by Julie McCarthy
While Pakistan battles an Islamist militancy that seeks to overthrow the state, another lesser-known conflict rages on its soil. In the southwest province of Baluchistan, separatist fighters are clashing with security forces and killing anyone they see as the enemy.
… We have been tracking Pakistan’s battles with an Islamist militancy that seeks to overthrow the state. In the next few minutes, we’ll hear about a different sort of fight: militants in the remote province of Baluchistan want to break away from Pakistan all together. It’s a fight where both the separatists and government forces are being accused of using viscous tactics. NPR’s Julie McCarthy has more. ….
Read more: → NPR.ORG
Sindhi song.
– YouTube
Pakistani politicians in talk shows. The language of the show is urdu (Hindi).
Courtesy: Aaj Kamran Khan Ke Saath ( special show ) 29th June 2011.
The language of the discussion is urdu (Hindi).
Courtesy: ARY NEWS TV (Program “Pakistan Tonight with Fahad Hussain” – 29th June 2011 -1 )
by Dr Shabir Choudhry
28 June 2011 – In a parliamentary form of government a party that gets majority forms the next government; and the party leader becomes a Prime Minister. This happens in every democratic and civilised country. However, rules in a Pakistani occupied territory known as Azad Kashmir (independent Kashmir) are different.
PPP emerged as the winner in the elections. It was expected, as always is the case, a ruling party in Islamabad gets the desired results in Azad Kashmir to suits its needs. Barrister Sultan Mehmood, former Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir and a leader of the PPP was interviewed by a Pakistani TV. He happily claimed to have got the majority to form the government. The TV journalist asked him who is going to be the Prime Minister. Barrister Sultan Mehmood with a fake smile on his face said: Zardari Sahib will decide who is going to be the Prime Minister’ (of Azad Kashmir). ….
Read more: → Dr. Shabir Choudhry
Excerpt:
…. If the US stops drone attacks, can Imran Khan give the guarantee that the Taliban — ardent adherents of an anti-democratic political system — will stop coercing society into theocratic chaos? If he deliberates for a few moments on this prospect, he will be as silent as he has been about religious terrorism. So, does it mean that he is ready to turn Pakistan into a theocratic state? Probably yes, whether he knows/acknowledges it or not. In private conversations he has been an admirer of the tribal jirga system, which shows that the idealisation of tribal institutions has been part of his mindset.
Besides opposing the US intervention, his political campaigns have been criticising and exposing the ruling political elite. Again, we know what he does not want but we do not know what he wants the Pakistani socio-political system to be. Mysteriously, he has not been very vocal about the role of the Pakistani military in the disaster-ridden evolution of Pakistan. He has not articulated the genesis of the socio-political ills that have proliferated under military rule. ….
To read complete article → Wichaar
Courtesy: → ARY NEWS TV, YouTube
– If Afghanistan has not become a modern functioning state after 10 years of American-led presence in the country, it should not be taken as a sign of the US’s defeat in our neighbourhood.
President Barack Obama has announced the drawdown plan whereby the US will gradually withdraw its combat forces from Afghanistan. The announcement comes almost 10 years after the American-led forces landed in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Such is the nature of warfare now that the battle is seldom between easily identifiable entities nor are its results a cut and dried victory for one side and a defeat for the other. Truth, as the old cliché goes, still remains the first casualty of warfare and different sides will claim victory in the mess that is Afghanistan now.
Here I will mention and put into perspective a version of the truth that will come from the self-congratulating triumphal camp within Pakistan who will portray the Obama announcement as an American defeat in Afghanistan. They will tell you the following things: the US, like the Soviet Union, has been defeated in Afghanistan. The Soviets had to pull out the last of their soldiers in little over 10 years and the Americans have started their withdrawal in the same timeframe. No matter how superior American military power, it is no match for the soldiers of Islam. And, if you need any proof, this is the victory of the Islamists against a decadent west. The American decision to gradually withdraw and approve negotiations with the Taliban is a vindication of the Pakistani establishment’s long-held view. That Islamabad has always maintained that the Taliban are a political force in Afghanistan and there can be no stable Afghanistan without the Taliban having a significant say in its political system. Finally, that time is on the Taliban and Pakistani side and ultimately any future political setup in Kabul will have to accommodate Islamabad’s genuine interests.
Before you accept this version of the truth, keep the following in mind: 10 years of the US’s presence had an identifiable beginning and the drawdown announcement is part of an undefined endgame. The Americans have had failures in the process but they can claim some salient victories. Pakistani analysts need to keep those victories in mind when issuing verdicts about the American ‘defeat’ in Afghanistan. Pakistan has not gained much by its strategic choices of the past 10 years and its current policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds does not portend well for the country.
