Wonders of Pakistan

IN THE NAME OF GOD, GO

2009-12-13T16:28:00.005+05:00

In the name of God, go

by Roedad Khan

13-12-2009

Some leaders sail with the wind until the decisive moment when their conscience and events propel them into the centre of the storm. Altaf Hussain's fateful decision not to support Zardari on the infamous NRO issue was a masterly stroke in the game of politics. Otto von Bismarck famously said that political genius entailed hearing the hoofbeat of history and then rising to catch the galloping horseman by the coattails. This is what Altaf Bhai has done, to the surprise of friends and foes alike.

Altaf Bhai's friendly advice to President Asif Zardari to sacrifice his exalted office for the sake of the country and democracy reminds me of the fateful "Norway Debate” in the House of Commons in May 1940. Britain was at war, facing the full might of Nazi Germany. In the backdrop of the dismal picture of failure and retreat which confronted the nation, L S Amery, MP, delivered the historic speech which led to the resignation of Prime Minister Chamberlain and elevation of Churchill as prime minister. "I cast prudence to the winds," Amery wrote in his diary, "and ended full-out with my Cromwellian injunction to the government… 'You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.' "

"I say solemnly," Lloyd George who followed Amery, declared, "that the prime minister should give an example of sacrifice because there is nothing which can contribute more to victory in this war than that he should sacrifice his Seals of Office." President Lyndon Johnson had won an enormous election victory and proposed civil rights legislations and Great Society. Less than three years later, broken by the Vietnam War, realising the nation no longer trusted him, and unable to appear in public, he announced he would not seek re-election. What is President Zardari going to do?

All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but no elected president in history has fallen this low this fast. All presidents are opposed, of course, and many are disliked; but few suffer widespread attacks on their personal integrity or veracity. President Zardari is one of those few. Zardari knows well the man responsible for the trouble he is in. He looks at him everyday while shaving.

Talking about despotic rulers, like himself, Mussolini said just before he faced the firing squad: "Have you ever seen a prudent, calculating dictator, they all become mad, they lose their equilibrium in the clouds, quivering ambitions and obsessions – and it is actually that mad passion which brought them to where they are." Absolute power, unrestrained by law, must make people mad. Power is heady substance. How else can one explain Zardari's erratic behaviour and his massive blunders?

Sometimes, once in a long while, you get a chance to serve your country. Today President Zardari is the Atlas on whose shoulders the state of Pakistan rests! Few people had been offered the opportunity that lay open to Mr. Zardari. He blew it. No wonder, the country is gripped by fear and uncertainty. If Zardari remains in command of the ship of state, we will all go down like the Titanic.

At a time when the country is at war, Mr. Zardari, the Supreme Commander, spends almost his entire existence in the confines of a bunker – which he seldom leaves these days. Mortally afraid of his own people and the sword of the NRO hanging over his head, he is more concerned about protecting himself and his power rather than protecting the country or the people of Pakistan.

Mr. Zardari is so swathed in his inner circle that he has completely lost touch with the people and reality. He wanders around among small knots of persons who agree with him. His blunders are too obvious, his behaviour too erratic, his vision too blurred. He has painted himself into a corner.

A year after he captured the presidency, Zardari seems to have lost his "mandate of heaven." At a time when leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of vital importance to the very survival of the country, Pakistan is led by a president who lacks both credibility and integrity. What is worse, he seems oblivious to the realities of his awesome responsibilities and is only interested in perpetuating himself.

What is it that people really expected from their president in a national crisis? It is something that the national psyche needs. The people, especially those in the war zone, expect the occupant of the Presidency to share their suffering, to assure those trapped in the crossfire that they will survive; that they will get through it. He has to be a Chief Executive who is in command, who reacts promptly, who alleviates human suffering. Above all, he must inspire confidence and hope. And so, he has to be that larger-than-life figure, which Zardari is not. No president and no prime minister can govern from a bunker.

These are critical days in Pakistan. Isn't it a great tragedy that at a time like this there is a loveless relationship between the rulers and the ruled? There is no steady hand on the tiller of government. The survival of the country, its sovereignty, its stunted democracy, its hard-won independent judiciary, all are on the line. Tragically, in our political life, we prefer to wait until things reach the emergency room. Each man feels what is wrong, and knows what is required to be done, but none has the will or the courage or the energy needed to speak up and say enough is enough. All have lofty ideals, hopes, aspirations, desires, which produce no visible or durable results, like old men's passions ending in impotence.

"Fortune is a fickle courtesan," Napoleon said on the eve of the battle of Borodino. "I have always said so and now I am beginning to experience it." When I watched Zardari a few days ago on TV, he was visibly undergoing a similar experience and looked like the captain of a sinking ship, the wind of defeat in his hair. How fortunes fluctuate! The calendar says Zardari will be around for another four years, but the writing on the wall shows the party is almost over.

For Mr. Zardari, the accidental president of Pakistan, the moment of truth has arrived. His presidency is collapsing all around us; the wolf is at the door.

The presidency is more than an honour, it is more than an office. It is a charge to keep. Asif Zardari's sudden ascension to presidency caused panic among the people. Thrown there by accident, he is grotesquely unsuited for his position. Henry Adams once wrote that the essence of leadership in the presidency is "a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek." President Zardari grasped the helm more then a year ago but the country still doesn't know whether he has an inner compass, or a course to steer or a port to seek. It is now abundantly clear that he is not worthy of the trust placed in him by his people. He carries a serious baggage, dogged for years by charges of corruption until they were abruptly dropped under the NRO, which he tried to get validated through the Parliament but failed. No democrat should come to power through such an array of backroom machinations, deals with Generals or foreign powers. No wonder, too many people reject Zardari's political legitimacy.

The Zardari aura is crumbling. His star is already burning out, but he will stop at nothing to keep his lock on power.

The writer is a former federal secretary. Readers may contact him at his Email: roedad@comsats.net.pk

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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THE SHARP HEAD OF THE TEMPEST BREWING

2009-12-12T23:48:00.005+05:00

Ours is a rotting state of affairs and rotting fruit is no good unless it falls to the ground, to be trampled under foot and provide space for fresh buds to emerge from the naked branch.

Ayaz Amir
12-12-2009

There’s a storm gathering and when it breaks the central pillars of the temple we call the government of Pakistan will crack, throwing out some incumbents and heralding a period of uncertainty and disorder from which something good, after all our years of despair, may yet emerge.

The NRO of black memory is just the thin edge of the wedge. The hearing of the NRO case in the Supreme Court has already taken an interesting turn — an interpretation which the Presidency is sure to dispute because from its point of view the turn is anything but interesting.

And as the case proceeds more and more vistas are coming into view. Fresh horizons are breaking forth and where it all comes to rest — and, respecting the SC’s directions, I shall be the last person to comment on a sub-judice matter — we don’t know. But the opening salvoes indicate where, if we are lucky, things might be headed.

We are already in a state of disorder but it is still not enough to merit the Maoist injunction (or was it a desire?) that when there is great disorder under the heavens the situation is excellent. Ours is a rotting state of affairs and rotting fruit is no good unless it falls to the ground, to be trampled under foot and provide space for fresh buds to emerge from the naked branch — if the rites of spring, when the time arrives, are to be properly celebrated.

I stand converted (for what my conversion is worth). Democracy is not an abstract virtue to be embraced in any form or shape it may assume. Weimar democracy in Germany led to the rise of Hitler. Neville Chamberlain’s democracy led to the surrender at Munich and encouraged Hitler to test the will of the western powers. French democracy on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War contributed immensely to the dissipation of French national morale.

Hitler was eventually overcome not by the democracies alone, his armies encountering their most decisive defeats in the endless wastes of totalitarian Russia.

If the face of Pakistani democracy reflects the shine of Swiss bank accounts, and villas in Spain and rural houses in England, then there is something seriously wrong with both that democracy and our destiny. Let’s face it: this democracy is breeding disillusionment and killing national hope.

Our army gave a good account of itself in Swat. Our officers and men are fighting valiantly in the harsh, nay cruel, terrain of South Waziristan. But where is the political direction of this war? Who is providing the inspired leadership and direction without which the army’s efforts, and the huge sacrifices being rendered, will come to naught?

The idea that someone accused of stashing away laundered millions abroad can provide any kind of leadership is laughable, testing the limits of absurdity. So unless some of the pillars of Islamabad — whose founding as our capital marks the time from where our misfortunes began — begin to shake, and something like a dramatic exit starts shaping up, we are lost.

Innocents like me wondered where the push would come from. Centcom Commander, Gen Petraeus, has declared before a congressional panel that there seemed to be no sign of the Pakistan army having any desire to imperil civilian rule.

The traditional push leading to the ouster of civilian rule has always come from the direction of Rawalpindi. This time the aim is not civilian rule as a whole but just one aspect of it in the shape of the tallest and supposedly strongest pillar of government. But Triple One Brigade, for much of our history our highest constitutional authority, is not moving anywhere. The ordnance likely to come into play (as already indicated) is deployed on a different ridge.

Not that — and let me hasten to add this — there is any design, any calculated aim, behind this deployment and the fireworks likely to ensue. The new dynamic whose first outlines are already visible to eyes which can see is being beaten into shape by circumstances.

Storms gather not because of any conspiracies. They gather because they must, because so the weather gods have decreed. In the NRO case one thing is leading to another. Much of it is haphazard, fortuitous. But great changes when they occur often have fortuitous circumstances behind them.

Another cruel thing to note: this democracy whose coming was greeted with so much hope and enthusiasm just two years ago has lost steam and direction in just this short period. It is waddling along but it is sick at heart and its place, on current form, is on a hospital bed — to be given a transfusion of blood and vitamins before it can rise again and be of any use to man/woman or beast.

We have seen the bankruptcy of military rule on four successive occasions. Musharraf was the ultimate doctor who cured us of any delusions we may have had regarding the efficacy of the military solution to our troubles. We are now seeing the bankruptcy of democracy. It is not a pleasant sight but perhaps it is useful in the sense that it is concentrating Pakistani minds to think of things which democracy must deliver if its altar is to be honoured and worshipped.

Our major problems are two: governmental ineffectiveness (which we can also call corruption) and the increasingly noticeable lack of direction as regards our war against the Taliban. For both these problems our current democracy has failed to come up with any answers.

Government at the centre is in a state of paralysis. National Assembly and Senate are debating societies and not very good ones at that either. The prime minister’s tailor (or designer suit provider) seems to be the most effective member of his team, deserving the Nishan-e-Imtiaz for always turning him out smartly. If clothes alone could make a man we would have a Churchill for a prime minister. Enough said.

And where is our Taliban war headed? The resort to arms in Swat was inescapable, the growing audacity of the Swat Taliban leaving the army no other choice. In South Waziristan the army so far has been very successful, going into that harsh region and capturing tough positions more quickly than anyone had expected. But if this operation is not to end in stalemate and eventual fatigue it should not an open-ended, spreading to the entire tribal belt. One Vietnam is enough, in Afghanistan. Circumstances should not be created where a mini-Vietnam is recreated on this side of the Afghan border.

So on the shoulders of the military success achieved thus far some sort of political victory has to be built, or we will keep on fighting with no end in sight. And our cities, as has been happening in recent weeks, will continue to be the target of terrorist strikes. This war is spreading. We need to contain it.

Defeatism? No, rather a call to realism. We cannot afford to be tied to America’s apron strings the way we are at present. We have to fight this war on our own, within our borders, without being seen as an American appendage. It is time to loosen, not tighten, the American connection.

Afghanistan should be none of our headache. Our generals who dedicated themselves to the doctrine of strategic depth deserve a long stay in a re-education camp. What are the internal processes in the army which lead to the production of such geniuses? The Americans and the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, should be left to their own devices. But such a course of action will only command credibility if we show zero-tolerance to our home-grown Taliban.

