As if the ravages of the floods, the incompetence of the government, and the shenanigans surrounding cricket were not bad enough, there is an additional cause of national depression: a group – ‘Kondemn the whole Kommunity Klan’, or the KKK – is actively pushing the narrative that Pakistan is a failed state because this nation, culturally, does not have the attributes of a successful civilisation.

The madness in Sialkot seems to have triggered their wholesale laceration of Pakistanis. This incident has been mounted on the billboards of ridicule as the final verdict on this all those who live here. According to one member of the KKK, our entire history is so designed as to only produce violence and bloodbath. In other words, we as a people, are historically, culturally, and politically wish death and destruction upon ourselves and on others.

Other members of the KKK are busy in drawing rooms spreading the argument that Pakistan’s experiment in attaining the level of a civilisation has failed. As exemplified by the horror of the beating-to-death of two brothers, those who live in this land have become permanently unhinged.

The cause of their anguish is understandable – the horrendous sight of humans being bludgeoned to pulp can wreck any soul and make people shout from the roof-tops in anger and hurt. But their conclusion is downright racist and alarmingly malignant – that this incident is further proof of a barbaric nature of the whole nation.While our grasp of world history may be faulty but we have poured over enough paper to know that the Indus civilisation does not have a monopoly over lynch mobs, witch-hunters, and stake-burners. Nor does the subcontinent species have beastliness built into its bones. The entire European history, as indeed British and American history is soaked in blood, sometimes shed in the name of religion, sometimes in name of carrying the white man’s burden, but mostly in brutal self-interest.

All colonialists were master killers. The British took the cake in managing meticulous elimination in the lands they occupied for gold, slaves and the glory of the crown. Today’s civilisational success – on whose merit according to the KKK, we don’t measure up – is built on yesterday’s systematic murder of weak natives.

These attitudes, though regulated and controlled, are still prevalent – as much in white, western societies are they are observed in the coloured eastern countries. Beneath the angelic calm of material achievement of these societies – which is enviable and laudable – lurks a blood-thirsty beast that demands annihilation every now and then. The US-led, British-backed war in Iraq is a manifestation of this beast. Need we recall how the Iraqis were, and are being killed? What transpired in those awful prison cells that were guarded by the progeny of successful civilisations? Need we talk about extermination in Afghanistan and the daily dance of death that goes by the name of collateral damage? Should we cite – again – the nuclear attack on Japan?

The KKK’s argument that Pakistanis are collectively responsible for the brutality of a few individuals is Hitlerian in accusation. It is absurd to say that since Pakistani film-goers used to lionise Sultan Rahi that means that they love violence. This is no more evidence of national penchant for violence than the Hollywood’s glorification of James Bond’s hi-tech mayhem and murder. And if we must take fictional characters as reflections of deeply-ingrained social attitudes, then Hollywood’s cannibals, flesh-eaters, vampires, mobsters, gangsters, rapists, torturers, and yes, ‘Terminators’ and paedophiles, have to be seen as mirror images of the inner self of the West.

In the same vein the English doctor Harold Shipman known as ‘Dr Death’ who killed 215 of his patients over a 23-year period can be seen as the way of the English. Or the burning of the Christians and pogroms of the Muslims should be seen as the collective intent of the Indian society. The point is that no society is collectively condemnable. No one nation can be held responsible for the sins of a few individuals. Millions of great men and women are at work serving their fellow human beings in this country. They should not be slighted and insulted by stereotyping them as failed human beings. The KKK should have a heart.

Or get another passport.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 1st, 2010

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The entourage of visiting Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Soeren Pind also included two journalists who were blacklisted by the Government of Pakistan and forced out of the country with the direction that they should not be granted visas in future.

Sources in the Federal Government informed TheNation that Ms Puk Damsgard Anderson and Ms Semi Jan, both Danish journalists, were blacklisted by the Ministry of Interior and after cancellation of their visas, they were previously deported in May and June last respectively. It was clearly mentioned in the letter that both the ladies were blacklisted permanently and all the departments including Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other concerned departments were duly intimated in this connection.
Sources further informed that Government had bowed to the demand of Danish Government that both these ladies should be removed from the list of persons blacklisted by the Government of Pakistan for their clandestine and dubious activities considered detrimental to the national interests. 

It was further informed that the names of both the ladies were deleted from the list on the direction of Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik and following this, the Pakistan Embassy in Denmark had issued visit visas to both these ladies who had the history of several years stay in Pakistan both as journalist and social worker.

It is pertinent to mention here that Semi Jan is Danish national having Pakistan background and Ministry of Interior had serious allegations against both these ladies and after having solid evidence against both these ladies, they were blacklisted and deported from the country.

Now both these ladies were part of the entourage of Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Soeren Pind, who, according to a source in the Government, had played a vital role in deletion of their names from negative list barred from visiting Pakistan.
When contacted neither the spokesman of Ministry of Interior was available nor the Interior Minister took his cell phone when contacted by TheNation for his comments. The Nation

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Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. While the people of Pakistan are resilient enough to face natural disasters it seems they are hapless when it comes to man-made fiascos. One incident that had disaster written all over it took place in New York on August 26, 2010 which not only caused embarrassment for Pakistan, but left Pakistanis absolutely stunned. The president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), to show solidarity with millions of Pakistanis badly affected by the recent floods, graciously offered the Nasdaq screen on Time Square, New York, to Pakistan’s consulate with the sole purpose of generating public awareness about the heart-wrenching destruction and devastation caused to life and property in Pakistan. Highlighting the plight and misery of the flood victims meant gathering support and donations for the flood-drowned country.

In a dismal lack of sensitivity, instead of projecting images of the devastation caused in areas ravaged by the flash floods, our pompous, self-serving, incompetent and shameless officials decided to display their own photographs with a slide that read, “Welcome to New York from the Consulate General of Pakistan Mr. R.S.A Babar Hashmi.” One wonders whether these Pakistani diplomats were raising awareness about their country’s predicament or promoting tourism in New York? Failing to capitalise on the NYSE’s offer, these officials of the Pakistan Mission not only ruined a chance to collect a substantial amount for their flood-hit brethren but infuriated the NYSE members to the extent that one of them remarked, “We were stupid to offer this opportunity to Pakistan.” 

When merit, competence and professionalism are ignored and appointment letters are reserved for the blue-eyed boys of the high and mighty; when senior positions are given to the utterly incompetent; when cronyism, nepotism, corruption and bribery reign supreme, what else can be expected? The only thing that bothers one is that while the shameless are walking with their heads high, the deserving, capable, responsible and committed are bearing the brunt of neglect.

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has ordered an inquiry into the matter, but then inquiries are in reality delaying tactics till memory fades. These officials need to be sacked immediately and replaced by competent and dedicated ones who represent and protect the interests of the sending state.

It’s pertinent to recall that Time Square is the same place where a car bomb attempt by Faisal Shahzad on May 1, 2010 was luckily foiled, saving precious lives. New York is the same place where a proposal to build an Islamic centre and mosque – two blocks from the World Trade Centre (WTC) site – has drawn a lot of criticism and the placards of hardliners state, “You can build a mosque at Ground Zero when we can build a Synagogue in Mecca.” In spite of all the commotion, the New Yorkers and the president of the New York Stock Exchange showed a magnanimous gesture of helping out Pakistanis in their hour of dire need. Setting aside the fact that Pakistan’s consulate failed miserably to avail the gesture of sympathy it’s important to convey that Pakistanis are deeply touched and truly indebted for the support and concern.

The UNO and other aid agencies recently declared that Pakistan is suffering from “image deficit” in the world and the slow flow of aid funds is because the country is linked to corruption and terrorism. “There are concerns expressed both here and back home (Britain) with the level of corruption in the country. People feel that if they give, it will not go to the people in need,” said Neva Khan, Oxfam’s director in Pakistan. Such statements should have rung alarm bells in the corridors of power and one would have expected the government to go the extra mile to change the general perception of the country ensuring that mishaps detrimental to its image are abridged. But it seems the government is not willing to correct mistakes and loves to blunder anew. But then what should we expect from those who view the affairs of the state as wheeling and dealing.

While people all over the world have slowly progressed from barbarism to civilisation, it seems we, instead of progressing, are retrogressing. And the sad part is that we have no one else to blame but ourselves. If we sit back and let things happen then we are equally responsible for the mess we are in. We need to correct our course. We have been waiting for too long for things to happen in our lifetime. It’s time to take chances before it’s too late. by Nosheen Saeed

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… but when will we reciprocate in kind?

· Two anti-Pakistan Danish journalists were allowed entry into Pakistan this week
· A visiting US scholar secretly slipped into Balochistan and was deported but Husain Haqqani granted him a visa again
· It is high time the military realized that the US is no ally but a hostile state that has need of Pakistan and its military right now

After being abused willingly by the US on many occasions post-9/11 on the pretext of security, like so many other segments of the Pakistani state and its leadership, the Pakistan military finally chose to refuse such treatment henceforth – and high time too. That is why one welcomes the stance the Pakistan military delegation took when it was subjected to inappropriate behaviour by US security officials at Dulles International Airport – merely because some passenger found their conversation “suspicious”. The delegation simply cancelled its meeting with CENTCOM and returned home. Of course, the usual apologies were offered by the US Defence Department, but what use are these once Pakistanis have been insulted? Whatever the official position, Pakistanis are being singled out for abuse in the US. After all, this was an official delegation going for an official visit so where was the official protocol that we turn out every time any US official visits Pakistan?

Meanwhile, what do we do with US nationals travelling to and residing in Pakistan? We give them visas on demand and in haste; and allow them to ride roughshod over all our laws, including injuring and killing Pakistani citizens on the roads. We also provide them with extra access to bypass our normal security procedures when they travel, as witnessed by many Pakistani travellers at our airports. Were we to report every US citizen as “suspicious” at our airports, it would provide a good lesson to the Americans in terms of reciprocity – that is if our authorities would ever find the guts to take a nationalist position.

It is high time the military realised that the US is no ally but a hostile state that has need of Pakistan and especially its military right now. But to pander to US goals is debilitating for our own national security and regardless of the personal equation between our COAS and the US military leadership, there is a need to distance ourselves from the US and its increasingly questionable agenda in this region – especially the underlying nexus it has with India.

Nor is it just US citizens who are given privileges not enjoyed by Pakistanis in these countries. We have just had an official Danish delegation arrive with two journalists who were deported from Pakistan earlier for suspicious activities and were blacklisted from ever entering Pakistan again. But under pressure from the Danish government, the Pakistani authorities undermined their own laws and actions and allowed these two controversial figures to enter the country again. This is a repeat of the case of an American journalist posing as a scholar who was deported for suspicious activities in Balochistan and then given a visa to visit Pakistan again. No wonder foreigners feel they can abuse our laws and decisions at will just as their governments and nationals mistreat and abuse our nationals as they please. In this context, the military delegation’s actions must be appreciated; but what is more important is when will reciprocate in kind?

Editorial by The Nation

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The Lord’s episode another RAW ploy

— Indian ICC Chief working to get Pak team banned for 3 to5 years
— Pak govt smell rat behind the match fixing drama
— Bookie emerges as RAW man, introduced to Indian cricketers by RAW
— Bookie met Pak player in South Africa at a dinner for the first time in 2009
— Aamir like young players were the basic target
— English journalist got 50,000 Pounds to organize fake sting operation for RAW
— Indian High Commission at London played key role in Bookie’s bail.

International Cricket Council President Sharad Pawar, an Indian national and Scotland Yard are making futile efforts to involve Pakistanis players in spot-fixing with the yearn desire of 2-3 years ban on Pakistan for taking part in International cricket events; reveal the investigations of The Daily Mail.

These investigations indicate that pre-set drama reveals that ICC chief and its members, The News of the World and notorious Indian intelligence agency RAW were the mastermind behind all this planned mess with special focus on putting the career of new teenage pace sensation of Pakistan Muhammad Aamir at stake who emerging as main threat to the batsmen across the world in the coming years.

The Daily Mail’s investigations reveal that picture of Salman Butt along with bookie and some reporter is clearly fabricated and created in photoshop computer programme that is installed at every newspaper office for sure. Furthermore the video of the bookie, Majeed giving Pounds to Wahab Riaz is also a creation.

The Daily Mail’s investigations indicate that the bookie Mazhar Majeed is a RAW front man and holds a key position in RAW’s illicit fund generation programme that includes running Mafia wings, running brothel houses, prostitution syndicates gambling dens, and betting on matches of Cricket, soccer and even tennis. He was merely a ticket blacker at movie theatres in Mumbai till a few years back when was hand picked by RAW like they did it in Chhota Rajan Case and was put under the command of RAW’s Special Operations Division SOD, headed by Chhota Rajan where he was trained for sports betting.

The Daily Mail’s findings further indicate that Majeed was introduced to different bookies at Mumbai, Delhi, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Dubai by RAW official. These findings reveal that in 2007, RAW arranged Majeed’s meeting with Indian Cricket star Sachin Tendulkar, Harbajjan Singh and Rahul Dravid so that so that they can further introduce Majeed to different players of Cricket teams of different countries, specially Pakistan and world cricketers like Shane Watson do confirm the same. These finding further indicate that in September 2009, an Indian businessman Vijay Aaloowalia, based in Cape Town, South Africa hosted a dinner for Pakistani and Indian cricketers on the sidelines of Champions Trophy. Bookie Majeed was also invited to that dinner where some Pakistani players were introduced to him for the first time. Though the trick didn’t work and Pakistan team defeated India easily in that tournament but Majeed remained sniffing Pak players then onwards.

The Daily Mail’s investigations indicate that RAW’s under cover officials at Indian High Commission at London along with Indian London-based Indian diplomats held meetings with some British journalists after which they finally succeed in getting nod from one particular journalist to organize a fake sting operation with connivance of Majeed, who was already operating under the instruction of his agency officials. The reporter also convinced his newspaper that his sting operation was going to be a genuine one. In the meanwhile the Indian High Commission managed to put it in the ears of the officials of the British police that Pakistani players would get indulged into illegal activities while the ICC Chief was already taken on board by Indian High Commission and RAW officials.

These investigations further reveal that the quick bail of Mazhar Majeed was also sponsored by Indian High Commission and RAW as Indian diplomats at London were seen extraordinarily active after the arrest of Majeed. The Daily Mail’s investigations further reveal that some undercover RAW had approach a Lahore-based a female showbiz artists at Dubai last year. She was told that she should be given leading role in an upcoming multi-star Bollywood thriller. Later she was asked to fix a Pakistani fast bowler as he had promised to work in an advertisement of the company of same film maker and later refused while he was already paid. She was launched for the first time in this direction and she has been re-activated now too to add colours to the drama that has been staged in England.

The Daily Mail’s investigations conclude that the basic aim of RAW was to play havoc with the careers of Aamir like young lot of Pak cricketers but when Sharad Pawar was taken on board, he expanded the plan to get the entry of the Pakistan team banned in international cricket for three to five years.

Meanwhile, Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said that there might be a conspiracy behind the match-fixing scam adding that initial report has been sought from the Scotland Yard. “We will believe only when we have concrete evidence with us,” Malik told media after attending a high level meeting at the National Crisis Management Cell and meeting with Sports Minister Ijaz Jhakrani.
Malik said a preliminary report on the matter had been sought and that the Pakistan government had written to Scotland Yard through Interpol to get more facts. Rehman Malik said that stern action would be taken if any cricketer is found guilty in the match fixing allegations.

He said that investigations have commenced regarding the involvement of cricketers in a match fixing allegation made by British media; an investigative team of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) would visit the United Kingdom to probe the matter after the report of the Scotland Yard. The probe team would search whether or not the match was fixed, or team players were fixed for spot. If any of the players are involved, we will make an example of it and strict action will be taken,” he added.

He said it has been decided to form a 3 member investigative committee consisting of FIA officers and an officer of Ministry of Sports. The ream would consist of Director FIA Admin Headquarter Inam Ghani and Assistant Director FIA Karachi Agha Ishrat while the third member would be nominated by the Sports Minister.

Rehman Malik said that this team would leave for UK after permission from UK. He said that however if the Scotland Yard and Interpol does not provide us the initial report than this team would proceed to UK with or without permission. Meanwhile, Sports Minister Mir Aijaz Hussain Jakhrani said that no charges had been framed against the team so far and until they are charged with something they would continue to play.

Jakhrani stated that alternate team of Pakistan wouldn’t be send to UK for One-day series. He said we would not bring back any player until charges against them are proven. He said that he would meet with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani after which he would be in the position to say whether PCB chairman should be removed or not.

Earlier in the day, PCB Chairman Ijaz Butt said, “There is a case going on over here with Scotland Yard. This is only an allegation. There is still no charge or proof on the account. So at this stage, no action will be taken.” The ICC’s anti-corruption unit has been asked to submit a report on its investigations within the next three days.

From Cherry Ferguson in London, Kapil Verma in Mumbai and Ambreen Nadeem Janjua in Islamabad

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A terror group based on Afghan border claims responsibility for the murder of Pakistanis in Lahore and Karachi, using teenage kids as suivide bombers. This is not a sectarian attack. This is a terrorist attack against Pakistan and Pakistanis. It is linked to the visit of Iran's presidential envoy to Pakistan tomorrow,… to the great and noble speech of Ayatollah Ali Khamenai in Paksitan's favor today, and to desperate US attempts to keep terror war ahead of flood sympathy for Pakistan. Our prayers are with our men and women, our Pakistani sisters & brothers who had fallen Shaheed a few minutes ago. More details in the next few hours about on the linkages of those who committed this terror. Analysed by Ahmed Quarishi

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A delegation of senior Pakistani military officials visiting the United States for a major defense conference headed home in protest Tuesday night after they said they were interrogated and rudely treated by security officials at Dulles International Airport.

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How likely is China's launch of a limited war against India? This is the question that has animated South Asia watchers over the last two days ever since reports about the Chinese denial of a visa to a top-ranking three-star Indian army general, whose operational command includes the state of Jammu and Kashmir, became public.

Notwithstanding the very animated media and cyber responses that have spewed on both sides of the Himalayas, as a defence analyst, I would aver that the probability of an actual shooting war, however limited — between the dragon and the elephant — is very, very low but this will not prevent their growling at each other as can be evidenced.

Kashmir and Tibet-Taiwan, though of different genealogy are a case in point.The question that is often raised among security experts is — what is the contour of the provocation that would compel the Asian giants to actually resort to military action?

Against each other, as for instance in the current fracas or a Sino-US confrontation say over Taiwan. These considerations have now moved out of the reclusive foreign office and security establishments in both China and India and civil society and the new netizen also stokes the debate in a palpable manner.

It is instructive that the question posed at the outset of this comment — how likely is China to launch a limited war — is from a Chinese daily, which in turn carried parts of a Forbes report (by two authors of Indian origin) and carried out a straw poll among its readers.

It is significant that at the time of writing this comment, the thumbs-down for this exigency — that China will or should launch a war — is 46 against 30 that gave a thumbs-up.

The inference that follows is that notwithstanding some shrill commentary and radical prescription in the more transparent and volatile Indian audio-visual medium, the immediate fallout and response from both governments has ranged from firm to muted and sabre-rattling is on hold.

This is to be cautiously welcomed and hopefully over the next few days, the politico-diplomatic channels will weigh in and bring the temperatures down.

Officially, both sides maintain that prevailing bilateral defence ties and relations have not been snapped or suspended and the foreign office in Beijing has formally stated, "…we are confident that both sides will stay focused on the broader picture of bilateral ties between our two countries, acting in a spirit of consultation and unity to promote the healthy development of military ties."

Two aspects of the current Chinese visa denial merit preliminary scrutiny. Clearly, the Indian government which has been dealing with the issue of Beijing issuing stapled visas to Indian citizens from J&K in a low visibility manner sees the current Chinese action as a case of raising the ante and pushing India on the status of J&K.

Post 1948, when the matter was referred to the U.N. by then Indian PM Nehru, the legal status of J&K is 'disputed' between India and Pakistan — the latter seen as the aggressor. While India is committed to the peaceful bilateral resolution of this dispute notwithstanding the revisionist wars that have been initiated by the Pakistan army, from 1965 to Kargil in 1999, till now the post Cold War Chinese stance was seen as neutral — particularly in the 1999 Kargil War.

