting anti-U.S. culture in the Pakistani military. The trust deficit is still huge. And the lessons of America’s defeat in Vietnam 35 years ago lurk just below the surface; it was the U.S. Congress that pulled the plug.

China is only too happy to hold America’s coat as it sinks deeper into expensive geopolitical commitments while Chinese leaders win friends and influence people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and a large part of North America (Mexico and Canada). China is also building an ultramodern infrastructure of roads, railroads and airports that is in sharp contrast to America’s long-neglected public services, water supplies, power grid, road and rail networks, and air traffic control.

In Afghanistan, a Chinese company is investing $3 billion in Logar province near Kabul to mine 240 million tons of copper ore, worth $88 billion. One must assume they are not worried by the Taliban. The insurgents confide in their Pakistani friends they will need the income when they get back in the saddle. China has 11 nuclear power plants and is planning to add 24. The last U.S. reactor went online in 1997. Only 27 percent of 253 ordered in the 1950s are in operation.

More than 100,000 Chinese students are now studying in the United States. There was a time when most of them would have tried to stay; now they see more exciting horizons in China. Thousands of U.S. schools stopped teaching foreign languages since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a government-funded survey. But there is one significant exception: Chinese. Beijing is sending language instructors abroad and pays for their room and board, presumably also to proselytize for the new superpower.

Since October 2009 some 30,000 Pakistani troops have been battling Pakistani Taliban guerrillas in South Waziristan, one of the seven tribal areas along the Afghan border. Heavy snow has now forced a halt in operations. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told Gates it would take another six to 12 months to complete. Not good enough for Gates — and Obama’s national security team.

Because that still leaves North Waziristan as a safe haven for Afghan Taliban operating against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. These are the insurgents originally trained by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency to take over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Off the record, knowledgeable Pakistanis can see them back in power, posing as moderates, after NATO and U.S. governments tire of fighting an invisible enemy….

The writer Arnaud de Borchgrave is UPI Editor at Large

Source: GeoploticalNWO

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Frosty welcome for India in Nepal

[Left: Nepal's popular leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a Maoist, is also known as Prachanda]

Dhruba Adhikary

KATHMANDU – Those who rule India from their power base in Delhi may not be wrong to view Nepal as their closest neighbor as well as ally, but whether the denizens of this largely mountainous country sharing a northern border with China – through Tibet – agree to such a perception has been a contentious issue ever since the British left the subcontinent in 1947.

Although the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, concluded in July 1950, sought to institutionalize the assertive posture Delhi thought it had inherited from its colonial masters, the Nepalis have consistently challenged this pact, describing it as an unequal treaty from the very day it was signed. The treaty has often been compared with the pact the Soviets imposed on Finland in 1948.

The people of Nepal, although ethnically diverse and politically polarized, have always been against what they perceive as Delhi’s bullying behavior. This week has been no exception.

First, Indian External Affairs Minister S M Krishna was greeted with black flags by those protesting against encroachment into Nepal’s border regions. While Krishna’s consultations with government leaders were to contain India’s offer of assistance during its current democratic transition, his meeting with the top Maoist leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (popularly known as Prachanda), was utilized to deliver a tough message to restrain anti-Indian rhetoric used to promote Nepali nationalism.

The customary joint press statement, issued on January 17 in Kathmandu at the end of Krishna’s three-day visit, restricted itself to alluding to “age-old, multifaceted relations” between the countries. But Krishna’s office in New Delhi released a separate statement saying the visiting minister “conveyed deep disappointment at the baseless attacks on India by the Maoist leadership”. This statement is indicative of the tough talks that Prachanda had with Krishna.

The Maoist party Prachanda leads, commands 40% of the seats in the 601-strong Constituent Assembly, which is working on a new constitution expected to be promulgated by May 28 this year.

Krishna’s warning was not taken too seriously, as was evident at the start of the four-day visit to Nepal of the Indian army chief, General Deepak Kapoor, starting on Tuesday. He, too, felt the heat from the outset at Kathmandu airport.

Over a dozen Maoist cadres were detained for several hours for waving black flags at the Indian visitor. On the same day, Maoists staged a rally and held a public meeting in front of the Indian Embassy. One of Prachanda’s deputies, Narayankaji Shrestha, told the audience that while the Maoists were in favor of maintaining normal, neighborly relations with India, what they opposed was Delhi’s continuous interference in Nepal’s internal affairs.

India officially always denies allegations of interference, but there have been occasions when such claims have proved true. One such occasion was in June 2006 – shortly after the April uprising against king Gyanendra’s absolute rule. An Indian parliamentary delegation visited Nepal, and one of delegates, S Sudhakar Reddy, observed after returning home: “Nepal is at the political crossroads and should be allowed to decide its policies independently without any intervention.” He did not mince words over where the interference was coming from. “Keeping in view the past experiences with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, it is better that we keep away from the internal affairs of that country.”

Unlike Nepal’s other political parties, the Maoist party has displayed skill at winning over the public and arousing a sense of nationalism. The leadership has explained that it has no quarrel with India as a country and its people; its confrontation is with the rulers in Delhi representing the political elite, bureaucracy, defense establishment and intelligence agencies.

Kapoor’s name surfaced precisely in this context. In a fiery speech he gave on the last day of a three-day nationwide general strike on December 22, Prachanda asked how the Indian army chief could “publicly advise” Nepal’s army chief, General Chhatraman Singh Gurung, to reject a proposition aimed at integrating former Maoist combatants into the national army. (These combatants numbering nearly 20,000 are sheltered in United Nations-supervised camps.)

It is a sensitive subject and is under official negotiations in line with peace accords signed ending the decade-long Maoist insurgency (1996-2006). There are serious apprehensions that if the integration issue is not resolved fairly, the whole plan for promulgating the new constitution on time might not be achieved. Nepal could face a constitutional crisis of an unprecedented nature.

After quitting the premiership last May amid controversy regarding his decision to sack the then army chief, Prachanda has toured various parts of the country, telling the people about Delhi’s excesses with regard to Nepal. The issues he has chosen to raise include Nepal’s notorious and mysterious palace massacre of June 2001, which claimed the lives of king Birendra, his queen and the crown prince. Echoing the perceptions of a section of the population, he said the monarch was killed for being a nationalist. Prachanda has also alluded to the death of another firebrand nationalist leader, Madan Bhandari, 16 years ago.

After Kapoor’s remarks to the media came at a New Delhi reception during his Nepali counterpart’s tour of India in December. Although the Nepal army and its ministry did not react to Prachanda’s objection, the Indian Embassy found it expedient to clear the air on the eve of Kapoor’s reciprocating trip to Nepal. His remarks, an embassy press release said, did not “reflect the government of India’s position” on the issue of “PLA integration” in Nepal army. The Maoists’ annoyance was further exacerbated when their cadres intercepted a caravan of military vehicles ”quietly” entering Nepal. This led them to accuse the Nepal army of importing weapons that could be used against them, defying provisions of the peace accords. Later, it was officially clarified that the fleet of 100 vehicles were carrying non-lethal equipment from India.

Indian media reports have said that New Delhi has been embarrassed more than once by Kapoor’s publicly aired thoughts. A seminar speech in which he spoke of two-front war against China and Pakistan was one such occasion.

MK Narayanan, until recently India’s national security advisor, has also influenced political events in Nepal in recent years. Weeks before Nepal went to the polls in April 2008, he appeared on television saying that India favored the Nepali Congress party and its leader, Girija Prasad Koirala. This prompted other political parties to be apprehensive about Indian designs on Nepal. Narayanan’s statement left room for speculation that Delhi had had a hand in the sudden creation of new regional parties in the southern plains bordering the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh just a few months before the constituent assembly election.

That Narayanan, who worked as the chief coordinator of India’s intelligence agencies, was involved in matters relating to Indian policies towards Nepal surfaced in a recent article in an Indian newspaper. “The Maoist menace at home and the mess in Nepal bear further testimony to his sterling abilities,” said a reporter from The Pioneer in a January 17 piece reviewing Narayanan’s performance.

In the initial years of Nepal’s political crisis, which was accentuated by the royal coup in early 2005, Delhi, Washington and London used to consult Kathmandu to find a durable solution. But, over time, both Washington and London perhaps thought it wise to “outsource” the job to Delhi. And Delhi’s political masters apparently found it useful to depend on the works and reports of agencies headed by persons like Kapoor and Narayanan.

Is India alone to be blamed for the political crisis in Nepal? Experienced politicians admit that it is often the Nepali side which, unwittingly or otherwise, leaves space for India to intervene. One such person is Prakash Chandra Lohani, a former foreign minister. Some of the politicians have gone out of the way to “invite” interference, he recently told a radio interviewer.

Who then bells the cat? Maoists claim they can, and they think they actually have. Regardless, Nepal is entering a crucial phase ahead of the May 28 deadline for issuing the new constitution.

_________________

Dhruba Adhikary is a Kathmandu-based journalist.

Source: http://www.atimes.com/

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Operation Cold Start, the possible war scenario between India, Pakistan & China

In 2005 India announced a new military doctrine called Start Cold mainly targeting Pakistan as its potential enemy. In November 2009, Indian army chief made a statement that there is a possibility of a limited war between Pakistan and India in a nuclear overhang. In December 2009, Indian chief announced that India is ready to take on both Pakistan and China in a ‘two front war’ simultaneously. These statements spurred a quick reaction in Pakistani media and military establishment.

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COLD START: THREAT TO PAKISTAN & CHINA

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by Farzana Shah

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In 2005 India announced a new military doctrine called Start Cold mainly targeting Pakistan as its potential enemy. In November 2009, Indian army chief made a statement that there is a possibility of a limited war between Pakistan and India in a nuclear overhang. In December 2009, Indian chief announced that India is ready to take on both Pakistan and China in a ‘two front war’ simultaneously. These statements spurred a quick reaction in Pakistani media and military establishment.

INDIAN STATEMENTS

Indian army chief statement came in a closed door seminar in Shimla based military academy on five year review of its military doctrine and operational preparedness. Full details of the Indian chief speech are not known but what is released to media can be summarized as under;

1. India is in position to mobilize its forces so that they can move into enemy territory within 96 hours to execute its Cold Start military doctrine.

2. India is now ready to take on Pakistan and China both in a “two front war” in a nuclear over hang.

3. India is going to enhance its “strategic reach and out-of-area capabilities” to protect its interests from Malacca strait to Persian Gulf.

4. To achieve above mentioned goals India would attain “operational synergy” between the three services

5. Countering “both military and non-military facets of asymmetric and sub-conventional threats.”

Gates Visit: The baits, traps, diplomacy, all to the advantage of the one & only one

[Note for WoP readers: In international relations nobody does anything for anybody without a return for the friendship or alliance [help, favor, trade or aid, whatever name you may give - to such relationship]. History is replete with such similar pacts, alliances and understandings. But in our case, it has mostly been a one way affair. Historically we have always been the US most allied ally, yet it has mostly been the Pentagon and the US military industry complex which got the maximum benefit and what “we” got were “the peanuts”. For this, however, I do not blame much on American politikers but its more because of our own men, of the past or the present occupying the throne of Islamabad. Unfortunately most of them were  the men in khaki who signed such instruments of abject surrender before the US administrations, merely because they could thus not only retain power but also indulge themselves into luxuries which otherwise they could never do, with their kleptomaniac hobbies – which they have now turned into a complete art of grabbing, looting and amassing their ill begotten wealth and then depositing these in European and US banks.

We played into their hands then and we still are playing into their hands now. The US imperialist neocons who have set an agenda since Reagan era to introduce their new world order, of which a very vital part is dismantling Pakistan, a continuously unstable middle east and consolidating their hold over this oil rich region through their lackeys in Pakistan and other Muslim countries who unfortunately are available in abundance in the Muslim world.

I am not arguing here for a confrontation. America by and large is a democratic country with its finest institutions in academics, administration and military science. Americans basically are democratic in their approach. Lot of people in US media are projecting our cause more sincerely than we Pakistanis do for ourselves

But once it’s a matter of chalking a route for our destiny, then it’s us and us alone to decide. We can’t blame others because no one can force a sovereign, independent Pakistan to do what others may wish it to do; until and unless the greed and the lust of the power holders- breakers and brokers in Islamabad makes them to sign such instruments [which however, does benefit that tiny lot of our men in khaki and civil] – all at the cost of ordinary poor folk of Pakistan. Nayyar]

What did recent Gates visit bring to us?

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US secretary of defense Robert Gates has come and gone, after making the noises so pet with American officials nowadays about Pakistan. But hadn’t we heard of this American prattle even when they were fighting a proxy war against the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan? Didn’t they declare us even then the frontline state of their war, which we actually had become foolishly, thanks to a military dictator, General Zia ul Haq, who threw this unfortunate nation into that foray to be clobbered and bled just to earn international legitimacy for his own illegitimate usurpation of power? Weren’t we then too charmed by Washington with hymns of strategic partnerships and long-term relationships? Weren’t we then too pledged $4.2 billion in US military and economic aid?

What came of all that once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan? Well, we don’t want to recall that sorrowful history, lest we embitter the sweet taste of Islamabad’s hierarchy, rollicking in such a binge of exultation and celebration as if they have pulled off a feat that no Halaku Khan of this earth could. Otherwise, the way we are being dealt by protagonists of this America’s so-called war on terror befits not a partner or an ally but only an exalted valet. And for the humiliating conditions on which the Kerry-Lugar Law has sanctioned US aid for Pakistan, not even a third-rate leadership would touch it, even if all charity. But let it pass. If our leadership feels so happy about all this, why to spoil its feel-good mood. After all, over the time this wretched nation has swallowed many an ignoble dignity inflicted on it by Americans for its leaderships’ pleasure. This poisoned chalice too it will gulp up for its present leadership to be happy.

Presently, it is secretary Gates’ discourse that we want to talk about. So nice of him to confess after the Soviet withdrawal the United States committed in the region a strategic mistake “driven by some well-intentioned but short-sighted US legislative and policy decisions”. But his confession is a stark understatement. For, as far as Pakistan is concerned, this wasn’t a US strategic mistake, not even a blunder. It was a callous and deliberate betrayal of a US-declared frontline state, which was clamped down with every nuclear-related sanction and every kind of embargo known to the American statute book and also robbed of its hard-earned money it had paid out from its own pocket for the F-16 planes never delivered to it for sanctions.

But, then, Gates’ own discourse was full of contradictions. While he harangued Pakistan that Taliban were all chips of the same block and couldn’t be compartmentalized into good and bad guys, his own people in Afghanistan are going by this categorization. What they call moderate Taliban, they admit trying wooing over. Not only are they talking to them. At their behest, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also unveiled a plan to buy off wavering Taliban with money and jobs. So what he wants Pakistan not to do, his people are themselves doing exactly this in Afghanistan. Isn’t it an outright hypocrisy, and also mean doublespeak and double standards?

Then, all fraught is his assertion that no matter wherever al-CIA-da raises its head, the epicenter of this monstrosity is the border land between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which if translated into plain language only means Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency. This plainly is a misleading and specious statement. The 9/11 was not planned in North Waziristan, not even in Afghanistan. It was planned in the German city of Hamburg and was executed by Saudi, Egyptian and other Arab students, who had studied in Western universities and trained in America’s aviation academies….and CIA for an inside job par excellence….

Even the Nigerian underwear bomber who attempted a foiled blasting of an American airliner may have stayed in Yemen learning Arabic, but he believably got radicalized in London where he was long studying engineering. North Waziristan he had never visited. But such uncomfortable things never torment an American conscience as doesn’t the clarifications Gates touted with a straight about the presence in Pakistan of the thuggish American private security outfit of Blackwater. His clarifications were more a confirmation than a denial. This outfit of mercenary killers may not be on his Pentagon’s or State Department’s payrolls. But it is the CIA which enrolls and pays them. And Blackwater is heavily represented in about 100,000 hired killers CIA has on its payrolls in Afghanistan alone. The number may not be lesser in Pakistan where CIA has had a free run for years.

But if the Americans have to be duplicitous, cunning and deceivers to us, do our own people have to be so to their own compatriots? For months, interior minister Rehman Malik has been lying to this nation that Blackwater exists not in this country. Even accosting his challengers he has been to prove him wrong and he will resign. Now he must. Gates with his evasive but confirmatory versions has proved him to be a liar and a big cheat deceiving his own people.

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Source: text: GeoploticalNWO, Image: Reuters.com

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Pentagon’s Circles within circles around the Taliban

Gordon Brown hosts a breakfast meeting at Downing Street ahead of the Afghanistan Conference in London, 28 January 2010

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s attention is likely to be divided as London hosts long-awaited international deliberations on the war in Afghanistan today. To be or not to be in the British capital was the question as Brown rushed to Belfast on Monday to “talk through the night” to save the Ulster power-sharing process from collapse.

In a manner of speaking, power sharing also forms the agenda of the London conference, attended by some 60 countries. Cynics have labeled the meeting more as a public relations stunt by Brown at a time when two-thirds of Britons oppose the Afghan war.

However, the conference serves a purpose. An idea that seemed heretic until recently has tiptoed to the center of the conflict-resolution agenda in Afghanistan - devolving on reconciliation with the Taliban. The United Nations put its imprimatur on the idea on Sunday, when its special envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, suggested that at least some of the Taliban senior leaders should be removed from the UN’s list of terrorists drawn up in 2001.

“If you want relevant results, then you have to talk to the relevant person in authority,” Eide said. “I think the time has come to do it.”

The UN black list contains 144 names, including Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Under UN Resolution 1267, all governments are obliged to freeze the bank accounts of people on the list and prevent them from traveling. The George W Bush administration forced the decision on the world community.

After eight years of war and loss of thousands of lives, Washington has changed course. As Robert Gates, the US secretary of defense said last week: “The Taliban … are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.”

In an extraordinary interview timed for the London Conference, the commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, said: “As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting.”

“After eight years of war, it’s clear that domestically many [Western] political leaders are having to answer questions, this [war] has gone on a long time and it’s no better than it was in 2004, so why are we maintaining it, will it get better?” he told the Financial Times on Monday.

Echoing Eide, McChrystal underscored that “the possibility for everybody to look at [is] what’s the right combination of participation in the government [in Kabul]“. It is important that all parts of the population have an absolute stake in the government, he said. “I think any Afghan can play a role … It’s the return of al-Qaeda we don’t want.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai would use the London platform to “announce his intent to implement a reintegration policy [towards the Taliban] and then move forward to implementation, and I’m hopeful and very optimistic that the international community will completely back that,” McChrystal predicted.

From various accounts, the Karzai plan pits the main protagonists in the insurgency – the Afghan and the Pakistani Taliban, former mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the so-called Haqqani network – within five concentric circles. The first circle includes Mullah Omar, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Hekmatyar; the second circle slots some 15-20 insurgent groups; the third comprises 60-70 individuals who include provincial commanders; the fourth brings together some 700 individuals; and the fifth circle brackets around 20,000 to 25,000 “foot soldiers”.

The protagonists in the first and the second circles will be engaged in a political and strategic agenda of “reconciliation” at national level, whereas those in the outer circles could be “integrated” through provincial-level initiatives. The Karzai government spearheads the implementation of the plan.

At a trilateral summit meeting with his Turkish and Pakistani counterparts in Istanbul on Monday, Karzai formally discussed the plan with Pakistan President Asif Zardari and his accompanying Inter-Services Intelligence chief. The Turks are working behind the scenes to bring about a better understanding between Kabul and Islamabad. Karzai revealed in Istanbul that he would ask the London conference to support his move to remove Taliban names from the UN black list.

Karzai and Washington find themselves on the same page. Simply put, Washington counts on Karzai to bell the cat. Karzai counts on Washington to acquiesce with his leadership. The first point on their common agenda envisages that now that the US thinks differently about the Taliban, the international community might as well do so.

Secondly, The US is caught in a bind. In order for reconciliation with the Taliban to proceed, the militants must be removed from the UN black list. To this end the Security Council – Russia and China in particular – must be brought on board. Karzai will seek a mandate in London to approach the Security Council.

Third on their agenda, the Security Council must also formally endorse Karzai’s reconciliation plan once it gets adopted as the international community’s collective wish. The US alone cannot bankroll the “rehabilitation” or “integration” of thousands of Taliban cadres and their families; it costs a lot of money and the international community should share the burden. After all, this is about global security.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Britain will be the US’s key partners for holding reconciliation talks with the Taliban. Separately, Washington has said it hopes to negotiate a “status of forces agreement” with Kabul regarding the US military presence in Afghanistan.

In sum, the London conference is getting set to witness a display of “smart power”. If it works, a substantial drawdown of US combat troops becomes possible in time for President Barack Obama’s re-election bid. But the big question is whether or not it will work.

Leaving aside the Taliban, who may well have minds of their own, the countries that could act as spoilers are mainly the regional powers – Pakistan, Iran, India, Russia and China. These potential spoilers may not be able to be subdued into a single “grand bargain”, so individual agreements may become necessary.

India, which gives primacy to its so-called “strategic partnership” with the US, is the least troublesome. It favors the American military presence in the region and wants NATO to fight on. But Delhi will work robustly to ensure that Kabul remains India-friendly.

Pakistan is in a category by itself insofar as it not only seeks a strategic partnership with the US but one that is at a par with the US-Indian nexus. Besides, its special interests need to be safeguarded in Afghanistan. Pakistan has excluded India from regional formats working on Afghanistan.

Islamabad is in a privileged position as it holds the option to bring the “irreconcilable” Quetta shura (the top Taliban council) to the negotiating table, or, alternatively, claim helplessness. How it chooses to play depends largely on the US’s ability to maintain a balanced relationship with India and Pakistan. Pakistan rejects any US-Indian strategic tie-up in the Indian Ocean. In short, Washington faces a tough call to get Pakistan to cooperate optimally while stringing India along.

Iran falls in a different category insofar as while Tehran has expectations regarding a normal relationship with the US, it also looks for recognition as a regional power. Tehran seeks a broad-based government in Kabul that ensures the welfare of the Shi’ite communities and it expects assurances regarding Iran’s own security. But Tehran does not confront the US in Afghanistan, although it is boycotting the London conference on account of frosty relations with Britain.

Most certainly, misgivings remain regarding any medium-term US military presence. China and Russia visualize Afghanistan’s stabilization in terms of the country getting rid of foreign occupation, regaining its sovereignty and becoming a genuinely neutral country.

The fact remains that the US, British and Saudi intelligence agencies have in the past used the Islamist forces in Afghanistan for geopolitical ends. Significantly, Moscow held a special meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization regarding Afghanistan on Monday in the run up to the London conference.

However, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. The US is promoting India-Pakistan rapprochement, Delhi is willing to move in tandem with Washington’s wishes and some anticipate a thaw in India-Pakistan ties. The US has also reduced the shrillness of its rhetoric against Iran.

Russian-American relations are at a sensitive juncture with the two countries inching toward a new arms control agreement. True, Beijing has reason to feel upset over recent US moves on arms sales to Taiwan, Google’s decision to pull out of China and Obama’s decision to meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. But China also has high stakes in regional stability in Central Asia and South Asia.

Meanwhile, apart from hosting the Afghan and Pakistani presidents in Istanbul on Monday, Turks gathered together Iran, Russia and China, Tajikistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A sprinkling of NATO and European Union officials was thrown into that mix, along with an aide to the US special representative for AfPak, Richard Holbrooke.

Originally, Turkey toyed with the idea of hosting an Organization of Islamic Conference meeting on Afghanistan. But something seems to have gone wrong in that enterprise. Turkey probably ended up doing slightly better by facilitating a last-minute opportunity to “find a single voice’’ at the London conference. President Abdullah Gul is traveling to Delhi on February 7.

Clearly, the focus of the London conference has shifted from the original focus on the Afghanization of the war. NATO’s troop surge has become a sideshow. French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday ruled out any deployment of additional combat troops. That eases pressure on Germany too. The Karzai plan for reconciliation with the Taliban has instead become the centerpiece.

However, just like in Bonn eight years ago, the London conference is an exclusive gathering of “victors”, while the vanquished Taliban remain excluded. The only difference is that the victors who gather today in London have been badly mauled in the past eight years and are terribly fatigued and almost bled white. They are determined to search out the vanquished and to talk real peace.

Karzai may outline a five-year reconciliation plan. Evidently, the London conference will only set the ball rolling in an engrossing game that promises to stretch to the final lap of Obama’s second term, should he get that far. Yardsticks of success and failure do not apply to a cliffhanger.

Source:text: text: GeoploticalNWO Image: flickr.com

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Attack of the Drones: WTF?

All based on REVENGE

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Posted by Quannah

I’ve been waiting for some media outlet to run a story on a seemingly ignored policy shift concerning the Predator Drone attacks in Pakistan by the CIA. I’m still waiting. So, rather than continue to wait, I decided to put this out there.

We all heard about the CIA deaths in Afghanistan on December 30, 2009, along with the Xe (Blackwater) contractors, after a Jordanian double-agent blew himself up inside a gym at a US installation — because security measures weren’t followed. But what I found most interesting about this story was the comments immediately after the attack. This was widely reported at the time. According to CNN International:

“An American intelligence official vowed Thursday (December 31, 2009) that the United States would avenge a suspected terrorist attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of seven CIA officers.”

So, REVENGE is now the purpose of launching Predator Drone strikes in Pakistan? Is that supposed to be the motive of our intelligence agencies in fighting counter-terrorism? WTF?

I find it interesting that, according to my research, there were 44 Predator Drone strikes in Pakistan in 2009. And since the attack on the CIA base in Afghanistan on December 30, 2009, the CIA has launched at least 11 strikes in Pakistan. In less than one month’s time. That means that in 2009, the CIA averaged 3.6 strikes per month. If we continue the uptick in attacks that we’ve seen since December 30, the total for 2010 could well exceed 132 attacks.

All based on REVENGE.

There were well over 700 civilians killed in these Drone attacks in Pakistan in 2009. In fact, for each Al Qaeda or Taliban member killed in these Drone attacks, there were 140 civilians killed. What a high price to pay for “getting” another “high value terrorist” in Pakistan! And the government always says that they managed to kill the “Number Two” or “Number Three” leader, and it has led me to think… how many Number Two or Number Three leaders of Al Qaeda or the Taliban can there possibly be? WTF?

The other disturbing thing that hasn’t been talked about much, other than Jeremy Scahill who does a phenomenal job reporting on Xe (Blackwater) and their nefarious role in the wars of the past decade, is the fact that CNN International also reported on December 30, 2009:

“Two of those killed were contractors with private security firm Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, a former intelligence official told CNN. The CIA considers contractors to be officers.”

So, not only are these growing numbers of civilians dying in Pakistan out of revenge for the deaths of CIA officers, but also for the deaths of the mercenaries Erik Prince sent to work with the CIA. WTF???

I know there are many stories in the news these days, and there are some that need to be discussed. But there are also “news” stories that are as insipid as the marriage and treatment of sexual addiction of Tiger Woods. But this story, which deserved close scrutiny, not to mention some explanation by Leon Panetta, flies under the radar.

But this is just My Three Cents…

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Source:text: Alternet.org Image: http://agitprop.typepad.com/

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A Comparison of Roman & ‘American’ Empires

In the same way as the value of Roman coins dropped, the value of the American dollar has been under attack for many years. To help correct America’s economic woes, the Obama administration announced in March of last year that it would print $1 trillion (ww.rt.com). However, history has shown again and again that printing money, without backing it up with gold or other sources of value, harms an economy instead of helping it. A prime example of this was when Septimus Severus, also seeking to boost his economy, decreased the silver content in Roman coins. It appears that the United States government is repeating some of the same mistakes from history, instead of learning from them.

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COMPLEXITY AND COLLAPSE

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“Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.”

- George Santayana

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Although I’ve never formally studied history, I am well aware of its importance, and do my best to make myself aware of interpretations which have relevance to our time. One such interpretation comes from the renowned anthropologist – Joseph Tainter. Tainter’s theory about how civilizations collapse is worrisome when we consider our present day circumstances. His basic idea is that as societies evolve and are met with challenges, these challenges are themselves met with increasing amounts of complexity. Complexity is, paradoxically, not that complicated – at least conceptually.

More US military personnel have taken their OWN lives than have died in action

Hard to believe but it’s true.

Finian Cunningham

Here is a shocking statistic that you won’t hear in most western news media: over the past nine years, more US military personnel have taken their own lives than have died in action in either the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. These are official figures from the US Department of Defence, yet somehow they have not been deemed newsworthy to report. Last year alone, more than 330 serving members of the US armed forces committed suicide – more than the 320 killed in Afghanistan and the 150 who fell in Iraq (see wsws.org).

Since 2001, when Washington launched its so-called war on terror, there has been a dramatic year-on-year increase in US military suicides, particularly in the army, which has borne the brunt of fighting abroad. Last year saw the highest total number since such records began in 1980. Prior to 2001, the suicide rate in the US military was lower than that for the general US population; now, it is nearly double the national average.

A growing number of these victims have been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. What these figures should tell us is that there is something fundamentally deranged about Washington’s “war on terror” – which is probably why western news media prefer to ignore the issue. How damning is it about such military campaigns that the number of US soldiers who take their own lives outnumber those killed by enemy combatants.

What is even more disturbing is that the official figures only count victims of suicide among serving personnel. Not included are the many more veterans – officially classed as civilians – who take their own lives.

Most likely, these deaths are reported in some small-town newspaper in “a brief” news item with no context or background as to what drove these individuals to take their own lives. It is estimated that the suicide rate among veterans demobbed from fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq is as high as four times the national average. The US Department of Veteran Affairs calculates that over 6,000 former service personnel commit suicide every year.

Many of these men have come home to a country they have fought for only to find no jobs, their homes repossessed by banks that have enjoyed trillion-dollar bailouts and broken relationships.

Meanwhile, President Obama – the erstwhile peace candidate – has taken on the role of Commander in Chief with gusto, telling his countrymen and women that they are fighting a “just war” to “defend American lives”. Only a year ago, he was campaigning for the presidency on a ticket to end such wars. Now, more than his predecessor, George W Bush, Obama is committing to wars without end. How soul-destroying is that for a grunt holed up in a bunker, with his young family back home probably telling him that they have just signed up for food stamps? In their guts, these US soldiers must know – as many other ordinary people around the world do – that these wars are nothing but a desperate, pathological bid by a dying power to salvage its crumbling empire – an empire that enriches a tiny elite and impoverishes the majority. Is it any wonder that many of them simply lose the will to live?

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Source: text: There are no sunglasses Image: Technorati.com

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Washington works the Af-Pak-India triangle

Zahid U Kramet

LAHORE – The United States’ Af-Pak special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, and US Defense Secretary Robert Gates have been running from pillar to post between Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to end the “war on terror” and bring some sort of stability to the South Asian region.

Until now they have not made much progress. The war persists. A troop surge in Afghanistan was seen as the solution. And, acceding to the requests of his counter-insurgency expert, General David Petraeus, and his commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, President Barack Obama sanctioned an additional 30,000 US troops to ramp up the approximately 100,000-strong coalition force already present in Obama’s December 1, 2009, address at the West Point Military Academy charted a new course when he remarked, “These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in 2011 …

America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.” In his State of the Union address this week, Obama reiterated his commitment to having US troops begin to leave Afghanistan in July 2011.

Reinforced at frequent intervals subsequently was that Pakistan held the key to bringing the conflict to an end. But a trust deficit existed. Pakistan felt it had sufficient influence over the AfghanTaliban to pursue peace talks. The US persisted with “no quarter” to any of the Taliban.

Pakistan’s perspective was that the al-Qaeda-aligned Pakistani Taliban led by Hakimullah Mahsud in South Waziristan needed to be tackled first. The US insisted the Afghan Taliban’s Sirajuddin Haqqani network, which allegedly had a fallback position in North Waziristan, must be targeted simultaneously.

Pakistan asked to use armed drones on selected targets. The US opted to operate them unilaterally, indifferent to the political consequences of the collateral damage with which Pakistan would have to contend. From the Pakistani viewpoint, the cruelest cut of all came when Holbrooke announced during a visit to New Delhi that India’s role was crucial to ensure regional peace, while Pakistan held India responsible for the restiveness in its western province of Balochistan.

What rankled even more was when Indian intelligence chief Lieutenant General R K Loomba was surreptitiously allowed bythe North Atlantic Treaty Organization to visit the Afghan National Army (ANA) headquarters in Kabul. This conveyed the impression to Pakistan that the US could be looking at India to oversee ANA operations against the Taliban on the withdrawal of the international forces from the country beginning in July 2011.

A paper published by the US think-tank Council on Foreign Relations titled “Terrorism and Indo-Pakistani escalation” further aggravated the situation when it warned of more “Mumbai-style” attacks emanating from Pakistan which would warrant India’s imminent retaliation. (This was a reference to the attack by militants on the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008 in which more than 150 people were killed.)

After an exchange of fire on the Pakistan-India border shortly thereafter, Shireen M Mazari, the editor of the English-language daily The Nation, found these signals ominous. In a front-page report titled “A two-front threat emerging for Pakistan”, she wrote, “A nightmare security scenario for Pakistan seems to be emerging – that of a two-front military conflict … after meetings between Indian officials and America’s Holbrooke and Gates … we are seeing unprovoked military firing.” The implication was obvious.

Pakistan’s immediate reaction was that it could not provide any guarantees against more Mumbai-type attacks, with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani reportedly saying to Gates, “Pakistan is itself facing Mumbai-like attacks almost every other day and when we cannot protect our own citizens how can we guarantee there wouldn’t be any more terrorist hits in India?”

Gates is then said to have upped the ante with the caution that unlike the Mumbai attack, India would not show restraint if attacked again. The same day, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Public Relations chief Major General Ather Abbas conveyed a message to the visiting US dignitary that the Pakistan army was looking to consolidate its gains rather than opening new fronts in its tribal areas.

But the hard-pressed Pakistan security apparatus had moved on to counter the rampant Taliban in another way. A week earlier, on Saturday January 16, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran inked a regional pact to confront the Afghan insurgency trilaterally and rejected a British proposal to include countries which were not contiguous to Afghanistan, but agreed to include all those that were, namely Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and China.

The Islamabad meeting and the trilateral summit that followed in Istanbul were a prelude to the grand London conference onAfghanistan that began on Thursday. The gala event has drawn 60 countries and has essentially been contrived to deliver the message that the world stands united against al-Qaeda, but ready to accede to Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s reintegration proposal for the Taliban.

America had finally accepted the need for this some days earlier, with Holbrooke reported to have said, “We are ready to support it.” He did not divulge how exactly this was to come about. What Holbrooke did say, however, was, “There are a lot of people out there fighting who have no ideological commitment to the principles, values or political movement led by Mullah Omar.”

Mullah Omar is an al-Qaeda ideologue and he would have to be won over for the war in Afghanistan to be brought to an end. The onus of responsibility for this will inevitably fall on the International Security Assistance Force-propelled ANA forces in Afghanistan, and the Pakistan army on its side of the border. But reining in Mullah Omar is not outside the realm of reality. It begins and ends with the exit of foreign forces from Afghanistan. And that is already on the anvil.

Obama has played his cards cleverly with his surge and withdrawal strategy in Afghanistan. He has been helped by near-unanimous support for financial assistance to rescue Afghanistanat the London conference. On the implementation of its objectives, the Western coalition will not be seen to have won the war, but much less the “arch-villains”. Al-Qaeda, however, is another matter.

Osama bin Laden’s latest audio relay, if authentic, first and foremost referred to the plight of the Palestinians. The Palestinians are Arab. The Arabs are Muslim for much the larger part. Obama would need to be seen addressing the Israeli settlements issue and the two-state prescription in earnest if he is to make a mark in the Muslim world.

In a recent interview, Obama stressed that a second term in office was not his primary objective. Being acknowledged for his achievements during his first term was of far greater significance. Breaking the deadlock in Afghanistan would be one such achievement. But if the ultimate aim is to break al-Qaeda’s back, it would require resolving the Palestine issue – and that may call for a New York conference.

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Zahid U Kramet, a Lahore-based political analyst specializing in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, is the founder of the research and analysis website the Asia Despatch.

Source: text: http://www.atimes.com/ YouTube videos: on title: www.realclearworld.com/blog/afpak/

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Will Islam save the United Kingdom by her example?

Archbishop Cranmer examining religio-political agendas with politico-religious objectives

Archbishop Cranmer

After the Battle of Trafalgar, Pitt the Younger was toasted as ‘the Saviour of Europe’. He demurred, insisting that Europe was not to be saved by any one man: “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.”

We did, of course, ‘save Europe’ on many occasions.

Perhaps not always ‘by example’, but certainly by consistently maintaining a balance of power which was invariably in the national interest. Now, of course, Europe has consumed (indeed, abolished) England: we are nothing but a country of ‘euro regions’, each directly funded by and subject to the foreign power; to the princes and potentates in Brussels who prohibit and permit, determine and decree, legislate and direct what we may and may not do.

But that is old news.

With a supine (to put it politely) national church, the marginalisation of Christianity and an increasing assertion of fundamentalist secularism, Islam may be about to the UK a great service.

Bear with His Grace on this one.

Harridan Hormone’s (EU-inspired) Equality Bill was dealt a severe blow in three key votes on proposed amendments in the House of Lords. The legal inequalities which our Masters in Brussels sought to force Parliament to eradicate were retained at Their Lordships’ pleasure.

The churches were prepared for the battle, and no doubt many thousands of Christians donned their breastplates of righteousness and interceded for victory. Cranmer wondered who might win (fully expecting, being a seasoned observer, that the Gates of Hell would prevail).

The issue of the extent to which churches (and other religious bodies) might continue to discriminate against employees on the grounds of their sexual conduct (or, for Pope Benedict, even their inclination), was of importance not only for religious liberty but also the right to freedom of conscience.

Baroness O’Cathain, supported by the passionate, charismatic and patriotic Archbishop John Sentamu (…would that he might succeed Rowan Williams…) insisted that religious institutions must retain their exemption from equality legislation which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sexuality: they must be permitted to maintain their traditional ethos and have the right to expect that staff would uphold tenets of their faith.

And they won: a powerful coalition of bishops and Conservative peers defeated the Government by 216 votes to 178.

The Government, of course, still wants it to be made impossible for a Roman Catholic school to sack its head teacher if he should declare himself homosexual, enter into a civil partnership with his boyfriend, undergo gender realignment and then cross-dress (if such it would be) to come to school.

But such a law must be applied uniformly. Thus the imam in a mosque or the head teacher of a Muslim school may also not be dismissed on the grounds of sexuality.

One wonders what legislative madness it is that permits dismissal for consuming a bacon sandwich, yet not for consummating a same-sex union.

But the Government now have a problem. And this is not a trivial point of inconsequential levity.

Lord Tebbit put it succinctly when he said: “We have a choice tonight – whether we walk in fear of the law of the Lord or the law of Brussels. I know which way I am going.”

The House of Commons could be asked to vote to overturn Their Lordships, effectively asserting EU judicial primacy over centuries of freedom of conscience and religion. Or risk prosecutions being brought by agitating atheists, militant homosexuals or tactical transsexuals against a church, a church school – or (Allah forbid) a mosque.

And this is not a trivial point of inconsequential levity.

While the Church of England has been content to do nothing to defend itself against foreign princes and potentates (indeed, it has been complicit in its own destruction), the Mosque of England might be a little less inclined to be told what it must and must not teach and whom it may or may not employ.

Will this Labour Government, consumed and distracted by its agonising death throes, ram this Bill through Parliament regardless of the views of the Lords Temporal and Spiritual?

Since the Archbishop of Canterbury has (again) gone Trappist, will the mosques assert the primacy of the Law of (the) God over the laws of man?

Will this England, which was wont to save herself by her exertions, now be saved by the example of Islam?

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Read more from Archbishop Cranmer at his blog: http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/

Image source: flickr.com/photos/

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India rethinks policy to keep Afghan influence

An initiative by Western powers seeking peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan is forcing India to modify its policy toward the hardline Islamists to avoid being marginalised in a country Delhi sees as key to the country’s security.

Krittivas Mukherjee

Officials fear an Afghan plan endorsed by global powers to win over Taliban foot soldiers will give rival Pakistan a greater say in the peace process and may ultimately lead to a Taliban takeover once Western forces leave Afghanistan.

The six-decade India and Pakistan rivalry since their independence from Britain in 1947 has turned Afghanistan into a proxy battleground, whose control both countries see as vital to their interests.

Their rivalry complicates Western efforts to stabilise Afghanistan.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s call on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to help reach out to the Taliban is threatening to undo eight years of financial and diplomatic investment that gave New Delhi great influence over Kabul.

“Delhi’s failure to respond to the changing situation in Afghanistan might cause huge setbacks for India,” C. Raja Mohan, a foreign policy expert at the U.S. Library of Congress, wrote in the Indian Express newspaper on Monday.

“India had a great run in Afghanistan in Phase One (since 2001 until recently) … However, the stasis that had gripped India’s security policy in recent months and some fine manoeuvring by the Pakistani army threaten to marginalise Delhi in Phase Two.”

The urgency to acquire a role in Afghanistan, even if limited, may have already prompted India to soften its stand on the Taliban so as not to be seen as blocking the peace process.

Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna said at the weekend New Delhi was willing to back efforts to seek peace with the Taliban to stabilise neighbouring Afghanistan.

“We are willing to give it a try,” Krishna said, provided the Taliban accepted the Afghan constitution and severed connections with al Qaeda and other militant groups.

India seeks to retain influence in Afghanistan to deter any anti-India militant training camps there — which it accuses rival Pakistan of backing — and to more generally try to counter a militant Islamic surge threatening regional security.

The Karzai administration, for its part, has deep suspicions about Pakistan, which considers Afghanistan as a strategic fallback position in the event of another war with India, and because of Islamabad’s ties to the Taliban.

“If the outcome of the London meeting is to be assessed, the world is trying to cut a deal with the Taliban and India has to accept that,” said Uday Bhaskar, head of New Delhi-based strategic affairs think tank National Maritime Foundation.

“India has to shape its policy in the light of this reality … otherwise it runs the danger of being on a standalone mode.”

But India’s traditional ties with Afghanistan and its popularity with Afghans from Bollywood films to aid projects — it is spending $1.2 billion to build roads and power lines in Afghanistan — puts New Delhi on firm ground in the war-torn country.

It is this aspect of their relationship that India could be strengthening in the coming years as a counterpoint to any Pakistan-backed move to marginalise New Delhi.

“India’s presence in Afghanistan is tremendous and it is that goodwill that clearly gives India its strength,” said Savita Pande, professor of South Asian studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Last week, India announced hundreds of fellowships to support Afghan students pursuing higher education in the field of agriculture, a sector seen as crucial for improving Afghan lives. “India has always been Afghanistan’s development partner and this is a strong aspect of the relationship that will be developed further,” said an Indian government official.

Moreover, a quick breakthrough with the Taliban is no certainty, given that the militants may be in no mood to compromise at a time when they are tightening their hold over much of Afghanistan.

“So we have to see how realistic this peace offer is,” said a Western diplomat, who asked not to be named.

“The other aspect is whether Pakistan still retains the same influence over all sections of Pushtuns, because their leverage has largely been over the hardline faction, which in any case is unlikely to be part of the peace process.”

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Source: There are no sunglasses

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What the future may hold

Indian President Pratibha Patil (2R) poses with Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina (R) after presenting her with the Indira Gandhi Award for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2009, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi (L) and Indian PM Manmohan Singh (2L) at The Presidential Palace in New Delhi on January 12, 2010. – Photo by AFP

Iqbal Jafar

To have an idea about what the future may look like — as seen from Washington, Delhi and Tel Aviv — it seems we have to see through the prism of the Indian establishment, Israeli hardliners and American neocons who wield significant influence on their governments.

Their world views are structured around their geopolitical ambitions that they make no effort to conceal. The Indian establishment dreams of being the hegemon of South Asia and the adherents of Zionism of the Middle East. As for the neocons, the world is their oyster, or so they insist.

This may seem ambitious enough, but there’s more — the regional hegemons, India and Israel, have an extended South Asia and Middle East in mind. As Israel Shahak, a highly regarded Israeli scholar and human rights activist, has pointed out, the subject of Israeli domination and influence is “the entire Middle East from Morocco to Pakistan”. Indian scholars and strategists from Sardar K.M. Panikar to Gen Deepak Kapoor consider the Indian Ocean their own (hence a blue-water navy), along with the region from the Persian Gulf to Malacca Strait to be within the Indian sphere of influence.

While the Indian establishment and Zionists are almost synonymous with their respective governments, the neocons are not that powerful in the Obama administration. But surprisingly, their imperial goals still remain a part of American foreign policy. The best that the Obama government has been able to do is to walk briskly on both sides of the street. This is understandable. Impelled by the peculiar dynamics of a superpower, no American administration can roll back the imperial impulse that always finds a place in the worldview of a big power. Even George Washington had referred to the United States as a ‘rising empire’ in March 1783.

While US-Israeli and Indo-Israeli partnerships have existed for a long time, the Indo-US partnership came into fruition only last year and is likely to be more important than the other two. As William Burns, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, said recently in a policy speech: “Few relationships will matter more in the course of human events in the 21st century than the partnership between India and the United States.”

One may wonder about the future repercussions of the present course of human events and the impact of Indo-US ties, but it can be taken for granted that old and new partnerships will, before long, coalesce into one triangular alliance in pursuit of their common goals in the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia. For all we know this may have happened already.

Now, where do we figure on the vast canvas of the allied powers? Well, we happen to occupy a critical spot on it; where their interests converge. These interests are well known but need to be enumerated here to complete the picture. Their first common interest is to denuclearise Pakistan. Second is to eliminate militants. Third is access to Afghanistan and Central Asia through Pakistan, in which the United States has a special interest as a major player in the New Great Game. Fourth is of special interest to India — persuading or coercing Pakistan to accept Kashmir’s accession to India or at least of the area under Indian occupation.

Then there is an intriguing fifth common interest also — the creation of an independent state of Balochistan, an idea that has been in gestation since before the creation of Pakistan. In May 1945, the post-hostilities planning staff of the British war cabinet had recommended stationing “military strategic reserve” to protect sea communications in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea as they were of “great strategic value”. It was argued that: “Central Headquarters India has suggested Balochistan as an alternative to India proper, on the grounds that it may be relatively easy to exclude this territory from the Dominion of India.”

Some two years later, on Aug 12, 1947, the Khan of Kalat proclaimed the independence of the state of Kalat, comprising the entire Baloch part of Balochistan. The demand for separation and independence has since been a recurrent theme in the politics of Balochistan and has been reiterated by the present Khan of Kalat. Incidentally, he has been living in London for many years now.

The Indian interest in Balochistan was made public when Indira Gandhi, in her victory speech after the fall of East Pakistan in 1971, assured Baloch “brothers” that India had not forgotten them. Now, 38 years later, there are good reasons to believe that the Indian establishment has indeed not forgotten them. The US interest in Balochistan is reflected in various speculations about the future geographical contours of Pakistan, complete with maps, in the US media. Balochistan, thus, remains an important piece on the chessboard of the New Great Game. There are three primary reasons why the idea of an independent state of Balochistan appeals to some strategists in the US and elsewhere. First, it will be far easier for multinationals to exploit the fabulously rich resources of a weak and poor state of ethnic Baloch people — the population is less than five million and the per capita income under half a dollar a day.

Second, it is suitably located for naval and other military bases to complete the chain of existing US bases that stretch back to Afghanistan and Central Asia. This will provide a protected outlet for an oil pipeline from Central Asia via Afghanistan. It will also bypass an already hostile Iran and a potentially hostile and otherwise volatile Pakistan. The bases could also be used to launch an overland assault on Iran’s south-eastern coast, opposite Oman, to consolidate control of the Strait of Hormuz, the Achilles’ heel of the world economy. Lastly, as a less lethal option, an independent state of Balochistan can be used as a launching pad for a greater Balochistan movement, not only to keep Iran in check but also to make it vulnerable to ethnic fragmentation. Thus, Balochistan as a separate entity offers many temptations to allied powers.

This is what the future holds when viewed from the ever sharpening Indo-US-Israeli focus on our land. And an impending mortal combat, mandated by fate and geography can only be resisted and survived if we stand united under a dedicated leadership. It is as simple and, let’s concede, as problematic as that.

—

The writer can be reached at iqbal.jafar1@yahoo.com

Source: DAWN.COM

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Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are like a man trying to fix a chimney on the roof of a burning house.

Eric Margolis

Is it finally light at the end of the Afghan tunnel, or an oncoming express train? Total confusion erupted last week as the US, NATO, the UN and the Kabul government all issued differing views on new plans to end the nine year Afghan war by bombarding Taliban with tens of millions in cash instead of precision bombs.

One thing is clear: the US and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan in spite of their fearsome arsenal of high tech weapons and war chests of billions of dollars.

Lightly-armed Pashtun tribesmen are living up to their legendary reputation of making Afghanistan the graveyard of empires.

So Washington and London, both in dire financial straits, say they are now ready for a possible peace deal with the Pashtun Taliban and its nationalist allies.  But, in spite of a $1.4 trillion deficit, President Barack Obama is asking Congress for an additional $33 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.

If you can’t bomb them into submission, then try buying them off.

A conference was held in London last Thursday to raise tens of millions of dollars to try to bribe lower level Taliban to cooperate with the western occupation and/or lay down its arms.

Bribery is a time-honored tool of war.   But it’s not the answer in Afghanistan. The bloody Afghan conflict can only be ended by genuine peace negotiations and withdrawal of all foreign troops.

US commanders in Afghanistan admit they have lost the military initiative. The resistance is steadily gaining ground.   Obama’s increasing US and allied troops to 150,000 won’t be enough to defeat Taliban.  By year end, US and NATO forces will only equal the number of Soviet forces committed to Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Meanwhile, Pakistan, without whose cooperation the US cannot wage war in Afghanistan, is in turmoil. The US is infiltrating Xe (formerly Blackwater) and DynCorp mercenaries into Pakistan to protect US military supply routes north from Karachi to Afghanistan, and to operate or defend US air bases in Pakistan.

US mercenaries are also reportedly being used to assassinate militants and enemies of Pakistan’s US-installed government, and to target Pakistan’s nuclear installations for future US action. This, and increasing attacks by US killer drones, have sparked outrage across Pakistan and brought warnings of creeping US occupation.

US and NATO forces in Afghanistan are like a man trying to fix a chimney on the roof of a burning house.

As Pakistan burns, so will Afghanistan.  Seventy-five percent of all US and NATO supplies for Afghanistan pass through Pakistan. This past weekend, the first time, NATO supply convoys were attacked by militants in the port of Karachi.

Washington lacks the men, money, and understanding to deal with chaotic Pakistan – never mind chaotic Afghanistan.

Washington, London, Ottawa, Berlin and Paris share the same problem: their war propaganda has so demonized Taliban as terrorists and woman abusers that western politicians are petrified to deal with the tribal movement, and risk being accused of sending soldiers to their deaths in a futile war.   The far right will howl “appeasement,” “giving in to terrorism,” and “betraying our boys.”

These advocates of permanent war and torture should be ignored. Afghans have suffered over 3 million deaths in 30 years of wars. They desperately need peace, political stability, and rebuilding, not the current western-installed puppet regime of thieving war lords, drug mafias, and thugs of the old Afghan Communist Party.

The best thing we can do for our western soldiers is to get them out of the Afghan morass before they die in this pointless war, or get stuck there for decades.

The west can’t “win” in Afghanistan. In fact, Washington cannot even define what victory means. The intelligent, straight-talking American ambassador to Kabul, former general Karl Eikenberry, as well a as VP Joe Biden, insist it’s time to start peace talks. We should heed their sensible advice.

The US and its allies need a face-saving way out of Afghanistan. Real peace talks are the answer. Not the ruse long proposed by US Gen. Stanley McChrystal to try to bribe away low-ranking Taliban and so split the Afghan resistance.

This stratagem worked to a degree with Sunni tribesmen in Iraq, but is unlikely to succeed with the proud Pashtun tribes who value honor more than money. Theirs is an antique concept most westerners cannot understand.

Taliban, an anti-Communist religious movement, knew nothing about al-Qaida’s plans to attack the United States. That plot was hatched in Europe, not Afghanistan. Many members of the anti-Communist Taliban and its allies Hisbi Islami and the Haqqani group were former allies of the west and were hailed by President Ronald Reagan as `freedom fighters.’

After 9/11, Taliban refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden to the enraged United States without proper evidence of his guilt because he was an honored guest and hero of the anti-Soviet jihad.

Taliban chose war with the US before betraying a guest. Such men are not to be easily bought.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

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Source: text: http://www.ericmargolis.com/ Title Image: SFGate.com

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Democracy in Pakistan

Elections are an important virtue of government, but they are not the only virtue. Democracy does not end with the ballot, it begins there. Governments should be judged by yardsticks related to constitutional liberalism as well. Despite the limited political choice they offer, countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand provide a better environment for the life, liberty and happiness of their citizens than do illiberal, sham, democracies like Slovakia, Ghana and Pakistan under their elected governments. Constitutional Liberalism has led to democracy everywhere, but democracy does not seem to bring constitutional liberalism. In fact, democratically elected regimes in the third world generally ignore constitutional limits on their powers, deprive the citizens of their basic rights and freedoms and, in the process, open the door to military rule as has happened several times in Pakistan.

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FOR RULERS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES LIKE PAKISTAN, DEMOCRACY IS A CHEWING GUM FOR THE PEOPLE, TO GO ON CHEWING……A SWEET YET USELESS TASTE

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by Roedad Khan

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In the West, democracy means liberal democracy – a political system, prevailing in a free and independent country, marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by Rule of Law, separation of powers, independent judiciary, the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, sanctity of contract and property etc.

This bundle of freedoms called constitutional liberalism – is not synonymous with democracy and is theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy. For much of modern history what characterized governments in Europe and North America, and differentiated them from those around the world, was not democracy but constitutional liberalism. Magna Carta, Rule of Law, Habeas Corpus, are all expressions of constitutional liberalism not democracy. During the 19th century most European countries went through the phase of liberalization long before they became democratic.