A farewell to Zia-style jihad: we have suffered enough because of the illusions it bred and the follies it led us into. The time to rethink and reinvent Pakistan has come. And it is arising from the throes of our present troubles, from this great disorder and confusion which surround us. Hope amid the ruins: that’s more like it, but only if courage and wisdom are our companions.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com

Source: http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/

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OUR MURDERERS IN THE SKY

2009-12-12T12:33:00.006+05:00

BARACK'S LATEST SURGE & CONDUCT OF THE WAR IN AFPAK

by Scott Ritter

12. December, 2009
TruthDig.com

War is hell, as the saying goes. Murder, on the other hand, is a crime. In this age of the “long war” pitting the United States against the forces of global terror, it is critical that the American people be able to distinguish between the two. The legitimate application of military power to a problem that manifests itself, directly or indirectly, as a threat to the legitimate national security interests of the United States, while horrible in terms of its consequences, is not only defensible but mandatory.

The true test of a society and its leaders is the extent to which every effort is made to both properly define a problem as one worthy of military intervention and then exhaust every option other than the use of force. It is true that President Barack Obama inherited the war in Afghanistan from his predecessor and therefore cannot be held accountable for that which transpired beyond his ability to influence. But the president’s recent decision to “surge” 30,000 additional U.S. military troops into Afghanistan transfers ownership of the Afghan conflict to him and him alone. It is in this light that his decision must be ultimately judged.

In many ways, Obama’s presentation before the Long Gray Line at West Point, in which he explained his decision to conduct the Afghanistan surge, represented an insult to the collective intelligence of the American people. The most egregious contradiction in his speech was the notion that the people of Afghanistan, who, throughout their history, have resisted central authority whether emanating from Kabul or imposed by outside invaders, would somehow be compelled to embrace this new American plan.

At its heart, the strategy requires a fiercely independent people to swear fealty to a man, Hamid Karzai, whose tenure as Afghanistan’s president has been marred by inefficiencies and corruption (even Obama was forced to acknowledge the fraudulent nature of the recent election which secured Karzai’s second term in office). Trying to reverse centuries of adherence to local authority and tribal loyalty with the promise of effective central government would represent a monumental challenge for the most efficient and honest of Afghan leaders. That we are attempting to do so behind the person of Karzai represents the height of folly.

For any military-based solution to have a chance of succeeding, we would need to deploy into Afghanistan an army of social scientists capable of navigating the complex reality of intertribal and interethnic relationships. They would require not only astute diplomatic skills that would enable them to bring together Hazara Shiite and Pashtun Sunni, or Uzbek and Tadjik, or any other combination of the myriad of peoples who make up the populace of Afghanistan, but also an understanding of multiple native languages and dialects. But the reality is we are instead dispatching 20-year-old boys from Poughkeepsie whose skill set, perfected during several months of predeployment training, is more conducive to firing three rounds center mass into a human body.

The nation-building or “civilian strategy” (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/
12/01/afghanistan.key.points/index.html) envisioned by President Obama, impossibly ambitious even under the most ideal conditions, simply cannot be achieved with the resources at hand, whether in 18 months or 18 years. That he has chosen to place at risk the lives of even more American troops, and by extension the citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the pursuit of such unattainable ambition is inexcusable.

The American military is unmatched in its ability to wage war. If the problem of Afghanistan was able to be defined in military terms alone, then perhaps Obama’s surge would provide the basis of a solution. But the Afghan problem has never been a military problem. The United States has, from the very beginning of its Afghanistan misadventure, sought to define the mission within the overall context of a “war on terror.” But the real mission revolves more around bringing to justice the perpetrators of mass murder and building international consensus to help prevent another such crime than it does any variation of closing with and destroying an enemy through firepower, maneuver and shock effect, which is the traditional core of any military operation.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, created problems best dealt with through diplomacy, law enforcement and intelligence. That the United States chose to define it instead as an act of war means that we have never assembled the tool set necessary to solve the Afghan problem, which explains a recent admission by U.S. military officers that, after eight years of war, America was at “square one” in Afghanistan.

Obama’s characterization of the threat faced by the United States and its allies in the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) theater of operations is as misleading as it is inaccurate. There is no singular, homogeneous enemy to be confronted by a surging U.S. military. The notion that the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida fighters operating in both countries are part of an overarching Islamic fundamentalist movement seeking to export violence to the shores of America is fundamentally wrong. While the president may in fact have seen intelligence information (of undetermined veracity) that shows that some individuals or groups operating in the Af-Pak area of operations have in fact plotted such attacks, to characterize these players and their actions as representing a majority (or even significant minority) opinion among the thousands of fighters opposing the United States and its allies is just plain wrong. Yet, having accepted the definition of the Af-Pak problem in military terms, Obama had no choice but to accede to the solutions put forward by such charismatic military leaders as Gen. David Petraeus (the commander of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM) and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

It is not just that generals such as Petraeus and McChrystal dominate the public face of military leadership in America today. The real problem is that the organization they represent, CENTCOM, dominates the entire U.S. military—and, by extension, the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex—as no other unified command has done in U.S. history. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, the demands of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV) on the U.S. military establishment had competition from U.S. European Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Pacific Command, because of the Cold War. Today, the only show in town is CENTCOM, given that its theater of operations encompasses the principal zones of operation in the “war on terror.”

The requirements of CENTCOM drive nearly every aspect of the U.S. military today, including training, procurement and operations. Even strategic nuclear forces have had their work impacted by the need of CENTCOM to strike deep underground targets associated with Iran’s nuclear program. Given the inherently militarized nature of the “war on terror,” CENTCOM has supplanted the Department of State as the “face” of America in terms of official interaction between the United States and the nations of an area of operations ranging from Africa to Pakistan.

CENTCOM therefore dominates issues such as economic assistance and other nation-to-nation interaction not normally associated with military operations. The combined military-diplomatic-economic activity associated with the work of CENTCOM provides it with unmatched leverage at home and abroad. While not intended as a direct result of the “war on terror,” CENTCOM has morphed into a virtual nation-state, operating largely independent of traditional checks and balances associated with the functioning of unified military commands.

Despite the command’s unprecedented power and influence, it would not have been all that difficult for Obama to stand up to the pressures brought to bear by CENTCOM in regard to Afghanistan. He is, after all, the commander in chief. The fact is, Obama opted out of any serious opposition to the plan for the most base of reasons—politics. Any serious effort on the part of Obama to meaningfully contest the CENTCOM-backed surge in Afghanistan would have triggered a contentious political struggle with both the military and Congress at a time when the president is pushing for passage of health care reform, the centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda. The reality is that, yet again, American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are being sacrificed for the political advantage of an American politician. This was a charge that was all-too-popular during the administration of George W. Bush. That such an accusation can so readily be applied to Barack Obama, after only a year in office, underscores the magnitude of the failure of leadership and imagination he has exhibited when it comes to the Af-Pak surge.

This lack of imagination was most evident in how the president sought to justify the Af-Pak surge. “This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaida,” he said in his West Point speech. In addition to his gross oversimplification of the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and its relationship with al-Qaida, Obama felt compelled to press the same fear-induced 9/11 buttons that were the trademark of his predecessor. “It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

The continued focus on hunting down Osama bin Laden further underscores the lack of sophistication of his strategy. It is likely that bin Laden was not the central force behind the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, contrary to popular opinion. That honor goes to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s Egyptian associate whose radical Islamic fundamentalist credentials trump even those of his better-known Saudi Arabian partner, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaida operations chief currently in U.S. custody awaiting trial in New York.

That bin Laden was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, and should be held to account for his crimes, is not a question. But the notion that by somehow “getting” bin Laden the United States would break the back of al-Qaida today is absurd. People should start thinking about the day after bin Laden dies. Al-Qaida cells will continue to function as they did the day before bin Laden died. The biggest measurable change will be the level of popular support for al-Qaida worldwide—it will skyrocket as bin Laden’s myth and demise inspire many thousands to join in a global jihad against the West and encourage fundamentalist Muslims from state and nonstate players alike to contribute countless more millions of dollars to underwriting this effort. There can be no greater boost to bin Laden’s cause than America’s continued singular focus on bringing him in, “dead or alive.” The exclusive militarization of the ongoing “hunt” for bin Laden plays directly into the Saudi terrorist’s game plan.

Revenge is not a defensible motive for a nation like the United States. Justice is. De-linking our hunt for bin Laden from the failed (and flawed) vehicle of the “war on terror” would be a wise move, but one that sadly is not going to happen in the foreseeable future if the rhetoric of Obama at West Point serves as a guide. And, in a nation that continues to be gripped (and manipulated) by the horrors of 9/11, it remains to be seen whether the concept of justice, as defined by American law, ideals and values, can ever be applied to the perpetrators of that crime. The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will serve as a litmus test in this regard. Given America’s track record to date in handling the alleged 9/11 mastermind (the water-boarding of Mohammed 183 times continues to boggle the mind), it is hard to anticipate his exposure to the American legal system as anything but a kangaroo court.

The “war on terror” has shredded the concept of the rule of law, at least as applied by the United States within the context of this struggle. While Obama has made moves to fix some of the symptoms of the flawed policies of his predecessor, the underlying foundation of American arrogance and exceptionalism from which such policies emerged remains unchanged. There is no more telling example of this than the current program of targeted assassination taking place under the guise of armed unmanned aerial drones (also known as remotely piloted vehicles, or RPVs) operating in the Af-Pak theater of operations.

All pretense of either Afghan or Pakistani sovereignty disappears when these drones take to the air. Ostensibly used for intelligence gathering and lethal direct-action operations against so-called high-value targets (i.e., senior al-Qaida or Taliban leadership), RPV missions have become increasingly popular within the U.S. military and intelligence communities as a risk-free means of bringing maximum harm, in highly discriminatory fashion, to the enemy. Expansion of the United States’ RPV effort in Af-Pak has become a central part of the surge ordered by Obama, complementing the 30,000 combat troops he has ordered deployed to the region. But exactly who is targeted by these RPV operations? While the U.S. military and intelligence community maintains that every effort is made to positively identify a target as hostile before the decision to fire a missile or drop a bomb is made, the criteria for making this call are often left in the hands of personnel ill-equipped to make it.

In the ideal world, one would see the fusion of real-time imagery, real-time communications intercept and human sources on the ground before making such a call. But in reality this “perfect storm” of intelligence intersection rarely occurs. In its stead, one is left with fragmentary pieces of data that are cobbled together by personnel far removed from the point of actual conflict whose motivations are geared more toward action than discretion. Often, the most critical piece of intelligence comes from a human source who is using the U.S. military as a means of settling a local score more than furthering the struggle against terror. The end result is dead people on the ground whose demise has little, if any, impact on the “war on terror,” other than motivating even more people to rise up and struggle against the American occupiers and their Afghan or Pakistani cohorts.

Supporters of the RPV program claim that these strikes have killed over 800 “bad guys,” with a loss of only about 20 or so civilians whose proximity to the targets made them suspect in any case. Detractors flip these figures around, noting that only a score or more kills of “high-value targets” can be confirmed, and that the vast majority of those who have died or have been wounded in these attacks were civilians. In a conflict that is being waged in villages and towns in regions traditionally prone to intense independence and religious fundamentalism, distinguishing good from bad can be a daunting task. Given the U.S. track record, under which tribal gatherings and family functions such as weddings have been frequently misidentified as “hostile” gatherings and thus attacked with tragic results, one is inclined to doubt the official casualty figures associated with the RPV strikes.

Rather than furthering the U.S. cause in the “war on terror,” the RPV program, which President Obama seeks to expand in the Af-Pak theater, in reality represents a force-enhancement tool for the Taliban. Its indiscriminate application of death and destruction serves as a recruitment vehicle, with scores of new jihadists rising up to replace each individual who might have been killed by a missile attack. Like the surge that it is designed to complement, the expanded RPV program plays into the hands of those whom America is ostensibly targeting. While the U.S. military, aided by a fawning press, may seek to disguise the reality of the RPV program through catchy slogans such as “warheads through foreheads,” in reality it is murder by another name. And when murder represents the centerpiece of any national effort, yet alone one that aspires to win the “hearts and minds” of the targeted population, it is doomed to fail.

Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2007).

Source: TruthDig.com Cross posted at: Therearenosunglasses weblog
Image: palestinianpundit.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_arc..