So the first strand with strategic connotations is if Beijing is revising its policies in regard to all these complex and interlined territorial issues.

The second aspect is about China's current mix of national assertion and collective anxiety. Is the fact that China is now the world's second-largest economy encouraging the hardline/nationalist constituency to advocate a greater flexing of Beijing beef?

If so, this has been counter-productive, in that the creeping Chinese assertiveness in the Asia-Pacific maritime domain led to a face-off in Hanoi at the annual Asean Regional Forum (ARF) meeting where the rise of China is being perceived as far from 'peaceful'.

In the current visa denial episode, the view in India is that China's pronouncements about bridging the trust deficit and working towards peace and stability in keeping with the Jiang Zemin – Narasimha Rao 1993 protocols cannot be taken at face value.

The moot question thus is not about the limited war against India — but if the inexorable 'rise' of China is conducive to equitable peace and stability in Asia. The unease from East Asia to South Asia about the mismatch between Beijing's self-image and its actions needs little reiteration and should encourage objective introspection among China's accomplished but inscrutable intellectuals and academics.

(C. Uday Bhaskar is Director of the National Maritime Foundation in New Delhi. The views expressed in this column are his own and do not represent those of Reuters).

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By Asif Haroon Raja

9/11 dramatically converted Pakistan from an international outcast under a military dictator aligned with extremist Taliban regime in Kabul to become a key strategic partner of America ’s war on terror. This change in status brought about by USA did not come about out of the blue but under a well conceived design. While Afghanistan was already on the hit list of USA since 1997, 9/11 gave a ready made excuse to forcibly occupy it and bring a regime change of its liking and to then work upon the laid down regional objectives.   

In its pursuit to denuclearize and secularize Pakistan , the US in concert with Israel , India and Britain worked out several contingency plans which ranged from coercion combined with inducement to destabilization, balkanization and fragmentation. Gen Musharraf was successfully coerced to ditch friendly Mullah Omar led Taliban regime in Kabul, to help US in militarily occupying Afghanistan, and to become a frontline state to fight US war on terror. Pakistan had to accept anti-Pakistan and pro-India Northern Alliance regime under Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

When Pakistan expressed its reluctance to send regular troops into South Waziristan (SW) to oust foreign terrorists since it had never done so in the past, Washington threatened that US forces would barge into FATA in case Pakistan failed to abide by its orders. Pakistan was induced to do Washington ’s bidding by rescheduling Pakistan ’s foreign debts and offering five-year package of $10.5 billion. By 2009, only 30% of this amount trickled into Pakistan ’s kitty which barely met the expenses incurred on services rendered; the rest shifted back to US treasury. As against this puny amount the US spent $60 billion annually in Afghanistan.      

Once the Army moved into SW, it was trapped and it was ensured that it got involved deeper and deeper in fighting futile war on terror. Nek Muhammad belonging to Ahmadzai Wazirs was killed by a US drone soon after he met Commander 11 Corps Lt Gen Safdar and inked Shakai peace accord in July 2005. Maulvi Nazir took over from Nek. Since Nazir reused to play American game, Abdullah Mehsud was released from Gitmo Prison and launched to accelerate militancy. His cousin Baitullah Mehsud too picked up the path of militancy but both operated separately so as to enlarge their areas of influence in FATA and beyond.

Army was pressed to shift from Wazir belt to Mehsud belt within SW. Abdullah was responsible for abducting and killing Chinese engineers working in Gomal Zam Dam project. It was RAW-CIA guided move to spoil Pak-China relations. Abdullah was killed in Zhob in July 2007 by Pak security forces. After his death Baitullah took up the mantle. The Army which had inked peace accord with Baitullah in early 2006 was pushed into North Waziristan (NW) to confront Hafiz Gul Bahadur led Othmanzai Wazir militants. Another peace deal was signed in NW in September 2006.

It was in this timeframe that Pakistani Taliban (PT) mysteriously surfaced in NW in late 2006 where Mir Ali and Miran Shah became their strong points. PT were later on duly trained, equipped, funded and protected by CIA, FBI, RAW, RAAM and Mossad foreign agencies based in Afghanistan and pitched against Pak Army to lock the two in deadly combat for a prolonged period. To prevent the Army from defeating militants, the army units operating in FATA were kept dependent upon doctored intelligence provided by CIA, FBI and satellite communication till as late as 2007. Bleeding and weakening of Army was considered essential for the success of the gory plan since without its destruction none of the envisaged objectives could be achieved. PT also helped USA in defaming Islam and Afghan Taliban.

Ranks of PT swelled after botched Lal Masjid operation in July 2007 triggering recruitment of fighters and suicide bombers in large numbers. Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Baitullah broke peace accords with security forces in July and August 2007 respectively. Mohmand Agency also came in the grip of militancy. Secular forces in Pakistan egged on by the west were responsible for instigating Gen Musharraf to launch a needless bloody operation. Revenge of killings of women and children receiving education in Jamia Hafsa became the rallying point. The Army was dubbed as a rental army on the payroll of US. Based on this analogy, killing of a soldier became a just cause. Reverses of Army at certain places in FATA further galvanized their spirits.

Taking advantage of hurt sentiments of the people of the area, RAW with the assistance of RAAM took upon itself to recruit fresh crop of fighters and to provide training, funds, equipment and reinforcement to PT from Afghan soil. Notwithstanding factor of revenge, chief causes of motivation of militants were regular handsome monthly salaries, perks and authority. Taste of adventure and heroism and easy availability of women to marry were other reasons to get lured. These were too intoxicating pleasures for the uneducated, unemployed youth belonging to poor families to go to any lengths.

Foreign agencies kept fueling their grievances and eulogizing their dare devilry. They pumped them that their cause to get rid of corrupt rulers and to introduce Sharia was genuine. Pak Army was projected as a mercenary army of the US . In the same breath it was ridiculed by USA for not doing enough and pressed to do more. It was also accused of being in cahoots with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Drone attacks which started hitting targets in FATA from January 2006 onwards remained confined to anti-US elements only or those refusing to tow US agenda. Purpose of drones was to fuel terrorism and not to curb terrorism.

Unheard of Baitullah who took over the reigns of Taliban in July 2007 surprisingly managed to establish Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan (TTP) in December that year with its tentacles in all the seven agencies of FATA and in Darra Adamkhel (DAK). The TTP took a leaf out of Taliban rule in Afghanistan , whom they considered as their mentors and tried to emulate them by fighting evildoers to purge the society of immorality and dispensing speedy justice to victims. Bandits of the area who had made the life of peaceful residents miserable were nailed and many hanged to death. In order to become the dominant force in FATA, Taliban started to gun down pro-government Maliks and Mullahs in two Waziristans, the two pillars of Pakhtunwali. Police, Frontier Constabulary, Khasadars were targeted. Government officials were kidnapped and harassed to force them to abandon their offices. Other than CIA and FBI outposts, Blackwater was also moved into FATA to lend a helping hand in the killing spree. All this was done to weaken Jirga system and administrative machinery run by political agent.  

RAW with easy money procured from illicit drug smuggling then started to equip TTP on a crash program. Bajaur, Swat and SW were converted into major strongholds where massive weapons, ammunition, explosives, suicide jackets, medical stores and other war munitions were stored in hundreds of caves, man-made tunnels, roofs and walls of houses and other secretive places throughout 2008.

CIA and RAW also helped TTP in getting aligned with several banned extremist groups so as to develop its capacity to engage Pak Army in a prolonged guerilla war, launch suicide attacks and group attacks against a specific defended or undefended target within cities. Idea was to enable TTP to strike targets within cities and also to show to the world that non-state actors had become strong all over the country. Its ability was however not built to hit targets outside Pakistan . Pak Army on the other and was denied requisite funds and counter terrorism equipment on the plea of Indian imaginary fears that equipment will be used against India .

CIA helped Baitullah getting aligned with Fazlullah led militants in Swat and making it part of TTP in February 2008. TTP also made inroads in southern Punjab wherefrom Punjabi youths were recruited. Unknown Fazlullah became popular in Swat and Malakand Division because of his preaching on FM radio which could not be jammed because of Israeli made transmitters. His motivational thrusts revolved around anti-Islamic lifestyle of the elite class, their insensitivity towards the poor, growing immorality and lack of justice.       

The Taliban spread their influence to Bajaur which became restive after a drone attack on Damadola village in January 2006 and another strike on a madrassa in October 2006 killing 80 young students. Within a year’s time, Bajaur, attached with Kunar province of Afghanistan in north, turned into a formidable stronghold of Taliban under Maulvi Faqir where the Frontier Corps (FC) had to launch several operations. 100,000 locals got displaced as a result of Frontier Corps (FC) operation launched on 10 January 2008 . FC operation under Maj Gen Tariq conducted in July 2008 ended on a victorious note in February 2009. It transpired that Bajaur militants were heavily funded and provided with all sorts of armaments and reinforcement by foreign agencies from Kunar. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Afghans and RAW agents used to assist Taliban in fighting security forces. Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh personally coordinated Bajaur insurgency.

Simultaneous to heating up of Bajaur, Swat under Tehrik-e-Nifaz-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) of Maulana Sufi, led by his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah became turbulent. After a military operation in November 2007, another operation was launched in August 2008 which ended in Swat Treaty in February 2009 according to which Nizam-e-Adal was to be enforced in Malakand Division and in return the militants would cease militancy.     

Mohmand Agency heated up and turned into another formidable front for security forces in 2007. Divided into two as upper and lower Mohmand, it shares border with Nangahar province of Afghanistan to the west, Khyber Agency to the south, Bajaur to the north and Malakand, Charsada, Peshawar to the east. Until 2007, Mohmand was the most peaceful Agency in tribal belt and known for its moderation. Banned militant groups played a role in activating militancy in this region. Consequent to Lal Masjid operation in July 2007, over 200 militants took over a huge mosque in Ghazi Abad village near Ghilanai and renamed it as Lal Masjid. An unknown figure Umar Khalid gained prominence. He had received military training from Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and had participated in Kashmir Jihad and had also taken part in Taliban last ditch battle against US invasion in 2001. All those who were pro-government were gradually put to death on the plea that they were infidels, hypocrites and American spies. This way, authority of tribal elders was gradually enfeebled.

Three militant groups including Lashkar-e-Islam cropped up from nowhere in Khyber Agency to create law and order problem in Landikotal, Tirah, Jamrud and to threaten Peshawar . Capital city was attacked by terrorists and kidnappers under a planned program. Kurram Agency was rocked by foreign instigated Shia-Sunni conflict resulting in tens of hundreds of deaths. An operation had to be launched to quell the sectarian unrest. RAAM was heavily involved in fuelling turbulence.

Besides FATA, Balochistan was also made turbulent in 2005 by cultivating rebellious Baloch Sardars of Bugti, Marri and Mengal tribes and nationalist Baloch political leaders. Baloch rebels were trained, funded, and equipped on a massive scale to fix security forces in interior Balochistan. Gradually the flames of terrorism were brought to the capital city Quetta . After the death of Akbar Bugti, RAW planted the seeds of separatism among Baloch nationalists and rebellious elements. Balochistan became a priority target for USA-UK-India because of commercial and strategic interests. Exiled Baloch leaders were sheltered in Kandahar and in London and mandated to work for independence of Balochistan. 

Another peace accord was signed with Hafiz Gul Bahadur in NW in September 2008 which is still intact. Peace agreement with Maulvi Nazir in SW is also holding on. Peace accords signed between militants and security forces or any sort of parleys taking place out of security and humanitarian compulsions are deeply resented by USA since it go against their plans. They wanted Pak Army and the militants to continue fighting till death. It was this hidden urge which prompted every US official to keep pressing Pakistan to do more and more. Peace deals gave an excuse to USA , India and Afghanistan to shout aloud that Pak Army was either soft towards the militants or didn’t have heart to fight them or was in cahoots with them. This charge-sheet has not been withdrawn till to-date.

Once India felt confident that the bastion of Swat fortified with huge efforts would be able to pin down a corps size force irreversibly, it advised the US to press Pakistan to start an operation in Swat in April 2009. It was also sure that Pakistan will not be able to cope up with the burden of 2.5 million displaced persons since by then its economy had slumped and was at the mercy of IMF and the new democratic rulers duly washed by NRO were also in the grip of Washington . When reverse happened, all hopes were pinned on SW becoming the final killing ground for systematic destruction of Pak Army.

When Pak Army turned the tables on TTP, it disconcerted the plot makers beyond measure. They could not imagine in their wildest dreams that Pak Army would break the back of TTP and that too in very short time. Their wish to steal nukes shattered. Instead of defaming the Army and lowering its morale, its image up surged and morale went sky high. The Frontier Corps and other paramilitary forces including police performed brilliantly. The PAF lent full support by way of targeting sanctuaries of militants.      

Orakzai Agency tucked in depth and well away from Afghan border but linked with Kohat and Peshawar had remained peaceful till as late as mid 2008. A deadly suicide attack on a Jirga that had assembled to form a lashkar to confront Taliban made this region turbulent as well. Waliur Rahman holds sway over militant group which coordinates its activities with Taliban in DAK. After loss of main base of TTP in SW in November-December 2009, Orakzai was prepared as an alternative base. This region has also been sufficiently neutralized. 

Extremists bottled up in specific areas first slipped into settled districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and then to major cities of Punjab and Karachi thus spreading terrorism all over. Militant groups banned by Musharraf in 2001/2, had become sleeping cells in major cities. These groups had come under the wings of TTP and got activated once runaway Taliban sought shelter in cities. Latter having got weakened do not command effective control over the militant groups from Punjab but remain in collusion. RAW exploiting the fluid situation created new groups like Asian Tigers under Osman Punjabi. Main groups are Lashkar-Zil headed by Ilyas Kashmiri, Jaish Muhammad under Maulana Masood Azhar, Harkatul Jihadul Islami under Qari Saifullah and Lashkar Jhangvi under Akram Lahori.    

Baitullah and his Shura and Mehsud belt as a whole were spared till such time he started behaving independently and giving anti-US statements in March-April 2009. When he claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack in New York in April 2009 and failed to unleash his horde of suicide bombers during operation Rah-e-Rast in Swat, he was declared a liability and a security risk and marked as a target. A warning shot was fired on him by a drone in June, but he had a narrow escape. He was eventually gunned down on 5 August and his death sparked leadership crisis in TTP. Hakimullah took over the reigns of TTP and accelerated suicide bombings and group attacks on military and civilian targets in major urban centres in Punjab so as to break the momentum of operations launched in forward areas and thus release pressure. He too apparently fell from America ’s grace when he was found to be associated with Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents at Khost base. Although his death was widely reported in western media, however, after few months he was re-incarnated. His rebirth was timed with Faisal Shehzad’s Time Square botched attempt.  

TTP and other militant groups in Pakistan are of no concern to USA and India . What concern the duo are remnants of Al-Qaeda, Haqqani network and Gul Bahadur led militants in NW, Maulvi Nazir in SW and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Punjab . Let is being projected as a global threat and blamed for current nonviolent unrest in India-Held Kashmir. The US instead of extending support to Pak Army to fight its battle with TTP and Fazlullah led militants in Swat-Shangla; it has been lending support to TTP. Hundreds of US, Indian and Israeli origin weapons recovered from Swat and SW during recent operations is a clinching proof of their involvement. It implies that the US didn’t want Pak Army to defeat terrorism in Pakistan but to preferably get defeated or as a minimum get pinned down irretrievably. India instead of tackling existential threat posed by Naxalites to Indian Union, it is myopically wasting all its energies in supporting terrorists in Pakistan, foolishly hoping that downfall of Pakistan would end all its worries. 

While there has never been any doubt of Indian involvement in Pakistan ’s domestic affairs, WikiLeaks has confirmed clandestine role of CIA in destabilizing Pakistan . It is now established that CIA has all along based its assessment on Afghanistan and Pakistan on the inputs provided by Afghan intelligence which gets fed by RAW.WikiLeaks has given an insight to Indo-US-Israeli-Afghan collaborative game of maligning Pakistan through an orchestrated vilification campaign with evil intentions.  

Ironically, the US has different sets of laws and standards for itself. While it gets outraged on finding any sort of linkage of Pakistan with Afghan Taliban, it is striving hard to negotiate with them. It has been ignoring peace accords inked by British soldiers with Taliban in Southern Afghanistan . It is also ignoring India ’s cross border terrorism against Pakistan and massive human rights abuses of Israel and India against Gazans and Kashmiris. Washington also refuses to admit its blunders and failures on the political and military fronts and has never found faults in its Generals operating in Afghanistan nor has it ever pressed them to do more. It continues to remain under the spell of Israel and India , bent upon rolling the honor and prestige of US military in dust in Afghanistan . 

Much hyped strategic dialogue with America is already proving to be a big hoax when seen in context with the renewal of pressure tactics and use of aggressive language by US leaders. Extreme pressure was applied on Pakistan to launch another operation in North Waziristan well knowing that Pak Army was outstretched and didn’t have the means to stretch any further and that too without fully consolidating gains in Swat and South Waziristan . In the wake of devastating floods and engagement of 60,000 additional troops in relief operations, opening of a new front for the time being has become impossible.

As long as perceptions and threat perceptions of the US and Pakistan are at variance, mistrust and misunderstanding will not fade away and US officials would keep blowing hot and cold. Hawkish attitude towards Pakistan and visible tilt towards India will not help in bridging the trust deficit and in toning down anti-US sentiments. India and Israel will continue to sprinkle fuel on the differences and clashing interests to keep the US fearful and antagonistic towards Pakistan . Notwithstanding wicked designs of the duo, the US should strive to win hearts and minds of Pakistanis by doubling its flood relief efforts altruistically to mitigate the sufferings of flood affectees without extracting its pound of flesh. In the wake of colossal losses suffered by Pakistan in war on terror and now in floods, the US instead of extending loans or rescheduling debts, it should demonstrate its sincerity of purpose and help Pakistan in getting rid of its external debt. This step will go a long way in reversing perceptions from negative to positive and in forging mutually sustaining lasting friendship.     

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It's true that Pakistani players do have a repo of bringing shame to the green but on a closer look and considering the magnitude of the negative coverage received, is the incident another deliberate setup to racially malign and target the Pakistani nation further? The classical "from the book" statement that the bookie gave [Pakistani cricketers only want women, food and money] may hint so. After all, aren't Indian and Aussies and Brits doing the same? Pakistani cricketers aren't the only ones here but get most attention everytime, why? More so, there is an Indian culprit [Dheeraj Dixit] involved too about whom the same media hasn't found the same zeal to talk about. So if Pakistani players want money and food, was he up to it considering it his religious duty? Pakistani players are indeed shameful but may have been set up too this time. Pakistan Observer has some findings here.

http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=49612

Cricket scandal part of psy-ops against PakistanThe latest allegation of match-fixing against Pakistani cricket team is said to be part of a greater psy-ops against Pakistan in which Indian intelligence and a Western secret service men jointly staged a drama to de-moralize the Pakistani nation.

According to an investigation conducted by Pakistan Observer, the two Asian-origin men behind the conspiracy were acting on behalf of their masters with the aim to malign Pakistan and initiate a campaign to disgrace Pakistanis at home and abroad.
One Pakistani close to alleged fixer believes that the man in picture may have been persuaded to act for a film or drama by the News of the World reporter. Otherwise no one is that fool to accept such illegal money in cash and spread it over to be filmed.

The British daily The News of the World reporters known for their disguised personalities and fake identities managed to convince a multi-millionaire Pakistani married to an Indian lady to play the drama to implicate the Pakistani cricket players.

The News of the World claimed their reporters had posed as front men for an Asian gambling cartel, paying 10,000 pounds to the alleged fixer as an upfront deposit.

The newspaper showed the alleged fixer, Mazhar Majeed, with piles of cash on a table who apparently allowed the Newspaper reporter to film him with the money. Senior investigative reporters are now questioning the way Mazhar Majeed spread the money in cash on a table and did not object to film the conversation and the deal.

Pakistani community from London have reported that Mazhar is a 35-year-old property tycoon, who also owns Croydon Athletic Football Club and a multi-million pound property business in England. He lives in a 1.8 million home in Croydon, with his Indian wife and two daughters. Sports officials in London also claimed Pakistan team members had been warned time and again not to get in touch with Mazhar Majeed who had been picked up by an Indian intelligence agency to implicate Pakistan team.