YouTube Video: Indian Police murdered 13 years old boy playing cricket

Here is the video sent by reader Muhammad Wasi of Kundian. This video is part of his comments on our post titled: Is there light at the end of the tunnel? By Eric Margolis

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this video are the sole responsibility of the author [St. Sheetrock’s blog) and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this video too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate info or incorrect statements contained in the video.

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General McChrystal! Actions speak louder than words!

(SPIEGEL Interview with General Stanley McChrystal)

Killing the enemy is not the best route to success

Note for WoP readers: The other day I happened to delve into thoughts of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan. While giving interview to the German weekly Der Spiegel online about his new approach to the war, negotiations with the Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, particularly when he said killing the enemy is not the best route to success, I could not agree with the respected General more than himself. But the only thing that makes the difference is that he does not do what he says “killing the enemy is not the best route to success”. Very well said General McChrystal, but if that’s the purpose, then why with the new surge by President Obama additional 30,000 troops are coming to Afghanistan! Will they travel thousands of miles away from their homes “to have lunch with the Taliban”.

In the last post by Roedad Khan that I uploaded on this blog, the writer mentions a quote by Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher and I reproduce this for respected Gen. McChrsystal. Though this quote is originally meant by R.K. for the Pakistani politicians particularly Mr. Asif Ali Zardari, it is equally applicable to President Obama, his General Stan and others who wield might of the states, institutions and communities. So said the philosopher, [Changed prepositions are mine] “You must be careful about the virtue [including of your own words]. Possessing the virtue will give you the people. Possessing the people will give you territory. Possessing the territory will give you wealth. Possessing the wealth, you will have resources for expenditure.

Virtue is the root, wealth is its branches. If you make the root your secondary object and the branches his first, he will only anger the people and teach them dishonesty. To accumulate power and wealth by arbitrary use of force is the way to disintegrate the people, and its honest use, the way to consolidate the people. Likewise, when your words are not in accord with which is right, they will come back to you in the same way, and the land and people got by improper means will leave you by the same road”. [Nayyar]

General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, talked to SPIEGEL about his new approach to the war, negotiations with the Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

SPIEGEL: General McChrystal, a couple of months ago you said, “Since 9/11, I have watched as America tried to first put out this fire with a hammer, and it doesn’t work.” What did the Americans do wrong in Afghanistan?

McChrystal: At the end of the day, a counter-insurgency is decided by people’s perceptions and by how people feel. I think any war like this is not a battle between materials. It’s not about destroying the enemy’s cities. It’s not even about destroying their army, their fighters. You have to weaken the insurgency. But it’s really about convincing the people that they want it to stop and they ultimately will. The most effective way for us to operate is to be really good and effective partners with our Afghan counterparts, because it’s not a technical problem, it’s a human problem.

SPIEGEL: Your 66-page assessment of the situation in Afghanistan was the basis for US President Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional American soldiers to the country this year, coming on top of the 68,000 which are already there. In your report, you wrote that the situation is serious but doable. Is it doable?

McChrystal: I think it is doable. But it is going to be a significant effort on everybody’s part and it will be very complex. Here is a resilient insurgency with elements of the Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Hekmatyar network that threaten the existence of the state. But there is also a crisis of confidence in the people which comes from expectations that were not met after 2001, regarding development and governance and positive things. Additionally, you have a disappointment in what they have seen from local and national governance and a sense that it’s not a fair system, that they are not getting basic justice. Those two things feed each other.

SPIEGEL: In your assessment you wrote that the key weakness of ISAF is that it doesn’t aggressively defend the Afghan population. This sounds like a big misunderstanding, because in our countries everybody believes the troops are here to protect the Afghans.

McChrystal: The protection of the people is the crucial point. If the coalition comes in and protects the Afghan people from a larger conventional threat with a conventional force, then we could feel we’d been successful. But that is really not the threat to the Afghan people. That comes from shadow governance, night letters (editor’s note: anonymous notices posted by the Taliban), coercion, improvised explosive devices (IEDs). And so the protection they really need, we can’t do in a strictly conventional sense. We can’t do, when we stay on installations and guard ourselves from all harm. We have to be closer and interact with people to do that.

SPIEGEL: Do you mean that the coalition troops need to take bigger risks?

McChrystal: In a counterinsurgency, your security ultimately comes from the people, because they help deny the insurgents support, then they provide you intelligence. Here is the conflict. To protect yourself perfectly, you get behind big forts, you wear body armor and travel in armored vehicles. But then you can’t interact with people. And if you can’t interact with people, the people will not protect you ultimately. If you want to swim, you have to let go of the side of the pool. You have to get in and amongst the people and build that relationship. In the long run you will suffer fewer casualties and you’ll be more successful.

SPIEGEL: Your intelligence chief, Michael Flynn, just came up with a provocative document claiming that US spies in Afghanistan are totally clueless. They only focus on the insurgency, he says, and do not understand the most fundamental questions of people’s lives and their environment. Is he right?

McChrystal: Understanding unconventional warfare is typically understanding the terrain, the physical terrain, and understanding the enemy. In a counter-insurgency the terrain is the people, rather than bridges and hills and forests. You have to understand tribes, leaders and the economic forces at work. Otherwise you can’t deny the insurgency. What General Flynn has pointed out correctly is the fact that we need to widen our understanding. We need to understand how the enemy interacts with the people.

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Source:SPIEGELONLINE International

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No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle

NWFP Senior Minister Bashir Bilour admitted on Saturday that the US private security company Blackwater is present in Pakistan and is operating in the NWFP as well as other areas. Bilour was speaking with the family members of the victims of the bombing in lower Dir in which four children, one Pakistani security officer and three US army trainers were killed.

Chris Floyd

Here’s the way the game works. First you get the outright lie, then later, in dribs and drabs, you get a few, grudging crumbs of the truth.

For example, first you get: “No, there are no Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. None. That’s just a conspiracy theory, terrorist propaganda. These kinds of lies just make it harder for us to do good in the region.” Then later: “Well, yes, we do have Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. But, uh, we don’t actually cut their checks directly in the Pentagon.”

Or what about this more recent example? First: “The United States has no troops in Pakistan. None. We are not going to send troops to Pakistan. That’s just wild talk, a conspiracy theory. And it makes it harder for us to do good in the region.

Then later: “Well, yes, we do have a few troops in Pakistan. All right, a couple hundred. But that’s it. We promise. And they’re just training their counterparts in Pakistan’s military. Oh yeah, and also working alongside paramilitary militias in the frontier regions.

And maybe, you know, following up on some of our drone strikes. That is, our alleged drone strikes, because we are not, as you know, officially admitting that we are carrying out an ever-accelerating campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, although if we were, these strikes would be very surgical, and the hundreds of people who might have been killed in just the past few months by these strikes, if they happened, would have all been vicious savage murdering 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! terrorists.

But other than these 200 troops we have in Pakistan now, we have no troops in Pakistan. Never have. Except, of course, for the 12 American troops who have been killed in, well, battle, in, er, Pakistan since 2001. But that’s it. Look me in the eye; would I lie to you?”

Yes, yet another aspect of what must be the most unsecret secret war in history has been rumbled. American troops are on the ground in Pakistan – and getting killed there. As the world now knows, three American soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing (which also killed six Pakistanis, as if anyone cares) in a remote frontier province in Pakistan this week. The bombing took place in an area that had supposedly been cleared in the savage, swoopstake “counterinsurgency” operations launched by Pakistan at America’s insistence. (Operations which, we were told at the time, had no American involvement whatsoever.)

Yet as the Pakistani paper The News points out, this massive “clearing” operation – which cleared more than a million people from their homes as they fled the fighting – could not stop the insurgents from placing a huge 70kg bomb “in an area that had reportedly been ‘cleared’ and moreover plant it on such a high-profile target that should have been guarded as closely as possible given that ‘foreign visitors’ were on their way. Nobody noticed a 70kg bomb being buried in the road?”

All this might suggest to a cynic that our much-ballyhooed “counterinsurgency doctrines” (and they are indeed treated as holy writ, handed down by St. David Petraeus) are not, perhaps, as entirely effective as they might be – especially considering the vast cost in innocent life they exact, and the hatred and extremism they engender.

Noel Shachtman at Wired has a couple of useful roundups (here and here) on the latest revelations of our sure-enough war in Pakistan. But equally revealing are some of the remarks he passes along from readers, and his own response: exchanges which demonstrate that, sadly, it is not only our elites who are marinated in “a sense of imperial entitlement and dominance” (as we noted here the other day).

Shachtman notes how the new revelations give the glaring lie to the solemn promises made by Obama’s “special envoy” to the region, Richard Holbrooke. Speaking in Brussels last May, Holbrooke declared:

“The heart of the problem for the West is in western Pakistan. But there are not going to be US or NATO troops on the ground in Pakistan. There is a red line for the government of Pakistan and one which we must respect,” he said.

(Parenthetically, isn’t it rather strange that the “heart of the problem” for our militarist mandarins always seems to lie outside the borders of the country they are ravaging? So the “real problem” in Afghanistan lies in Pakistan. And, as we were told repeatedly for years, the “real problem” in Iraq was actually Iran, whose nuke-mad mullahs kept stirring up our lazy, docile darkies in Iraq. Tony Blair stuck to this line, well, religiously in his recent canard-o-rama at the Iraq inquiry in London. It was Iran who caused all our problems in Iraq, he said over and over; in fact, he mentioned Iran 58 times in the course of his testimony, much of which was aimed at fomenting new war fever against Tehran.)

Shachtman also notes the fact that the Americans killed in Pakistan this week were not, by the Pentagon’s own admission, super-duper secret agents, but part of a straightforward “counterinsurgency” program: “a widening war,” as he says, rightly.

Then comes a pushback from various warbloggers. First, the pseudonymous Islamophobe armchair warrior “Rusty Shackleford” (I guess cowardice in the service of virtue is no vice, eh, Rusty?) weighs in:

“Admitting that we have troops on the ground engaged in combat roles would — literally — lead to a civil war in Pakistan. .. It is a catch-22, ironic, and duplicitous: but calling this a war is the same thing as losing it. Me, I’m willing to be called two-faced for sake of winning a war. Those that prefer consistency over victory are misguided.”

This is wilful ignorance with a vengeance. Obviously, Pseudo-Warrior believes that Pakistanis are too stupid to notice foreign troops fighting on their own soil. So as long as we don’t admit “that we have troops on the ground engaged in combat roles,” then those dumb Pakis will never know! Man, that’s some crafty, subtile strategy there.

Shachtman then gives us the views of “Uncle Jimbo” at Blackfive:

It is fair to point out that the ops in Pakistan are more tightly tied to a shooting war than many others, but does that mean we should take them and shine a bunch of bright lights on them? … There is plenty of oversight operating where it belongs in classified briefings… The political environment in Pakistan is delicate as Hell so we properly tread lightly. A bunch of breathless stories about the mere possibility that we are cooperating more w/ Pakistan or that heaven forbid the evil Blackwater mercenaries are helping load drones doesn’t make doing any good there easier… It is smart and a proper use of Special Forces. Now let’s stop making their jobs harder by acting like something nefarious is going on.

Shachtman replies, reasonably, that, as noted, the Pakistanis already know what’s going on in their own country, and that “secrecy is only fueling the paranoia and conspiracy theories — not to mention depriving Americans of their right to know how their blood and treasure is being spent.” Shachtman also, perhaps out of courtesy, refrains from commenting on Jimbo’s touching naiveté that our always wise and competent leaders will provide all the necessary “oversight” in their secret briefings.

But despite this display of common sense, Shachtman feels compelled to establish his own “tough realist” credentials. In response to Jimbo’s claim that telling the truth about the U.S. war in Pakistan “doesn’t make doing any good there easier,” Shachtman hastens to reply:

I hear that. And if this were some other, relatively small-scale SF operation (cough Yemen cough), I’d agree 100%.

And there you have it: the quintessential, unconscious response of the fully marinated modern American. Shachtman is not at all opposed to imperial agents carrying out deadly attacks in foreign lands at peace with the United States. Theprinciple of unlimited violence — the right of America to kill people anytime, anywhere in the world — is never questioned. The only argument that “serious” people can have concerns the application of this principle; i.e., is it in our best interest to killthese people now, or wait until later, or maybe kill some other people instead, or build a few more schools while we’re killing people or — and this is as radical as our “serious” discourse allows — should we even maybe hold off on killing people for just a little while, to let the lesser breeds cool down a bit, and rebuild our busted finances?

As we noted here the other day:

Our elites and their courtiers [and their commentators] literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.

And so these debates between chest-beating militarists and more thoughtful “moderates” over the proper application of imperial violence in foreign lands will go on. Because until the empire is dismantled — until we bring America home — there will be no end to these wars and op and “interventions,” secret, open, two-faced or otherwise. And no end to the blowback of violence and retrogression they produce.

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Source:text: There are no sunglasses Title image: DAWN.COM

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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The Image of the Beast [1 of 3]

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To win the war in Afghanistan, the US has decided that it must attack its closest ally in the war, because allegedly, Pakistan is the state sponsor of the Afghan Taliban.  The Pak Army refuses to fight all the militants in Pakistan at one time, because their numbers are so great and tribal connections run so deep that it would be suicidal.  American leaders claim that such a nationwide Pakistani offensive is the only way that the war can be won.  Pakistan, on the other hand, maintains that the US, India and Israel are the state sponsors of the “Pakistani Taliban” terrorist outfit which is waging war against the people of Pakistan.  Since the United States controls the narrative, the whole world holds Pakistan accountable for all the terrorism in the world, no matter whether it is true or not.

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TILL NOW THE US NARRATIVE ON WAR ON TERROR HAS BEEN THE ONLY ‘TRUTH’ BUT THIS ‘TRUTH’ IS UTTERLY FALSE

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by Peter Chmberlin

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THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MYTH OF PAKISTAN AS A STATE SPONSORING TALIBAN & TERRORISM

Up until now, the United States has been able to exert control over most of the earth just by controlling the narrative that reflects popular opinion about the war on terror.  Whatever government spokesmen or reporters have said happened on a particular day, was what really happened; it was validated by popular consent.  The ability to shape people’s thoughts and opinions is a power that every tyrant has dreamed about.  Global trust in the good intentions of the people of the United States moves individuals and entire nations to give American leaders the benefit of the doubt, even when common sense cautions against it.

Image of the Beast [2 o 3]

Until now, researchers have consistently charged that the Pakistani Taliban were sponsored by India and Israel, but have had nothing to prove this other than photosof tons of Indian / Israeli / American arms.  The following from Summer Offensive Report reinforces those charges: “The summer offensive includes establishment of 57 training camps in Occupied Kashmir, East Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Assam to train and launch terrorists inside Pakistan. Trainees are generally drawn from the Indian hatched dissident groups of Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), Jiye Sindh Mohaz (JSM), Jiye Sindh Students Federation (JSF) and Balochi nationalists and other nationalist groups from various parts of Sindh, Balochistan and Tribal Areas.

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INDIA BECOMES PART OF THE US NARRATIVE ON WAR ON TERROR IN PAKISTAN

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by Peter Chamberlin

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CIA, MOSSAD & RAW: MASTERMINDS BEHIND TEHRIK-E-TALIBAN PAKISTAN [TTP]

The guided missile attack that killed Nek set in motion the events that would bring Baitullah Mehsud to power. He inherited a ready-made army from his cousin Abdullah Mehsud, which formed the hardcore Uzbek center of the TTP.  After his sudden release from Guantanamo to Afghanistan in 2002, Abdullah suddenly amassed thousands of Uzbek and Northern Alliance fighters and became endowed with millions of dollars in cash and tons of the most advanced weapons.

Image of the Beast [3 of 3]

The entire Wana-centric destabilization plan can be seen in the so-called Tehreek Taliban Pakistani movement, the Punjabi-Taliban influence and the leadership succession.  In addition, it traces the roots of the entire “Islamist” psyop that grew from CIA / ISI operations against the Soviets and the Iranians.  Anti-Shia sectarian terror outfits were formed in Pakistan, then sent into Afghanistan, where they slaughtered both Soviets and Shiites.  After the Soviet defeat, they turned against the Iranian-sponsored Northern Alliance troops, before being fought to a standstill by the forces of legendary rebel leader Ahmed Shah Mahsoud. (Mahsoud was eliminated by a suicide bomber on September 10, 2001, his forces taken over by Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum with the aid of one Amrullah Saleh, who is now the head of the Afghan secret police (NDS) and might be working for Iran.)

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A COVERT INDO-AMERICAN WAR UPON THE PEOPLE OF PAKISTAN!

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by Peter Chamberlin

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CONSPIRACY THEORY IS NO MORE A THEORY NOW

As expected the incident created headlines all around and culprits not being found created a widespread indignation. This was shortly followed by the firing of hundreds of small rockets at gas installation in Sui on 7 January 2005 which put a hole in the supply of gas to the rest of the country for an entire week.

Starting March 2007…, the numbers of ‘Pakistani Taliban’ in Swat surged and just their ammunition and their military hardware did. Some of this hardware was more advanced to what the Pakistani soldiers used.

A portion of this military hardware ended up in the ill-fated Lal Masjid. While intelligence and military were busy keeping Musharraf’s seat safe in Pakistan, a new political game started in the UAE.

Rehman Malik enthusiastically started pursuing the goal of National Reconciliation Ordinance. He became instrumental in the final deal between Benazir Bhutto, US and Pervez Musharraf and NRO.

Near the end of 2007, the intelligence and the military were convinced that a conspiracy had been hatched in the country with the sole aim of removing Musharraf from power.

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, simultaneous riots throughout the country, terrorist activities occurring in every province, all of this had considerable similarities to the Bush Administration-backed Color Revolutions. In order to keep Musharraf in power the government kept giving into one demand after the other. As a result Rehman Malik becomes head of Interior Ministry, Yusuf Raza Gilani becomes the Prime Minister of Pakistan and sweeping changes are made in the security and intelligence community. Still, the government saw the war finally over when in one move Gilani puts ISI under the Interior Minister on 27 July 2008.

The entire Wana-centric destabilization plan can be seen in the so-called Tehreek Taliban Pakistani movement, the Punjabi-Taliban influence and the leadership succession.  In addition, it traces the roots of the entire “Islamist” psyop that grew from CIA / ISI operations against the Soviets and the Iranians.  Anti-Shia sectarian terror outfits were formed in Pakistan, then sent into Afghanistan, where they slaughtered both Soviets and Shiites.  After the Soviet defeat, they turned against the Iranian-sponsored Northern Alliance troops, before being fought to a standstill by the forces of legendary rebel leader Ahmed Shah Mahsoud. (Mahsoud was eliminated by a suicide bomber on September 10, 2001, his forces taken over by Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum with the aid of one Amrullah Saleh, who is now the head of the Afghan secret police (NDS) and might be working for Iran.)

In ’07 the British operation in Helmand, Afghanistan, which had been centered around recruiting the brother of militant Mullah Dadullah, Mansoor was merged with the Indian / American / Israeli hotbed of terrorism in S. Waziristan. Baitullah was promoted to top dog in the militant hierarchy, as Benazir Bhutto was killed and Mansoor Dadullah took the blame. The Afghan Taliban transferred Dadullah’s forces to Mehsud, conferring legitimacy upon the operation, Mullah Omar not yet realizing that Baitullah was really anti-Taliban.

FAZLULLAH: THE TTP’S DISC JOCKEY IN SWAT

Mehsud’s Swat operation under radical disc jockey, Mullah Fazlullah, was the opening front of the Wana-trained forces against the Pakistani Army.  It is no coincidence that there was not a single Predator attack against Fazlullah’s forces, and all drone attacks from that point on were against Baitullah Mehsud’s main adversary, Mullah Nazir in Wana. Nazir was the head of the Pak Army supported tribal lashkars who had run the Uzbeks of Mehsud out of Wana.

In 2008 Bush signed a secret order authorizing operations inside Pakistan and the Pakistani Army secretly acquiesced to American Predator show attacks upon former Guantanamo alumni.  This provided a means to keep up the show for the American audience.  It also opened the door to covert commando strikes in conjunction with action by the Pakistani Taliban.

The rest is history.  On August 6, 2009, Baitullah Mehsud was mistakenly killed by an American guided missile, tracking a Pakistani-planted transmitter.  It is likely that the CIA was tricked into killing Pakistan’s primary enemy. Ten days later, the tribal rival of Mehsud, Maulvi Nazir, who very likely had planted the tracking device,  is killed by black-clad Special Forces type commandoes near Wana; probably payback from the United States.

THE COVERT INDO-AMERICAN WAR ON THE PEOPLE OF PAKISTAN

The “AfPak” zone of conflict is a land of smoke and mirrors intended to put-on a show and simultaneously obscure the action on the ground.  Beginning in 2007, the action obscured was a covert Indian / American war upon the people of Pakistan.

All the usual voices will chime in here, saying—“We didn’t create al Qaida; we didn’t sponsor Abdullah Mehsud, or Baitullah; we don’t create terrorists”!  No matter how much they yell, the truth remains to be seen in these militants and their actions.  After his release from Guantanamo, Abdullah Mehsud did not kidnap or kill Americans; he went straight after America’s greatest competitor, the Chinese.  Likewise, in the case of Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, the leader of “al Qaida in Iraq,” after his release from Jordanian prison, his victims were usually Iraqi Shiites, not Americans.  After being captured, abused and then released, both of these guys went after our enemies, no matter what the press has reported otherwise.  Were they brainwashed, “Manchurian candidates,” or were they merely paid-off?   US Rep. Mark Kirkhas raised the issue that most of the militant leaders in southern Afghanistan were formerly held at Guantanamo and Bagram.  Is that also a coincidence, or by design?  “Islamists” are primarily a product of the intelligence agencies.

American / Israeli / Indian / Iranian / British hands are all extremely dirty after taking a walk on Dick Cheney’s “dark side” in Pakistan and they owe a heavy penalty to both Pakistan and Afghanistan for what they have done there.  It is high time to drag all the spooks out of their closets and air their dirty linen to the world.  Only such a complete CIA housecleaning as this will redeem the United States of America in the eyes of the world.  Anything less would do no good at all, and would also be a grave insult to those who have fallen in our poisonous shadow.

Concluded.

Previous 1  2 3 

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The writer is editor of the blog There are no sun glasses. He can be reached via email: peter.chamberlin@hotmail.com

Source

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An Intolerant Society

Women weep for relatives, who were killed in the attack on a bus travelling to a religious procession, during their funeral in Karachi February 6, 2010. – Photo by Reuters.

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Huma Yusuf

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Coming on the heels of the Ashura tragedy, the two blasts in Karachi on Friday are a reminder that sectarian violence poses one of the greatest threats to Pakistani society. Well over 4,000 people have been killed in the past two decades in sectarian — involving primarily Shias and Sunnis — violence.

Although no group has claimed responsibility for Friday’s attacks, fingers are pointing at banned sectarian outfits such as Jundullah and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. No doubt, radicalised militants are behind the kinds of anti-Shia attacks we saw on Dec 28, and again on Friday. But the time has come to put sectarian violence in a broader perspective.

Such violence can no longer be denounced as the work of fringe elements, an accident of history or politics. Instead, it must be recognised as a symptom of an increasingly intolerant and divisive society.

Indeed, intolerance is very much a characteristic of Pakistani society, a fact obvious to anyone who follows the media. Take, for instance, the highly sensationalised, racist jibe at Senator Babar Ghauri by Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf chief Imran Khan. Khan resorted to racism as a response to Ghauri’s accusation that he had an illegitimate child. But the ease with which he opted for the race card — and the resounding applause that met his comment — indicates that intolerance is thriving here.

Khan’s one-off insult cannot, however, compare with the consistent intolerance preached by other prominent personalities. Pakistani bloggers have made much of self-proclaimed strategic analyst Zaid Hamid’s Wake Up Pakistan campaign, which is explicitly anti-India. Although the campaign calls for an “ideological revolution” that restores the Muslim identity of the Pakistani state, Hamid’s dream of Radio Pakistan broadcasting from New Delhi has come to symbolise the no-compromises attitude of this particular movement.

Meanwhile, Pakistani grievances against US government policies such as escalating drone attacks and the use of private security firms may be justified. But anti-Americanism is slowly becoming conflated with anti-white sentiments: local websites, for example, publish photographs of any white person spotted here, identifying them as Blackwater or CIA agents.

Similarly, in the last year or so, public disdain for the Taliban has been expressed through discriminatory attitudes towards all Pushto-speaking people, who are being pushed out of jobs and increasingly find themselves the victims of arbitrary arrests and harassment.

Returning to a religious context, there is no shortage of examples of intolerance. Sunni-Shia sectarian violence seems to be on the rise in Karachi. Religious parties and the opposition PML-N hushed up calls for the repeal of the controversial blasphemy laws — long identified as anti-minority — after eight Christians were killed in Gojra last year. In September 2008, popular televangelist Aamir Liaquat declared that Islam sanctioned the murder of Ahmadis. Subsequently, at least two Ahmadis were murdered in cold blood. Need one go on?

The government has fuelled this widespread intolerance by employing vague terminology and heaping all the country’s problems on ‘non-state actors’ and ‘foreign elements’. This language has perpetuated a belief in an amorphous, elusive enemy that is defined by one characteristic alone: not being Pakistani. This allows anyone who believes they can define the traits of a Pakistani (increasingly synonymous with Sunni Muslim) to fill in the vague outline of the enemy with that which is considered the ‘other’: Hindu, American, Israeli, Shia, Ahmadi, Christian, Sikh.

And this practice is no longer confined to political, extremist or media circles: the trend is proliferating among Pakistan’s urban, educated middle classes. Just this week, I heard of two incidents that betray the extent of xenophobia and religious intolerance in our society. After an intense medical examination, a friend was using yogic breathing to compose herself when another patient in the waiting room asked her contemptuously if she were Hindu.

Across town, incidentally in another hospital waiting room, an aunt decided to say her prayers. When she was done, a woman spitefully asked her if she belonged to the Ahmadi community. When she responded that she was not, the woman asked, “how can you not be, if you pray with nail polish on?”

In other words, we now live in a society in which any evidence of divergent beliefs or differing practices invites judgment. Rather than embrace diversity and pluralism, or respect people’s personal choices, we are becoming a people who label, despise and even attack that which is deemed to be variant.

A 2005 International Crisis Group report concluded “sectarian conflict in Pakistan is the direct consequence of state policies of Islamisation and marginalisation of secular democratic forces”. But, as the above examples suggest, sectarianism and other forms of intolerance have gone well beyond the political realm, and are now in danger of becoming social norms.

Indeed, a January 2010 report by the Legatum Institute, a London-based think tank, argues that Pakistani society will become more Islamist in the coming years. The report says that religious parties will not win more votes, but will exercise more ‘soft power’ through participation in political coalitions. This power will manifest itself in a move towards ‘Islamic values’, which will be articulated in increasingly conservative and intolerant legislatures; for example, Sharia-compliant laws to govern the banking system, limited women’s participation in the public sphere, public displays of piety, and the further marginalisation of minorities.

This means that the horrors Karachi saw on Friday, and that the country has grappled with for decades, will no longer be the extreme activities of militant groups — they will be an expression of public sentiment. We can already see how incitement to hatred is a prerequisite for representing Pakistanis, while religiously, racially and ethnically motivated violence is becoming intertwined with nationalism.

If our politicians, public figures and media personalities do not make a concerted effort to preach and practise tolerance, Pakistan will continue to head down an explosive path.

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Writer can be reached at huma.yusuf@gmail.com

Source: DAWN.COM Cross posted at: There are no sunglasses

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Fighting traitors in Nepal

History of Indian Conspiracy

Unless the traitors and corrupt leaders dominating the big parties in Nepal are chased, democracy and nationalism in this country will not be secured.

Dirgha Raj Prasai

Nepal is a landlocked nation. It borders China in the north and India in the south. Defending its sovereign identity from two giant neighbours should be Nepal’s nationalistic strategy. However, an unfortunate fact of our nation’s history is that majority of our political leaders are Indian agents. So from such leaders, it would be worthless to expect that they will save our nationality and independence. Unless the traitors and corrupt leaders dominating the national political parties (Congress, UML, and Maoists) are chased, democracy and nationalism here will not be secured.

THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY IN NEPAL

But it doesn’t mean that we should follow Indian diktat and perish Nepal’s identity as an independent, sovereign nation. Nepal’s nationality is defined to maintain balanced bilateral diplomatic ties with both her giant neighbours i.e. China and India and these are to be based on democracy and her national pride. Cordial people to people, brotherly relations between Nepal and India have existed since ancient times. We have to have friendly relations with India also because of our identical cultural and religious traditions.

But sadly India’s congress party, ever since it came to power, has been striving to destabilize Nepal. Through its intelligence agency ‘RAW’, India, has been found involved in destabilizing our national identities [royal institution, a Hindu Kingdom and our national language], which were developed along with the ideology of national unity, security and national integrity. In sync with India’s policy under congress governments, now RAW through its agents in the Nepali Congress, UML and Maoist parties, is pressing Nepal for a union of autonomous federal states on communal basis.

PERILS OF OPEN DOOR POLICY

Due to the open borders, India has always been masterminding strategies to keep Nepal under her direct influence. Through continuous interventions, her assistance and supports have turned into a curse for us. 58 years ago, in the name of helping Nepal in establishing democracy, she endorsed an unequal treaty in July, 1950. They urged upon the then rulers in Nepal, the Ranas, to likewise endorse this treaty and in return were promised of India’s continued support for their regime. Four months later, it maneuvered in such a way to make King Tribhuvan’s escape to New Delhi, and to keep Nepal under India’s influence through another instrument – the Delhi Agreement. Some points in the agreement, however, were endorsed without the knowledge of the King.

[Right: The clauses entered in the Indo Nepal treaty 1950 reveal how the game on chessboard of politics was played in Delhi, culminating in an instrument which clearly shows ‘who was (is) the king and who was (is) the pawn’. No wonder Nepal’s mainstream politicians demand a revision of this treaty, which they want on equitable basis].

In accordance with this agreement Nepali Army personnel were stationed at the gate of the Royal Palace and India’s Panjabi army personnel were stationed inside the palace ‘for the security’ of the King. An Indian national, Govinda Narayan Singh was assigned as chief secretary to the King. Another Indian national Murdeshwor was appointed the chief secretary of the council of ministers. Then a third person, again of Indian nationality named Angkor was appointed as Nepal’s legal advisor.

And above all an Indian army general Sharadanandan Singh was kept at the Nepali Army’s general headquarters. In name of reforming the army, the number of soldiers was reduced from 18000 to 8000. In the name of security of Nepal, an Indian army check-post was established inside Nepal which was located in the northern border. Though Nepali nationalist forces moved against Indian intervention, but the intervention continued unabated.

TO KEEP UP HIS PEOPLE’S ASPIRATIONS, KING MAHENDRA ASKED INDIAN FORCES TO LEAVE NEPAL

In 1969 the patriotic King Mahendra on following a policy to enhance country’s national identity asked the Indian forces to leave Nepal without any condition. India could not oppose this request as Nepal had by now already established ties with China and various other nations around the globe.

Yet in 1988 India initiated economic blockade of Nepal causing much suffering to the people. In the meantime, India also reached out power hungry and demoralized political leaders of Nepal to initiate an uprising in this country. Indians tried to threaten the then King Birendra through that India sponsored uprising so as to bring Nepal under the Indian strong hand. The Indian designs were to control Nepal’s foreign policy and security. But it failed. In 2006 India again made an effort to trick King Gyanendra into suppressing the uprising by giving various assurances.

But the King did not vow into Indian urges. One wonders how the Nepali people residing in the country and abroad tolerated this. Even Americans as well as certain representatives from the United Nation were involved in the Indian conspiracies against Nepal. Despite her machinations, when India found it was impossible to bring the Nepali King under her thumb, she attempted to remove the 260 year old historical institution of monarchy forever. Americans and the UN representatives equally contributed to the Indian endeavors to bring success to this conspiracy.

THE FOLLY OF FEDERAL RESTRUCTURING

Having ultimately succeed in its conspiracy, India is now trying to disintegrate Nepal by separating Tarai as ‘Madhes state’ and power hungry leaders in the Nepali Congress, UML, Maoist and Tarai are serving the vested Indian interests. In the long run, however, the Indian plan is going to be as much counterproductive for India as it is now for Nepal. If Indian leadership thinks that by disintegrating Nepal, it would succeed in its designs, then they should know that this plan could be very costly for India as well. The Indian Congress shouldn’t forget that due to RAW’s naked conspiracies, the angry Panjabi and Sri Lankans killed Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Why were the Indian agents and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman (who was later installed as the Bangladeshi president by ‘RAW’ after creation of Bangladesh by vivisection of Pakistan in Dec. 1971) killed? The Indian Congress should also not forget the act of nationalist Bengalese against the disgusting conspiracy by ‘RAW’. Similarly the Nepali patriots living abroad and in the country will not keep on tolerating the continued interventions by India.

The Indian agenda to destroy Nepal continues: the Constituent Assembly elections were conducted for 601 seats. India is active to disintegrate Nepal by fomenting such issues as anti-nationalist policy of a republic under Indian hegemony, secularism, federalism and caste-based ethnic autonomy for which it is using the pro-Indian elements in the CA.

The Shah Kings always fought with imperialist forces to protect modern Nepal. They have still not bowed before the foreigners’ interventions. Nepal’s royal institution is the backbone of nationality. King Gyanendra has taught a lesson to his opponents by renouncing the Narayanhiti Royal Palace and by denying to take shelter in a foreign land. It is now the duty of the nationalists within the political parties and all Nepali people to maintain Nepal’s pride by establishing their royal institution for generations to come. Nepali people should be ready to offer sacrifices through their blood for continuation of their monarchy, which through centuries has been a symbol of their nationality.

LONG LIVE THE INDEPENDENT SOVEREIGN STATE OF NEPAL

No wonder now, the Nepali nationalism is now blooming and the aroma of Nepali culture is permeating worldwide. Our nation is small, but in spite of that; it is home to various castes. Nepal, is blessed by Mother Nature with natural and cultural uniqueness, and it is the symbol of joint efforts between the King and his people on our nation building. Our nationalism cannot be safeguarded if any of the castes or the royal institution is suppressed. Nepal has adopted a common culture as nationalism through agreement between different castes and tribes. Nepali culture is a beautiful blend of Hindu, Vedic and Buddhism subcultures & identities. Our culture is the best one in term of tolerance. Nepali language is established as a common language to keep over 50 mother languages alive. Nepalis will not back off from giving their lives for their motherland to save the norms, identity and Nepali way of life.

We nationalists should follow the model of Bangladesh nationalists like they did in 1975. This is the time to save our nation from Nepal turning into another Sikkim, save Nepal against foreign intervention, and to fight against anti-nationalist, corrupt elements so that we can raise our heads with pride and lead Nepal to its destiny as a heaven on earth.

Image Source: TelegraphNepal.com/

The writer Dirgha Raj Prasai is a former Member of Parliament, a Political and Cultural Analyst. He can be reached via  Email:dirgharajprasai@gmail.com

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American defends Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

COURT PROCEEDINGS AGAINST DR. AAFIA SIDDIQUI

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Salute to this US citizen [who along with millions of others like him in the US] restores our faith in the basic goodness of the American people and all peoples. Pakistanis never doubted for once this fact despite the info war that some in Washington have unleashed against us, scaring the Americans about Pakistan and its people; spreading anti-Pakistanism inside the US and worldwide.

Elements within the US government and the mainstream US media continue to demonize Pakistan and spread alarm about Pakistanis. The US authorities continue putting innocent Pakistanis into prison on trumped up charges. So does Britain, and their new found friend and partner in South Asia where some 800 Pakistanis rot in jail without trial and with a proven track record of extreme torture.

This video from a US citizen is also a message to the handful of pro-US defeatists sitting in the Pakistani government, who speak Washington’s language, and to the few journalists in some corners of the Pakistani media who are in the ‘Good Guys’ list prepared by the US Embassy in Islamabad.

’Good Guys’ of course being anyone who agrees to peddle US propaganda in order to please US representatives in Pakistan.

Dr. Siddiqui might not be perfect, we know. She might have held extreme views, could be. And might have sought to mingle with men wanted by law, but she symbolizes the humiliating treatment meted out to Pakistanis – by their own government and by allied governments in the US and the UK – during the course of the past eight years.

[Here now a note to WoP readers from Pakistan: Above video is a representation of fair minded people in the United States who frequently voice their opinions in the free media as well as at different other forums available to them. There are so many friends of mine too, some highly reputed minds in the US free media who oppose the hegemonic trends in the US administrations’ policies.

Unfortunately many people in Pakistan start equating the policies of Washington’s neocons with those of America which is contrary to the fact. As a matter of fact people around the world are nice people. It’s only the realpolitikers in the ruling elites / establishments of US and other states /countries who steer a wrong course [wrong though for the people but perfectly suits the vested interests of their respective establishments, the present setup in Pakistan being no exception either].

So while condemning the attitudes and policies of the US neocons, we should never forget that by and large America is a country that inhabits, apart from the neocons, millions of good and fair minded US citizens as well. Nayyar]

Note The first part of this post has been contributed by the Lounge.

Related Posts: 1. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s Crime? 2. More Arrests in America`s War on Islam 3. The Truth about US Justice

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The Truth about US Justice

[Left: Dr Aafia Siddiqui, photographed at the graduation ceremony as she is awarded the Ph.D. in neurosciences from Brandeis, one of America’s top ten universities].

Yvonne Ridley

Many of us are still in a state of shock over the guilty verdict returned on Dr Aafia Siddiqui.

The response from the people of Pakistan was predictable and overwhelming and I salute their spontaneous actions.

From Peshawar to Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and beyond they marched in their thousands demanding the return of Aafia.

Even some of the US media expressed discomfort over the verdict returned by the jurors … there was a general feeling that something was not right.

Everyone had something to say, everyone that is except the usually verbose US Ambassador Anne Patterson who has spent the last two years briefing against Dr. Aafia and her supporters.

This is the same woman [Anne Petterson] who claimed I was a fantasist when I gave a press conference with Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Imran Khan back in July 2008, revealing the plight of a female prisoner in Bagram called the Grey Lady.

She said I was talking nonsense and stated categorically that the prisoner I referred to as “650” did not exist.

By the end of the month she changed her story and said there had been a female prisoner but that she was most definitely not Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.

By that time Aafia had been gunned down at virtually point blank range in an Afghan prison cell jammed full of more than a dozen US soldiers, FBI agents and Afghan police.

Her Excellency briefed the media that the prisoner had wrested an M4 gun from one soldier and fired off two rounds and had to be subdued. The fact these bullets failed to hit a single person in the cell and simply disappeared did not resonate with the diplomat.

In a letter dripping in untruths on August 16^th 2008 she decried the “erroneous and irresponsible media reports regarding the arrest of Ms
 Aafia Siddiqui”. She went on to say: “Unfortunately, 
there are some who have an interest in simply distorting the facts in an effort to manipulate and inflame public opinion. The truth is never served by sensationalism…”

When Jamaat-e-Islami invited me on a national tour of Pakistan to address people about the continued abuse of Dr. Aafia and the truth about her incarceration in Bagram, the US Ambassador continued to issue rebuttals.

She assured us all that Dr. Aafia was being treated humanely, had been given consular access as set out in international law … hmm. Well I have a challenge for Ms Patterson today. I challenge her to repeat every single word she said back then and swear it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

As Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s trial got underway, the US Ambassador and some of her stooges from the intelligence world laid on a lavish party at the US Embassy in Islamabad for some hand-picked journalists where I’ve no doubt in between the dancing, drinks and music they were carefully briefed about the so-called facts of the case.

Interesting that some of the potentially incriminating pictures taken at the private party managed to find the Ambassador was probably hoping to minimize the impact the trial would have on the streets of Pakistan proving that, for the years she has been holed up and barricaded behind concrete bunkers and barbed wire, she has learned nothing about this great country of Pakistan or its people.

From Peshawar to Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and beyond they marched in their thousands demanding the return of Aafia.

One astute Pakistani columnist wrote about her: “The respected lady seems to have forgotten the words of her own country’s 16th president Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865): “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”.

And the people of Pakistan proved they are nobody’s fool and responded to the guilty verdict in New York in an appropriate way.

When injustice is the law it is the duty of everyone to rise up and challenge that injustice in any way possible.

The response – so far – has been restrained and measured but it is just the start. A sentence has yet to be delivered by Judge Richard Berman in May.

Of course there has been a great deal of finger pointing and blame towards the jury in New York who found Dr. Aafia guilty of attempted murder..

[Right: Dr. Aafia Siddiqui in US custody, US FBI circulated this photo of  Dr. Aafia as a proclaimed offender i.e. a terrorist belonging to Al-Qaeda].

Observers asked how they could ignore the science and the irrefutable facts … there was absolutely no evidence linking Dr. Aafia to the gun, no bullets, no residue from firing it.

But I really don’t think we can blame the jurors for the verdict – you see the jury simply could not handle the truth.    Had they taken the logical route and gone for the science and the hard, cold, clinical facts it would have meant two things.  It would have meant around eight US soldiers took the oath and lied in court to save their own skins and careers or it would have meant that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was telling the truth.

And, as I said before, the jury couldn’t handle the truth. Because that would have meant that the defendant really had been kidnapped, abused, tortured and held in dark, secret prisons by the US before being shot and put on a rendition flight to New York. It would have meant that her three children – two of them US citizens – would also have been kidnapped, abused and tortured by the US.

They say ignorance is bliss and this jury so desperately wanted not to believe that the US could have had a hand in the kidnapping of a five-month -old baby boy, a five-year-old girl and her seven-year-old brother.

They couldn’t handle the truth … it is as simple as that.

Well I, and many others across the world like me, can’t handle any more lies. America’s reputation is lying in the lowest gutters in Pakistan at the moment and it can’t sink any lower.

The trust has gone, there is only a burning hatred and resentment towards a superpower which sends unmanned drones into villages to slaughter innocents.

It is fair to say that America’s goodwill and credibility is all but washed up with most honest, decent citizens of Pakistan.

And I think even Her Excellency Anne Patterson recognizes that fact which is why she is now keeping her mouth shut.

If she has any integrity and any self respect left she should stand before the people of Pakistan and ask for their forgiveness for the drone murders, the extra judicial killings, the black operations, the kidnapping, torture and rendition of its citizens, the water-boarding, the bribery, the corruption and, not least of all, the injustice handed out to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her family.

She should then pick up the phone to the US President and tell him to release Aafia and return Pakistan’s most loved, respected and famous daughter and reunite her with the two children who are still missing.

Then she should re-read her letter of August 16, 2008 and write another … one of resignation.

_______________

* Yvonne Ridley is a patron of Cage prisoners which first brought the plight of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to the world’s attention shortly after her kidnap in March 2003. The award-winning, investigative journalist also co-produced the documentary In Search of Prisoner 650 with film-maker Hassan al Banna Ghani which concluded that the Grey Lady of Bagram was Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.

Source: text: There are no sunglasses

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Spending America into ruin

One of history’s most important lessons is that politicians should never be given a free hand to borrow money to cover the costs of wars, overseas adventures, or military spending.

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SPENDING AMERICA

INTO RUIN

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Eric Margolis

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One of history’s most important lessons is that politicians should never be given a free hand to borrow money to cover the costs of wars, overseas adventures, or military spending.

More empires have been brought down by reckless spending than by invaders. The late Soviet Union, which wrecked its economy by buying too many tanks, is the most recent example. Now, the United States appears headed in the same direction.

Even so, President Barack Obama calls the US $3.8 trillion budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America’s economic health.

In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug of debt.

Washington’s deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion this

year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, which the US already owes $1.5 trillion. The United States has put its fate in the hands of two nations who bear it little good will.

Debt service will cost Washington $250 billion, and may reach over a third of the total Federal budget within the next decade. Washington is still paying for past wars while considering starting a new one against Iran.

To understand the immensity of one trillion dollars, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today.

Obama’s total proposed annual military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret `black programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan (including bribes); 225,000 military `contractors’ (mercenaries and workers); and veteran’s costs. Add $75 billion (nearly 2.5 times France’s total defense budget) for 16 poorly functioning intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees who keep tripping over one another.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far), will cost $200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and indirect expenses. Obama’s Afghan `surge’ of 30,000 new troops will cost an additional $33 billion - more than Germany’s total defense budget.

These figures do not account for wear and tear on US military equipment, costs of reconfiguring the US military to wage colonial wars in the Third World, or the cost of replacing worn-out equipment.   Pentagon bookkeeping is about as flexible as Enron’s bookkeeping.

No wonder US defense stocks rose after Peace Laureate Obama’s `austerity’ budget.

Military and intelligence spending relentlessly increase as the official unemployment figure hovers near 10% and the economy bleeds red ink. Some estimates put real unemployment at over 20%.

America has become the Sick Man of the Western World, an economic cripple like the defunct Ottoman Empire whose inept financial management was legendary.

The Pentagon colossus now accounts for half of total world military spending. Add America’s rich NATO allies and Japan, and the figure reaches 75%.

China and Russia combined spend only a paltry 10% of US on defense.

There are 750 US military bases in 50 nations and 255,000 service members stationed abroad, 116,000 in Europe, nearly 100,000 in Japan and South Korea.  President George W. Bush doubled military spending – much of which accrues to Republican states – to wage his faux war on terror.

Military spending gobbles up 19% of federal spending and at least 44% of tax revenues. America is on a permanent war footing. Many Americans believe the president’s primary role is as a war leader rather than chief executive of the republic.

Like Bush, President Barack Obama is paying for America’s wars through supplemental authorizations – i.e. putting them on the nation’s already maxed out credit card.  Wage war now – pay later. Future generations will be stuck with the bill.

This presidential and congressional jiggery-pokery is the height of public dishonesty.

America’s wars ought to be paid for through taxes, not bookkeeping fraud. If US taxpayers had to actually pay for the Afghan and Iraq wars, these conflicts would end in short order.

America needs a fair, honest war tax. But hardly any politicians – save the courageous and honest Rep. Ron Paul – dare admit this hard truth.

The US has clearly reached the point of imperial overreach. Military spending and debt servicing are cannibalizing the US economy, the real basis of its world power.   Besides the late USSR, the US also increasingly resembles the dying British Empire in 1945, crushed by immense debts incurred to wage WWII, unable to continue financing or defending the imperium, yet still imbued with imperial pretensions.

It is increasingly clear the president is either not in control of America’s runaway military juggernaut, or working with it.

Sixty years ago, the great President Dwight Eisenhower, whose portrait I keep by my desk, warned Americans to beware of the military-industrial complex.   Six decades later, partisans of permanent war, fear-mongering,   and world domination have joined Wall Street’s money lenders to put America into thrall.

Increasing numbers of Americans are rightly outraged and fearful of runaway deficits. But many do not understand their political leaders are also spending their nation into ruin through unnecessary foreign wars and a vainglorious attempt to control much of the globe -what neocons call `full spectrum dominance’ – using the canard of terrorism to justify an imperial policy that often closely resembles that of the old British Empire.

If Obama were really serious about restoring America’s economic health, he would demand military spending be slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars,  and break up the nation’s five giant Frankenbanks that now control 40% of all deposits.

But the president won’t, of course, and neither will Congress. They would rather see the nation go over the financial falls rather than change course.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

—

Source

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Will the democratic war president really end the war?

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OPTIONS FOR INDIA

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Shekhar Gupta

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The talk among global leaders now is all about “exiting”. Except this is not about exiting from the economic stimulus packages governments unveiled in the 2008-9 downturn. It is about exiting from Afghanistan, or more accurately, the Af-Pak quicksand.

This question overshadowed the minds, and discussions, at two global meetings of top leaders last week, the Afghanistan conference in London and the World Economic Forum in Davos. On all evidence, it would now be safe to conclude that the big powers have decided in principle on the issue of whether to exit or not. The questions that now remain are, when, and how. Public opinion in Britain and even in the US is tiring of the war. Clearer indication of this came from a statement made by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband at the London conference that this war had already gone on longer than World War II. So the implication is, it cannot become just a war without end or purpose. So time has come to fix “realistic” targets and objectives or, rather, devise a new definition of victory.

This is what India needs to think and worry about. More importantly, we now have to start thinking about the sequence of events that may unfold as the US-led forces fight, talk, negotiate and bribe their way out of Afghanistan.

The clearest indication that they had thrown in the towel already came in the London conference when an idea so far whispered in off-record briefings was stated publicly: the need to find “good” Taliban to share power with. Even Hamid Karzai was made to endorse it. Nobody was talking of winning that “war” any more, but only of bringing it to a stage where a large “moderate” section of the Taliban can be persuaded to break rank and agree to a power-sharing arrangement. Of course, the funniest moment in that conference was Karzai announcing with a straight face that the Americans will now help him fight corruption in his country.

Theoretically, there are four ways Obama could begin his withdrawal middle of next year, or maybe a little later, but in this presidential term for sure:

* With a clear-cut military victory with the annihilation of the Taliban and the ceding of all Pashtun loyalty to a West-supported government in Kabul. This is a near impossibility given the military realities and tribal divisions. More importantly, this is an outcome that suits Pakistan least of all, and they will ensure it does not come to pass. Also, the modern history of big-power military expeditions tells you that such decisive military-political outcomes are impossible.

* With a total defeat for the US-led forces and a humiliating retreat as in the case of Vietnam. This is an impossibility too. Military realities of Afghanistan are very different from Vietnam where the Soviet-Chinese bloc was actively aiding the Viet Cong and where, even domestically in the US, the justification of terrorist threat was not available. That war was purely ideological. This is also about self-preservation.

* A withdrawal after a division of Afghanistan, much on the pattern of the Koreas, leaving the south-eastern, mostly Pashtun regions under a different, Talibanised local leadership “supervised” by Pakistan, and securing the rest with a friendly regime of the northern tribes. This would have been a possibility if the Americans were sure of the Pakistanis being able to keep this Pashtun government in control. Chances are even the Pakistanis will fear this as a Pashtun government in Kandahar would make their hold on their own Frontier districts untenable.

* The fourth scenario is the Americans being able to declare some kind of a victory and get out, leaving power to a friendly and “protected” government in Kabul much on the pattern of Iraq. This is the most likely and, from the Western powers’ point of view, the most desirable of all prospects. But it can only be achieved in collaboration with Pakistan. The Pakistanis will have to help broker some kind of peace, and a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban that promises, besides other things, that their territories will no longer be available to Al Qaeda. The signals from policy-makers in both London and Davos last week were clear: a new thrust was now being launched to reach this outcome. This was no longer going to be a military war to the finish.

This is what India has to prepare for, and there is no time to lose. In the course of a war that has gone longer than World War II already, while we have harped non-stop on the dangers next door, we have also become complacent. This is the kind of smug complacence that sets in when, to use an Americanism, you know that there is a fire tender parked permanently next to your door. Translated, it means, yes, there is trouble in the Pak-Afghan region but the Americans and their drones are dealing with it so we can wait and watch. This is going to change soon.

Even the progress to that outcome will challenge us. As Pakistan’s role in such a “settlement” becomes more pronounced, it is bound to pressure its Western allies to lean on India to “resolve” the Kashmir issue as well.

Already, frustrated at their failure to control terrorism, many Western leaders are whispering that Kashmir too is a major cause of pan-Islamic radicalisation. As their own notion of military non-success (if not defeat) in Af-Pak grows, they will be more inclined to join the Pakistanis in pressing for a more “comprehensive” solution for “the most dangerous region in the world”. Except, now they will add India to that region, even if as the country most exposed, and vulnerable to jehadi terror.

The game is now beginning to change and we have no choice but to play to new rules. Soon enough, we and Pakistan may pretty much be on our own. The comfort of an almost permanent Western military presence on Pakistan’s west will eventually go and we will watch very carefully for what replaces it, and if we have any leverage with that successor. Even more challenging is to guess what kind of a regime will be ruling Pakistan by then. It is, therefore, even more imperative that we continue to engage with whoever calls the shots in Pakistan in coming months. We cannot be lazy because, as they often say, objects in this mirror are far closer than you think.

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Source: Originally published in Indian Express and cross posted at GeoploticalNWO

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Soviet Lessons from Afghanistan

Afghanistan is in turmoil, with tensions rising and people dying every day. Many of them — including women, children and the elderly — have nothing in common with terrorists or militants.

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MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

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The government is losing control of its territory: of the 34 provinces, the Taliban controls a dozen. The production and export of narcotics is growing. There is a real danger of destabilization extending to neighboring countries, including the republics of Central Asia as well as Pakistan.

What began after Sept. 11, 2001, as a seemingly appropriate military response aimed at rooting out terrorism could end in a major strategic failure.

We need to understand why this is happening and what can still be done to turn around a nearly disastrous situation. The recent conference in London, attended by representatives from many countries and international organizations, is a first step in a new direction.

After diligent preparations, delegates to the London meeting adopted decisions that could help to turn things around — but only if the experience of the past three decades is reassessed and its lessons learned.

In 1979, the Soviet leadership sent troops to Afghanistan, justifying that move not just by the desire to help friendly elements there but also by the need to stabilize a neighboring country. The greatest mistake was failing to understand Afghanistan’s complexity — its patchwork of ethnic groups, clans and tribes, its unique traditions and minimal governance.

The result was the opposite of what we had intended: even greater instability, a war with thousands of victims and dangerous consequences for our own country. On top of it, the West, particularly the United States, kept fueling the fire in the spirit of the Cold War; it remained ready to support just about anyone against the Soviet Union, giving no thought to possible long-term consequences.

As part of perestroika in the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leadership drew conclusions from our troubles in Afghanistan. We made two crucial decisions. First, we set the goal of withdrawing our troops. Second, we intended to work with all parties in the conflict and with the governments involved to achieve national reconciliation in Afghanistan and make it a peaceful and neutral country that threatened no one.

Looking back, I still believe that it was a proper and responsible two-track course. I am sure that if we had fully succeeded, many troubles and disasters could have been avoided. Our new policy was not just a declaration; during my tenure, we worked hard and in good faith to implement it.

