What makes a regional chaudhry?

According to Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, those states emerge and survive as great powers that are able to maintain a “balance of military and economic strength”. As Kennedy notes, “great power ascendancy correlates strongly to available resources and economic durability; military overstretch and a concomitant relative decline are the consistent threat facing powers whose ambitions and security requirements are greater than their resource base can provide for”. In other words, great world powers are made by their own achievements and through recognition by peers..

·

IF WE WANT TO BE  A CHAUDHARY LET US WORK TO BECOME ONE!

·

by Ardeshir Cowasjee

·

SOON after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement earlier this year that America was “betting” on India’s future and sought Indian presence beyond the region, numerous articles were written in Pakistani papers with titles such as ‘US daydreaming’, ‘Sponsoring India’s rise’, ‘Challenging regional environment’ and ‘America plays Indian game’.

The common theme of these articles, duly backed by the rantings of our television anchors, was that the US is ‘sponsoring’ India’s rise as a major power and since India is Pakistan’s eternal enemy, such US sponsorship of our eternal enemy should be unacceptable to and resisted by us.

Are major powers really sponsored and created by others? Our intellectually challenged prime minister summarised the contrived national sentiment when he said that Pakistan would not accept a chaudhry or hegemon in the South Asian region.

The Memogate Brouhaha

Mr. Haqqani’s audacious caper seems to have backfired spectacularly. Far from reining in the generals, President Zardari is weaker than ever. The military is confirmed in its suspicion that he would, if he could, sell them (and Pakistan) to the US. Its doubts about US intentions have increased, especially in respect of its nuclear arsenal. Husain Haqqani, for the time being, sits snug in his wife’s apartment in the presidency, occasionally issuing defiant Tweets (though not on the infamous Blackberry, now impounded, that, as Eliza Doolittle would say, had done him in!). Outside, angry mutters of treason trials are being heard. Memogate rolls on.

·

·

FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS!

·

·

by F B Ali

·

·

All of Pakistan has recently been watching with rapt attention the twists and turns of an unfolding scandal that the country’s febrile media has happily termed ‘Memogate’. The ruling party, in full defensive mode, watches apprehensively even as it bobs and weaves with every disclosure. The opposition parties gleefully plot and maneouvre to gain maximum advantage, while the generals nervously button and unbutton their holsters. 

Days of rage

Nearly 300 trucks carrying supplies to U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan clogged the Pakistani border crossings Sunday, leaving them vulnerable to militant attack a day after Islamabad closed the frontier in retaliation for coalition airstrikes that allegedly killed 24 Pakistani troops. As Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani attended the funerals of the victims, including a major, the U.S. sought to minimize the fallout from the crisis, which plunged Washington’s already troubled relationship with Islamabad to an all-time low. Pakistan also ordered the U.S. to vacate an airbase that is used by American drones to target al-Qaida and Taliban militants in the country’s tribal region along the Afghan border.

·

 NATO’S BLATANT ATTACK IS AN ACT OF TERROR (IN THE WAR ON TERROR)

·

the News Editorial

·

Pakistan, its government and its people have every right to express their sense of rage. Which country would not if the armed forces of another state had crossed its borders in the dead of night and fired on sleeping soldiers in a border-control post, killing 26 of them and wounding many others? Those who died were buried with full military honours on Sunday at a funeral attended by General Kayani, and the diplomatic storm gathered weight and power as the bodies were lowered into the ground. The incident has plunged the frosty Pak-US ties into deeper crisis.

Why is Greece in Trouble? The Analogy

The global financial crisis is an engineered strategy by the group to force the US-EU into a global war—WW III so that the nation called Zion emerges as the grand ruler. Next year –2012—is US presidential elections and beyond a shadow of doubt the Republicans will move into the White House in Jan 2013. The group will ensure that through the media, US and EU Reserve banks, energy, etc remain under it’s controls. They’ll call for the blood of Iran and Pakistan – once again – the choice of “you’re with us or with them”.

·

THE VANISHED BRIDGE

·

by Gulam Asgar Mitha

·

Some years ago a small rural town in Spain twinned with a similar town in Greece. The mayor of the Greek town visited the Spanish town. When he saw the palatial mansion belonging to the Spanish mayor he wondered how he could afford such a house.

The Spaniard said, “You see that bridge over there? The EU gave us a grant to build a two-lane bridge, but by building a single-lane bridge with traffic lights at either end, this house could be built.”

The following year, the Spaniard visited the Greek town. He was simply amazed at the Greek Mayor’s house, gold taps, marble floors, it was marvelous!