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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AMERICA LOOKING FOR EXCUSES - TO ATTACK PAKISTAN

2009-12-11T23:59:00.005+05:00

Allegory about Afghan Shura and Al-Qaeda in Pakistan

by Brig Asif Haroon Raja

Like the myth of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda headquartered in FATA, which I discussed in a previous write up, another absurd claim has now come up from America that Mullah Omar along with his Shura is based in Quetta.

This story woven by spin doctors has caught the imagination of policy makers in Washington who are playing it impishly. Pakistani leaders already harassed by never ending allegations are at a loss how to respond to this latest assault since denials make no impression on accusers.
After repeating their story several times, US officials laid bare their actual motive by mentioning their flaming desire to employ the horrible drones in Balochistan including its capital.
Let us carryout a dispassionate appraisal of this claim. It is now a well known fact that Afghan Taliban hold control of nearly 80% Afghan Territory and hold complete sway over southern, eastern and to some extent western Afghanistan. These regions provide a safe and secured base to them; to operate into western, central and northern Afghanistan and return. Had their hold over southern and eastern Afghanistan been weak, it would have been quite logical to assume that they have made FATA or Pashtun belt of Balochistan adjacent to Helmand Province as their bases of operation.
Now that over 30000 troops of Pakistan Army have taken full control of South Waziristan and a division plus force is in North Waziristan, part of which is in Makeen area, any possibility of Afghan Taliban operating from these regions is ruled out. Same is applicable to Al-Qaeda. The only possible space which still requires further scanning is the countryside west of Ladha and Makeen towards Afghanistan border. Using boots on ground strategy, our troops are gradually clearing these areas as well.
Within Afghanistan, morale of US-NATO forces has considerably sunk and bunker mentality has crept in. Karzai regime has no control over state affairs and his credibility after last August (fraudulent) elections has eroded further. He is now seen more as an American stooge, who is at the mercy of non-Pashtun Northern Alliance. Afghan National Army and Police too are in bad shape and operationally unfit to confront the Taliban. Afghan Pashtuns who are a predominant ethnic entity in Afghanistan, hate Americans because of their discriminatory attitude and are supportive of Taliban. Gulbadin Hikmatyar led Hizb-e-Islami and Jalaluddin Haqqani are also anti-American and anti-Karzai.
Given the favourable operational environment in Afghanistan for Taliban, it should be utterly foolish on part of Mullah Omar and his Shura to abandon the fully secured bases in Afghanistan and opt for an insecure base like Quetta where CIA, FBI, US marines, Blackwater, MI-6, RAW, BLA, BRA, BLF command strong influence. Target killings by BLA in Quetta have become a norm. Jacobabad and Pasni air bases are still under operational control of US troops as revealed by Lt Gen ® Shahid Aziz and confirmed by Defence Minister.
Shamsi base near Kharan had been in use for launching drones. Quetta being the capital city of Balochistan is too open and conspicuous for Mullah Omar to hide particularly when a heavy head money is the prize and the success or failure of Taliban resistance movement depends upon his survivability.
Pashtun areas in Balochistan have not only kept themselves dissociated from RAW backed Baloch insurgency (now turned into a separatist movement) but also kept both Afghan and Pakistani Taliban at bay. Under such insalubrious environments, it is preposterous for the US to keep insisting that Afghan Shura is in Quetta. Latest fabrication is that Afghan Taliban Shura has shifted to Karachi under the supervision of ISI where Omar has established a Madrassah.
If for discussion sake we accept the wacky claims of presence of Afghan Shura in Quetta and that of Osama led Al-Qaeda in FATA theoretically; it implies that as far as US is concerned, the battle for Afghanistan is almost over. The news should have logically transported Gen McChrystal and his team to celebrate that the entire Taliban leadership and Al-Qaeda have fled to Pakistan and it is now much easier for them to get hold of few thousand rag tag Taliban fighters and not more than 100 Al-Qaeda fighters abandoned by their leaders or to win them over? The only precautionary measure required to be taken was to prevent re-entry of Afghan Shura and Al-Qaeda leadership by enhancing border check posts and surveillance means along the entire Afghan-Pakistan border (as frequently requested by Pakistan). In addition, he needed to fence and mine the entire length of border as repeatedly proposed by Pakistan but refused by Karzai and USA for reasons best known to them. No such thing has happened since Chrystal is depressed because of Osama phobia. Within Pakistan, once US intelligence agencies acquired credible intelligence, shouldn’t they have carried out joint raids on suspected locations without wasting a single minute? CIA, FBI and US diplomats would not have encountered an obstruction as they move about in Pakistan unchecked and enjoy full cooperation of all law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Otherwise too, was it wise on part of US leadership to broadcast the locations of Omar and Osama prematurely thereby giving them full chance to runaway??
Well knowing that Pakistan Army is deeply committed in fighting sponsored terrorists in various parts of NWFP and FATA and achieving fruitful results, the US instead of feeling mighty pleased and encouraging it to further stabilize these vital regions, has once again begun to chant their nauseating mantra of ‘do more’ and that too in new areas. Areas in Waziristan which are presently quiet and neutral are being provoked through drone attacks to make them restive. Orakzai Agency is being developed into another bastion. The US is pressing Pakistan to shift more troops from its eastern border and to start operations in Wazir inhabited South Waziristan and in North Waziristan, where it alleges most runaways have fled. It is trying to create conditions wherein Pakistan Army would be compelled to fight the combined force of Maulvi Nazir, Hakimullah Mehsud and Gul Bahadur. United front would ease up pressure on Hakimullah led TTP, which is in disarray. The US also want the Army and the FC in Balochistan to shift its focus from Baloch held areas where RAW-CIA-MI-6 backed separatist movement is raging and to concentrate towards peaceful Pashtun areas including Quetta, where it suspects Afghan Shura is hiding. The US-NATO forces, after their failed operation in Helmand are expected to launch another operation there once additional US troops arrive so as to force the militants to flee to neighbouring Pashtun belt of Balochistan and turn it volatile.
Having fully committed the army in fighting a futile US war on terror, RAW sponsored terrorists duly aided by Blackwater elements are playing havoc into major cities of Pakistan - through almost daily bomb blasts and suicide attacks. Focus is on such targets which hurts the military the most. Attack on a mosque during Friday prayers in Rawalpindi on 27 November, frequented mostly by army senior officers and their sons, was most gruesome. ISI set ups have been repeatedly struck since they frustrate the designs of enemies of Pakistan. Focus is now towards destabilizing the Punjab, after which emphasis will shift to Sindh to upturn main economic base of Pakistan. While CIA and FBI along with its shady outfits are fully involved in this destabilization game, the US leaders are hypocritically harping on the same old tunes that Pakistan is a key ally and the US seeks its stability and prosperity. Our leaders having been provided with clinching evidence of involvement of RAW in terrorism have still not picked up courage to expose India and to forcefully ask USA to bridle its strategic ally.
Fact of the matter is that Omar, Osama and nuclear cards are being played with devious intentions. The real purpose behind it, is to cast aspersion on Pakistan that Pakistan Army and the ISI are aligned with Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda and sheltering them. It implies that there is a nexus between Pakistan-Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda and Pakistan is fully supporting Taliban and Al-Qaeda in their war against US-NATO forces in Afghanistan. With leadership of the two deadly organizations based inside Pakistan, it becomes a fit case for the US to mount an offensive against Pakistan (to root out safe sanctuaries and turn the corner). Cambodia model is on the cards. Indian forces have begun to mark time in concentration area. Desire for hot pursuit operations inside Pakistan and to extend the radius of action of drones too has again been expressed.
The US civil and military leadership instead of wasting time in superfluous blame game and monkey tricks is ought to concentrate on its work in Afghanistan and put things in order so that Pakistan gets back to peace again. After Pakistan Army having done their job admirably, it is now the turn of Gen McChrystal led US-NATO forces to perform at their end, by doing more - creating suitable conditions for safe and honorable exit from the quagmire called Afghanistan.

Brig Asif Haroon is a Member Board of Advisors, Opinion Maker and writes on defense and security issues. He is based in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
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OBAMA'S STATE OF SURGE, AFGHANISTAN

2009-12-11T21:47:00.003+05:00

Obama Surge Afghanistan---and---Pakistan

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This small website has, I think, had some of the better analysis and reporting on the Afghan War this year. It had Anand Gopal’s on-the-ground pieces on the Taliban, Ann Jones’s first-hand account of the farcical U.S. training program for the Afghan army and police, Pratap Chatterjee’s carefully reported tale of corruption at the highest levels, and Nick Turse’s report on just how the Pentagon has been digging in throughout that country, among other pieces. As early as May, I was already writing about the various often little-noticed ways in which the Af/Pak War was escalating. I return to that theme today. It’s important for us all to take in as full a picture as possible of the true dimensions of the Afghan “surge.”

Tom]

The Nine Surges of Obama’s War

How to Escalate in Afghanistan

by Tom Engelhardt

In his Afghan “surge” speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.

Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media's focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway.

In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it’s scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together.

What follows, then, is my own attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the U.S. has been surging, and continues to do so, as 2009 ends. Think of this as an effort to widen our view of Obama’s widening war.

Obama’s Nine Surges

1. The Troop Surge: Let’s start with those “30,000” new troops the president announced. First of all, they represent Obama’s surge, phase 2. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were “just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan” when he took office in January 2009. In March, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. Last week, when he spoke, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. If you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 actually dispatched after the March announcement, however, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, 11,000 of those were “authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year,” bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan “surge” was already underway when Obama arrived.

It also looks like at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door in recent months without notice or comment. Similarly, with the 30,000 figure announced a week ago, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.” That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed “senior military official” told De Young “that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, med-evac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.”

Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.

2. The Contractor Surge: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan as if they were increasing in a void. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many former military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases. There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. Did their numbers play any part in the president’s three months of deliberations? Does he have any control over how many contractors are put on the U.S. government payroll there? We don’t know.

Private contractors certainly went unmentioned in his speech and, amid the flurry of headlines about troops going to Afghanistan, they remain almost unmentioned in the mainstream media. In major pieces on the president’s tortuous “deliberations” with his key military and civilian advisors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, all produced from copious officially inspired leaks, there wasn't a single mention of private contractors, and yet their numbers have been surging for months.

A modest-sized article by August Cole in the Wall Street Journal the day after the president’s speech gave us the basics, but you had to be looking. Headlined “U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace,” the piece barely peeked above the fold on page 7 of the paper. According to Cole: “The Defense Department's latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40% between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5% in the same period... Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total...” In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.

Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corp., TPM Muckracker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 “third country nationals” among the contractors, and 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that Dyncorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan “which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years.”

3. The Militia Surge: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a mini-surge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to create a movement along the lines of Iraq's Sunni Awakening Movement that, many believe, ensured the "success" of George W. Bush's 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we'll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of money.

This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of USA Today, will “funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize ‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with security.” Think of this as a “bribe” surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy “friendship.”

4. The Civilian Surge: Yes, Virginia, there is a “civilian surge” underway in Afghanistan, involving increases in the number of “diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country.” The State Department now claims to be “on track” to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by “the early weeks of next year.” (Of course, that, in turn, means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government.) A similar civilian surge is evidently underway in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for a humongous new, nearly billion-dollar embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.

5. The CIA and Special Forces Surge: And speaking of Pakistan, Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog had it right recently when, considering the CIA’s “covert” (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, he wrote: “The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn’t mention at West Point.” In fact, the CIA’s drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af/Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report that in recent months the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House “for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.”

In addition, Scott Shane of the Times reports:

“The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said..., to parallel the president’s decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time -- a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas -- because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”

The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a hornet’s nest with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital of Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.

In addition, thanks to the Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we now know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates “a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the “surge” there means.

6. The Base-Building Surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base-building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama's latest troop-surge announcement. A recent NBC Nightly News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a “boom town,” shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which -- especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades underway at the moment -- are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.

In addition, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported, forward observation bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. “Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy,” he wrote in early November, “and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn't going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military's building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon.”

7. The Training Surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan national army and police. Despite years of American and NATO “mentoring,” both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions -- 25% of those trained in the last year are now gone -- and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by next fall and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.

8. The Cost Surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan Army and more than $10 billion has gone into police training -- staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the country's security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works (which seems unlikely), try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-man force. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just suggested that it will take at least 15-20 years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule (“You break it, you own it”); in this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. (And this is even without adding in those local militias we’re planning to invest “millions” in.)