To succeed, we needed sincere and responsible cooperation from all sides. The Afghan government was ready to compromise and went more than halfway to achieve reconciliation. In a number of regions, things started to improve.

However, Pakistan, particularly its top brass, and the United States blocked all avenues to progress. They wanted one thing: the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which they thought would leave them in full control. By denying Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah’s government even minimal support, Boris Yeltsin played into their hands when he took office.

During the 1990’s, the world seemed indifferent to Afghanistan. In that decade the country’s government fell into the hands of the Taliban, who turned Afghanistan into a haven for Islamic fundamentalists and an incubator of terrorism.

Sept. 11 was a rude awakening for Western leaders. Even then, however, the West made a decision that was not carefully thought through and therefore proved flawed.

After ousting the Taliban government, the United States thought that the military victory, achieved at little cost, was final and had basically solved the long-term problem.

The initial success was probably one reason why the Americans expected a “cakewalk” in Iraq, taking a fatal step in a militaristic strategy there as well. In the meantime, they built a democratic façade in Afghanistan, to be guarded by the International Security Assistance Force — i.e., NATO troops. Increasingly, NATO sought to assume the role of a global policeman.

The rest is history. The military path in Afghanistan turned out to be less and less sustainable. That was an open secret; even the U.S. ambassador, in recently disclosed cables, said so.

I have been asked several times in recent months what I would recommend to President Obama, who inherited this mess from his predecessor. My answer has been the same each time: a political solution and troop withdrawal. That requires a strategy of national reconciliation.

Now, at long last, a strategy very similar to the one we offered more than two decades ago and that our partners rebuffed was presented at the London meeting: reconciliation, involving all more or less reasonable elements in reconstruction, and emphasizing a political rather than a military solution.

The United Nations envoy to Afghanistan said in a recent interview that what’s needed is demilitarization of the entire strategy in Afghanistan. What a shame this wasn’t said, and done, long before!

The chances of success — success rather than military “victory” — are at best 50-50. There have been some contacts with certain elements within the Taliban. Still more needs to be done to bring Iran into the process; a lot of hard work remains to be done with the Pakistanis.

Russia could become an important part of the Afghan settlement process. The West should appreciate the position Russia’s leaders are taking on Afghanistan. Far from gloating and letting the West bite the bullet while we wash our hands of the whole thing, Russia is ready to cooperate with the West because it understands that it is in its own best interests to counter the threats coming from Afghanistan.

Russia is right in asking why, during the years of U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan, little or nothing has been done to stem the production of narcotics, large amounts of which flow to Russia through its neighbors’ porous borders. Russia is also right to demand access to economic opportunities in Afghanistan, including the reconstruction of dozens of projects built with our help and then destroyed during the 1990s.

Russia is Afghanistan’s neighbor, and its interests must be taken into account. The logic seems self-evident, but sometimes a reminder is in order.

I would like to hope that a new day is dawning for long-suffering Afghanistan, a ray of hope for its millions of people. The opportunity is there, but much is needed to seize it: realism, persistence and, last but not least, honesty in learning from the mistakes made in the past and the ability to act on that knowledge.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last President of the Soviet Union.

Source: Originally published in New York Times, Cross posted at GeoploticalNWO

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Cry, The beloved Pakistan

Governance in Pakistan ‘Corruption is thy name!

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·

by Roedad Khan

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At length Corruption, like a general Flood,

(so long by watchful ministers withstood),

Shall deluge all’

Pope

Citizens! Our country is in grave danger. 62 years after Mr. Jinnah gave us a great country, little men, mired in corruption, hijacked it and destroyed Jinnah’s legacy.

In this country, nothing has so altered the fortunes of so many people so suddenly as political power. Here money and power seek each other. No wonder, the business of politics attracts the scum of the community and a legion of scoundrels.
In the name of democracy, unspeakable sins are committed. 

The highway robbers called thugs in 19th century India have reincarnated in the Pakistani capital which abounds with looters in every corridor of power these days.

 

These practitioners of the art of grand larceny, loot, and plunder in broad day light, with no fear of accountability, reminiscent of the situation in the early 19th century in India when highway robbers, professional dacoits, and assassins or thugs, as they were called, travelled in gangs in the darkness of the night throughout Central India and when a favourable opportunity occurred, strangled unsuspecting wayfarers by throwing a handkerchief or noose round their necks and then plundered and buried them.

The country was rid of this evil only when Captain Sleeman hanged over 400 members of this confederacy of robbers. The people of Hindustan heaved a sigh of relief and welcomed the Raj. What is distressing is that mega corruption has reached the summit of power in this country and is acquiring an aspect of high respectability and great social distinction.

“If a ruler trips”, Churchill wrote, “He must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, he must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. But if he is no good, he must be pole-axed”. And, let me hasten to add, if he is corrupt, if he has looted and plundered the wealth of his country while million starve, he must be tried in an open court and given exemplary punishment.

A year ago, Zardari was anointed, as the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, literally behind the coffin of his wife, only to find the reins of power slipping from his grasp just as his moment in history arrived. He has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. With Zardari in the Presidency, one doesn’t have to read the tea leaves for a glimpse of our future. I fear for thee, my country.

All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but no elected president in history has fallen this far this fast. All Presidents are opposed, of course, and many are disliked; but few suffer widespread attacks on their personal integrity or veracity. President Zardari is one of those few. He knows well the man responsible for the trouble he is in. He looks at him everyday while shaving.

A year after he captured the Presidency, Mr. Zardari has lost his “mandate of heaven”. His Presidency is collapsing all around us; the wolf is at the door. At a time when leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of vital importance to the very survival of the country, Pakistan is led by a President, who lacks both credibility and integrity. If you came up with ten words to describe Zardari, integrity and credibility would not be two. What is worse, he seems oblivious to the realities of his awesome responsibilities and is only interested in perpetuating himself and amassing wealth.

No corrupt authoritarian ruler can afford a free press or an independent judiciary. No wonder, both are under attack in this country. Zardari has openly challenged the Supreme Court, the Guardian of the Constitution, the defender of all our liberties. He has betrayed his oath to uphold the Constitution. At a time when his fortunes have sunk to their lowest and his foes picture him as a man consumed by rancor and determined on revenge, his reluctance to implement the landmark Supreme Court judgment, and his plan to pack the superior courts have aroused the anger and disgust of the people.

It is hard to exaggerate the baleful impact of Zardari’s rule: the oligarch and the mafia who have stolen away every asset of any value, the inflation that has ruined the middle class and the poor, the corruption that has corroded all values and humiliated every decent citizen; and the insecurities that have filled everyone with fear and anxiety. What will become of poor Pakistan? “What the end will be”, Carlyle wrote, “is known to no mortal; that the end is near all mortals may know”.

[Its not corruption when we do it, says the poster, no wonder a PPP minister felt no shame when he openly admitted  in a TV appearance. “The others too have done corruption, so what if we do as well”].

Henry Adams once wrote that the essence of leadership in the Presidency is “a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek”. President Zardari grasped the helm more then a year ago but the country still doesn’t know whether he has an inner compass, or a course to steer or a port to seek. It is now abundantly clear that Zardari is not worthy of the trust placed in him by his people. He carries a serious baggage, dogged for years by charges of corruption until they were abruptly dropped under NRO. No democrat should come to power through such an array of backroom machinations, deals with Generals or Washington. No wonder, too many people reject his political legitimacy.

Today the nation is clearly at a fork in the road. We can follow the line of least resistance, turn a blind eye to all that Zardari is doing and continue to follow the road that has led us to where we are today. Or we can choose the other road. We don’t need pitchforks and guns. If parliament is unable or unwilling to respond to public demands and declines to defend the Constitution and support the Supreme Court, people will, perforce, take the issue to the Parliament of Man, the parliament of the streets, as they have done in the past.

If people want a change, they will have to vote with their bodies and keep voting in the streets – over and over and over. A regime like this, which is defying the Supreme Court, can only be brought down or changed if enough people vote in the streets. This is what the regime fears most, because it either has to shoot its people or quit.

In a recent TV interview President Zardari associated me with “the Establishment”, a curious observation that can be explained only by Zardari himself. What seem to have aroused his ire is that in pursuit of my rights as a free citizen of Pakistan, no longer constrained by government service rules, I have, from time to time, made public expression of my concern over the serious charges of corruption that have been leveled against Zardari, at home and abroad. I also had the privilege of moving a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the validity of a deplorable legislation, not because I had an animus against any particular person. Nor did I stand to personally gain anything. I did so because, as a citizen, I felt it my duty to challenge such an iniquity being imposed on millions of my fellow citizens.

I have publicly denounced the policies of General Musharraf in print and electronic media when he was at the peak of power. I have participated in rallies and demonstrations for the independence of the media and the restoration of Chief Justice and other deposed Judges. Today I can say with great pride: I was there. I was there.

Mr. Zardari’s statement associating me with “the Establishment” is therefore utterly baseless. I shall continue to exercise my right of free expression and association, as I have done in the past. All I want is that justice be done without fear and favour. Nothing shall deter me from following this course of action. As the Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson warned: “law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power”. “Fiat justitia Ruat coelum”, (let justice be done if the heavens fall). Heaven won’t fall. That is for sure. It will be morning once again in Pakistan.

I end this article with the profound observations of a great philosopher, which are as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago.

“The Ruler must be careful about his own virtue. Possessing the virtue will give him the people. Possessing the people will give him territory. Possessing the territory will give him wealth. Possessing the wealth, he will have resources for his expenditure. Virtue is the root, wealth is its branches. If the ruler makes the root his secondary object and the branches his first, he will only anger the people and teach them dishonesty. Hence, the accumulation of wealth is the way to disintegrate the people, and the distribution of wealth is the way to consolidate the people. Likewise, when his words are not in accord with that which is right, they will come back to him in the same way, and wealth got by improper means will leave him by the same road”.

[Confucius]

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Source: text. roedadkhan.com image. industry.bnet.com/…/

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The Terror-Industrial Complex

Terrorism needs analysis and the phenomenon that works behind it, Lot is still required to be explained as yet. How is it judged morally, legally, politically? And how does one deal with terrorism? These are some very relevant questions one inevitably needs to ask while looking at terrorism rationally. While proclaiming a verdict in case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui questions like these too, need to be answered yet.

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Chris Hedges

• 
  

The Trial of Dr. Afia Siddiqui shows us how our permitting the jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile.

The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security does not come from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.

The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.

Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.

“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me. “The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story.”

The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach.

No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen?

Her arrest in Ghazi saw, according to the official complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents and two military interpreters arrive to question Siddiqui at the police headquarters. The Americans and their interpreters were shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” The group sat down to talk and “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui allegedly reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, and then fell unconscious.

But in an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version. The governor of Ghazni province, Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: The U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui. The Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Siddiqui told a delegation of Pakistani senators who went to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest that she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”

Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.

Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts.

“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,” said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear.”

I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.

Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.

I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.

____________

Source: Originally published in Truthdig.com and cross posted at Wichaar.com

Related Posts:

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s Crime?

The Truth about US Justice

American defends Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustice

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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India Worries as China Builds Ports in South Asia

Continued signs of stress between the 2 developing Asian powers are now occupying the entre stage in the region.

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by: Trader_Mark

• Continued signs of stress among the 2 developing Asian powers.  Not the first sign that China’s new heavyweight status is causing consternation.  [Dec 15, 2009: China's Economic Power Unsettles Neighbors] [Jun 13, 2009: Australia in Perfect Position Aside China, but at a Cost?]  China appears to be following the same strategy in South Asia that it has taken in Africa ….

Via NYT:

For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town (Hambanato, Sri Lanka) near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China.  Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.

• China’s Export-Import Bank is financing 85 percent of the cost of the $1 billion project, and China Harbour Engineering, which is part of a state-owned company, is building it. Similar arrangements have been struck for an international airport being built nearby.

• Mr. Rajapaksa has said he offered the Hambantota port project first to India, but officials there turned it down. In an interview, Jaliya Wickramasuriya, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the United States, said the country looked for investors in America and around the world, but China offered the best terms.  Still, Sri Lankan officials have refused to disclose information that would allow analysts to compare China’s proposals with those submitted by other bidders. The country has also kept private details about other projects that are being financed and built by China, including a power plant, an arts center and a special economic zone.

• The Sunday Times, a Sri Lankan newspaper, recently estimated that China was involved in projects totaling $6 billion — more than any other country, including India and Japan, which have historically been big donors and investors in Sri Lanka.

• Harsha de Silva, a prominent economist in Colombo and an adviser to the country’s main opposition party, said the Sri Lankan government appeared to prefer awarding projects to China because it did not impose “conditions for reform, transparency and competitive bidding” that would be part of contracts with countries like India and the United States or organizations like the World Bank.

• As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.

• But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat.

• “There is a method in the madness in terms of where they are locating their ports and staging points,” Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary who is now a member of the government’s National Security Advisory Board, said of China. “This kind of effort is aimed at counterbalancing and undermining India’s natural influence in these areas.”

• India and China, the world’s two fastest-growing economies, have a history of tense relations.  But the two countries also do an increasingly booming business with each other. China recently became India’s largest trading partner, and both have worked together to advance similar positions in global trade and climate change negotiations.

• As recently as the 1990s, China’s and India’s trade with four South Asian nations — Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan — was roughly equal. But over the last decade, China has outpaced India in deepening ties.
• For China, these countries provide both new markets and alternative routes to the Indian Ocean, which its ships now reach through a narrow channel between Indonesia and Malaysia known as the Strait of Malacca. India, for its part, needs to improve economic ties with its neighbors to broaden its growth and to help foster peace in the region. Some of the shift in trade toward China comes from heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, which has hampered trade between the two countries. But China has also made inroads in nations that have been more friendly with India, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

• Moreover, protectionist sentiments have marred India’s relationships with its neighbors. South Asia has a free-trade agreement, but countries that are part of the pact get few benefits, economists say, because India and its neighbors refuse to lower tariffs on many goods and services to protect their own businesses. By contrast, the countries of Southeast Asia have minimal or no duties on most goods and services that they import from one another.

__________

Source : The Market Oracle

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Good Americans waking up to their Govt’s Mess in Pakistan

[Right: Gayle Kimball is shown here with many of the dozen books she has authored. She had no idea her latest book, a survey of the insights and questions of teens around the world (inset), would lead her to discover—long before it became public knowledge, that the infamous Blackwater private militia was carrying out special operations in Pakistan]. PHOTO COURTESY: GAYLE KIMBALL

About Gayle Kimball, Ph.D.:
A woman who wears many hats, this former Chico State sociology professor is a personal coach, writes the “Ask Dr. Gayle” advice column for the Lotus Guide, and is director of Earthhaven: Center for Spiritual Enrichment. She is the author or editor of a dozen books, including 50/50 Parenting, 50/50 Marriage and How to Survive Your Parents’ Divorce. As a way of gathering material for her upcoming book, she hosts the Web siteglobalyouthspeakout.ning.com. She can be reached at gkimball@csuchico.edu.

A Dangerous Secret

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Robert Speer

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On Oct. 17, 2009, Chico author Gayle Kimballgot an e-mail from her friend Saeed, a 17-year-old Pakistani boy with whom she’d been corresponding for some time. He is one of the nearly 4,000 teenagers from around the world she’s contacted via e-mail for her next book, Wired & Green: Global Youth Insights & Questions, a survey of teens worldwide.

Something ominous was occurring in his country, Saeed said. American troops and Blackwater mercenaries were starting to make their presence known.

“There is a badge of blackwater army in my city,” wrote Saeed, who lives in Peshawar, in the frontier region adjoining the largely lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Afghanistan border. “They have bought a specific land and that area is sealed securely. They live there. But I have no idea what’s their mission. A few days earlier, my friend texted me that 700 U.S. army soldiers have landed in Pakistan at 3 in the morning and 1,000 will come after that. We have never experienced U.S. soldiers entering the soil of our country like that. This definitely is a sign of danger for us.”

If Saeed was correct, Kimball thought, she inadvertently had come to know a hugely important secret about U.S. involvement in Pakistan that virtually nobody in America—outside of government and military circles, presumably—was aware of: The United States had sent troops and private mercenary contractors into a sovereign and supposedly friendly nation.

This was unprecedented—and disturbing.

It’s now known, following the Feb. 3 roadside bombing that killed three U.S. special-operations soldiers (along with three schoolgirls) in Peshawar, that U.S. troops have been operating in Pakistan for some time. But four months earlier, when Kimball first heard about them from her young friends, top military and governmental officials staunchly denied they were in country.

Right or wrong, there was reason for the subterfuge. Pakistanis in general dislike and distrust the American government, and confirmation that the U.S. military was operating in their country would have provoked outrage against the already weak pro-U.S. government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

At the same time, Zardari is under tremendous pressure from the United States to respond to the growing insurgency in his country. He deployed the Army to drive Taliban soldiers from the Swat Valley, and he’s quietly allowed the United States to use his country as a staging area for the drone bombing attacks on Taliban hideouts in the FATA.

Kimball knew none of this when her teen reporters in Pakistan began telling her about the presence of U.S. military personnel and Blackwater mercenaries in their country.

“I had no idea,” she said during a recent interview. “I thought Blackwater had been completely discredited in Iraq and kicked out.” So she was especially surprised to discover the company, now known as Xe Services, was in Pakistan at the behest of the Obama administration, especially since the president, in March, had stoutly insisted no armed forces would be sent to the country.

She went to the Internet to find out more, but was able to locate only one relevant article. The report had appeared in The Intelligence Daily, an online journal of geopolitical and economic news, on Sept. 2. Written by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Quraishi, it’s headlined “US Hummers Enter Pakistan, Undercover American Soldiers in Islamabad,” and begins as follows:

“ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Undercover armed Americans are swarming the Pakistani capital in the latest sign that the elected government has allowed Washington to dispatch what is believed to be a large number of American special operations agents and contractual security guards, including the infamous Blackwater private militia.”

Kimball’s teen reporters subsequently directed her to other reports indicating the presence of American personnel, including Blackwater and DynCorp mercenaries, in both Islamabad and Peshawar. The Blackwater employees stood out, according to the articles, for their arrogant and disrespectful treatment of locals.

Kimball was furious—and frightened. She wrote up her experiences, gave it the title “A Dangerous Secret,” and distributed it widely, including to Sen. Barbara Boxer. She wanted others to know what was going on, but the story was largely blacked out in this country. She felt alone, like the only person in this area who knew what her country was secretly doing to the people of Pakistan.

Then, on Nov. 23, The Nation magazine published a lengthy article by Jeremy Scahill, author ofBlackwater: The Rise of the Word’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, titled “The Secret US War in Pakistan.” This was the first significant account of U.S. armed involvement in Pakistan, and it confirmed everything Kimball had learned.

“[M]embers of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan,” Scahill writes.

The Blackwater operatives, working in conjunction with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, “also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes,” he adds.

The JSOC assassination program is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had cancelled in June 2009. The JSOC, which was commanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal before he was put in charge of NATO operations in Afghanistan, is the special-operations branch (read: counterterrorism and covert services) of the U.S. military.

Scahill’s efforts to get official confirmation of Blackwater’s presence in Pakistan all hit a blank wall. The Defense Department, Blackwater, the Pakistani government and the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad denied it.

Indeed, two days after Scahill’s article appeared, on Nov. 25, the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, issued a press release rejecting The Nation’s assertions about Blackwater as “completely false.”

American “personnel and programs in Pakistan have only one purpose—to assist the government and people of Pakistan as they face the complex challenges confronting their nation,” she said.

And so it remained, until Jan. 21, 2010, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed, in an interview for Pakistani television, that Blackwater was indeed operating in Pakistan.

The acknowledgement was huge news in Pakistan, made larger two weeks later when the three American troops were killed.

Department of Defense officials quickly tried to backtrack, saying Blackwater didn’t actually work for the Pentagon. As Scahill reports in The Nation, that’s because it’s actually contracted to Kestral, a Pakistani security and logistics firm. “That contract, say my sources,” Scahill writes, “is technically with the Pakistani government, which helps cloak Blackwater’s presence.”

Now the world sees what Gayle Kimball saw back in October, when the whole thing was terribly hush-hush. Had it not been for her teen reporters in Pakistan, she too would have known nothing then.

Right now, her biggest concern is for them, especially the three she is in closest contact with. She gets frequent e-mails from them, in which they talk about their fears of terrorists as well as of the American mercenaries, of the chaos that seems to lurk just below the surface of Pakistani society, and of the secret deals their government has made with an American government they don’t trust.

All have studied previously in the United States, and they like Americans as people very much, but they don’t understand why this country is meddling in their internal affairs.

Nor does Kimball, who is convinced fighting terrorism with violence is not the answer. Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson’s visit to Chico last year convinced her that education, not violence, is the way to combat the religious extremism that fosters terrorism.

In the meantime, she is trying to raise funds to bring her Pakistani friends to this country to attend college. She is also collecting more teen participants and preparing to gather their insights on a wide range of topics into her book.

__________

Robert Speer is editor of the web site the newsreview.com

Source: http://www.newsreview.com/chico/content?oid=1372997 & AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

Related Posts:

1. The Sneaking US Occupation Of Islamabad 2. WITHOUT ANY LET OR HINDRANCE 3. Afghanistan and Pakistan: Not Just About Al Qaeda Any More 4. Blackwater Founder: Fatcat, Hired-Gun, Mercenary, Spook, Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy 5. Erik Prince Quitting Blackwater to Teach High School History and Economics 6. U.S. confirms what it had denied for months: Blackwater is in PakistanGates Visit: The baits, traps, diplomacy, all to the advantage of the one & only one 7. US plans for ‘imperial’ presence in Pakistan 8. American NGO Covers For Blackwater In Pakistan? 9. Its Great Game once again – now in Pakistan 10. http://wondersofpakistan.blogspot.com/2009/12/secret-us-war-in-pakistan-i_14.html 11. http://wondersofpakistan.blogspot.com/2009/12/secret-us-war-in-pakistan-ii.html 12. http://wondersofpakistan.blogspot.com/2009/12/secret-us-war-in-pakistan-iii.html

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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“A” is for Allah, “J” is for jihad

CIA brainwashed these Afghan kids to fight Jihad against the Infidels. These children, the product of CIA’s war against the Godless Soviets are today’s Taliban. It shouldn’t surprise anybody not even the CIA that they continue (from the lessons taught by their CIA trained masters in madrassas in different refugee camps scattered all over Pakistan’s NWFP) their Jihad against the infidels, not now from the neighboring Soviet lands but from a distant continent.

[Is the author of this article the same “Craig Davis” who was arrested and deported from Peshawar, allegedly working for “Blackwater”?   I tried everything to contact the author of this article, Craig Davis, even contacting former colleagues at Indiana State Univ., but no response could be obtained.]

Pakistani security officials apparently became alarmed by reports that Blackwater was operating from the office of CAII on Chinar Road, University Town in Peshawar. The man in charge of the office, allegedly an American by the name of Craig Davis according to a report in Jang, Pakistan’s largest Urdu language daily, was arrested and accused of establishing contacts with ‘the enemies of Pakistan’ in areas adjoining Afghanistan.  His visa has been cancelled, the office sealed, and Mr. Davis reportedly expelled back to the United States.

It is not clear when Mr. Davis was deported and whether there are other members of the staff expelled along with him. When I contacted the US Embassy over the weekend, spokesman Richard Snelsire’s first reaction was, “No embassy official has been deported.”  This defensive answer is similar to the guilt-induced reactions of US embassy staffers in Baghdad and Kabul at the presence of mercenaries working for US military and CIA.

AS YOU SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP

by Davis, Craig

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Education Center for Afghanistan, located in Peshawar, Pakistan, and operated by the Afghan Mujahideen (holy warriors), published a series of primary education textbooks replete with images of Islamic militancy. These schoolbooks provided the Mujahideen (who, after a ten-year struggle, drove the Soviet occupying forces from Afghanistan in 1989) with a medium for promoting political propaganda and inculcating values of Islamic militancy into a new generation of holy warriors prepared to conduct jihad against the enemies of Islam. Consider the following introduction to the Persian alphabet in a first-grade language arts book:

Alif [is for] Allah.

Allah is one.

Bi [is for] Father (baba).

Father goes to the mosque…

Pi [is for] Five (panj).

Islam has five pillars…

Ti [is for] Rifle (tufang).

Javed obtains rifles for the Mujahideen…

Jim [is for] Jihad.

Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. Our brother gave water to the Mujahideen…

Dal [is for] Religion (din).

Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam…

Zhi [is for] Good news (muzhdih).

The Mujahideen missiles rain down like dew on the Russians. My brother gave me good news that the Russians in our country taste defeat…

Shin [is for] Shakir.

Shakir conducts jihad with the sword. God becomes happy with the defeat of the Russians…

Zal [is for] Oppression (zulm).

Oppression is forbidden. The Russians are oppressors. We perform jihad against the oppressors…

Vav [is for] Nation (vatn).

Our nation is Afghanistan…. The Mujahideen made our country famous…. Our Muslim people are defeating the communists. The Mujahideen are making our dear country free.

As in this passage, the promotion of violence for the sake of Islam is the predominate theme throughout the Mujahideen textbook series in both mathematics and language arts for grades one through six.

Although these violent images were officially edited out of the schoolbooks in 1992, my fieldwork in Afghanistan and among the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan in 1999 and 2000 revealed that the unedited versions of these textbooks were still in use in both countries. Aid workers reported that the unedited versions promoting violence occasionally surfaced in classrooms in Pakistan and were sanctioned by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Peshawar’s secondhand bookshops regularly stocked the old textbooks, which are filled with messages of Islamic militancy and illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers, and automatic weapons.

When I visited Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, in May 2000, I discovered that the stores stocking Taliban-approved textbooks were selling freshly printed copies of the old, unrevised Mujahideen texts. Reports coming out of Kabul confirm the continued use of these schoolbooks, even as the new interim government assumed power. These textbooks glorify martyrdom, celebrate jihad, and speak of execution of “the enemy.” However, such messages and images of violence aimed at children are by no means a recent phenomenon. Consider this poem from a first-grade language arts textbook, published in 1970:

On the road

to our independence,

Our bodies, our heads, our possessions,

We will sacrifice,

We will sacrifice.

If, with designs on our land,

Our dirty enemies

Come forward one step,

We will cut off their feet,

We will cut off their legs,

We will cut off their legs.

If, in the direction of our land,

If, in the direction of our land,

The unjust enemy

If he casts a sharp glance,

We will pluck out his eyes,

We will pluck out his eyes.

A joke in fifth-grade language-arts schoolbook from the same period displays a macabre sense of humor: A boy returning from war was asked, “What did you do in the war?” He answered, “I cut both legs off an enemy at the knees.” When asked why he did not cut off the enemy’s head, the boy answered, “Someone else had already cut it off.”

These are but two instances in which educational materials were used to train young minds in a fanatical form of loyalty to the nation. The hostile imagery was part of the official curriculum during the reign (1933-73) of King Zahir Shah, the 88-year-old exile who has lived in Rome since 1973 and to whom many Afghans still turn for a sense of legitimacy and stability.

A new series of Afghan textbooks was developed during the period of communist government in Afghanistan, which stretched from 1978 under Nur Muhammad Taraki’s rule–and the subsequent Soviet invasion in 1979–to Muhammad Nagibullah’s fall in 1992. These textbooks promoted Marxist ideology within an Afghan cultural context. In “Martyrs,” a poem printed in a fourth-grade textbook, the students learned that they were the “martyrs of Western oppression.” Martyrdom and sacrifice were stressed as necessary components of the communist revolution and resistance against the enemy: “agents of the British,” “agents of colonialism,” and “agents of Western oppression.” These all were euphemisms for theMujahideen, who formed the militant resistance against the communist government after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Ironically, the term “Mujahideen” was avoided in the textbooks of the time.

This series was still in limited use in May 2000 in some Afghan schools in the region, including in Estiqlal Lycee, a small coeducational Afghan elementary school in Islamabad, Pakistan. Almost half of the 236 students then at the lycee were girls, many of whom had come from Afghanistan after 1996, when the Taliban seized power and implemented policies that denied girls access to education past grade three.

One reason the school uses these books may be because women tend to fare better in the communist-era textbooks than in most of the other series. The textbooks attempted to appeal to young Afghan girls by stressing the important role that women played in the April Revolution, as the Afghan communist revolution was called. Mothers, female combatants, and the women of the proletariat were elevated to hero status at the expense of the revolution’s enemies: “Eternal glory to the nation’s heroic martyrs who have sacrificed their own lives in the struggle against the enemies of the April Revolution and of the people of Afghanistan…. Women combatants of the nation! Become active participants in the social, political, and economic life of the homeland, and strengthen…the April Revolution…. Boundless glory to the mothers of the heroes and the proletariat women of the nation.”

Ironically, the emphasis these textbooks placed on women’s participation in Afghanistan’s communist revolution may have played into the hands of the Islamic extremists who stripped Afghan women of their rights when they gained control of the country.

Far more violent, religiously oriented, and potentially damaging to Afghan children was the next generation of textbooks, developed in Peshawar in the late 1980s by a committee of Afghan educators under the auspices of the seven-party alliance of Mujahideen, who formed the legitimate political and military resistance to the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. These textbooks aimed both to counterbalance the Marxist ideology of the communist series and to indoctrinate young Afghan children in Islamic militancy. Thus this subtraction problem, from a third-grade mathematics textbook: “One group of mujahidin attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians were killed. How many Russians fled?”

A fourth-grade mathematics textbook poses the following problem: “The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3,200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.”

Another irony is that this textbook series was underwritten by U.S. grants. One of the responsibilities of the mujahidin-operated Education Center for Afghanistan was to write, print, and distribute textbooks. The ECA was funded by the Education Program for Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), under a $50 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development that ran from September 1986 through June 1994. The UNO program staff chose to ignore the images of Islamic militancy in the children’s textbooks during the first five years of the program.

Raheem Yaseer, an Afghan educator who worked at the UNO office in Peshawar during the early years of the program and now acts as the campus coordinator for the program in Omaha, defends the decision to allow the mujahidin parties to develop the violent content of the textbooks free of outside intervention. The staff, he says, was acutely aware of Afghan “religious and cultural sensitivities” during the war with the Soviets. Moreover, the University of Nebraska did not wish to be seen as imposing American values on Afghan educators. 1

After the Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Education Program for Afghanistan–under increasing pressure from Afghan parents and teachers, and various aid organizations–decided in 1991 to remove the militant images from the Mujahideen textbook series. The revision process was completed by 1992. Educators commonly refer to the edited versions as the revised UNO textbooks, which are widely used in Pakistan and Afghanistan today.

However, two years ago, Joyce Gachiri, a project officer on education for the Afghanistan Country Office of UNICEF located in Islamabad, reported seeing many of the unrevised mujahidin books in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as well as in the province of Badakhshan, which was then in the hands of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. 2 During my visit to Kabul in May 2000, I purchased an entire series of the unrevised textbooks.

According to Ahmad Shah Durani, the printing press manager at the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) in Peshawar–the organization responsible for printing the revised UNO textbooks–the unedited mujahidin textbooks were not printed by ACBAR after 1992. When I confronted him in June 2000 with new copies of the violence-filled unrevised textbooks I had purchased in Kabul, he said that the inferior quality of paper and ink used pointed to an independent printing press in Peshawar.

The appearance of these unedited textbooks freshly printed in Peshawar and sold at textbook shops in Kabul some eight years after they were to have been replaced suggests that the Taliban wished to inspire a new generation of militants with the message of jihad. But the Taliban, who came to power in 1996, may not be entirely to blame. Between 1992 and 1996, militant factions of Mujahideen ruled and battled over Kabul. Thus it is likely that these textbooks never fell out of favor with the Mujahideen leadership, who were responsible for the militant content in the first place.

Much has been written since September 11 about the madrassa (theological school) system of education in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, extremist Muslims in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere helped to fund the madrassas, many of which have become vehicles for inculcating militant values in students. The most violent product of the madrassa system are the Taliban, who promoted absolute theocracy, public militancy, violent repression, and jihad in conjunction with terrorist groups. Even though the Taliban have been crushed, it would be a mistake to underestimate the political force of the madrasa system. Because of the inability of both the Afghan and Pakistani governments to provide universal education within their respective nations, many parents still look to madrassas to fill the void. In other cases, many students attending secular schools in the morning regularly study at madrassas in the afternoon. Recent estimates suggest that between 10 and 15 percent of Pakistan’s 45,000 madrassas promote violence; if true, the next generation of graduates will likely be a political force to be reckoned with.

One of the greatest challenges to the establishment of a lasting peace in Afghanistan and to the success of representative government there may lie in reforming the country’s educational system. But as the new interim government assumed power in Kabul, the future of Afghan education was unclear. Will the Mujahideen who are once again in a position to influence policy, insist on teaching Islamic militancy to school-children? Will Afghan children once again be exhorted to cut off the legs and pluck out the eyes of their “dirty enemies”? If so, Afghanistan’s road away from violent unrest will be a long one indeed.

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Iran’s Ahmadinejad strikes again

For most Iranians, developing nuclear power means breaking out of their Western-imposed technological ghetto and modernization.  It’s a matter of profound national pride and defiance: Iran was repeatedly invaded by Britain and Russia, its governments were overthrown by Western powers, and its oil exploited. So muclear technology offers independence, and, potentially, weapons for self-defense, if Tehran so chooses. This writer has long believed that one day Iran will opt to deploy nuclear weapons for self-defense. The Western and Israeli claim that Tehran’s `mad mullahs’ are intent on inflicting worldwide nuclear doomsday is ludicrous and absurd. To Western dismay, most of the current Iranian protest movement’s leaders back its nuclear program. If Ahmadinejad were replaced, Iran’s nuclear efforts would continue unless the US and Britain managed to achieve their strategy of imposing a new, compliant royalist regime in Tehran. 

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SELECTIVE MORALITY: THE LEADING CAUSE OF ANTI-AMERICANISM AROUND THE GLOBE

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Eric Margolis

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To fete the 31st anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gleefully announced his nation will enrich uranium to 20%.

The bombastic Ahmadinejad seems to delight in provoking howls of outrage from the West. They were not long in coming.

How the young Afghans were indoctrinated to kill the “INFIDELS”

“HOAR CHOOPO”

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Nayyar Hashmey

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Today, while reading the online journal ‘There are no sunglasses’ weblog edited by my blogger friend, Peter Chamberlin, I saw an interesting piece [it follows next].

While reading this article I was startled to note that the writer of this piece could be the same Craig Davis about whom we already had mentioned in our post, “Pakistan, A Suicidal Nations in the Crosshairs” , also see .

The article shows how the CIA through its men indoctrinated the Afghan children to harass, maim and murder the infidels [which in those days were the Soviets]. While doing this, the CIA guys overlooked the fact that while teaching the kids to kill infidels (in the name of Islam), a chain of Jihad starts in the raw minds, a strong belief remains embedded throughout their life even when their minds have reached to a full maturity that they have to kill infidels no matter they are from the neighboring soviet lands or from thousands of miles from across the seven seas.

One of such men the prime mover, the Incharge of this brainwashing programme was Dr. Craig Davis. This man who later was reported to have become the part of Blackwater /Xe / CAII’s notorious agenda of a follow up of the same nurseries they had groomed in yesteryears [to kill the infidels] had now come to devise the ways and means of changing the text books of these schools. Its in this context that Dr. Craig Davis recalls his experience in the following post which we publish courtesy ‘There are no sunglasses’.

Dr. Craig Davis was reported to be back in Pakistan last year, however was expelled from the country in June, 2009 but after two months again was said to be back. Peter Chamberlin reports about his search in following words.

[Is the author of this article the same “Craig Davis” who was arrested and deported from Peshawar, allegedly working for “Blackwater”?   I tried my best to contact the author of this article, Craig Davis, even contacting former colleagues at Indiana State Univ., but no response could be obtained.]

Let’s now come to the post which Dr. Craig Davis compiled in 1999-2000. This post reveals how did Craig and his bosses devise the text books for “primaries” in the Afghan tent villages, how did they poison the raw minds against “infidels”. Poisoned they did and succeeded too, but as Arundhati Roy so aptly remarks on indoctrination of raw minds with hatred and revenge for infidels in the name of Islam / Afghan nationalism and thus create Frankenstein which brings the elephant right into your own room.

So what’s happening nowadays with the US vis-à-vis the Mujahideen is something that we call in Punjabi “Hoar Choopo”.

Tragic though it is, that our governments, then and now fully supported them. They told us then in the eighties that it was our war against the Soviets and now we are again being told that it is our war against the Taliban. It was either wrong then or is it wrong now.

Am unfortunate saga of this dreadful policy is that we still are a part and parcel of CIA’s covert and overt wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan. At one time we are helping US in achieving its agenda, but then we lament why US asks us to do more forgetting the very fact that to be accomplice in an uncalled war and then shedding crocodile tears over it doesn’t pay. It never paid anybody.

Decades after decades we commit fatal mistakes. First Gen. Zia did it, then Musharraf [though Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto as well as Mian Nawaz Sharif too cannot be absolved of this 'noble' act of playing into the hands of the successive US administrations] and now president Asif Ali Zardari doing the same thing.

“Sowing barley, AND expecting a wheat harvest!!

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Blowback: Legacy of the CIA in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan

The least we can say is that in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan the U.S. reaps today what the CIA planted with the help of people like Congressman Charlie Wilson.

BLOWBACK

LEGACY OF THE CIA IN IRAN, AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN

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Argemiro Ferreira

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Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA to attack the Russians, liked it and then attacked the World Trade Center in New York. And the bombs in Pakistan (real) and Iran (hypothetical) are due, at least in part, to the same courtesy of the CIA. The current situation of these three countries reflects the past irresponsible behavior of U.S. intelligence.

The image of the hero on the white horse [image below] to save the girl from the clutches of the villain, be it a bank robber or Indian in defense of their invaded lands, is recurring in the fiction of Hollywood. Representative Charlie Wilson died, aged 76, on 10 February, some consider him a hero in real life. Reason: Congress poured billions of dollars to finance those who fought against the Russians in Afghanistan.

When he died of a heart attack, Wilson was already retired. But he represented Texas for 14 consecutive terms in the House. A book (“Charlie Wilson’s War – The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History” by George Crile), and a movie (“Charlie Wilson’s War” by Mike Nichols with Tom Hanks in the title role) portrayed him as a hero.

The week also marked the 31st anniversary of the revolution of the ayatollahs of Iran, which occurred just a few months before the invasion of Afghanistan. Iranians overthrew the regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi, installed in 1953 through the coup planned by the same CIA that used the secret funds provided by Mr. Wilson to recruit and arm Islamic radicals on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan.

The least we can say is that in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan the U.S. reaps today what the CIA planted with the help of people like Mr. Wilson.

Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA to attack the Russians, liked it and then attacked the World Trade Center in New York. And the bombs in Pakistan (real) and Iran (hypothetical) are due, at least in part, to the same courtesy of the CIA.

The current mess in Afghanistan (largely in the hands of Islamic radicals used by the CIA from 1979), Pakistan (where the CIA set up camps to attack the Russians in the neighboring country and encouraged the dream of a Pakistani Islamic nuclear bomb) and Iran (which now refuses to abandon uranium enrichment) reflects the past irresponsibility of U.S. intelligence.

 

India’s path to global power?

IF INDIA IS TO TAKE UP THE MANTLE OF GLOBAL LEADER STATUS, IT MUST REMAIN OPENAND WELCOMING, NOT CLOSED AND DRIVEN BY FEAR AND PREJUDICE.

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by Aijaz Zaka Syed

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Just when you think the likes of the Shiv Sena Party couldn’t get any more disingenuous and meaner, they get worse. After all, for nearly five decades Sena has done nothing but spew sweetness and light and you would think it had squeezed the last drops of political mileage out of spreading all round cheer and goodness. This time around though, it seems Sena and its rabble- rousing chief, Bal Thackeray, have finally bit off more than they can chew.

All these years, Sena has fed and grown on divisive and subversive politics. From targeting poor south Indians, or the Madrasis as they are contemptuously called, to attacking Muslims as “traitors and Pakistani agents”, Shiv Sena has swelled and expanded its ranks the way all such outfits do, by preying and playing on people’s deepest insecurities and complexes. Of late, north Indian “bhayyas”, or people from the Hindi heartland of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, have been the target of Sena’s campaign. From bashing up the north Indian youths appearing for job interviews and tests in Mumbai to attacking poor cabbies from small towns and villages working the city’s crowded streets, Shiv Sena has not just terrorised the city but has held the whole of India hostage to its brute power.

[Left: A symbol of Hindu militancy in India, Bal Thackeray, the head of Shiv Sena]

A great deal has been said about Mumbai’s infamous underworld and its stranglehold over the nation’s financial and cultural capital. But indeed it is Shiv Sena — and now its other franchise headed by Bal Thackeray’s nephew Raj Thackeray — that rules Mumbai’s streets. For years, from Bollywood’s most popular Khans to the powerful industrialists and billionaires, just about everybody who’s somebody has been cowering in their pants and paying obeisance to the deity at Matoshri from time to time. No one could survive in Mumbai by getting on the wrong side of the Sena. Ramgopal Verma captured it rather well in his dark and brooding blockbuster Sarkar, even though one couldn’t quite accept the redoubtable Amitabh Bachchan in Thackeray’s avatar. Big B succeeds in conveying the quiet menace of his character in his measure style, even glamourising the legend of Thackeray in the process.

Lately, there have been increasing signs that Mumbai, one of the greatest and most vibrant cities, wants to move on. It is showing signs of revolt against the kind of venomous politics the Sena and its allies have been playing all these years. This week, Mumbai and India sent a loud and clear message to the Thackerays, and everyone else who cared to pay attention, that they aren’t prepared to take any more baloney in the name of Marathi people and the so-called son of the soil. Shiv Sena’s tyranny is being challenged by Mumbai wallahs and ordinary Indians on two fronts: its campaign against so- called outsiders and its endless bashing of Muslims and Pakistan.

[Right: The defiant Khan (SRK) in a poster of his recently released film 'My name is KHAN'']

It was this changing mood that may have emboldened and encouraged Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to defy the Sena toughies. It was curiously uplifting to see Shah Rukh stiffen his spine and stand up to the terror tactics of the Thackerays. By refusing to eat his words criticising the exclusion of Pakistani cricketers in Indian Premier League matches, Shah Rukh may have made up for the moral spinelessness of the world’s biggest film industry all these years. The actor refused to give in and go down on his knees, as many before him repeatedly have, even when the Sena threatened to prevent the screening of his much-awaited movie, My Name is Khan. (As I write this, there are reports of Sena vandalising cinemas across the state)

For his part, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the nation’s most celebrated political dynasty and probably a future leader of the world’s largest democracy, showed rare political and moral courage that has been lacking in the governing Congress for some time. Rahul not only took on the Sena for its campaign against north Indians by declaring that every inch of India belongs to all Indians, but he also travelled to Mumbai to take the local train to Dadar, right into the heart of Sena territory. Like a simple, ordinary guy confronting a neighbourhood bully in a Bollywood production, Rahul defied and vanquished the Sena in a manner not seen in years.

[Left: Though not much experienced in politics Rahul Gandhi can definitely be an instrument of change for the future of India. Many Indians believe he is the most preferred candidate for the role of India’s future prime minister]

Am I being sentimental here? Maybe. Perhaps, it was a routine populist gesture — the kind that comes naturally to our politicians. But there was something quintessentially Gandhian about Rahul taking that trip in the face of threats and dire warnings and peacefully but resolutely confronting the folk who only speak and understand the language of violence and force.

This is the way to go. If India is to attain the heights of greatness that it aspires to and deserves to achieve, it can do so only by following in the footsteps of Gandhi and other visionaries of modern India. If India is respected and admired around the world, it’s because of that vision, not because of the hate-fuelled politics practised by outfits like Shiv Sena, a party that has been repeatedly snubbed by the voters.

India wants to move on. In fact, it has already moved on from the poisoned temple-mosque politics of the 1980s and 1990s. It is evident in the decline of parties like Shiv Sena, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and others. This may be why even the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have criticised Thackeray, their ally and fellow traveller for years. This may be bad news for the Hindutva alliance, but it augurs well for India and its rich, diverse and pluralist society.

With the progressive decline of the United States, China and India are being seen around the world as the next superpowers. While China’s pace of growth is far more consistent, I believe it is India that is more qualified and deserves to be the next world leader. With its stable democratic institutions, genuinely independent judiciary and media, and a healthy civil society, India is best prepared to take over the mantle of global leadership from America.

The US has come this far and enjoys the eminence of global leadership not because of its military or economic might but because of its democratic institutions and the welcoming nature of its multicultural society. If America is where it finds itself today it is because it has constantly welcomed dreamers and go- getters and enterprising, talented and hard working people from around the world. It’s a nation of immigrants and its doors have always remained open for everyone who wants a slice of the American pie. It matters not where you come from or who you are. What matters is what you can bring to the table and how you can contribute.

This is the secret of American dream. If India is to be a world leader like America it can do so only by preserving and promoting its all- welcoming, all-embracing culture and attitude: an India where everyone gets his or her due with dignity. When Indians find themselves unwelcome in their own country, in cities like Mumbai, how can this amazing country ever hope to touch the heights of greatness that it seeks to touch?

The future belongs to the India of Rahul Gandhi, Shah Rukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar, not to the banana republic that parties like Sena want to make out of India.

The writer is opinion editor of Khaleej Times .

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You might also like other posts from Aijaz Zaka Syed! 

1. What a billion Muslims Think 2. Lessons for Iran, Mideast in North Korea’s Nukes 3. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s Crime? 4. Attacking Pakistan? Don’t Do It. 5. Islamistische Gewalt (Der Spiegel Article)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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INDIA under THREAT

Blankets cover bodies of Indian soldiers killed by insurgents in India’s West Bengal state. Maoist guerrillas are reported to be active in the 220 districts across 20 states and affects 40 per cent of the geographical area of the country.

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Gamini Weerakoon

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Despite India’s demonstration of its military and economic prowess beyond its borders, very recent events have demonstrated the extreme vulnerability of its internal security. On February 7, India test fired its nuclear capable Agni 3 missile from Wheeler Island in the Bay of Bengal.

This missile has a 3500 km range and its range covers vast areas of China and Pakistan. Reports said that: ‘pin point accuracy was achieved’. Defence Minister Antony announced recently India’s plans to raise two mountain divisions in North East India ‘not against China but as a part of the policy to strengthen armed forces in that region’. Meanwhile India has committed $ 1.3 billion in development assistance and infrastructure in Afghanistan.

HOME GROWN THREAT

On February 10 in a remote camp in Midnapore (West Bengal) 24 jawans (soldiers) of the Eastern Front Rifles in the Sildha camp were killed by Maoist guerrillas who arrived on motor cycles and four wheeled vehicles. Reports said that these poorly trained soldiers deployed to combat the Maoist guerrillas in an operation launched by the central government known as Operation Green Hunt against the guerrillas were sitting ducks.

Naxal Leader Kiserji had said that the attack was an answer to the government operation against them and asked that it be called off.

This movement that commenced in 1967 following the split of the Communist Party of India was recently described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the greatest security threat to India. The movement has spread to 220 districts across 20 states and affects 40 per cent of the geographical area of the country. It controls a region known as the Red Corridor extending over 92,000 sq miles and the Indian intelligence organisation, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) estimated the strength of the Naxalites last year at 50,000 regular cadres in mass organisations with millions of sympathisers. The affected states are: West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Orissa, Andra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Jhakarland, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Map showing The Red Corridor of India

WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

This movement that has lasted for over four decades comprises the Wretched of the Earth of India. They are tribals, untouchables, and other spurned castes but also include radical students in large numbers as well as intellectuals. Some of the Naxals identified have been alumni of well known colleges whose products include leading Indian politicians. But the movement has failed to attract the support of mainstream political parties.

Reports speak of the state machinery systematically annihilating student supporters. Human rights groups have expressed concern about disappearance of such students and some estimates speak of 5000 Bengali students and intellectuals being killed. At the inception of the movement it was declared that assassination of ‘class enemies’ was an objective and that revolutionary warfare was to take place not only in the countryside but everywhere. Well known leader Majumdar was arrested and died in custody under ‘mysterious circumstances’. The movement poses a serious challenge to the Indian state but can it be eliminated by the use of force as is being presently attempted?

To those observers of the rise of India under free market capitalism the high rise buildings of Mumbai with vast areas of slum land around demonstrates the paradox of modern India.

The Naxalite movement originated during the days of Nehruvian socialism under Indira Gandhi. Socialism it is said has the capacity to make every one poor and did little to alleviate the abjectly poor. Now under free market capitalism, the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. How long will it take for the wealth to trickle down from the high rise buildings to the slum lands of Mumbai?

AL-QAEDA THREAT

An incident of even graver threat to the security of the Indian state was witnessed on February 13 when a bomb went off in a popular restaurant in the western city of Pune killing eight and injuring 33. This was the first such attack in India after Mumbai terrorist attack in November 2008. The Pune attack was significant in that responsibility for the attack was claimed by an organisation styled as the Indian Mujahideen. This group has been identified by the Indian media as a front created by the Islamic terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba ( LeT ), operating from Pakistan and another Islamic terror organisation Harkat-ul-Jihad to cover the tracks of the radical Students’ Islamic Movement of India.

[No more threats from Osama bin Laden??

India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has recently termed the Naxalites; a Maoist led movement that commenced in 1967 following the split of the Communist Party of India, as the greatest security threat to India].

It is now suspected that most of the bombings that took place in Indian cities last year were directed by LeT and carried out by the Indian Mujahideen.

A consolation for the United States and other western countries has been that even though India ranks third in terms of Muslim populated countries it has been largely left untouched by Islamic terror of the al Qaeda variety. President George W. Bush made specific mention of this in his speeches as president. If Islamic radicalism grips the Indian Muslim population of 160 million (13.3 percent) of the total Indian population, it could have immense destructive potential not only for India but entire South Asia.

Al Qaeda last week also threatened India against staging international sporting events such as the World Hockey Cup and the Commonwealth Games. A leading commander of the organisation Ilyas Kashmiri had warned the world not to send sportspeople to India, Asia Times an online internet channel said. However indications were that most countries were ignoring the threat.

Kashmir continues to rumble, and rattle India-Pakistan entente

INDO-PAK TALKS

India’s perennial problem of Kashmir remains unresolved. Kashmir is the font of most of South Asian ills and continues to be so. The two countries last week decided to hold talks at foreign secretary level on February 25 despite strong objections made in certain quarters in India that the talks should not be held in view of the Pune bombing. Indo-Pakistan talks that commenced in 2004 came to a halt after the Mumbai attacks but the Indian government and most of India’s geopolitical strategists held that nothing could be lost by holding the talks.

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Source: text, The Sunday Leader, cross posted at: There are no sunglasses Images: 1. Title image, Indian military men killed by Maoist insurgents in West Bengal 2. Middle, India’s red corridor 3. On right, Manmohan Singh & Osama bin Laden 4. Bottom, Kashmir rumbles & rattles

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Is India-Pakistan entente possible?

For India, the solution to the conflict will allow it to play a meaningful role in the region. — Photo by AFP

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INDIA PAKISTAN DIALOGUE PROCESS

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[Note for WoP readers: The Talks are scheduled between two neighbors who ever since independence have been on a warring path. People in South Asia as well as international observers have always been urging the two countries for such a process. Unfortunately the governments in both countries backtracked from these peace talks and a more belligerent stance was adopted particularly from the Indian side after the Mumabai attacks of Nov 2008. So now when these talks are being held, the holding these talks itself is a welcome sign for peace in the region.

My friend Peter Chamberlin has put in very pertinent remarks on this subject, so before you go to the main piece jotted down by Izzuddin Pal, first read this. Peter writes:-

Tear gas in Kashmir

women shout slogans during the funeral procession of teenager Zahid Farooqon the outskirts of Srinagar, Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010. Fresh protests erupted fueled by the death of the second teenager on Friday, as thousands of soldiers in riot gear patrolled the streets in the capital of Kashmir valley for three straight days to quell protests.

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“ENJOY” THE BEAUTY WHILE ON DUTY

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JEFFREY STERN

TO CONTROL THE MOBS, CONTROLLERS MUST REMAIN SANE

When you fire a tear gas shell, you’re supposed to aim below the chest. That’s basically agreed upon, it’s written somewhere: an understanding extracted from a code of conduct housed in an operating manual stuck in someone’s desk drawer. “The policemen are trained to fire the tear gas shells in a parabolic way and not directly,” the Inspector General of Kashmir’s police force told a local paper, describing in a decidedly sterile manner the intended trajectory of a little steel projectile whose intended target is, after all, civilians.

It’s also understood that often, this does not happen. Tear gas shells rocket off walls and ricochet and dance and skip across the concrete, so “non-lethal” intentions don’t necessarily beget non-lethal results. You don’t know where the thing is going to end up really, and sometimes — in the case of especially zealous protesters — where it ends up is hurtling back through the air at you. So you fire them where you want the gas to go and hope you don’t learn later that it hit a soft part of someone’s body, producing the precise inverse of the effect you intended. “Minimum force” weapons can prove plenty forceful, and “crowd control” measures sometimes wind up rousing bigger and angrier crowds.

NON LETHAL INTENTIONS- BUT LETHAL RESULTS

The wayward tear gas canister is perhaps an apt metaphor for India’s problem in its Himalayan northwest, where it administers to a province of people who don’t want it there, and where it is trying to control the population with enough force that Indian authority is respected; not so much that it’s resented.And it’s a wayward tear gas canister that catalyzed violence last fortnight in Kashmir, after an incident that began when a 14-year-old boy headed out to play cricket with his friends on January 31.

By way of explanation, if not necessarily apology, for the events that followed, the director general of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) later said that “stone pelting” is “a new form of gunless terrorism.” He lamented bodily injuries of unspecified severity suffered by his men, and cited “close to 400 vehicles damaged in the last one-and-a-half year.”

He might have gone on to complain about name-calling and rude language. Indeed, for all its tactical prowess, the CRPF falters when it comes to PR. Its concept of a public information campaign is a series of signs at security checkpoints across Kashmir that read enjoy the beauty, we are on duty, an almost satirically blithe appeal coming from hardened counterinsurgency men with big weapons and grim faces.