The US mounted the attack on Afghanistan’s Taliban regime because it considered the Taliban as the providers of safe havens to the forces that had attacked the US mainland in September 2001. It managed to have all its NATO allies be part of the US-led mission. Step one of the US’s policy was to punish the Taliban regime, and this they did quite successfully by dismantling it. The second step was to go after al Qaeda in this part of the world. This culminated in the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In the past 10 years, if one goes by the US’s account, it has greatly eliminated the al Qaeda’s leadership base in Afghanistan.
As a result, in these 10 years, there has not been any major attack on the US mainland, and the likelihood of any such attack coordinated from the Af-Pak corridor is quite slim. From the US’s vantage point, 10 years of engagement started with the successful dismantling of the Taliban regime, and now the killing of bin Laden will serve as the beginning of a long end.
In the meantime, American politicians tried to, simultaneously, put in place the state and nation building project in Afghanistan. Many sensible analysts had all along, and rightly so, maintained that it was a doomed project and not in the US’s best interests. If Afghanistan has not become a modern functioning state after 10 years of American-led presence in the country, it should not be taken as a sign of the US’s defeat in our neighbourhood.
What about Pakistan in all of this? It is at a crossroads. From now on, if it exclusively backs the Taliban in Afghanistan, it will be supporting forces that are determined to tear apart the fabric of the Pakistani state. If it wants to have a diverse political portfolio in Afghanistan then time may be fast running out. One hopes that the policymakers in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, unlike the ghairat (honour) brigade of the small screen, do not read the Obama announcement as an unmitigated victory for Pakistan. Pakistan’s security policy choices have isolated the country and adopting a triumphal tone will not change that fact.
The writer teaches political science at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He can be reached at hnizamani@hotmail.com
Courtesy: → Daily Times
Former Chief of Army Staff, General (R) Mirza Aslam Beg’s interview with Dr. Danish on ARY NEWS TV. The language of the interview is urdu (Hindi).
Courtesy: ARY NEWS TV (Program “Sawal Yeh Hai“, 26th June 2011-1), YouTube
Excerpt:
….. Myths proliferate. The AJK assembly represents Azad Kashmir and the territory administered by India across the Line of Control. Since the refugees from the other side are scattered all over Pakistan, AJK elections for seats from the ‘other side’ are held in other provinces too. The MQM, which had won two seats last time, wanted to retain them both, but the PPP wanted one. When the MQM did not agree, the inspector-general of the Sindh police reported that conditions for polls in Sindh were not good, thus allowing the government to postpone voting. This has led to another PPP-MQM rift which promises to get worse in the coming days, with MQM leader Altaf Hussain saying that “the end of the PPP has begun”.
Everybody knows that India rules Kashmir from New Delhi, calling the head of the executive there chief minister; Pakistan has sensationalised the myth by calling the AJK chief executive the prime minister while ruling AJK from Islamabad. Once, the Muslim Conference was the blue-eyed boy of the establishment. Under General Ziaul Haq, Sardar Qayyum and Nawaz Sharif were equal beneficiaries at the fountainhead of power. The Muslim Conference thought it could go along with President Pervez Musharraf and switch off jihad. Sardar Atique is blameless today. The fact is that the establishment has rolled back the Musharraf policy and dumped his party.
A ‘flexible’ President Asif Ali Zardari has taken the PPP into the embrace of the establishment, concerned about reviving the ‘safe havens’ scaled down by Musharraf. On the other hand, the PML-N is challenging the establishment, not because of any difference in its thinking, but because of the PPP. It can switch off its intense criticism of the army if the latter dumps the PPP. The military is not particularly enamoured of the PPP. Furthermore, in comparison with the PML-N, it is less fearful of the PPP because of the PML-N’s reach and clout in the country’s most populous province. And clout matters within the officers’ corps. ….
To read complete editorial: → The Express Tribune
KARACHI: The government’s main coalition partner, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, said Monday it had quit the beleaguered administration, citing the “dictatorial” and “brutal” approach of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party.