9. The Anti-Withdrawal Surge: Think of this as a surge in time. By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting “an open-ended commitment.” With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan, emphasized in his speech, in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011, about 18 months from now. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post headline says it all: “McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact.” On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of promises (“…and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011”). Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right-wing began to blaze away on the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date “to the enemy,” there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful.

In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a “flurry of coordinated television interviews,” the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows “in lockstep” to reassure the right (and they were reassured) by playing “down the significance of the July 2011 target date.” The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. (“...July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [National Security Advisor] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’ rather than a ‘cliff.’”)

How Wide the Widening War?

When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: “We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” This seems a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re talking about a minority Pashtun insurgency -- Pashtuns make up only about 42% of Afghanistan’s population -- and the insurgents are a relatively lightly armed, rag-tag force. Against them and a miniscule number of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched a remarkable, unbelievably costly build-up of forces over vast distances, along fragile, extended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has, to the best of its abilities, followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan.

All of this has been underway for close to a year, with at least another six months to go. This is the reality that the president and his top officials didn’t bother to explain to the American people in that speech last week, or on those Sunday talk shows, or in congressional testimony, and yet it’s a reality we should grasp as we consider our future and the Afghan War we, after all, are paying for.

And yet, confoundingly, as the U.S. has bulked up in Afghanistan, the war has only grown fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. Sometimes bulking-up can mean not reversing but increasing the other side’s momentum. We face what looks to be a widening war in the region. Already, the Obama administration has been issuing ever stronger warnings to the Pakistani government and military to shape up in the fight against the Taliban, otherwise threatening not only drone strikes in Baluchistan, but cross-border raids by Special Operations types, and even possibly “hot pursuit” by U.S. forces into Pakistan. This is a dangerous game indeed.

As Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, wrote recently, “Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.” Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, the American ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

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OBAMA EXPANDS WAR INTO PAKISTAN

2009-12-11T18:45:00.002+05:00

AMERICAN WAR PLANNERS SEE THE AFGHAN WAR AS THE ANSWER TO THEIR PRAYERS.

Introductory paragraph in the following report comes as close as anything that I have ever read to explaining why America is carrying-on like a bull in a China shop in S E Asia, and the ultimate objective--to create a spiraling war in Afghanistan, which leads to civil war in Pakistan, confrontation between Pakistan and India and war between India and China. It is diabolic in its simplicity.

Obama expands war into Pakistan

Barry Grey

There is an element of immense recklessness in Washington’s aggressive policy toward Pakistan. It is driving the country into civil war, which would rapidly destabilize the entire region and heighten the danger of war between India and Pakistan and between India and China, all three of which are nuclear powers. Russia and Iran would inevitably be drawn into the maelstrom as well.

WSWS, 9 December 2009

One week ago, President Obama in a speech at West Point sought to portray his escalation of the war in Afghanistan as the prelude to an early withdrawal of US troops. It has since become increasingly apparent that the speech was nothing more than a calculated exercise in public deception.

The speech was crafted to chloroform the public, the better to defy and disorient mass popular opposition to the war.

It is now clear that the actual policy Obama has decided to pursue is not only the maintenance of an indefinite military occupation of Afghanistan, but a vast expansion of the war into Pakistan.

Within hours of the speech, administration officials were “clarifying” Obama’s talk of beginning the withdrawal of US forces by July 2011 to make clear that there is no such deadline and that US troops will remain in Afghanistan long after that date. Now it has emerged that a central component of Obama’s war plan is an expansion of US drone missile strikes in Pakistan and the deployment of US Special Operations forces on Pakistani territory to carry out attacks on insurgents in that country.

Obama said nothing in his speech about expanding the war into Pakistan. As the New York Times reported Tuesday, quoting an unnamed senior aid to the president, “We concluded early on that whatever you do with Pakistan, you don’t want to talk about it much.”

The Times, which has for months been campaigning for an escalation of the war and its expansion into Pakistan, reported the day after Obama’s speech that the White House last month signed off on an expansion of CIA operations in Pakistan.

On Tuesday, the newspaper reported that prior to Obama’s speech, his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, met with the heads of Pakistan’s military and intelligence service and told them that unless Pakistan moved quickly to expand its military offensive against insurgents to Baluchistan and North Waziristan, “the United States was prepared to take unilateral action to expand Predator drone strikes beyond the tribal areas and, if needed, to resume raids by Special Operations forces into the country against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”

In an editorial on Tuesday bristling with imperialist arrogance, the Times demanded that the Pakistanis “stop temporizing and get fully into the fight.” On the expansion of US missile strikes in Pakistan, including their extension into Baluchistan, the newspaper wrote: “Such strikes have killed several top extremists, but the program is hugely unpopular in Pakistan and Mr. Obama must be judicious about expanding it. That means three things: extremely careful targeting, no civilian casualties, or as few as possible [i.e., as many as needed], and no publicity.”

In other words, the American people are to be kept in the dark about targeted assassinations, civilian casualties from missile strikes, and other covert military operations in Pakistan. And the Times will do its part to suppress any information about such actions.

The editorial went on to declare that Obama had to persuade the Pakistanis that “the United States is in it for the long haul this time.”

What this points to is an unprecedented program of US military aggression and subversion and the transformation of both Afghanistan and Pakistan into US protectorates. This is the meaning of the recent statement by National Security Adviser Jones that “We are not leaving the region. We have enormous strategic interests in Afghanistan, east of Afghanistan in Pakistan…”

Since Obama’s lyeing speech, a program of US colonial domination of Central and South Asia has been unfurled, and the US media has swung into action to bolster the effort with a new round of pro-war propaganda, including the dispatch of TV news anchors to American bases in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is only part of the global strategy of American imperialism to assert its domination of a region rich in oil and gas and of critical geo-strategic importance for supremacy over the Eurasian continent. The implications of this drive are catastrophic for the peoples of the region, who will pay the price in countless deaths, social devastation and neo-colonial oppression. But they are also disastrous for the people of the United States, whose sons and daughters will be sacrificed and whose living standards will be further slashed to pay for never-ending military adventures.

There is an element of immense recklessness in Washington’s aggressive policy toward Pakistan. It is driving the country into civil war, which would rapidly destabilize the entire region and heighten the danger of war between India and Pakistan and between India and China, all three of which are nuclear powers. Russia and Iran would inevitably be drawn into the maelstrom as well.

Obama’s election was promoted by sections of the American ruling elite who believed he could serve as the figurehead for a certain recalibration of US foreign policy after the disasters of the Bush years. It is now clear that Obama is the front man for the military and the most ruthless representatives of the ruling class.

It is necessary for workers and youth to draw the requisite conclusions. The fight against the war is a fight against the Obama administration. It is a fight against the Democratic Party and the two-party system. And it is a fight against American imperialism and the capitalist system upon which it is based.

:: Article nr. 60888 sent on 09-dec-2009 20:17 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=60888

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Tags: false flag terror, scientific dictatorship, starting world war III
Categories : How Do We Build the Resistance?, Organizing resistance, Pakistani surrender, The Most Moral Army In the World, crimes against humanity, idiot nation, image of the beast, monsters

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SURGING INTO DISASTER

2009-12-11T15:20:00.005+05:00

by Eric Margolis

President Barack Obama has missed two sterling opportunities to wind down the ugly Afghan morass he inherited from George W. Bush.

First, Obama could have hit the pause button on the war when he first took office. A thorough evaluation should have been done at that time.

Second, during all the heavy duty strategy meetings over Afghanistan this November, the new president could have announced a cease-fire in the war or sharp reduction of military operations, then called for genuine peace talks under Saudi aegis with Taliban and its nationalist allies.

Instead of a sensible pause, Obama’s made the tragic decision last week to enlarge and prolong the eight-year war in Afghanistan.

The ugly, messy conflict Obama inherited from George W. Bush now fully belongs to the “peace president” and his unhappy party.

President Obama faced a choice between guns – $1 trillion for the next decade of warfare in Afghanistan – or butter – his $1 trillion national health plan.

The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate chose guns.

What Obama should really have been concerned with was Osama bin Laden’s vow to first bleed the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, then break America’s domination of the Muslim world by luring it into a final battle in Pakistan, a nation of 175 million, 90% of whom see the United States as their country’s primary enemy.

The president also heard alarms from his field commanders and CIA that Taliban and its allies were taking control of much of Afghanistan and threatening the big cities. As US Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned, the mighty US even faced defeat at the hands of lightly armed mountain tribesmen – the same humiliating fate that befell the Soviet Union and led to the collapse of its empire.

So, as expected, Obama will rush 30,000 new troops into the Afghan quagmire, and arm-twist reluctant NATO allies to contribute 10,000 more mostly token forces.

Obama, with his eye on the Afghan War’s growing unpopularity among Americans, confusingly promised some of the 105,000 US garrison there will begin withdrawing in 2011. But Obama’s aides almost immediately began backtracking on this pledge, which made no military sense at all.

Senator John McCain and fellow Republican hawks had a field day shredding Obama’s foolish proposal.

Many Afghans, however, listened and concluded that the US, like the Soviets, would one day decamp. Those Afghans working for the US will quickly begin hedging their bets by making discreet side deals with Taliban, as I saw them do with the mujahidin during the Soviet era.

The president insisted his objective remains destroying al-Qaida. But al-Qaida hardly exists in Afghanistan. Only a handful remain in Pakistan, likely no more than a dozen men.

President Obama’s insincerity on this issue is very disturbing, undermining his reputation for veracity and clear thinking.

There is also concern that when Obama targets al-Qaida, his real target may be Pakistan. Pakistanis sourly joke that the US long ago killed Osama bin Laden and is keeping his spectral image alive to justify occupying Afghanistan.

Obama’s new military plan mirrors the Bush administration’s Iraq `surge’ that candidate Obama sharply criticized. US Marines may even go and crush rebellious Kandahar the way Iraq’s Fallujah was laid waste.

The Soviets also tried the same surge tactic in the mid 1980’s during their Afghan occupation. When that failed, Moscow decided to pull back its over-extended 160,000 troops to defend Afghanistan’s major cities and main roads from Afghan “terrorists.”

That strategy also failed miserably, as did a similar effort by the French in the Red River Delta during the first Indochina War. Now the US is trying the same thing.

Anyone who understands Afghanistan’s deep complexities knows that Obama’s surge won’t win the eight year war. Afghanistan’s 15-million strong Pashtun tribal majority will continue to resist western occupation. Waging colonial wars of pacification against resident populations has proven futile time after time.

At best, it will be an exercise in managing a failed policy.

Americans are turning against the war. Congress is fretting over its mounting costs: US $300 billion for 2009 in a $1.4 trillion deficit year. This war is being waged on money borrowed from China.

Some Democrats are rightly calling for a special war tax on all Americans rather than continuing to conceal the war’s huge expenses on the national credit card.

It costs US $1 million to keep each American soldier in Afghanistan. Renting Pakistan’s assistance will cost $3 billion per year (overt and black payments combined). Thousands of US troops will remain stuck in Iraq where the underground Ba’ath Party is showing signs of life.

President Obama vowed at West Point to fight al-Qaida (read: anti-American groups) in Africa and Asia. No wonder many angry, betrayed Democrats are calling him “George Bush’s third term.”

The most positive interpretation of President Obama’s

“surge” is that it is a face-saving exercise to cover America’s retreat from the Afghan morass.

The key to US strategy is cobbling together a large Afghan army and police led by the US military – the modern version of the British Raj’s native troops under white officers. The Soviets also tried to build a 260,000-man Afghan Communist army, but failed. The US will be no more successful because its Afghan forces are mostly minority Tajik and Uzbek who are hated by the majority Pashtun. This was also the case during the Soviet occupation.

Efforts will be made to sanitize the corrupt Karzai government and its mafia-like warlords. This, too, will fail. But Obama’s hope is that he can declare victory by 2011. This would allow substantial US troop reductions before the next mid-term and presidential elections – if all goes well.

But things are not going well in Pakistan, without whose cooperation, bases, and supply routes the US cannot wage war in Afghanistan. The US-backed Pakistani government of Asif Ali Zardari is awash with corruption charges, condemned by the public as a puppet regime, and may soon be ousted by Pakistan’s military.

