Enter PML-F: A turning point in Sindh’s politics

In Punjab, the PML-N is set to face competition from the emerging PTI, PML-Q and PPP. However, one never thought that the political scenario in Sindh would be similarly fraught with stiff competition. This is because PPP has historically enjoyed a monopoly over Sindh.

But nobody knew what December 14, 2012 would bring forth.

December 14, was the day when the unprecedented monopoly of PPP was finally challenged. It was not PML-N nor the PTI, but the Pakistan Muslim League – Functional (PML-F) led by Syed Sibghatullah Shah Rashdi, popularly known as Pir Pagaro, that did so.

Fighting in the Fifth Dimension

Innovations in technology are changing the tactics of modern-day conflict, turning the cyberworld into a new frontline. ….

Read more »  aljazeera

Young Pakistanis turn to music to beat bombers

Against a backdrop of militant bombs and bullets, wealthy young Pakistanis are turning to the beat of modern music to help bring social change to their troubled Muslim nation.

“I love how when you enter the place, you’re completely transformed,” said DJ Faisal Big at a recent all-night rave in a brick factory courtesy of London’s Ministry of Sound.

“It doesn’t feel like Pakistan — definitely not the Pakistan you see on the media.” …

Read more → Radio Nethrlands Worldwide (RNW)

Pakistan could “pull troops Afghan from border” if U.S. cuts aid

By Zeeshan Haider

Islamabad : (Reuters) – Pakistan could pull back troops fighting Islamist militants near the Afghan border if the United States cuts off aid, the defense minister said on Tuesday in an interview with Pakistani media.

The United States Monday said it would hold back $800 million — a third of nearly $2 billion in security aid to Pakistan — in a show of displeasure over Pakistan’s removal of U.S. military trainers, limits on visas for U.S. personnel and other bilateral irritants.

“If at all things become difficult, we will just get all our forces back,” Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar said in an interview with the Express 24/7 television to be aired later on Tuesday.

The television aired excerpts of the interview Tuesday.

“If Americans refuse to give us money, then okay,” he said. “I think the next step is that the government or the armed forces will be moving from the border areas. We cannot afford to keep military out in the mountains for such a long period.”

In Pakistan, the defense minister is relatively powerless. Real defense and military policy is made by the powerful Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, and the head of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

Monday, the military said it could do without U.S. assistance by depending on its own resources or turning to “all-weather friend” China.

Mukhtar later told Reuters Pakistan wanted the money spent on the maintenance of the army in the tribal areas. “This is what we are demanding,” he said. “It is our own money.” ….

Read more → REUTERS

NATO Missile Strike Kills Gadhafi’s Son

Gadhafi Survives NATO Missile Strike That Killed Son

By RICHARD BOUDREAUX and CHARLES LEVINSON

TRIPOLI, Libya – A missile fired by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization struck a house where Col. Moammar Gadhafi was staying Saturday, missing the Libyan leader but killing his youngest son and three young grandchildren, a government spokesman said.

Col. Gadhafi and his wife were in the home of their 29-year-old son, Saif al-Arab Gadhafi, when the missile crashed through the one-story house in a Tripoli residential neighborhood, according to the spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim.

The young Mr. Gadhafi, who was reported killed, was the seventh son of the Libyan leader.

“The leader himself is in good health; he wasn’t harmed,” Mr. Ibrahim told a news conference early Sunday. “His wife is also in good health; she wasn’t harmed, [but] other people were injured.”

“This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country,” the spokesman added. “It seems intelligence was leaked. They knew about him being there, or they expected him. But the target was very clear.”

The attack could mark a volatile turning point in Col. Gadhafi’s 10-week-old battle against an armed popular uprising based in eastern Libya and the NATO bombing campaign that began in March. His regime is expected to use his son’s death to rally Libyans against foreign intervention in the conflict. His Libyan foes, based mainly in eastern Libya, hope the threat of similar NATO strikes will erode support for the leader within his inner circle.

NATO officials made no immediate comment on the fatal airstrike. …

Read more : THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Our textbooks and the lies they teach

By Raza Rumi

Due to the 18th Amendment, a momentous shift in Pakistan’s governance arrangements is taking place through a politically mediated and largely consensual manner. The federal government is being trimmed and 10 ministries have already been devolved to the provinces. A key development pertains to the devolution of education — lock, stock and barrel — to the provinces. Most notably, the odious era of setting poisonous, centralised curricula in the name of a ‘martial’ nationalism is finally over. Whether the past practices of turning Pakistan into a jihad project will end is uncertain, unless the provinces take the initiative and reverse the regrettable trajectory of the past.

Pakistani textbooks have preached falsehoods, hatred and bigotry. They have constructed most non-Muslims, especially Hindus, as evil and primordial enemies, glorified military dictatorships and omitted references to our great betrayal of the Bengali brothers and sisters who were the founders and owners of the Pakistan movement. It is time to correct these wrongs. ….

Read more : The Express Tribune

World War III: One Nation at a Time

Look past the puppets and above the globalists’ stage.

commentary by Tony Cartalucci

The globalists are infiltrating, corrupting, and turning the entire planet, one nation at a time in a combined scientific-geopolitical dictatorship that will be effectively impossible to reverse once it is completed. The latest Western-fueled conflagration in the Arab world indicates an accelerated regional strategy of destabilizing and taking over target nations. Nations like Russia and China, whose interests are being directly threatened and stripped away in this malicious melee, appear powerless and unprepared.

Some nations succumb in silence behind the scenes, others are invaded, mercilessly brutalized, and assimilated into the globalist combine. The civil society overlay the globalists use to establish what amounts to a subversive shadow government is always creeping forward no matter how hard a target nation may try to ward it off. Only in the most extreme cases, such as Qaddafi’s Libya has civil society been uprooted entirely – making military intervention an acceptable and inevitable alternative from a globalist perspective. …

Read more : Info Wars