ENJOY THE BEAUTY WHILE ON DUTY

And yet, one can’t fault them for trying to make their name smell a little better in a place where they’ve come to stand for everything the people hate. To many Kashmiris, the very presence of the paramilitary CRPF constitutes an insidious kind of insult. Not just because the paramilitaries are viewed as a Hindu force in the majority Muslim Kashmir, but because they’re perceived to be hard men trained to fight militants, and having them keep the peace on city streets feels a little like calling in Navy SEALS to mediate bar fights.

That New Delhi sends paramilitaries to do crowd control in Kashmir suggests to Kashmiris that India regards the people there as indistinct from al Qaeda, Lashkar-e Tayyaba, or other Pakistan-based militants. In other words, despite New Delhi reducing the paramilitary presence in Kashmir year by year, Kashmiris feel their being there at all is an indication that India thinks of all Kashmiris — Indian citizens — as terrorists.

So was the situation in Kashmir during last Sunday of January sitting at a high simmer, when an assistant sub-inspector with the Jammu and Kashmir police force fired a teargas canister in an apparently un-parabolic manner, hitting a teenage boy named Wamiq Farooq in the head and killing him.

A number of things happened next. Protests erupted in towns and villages all over the valley, people taking to the streets as reports emerged of another boy taking a plastic pellet in the forehead and losing his sight, one getting a canister in the belly and losing his spleen, still others struck through with pellets but preferring to forgo treatment for fear of police waiting at hospitals, ready to arrest those carrying proof of participation in protests on (or in) their bodies. Each story instigated new and more intense protests, as local journalists reported that the government arrested close to 100 peopleby its own count and many more by everyone else’s, and injuries suffered by citizens, police, and paramilitaries numbered in the hundreds.

As news of the violence made its way west, Pakistanis already planning to demonstrate for “Solidarity Day,” an annual day of protest against Indian control in Kashmir took to the streets to support their (mostly) Muslim brothers on the Indian side of the Line of Control, forming human chains in Islamabad and Muzaffarabad, holding rallies in Lahore and Peshawar.

BLOOD FOR BLOOD,  CRY THE KASHMIRIS NOW

Last Friday amidst growing protests, a member of one of the paramilitary forces operating in the valley shot and killed a 17-year-old named Zahid Farooq (no relation to Wamiq), sending the situation over the edge. Cries of “blood for blood” and “we want freedom” sounded out at his funeral a day later, and Srinagar fell under an even tighter grip of government forces. The government restricted the assembly of more than four people, and shut down roads.

I reached a journalist friend on the phone, out of breath and frantic, who told me “everything is closed. We are not being allowed to go to places, I tried my best to go to one of the places where they imposed the curfew and are now protesting.” As he spoke, he became so exercised that that he began pushing keys on the dial pad accidentally. “Downtown area Srinagar,” he said, “I can’t get there, nobody is being allowed, the protesters are only getting there through back alleys.” Before hanging up, he told me, “It is totally different this time. The youth are very angry; I see rage in their eyes, more so than ever before.”

Here is what’s strange about the latest boiling-over in Kashmir: the youth in the streets aren’t responding to orders, they’re giving them. The main Muslim party in Kashmir, the All Parties Hurriyat conference, initially declared a one-day strike, but a group of twenty or so young men assembled a conference of their own and announced they wouldn’t listen to Hurriyat leaders; they wanted a longer strike, four days instead of one. The people struck for four. And after more violence, they struck some more.

KASHMIR’S NEW, YOUNG GENERATION IS BORN ON THE BATTLEFIELD

As influence in Kashmir has percolated from state officials down to religious leaders, and finally, to young men, New Delhi will have a harder and harder time finding people to negotiate with. A government minister can’t hold two-party talks with teenagers, but increasingly it’s the disenfranchised youth who have the pulse of the people, and the inclination to act decisively.

Frustrated young men are taking the torch from older separatist leaders who’ve become more ruminative in their twilight. “After twenty years of violence, the new generation which is now on the street was born on a battlefield,” says Inpreet Kaur, another Kashmiri-born journalist. “They are born under the shadow of a gun. For them, these agitations are part of life. The protests are part of life.

Violence is a point or normalcy for this generation.” So youth make up the new power bloc, a phenomenon that in both origin and implication is not unlike the Taliban (“the students”) storming forth from the madrassas in Pakistan in the nineties, or al Shabaab (“the lads”) lording over war-torn Somalia.

India does not appear to be addressing disenfranchised youth in Kashmir very well. India has been remarkably proactive in advocating negotiations with Pakistan, and deserves credit for any progress the two countries make. The Byzantium of backroom negotiations that characterize Indian geopolitics is dizzying, and because most negotiations related to Kashmir are necessarily secret, it’s impossible to fairly evaluate New Delhi’s efforts to mitigate the Kashmir crisis.

Two weeks ago, however, India appointed a new national security advisor with a more flexible stance towards Pakistan than his predecessor, and for this weekend, India publicly proposed foreign-secretary-level negotiations with its archrival. If Pakistan responds favorably to these steps, India’s higher-road statecraft could lead to tangible progress. But it will do little to defuse Kashmir, because even if Pakistan and India were, hypothetically, to agree on Kashmir, Kashmiris likely wouldn’t.

KASHMIRIS FEEL THEY ARE THE ASIAN PALESTINE FIGHTING A KASHMIRI INTIFADA

While India is closer to bilateral talks, “trilateral” talks — negotiations which actually include Kashmir — could never be publicly entertained. Negotiations with Kashmir would suggest that Kashmir is an autonomous region, that it’s not is one of India’s central contentions. Kashmir does not belong to Pakistan, Kashmir belongs to India, so goes the logic, and that Kashmir might belong to itself is not an option India has political room to consider.

They’ve tried to, even recently. New Delhi held “quiet diplomacy” talks with Kashmir’s Hurriyat conference last fall, but when The Hindu reported the story, the project was scuttled, and Kashmiris were left to doing what they’ve been doing as long as they can remember: watching Pakistan and India volley back and forth over their heads, feeling sometimes ignored, sometimes like puppets between two disputants, children manipulated by two feuding parents.

It is fitting, then, that the region’s fate depends on its children. Some of the young Kashmiris have taken to calling themselves the Asian Palestine, and they believe they’re fighting the Kashmiri intifada.

 

The antidote is better development, hospitals, opportunities for work and normalized political engagement. But as it stands, “the only relief the young people are getting is through religion,” the Kashmiri journalist Kaur says. “On the ground you don’t see job opportunities.

So what is happening is that you’re starting to hear of local young people getting involved in militancy against the government.” The trend is shifting from Pakistani terrorists hopping (or being shoved) across the Line of Control into India to wreak havoc, more now to Indian citizens training to confront India. Official estimates place the number of Kashmiris who’ve gone into Pakistan for training at 800, but the figure could be significantly more.

 

Riding the metro in New Delhi as he spoke to me, speaking low and covering the receiver so as not to be overheard, Kaur explained the significance of a recent report that eight teenage boys were arrested on their way to Pakistan, allegedly intending to receive militant training. “According to the police,” he said, “all these boys were from South Kashmir, they were young new recruits. What is the true story? We don’t know.” But when young people get caught or go missing in Kashmir, everyone assumes the worst.

OPENING OF SHOPS AND CLEAR ROADS IN KASHMIR DON’’T MEAN THE PROBLEM IS DYING OFF

On Tuesday, shops reopened and the government cleared roads they had blocked, returning Kashmir to a tentative kind of normalcy. “But that doesn’t mean Kashmir will die off,” Kaur says. “The situation is best suited for pan-Islamic militants, and they’re growing into a mass movement. They need a political solution. This disease is slowly growing.”

__________

Jeffrey Stern is the international engagement manager at the National Constitution Center and a journalist who spent much of the last two years traveling across South Asia.

Source: text: afpakforeignpolicy.comTitle Image

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India, Pakistan break the ice, but chill remains

Good chemistry but poor trust mark the dialogue

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M K Bhadrakumar

• 
  

Amid much grandstanding, the India-Pakistan “dialogue” got off to a start in New Delhi on Thursday – albeit a somewhat bumpy one. No immediate breakthrough in frosty ties was expected, nor was one achieved. The United States, which is brokering the structured talks at the Foreign Ministry-level, should heave a sigh of relief that the ball is rolling after a 14-month hiatus.

The approach of the Indian and Pakistani sides presents a study in contrast, although both saw the other as desperately keen for talks to resume. India always held dialogue as a trump card to force Pakistan to respond to its demands to curb the activities of terrorist groups. On its part, Islamabad presumed that India “panicked” at the prospect of regional isolation on its part after placing itself brilliantly to seek leverage with the US from its “strategic assets” – the Taliban – in the endgame in Afghanistan.

Neither assumption is valid. Delhi ought to realize that despite its stubborn refusal to talk, Islamabad parried its demand to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure with links to the Pakistani security establishment that bleeds India. Indeed, indications are that Pakistan envisages the continued use of terrorism as a state policy vis-a-vis India.

Equally, Islamabad is naive to think Delhi will roll over and accept a Taliban regime in Kabul. Indeed, India has several big advantages insofar as its economy is robustly coasting toward a 9% growth rate and it isn’t a basket case needing a constant infusion of American aid, apart from enjoying the political stability that comes with civilian supremacy in government.

The Indians used the talks on Thursday to push terrorism to center stage. The Indian brief seems to have been as hard as nails, with Delhi handing over three dossiers listing Pakistan-based terrorists, while its projection in the run-up was as smooth as silk, with Delhi presenting itself as reasonable and open to exchanges on a range of bilateral issues.

The Pakistani side apparently did not expect Delhi to name a senior serving Pakistani military official as a terrorist. Given the political realities in Pakistan with the military calling the shots, Delhi’s allegation almost instinctively forced the suave Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir, who led the visiting delegation and who is well regarded in Delhi, to launch an uncharacteristic 90-minute televised diatribe against India at a press conference in the Pakistani chancery.

How the Indian allegation regarding the Pakistani military officer pans out remains to be seen since it constitutes a virtual finger-pointing of the army chief in Rawalpindi, General Pervez Kiani, as the mastermind behind terrorism in the sub-continent.

We may expect storms in the days ahead, and how big the American umbrella is to ferry home the Indians and the Pakistanis in the event of a sudden downpour becomes an element in the Barack Obama administration’s checklist, alongside the attendant woes of the war in Afghanistan.

The audacity of Obama’s hope is simply stunning - pick up the Pakistani military to be a key ally of both the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the fulfillment of strategy on Afghanistan and Central Asia, while stringing Delhi along as a “strategic partner” in encounters with a rising China and resurgent Russia.

Obama faces an acute dilemma. Time is short and he desperately needs the Pakistani military to bring the Taliban in from the cold to the negotiating table, without which the bleeding of the US’s Afghan wound won’t stop. The Pakistani military senses Obama’s need and it knows it is immensely experienced in serving Washington’s interests in the Hindu Kush – but for a price.

The Pakistani wish-list is demanding. The military expects to be built up by Washington to a near parity in conventional strength with its Indian adversary. It also deserves a nuclear deal similar to the one the George W Bush administration granted India. It cannot and will not accept any thinking in Washington that attributes the role of a regional superpower to India; and it expects a US mediatory role to pressure India to settle the Kashmir dispute.

In essence, Pakistan seeks a strategic relationship with the US that duly recognizes its own legitimate claim as a regional power that goes beyond the imperatives of the Afghan war or NATO’s enlargement in Central Asia.

Delhi – and indeed other regional powers – will be keenly watching how far Obama bends to accommodate Pakistan. Meanwhile, a series of consultations with other key players with stakes in Obama’s regional policies is beginning. Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna is scheduled to visit Beijing; Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is due to visit Delhi in March; and a round of ministerial consultation with Iran may come up in May.

However, Delhi may see no real need to seek an entente cordiale with third parties in order to catch Obama’s eye. India’s ties with the US are steadily deepening and unlike in the case with Pakistan, strategic partnership with the US goes down extremely well with the Indian elites and public opinion. It cannot be lost on Washington that India is indeed one of the few “natural allies” left on the planet for the US and unlike the case with Pakistan, Delhi promises a durable relationship of intrinsic worth.

Why should the US, therefore, kill the goose that lays the golden egg? Delhi expects Washington not to tread on India’s core interests and concerns and estimates that a relationship of mutual trust and global partnership isn’t too much to ask.

While the US has seldom been so influential in the sub-continent, a striking parallel can be drawn with the early 1960s after the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict. Chinese “communist expansionism” was the core US agenda and Washington counted on keeping both India and Pakistan as allies – and perhaps made its most direct intervention to settle the Kashmir dispute so that its geostrategy could work.

However, as Howard Schaffer, an experienced former US ambassador, wrote in a recent book, at a certain point the John F Kennedy administration saw the danger of annoying India by pressuring it on Kashmir lest Delhi drift toward Beijing for a normalization of relations.

But historical analogies apart, the nascent India-Pakistan dialogue process that started in Delhi on Thursday will likely continue. It seems reasonable to estimate that despite hardliners in both countries, Delhi and Islamabad will realize the usefulness of an incremental dialogue process.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is an ardent advocate of a transformation of the adversarial India-Pakistan relationship on lines similar to the historic French-German concord of the 1950s. But there is also some disarray insofar as the Indian security establishment doesn’t seem to share his vision and often gives into silly pastimes of laying booby traps along the path of India-Pakistan normalization.

The prime ministers of India and Pakistan are bound to come across one another on April 28-29 at a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in the Bhutanese capital of Thimpu.

Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao revealed that Bashir invited her to visit Islamabad for the next round of talks. Will they schedule a session in late March or early April?

__________

M K Bhadrakumar has been a former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service.

Source : text – Originally published in Asia Times, cross posted at GeoploticaNWO Title Image: AFP / DAWN.COM

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Marjah: ‘This is not Fallujah’

Operation Moshtarak, the largest operation in Afghanistan since the Taliban were overthrown, will be worth the human costs that will be suffered, says British General Sir Richard Dannatt.

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A NEW GENTLER WAR??

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Eric Walberg

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So says McChrystal, as the US surge goes full steam ahead in Marjah — a new “gentler” war.

Apart for Abu Ghraib, Fallujah is perhaps the Iraq war’s defining moment. The hatred and resentment of the occupied people found a catalyst in the four Blackwater mercenaries, who were killed and strung up, and no doubt deserved their fate, certainly as symbols of a cynical, illegal invasion. The US soldiers — who are just as mercenary, being a professional army invading a country sans provocation — came and “destroyed the village to save it.”The “success” of the blitzkrieg war in Iraq has been difficult to duplicate in Afghanistan, “the heart of darkness”, one British commander quipped to his troops as they went into battle, despite dropping far more bombs — many of them radioactive.

The unflagging resistance of the Afghans, their refusal to submit to the occupiers, is that because they realise the invaders are not there for their purported altruistic motives. The thousands of civilians and resistance fighters who have been killed by airstrikes — none of them guilty of anything more egregious than defending their homeland — is more than ample proof, as is the craven propping up of a US-imposed government, and the proliferation of US bases in the country. The unapologetically un-Islamic ways of the invaders, their lack of even the remotest understanding of the people they are occupying, is a constant insult to a proud and ancient people.

The new exit plan, so it goes, involves “clearing” all regions of Taliban — US Marines call it “mowing the grass”, acknowledging that as soon as they murder one group of resisters and leave, more pop up. The “new” strategy is to bring in ready-made Afghan administrators and police to create a prosperous, peaceful society once the “enemy” have been destroyed, “winning the hearts and minds” of the locals. “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said chief honcho General Stanley McChrystal.

But wait a moment. Is it possible the invaders are the enemy? And who are these newly discovered Afghan officials? Are (famously corrupt) Afghan government officials and police nominally loyal to NATO forces, trucked in by the invaders, going to be welcome in remote villages as ready-made trusted representatives of the people? And wasn’t this precisely the failed policy the US followed in Vietnam ? This old “new” policy was what convinced United States President Barack Obama to go along grudgingly with the Pentagon’s demands to radically increase NATO force — though on the condition that the whole operation be complete by next year. He clearly was given no choice in the matter, and his “ultimatum” was dismissed by US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates moments after Obama made it.

Not surprisingly, NATO forces have met strong resistance in Marjah as their onslaught enters its second week, from both the incredible, ragtag resistance and from locals, who doubt that the postwar reality will correspond remotely to the picture the invaders are painting. Tribal elders in Helmand this week called for an end to the “Moshtarak” offensive, citing Western troops’ disregard for civilian lives. Realising their “shock and awe” bombing kills civilians and turns locals against them, the invaders have reluctantly cut back, now authorising them only under “very limited and prescribed conditions.” Even so, over 50 civilians are among the dead so far — 27 in an airstrike in Uruzgan Province — and “friendly fire” killed seven Afghan police. Six occupiers were killed in one day alone, bringing NATO losses to 18 at the time of writing.

The latest propaganda ploy is to accuse the Taliban of using locals as “human shields” and of holing up near civilians. But surely it is the NATO forces that are using locals as human shields, invading their homes in search of the “enemy”, forcing them to betray their children and friends, often under torture in Afghan-run prisons. Even those Afghans who collaborate with the occupiers, taking their dollars, guns and uniforms, are in effect human shields for the troops. And when they realise their lives are on the line, they flee their paymasters. How else to explain the 25 police officers who left their posts last week and “defected” to the Taliban in Chak?

But Marjah is really just a microcosm for what the US is doing at this very moment around the globe — waging a veritable war on the world, in Iraq, Pakistan, expanding into Yemen, Somalia, Iran, supplementing bombs and soldiers with militarised sea lanes, forward military and missile bases on every continent, encircling “enemies” Russia and China.

The process is merely accelerating as the US loses its traditional edge in the world economy, outpaced by China . It is the logical next step for a deeply illogical economic system. It can’t be repeated too often: the US is frantically trying to consolidate its sole superpower status militarily before it loses the economic war.

Marjah also represents the US project of replacing the UN with NATO as the world’s peacekeeper. The coalition of almost 60 nations is pursuing an illegal war launched by the US, with the UN — the only legitimate forum for world peacekeeping — now in tow solely as window dressing. Though not quite. Deputy special representative of the secretary general Robert Watkins said the UN will not be involved in NATO’s reconstruction plans for Marjah “because we would not want to have the humanitarian activities we deliver to be linked with military activity.”

Today’s Russia, unhappy with the Yelstin-era acquiescence to a subservient role in the US empire, is the only country standing up to the US empire. The new military doctrine announced by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev earlier this month is unwavering in its condemnation of US plans. The fact that NATO is attempting to “globalise its functions in contravention of international law” is threat Number One, followed by NATO’s encirclement of Russia and US forward missile bases, now rapidly being deployed around the world — and Russia. International terrorism is ninth out of 11 threats listed. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reiterated this on Tuesday, saying Russia will give priority to nuclear deterrence, space and air defense in its military reforms.

The Russians argue that the OSCE should have been the vehicle for European security after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but instead, the US chose to expand NATO. This meant not uniting Europe, but merely moving the dividing line east, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week at the Munich Conference on Security. Lavrov pointed to the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the tragedy in the Caucasus in August 2008 as evidence that the OSCE had failed to rise to the challenge of maintaining peace in Europe. The OSCE Permanent Council knew about the Georgian leaders’ preparations for a military attack but took no measures. The Russia-NATO Council also failed when members blocked Russia’s request to convene an urgent meeting when the military actions were at their height.

Last month’s London conference on Afghanistan was presented in the West as a benign effort to provide economic development and humanitarian aid. It was not a UN conference, but “the international community coming together to fully align military and civilian resources behind an Afghan-led political strategy”, graced by the UN secretary general’s presence. It was preceded by two days of meetings between top military commanders of almost a third of the world’s nations at NATO headquarters in Brussels, and followed by two days of meetings by NATO and allied defense chiefs last week in Istanbul, the latter attended by Israeli Chief of General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

The brazen involvement of Israel in a war against Islamic Afghanistan, where Israeli drones have killed and continue to kill civilians and resisters, suggests what this war really represents. The invaders should note that their nickname “Moshtarak” (collective) derives from the same Arabic root as shirk (idolatry). Though Pentagon planners don’t register such subtleties, the locals surely do.

Marjah is indeed Fallujah. Like Fallujah, it will become a symbol, the defining moment in the war against the Afghan people. US Marines may “mow the grass”, eradicate the “weeds”, and plant their sterile seeds of Western-style democracy and economic prosperity as much as they like. However, “the Taliban is the future, the Americans are the past in Afghanistan,” as former head of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Hamid Gul recently told Al-Jazeera. This is clear to any sensible observer.

Gul angrily notes that it is Afghanistan’s neighbours, in particular, Pakistan, that will be left holding the bag when the inevitable arrives. “The OIC and the Muslim countries will have to come in and play their part. Then Afghanistan can redeem itself.” The sooner the US accepts the inevitable, the fewer will be the needless deaths of both Americans, Europeans and Afghans.

_____________

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly

Source: text- Originally published in Information Clearing House, cross posted at Op-Ed News Title Image: Telegraph.co.uk

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Israel`s Region-wide Underground War

Palestinians carry a picture of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of Hamas’ military wing, as others carry his coffin, left, during his funeral procession at the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, near Damascus. File photo: AP.

• 
  

Seumas Milne

• 
  

Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if Iranian intelligence was almost universally believed to have assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state.  Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the operation using forged or stolen passports of citizens of four European states, including Britain, with dual Iranian nationality.

You can be sure it would have triggered a major international storm, stentorian declarations about the threat of state-sponsored terrorism, and perhaps a debate at the UN Security Council, with demands for harsher sanctions against an increasingly dangerous Islamic republic.

Substitute Israel for Iran, and the first part of that scenario is exactly what happened in Dubai last month. A senior Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was murdered in his hotel room in what was widely assumed from the start to be an operation by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.  Less than a month later, strong suspicion has turned to as good as certainty with the revelation that the hit team had used the passport identities of six Britons with dual nationality and currently living in Israel.

But instead of setting off a diplomatic backlash, the British government sat on its hands for almost a week after it was reportedly first passed details of the passport abuse.  And while the Foreign Office finally summoned the Israeli ambassador to “share information”, rather than protest, Gordon Brown could yesterday only promise a “full investigation”.

In parallel with this languid official response, most of the British media has treated the assassination more as a ripping spy yarn than a bloody scandal which has put British citizens at greater risk by association with Mossad death squads.  It was an “audacious hit”, the Daily Mail enthused, straight out of a “Frederick Forsyth page-turner”, while theTimes revelled in an attack that resembled nothing so much as a “well-plotted murder mystery”.

Running throughout all this is a breathless awe at Mossad’s reputation for ruthless brilliance in seeking out and destroying Israel’s enemies.  In reality, the Dubai operation was badly bungled, as the Israeli press has already started to acknowledge.  Despite having the relatively easy target of an unarmed man in a luxury hotel in a non-hostile Gulf state, Mossad managed to get its agents repeatedly caught on CCTV and effectively exposed Israel’s responsibility through the ham fisted passport scam.

Dubai follows a long history of Mossad bungles, from its accidental 1970s killing of a Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaken for a Palestinian Black September leader, through its failed assassination attempt against the Hamas leader Khalid Mish’al in Jordan in 1997, when agents had to take refuge in Israel’s embassy and the US forced Israel to produce the antidote for the nerve toxin used in the attack.

In that case, the would-be assassins were carrying the Canadian passports of Israeli citizens, apparently with their knowledge.  But while Mossad has used British documents in other attacks, it has naturally steered clear of faking the passports of its US sponsor.  So at the same time as Israel is demanding the British government change the law without delay to prevent the arrest of visiting Israeli leaders on war crimes charges, what is Britain planning to do over the abuse of its citizens’ identity to carry out state-directed murder?

Very little, it seems.  Part of the explanation has to be that Britain and the US have of course been carrying out their own assassination campaigns, in violation of the laws of war, in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In his new book on secret SAS operations in occupied Iraq, Mark Urban estimates that 350 to 400 were killed in covert British attacks.  The Joint Special Operations Command run by General Stanley McChrystal, now US commander in Afghanistan, was responsible for perhaps 3,000 deaths.  In Pakistan, US drone assassination attacks are now routinely carried out against Taliban and al-Qaida targets, real or imagined.

And since launching its war on terror, the US has also adopted Israel’s practice, stretching back decades, of carrying out killings far from the theatre of war.  First, Israel’s attacks were targeted against PLO leaders; more recently against the Islamists.  But since the fiasco of the Mish’al plot, its assassinations have mostly been confined to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Israel made a determined attempt over the past decade to decapitate Hamas of its entire leadership.

Now that focus has again widened. Under the direction of Mossad director Meir Dagan, Israel is running a region-wide underground war against the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas — which have both maintained an effective ceasefire for more than a year — and their Syrian and Iranian backers.  Since the killing of veteran Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008, Israeli-hallmarked assassinations have multiplied in Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

But coldblooded killing isn’t only a morally repugnant crime. The lesson of colonial history is that decapitation campaigns against national resistance movements don’t work.  In the short term they can disrupt and demoralise, but if the movement is socially rooted, other leaders or even organisations will take their place.  That was Israel’s experience when it killed the Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi and his family in the early 1990s, only for him to be succeeded by the more effective and charismatic Hassan Nasrallah.

Such campaigns also tend to spread the war. Unlike the historic PLO factions, Hamas has always confined its armed attacks to Israel and the Palestinian territories.  Writing in the Guardian in 2007, Mish’al confirmed the “principle that the resistance should only be fought in Palestine“. But in the aftermath of the Dubai assassination, Hamas leaders have started to hint strongly that policy could now change, and that they could respond to Israel’s attacks in “the international arena”.

If so, it would give an added dimension to the assessment by Ben Caspit in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv yesterday that the Dubai killing had been a “tactical operational success, but a strategic failure”.  So far the response of British ministers to Mossad’s provocation has been craven.  Unless that changes fast, they can only increase the risk of being drawn further into a conflict ready to erupt again at any time.

____________

–Seumas Milne [MrZine Monthly Magazine] is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. He is also the author of The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners. This article was first published by the Guardian on 18 February 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/

Source: Mathaba

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Jundallah arrest proves timely for Iran

This picture released February 23, 2010 from Iranian state TV shows Jundallah’s yop man Abdolmalek Rigi under armed guard following his arrest. – Reuters

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M K Bhadrakumar

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If the snow-covered Elbruz mountains rising just north of Tehran took on an extra glint in the bright wintry sunshine on Wednesday, there was good reason. It was the morning after the dramatic capture of the 31-year-old leader of the dreaded Pakistan-based terrorist group Jundallah, Abdulmalik Rigi, in a stunning operation by Iranian intelligence.

The Soureh Cinema Institute in Tehran and Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance are already contemplating making a movie about the capture of Rigi, who headed Jundallah (Soldiers of God), a Sunni insurgent group that operates mostly in Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Balochistan against the Shi’ite regime.

[Right : The Soureh Cinema Institute in Tehran and Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance are already contemplating making a movie about the capture of Rigi].

The operation had all the ingredients of a thriller. From available details, Iranian intelligence, which has been stalking Rigi for months, grabbed him while he was on a flight from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Kyrgyzstan. The aircraft was forced to land in Bandar Abbas, in southern Iran, where Rigi and an accomplice were forcibly deplaned.

However, Rigi’s capture has wider ramifications going well beyond the stuff of high drama. For one thing, the Iranian public was dazzled by the intelligence operation and it has provided a morale boost at a critical juncture when the West is besieging Iran over its nuclear program and the political class in Tehran is more polarized than at any time in the three decades of the Islamic Republic.

Ironically, the Iranian performance stands out in sharp contrast with the fallout from the Israeli intelligence operation in Dubai in the UAE to assassinate prominent Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on January 19. (See Dubai hit exposes Hamas’ weaknesses, Asia Times Online, February 23) Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar made this clear when he said, “Such an operation by the Islamic Republic’s security forces indicates that the country’s intelligence and security have the upper hand in the region.”

[Right: Map shows Iran's ethnic mix: contrary to Balochistan province of Pakistan where ethnicity has been pushed up resulting in an insurgency in the area, in Iran Jundullah outfit was tasked to exploit the sectarian identity as the cause for a terror oriented struggle against Iran's central government in Tehran.

No doubt, Iranian public opinion will identify with this mood of self-confidence, no matter the political persuasions of various factions at this current juncture as regards the ruling establishment.

In turn, that would have implications for the United States-Iran standoff. But that is only one aspect. The fact is that Tehran has put Washington on the back foot at a critical juncture. Rigi is bound to spill the beans – he may already have begun – and much is going to surface about the covert activities by the US forces based in Afghanistan to subvert Iran by hobnobbing with Jundallah, which, incidentally, is also known to have links with al-Qaeda.

Rigi apparently had a meeting with his US mentors in an American base just a day before his journey to the UAE. It seems he was traveling with a fake Afghan passport provided by the Americans. A lot of highly embarrassing details are trickling in already that will be eagerly lapped up by the so-called “Arab street” and which will make the entire American position on the situation around Iran look rather weak.

The American doublespeak on terrorism comes out all too starkly. The big question is whether Pakistan played a helpful role in Rigi’scapture. Iranian officials flatly insist that Rigi’s capture was “fully carried out” by Iranian agencies, including its “management, operation and planning” and the credit goes “solely to our country’s security and task forces”.

Iranian Intelligence Minister Hojjatoleslam Heydar Moslehi, who is also an influential clerical figure, has stated categorically that “no other country had a share in this success”.

But Persian is a highly nuanced language. What is significant is that while Iranian officials have unhesitatingly pointed their finger at the US as Rigi’s top mentor, there has not been a single reference direct or implied about Pakistan that could be construed as critical or unfriendly. This must be noted as on several occasions in recent months Iranian officials publicly expressed their anguish that Pakistani intelligence was involved with Jundallah in one way or another, and that Islamabad was not doing enough to live up to its claims of being a friendly neighbor.

Tehran repeatedly passed on intelligence and urged Islamabad to extradite Rigi following the deadly attack by Jundallah in Sistan-Balochistan province in October, which resulted in the killing of 42 people, including several high-ranking Iranian military commanders.

On balance, Islamabad seems to have implied that it did cooperate with Tehran on Rigi’s capture. The Pakistani ambassador in Tehran, Mohammad Baksh Abbasi, took the unusual step of “underlining Islamabad’s support” for Rigi’s arrest. Abbasi held a press conference to affirm, “Rigi’s arrest showed that there is no place for Iran’s enemies in Pakistan.” Shorn of diplomatese, Abbasi claimed a share of the credit that Tehran was bent on exclusively hogging. But Maslehi was plainly dismissive about any Pakistani role.

If there was a Pakistani role in Rigi’s capture there would be deep implications for regional security. Most certainly, Islamabad could claim reciprocal “goodwill” from Iran, such as accommodating its own interests in Afghanistan. On the other hand, Iranian officials have made it clear that Tehran is not indebted to anyone, including Pakistan.

Tehran remains deeply concerned about the US strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s role in it. In the Iranian estimation, the US strategy aims at consolidating a long-term North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Equally, Pakistan’s growing ties with NATO as the alliance’s South Asian “pillar” have not escaped Iranian attention. There is no denying the fact that NATO-Pakistan ties are fast assuming a strategic character and have exceeded the immediate requirements of practical cooperation in Afghanistan.

Tehran is equally apprehensive that the US’s long-term strategy is to become the “umpire” or arbiter of Asian security involving four major powers neighboring Afghanistan – Iran, India, Russia and China – by exploiting the contradictions in the region. Tehran estimates that Pakistan is collaborating with this and is in many ways becoming a beneficiary of it.

Therefore, Tehran will follow a two-track policy on the Jundallah-Pakistan nexus. On the one hand, it would like to persuade Islamabad at all available levels to be cooperative in curbing the activities of terrorist elements operating out of Pakistani soil. However, Tehran cannot be naive enough to imagine that the Jundallah terrorists are “non-state actors” based in Pakistan and Afghanistan over whom the security establishment in Islamabad has no control.
Tehran would prefer not to harp on about that sensitive aspect and will instead cajole and persuade the Pakistani intelligence and military to be cooperative in countering terrorism directed against Iran from Pakistani soil.

The Rigi episode brings out the complexity of Iran-Pakistan relations in the fight against terrorism. The bottom line is that Iran’s interests in Afghanistan are far too fundamental to be bartered away under any circumstances.

M K Bhadrakumar is a former career diplomat of  the Indian Foreign Service.

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Source: Originally published in Asia Times, Cross posted at: GeoploticalNWO

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Two crimes do not make a right

Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan national who is suspected of targeting New York subway with lethal explosives.

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Eric Margolis

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The blizzard that hit New York last week dumped 24 inches on the city and paralyzed almost all surface transport. But New York’s subways, which were begun in 1904, kept on zipping along, heedless of the tempest above.

The city’s subways carry 5.2 million riders daily to 468 stations. The fabled D train even goes from Manhattan to the beaches at far off Coney Island and Rockaway.  Before the era of air conditioning, escaping by subway to Long Island’s spacious beaches was the only way of avoiding madness from New York’s oppressive summer heat and humidity.

Compared to the Big Apple’s subways, the rest of the country’s system look like little choo choos.

Subways are the city’s vital arteries. On the hurtling express train, it takes 20 minutes to cover the seven miles from 96^th Street to Wall Street – provided the train does not catch fire, flood, or break down.   A friend of mine calls New York’s often evil, filthy subways, `the electric sewer.’ Yes, but there is often no other way to get up or downtown in New York’s traffic gridlock.

At the age of six, I used to go to school every day by subway, taking three trains to get from the Upper West Side to the lower East Side at Gramercy Park.   The trip, requiring three transfers, took about an hour and required negotiating the disgusting and scary 42^nd Street Shuttle. We tough little New Yorkers didn’t ride sissy school buses or be driven in a van by mama.

On the way to and back from school, I used to fight off gangs, all sorts of perverts and molesters, thieves, and lunatics.  Just a normal school day in the Big Apple.

Federal, state and city authorities have long feared New York’s subway system was the leading target for attack by anti-American groups. Security is intense, but the vulnerability remains: a single major attack with explosive, poison gas or germs could cripple the world’s financial center and deal a devastating political blow to the White House which is under relentless attack by Republicans who are demanding more torture, more assassinations and less legality.

Najibullah Zazi, in custody of FBI officials in Aurora, Colo. Photo Schneider, Denver Post/AP

The week before last, an Afghan emigrant named Najibullah Zazi pled guilty in a New York court to planning to set off home-made explosives in the city’s subway to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Zazi, an airport shuttle bus driver from Denver, determined to stage an attack on civilians in New York to protest the US-led war in Afghanistan.

Sporting a lush Islamic beard and accented English, and making no efforts to conceal his activities, Zazi bought carts full of acetone and peroxide from beauty supply stores to confect a home-made bomb.

One does not see many fully-bearded Muslims shopping in beauty supply stores.

Zazi stuck out like an Islamic sore thumb and was quickly identified five months ago as a terrorism target by the FBI. The government tracks sales of explosives ingredients like acetone, hydrogen peroxide and fertilizer.

The Afghan emigrant was arrested as he drove into New York with his explosive materials. Some of Zazi’s relatives in New York were also arrested and charged with terrorism.

Luckily for the city, Zazi was a bumbling dope, not a master terrorist. In fact, most Muslims charged with terrorism in the US, Britain, Canada, and Europe have also been home-grown amateurs protesting over Afghanistan or Iraq. Some were drawn into terrorist plots and egged on by government provocateurs, a favorite tactic of the old Soviet NKVD and KGB secret police.

These home-grown young extremists were not experts trained or sent by al-Qaida, as authorities have claimed to make the arrests seem more important and show governments are successfully fighting anti-Western groups.

They were mostly young men who were violently reacting to Western military operations in the Muslim world, not attacking the West because, as President George Bush so deceitfully claimed, they hated its values and freedoms. This was not mindless terrorism but direct blowback from our actions.

Still, these angry amateurs can be a serious danger. I was on the London Underground on 7 July, 2005, when a group of young British Muslim men set off explosive devices very similar to what Zazi intended to build. The bombs killed 56 and injured 700. I just missed a nerve gas attack in Tokyo’s subway by fanatical cultists.

No protest targeting civilians or public transport has any legitimacy or justification. Attacking civilians violates Islamic law and is opposed by 98% of Muslims. Those who conduct such crimes are a tiny minority, much like the 19^thcentury bomb-throwing anarchists. But as Western wars against the Muslim world expand, they generate more and more of these violent young men who equate their planned attacks on civilian targets with US bombing of Afghan and Iraqi cities and towns.

A final caution: Zazi confessed after prosecutors threatened to imprison his entire family. A former Bush administration `terrorism expert’ boasted on CNN how threatening suspect’s families with prosecution gave the government useful `leverage.’   She would have found a happy home chez the Soviet secret police.

This is exactly how the Soviet secret police got people to sign confessions during the 1930’s purges. In fact, the great 1936 purges began right after the Soviet courts changed the law to allow the arrest of children over 12 years. That gave the NKVD a potent lever for getting parents to confess under threat their children would be jailed and disappear.

We also learn that CIA interrogators menaced suspects with an electric power drill, and threatened to arrest their families.

Is this what we have really become? Sinking to the level of the Iraqi secret police.

Security is vital, but equally so upholding the law and democratic values.

TWO CRIMES DO NOT MAKE A RIGHT.

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Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World.

Copyright © 2010 Eric Margolis

Source: Ericmargolis.com:

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Natural law brings AfPak crashing

What goes up must come down. In a way, the sheer dynamics of the nosedive of the United States’ AfPak diplomacy in the four weeks since the London conference on Afghanistan on January 28 can be attributed to the Newtonan law on gravitational pulls.

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M. K. Bhadrakumar

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Be it a baseball struck in a neighborhood sandlot game or in high-wire diplomacy, an elementary principle of physics holds good – what goes up must come down. In a way, the sheer dynamics of the nosedive of the United States’ AfPak diplomacy in the four weeks since the London conference on Afghanistan on January 28 can be attributed to gravitational pulls.

Earth’s gravity does not permit animated suspension, and US’s AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke has found it difficult to keep up the entente cordiale worked out in the British capital. United States President Barack Obama may need to act faster than he would have thought.

The US’s AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke has run into head wind almost simultaneously in four key capitals in and around the Hindu Kush – Islamabad, Kabul, Tehran and New Delhi.
Holbrooke no doubt achieved spectacular success in London, by rushing an agenda of “reintegration” and reconciliation of the Afghan Taliban through the assembled gathering of statesmen. The gathering included such inveterate critics of the doctrine of the “good Taliban” as India, China and Russia. But Holbrooke kept the lot together. That was probably the finest hour of AfPak diplomacy.

PAKISTAN SETS GROUND RULES

But did he force the pace? No sooner had the crowd dispersed from London, than AfPak diplomacy began unraveling. First, Pakistan went ahead and “captured” the Taliban’s deputy head Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. The funny thing is that Baradar was shaping up as a key interlocutor for AfPak diplomacy. The Mullah or his men were darting in and out of the Persian Gulf oasis towns having secret rendezvous with American envoys. Call it Track II or whatever, but a track was being cleared for the US’s reconciliation with the Taliban’s Quetta shura – its top leadership organ.

Or, at least, that was how Washington assessed the situation. Of course, these goings on were completely in the know of Pakistan. But there was a crucial difference: they were not being conducted through Pakistani mediation. So, Pakistan just nabbed Baradar. The dilemma facing AfPak diplomacy today is: how do you negotiate when you don’t have an interlocutor? A kind of recess is developing in the AfPak diplomatic calendar.

Pakistan’s message is straightforward: any negotiations with the Taliban ought to be conducted through the proper channel, namely, Pakistan’s ISI. Actually, it is not too much to demand. Pakistan committed a great deal of resources to stop the Taliban disintegrating through some of their darkest days between 2001 and 2004. Islamabad cannot be expected to just roll over and let the Americans inherit the crown jewels (“strategic assets”) when the hour of glory is nearing.

KARZAI DELIVERS A BLOW

Witnessing the determination in Islamabad to lock the stable doors to prevent the studs from being stolen, Kabul seems to have followed suit. Afghan President Hamid Karzai went ahead with a decree “Afghanizing” the country’s election commission. Curiously, Karzai acted unilaterally, just as Holbrooke was on a visit to Kabul.

There is some dramatic irony insofar as Karzai intended his move with the primary purpose of preempting the sort of regime change that Hobrooke attempted during the last presidential elections. Karzai has decreed that the Afghan election commission shall henceforth have no more foreigners – that is to say, there is no more scope for the US to plant proxy agents who might dictate terms within the election supervisory body.

The timing is interesting insofar as the Afghan parliamentary elections are due in August. Karzai expects insurgent groups to increase their participation in the elections to make the new parliament more representative. He has negotiated with the Taliban with this objective in mind. Karzai hopes to see the new parliament as an Afghan political base for himself that would insure against any US attempts to oust him.

AfPak diplomacy, on the other hand, is moving on an altogether different track to engage the Taliban with a view to integrate the latter in the Afghan mainstream politics, which would certainly necessitate Karzai making way for an “interim government” within a year or so. If he succeeds in constituting a new parliament with a four-year term as prescribed by the constitution, the US game plan will crash land.

The political stakes are indeed high. Karzai has, plainly put, cocked a snook at AfPak diplomacy. Washington has been

left _{with no option for the present but to take Karzai’s blow and pretend nothing happened. The only way out now will be to deny Karzai the international funding without which he may be hard-pressed to the elections in August. But that is a blatant strong-arm tactic. Besides, Karzai is a tenacious leader and may still find a way out to hold the elections, and that could deal a blow to American prestige.}

Conceivably, Holbrooke left Kabul with mixed feelings. It is unclear whether Karzai took him into confidence about his move to clip the AfPak wings, though Karzai probably did not. Quite obviously, Karzai’s move is primarily directed at the sort of diplomacy Holbrooke practises – loaded with a lot of muscle power.

AN IRANIAN SET UP

From Kabul, Holbrooke apparently headed for his first ever tour of Central Asian capitals as “part of an accelerating intensification of our [AfPak] diplomatic outreach efforts”. But Iranian reports have since interpreted that Holbrooke’s real mission was to hold a clandestine meeting with the Jundullah terrorist leader Abdul Malik Rigi at the US airbase at Manas on the outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek.

Washington is studiously keeping mum at the Iranian allegation. But Tehran has followed up on the matter with Bishkek. The Kyrgyz ambassador in Tehran has been summoned to the foreign ministry and asked to explain how his country’s government got mixed up with a notorious terrorist like Rigi.

The story is still unfolding and there is no need to second-guess that if the Iranians chose to divulge so much already to the media, they must know a lot more. Rigi is presently undergoing interrogation at the hands of the Iranian authorities. If the Iranian media reports have any basis, AfPak diplomacy stands exposed as inept and ludicrous. The Iranians seem to have not only plucked Rigi out of the hands of his American mentors (which doesn’t speak highly of the US intelligence capability) but it is all but certain that Pakistani intelligence may have directly or indirectly been privy to the Iranian operation.

A STORM IN DELHI

But what happened on last Tuesday was much worse. For no apparent reason, Holbrooke waded into the explosive subject of the terrorist attack in Kabul on February 25 which resulted in the killing of nine Indians, including two senior army officers. At a press briefing in Washington on Tuesday, he rubbished the preliminary assessment of Indian (and Afghan) officials that it was a targeted attack by the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-i-Taiba masterminded by the ISI.

“I don’t accept the fact that this was an attack on an Indian facility like the embassy.” Holbrooke said. ”They were foreigners, non-Indian foreigners hurt. It was a soft target. And let’s not jump to conclusions. I understand why everyone in Pakistan and everyone in India always focuses on the other. But, please, let’s not draw a conclusion which – for which there’s no proof.”

The Indian embassy was attacked by a suicide bomber last October, with 17 people killed. It was also bombed in July 2008 when 60 people died.

In principle, Holbrooke had a point, as the inquiry into last week’s Kabul attack is still underway. But there is evidence that the terrorists went from room to room and sought out the Indians before killing them. Delhi is shocked that Holbrooke would go out on a limb apparently to cover up for the ISI.

But why he spoke at all – and its awkward timing – is becoming important. After all, diplomacy is also about remaining silent. Especially when Delhi and Islamabad are entangled in high-strung diplomacy under close US watch from behind the curtain.

The feeling in Delhi is that Holbrooke spoke on purpose. He is no doubt a consummate diplomat.

Holbrooke was likely indulging in a complex image-building exercise. The Baradar setback aside, Holbrooke has been having a rough time with the Pakistanis. According to the Delhi grapevine, he refers to the Pakistanis in a highly disparaging way as “useless fellows”. The reading in Delhi is that the Pakistanis receive Holbrooke with elaborate courtesy and lavish hospitality, but prefer to do hard business with the Pentagon on the substantive issues of AfPak policy.

Holbrooke probably hoped that by placing ambassador Robin Raphel, who enjoyed past connections with the Pakistani establishment and the Taliban leadership, as his deputy in Islamabad he would get an inside track on the Quetta shura. But for Pakistan, anything involving the Quetta shura is for now deadly business. Pakistan is using Raphel to lobby in Washington for increased aid and so on, but it keeps the Quetta shura out of the matrix.

The harsh reality is that Pakistan is in a position to make or unmake AfPak diplomacy – and also AfPak diplomats. It holds the trump cards to deliver the Taliban to the negotiating table. And Islamabad is skilled enough to manipulate Washington.

In sum, with Karzai spinning out of control and Islamabad making a mockery of AfPak diplomacy, Holbrooke most probably spoke out of pressure. Viewed from Delhi, Holbrooke made a high-profile attempt to ingratiate himself with the powers that be who control Lashkar-i-Taiba. Whether he will succeed in this enterprise or not remains to be seen but he has certainly annoyed the Indian establishment.

The Indians made diplomatic demarche both at Delhi and at Washington, taking exception to Holbrooke’s “unhelpful” outburst over the Kabul terrorist strike. After repeatedly rebuffing Holbrooke’s request to visit Delhi for consultations, Indians finally received him only in late January in the immediate run-up to the London conference. Holbrooke blithely forecast at his press conference on Tuesday that he hopes to visit Delhi next with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. How Mullen (or Delhi for that matter) views the prospect remains to be seen.

WILL OBAMA STEP IN?

Why is AfPak diplomacy in such disarray? It isn’t entirely Holbrooke’s fault. For one thing, South Asians aren’t like the “junkyard dogs” that he came across in the Balkans in the mid-1990s. They are a deeper lot credited with oriental patience and can be every bit as tenacious as Holbrooke himself must be.

Then, there is also a far deeper issue. Holbrooke is seriously handicapped by an AfPak brief that keeps evolving in his hands. This was not like the case with Yugoslavia where the Bill Clinton administration pursued a cold-blooded agenda. The Washington Post reported that the AfPak diplomacy has confused all protagonists, including the Afghans.

At any rate, Holbrooke has been left somewhat stranded on the center stage. The worst thing that can happen to a diplomat is to be expected to stay in the limelight and yet not do anything.

Second, unlike in the 1990s, the US’s influence is much diminished today, but its diplomats work as if they operate in a unipolar world. The plain truth is that regional powers like India, Iran or even Pakistan are far from convinced about the US’s AfPak policy. And they can be expected to do their utmost to safeguard their interests, no matter what the US diplomats prescribe as good enough.

The tailwind that the London conference was expected to generate dissipated all too soon and AfPak diplomacy is running into head winds that may make forward movement difficult. But Obama gets an opportunity to tack into the wind in early April when he is due to meet the prime ministers of India and Pakistan on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.

The writer M K Bhadrakumar is a former career diplomat of the Indian Foreign Service.

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Source: Originally published in Asia Times, cross posted at Geoplotical NWO

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Nepal Running Out of Time

The map above shows the ethno-geographic mix of Nepal. The Maoists want an administrative restructuring of the country on ethnic lines whereas the ruling Nepali Congress coalition wants a geographically identified Nepal. The transition from the recent to proposed constitutional make up of the country now hangs in the balance.

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Dhruba Adhikary

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Nepal’s transition from a Hindu monarchy to a secular republic is not going smoothly, and not just over the fast-approaching May 28 deadline for the nation’s new constitution.

Nepal’s three major parties are at loggerheads in the special assembly formed to draft the constitution over the structure of a proposed federal system. The opposition Maoists insist that federal states be created on an ethnic basis, while the ruling Nepali Congress party and its coalition partner believe the states should be formed on a geographic basis.

The Constituent Assembly was formed after a 2008 election when members voted overwhelmingly to abolish the monarchy and restructure the country into autonomous states. The powers of the last king , Gyanendra, had been steadily curtailed since a disastrous period of his rule ended in April 2006 amid a popular revolt.

In the Constituent Assembly the opposition Maoists, who form the largest block with 40% of the seats, favor an executive presidency, while the Nepali Congress and Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist are floating a parliamentary system.

At the same time, public opposition to the idea of federalism is growing, as seen in the successful anti-federalism campaign being carried out by the National People’s Front (Rashtriya Janamorcha), a small left-leaning party.

“Federalism is a recipe for Nepal to disintegrate, like the former Yugoslavia,” said Chitra Bahadur KC, the party leader. In his view, Nepal’s marginalized peoples would be better served through greater decentralization. A successful general strike his party organized in January is forcing the assembly to listen to his concerns.

[Left: Former king Gyanendra of Nepal, a small yet growing number of Nepalese now wish a return of the monarchy. RPP-Nepal which has only four members in the national assembly, led a protest campaign which attracted a wide following. Even the powerful Maoists were forced to cancel an important meeting due to the chaos and party’s large rallies managed to block the entrance to Simha Durbar, the seat of central government.]

Another small party, the royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party-Nepal (RPP-Nepal), is calling for a national referendum on federalism, as well as on secularism and a restoration of the monarchy. It last week launched a general strike that brought Kathmandu Valley, which encompasses the capital and two other districts, to a standstill.

RPP-Nepal has only four members in the national assembly, but its protest campaign has attracted a wide following. Even the powerful Maoists were forced to cancel an important meeting due to the chaos and the RPP-Nepal’s large rallies managed to block the entrance to Simha Durbar, the seat of central government.

The party also wants a referendum to address Nepal’s status as the world’s only remaining Hindu state, which was abolished in 2008 when Nepal became a republic. More than 80% of the population is from the Hindu faith, also known as Sanaatan Dharma (the eternal law).

Hinduism, the third-largest religion after Christianity and Islam, is known for its tolerance towards other faiths. Nepal, with a sizeable Muslim population, does not possess the type of religious rivalries seen in India.

This, however, is undergoing a subtle change. There are growing feelings that too much tolerance could impact on Nepal’s Hindu way of life, especially if there is a lack of reciprocity from other faiths. The concern has grown since the proselytizing activities of Western groups that had entered Nepal in the garb of non-governmental organizations were exposed.

The Hindu backlash against Nepal becoming a secular state has grown since 2006 when the monarchy first fell and the state was established, but the leaders of some prominent political parties believe the recent popular movements may also be a power play by right-wing elements. And they are also jittery about a possible revival of the monarchy.

Kamal Thapa, who heads RPP-Nepal, denies that his party is working to restore the monarchy’s absolute rule. “All our party believes in is the restoration of a ceremonial institution that provides a symbol of unity for a country that is known for its ethnic diversity,” Thapa told Asia Times Online.

[Right: Kamal Thapa, the current president of Nepal's only royalist party, the Rastriya Prajatantra Party. He served as Home Minister during King Gyanendra's direct rule in 2006, until the king was forced to handover power to Gerija Prasad Koirala of the Nepali Congress Party and his allies with CPN-UML and CPN-Maoist. Thapa and his party are on a signature campaign, asking for a referendum to decide the fate of monarchy.

The RPP president claims that no political party in Nepal possesses the guts to safeguard Nepali Nationality. “Now the onus lay only with the institution of monarchy to safeguard Nepali sovereignty and National Unity”, says Thapa.^[2] He has further urged upon the government to re-investigate the royal massacre and dig out the truths. “Those blaming former King Gyanendra for the massacre are now holding power in the government. I challenge them to track down the guilty.”]^[3]

Thapa’s ideas appeal to many, as the 2006 declaration that made Nepal a secular nation was made without consulting the people. The May 18 declaration was made in a parliament that had been restored through royal proclamation, and the person who made it, Girija Prasad Koirala, was sworn in as prime minister by Gyanendra himself.

That declaration was illegitimate and should have been challenged there and then, according to Bishwanath Upadhayaya, a former chief justice and the head of the panel that drafted the 1990 constitution. If the changes were the outcome of a mass movement or a revolution, it should have been documented as such, he maintains.

Instead, sweeping changes were abruptly announced by Koirala on the grounds of bringing the Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) to an end and bringing the rebels into mainstream politics at all costs.

Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (popularly known as Prachanda) has now become one of two important figures who concede that the secularization of Nepal was a mistake. The other person is none other than the incumbent President Ram Baran Yadav.

Yadav made this clear to a controversial Indian holy man, Chandraswami, when he was on a pilgrimage to Nepal. Former prime minister Koirala purportedly evaded the question. Unlike rulers in Delhi, media reports indicate that India’s Hindus want the religious identity of neighboring Nepal to remain unchanged. For them, too, this is an emotional issue.

If Nepal’s secularization was a mistake, this could be rectified when Nepal receives its new constitution. There is no need for a simultaneous restoration of the monarchy, which ceased being the custodian of the nation’s Hindus after the notorious palace massacre of 2001. Nepal could now learn to stand as a Hindu republic, not a kingdom.

Dhruba Adhikary is a Kathmandu-based journalist

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Source: Asia Times Title Image: http://www.revivenepal.com/

Related Posts: 1. Fighting traitors in Nepal 2. The real face of Nepal premiers – Past & Present

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Can Japan Say No to Washington?

The Marine Corps Air Station in Futenma, Okinawa, Japan.