Most Pakistanis support Taliban, see US occupation of Afghanistan as driven by lust for oil and gas, and increasingly fear the US intends to tear their unstable nation apart in order to seize its nuclear arsenal.

CIA-funded assassination teams have joined Predator drones in killing Pakistanis judged hostile to US interests. Increasing numbers of Pakistanis believe their nation is actually under US occupation.

Obama’s advisors have convinced him an early US withdrawal from Afghanistan will provoke chaos in Pakistan. They don’t understand that it is the US-led war in Afghanistan that is destabilizing Pakistan and creating ever more anti-western extremism. Forcing Pakistan to adopt policies inimical to its national interests that are detested by its public risk producing an Iranian-style revolution or coup by nationalist officers.

The longer US forces wage war in Afghanistan, the more the conflict will spread into Pakistan, where 15% of its people, and 20% or more of its military and intelligence service are Pashtuns who sympathize with their beleaguered fellow Taliban Pashtuns in Afghanistan.

A grimmer view is that Obama has fallen under the influence of conservative military-financial interests, and Washington’s rabid neocons who seek permanent war against the Muslim world.

This week, Gen. James Jones, the president’s national security advisor, asserted, "We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times." In short, the American Raj will continue to dominate Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama’s “surge” may only expand, intensify, and prolong the Afghan conflict. It may also ruin the presidency of a man so many Americans looked to as a savior and inspiration.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009

WAR IN WAZIRISTAN

2009-12-10T17:31:00.010+05:00

Operation Rah-e-Nijat (Freedom Path) in South Waziristan

Nore for WoP readers: Here are two posts from Brig. Asif Haroon Raja. I have put these up on pages of this blog to enable our readers see through facts. Not that everything said by our writers whether on the pro or cons side of the issue is correct, but they do help us reach to some conclusion, to sift real from tainted ‘facts’ produced by the mainstream media here in Pakistan, India as well as in the west.

I myself do not subscribe to Brig. Raja’s views particularly about India in so far as it has become a habit with both India and Pakistan putting everything bad happening in each country to other’s doing. Whatever bad happens in India goes to the ‘credit’ of ISI (Pakistan’s principal spy agency) and in Pakistan it is straightway ‘credited’ to ISI’s equivalent the RAW of India. Indeed if it is so, can’t both of us avoid this “panga bazi” when we have already the menace of extremism in our north (whether India or the US, Afghanistan or somebody else is doing this, is of secondary nature), main thing is that we are being hit, and hit badly. Last three days we had a continuous spate of attacks in Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Lahore and Multan. The problem is so serious that the whole country, the nation state of Pakistan is at stake.

As far India, they have enough of trouble in their part of Kashmir. If they stoke their sticks in the fire in Pakistan, it is naturally going to ignite equal fire in their part of the world.

Having a past which has been a mix of love hate relationship, let it be a relation of love and not hate. Are we, the people of India and Pakistan wrong to wish so?? I as a Pakistani (and I believe same are the wishes of a majority of peace loving Indians) do wish again and again and ask upon the two governments to turn this subcontinent into a haven and heaven of peace.

ARE WE WRONG TO WISH SO!!

Brig. Asif Haroon Raja

FATA region in the North Western Frontier Province (Pakhtunkhwa) of Pakistan consists of seven tribal agencies. It is backward and poverty stricken with little means of employment.

The tribesmen, the inhabitants of FATA are excellent fighters, revengeful, hospitable, fiercely independent, religious and proud of their traditions. They have all along remained loyal to Pakistan and defended western border without any assistance from Pakistan army.

After 1947, South Waziristan Agency (S.W.A.) was penetrated for the first time by regular troops in 2002 to flush out foreigners under intense pressure from Bush Administration. It ignited fire of militancy which kept spreading. After fighting the Wazirs under Nek Muhammad and signing a peace deal with him at Shakai, the troops entered Mehsud area within S.W.A. in 2004.

They could reach up to short of Srarogha after which operation was halted and peace agreement inked with Baitullah Mehsud. Thereon, operation was launched in North Waziristan Agency (N.W.A.) which also culminated in uneasy peace deal with Gul Bahadur led Taliban. During second operation in Mehsud area in 2007 in which major battles took place in Shrawangai-Tiarza-Kunigram areas, 250 soldiers were deceptively taken hostage at Khaisura. To get the hostages released a deal had to be brokered with Baitullah and forward check posts were pulled back.

In November 2007, an inconclusive operation was launched in Swat. In January 2008, Srarogha fort in S.W.A. was captured and inmates taken hostage by Mehsuds. Series of military operations were launched in 2008 which included Khyber Agency in June, Bajaur Agency in July and Swat in August. Another operation was launched in Swat in first week of May 2009 which broke the back of Fazlullah led militants.

However, when acts of terror continued and worsened internal security situation, it was concluded that Hakimullah led Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) with its main base of operation in S.W.A. was responsible for terrorism. It was therefore decided to launch a full-fledged operation to dismantle the network of TTP.

S.W.A. stretches from Jandola in the northeast to Wana in southwest and is pided between Mahsud, Wazir and Bhittani tribes. Area stretching from Kot Nawaz-Makeen in the north to Shrawangai-Sarwakai in the south is inhabited by tribes of Mehsuds. Important towns and villages in this area are Makeen, Ladha, Srarogha, Kotkai, Kunigram. Remaining half of S.W.A. from excluding Sarwakai up to Wana and Tanai is the domain of Waziri tribes. Other important towns in Wazir area are Angoor Adda and Shakai. Bhittanis followed by Mehsuds are in majority in Jandola.

Tank which is a settled town and connected with Dera Ismail Khan (DIK) also has large concentration of Bhittanis and Mehsuds. While Jandola is the gateway into S.W.A, Wana is the major bustling city. N.W.A. spreads from Miramshah-Mir Ali-Razmak in the north up to short of Makeen in the south. While Wazir belt is connected with Afghan border, Mehsud belt is not directly connected with Durand Line and for movement across the line, residents have to traverse through Waziri area or through N.W.A. Movement by foot or by mules across rugged mountains is however possible.

S.W.A. is served by main artery of Bannu-DIK-Tank-Jandola. From Jandola, one branch moves to Spinkai Roghzai- Kotkai- Srarogha-Makeen; the other along Jandola-Sarwakai-Wana. From Wana, the road traverses further south towards Tanai-Sambaza-Zhob-Mulslim Bagh-Quetta. Within Mehsud area, three arteries run from north to south, which are inter-connected. Road Makeen-Ladha enters into N.W.A at Cheena-Kot Nawaz. From Makeen, one road leads southwards to Tiarza and the other to Ladha. From Ladha, one branch moves towards Kunigram-Chalweshtai-Shrawangai-Torwam Bridge from where it enters Wazir area at Shakai and hits Wana. Khaisura is closer to Shakai. From Torwam, one track moves eastwards towards Gurgara Sar-Shinsar-Barwand. From Barwand, one road leads north-eastwards to Srarogha and the other to Jandola.

Mehsud area has all along remained a no-go area where runaways would seek refuge, or kidnapped persons or hijacked cars taken. Being hot headed and aggressive by nature, they have never been under the effective control of political agent or law enforcing agencies in the form of South Waziristan Scouts and Khasadars. Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Arabs who had taken part in Afghan jihad in 1980s and in 2001 had taken refuge in S.W.A., got married and preferred to settle down permanently as they were refused entry by countries of their origin. They found the environment most suitable to continue with Jihadist activities unobserved and unscathed.

Uzbeks, mostly belonging to Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan are in larger strength and are the most hardy and ruthless fighters. Till June 2009, not a single drone attack came on positions held by Baitullah since he was on the payroll of CIA and RAW. Reportedly, he had over $2 billion in cash and arms worth $1 billion which enabled him to pay handsome salaries to his fighters and heavy compensation to families of suicide bombers. With plenty of resources and no other errand to do, Baitullah established Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in December 2007 and started dreaming of a caliphate.

Assisted by foreigners and his confidantes, he got busy in recruiting, training and stocking armaments provided by foreign sources in Kabul. Commanders for each agency were nominated. Bajaur Agency and Swat were turned into fortresses. In anticipation to a showdown with the army in his home ground, he appointed commanders for each town in Mehsud belt and turned every house into a fortress and caves, mountain hideouts and tunnels into arms storehouses. Peaceful residents were terrorized into silence while over 500 elders and Maliks assassinated. Promise of Islamic laws and portrayal of army as American mercenary army were other factors which helped fake Taliban in gaining sympathy of the locals

To approach Mehsud area, the attacker has to first tackle Ahmadzai Wazir dominated inhabited S.W.A. in the south, or Othmanzai Wazir-Dawar dominated N.W.A. in the north, or Bhittani dominated Jandola in southeast. Mehsud belt tucked deep inside treacherous terrain of S.W.A. is well served with inter-connected roads and tracks, which allows militants to shift or reinforce threatened sectors. High mountains covered with thick vegetation together with dense forests provide excellent hiding places and vantage points. Defiles and valleys canalize intruders and make the area an ideal place for planning and conducting guerrilla operations.

Wazir-Mehsud antagonism is age-old but sometime back Maulvi Nazir heading Ahmadzai Waziris suspecting that the army was directing drone attacks on his positions had distanced himself from the army and had become an ally of Baitullah. Gul Bahadur heading Othmanzais having similar grouses had also joined the alliance and so had Faqir Muhammad in command of Bajaur chapter of Taliban. Sudden death of Baitullah in August 2009 as a result of drone attack coupled with successful military operation in Swat and adjoining areas gave a death blow to the alliance.

Both Nazir and Gul Bahadur reluctant to accept leadership of Hakimullah Mehsud have distanced themselves from TTP. More inclined towards Jihad in Afghanistan, they promised to stay neutral in case of an operation against Mehsuds. Both have endured maximum brunt of drone attacks for being allegedly linked with Jalaluddin Haqqani and for maintaining pro-Pakistan stance.

Loss of Swat front and neutralization of two flank guards of Mehsud belt made the position of Hakimullah led TTP in S.W.A. exposed and vulnerable. The TTP otherwise is going through a period of turmoil because of war of succession and tightened noose of the army around its domain in S.W.A. since July. Hakimullah has not been able to assert his authority since he took over under extremely turbulent circumstances. His grip over TTP has become fragile which is on the verge of breakup.

Like in Swat, TTP under Hakimullah has no dearth of cash and armaments. Most weapons are of Russian and Indian origin, which have been supplied to this mercenary outfit from Afghanistan, and stored in caves, tunnels and selected houses in each village/town. They have been receiving concerted training in art of guerrilla warfare by Indian commandoes and Afghan instructors who had taken part in 1980s Afghan Jihad. Qari Hussain, an expert in training suicide bombers and some others are feverishly engaged in training boys of tender age. Orphans from Azad Kashmir were whisked away soon after the devastating 2005 earthquake.

These and other destitute are their preferred choices since this category can easily be misled and brainwashed. Each house with a high compound wall has an MG in fixed role facing the entrance door, a manned observation post on the roof and a cave towards the rear side. Anyone trying to barge in is automatically engaged by the cleverly concealed MG, allowing reaction time to the inmates to escape through the cave. Nodal points on mountains overlooking valleys and towns/villages duly converted into strong points guard approaches. IEDs innovatively fixed astride roads/tracks are planted extensively to cause heavy damage to intruding troops and vehicles.

The TTP lost public support when Fazlullah led Taliban in Swat drunk with power and affluence instead of letting Nizam-e-Adl get introduced, refused to de-weaponise and abide by Swat agreement signed in February 2009 and occupied Lower Dir and Shangla. Successful Swat operation Rah-e-Rast and return of over 2 million displaced persons to their homes turned the tide and forced the militants to run in panic. Establishment of linkage of militants with foreign powers further brought them in bad books of the people. Spate of acts of terror in September-October made the public averse to Taliban and demand for uprooting their main base in S.W.A. grew louder. The public as well as all political parties less Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat Ulema Islam and Tehrik-e-Insaf stood behind the army.

