Pakistani general ‘Tiger Niazi’ was obsessed to change the “Nasl of buzdil Bengalis”

‘Genetic engineering’ in East Pakistan

By Khaled Ahmed

Pakistan’s name has been blackened by just one man: General AAK ‘Tiger’ Niazi. According to a new book by Oxford University Press, he is supposed to have pronounced the words that even Genghis Khan would have hesitated to use: that he would let loose his soldiers on the women of East Pakistan till the lineage/ethnicity of the Bengali race was changed.

The account has come from a true son of Pakistan, late Major-General (retd) Khadim Hussain Raja in his recently published book A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan, 1969-1971 (OUP, 2012). The book is posthumously published probably because it was a hot potato in the times it was actually written. He was General Officer Commanding 14 Division in East Pakistan.

What’s Wrong with Pakistan?

Why geography — unfortunately — is destiny for South Asia’s troubled heartland.

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Perversity characterizes Pakistan. Only the worst African hellholes, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Iraq rank higher on this year’s Failed States Index. The country is run by a military obsessed with — and, for decades, invested in — the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes. But despite an overbearing military, tribes “defined by a near-universal male participation in organized violence,” as the late European anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, dominate massive swaths of territory. The absence of the state makes for 20-hour daily electricity blackouts and an almost nonexistent education system in many areas.

A society obsessed with love for death – By Mujahid Hussain

During 1990s, Pasban the “Revolutionary Brigade” of Jamaat-e-Islami came up with a slogan “If we won’t succeed in equitable redistribution of resources, we’ll distribute the hunger and poverty on equal basis”. Majority of newspaper intellectuals found themselves enchanted in the apparent structure of the sentence with understanding the real implications of this vague and rather unreasonable slogan and kept them busy in forecasting a potential revolution from the village Karbath in outskirt of Lahore. But one fine morning it was Pasban itself that was found in the middle of a revolution and Jamaat-e-Islami also got some tranquility as a result. Not long ago a newspaper published a photograph of a shop where a routine ‘Sale’ was the advertised in these words: “Suicidal Attack Sale”. There was a flashback of same slogans in one’s mind when on 30th October 2011 the chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e- Insaf, Imran Khan while addressing the grandest ever rally of his party in Lahore declared that “Tsunami of Tahreek-e-Insaf has arrived here”. Pasban a movement of some emotional youth wanted to distribute want and hunger on equitable grounds if their campaign to provide social justice to masses fails in any case; the trader of Lahore emphasized the expanse of his price-reduction as “suicide attack” while the chief of PTI used the euphemism of a catastrophic term of tsunami to highlight his intent to provide social justice to all citizens of state and to end corruption from the country. Have we fallen short of agreeable and pro-life lexicon even to denote a positive action? ….

Read more » View Point

For Pakistan to change, army must change

– by Ayaz Amir

Decades of misadventure have distorted and even corrupted the Pakistani mind. We do not live in the real world. Our foreign policy notions, our list of assets and threats, have but a remote relation to reality. We must look to first causes. How did we create these bonfires for ourselves? How did we become prisoners of our misconceptions? Liberating the Pakistani mind from the shackles of these self-imposed errors must be the first of our tasks if, with luck, we are to become a normal nation.

The army and its strategic adventures have brought Pakistan to its present pass. The footprints of the terrorism now haunting the country go back to the first Afghan ‘jihad’, the one army-inspired event which pushed Pakistan to the frontiers of insanity. The phoenix won’t rise from its ashes, and there will be no return to sanity, unless the army can bring itself to change its outlook and reinvent some of its mental apparatus.

Civilians have been poor administrators, in no position to escape their share of the blame for the mess the Fortress of Islam is in. But in the driving seat of Pakistan’s steady march to the brink have been our holy guardians. There is little room for quibbling on this point.

Even so, despite the mounting evidence of disorder, the army refuses to change, still obsessed with the threat from the east, still caught up with the quixotic notion of exercising influence in Afghanistan. God in heaven, why should it matter to us if a president of Afghanistan is a Tajik, an Uzbek or a Pathan? Can’t we keep our eyes focused on our own problems? The threat we face lies squarely within but our strategic grandmasters insist on being foreign policy specialists.

If a Stalin were around, although fat chance of that occurring, he would lay his hands first not on militants and assorted terrorists but on the foreign policy experts who infest our television studios.

Is Mossad pulling the strings of terrorism in Karachi? Was the CIA behind the attack on Shia pilgrims in Mastung? Was RAW behind the attempt on the life of the Karachi special investigator, Chaudhry Aslam?

By any reasonable computation we have enough of a nuclear arsenal. By any yardstick of common sense, a commodity often in short supply in the conference rooms of national security, we have as much of a deterrent as we need to counter the real or imagined threat from India. This being the case, we should be directing what energies we have to the threat from within: that posed by militancy marching under the banner of Islam.

As part of this undertaking, we need to advertise for a Hakim Luqman who could cure our general staff and the ISI of their preoccupation with the future of Afghanistan. We have been burnt by Afghanistan. We don’t need any further burning. For the sake of Pakistan’s future we need to distance ourselves from Afghanistan’s problems, dire as they are.