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Pacific Pushback

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[A note from Tom Engelhardt for TomDispatch and WoP readers: When it comes to cracks in America’s imperial edifice -- as measured by the ability of other countries to say “no” to Washington, or just look the other way when American officials insist on something -- Europe has been garnering all the headlines lately, and they’ve been wildly American-centric.  “Gates: Nato, in crisis, must change its ways,” “Pull Your Weight, Europe,” “Gates:  Europe’s demilitarization has gone too far,” “Dutch Retreat,” and so on.  All this over one country -- Holland -- which will evidently pull out of Afghanistan thanks to intensifying public pressure about the war there, and other NATO countries whose officials are shuffling their feet and hemming and hawing about sending significant reinforcements Afghanistan-wards.  One could, of course, imagine quite a different set of headlines (“Europeans react to overbearing, overmuscled Americans,” “Europeans turn backs on endless war”), but not in the mainstream news.  You can certainly find some striking commentary on the subject by figures like Andrew Bacevich and Juan Cole, but it goes unheeded.

The truth is that Europe still seems a long way from being ready to offer any set of firm ‘noes’ to Washington on much of anything, while in Asia, ‘noes’ from key American clients of the past half-century have been even less in evidence.  But sometimes from the smallest crack in a façade come the largest of changes.  In this case, the most modest potential “no” from a new Japanese government in Tokyo, concerning U.S. basing posture in that country, seems to have caused near panic in Washington.  In neither Europe nor Asia have we felt any political earthquakes -- yet.  But just below the surface, the global political tectonic plates are rubbing together, and who knows when, as power on this planet slowly shifts, one of them will slip and suddenly, for better or worse, the whole landscape of power will look different.

John Feffer, the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus and a TomDispatch regular, already has written for this site on whether Afghanistan might prove NATO’s graveyard.  Now, he turns east to explore whether, in a dispute over one insignificant base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, we might be feeling early rumblings on the Asian fault-line of American global power.  Tom]

Has the U.S. Empire of Bases Reached Its High-Water Mark?

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John Feffer

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For a country with a pacifist constitution, Japan is bristling with weaponry. Indeed, that Asian land has long functioned as a huge aircraft carrier and naval base for United States military power. We couldn’t have fought wars in Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1959-1975) without the nearly 90 military bases scattered around the islands of our major Pacific ally. Even today, Japan remains the anchor of what’s left of America’s Cold War containment policy when it comes to China and North Korea. From the Yokota and Kadena air bases, the United States can dispatch troops and bombers across Asia, while the Yokosuka base near Tokyo is the largest American naval installation outside the United States.

You’d think that, with so many Japanese bases, the United States wouldn’t make a big fuss about closing one of them. Think again. The current battle over the US Marine Corps air base at Futenma on Okinawa – an island prefecture almost 1,600 kilometers south of Tokyo that hosts about three dozen US bases and 75% of American forces in Japan – is just revving up. In fact, Washington seems ready to stake its reputation and its relationship with a new Japanese government on the fate of that base alone, which reveals much about US anxieties in the age of President Barack Obama.

OKINAWA AND THE NEW DOMINO EFFECT

What makes this so strange, on the surface, is that Futenma is an obsolete base. Under an agreement the Bush administration reached with the previous Japanese government, the U.S. was already planning to move most of the Marines now at Futenma to the island of Guam. Nonetheless, the Obama administration is insisting, over the protests of Okinawans and the objections of Tokyo, on completing that agreement by building a new partial replacement base in a less heavily populated part of Okinawa.

The current row between Tokyo and Washington is no mere “Pacific squall,” asNewsweek dismissively described it. After six decades of saying yes to everything the United States has demanded, Japan finally seems on the verge of saying no to something that matters greatly to Washington, and the relationship that Dwight D. Eisenhower once called an “indestructible alliance” is displaying ever more hairline fractures. Worse yet, from the Pentagon’s perspective, Japan’s resistance might prove infectious — one major reason why the United States is putting its alliance on the line over the closing of a single antiquated military base and the building of another of dubious strategic value.

During the Cold War, the Pentagon worried that countries would fall like dominoes before a relentless Communist advance. Today, the Pentagon worries about a different kind of domino effect. In Europe, NATO countries are refusing to throw their full support behind the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In Africa, no country has stepped forward to host the headquarters of the Pentagon’s new Africa Command. In Latin America, little Ecuador has kicked the U.S. out of its air base in Manta.

All of these are undoubtedly symptoms of the decline in respect for American power that the U.S. military is experiencing globally.  But the current pushback in Japan is the surest sign yet that the American empire of overseas military bases has reached its high-water mark and will soon recede.

TOADY NO MORE?

Until recently, Japan was virtually a one-party state, and that suited Washington just fine. The long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had the coziest of bipartisan relations with that city’s policymakers and its “chrysanthemum club” of Japan-friendly pundits. A recent revelation that, in 1969, Japan buckled to President Richard Nixon’s demand that it secretly host U.S. ships carrying nuclear weapons — despite Tokyo’s supposedly firm anti-nuclear principles — has pulled back the curtain on only the tip of the toadyism.

During and after the Cold War, Japanese governments bent over backwards to give Washington whatever it wanted. When government restrictions on military exports got in the way of the alliance, Tokyo simply made an exception for the United States. When cooperation on missile defense contradicted Japan’s ban on militarizing space, Tokyo again waved a magic wand and made the restriction disappear.

Although Japan’s constitution renounces the “threat or the use of force as a means of settling international disputes,” Washington pushed Tokyo to offset the costs of the U.S. military adventure in the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991, and Tokyo did so. Then, from November 2001 until just recently, Washington persuaded the Japanese to provide refueling in the Indian Ocean for vessels and aircraft involved in the war in Afghanistan. In 2007, the Pentagon even tried to arm-twist Tokyo into raising its defense spending to pay for more of the costs of the alliance.

Of course, the LDP complied with such demands because they intersected so nicely with its own plans to bend that country’s peace constitution and beef up its military. Over the last two decades, in fact, Japan has acquired remarkably sophisticated hardware, including fighter jets, in-air refueling capability, and assault ships that can function like aircraft carriers.  It also amended the 1954 Self-Defense Forces Law, which defines what the Japanese military can and cannot do, more than 50 times to give its forces the capacity to act with striking offensive strength. Despite its “peace constitution,” Japan now has one of the top militaries in the world.

Enter the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). In August 2009, that upstart political party dethroned the LDP, after more than a half-century in power, and swept into office with a broad mandate to shake things up. Given the country’s nose-diving economy, the party’s focus has been on domestic issues and cost-cutting. Not surprisingly, however, the quest to cut pork from the Japanese budget has led the party to scrutinize the alliance with the U.S. Unlike most other countries that host U.S. military bases, Japan shoulders most of the cost of maintaining them: more than $4 billion per year in direct or indirect support.

Under the circumstances, the new government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama proposed something modest indeed — putting the U.S.-Japan alliance on, in the phrase of the moment, a “more equal” footing. It inaugurated this new approach in a largely symbolic way by ending Japan’s resupply mission in the Indian Ocean (though Tokyo typically sweetened the pill by offering a five-year package of $5 billion in development assistance to the Afghan government).

More substantively, the Hatoyama government also signaled that it wanted to reduce its base-support payments. Japan’s proposed belt-tightening comes at an inopportune moment for the Obama administration, as it tries to pay for two wars, its “overseas contingency operations,” and a worldwide network of more than 700 military bases. The burdens of U.S. overseas operations are increasing, and fewer countries are proving willing to share the costs.

OF DUGONGS AND DEMOCRACY

The immediate source of tension in the U.S.-Japanese relationship has been Tokyo’s desire to renegotiate that 2006 agreement to close Futenma, transfer those 8,000 Marines to Guam, and build a new base in Nago, a less densely populated area of the island. It’s a deal that threatens to make an already strapped government pay big. Back in 2006, Tokyo promised to shell out more than $6 billion just to help relocate the Marines to Guam.

The political cost to the new government of going along with the LDP’s folly may be even higher. After all, the DPJ received a healthy chunk of voter support from Okinawans, dissatisfied with the 2006 agreement and eager to see the American occupation of their island end. Over the last several decades, with U.S. bases built cheek-by-jowl in the most heavily populated parts of the island, Okinawans have endured air, water, and noise pollution, accidents like a 2004 U.S. helicopter crash at Okinawa International University, and crimes that range from trivial speeding violations all the way up to the rapeof a 12-year-old girl by three Marines in 1995. According to a June 2009 opinion poll, 68% of Okinawans opposed relocating Futenma within the prefecture, while only 18% favored the plan. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Party, a junior member of the ruling coalition, has threatened to pull out if Hatoyama backs away from his campaign pledge not to build a new base in Okinawa.

Then there’s the dugong, a sea mammal similar to the manatee that looks like a cross between a walrus and a dolphin and was the likely inspiration for the mermaid myth. Only 50 specimens of this endangered species are still living in the marine waters threatened by the proposed new base near less populated Nago. In a landmark case, Japanese lawyers and American environmentalists filed suit in U.S. federal court to block the base’s construction and save the dugong. Realistically speaking, even if the Pentagon were willing to appeal the case all the way up to the Supreme Court, lawyers and environmentalists could wrap the U.S. military in so much legal and bureaucratic red tape for so long that the new base might never leave the drawing board.

For environmental, political, and economic reasons, ditching the 2006 agreement is a no-brainer for Tokyo. Given Washington’s insistence on retaining a base of little strategic importance, however, the challenge for the DPJ has been to find a site other than Nago. The Japanese government floated the idea of merging the Futenma facility with existing facilities at Kadena, another U.S. base on the island. But that plan — as well as possible relocation to other parts of Japan — has met with stiff local resistance. A proposal to further expand facilities in Guam was nixed by the governor there.

The solution to all this is obvious: close down Futenma without opening another base. But so far, the United States is refusing to make it easy for the Japanese. In fact, Washington is doing all it can to box the new government in Tokyo into a corner.

Contd….on page 2

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Can Japan Say No to Washington? -II-

Over 21,000 people in Okinawa protest to demand the removal of the US bases from the prefecture, criticizing the plan to only relocate the Futenma US air base from its current location of Ginowan City to the Henoko district of Nago City, also in Okinawa. Photo: japan press-weekly

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RATCHETING UP THE PRESSURE

The US military presence in Okinawa is a residue of the Cold War and a US commitment to containing the only military power on the horizon that could threaten American military supremacy. Back in the 1990s, the Bill Clinton administration’s solution to a rising China was to “integrate, but hedge”. The hedge – against the possibility of China developing a serious mean streak – centered around a strengthened US-Japan alliance and a credible Japanese military deterrent.

What the Clinton administration and its successors didn’t anticipate was how effectively and peacefully China would disarm this hedging strategy with careful statesmanship and a vigorous trade policy. A number of Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia, succumbed early to China’s version of checkbook diplomacy. Then, in the last decade, South Korea, like the Japanese today, started to talk about establishing “more equal” relations with the US in an effort to avoid being drawn into any future military scrape between Washington and Beijing.

Now, with its arch-conservatives gone from government, Japan is visibly warming to China’s charms. In 2007, China had already surpassed the US as the country’s leading trade partner. On becoming prime minister, Hatoyama sensibly proposed the future establishment of an East Asian community patterned on the European Union. As he saw it, that would leverage Japan’s position between a rising China and a United States in decline. In December, while Washington and Tokyo were haggling bitterly over the Okinawa base issue, DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa sent a signal to Washington as well as Beijing by shepherding a 143-member delegation of his party’s legislators on a four-day trip to China.

Not surprisingly, China’s bedazzlement policy has set off warning bells in Washington, where the People’s Republic is still a focus of primary concern for a cadre of strategic planners inside the Pentagon. The Futenma base – and its potential replacement – would be well situated, should Washington ever decide to send rapid response units to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, or the Korean peninsula. Strategic planners in Washington like to speak of the “tyranny of distance”, of the difficulty of getting “boots on the ground” from Guam or Hawaii in case of an East Asian emergency.

Yet the actual strategic value of Futenma is, at best, questionable. The South Koreans are more than capable of dealing with any contingency on the peninsula. And the UnitedStates frankly has plenty of firepower by air (Kadena) and sea (Yokosuka) within hailing distance of China. A couple thousand Marines won’t make much of a difference (though the leathernecks strenuously disagree). However, in a political environment in whichthe Pentagon is finding itself making tough choices between funding counterinsurgency wars and old Cold War weapons systems, the “China threat” lobby doesn’t want to give an inch.

Failure to relocate the Futenma base within Okinawa might be the first step down a slippery slope that could potentially put at risk billions of dollars in Cold War weapons still in the production line. It’s hard to justify buying all the fancy toys without a place to play with them.

And that’s one reason the Obama administration has gone to the mat to pressure Tokyo to adhere to the 2006 agreement. It even dispatched Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Japanesecapital last October in advance of president Obama’s own Asian tour. Like an impatient father admonishing an obstreperous teenager, Gates lectured the Japanese ”to move on” and abide by the agreement – to the irritation of both the new government and the public. (See Gates gets grumpy in Tokyo, October 28, 2009)

The punditocracy has predictably closed ranks behind a bipartisanWashington consensus that the new Japanese government should become as accustomed to its junior status as its predecessor and stop making a fuss. The Obama administration is frustrated with “Hatoyama’s amateurish handling of the issue,” writesWashington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt. “What has resulted from Mr Hatoyama’s failure to enunciate a clear strategy or action plan is the biggest political vacuum in over 50 years,” adds Victor Cha, former director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council. Neither analyst acknowledges that Tokyo’s only “failure” or “amateurish” move was to stand up to Washington. “The dispute could undermine security in East Asia on the 50th anniversary of an alliance that has served the region well,” intoned The Economist more bluntly. “Tough as it is for Japan’s new government, it needs to do most, though not all, of the caving in.”

The Hatoyama government is by no means radical, nor is it anti-American. It isn’t preparing to demand that all, or even many, US bases close. It isn’t even preparing to close any of the other three dozen (or so) bases on Okinawa. Its modest pushback is confined to Futenma, where it finds itself between the rock of Japanese public opinion and the hard place of Pentagon pressure.
Those who prefer to achieve Washington’s objectives with Japan in a more roundabout fashion counsel patience. “If America undercuts the new Japanese government and creates resentment among the Japanese public, then a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic,” writes Joseph Nye, the architect of US Asia policy during the Clinton years. Japan hands are urging the UnitedStates to wait until the summer, when the DPJ has a shot at picking up enough additional seats in the next parliamentary elections to jettison its coalition partners, if it deems such a move necessary.

Even if the Social Democratic Party is no longer in the government constantly raising the Okinawa base issue, the DPJ still must deal with democracy on the ground. The Okinawans are dead set against a new base. The residents of Nago, where that base would be built, just elected a mayor who campaigned on a no-base platform. It won’t look good for the party that has finally brought real democracy to Tokyo to squelch it in Okinawa.

Contd…on page 3

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Image Source: Tuesdaysblog.com

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Can Japan Say No to Washington – III-

Protesters waive banners at a rally  held against the rape of a teenaged Okinawa girl by US marines. Tomohiko Futamata, head of the Hokkaido Defense Bureau said: “We take seriously the unforgivable incident in Okinawa and will strongly request that U.S. soldiers maintain strict discipline”.

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REVERSE ISLAND HOP

Wherever the US military puts down its foot overseas, movements have sprung up to protest the military, social, and environmental consequences of its military bases. This anti-base movement has notched some successes, such as the shut-down of a US navy facility in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. In the Pacific, too, the movement has made its mark. On the heels of the eruption of Mt Pinatubo, democracy activists in the Philippines successfully closed down the ash-covered Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station in 1991-1992. Later, South Korean activists managed to win closure of the huge Yongsan facility in downtown Seoul.

Of course, these were only partial victories. Washingtonsubsequently negotiated a Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippines, whereby the US military has redeployed troops and equipment to the island, and replaced Korea’s Yongsan base with a new one in nearby Pyeongtaek. But these not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) victories were significant enough to help edge the Pentagon toward the adoption of a military doctrine that emphasizes mobility over position. The US military now relies on “strategic flexibility” and “rapid response” both to counter unexpected threats and to deal with allied fickleness.

The Hatoyama government may indeed learn to say no toWashington over the Okinawa bases. Evidently considering this a likelihood, former deputy secretary of state and former US ambassador to Japan Richard Armitage has said that the UnitedStates “had better have a plan B”. But the victory for the anti-base movement will still be only partial. US forces will remain in Japan, and especially Okinawa, and Tokyo will undoubtedly continue to pay for their maintenance.

Buoyed by even this partial victory, however, NIMBY movements are likely to grow in Japan and across the region, focusing on other Okinawa bases, bases on the Japanese mainland, and elsewhere in the Pacific, including Guam. Indeed, protests are already building in Guam against the projected expansion of Andersen Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam to accommodate those Marines from Okinawa. And this strikes terror in the hearts of Pentagon planners.

In World War II, the United States employed an island-hopping strategy to move ever closer to the Japanese mainland. Okinawa was the last island and last major battle of that campaign, and more people died during the fighting there than in the subsequent atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined: 12,000 US troops, more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians. This historical experience has stiffened the pacifist resolve of Okinawans.

The current battle over Okinawa again pits the United States against Japan, again with the Okinawans as victims. But there is a good chance that the Okinawans, like the Na’vi in that great NIMBY film Avatar, will win this time.

A victory in closing Futenma and preventing the construction of a new base might be the first step in a potential reverse island hop. NIMBY movements may someday finally push the US military out of Japan and off Okinawa. It’s not likely to be a smooth process, nor is it likely to happen any time soon. But the kanji (a form ofJapanese writing) is on the wall. Even if the Yankees don’t know what the Japanese characters mean, they can at least tell in which direction the exit arrow is pointing.

Pages 1, 2

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John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website [ Copyright 2010 John Feffer].

Source: TomDispatch.com Image: Japanprobe.com

Related Posts: 1. Obama’s Domino Theory 2. Obama wastes no time in finding his own war 3. Obama, the Democratic “War President” (updated) 4. Gorby smarter than Obama

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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China hangs fire on Iran-Pakistan pipeline

♦

Stephen Blank

♦

For over a decade, Iran, Pakistan and India (IPI) have taken pains at negotiating a major pipeline deal whereby Iran would send natural gas from its territory to the region. Yet geopolitical and commercial issues have repeatedly prevented the deal’s fruition despite Tehran’s growing need to diversify gas sales to Asian markets and Asian countries desire to find a stable, reliable source of gas supplies.

In recent years, India’s participation in this project has become more uncertain, which is partly responsible for the long delay that the project has suffered. Iran’s repeated attempts to raise the price of gas, US pressure on India to refrain from participating in the pipeline, external skepticism about Iranian capability to fill the pipeline as it promises, Indian concerns about the overall stability of Pakistan, and in particular, the possibility of terrorism in Pakistan’s Balochistan province through which the pipeline would travel, all contributed to India’s angst.

Iran recently warned India that there is a limit to its patience in waiting for New Delhi to decide. Iran was apparently able to present this ultimatum because it believes that it now has the “China card” in its deck. In early February, Iranian Foreign Minister Manucher Mottaki reportedly said Iran was ready to start the pipeline at any time – even without India - and urged Pakistan not to heed US pressure against the pipeline as China could soon replace India in the deal.

BACKGROUND

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, signed a US$7.5 billion agreement in Tehran on May 23, 2009, to transfer gas from Iran to Pakistan. According to the deal, Iran will initially transfer 30 million cubic meters of gas per day to Pakistan, but will eventually increase the transfer to 60 million cubic meters per day. The pipeline will be supplied from the South Pars field. The initial capacity of the pipeline will be 22 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas per annum, which is expected to be raised later to 55 bcm.

After many months of negotiations, on February 11, 2010, Islamabad and Tehran were able to finalize the agreement on the issues, including the issuance by Pakistan of a “comfort letter” that provided Iran with the assurance that India - or China – could be brought into the project later. The two parties have vowed to sign the formal agreement by March 8 in Ankara, Turkey. The News reported:

Under the comfort letter, the government of Pakistan would allow the third country to import gas through [the] IP [Iran-Pakistan] line in case any country in future comes to join the project, but the permission will be subject to the gas tariff and transit fee to be worked out as per best practices of that time.

CHINESE INTERESTS IN THE IPI PIPELINE

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Iran’s most recent announcement is that China has yet to comment publicly on the pipeline except that it is studying the Pakistani proposal. That was early in 2008. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said at that time: “We are seriously studying Pakistan’s proposal to participate in the IPI gas pipeline project”.

Pakistan clearly wants China to join the pipeline for many reasons. Islamabad desperately needs the gas that might not come if there is no third party to make the deal profitable to Iran. Second, it would gain much revenue from the transit fees for the gas going to China and benefit considerably from the ensuing construction of infrastructure within Pakistan. Third, it would further solidify its “all-weather” relations with China. Those goals have always been part of Pakistan’s foreign policy and explain not only its interest in the original pipeline plan but also its previous invitations to China to join the project. The prospect of an invitation to China was also used in the past to galvanize India’s decision-making process regarding the pipeline.

Throughout the spring of 2008, former Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf and his government frequently courted Chinese leaders to join the pipeline project, a pitch that Musharraf also tied to an earlier proposal of establishing a corridor linking Pakistan to China through rail, road and fiber optics. At that time, China promised to consider the proposal and then asked for more information, but did nothing else, leaving the issue in abeyance. Subsequently, Pakistani media reports claimed that China was keen on joining the pipeline and would send a delegation to negotiate the deal, but clearly, nothing came of it.

In 2009, Iran’s ambassador to India, Seyid Mehdi Nabizadeh, told Indian journalists that China was interested in the pipeline, but he too refused to confirm if talks with China were taking place. Based on this precedent, it may be possible that these Pakistani and Iranian gambits were spurious to begin with and its purpose was to pressure India or entice China into joining the pipeline project.

The India Factor: The blend of American and Iranian tensions and the tensions between India and Pakistan in a neo-global order has formed a situation for India to ponder over a final decision. India can neither adopt the decision to implement the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline, nor can she abandon the pipeline because the stakes of energy security and geopolitics are too high for India to be able to afford losing the pipeline.

There is considerable interest among external observers in the pipeline and Chinese officials have sporadically expressed an interest in it. For example, China’s ambassador to India in 2006, Sun Yuxi, said China has no objections to the IPI, while India’s minister for state planning, MV Rajashekaran, also said that once the pipeline is completed it could be extended to China [1]. Gazprom (the Russian gas monopoly) and the Russian government have long since indicated a desire to participate in sending oil and/or gas to the subcontinent through the IPI. Indeed, Gazprom’s man in Tehran, Abubakir Shomuzov, has even advocated extending the IPI pipeline to China to tie Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran together in a very big project having major strategic implications as well as a huge number of consumers.

Presumably, such statements – if not plans – are intended to mollify Chinese concerns about the possibility of Russian energy being diverted from it to India. Nevertheless, if one correlates China’s recent maneuvers in Central Asia concerning pipelines with its deals with Iran, it is clear that China is contemplating a pipeline network running from Iran either through Central Asia, or prospectively through Pakistan and/or India to China.

In this context, the IPI pipeline poses several risks and opportunities for Beijing. If India exited the pipeline, that would lessen Iran’s leverage to drive a hard bargain on gas prices. At the same time, as part of the overall strategy to build pipelines from Iran to China, or at least to Gwadar in Balochistan, from where gas or oil could be shipped directly to China, Chinese participation would create a new overland energy link that could complement China’s energy diversification strategy.

Nevertheless, the project also faces several political and logistical difficulties that could scuttle Chinese participation. The pipeline is planned to traverse very difficult terrain in Pakistan’s Gilgit region. That would increase the costs and time required to eventually connect the pipeline to Xinjiang. Moreover, the risks inherent in Pakistan and Iran also pose problems.

The massive investment required to link China to the pipeline would be susceptible to many risks since it falls along a major fault line of political instability; there could be large-scale terrorism in the territory of the pipeline or more generally from a mass civil upheaval in Pakistan. In view of these positive and negative aspects to the deal, some observers suggest that Beijing might just be feigning interest in the IPI pipeline to get a better deal in negotiations with Russia on relatively safer Siberia-China gas pipelines [2].

Certainly the prospect of China obtaining a secure and stable supply of gas from Iran would reduce its need to get that gas from Russia and give it even more leverage over Russia in the current negotiations on gas pipelines from Siberia to China than it already possesses [3].

There is another aspect to this deal. China has recently stuck its neck out for Tehran in its call for continuing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear enrichment programs irrespective of the fact that Tehran is clearly defying the International Atomic Energy Agency and the offers of the six negotiating partners (United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia). On February 24, 2010, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang stated that, “China holds that the parties should continue to step up diplomatic efforts in a bid to maintain and promote the process of dialogue and negotiations. China hopes the parties demonstrate more flexibility and create conditions conducive to a comprehensive and proper solution to the Iran nuclear issue through diplomatic means.”

Chinese sources also report that Iran is able to resist the United States because the political situation in Iran is stabilizing. This suggests a more optimistic view of the domestic situation in Iran than might be the case elsewhere. Likewise, it appears that China suspects US motives in the region. High-level visits by US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to Saudi Arabia and by another high-level Israeli delegation to China aim to wean China away from Iran in return for the United States brokering increased oil exports from Saudi Arabia to China. The Chinese media apparently considers this a trap to get China to renounce its principles for transitory economic gain.

CONCLUSION

At the same time, if China did become a full partner in the IPI pipeline that would offer it another opportunity to build on Beijing’s so-called strategy of building what has been called a “string of pearls” across the Indian Ocean. Chinese officials have publicly stated their desire to turn the Chinese-built Pakistani port of Gwadar into an energy hub. China also has substantial interests in overland transport links in Pakistan through the Karakorum Highway, and participation in the IP pipeline would extend those interests.

Indeed, many observers in New Delhi and Washington view Sino-Pakistani collaborations to build naval facilities and oil refineries at Gwadar as a prelude to the establishment of a Chinese naval base there. Whether this is true or not, if China joins the IPI project, then the odds of China supporting American efforts to isolate Iran would effectively be reduced to zero because it would depend too much on Iranian gas, in addition to its recent oil contracts to antagonize Iran by siding with Washington [4].

While we wait to see how China decides to play this issue, the United States needs to understand that Beijing’s decision to join or stand aloof from this pipeline will have major geopolitical repercussions and comparable geo-economic repercussions across Asia, another sign not only of the integration of south and southwest Asia with East Asia, but also of China’s rising importance as the nexus of the Asian continent.

Dr Stephen Blank is a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, PA. The views expressed here do not represent those of the US Army, Defense Department, or the US Government.

Notes

1. “The Energy Game,” Heartland: Eurasian Review of Geopolitics, November, 2005, www.heartland.it 2. Zachary Fillingham, “India, China & the IPI Pipeline,” www.geopoliicalmonitor.com, November 5, 2009. 3. Stephen Blank, “Russia’s New Gas Deal With China: Background and Implications,” Northeast Asia Energy Forum, VI, No. 4, Winter, 2009, pp. 16-29. 4. Fillingham, op. cit.

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Source: This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation & was cross posted at Geoplotical NWO

Related Posts: 1. Energy security, diplomacy and pipeline corridors…all over EURASIA 2. China wins struggle for Pipelinestan 3. Turkmenistan Gas is now flowing to China Overland 5. BALOCHISTAN is the ULTIMATE PRIZE Part 3 of 3 6. Rebranding the Long War: BALOCHISTAN is the ULTIMATE PRIZE Part 2 of 3 7. Rebranding the Long War: BALOCHISTAN is the ULTIMATE PRIZE Part 1 of 3 8. Washington is Playing a Deeper Game with China

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

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Arresting Taliban to Cover America’s Ass [2 of 4]

Muslim Khan, [one of Pakistan’s most wanted] arrested by Pakistani security forces. Muslim Khan was chief spokesman for the TTP in Swat. He was the first one in the series in which many others Taliban leaders including those from Afghanistan [ fighting against NATO & ISAF forces in Afghanistan] have been arrested by Pakistan.

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ISI-CIA: A TIT-FOR-TAT SERIES OF PAYBACKS

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Peter Chamberlin

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The multitude of theories on the reasons for the arrests are divided between cooperation and confrontation theories, either it is explained by mutual interests or by rivalries.  In my opinion, it is both.

These gimmicks can’t bail out America [3 of 4]

The mystery surrounding the recent Pakistani arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders can best be seen in this & the following alleged pictures of Mullah Abdul Salaam.  This one is from the German magazine Der Spiegel.  It may be remembered that the northern Afghan territory of Kunduz is allegedly under Salaam’s command, a district under German NATO troops].

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MIND GAMES, CIA AND THE TALIBAN

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by Peter Chamberlin

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The TTP project continued to rain havoc upon Pakistan, forcing the Army to finally take action, even though the local tribes had opposed past military offensives.  The TTP would rain such hell down upon the heads of the innocent people of FATA and the NWFP that they would welcome the Army with open arms and even accept an American drone war in their midst.  Anything, as long as someone got rid of those pesky militants!

Comments on Peter Chamberlin’s Article: Arresting Taliban to cover America’s Ass [1 of 4]

According to reports from the western media, Afghan Taliban deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Barodar, image above, was leading peace efforts, after having been released from custody in Pakistan. The reports said: Barodar has been meeting with Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with security guarantees from both governments and the US. Four other Pakistan-based Taliban leaders supportive of Barodar are also thought to have been in contact with US authorities, and are reported to have travelled into Afghanistan under NATO escort on several occasions. But the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence said “there is no truth in the fact that Barodar was released recently”. It was amid such conflicting reports that ISI ultimately declared that it indeed had arrested the Mullah, reported to be the deputy commander of the Afghan Taliban.

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WAR GAMES, WAR RACKET AND THE WAR ON TERROR

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Nayyar Hashmey

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An Afghan official says two Taliban “shadow governors” from northern Afghanistan have been arrested by Pakistani authorities, including one very senior commander for the militant group in the country’s north. These arrests are the subject of this article written by my friend Peter Chamberlin.  Another friend then asked me to put this article under review and give my own personal opinion].

So here now is this 2 piece article by Peter Chamberlin, followed by my own observations on what has been said- been so meticulously analyzed in his article. As I promised to a friend in absentia (for I have never met him in person, yet he is such a lovable soul, a man with beautiful thoughts and kind wishes for the whole of humanity that you enjoy and benefit having a meaningful dialogue with him).

Arresting Taliban to Cover America’s Ass [4 of 4]

American born al Qaeda militant Adam Gadahn. The daily Telegraph of London reports the arrest of Adam Gadahn as a major victory for the US-led battle against al-Qaeda and follows the recent detentions of several Afghan Taliban commanders in Karachi, including the movement’s No 2 commander. US officials did not immediately confirm Gadahn’s capture. Photo: REUTERS

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IF YOU BYPASS ME, SO SHALL I

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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I agree with what Peter says in first 3 paragraphs of his story. [You will find these paras before the image of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed]

Actually it is a love-hate relationship between US and Pakistan. When interests are in full sync, they turn into love. When, rivalry, though to call it rivalry will  rather be a big word as Pakistan can neither be a rival to America nor it can aspire to, so let’s call it a clash of interests, it then becomes a ‘hate’ relationship. But I personally think it’s all a humbug.

The Pak politicians adopt a posture i.e. of indifference, anti-US or something like a ‘hate’ feeling towards Washington, mostly to avoid a sudden backlash by the people of Pakistan, who never did benefit from Pakistan’s “most allied ally” of the United States of America relationship whether it was the honeymoon period between Washington and Islamabad or was a period of interests’ conflict which in any way never benefited the people.

Our leaders though do orchestrate a massive display of such signs as “Thank you America” when they feel benefited from this relationship and when they feel of being “bossed” by the officials from the State department, then these billboards are replaced  by “Yankees go home” or “Down with America” shoutings and signs.

In the following two paragraphs [You can see these paras below the image of Binyam Mohamed], again Pete is right. It’s both. The State department/CIA guys perhaps wanted to bypass the Paks which of course means its high ups in the ISI, who seem to have signaled the CIA that if you could talk to the Taliban at our cost, then we can do ‘this’ as well. Secondly there has been a good number of news as well that US having been forced to strategize steps by which she could avoid heavy losses to its forces, then its worth considering buying them out.

And Jeff I wish to share something personally with you and the readers that I have blood relations; from my maternal side with the Pashtuns and I know that some tribal leaders are terribly lusty so could be that Americans identified such elements in Taliban leadership and it is possible that with hefty sums Americans might have been able to persuade these ‘ISI assets’ why fight with us when we can offer you something better than what the other side is offering.

Through this process Am’s could have not only bought these assets but would have extracted their links as well. So here too Peter is quite logical and right and this is what he refers to in his following paragraph.

Quote: “The true meaning of the arrests can be ascertained from the timing of the events.  It may have been primarily an American/Pakistani operation to isolate Taliban leaders who had either negotiated with the British, or had been held at Guantanamo.  British courts had taken up the case of Binyam Mohamedand American officials publicly stated that disclosing classified information about US abuse of this detainee would damage intelligence cooperation between the agencies of the two nations”. Unquote.

In the successive part of his article, where he has detailed the name of major Taliban leaders, I don’t know much about the others but one Mullah Rocketi in Afghanistan’s northern belt, had put the Taliban after 2001; and this included Taliban from Pakistan also who were packed into steel barrels and fire was alighted beneath these barrels. It was reported that when the sealed humanware in the barrels rocked during the bodies burning process [roasted], the sadistic Mullah enjoyed the scene like the old Romans enjoyed the tearing of slaves’ bodies by hungry lions in the coliseum of Rome.

My further information especially where he has  time-lined the events, and his subsequent  views is much limited, hence unable to comment on this aspect. But what he says in the paragraphs following this part, I fully endorse his views.

The paragraphs one above the image of Hafiz Saeed and the other following the same image, are fully endorsed too.

On his information regarding ISI’s involvement in using the Taliban for inter sectarian riots and other acts of terror, again my information in this regard is also much limited, hence unable to comment further on this aspect too.

My further information especially where he has  time lined the events, is also much limited, hence unable to comment on this aspect of the story. But what he says in the subsequent paragraphs, I fully endorse his views.

Again what he says in the paragraphs one above the image of Hafiz Saeed and the other following the same image, I fully agree with him.

On his information regarding ISI’s involvement in using the Taliban for inter sectarian riots and other acts of terror, again my information in this regard is much limited, hence unable to comment further on this aspect of the story.

Coming to his analysis on Rigi’s arrest by Iranian authorities, and ISI role in this regard seems to me too as valid one and therefore, I agree with him in this regard.

Peter’s assessment about the central Asian drama seems to be the most pragmatic part of the story, Central Asia. If you combine Balochistan with Afghanistan  and with Central Asia, the new great game starts unfolding before you, as this is the area which holds strategic position for every one i.e. Pakistan, China. India, Russia and the West.

As regards his assessment on Americans opting for Hekmatyar’s role, it could be so, but I doubt Americans would be ready so soon to come to an understanding with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. First, because he is a highly qualified Mullah (unlike others who though have an ever burning flame of Islamic Jihad in them like Mullah Umar etc., yet are academically poor).

In contrast Hekmatyar has been teaching at a University and had a very close relation with Pakistan’s Jamat-e-Islami. He is quite a formidable factor in the current drama going on in Afghanistan. But as always the case is, in war games nobody comes to ‘talking’ until and unless one is forced to. If the Americans do not have any other possible alternative, the scenario presented by Peter may very well hold.

Now about the part regarding the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. The TTP is reported to have been behind the terror attacks in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Peshawar. These acts of terror included the suicide bombings as well. And being Muslim, howsoever bad he may be, he can never think, I repeat, even think of attacking some body in a mosque. It’s as simple as that. No Hindu would attack a Mandir and no Sikh would even think of such act /s in a Gurdwara. This is possible only when such an undertaking is either a false flag or otherwise some lunatic may do this. In later case there can be some singular incident but not on such a large scale as they have done it in Pakistan.

I am in full agreement with Peter’s analysis as presented by him in the last part of his story. [This starts from the paragraph where he mentions about president Obama having taken over administration in White House.]

And with this, I conclude my comments on Peter Chamberlin’s highly useful and analytical coverage of this most recent event (of an on-going saga of so called war on terror). Once again peace be to you all.

Concluded.

Previous  1  2 3 4

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Back to 1. Comments on Peter Chamberlin’s Article: Arresting Taliban to cover America’s Ass2. AF-PAK: Arresting Taliban to Cover America’s Ass3. These gimmicks can’t bail out America

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Decade Of The Drone: America’s Aerial Assassins

Contractors handle an MQ-9 Reaper at Kandahar in Afghanistan. The two towers in the background are used to control the aircraft during take-off and landing.

 

Rick Rozoff

 

2010 is the last year of the new century and millennium and is the tenth consecutive year of the United States war in Afghanistan and in the 15-nation area of responsibility subsumed under Operation Enduring Freedom.

In early March American military deaths in the Greater Afghan War theater Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen surpassed the 1,000 mark.

Many are dying for our having hoped Obama would not practice Imperialism

It sounds terribly naive to have hoped a U.S. president whose candidacy was selected and backed by our most powerful bankers would be permitted, just may be, perhaps by virtue of his being black and well spoken, to modify the intense imperialism that has characterized all previous presidencies since, if not including, that of Teddy Roosevelt and before. He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has. He indicated he would be willing to sacrifice men, women and children to assassinate leaders of those warring against American occupations and he has. He said he would, and he did, send more troops to broaden the war against Pashtun Taliban, formerly the Reagan approved and recognized government of Afghanistan. Then how could we befool ourselves to think Obama will be different from his predecessors?

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A HOPE THAT DIED SO SOON

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” –Winston Churchill

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by  Jay Janson

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In retrospect, does it not sound terribly naive that we would hope a U.S. president whose candidacy was selected and backed by our most powerful bankers would be permitted, just maybe, perhaps by virtue of his being black and well spoken, to modify the intense imperialism that has characterized all previous presidencies since, if not including, that of Teddy Roosevelt and before?

He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has.

India-Pakistan conundrum

Experts have predicted that future wars will be fought over water. States within India, like Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan, are continuously at each other’s throats because of this scarce natural resource.

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Dr. Manzur Ejaz

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Pakistan, with a regressing economy, cannot keep up with Indian defence outlays even on proportional basis. Therefore, Pakistan has no choice but to detract and pull India back through other means

Like many last decades, the recent Indo-Pak talks in Delhi did not make any breakthrough. As usual, they provided the forum for both countries to restate their positions. The US can force the horse to the water, but cannot make it drink. As a matter of fact, Indo-Pak reconciliation is becoming more difficult every passing year because of increasing scarcity of water, a mutual desire to pull the other side down, and conflicts riddling societies in both countries. Sometimes it appears that keeping the tensions up serves both sides.

Pakistan was adamant to put the Kashmir and water issues on the agenda, while India was mainly interested in terrorism originating from Pakistan. For Pakistan, the territory of Kashmir may not be as important as the water issue. If the Pakistani claims are valid, then Indian infringements into the rivers running from its territory into Pakistan will leave major parts of Pakistan barren. Agriculture is not possible in Punjab and Sindh without river water. Therefore, unless Pakistan is assured on the supply of water, it will never abandon the proxies that can keep India on its toes by destabilising Kashmir.

Many world experts have predicted that future wars will be fought over water. States within India, like Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan, are continuously at each other’s throats because of this scarce natural resource. If federating units within India and Pakistan cannot forgo their claims, how will the two hostile nations? Therefore, the Indo-Pak dispute over water in the garb of the Kashmir problem is not unique and will not go away unless credible international organisations provide effective guarantees.

Besides the real issue of water, future scenarios are also an unending source of tension. India is growing fast and may want to leave Pakistan behind so that the competition between the two neighbours becomes irrelevant.

Following the Reagan strategy against Russia to raise defence expenditures to the level that your enemy breaks down if it tries to compete, India, by military expansion, is forcing Pakistan to follow suit and economically get destroyed.

Pakistan, with a regressing economy, cannot keep up with Indian defence outlays even on proportional basis. Therefore, Pakistan has no choice but to detract and pull India back through other means. Pakistan’s strategy has not worked very well because, despite the Kashmir issue, India has grown steadily. Probably, Pakistan’s military leadership is aware of its unsuccessful strategy and, therefore, trying to strengthen the state institutions to match Indian economic growth. However, it cannot let go of instruments developed to keep India distracted.

Besides the real geographic and economic issues between India and Pakistan, the public opinion in both countries has hardened. The new electronic media, run by not-so-well-groomed people, looks for the easy formula to dub villains in a situation.

The Indian media quickly blames Pakistan for any bomb blast in their country and the Pakistani media reflexively traces the tragic incidents on its territory to an Indian conspiracy. The situation has become so messy that it is hard to tell who is doing what.

The public in both countries accept the media versions because of changing public psyche due to internal conflicts and extreme rightwing forces donning the mantle of patriotism. While Pakistan is fighting the Taliban and other Jihadi outfits, India is also mired in communal, ethnic and guerrilla insurgency.

The Gujarat massacre of Muslims, the Shiv Sena crusade to cleanse Maharashtra and Mumbai of North Indians, and the Maoist guerrilla war are just a few things that have embittered the public psyche. A psyche born out of a constant conflict-ridden atmosphere can easily be turned against other nations.

The right wing’s monopoly over patriotism in Pakistan, a well-entrenched phenomenon, has been replicated in India. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), especially the Narendra Modi brand, and the likes of Bal Keshav Thackeray, founder of Shive Sena, have become the standard bearers of national pride. They have pushed the Congress Party to the right as well in pursuit of patriotism.

The decline of communist parties in North India has also been responsible for the unchecked rise of a jingoistic style of nationalism. The dynamics of generating hatred are becoming much more powerful than the forces preaching reconciliation within the country and in the international arena.

Settlement of longstanding issues between India and Pakistan is becoming more difficult than it was in the past. The fight over water with hardening public opinion in both countries is further complicating the situation. No one knows how and where the chips are going to fall.

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Source: Wichaar.com Image: rupeenews.com

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The End of the Indo-American Delusion!

India out of the loop on Af-Pak

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Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN

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The atmospherics are good but the ground realities are unfavourable. India is struggling to stay relevant and advance its geo-political equities with the United States at a time Washington is buffeted by domestic pressures and international crises that are undercutting its resolve to put ties with New Delhi on a higher plane.

Good intentions, broad agenda, and packed schedules notwithstanding, Indian diplomatic foray into Washington this week was notable for gripes and grievances than any significant advancement towards the stated goal of achieving a strategic relationship with the US, foreign secretary Nirupama Rao had a series of meetings on Tuesday, including a drop-in by secretary of state Hillary Clinton at a state department meeting with her counterpart William Burns, but in the end there was no meeting of minds on the most fundamental security issue of the times.

India and US disagree on Afghanistan and Pakistan. That much became clear towards the end of the foreign secretary’s visit although elaboration on this issue was foiled by the cancellation of Rao’s wrap-up press meet (Indian Embassy said she was unwell).

At a time when Washington is searching for an exit strategy from the Af-Pak region, a statement released at the end of her visit (in lieu of the cancelled press conference) tersely noted that “she (Rao) reiterated India’s long-held position that it was important for the international community to stay the present course in Afghanistan for as long as it is necessary.” The international community on the other hand wants to get the hell out of Afghanistan — yesterday.

There were other unresolved issues. Rao’s engagement was also partly torpedoed by the withdrawal by the government of the nuclear liability bill in Parliament hours after her arrival here. As a result, there was little progress on tying up loose ends of the civilian nuclear deal including an agreement on reprocessing although there were brave words about the deal being on track and on schedule.

Most notably, on the issue of high-tech cooperation, the Indian side was still pleading for removal of some its organizations from the so-called Entities List, seven years after the establishment of the group. “The Indian side requested the US department of commerce to review US export controls applicable to India and update them to bring them in keeping with the changed political realities that contextualize India-US strategic partnership today,” the concluding statement said.

To say India has become a mere sideshow in Washington would be overstating it (besides meeting Clinton, Rao also called on the NSA Jim Jones and two key lawmakers on a day Washington was awash with the health care issue and the US-Israel spat). There were important advances in bilateral matters, including setting the stage for external affairs minister S M Krishna’s visit to Washington shortly leading in turn to President Obama’s visit to New Delhi later this year.

But on the Af-Pak issue, India is clearly out of the loop. Pakistan is again the new game in town. Even as the Indian foreign secretary made the rounds of a capital in political and legislative ferment (over the health care bill), diplomatic corridors were abuzz with Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s own outreach to the Taliban through his brothers and Pakistan’s effort to impose itself on that engagement.

Rao meanwhile was telling think-tankers that Taliban remained untouchables for New Delhi. India’s gripe about US arms to Pakistan also went largely unaddressed. In fact, even as Rao was complaining about the potential use by Pakistan of US-supplied weapons against India, Washington had delivered from its base in Jordan a squadron of 14 AH-1 Cobra advanced helicopter gunships to Pakistan.

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Source: There are no sunglasses Title image: Blogs.reuters.com

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Pakistan’s Delusional “Holy Warrior”

‘The demagogues such as Zaid Hamid are playing their game unchecked and unchallenged. The political and military leadership is being painted as a traitor for fighting militancy” [a lead story published in the daily Dawn].

WHO IS BEHIND ZAID HAMID’S CRUSH INDIA BRIGADE?

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by Kamran Shafi

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The crazy Right and rump Pakistan

I was to regale you with other stories to do with our security establishment’s tortured and seemingly futile hunt for the very elusive holy grail of strategic depth in Afghanistan (I ask you) this week, but the ever-increasing assault on our poor country and its innocent people by unlettered and brainwashed and murderous yahoos leads me elsewhere.

Who saw clips of the unintentional video shot by a shocked bystander who burst into uncontrolled moans as he filmed the Yahoo blow himself up and tens of others with him, limbs and blood and gore flying in all directions?

Well, I did, and while one has almost been inured to such scenes, the live images were shocking in the extreme and outraged me more and more every time they were repeated. Not for long though, because soon the scenes began to be censored, the more gory parts cut out of the film. Bad move by whoever for the people at large must be shown the extent of the bestiality and the brutishness of the yahoos who are lionised by some politicians for their own narrow political ends.

Lahore has been attacked twice inside of a week, the attacks killing scores of people and injuring and maiming many more. The intelligence agencies failed all ends up yet again, and as per usual, specially the premier agency aka the Mother of All Agencies which seems to have its finger in every matter — from disappearing people to formulating the country’s foreign policy to destabilising the government whenever it is perceived to be stepping ‘out of line’ — except in running the yahoos to the ground and nipping their evil in the bud.

You might well ask what I mean by the title of this piece. Simple: the Crazy Right are the successors of the Crush India Brigade of the late 1960s and early 1970s which gave us the Bangladesh tragedy (which of course had other reasons too); rump Pakistan is the country we are left with after the breakup of Pakistan as a result of the exertions of the crazy Right. They might well succeed yet again.

[Left: Zaid (Zaman) Hamid, the present high priest of the crazy Right]

Here is the present high priest of the crazy Right, one Zaid (Zaman) Hamid, reportedly speaking on something called ‘Ummah Radio’: “Pakistan is in the headlines again! Oh people! Know that it is a combined action of RAW and Mossad to dismantle the divinely placed concrete foundations of the house of the pure, the feared fort of Islam. We are a nation which is like a glittering star of guidance for the crescent of the whole Muslim world, the pioneer of the creation of the green united states of Islam in the world that is drowning in the sea of ignorance.

“Oh Muslims! Always hold on to truth, and the truth is that it is yet again a Zionist-controlled western media’s conspiracy. Let’s rise up against the enemies of Islam; let’s nuke the … Hindus and Jews, the nefarious dark forces of this planet. Insha’allah, the time for shahadat is near. My sons and daughters, get ready for the big day, the promised day when Allah will make the Muslims victorious and Jews will run here and there to find shelter. Even the trees will talk and will say: ‘these sons of apes and swines are hiding behind my trunk’.

“Rise up and get ready for the mass suicide. Great nations die for a noble cause. What is more nobler than wiping the enemies of Islam from the face of this earth?

Remember, Islam is a peaceful religion. Allah commands us to take care of each other. All are equal in the eyes of Allah. Slay them with your daggers. …Islam will rule the world….”. The transmission is interrupted. Announcer: “We are trying to re-establish the connection with our great leader, meanwhile we will ask Qari Bakir to recite ‘Surah Tauba’.”

If this doesn’t make your blood run cold and infuriate you all at once, dear reader, I don’t know what will. Can you and I ask why this person is allowed to go on with his increasingly violent rants aimed at the huge numbers of unemployed, half-educated youths who have nothing to do in a country that is essentially a security state and which, instead of creating job opportunities for these vulnerable targets for the spreaders of poison, spends most of its money on toys and more toys for the boys, and more and more luxurious perks for its generals?

Surely spreading hate against other religions is against the law? Surely calling for mass suicide is against the law? Surely advocating nuking the hell out of another country is a crime against humanity itself? Why, then, is this man not prosecuted?

Why does the federal government not get the Federal Bureau of Revenue to investigate the sources of this person’s income, which must be huge judging from the campaigns he mounts, to see who exactly keeps him in big money? Why does the judiciary, which seems to be hell-bent on just pursuing the federal government’s leaders, not take suo motu notice of this man’s dangerous spoutings?

We must recall immediately too that some days ago this person was hosted in Peshawar by Governor Owais Ghani and sent amidst official protocol to speak at Islamia College University where he was not allowed to speak by the Pakhtun Students Union and the Amn Tehrik and was sent scurrying back to the comfort of the governor’s bosom.

Why, pray, is the federal government’s representative in Peshawar trying to smooth the way for this purveyor of hatred? Why is he mollycoddling this man who is attempting to lead the country’s disaffected young astray?

Our country is at great risk, my friends, for no one seems to have learnt any lessons at all. I fear it will face even more grief in the coming days while our politicians leap off the cliff like lemmings.

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Source: Dawn, Cross posted at : There are no sunglasses

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Ditching our strategic depth!

“The human factor will decide the fate of war, of all wars. Not the Mirage, nor any other plane, and not the screwdriver, or the wrench or radar or missiles or all the newest technology and electronic innovations. Men—and not just men of action, but men of thought…

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Myra MacDonald

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Kamran Shafi has a column up at Dawn mocking Pakistan’s old strategy of seeking “strategic depth” - the idea that in the event of war with India its military would be able to operate from Afghanistan to offset its disadvantage as a small country compared to its much bigger neighbour:

“Let us presume that the Indians are foolish enough to get distracted from educating their people, some of whom go to some of the best centres of learning in the world. Let us assume that they are idiotic enough to opt for war instead of industrialising themselves and meeting their economic growth targets which are among the highest in the world. Let us imagine that they are cretinous enough to go to war with a nuclear-armed Pakistan and effectively put an immediate and complete end to their multi-million dollar tourism industry. Let us suppose that they lose all sense, all reason, and actually attack Pakistan and cut our country into half.

“Will our army pack its bags and escape into Afghanistan? How will it disengage itself from the fighting? What route will it use, through which mountain passes? Will the Peshawar Corps gun its tanks and troop carriers and trucks and towed artillery and head into the Khyber Pass, and on to Jalalabad? Will the Karachi and Quetta Corps do likewise through the Bolan and Khojak passes? And what happens to the Lahore and Sialkot and Multan and Gujranwala and Bahawalpur and other garrisons? What about the air force? Far more than anything else, what about the by now 180 million people of the country? What ‘strategic depth’ do our Rommels and Guderians talk about, please? What poppycock is this?

“More importantly, how can Afghanistan be our ‘strategic depth’ when most Afghans hate our guts, not only the northerners, but even those who call themselves Pakhtuns?”

Pakistan’s policy of seeking strategic depth in Afghanistan has been up for discussion since 9/11, when it was forced to abandon the Taliban regime it had backed to try to contain Indian influence there and give itself the space that it felt was so lacking on its eastern border. I have heard Pakistanis saying it was a stupid idea; others saying that even within the Pakistan Army there was a recognition that strategic depth nowadays was best achieved through building a strong domestic economy. Unlike 1971, when Pakistan was cut in two after Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, won independence with Indian military support, the notion that it might be split in half by an Indian offensive pretty much became outdated when both countries announced they had tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

So is Shafi tilting at windmills? Attacking an idea that belonged to the last century?

Not entirely. Strategic depth has become ingrained in the narrative of relations between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan — so taken for granted that I remember being rather surprised myself when a subeditor, quite rightly, asked me to explain what it meant. It may no longer apply in the pure military sense of providing a space to which the army can fall back and where reserves and supplies can be stored, but as a theoretical and emotional concept it lingers. (That is presumably why Shafi felt the need to bury it, since he must have heard the various incarnations of the debate on strategic depth far more than most of us.)

As a concept it continues to inform India and Pakistan’s approach to Afghanistan in ways that are likely to become increasingly important as the United States prepares to start winding down its military presence there in 2011.  India has expanded its involvement in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, and Pakistan in turn is seen as unwilling to tackle the Afghan Taliban as long as it believes it might need to use them to counter Indian influence there.

Both India and Pakistan say they have legitimate interests in Afghanistan. For India, Afghanistan is part of its near-neighbourhood; it has historical relations with the Afghans and it does not see why Pakistani “sensitivity” should stop it from pursuing its commercial and political interests there. For Pakistan, Afghanistan is a potentially difficult neighbour which has never recognised the Durand Line, the British colonial legacy which fixed the border between the two countries, and where Indian involvement only complicates an already delicate situation.  Both India and Pakistan tend to see each other’s role in Afghanistan as part of a zero sum game, their view of each other’s intentions informed by six decades of distrust and the festering Kashmir dispute.

I’ll come back to this subject in more detail later, but in the meantime it is worth asking what we mean by strategic depth.  Does the expression need to be ditched altogether, or simply redefined?

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Source: http://blogs.reuters.com/Pakistan/india Title Image: www.jewcy.com

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How to rule India: Break it into more pieces?

Pro-Telangana supporters hold flags and celebrate in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad Dec. 10, 2009. Following violent protests, the government will carve a new state out of southern Andhra Pradesh, a move likely to fuel more statehood demands. Photo: Krishnendu Halder / Reuters

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HOW TO RULE INDIA

BREAK INTO MORE PIECES?