However, another Asian-British personality who apparently played the lead role to distort the image of Pakistan and promote psy-ops to demoralize Pakistanis is the reporter of The News of the World newspaper. Pakistani community speaks of long history of The News of the World reporter, Mazher Mahmood who really planned the scandal.

Mazher Mahmood is an undercover reporter for the British tabloid newspaper News of the World. He often poses as a Sheikh in order to gain his target’s trust, and is also known as the “Fake Sheikh.” In September 2008, he wrote a book titled Confessions of a Fake Sheikh – The King Of The Sting Reveals All published by Harper Collins.

Little can be confirmed of Mahmood’s background, the majority of which he has provided himself. In his 2008 book, he claimed to have been born in the Midlands as the son of an immigrant Pakistani journalists who settled in the UK in the 1960s. But that claim was never confirmed by any of his friends.

Mahmood’s late father, Sultan Mahmood had developed close links with the Indian community leaders who financed him to start a an Urdu newspaper from UK. He got his first job as a journalist aged 18, and began his career with exposing his own family friends who had objected his close links with the Indians.

In 1984, he first used the “Fake Sheikh” disguise to entice prostitutes to a hotel room and tried to embarrass the Arab community in England. In 1989 he joined The Sunday Times but after some time the Newspaper’s managing editor dismissed for an attempted cover-up of an error he had made. Mahmood works secretively, rarely going into the media offices. During his investigations, as well as the “Fake Sheikh,” Mahmood used several fake identities. He is often accompanied by a bodyguard, said to be his second cousin Mahmood Qureshi, who also use fake names and identity as businessman Pervaiz Khan.

The News of the World pays him a yearly salary of £120,000, plus an editorial and technical support budget which includes a dedicated technical support crew, his two bodyguards, and essential props, including: luxury hotel suites; private jets; limousines; and fees paid to informants. In September 2004 he posed as a Muslim extremist to “expose” three men who were trying to buy radioactive material for a suspected Muslim terrorist group seeking to carry out attacks in the United Kingdom. The men were later found not guilty following a trial at the Old Bailey, with the judge criticizing the News of the World for not checking the credibility of the story before printing.

In 2004, Mahmood again led an investigation into exposing the creation of a “dirty bomb,” through the supply of the fictitious substance red mercury to three men from a supposed terrorist group. Mahmood was registered as an informant for the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch during the story, which lead to a criminal case prosecution by the Crown Prosecution Service. The case, signed off by the Attorney General, collapsed in July 2006.

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At least four NATO supply oil tankers were completely destroyed by militants Sunday near Torkham in northwest of Pakistan. Militants attacked NATO tankers supply caravan with rockets turning four of them into ashes in Khyber Agency tribal area near Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Xinhua said, citing local media reports. No casualties were reported in the attack.

Attacks on NATO supply truck have been accelerated this year where almost a hundred of trucks and oil tankers carrying supplies to 140,000 US-led NATO troops fighting insurgency in Afghanistan were frequently attacked and destroyed in southern Balochistan and troubled northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

In June, 60 NATO supply trucks were burnt to ashes and eight local drivers were killed in an attack near Islamabad. In April four policemen were killed as 12 NATO trucks were burnt in eastern Punjab province.

Some 70 percent of NATO supplies and 40 percent of its fuel are being shipped through trucks into the landlocked Afghanistan from the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi. Source: All About: Asia,Pakistan

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Informed sources in the Government of Pakistan have told Veterans Today that they are developing “hard evidence” indicating the Air Blue Airbus 320 that crashed July 28th outside Islamabad was a terrorist hijacking tied to rogue American security forces operating inside that country.

Sources indicate that the plane crash was an unsuccessful hijacking attempt intended to crash into the nuclear weapons facility at Kahuta, outside Islamabad. Such an attack may have been blamed on India and would likely have led to retaliation which could easily have escalated to a nuclear exchange between these two nations that have spent decades at each other’s throats.
Suspicions were raised inside Pakistan’s military and intelligence organizations when American military contractors employed by Blackwater/Xe showed up on the scene immediately after the crash, seizing the black box and “other materials.” There is no confirmation that parachutes or electronic equipment had been removed when Blackwater/Xe security relinquished control of the crash scene to Pakistani investigators.

Royal Television in Islamabad, owned by the brother of the head of Pakistan’s powerful JI (Jamate Islami), the Islamic political party, has reported that investigations are underway tying American based contractors to the planning of the attack. Pakistan’s ISRP (Inter-Services Public Relations) has failed to confirm this but private sources indicate that an active investigation of these allegations is, not only underway but has established ties between an American group and the hijackers. Military and intelligence officials inside Pakistan, in concert with the American embassy, are withholding all official details of the investigation and are likely to continue doing so.

This same facility had been the subject of an armed penetration by American contractors, believed to be employed by the State Department, in 2009. Four Blackwater employees, armed and possessing explosives were arrested outside the Kahuta nuclear facility in 2009. The four, driving a Jeep 4×4 and possessing advanced surveillance and jamming equipment of Israeli manufacture, were intercepted 1.5 miles from the Kahuta nuclear facility.

The four spoke fluent Pushtu and were dressed in a manner as to resemble Taliban fighters. The order for their release, given by Minister of the Interior Rehman Malik, is an issue of considerable controversy between the civilian government in Pakistan and the powerful military.

The passenger jet with 152 on board slammed into a hillside in what was believed to be Pakistan’s most serious air crash. At least 2 Americans were believed to be on board but, a month later, the US Embassy in Islamabad has left this unconfirmed. Reports received today, however, confirm that at least 5 Americans, military contractors said to be employed by Xe, may also have been on the craft but could not be identified as they had been traveling in local garb and had boarded with false identification.
Xe is an American based military and intelligence contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater and has been the subject of considerable controversy for activities inside Pakistan.

Sources indicate that the attackers stormed the cockpit in a hijacking attempt. The pilot is said to have jammed the flight controls, careening the Airbus 320 and all aboard into a hillside rather than allowing the plane to be used in a “9/11″ type attack inside Pakistan or flown into Indian air space for a repeat of the 2008 Mumbai attack.

Pakistan has, at times in error, referred to American contractors employed by the Departments of Defense, State or the Central Intelligence Agency as Blackwater. However, it is believed the majority of such employees are, in fact, members of that organization or is derivitive, Xe.

The same group, often criticized for irregularities in Iraq, has been contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency to operate Predator drones inside Pakistan, operations that have resulted in a significant number of civilian deaths and said by political leaders of several factions to do little but recruit terrorists.

 By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor - veteranstoday

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Pakistan is reportedly seeking the extradition of Shamim Khan, the who allegedly hurled a shoe at President Asif Ali Zardari during a party rally in Brimingham earlier this month.

According to sources, the interior ministry has provided “criminal records” of Shamim to the British authorities, and asked them to hand him over to Pakistan for further action. “Khan, a resident of Palai Gala, Sehnsa tehsil (occupied Kashmir), has been declared a proclaimed offender in an attempted murder case. In 1993, he injured his opponent and inspector Shadab over an enmity and then managed to flee to UK,” The Dawn quoted sources, as saying.

Earlier, it was reported that it was one of a disgruntled Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) who had hurled the shoe at Zardari, but further investigations have revealed that Shamim had never been associated with the PPP.

“It has been transpired that Khan had never been a PPP worker and he entered the place along with Lord Nazir Ahmed,” a PPP leader said.

The leader, who refused to be named, added that now Shamin claims to be a close associate of PML-N’s (occupied) Kashmir chapter president Raja Farooq Haider. However, Haider has denied any relation with the attacker.

“I would like to ask those who portrayed Khan as a ‘thorough gentleman’ to look into these facts,” Haider said.
Meanwhile, Zardari’s spokesnman, Farhatullah Babar, insisted that no shoe hurling incident took place during Zardari’s rally.
“Therefore there is no question of extradition of anyone,” Babar said. (ANI)

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By Kamran Shahzad

Relief work has been performed in sukkhar Fallah e Insaniat camp and at sanghi area near sukkhar where flood devastation occurred due to our honourable minister Mr. Khursheed shah ordered to destroy the water shield in order to save his lands destroyed acres and acres of poor farmers land. 

seen horrific and terrible human devastation

May Almighty extend us a strength and opportunity to provide max relief to muslim and countrymen in this hard time.

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The Pakistan Army is unlikely to change its assessment of the threat from India despite heavy demands on its troops to provide flood relief while also fighting militants, a senior security official said.

The Wall Street Journal said this month Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had decided – for the first time in the country’s history – that militants had overtaken India as the greatest threat to national security. But the security official suggested this was a misinterpretation of the stance of the Pakistan Army, which views the threat from militants and India in very different ways, rather than comparing them against each other.

“These are two mutually exclusive threats. The magnitude, the type, is quite different. One is an internal threat which is insidious, difficult to quantify. It is a clear and present danger. This is a very serious threat,” he said. “The other is a conventional threat. What has India done, politically and militarily, for this threat to have been reduced?”

Another official said the threat from India had if anything increased into both a conventional and unconventional threat, as it used its presence in Afghanistan to support those fighting against the Pakistani state in its western border regions.
India denies accusations by Islamabad that it backs rebels in Balochistan. With flooding which has uprooted some 6 million people further destabilising a country already battling militants, the WSJ report raised the possibility the Pakistan Army might revise its assessment of the threat from its much bigger neighbour. The Nation News

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Aimless life is certainly a sin. Many people have no definite aim in life. They are like the travelers going a head without any destination. Such people lead an aimless life and what they do in life, is largely a matter of chance, determined by the circumstances in which they happen to be placed. Aimless people do not achieve any thing in life. They just live because they have to live. One should have a definite purpose of life. The people who want success in life, first of all, determine their target. They keep before them their circumstances, their virtuous, their qualities, their talents and their ability to work. They select some definite target of their life and remain successful.

* I love Pakistan because despite the corrupt politicians and rulers of past .. we as a whole nation has progressed alot in the past 63 years when compared to nations which were formed 200 – 300 years back. We are considered around the world as an emerging market which has great potential. This is all because of one reason .. people of Pakistan .. public of Pakistan .. they are really hard working .. infact one of the hardest working nation in the world. I love Pakistan … I love people of Pakistan.

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Lately, we have been too depressed to notice a piece of real good news. Our very own ISI has been ranked the world’s top intelligence agency. And just in case one had never heard of the “smashing lists website”, a look at it would be worth its while. The ratings are done professionally. That the ISI carries out its primary mission — forewarn external threats and counter covert operations — reasonably well, must have counted, but “no double agents or defectors, no one ever caught on camera, and all of this on a modest budget”, seem to have clinched us the gold medal.

Only the other day the agency was complimented, even though back-handedly, to have helped a rag-tag militia in Afghanistan, frustrate the world’s mightiest military alliance, Nato. Calls for a double celebration, I suppose!

After the Soviets left Afghanistan, the US, our partner during the occupation, had a change of heart. Since we had “misused” our frontline status to upgrade our nukes, we had to be punished for this impertinence. Invoking Pressler (Amendment) should normally have sufficed; except for a problem. The ISI having played the lead role during the Afghan resistance — helped no doubt from some of the best in the business — was now raring to join the big league. An efficient secret service of suspect loyalty can become a pain in the neck. When General Brent Scowcroft, a former US national security adviser, publicly acknowledged that the ISI’s assessment of Iraqi forces in Kuwait was better than theirs, it was time for the upstart to be cut to size.

Before it is killed, a dog is given a bad name, and the ISI was hence labelled a rogue organisation. In Afghanistan it was no longer helping a national resistance but “building-up a client regime”; if some religious literature found its way to the newly independent Central Asian Republics, it must be the ISI “exporting regressive ideologies”; and its support to the uprising in Indian-held Kashmir was but “state-sponsored terrorism”. And the baggage that the ISI carried because of its involvement in domestic politics — an upshot of the military’s role in Pakistan — made all this easier for our detractors.

If the outfit withstood the onslaught and is again lauded as the best of its kind, it must have done something good. However, there is another reason that the ISI must be wooed, once more: it is America’s best bet to clinch a face-saving deal in Afghanistan. I have no idea what our super spooks have done to earn this recognition, but if there was any reality in the perception that the ISI has kept the Taliban in good shape against all odds, then at least in my reckoning it has done us all a big service. Without an effective resistance, the occupation of Afghanistan is not likely to be vacated. And unless that happened, our western borders would remain on the boil.

Intelligence agencies are not a panacea for all ills. They can at best ward off immediate threats and provide space for other organs of the state to find long-term remedies. Admittedly, it is the harder part and ours counts amongst the softer states. It would rather abdicate its duty to the ISI and then call it “a state within a state”, or do worse: bring an external intelligence agency under command of the interior ministry and send its spymaster abroad to face criminal charges.
How to deal with this “mother of all threats” is a different matter. For now, the ISI has other battles at hand, and would do well fighting them one at a time.

Lt-Gen(r) Asad Durrani
Published in The Express Tribune, August 27th, 2010.

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Our political parties have yet to unite for fighting the floods unitedly. If the floods have failed to unite the politicians, what can? Obviously, their individual political ideologies don’t permit them to unite. These ideologies have been ferociously fighting each other since Pakistan’s birth for selfish motives. Let alone the current national holocaust, even if the skies were to fall there is not even an iota of possibility that the professional politicians would absolutely honestly unite. We desperately need a mighty miracle. Earthquakes keep hitting us periodically. But we need a unique kind of earthquake which destroys our political ideologies. Let’s call it an ‘ideology-quake’.

For years, the country has been sinking deeper and deeper into an economic morass. The devastation is a creation of our politics. We can rescue the country only by burning our politics at the stake. We should no more be ruled by politics. But obviously, there must be an alternative.

Let’s pray: “O’ Almighty God! Please pity us! Our politics has been eating the very bones of the masses. Please, help us.” If our lamentation was accepted by God, we would be blessed with a unique breed of rulers. These rulers would be mortally allergic to politics. They would rule as great humanitarians but not at all as professional politicians. Let’s name such rulers Anti-politics Rulers.  Recently, two major political parties tried to unite. The leaders of the parties shook hands as an initial step towards a unification. But soon after, they dust-binned the handshaking and turned their backs towards each other. The backs were emitting fire.

Numerous residents of the flood-devastated areas have been experiencing sleepless nights and foodless days. The politicians have been expressing their sympathies for the sufferers. But can mere verbal sympathies lull the sufferers to sleep and fill their stomachs? A knowledge of someone’s misery and a personal experience of misery are two radically different entities. Had the sympathisers spent some sleepless nights and foodless days with the sufferers, the suffering of the sufferers would have lost a substantial part of its biting power.

Plato asserts that only philosophers as kings can guarantee all the citizen a peaceful and prosperous living. Had Plato been alive today and visited Pakistan, he would have burnt his philosopher-king dogma. Pakistan’s floods would have forced him to assert: “No politician who has not experienced sleepless nights and foodless days during the national floods should be eligible to become a ruler.”

Japan has declared to send 300 soldiers and six helicopters for the assistance of our flood-affectees. Japan’s sensitivity to our suffering is touching. Helping our sufferers in the mountainous regions is an extremely dangerous venture. Fortunately, we have the means to cope with the devastation but unfortunately, we don’t have the moral will. We are very rich beggars.

The floods have been horrifically disastrous. But luckily, they also have a positive aspect. They have given us an opportunity to undo the effects of our past blunders. In the past, as natural disasters played havoc with us, we played havoc with the aid-money of the foreign donors. Our misuse of the aid-money destroyed our reliability, once the aid-money flooded the country. Now, it is being doled out drop by drop. The little bit of the money which we are now getting we must spend so transparently that the transparency forces the donors to bury their suspicions about our reliability.

The current flood-devastation is not a unique phenomenon. Floods keep hitting our masses all the year through. What is inflation? It is only a flood but in a disguised form. What is extreme poverty? It is only a flood but in a disguised form. Just compare the devastation which the current floods have inflicted in a few days with the devastation which inflation and poverty have inflicted in one year. You would be shocked to discover that the short-lived floods are far less devastating than the ever-hitting inflation and poverty.

The current floods have killed a large number of citizens. But inflation and poverty kill far larger numbers during a year or so. And yet the devastation caused by the floods is more shocking than the devastation caused by inflation and poverty. There is a very simple reason for this. The floods kill wholesale, whereas inflation and poverty kill piecemeal. The Nation Newspaper

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MQM has ordered its elite terrorist wing to move from South Africa to Pakistan for the final round with the Armed Forces and make Karachi Beirut of Pakistan leading to the separation as independent territory. Though it might not be relevant to the South African government now but may become problem in future. It is understood that elite terrorist unit is active by looking at the targeted killings of 18 Haqiqi (Mohajir Qumi Movemnt) in the month of January 2010 alone, and 81 members from June 2009 – December 2009 in six months period, the total number of Haqaqi workers killed in the past eight years from 2002-2010 is shamefully 154. There are other groups whose members have been killed allegedly by London – Edgware based MQM-Altaf group.

Approximately 16 or more members of MQM elite terrorist wing have entered into Pakistan some with different IDs in the past four weeks. Some of the people arrived in Karachi had bounty on their heads and are wanted in Pakistan for heinous crimes. The master mind of the group is known as Qamar Ghalib Teddy (Johannesburg), Sohial Commando, Rizwan Haider, Nadeem Mullah.
Minister for Ports and Shipping Nabeel Gabool, claimed in an interview published on 25th January 2010 that an MQM assassination team has arrived from South Africa to eliminate him. The minister claimed that, ‘he was called in by the Intelligence Bureau and warned face to face that his life could be in danger.’ The minister confirmed the names of the elite terrorist unit mentioned above.

South African MQM assassins will be taking over the command of the local elite terrorist group known as ‘Shurfa Committee’ aka (Gentlemen’s Committee). Some of the members of this committee are Sultan Keel, Ejaz Gorchani, Naeem – East Sector (Maleer) nephew of a cleric Shahturabul Haq, Manzoor Landhi Wala, Sohial Commando, Farooq Baig, Aslam Chor, Anawar Alam, Hishamul Zafar and ring leader Saleem Shazad. Some of the members are not known to the local sectors as they only report to MQM London Head Office and mobilised to do elite operations. They are provided every facility in the world. Their families are protected and supported. They are the real hired guns.

On the issue of confiscation of spying and recording equipments from senior MQM leader Waseem Akthar (MNA) by the Paramilitary Forces (Rangers) a senior security official told, “it is a very serious violation of the national security of the country as venues of the meetings with Presidential and Prime Minister are debugged and checked as Standard Official Procedure (SOP) but if any invitee or invitees bring some recording device with them that is a serious violation of the security of the state”. We don’t know for whom MQM leaders were recoding? Was he recording for USA, India, Mossad or any one else?

While commenting from Islamabad on the MQM spying matter a Senior Pakistan Army General and security analyst told me over the phone that, “MQM is heavily infiltrated by Indian RAW and Altaf Hussain admitted to him being close to the Americans”. One can not comment on the closeness as Americans are known to sleep and forget their girlfriends behind with illegitimate children, like in Vietnam.

The worst thing is that current so called political regime has no idea of national pride and national security. I spoke to Fozia Wahab (MNA) political spokesperson of the current Zardari regime. She asked me, ‘who was recording MI (Military Intelligence)”?. I said, ‘no MQM leader Waseem Akthar’. FW: ‘oh he was with me in a TV program and there is problem between President Zardari and Altaf Hussain. President would have told himself to Altaf Hussain about the meetings. I explained to her that Presidential meetings are state secrets and not party political broadcasts’. It sounds she was more worried about Military Intelligence recording who is paid by the state to do this job then MQM recordings for India, USA or smuggling state secrets outside Pakistan. The whole regime is full of apologists, criminals, fraudsters, and opportunists.

It looks like as if ‘current regime is using the ‘new trick of treachery’ BY PASS THE SYSTEM, which is undermining the state institutions especially State Security, Law Enforcement, and Defence. For example:

(1) When they see Zardari regime and MQM working on the Indo-US plan of dragging Pakistan Army into civil war in Karachi because armed forces refuse to expand useless war in the FATA.