When he asked how this could be afforded the Greek said, “You see that bridge over there?”

The Spaniard replied, “No.”

***

MEMOGATE: Who in the World is Mansoor Ijaz? [II]

James Jones said, he was the intermediary who delivered to former military chief Admiral Mike Mullen a secret memorandum that he received from Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz and delivered it to Mullen in May. Mansoor Ijaz claims that he drafted the memo on the instructions of Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani, a charge denied by the envoy [who in the meanwhile has resigned]. Jones, was the NSA of President Barack Obama from January 2009 to October 2010.. Haqqani has been at the centre of what the media is referring to as the “Memogate” controversy since Mr. Ijaz claimed last month that the memo delivered to Mr. Mullen had sought American assistance to prevent a possible military takeover in the wake of the US raid that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden on May 2 this year.

·

THE (ULTIMATE) BELTWAY INSIDER

·

by Fasih Ahmed | The Newsweek

·

 In the days between Admiral Mullen’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in September—in which he said the “[Jalaluddin] Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency”—and the publication of his October op-ed, Ijaz says an exhausted Haqqani sounded him out on another matter.

 “He was ready to call it quits,” claims Ijaz, who urged the ambassador to “hang in there.”

 But what made Ijaz go rogue? Ijaz says he wrote the op-ed in reaction to the “harsh treatment” of Admiral Mullen by Pakistan’s media after his Senate testimony. “I opened the piece with the brief anecdote of what had been done in May to highlight the tangible actions that had been taken to deal with the growing interference and threat posed by extremist segments of the military and intelligence communities in Pakistan,” says Ijaz.

MEMOGATE: Who in the World is Mansoor Ijaz? [I]

Musawer Mansoor Ijaz has always been willful, a trait that worried his late father, so one summer afternoon in 1976, he organized a sort of intervention for the oldest of his five children, with some hefty help. “Abdus, can you please explain to this young man that being so headstrong is not good?” The professor’s friend, Dr. Abdus Salam, sized up the young Ijaz and smiled. “Do you remember how headstrong we were at that age? That’s how we got to where we are,” Salam told his friend, “so let him be.”  For 15-year-old Ijaz, Salam wasn’t one of the world’s most important scientists but simply the genial uncle who would bring chocolates each time he visited. Salam would eventually become Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, but despite that achievement he would die an outsider, heartlessly disowned as a heretic by most Pakistanis deeply suspicious of his Ahmadi beliefs. But the trait that worried Ijaz’s father has served the son well—as Salam knew it would.

·

THE (ULTIMATE) BELTWAY INSIDER

·

by Fasih Ahmed | The Newsweek

·

The startling allegations leveled by the Pakistani-American businessman and citizen diplomat have already claimed their first casualty. Meet the man who blew the whistle on Memogate.

Can Pakistan reinvent itself?

Isn’t it an irony that a nation imagined and inspired by Iqbal should end up as a client state of a corrupt and crumbling empire? Isn’t it about time Pakistan set itself free and made a fresh start in a new direction? If Pakistan is to rediscover itself as a proud nation respected by the world, it will have to stop living on borrowed glory. Only those who stand on their own feet without any crutches earn respect for themselves. It’s true of both individuals and nations. With its potential and resources – and its people, more than half of whom are young and are its most precious asset – Pakistan deserves better than the current lot of self-serving politicians. Imran Khan looks like a ray of hope but one man – however sincere – cannot change the system. The change will have to be all-embracing and universal. Pakistan needs more of such leaders and they must emerge from within, not foisted from outside. 

·

MEMOGATE SCANDAL: THE CURRENT ANGER AND OUTRAGE BE CHANNELISED TO BUILD A NEW, TRULY FREE PAKISTAN

·

by Aijaz Zaka Syed

·

Anything is possible in Pakistan, the land of infinite possibilities. The Pakistanis have grown so used to the setbacks and betrayals over the past six decades or so that nothing seems to shock or surprise them anymore. The tsunami unleashed by the Memogate saga, however, is proving to be an exception.

Even as a stunned nation tries to make sense of the claim by Pakistani-American Mansoor Ijaz that he delivered President Zardari’s SOS to Admiral Mike Mullen, the then chairman of US joint chiefs of staff, in May, seeking help against his own army, it’s increasingly worried about its future.