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byIshaan Tharoor

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In mid-October 1952, an acolyte of Mahatma Gandhi named Potti Sriramulu invoked the tactics of his teacher and went on a hunger strike. The nation of India — at the time just five years old — was still finding shape after centuries of division and colonial rule, with many of its diverse regions clamoring for greater political recognition. Sriramulu’s fast came on behalf of tens of millions who, like him, spoke Telugu, a prominent south Indian language, and wanted their own state within the country.

Yet his protest went unheeded for weeks by New Delhi and, 58 days after it began, Sriramulu died, a sacrifice that triggered widespread rioting and eventually forced the government into forming the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh in 1953, as well as other new states organized on linguistic lines. No small irony then, that, almost 60 years later, another hunger strike threatens to dismember the state Sriramulu first won, and revive a fierce debate about the nature of the federal Indian nation-state.

(See a pictorial history of the tempestuous Nehru dynasty of India.)

Late Wednesday, the Indian government announced it would approve the carving out of a separate state known as Telangana from Andhra Pradesh. The movement for Telangana secession is virtually as old as the Indian republic itself, but it gained traction this month after its main political leader, K. Chandrashekar Rao, commenced a week-long fast. Rao’s deteriorating health as well as coordinated protests — some violent — across the 10 districts of Andhra Pradhesh’s 23 that comprise Telangana, including the influential high-tech capital of Hyderabad, seemed to force New Delhi’s hand. But it could open a whole series of controversies for the Indian government as many other regional movements have now stepped up their own demands for statehood.

(See a story about the death that may have precipitated the Andhra Pradesh controversy.)

Though Telugu-speaking as well, Telangana had once been part of a separate kingdom ruled from Hyderabad, which recognized British suzerainty during the colonial period but was not administratively part of British India. It was subsumed into the territory of Andhra Pradesh only in 1956, after a further dismemberment of the once independent Hyderabad kingdom. Though the city of Hyderabad was made the capital of the united Andhra Pradesh state, calls for greater autonomy have lingered, with many in Telangana complaining of marginalization at the hands of the coastal Andhra population.

But if New Delhi imagined it would calm tensions with its nod toward accepting a new state, the move backfired. Dozens of local legislators in Andhra Pradesh have resigned their posts and strikes by those opposing Telangana’s secession have paralyzed much of the state. Trains have been blocked, businesses shut down. According to news reports on Saturday, two activists in favor of a “united Andhra” took their lives in protest of the state’s splitting. The turmoil has also plunged Hyderabad, a booming, cosmopolitan I.T. hub, into panic as politicians and business leaders fret over the costs of the current instability. “This will be a total flop as investors will flee,” says Amruthraj Padmanabhundi, a 27-year-old I.T. professional in Hyderabad. “I am very worried [about] my prospects slipping.”

The prospect of Telangana’s creation has buoyed similar causes elsewhere as calls for secession echo in nearly a dozen states in India.

A four-day strike is under way among the picturesque hills and tea estates of Darjeeling, in northern West Bengal, with protesters intensifying demands for a new state of Gorkhaland that would better address the needs of the area’s ethnic Nepalese population.

This is the officially realeased proposed map of Gorkhaland which covers Darjeeling, Kurseong, Kalimpong, siliguri, Bhaktinagar. Malbazar,  Chalsa, Nagrakot, Banarhat,  Birpara, Madarhat, Jaigaon,  Kalchini and KumarGram (underlined places fall in Duars)

More than 100 activists have begun what they call a “fast-unto-death.” On the other side of the country, in the vast desert state of Rajasthan, a caravan of some 5,000 demonstrators and 500 camels paraded into the capital of Jaipur on Friday, agitating for the formation of Maru Pradesh, a state that would be carved out of some of Rajasthan’s poorest districts.

“Rajasthan is huge. It is not easy to keep track of all the villages, of the development or the lack of it,” says Jaiveer Godara, the leading voice of the movement. “The person who lives in the last village of Maru Pradesh has to wait for three days to get supply of water from outside … [And] there are no roads that lead to his village.

”(See a story about the 1937 silver jubilee of the ruler of Hyderabad, reputedly the world’s richest man, from TIME’s archives.)

At the root of this looming crisis lies the still unresolved question of how the world’s largest democracy ought best to govern itself. Independent India was at first a patchwork of former British provinces and princely states threaded together into a federal republic. Some of its states remain huge and unwieldy — for example, the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, with its estimated 190 million people, would be virtually tied with Brazil as the fifth most populous country on earth but it would also possess 8% of the world’s population under the global poverty line.

With a country of India’s size and diversity — as well as poverty — there is logic in having smaller states. “It will in fact strengthen [governance] through economic and administrative convenience,” says Delhi-based political analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta. “India can survive and prosper by breaking up.”

The Indian government last fashioned new states in 2000, when three largely remote and impoverished regions were elevated in status. At least two of them — Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand — have shown marked progress since their inception. Small states like Kerala in the south and Haryana in the north, both with populations under 30 million, boast some of India’s highest development indicators.

Backers of further decentralization even point to the original, idealistic Gandhian vision for India — of a republic brought together not by a strong central government, but an “ocean” of egalitarian and self-sufficient villages.

New States in India

List of Aspirant States:

• Angika speaking state (Bihar) Brown color
• Bodoland (Assam) Light Green color
• Bagelkhand (Madhya Pradesh) Water Blue color
• Bundelkhand (Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) - Dark Blue color
• Delhi(Not a full fledged state yet)
• Gondwana (northern Deccan Plateau)
• Gorkhaland (West Bengal) Red Color
• Harit Pradesh (Uttar Pradesh) – Dark Green in color
• Kamtapur / Greater Cooch Behar (West Bengal)
• Karbi Anglong (Assam)
• Kodagu (Karnataka) Sky blue color
• Kosal/Koshal (Orissa)
• Ladakh (Jammu and Kashmir) - Pink color
• Maru Pradesh (Rajasthan) – Dark Grey
• Mahakoshal (Madhya Pradesh)
• Mithila (Bihar)
• Panun Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir)
• Purvanchal (Uttar Pradesh) Purple color
• Rayalaseema (Andhra Pradesh) Dark Pink color
• Saurashtra(Gujarat) Light Grey color
• Telangana (Andhra Pradesh) Yellow color
• Tulu Nadu (KarnatakaKerala) Black color
• Vidarbha (Maharashtra) Orange color
• Vindhya Pradesh (Madhya Pradesh)

Of course, that sort of utopianism has little place in the current hurly-burly of Indian politics. Experts worry that new states may simply mean more jockeying for power and expanded bureaucracy in a country already notorious for its spools of red tape as well as its perpetual political horse-trading. “Ultimately, fragmentation is not a substitute for good governance,” says C.V. Madhukar, director of PRS Legislative Research, a Delhi nonprofit which advises the government.

Hoping to dampen a few of calls for new and smaller states ignited by the Andhra controversy, New Delhi has dialed back its support for Telangana, insisting that the matter now find a resolution through a vote in the Andhra Pradesh legislature. Given the current tumult, it’s unclear when or how such a motion may go through.

The political party headed by Rao, the Telangana separatist leader, was trounced both in recent state and national polls. His hunger strike — now ended — and the disturbances organized around it were likely an act of desperation of a movement shorn of much of its real political capital.

“Having the government buckle to this kind of moral blackmail is not a healthy way to go about things,” says Madhukar. “There shouldn’t be this sword of Damocles hanging over peoples’ heads.” A young India may have come of age through such dramatic acts of Gandhian sacrifice, but a more mature nation needs more measured habits.

—With reporting by Nilanjana Bhowmick/New Delhi

1. See a pictorial timeline of events that shaped modern India. 2. Read “The Insurgency Threatening India’s Schools.”3. “New States in India”

—

Source:There are no sunglasses Mapshowing new states in India

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Israel – or You Don’t Pee in My Pool and I Won’t Sh*t in Your Sandbox – I

Once upon a time there was a treaty by the United Nations – Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.  Guess who has never signed it?  Israel.

·

Israel – or You Don’t Pee in My Pool and I Won’t Sh*t in Your Sandbox

·

Last month Sec. of State Hillary Clinton had been doing a middle east tour where she called for a nuclear free middle east, and of course Iran is playing the game..and guess who else is playing?  Israel.

Once upon a time there was a treaty by the United Nations – Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Guess who has never signed it?  Israel.  For years Israel has refused to discuss it’s nuclear capabilities, although it is generally accepted that they are a nuclear state.    Does that not beg the question why do we, as the US or anybody in the rest of the world not demand that Israel disclose what they do or do not have, particularly in light of Iran claiming to be a nuclear state.

The Middle East is a simmering keg – and some nukes in there and see if the entire world doesn’t feel the heat.  Not that I have any particular love for the Iranian regime (let’s be honest Ahmadinejad is an idiot, and I fully support the Iranian people in their rebellion) but at least they are admitting they have the capabilities.   Just in time to turn up the heat Israel shows their new drone which can fly up to 20 hours, a not too subtle hint to Iran that we can reach you…there is a lot of saber rattling going on, makes one wonder who is going to call whose (or should that be whoms) bluff.

I also think that in light of the financial help the US directly gives Israel they should at least come clean with their nuclear capabilities..here are some interesting facts and figures..I mean after all we bought the information one way or another.Total direct aid to Israel, 1948-2003$89.9 billion (uncorrected for inflation)

• • Since 1976 Israel has been the largest annual recipient of US aid. It is the largest cumulative recipient since World War II.
  • Direct U.S. aid for each Israeli citizen in 2001 (per capita annual income of Israel = $16,710) — over $500
  • Direct U.S. Aid for each Ethiopian citizen in 2001 (per capita annual income of Ethiopia = $100) — about $.45
  • REGULAR US GRANT AID in FY 2003
  • $2.76 billion military aid grant
  • $2.1 billion economic support funds
  • $600 million refugee resettlement grant
  • COMMERCIAL LOAN GUARANTEES IN FY 2003
  • $2 billion
  • BUSH ADMINISTRATION SUPPLEMENTAL REQUEST FOR FY 2003
  • Military aid grant $1 billion
  • Commercial loan guarantees $9 billion
  • Arrow missile development $60 million
  • TOTAL AID FOR FY 2003 $14.82 billion
  • Percentage of U.S. foreign aid that goes to Israel — 30%
  • Israel’s population as a percentage of world population — .01%
  • Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) states, “No assistance may be provided under this part to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” 22 U.S.C. 2304(a)
  • Section 4 of the Arms Export Control Act prohibits selling military equipment to countries that use them for non-self-defense purposes.
  • The U.S. State Department determined in February 2001 that Israel has committed each of the acts that the law defines as “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges and trial, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, and other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or the security of person.” It described Israeli army use of live ammunition against Palestinians when soldiers were not in impending danger as “excessive use of force.”

SOURCES: Clyde R. Mark, Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance,  Congressional Research Service, updated April 1, 2003; Clyde R. Mark,  Middle East: U.S. Foreign Assistance, FY 2001, FY 2002, FY 2003 Congressional Research Service, March 28, 2002

Sometimes I am quite confident that I am the only person in the world that doesn’t have direct access to a bomb.

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Source: Public Monkey 2010 Blog

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Israel – or You Don’t Pee in My Pool and I Won’t Sh*t in Your Sandbox -II

·Ok, I know it isn’t a nice visual, it isn’t meant to be.  This middle east peace process has been going on for decades.  One has to wonder if nobody has informed Israel?

Israel – or You Don’t Pee in My Pool and I Won’t Sh*t in Your Sandbox

·

Early this month V.P. Joe Biden was in Israel trying to jump start the peace process, and what should Israel announce while Biden is there?  A plan to expand another 1,600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem.  Diplomatic faux paux or a deliberate snub at the US?  I find it hard to believe that was just bad timing.    Benjamin Netanyahu is not a man likely to be uninformed about what announcements are coming out regarding the hot topic of settlement issues.

I have to give the Obama administration credit, they took Israel to task, unlike the previous Bush administration who gave Israel carte blanche.    Hillary Clinton had a tense phone call with Netanyahu in which aides say she demanded a reversal of the decision on the East Jerusalem settlements and additional gestures by Israel to the Palestinians to demonstrate its seriousness about negotiations.

In his first public remarks on what Israeli commentators called his most serious crisis with Washington since taking office a year ago, he gave no sign he would meet Palestinian demands to cancel a project for 1,600 new settler homes.

“I suggest not to get carried away and to calm down,” Netanyahu told his cabinet, after a reprimand by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and written statements issued by the prime minister’s office that failed to calm the dispute.

“There was a regrettable incident here, that occurred innocently,” Netanyahu said, referring to an announcement by a government ministry during a visit last week by Vice President Joe Biden, of planned construction in an area of the West Bank that Israel has annexed to Jerusalem.

The timing of the disclosure, after Palestinians agreed to indirect peace talks, embarrassed Biden and raised questions over whether Israel’s settlement policy could harm U.S.-Israeli security cooperation on the question of Iran.

“It was hurtful and certainly it should not have happened,” Netanyahu said of the announcement by the Interior Ministry, controlled by the religious Shas party, a member of a governing coalition dominated by pro-settler parties, including his own.

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Source: Political Monkey 2010’s Blog

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Censored by The Huffington Post: “What Really Happened on September 11th?“

Even questioning the events of September 11th is too much for the Huffington Post, thought of by many as a progressive news source.

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VENTURA ON 9/11

·

[Note for WoP readers: Huffington Post is considered a progressive medium, in contrast to the mainstream media; who day and night publish / project news, views, features, issues, every thing from a particular angle, a set mindset all aimed to motivate their readers to be carried away with all what they want them to. Much to my astonishment and other readers of this publication, the management decided to refuse Jesse Ventura’s upcoming post.

Now had Ventura been a young journalist, a novice seeking to gain a foothold in the realm of journalism by bringing up some sensational news item or digging out a scandal to become popular overnight, I would have thought the HuffPost guys are smart enough to sift facts from faction. But Jesse is not a young amateurish intern in journalism. Here is a brief, excerpted from Wikipedia on this seasoned man and his achievements. [Nayyar]

James George Janos^[1] (born July 15, 1951), best known as Jesse “The Body” Ventura, is an American politician, previous governor of Minnesota, retired professional wrestler and color commentator, Navy UDT veteran, actor, and former radio and television talk show host.

As a professional wrestler, he is best known for his tenure in the World Wrestling Federation as a wrestler and color commentator. In 2004, he was inducted into the company’s Hall of Fame.^[1]

In the Minnesota gubernatorial election of 1998, running as an Independent and member of the Reform Party, he was elected the 38th Governor of Minnesota and served from January 4, 1999 to January 6, 2003 without seeking a second term.

VENTURA ON BUSH/CHENEY ADMINISTRATION AND TORTURE

In a May 11, 2009 interview with Larry King, Ventura twice stated that George W. Bush was the worst president of his lifetime, adding “President Obama inherited something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. You know? Two wars, an economy that’s borderline depression.”^[51] On the issue of waterboarding, Ventura added:

[I]t’s a good thing I’m not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law. …

[Waterboarding] is drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders. … If it’s — if it’s done wrong, you certainly could drown. You could swallow your tongue. You could do a whole bunch of stuff. If it’s it done wrong or — it’s torture, Larry. It’s torture.^[52]

Ventura then stated that he had no respect for Dick Cheney because he is “a guy who got five deferments from the Vietnam War. Clearly, he’s a coward. He wouldn’t go when it was his time to go. And now he is a chickenhawk. Now he is this big tough guy who wants this hardcore policy. And he’s the guy that sanctioned all this torture by calling it ‘enhanced interrogation’.”^[52]

Ventura also expressed interest in being appointed ambassador to Cuba should U.S. relations with Cuba continue to improve.^[53] On a May 18, 2009 appearance on The View, Ventura asked Elisabeth Hasselbeck if waterboarding is acceptable, why were not Oklahoma City bombers, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols waterboarded.

“We only seem to waterboard Muslims.”^[54] Comparing the waterboarding of detainees to the North Vietnamese torture of American P.O.W.s, Ventura asserted, “We created our own Hanoi Hilton in Guantánamo. That’s our Hanoi Hilton.“^[54] “‘Enhanced interrogation’ is Dick Cheney changing a word. Dick Cheney changed a word to cover his ass.”^[54]

On May 20, 2009, Ventura appeared on Fox & Friends. When Brian Kilmeade told Ventura that he would stop supporting waterboarding when “they’re dead”, Ventura responded, “Really? Have you enlisted? Have you enlisted or are you just talking?… Go walk the walk, don’t talk the talk.”^[55]

VENTURA HAS QUESTIONS ON 9/11

In April and May 2008, Jesse Ventura, in several radio interviews for his new book, Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me, expressed concerns about what he described as some of the unanswered questions of the September 11 attacks.^[56] His remarks about the possibility that the World Trade Center was demolished with explosives were also repeated in newspaper and television stories following some of the interviews.^[57]

Ventura was interviewed on the Alex Jones radio show on April 2, 2008^[58] where he said that he felt that many unanswered questions remain, and he believes that World Trade Center Building 7, which was not struck by a plane, collapsed on the afternoon of 9/11 in a manner which resembled a well executed controlled demolition^[59] Ventura stated:

How could this building just implode into its own footprint five hours later? That’s my first question. [...] The 9/11 Commission didn’t even devote one page to that in their big volume of investigation.^[60]

He also states the Twin Towers appeared to be pulverized to dust, that they fell at virtually free-fall speed, and that no other massive steel-framed buildings had ever collapsed in this manner due to fire before.^[57]

On May 18, 2009, when asked by Sean Hannity of Fox News, how George W. Bush could have avoided the attacks of September 11, 2001, Ventura answered, “Well, you pay attention to memos on August 6th that tell you exactly what bin Laden‘s gonna do.”^[61]

CONSPIRACY THEORY WITH JESSE VENTURA

Main article: Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura

In August 2009, it was announced that Ventura would host TruTV‘s new show Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura.^[62] “Ventura will hunt down answers, plunging viewers into a world of secret meetings, midnight surveillance, shifty characters and dark forces,” truTV said in a statement. On the program, which debuted on December 2, 2009, Ventura travels the country, investigating cases and getting input from believers and skeptics before passing judgment on a theory’s validity.^[63] According to TruTV, the first episode drew 1.6 million viewers, a record for a new series on the network. Contd…

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Censored by The Huffington Post: “What Really Happened on September 11th?” – II

It’s worth noting that Huffington Post while censoring this piece by Ventura already ran an excerpt from another chapter of American Conspiracies, about the US “war on drugs,” and they had no problem with that subject.

·

VENTURA ON 9/11

·

Here now is a brief from Prisonplanet.com on Ventura’s disputed article:

As I noted in an item yesterday, Jesse Ventura has a new book out, co-authored with Dick Russell, called American Conspiracies, which includes an excellent chapter on election fraud and its connection to the likely murder of Mike Connell.

Well, this morning, Jesse had a front-page piece on 9/11 up at HuffPost: a front-page piece that quickly slipped off that front page–and then completely disappeared.

Here’s what you’ll find there now (or will, until they take that down as well):

Jesse Ventura
Author, American Conspiracies
Posted: March 9, 2010 11:00 AM

Editor’s Note: The Huffington Post’s editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories — including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.

All that’s up there now are the comments left by 65 of HuffPost’s readers.

It’s worth noting that HuffPost already ran an excerpt from another chapter of American Conspiracies, about the US “war on drugs,” and they had no problem with that subject.

But this one is, as we all know, taboo. Clearly, even to question the official story of 9/11 is to engage in “conspiracy theories” (as if the official story weren’t itself a “conspiracy theory,” and a preposterous one at that).

Such is always the response of the US mainstream media (the foreign media tends to be more open-minded)–and it’s also the response of our left/liberal media, as this amazing act of censorship makes clear.

So here is the offending piece. Please read it; and let’s all try to locate the particular points that are so obviously wild and baseless that HuffPost had to kill the whole piece instantly…

You didn’t see anything about it in the mainstream media, but two weeks ago at a conference in San Francisco, more than one thousand architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.

That’s right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy – because they don’t buy the government’s version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible – or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the Twin Towers and Building 7.

Richard Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects and the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, put it like this: “The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction.” He’s especially disturbed by Building 7, whose 47 stories came down in “pure free-fall acceleration” that afternoon – even though it was never hit by an aircraft.

This is a subject I take up in my new book, American Conspiracies, published this week by Skyhorse.   An excerpt follows:

Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers were completed in 1973. Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9/11 were going 440 and 550 miles an hour.

Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers. Keep in mind that no other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a controlled demolition from inside the buildings? I don’t claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the Navy’s underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water.

And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist, Steven E. Jones, who says that a “gravity driven collapse” without demolition charges defies the laws of physics. These buildings fell, at nearly the rate of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately ten seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds. Then there’s the fact that steel beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as 500 feet.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started its investigation on August 21, 2002.  When their 10,000-page-long report came out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a controlled demolition. But Steven E. Jones also says that molten metal found underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn’t have been all that was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9/11, with Governor Pataki and my wife Terry.  It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running into heat pockets of huge temperatures. These fires kept burning for more than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever. And this was all due to jet fuel? We’re talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal, in April 2009. In studying dust samples from the site, these scientists found chips of nano-thermite, which is a high-tech incendiary/explosive. Here’s what the paper’s lead author, Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen’s chemistry department, had to say about the explosive that he’s convinced brought down the Twin Towers and the nearby Building 7:

“Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron.  So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly. Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.”

Richard Gage is one of hundreds of credentialed architects and structural engineers who have put their careers on the line to point out the detailed anomalies and many implications of controlled demolition in the building collapses. As he puts it bluntly: “Once you get to the science, it’s indisputable.”

THE END. Below is once again the response that the HuffPost put up after censoring the article and as of today, the 24^th March 2010 it still stands so.

Editor’s Note: The Huffington Post’s editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories — including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.

________

Source: Mathaba

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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You Don’t Pee in My Pool and I Won’t Sh*t in Your Sandbox – III

David Milliband, the British Foreign Secretary says there was “compelling evidence” that Israel has been responsible for misuse of British passports as part of a plot to kill one of the most prominent members of Hamas.

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UK Expels Israeli Diplomat

·

For those of you who think I am digressing from my US political obsession I am not, but the UK actions this Tuesday were significant.  I have deliberately not addressed the Dubai murder mystery, waiting for more factual information or ideas to form..and today I believe that has happened.  First, let’s review what happened in Dubai:

In Jan. of  2010 – Mahmoud al-Mabhouh a member of Hamas was in Dubai, he was found dead in his hotel room.  The Dubai authorities pieced together surveillance tapes and literally showed the assassins from the point of entry to exit, every step of the way was recorded.  (You can view the video here). It reeked of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, yet there was not confirmed proof.  Israel for its part has always refused to confirm or deny any Mossad activities, rather convenient isn’t it?

Turns out there were forged, fraudulent passports involved from a variety of countries, including, but not limited to  Britain, Ireland, France and Australia.   Needless to say these governments were very upset, how did this happen?  Well today, David Milliband, the Foreign Secretary announced that there was “compelling evidence” that Israel was responsible for misuse of British passports as part of a plot to kill a prominent member of Hamas.

He went on to say that given the high quality of the forgery on the passports it was “highly likely” that they were made by a state intelligence service.

“This, together with other enquiries, and the links to Israel established by Soca, [means] we have concluded that there are compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of British passports”

Here comes the kicker:  Miliband went on to say the UK government took the matter extremely seriously and had written to the Israeli administration seeking assurances that such misuse would never happen again.

The misuse of UK passports not only presented a hazard to British nationals in the region but also represented a “profound disregard” for the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, the foreign secretary said.

“The fact that this was done by a country that is a friend with significant diplomatic, cultural, business and personal ties to the UK only adds insult to injury. No country or government could stand by in such a situation.”

Guess what the Israeli government has not responded directly, gee really?

He went on to confirm that Britain had demanded the withdrawal of an Israeli diplomat following the “intolerable” use of 12 forged British passports by a hit squad that killed the founder of Hamas’s military wing in Dubai.

Miliband attacked the “profound disregard” for UK sovereignty and said the apparent involvement of a friendly nation “added insult to injury”.

(source http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/7503921/Britain-to-expel-Mossads-man-in-London-over-Dubai-assassination.html, you can also watch Miliband)

Ok, now let’s go across the pond as it were and what is going on in our backyard America?  Guess who’s coming to dinner?  Binyamin Netanyahu.   The Israeli prime minister gave a defiant speech in Washington to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee where he announces that Jersalem is not a settlement but the capital of Israel.  See the video http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/mar/23/binyamin-netanyahu-washington-speech

Let’s review:  Jerusalem and its final status is a point of contention in the Palestinian issue.

Let’s review:  Biden was insulted when in Israel trying to jump start the peace process and Israel announced that they would build another 1,600 apartments in East Jerusalm.

Let’s review:  On Jan. 16, General Petreus, you remember him?  The fellow in charge of Afghanistan.  He sent a team of senior miilitary briefers to the US and reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region.  Read the whole article at http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/14/the_petraeus_briefing_biden_s_embarrassment_is_not_the_whole_story

Let’s Connect the Dots:  We want our troops home, we want out of Afghanistan.  Does anybody disagree?  What is slowing us from making an exit?  Let’s see  according to the guy on the ground he has put his finger right on it, we have to solve the Arab Israeli crisis, and maybe, just maybe we shouldn’t be telling Israel that we are best friends forever, maybe just maybe we should be telling them – you know what…it is not acceptable for you to involve other countries in your James Bond “hits”, it is not acceptable for you to make unilateral inflammatory statements when everybody is trying to save you ass and find some peaceful resolution, you cannot keep pissing in everybody’s pool and not expect somebody to come over and shit in your sandbox!

Of course now we all want to know who this Israeli diplomat was?  Don’t we?  Miliband did not say..but according to the UK newspaper the Telegraph it was…. “A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment ahead of the statement, says Britain will expel one Israeli diplomat. Sources disclosed that the individual is MOSSAD’S London representative.

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Source: Political Monkey 2010’s Blog

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

You Don’t Pee in My Pool and I Won’t Sh*t in Your Sandbox – IV

Does ”special ties” mean their Political Action Committees and Funds?  It is time for the US and the US politicians to quit prostituting themselves out for Israeli PAC money and do the right thing for America.

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“Bibi” Netanyahu in Washington

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OK, this is a long post, and I beg you to read it fully.  The Palestinian – Israeli conflict is a complicated one, I don’t profess to be an expert, but I do believe that if we educate ourselves we stand a better chance at solving it.

For those of you “Tweeters” out there who want news in 140 characters or less, this won’t fit for you, if you want to think…grab a cup of coffee sit down and read…

I think we can all agree that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an idiot.  His rhetoric is obscene and inflammatory, but you know what …I am fully convinced that Netanyahu is just as evil in his rhetoric.

These folks have something else in common…neither of them are based in reality, neither of them have any regard for the UN or any other recognized government’s opinion or sovereignty, nor does the idea of what is the morally right and just course of action apply to either of them.

What will it take for Israel to get the message?  The world is rapidly running out of time to placate Israel and their disregard for reality.   Solving the Israeli – Palestinian conflict will help us get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, I want my family members home who serve their country.

I am tired of American blood being shed.  We are fighting with one hand tied behind our back, if we solve the Palestinian problem, it removes a MAJOR source of tension and feed for those who want to terrorize the world.  I often wonder if we are fighting the wrong enemy?

Perhaps our biggest enemy is Israel and their refusal to engage in a realistic peace process or implement any of the 60 plus resolution passed by the UN.

Their continual provocation and escalation of the situation as so well illustrated by Benjamin Netanyahu  – the current Israeli Prime Minister and his recent  inflammatory remarks that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel.  Israel continually ignores and has no use for the UN, unless of course the UN is going to protect them, when it is  somebody else’s blood being shed on their behalf , like right now there are UN peacekeeping troops on the Israeli – Lebanon border, then the UN is just dandy!

Israel is a rogue state, just like Iran.  And no, I am not being anti-semantic here, it is just a fact.  Given the recent events linking Mossad the Israeli intelligence agency to the Dubai Murder of a Hamas member, using cloned passports from all over the world and the expansion and inflammatory language from Netanyahu I ask a simple question:  What is the difference between Iran and Israel?

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has slammed Israel for approving construction of 20 new apartments in occupied East Jerusalem, pressing that the building of “illegal” settlements “must stop”. Photo: AP / Khalil Hamraa

The US should own up to what we have created, we continually blocked binding resolutions and resolutions condemning Israel because of our “special ties” with Israel.  Does “special ties” mean their Political Action Committees and Funds?

It is time for the US and the US politicians to quit prostituting themselves out for Israeli PAC money and do the right thing for America.   Here is an organization – the UN -delegated with keeping the peace of the world, and guess who has consistently ignored resolutions with regard to the Palestinian Israeli conflict?  Israel.

In January Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-moon made the following statement at the opening of the 2010 session of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, in New York, 21 January:

I congratulate you and your distinguished colleagues on your re-election to the leadership of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

As we open this year’s session, intensive efforts are under way by the international community to restart the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.  I support the United States-led efforts to bring about a resumption of meaningful negotiations on all final status issues, including the security of Israelis and Palestinians, borders, refugees and Jerusalem.

In the absence of talks, confidence between the parties has diminished.  Tensions have risen in East Jerusalem.  People in Gaza and southern Israel continue to suffer from violence.  If we do not move forward on the political process soon, we risk sliding backwards.

Notwithstanding the Government of Israel’s decision to restrain settlement construction in the West Bank, I am concerned that settlement activity and financial support for settlement expansion continues in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The international community has repeatedly appealed to Israel to halt settlement construction throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory.  Settlement construction violates international law and contravenes the Road Map, under which Israel is obliged to freeze all settlement activity, including the so-called “natural growth”.

This is in no one’s interest, least of all Israel’s.  Settlement activity undermines trust between the two parties, seems to pre-judge the outcome of the future permanent status negotiations, and imperils the basis for the two-State solution.

In East Jerusalem, a series of worrisome events has not only stoked tensions in the city but also has the potential to endanger stability in the region.  The Israeli authorities have continued to discriminate against Palestinian residents, including by ordering house demolitions and evictions and revoking identity cards.  Local authorities have also announced plans to consolidate and expand settlement infrastructure.

It bears repeating that the international community does not recognize Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, which remains part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.  The question of Jerusalem is a central and highly sensitive issue to be addressed by the parties in permanent status negotiations. A way must be found, through negotiations, for Jerusalem to emerge as the capital of two States living side-by-side in peace and security, with arrangements for the holy sites acceptable to all.  This is the road to fulfilling the vision of Security Council resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative.

In Gaza, one year after the end of the most recent round of hostilities, neither the issues that led to the conflict nor its aftermath have been fully addressed.  Very few of the key measures for stability, as identified in Security Council resolution 1860, have been implemented.  Moreover, and regrettably, accountability for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law has not been adequately addressed.  I call on Israel and the relevant Palestinian authorities to conduct, without delay, credible domestic investigations into the many reported allegations of serious human rights violations.

The grave humanitarian situation in Gaza remains of special concern to me.  The amount of humanitarian and other supplies allowed in is insufficient to meet the needs of the population or to enable urgently needed reconstruction.  I deeply regret that the United Nations proposal to kick-start civilian reconstruction activity has not been approved.  I repeat my call on Israel to end its unacceptable and counterproductive blockade and to fully respect international law.

I am also greatly concerned about those in southern Israel who have to live in fear of continuing Palestinian rocket and mortar fire from Gaza.  I call for a complete end to violence and the targeting of Israeli civilians.

For 42 long years, the Palestinian people have been living under occupation.  I reiterate my firm commitment to putting an end to the occupation, and to the conflict, through the creation of a State of Palestine living side by side with Israel in peace and security, and through the achievement of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the region.

We shall pursue this objective in keeping with Security Council resolutions, previous agreements, the Road Map and the Arab Peace Initiative.

If we are to advance this common agenda in the crucial period ahead, a revitalized Quartet must step up its engagement.  This Committee has also a contribution to make.

I look forward to continuing our work together to end a tragic situation that has persisted for far too long, to the detriment of far too many men, women and children.

Today Ban Ki-moon made the following statement:

New York, 24 March 2010 – Secretary-General’s press encounter following security council briefing on the Middle East

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure to see you.

I have just briefed the Security Council on last Friday’s Quartet meeting and my own visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.

Tomorrow I am heading to Sirte, Libya, to participate in the League of Arab States Summit meeting.

These missions take place amid continuing efforts to start Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks, as well as a crisis of confidence surrounding Israel’s plans to build new settlements in East Jerusalem.

I am aware of the latest news concerning yet another 20 dwellings to be constructed in East Jerusalem, this time in the heart of an Arab neighborhood.

I say again, here, what I have been repeatedly saying: that settlements are illegal under international law. This must stop.

From my discussions with the Israeli and Palestinian leadership and the Quartet members, as well as what I saw for myself in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, I would draw four main points:

First, there is no alternative to negotiations for a two-state solution. As the Quartet stressed, proximity talks should move ahead, evolving into direct negotiations between the parties as soon as possible. The goal should be to resolve all final status issues within 24 months.

Second, we must not let those negotiations be disrupted by provocations. No doubt there will be tests. However, you should know that extremists must know that the parties are determined to stay at the table.

Third, there have been too many negative facts on the ground. We need more positive facts — a settlement freeze, a lifting of the blockade of Gaza, an end to rocket fire from Gaza, an easing of the constraints that stifle Palestinian life, prisoner exchanges, Palestinian unity, further security and economic progress by the Palestinian Authority.

The list is long, and time is very short. Israelis and Palestinians should do much more to build trust and meet their obligations under international law and the Roadmap.

Fourth, while peace is primarily in the hands of the parties themselves, the international community will continue to play a crucial role. At this important juncture, the Quartet is determined to push the parties and monitor the situation. That is one of the reasons why I am going to Sirte to meet with Arab leaders to encourage and facilitate and support these proximity talks. The parameters of a solution are well known. Our challenge is to get from here to there.

Thank you very much.

Q: Mr. Secretary-General, you spoke of how the indirect talks should not be interrupted or delayed by provocations. What about pre-conditions? Would you say that the Palestinian side should not allow the building going on as a pre-condition for beginning these indirect talks and moving to direct talks?

SG: Most ideally speaking, there should be no pre-conditions in talks. There should be negotiations going on. The process for these proximity talks has been agreed upon. It has been quite difficult. However, I am pleased these parties have agreed to engage in proximity talks. Therefore, any unilateral actions, which would undermine or prejudice the final outcome of this negotiation will have to be refrained.

Q: Mr. Secretary-General, you’re going to Sirte to tell the Arab leaders there’s no alternative but a negotiated two-state solution. Many Arab countries including Saudi Arabia have come and said that the statements of the Israeli Prime Minister Mr. [Binyamin] Netanyahu in Washington about East Jerusalem have torpedoed the talks, and they want clarifications from the Quartet and the United Nations on their position on such statements. What do you say to these Arab countries who are very worried that this is not a pre-condition, that this is already undermining the final status talks by declaring a position on a very important subject for the Arabs and for the world: East Jerusalem. What do you say to that?

SG: That is exactly what and why I have been saying that not only the parties concerned, the whole international community, particularly the countries in the region should do their best to encourage these talks. I know that the Arab countries are frustrated, and they express their concerns and even reluctance in supporting these proximity talks. I have been engaging in bilateral talks with many Arab leaders, advising an opinion to them to support this dialogue process, and I’m grateful for their flexibility, even though they have given some conditional support. This support should continue so that Israeli and Palestinians will continue their bilateral negotiations. These proximity talks eventually should lead to direct negotiations. I will talk first of all with President [Mahmoud] Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and engage a group of Arab leaders collectively and individually, and I’m going to discuss this matter with them.

Q: A follow-up, sir. It seems like all the talking has been done with Arab leaders, while many feel that the Israelis should be told to refrain from making such statements on a very important topic, East Jerusalem, in a very definite way, which Binyamin Netanyahu did!

SG: The Quartet and the United Nations and the whole international community have been vocal and clear and loud that Jerusalem is an issue that should be negotiated and discussed as a result of a final negotiation.

Q: I wanted to ask in the run-up to this meeting with the Group of Friends of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi has said that her party, the NLD [National League for Democracy], and other opposition parties, shouldn’t even register for the poll, that the election laws are flawed. I’m wondering; you convened the meeting, what’s your thinking of what the UN can do, given that the main opponent now wants to boycott it? And just one other thing, a week ago you’d said on the Sri Lanka panel or board on accountability that there’d be no delay. So a week’s gone by, I want to know if anything’s been done in that regard in that week?

SG: For your first question, let me answer tomorrow afternoon after I have convened the meeting of the Group of Friends of Myanmar. I need to discuss this matter with the ambassadors participating in that meeting. I will have a clearer answer, if you excuse me.

And second, I’m in the process of identifying persons who can work in the panel of experts. My chef de cabinet has been meeting with the Sri Lankan ambassador here and they are now in the process of making a move on this, and I expect that Mr. Lynn Pascoe will be able to visit Sri Lanka in the near future to discuss all the matters.

Q: Mr. Secretary-General, in the past week you’ve seen Prime Minister Netanyahu, and you met yesterday with the opposition leader [of Israel] Tzipi Livni. Do you sense at all that there’s any room for movement in these proximity talks? It seems that, particularly in his speech in Washington, the Prime Minister took a very, very hard line defending the settlements and everything else, so I wonder if whether in your private talks you got any sense that there was any room for movement or flexibility?

SG: First of all, you should know the positions of both Israelis and Palestinians on proximity talks. These proximity, talks facilitated by the United States with a lot of political difficulty, have now been agreed. This is an encouraging point. How much progress can they make? I think they need to discuss all substantive core issues in the proximity talks. If you remember, there is a conditional restraint on settlements, freeze by the Israeli Government, and again some conditional support by the League of Arab States on these proximity talks. Time is very short so we must make progress so that they can move further toward direct negotiations. I can only urge the parties concerned to engage in dialogue with sincerity, sense of flexibility and also political will with longer perspective, visions.

Q: Mr. Secretary-General, while you were talking in Moscow and here in Washington and other places, while talks are for talks and may take a very long time, what did you sense from the leaders and the ministers regarding the situation in Gaza? Are the people of Gaza going to wait many years until this blockade will be lifted?

SG: My second visit to Gaza was very much sobering. I went there with a sense of a heavy mind, knowing that the people in Gaza have been living under such very difficult circumstances. I have seen many houses and ruins still lying without being cleared. All these things need to be accelerated, for reconstruction, which will last one year after the end of this conflict. Nothing has been done, and I was relieved that the Israeli Government had finally approved the United Nations humanitarian projects. But as I said it is just less than one per cent of all the requirements which are needed to reconstruct all the Gazan economy. I have made this case very strongly to the Israeli authorities that the longer this closure continues, the more the people, Palestinians in Gaza, will suffer and may end up in undermining and disrupting the normal economic life of Palestinian people and also empowering these extremist militants there in Gaza. That is not in the interest of Israel, it is not in the interest of people in the region and it’s not in the interest of anybody in the international community.

Q: But they don’t care. Are you going to take any further steps like recommending to the Security Council to come forward – any new resolution in this regard?

SG: The Quartet in its statement said that they will monitor the situation and will take into consideration any additional steps if necessary, and we will continue to monitor the situation. And I have very sincerely and strongly urged the Israeli Government to take urgent measures to ease such closures and open crossings, and urge them to have longer perspectives for the future.

Q: Mr. Secretary-General, do you think that lifting the blockade in Gaza can be played with this, with some tolerance from the Palestinians for the new settlement?

SG: I’m not sure about all this. However, easing the sanctions that they are [placing], the closures, and opening crossings — that should be done without any preconditions on humanitarian grounds.

Q: Mr. Secretary-General, it was remarkable that you added Iran in the Middle East context, that you addressed the issue of Iran. Do you believe that the issue of Iran should be addressed in the Middle East context, the whole Arab-Israeli conflict?

SG: There are many regional dynamics in the Middle East. The Iranian issue is one of them. It has become international consensus that this is the one which must be addressed now. All the Member States of the international community have deep concern on the nuclear development programme. The Iranian authorities, according to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], have not been able to verify the true nature and scope of their nuclear development programme, that it is genuinely for peaceful purposes. That should be verified and proven by international community, and the burden is on them. At the same time, the negotiations should continue. Iranians should return to negotiations with the EU 3 + 3 and IAEA has made a good proposal and EU 3 + 3 also, their proposal is now something which needs to be given serious consideration by the Iranian authorities. I again urge that this issue should be resolved peacefully, through dialogue, as soon as possible.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

It is time for America to play hard ball with the Israeli’s, there comes a time when you have to say enough is enough.  Perhaps it is the stain of the holocaust and the atrocities that occurred that makes us feel protective of Israel, but I think we have created a spoiled child, we have raised this child with no boundaries, never told this child no, always held their hand and assured them they were “special”.

The fact is a Jewish soul is no more special, than an American soul, than a Palestinian soul, than a Muslim soul, a Buddhist soul, Christian soul… or any other living being’s soul.  It is time for Israel to either grow up and come to the table prepared to do what is right, or it is time for the US to break those “special ties”, including the purse strings.

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Source: Political Monkey 2010’s Blog Title Photo: Courtesy Alan Sabrosky

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

America’s “Islamists” Go Where Oilmen Fear to Tread

Unlike this image, where you can easily recognize the wolf in a sheep’ cloak, the science of propaganda, psyops and killings through conventional as well as ultra modern weapons has been perfected to such an extent that it’s difficult to differentiate between terrorism and its victims. Wolves as sheep and the sheep have been turned into monsters.

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Peter Chamberlain

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By following the trail of militant terrorists US forces and American interests have gained access deep in Central Asia, where oil companies have had little luck gaining a foothold on their own.

To students of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and throughout the world, it is common knowledge that the United States military and Central Intelligence often act in a manner that is contradictory to the words of American leaders.

Is India’s Regional Influence on the wane?

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, center, with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, left, and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan [Photographed May 24, 2009] With Pakistan and Afghanistan fighting the radical, Islamic insurgents, the meeting seemed designed by Iran to assure its neighbors that working together the three could solve their problems without having to rely on the West.

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Chacko Philip, France

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In recent weeks, lot of things were happening in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre which are critical to the evolution of India’s regional role and its foreign policy. On 26 February 2010, at least nine Indians, including three army officers were killed in a terrorist attack in Kabul. The attack was carried out focussing the residential areas used by Indians working in Afghanistan. The Indian National Security Advisor, Mr. Shiv Shankar Menon made a two day visit to Kabul on 5 March 2010 to review the security situation of the Indians working there. Following his visit, Pakistani Army Chief General Pervez Kiani met the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai in Kabul, on 6 March 2010, to discuss “matters of mutual interest”.

On 7 March 2010, the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates carried out an urgent visit to Kabul. This was in view of the scheduled visit of the President of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad on 10 March 2010. The Iranian president’s visit was aimed at showing their strong support for President Karzai and to secure Afghan support. This was followed by a two day visit by President Karzai to Pakistan on 10 March 2010. During this visit, Karzai held talks with his Pakistani counterpart, President Asif Ali Zardari and also had a separate meeting with Pakistani Army Chief, General Kiani.

LOOSING KARZAI AND AFGHANISTAN:

Indian government officials and strategic thinkers till now took Indian influence in Afghanistan for granted. They dealt with Afghanistan as an Indian outpost, using it to monitor Pakistan and to secure India’s national interests. Following the London conference on Afghanistan in February 2010, while the international community accepted the idea of involving moderate Taliban in the political settlement, India vehemently opposed it. India always remained cynical about involving Taliban in the Afghan national reconciliation process. India’s opposition is based on the ground that there is no difference between a good and bad Taliban. The geopolitical reason behind this Indian opposition is that, if Taliban is involved in this process, then it will become inevitable that, Pakistan will play a major role in the formation of any future afghan government.

President Karzai is going ahead with the reconciliation program. In view of that, he is planning to hold a “loya jirgha” or “grand council” on 29 April 2010. President Karzai’s recent visit to Pakistan should be looked at from this angle. Karzai needs Pakistan’s support to be successful in his reconciliation plan. During his visit to Pakistan, President Karzai said, “India is a close friend of Afghanistan but Pakistan is a brother of Afghanistan. Pakistan is a twin brother. We are conjoined twins, there’s no separation.” He also stressed Afghanistan’s neutrality by saying, “Afghanistan does not want any proxy wars on its territory. It does not want a proxy war between India and Pakistan. It does not want a proxy war between Iran and the U.S. on Afghanistan.”

General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Chief of Army Staff with Afghan President Hamid Karzai

In addition, during his talks with Gen. Kiani, the Pakistani army chief offered him to train the Afghan army. To this Karzai said, “as far as the training of Afghan soldiers, my minister of defence will study and we will come back on this”. All these developments are not fitting well with the plans envisioned by the Indian strategic thinkers.

India has no one else to blame for this predicament other than itself. India lost its influence over Karzai following its miscalculated backing of the opposition candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, fielded by the US and also having failed to support Karzai in the recent months. It is evident that in the coming weeks, President Karzai will be working closely with Pakistan to ensure that the “Loya Jirgha” ends successfully.

INDIA’S DISTANCING ITS RELATIONS WITH IRAN:

Iran was one of India’s long standing allies in the region over decades. However, during its flirtation period with the Bush administration, the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government (2004-2009) in Delhi forfeited this special relationship. In January 2003, under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India and Iran signed a landmark agreement known as “the Delhi Declaration”. As per the declaration, “the combat against international terrorism should not be based on double standards. States that aid, abet and directly support international terrorism should be condemned”.

The declaration added that in the field of oil and gas, the two sides would formulate a joint mechanism to promote cooperation. Prime Minister Vajpayee added that the joint India-Iran initiative to develop the Chahbahar port in Iran and to connect it to Afghanistan by road have started a new trend of investment in infrastructure development. During this period India was considering the construction of a pipeline from Iran through Pakistan, commonly know as the IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India) pipeline. This was the high point in the Indo-Iranian cooperation.

The first major blow to Indo-Iranian relationship came on 24 September 2005, when, for the first time, India voted against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting in Vienna. The Indian government declared that “decisions are taken in conformity with our stated foreign policy and also in the interest of India and the world”. Iran was surprised by India’s vote against it. Following this, Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran said that “India was our friend”.

India voted against Iran at the IAEA to please the Bush administration to continue with the plans for a civilian nuclear cooperation between India and the US. In October 2008 both sides formally signed the civilian nuclear deal. However, since Barack Obama came to power in November 2008, the deal remains unimplemented due to his reluctance to the transfer of “dual-use technology” to India. In November 2009, India once again voted against Iran at the IAEA. Any chance of placating Iran was lost with this gesture. Countries like Brazil, South Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Turkey abstained from the resolution. It is interesting to note how countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey have been successful in maintaining their cordial relationship with the US and Iran at the same time.

INDIA-US: MID-LIFE CRISIS?

The Indo-US relationship reached a new height during the UPA led government in Delhi and the Bush administration in Washington. This period saw a continued increase in Indo-US cooperation in many fields. The glorious hour of Indian diplomacy came with the successful signing of the ‘Indo-US Civilian Nuclear Agreement’ in October 2008. However, one thing which Indian strategic thinkers missed out was that it was also the starting point of the declining graph of Indo-US Cooperation. Since Barack Obama came to power in November 2009, the US administration have not shown much enthusiasm in going ahead with the nuclear deal. Honouring President Obama with the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his promotion of nuclear non-proliferation also have further complicated this issue.

After coming to power, President Obama had not been in a hurry to warm up relations with India. The Indian government and the Indian strategic community were lost in every sense, at this new posture taken by the US administration. Faced with the economic crisis back home, war in Afghanistan and the rise of Taliban in Pakistan, his priorities lie elsewhere. India no more enjoys the equal status it enjoyed under the Bush administration. For Obama, priorities are Afghanistan, Pakistan and China in the region. Indian policy makers and strategic thinkers misinterpreted the fact that Pakistan is US’s major non-NATO ally in the region and also underestimated Pakistan’s influence over the US policies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.

INDIA-CHINA: BROTHERS IN ARMS?

India’s obsession with China as its greatest security threat dates back to its defeat in the 1962 war with the Chinese. Since then, China has remained a hot topic for Indian diplomats, military strategists, policy makers and researchers. It is a fact that China is a threat to India, but not to the extent to which they are being projected by the media.

From the Indian point of view, all these Chinese development projects in the region are part of the larger Chinese plan to encircle India. For Indian military analysts and policy makers, the Chinese are everywhere in the region, including the Indian Ocean, which India has traditionally considered as its sphere of influence. The encirclement of India with ports, also known as ‘the string of pearls’, can be looked at from another perspective. Chinese are trying to safeguard their national interest and protect its economy. China’s dependence on imported oil and natural gas has led it to think of possible openings in this part of the world, rather than depending completely on the Malacca Strait for the passage of its vessels. They are trying to protect their back.

In case of a future conflict with the US, China does not want the US to be successful in blockading its shipping lane. The reason behind developing ports in the Indian Ocean is to ensure continued oil and energy flow to China. It is wrong to interpret the increased Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean as the result of their obsession to encircle and monitor India. China will never be ready to give that much predominance to Indian military capabilities. The Chinese have never considered India as a major power or a threat. It considers India as a regional player. On the geopolitical map, the US is their only contender.

By projecting China as its greatest menace, it is India who is loosing in the Great Game nations play. India needs an approach to deal China diplomatically.

INDIA-RUSSIA: REDISCOVERING OLD COMRADE

Since the 1990s the relationship between India and its long time ally and friend, Russia, has declined considerably. Changes in the government, economic policies and ideologies resulted in this drift. India’s leaning towards the US during the Bush administration has led to a weakened relation with Russia. But, with the visit of the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin to India on 12 March 2010, both sides are trying to reset this. During this visit, Putin successfully secured a list of agreements and contracts.

Reviving once again the old comraderie: Russian Premier Vladimir Putin with his Indian counterpart Mr. Manmohan Singh

This includes:

1: $1.5 billion deal for the supply of 29 additional MiG-29 Fulcrum D-based fighter aircraft.

2: An agreement to sign a contract on the joint development of a new fifth-generation fighter.

3: A revised deal of $2.3 billion on the upgraded Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier.

4: Deals to establish a joint venture to produce navigation equipment for GPS (global positioning system) and its Russian equivalent Glonass, and the use of Glonass signal for military use by India.

5: Agreements for the construction of up to 16 nuclear power plants in India worth tens of billions of dollars.

These contracts and agreements signed by both sides will play a vital role in increasing India’s cooperation with Russia. It is to be noted that, during Putin’s one day working visit to New Delhi, which did not include any state dinner, he went ahead with offering India with the technology and partnership that India had been looking for over the years, from the US and other western powers. Hopefully, this new boost in Indo-Russian relations can help to change the US centric mindset of the Indian strategic community and policy makers.

CONCLUSION:

It is a fact that whichever government is in power in Delhi, be it the ruling Congress Party or the opposition Bharathiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s foreign policy remains US-centric. Even India’s strategic community is so obsessed with “America” that any future policy making, independent of US influence and aiming at India’s national interest would be a difficult task.

Allowing India’s diplomatic relations to be controlled or reviewed by other countries like the US or the European Union, will only undermine India’s capacity to project itself as a rising power.

Looking at India’s geopolitical priorities and the policies and actions taken to achieve it, it is clear that India’s diplomatic capabilities are not very ingenious. It is important to learn from history and experience, rather than repeating the same mistakes again. India has to start engaging with countries with which it have limited contacts or strained relations.

At this point, it is important for India to concentrate on improving its relations with Russia, China, Iran and other countries in Asia, Africa and South America. It is important that India engages closely with China, Iran and Russia on issues relating to regional security. All these countries have stakes in Afghanistan. Afghanistan should be taken as a common point to start communicating with these countries.

India’s tailing of the US policy in Afghanistan is a barrier in conducting overt dialogues with Iran, China and Russia on regional security. Pakistan is cleverly using this Indian inability to strengthen its stand with all the other important players in the region. India can use regional groupings like South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as platforms to discuss regional security issues.

India has to make a clear and concerted approach in framing an independent foreign policy. Even though it might hurt some of India’s close allies, in the long run it will only strengthen India’s position on the international stage. It will demonstrate India’s independent policy making capacity, to protect its vital national interest.

Sources: 1 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-votes-against-Iran-at-IAEA/articleshow/5276462.cms 2. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC12Df04.html 3. http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article244902.ece?homepage=true 4. http://rupeenews.com/2010/03/11/the-kiyani-doctrine/ 5. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC16Df01.html

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Source: Intellibriefs Cross posted at: GeoploticalNWO

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Who created the BLA [Balochistan Liberation Army]

Pakistan Army unloading goods in Balochistan

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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Peter Chamberlin is not only a blogger but a world class writer as well. He picks up his pen to jot down highly readable, analytical and thought provoking articles. And as I already said in a previous note, his is the blog that’s one of my most favorites. Some days back he put up a sensational [not in the journalistic sense but an alarming one] report rather for all of us].

This report has been compiled by five different journalists each one of them sitting in the very nerve centre that causes to move different state and non state actors to mark the dots. They do say though they still need a lot  of dots to connect, yet after going through their report, like a crystal gazer you can look through the glass and see so vividly how do these dots are put, moved, interlinked and above all where-these-dots-are, who-are-drawing-the-lines, and who-is-connecting-all- these-lines to land these into the very theater, where this whole drama of ruthless geopolitics, the great rich central Asian highlands is going to be staged very soon.

In the beginning [when I started editing this blog – it was in May/June 2008], I had a feeling that people who want friendly relations between India and Pakistan should not put up posts on their blogs & websites as this could further deteriorate the already tense situation that exists between the two.

I, therefore, kept the matter restricted mainly to tourism, history, heritage, art & culture. There used to be hardly 1 or 2 posts every month on politics. Contentious issues were not touched in principle.