(2) When they see MQM and PPP are heavily infiltrated by RAW and following its agenda.
(3) When they see Rehman Malik not asking half Jewish US citizen David William Hedley aka (Dawod Gillani), alleged mastermind
     of Mumbai Bombing’s handover to the Indian authorities as Ajmal Kasab, who admitted to be remain in the Mumbai police
     custody long before the bombings.

(4) Why Rehman Malik is too keen to implicate small group ‘Let’ following Indian agenda?

(5) Rehman Malik is a foreign national, chief protector of the Blackater/Xe and mercenaries in the country. He is following Indian agenda to divide Karachi into ethnic zones and start a civil war with full co-operation of MQM whose many leaders including Altaf Hussain are foreign nationals. His idiotic statements sound like a curse and shame on the nuclear nation of 180 million.

(6) Eshrat Abad Khan MQM Governor of Sind is also a foreign national and allegedly providing safe heaven to terrorist involved in targeted killings.

(7) State security, defence, and intelligence institutions especially lower ranking officials who don’t have foreign dollar accounts or have kids studying in Europe and US are feeling helpless, unsupported, demoralised, and betrayed.

(8) surely they have genuine reason when they see Rehman Malik doing ‘pimping’ and applying foreign agenda of fanning sectarianism in Pakistan ignoring national interest of the state of Pakistan.

(9) When they see MQM and Rehman Malik working on the agenda of dividing Karachi and DI Khan into Shia –Sunni sectarian and Punjab-Pashtun – Sindhi and Mohajir ethnic zones.

(10) When they see President Zardari deliberately putting Pakistan into IMF debt trap (friends of Pakistan)

(11) When they see transfer of million of dollars outside Pakistan into foreign accounts of the corrupt and compromised.
There are ways these challenges can be countered: (a) informed public opinion (b) support of ‘MQM feared media’ (c) support of judiciary (d) elimination of infected elements in the police and security agencies.
How to counter terrorism in Karachi:

a) Exposing the real faces of MQM terrorists’ involved in the targeted killings of civilians, armed forces personals, and 650 police officers of the Sindh Police.

b) All political appointees in the Rangers, Police, and Law Enforcement Agencies immediately transferred into other parts of province into interior Sind outside Karachi as their loyalties are with the mafia more than the state of Pakistan. For example cold blooded killings of 4 innocent injured patients as reported on 6th February 2010 at Abbasi Shaeed Hospital proves that MQM – Altaf is a terrorist mercenary group part of Blackwater and not a political party because even in war one don’t kill injured enemy prisoners.

c) All the political prisoners including Mohajir Qumi Movement’s leadership Amir Khan and Afaq Ahmed immediately released if no cases have been proven against them on bail following the law.

d) All community police recruited on the political basis must be disbanded as they have become part of the problem and not part of the solution.

e) Data collection of all arms licence holders
f) Data collection of all the landlords of the foreigners in the city/country
g) Strict monitoring and managing of print and electronic Media propagating Indian propaganda, and become part of Indian Psychological Operations in Pakistan especially media groups emerged in last ten years and owned by dodgy jewellers, businessmen and smugglers.

h) Stop MQM fake registration of votes into the voters list as they plan to register 5 million votes before local bodies’ election.

(i) Complete ban on nonsensical international politics telephone politics. If you want to do politics be brave come in the country and stop ‘sofa–cell politics’. Shamelessly Altaf Hussain has never voted in any Pakistani elections since 1992.
People of Karachi must stand up against the foreign mercenaries of MQM and Blackwater.

“Though brave don’t live longer but cowards don’t live at all”

Source of this information is from The London Post. Please contribute your comments on this issue.

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RAW AND BANGLADESH is an illuminating book written by Mr. Zainal Abedin, a senior Journalist of Bangladesh and published by Fatema Shahad in November 1995. It is printed by Madina Printers and distributed by Madina Publications, 38 Banglabazar Dhaka – 1100, Bangladesh.

Mr. Zainal Abedin is a former student leader and a freedom fighter who crossed over to India in 1971 for military training, joined the Mujib Bahini and fought for the freedom of Bangladesh alongside the Indian Army. Mr Abedin holds a masters degree and a BEd.
In the book Mr Abedin ponders over the events of 1971 and 'one particular incident chastises me the most', he writes, It was in April 1971 in the district headquarters of Noakhali, his home district, where the freedom fighters were gathering, that he met his neighbour. A middle-aged, mature and sober person, his most staunch supporter and admirer. 'He got hold of my hand and took me to a nearby restaurant'. Narrates Mr Abedin, 'As we sipped tea, he started narrating the history of pre-1947 Bengal. He mentioned gory details of how the Hindus used to treat the Muslims and explained the reasons for creation of Pakistan. He said that struggling for one's right is different from break up of the country. He stated that India would first weaken us by breaking our unity and then exploit us. He added that his life time experiences had told him that India would never be sincere to Muslims. With tears in his eyes and hands trembling with emotions he quipped, 'Are you again going to make us the slaves of the Hindus?'.
Mr Abedin admits that he did not give any serious thought to the urging of his neighbour at that time as he was too young and emotional. 'The said question now haunts me often', he writes. 'The realization of what lay in store for us started soon after I crossed over to India. The attitude of our Indian handlers and trainers indicated that they treated us (the Freedom Fighters) not as friends but as agents. The real Indian face lay bare after the surrender of Pakistani forces, when I saw the large scale loot and plunder by the Indian Army personnel. The soldiers swooped on everything they found and carried them away to India. Curfew was imposed on our towns, industrial bases, ports, cantonments, commercial centres and even residential areas to make the looting easier. They lifted everything from ceiling fans to military equipment, utensils to water taps. Thousands of Army vehicles were used to carry looted goods to India. History has recorded few such cruel and heinous plunders. Such a large scale plunder could not have been possible without connivance of higher Indian authorities'.

From the conduct of the Indian Army it was evident that they treated Bangladesh as a colony. That was the time the question asked by his neighbour seriously surfaced in Mr Abedin's mind. He feels that 'India through her notorious deeds has proved time and again that she is not our friend but an arch roguish foe', which has posed a grave threat to the independence and sovereignty of Bangladesh.

'It is now evident', writes Mr Abedin, 'that India helped the creation of Bangladesh with the aim that it would be a step forward towards the reunification of India'. Soon after the creation of Bangladesh, India let loose all forces at her command to cripple the newly born country. Their aim was to precipitate its collapse and eventual merger with India to realize part of the Brahmanic dream about 'Akhand Bharat'. The most significant player of this heinous game is India's notorious intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing commonly known as RAW. Established in 1968 and still 'eating into the vitals of Bangladesh'.

The author explains the main sources of inspiration for India's intelligence agencies and her foreign policy – the ancient pundi-cum-political, Koutillaya, Prime Minister of Chandra Gupta. In his book 'Arthshastra' written about 300 BC Koutillaya laid down three guidelines: when your country is weak pursue the policy of peace; when your country becomes militarily strong follow the policy of war; when another state seeks your help, apply double standards. In his book Koutillaya has recommended six principles as the basis for foreign policy. These deal with peace, war, neutrality, military preparedness, formation of alliance and duel policy. Koutillaya's final dictum is. 'Power is the ultimate truth and the main aim of an organised state should be to obtain power'. The author shows how Mrs Indira Gandhi was an ardent follower of Koutillaya and subscribed fully to his policy of waging 'battles of intrigues' and 'secret wars' to achieve her unholy objectives. She created RAW, a secret intelligence agency functioning directly under the Prime Minister to pursue her ambitious but nefarious agenda particularly in the South Asian region.

The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), explains the author, was raised in September 1968 from the foreign Intelligence Desk of Intelligence Bureau (IB). Mr Rameshwar Nath Kao was appointed its first director and assigned the task of collection, collation and analysis of intelligence from beyond India's national frontiers. A 'Special Operations Branch' was included in its organisation for conducting secret and covert operations. RAW started with a staff of 250 persons and an annual budget of Rupees two crore. It expanded rapidly and by 1990 had a staff exceeding 8 thousand persons and a budget of Rupees 500 crore. Its present budget is around Rs. 1500 crore. It has its own aircraft and helicopters, the headquarters is located in large eleven storey building in Lodhi Estate, New Delhi. The present director is Mr. A. S. Siyali.

RAW has its own agenda particularly concerning neighbouring countries and has great influence in formulation of external policy of India. Since the last few years RAW has become so powerful and influential that it has emerged as a major player in the internal politics as well.

Besides the usual functions as an intelligence agency, RAW is relentlessly working for attainment of the following objectives. One, to extend Indian sovereignty over unprotected and vulnerable smaller neighbours. Two, to enhance Indian influence particularly in the Indian Ocean region militarily, politically and culturally, so as to project and develop India as a future super power. Three, to implement the Brahmanic dream of establishment of 'Akhand Bharat'.

The book explains how RAW's popularity, acceptability and influence increased manifold after its success in disintegration of Pakistan in 1971 and annexation of Sikkim in 1975. However, its image suffered some setbacks due to debacle in Sri Lanka during 1987 and its failure to have Pakistan declared a terrorist state. Nevertheless it retains its image as the country's premier intelligence agency wielding considerable influence in the formulation of foreign policy and internal security.

The book goes on to explain the cardinal principles of RAW inspired foreign policy. Which is to exert influence on other countries under the cover of friendship and co-operation: resort to threat and coercion to achieve desired objective when necessary; insist on policy of bilateralism etc. RAW attains these objectives abroad by conducting extensive espionage activities by the under cover diplomats and staff posted in Indian Missions abroad; recruiting leaders and other important persons; putting pressure or luring through incentives; brain washing intellectuals and spreading cultural influence; promoting internal clashes and developing separatist movements; influencing the government, members of parliament and government officials; forming pressure groups by spreading false, and distorted news; arranging assassination of important personalities etc.

The author explains the espionage set up of RAW in and around Bangladesh. Inside the country the prime centres are Indian High Commission at Dhaka and Deputy High Commissions at Chittagong and Rajshahi. Another RAW organisation operates around Bangladesh with its regional office at Malibagh, Calcutta. It has an annual budget of Rs. 20 crore and supervises the conduct of espionage and special operations inside Bangladesh. Its three regional offices are located at Darjeeling in the North Shillong, in the North East and Agartala in the East. Bangladesh is therefore very well covered from all sides.

RAW agents employed in Bangladesh can be divided into three broad categories. One, trained Indian nationals who come as diplomats, journalists, businessmen, students, cultural activists, literature etc. Two, Bangladesh nationals for a variety of motives including financial rewards, business interests, ideological considerations (some Hindus). Three, officials of multi-national organisations, NGOs, business houses etc.

The book vividly describes how RAW operated in the former East Pakistan and helped in the creation of Bangladesh. After that it has consistently tried to destabilise the new country politically and financially with the aim of merging it with India as planned by the Indian National Congress. This fact is well illustrated by a letter written by Mr. Nehru on 23 May 1947 to Mr Ashrafuddin, a congress leader from Comilla quoted by the author and attached as an appendix to the book.

'The Congress had stood for the union of India and still stands for it'. Wrote Mr Nehru, 'But we have previously stated that we are not going to compel any part against its will. If that unfortunately leads to a division then we accept it. But inevitably such a division must mean a division also of Bengal and Punjab. That is the only way to have a united India soon after. If we can have a united India straight away without such a division, that will of course be very welcome'.

This book is written by a highly educated man who was a student leader, a freedom fighter, a politician, and is now a journalist of great standing in his country. It is written with great perception and knowledge, quoting accurate facts and figures to illustrate his point of view. It should be read by our policy planners and all those concerned with the well-being and prosperity of South Asia. The book does show India's policy, present attitude and future plans concerning her small neighbours.

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The Obama Administration’s policy of escalating drone strikes took another hit today, after the explosion from a drone attack against the house of “suspected militants” in North Waziristan also destroyed a neighboring house full of women and children.

The combined toll from the blast was 20 people killed, with at least four women and three children among the slain. At least 13 other civilians were also reported wounded, including a number of other children.

Pakistani intelligence officials say most of the “suspects” killed in the attacks were Afghans, but it is unclear how much evidence they had of wrongdoing. Large numbers of Afghan civilians have been living as refugees in the tribal areas since the 2001 US invasion.

The large numbers of civilians (700 in 2009 alone) killed in the US drone strikes has fueled considerable anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. When pressed during a previous visit Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shrugged off concerns about the civilians, saying only “there’s a war going on.”

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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will soon travel to flood-hit Pakistan to witness first hand the impact of the natural disaster that has engulfed Iran's eastern neighbour, the interior minister said Tuesday. "The president has decided to personally visit the affected areas to decide how to better help the flood victims," ILNA news agency quoted Mostafa Mohammad Najjar as saying. Najjar did not specify when Ahmadinejad's visit would take place.

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     A US client regime In Islamabad accepts insignificant Indian aid on US prodding

No respect for Kashmiri blood & no thought to Indian terrorism In Balochistan

The Government of Pakistan has truly shown its subservience to the United States on whose orders it chose to accept the puny amount of $5 million Indian aid for the flood relief. This money has the blood of Kashmiris on it and one wonders how our Kashmiri brethren must be feeling as they face the bullets of Indian forces every day and see us taking Indian "aid".

Some would say that we also took Indian assistance in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake but that was different in that the Indian aid was in kind and basically the two sides of Kashmir were opened up on humanitarian grounds. Later, it transpired that most of the Indian material aid, specifically targeted for Azad Kashmir, was tarnished. But even at that time we had refused to accept India's offer of helicopters for relief work – an offer which also had the conditionality that Indian crews would come with these copters.

But to accept money from India at a time when the Kashmiri youth have risen afresh against the Indian occupation and are being killed on a daily basis, and at a time when India is targeting Pakistan on false charges again on a regular basis, is a shame for the entire nation. Even as PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif was declaring that Pakistan did not need Western assistance, the US ordered the Pakistani leadership to meekly accept the Indian aid offer. In fact, barely had Senator Kerry departed that the Pakistanis accepted US diktat yet again. Kerry also compelled the government to target Pakistani religious charities doing a remarkable job of relief work.

Here is a country, India, with whom we have fought wars; a country that was instrumental in breaking up Pakistan; a country that continues to deny the Kashmiris their right of self-determination; and the moment the US commands, we accept a meager amount of aid from this same India. How can anyone take our position on Kashmir seriously when we are prepared to forget the people of Kashmir at the mere offer of a blood-soaked $5 million Indian loan? Certainly this reflects our total abandonment of the Kashmiri people in their hour of dire need and moral support.

What can you expect though from a government which allows its President to break all protocol and stand next to a mere Senator from the US for a press conference? This is our shame today – we have effectively become a vassal state of the US.

This column was published by TheNation. Reach Dr. Mazari at callstr@hotmail.com

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The scale of the disaster caused by the floods in Pakistan, is barely comprehensible. As Juan Cole has written, expressing near disbelief : "The submerged area of the country is as big as the United Kingdom, fourteen million Pakistanis are affected, two million are homeless." Six million need immediate relief, according to the UN., and thirty six thousand are suffering from acute diarrhoeal symptoms, with cholera already diagnosed. 1,600 are reported dead, with the number certain to multiply. Famine is a real possibility.

The great Indus river, one of the world's longest, which flows also through China, India and Kashmir, rising in Tibet and flowing in to the Arabian Sea, has flooded Sindh and Balochistan provinces, forcing the evacuation of over ninety percent of the villages. With no place to hide, people watched their homes washed away, in a monsoon season that continues through September. Hundreds of villages are inundated or completely under water, with roads, rail links, thus transportation cut, as frantic people try to flee to safer ground. It is the worst flooding in the country's history, with some experts saying the region worst affected for nearly one hundred years. A far wider area is now threatened.

When the waters subside, the million-plus people who are directly or indirectly dependent on the mangroves, will have had their livelihood affected or erased, as will the fishermen along this great expanse.

Looking at US., news sites, the enormity of this tragedy has evoked not pity, but almost universal vindictiveness. One with over 19,000 comments are typified by:

• "Pray for more rain"; "Uncle Sam, I need your help again!!! …";
  
• "Doesn't it just pull at your heartstrings that Dear Ol' Uncle Sam wants to help out the enemy-";
  
• "Ha, God truly works in mysterious ways … forsaken by their false prophet";
  
• "What did it cost to deploy this missle to kill a measly 12 people? Not good use of our tax dollars! Get a bigger missle,12,000 would be better!"(1) are, sickeningly, a few of the milder ones, addressed to a River Valley civilization which dates to about 3,300 BC., with tools found, used fifteen thousand years ago.
  

Saturday 14th August, is Pakistan's Independence Day, celebrated annually since 1947. Flags and flowers, traditionally decorate all, homes, roofs, vehicles. This year celebrations were muted to sombre, devastation and death dominated. Prayers for both replaced festivity. The army cancelled their celebrations and donated the funds allocated for their day's events to the flood victims.

President Obama in a message for Independence Day, pledged U.S. support: “… in line with deepening partnership between the two nations”, praising the Pakistani people " … as they bravely respond to widespread and unprecedented flooding." He ended: "I have directed my Administration to continue to work closely with the Government of Pakistan and provide assistance in their response to this crisis.”

Pakistan has requested helicopters from this US "partner", close by in Afghanistan, however : "A senior U.S. military official said transfer of additional helicopters, which are in short supply in Afghanistan, would require a political decision in Washington. 'Do they exist in the region? Yes', he said. 'Are they available? No' ", writes Robert Naiman.

What was available, on Pakistan's National Day, and the third day of the holy month of Ramadan, were US drones. A US missile strike on (as ever) a "militant" compound on the Afghan border, killing thirteen "rebels" and wounding five others on Saturday, in the village of Eisori, in North Pakistan, is widely reported. Wait for the bodies of the militant children, women, teenagers. It is still confusing to know how these "militants" are recognised from the air, from a computer in the US, given so many have turned out to be families having a meal, tending their land, or mince-meated infants. What happened to Courts of Law?

Unmanned drones, decimating lives since 2004 in the US's "deepening partnership" country, operated by those who have graduated from computer games to war games, with real human targets, has to be one of life's more memorable, bizarre, cowardly, illegal obscenities. Some "partnership."

The good news or the bad?

A shipload of U.S. Marines and helicopters did arrive to boost relief efforts in flooded Pakistan on Thursday (12th August.) However, given the number of US Special Services alleged to have been at sites of bombings in Pakistan, from schools to communal compounds, the cynic might wonder whether this is in spirit of co-operation and "partnership" or an eye to the main chance.

And the US has a bit of form when it comes to Ramadan missiles. In Ramadan in Iraq, the US., military signed their missiles with: "Have a nice Ramadan, Saddam."

UN Secretary General, Ban, has finally limped in to Pakistan, saying not a lot. The Taliban have offered, allegedly, twenty million dollars in aid if Pakistan rejects US aid (given US form, they could possibly be on to something – further once in, the US., have a tendency to stay) and President Obama and his family are swimming in Florida to promote tourism in BP infested waters.

One commentator reached a US news site, and compared poor Michelle Obama to Marie Antoinette. A long way from: "Change we can believe in."

Nearly five hundred years ago, William Shakespeare put it well : " … perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame; savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust."

Funny world. 

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Canadian Sikh Leader Says The Sikh Nation Will Stand By Kashmiris, And Wants Freedom For Sikh Homeland

Worried Indian diplomats sneaked behind the curtains of the windows at the building of the Consulate General of India in this Canadian city as Kashmiris, Pakistanis, and Sikhs gathered across the street, drawing the attention of the Canadian media and public to an important idea whose time has come: an end to the Indian occupation of Kashmir.

World Kashmiri Diaspora Alliance held a peaceful rally in front of the Consulate General of India in Toronto to ask the world powers important questions that must be answered that must be answered: “Should India get away with defiance of international agreements?”  and “Who has given India a license for the genocide of the Kashmiris and other minorities?”

The demonstrators included children, women, and the elderly. They raised slogans of protest saying, “Kashmiris demand the right to life.”