“The MQM leadership and workers have reached the conclusion it is difficult to go along with the Pakistan People’s Party, keeping in view its democratic and dictatorial attitude,” senior party official Farooq Sattar told reporters. …
Read more: → DAWN.COM
By the CNN Wire Staff
(CNN) — The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants Monday for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and two of his relatives. …
Read more: → CNN
by Wendy Johnson
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
As extra-judicial killings in Balochistan start to receive international attention, words like “serial killers” are finally appearing in the coverage. In “Pakistan’s secret dirty war,” Declan Walsh writes, “The stunning lack of interest in Pakistan’s greatest murder mystery in decades becomes more understandable, however, when it emerges that the prime suspect is not some shady gang of sadistic serial killers, but the country’s powerful military and its unaccountable intelligence men.” …
Read more: → crisisbalochistan.com
HRCP slams violence by hooligans at PU
Press release- Lahore, June 27: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has expressed alarm at torture against students of Punjab University’s Philosophy Department by armed activists allegedly belonging to Islami Jamiat Talaba (IJT) early on Sunday, which left seven students injured.
– Insurgents suffer bloody reprisals
By Cyril Almeida
QUETTA: A deadly campaign of killings in Baloch areas has driven a low-level insurgency in Balochistan further underground, curtailing insurgent attacks in the province but raising fears that a new generation of Baloch youth may embrace separatist violence.Since June last year, the bodies of approximately 170 Baloch men aged between 20 and 40 have been recovered, victims of the so-called ‘kill and dump’ operations. …
Read more: → DAWN.COM
– A weaker insurgency, but with new contours
By Cyril Almeida, dawn.com
QUETTA: The decline in insurgent violence over the past year, at the cost of savage violence by the state, has produced a fragile recovery in Quetta and other insurgency-hit parts of Balochistan.
Continue reading Shouting about Indian repression in Kashmir is hypocrisy
– The Double Game
The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan.
by Lawrence Wright
Excerpt:
…. India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism. Politically and economically, it verges on being a failed state. And, despite Pakistani avowals to the contrary, America’s worst enemy, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding there for years—in strikingly comfortable circumstances—before U.S. commandos finally tracked him down and killed him, on May 2nd.
American aid is hardly the only factor that led these two countries to such disparate outcomes. But, at this pivotal moment, it would be a mistake not to examine the degree to which U.S. dollars have undermined our strategic relationship with Pakistan—and created monstrous contradictions within Pakistan itself. …
… Within the I.S.I., there is a secret organization known as the S Wing, which is largely composed of supposedly retired military and I.S.I. officers. “It doesn’t exist on paper,” a source close to the I.S.I. told me. The S Wing handles relations with radical elements. “If something happens, then they have deniability,” the source explained. If any group within the Pakistani military helped hide bin Laden, it was likely S Wing.
Eight days before Osama bin Laden was killed, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistani Army, went to the Kakul military academy in Abbottabad, less than a mile from the villa where bin Laden was living. “General Kayani told the cadets, ‘We have broken the backbone of the militants,’ ” Pir Zubair Shah, the reporter, told me. “But the backbone was right there.” Perhaps with a touch of theatre, Hamid Gul, the former I.S.I. chief, publicly expressed wonder that bin Laden was living in a city with three army regiments, less than a mile from an élite military academy, in a house that appeared to have been built expressly to protect him. Aside from the military, Gul told the Associated Press, “there is the local police, the Intelligence Bureau, Military Intelligence, the I.S.I. They all had a presence there.”
To read complete article : ♦ The New Yorker
→ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_wright#ixzz1QU3ZbWsw
– Musadiq Sanwal recalls the life and ways of a dear poet friend, Hasan Dars
Life is but one of the small pieces of Rilli
If you won’t sit on it,
I better fold it.
Out of the blue the other day I received the text message: “Hasan Dars passed away”. I thought it was a joke. How could it be? Hasan was still an adolescent! Maybe it is not the right word, but his energy, his wide, poetry-breathing grin, how could it all have suddenly evaporated into thin air? There was something terribly wrong with the message.
by Eric Margolis
Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Rudyard Kipling “Recessional”
NEW YORK – War is waged to achieve political objectives, not to kill enemies. In this sense, the United States has lost the ten-year Afghan conflict, its longest war. Afghanistan remains the “graveyard of empires.”
The US has failed to install an obedient regime in Kabul that controls Afghanistan. It has made foes of the Pashtun majority, and, in pursuing this war, gravely undermined Pakistan. Claims that US forces were in Afghanistan to hunt the late Osama bin Laden were widely disbelieved.
Last Wednesday, President Barack Obama bowed to public opinion, approaching elections, military reality and financial woes by announcing he would withdraw a third of the 100,000 US troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer. Pentagon brass growled open opposition.
US allies France and Germany announced similar troops reductions. All foreign troops are supposed to quit Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Washington currently spends at least $10 billion monthly on the Afghan war, not counting “black” payments, CIA and NSA operations. The US has poured $18.8 billion in development aid into Afghanistan since 2001 with nothing to show for the effort. Pakistan has been given $20 billion to support the Afghan War.