Looking back on the road to folly

The grubby Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neocon architect of the war, glibly predicted invading Iraq would cost a mere $40 billion and will be paid for by plundering its oil. But Wolfie’s jolly little war has so far cost $1 trillion.  In spite of the draw-down of US troops in Iraq, funding the remaining US garrison and the American-installed Baghdad regime remains enormously costly.  Much of the cost is hidden in CIA’s $54.1 billion “black” budget. The Bush and now Obama administrations have concealed the war’s cost from Americans by refusing to pay for it through a war tax.  Instead, the total cost of  this war was put on the surging national debt, leaving future generations to pay for Bush’s folly. As we look back on this epic folly and again hear calls for war against Iran, we hear the famed words of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, “one more such victory and we are lost.”

·

ATTACKING IRAN: AFTER IRAQ, ONE MORE SUCH VICTORY AND WE ARE LOST

·

by Eric Margolis

.

In October, 2002, I wrote an analysis of the impending Iraq War for “American Conservative” entitled “The Road to Folly.”

I observed, “A war that fails to achieve clear political objectives is merely an exercise in violence and futility.”   Having covered 14 conflicts as a war correspondent and the Mideast, I’ve seen a lot of violence and futility.

The White House launched a thunderous, utterly shameless propaganda campaign about phony threats to America and the world from President Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

On cue, US forces invaded Iraq in March, 2003.

In America, the “bodyguard of lies” that Churchill said accompanies every war swelled into an army of liars. The Bush administration’s neocons played a leading role in engineering the Iraq conflict. Media acted as megaphones for the war party.

Where nonsense has a life of its own

Suppose it was not just one memo delivered to Admiral Mike Mullen but a full dozen, would this paper trail have led to the castration of the Pakistani military at American hands? Would the army have been brought under the Pentagon’s control and our vaunted nuclear assets under American discipline? In God’s name what are we talking about? The American lobbying and think-tank scene is full of characters like Mansoor Ijaz. Remember the Iraqi conman Ahmed Chalabi who sold himself to Donald Rumsfeld and his crew as a future leader of Iraq? Washington DC crawls with such self-promoters. All right, he had what is being called an “explosive” memo delivered to Mike Mullen. Did the latter order the Sixth or Seventh Fleet into Pakistani waters? Did American drones start circling over the sites where our treasured nuclear assets are kept?

·

THE MOUNTAIN OF A MOLEHILL?

·

by Ayaz Amir

·

Ours must be the most insecure country in the world, and the most paranoid. We are terrified not just by our nightmares but our very shadows. And judging by our behaviour we seem to think that the rest of the world has nothing else on its mind but how to undermine the Islamic Republic’s impregnable foundations.

Husain Haqqani and Mansoor Ijaz deserve each other. They are of a kind. The BlackBerry evidence leaves little doubt that in the preparation of the memo, which has all of establishment Pakistan in a spin, both were in it together.

But suppose it was not just one memo delivered to Admiral Mike Mullen but a full dozen, would this paper trail have led to the castration of the Pakistani military at American hands? Would the army have been brought under the Pentagon’s control and our vaunted nuclear assets under American discipline? Some assets these, whose possession instead of making us a more confident nation seems to have made us more insecure.

The Politics Of Gas Pipelines In Asia

In January 2009, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO Secretary General, said, “Protecting pipelines is first and foremost a national responsibility. And it should stay like that. NATO is not in the business of protecting pipelines. But when there’s a crisis, or if a certain nation asks for assistance, NATO could, I think, be instrumental in protecting pipelines on land.” These comments suggest that NATO troops could be called upon to assist Afghanistan in protecting the pipeline. Since pipelines last 50 years or more, this could auger a very long commitment in Afghanistan. Interestingly, in February 2002 the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv had pointed out: “If one looks at the map of the big American bases created in the Afghan war, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.” 

·

EURASIA’S  PIPELINE

TANGLE

·

by Abdus Sattar Ghazali

·

 On November 14, Pakistan and Turkmenistan signed an agreement to build the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project under which Pakistan will get 1.3 billion cubic feet per day of gas. The agreement was signed during a visit by President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov of Turkmenistan to Islamabad.

 The trans-Afghanistan pipeline, first proposed in early 1990s, will transport Caspian Sea natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan and then to India.

 Under the proposed project, the 1,680 kilometre-long gas pipeline, backed by the Asian Development Bank, will bring 3.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day (bcfd) from Turkmenistan’s gas fields to Multan and end at the northwestern Indian town of Fazilka. Under the agreement, Afghanistan’s share will be 500 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd), Pakistan’s share will be 1,325 mmcfd and India’s 1,325 mmcfd.