Gradually, however, I came to realize that turning our eyes away from such differences and disputes would not solve the problem / s at all.

WHY?

Because the machinations of respective governments, their spy masters including the top brass as well as the rank and file, groups with vested interests including the religio-mercantile-industry combine, notwithstanding the geopolitical players doing their job- disseminating the philosophy of terror, hate and animosity sometime in the name of religion, another time in the name of pseudo patriotism, and  then also in the name of a word that is very fashionable these days ‘the national security’ were mostly profiteering from exploitations of the common people every where.  The result therefore, has been more aggrandizement not only between the governments but also amongst the common public as well.  To add fuel to the fire, such designs, such machinations, such strategies were and are continually being hyped up by the mainstream media.

CONSEQUENTLY

I felt the need to highlight such issues so that people at large know all sides of a particular contentious issue; without any taint or color as Peter would term it “without sunglasses”. In other words, every issue, every dispute, every contention be seen in the broad daylight. It has been in this context that I decided to put up matter on such political issues as well, for I now believe that all machinations, all strategies, all conspiring by respective governments  and their organs, vested groups, need be exposed as far as possible.

While writing these lines, I do understand: putting up contentious material on any medium does not and should not mean one has abrogated one’s true patriotism. Like any other Pakistani I love my country but my patriotism does not spring from a negative view of all those who may differ from us, neither is it based on animosity towards others, be they the individuals, communities, cultures,  different religions and nations. On the other hand, putting up material on all issues, particularly the contentious ones to the general reader, enables him / her to adjudge what’s wrong, what’s right.

It’s in this context that I accessed [courtesy once again to Peter Chamberlin’s blog] a report compiled by Turkmenistan News Agency. The report reveals some startling as well as highly alarming facts on what the US-Russian-India combine is attempting to do in Pakistan.

Though in the initial part of their report, the authors try to avoid attributing the subversion in Balochistan by using BLA as a surrogate, to any government, in later parts however, they  do conclude that it is most probably the CIA-RAW and Russian intelligence which of late have been joined by Iran as well [though partially].

The contributors conclude that by and large the people of Balochistan are as patriotic as their countrymen in other four provinces of Pakistan. However, as they say, a little spark needs a little of fuel, and it turns into a big fire, a fire that will not only burn the ‘les miserables’ but the whole body. Right now it’s our body, our corpus that’s at stake.

The happenings of late February / March this year have made our government celebrate the successes in having marginalized India in Afghanistan [at least it appears so] but question remains: success at what cost!

As we would increase the pressure on Taliban in Afghanistan our country being direct partner and a frontline ally of the United States of America, how could we then say [that’s what our government’s rhetoric is]. “It’s not our war, neither are we fighting this war nor we a party to it – we are trying to fight the terrorists who are attacking our people, our properties and our state institutions, we will defeat terrorism at any cost. It’s not America’s war, it’s our war”.

Contrary to such rhetoric’s, we are sacrificing our sons for purposes which fit precisely into the context of a larger geopolitical agenda of the world’s sole super power as her friend and ally. But as Henry Kissinger cynically would say “Being America’s ally is more dangerous than being its enemy”.

We are America’s ally and we are throwing ourselves into more and more dangerous situations than ever before.

To quote our rulers once again. “It’s our war” they say. But it is not our war, its America’s war, our country is at stake, our people are at stake, the people who are mired in an unending struggle to earn bread for their children. The people are least bothered who is wining, the Americans or their opposing forces. They want bread, they need education, healthcare and a livelihood for their families. Unfortunately they have none at the moment. But they are paying the price for what their rulers are doing in their name.

It’s high time now that we realistically look to ourselves and ask, where do we stand in this war on terror! By offering our sons as cannon fodder, Pakistanis pitted against Pakistanis, can we keep our federation intact. Can we think of a stable nation state of Pakistan?

The Stunning Investigative Story on the Birth of Balochistan Liberation Army – I

Because of his intimate connections with India and Russia, it was no surprise that Balach Marri was picked as the new head of the revived BLA. He was later killed in an encounter with Pakistani forces in 2007.

Deception and treachery. Live and let die. The ultimate zero sum game. Repetition of bloody history: Call it what you may, something is happening in the Pakistani province of Balochistan that defies comprehension on any conventional scale.

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CONNECTING THE DOTS

[WHAT'S HAPPENING IN BALOCHISTAN]

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By Tariq Saeedi in Ashgabat, Sergi Pyatakov in Moscow, Ali Nasimzadeh in Zahidan, Qasim Jan in Kandahar and SM Kasi in Quetta·

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Four correspondents and dozens of associates who collectively logged more than 5000 kilometers during the seven weeks spent in pursuit of a single question – What is happening in Balochistan? – have only been able to uncover small parts of the entire picture.

The Stunning Investigative Story on the Birth of Balochistan Liberation Army – II

Insurgent in action:  A basic insurgent gets around US $200 per month, a small fortune for anyone who never has a hope of landing any decent government job in their home towns. The section leaders get upward of US $300 and there are special bonuses for executing a task successfully. Although no exact amount of reward could be ascertained for specific tasks, one can assume that it must be substantial because some BLA activists have lately built new houses in Dalbandin, Naushki, Kohlu, Sibi, Khuzdar and Dera Bugti. Also, quite a few young Baloch activists have recently acquired new, flashy SUVs.

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THE INDIAN CONNECTION

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By Tariq Saeedi in Ashgabat, Sergi Pyatakov in Moscow, Ali Nasimzadeh in Zahidan, Qasim Jan in Kandahar and SM Kasi in Quetta

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BALACH MARRI IS PICKED UP TO RESTART BLA’s ACTIVITIES FROM KOHLU

In Kohlu they met with some Baloch youth and one American stayed in Kohlu while two Indians and one American went to Dera Bugti and returned after a few days. They spent the next couple of weeks in intense consultations with some Baloch activists and their mentors and then the work started for setting up a camp.

“Balach was one of our good boys and even though I don’t know who the present operators are, it can be said safely that Kohlu must have been picked as the first base because of Balach,” said Misha.

The Stunning Investigative Story on the Birth of Balochistan Liberation Army – III

In Balochistan, a larger, triangle that affords a kind of cushion for the first triangle is formed by Naushki, Wana (in NWFP) and Kashmore. Actually, landscape of Balochistan is such that it offers scores of safe havens, inaccessible to outsiders. Starting from the coastline, there are Makran Coastal Range, Siahan Range, Ras Koh, Sultan Koh and Chagai Hills that are cutting the land in east-west direction. In the north-south direction, we find Suleman Range, Kithara Range, Palma Range and Central Ravi Range to complete the task of forming deep and inaccessible pockets. Few direct routes are possible between the coastline and upper Balochistan. Only two roads connect Balochistan with the rest of the country. Apart from the triangles of instability that we have mentioned there is an arc – a wide, slowly curving corridor – of extensive activity. It is difficult to make out as to who is doing what in that corridor!

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ANOTHER LARGER TRIANGLE—CUSHION TO THE FIRST TRIANGLE

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By Tariq Saeedi in Ashgabat, Sergi Pyatakov in Moscow, Ali Nasimzadeh in Zahidan, Qasim Jan in Kandahar and SM Kasi in Quetta

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There is another, larger, triangle that affords a kind of cushion for the first triangle. It is formed by Naushki, Wana (in NWFP) and Kashmore. Actually, landscape of Balochistan is such that it offers scores of safe havens, inaccessible to outsiders.

Starting from the coastline, there are Makran Coastal Range, Siahan Range, Ras Koh, Sultan Koh and Chagai Hills that are cutting the land in east-west direction. In the north-south direction, we find Suleman Range, Kithara Range, Palma Range and Central Ravi Range to complete the task of forming deep and inaccessible pockets. Few direct routes are possible between the coastline and upper Balochistan. Only two roads connect Balochistan with the rest of the country.

The Stunning Investigative Story on the Birth of Balochistan Liberation Army – IV

In the past when the Baloch Sardars were enthusiastically selling Balochistan to the British government, there was no support to the idea of Pakistan whereas the ordinary Baloch gave full approval for Pakistan. Any positive development in Balochistan would go against the interests of Sardars and only a fool would expect them to do anything for the good of their people. Bear in mind that Marri and Mengal Sardars first stood up against the Pakistan government when the law was passed to abolish Sardari system in Balochistan to free the ordinary Baloch from the clutches of their tribal leaders.

Except for Balochistan, rest of Pakistan is useless for Americans, assert the two former agents of the KGB.

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A GLOBAL GAME TO CAPTURE BALOCHISTAN 

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By Tariq Saeedi in Ashgabat, Sergi Pyatakov in Moscow, Ali Nasimzadeh in Zahidan, Qasim Jan in Kandahar and SM Kasi in Quetta

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Question: OK. This sounds plausible. But what interest could Russia have in helping Pentagon in this trouble-Balochistan project?

Sasha: Russia has its own policy goals and as far as the present phase of creating trouble in Balochistan is concerned, American and Russian goals are not in conflict with each other. Russia wants to maintain its monopoly over all the energy resources of Central Asia.

At present, the Central Asian countries are dependent entirely on Russia for export of their gas projects proceeds, it would open the floodgates of exodus. Central Asian countries would understandably rush to the market that pays 100% in cash and pays better price than Russia. It is therefore very clear that by keeping Balochistan red hot, Russia can hope to discourage Trans-Afghan pipeline or any other similar projects. Russian economy in its present form is based on the monopoly of Gazprom and if Gazprom goes under, so will the Russian economy at some stage.

Chechens’ fight for freedom [terror]

During Chechens’ struggle for independence, powerful Russian forces invaded and crushed the life out of Chechen resistance. All moderate Chechen leaders were assassinated, leaving mostly militant Islamists. A Moscow-installed Chechen puppet regime imposed a rein of terror upon the population, using torture, murder, mass reprisals, hostages and rape. The world ignored these violations but paid rapt attention to another crime, the death of over 300 Russian child hostages in the still murky school massacre at Beslan. As the outside world totally ignored the death of another 100,000 Chechen after Moscow successfully branded them, `Islamic terrorists’ a quarter of the Chechen people, Muslims and Russians, died from 1991 until 2010, not counting Stalin’s mass murder. Yet Chechen keep fighting on.

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TIME TO SET THE CHECHEN FREE

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Note for WoP readers: Chechnya is a country in the Northern Caucuses. Majority of its people are Muslim by faith.

Chechens are fighting for freedom since last 300 years. They first fought against the Tsars, then Soviets and now again they are up in arms against the Russian Federation.

Punjab can no longer live in a state of denial

In the 1980’s President Reagan’s administration found a great ally in the form of Pakistani leader General Zia ul Haq who was willing to allow Pakistan to be used as a base to receive American weapons and support to be funneled to the Afghani resistance fighting the Soviets. With the help of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, a fundamentalist and well financed Saudi by the name of Osama Bin Laden became one of the key players in organizing training camps of radicalized Muslims eager to wage jihad against the communist regime of the Soviet Union. Soon, over 35,000 fundamentalists came to fight alongside the Afghani holy warriors. Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo III (1988) was based on this vision of the world: when the “good” guys were the Bin Laden and mujahideen “holy warriors” fighting the “evil communist” Soviet empire.

THE MONSTER CALLED TERRORISM IMAGE

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Ayaz Amir

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The United States and Pakistan’s spy agency the ISI, provided arms and funding to the Afghans resisting the invasion of Afghanistan. The ISI also assisted in the process of gathering radical Muslims from Afghanistan, Pakistan and indeed around the world to help in fighting the Soviets. With the help of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, a fundamentalist and well financed Saudi by the name of Osama Bin Laden became one of the key players in organizing training camps of radicalized Muslims eager to wage jihad against the communist regime of the Soviet Union. Soon, over 35,000 fundamentalists came to fight alongside the Afghani holy warriors. Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo III (1988) was based on this vision of the world: when the “good” guys were the Bin Laden and mujahideen “holy warriors” fighting the “evil communist” Soviet empire.

SEEDS OF BIGOTRY CALLED ISLAMISATION SOWN BY GEN ZIA

If FATA represents the cutting edge of terrorism in the name of Islam, Punjab, unfortunately, is the hinterland of this phenomenon. Or, to borrow a phrase from the repertoire of military folly, Punjab is the strategic depth of bigotry and extremism masquerading in the colours of Islam.

Religious extremism took root in the soil of Pakistan thanks to the so-called Islamisation policies of Gen Ziaul Haq and his role in pushing the first Afghan ‘jihad’. The dragon’s teeth of our sorrows were scattered by Zia. We are reaping the harvest.

Next in the line of military saviours, Pervez Musharraf — may Pakistan for all its faults never have such a saviour again — could have reversed the trend of the Zia years. But he had only a limited understanding of things. President Asif Zardari is not the first of our accidental leaders. Musharraf was another product of accident and circumstances. Had he not been plucked out of Mangla and made army chief Pakistan would have been spared the misfortunes it had to endure under his star.

GEN PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: BIGOTRY AGAIN. PROVIDES SAFE HAVENS TO THE VERY EXTREMISTS, HE VOWS TO FIGHT

He signed on with the Americans in 2001 but despite the two assassination attempts on him, he was never serious about cleansing the Frontier havens where the fleeing Taliban from Afghanistan had taken refuge. Far from eradicating the Taliban, his vacillation and lack of true commitment allowed the problem represented by the Taliban to grow. The Taliban phenomenon in Swat and the Lal Masjid affair — small problems through neglect assuming a bigger shape — were testimonies to his limited vision and short-sighted policies.

The extremism, Pakistan is now battling, is thus a gift whose line of descent can be traced from Zia to Musharraf. The army’s predicament can be imagined. The ghost it is trying to lay to rest was conceived and tested in its own laboratories. This is the Pakistani way of doing things. First create a problem and then invoke the power of heaven to eliminate it.

As an aside I can’t help adding that one of the key figures instrumental in getting US Congress to fund the Afghan resistance was Congressman Charlie Wilson of Texas. Wilson was fond of a hard drink and fond of good-looking women, tempting qualities that suggested a swashbuckling knight errant. [Most men have Wilson’s inclinations. But it is not given to everyone to fulfil them.] The irony is piquant: someone like him emerging as one of the central protagonists in an enterprise hailed by its partisans as a great victory of Islam.

Wilson had all the fun while it lasted. On his frequent visits to Pakistan during that period he was never without one or two striking companions. The Pakistani generals he interacted with were content to make a lot of money, some of which shows in the prospering business enterprises of their lucky offspring. More than in most other places, it helps in Pakistan to have the right kind of father.

PUNJAB IN THE HINTERLAND, PROVIDES ‘STRATEGIC DEPTH’ TO EXTREMISTS OF FATA

But to return to the complex relationship between the Frontier and Punjab in that clash of arms, fought for the greater glory of Islam, the former was the staging post or the launching pad of that ‘jihad’ while Punjab was what might be called, in military terminology, the concentration area. The nerve centre of that ‘jihad’ was ISI Hqs in Aabpara, Islamabad. CIA supplies were landed at Chaklala Airbase and then brought for storage to Ojhri Camp next to Faizabad in Rawalpindi. From there they were transported to the frontlines of the Frontier.

Meanwhile Zia’s missionary zeal, backed by Saudi money, was beginning to transform the Punjabi landscape. Madressahs or religious schools began cropping up everywhere, including Islamabad. Backed by state patronage, mullah power, hitherto not much of a factor in Pakistani politics, began to show its muscles. There was a ban on politics in any case. Apart from PTV, there was no other TV channel and even PTV was being conquered by the mullahs. Newspapers lay under a heavy blanket of censorship. The only thing to do under Zia was to either watch Indian movies at home or perform the various rituals of religious hypocrisy in public. The begums of the good and great, never behind their men folk in bowing to the prevailing wings, entered heavily into the business of arranging religious ceremonies (milads) under one pretext or another. Pakistan became a very pious and hypocritical society. Even army promotions began to be affected by one’s reputation for religious observance or otherwise. All the extremist outfits with whose names we are now familiar emerged at that time: the jaish this and that, the lashkar so and so. Most of them were Punjab-based and members from all these organisations acquired battle experience in Afghanistan. My friend Colonel Imam of Afghan ‘jihad’ fame — and who, like most good people, is from Chakwal — takes enormous pride in saying that the most fearless fighters of all were from Punjab. And he should know for he was in the thick of it.

MUJAHIDEEN IN KASHMIR

When with the departure of the Soviet army and the victory of the Saudi and Charlie Wilson-funded ‘mujahideen’, the Afghan war wound down, the fighters who had gained battle experience in Afghanistan were shifted to an entirely different front: Kashmir, where in a protracted struggle they managed to tie down half a million Indian troops.

Their godfathers in the security establishment felt elated. Forgetting the role of hard-drinking Charlie Wilson and the Saudis, they wrote a self-glorifying narrative in which it was claimed that not only had the power of faith defeated the Soviets. It had also hastened the end and break-up of the Soviet empire. If a superpower could be thus defeated, zeal and the spirit of ‘jihad’ could work similar miracles in Kashmir.

This was the mood then pervading the top ranks of the army and the intelligence agencies. So it is scarcely to be wondered at that when after the fall of Kabul to the ‘Mujahideen’, a Pakistani delegation was on its way to the Afghan capital, no sooner had the aircraft carrying it entered Afghan airspace when those on board, including some Americans, were startled by a loud cry: “Allah-o-Akbar”. This from the then ISI chief, the heavily-bearded Lt-Gen Javed Nasir.

Our rendezvous with our present extremist-flowing troubles did not come about from out of the blue. We had ploughed the land and watered it for a long time.

When the Americans attacked Afghanistan post-Sept 11, the theatre of ‘jihad’ shifted again: back to Afghanistan. The Bush administration of course screwed things up for itself by going on to attack Iraq before finishing the job in Afghanistan, a piece of folly sure to haunt the US for a long time to come. But Afghanistan was bad enough by itself. It reignited the fires of holy war and, given the iron dictates of geography, it was inevitable that Pakistan sooner or later would have its hands burned by another conflict raging in Afghanistan.

MUSHARRAF’S DOUBLE GAME

Once a change of course in our strategic course was forced upon us by the US — Musharraf succumbing to American pressure without extracting the kind of bargain that would have better served Pakistan’s interests — logic and necessity demanded a clean break with the playing-with-fire policies of the past. In other words, a clean and definitive break with Zia-minded ‘jihad’. But Musharraf played a double game. Even while dancing wildly to America’s tune he was never serious, or he lacked the will and capacity, to seriously rethink the past.

But now that under a new sun and a new sky we are finally embarked upon a new course — which marks a true break with the past — we have to realise the extent and magnitude of the problem. The terrorism we are now fighting is not a provincial subject. It is not confined to any one province. It is a composite whole, organically tied together, growing not from any isolated virus but from a sickness of the mind and soul which had the whole of Pakistan, or at least its strategic quartermasters, in its grip.

If Pakistan is to become something, realising its dreams and potential, if it has to enter the real world and leave the world of dreams and fantasies behind, then there is no course open to it except to tackle this sickness, no matter what it takes and what sacrifices it entails, without ifs and buts, and without any misconceived appeals to the Taliban.

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Ayaz Amir is a distinguished Pakistani commentator and member of national assembly. He can be reached via his Email: winlust@yahoo.com

Source: thenews.com.pk

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

The puppet tries to cut his strings

Watching Washington’s growing anger with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, one recalls the unhappy endings of such former US allies as South Vietnam’s Diem, Iran’s Shah, Indonesia’s Suharto, Nicaragua’s Somoza, and Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq.

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Eric Margolis

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As Henry Kissinger once rightly observed, it is often more dangerous being America’s ally than its enemy.

Watching Washington’s growing anger with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, one recalls the unhappy endings of such former US allies as South Vietnam’s Diem, Iran’s Shah, Indonesia’s Suharto, Nicaragua’s Somoza, and Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq.

Washington has been loudly hinting it would like to oust Karzai, but so far it has not managed to identify a suitable replacement who commands any respect or tribal support from Afghans.

The Obama administration flirted with trying to replace Karzai by the North Alliance chief, Abdullah Abdullah, but he had too many Communist and drug-dealer skeletons in his closet.

The Obama administration is blaming the largely powerless Karzai, a former CIA `asset,’ for America’s failure to defeat Taliban.

Washington accused its man Karzai of rigging last year’s elections. That’s true.  But the US pre-rigged the Afghan elections by excluding all parties opposed to Western occupation.  The US is doing the same thing in Iraq’s elections.

Washington, which supports dictators and phony elections all over Africa and Asia, had the nerve to rebuke Karzai for corruption and rigging votes.  Meanwhile, it appears the Pentagon was busy preparing the groundwork for a full military takeover of Pakistan.

You could almost hear Washington crying at Karzai, `bad puppet! Bad puppet!’

Karzai fired back, accusing the US of vote-rigging. He has repeatedly demanded the US military stop killing so many Afghan civilians.

Next, Karzai dropped a bombshell, asserting the US was occupying Afghanistan to dominate the energy-rich Caspian Basin region, not because of the non-existent al-Qaida or Taliban.

Karzai rightly described Taliban as a national resistance movement fighting Western occupation.  He invited Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Kabul, further enraging the Americans who will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Last week, Karzai even half-jested he might join Taliban. This, after a whirlwind visit by President Barack Obama that apparently did not patch up their growing differences.

Washington had apoplexy. A vicious propaganda campaign was immediately unleashed against Karzai.

The `New York Times,’ which speaks for the Obama administration and is an ardent backer of the Afghan war, all but called in a custom-made op-ed column for the overthrow of Karzai and his replacement by a compliant general.  Keep your eyes on the Afghan defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, whom I remember well, and with respect, from the 1980’s anti-Soviet war.

A louche American self-promoter, Peter Galbraith, who had been fired from his job with the UN in Kabul, was trotted out to tell media that Karzai might be both a drug addict and crazy.

Behind this ugly, if also comical, spat lay a growing divergence between Afghans and Washington.  After 31 years of conflict, nearly 3 million dead, millions more refugees, and frightful poverty, Afghans yearn for peace.

For the past two years, Karzai and his warlord allies have been holding peace talks with Taliban in Saudi Arabia, which has long played an important role in Afghanistan – and will continue to do so in the future.

Karzai knows the way to end the Afghan conflict is to enfranchise the nation’s Pashtun majority and its fighting arm, Taliban.   Political compromise with Taliban is the only – and inevitable- solution.

But the Obama administration, misadvised by Washington neocons and other hardliners, is determined to `win’ a military victory in Afghanistan (whatever that means) to save face as a great power, and impose a settlement that leaves it in control of strategic Afghanistan.  US propaganda has so demonized Taliban that negotiating with it has become politically impossible for the Western powers.

Accordingly, the US thwarted Karzai’s peace talks by getting Pakistan, currently the recipient of $7 billion in US cash, to arrest senior Taliban leaders sheltering there  who had been part of the ongoing peace negotiations with Kabul.

It was Karzai’s turn to be enraged.  So he began openly defying his American patrons and adopting an independent position. The puppet was cutting his strings.

Karzai’s newfound boldness was due to the fact that both India and China are eager to replace US/British domination of Afghanistan.

India is pouring money, arms and agents into Afghanistan and training government forces.  China, more discreetly, is moving in to exploit Afghanistan’s recently discovered mineral wealth that says Karzai, is worth $1 trillion, according to a recent US government geological survey.

China, Pakistan’s closet ally, clearly does not want to see rival India become the new protector of Afghanistan.

Russia, still smarting from its 1980’s defeat in Afghanistan, is watching America’s travails there with rich enjoyment. Moscow has its own ambitions in Afghanistan.  Happy to see the US fight Taliban, Moscow hopes to eventually pick up the pieces after the US and its dragooned allies become exhausted by the Afghan conflict, which will end up costing Washington at least $1 trillion.

This column has long noted that Karzai’s best survival option is to distance himself from American tutelage and demand the withdrawal of all foreign occupation forces.

Risky business, of course.  Remember Kissinger’s warning. Karzai could end up dead. But he could also become a national hero and best candidate to lead an independent Afghanistan that all ethnic groups could accept.

Washington keeps making the same mistake of seeking obedient sycophants rather than legitimate, popular allies.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010

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Source: ericmargolis.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Terrorism: The nuclear summit’s ‘straw man’

The threat of nuclear confrontation remains dangerously high despite the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) with Russia and America’s passive-aggressive Nuclear Posture Review. This is particularly true along the nuclear fault-lines in the Middle East and South Asia which have existed since the Cold War.

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Shibil Siddiqi

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American President Barack Obama gathered 47 national delegations for the first Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in Washington on April 12 and 13. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in Washington since the close of World War II. The scale of the summit was meant to impress the gravity of the subject matter.

In Obama’s words, “This is an unprecedented gathering to address an unprecedented threat”: the prevention of nuclear terrorism. In trademark style, Obama offered rhetorical flourishes to fit the occasion: “Two decades after the Cold War we face a cruel irony of history. The risk of nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up”. The president said that a tiny scrap of plutonium the size of an apple was now the biggest threat to world stability, with “just the tiniest amount of plutonium” in the wrong hands posing potential for catastrophe.

However, the president’s assessment of global nuclear threats paper over some basic realities. The threat of nuclear confrontation remains dangerously high despite the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) with Russia and America’s passive-aggressive Nuclear Posture Review. This is particularly true along the nuclear fault-lines in the Middle East and South Asia which have existed since the Cold War. Perhaps a “dirty bomb” made out of a handful of plutonium or other radiological material forms the most significant “nuclear” threat to the US. But outside of this Western-centric world-view, it is the threat of nuclear attack or exchange in the Middle East and South Asia – home to nearly a fourth of the world’s population – that clearly remains the largest global nuclear threat.

‘NUCLEAR’ TERRORISM?

In actuality, the threat of terrorists acquiring a working nuclear device are relatively remote. Building nuclear weapons is a complex and resource intensive business; if it were not, more countries would already possess them.

That leaves the option of stealing a weapon. But pilfering a nuclear weapon is not simply a case of planning a sophisticated smash-and-grab operation. Nuclear weapons have multi-layered security systems, both technological and human. For example, access to nuclear facilities and weapons follows strict chains of command. Warheads are usually stored in several different pieces that require a cross-expertise and technical sophistication to assemble. In addition, they employ security features called Permissive Action Links (PAL) that use either external enabling devices or advanced encryption to secure the weapon. Older security systems include anti-tamper devices capable of exploding the device without a nuclear chain reaction. Not to mention that effectively delivering a nuclear device comes with its own hefty challenges. Thus, there are many serious obstacles to terrorists actually obtaining and setting off a nuclear bomb.

There is, however, a distinct possibility that fissile materials could fall into the hands of terrorists. It would not be a first. Chechen rebels planted crude “dirty bombs” as early as 1995 and 1998. Neither device was detonated and the rebels provided advance warning to the authorities. But they did succeed in terrorizing the general population. Further, in 2007 a nuclear facility in South Africa was attacked twice, but the attackers were repelled before they were able to get any nuclear materials or intelligence on the computer systems. The prime suspects for the end buyers in these attacks are states – primarily Pakistan. Still, an active and lucrative trade in smuggling nuclear materials and technologies makes further such attacks likely.

But strictly speaking, setting off a dirty bomb is not the same as “nuclear terrorism”. A dirty bomb does not involve a devastating nuclear chain reaction. It simply disperses (usually with the aid of conventional explosives) fissile or radiological materials. Such a bomb could potentially cover a relatively large area with radiological material. However, many experts, including the US Department of Energy, have noted that the fallout from such a bomb would not necessarily lead to fatal radiation exposure.

Yet clearly a dirty bomb is a terror weapon simply because it so easily inspires terror. It has the potential to induce serious ill-health in a large population in the medium and long-term, render areas unhabitable and unproductive for long periods of time and would produce psychological effects in the victims and for anyone wanting to resettle in the affected areas.

But the effects of such a bomb would pale in comparison to even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons. Such a nuclear war still remains plausible.

FAULTLINE: MIDDLE EAST

Israel is the only country in the Middle East to possess nuclear weapons, though it does not officially admit to having any under a policy of “nuclear opacity”. Israel acquired the capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons in the mid-1960s. An intelligence estimate by the Central Intelligence Agency from 1967 – the year of the Six Day Arab-Israeli War – states that Israel had already acquired the capability to manufacture a number of nuclear warheads. Israeli warplanes were fitted for delivering nuclear weapons during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Of course, this war also generated a nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union.

Israel’s proliferation record is also on par with or perhaps even surpasses that of Pakistan. In addition to joint testing, Israel is thought to have provided South Africa with up to six functional nuclear warheads in the 1970s – the only known instance of a country simply giving nuclear weapons to another.

Israel presently possesses an estimated 400 nuclear weapons, from powerful thermonuclear devices to tactical or “battlefield” nukes. Its nuclear doctrine embraces not only a “first strike” posture but also one of “preemptive strike” against a conventional or unconventional attack on any of its weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical or biological). It is also committed to maintaining nuclear superiority by preventing any other Middle Eastern country from obtaining nuclear weapons. It has already employed conventional attacks and assassinations to prevent such an outcome.

Further, according to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, faced with an existential threat Israel’s nuclear doctrine includes the so-called “Samson Option”: a massive nuclear assault against the nations threatening Israel. It was thus named by Israeli leaders of the stature of David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan for the Biblical figure of Samson who brought down a Philistine temple, killing himself and hundreds of Philistines gathered there.

Israel remains in constant conflict with its neighbors, providing any number of potential triggers of nuclear conflict. It barely disguises its intention to reject any peace plan with the Palestinians that would require it to end its occupation. Tensions between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon remain high. Israel recently attempted to goad negotiations with Syria over the occupied Golan Heights by threatening to go to war with it. This brought on a joint declaration of mutual assistance by Syria and Iran to intervene if either one of them is attacked. And of course, Israel remains unconvinced that “crippling sanctions” against Iran’s nuclear program will materialize and thus, has pushed for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities both publicly and privately. With Iran forging ahead with its program despite American pressure, it remains to be seen how a nearly-nuclear Iran will interplay with Israeli nuclear doctrine.

FAULTLINE: SOUTH ASIA

The other likely region for a nuclear exchange is in South Asia, where regional rivals India and Pakistan possess the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal.

India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. This prompted Pakistan to publicly own up to its own nuclear weapons program that had secretly begun two years prior. Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons capability in the late 1980s with the quiet acquiescence of the US. The US found it convenient to ignore Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program while the country was the “frontline” state in the American-sponsored jihad against the Red Army in Afghanistan. Washington imposed sanctions in 1990, only after credible intelligence assessments indicated that Pakistan had already manufactured a bomb. India conducted another series of nuclear tests in 1998 and this time Pakistan was able to follow suit.

Both India and Pakistan possess an estimated 80 to 120 nuclear warheads, though the actual numbers may be higher, particularly for India. Pakistan has a “first use” policy in the face of a large conventional losses, whereas the more powerful India prescribes to a “no first use” nuclear doctrine.

Pakistan has already displayed the most reckless nuclear brinkmanship since the Cuban Missiles Crisis. In 1999, its army incited a war in Kargil in Indian-occupied Kashmir. As the conflict escalated with the Indian Air Force being engaged, Pakistan’s mobile nuclear missile launchers were allegedly put on alert. Then army chief General Pervez Musharraf believed that a potential nuclear conflict would successfully “internationalize” the Kashmir imbroglio (he was dangerously wrong). Both countries’ nuclear arsenals were similarly put on alert during their tense 2002 stand-off brought on by a terrorist attack on Indian Parliament.

Unlike Israel and South Africa, which officially stayed mum about their nuclear weapons, both the Indian and Pakistani tests were publicly celebrated as VIP passes into the exclusive nuclear club. Except neither country was accepted as a legitimate nuclear power. International sanctions quickly followed against both countries, with Pakistani sanctions being more stringent.

But this changed with a deepening America-India alliance under former US president George W Bush. India became the most prominent counter-point in designs to ring China with American allies. This resulted in a civilian nuclear deal under the so-called 123 Agreement, making India the only country in the world that can engage in nuclear commerce without being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India can now use its older reactors not covered by the deal almost exclusively for its weapons program.

This has fuelled a renewed nuclear weapons race with Pakistan, which has been seeking a similar civilian nuclear deal from the US and China. The topic figured prominently in the recent Pakistani delegation to Washington for the US-Pakistan “Strategic Dialogue” and the issue has taken on a greater urgency for Pakistan since the “leak” of India’s new “Cold Start” military doctrine late last year. Cold Start involves rapid and massive offensives against Pakistan (and China). Pakistan’s army chief has responded with a veiled but unambiguous threat that the country would use nuclear weapons in the case of such a conflict. Just as terrifying as Pakistan’s response is that Cold Start actually anticipates a nuclear war. Thus, the South Asian region teeters along the precipice of an unimaginable conflict even as the nuclear arms race is being escalated through the US-India partnership.

KNOCKING DOWN THE STRAW MAN

Last week’s nuclear summit in Washington is a big summit about a relatively little problem when it comes to the question of nuclear disarmament. It is no doubt a positive achievement and will be all the more so if it leads to some kind of treaty to regulate and limit fissile material. But this essentially sets up and then effectively knocks down a straw man – that of “nuclear terrorism”, an issue that everyone already agrees upon anyway. The fanfare of the summit effectively deflects the problem of nuclear disarmament and locates the threat of nuclear Armageddon in the wrong place. When it comes to nuclear weapons, the threat of inter-state conflict far outweighs the dangers posed by non-state actors.

But perhaps this is the intent. In dealing with foreign relations, Obama’s presidency has simply brought a new style to a substantively same policy direction. The nuclear arsenals of Israel, India and Pakistan maintain strategic balances that are favorable to the US. Little surprise that conversations about the clear and present danger that these strategic American allies present are kept on the back-burner.

Shibil Siddiqi is a Fellow with the Center for the Study of Global Power and Politics at Trent University and a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives and ZNet.

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Source: GeoploticalNWO

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The flying Sikh and the peacenik

AFP OUT) United States President Barack Obama meets Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India at last week’s Nuclear Security Summit in Washington DC.

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M K Bhadrakumar

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Senior Indian officials in their private briefing insist there was “almost a Zen-like spiritual quality” to the meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and United States President Barack Obama in Washington last Sunday. However, the question being posed by the Indian strategic community is still: “Does Obama care about India?”

At the bottom of such poignantly contrasting characterizations of statecraft lie two factors. First, the residual feudal mindset of the Indian invariably attributes what are in reality flaws in policies to personal vagaries in the thinking of the leader. It’s not so simple. Statecraft is a complex crucible where the witches brew is a broth of many strange ingredients that might or might not include “a pilot’s thumb, Wreck’d as homeward he did come”, as the first witch in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth claimed.

Second, generally speaking, India faces an existential dilemma insofar as it is never quite willing to admit it is solely responsible for giving its own life meaning and living that life passionately and sincerely. It fails to account for its “leap of faith”, a phrase commonly attributed to the 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard – believing in or accepting something intangible or unprovable without empirical evidence.

Sunday’s meeting between the “flying Sikh and the peacenik” – to borrow the words of an Indian editor – was keenly awaited. There is a lot of angst in Delhi about the orientations of the Obama administration’s South Asia policies. Somehow the fizz has gone out of the US-India relationship. This was most conspicuous from the fact that the two sides almost underplayed the Manmohan-Obama meet. The usual hype was lacking in the White House press statement.

According to the Indian strategic community in Delhi, the fault lies entirely at the doorstep of the Oval Office. Simply put, Obama is a different man from George W Bush, who was by implication a passionate lover of India through a longstanding family relationship with the country.

Is Obama the real problem in US-India relationship today? Is it that he does not really care for India? An answer can be faithfully derived only if a close look is taken at the three main “fault lines” in current US-India ties: Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Asia-Pacific.

The Indian strategic thinkers take umbrage that the Obama administration is determined to end the fighting in Afghanistan and as a means of securing that objective, seeks the Taliban’s reintegration and reconciliation. They feel badly let down. They want the fighting to go on and on till the Taliban are bled white and vanquished from the face of the earth.

They are unwilling to concede that the Taliban could be essentially a homegrown Afghan movement that outsiders have cynically manipulated over years. Thus, they feel “deeply disturbed” about what is unfolding and feel cheated that the Obama administration “shunned advance consultations on Afghanistan with its Indian partners”.

The fact of the matter, however, is that those Indians are almost completely alone in the region in clinging on to their one-dimensional view of the Taliban as a 100% Pakistani clone. Almost all major regional powers of consequence to the Afghan situation – Iran, China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Central Asian states – agree on the limited point that there is need of an inclusive pan-Afghan solution to the present problem if the peace dividends are to be enduring.

In Delhi, arguably, the Indian establishment also has grudgingly come to be aware that the “reintegration” of the Taliban is something that mainstream Afghan opinion itself desires and the international community seeks and India, therefore, doesn’t have the locus standii to be unilaterally prescriptive.

But the so-called Indian hawks shall have nothing of such blasphemous thoughts.

There is also some sophistry here. The heartache among the Indian hawks about the reconciliation with the Taliban is actually all about their deeply flawed assessment of the Afghan situation in the past eight years. The sad reality is that the overwhelming bulk of the Indian strategic community has no clue about the fundamental aspects of the Afghan problem and harbors simplistic notions about its long-term ramifications for regional security and stability not only with regard to South Asia but Central Asia as well.

Until very recently, they fancied an Indian military deployment in Afghanistan and an open-ended war in which India and the US as allies work tirelessly toward purging the Hindu Kush of the Taliban movement through the use of force.

A CLAUSEWITZEAN WAR

The Indians never really comprehended at anytime during the past eight years or so that this has been a Clausewitzean war that is also linked to the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a world security body, the long-term US military presence in “Inner Asia” and the US’s containment strategy toward China’s rise and Russia’s resurgence. The result has been plain to see. Pakistan was shrewd enough to assess the potentials of the war and to work out its geopolitical positioning, whereas Indians find themselves in near-total isolation.

Besides, Indians overlook that Obama represents the US interests and his mandate is to show “results” in an increasingly hopeless war that is becoming unpopular in the West. The Afghan conflict has become unsustainable politically and financially over the medium term and become a futile war that is locked in stalemate with no real victors.

Also, a gifted politician like Obama has no intention of committing political hara-kiri as the campaign for the presidential election of 2012 draws close. He cannot continue with the war simply for the sake of pleasing the Indians and getting the US-India partnership in the “war on terrorism” to be waged ad infinitum. For argument’s sake, it is highly doubtful such misconceptions would have figured even in Bush’s grotesque world view.

Obama has an extremely erudite mind and sizes up that despite the shenanigans of the Pakistani military, he needs to forge a working relationship with Islamabad to extract as much cooperation as possible in bringing the fighting in Afghanistan to an end. All indications are that Obama conveniently looks away from raising dust over the Pakistani generals’ doublespeak in the fight against terrorism since he is coolly logical about his priorities at this point in time.

He estimates that just as in Delhi, the political elites in Islamabad also have a zest to be co-opted as the US’s principal instrument of geo-strategy in South Asia. He will be extremely unwise not to exploit the factors of advantage in the US’s favor.

Having said that, Obama isn’t overlooking, either, that the Indians almost instinctively sweat under their collar as he forges closer working relationships with the Pakistanis. He has therefore repeatedly made assuaging gestures toward the Indian leadership, stressing that the long-term imperatives of US-India relationship are not to be hyphenated with the emerging US-Pakistan partnership in Central Asia. Alas, he cannot help it if US-Indian cooperation in critical fields such as agriculture or education do not appear sexy enough to the Indian strategic community.

Despite Delhi’s claims to be an emerging regional power, the hard reality is that relations with Pakistan remain the core issue in its foreign policy. A senior Indian journalist present at the Indian officials’ briefing in Washington on the Manmohan-Obama meet on Sunday pointed out that there were as many as 30 direct or indirect references to Pakistan and, in fact, during the Q&A, 11 out of 13 questions from the media persons related to Pakistan. As he pointed out, “If she [the Indian official] had refused to answer any questions on Pakistan because the subject of her press conference was the highest level Indo-US meeting, there would have been only her opening statement and two questions: one about Obama’s forthcoming visit to India and another about the sanctions Obama wants to impose on Iran soon.”

OBAMA CAN’T PRESSURE PAKISTAN

To be fair to the Indian strategists, a huge and almost unbridgeable hiatus has appeared between the Indian expectations of the US pressuring Pakistan to do away with its terrorist infrastructure and the US’s alleged unwillingness to apply such pressure on the Pakistani military. This is most evident in the Obama administration’s dogged refusal to give Indian intelligence direct access to interrogate David Coleman Headley, a prime suspect behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008, aside from allowing Delhi to extradite him.

The Indians have a point in saying that in a comparable situation over the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the Americans would have bombed India to the Stone Age if Delhi refused to hand over its own Headley. Especially if it insisted on keeping him behind the purdah (veil) somewhere in detention in a south Indian city and argued that it had a “plea bargain” with him.

But then, these are the realities of world politics. The US never ever has hidden its inability to treat other nations as equals or its John Waynesque ways in world politics: that might is right under all circumstances. Neither has it given up its prerogative to pursue its national interests first and foremost even at the cost of other nations sacrificing theirs.

To be sure, if the Indian perceptions of recent years in the promised land of the US-India strategic partnership turned out to be full of weeds and bleached bones, is it Obama who is at fault? The Indians could have easily learnt from the Iranians who live in their close neighborhood or the Iraqis in Mesopotamia who were their ancient partners in the civilized world millennia ago, how ruthlessly self-centered the US could be when the chips are down.
Yet Obama is an exception. He has not hidden his genuine warmth toward India and all the values of humaneness that Indians can legitimately claim as their historical legacy. More than that, as a pragmatist and patriot, he is intensely aware that ignoring or neglecting the relationship with India will deeply injure the US geopolitical interests in the Asian continent.

Equally, he has no reason to slight India, a country that he knows to be genuinely enthusiastic about almost everything American, which is extremely rare nowadays to find on this planet.

All the same, Obama’s primary loyalty will still be toward his own American people. He must give overriding priority to safeguarding America’s homeland security and the American facilities and lives overseas and as Vladimir Lenin once told Leon Trotsky, if it becomes necessary for securing peace in Afghanistan, he may even have to wear a petticoat.

However, that doesn’t confuse Obama’s true role as a democrat when his team deals with the tough generals in Rawalpindi.

Finally, what disheartens sections of the Indian strategic community most about Obama is that he is revamping the architecture of the US’s Asia-Pacific strategy. They placed a touching faith in the US’s grit and capacity to thwart China’s rise and in that struggle, they visualized India’s role as the great Asian “balancer”.

It is Obama’s misfortune that he is presiding over the global economic downturn as it exposes the US’s inexorable decline as a superpower. At any rate, the Indians were naive to have overlooked that the US and China were locked in a deadly embrace of interdependence that didn’t allow them the luxury of going beyond an occasional sparring. The bitter truth is the Indians are unwilling to admit that they misread the tea leaves when Condoleezza Rice led them up the garden path and today they would rather place the blame on Obama.

They are unwilling to ask searching questions about the entire basis of the global vision that the Indian policy makers subscribed to in the recent years, especially since 2005. Is Obama to be held responsible for India’s gross neglect of its neighborhood policy, its cavalier demolition of India’s traditional ties with Iran, the deliberate atrophying of its profoundly strategic partnership with Russia or India’s unpardonable failure to come to terms with China’ rise?

Again, the US is justified in securing its hardcore interests by striving to establish a vice-like grip over Indian policies but ultimately it should have been up to the Indian leadership to have created space for the country to maneuver in the highly volatile international system in order to pursue their interests rather than be boxed in.

There is no way Indians can justify their failure to pursue an independent foreign policy. If they find themselves today sitting on the ground and telling “sad stories of the death of kings”, is it Obama who is at fault?

The existential angst in the Indian mind is in actuality nothing else than the experience of human freedom and responsibility. India is an emerging power in the world order and it cannot insist on living an inauthentic existence.

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The writer M K Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat of the Indian foreign service.

Source: GeoploticalNWO

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Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim

Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim — and they are not necessarily where you might think, according to an extensive new study that aims to map the global Muslim population.

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THE GROWING WORLD OF ISLAM

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by Richard Allen Greene

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Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim — and they are not necessarily where you might think, according to an extensive new study that aims to map the global Muslim population.

Nearly two out of three of the world’s Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.

India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt.

China has more Muslims than Syria.

Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.

And Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya put together.

Nearly two out of three of the world’s Muslims are in Asia, stretching fromTurkey to Indonesia.

The Middle East and north Africa, which together are home to about one in five of the world’s Muslims, trail a very distant second.

There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report, “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That represents about 23 percent of the total global population of 6.8 billion.

There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.

Brian Grim, the senior researcher on the Pew Forum project, was slightly surprised at the number of Muslims in the world, he told CNN.

“Overall, the number is higher than I expected,” he said, noting that earlier estimates of the global Muslim population have ranged from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The report can — and should — have implications for United States policy, said Reza Aslan, the best-selling Iranian-American author of “No God but God.”

East meets West: Muslims pray during the Holy Month of Ramadan at a mosque in Rome

Fact Box

Report: Top 10 Muslim countries, by population

1. Indonesia: 202,867,000 (country is 88.2 percent Muslim)

2. Pakistan: 174,082,000 (country is 96.3 percent Muslim)

3. India:160,945,000 (country is 13.4 percent Muslim)

4. Bangladesh: 145,312,000 (country is 89.6 percent Muslim)

5. Egypt: 78,513,000 (country is 94.6 percent Muslim)

6. Nigeria: 78,056,000 (country is 50.4 percent Muslim)

7. Iran: 73,777,000 (country is 99.4 percent Muslim)

8. Turkey: 73,619,000 (country is about 98 percent Muslim)

9. Algeria: 34,199,000 (country is 98 percent Muslim)

10. Morocco: 31,993,000 (country is about 99 percent Muslim)

Source: “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

“Increasingly, the people of the Middle East are making up a smaller and smaller percentage of the worldwide Muslim community,” he told CNN by phone.

“When it comes to issues of outreach to the Muslim world, these numbers will indicate that outreach cannot be focused so narrowly on the Middle East,” he said.

“If the goal is to create better understanding between the United States and the Muslim world, our focus should be on south and southeast Asia, not the Middle East,” he said.

He spoke to CNN before the report was published and without having seen its contents, but was familiar with the general trends the report identified.

The team at the Pew Forum spent nearly three years analyzing “the best available data” from 232 countries and territories, Grim said.

Their aim was to get the most comprehensive snapshot ever assembled of the world’s Muslim population at a given moment in time.

So they took the data they gathered from national censuses and surveys, and projected it forward based on what they knew about population growth in each country.

They describe the resulting report as “the largest project of its kind to date.”

It’s full of details that even the researchers found surprising.

“There are these countries that we don’t think of as Muslim at all, and yet they have very sizable numbers of Muslims,” said Alan Cooperman, the associate director of research for the Pew Forum, naming India, Russia and China.

One in five of the world’s Muslims lives in a country where Muslims are a minority.

And while most people think of the Muslim population of Europe is being composed of immigrants, that’s only true in western Europe, Cooperman said.

“In the rest of Europe — Russia, Albania, Kosovo, those places — Muslims are an indigenous population,” he said. “More than half of the Muslims in Europe are indigenous.”

The researchers also were surprised to find the Muslim population of sub-Saharan Africa to be as low as they concluded, Cooperman said.

It has only about 240 million Muslims — about 15 percent of all the world’s Muslims.

Islam is thought to be growing fast in the region, with countries such as Nigeria, which has large populations of both Christians and Muslims, seeing violence between the two groups.

The Pew researchers concluded that Nigeria is just over half Muslim, making it the sixth most populous Muslim country in the world.

Roughly nine out of 10 Muslims worldwide are Sunni, and about one in 10 is Shiite, they estimated.

They warned they were less confident of those numbers than of the general population figures because sectarian data is harder to come by.

“Only one or two censuses in the world … have ever asked the sectarian question,” said Grim.

“Among Muslims it’s a very sensitive question. If asked, large numbers will say I am just a Muslim — not that they don’t know, but it is a sensitive question in many places,” he said.

One in three of the world’s Shiite Muslims lives in Iran, which is one of only four countries with a Shiite majority, he said. The others are Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.

Huge as the project of mapping the world’s Muslim population is, it is only the first step in a Pew Forum undertaking.

Next year, the think tank intends to release a report projecting Muslim population growth into the future, and then the researchers intend to do the whole thing over again with Christians, followed by other faith groups.

“We don’t care only about Muslims,” Grim said.

They’re also digging into what people believe and practice, since the current analysis doesn’t analyze that.

“This is no way reflects the religiosity of people, only their self-identification,” Grim said. “We’re trying to get the overall picture of religion in the world.”

—

Source: CNN.COM Title Image: The Black Cordelias Image in the middle

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Brzezinski: We baited the Soviets to fall into Afghan trap

According to this interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA’s intervention in Afghanistan preceded the 1979 Soviet invasion. This decision of the Carter Administration in 1979 to intervene and destabilise Afghanistan is the root cause of Afghanistan’s destruction as a nation.

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CIA’s INTERVENTION IN AFGHANISTAN

Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, 
Former President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser

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Translated from French by Bill Blum

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Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahideen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.

And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski:: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Chechnya: Monster in the Mountains

Chechnya has returned to haunt Russia. Forty deaths by suicide bombs on the Moscow subway confirm that outsourcing rule in the restive republic is a failed policy. But no other plan is in sight; these are not likely to be the last innocent lives lost.

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John Russell

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The ease with which terrorists detonated their bombs in the heart of the Russian capital – under the very headquarters of the Federal Security Service at the Lubyanka station and near the world famous Gorky Park – raised serious questions, not just about the ability of Russian security forces to defend citizens, but more fundamentally over the entire Russian policy towards the North Caucasus, begun under Vladimir Putin and carried on by his successor as Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev.

Insofar as Putin’s reputation and popularity were built on his aggressive Chechen policy, the latest spike in attacks from the North Caucasus calls into question his frequent assertions that the ‘war’ against terror in Russia’s southern republics has been won.

For Medvedev, who has been much more proactive in addressing the root problems of the region: corruption, unemployment, low levels of development, a question mark hangs over the future of his hand-picked plenipotentiary to the North Caucasus – Aleksandr Khloponin – who was appointed, one assumes, to tackle these issues.

[Right: The hand-picked plenipotentiary to the North Caucasus by Russian president Medvedev – Aleksandr Khloponin has no doubt the financial skills and business acumen, but the fresh-faced newcomer from Krasnoyarsk appears as vulnerable as a sacrificial lamb in the tricky political landscape he has been assigned to handle].

For all his undoubted financial skills and business acumen, the fresh-faced newcomer from Krasnoyarsk appears as vulnerable as a sacrificial lamb in a political landscape increasingly dominated by factions that have a tendency to behave more like wolves than sheep.

CAUCASIAN CAULDRON

In attempting to crush separatism and extremism, the Kremlin twice tried and failed to implement the strategy employed by the Sri Lankan government against the Tamils: to impose a military solution by force, ignoring international condemnation of disproportionate civilian suffering.

By 2000, then President, now Prime Minister, Putin turned to Chechenisation, in effect delegating responsibility for countering the insurgency in Chechnya to pro-Moscow Chechens, led by the Kadyrovs: first the father Akhmad until his assassination in 2004, and then his son Ramzan, now the young and controversial Chechen president. Never popular with some of Putin’s presidential advisers, let alone Russian military leaders, the policy appeared to have paid dividends by 2007 when fighting in Chechnya largely subsided.

The Faustian pact between Putin and the Kadyrovs promised, in return for offering the latter virtually a free hand in running their fiefdom, not only Russian territorial integrity, but also a guarantee that ordinary Russians would no longer be subject to such bloody terrorist spectaculars as the 2002 Dubrovka theatre siege and the Beslan hostage-taking two years later. The Moscow subway bombings effectively demonstrate that the deal now appears incapable of fulfilling this important last condition and that Russians must brace themselves for further assaults.

FUNDAMENTALIST TRAJECTORY

Although surprise is necessary for any successful terror operation, the warning signs have been there for some time. Despite the success of Kadyrov in suppressing armed opposition in Chechnya, much of the violence had merely shifted to the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan. Last year there was a significant increase in the number of insurgent attacks in the three republics as a whole.

As pressure on the resistance increased, the tactic of suicide bombings reappeared after a considerable lull. In November the fight was once again taken to Russia, with the bombing of the Nevsky Express train between Moscow and St Petersburg.

In February, Doku Umarov, leader of the self-proclaimed Emirate of the North Caucasus, warned after the loss of several key rebel commanders – including the alleged perpetrator of the train bombing, Said Buryatsky – that attacks deep in Russia were being planned. Umarov took responsibility for the Moscow bombings in a video posted on YouTube two days later – subsequently withdrawn – claiming they were in response to the February killing and mutilation by Russian forces of four local civilians.

Umarov, the only field commander who has been fighting federal forces since the outbreak of the first Chechen war in 1994, has gradually evolved from a relatively moderate, nationalist and secular fighter into a radical Islamist pledged to spread the writ of Shari’a law beyond even the North Caucasus to the Muslim republics of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan on the Volga.

Chechen leader Docu Umarov : It is rumoured that Umarov’s septuagenarian father had his eyes plucked out by one of Kadyrov’s henchmen – after which he appears to have altered his tactics – from a negotiated settlement to an armed struggle against the Russians.

The evolution of this Moscow-based graduate engineer to Russia’s ‘terrorist number one’ appears to have imitated that of his former comrade-in-arms, Shamil Basayev, who went from defending the capital’s White House during the communist putsch of August 1991, to masterminding a string of ‘terrorist spectaculars’, culminating in the Beslan school siege. In fact, Umarov roundly criticised the tactics employed by Basayev at Beslan, vowing henceforth to target government and security personnel rather than civilians.

However, just as Basayev’s demeanour changed radically after Russian forces killed eleven of his relatives in 1995, the savage treatment of Umarov’s family by pro-Russian Chechen forces – it is rumoured that his septuagenarian father had his eyes plucked out by one of Kadyrov’s henchmen – appears to have similarly altered the tactics of the current insurgent leader.