Additional troops had started to move into Waziristan from July onwards in anticipation to a decisive battle in S.W.A. USA had been exerting extreme pressure on our government to commence operation in Waziristan in conjunction with Swat operation. Army disfavoured opening of two fronts simultaneously particularly when troops were engaged in Swat, Lower and Upper Dir, Buner, Shangla, Bajaur, Mohmand Agency, Khyber Agency and Darra Adam Khel. It would have amounted to dilution and dispersion of resources thereby losing concentration of effort in all sectors. It took its time to allow consolidation of gains made on Swat front.

Period from July to mid October was judiciously utilized for gaining intelligence to formulate plans, getting to know strength and weaknesses of militants, acclimatization of troops and familiarization of area of operations, completing its operational deficiencies, tying up nuts and bolts and streamlining drills how to confront challenges of IEDs, militants adept in guerrilla warfare and rugged terrain. For the first time, the army was not launched in haste and given adequate preparation time and moral support. During preparatory manoeuvre, troops continued with their creeping forward policy to isolate and encircle targeted area from multiple sides. This tactic curtailed liberty of action of Hakimullah led militants and gave psychological ascendancy to the military. At the same time, both Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur were kept under tight control and no deal was made to keep them friendly.

Once the go ahead was given by Federal and NWFP governments, operation Rah-e-Nijat was unfolded from three directions on 17 October. One prong moved from north to south along axis Razmak-Makeen, the second from southeast to northwest along axis Jandola-Kotkai-Srarogha, the third from south to north along axis Shakai-Shrawangai-Ladha. Balanced force was employed on each axis of advance and movement made on broad front to overcome opposition with speed and to home on to vital complex of Ladha-Makeen. The three pronged manoeuvre aimed at outmanoeuvring and encircling the adversary and blocking all avenues of escape or reinforcement from elsewhere. Soldiers climbed the rugged mountains like mountain leopards and rolled down to rupture the positions occupied by militants on hilltops.

Within fortnight, considerable progress has been made on all axes causing disarray among militants. Wireless intercepts indicated signs of chaos among them. Many among them have shaved their beards or trimmed their beards and are running for life. Troops on Razmak pincer have secured Kot Azam and Cheena and are fast moving towards critical position of Makeen. On Jandola axis, troops have captured important places of Spinkai Roghzai, Kotkai which is hometown of Hakimullah and Qari Hussain and have now over run the pivotal position of Srarogha and succeeded in occupying important hilltops around the town which is facilitating their mopping up operation. This axis is now poised to move towards Makeen. On Shakai-Shrawangai axis, Shrawangai, Khaisura, Barwand, Torwam Bridge and key town Kunigram have been captured. Troops on this axis are all set to attack vital target of Ladha within next 24 hours, which is 8 km ahead of Kunigram.

Although the militants put up stiff resistance at each point, however the resolve and determination of assaulting troops led by officers was so strong that they had to give in. Rapid successes made by the brave-hearts have shattered centuries-old myth of invincibility of tribesmen of this region.
Terrorists are failing and will fail because they are fighting for a wrong cause and at the behest of foreign powers. Huge caches of arms, ammunition, explosives, suicide jackets and material required for suicide jackets have been seized; chemical factories making IEDs taken over. Five truckloads of Indian origin arms, ammunition, medical equipment and literature have been apprehended from Kunigram.

One laptop of 1000 GB with external drive containing all sorts of data, training lessons, and videos of criminal activities of so-called Taliban recovered. Tunnels laden with armaments in hundreds have been discovered in captured areas. One of the tunnels in Kotkai is 500 meters long. These tunnels were in use for treating injured, for rest and refitting, for training and hiding suicide bombers and for making escape good. Houses with compounds and high mud walls where suicide bombers were imparted training have also been unearthed. Weapons and equipment seized include heavy MGs, RPGs, 12.7mm and 14.5mm guns, 107mm rockets, AK-47 rifles, SMGs, missile launchers, anti-aircraft guns, grenades, anti-tank mines, chemicals, explosives, wireless sets, jamming equipment.

Phase one of operation has been completed and the decisive battle will be fought in the vital complex of Ladha-Makeen in one week time. It will be the hardest battle since apart from presence of top leadership of TTP; majority of militants uprooted from forward positions would have withdrawn to these towns and would give last ditch battle. Reportedly strength of local militants is around 10000-12000 and that of foreigners 1200-1500. So far about 300-400 have been killed, which implies that bulk is still alive. Either most have withdrawn to Ladha-Makeen area, or to N.W.A. Reward money of Rs 50 million each for Hakimullah, Qari Hussain, Waliur Rehman and 10-20 million for 24 terrorist commanders has been announced.

Although border security check posts along Afghan-Pakistan border have been deviously vacated by US-NATO troops at a crucial time when operation had just begun, no RAW-RAAM agent would like to jump into boiling cauldron of S.W.A. If they come they are sure to die a horrible death. Afghan Taliban have categorically stated that they would abide by their policy of not confronting Pak Army. Terrorists from other militant groups linked with TTP outside the battle zone are now in no position to come to the aid of beleaguered Taliban.

They would otherwise not like to get sucked into killing area and get killed. Ongoing suicide attacks are being undertaken by those who had been already launched from S.W.A in September, or by other banned groups linked with TTP, or by RAW-RAAM trained suicide bombers and terrorists. Several RAW agents have been caught in last few days. Possibility of involvement of Blackwater elements in terrorist activities in major cities of Punjab, NWFP and Islamabad cannot be ruled out.

Successful completion of Rah-e-Nijat would certainly help in curbing terrorism to a great extent but as long as six foreign agencies in Kabul busy hatching conspiracies and launching covert operations against Pakistan do not wind up their offices and return to their respective homes, terrorism would not get eliminated.
Likewise, as long as our rulers follow US friendly and anti-people policies and do not address root causes, terrorists would keep multiplying. Now that Indian role in destabilizing Pakistan has been thoroughly exposed, it is to be seen whether US Administration would continue to play a double game by defending India and pressing Pakistan to continue doing more and more.

New battlegrounds will be created to keep the army bogged down. Going by the logic of Hillary Clinton that it is difficult to believe that Pakistan military leadership didn’t know the existence of Al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan since 2002, how should Pakistanis get convinced that RAW is undertaking covert operations from Afghan soil without the knowledge of USA. How and why should we accept the tainted logic of USA that India is no threat to Pakistan?

Time for US military in Afghanistan is running out and it must know that Pakistan and not India or unpopular Karzai regime will help in providing safe and honourable exit to US forces. US leadership will have listen to the voice of American people who want US soldiers to return to their homes.

Brig Asif Haroon is Member Board of Advisors, Opinion Maker. He is a defence and security analyst based at Rawalpindi and author of several books. He has been Military Attaché in Egypt.

Courtesy: Veterans Today http://www.veteranstoday.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=9233

Title image: http://www.historycommons.org

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

AFGHANISTAN "ONE MORE SURGE" BY WASHINGTON'S BLOG

2009-12-09T23:00:00.029+05:00

WHAT EMPIRES HAVE SAID

THROUGHOUT HISTORY

A leading advisor to the U.S. military, the Rand Corporation, released a study in 2008 called "How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida". The report confirms what experts have been saying for years: the war on terror is actually weakening national security.

As a press release about the study states:

"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism."

In fact, starting right after 9/11 -- at the latest -- the goal has always been to create "regime change" and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon and other countries.

As American historian, investigative journalist and policy analyst Gareth Porter writes in the Asia Times:

Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.

Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states...***

General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon].

***

When this writer asked Feith . . . which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them."

***

The Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy" their military capacities - not necessarily limited to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The goal was never focused on destroying Al Qaeda. As just one example, the U.S. let Bin Laden escape in 2001 and again in 2007.

Indeed, the goal seems to have more to do with being a superpower (i.e. an empire) than stopping terrorism.

As the Porter writes:

After the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa [in 1988] by al-Qaeda operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael Sheehan proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime. However, senior US military leaders "refused to consider it", according to a 2004 account by Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at Tufts University.

A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".

One More Surge in Afghanistan

Empire after empire has broken its back trying to control Afghanistan.

Why?

It is the crossroads between East, West, South Asia and Central Asia. And now it is the proposed site for a Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline.

If you believe President Obama's statement that America will be out of Afghanistan in 18 months, I have some barren, rocky hills to sell you. Indeed :

[Presidential] aides said today that Hillary Clinton told her that troops might still be in Afghanistan in 60 years, like American bases have remained in Japan, Germany and elsewhere long after WWII ended.

Michael Rivero summarizes one potential view of Obama's Afghanistan war surge in the context of the 2,000-plus-year history of empires trying to conquer that country:

"Just one more surge!" -- The Indus

"Just one more surge!" -- The Kushan

"Just one more surge!" -- The Scythians

"Just one more surge!" -- The Parthians

"Just one more surge!" -- The Saffarid

"Just one more surge!" -- The Ghaznavid

"Just one more surge!" -- The Ghorid

"Just one more surge!" -- The Timurid

"Just one more surge!" -- The Hotaki

"Just one more surge!" -- The Durrani

"Just one more surge!" -- The Aryan

"Just one more surge!" -- The Persians

"Just one more surge!" -- The Sassanids

"Just one more surge!" -- The Hephthalites

"Just one more surge!" -- The Huns

"Just one more surge!" -- The Mughals

"Just one more surge!" -- The Arabs

"Just one more surge!" -- The Turkic

"Just one more surge!" -- The Hazaras

"Just one more surge!" -- The Khwarezmids

"Just one more surge!" -- The Mongols

"Just one more surge!" -- The British

"Just one more surge!" -- The British (again)

"Just one more surge!" -- The British (Yet again)

"Just one more surge!" -- The USSR

"Just one more surge!" -- The United States
______________

Source: Text: Globalresearch Image: umfreedom.com/tag/empire/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

OBAMATHINK ON AFGHANISTAN: ESCALATE TO EXIT

2009-12-09T15:39:00.028+05:00

Sitting comfortable in his White House, Obama continues to serve foreign goals with further Afghanistan U.S. military increases

by Stephen Lendman

Ahead of his address to the nation on December 1, The New York Times broke the news in an Eric Schmitt article titled, "Obama Issues Order for More Troops in Afghanistan," saying:

During a late November 29 Oval Office meeting with top Pentagon brass, "Obama issued orders to send about 30,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan (over the next six months in) what may be one of the most defining decisions of his presidency." Compounding months of public betrayal, it's perhaps another outrage that will make him a one-term president, the way Vietnam ended Lyndon Johnson's hope for a second term.

An additional 30,000+ will raise US forces to about 100,000 plus whatever additional numbers NATO countries provide that at best will be small and come grudgingly for a war no one believes can be won, and some feel never should have been waged.

To these numbers, add a shadow footprint consisting of tens of thousands of private contractors - 73,968 according to a September 21, 2009 Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report as of June 2009. Included are familiar names like Kellogg, Brown and Root, Fluor Corp, Lockheed Martin and hired guns like DynCorp and Xe (formerly Blackwater USA) costing tens of billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan for lack of oversight so scandalous that rampant waste, fraud, and abuse go unmonitored and will worsen with more troops.

In addition, CRS reports that supporting each soldier costs $1 million a year, partly because private contractors replaced US troops at a far higher expense plus no oversight giving them license to steal for over eight years and do it as well in Iraq. Yet policy going forward will worsen things and greatly increase costs, already over-stretched by America's largest ever military budget at a time the country has no enemies.

Worse still, besides earlier in the year reinforcements, more buildup "represents a high-stakes gamble by a new commander in chief that he can turn....an eight-year old" quagmire into victory, a possibility many in the Pentagon think unlikely to impossible and other experts agree.

According to Schmitt, Obama will test "his ability to rally an American public that according to polls has grown sour on the war, as well as (vice president Joe Biden and) his fellow Democracts in Congress" - like Senator Carl Levin, Armed Services Committee chairman, as well as Colin Powell, and his Afghan ambassador, Karl Eikenberry.

On condition of anonymity, a senior Defense Department official told The Times that "the first additional troops would be thousands of Marines sent to opium-rich Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold in the south....(They'll begin arriving) in January (to be) followed by a steady flow of tens of thousands."