Protesters were carrying placards demanding “Indian Army: quit Kashmir”; “We demand self-determination, as agreed upon in 1948”; “India honor her pledges given at the UN”; “Stop killings & inhumane crimes in Kashmir”; “Stop state terrorism in Kashmir”; “Kashmiris demand peace & justice”.  Since June, 2010, the Kashmir Valley has been burning. A renowned Kashmiri leader Farooq Siddiqui said:

“Our parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins are undergoing unwanted sufferings and uncertainties. Protests and demonstrations have been rocking Kashmir; strikes and curfews have brought the Kashmir's life to a standstill. We would like to draw the world attention on Indian armed personnel's presence which is more than 800,000 in the civilian population to intimidate the Kashmiris. It is horrifying to imagine more than 192,685 killings, 215,877 arrests, and 110,000 disappearances, 115,665 home demolitions, committed by Indian Forces, leaving 122,675 widows and 207,218 orphans in the last six decades. India has been committing crimes such as rapes, torture, atrocities, humiliation, dehumanization and gross human rights violations of the Kashmiris. Nobody has paid any attention to the agony of the Kashmiris for over 63 years. Despite all these atrocities, India still claims to be the world’s largest democracy. It is evident that India’s treatment of the people of Jammu and Kashmir is vastly different than its other states. “

Canadians participated in the rally. Of special significance was the participation of activists from the United Front of Sikhs, a renowned Sikh organization based in Toronto, Canada.

Sikh leader Sardar Balkar Singh, a victim of India's terrorism and in charge of the United Front of Sikhs, announced that the Sikh nation will work together with their Kashmiri brethren in order to achieve sovereignty for both Kashmir and Khalistan, the Sikh homeland that waits to be freed from Indian occupation.

He also stressed that they were present to show solidarity with their Kashmiri brothers and fully support to their just cause. They were also carrying banners displaying “The Indian Government must cease the illegal occupation of Khalistan.”

The Sikh leader said the Sikh nation has been struggling for the sovereignty of Punjab (Khalistan), which is also occupied by the Indian Government since the day India received freedom from Britain on August 15, 1947. This was day when the Sikh nation and PUNJAB were 'robbed' by the deceitful Indian government masters and made the Sikhs a 'Landless Sikh Nation.” So far, India has murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Sikhs since 1984.

Habib Yousafzai, a member and spokesperson in Toronto for the World Kashmiri Diaspora Alliance, strongly demanded that, “The Indian democracy must honor its own words to the inhabitants of Jammu and Kashmir whose sovereignty is disputed as per various United Nations resolutions. Their fate should be decided by the right of Self-Determination by the people of Kashmir. The New Delhi administration, he said, must:

i. declare ceasefire against Kashmiri innocent peoples
ii. remove curfew, and
iii. withdraw all its armed forces to let the people of Jammu and Kashmir decide their own destiny and the future for their
     coming generations, by a democratic verdict of referendum

Others who addressed the rally included Mr. Mohammed Aslam Rathure, Mr. Hussain Yousafzai, Mr. Mueen Hakak, Mr. G.S. Dhaliwal, Mr. Altaf Qazi, Sardar Kuljit Singh and Ms. Khaoula Siddiqi.

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Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, who was away from his country when it was hit by the worst floods in 80 years, has topped a unique list of influential people who were conspicuously absent when they were needed the most.

Releasing the list of five such people, the prestigious 'Foreign Policy' magazine said Zardari was travelling in Europe when millions of people had been affected by the devastating floods and hundreds others hit by political violence in his country.

"For a world leader, being seen directing relief efforts (or at least showing sympathy for the victims) is usually a good idea when a natural disaster strikes. 

"But for Pakistan's Zardari, forging ahead with a tour of Europe seemed more important -even after US officials privately urged him to discontinue the lavish trip, which allegedly included hotel stays that cost more than USD 11,000 a night," the Foreign Policy magazine said. Zardari's officials fired back, saying the President chose the "cheapest five-star hotel" in London — the Churchill Hyatt Regency — and even chose not to sleep in the royal suite, the magazine wrote. 

"The President's trip wasn't all fun and games, though — at a public speech during one of Zardari's final stops in Britain, a 60-year-old British-Pakistani protester hurled his shoes at the President in light of his decision not to return home. "This was the only means of protest available in front of me at that time," it quoted the demonstrator as saying after he was released by police. 

Zardari's absence continued on August 18 with a visit to the Black Sea resort at Sochi, Russia, where he met his Russian, Afghan, and Tajik counterparts for a security summit. "Perhaps wisely, Zardari decided not to stay for lunch and left quickly after the meeting," the magazine said.

Among other leaders part of the unique list are Yuri Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow, who was receiving physical therapy in the Austrian Alps while his city was engulfed with wildfires; and Wyclef Jean, a Hip-hop artist-turned Haitian presidential candidate who was "in hiding" at the time of reconstruction of the disaster-stricken country.

BP CEO Tony Hayward, who was on a yacht off the Isle of Wight during the oil spill in the Gulf; and Tony Woodley, General Secretary of Unite, Britain's largest labour union, who during the British Airways strikes was on a Mediterranean island villa, also figured in the list.

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• Both US And PAF Are Responsible For Flood Relief Hurdles
  
• Aid workers confirm they can’t reach half a million victims due to a US-related security cordon
  
• Jacobabad cut off from the rest of the country
  

Pakistan Air Force arranged a hurriedly organized media tour yesterday to prove that the base is not under US control. But this does not appear to be the whole truth. Over the past eight years, PAF offered and withdrew different types of facilities to US military at the base. The Americans used the base mostly for logistical purposes and not to stage direct attacks against targets in Afghanistan or inside Pakistan’s northwestern region. But there were times when the number of US personnel at the base crossed 200, including special-forces operatives. According GlobalSecurity.org, Pakistani newspaper Daily Times claimed on 10 March 2004 that the airbase was under US control, “with an inner ring of facilities off-limits to Pakistan's military,” according to the paper. But in August 2010, there is credible information that new special residential barracks for US personnel have been constructed. Unfortunately, Pakistan has accepted to house US personnel who will ensure the country’s doesn’t ‘misuse’ the new F-16s. So despite PAF’s – and US Embassy’s – sharp reaction, it is clear there is some merit to the statement of Federal Health Secretary Kamran Lashari that US presence at the base is preventing using the base for flood relief operations. Another related issue is the level of Pakistani involvement in CIA drone attacks inside Pakistan that have killed a huge number of innocent Pakistanis and turned Pakistani citizens against their country. [PakNationalists.com]

The floods have not only shown the ineptitude of the Pakistan government but also the confusion that prevails within government institutions. On Wednesday the Federal Health Secretary informed a Senate Panel that Jacobabad air base was under the US control so health relief operations could not be provided.

On Thursday, the PAF through APP issued a strange press release stating that “certain sections of the print and electronic media have wrongly reported that the PAF Base Shahbaz (Jacobabad) is under the control of the US. This has been spread by uninformed people”. So was the PAF referring to Federal Health Secretary Khushnood Lashari as “uninformed? After all, it was he who gave out the information about the Base being under the US control and to a Senate Panel.

While the PAF stated that Shahbaz Base was under complete command and control of the PAF and was being used extensively for providing relief and medical care to the affected people of the area, the US embassy had already issued another interesting response to the Khshnood Lashari’s claim. On Thursday, the US press note issued from Embassy of US in Islamabad stated that Shahbaz Air Base in Jacobabad is a Pakistan Air Force Base and is commanded and operated by PAF forces. The base is home to Pakistan’s newest F-16 Block 52s, which arrived this summer. PAF personnel maintain high security standards there to ensure that the technologically advanced aircraft can be securely maintained and operated from the base. On August 18, at the request of the Pakistan government, US Air Force C-130 aircraft flew to Shahbaz Air Base from the Pakistan Air Force Base in Rawalpindi bringing urgently needed relief supplies for Jacobabad.

What was left unsaid was that it was the PAF that was denying all manner of access to the airbase because of the presence of US personnel who had come along with the Block 52 F-16s, which were delivered at this base and had US conditions attached to the delivery of the planes, including the presence of US personnel to “keep an eye” on how the planes were used by the PAF. While the PAF was responsible for the security of the base, it was the pressure from the US on security grounds that was preventing access to the base-even for Pakistanis who had been involved in carrying out building work at Shahbaz.

So, it appears that both the US military and the PAF together are responsible for the relief work hurdles as news from the ground shows that the hurdles are very much there. Hopes are fading away to provide food and clean drinking water to 500,000 to 700,000 people who have been displaced from Jacobabad, Thul, Kandhkot, Kashmore Ghouspur and Karumpur (currently camping in Dera Allah Yar) as Jacobabad was still no-go area for choppers or C-130 due to security concerns to the American personnel deployed at the Jacobabad air base, well-informed sources told TheNation on Thursday. Organisers of national and international NGOs told TheNation on condition of anonymity, when contacted on telephone, that they could not reach Jacobabad to provide food and drinking water to as many as 500,000 to 700,000 flood victims due to strict security conditions adopted for Shahbaz Air Base. Although Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman has ordered PAF to form an air bridge of relief supply for Jacobabad which has been cut off from the rest of the country and make operational an airfield near Sibi for immediate supply of relief goods to flood-hit areas in the vicinity, however, Jacobabad is still the only location in Pakistan where rescue choppers of PAF have no access to carry out relief operations.

The sources told this scribe that foreign health teams could not start their relief operations in remote areas because there are not airstrips close to several areas, including Jacobabad.

The town has been evacuated and 500,000 to 700,000 people have been affected. The people displaced from Jacobabad, Thul, Kandhkot, Kashmore, Ghouspur and Karumpur are camping in Dera Allah Yar.

Earlier, it was reported that Shahbaz Air Base was under control of American personnel who were guarding the air base while monitoring the operations of F-16s against militants and extremists in FATA and Waziristan. As one seeks to discover the reality on the ground, the flood-stricken people of this devastated area of Sindh continue to suffer.

Report published by TheNation. Newspaper’s rights are reserved.

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Will US now dictate how Pakistanis help their own flood victims? US is forcing ISPR to give media coverage to US helicopters, and wants the puppet Pakistani govt to ban Pakistani charities that are doing a good work just because US considers them enemies, while US puppets in govt refuse to do anything or even donate despite being millionaires? Jacobabad air base can’t be used for aid dispersement because US personnel are housed there to check we don’t misuse F-16s? And now this US-installed govt is accepting aid from India? Thieves in power fully protected by US & their local guarantors. May God have mercy on Pakistan where national spirit lies in the pits today thanks to these Abdul-Dollars. – Ahmed Qureshi

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi appealed to the international community to provide more and immediate aid to cope with the humanitarian crisis due to the floods. Moreover, Pakistan has decided to accept flood aid from its neighbour India, saying the offer was a “very welcome initiative” as both countries look to improve their tense relations. Foreign Minister Qureshi told India’s NDTV television in an interview broadcast Friday that Islamabad would take India’s offer of five million dollars which was made last Friday.

“I can share with you that the government of Pakistan has agreed to accept the Indian offer,” Qureshi said from New York, where he addressed a special session of the UN General Assembly called to boost aid for flood victims. “I think this initiative of India is a very welcome initiative.”

India and Pakistan have made major efforts in recent months to build confidence in their relations, which were badly strained by the Mumbai 2008 terror attacks, which Indian blamed on militants from Pakistan. The United States urged Pakistan earlier this week to accept the Indian offer and not let rivalry stand in the way of helping its citizens in flood-ravaged regions. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rang his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani on Thursday “to express his sense of sorrow and to condole the deaths resulting from the huge floods,” Singh’s office said.

The catastrophic floods in Pakistan have claimed nearly 1,500 lives and affected 20 million people.

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SPECIAL REPORT

This is a lesson for the whole Pakistani nation. If you are a Pakistani reading this, please tell others. While the world’s rich dole out money to help Pakistan’s flood victims, Pakistan’s rich political elite refuses to budge. By now we should have been seeing members of this ruling elite buying tents, building shelters and providing gallons of clean drinking water to the homeless millions. But in every flooded district of the country, you will see Pakistani civilian and military volunteers. But not the politicians.

Consider this:

On the first day of a nationwide Saudi campaign to raise funds for the victims of floods in Pakistan on Monday, 17 Aug. 2010:

- King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdelaziz Al Saud, donated US$5.3 million from his private money to Pakistan flood victims

- Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdelzziz Al Saud gave away US$2.7 million from his private money

- Interior Minister Nayef bin Abdelaziz Al Saud gave away two million Saudi riyals

- Governor of Tabouk donated one million Saudi Riyals

- Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdelaziz Al Saud gave ten million Saudi riyals

- Businessman Eesa bin Mohammad al Eesa, president of the Samba Financial Group, donated two million Saudi riyals

This is not to mention the sight of Saudi women who thronged public aid collection camps in different Saudis cities and were photographed by the international media donating their jewelry to King Abdullah’s campaign in support of Pakistan.  Compare this to the reaction of the Pakistani elite:

- Pakistan’s president, a billionaire in dollar terms by some accounts, is yet to donate anything or even be seen donating anything anywhere. There were reports he donated Rs. five million to a fund named after his son and daughter, and only Rs. one million to the government fund. This is less than what he might have spent wandering in France and Britain earlier this month.

- The most shocking part is that the PPPP is trying to milk large companies out of relief money for private party funds. This means that the party is quietly trying to direct aid money to private funds rather than relief funds run by the government or the Pakistani military. The ruling party is reported to have convened a meeting in the business hub city of Karachi where leading businessmen were asked to donate to a Bakhtawar Fund, named after the president’s elder daughter. The meeting was chaired by president’s sister, senator Faryal Talpur. But she failed to get a pledge for a single rupee from any attending businessmen.

- The Sharif family has donated Rs. 10 million, which is peanuts compared to what the family could have donated. Not to mention that no one knows how this amount will be spent. Pakistanis are yet to see any member of the Sharif clan seeing off trucks carrying relief goods or opening clean water plants in the affected areas.

- None of the one thousand members of the federal and provincial parliaments have been sighted at any of the affected regions helping people or distributing aid. If anything, a few of the shameless politicians were quick to jump in front of visiting TV crews. One of them, from Sindh, was seen seated in a boat run by the army for the media giving out an interview to a leading anchor. The politician was pretending as if he was organizing the rescue operations in Sindh.

- Forget helping people, a senior member of the PPPP from Balochistan is accusing two influential feudal members of PPPP Sindh of diverting flood waters to Balochistan and creating a humanitarian crisis there to save their vast landholdings in Sindh. This is a serious allegation that merits investigation and stern punishment if proven. But who will do it? And what is more important: private feudal landholdings or the lives of thousands of poor people? Don’t ask Pakistani politicians, obviously.

- An unusual situation in Pakistan is that the country’s closed club of political elite monopolizes large chunks of the economy. So these politicians control everything, benefit from inflation, pay no taxes and are under no obligation to donate generously when fellow countrymen are in need.

- The Pakistan Army donated a day’s salary of its soldiers, who come from poor backfrounds, for the relief effort. No politician is yet to take a similar step. And we are talking about a bunch of people who arrive at the federal parliament in Islamabad in expensive imported luxury cars, wearing expensive watches and jewelry and looking awash in wealth.

- The millionaires and billionaires in the Pakistani business community, unlike the politicians, are donating directly to the victims in the affected areas but refuse to route the money through the coffers of a government run by this political elite.

The conclusion is this: while the country reels under a humanitarian tragedy, it is the Pakistani middle class, the Pakistani business class, a couple of religious charities and the armed forces that have come to the rescue of their fellow countrymen during a disaster. They will always step up to help their countrymen. 

Pakistan’s politicians, among them the nation’s richest, will disappeared in a flash during a crisis like they have done now.

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Health relief operations in Jacobabad are not possible because the airbase in the area is controlled by the US.

The stunning statement was made by Health Secretary Khushnood Lashari during an appearance at the Senate Standing Committee on Health on Wednesday.

“Health relief operations are not possible in the flood-affected areas of Jacobabad because the airbase is with the United States,” Mr Lashari said while answering a question asked by Senator Semeen Yusuf Siddiqui of PML-Q.

Dr Jahanzeb Aurakzai, coordinator of the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Centre, said: “Foreign health teams could not start relief operations in remote areas because there are no airstrips close to several areas, including Jacobabad.”

The town has been evacuated and 500,000 to 700,000 people have been affected. People displaced from Jacobabad, Thul, Kandhkot, Kashmore, Ghouspur and Karumpur are camping in Dera Allahyar.

“It is very unfortunate that Americans can launch a drone attack from Shahbaz airbase but the government is helpless even in using the country’s base for relief operations,” Senator Semeen said while talking to this correspondent.

She said the health ministry should have requested the army to ask the US to allow relief operation from the base.

“I don’t know why the health minister failed to report the matter to the quarters concerned, specifically the Pakistan Army.

“The airbase, which I think the government has given on lease to the Americans, should be used to provide immediate health relief to the flood-affected people.”

The committee, headed by Senator Kulsoom Parveen, was briefed by officials on health-related operations in the affected areas.

APP adds: Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman has ordered PAF to form an air bridge of relief supply for Jacobabad which has been cut off from the rest of the country and make operational an airfield near Sibi for immediate supply of relief goods to flood-hit areas in the vicinity.

Presiding over a meeting, he asked the air staff to use all available human and material resources to provide timely relief to the affected people.

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• Indian company controls dam on Kabul River, tens of dams control flow of Kashmir water into Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan
  
•  Flood gates of Afghan Sarobi Dam, Indian Baglihar Dam were opened to drown Pakistani plains
  
• Two US allies, the puppet regime in Kabul and the ‘strategic ally’ in New Delhi, declare water war on Pakistan
  
• The tragedy one again raises question marks on the US double game against Pakistan in the region
  
• · Melting glaciers have nothing to do with this tragedy; it also doesn’t explain why Kabul river surged

It’s not as if the clouds dodged borders and focused on Pakistan only. Pakistan’s water flows from Indian-occupied Kashmir and from US-occupied Afghanistan. A natural deluge should have shown some spillover effect into Indian and Afghan regions adjoining Pakistan. It is interesting that a second and a third wave of floods is expected in Pakistan when there’s no rain to justify it. Where is the water coming from? Here’s a perspective by Mr. Zaid Hamid, a security analyst at BrassTacks, and Ms. Gulpari Mehsud, a researcher at PakNationalists.com. [PakNationalists.com]

There is a very sinister aspect to the floods in Pakistan that no one is discussing in the media. While there were rains and flooding in some rivers of the country, the size, scale and the gush of water suddenly pumped into these rivers defies logic. This is especially true considering that rains have slowed down since the breakout of the floods on 29 July.

It is two weeks since the rains stopped but water continues to rise in the rivers Indus and Chenab. There was no flooding in India or in Afghanistan. Never before have rivers in all the provinces of Pakistan flooded at the same time without a similar act affecting the upstream, the source. While some parts of the country, like some areas of Khyber Pakhtun Khwa saw flooding in 1929, the simultaneous floods covering all of Pakistan and in all of the rivers flowing in from Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir is something truly unprecedented.

This speed and quantity of the gushing water and the short span of time in which it picked momentum preclude the possibility that water from melting glaciers are solely responsible for the floods.

There is no evidence that suggests that glaciers decided to melt at a faster speed just in time for the heavy monsoon rains.

There is every likelihood that what we are seeing today is that the Indians and the US-backed regime in Kabul are using water as a weapon for the first time to deluge Pakistan. There is no doubt about it.

From an initial look at the data, it seems that a natural spill of heavy rain was exploited by releasing water reservoirs in Indian-occupied Kashmir and on river Kabul. Let’s remember that the Met Office in Pakistan had already forecast heavy rains almost ten days before the first downpour. Different people received this news in different ways. Pakistani politicians, inept and incompetent as usual, slept over it. The anti-Pakistan terrorists based on Afghan soil and supported by several countries used this information to exacerbate terror against Pakistani citizens in the southwestern province of Balochistan, knowing that the State machinery would be distracted.

Interestingly, even when it comes to water, it is Indians where are sitting to the left and right of Pakistan’s borders. The dam on Kabul river is handled by Indian personnel, while tens of dams choke Pakistan from the side of occupied Kashmir.

RIVER KABUL

In February, the Obama administration organized a meeting for senior government officials in Kabul and Islamabad who handle agricultural issues. The meeting was strangely held in Doha, Qatar, on US request. The agenda was to force the Pakistanis to grant agricultural concessions to the US-propped government in Kabul, without Pakistan getting anything in return.