Like Basayev before him, Umarov gave up on any prospect of peace talks with the Russians, especially after the assassination in March 2005 of Aslan Maskhadov – the one Chechen resistance leader who had held out to the last the prospect of negotiations with Putin.

In his frequent webcasts, Umarov has complained repeatedly of both the hypocrisy of the west and the indifference of the Russian public in effectively ignoring what he termed the ‘Chechen genocide’ and has followed Basayev’s trajectory towards a more fundamentalist brand of Islam than the Sufism traditionally followed by Chechens and energetically promoted since Ramzan Kadyrov came to power.

Thus, a man who admitted that, at the start of the conflict with Russia, he barely knew how to pray, has become leader of one of the most active and dangerous Islamic armed groups in the world. Clearly, this conversion has been opportunistic, albeit in part, not least because the bulk of funding for his forces comes from Salafist factions in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and the considerable north Caucasian diaspora in the Middle East and Europe.

Western and Russian diplomats tend to agree that there is presently no alternative to Kadyrov’s one-man rule, so there appears to be no place for opposition of any hue, let alone Umarov’s militants. Indeed, the bitter reality of the situation appeared to reach even the remnants of the Chechen independence movement, led from exile in London by Akhmed Zakayev. He broke with Umarov after the latter established the Emirate in 2007 and at times seemed to be on the brink of an historic reconciliation with Kadyrov.

Next: Who is to blame? Who is to gain?

______

Related Post: Time to Set the Chechen Free

Source: World Today Title Image: Culture of Life Energy News Image in the middle: Getty Images Image at bottom: blogs.usatoday.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Chechnya: Monster in the Mountains – II

Killed in 2006… Chechen commander Shamil Basayev.

WHO IS TO BLAME? WHO IS TO GAIN?

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John Russell

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Basayev was finally tracked down and killed in July 2006, a fate that, sooner or later, surely awaits Umarov. Inevitably, however, a successor will be found and the conflict will drag on until and unless a satisfactory political resolution is achieved.

While it is understandable that the Russian leadership is keen to stress the international nature of the common threat posed by such terror groups, and even point the finger at ‘foreign intelligence services’ in organising the Moscow blasts, the reality is that Russian domestic policy must shoulder the lion’s share of the blame for the North Caucasus tragedy.

Having effectively chosen, under Putin, to follow the Eurasianist ‘great power’ path of development, territorial integrity and a highly-centralised political ‘vertical’ became essential for Russia’s survival. This inhibited movement towards genuine federalism and democracy and enhanced the necessity for prerogative power to be exercised by those factions which were, in fact rather than constitutionally, running the country. Although Medvedev has recognised the obstacles that such policies place in the modernisation path, he seems incapable of shifting his country away from the course Putin has set.

BENEVOLENT DESPOTISM

The bizarre outcome of these policies was the emergence of Kadyrov’s medieval style of benevolent despotism. In effect duplicating Putin’s ‘vertical of power’, Kadyrov has emerged virtually unchallenged as the arbiter of Chechnya’s fate, eliminating all in his way, whether loyal to Moscow or not.

Heavily dependent on both Putin’s personal support and generous subsidies from the Russian treasury, Kadyrov, to his credit, has devoted much time and energy to rebuilding the shattered infrastructure and giving his people, at least those who do not openly oppose him, relative peace, prosperity and elements of cultural renaissance, embodied in the massive new mosque in the capital Grozny.

Here lies the rub. By actively promoting the Sufi brand of Islam, Kadyrov is not only marginalising the militant Salafis under Umarov, but also turning Chechnya into a cultural, national and religious enclave in Russia.

While this has brought some fame and popularity among his own people and Islamic leaders around the world, his eccentricities clearly remain somewhat of an embarrassment to the current Russian president and make him an unwelcome guest in any western capital.

The Russian leadership’s patent misunderstanding of the Caucasian mentality has led separatists and radicals to be lumped together with terrorists in cracking down heavily on any form of opposition. Deprived of any legitimate outlet and subject to repression at every turn, it is hardly surprising that young Muslim men and, as evidenced by the Moscow bombings, increasingly women, are being drawn to the fundamentalist Islamic resistance.

To be fair, even under the intense pressure of the suicide bombings, Medvedev has balanced the tough-talking military approach of his predecessor with a continuing commitment to socio-economic improvement throughout the North Caucasus. Here, Russian interests will undoubtedly at times continue to clash with those of Kadyrov.

Some Russian commentators have even gone so far as to claim that the bombings worked to Kadyrov’s advantage by weakening the position of Medvedev’s envoy Khloponin. Certainly, irrespective of whether he was involved in any way, following the murders of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, and the assassinations of pro-Russian Chechen commanders Movladi Baisarov and Sulim Yamadayev, it would appear that Kadyrov might yet again be the immediate beneficiary of acts of political terror.

BLOOD FEUDS

However, neither Caucasian nor Russian politics are ever that simple or transparent. It might equally be argued that, by outperforming his predecessor in firmness and reason in dealing with the attacks, Dmitry Medvedev may well have consolidated his position as a frontrunner for the Russian presidency in 2012. His security forces will go after Umarov and his supporters with renewed vigour, while measures aimed at improving the welfare of citizens in the North Caucasus will continue.

Yet time is not on Medvedev’s side. The ability of the Russian economy to continue to bankroll the north Caucasian republics, the growing resentment of ordinary Russians against such generosity and the absence of the flexibility and understanding to reach a genuine political resolution, not to mention the unpredictability surrounding the likely longevity of Kadyrov’s rule, all point to the fact that Moscow has produced something of a monster in the North Caucasus mountains.

Insofar as that monster was born amidst, and has been bred on the blood of literally hundreds of thousands of victims, over the past two decades in a region in which the blood feud still holds sway, it would, regrettably, be foolhardy to predict that more will not be shed – be it in Makhachkala or Moscow.

Concluded.

Writer John Russell is Professor of Russian and Security Studies at the University of Bradford,and the  author of Chechnya – Russia’s ‘War on Terror’ (Routledge, 2007)

_______

Related Post: Time to Set the Chechen Free

Source: World Today

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Israelis or Jews?

Marital happiness depends, sometimes, on the racial purity of the lovers. This is the message that the citizen Baruch Marzel sent to Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli, who plans to marry the great Leonardo Di Caprio.

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José Steinsleger

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Marital happiness depends, sometimes, on the racial purity of the lovers. This is the message that the citizen Baruch Marzel sent to Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli, who plans to marry the great Leonardo Di Caprio.  “Not by chance you were born Jewish, he said.”  Does Baruch live among the Taliban of Afghanistan or does he sympathize with Iran’s ayatollahs? Neither one nor the other. Baruch is a Zionist colonist living in the occupied territories of Palestine and serves in the organization Lehava. That, in Christian, means flame, and in the original acronym: To Prevent Assimilation in the Holy Land.

A conclusive proof that the fundamentalist gangsters who rule Israel are pushing the faith of the Jews in a quagmire of confusion, atrocities and violations?

Not by chance you were born Jewish. Lehava strives to provide assistance to Jewish women who maintain relationships with Gentiles (especially when it comes to Arab men) to prevent marriages from being completed. And if couples do not agree, they travel to Cyprus, which has become the Las Vegas of Israel.

[Right: There are about as many Jews in the United States as there are in Israel. And Israel has as yet not declared whether it wants to be a Jewish state in accordance with the columns of filament (the commandments of Jewish religion) or a Western secular democracy].

Sociologist Sara Stricker investigated that between 150 and 200 couples travel monthly to Cyprus from Israel.  Since according to international law, Israel should recognize marriages performed abroad. But, as Striker said, 63 years after the founding of the state, “… Israel has not declared whether it wants to be a Jewish state in accordance with the columns of filament (the commandments of Jewish religion) or a Western secular democracy.”

Zionist propaganda identifies Israel as the most modern and democratic state in the Middle East. But what decisions on the other side of justice are taken into account for personal circumstances? Marriage, divorce or death are treated in Israel in absolutely sectarian terms.

On the other hand, Zionism does not care to explain why modern Israel is also the only one in the Western world in which there are only religious and not civil marriages. Or why not recognize marriages between Jews and Muslims or Christians, or between Jews and atheists?

Israeli law defines a Jew as a person whose mother is Jewish or has converted to Judaism and is not part of another religious community.  And this in spite of the amendment that grants this right to the son and to the grandson of a Jew; to the wife of a Jew; to the wife of the son of a Jew and to the wife of a grandson of a Jew, except to those that having been a Jew and have voluntarily changed religion.

In July 2005, the Knesset (Israeli parliament) decided to grant citizenship to Palestinians married to Israeli citizens, if the men were at least 35 years, and if the women were older than 25.  Good resource for practical purposes. For this way, only children born to Jewish parents are obliged to perform military service for two years, and we’ll see later if they are Jewish enough to marry in Israel.

If a Mexican who lives in Israel is converted to Judaism, they can acquire citizenship at the time of their conversion. But if Mexico (or any other country) regulates that Jews cannot become citizens under the same conditions as others, Zionist experts in ethics, altruism and morality put the signature that it will be seen as a test of anti-Semitism.

________

Source: Originally published in www.jornada.unam.mx Translated from original Spanish version by: Lisa KARPOVA of PRAVDA.Ru

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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Go! Kiss the World!

Subroto Bagchi, COO, MindTree Consulting

·

Subroto Bagchi

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THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

Address by Subroto Bagchi (a man who was vice- president for Lucent Technologies and Wipro with just a Political science degree from Utkal University) Chief Operating Officer, Mind Tree consulting to the Class of 2006 at the IIM, Bangalore on defining success.

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was, and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep – so the family moved from place to place and without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system, which makes me what I am today and largely, defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not ”his jeep” but the government’s jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep – we could sit in it only when it was stationary.

That was our early childhood lesson in governance – a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

THE TEAM SPIRIT DEMANDS YOU RESPECT YOUR SUBORDINATES AS MUCH AS YOU DO YOUR SUPERIORS

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix ‘dada’ whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed – I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, ‘Raju Uncle’ – very different from many of their friends who refer to their family driver, as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother’s chulha – an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was neither gas, nor electrical stoves.The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman’s ‘muffosil’ edition – delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson.

HE USED TO SAY,

“You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it”. That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios – we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios – alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply,” We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses”. His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.

Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”.

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term “Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan” and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University’s water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

IMAGINATION IS EVERYTHING

If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother’s eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, “Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair”. I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date.Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes.

That was 1969. She died in 2002.

In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed”.

Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

TO ME SUCCESS IS ABOUT THE SENSE OF INDEPENDENCE; IT IS NOT ABOUT SEEING THE WORLD BUT SEEING THE LIGHT.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life’s own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world.

In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him – he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet?” Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create. My father died the next day.

HE WAS A MAN WHOSE SUCCESS WAS DEFINED BY HIS PRINCIPLES, HIS FRUGALITY, HIS UNIVERSALISM AND HIS SENSE OF INCLUSION.

Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts – the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of an ill-paid, unrecognized government servant’s world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.

IN THEM, WE LEARNT THE POWER OF DISAGREEMENTS, OF DIALOGUE AND THE ESSENCE OF LIVING WITH DIVERSITY IN THINKING.

Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work.

While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said,

“Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and God’s speed. Go! , kiss the world.

_________

Source: http://thejeshgn.com/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

The Great Game– Renewed – I.1

Lord Curzon famously stated “who ever controls West Asia, controls the world”. In his view this entailed the exercise of a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan – a role he reserved for British India.

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BIRTH OF RADICAL ISLAMIST MILITANCY

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by Hassan Rizvi

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Today we have many nations desperate to acquire that role? NATO and ISAF led by the USA, fighting Al-Qaeda and the Pakhtuns (Taliban). Even Russia and China are not ignoring their strategic interests in the area; and of course the traditional rivals India and Pakistan always ready to fight a proxy war in Afghanistan. This article –and a few others to follow- will look at the issues at stake today – primarily from Pakistan’s point of view. But first an over view of the make up and strategic importance of Central Asia.

CENTRAL ASIAN DEMOGRAPHY

Once upon a time not so long ago the world’s biggest Empire possessed unimaginable land, wealth and potential. However, lacking the vision to manage what it possessed; it chose the wrong friends and made the wrong enemies resulting in an inevitable humiliation at the hands of a ‘despicable band of holy warriors’. China which should have been it’s biggest helper lifted not a finger to assist; and India which should have been it’s biggest friend shed not a single tear -in fact jumped on to the opposing band wagon with glee.

The Great Game – Renewed – I.2

In 1893 the British created the “Durand line” as a buffer between the Czars and the British Empire. After the British departure Kabul refused to recognize Pakistan, challenging the legitimacy of its borders. India jumped in, to encourage Afghan claims – supported by its ally the USSR. Despite the tension in its Frontier province, Pakistan’s founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah had already pulled out troops from the Pashtun areas, confident that Pakistan had the allegiance of the tribes. Subsequent events were to prove him correct. Aslam Khattak then first secretary and later ambassador in Kabul even started a proposal for a Pakistan-Afghan confederation. Both sides agreed to work for a confederation in which the two regions would be autonomous in all matters, except for defence, foreign policy, foreign trade and communications.

IMAGE ABOVE:PAKISTAN AFGHANISTAN BORDER NEAR CHAMAN (BALOCHISTAN) EPA/OLIVIER MATTHYS

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AFGHANISTAN- PAKISTAN FRICTION

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by Hassan Rizvi

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             ♦     A Wider Northern By-Pass (Route 3)

Russia has proposed exporting oil north to join its existing pipeline system at Novorossiysk .This development would remove the pipeline further from Chechnya and help maintain regular flow of Caspian Sea and Kazakh oil.

            ♦      The Trans Caucasus Route (Route 4)

The Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC) built an initial line from Baku through Georgia to the Georgian port of Supsa on the Black Sea. It is pumping a limited amount of oil since l999.This is relatively an inexpensive option, but the oil still has to move from Supsa by oil tankers through the Black Sea and the Bosporus. Turkey controls the traffic between the Black and Mediterranean Seas and does not want increased oil tanker traffic through the straits because of environmental concerns. Russia objects to this route because none of the pipeline passes through Russia. Further, this pipeline runs through domains of many fractious mountain tribes.

The Great Game- Renewed – I.3

The Soviet backed coup in Afghanistan gave birth to Afghan militancy followed by Soviet attempts to destabilize Balochistan. A natural consequence should have been the involvement of the USA and CIA on the Pakistani side in a communistic vs. free world conflict as was the norms of the time; more so as both sides were Muslims. Yet two developments on the inter –national stage were to give it an irretrievable ‘Wahabi’ luster which US supported & this ‘Wahabi’ militancy continues to this day. The first was the vast growth in Saudi wealth due to sharp rise in oil prices. The second was the castration of CIA as a result of post Watergate repercussions!

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THE BIRTH OF MILITANCY INSIDE AFGHANISTAN / PAKISTAN

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by Hassan Rizvi

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In 1973 Prince Daud staged a Soviet assisted coup to oust King Zahir Shah. The Daud regime not only raised the issue of Pashtunistan (Afghans claims to Pakistani provinces of NWFP and Balochistan), but also for the first time moved the Afghan army closer to the borders. More importantly KHAD the Afghan Intelligence agency (aided and abetted by the Russian KGB and Indian RAW as all three were allied in those days) used several Pakistani tribal leaders (Sardars) to start an uprising in the tribal areas of Balochistan and parts of NWFP.

Z.A. Bhutto’s government retaliated by supporting the disenchanted elements within Afghanistan. These included Burhanuddin Rabbani, Ahmad Shah Masud and Gulbadin Hikmatyar. Thus relations in the 1970s began with each country supporting the other’s dissidents on a purely nationalistic agenda on a quid pro quo basis; and till the mid-70’s Pakistan army was busy fighting a bitter insurgency in the province of Balochistan – with the help of it’s ‘Militants’ within Afghanistan. There was no question of an Islamic Jihadi motivational base for either; as ‘enemies’ of both sides were Muslim. As we shall see this was to come much later when the CIA would conceive the theory of turning ‘Afghan militants’ into ‘Islamic militants’ for use against the ‘USSR’.

The Great Game – Renewed – I.4

THE RISE OF BCCI

·

by Hassan Rizvi

·

Adham, and other intelligence heads worked with Abedi to contrive “a plan that seemed too good to be true. The bank (BCCI) would solicit the business of every major intelligence – and therefore terrorist, rebel, and underground – organization in the free world. The intelligence collected – and links forged in the process – would be shared with these ‘friends’ of BCCI.” CIA operative Raymond Close worked closely with Adham during the Congressional inquiry years to help identify and tap “into CIA’s hordes of misfits and malcontents to help man a 1,500-strong group of assassins and enforcers.”

[Right: Late Agha Hassan Abedi, Founder of  the BCCI]

Soon, BCCI became the fastest growing bank in the world. Time magazine would later describe BCCI as not just a bank, but also “a global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad. Operating primarily out of the bank’s offices in Karachi, Pakistan; the 1,500-employee network had used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder. It stops at almost nothing to further the bank’s aims the world over.”

Saudi Prince Mohammed al-Faisal also set up Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE) as part of the banking empire. The “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman was one of its founding members. Growth of Islamic banking would directly help the growth of the Islamist movements, and allow the Saudis to pressure poorer Islamic nations, like Egypt, to shift their policies to the right. FIBE worked closely with BCCI. Investigators would later find that BCCI held $589 million in “unrecorded deposits,” $245 million of which were placed with FIBE!

BCCI at a later stage was also ‘discovered’ to be deeply implicated in illegal arms and narcotics trade .But all this was to happen way in the future, when CIA wanted to get back into the driving seat!

The Great Game- Renewed – I.5

“Tim Osman” was the name assigned to Osama bin Laden by the CIA for his tour of the U.S. and U.S. military bases, in search of political support and armaments. [...] There is some evidence that Tim Osman … visited the White House. There is certainty that Tim Osman toured some U.S. military bases, even receiving special demonstrations of the latest equipment. Why hasn’t this been reported in the major media…? The answer is that the US is now obsessed by the Afghan war i.e. operation Geronimo, and therefore the western media too put a blind eye to OBL’s days with the CIA.

·

AND FINALLY…

THE BEAR TRAP IS SPRUNG

·

by Hassan Rizvi

·

He allowed a free hand to the CIA approved Wahabi Islamic doctrine to gain a firm foothold in Pakistan. Passing pro-Islamic legislation, he allowed FIB (Faisal Islamic bank) to start Islamic banking systems, and created Islamic courts. Most importantly, he imposed a new religious tax which was used to create tens of thousands of madrassas, or religious boarding schools, where “Islamic text books’ printed in USA and approved by CIA were taught. These schools would be used to train and indoctrinate a large portion of future Islamic militants using courses developed in the USA.

“Radical Islamist ideology began to permeate the military and the influence of the most extreme groups crept into the army,” writes journalist Kathy Gannon in her book ‘I is for Infidel’. The BBC later commented that Zia’s “Islamization” policies created a “culture of jihad” within Pakistan that continues until present day. Meanwhile ISI took over to continue the field work and launched a massive campaign of terrorism, assassinating hundreds of teachers and civil servants in Afghanistan.”

Trees and Us

There are two things about trees and us. For one, we do not know our indigenous species. And that may be because all of us have come from Arabia, Turkey, Iran or Central Asia. We first blighted this land with eucalyptus to such an extent that so called educated people do not know that it is an alien from Australia. Now we are disfiguring it with cornucorpus, rubber tree, asoka and whatever else we can import from any old place. The other thing that we simply lack is the acumen to see the connection between trees and ecology. So where we should be planting indigenous banyan, pipal, and neem trees – to name a few – we have diseased the land with useless species that give neither shade nor fruit nor sanctuary to our fat dwindling avian friends. Mind you, once the song of the birds is gone, we will die from a loneliness of the soul.

·

A TREE THAT MAY IN SUMMER WEAR

A NEST OF ROBINS IN HER HAIR;

A TREE THAT LOOKS AT GOD ALL DAY,

AND LIFTS HER LEAFY ARMS TO PRAY

·

by Salman Rashid

·

In 1914, Alfred Joyce Kilmer wrote a poem titled Trees: I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/ Against the earth’s sweet-flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day,/ And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in summer wear/ A nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose bosom snow has lain;/ Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me,/ But only God can make a tree.

But we in Pakistan think that is hogwash. The Express Tribune issue of May 9 carried a news item about the cutting down of seven trees in Jinnah Supermarket, Islamabad. It detailed that the builder of a new plaza did not agree with the ugly view (as reported) that these 40-year-old trees presented to the plaza. I ask you! We are told that the Capital Development Authority only acted after the trees were destroyed to suspend the official concerned and impose a fine of Rs50,000 per tree.

There are two things about trees and us. For one, we do not know our indigenous species. And that may be because all of us have come from Arabia, Turkey, Iran or Central Asia. We first blighted this land with eucalyptus to such an extent that so-called educated people do not know that it is an alien from Australia. Now we are disfiguring it with cornucorpus, rubber tree, asoka and whatever else we can import from any old place.

The other thing is that we simply lack the acumen to see the connection between trees and ecology. So where we should be planting indigenous banyan, pipal and neem trees — to name only a few — we have diseased the land with useless species that give neither shade nor fruit nor sanctuary to our fast dwindling avian friends. Mind you, once the song of the birds is gone; we will die from a loneliness of the soul.

But the lout in Islamabad is no exception. About 18 years ago, a house was built in K Block, Model Town, Lahore. It being a corner plot, there were eight magnificent biri patti trees along the boundary. All were chopped down. As the process was afoot, I paused to take up the issue with the perpetrators. They — simple workers — said the owner wanted his house to be seen from outside. Of course, who wouldn’t when they have a façade of bathroom tiles! Even today, a couple of stumps still remind me of once beautiful spreading trees.

In 2003 or thereabouts, a new road connected Thokar Niaz Beg with WAPDA Town. It swung past a clump of three handsome pipal trees about opposite the electric grid station in Johar Town. Then it was a single two-way road. In 2004, its second track was planned. I hurried to photograph the pipal trees because I knew they figured nowhere in the grand scheme of the morons who rule our miserable lives. Sure enough, the trees, those magnificent heroes who purified the air we breathed and who sequestered the carbon that we madly generated so that this world could still be liveable for us, were brutally cut down. There was no question of anyone even considering giving the road a little swing to one side in order to let the trees live. They disappeared from sight and memory. Today, they exist only in a set of 35mm transparencies in my collection.

Come with me to my ancestral village Uggi. On the highroad to it from Jalandhar city, amid carefully tended fields of whatever may be in season, the road suddenly divides in two. There in the middle of it stands a lovely pipal tree. I joked with my kinsman Bakhshish Singh who was driving me home to Uggi: “Cut it down, you fool. It has no business in the middle of a road”.

An aghast Bakhshish stopped the car. He turned around to look me straight in the eye. “Never ever must you talk of destroying a tree,” he said. “Here we value trees more than we value human life. They are our truest friends who only do us good; and they ask for no recompense.”

So what really went wrong with us?

The writer Salman Rashid is  Fellow of Royal Geographical Society. His travel writing appears regularly in leading English language journals and he is the author of eight travel books including The Apricot Road to Yarkand and jhelum: City of the Vitasta.

You might also like:

1. My beautiful Pakistan, the land of Balochistan 2.Birds of Lahore – Sustainers of City’s Biodiversity 3. Muhammad (S.A.W.W), A Pioneer of Environment

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Washington’s Hypocrisies

The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst–Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere. The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogyman- in-the-making–China, the country selected for the role of Washington’s new Cold War enemy. Hillary Clinton, another in a long line of unqualified Secretaries of State, informed “governments around the world: we are watching, and we are holding you accountable,” only we are not holding ourselves accountable or Washington’s allies like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the NATO puppets.

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US POLICY: RUNNING WITH THE THE HARE, HUNTING WITH THE HOUNDS

·

by Paul Craig Roberts

·

The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst–Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere.

The US State Department’s “human rights report” focuses its ire on Iran and Syria, two countries whose real sin is their independence from Washington, and on the bogyman- in-the-making–China, the country selected for the role of Washington’s new Cold War enemy.

Hillary Clinton, another in a long line of unqualified Secretaries of State, informed “governments around the world: we are watching, and we are holding you accountable,” only we are not holding ourselves accountable or Washington’s allies like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the NATO puppets.

Hillary also made it “clear to citizens and activists everywhere: You are not alone. We are standing with you,” only not with protesters at the Chicago NATO summit or with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, or anywhere else in the US where there are protests. (ref)

The State Department stands with the protesters funded by the US in the countries whose governments the US wishes to overthrow. Protesters in the US stand alone as do the occupied Palestinians who apparently have no human rights to their homes, lands, olive groves, or lives.

Here are some arrest numbers for a few recent US protests. The New York Daily News reports that as of November 17, 2011, 1,300 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested in New York City alone. FoxNews reported (October 2, 2011) that 700 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. At the NATO summit in Chicago last week, 90 protesters were arrested (Chicago Journal).

In the US some protesters are being officially categorized as “domestic extremists” or “domestic terrorists,” a new threat category that Homeland Security announced is now the focus of its attention, displacing Muslim terrorists as the number one threat to the US. In September 2010, federal police raided the homes of peace activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. The FBI is trying to concoct a case against them by claiming that the peace activists donated money to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As demanded by Israel, the US government has designated the PFLP as a terrorist group.

In Chicago last week, among the many arrested NATO protesters with whom the State Department does not stand are three young white americans arrested for “domestic terrorism” in what Dave Lindorff reports was “a warrantless house invasion reminiscent of what US military forces are doing on a daily [and nightly] basis in Afghanistan.” If the US government, which stands with protesters everywhere except in America, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Palestine, can make this into a terrorism case, the three americans can be convicted on the basis of secret evidence or simply be incarcerated for the rest of their lives without a trial.

Meanwhile the three american “domestic terrorists” are being held in solitary confinement. Like many of the NATO protesters, they came from out of town. Brian Church, 20 years old, came from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Jared Chase, 27, came from Keene, New Hampshire. Brent Betterly, 24, came from Oakland Park, Florida. Charged with providing material support for terrorism, the judge set their bail at $1.5 million each.

These three are not charged with actually throwing a Molotov cocktail at a person or thing. They are charged with coming to Chicago with the idea of doing so. Somehow the 16 federal intelligence agencies plus those of our NATO puppets and Israel were unable to discover the 9/11 plot in the making, but the Chicago police knew in advance why two guys from Florida and one from New Hampshire came to Chicago. The domestic terrorism cases turn out to be police concoctions that are foiled before they happen, so we have many terrorists but no actual terrorist acts.

Two other young americans are being framed by their Human Rights Government. Sebastian Senakiewicz, 24, of Chicago is charged with “falsely making a terrorist threat,” whatever that means. His bail was set at $750,000. Mark Neiweem, 28, of Chicago is charged with “solicitation for explosives or incendiary devices.” His bail is set at $500,000.

This is human rights in america. But the State Department’s human rights report never examines the US. It is a political document aimed at Washington’s chosen enemies.

Meanwhile, Human Rights america continues to violate the national sovereignty of Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan by sending in drones, bombs, special forces and in Afghanistan 150,000 US soldiers to murder people, usually women, children and village elders. Weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, schools and farmers’ houses are also favorite targets for Washington’s attacks. On May 25 the Pakistani Daily Times reported that Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Moazzam Ali Khan strongly condemned the drone attacks: “We regard them as a violation of our territorial integrity. They are in contravention of international law. They are illegal, counter productive and totally unacceptable.”

The US reportedly funnels money to the Iranian terrorist group, MEK, declared terrorists by no less than the US State Department. But it is OK as long as MEK is terrorizing Iran. Washington stands with MEK’s protests delivered via bombs and the assassin’s bullet. After all, we have to bring freedom and democracy to Iran, and violence is Washington’s preferred way to achieve this goal.

Washington is desperate to overthrow the Syrian government in order to get rid of the Russian naval base. On May 15 the Washington Post reported that Washington is coordinating the flow of arms to Syrian rebels. Washington’s justification for interfering in Syria’s internal affairs is human rights charges against the Syrian government. However, a UN report finds that the rebels are no more respectful of human rights than the Syrian government. The rebels torture and murder prisoners and kidnap civilians wealthy enough to bring a ransom.

NATO, guided by Washington, went far outside the UN resolution declaring a no-fly zone over Libya. NATO in blatant violation of the UN resolution provided the air attack on the Libyan government that enabled the CIA-supported “rebels” to overthrow Gadhafi, killing many Libyan civilians in the process.

Under the Nuremberg standard (principle VI.a.i), it is a war crime to launch a war of aggression, which is what Washington and its NATO puppets launched against Libya, but, no sweat, Washington brought Libya freedom and democracy.

Assassinating foreign opponents is the West’s preferred diplomacy. The British were at ease with it, and Washington picked up the practice. In his book, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Cambridge University historian Piers Brendon, the Keeper of the Churchill Archives, reports from the documents he has at hand, that in the build up to the “Suez Crisis” in 1956, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden told Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting, “I want him [Nasser, Egypt’s leader] murdered.”

Brendon goes on to report: “Doubtless at the Prime Minister’s behest, the Secret Intelligence Service did hatch plots to assassinate Nasser and to topple his government. Its agents, who proposed to pour nerve gas into Nasser’s office through the ventilation system, were by no means discreet.” The secret agents talked too much, and the scheme never came to fruition.

Last week in Malaysia a war crimes tribunal found George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes II, Jay Bybee, and John Choon Yoo guilty of war crimes. (ref)

But don’t expect Washington to take any notice. The war crimes convictions are merely a “political statement.”

Paul Craig Roberts has been Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. Roberts earned his fame as co-founder of Reaganomics. He is also a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and Scripps Howard News Service, who has testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of economic policy. He is a critic of Israel, and calls Gaza “the world’s largest concentration camp”.

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More from Paul Craig Roberts on Wonders of Pakistan

1. The Global War on Terrorism 2. Does The West Have A Future? 3. Brewing a Conflict with China 4. Washington Leads World Into Lawlessness 5. Empires Then and Now 6. The Outlook for the New Year [in two parts] 7. Is the War on Terror a Hoax? [in two parts] 8. The latest orchestrated threat and the end of history 8. The Critics of 9-11 Truth. Do they have a Case

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More subas? — I

·

The rumour that President Asif Ali Zardari is likely to announce the formation of new provinces on August 14 is bogus. The president, even if he so wished, cannot do it because he is not authorised to do so. Factually, it is all about politics e.g. there is the problem over the concept around which the three-stage exercise of delimitation, delineation and actual demarcation would/should take place. Pakistan Muslim Leadue Nawaz says the exercise must not be conducted  on ethnic basis because that would serve to deepen the ethnic fault lines. That”s one way of looking at it and the sentiment cannot be faulted per se. But if one maps the ground, it becomes clear that the demand is essentially ethnic. We have two overt expressions of it Sraiki and Hazara Subas and we have the more covert MQM demand which manifests itself in the party’s support to ethnic groups asking for their own units.

·

ITS ALL ABOUT POLITICS 

·

by Ejaz Haider

·

Do we need more provinces? Yes, we do. Could we please have a few more tomorrow, or a week from now? No, we can’t.

The challenge lies precisely in doing what needs to be done but which, for a host of reasons, will be resisted by various groups and parties, not because most oppose the carving out of more provinces but because each group has interests in the carrying out of such an exercise that run against those of the other group(s).

To put it another way, the very reasons for which some of the group/parties want more provinces are the reasons which would make this process difficult instead of facilitating it. The additional problem would of course be resistance from those groups that do not want more provinces — Sindhis losing Karachi; the Lahore-centred Nawaz League that would not want its political base diluted; the Baloch who claim all of Balochistan and so on.

The rumour that President Asif Ali Zardari is likely to announce the formation of new provinces on August 14 is bogus. The president, even if he so wished, cannot do it because he is not authorised to do so. Article 239 (4) of the constitution is very clear about the procedure for altering the limits of a province and adds another layer to any such constitutional amendment by bringing in the provincial assembly, two-thirds of whose members must assent before such an amendment can be sent to the president for his final approval.

·

·

It’s all about politics, however, before it becomes legal. The first problem is the concept around which the three-stage exercise of delimitation, delineation and actual demarcation would/should take place. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz says the exercise must not be conducted on ethnic basis because that would serve to deepen the ethnic fault-lines. That’s one way of looking at it and the sentiment cannot be faulted per se. But if one maps the ground, it becomes clear that the demand is essentially ethnic. We have two overt expressions of it — Seraiki and Hazara subas — and we have the more covert MQM demand which manifests itself in the party’s support to ethnic groups asking for their own units.

I asked Ahsan Iqbal how the PML-N would like to map this. He mentioned the former state of Bahawalpur. Sure, I said, prodding him on to give me some more examples. But he couldn’t. In fact, the Bahawalpur factor is interesting because there has been an internal fault-line in southern Punjab between the Riyastis and the Seraikis. However, Ayesha Siddiqa, who has recently done a survey, told me that while 60 per cent of the respondents said they wanted their own province, “their reasons for the demand related to better governance”.

Siddiqua’s take is that given the financial viability, or inviability, of the Bahawalpur suba, it would be much better to opt for a Seraiki suba. The same sentiment was expressed to me by Mohsin Leghari, a PML-Q MPA. Leghari, like Siddiqa, said that this dormant fault-line is being artificially revived and is part of the PML-N’s political strategy. He also gave the example of the ruckus in the Punjab Assembly on August 11 when an MMA member from Mianwali got up to ask for a resolution for a Thal suba.

“The PML-N doesn’t want to come out openly against more provinces because that will be politically disastrous so they are now resorting to muddying the waters for a viable Seraiki sooba,” says Leghari.

This is to be expected. Just like the Sindhis would not want to lose Karachi in any future delimiting of Sindh, the PML-N doesn’t want its power centre in the Punjab diluted. And it can resort to the tactics it is using and also mount serious arguments against the whole exercise while agreeing to have as many provinces as can be made on — its buzzword — ‘administrative’ rather than ethnic basis.

In a newspaper statement, Mian Nawaz Sharif has proposed that if the government (read: the Pakistan Peoples Party and its allies) is serious about creating more provinces, it should set up a National Commission for this purpose which can bring together, for consultation, all the interested parties. While Babar Awan has already dismissed the idea, saying there is no provision in the constitution for such a commission, the fact is that some senior PPP leaders agree that if and when it comes to this, and the PML-N presents a formal proposal in this regard, a commission can be set up and its terms of reference worked out.

“Such a commission doesn’t by its formation violate any constitutional provision especially if it is to be a consultative body which can do the spade work before the issue is taken to the assemblies,” said one senior PPP leader who asked that he not be named.

The writer was a Ford Scholar at the Programme in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security at UIUC (1997) and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Studies Programme. Presently he is op-ed editor of Daily Times and host of Samaa TV’s programme “Siyasiyat”. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk

Related Posts:

 1. The dangers of new provinces 2. What if Punjab is too large? 

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this report / article / Op-Ed are the sole responsibility of the author or the source from where this material has been taken. These may not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author (s) or the source. WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statement / s contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

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Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults. 

We at Wonders of Pakistan use copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

We do not claim exclusive rights on all articles, images or videos published on this site. The sources we use to create our articles, images, videos etc. are credited with a proper linkback. However, we do host material from unknown authors we receive via mails, from friends and our readers. If you own copyrights to some material and you want us to remove it from our pages, contact us to claim your ownership and we will either credit you, or if you wish – completely remove the content.

Clinton Bares All

Clinton finally brings the secret military/State Dept. covert operations out into the open. This is the logical outcome of a process started long ago, during the Reagan Administration, when Congress put restrictions on the CIA’s shadow wars in Central America. It was then that this so-called “smart policy” began, thereafter, all of the CIA’s illegal operations were contracted out to private interests. Hillary’s baby, “the Conflict Bureau”, grew out of Reagan’s NED [National Endowment for Democracy]. These hearings uncovered the inner workings of a new State Dept. entity, which was intended to take over many of the CIA’s operations. 

·

HILLARY FINALLY BRINGS BUREAU OF SPY/DIPLOMATIC LIAISONS OUT OF THE CLOSET

·

by Peter Chamberlin

·

Clinton finally brings the secret military/State Dept. covert operations out into the open (SEE:  Clinton Goes Commando, Sells Diplomats as Shadow Warriors).  This is the logical outcome of a process started long ago, during the Reagan Administration, when Congress put restrictions on the CIA’s shadow wars in Central America.  It was then that this so-called “smart policy” began, thereafter, all of the CIA’s illegal operations were contracted out to private interests.   Hillary’s baby, “the Conflict Bureau,” grew out of Reagan’s NED (National Endowment for Democracy).   The new bureau of State Dept. activism was originally called the “Office of Public Diplomacy,” as first revealed in the Congressional Iran/Contra Hearings.  These hearings uncovered the inner workings of a new State Dept. entity, which was intended to take over many of the CIA’s  operations.

Private corporations and benefactors were solicited to form patriotic partnerships with the military, to be overseen by a hierarchy of diplomats.  These partnerships turned-out to be privately funded criminal enterprises, which were organized to implement Administration policies.  The objective of these enterprises was to destabilize nations by turning the people against their own governments.  This was to be done primarily through diplomatic largess, as opposed to the use of military force.  A veritable river of cash and other economic incentives began to pour into the hands of poor people and local criminal networks.  The people’s loyalty would be bought, as would the criminals’ silence, as well as the local bureaucrat’s complicity.  The louder that those who received their newfound wealth boasted of their good fortune, the more envious the rest of the people would become.  All forces would contribute to the primary mission of destabilization.

Perhaps the most important acquisition that the beneficent diplomats could make would be that of the voices of established local journalists and newsmen, who would be the primary agitators of the class struggle between the haves and the have-nots.  In Muslim countries, the most important acquisition would likely be local religious authorities and devotees, who could be used to further agitate long-simmering local religious squabbles, such as that between Sunni and Shia.

Through the “smart” interplay between the various news-generating sources at their disposal, the aggressive diplomats could actually take over popular dialogues and generate “new news” (propaganda).   By using their local and national players to dominate popular opinion-making, diplomats could successfully replace the ongoing national narratives with new false narratives, which were used to bring the thinking of the people in line with the Administration’s will for them.  The overriding purpose was to generate national revolutions by first creating a false perception of an ongoing revolution within the minds of the people.   The people were made to believe in an inevitable national revolution by hiring locals to stage revolutionary attacks (terrorism) on key targets, at critical junctures in the molding of the national debate.  The contracted newsmen spread the story of the ongoing revolution far and wide, while the newsmen who could not be bought are deceived with selective leaks from anonymous government sources.  The revolutionary (terrorist) acts are timed so as to validate the doctored news reports.

Today the diplomatic meddlers have networks of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to assist them with the process of spreading the “pork” locally and creating new false narratives which mirror the latest fashionable lies being peddled by Washington’s other sources.  You see the process most completely in the fate suffered by Libya, or Syria, or that visited upon the people of Iraq.  At the end of the “smart” process is nothing but war and local devastation giving the US and NATO military a foot in the door.   For this the national governments are blamed by the manipulated, agitated, radicalized and weaponized masses.

Hillary is extremely proud of her smart operation, her “Silk Road” to hell.

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More from Peter Chamberlin on Wonders of Pakistan

1. Whirling Dervish and TAPI Politics 2. Shaitan is smiling in Balochistan 3. Investing Your Future In a Poison Peace Process 4. Understanding Reality From Deception in the War on Terror 5. Smashing Greater Central Asia-Part One [in three parts] 6. Washington’s Silk Road Pipe Dream

Peter Chamberlin is an op-ed writer and a blog editor. Peter has been very active against all types of wars since 1982. He has been writing letters to newspapers and magazines, as well as recalcitrant national leaders, speaking-out against war, nuclear war, and the impending violent collapse of the Western empire (that is now at hand). Chamberlin has had several hundred letter-to-editors printed in this time. peterchamberlin@naharnet.com

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author (s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statement / s contained in this post.

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Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.

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The Quaid and the Significance of Pakistan

All renowned historians, right from Gibbon to Toynbee, agree on one focal point, that nations fall when they stop thinking as a nation– when they loose confidence in their pride  and they fail to self respect. With sall in their thinking, the very first symptom that afflicts such people, such communities is the indifference, the apathywhich they have over their nation’s resilience. Doubts are caste on Leader’s vision and they start eulogising the opponents of their founding father /s.

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THE PSEUDOS AND THE QUAID

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by Nayyar Hashmey

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All renowned historians, right from Gibbon to Toynbee, agree on one point, that nations fall when they stop thinking as a nation. Or when they loose confidence and pride as a nation or they fail to self respect. The very first symptom of such fall is the affliction that befalls such people, such nations, such communities is the indifference, the apathy which they have over their nation’s resilience. Doubts are cast on their leader’s vision and they start eulogising the opponents of their founding father / s.

Flashback: A pillar of strength

During the Taliban occupation, Swat Valley, which was visited by Queen Elizabeth in 1961 and many other dignitaries turned into a mess. Long gone were the backpacking students from Europe who biked their way through the valley. Even Pakistanis who took the annual summer vacations, frequenting Bahrain and Mingora, stopped as news of the Taliban takeover spread. The destruction of Malam Jabba ski resort, a picturesque spot that was frequented by skiers from the region, was savage. The footage beamed all over the world was a stark reminder that the valley was in the grips of mad men. Schools set up by the last rulers were blown away and for many, the images they saw of Afghanistan on TV seemed to have become a horrible reality. But the sad part is that it was religious minded people who supported the maulana, thinking of him as a man of faith who was true to the spirit of Islam.

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THE LADY IS NO MOTHER THERESA BUT PROUDLY WALKS HER  WAY

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by Sumaira Jajja

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A note from Raja Mujtaba of Opinion Maker: Mussarat Ahmedzeb is the widow of a dear friend of mine Capt Ahmezeb who was my course mate in Pakistan Military Academy. It’s indeed an honour for me to republish what was published in Dawn about her role and conduct in Swat during all those years of insurgency and terrorism. [Raja Mujtaba]

Sanitizing the infestation in the Wakhan Salient [2 of 2]

Dr.  Ahmad Hassan Dani in his book “History of Northern Areas of Pakistan”, states: “Wakhi is spoken in Chitral (Upper Yarkhan valley), in Upper Ishkoman valley and in the Upper Hunza valley (above Gulmit)..the Wakhi speaking communities settled in the northern Areas of Pakistan, came there (more than one hundred years ago?) from their Upper Oxus previous location through the Irshad Pass, which connects the Wakhan, Yakun, Ishkoman and Chapursan Valleys”. He continues “Wakhi is an ‘Iranian’ language but Wakhis are inhabiting for a long time in the Pamir Valleys (Wakhan). They are not Iranians and do not stem from present-day Iran. ‘Iranian simply means that 4000 years ago some groups were speaking a language related to that of Zoraster very different from Wakhi as we know it, but which evolved in course of centuries and is now Wakhi”. The British conspiracy separated Tajikistan from Pakistan.

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 WAKHAN IS A WAKHI AREA, PART OF OUR CHITRAL DISTRICT, HENCE WE OUGHT TO NEGOTIATE A DEAL WITH AFGHANISTAN FOR RETURNING WAKHAN CORRIDOR BACK TO US

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by RupeeNews

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The prodigiously brilliant article by Dr. Naveed Tajammal sheds light on a subject which has rarely been discussed in Pakistani or world history books.

The birth of the new geographic entity of Afghanistan was based on global events as they started to unfold, and so the British Empire the ’’ King Makers’’ from the turn of the 19th Century set about creating new states, by awarding them new names, and thereby delinking them from their past heritage, Khurassan, too met the same fate as did the Sindh Valley, whose integral part it always had been, Sir. Thomas Holdich, writing in 1901 was correct when he confessed the same in his book,” The Indian Borderland’’, ’’We have contributed much to give a National Entity to that Nebulous Community which ‘’WE’’ call ‘’AFGHANISTAN’’ (but which the Afghan, Never, CALL, by that name) by drawing a boundary all around it and elevating it into a position of a Buffer State, between ourselves and Russia, all this has been done at great expense, and with infinite pains……….’’.

Sanitizing the infestation in the Wakhan Salient [1 of 2]

The picturesque Wakhan Corridor has become a nest of vipers-with untelligence agencies from Delhi, Washington,and Tel Aviv infesting the area to keep watch on Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Wakhan chas to be sanitized and cleansed of all intelligence agencies.  The Wakhan Corridor or Wakhan Salient is often called the Afghan (the local word for Pakhtun) Panhandle and was created by the British in 1895–a progeny of the Great Game between Britain and Russia.There are three passes (Broghol, Irshad, and Dilisang) in the territory which have been used to link the Tajiks to the Pakistanis throughout the centuries. These were the passes which were the sustenance of the 7000 year old Pakistani Mehargarh Civlization and the 5000 yearl od Pakistani Indus Valley.

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WAKHAN – A NEST OF VIPERS

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by RupeeNews

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WAKHAN: THE CORRIDOR

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The Wakhan Corridor has become a nest of vipers–with intelligence agencies from Delhi, Washington and Tel Aviv infesting the area to keep watch on Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

The Wakhan corridor has to be sanitized and cleansed of all intelligence agencies.

Rediscovering our Sikh heritage

The image of Samadhi above is the mausoleum of the great Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It is located near the Lahore Fort and Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan. Construction was started by his son, Kharak Singh on the spot where he wa scremated and was completed by his younger son, Dillip Singh in 1848. The tomb exmeplifies Sikh archiecture, it has gilded fluted domes and cupolas and an ornate blustrade around the top. Ranjit Singh’s ashes are contained in a marble urn in the shape of a lotus, sheltered under a marble pavilion inlaid with petra dura, in the centre of the tomb. Photo courtesy Bushra Shehzad for Hosh Media/Dawn.com

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REDISCOVERING OUR SIKH HERITAGE 

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by Hosh Media

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It was my first encounter with the pioneering woman who has made it her life’s mission to document the largely undiscovered subject.

“I was roaming around the Lahore Fort when I came across the Athdara. I got on top of it and started looking around. I found several features that were Mughal but some were very different – a confusing but intriguing mix of materials and motifs,” remembers Dr Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan. This was the moment when her unique journey to documenting Sikh art and architecture in Pakistan began, which in her words, was “serendipity.”

Righ: Naeem Khan teaches History of Art at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. She is a Charles Wallace Pakistan Fellow 2011. Her areas of interest are Mughal and Sikh period Art & Architectural Ornament. Her research area is Sikh Art & Architectural Ornament. She has traced different influences that have contributed to its flowering during the Sikh rule in Punjab in the nineteenth century. Her main focus though remains the ornamental program of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi.

Dr Khan graduated with a degree in graphic design from the Department of Fine Arts, University of the Punjab (presently the College of Art and Design) and completed her postgraduate in the same. Later, she taught at their Fine Arts Department for a few years before working for an advertising agency, and then joined the Lahore College for Women University, where she set up their Department of Art and Design.

In 2002, while Dr Khan was teaching Art and Design, the Punjab University announced a PhD programme in Art History. It was then that she says, she just “dived into it” without a very clear concept of where it would lead her.

A visit to the Athdara at the Lahore Fort triggered her destiny and took Dr Khan to Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi to discover and learn more. “That was the day when I silently told myself that this was it – my dissertation was going to be on the Samadhi!”

Fresco is in Kharak Singh’s haveli within the Lahore Fort.– Photo courtesy Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan for Hosh Media/Dawn.com

” When I learned that ‘Getting to Know Pre-Colonial Punjab through Sikh-period Frescoes’ was being offered as an actual course at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) last semester, I was ecstatic “.

Dr Khan’s PhD dissertation was a study of the ornamental program of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi in Lahore. This led her to study other Sikh monuments in Punjab. In the process, she has built an impressive photographic archive documenting some endangered sites –an area that needs more people like her to carry out specialised research given  dire need of preserving and conserving heritage sites in Pakistan.

Performing documentation and research on historical sites in Pakistan is quite an arduous task, considering most of the monuments lie dilapidated, on the verge of being erased from history.

“The day I decided that this was what I wanted to take up as my research topic, I had no clue of what I was getting myself into.” The first difficulties of this long and laborious journey started to surface when failed to find any relevant published or archival work on the subject.

“I did not know where it all started from and except for small accounts by various 19th-century historians who briefly talk about Ranjit Singh; his pillaging of Mughal monuments and his Samadhi being a mix of Hindu and Muslim architectural elements, there was nothing else,” she says, expressing the hopelessness she felt at the time.

All the “desperately needed” material was in Amritsar and getting a visa to visit the land of the Maharaja’s commissioned Golden Temple seemed impossible, until she met Manveen Sandhu and Tripat Bains, two charismatic Sikh women who opened the doors of the city, its research material as well as their hearts to Dr Khan.

The eastern facade of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi. It has frescoes of guardian figures that Dr Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan found after scraping thick layers of whitewash. They have since been covered with more layers and lost again. – Photo courtesy Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan for Hosh Media/Dawn.com

Her voyage of research is a story as unique as her area of research. In the field, she is called the ‘scratching lady.’ Dr Khan says her “scratching project started with Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi. The interior has beautiful panels of wall paintings and I was puzzled by the fact that the exterior was completely devoid of any.” This made her think that there was a strong possibility that these white washed walls originally may have had wall paintings. But she says it was almost impossible to pinpoint as to where these paintings might have been. She then came across a late 19th-century black-and-white photograph by Bourne and Shepherd showing male figures flanking the northern entrance of the Samadhi, published by F. S. Ijazuddin in Lahore: Illustrated Views of the 19th Century, which led her to discover them being buried under thick layers of whitewash.

In a recent television news report on the Lahore Fort, the reporter mentioned, “And on this side, right outside the Roshnai Gate is Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi. And for those of you who do not know who Ranjit Singh is…” and she went on. I always thought Ranjit Singh’s depiction in our history books was exaggerated. Before I took up Dr Nadhra’s course, I had this image of Ranjit Singh as some bandit, who looted “our” Mughal buildings and ruled Punjab. I have been her student for a year now and every day I learn to see things from a new perspective. I wondered whether she had similar preconceived notions of these things as well?

“I embarked on my own project with these preconceived notions which were dispelled only much later. It happened gradually, as I met people across the border and studied and analysed history written by various historians giving different standpoints,” affirmed my professor.

Dr Khan feels particularly sad at how we, as a nation, have come to view history. “We look at history with lenses coloured with our bias. We need to take them off and bring in objectivity. We need to start owning our heritage. We need to look at it with pride, whether it is the Sikh period, the Mughal or the British. It is all part of us.”

She says we have developed this habit of looking at history from very specific angles. “This is Mughal, so this is ours; this belongs to another religion, so this isn’t. It should not be like this. We are heirs of an ancient culture and we need to understand it. Starting from the Indus Valley, anything and everything in this part of the world is what makes us who we are,” she adds with conviction.

I had never noticed the narratives from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata beautifully painted in the sunken niches of the Sheesh Mahal at the Lahore Fort before I decided to write my research paper on Draupadi – a woman portrayed in the Mahabharata as the epitome of conviction and resilience. And I wonder how many of us visiting the Lahore Fort know what these frescoes mean and signify – the majority probably just takes them as imaginary male and female figures painted merely for decorative purposes.

In Professor Nadhra’s opinion this is one of the major reasons so little is being done to preserve our heritage sites, “there is so little that people are aware of.” Talking about Naunehal Singh’s Haveli, which now functions as the Victoria School, she says, “This reflects our ignorance as a nation.”

“The building needs to be vacated immediately. The school can operate in any of the surrounding buildings or houses,” Dr Khan adds as she laments over the almost faded Sikh monument. She stresses the need for government intervention, as she adds that of course one cannot deprive the students of their school.

The problem, she says, is that we are not trying to look at the long-term benefits of these buildings. “These buildings can become a source of huge benefit for our own people. They are not for one individual. This is important for our own people, every Pakistani. They also need to be familiar with their own heritage.”

Talking about the importance of conserving and preserving historical sites, she says that political stability comes when it has to come, but “one needs to bring economic stability and for this you have to work on many levels”. She adds, “This is one level where you can actually earn tonnes of millions for your people. The Sikhs yearn to come to Lahore, to visit their cultural heritage. They would do anything for a glimpse.” Why can’t we take this opportunity and develop tourism, a huge industry that could benefit both individuals and the country, she asks.

Dr Khan believes more people need to be trained in this field, because there is so much to explore and learn. Her course at LUMS is an important step to create awareness but there is also urgency to preserve these endangered sites as they are fast decaying.

Bushra Shehzad interviewed Dr Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan for Hosh Media, a volunteer based organisation that mentors & publishes young bloggers and journalists on mainstream media in Pakistan, giving their voice more reach and impact. Bushra is a photojournalist and contributor with Hosh media. 

 You might also like:

1. Heritage – Our Identity – Our Pride 2. Sikh Killings By Militants Confirm Deep RAW-TTP Links 3. India and Pakistan – Apologies should be genuine 4. Sikh Community Waiting for Justice 5. Punja Sahib: The Miracle that Refused to Happen 6. Khota Qabar & the Story of a Lost Battle 7. Sher-e-Punjab Maharaja Ranjit Singh 8. Baba Guru Nanak Dev Ji & His Message for Humanity

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YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.

We atWonders of Pakistan use copyrighted material the use of which may not have always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” only. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

Bursting the bubble of ‘Balochi Nationalism’

If all the Kuchi wandering clans, who sought refuge from their persecutors, having a history of not very distant past, today stake a claim on carving for themselves part of the Indus Basin civilization, on one fallacious myth or the other, let them be well adviced to kindly study their wanderings or the trails which led them here with the reasons why the crafty British created a geographic entity tittled Balochistan, affiliated to their present generic calling.

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THE MYTH OF BALOCHI NATIONALISM

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by Naveed Tajammal

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If all the Kuchi wandering clans, who sought refuge from their persecutors, having a history of not very distant past, today stake a claim on carving for themselves part of the Indus Basin civilization, on one fallacious myth or the other, let them be well adviced to kindly study their wanderings or the trails which led them here with the reasons why the crafty British created a geographic entity tittled Balochistan, affiliated to their present generic calling.