A November 25 Washington Post Scott Wilson article titled, "War speech to outline escalation and exit" strategies will "outline plans for ending it. (He'll) outline a modest endgame (to) allow US forces to leave and set a general time frame" in 2011, according to some, and after what's announced, beginning in July 2011, over a decade after American forces arrived.

Timelines are always flexible, and Obama hedged by saying withdrawal depends on "conditions on the ground," with further interventions likely because "The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly. (It) extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan," meaning Iran, Somalia, and perhaps Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and/or Cuba, given the Pentagon's growing presence in Colombia as a regional garrison for waging hemispheric conflicts.

Yet he said America can't afford and shouldn't shoulder an open-ended commitment - which, among others, begs these questions:

-- besides the situation in Iraq, why are we in Afghanistan at all; and

-- why for an unwinnable, illegal war over-stretching the federal budget toward bankruptcy while ignoring vital homeland needs.

Also, opposition is increasing, including among congressional Democrats. The situation is unstable and much depends on uncontrollable factors and a growing conviction that after eight years, the war is lost and withdrawal, not escalation is advised.

Others fear imperial madness, perpetual wars, the illusion of Pax Americana, and the nation transitioning toward tyranny, already entrenched with a strong foothold, but who'll tell the public when the media won't, and everyone knows politicians lie, especially the president and others with power.

Nonetheless, Obama told West Point cadets he'll "bring this war to a successful conclusion," and added:

"America, we are passing through a time of great trial. And the message that we send in the midst of these storms must be clear: that our cause is just, our resolve unwavering....If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow" - while telling foreign allies: "This is not just America's war."

Fact Check

Planned a year or more in advance, America willfully, maliciously, illegally, and preemptively attacked a non-belligerent nation (four weeks after 9/11 on October 7) in violation of international and US laws.

Those responsible are war criminals. Those continuing it, including congressional members funding it, are as well. Those claiming America's security was threatened lied. It wasn't then. It's not now, and international and US laws are clear.
The UN Charter's Article 51 allows the "right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member....until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security."

In other words, justifiable self-defense is permissible. In addition, Charter Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 absolutely prohibit any unilateral threat or use of force not specifically allowed under Article 51 or authorized by the Security Council.

Three General Assembly resolutions concur, absolutely prohibiting "non-consensual military intervention:"

-- the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty;

-- the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations; and

-- the 1974 Definition of Aggression, drawing largely on the UN Charter's Article II, paragraph 4 stating:

"All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."

Aggression was defined:

-- a "crime against peace;"

-- the "Invasion of a State by the armed forces of another State, with or without occupation of the territory; (and)

-- attacks on marine fleets."

The UN Charter's Article 39 provides for the Security Council to determine the existence of any act of aggression and "shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security."

The Rome Statute of the International Court of Justice calls the crime of aggression one of the "most serious crimes of concern to the international community," and provides for it to fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) after state parties agree on a definition and define the conditions under which guilty parties may be prosecuted.

The Nuremberg Tribunal said:
"To initiate a war of aggression....is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime (against peace) differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause (Article VI, paragraph 20), the Constitution, federal statutes, and US treaties are "the supreme law of the land," including international laws (like Geneva) to which America is a signatory. The paragraph reads:

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding."

US law is also clear and unequivocal. Under the Constitution's Article I, Section 8, only Congress may:

....provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States....

....declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

....provide and maintain a navy;

....make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

....provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; (and)

....provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States...."

Nowhere does it authorize a preemptive, imperial, aggressive attack on a non-belligerent nation.

The Founders considered declaring and waging wars so important that no single person, including the president, should decide it alone.

Congress last obeyed the law on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. Thereafter, every US war was illegal, according to the Constitution of the United States. By continuing such wars, President Obama stands guilty of war crimes and is fully accountable under US and international laws.

Further, under Article I, Section 7, only Congress may fund wars as:

"All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills."

Either body may originate appropriation bills, although the House claims sole responsibility for it. Either one may amend bills, including revenue and appropriation measures. Congress may resist defunding, but it's empowered to withhold future amounts without which wars and occupations aren't possible so the current ones would end.

Congressional appropriation power is key under Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 saying:

"No money shall be drawn from the treasury; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time."

It means Congress alone has constitutional power over the federal budget, including the funding of wars. Cut it off and wars and occupations end, with or without presidential concurrence.

After years of congressional inaction, the 1972 Church-Clifford amendment, attached to foreign aid legislation, tried to end Southeast Asian war funding, but it was defeated in the House. However, the June 1973 Church-Case amendment succeeded after earlier attempts failed, and ended America's involvement in Vietnam. In the same year, over Richard Nixon's veto, Congress passed the War Powers Act (still the law) requiring the president to consult with Congress before authorizing troop deployments for extended periods.

Without congressional collusion, wars can't be fought or continued. The 111th Congress and most previous ones have been complicit in America's aggressive wars and share equal guilt with the president and top Pentagon brass. Ending wars politically are daunting, but doing so financially is as simple as cutting off funding.

Afghanistan's Tragic History:

Ravaged by Wars Without End

For centuries, Afghanistan has been war-torn and ravaged by invaders, yet endured by repeatedly repelling them - more recently against Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the Soviets in the 1980s. Today imperial America risks the same fate after eight failed years, yet those in power won't act because of Afghanistan's strategic importance and fear of strong repercussions from an opposition looking for reasons to criticize.
As a result, Afghans keep suffering the way John Pilger poignantly described under conditions there in his 2006 book, "Freedom Next Time, saying:"

"Throughout all the humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has been abused and suffered more, and none helped less than Afghanistan." He described Kabul like many parts of the country today, plagued by "contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue (with) no light....heat," or relief from perpetual wars and human misery, the result of imperial invasions and internal conflicts.

Over time, the toll has been horrific:

-- unemployment is around 50%;

-- impoverishment is among the highest in the world affecting nearly two-thirds of the country;

-- in October 2008, spokesman for the UN mission in Kabul, Adrian Edwards, told the BBC that:

"The human conditions in Afghanistan are very serious. Continuous insecurity, drought and booming food prices on the world level are the main cause for the emergence of this situation but the condition in the future months is not tangible. There is no doubt that people are in dire need of food."

-- conditions today are no better and perhaps worse;

-- those with jobs don't earn enough to meet minimal needs;

-- life expectancy at 44 years is one of the lowest in the world;

-- the infant mortality rate is the world's highest with 20% of children dying before age five;

-- an Afghan woman dies in childbirth every 30 minutes;

-- 75% of the population has no access to safe drinking water;

-- homelessness is epidemic forcing many to live under deplorable conditions;

-- only one doctor is available per 6,000 people and one nurse per 2,500 people;

-- unexploded ordnance kills or wounds hundreds each month, a situation worsening as conflict persists;

-- children are kidnapped and sold into slavery or murdered for their organs;

-- less than 6% of Afghans have access to electricity, available only sporadically;

-- women's literacy is about 19%, and many have to beg on streets or turn to prostitution to survive.

In addition, no part of the country is safe. Internal conflict rages. Life for most Afghans is intolerable, and accounting for around 60% of its economy, Afghanistan is the world's largest opium producer.

On September 2, 2009, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported that opium cultivation dropped to 123,000 hectares, down from the 2007 193,000 hectare peak. However, production fell only 10% to 6,900 tons from 2008 because farmers get more yield per bulb. At the same time, world demand is stable at around 5,000 tons, much less than Afghanistan supplies. In contrast, prior to America's invasion, the Taliban eradicated 94% of opium production, reducing it to 185 tons according to UN figures.

Under eight years of occupation, it again flourishes, mostly benefitting organized crime, the CIA, and powerful Western business and financial interests, in America most of all.

Also, in its latest 2009 report, Transparency International ranks Afghanistan the world's second most corrupt country after Somalia under its US-backed Transitional Federal Government and African Union paramilitary peacekeepers. Occupied Iraq ranks fifth, further testimony to imperialism's exploitive failure and its harm to targeted countries.

Meanwhile, since Afghan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, took charge of US and NATO forces last June, he's favored more troops for a wider war he can't win using similar tactics he was infamous for as head of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) - established in 1980 and comprised of the Army's Delta Force and Navy seals, de facto death squads writer Seymour Hersh once described as an "executive assassination wing" operating out of Dick Cheney's office.

While escalating the Afghan war, he's also destabilizing Pakistan to balkanize both countries, weakening them by design to control the Caspian Sea's oil and gas riches and their energy routes to secured ports for export. The strategy includes encircling Russia, China, and Iran, obstructing their solidarity and cohesion, toppling the Iranian government, perhaps attacking its nuclear sites, eliminating Israel's main regional rival, defusing a feared geopolitical alliance, and securing the ultimate goal of unchallenged Eurasian dominance in a part of the world rich in oil, gas and other vital minerals.

It's a huge task for any commander, let alone a man James Petras calls a "notorious psychopath" who's perhaps the right man to pin failure on if things go sour or if popular discontent reaches critical mass, forcing withdrawal like from Vietnam. Blame it on the general, not the commander-in-chief who appointed him who may not get off easily, nor should he given an ill-chosen strategy cooler heads want to avoid, but not vocal hawks who demand he press on no matter the long odds or overstretched the budget, threatening bankruptcy because of its unaffordability combined with bailing out Wall Street and other obligations.

The die is cast. Escalation is now fact by a man promising change, delivering betrayal, and seeing his approval rating fall from a 68% late January high to 47% according to the December 1 Rasmussen Report, a number steadily falling because growing numbers of supporters are losing faith. Heading into 2010, the combination of economic hardship, eroding civil liberties, and wasted billions on futile wars promises to raise public discontent and disapproval of a president and Congress they no longer trust. What's disturbing is why they did in the first place.

Stephen Lendman is a Mathaba Analyst.
Source: http://www.mathaba.net/authors/lendman
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

YEARS OF DECEIT: US OPENLY ACCEPTS BIN LADEN LONG DEAD

2009-12-09T14:12:00.018+05:00

BIN LADEN NEVER MENTIONED IN McCHRYSTAL REPORT OR OBAMA SPEECH

"HUNT FOR BIN LADEN" A NATIONAL SHAME

by Gordon Duff

Conservative commentator, former Marine Colonel Bob Pappas has been saying for years that bin Laden died at Tora Bora and that Senator Kerry's claim that bin Laden escaped with Bush help was a lie. Now we know that Pappas was correct. The embarassment of having Secretary of State Clinton talk about bin Laden in Pakistan was horrific. He has been dead since December 13, 2001 and now, finally, everyone, Obama, McChrystal, Cheney, everyone who isn't nuts is finally saying what they have known for years.

However, since we lost a couple of hundred of our top special operations forces hunting for bin Laden after we knew he was dead, is someone going to answer for this with some jail time? Since we spent 200 million dollars on "special ops" looking for someone we knew was dead, who is going to jail for that? Since Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney continually talked about a man they knew was dead, now known to be for reasons of POLITICAL nature, who is going to jail for that? Why were tapes brought out, now known to be forged, as legitimate intelligence to sway the disputed 2004 election in the US? This is a criminal act if there ever was one.

In 66 pages, General Stanley McChrystal never mentions Osama bin Laden. Everything is "Mullah Omar" now. In his talk at West Point, President Obama never mentioned Osama bin Laden. Col. Pappas makes it clear, Vice President Cheney let it "out of the bag" long ago. Bin Laden was killed by American troops many many years ago.

America knew Osama bin Laden died December 13, 2001. After that, his use was hardly one to unite America but rather one to divide, scam and play games. With bin Laden gone, we could have started legitimate nation building in Afghanistan instead of the eternal insurgency that we invented ourselves.

Without our ill informed policies, we could have had brought a diplomatic solution in 2002 in Afghanistan, the one we are ignoring now, and spent money rebuilding the country, 5 cents on the dollar compared to what we are spending fighting a war against an enemy we ourselves recruited thru ignorance.

The bin Laden scam is one of the most shameful acts ever perpetrated against the American people. We don't even know if he really was an enemy, certainly he was never the person that Bush and Cheney said. In fact, the Bush and bin Laden families were always close friends and had been for many years.