But in the meeting, Mr. Zahoor Malik, a senior Pakistani bureaucrat leading the Pakistani delegation, raised the issue of an Indian company with close links to the Indian government building a dam on river Kabul near the border with Pakistan. It is not clear what the Americans and Karzai’s officials had to say about this. There is a track record, however, that the incumbent pro-US government in Islamabad has often swept such issues under the carpet in order not to jeopardize Washington’s support for the Zardari government.

All major rivers flowing into Pakistan including the Indus are blocked by Indian-built dams.

US and British officials often defend India and dismiss Pakistani concerns as ‘conspiracy theories.’ Some Pakistani analysts accuse elements within US government and intelligence of using Afghan soil against Pakistan.

But imagine this: India, a country that faces a debilitating conflict over Kashmir with Pakistan, goes to build tens of small and medium sized dams on all the rivers flowing down to Pakistan, and everything is supposed to work out smoothly? Not possible, even theoretically. But luckily Indian actions on the ground more than strengthen Pakistani concerns.

After the first wave of floods, the other rivers were flowing normally and no extraordinary rains followed. But suddenly Chenab and Indus Rivers overflowed and the flow picked up speed, turning into a flood. India’s Baghliar Dam in occupied Kashmir opened its flood gates to cause a tragedy in the plains of Pakistan [Sindh and Punjab]. While Sarobi Dam – the Indian-maintained dam near Kabul – controls the flow of Kabul River entering Pakistan. The same thing happened here. Monsoons did not lash Afghanistan and there was no flooding there of any magnitude. But again, strangely, water flowing from river Kabul into Pakistan dramatically picked up speed as water levels increased turning into a flood. The speed with which this transformation occurred could have happened only because of one of two reasons: massive rains in Afghanistan or because Sarobi Dam released large amounts of water over a sustainable period of time.

PAKISTANI POLITICIANS

ANP, a US-allied party with strong links to Kabul and New Delhi and ruling the Pakistani northwestern province, has always opposed the construction of the Kalabagh Dam which would have saved thousands of lives and property had it been there. The ANP has argued that building the dam would drown the city of Nowshehra. Ironically, ANP’s lie was exposed when not only Nowshehra but also Charsadda drowned without the Kalabagh Dam being there and thanks to the artificial floods created in Kabul River by ANP’s Indian and Afghan patrons.

[Earlier this year, Washington and New Delhi came to ANP’s defense on the Kalabagh Dam project by lobbying the World Bank to refuse Islamabad’s request for funding the dam. The Bank obliged and said it can’t fund the project due to Indian objections.]

OUR RESPONSE

How Pakistan responds to this latest Indian water war and aggression is something that remains to be seen. What is confirmed is that the incumbent pro-US government in Islamabad is useless when it comes to defending the Pakistani interest. To be fair to this government, this unusual situation in Islamabad started under former President Musharraf and continues with the current ‘elected’ government with amazing continuity. This water aggression has proved more lethal than the TTP [so-called Pakistani Taliban] and the BLA insurgencies, both of which were started from the Afghan springboard to punish Pakistan.

Pakistan has taken another serious hit, more from its corrupt rulers than external enemies. These Indian Dams now need to be destroyed. India has declared war on us by exploiting and orchestrating these floods.

Mr. Hamid can be reached at info@brasstacks.biz and Ms. Mehsud can be reached at info@paknationalists.com Research associates contributed to this report.

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Aey Watan K Sajeely Siyasat dano
Sare Raqbey tumharey Liye Hain

Kothiyon K Talabgar Ho Tum
Ploton K Parastar Ho Tum

O, Zalalat Ki Zinda Misalo
Saray karzey tmharey liye hain

Tum Hi Se Qaim Budget Ka Khsara
Lahoo pi lo ghariboo ka sara

Aey Jahanum k zinda nishano
Sarey Funds Tumarey Liye Hain

Aey Pak Watan K Ghadaro
O, America K Wafadaro

Ye jitni bhi hain is jahan mai
Sari Lanatain Tumhare Liye Hain…

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The recent floods have most strongly highlighted what absence of dams can do to a country. I have great trust in Pakistan and that Allah will not abandon us especially when Pakistanis want to take up the role that Allah wants for muslims and so I would more likely be inclined towards calling these recent floods a signal from Allah to make dams by shattering the propaganda on dams. Its true the floods have inflicted great hardship and azmaish on Pakistan but at the same time have also shattered the so called ANP and anti pakistan elements propaganda on KBD and other dams. Pakistan must urgently move towards making dozens of dams and without any delay. Whosoever stands in hindering it, should be put brought to good justice. This is a signal from Allah reminding us many things, one of which is dams also. Otherwise, there is no other way for Pakistan to confront India's plans working on Indus Water Treaty. Once it was more of apprehensions, now it has become reality. At the same time, we should also turn to Allah with honest hearts seeking His forgiveness and work to re-establish our link with Him by fulfilling our promise for Pakistan. He may be trying us but at the same time exposing everything working against Pakistan too. For sure He is the best planner. Pakistanis should more strongly raise their voices for constuction of dams in Pakistan.

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Regional/Islamabad/17-Aug-2010/SC-moved-for-Kalabagh-Dam-construction

Supreme Court has been moved for immediate construction of the controversial Kalabagh Dam on Tuesday. The petition was filed by Advocate Azam Khan Sultanpuri, who made federal and provincial governments, members of the National Assembly and Senate the parties in his application. Advocate Sultanpuri argued that the World Bank had pledged to fund dams in Pakistan at the time of Indus Basin Treaty. However, these projects were ignored due to political compulsions, he said. He contended that the ongoing floods proved that the deluge could have been averted, had there Kalabagh Dam been constructed. The petition urged the apex court to order immediate construction of Kalabagh Dam so that flood-like natural catastrophes could be prevented in the future.

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BrassTacks Report

There is a very sinister aspect to the floods in Pakistan which no one is discussing in media. While there were rains and flooding in some rivers of the country, the size, scale and amount of water which came into these rivers so suddenly defies logic, considering that rains have slowed down for couple of weeks now but floods continue to rise in Indus and Chenab. There were no flooding in India or in Afghanistan but the rivers that flow into Pakistan swelled beyond logic, causing death and devastation of unprecedented scale. Indians and Afghans have used water as weapon for the first time to deluge Pakistan. There is no doubt about it. This flood disaster is more manmade than natural.

All major rivers flowing into Pakistan including Indus are blocked by Dams by India. On Chenab River, Baglihar is the biggest project. After the first wave of floods, all the other inflowing rivers are flowing normally and there are no extra ordinary rains as well but suddenly Chenab and Indus Rivers go into high floods. Baghliar Dam has opened its flood gates to cause flooding in Chenab. While Sarobi Dam near Kabul controls Kabul river entering Pakistan.

The argument which the traitor ANP always gave to block the construction Kalabagh Dam was that it would drown and submerge Nowshehra city upstream, non-sense logic to start with. Ironically, even without this Dam, the city of Nowshshra and Charsadda were drowned in artificial floods created in Kabul river created by their Indian and Afghan patrons. Even more ironic is that fact that Charsadda is the stronghold and base regions of ANP!! Now they should be put on trial for their role in helping Indians to cause these floods! InshAllah soon.How does Pakistan respond to this latest Indian water war and aggression remains to be seen. There is no hope from this government. This water aggression has proved more lethal than TTP and BLA insurgencies. Pakistan has taken another serious hit, more from its corrupt rulers than external enemies. These Indian Dams now need to be destroyed! India has declared war on us by exploiting and orchestrating these floods!

InshAllah Khair. Nation is alive, rising and charging forward to defend the land and the ideology. The time for change is now. Prepare yourself, make best of Ramazan. Allah has not abandoned us. InshAllah very soon we shall see His Rehmat!

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The U.S. military is pressing ahead in its efforts to support Pakistan’s army in bringing relief to millions of people affected by the worst flooding in the country’s history, undeterred by suspicions about its intentions.

Amid conspiracy theories that U.S. forces deployed in Pakistan could also be used against terrorists, a senior officer says the military does not spend a lot of time or energy worrying about rumors of hidden agendas behind the assistance.

“We would chase these things endlessly if we decided to make that our focus,” U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Michael Nagata told reporters in a conference call from Pakistan.

“What we try to do every single day is provide the support, the assistance and the partnership that the Pakistani government and military ask us for,” he said. “We’re not here to conduct anything other than humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in Pakistan Sunday he had never seen such devastation, despite having witnessed the results of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and this year’s earthquake in Haiti.

Although the current death toll, around 1,600, is much lower than those earlier disasters, an estimated 20 million people reportedly are affected, with two million homeless and some six million in serious need of food and water. Cholera and other waterborne disease epidemics are looming, health experts warn.

The longer term damage in the still-unfolding disaster is harder to quantify, but huge swathes of Pakistan’s farmland have been destroyed, setting the scene for a major food crisis in the coming months.

The cotton crop also has been ruined. According to the Center for Research and Security Studies cotton and related products account for 67 percent of Pakistan’s export earnings.

Although the flooding has affected all four of Pakistan’s provinces and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the worst-hit area for fatalities (about 1,000) and destruction of homes (415,000 plus) has been Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province), according to Pakistani government figures.

On August 4 the U.S. Army deployed six helicopters from Afghanistan to an airbase in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and over the ensuing days they rescued more than 3,500 stranded people and delivered hundreds of thousands of pounds of emergency relief supplies, despite poor weather conditions.

On August 11 Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered in 19 U.S. Marine and U.S. Navy helicopters, and the first of these, U.S. Marine CH-53E Super Stallions, began arriving the following day. Some are deploying from the USS Peleliu, an amphibious assault ship now in waters off Karachi.

As happened in the aftermath of a massive South Asian earthquake in 2005, charities linked to militant organizations are reportedly carrying out relief missions in flood-stricken areas where government aid has yet to reach, especially in the north-west.They include Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), which the U.S. State Department calls a “front operation” for Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), a jihadist group playing a growing role in anti-coalition terrorism in Afghanistan.

Nagata, who is attached to a division of the U.S. Embassy known as the Office of the Defense Representative Pakistan, said there had been no reports of encounters between U.S. forces involved in the relief effort and militants.

He acknowledged the militant threat in the region, but said the Pakistani military “have done simply an incredibly energetic and totally committed job at providing multiple layers of security around our activities both in the air and on the ground. And frankly, we’ve just seen no evidence of a threat so far.”

‘Reports of thousands of troops not true’

The U.S. has been pressing Pakistani authorities – without success – to expand a military offensive in the country’s northwest to take in areas of FATA that are havens for Taliban and allied terrorists fighting in Afghanistan like the Haqqani network.

Against that background, rumors quickly began circulating on Pakistani Web sites and blogs that the U.S. military relief mission may provide a cover for anti-terror operations, with talk of “thousands” of U.S. troops inside the country.

Nagata could not put a definitive figure on the number of U.S. personnel involved but said it was far lower than that. Before the floods there were about 250 personnel in the country, either based at the U.S. Embassy or involved in training and “other forms of engagement with our Pakistan military partners,” he said.

A U.S. Army element involved in the initial flood relief comprised about 100 people – helicopter crew, logistics, maintenance staff. Now a U.S. Marine contingent is taking over, but there were probably fewer than 100 Marines on the ground as of late last week, he said.

Nagata said “talk about thousands of Marines or thousands of U.S. military personnel that are in Pakistan” was simply “not true.”

The U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator John Holmes has appealed for $460 million in international aid, saying the most critical priorities include food, clean water, shelter and emergency health care.

According to the State Department, the U.S. has pledged approximately $76 million in assistance.

Americans also are being invited to contribute by texting the word “SWAT” to 50555. Each text sends a $10 donation to a U.N. High Commission for Refugees program to provide tents and emergency aid to displaced families.

Patrick Goodenough – CNS News

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63 years ago we made a covenant with Allah and had a tryst with destiny. Serried like tidal waves under the proud banner of Islam, led majestically from the front by an indomitable great leader, imbued and buoyed by the stirring lessons imparted by the poet of the east, swept over by a frission of unwanted unity and unheard of camaraderie, the multitude fell into a paroxysm of collective greatness and by defying and re-writing the known laws of human conduct altered the course of history forever. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did what hardly any other man can be credited with doing; Creating a nation state!

When the situation and the man meet, the machinery is set off by which history takes one direction instead of the other. The man met his situation with legendary aplomb and fate descended from the heavens to have a rendezvous with those who stood behind him like a rock, animated with the singular desire of making the greatest and most significant experiment in the entire human history. Pakistan was the result of that monumental and epoch changing experiment; a corollary of the man’s meeting with the situation; a testament of the rendezvous between the fate and a nation! The laws of nature and human conduct treat individuals and nations on the same footing; no exceptions admitted! In order to experience a smooth, measured and phased evolution, to acquire all the requisite facets of a complete personality, to equip oneself with all the tools and the weapons to wage the war of life successfully, a child needs a conducive environment and benevolent lady luck. If any spanner gets thrown in the works leading to the vitiation of the environment the growth of the child shall get stunted. The life and times of a man are a mere reflection of the events surrounding his birth and rearing up. Same is exactly true for the birth, growth and evolution of a nation or a country.

When the conception and gestation was such history defying, the birth was expectedly cataclysmic. A cataclysmic birth means an unstable childhood, precocious adolescence, and a riotous youth preceding a robust and dynamic maturity. When the creation of the country entails massive destruction, to cut the umbilical cord from the rancor and hostility of the past becomes an arduous task. A nation flowing through the womb of violence has to fight against the nature and surrounding circumstances to find its feet and clamber out of the dark valley of disunity and divide. A country witnessing such gore and bloodshed at the time of its inception is bound to remain engaged in a life and death struggle to merely stay afloat and keep itself intact. Much of the instability and acrimony characterizing the accident ridden history of Pakistan is attributable to a cataclysmic birth, precocious adolescence and a riotous youth.

We survived the partition holocaust; started literally from the scratch and went about building our Rome with renewed vigor and unending zeal and braving all the odds heavily stacked against us steered our way into a precocious adolescence. The nation began to decipher the contours of a viable and robust state; began to get used to a new socio-cultural identity; began to write a future tinged with the acrimony of the past but laced with scented leaves of the tree of freedom. This was the time when economists and pundits around the world were churning out rosy and promising forecasts for the future of Pakistan; when we were in throes of a green revolution; when we were being imitated by the would be Asian Tigers; when we were the great people to fly with; when royalties of various hues and colors were making a beeline for our prestigious educational institutions. Those were the times when we stared at nothing but the peak, when we saw nothing but the sun, we did nothing but what was fruitful. But to defy history is to earn its ire; the blowback struck, the inertial forces managed to grab an upper hand and induced a downward slide, which soon got converted into one steep fall from grace for us. We have had our share of follies, blunders and faux paus; we broke our covenant with Allah, we obfuscated the memories and the message of that glorious tryst with destiny which gave us Pakistan; we fell from the high pedestal of sacrifice and unity and slithered into the slimy waters of divisiveness and self seeking. We constructed a glorious nation state, envisioned democracy as a way of life for it only to wreck the chariot by becoming indifferent. We glossed over the cardinal lesson of history that the tyranny of a prince in an autocracy is less disastrous for the future of the nation than the indifference of a common man in a democracy.

It was us, who had clothed the skeleton of Pakistan with our flesh and blood; adorned it with the hem of our love and sacrifice. It were us who staged the biggest migration in recorded history; who suffered unheard of brutality and untold misery on the road to Pakistan; it were we who packed the locomotive mortuaries; it were we who were uprooted from our homes, separated and lost from our own kith and kin and yet did not allow the flame of freedom to extinguish No gust of adversarial wind was strong enough to blow out our lamp of Pakistan. It was us who paved the road of progress and prosperity of Pakistan by putting our limbs on the line; it was us who sublimated and synergized our intellectual and creative faculties to script an inimitable and ingenious blueprint for a viable, robust and impregnable Pakistan. It were us again, tragically, who allowed the chariot to get wrecked; who allowed the blanket of our fortunes get blackened by the vile deeds of humbugs whom our indifference had catapulted to power.

A man with a mission knows no rest; greatness countenances no complacency; heroes cannot afford indifference!

Indifference breeds mediocrity; once perpetuated mediocrity invites ruin and ruination is a guest which knows not how to bid farewell. When ruination settles in, the machinery of the universe shifts a gear and everything begins to run to seed; all fabrics begin to come apart at seams and vivisection of an entire nation begins. This vivisection is met with supine indifference coupled with simmering self pity. It may be some bodily malfunction which paralyzes a man; but its criminal indifference and simmering self pity which cripples an entire nation. To be hemmed in by its own fears and flattened by the weight of circumstances are the hallmarks of a nation paralyzed by a piteous inaction. Same is happening to us. We rush in where angels would fear to tread, only to get cold feet where angels would scamper ahead.

Another characteristic trait of a paralyzed and supine nation is to blame the leadership or the lack of it for its miserable lot. An unhappy and dejected man loves to clutch at straws and heap opprobrium on most extraneous of circumstances. Like a rudderless ship, it keeps tossing about the vagarious waves of time and space and ends up chasing its own tail when time for a mandatory transition strikes the hour. It loses its capacity to learn from the past; hence, gets condemned to keep repeating it. The cognizance, the consciousness, the ability to distinguish good from bad; hero from villain, crisis from opportunity, opportunity from crisis and gold from dust is lost and battle lines in the war of survival get blurred. Same is happening to us. We denigrate and run down our heroes while ascribe divinity to humbugs and charlatans.

Ours is not an ideological crisis; nor is there any identity deficit roiling our self image. The ideological foundations were helped laid very firmly in the sands of time by the Almighty itself; without an ineffaceable ideology underpinning the caravan of freedom, the dream destination could never have been arrived at. We have not lost our way because of want of ideology or some historic infirmity of ours; there is nothing wrong neither with the ship nor with its rudder or the anchor; just that the hands behind the helm are too venal, too ineffectual and too plangent to induce it to a smooth sail. It’s not that our guns have been spiked or our pitch has been queered; just that the hands behind the gun and the players on the pitch have faltered big time. The ideological foundation once laid can resist and withstand all tremors and jolts, but a covenant once betrayed through sheer apathy and delinquency saps all the moral vigor and ethical spirit of the nation. We are faced with a critical moral crunch; a telling paucity of ethical power ails us; hence our delinquency, hence our self pity, hence the unbreakable stranglehold of lassitude and inaction.

Self infliction and incessant lamentation have not got us anywhere, nor is it going to take us anywhere In future. The sparkling road to glory is paved by noble intentions and valiant deeds not by fanciful self deception. Fiddlers do not build Rome In a day, that too with borrowed brick and mortar. To be in harmony with nature is the only good in the world; to harmonize yourself with nature is to tap the vast reserves of potential and creativity endowed by it. To galvanize your faculties and realize your true potential is to set yourself on the path of salvation and lasting glory. Sky is the limit for those who know how to hit top flight.

History always comes a full circle to repeat itself. What goes around comes around. Our deeds boomerang with their results. Paybacks, blowbacks determine our fate. The cycle of action reaction, cause, effect, deed, result continues to repeat itself to keep providing us humans the chance to learn from the past and make amends for the future. We made a covenant to Allah during this very month of Ramadan, 63 years ago. We swore it on our collective oath that we shall prize, cherish and safeguard this sublime gift ennobled by his numinous hands and shall turn it into a laboratory of Islam, from where it shall send out seismic tremors to bring down all vainglorious structures of false pretences and hollow civilizations. How have we shamed ourselves? How badly have we fared on our sworn duty? Just how mortified are we before our Lord? Darkness has descended upon the laboratory; sterile have become the imaginations; morose are the souls; a dreadful hush prevails over the landscape disturbed only by the piercing explosions of terror hits. The once shining armor lies riddled with innumerable holes, each of which is an aperture through which the empire is trickling. The dream has gone sour, the miracle has been eclipsed, and the bastion of peace and purity now remains marooned in monstrous floods. But in this hour of greatest despair lies our greatest opportunity. Only from the ruins of the past flows fresh life, renewed vigor and new leadership. Let us renew our pledge, let us revisit our oath, let us go back to the drawing board, let us make a new beginning, let us revive the long forgotten and much abused covenant with Allah, in the very month, during the very hours, in throes of the same misery, in which 63 years ago, he deigned to award us with this dreamland. The moment of truth has arrived; we have come to a crossroads in our history. Here each individual step forward would be a giant leap for the nation. Let us renew the eternal pledge to regain the lost moral fibre, to resurrect in the infirm ethical muscles. No excellence can be separated from right thinking and right living. No living can be right once shorn of moral courage and ethical honesty. Let us reclaim the lost ground and once again climb the high pedestal of devotion and sacrifice. Let us re-learn to smile through adversities; let us again be cognizant, alert and honest.