The US deficit is heading over $1.4 trillion. The national debt, when unfunded pensions and benefits are added, is likely $100 trillion, according to the chief of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond trader.
Forty-four million Americans now receive food stamps; the national infrastructure of roads, airports, bridges and schools is crumbling from neglect. Unemployment, officially at 9.5%, is probably closer to 20%.
The cry is being heard: “Rebuild America, not Afghanistan.”
In spite of intense pro-war propaganda, over half of Americans now oppose the Afghan War. Even US-installed Afghan president Hamid Karzai calls it, “ineffective, apart from causing civilian casualties.”
So will the US really pull out of Afghanistan? That remains to be seen. There are contradictory signs.
Mid-level talks between the US and Taliban are under way. The US will probably keep some of its remaining 66,000 soldiers in Afghanistan after 2014, rebranding them training troops. The huge US bases at Kandahar and Bagram will be retained.
Billions more will be spent on the Afghan government army and police. They have so far proved ineffective because most are composed of Tajik and Uzbek mercenaries who are hated and distrusted by the Pashtun.
A similar process is underway in Iraq where “withdrawal” means keeping renamed US combat brigades in Iraq, thousands of mercenaries, and US combat forces in neighboring Kuwait and the Gulf. New US embassies in Baghdad and Kabul– huge, fortified complexes with their own mercenary combat forces– will be the world’s biggest. Kabul will have a staff of 1,000 US personnel. Bin Laden called them “crusader fortresses.”
In addition, the US will still arm and finance allied Tajik and Uzbek militias in Afghanistan. Financing Pakistan’s US-backed regime and Uzbekistan must also continue at around $3 billion yearly.
The US appears to be going and staying at the same time. By contrast, Taliban’s position is clear and simple: it will continue fighting until all foreign troops are withdrawn. US special forces, drones and hit squads have been unable to assassinate enough Taliban commanders to make the mujahidin stop fighting.
Americans never study history, not even their own. They don’t recall founding father, the great Benjamin Franklin, who said, “there is no good war, and no bad peace.” Or that the Pashtun Taliban and its allies are fierce, dedicated, undefeated warriors. I’ve been in combat with them and remain in awe of their courage and love of combat. The Pashtun mujahidin will keep fighting as always, as long as their ammunition lasts.
America, for all its B-1 heavy bombers, strike fighters, missiles, helicopter gunships and drones, armor, super electronics, spies in the sky and all the other high tech weapons of modern war has failed to defeat some 30,000 tribal fighters with nothing more than small arms and legendary valor.
The US has lost the all important military initiative in Afghanistan. It may linger there, but it cannot win.
Courtesy: → ericmargolis
http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/a-real-pullout-or-a-shell-game.aspx
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan President Hamid Karzai accuses Pakistan of firing 470 rockets into two of its eastern border provinces in a three-week barrage.
Afghan security forces said Sunday that 36 people have died in the barrages, which hit civilians in areas where NATO forces have withdrawn. After the civilians fled, Pakistani Taliban came in and occupied the cleared areas, Afghan border officials said. …
Read more: → HuffingtonPost
Memoirs of a British civil servant never seen in public until now show how much the partition of India was decided by just two men, the BBC’s Alastair Lawson reports. …
Read more: → BBC
– BY MIRA SETHI
Two months after Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, was assassinated by his own bodyguard for criticizing the country’s blasphemy law, the only Christian member of the Pakistani cabinet, Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, was killed for doing his job—advocating protection of the country’s two million Christians.
Taseer’s assassination prompted a debate: Was the blasphemy law, introduced by Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s in his bid to “Islamize” Pakistan, being exploited for mundane interests? Was it leading to witch hunts? Bhatti’s death should prompt Pakistanis to ask themselves an equally disquieting question: Does Pakistan have a future as …
Read more: → THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The fact that the people in Balochistan and Kurdistan are increasingly willing to sacrifice shows that they have lost all hope of achieving their rights within the existing systems. The fact that the immeasurable brutality of the state has not dampened their spirit of resistance proves freedom cannot be suppressed by repression ….
Read more: → Daily Times
Firing in Defence Karachi kills five; hurts seven
KARACHI: At least five people have been killed including Talay Bugti, the grandson of late Nawab Akbar Bugti, and another seven injured in an incident of firing at a private gathering in a bungalow located in Defence Khayaban-e-Rahat area in Karachi late on Saturday, SAMAA reported.
Initial reports suggested that the Baloch leader Talal Bugti of Jamhori Watan Party (JWP) was also among dead. However, later it was confirmed by hospital sources that the killed man was Talay Bugti instead of Talal.