The day we galvanize our collective will to power; the cosmic machinery shall shift a gear and the vagaries of time shall come into play and we shall discover our new leaders. We can never manufacture leaders, we can only discover them, let the hour discover its men; cometh the hour, cometh the men!

Allah gave us Pakistan; and Allah shall defend and protect it from all harm, it is just that how we conduct ourselves is what shall seal our fate. It is us who are on trial not Pakistan, it is us who need to rediscover our true potential and regain the lost respect not Pakistan. It is us who face a momentous war of self renewal not Pakistan. The war is very much on, the bugle of the decisive battle has sounded, and lines remain clearly drawn. Piteous fence sitting and self lamentation have become passé, time to stand up and be counted, to choose a side. Those on the side of courage, cognizance and honesty have already been assured of a splendid victory while the rest shall find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Wake up Pakistanis! Destiny beckons and luck is ready to turn its smile upon you. Time to pick up the threads and wriggle out of this labyrinth of lost illusions and wasted years. Time to make the historic transition from being a nuclear power to an economic power. From being the fifth most populous country to being the most productive country. From being an Islamic state in the name to a real, actual Islamic welfare Republic. The end of the tunnel is lit up with the promise of a bright future, let us all take the first step in unison towards it.

Let us be honest to ourselves and in our covenant with Allah and the long journey to glory shall commence!

Pakistan Paindabad!!!
PKKH EXCLUSIVE | Umar Khayyam

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Greater Kashmir Movement	Bharat Mata or Mother India

On 26 January 1992, Murli Manohar Joshi, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, after travelling by road all the way from the southern tip of India, was airlifted from Jammu to the heart of Srinagar where he half-raised the Indian flag near historic Lal Chowk. All of Kashmir was put under severe curfew, and the army was given shoot-at-sight orders. Throughout the day soldiers shot dead more than a dozen Kashmiris in the streets of Srinagar. Over the previous two years, the Indian government had unleashed a reign of terror on the people, with massacre upon massacre of unarmed protestors dotting Kashmir’s timeline. Joshi’s Ekta Yatra (Unity March), protected and provided of full support by the Indian government, was an important reminder of the nature of the Indian state and the relationship it sought with the people of Kashmir. The event was designed to put on display the majoritarian character of Indian nationhood, and line up power of the state behind it to send barely coded messages to audiences in India and in Kashmir.

In the 1980s, overt Hindu nationalism, after years of keeping a relatively low profile, had been gaining momentum across India. Post-Emergency, Indira Gandhi openly started pandering to Hindu chauvinism. On an election campaign in Jammu in 1983, Gandhi shocked many with her rabid communal pronouncements. The Congress party’s changing discourse gave fillip to even more extremist parties. While Congress soon ranged its guns at Sikhs, other Hindu nationalists gathered storm around the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. The Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi, which came to power after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, was not only soft on the rise of Hindutva, but clearly displayed a soft Hindutva of its own. From communally charged rituals, like the foundation laying (Shilanyas) ceremony for the proposed Ram Temple near the 16th century mosque, Hindus in India were mobilized into a frenzied movement that would realize some of the social and political projects whose history dates back to the pre-1947 politics of the subcontinent.Organizations like Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for decades declared India primarily a Hindu nation, while slowly politicizing the faith of millions of Hindus into a militant nationalism. Despite the Indian National Congress’ secularist discourse, it clearly subscribed to the Hindu subjective view of India as an organically united nation state—a natural home of Hindus. Nehru, the supposed exemplar of Indian secularism, often used Hindu imagery in conceiving India as a nation. Like many Hindu nationalists, he often depicted India as a living territorial goddess. Using religious imagery was in itself not so much a problem, but the fact that the Hindu elite had inherited almost all of the British Indian Empire, and not all of it with the democratic consent of the diverse peoples who inhabited that empire, meant this vision was bound to produce friction. So when, a day after the British officially transferred power to Indian leaders on 15 August 1947, Nehru stood on the ramparts of the Mughal-built Red Fort in Delhi and raised the Indian flag, its Gandhi’s charkha replaced with the Mauryan Chakra, the significance was not lost on many.

Nehru was symbolically laying claim over a historic continuity with the two largest empires that the subcontinent had ever seen, the Mauryan and the Mughal. In his book Discovery of India, a book that is foundational to understanding the construction of India as a nation state, Nehru followed a teleological narrative borrowed from the British colonial historians, who had used history instrumentally to construct legitimacy for their rule over the subcontinent’s peoples. This narrative often depicted the British colonial arrival as liberation for Hindus from Muslim despotism. Nehru tweaked it and saw 1947 as the final liberation. History, in a way, had come to an end for India, as Nehru pronounced that the Indian “nation, long suppressed, had finally found its utterance.” The discourse of “India as a nation” sought to naturalize a territorial vision of permanence.

It might have been liberation from direct colonialism, and it did create a possibility of empowerment for the masses, but India’s “liberation” was intimately tied to the enormous costs paid by peoples whose needs and hopes India did not represent. “India” was a colonial construction, and any attempt to retain this artificial territorial behemoth, as it was, required the creation of a national elite with an insured political power, even if this elite was far removed from the particular and unique experiences of this new country’s diverse inhabitants. This elite deeply territorialized the ‘idea of India’, within which the yawning contradictions on the inside were papered over by creating fear of the outside and of territorial break-up. In turn, and more consequentially for such an entity to sustain itself this national ruling class pushed for homogenization, where a supreme Indian identity would gradually subsume, or erase other identities. Templates for such homogenization had been operational for quite some time, the most potent of which was uniting different Hindu communities under the idea of a singular Hindu nation/religion. Ashis Nandy has argued well, however, that this construction of a new Hinduism out of the plural “little cultures” of Hinduism was always more political than religious. This form of Hinduism also represented and secured the interests of upper castes alone, substantively depriving effective political power to the bulk of Hindus. It must be borne in mind that such efforts, in reality, haven’t been completely successful.

Constitutionally, the Indian state was “secular.” The Indian constitution promised political equality to the inhabitants of the successor state of the British Indian Empire. Much of the progressive outlook of this document is owed to the enormous struggles of B. R. Ambedkar whose own community was (and continues to remain) the most oppressed caste of Hindu society. Constitutions, however, are ideal forms, which work only as long as the societies they seek to shape allow them. Majoritarian politics and the contending popular vision of India as primarily a Hindu nation enormously restricted the possibilities of empowerment for non-Hindu communities as well as for smaller nationalities, like Kashmiris. For Indian Muslims, who were regularly administered doses of guilt for the creation of Pakistan the political choices remained confined to seeking a fuller implementation of the promises enshrined in the Indian constitution. Despite their enormous numbers, their representation and negotiating power in Indian politics remained small. Much of the time, the powerlessness and gradual socio-economic destitution was met with silence and grudging quiescence, or of hope of constitutional amelioration, while the social landscape around this large minority shifted decidedly toward Hindu majoritarianism. Resentment against lack of substantive progress was also displaced of to an illusory sense of well being by misidentifying with the over-advertised success of a few charismatic Muslims.

On the other hand, Kashmiris had real political choices. The order of mass politics in British India and in Kashmir was different from the beginning. When the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League took an anti-colonial stance, Kashmiris focused exclusively on fighting for the end of their oppression at the hands of the Hindu monarch. Despite British protection to Dogra rule, Kashmiris did not connect their struggle, in discourse or in deed, with the anti-colonial struggles in the Indian subcontinent. Sheikh Abdullah, the predominant leader of Kashmiris, envisioned an independent state of Kashmir, a vision that only reflected a historically ingrained sense of Kashmir as a realm of its own. The National Conference’s “New Kashmir” document had independence as one of its chief goals. In fact, its entire socio-economic and progressive political program was intrinsically linked to Kashmir as a separate state.

There were broadly two groups opposed to the socio-political vision of National Conference. First, was the leadership of Muslim Conference, who suspected Abdullah’s proximity to Indian leaders as fraught with risks (a suspicion proved right in the end), but was itself close to Muslim League. In the end, Muslim Conference was willing to negotiate with the Dogra ruler a settlement where he could keep his privileges but declare independence. The second was the leaders of the Kashmiri Pandit community, who hoped Kashmir would become part of Hindu India, so that their own privileges, acquired during the Dogra regime, would be safeguarded. Sheikh’s unrelenting opposition to the idea of Pakistan and fondness for progressive and often pluralistic rhetoric of Indian leaders later drew the Pandit community closer to him. Both these groups were quite small, even though their power was disproportionately large. The idea of independence, however, gained predominance among the masses in Kashmir who believed (and continue to believe) that only in a free state could any substantial socio-political empowerment happen. This belief has only grown stronger after six decades of life under the Indian rule.

From the beginning, the Indian state’s claim over Kashmir consisted of a breach of democratic principles, and stood in direct contrast to the spirit of its own Constitution. India’s claim was based on an implicit acceptance of the Hindu nationalist notion of Indian sovereign territoriality. Kashmir, in the view of Hindu nationalists, was an “integral” part, or an “atoot ang” (inseparable body part), of Mother India. (As was Pakistan. That is why India’s Hindu leaders saw Partition of the subcontinent as a tragedy; not because it divided people, but because it divided the organically united territory of the living goddess.) Kashmir was imagined as India’s crown, not so much a “secular crown” as we are led to believe, but an actual crown of Bharat Mata’s image superimposed on the map of India. This Hindu nationalist view is intrinsically arrogant and violent because it denies the histories and unique experiences of Kashmiris. It didn’t matter, for instance, that Bharat Mata’s symbolic, if not militant, equivalent in Kashmir was “Mouj Kasheer,” representing a separate Kashmiri nationhood.

In annexing Kashmir, Indian leaders put aside their progressive anti-colonialism, and pursued a policy that stood in direct confrontation with the goals of struggling Kashmiris. Nehru’s professed derision for princes and despots proved facile in Kashmir in this first real test of his commitment to anti-colonialism and democratic values. His decision to urge the discredited and runaway Dogra ruler to sign the imperial Instrument of Accession, and then accept it, was a defeat for the oppressed Kashmiris who had, with great sacrifices, forced the Dogra ruler out. By recognizing the authority of the Dogra ruler, Indian sovereignty over Kashmir simply replaced the sovereignty enshrined in the Dogra maharaja. But along with that sovereignty, India inherited Dogra rule’s illegitimacy as well. The Indian condition of accession before intervention in Kashmir proved disastrous for Kashmiris. It was not that India couldn’t have intervened without the accession of Kashmir. It has done so a number of times since, in East Pakistan, in Jaffna. Sheikh Abdullah, who was at the head of the Quit Kashmir movement, was released from jail only to discover a new strategic environment where it seemed better to trust India for a while than to be forced to be part of Pakistan. After all, Indian claims over Kashmir were flimsier than Pakistan’s.

The illegitimacy of Indian rule remained at the heart of crisis after crisis that unfolded in Kashmir. To plug one hole in Indian claims many more holes opened. One day Sheikh Abdullah was the “tallest leader of Muslims” but the next he would become a “traitor.” On one end, Nehru promised a principled referendum, yet on the other he let his government indulge in petty election rigging. India had to install its own cronies to nominally rule over Kashmiris, to stave off embarrassing challenges to its rule. And, obviously, India needed to keep a massive military infrastructure in place in Kashmir if it hoped to suppress the inevitable revolts. It had to create a class of beneficiaries who developed a stake in the grey business of illegitimate rule. India has, therefore, continued to hop from one series of desperate measures to another to buffer its illegitimacy with deceit, threats, and outright force.

Kashmir then stands outside the sphere of the Indian constitution, because it was not on the basis of that constitution that Kashmir became part of India. Kashmir was annexed against the wishes of its people who had won their sovereignty from an oppressive monarchy. The political contract between India and Kashmir was one signed by a person with no legitimacy and moral authority to represent Kashmiri will. At the same time, sixty-three years of India-Kashmir relations have proven that it is structurally impossible for Kashmiris (or, for that matter, for many other smaller nationalities and communities in India) to hope for full citizenship rights within the Indian Union. For full citizenship rights to become available would require a fundamental recognition of the Kashmiri right to self-determination. But more importantly, it is structurally impossible because the original form of this forced union is based on a view, which values Kashmiri territory as sacred to India’s self-conception as a Hindu nation, but sees Kashmiri Muslims as alien others. It is no surprise that the most common and popular ‘solution’ Indians want to impose is the removal of Article 370 (already violated beyond recognition), which openly reveals a desire for Kashmir’s land. It should also then not come as a surprise that Kashmiris never really saw themselves as Indians. India was always “neabar” (foreign), in contrast to Azad Kashmir, for instance, which in the Kashmiri imagination remained “apore” (across the wall, but our own).

Murli Manohar Joshi may have been able to stand ground in Lal Chowk for all of 11 minutes on that day 18 years back.The flagpole did come crashing down on his head in his attempt to unfurl the Indian flag. And, he did scamper off as hastily as he arrived. But that event had a message for Kashmiris. The Indian nation-state revealed its subcutaneous Hindu identity directly to Kashmiris. It revealed how the hegemonic vision of “Akhand Bharat” (United India–a conception that includes not only Kashmir, but also Pakistan and Bangladesh–with or without Kashmiris, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) was the way the leaders of the Hindu nation saw the ultimate self-realization of the nation they had forged. This exclusivist, territorial vision often plays itself out in Kashmir. In recent years, state-facilitated pilgrimages have often been used to create a bigoted national territorial consciousness in the Indian public sphere. The coming together of Hindu religious leaders, nationalists and the state apparatus in 2008 against Kashmiri opposition to the Amarnath land deal is not so hard to understand within this context. For Indian nationalists Kashmir’s territory is part of India’s national territorial space within which Kashmiris may live only as long as they profess loyalty to India, but over this territory only the Indian state must make the ultimate decisions.

Note from Huma Dar: Here’s an 3:28 minute long extract from Sanjay Kak’s documentary film, Jashn-e Azadi[How We Celebrate Freedom](2008), posted not just because Indian Independence Day is two days away, but also because it is pertinent to Mohamad Junaid’s excellent article, with yet another lonely flag-raising ceremony. The land redistribution mentioned at the beginning of the film clip was enacted by Sheikh Abdullah during the first few years of his Prime Ministership of Kashmir — yes, that’s not a typo: Jammu & Kashmir was the only “Indian state” to have a Vazir-e Azam (Prime Minister) and Sadar-e Riyasat (Head of the State). In 1953, barely six years after the much-debated accession, Sheikh Abdullah was unceremoniously thrown into an Indian jail, without charges, because he had insisted that the UN Resolutions seeking plebiscite in Kashmir, duly promised repeatedly by Nehru, be implemented. Abdullah spent, off and on, more than two decades in Indian prisons, only to come out a broken man, who signed on the dotted line for Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. Precisely because of the abundant love initially bestowed upon him, the Kashmiris have not forgiven Sheikh Abdullah this final betrayal. His grave near Hazratbal in Srinagar is threatened by desecration, and has thus earned around-the-clock military guards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ApbTHYWLdM

Mohamad Junaid grew up in Kashmir during its most turbulent years. He is now a graduate student of Anthropology at City University of New York.

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Security analysts who reviewed India’s record fear New Delhi might use terrorism at Commonwealth Games Delhi 2010 to divert international media’s attention away from deeply embarrassing preparations for the event.

Traffic jams, shoddy game venues and a lousy organization are expected to create an international embarrassment for India in the Commonwealth Games Delhi 2010 in October. Already the media coverage is giving Indian officials sleepless nights, with less-than-inspiring headlines such as Commonwealth Games: Safety fears grow amid chaos‎, Organizers of India’s Commonwealth Games Face Corruption Allegations and Commonwealth Games: Safety fears grow amid chaos‎.

But the worst could be yet to come: a terrorist attack on New Delhi killing international athletes carried out by any one of the one hundred deadly terror groups active in India. These groups fuel fourteen violent insurgencies that receive little coverage in the international media. Topping the list is the Naxalite insurgency that covers most of northeastern India.

This is to say nothing of the freedom movement in disputed Kashmir where angry Kashmiris are breathing down on New Delhi because of extrajudicial killings and mass rapes by the Indian army. Security analysts say that experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan indicate there is bound to be blowback from an angry suppressed population.

Diplomats from New Zealand have already warned their government about the chances of a terror attack targeting the games.

Already in February this year a German bakery frequented by tourists was bombed killing seventeen people, including four foreigners. No one claimed responsibility but the location could mean one of the northeastern Indian militant groups might have been involved.

Blame It On Pakistan  But even if terrorism doesn’t strike New Delhi, there are reports Indian officials are considering ideas to divert the attention of Indian and international media away from the shabby preparations during the October 4-14 event.

Many Pakistani analysts are worried that New Delhi might resort to false flag operations or a mock terror threat to sidetrack media attention from the mess surrounding the games. In all probability, India could use one of the many Hindu terror groups to mount attacks that would be blamed on Pakistan. India has seen a mushrooming of Hindu terror groups over the past decade.

There are at least two recent precedents where India falsely accused Pakistan for terror acts that Indian investigators discovered later were committed by Hindu terrorists.

In both cases, serving Indian military intelligence officers were found directly involved in carrying out the bombings. The purpose was simple: To implicate Pakistan and its intelligence agencies and build international pressure to force Islamabad into conceding the disputed territory of Kashmir.

For example, an Irish newspaper published this report, India uncovers Hindu terror group that carried out bombings blamed on Islamists . A Hindu extremist and a serving Indian Army officer were arrested and charged with planting bombs in public places that were blamed on Pakistan. That was November 2008.

In Spring 2007, a peace train called Samjota Express carrying Pakistani visitors to India as part of peace dialogue was blown up causing a fire that burned 59 Pakistanis alive. The Indian government accused Pakistan’s ISI of involvement. It said Pakistan’s military wanted to derail Pakistan-India peace talks. A year later three serving Indian military intelligence officers were arrested for planning and executing the attack. The Indian investigator who uncovered the nexus between Indian intelligence and Hindu terror groups was the first casualty of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. He was eliminated by a professional sniper far away from the Taj hotel but was his death was blamed on the terrorists who stormed that building.

A JUICY REPORT

An earlier report by our New Delhi correspondent Anant Sheth, titled, Indian Commonwealth Games: Corruption, Missed Deadlines & Security Risks, paints a colorful picture of how event organizers have turned the Indian capital into a messy beautification workshop with no signs of cleaning up the mess in time for the Commonwealth games.

The situation was captured by Economic Times, in a report titled, ‘Commonwealth Games: Delhi’s missed deadline:

“Meant to showcase India as a world class sporting venue, the Commonwealth Games could end up being an unforgettable embarrassment for the country given the shoddy build-up which has turned host city Delhi into a giant construction site. Tons and tons of rubble are piled on pavements as civic agencies race against time to finish the so-called beautification drive, while the Games’ venues present an equally grim picture of unkept promises that were made when the hosting rights were won amid much fanfare in 2003.”

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PKKH Editorial | Sarmad Gilani

Jashn-e-Azadi Mubarak!

Do not lose faith because of our hardships and misfortunes; despite
what any person may try, Pakistan is safe and sound. Having a bad
driver or bad directions doesn’t take away from the grandeur of a
priceless vehicle.

Pakistan is more than a nation. It is a gift, a mission, and a vehicle
that is to be steered at the behest of its Creator. The misfortune is
not of Pakistan itself or our esteemed people; the misfortune belongs
to those who abandon Pakistan and instead enrich themselves, because
they are missing the opportunity to cement their name in history as
being the leader that steered Pakistan towards it’s destiny.

Politicians are not in control; they can merely grab the steering
wheel and try and give Pakistan a jolt as it travels on the road of
destiny. Inshallah, our destiny is one of prosperity, progress, and
peace; moderation, modernity, and staying firm to our Islamic
principles.

Celebrate not just our independence as a state, but our independent identity.
We are not Sindhi, Balochi, Punjabi, or Pathan–we stand strong and we
are Pakistan.

Pakistan Zindabad.

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Pakistan is the modern incarnation of a people, a culture and a civilization that stretched across ten centuries and beyond from Central Asia to Sindh River basin, to India, uniting languages and cultures, from the Persians, Turks, and Arabs to Aryans, and Indians.

In its modern form, for 63 years since Independence in 1947, Pakistanis have shown themselves to be a resilient nation, marching against all odds. Our enemies have tried to punish us with terrorism directed against ordinary Pakistanis on many occasions, in the 1970s and 1980s, and during the past eight years. These days many of us face daunting challenges. Our people in Kashmir continue to face terror and repression. But Pakistanis are coming together to help their own.

Sixty-three years ago, skeptics claimed this nation won't survive. We had our share of setbacks but we also wrote a new chapter in the history of politics and nation-states.

Today, Pakistan's young, close to one hundred million, are now the guardians of the vision of the Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Pakistan is a proud, modern, Islamic nation. This is a story of brave women and men, products of a great history, now contributing to the global march of civilization with pride, a unique history, and a glorious future.

A salue to the nation on Pakistan Independence Day 2010.

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Photographs of ordinary Pakistanis offer a glimpse into the soul of the nation [GETTY]

It is the sheer scale of the devastation that leaves one speechless. As one surveys the overhead photos of vast lowland plains inundated with swirling brown water or stares at the upland images of mighty torrents washing away roads, bridges, entire villages, it is the utter scope of the disaster which almost defies comprehension, which far outstrips the power of words to convey.

Only the flint-hearted could be left unmoved by this. The heart aches for Pakistan.

But it is only in the photos of the people that one begins to grasp the full dimension of what is happening and, through that prism, to gain a glimpse into the soul of the Land of the Pure.Endurance

SPECIAL COVERAGE

One hears the stories of building frustration, of bitter complaints against a government so often indifferent in the best of times, and simply unequal to the challenge in these, the worst of times.

But this is not what I see in the photographs, in the images of entire families clinging to trucks to gain higher ground, of people stranded on roof-tops or on the raised strips of highways, of those isolated and forlorn, reaching for a bottle of clean water or a packet of sodden food dropped from a helicopter.

In these images one looks in vain for signs of hysteria, or for righteous indignation. What one sees instead is what one always sees in Pakistanis – endurance: Simple, often noble, endurance.

I have lived some years among Pakistanis. I cannot claim to have done them much good. Instead, my preoccupations have been those which animate the game of nations. I have served a great power which hunts its enemies, pursues its interests, and tries to meet what it sees as its responsibilities in distant places, far from home. I make no apology for this; neither do I expect great credit.

But one cannot travel among the Pakistanis, as I have been privileged to do, without developing a great admiration for their decency and their dignity.

I have found the mass of Pakistanis to be honest, hard-working, devoted to their faith and to their families, hospitable and generous almost to a fault, and devoted to the defence of right as God has given them to see it. But more than anything else, I have come to admire their capacity for endurance.

Beset by plagues

Eventually the flood waters will recede to be replaced by other calamities [GETTY]

The current cataclysm has focused the world's attention, albeit perhaps only briefly, on the suffering of ordinary Pakistanis.Without trivialising the acuteness of their current plight, however, it is hard not to see in Pakistan's current distress a metaphor for the many plagues which beset the mass of Pakistanis even in normal times: The crushing demographic pressures, the growing scarcity of clean water supplies, the slow strangulation of civil and economic infrastructure, the indifference of an elite class whose relation to the masses is most often "extractive," the woeful lack of public education, the growing radicalism of the militants, and the increasing wantonness of the violence they inflict, mainly upon the innocent.

Eventually, the flood waters will recede. For some time, other calamities will replace them: Persistent economic devastation, disease, perhaps famine. Eventually, these, too, will recede, and the world's attention will focus elsewhere, if in fact it has not done so already.

No one knows how long the effects of this year's floods will persist, or how far they will retard Pakistan's progress towards development. The one thing one can count on is that through it all, Pakistanis will do as they have always done. They will endure.

Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre.

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On the 63rd Independence day Master Abdul Basit a 15 year old boy made a history to become soldier of Pakistan Army for a day. The young, patriotic lad, who is suffering from blood cancer had expressed his desire to Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani through an NGO “Make A Wish Foundation” that he wanted to be soldier of Pakistan Army, may be for a day. Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani took special interest and allowed the child to become a soldier for a day and spend time in a unit on the Independence Day of Pakistan.

Master Abdul Basit, though very weak and fragile, because of his ailment put on the uniform like a professional soldier and reported to unit of Punjab Regiment at Malir Cantt Karachi. The young soldier was warmly welcomed at the unit. Later, Master Abdul Basit spent a busy day with officers and men of his unit.

Master Abdul Basit after a day’s work with soldiers said that his life time dream to join Pakistan Army has come true and he cherished every minute spent with the soldiers. 

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There's something happening, something building up against Zardari & Co., and it's something big. Infact, it always has been there, just that these floods didn't add any water to the fire. There are reports of growing public anger against the PPP government, infact against every man and woman they know by the label of 'Politician'. This time however, it's not mere anger. There have been signs of riots and civil unrest too because of a colossal political failure and an attitude of unending indifference towards the nation. And while the playboy Zardari was in UK to ready another curse for Pakistan [in the form of his own boy this time], we didn't see any other famous crooks on the ground.

Just what has any of these bloody politicians done except even denying helping the Pakistanis with a least donation. We don't need these leaders, who made them leaders in first place. I think these floods have done it. Zardari government, in fact all of this political structure of sham, this wicked borrowed democracy, is coming down. Someone said it right, lynching awaits them.

Flood response prompts rising anti-government resentment: report

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/13/pakistan-flood-response-anti-government-resentment

Under fire president Asif Ali Zardari tries to ease public anger amid fears he could be overthrown

Pakistan's government faces the threat of social unrest or even military takeover after its shambolic response to the floods that have devastated the country, leaving 1,600 people dead and 2 million homeless, say analysts.

Fears that Asif Ali Zardari, the president, could be overthrown – possibly through an intervention by the army – have grown as the government's failure to adequately tackle the crisis has fuelled long-held grievances.

"The powers that be, that is the military and bureaucratic establishment, are mulling the formation of a national government, with or without the PPP [the ruling Pakistan People's party]," said Najam Sethi, editor of the weekly Friday Times. "I know this is definitely being discussed. There is a perception in the army that you need good governance to get out of the economic crisis and there is no good governance."

Rescuers are struggling to help the 14 million people affected across the country, with fresh flood warnings today forcing even more to flee the city of Jacobabad. But the impact of the disaster will be felt throughout Pakistan's 170m population.

The agricultural heartland has been wiped out, which will cause spiralling food prices and shortages. Many roads and irrigation canals have been destroyed, along with electricity supply infrastructure.

"The immediate risk is one of food riots," said Marie Lall, an Asia expert at Chatham House. "There is already great resentment in Swat and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where people had to be cleared during the government offensive. Now there is the threat of social unrest as various factions, families and ethnic groups compete with each other in the event of a breakdown in government."

The World Bank estimates that crops worth $1bn (£640m) have been ruined and the Pakistani finance secretary warned today that the disaster would cut the country's growth in half.
The government may have to spend $1.7bn on reconstruction, and has said it will have to divert expenditure from badly needed development programmes.

With the economy currently surviving on an IMF bailout, experts predict that another may be necessary. Experts believe that the floods could now knock 2 percentage points off projected economic growth for this year.

US and European diplomats are gravely concerned about the situation, as Pakistan is crucial in the fight against al-Qaida and the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Cathy Ashton, EU foreign policy chief, said the west could not afford to abandon the country: "Pakistan is faced with so many issues, not just floods, terror, development, India. It's in the EU's interest to have a stable and prosperous Pakistan."

Zardari, who left the country after the floods began and continued on his trip to France and Britain even when the scale of the disaster became apparent, is the focus of much of the anger. Despite the outcry, he is to go ahead with a visit to a regional summit in Russia next week. A spokesman said the president had cut the planned two-day trip to "a couple of hours". Only the courts could legally dismiss him but, as his PPP is a minority government reliant on coalition partners, behind-the-scenes military pressure on those partners could bring it down, while keeping parliament in place, said Sethi.

With the government overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, Islamic groups, including extremist organisations such as Jamaat-ud-Dawa, have stepped into the gap. The military has also distributed aid in areas where locals complain that government help is almost entirely absent.

"If the military takes over now, I can assure you that it will be the end of Pakistan, an end which will be punctuated by a very bloody civil war," said Asad Sayeed, an analyst based in Karachi. "Pakistan is a very divided country right now."

Pakistan has lurched from crisis to crisis in its 63-year history. The break-up of the country in 1971 can be linked to another natural disaster, when authorities responded slowly to a devastating cyclone. A secessionist movement in East Pakistan capitalised on public anger to successfully fight for independence as Bangladesh.

In the flood-hit areas, people are bewildered by the government's response, with accusations and conspiracy theories abounding. At the side of the Indus river in Sukkur town, Sindh province, shopowner Ali Sher gave a scathing reaction to promises of aid.

"They [the government] want to drown Sukkur," he said. "They want to show some bodies, so they can ask for more aid from other countries. They are after dollars." (The Guardian)

Floods leave Zardari marooned from people: FT

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Politics/14-Aug-2010/Floods-leave-Zardari-marooned-from-people-FT

The stage seemed set for a lynching: a man sat down in the road to block a car carrying a pair of government officials through a camp housing 3,000 people who had lost their homes in floods. Within seconds a mob had surrounded the vehicle. “You’re enjoying yourselves while we’re suffering,” a man yelled. Another climbed on to the bumper.

The crowd was angry at official attempts to regulate a chaotic relief effort by local charities, fearing the authorities would steal supplies. “If you hand over any aid to the government then nothing will reach the ordinary people,” said Hasan Zia, a doctor.

After a heated discussion the crowd dispersed and the officials escaped unscathed, but the incident in the north-western town of Nowshera this week reflects the growing sense of alienation between millions of Pakistanis and their state.

The disaster does not immediately threaten the two-year-old administration of Asif Ali Zardari, president, who has begun visiting flood victims after being criticised for a visit to the UK and France. But Pakistan’s 170m people want their leaders to do more than muddle through. So does the west.

The disaster has struck as the Obama administration is increasing aid in a drive to shore up a civilian leadership emerging from decades of army rule, undercut an insurgency and win greater co-operation over Afghanistan.

The army is playing the lead role in rescue efforts but has pledged not to divert forces from the battle against militants.

The insurgents, meanwhile, have said they are halting operations during the floods. “The jihadists have also been affected in terms of their operations – floods do not discriminate,” said Kamran Bokhari, an analyst with Stratfor, the global intelligence company. However, he cautioned: “What they will benefit from is the difficulties that the state is going to face.”

Islamic charities, some with ties to militant groups, have set up relief efforts in some areas, raising concerns that the groups will gain sympathy for their extremist ideology.

Criticism of the government’s flood response may fuel concerns about its ability to harness effectively a projected influx of $7.5bn (€5.8bn, £4.8bn) in US aid to combat poverty over the next five years.

“People say they have simply lost confidence in our leaders,” said Sardar Naeem, a volunteer with the privately run Edhi ambulance service, helping victims around Nowshera, one of the hardest-hit areas.

Officials say any country would have struggled to cope with the floods that have either swamped or otherwise affected about a third of the country. Six million people are in urgent need of emergency relief, and aid agencies are warning of the risk of disease among an estimated 14m affected by the deluge.

The bitterness among those awaiting help, however, stems from a broader failure that is reflected in a litany of woes, from a power crisis to economic stagnation, that has provided fertile ground for militancy. Mr Zardari says his government has made significant progress in dismantling the vestiges of military dictatorship. But the military’s main role in the relief effort is a reminder it remains the country’s most powerful institution.

The civilian leadership will bear responsibility for tackling underlying problems that have been exacerbated by the catastrophe, in particular in the agriculture sector. Robert Zoellick, World Bank president, said the floods were likely to have destroyed crops worth about $1bn. Pakistan has said it will miss this year’s 4.5 per cent gross domestic product growth target.

Until the floods, much of Pakistan had been preoccupied by water shortages. Population growth in the eastern Punjab province led to the diversion of water for farming, reducing the once-mighty Indus river to a puddle in parts of the southern Sindh province, says a 2009 study by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a US think-tank. Climate change is worsening the situation, the study says, as does Pakistan’s failure to adopt effective policies.

Michael Kugelman, an associate at the centre, says a political class rooted in land-owning dynasties has little incentive for reform. “These vested interests are the single biggest obstacle to moving forward in a sustainable and long-term way. It’s not just on the water problems, but also food insecurity, agricultural problems and also the energy crisis.”

On the central reservation of a highway linking Peshawar and Lahore, a tented village has mushroomed. “The rain came from heaven and our fate lies in heaven,” said Ata Gul Jan, a farmer, fighting back tears. “No one can save us but God.” (The Financial Times)

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It is a humbling reminder that the worst is not over yet. As you read this in the comfort of your homes or offices, remind yourselves of the responsibility and debt you to this country and its unfortunate masses.

Pakistan is still facing the worst of calamities. As we stand at 63rd independence , our hearts and minds are bruised with the most recent and painful incidents such as plane crashes, sectarian and target killings, suicide bombings and the worst of all, the biggest flood disaster in the country’s history. Over 5000 lost lives, 15 milliondisplaced or affected and 1.4 million acres (about 570,000 hectares) of farmland under water, 80 % of infrastructure destroyed.

Mothers rock their children to sleep on empty stomachs. Others wait to hear news of loved ones lost in the floods. Some men agree amongst themselves to go back to their homes, hoping to salvage some clothes, rice, anything they can find, but return empty handed and barely able to face their wives and children. All the dreams and hopes are washed in merciless water.

Evil has appeared on land and sea because of what the hands of men have earned (by oppression and evil deeds), that He (Allâh) may make them taste a part of that which they have done, in order that they may return (by repenting to Allâh, and begging His Pardon). Verse:041, Sura Al Room

Have we pondered upon the fate that has befallen us. “Why” is the big question to ask!

Why is it that we are being tested and tried with such ferocity while incompetent, unaffected and corrupt leaders sit at our head? Have we wronged ourselves in the eyes of Allah to draw upon his wrath? Are we being given signs to straighten our paths before it’s too late?

We need to ask ourselves individually and collectively as a nation, where did we went wrong, isn’t this because of what we have earned through our hypocrisy towards Islam and Pakistan at all levels. There are debates on the functions of the government and its incompetence and corruption. Does that solve the problem? Who allowed these blood-sucking leeches to the corridors of power? Are we willing to take ANY responsibility for this? Aren’t we to blame in some way? Have we not earned this evil to appear?

What more suitable time do we need to repent? Are we waiting for the turbulent waters to enter our safe abodes?

We need to draw inspiration from the fact that even in these troublesome times, there are still those plentiful souls who do not waste a second before risking their own lives and livelihoods for the sake of their countrymen, whether it’s the thousands of Army jawans, Islamic NGO’s, general public or private individuals. Think about that man in Mohammedan agency who dived in a pond to successfully save the lives of two children and died himself in the process of doing so. This goes on to prove a very valid point; we are a nation that is still alive.

As we see our country in a broader spectrum, this looks more and more like the destruction out of which a new beginning, a new Pakistan will rise. These incidents have further exposed those in our midst who have been holding this nation back.

We have a shining example right next to us in Indian-Occupied Kashmir where the new generation has laid the foundations with valor and courage and changed the rules of the game. They stood at the face of tyranny and they are streaming towards their manifest destiny. There are strong vibes coming from the valley explaining the word freedom to us.

A new beginning is for certain, but what isn’t certain is that will it be us, as a generation, who will become the agents of change. Salvation lies in collective repentance, probably more than ever before. As we enter the holy month of Ramadan, let us make a solemn pledge that each of us shall do so for if we don’t, Allah will replace us by those that are obedient to Him and THEY will be the glorious, victorious ones while we’ll be destroyed.

Be sure we shall test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits (of your toil), but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere

Pakistan is the Fortress of Islamic Ummah. Now is the time to fortify it for the trials that make us strong and test our determination. We need to submit our weaknesses to the one and only ALLAH ALMIGHTY, and we need to stand at the helm of these tragedies with a determination, how harsh the winds may “Don’t let it fall!”

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In a development that could trigger a serious political backlash against the government, Pakistan is said to have opened its camp office in Tel Aviv, while the two sides are engaged in a series of covert talks to find out possibilities to establish direct links, top-level diplomatic sources told The Nation.

Most interesting part of this episode is that a prominent politician who is also the chief of a religious party, has played vital role in bringing the two sides at a point which could lead Pakistan, following footsteps of Turkey, to recognise Israel in near future.

Sources told TheNation that Pakistani authorities including a prominent politician belonging to a religious party, have been holding talks with Israeli authorities, which took place in Paris and London recently. When contacted by this correspondent on telephone, FO Spokesperson Abdul Basit strongly denied such reports and saying Pakistan’s policy towards Israel was very much clear and it was using no backdoor channel to establish link with Israel.

It is pertinent to mention here that Pakistani authorities, keeping in view Israel ‘s position in global scenario, have many a time met Israeli authorities on different occasions in the past. Israel and Pakistan are key allies of the US, and there have been indications of warming ties between them.

In 2005, Israel’s then-foreign minister, Silvan Shalom met his Pakistani counterpart, Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, in Turkey, sparking protests from Islamic hard-liners in Pakistan. In September 2006, Musharraf had said Pakistan’s government would have to recognise Israel after an independent Palestinian state was established-but not before. “We cannot do something that sidelines us from the Muslim world,” Musharraf had said at that time. Another secret meeting between former President Musharraf and Israel’s defence minister took place in Paris in January 2008.

The two states have no diplomatic ties, and their officials rarely meet. But Musharraf and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak held a scheduled 20-minute meeting in January 2008 in Paris.

The Nation  

Ranking Member Ros-Lehtinen meets with Israeli Ambassador Sallai Meridor to offer her support for Israel's defense measures against Hamas in Gaza.Asif ali GHADARI is also standing with his idiotic smile. El-Presidente ASIF GHDARI with his alleged Israeli girlfriend Daphne Barak. Here is Zadari… Exposed being with his "friend" before & soon after Benazir's death!!!

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Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has called for adequate steps to purge Afghanistan of the terrorists’ havens. General Kayani made this demand during the daylong 31st meeting of the Tripartite Commission held in Kabul on
August 9.

“Such a demand from the Pakistan Army has come for the first time since inception of the Commission comprising USA-led ISAF, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” well-placed sources privy to the meeting informed TheNation on Wednesday. According to the informed sources, General Kayani emphasised the need for elimination of safe sanctuaries being used by the terrorist groups inside Afghanistan.

Sources said General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Chief of Army Staff, General David H Petreaus, Commander International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and General Sher Muhammad Kirmi, Chief of General Staff of Afghan National Army, who headed the respective delegations, attended the meeting.

Sources were of the view that General Kayani called upon the allied commanders of ISAF and ANA for elimination of the terrorists’ hideouts on Afghan soil, as they were equally creating problems for Pakistan through illegal border crossing. Sources said that General Kayani regretted that despite massive resources both in terms of men and material ISAF and ANA had failed to curb illegal border crossing and infiltration of militants into Pakistan.

He also pointed out the measures taken by the Pakistan Army on the Pak-Afghan border to curb the illegal border crossing, but he was disappointed over the lack of adequate security checkpoint on the Afghan side of the border.General Kayani, the informed sources said, also expressed his disappointment over the Western media’s allegations about existence of the terrorists’ sanctuaries in Pakistani territory bordering Afghanistan.

He had also taken serious exception to the baseless criticism against the ISI by the so-called independent Western media, and brushed aside the unfounded and baseless allegations against Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency.The meeting agreed to further enhance coordination to improve the security on Pak-Afghan border.

The Nation

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