According to sources, the exchange of fire between the security guards after some arguments on conflicting points emerged during a dance party led to the killing.
Law enforcement agencies including police and rangers have converged to the crime site and kicked off investigations after placing strict cordon around the area.
Meanwhile, the dead bodies and the injured people have been shifted to a private hospital for autopsy and medical attainment respectively. SAMAA
– MQM boycotts AJK elections
KARACHI: Lamenting the postponement of elections on two seats of Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) assembly reportedly for security reasons, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) has announced to boycott the elections. ….
Read more: → GEO
The long sulk – by Ayaz Amir
Corps commanders? Our guardians seem more like cry commanders these days, wearing their anger and hurt on their sleeves and refusing to come out of the sulk into which they went after Abbottabad…a place destined from now on to be less associated with Major Abbott and more with that warrior of Islam from whose parting kick we have yet to recover, Osama bin Laden.
True, May has been a cruel month for the army and Pakistan, with troubles coming not in single spies but entire battalions: the Mehran attack, Frontier Corps marksmanship in Quetta, Sindh Rangers zeal in Karachi, and the death by torture of the journalist Saleem Shahzad… this last bearing all the hallmarks of insanity tipping over the edge.
Which raw nerves had his reporting touched? Who could have kidnapped him on a stretch of road probably the securest in Islamabad? Mossad, RAW, the CIA, the Taliban? Definite proof we don’t have but circumstances point in an uncomfortable direction. If this is another conspiracy against Pakistan we ourselves have written its script.
Still, since when was sulking an answer to anything? It may suit kids and pretty girls but it makes an army command look silly, especially one prone to take itself so seriously.
Terseness should be a quality of military writing: that and precision. The rambling nature of the statement issued after last week’s corps commanders’ conference is likely to leave one baffled. It rails against the “perceptual biases” of elements out to drive a wedge between the army and the nation; contains such bromides as the need for national unity; and in part reads like a thesis on Pak-US relations, which it should not have been for the corps commanders to delineate in public.
The army has “perceptual biases” of its own. It should keep them to itself.
The National Defence University, one of the biggest white elephants in a city dedicated to this species, seems to be an idea ahead of its time. Pakistani generals putting on intellectual airs is no laughing matter. Half our troubles can be traced to ‘intellectual’ generals.
Admittedly, these are troubling times for Pakistan and the army command post-Osama is under a great deal of pressure. But the answer to this should be grace under pressure, coolness under fire, rather than desperation and hurt pride.
There are legitimate questions arising from the discovery of Bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad. We should answer them without losing our cool. And, preferably, we should avoid the temptation of climbing the rooftops and beating the drums of national pride and dignity. Why is it so difficult for us to understand that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have compromised our sovereignty more than all the drones fired by the CIA?
And, please, let’s get rid of the notion that Islamist militancy is a response to the American presence in this region. Uncomfortable as this truth may be, Pakistan had become the crossroads of international jihad much before 9/11 and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan. The ISI was up to its neck with Afghan and Kashmir jihad much before these events. It won’t do to hide our heads in the sand and pretend that none of this happened or that the world is responsible for our woes.
In fact it is the other way round. The CIA footprint in Pakistan is a response to the jihadi footprint in this country. The Raymond Davises came afterwards. The flaming warriors of Al-Qaeda and its local affiliates, many of them trained and nurtured by the army and its subordinate agencies, came earlier. And if we are to be honest with ourselves, the CIA footprint, unconscionably large as it may be, could never come close to the enormous dimensions of the jihadi footprint on the variegated landscape of the Islamic Republic.
If half the passion the army is now showing in defence of national sovereignty in the wake of the Abbottabad embarrassment, had been displayed against Al-Qaeda-inspired jihadism we wouldn’t have been in the mess we are in now.
The world has moved on, other concerns have risen to the fore and no one, anywhere, has any patience for these games any more. They just don’t fit into the framework of present-day events. Why can’t we move on?
Let’s disabuse ourselves of another notion. There is no international conspiracy against Pakistan. We are not that important an international player to merit that kind of attention. No one is eyeing the nebulous frontiers of our sovereignty. We are the authors of our own troubles and the sooner the army command starts accepting the truth of this the sooner can begin the task of rectification.
Viva Arab music!
– YouTube
– Seized Phone Offers Clues to Bin Laden’s Pakistani Links
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men in Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say.
The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency, given that it had mentored Harakat and allowed it to operate in Pakistan for at least 20 years, the officials and analysts said.
In tracing the calls on the cellphone, American analysts have determined that Harakat commanders had called Pakistani intelligence officials, the senior American officials said. ….
Read more: The New York Times
– – – – – –
More details: BBC urdu
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