What kind of man was Osama bin Laden? This one time American ally against Russia, son of a wealthy Saudi family, went to Afghanistan to help them fight for their freedom. America saw him as a great hero then. Transcripts of the real bin Laden show him to be much more moderate than we claim, angry at Israel and the US government but showing no anger toward Americans and never making the kind of threats claimed. All of this is public record for any with the will to learn.

How much of America's tragedy is tied with these two children of the rich, children of families long joined thru money and friendship, the Bush and bin Laden clans.

One son died in remote mountains, another lives in a Dallas suburb hoping nobody is sent after him. One is a combat veteran, one never took a strong stand unless done from safety and comfort. Islam once saw bin Laden as a great leader. Now he is mostly forgotten.

What has America decided about Bush?

We know this: Bin Laden always denied any ties to 9/11 and, in fact, has never been charged in relation to 9/11. He not only denied involvement, but had done so, while alive, 4 times and had vigorously condemned those who were involved in the attack.

This is on the public record, public in every free country except ours. We, instead, showed films made by paid actors, made up to look somewhat similar to bin Laden, actors who contradicted bin Ladens very public statements, actors pretending to be bin Laden long after bin Laden's death.

These were done to help justify spending, repressive laws, torture and simple thievery.

For years, we attacked the government of Pakistan for not hunting down someone everyone knew was dead. Bin Laden's death hit the newspapers in Pakistan on December 15, 2001. How do you think our ally felt when they were continually berated for failing to hunt down and turn over someone who didn't exist?

What do you think this did for American credibility in Pakistan and thru the Islamic world? Were we seen as criminals, liars or simply fools? Which one is best?

This is also treason.

How does the death of bin Laden and the defeat and dismemberment of Al Qaeda impact the intelligence assessments, partially based on, not only bin Laden but Al Qaeda activity in Iraq that, not only never appened but was now known to have been unable to happen?

How many "Pentagon Pundits," the retired officers who sold their honor to send us to war for what is now known to be domestic political dirty tricks and not national security are culpable in these crimes?

I don't always agree with Col. Pappas on things. I believe his politics overrule his judgement at times. However, we totally agree on bin Laden, simply disagree with what it means. To me lying and sending men to their deaths based on lies is treason.

Falsifying military intelligence and spending billions on unnecessary military operations for political reasons is an abomination. Consider this, giving billions in contracts to GOP friends who fill campaign coffers, and doing so based on falsified intelligence is insane. This was done for years.

We spent 8 years chasing a dead man, spending billions, sending FBI agents, the CIA, Navy Seals, Marine Force Recon, Special Forces, many to their deaths, as part of a political campaign to justify running American into debt, enriching a pack of political cronies and war profiteers and to puff up a pack of Pentagon peacocks and their Whitehouse draft dodging bosses.

How many laws were pushed thru because of a dead man?

How many hundreds were tortured to find a dead man?

How many hundreds died looking for a dead man?

How many billions were spent looking for a dead man?

Every time Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld stood before troops and talked about hunting down the dead bin Laden, it was a dishonor. Lying to men and women who put their lives on the line is not a joke.

Who is going to answer to the families of those who died for the politics and profit tied to the Hunt for Bin Laden?

Courtesy: Veterans Today
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

YOUR COMMENT IS IMPORTANT

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

_______________

Veterans Today Senior Editor Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.

INDIA: THE LARGEST DEMOCRACY?

2009-12-09T00:52:00.027+05:00

by Trond Øverland

ARUNDHATI ROY DISTURBS DEMO-CRATIC DAYDREAMING

Arundhati Roy is an unusual Indian woman. Instead of acting the graceful upholder of traditional values, she goes on challenging the hard core of establishment thinking. Roy is India's leading commentator on such evils as militaristic imperialist capitalism, Hindu-supported genocide of Muslims, and dam disasters. In her latest book, Listening to Grasshoppers; Field Notes on Democracy, she hammers at perhaps the most central of all contemporary sacred pillars, i.e. that of democracy, which in her words “have metastasized into something dangerous”.

Grasshoppers is a collection of essays on such recent events as the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, the 2006 visit to India by “the war criminal” U.S. President George W. Bush, the 2002 Gujarat carnage (between 2000-4000 Muslims slaughtered), the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament by "so-called" Pakistan-based terrorists, and the growing inequality in India (“the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream – and a lot of water...”).

A radical analysis of democracy runs through the book's fiery chapters, like a river running from its mountainous source towards the ocean. Roy's conclusion is disquieting: she is forced by the rationale of her facts and arguments to approve of violence as a means of people's resistance to injustice. She observes with understanding that many of the poor are “crossing over... to another side; the side of armed struggle.”

While reviewers across India are busy assuring their readership of their being in wonderful agreement with the greater part of Roy's information and reflections, they uniformly disagree with her basic take on the rising violence amongst India's poor. The world-wide success of Roy's novel The God of Small Things would not be the only reason why they have to agree at least somewhat. The documented material is just too true and persuasive. As readers we are forcefully moved to wish that things would be very different – and this reviewer is left to ponder how such a critique of the world's largest democracy may produce such a fundamental clash between the radical author and her educated audience, the newspapers columnists, the upholders of status quo.

The key appears to be capitalism and communal unrest, or communal fascism as Roy calls it. She eloquently argues that democracy in India is not for, by and of the people but for, by and of capitalism – “designed to uphold the consensus of the elite for market growth”. Here are two quotes from the book:

“Dangerous levels of malnutrition and permanent hunger are the preferred model these days. Forty-seven per cent of India's children below three suffer from malnutrition, 46 per cent are stunted... Today an average rural family eats about hundred kilograms less food in a year than it did in the early 1990s. But in urban India, wherever you go – shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports, gymnasiums, hospitals – you have TV monitors in which election promises have already become true. India's Shining, Feeling Good. You only have to close your ears to the sickening crunch of the policeman's boot on someone's ribs, you only have to raise your eyes from the squalor, the slums, the ragged broken people on the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor and you will be in that other beautiful world. The singing-dancing world of Bollywood's permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, permanently happy Indians waving the tricolor flag and Feeling Good. It's becoming harder and harder to tell which one's the real world and which one's the virtual.”

“Personally I don't believe that entering the electoral fray is a path to alternative politics ... because I believe that strategically battles must be waged from positions of strength, not weakness. The target of the dual assault of neo-liberalism and communal fascism are the poor and the minority communities. As liberalism drives its wedge between the rich and the poor, between India Shining and India, it becomes increasingly absurd for any mainstream political party to pretend to represent the interests of both the rich and the poor, because the interests of one can only be represented at the cost of the other... A political party that represents the poor will be a poor party. A party with very meagre funds. Today it isn't possible to fight an election without funds. Putting a couple of well-known social activists into Parliament is interesting, but not really politically meaningful. Individual charisma, personality politics, cannot effect radical change.”

Hardly the stuff that middle-class democratic daydreaming is made of. More like a real nightmare, actually.

So, by providing a proper perspective on the role of the world's largest democracy as a mechanism and mouthpiece for market forces, Roy stimulates debate on a question of global importance: Democracy for, by and of what? It seems that democracy can never be for democracy's sake, it has to serve some purpose. In other words, what kind of values and fundamental mentality are needed for democracy to be really successful and well functioning?

P.R. Sarkar, the founder of Prout, the Progressive Utilization Theory, opined that democracy can never be successful unless the majority of the population are moralists. In other words, there needs to be a leading trend that supports humanistic values and spiritual growth. Capitalism on the contrary serves to break down whatever remains of those very values. In its relentless quest for individual material acquisitions and selfish comfort it makes us all insensitive to the suffering of others and prone to divisive tendencies. It is in this contemporary reality, in the late phase of mature capitalism, that Roy keeps haunting the lazy, unimaginative and selfish middle class with her vision of a capitalistic system headed for hell.

Grasshoppers may not provide all or any answers at all to Roy's ongoing inquiry. Also, Roy is not God and there may be more complex causes as to Muslim genocides and other of her pet themes than what she chooses to emphasize. However, her writing most definitely raises some very important questions -- and reactions. Roy's concrete, bold way of measuring the pulse and temperature of the sick body of democracy leaves no one undisturbed it seems. We would not be surprised if irrational, defensive reactions continue to hound her noble inquiry into contemporary leadership and official thinking.

Listening to Grasshoppers; Field Notes on Democracy, Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton, Penguin, India 2009, 240 pages, 499 rupees.

Trond Øverland writes on progressive socio-economics. He is currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark
Source: Globalresearch

LET KASHMIR BE A HUB OF INDIA-PAKISTAN TOURISM

2009-12-08T19:38:00.012+05:00

From PEACE between India and Pakistan in Kashmir there is an unexpected beneficiary - the world's largest goat. The markhor, a mountain goat that stands almost 6ft tall at the shoulder and can weigh 17 stone, was thought to go extinct in Indian-controlled Kashmir. But a joint survey by Indian wildlife organisations and the Indian army found 35 small herds - 155 goats - thriving near the Line of Control.

From Af-Pak to Indo-Pak again

by Zeenia Satti

On one hand, Pakistanis decry the induction of the private militia called Blackwater on their soil. On the other, when India demands that the Pakistan-based private militia called Lashkar-e-Taiba be dismantled for the resumption of the peace dialogue between India and Pakistan, the linkage seems incomprehensible to most Pakistanis.

If the Pentagon’s use of a private militia is unacceptable to the Pakistanis, then why should India be deemed wrong in demanding that Lashkar and Jaish, whose sole operational target is India, be uprooted?

If India’s given evidence regarding Mumbai is not enough for Pakistan to move against the Lashkar leadership, then, rather than allowing a stalemate over the issue, Pakistan should a) post the entire matter on the web wherein the insufficiency of the Indian dossier is clearly shown and invite India to post its counter argument; b) refer the matter to the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice for prosecution; and c) dismantle the Pakistan-based private Kashmir liberation militias, regardless of whether or not they are involved in the terror attacks in Mumbai.

Pakistan’s future prosperity depends not on the waters that flow from Kashmir but on the oil and gas that flow from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and connect with the Arabian Sea through Pakistan. Both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan need to diversify their reliance on Russia for access to international markets. With Russia as monopoly purchaser, Ashgabat and Tashkent’s ability to negotiate pricing is restricted. Pakistani-Afghan transit is the sole guarantor of competitive pricing for both. The diversification of Central Asian energy routes is in the United States’ interest as well. US-Russian relations are strained once again. India, being the second-largest energy market in the region after China, has a fundamental stake in this route as well. Revenue from energy pipelines from Central Asia can change the economic landscape of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The above dynamic binds the states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the United States in a mutually beneficial framework. If the US involvement in Afghanistan is rightly administered, it is the best source of a quick fix for the region. This is why even Vladimir Putin insists that the US leave only after it has sorted out the “mess it created in the first place.”

Unlike his predecessor, Barack Obama’s moves—e.g., the elimination of Baitullah Mehsud—are directed at restoring stability in the region. While pursuing this goal, he is not solely corporation-driven, but people-oriented. That is why the administration wants to ensure the aid money for social-sector development in Pakistan reaches its target and wants to release it directly to the NGOs. It is the first time in history that Washington has departed from its practice of giving bags of money to the individual who is sitting in Islamabad toeing its line, disregarding how he/she spends it. It is Obama’s people-centric approach that has made nervous vested interests in the US resort to absurdities such as challenging the authenticity of his US birth certificate.

There is an acute awareness within the new White House that a new thought and new approach is necessary to handle Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Obama administration needs cooperative, sincere and visionary input from the regional political elite for the purpose. The Jamaat-e-Islami’s go America movement is ill conceived at this juncture. Just like the go Musharred movement did not yield desirable governance in Pakistan, America’s departure, though necessary, is not in the region’s interest with matters being the way they are.

Both India and Pakistan need to disengage from mutual acrimony and join heads together with significant actors in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, to help the new White House develop a blueprint for regional stability so foreign troops can go home and business benefiting all can flourish.

However, if, instead of finding help from the local elites, the new intellect in the Obama administration finds itself frustrated with entrenched mutual suspicion between regional actors, acrimony, double dealings, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, its frustration with regional lack of vision would confine it to its other source of policy input—i.e., the CIA and the Pentagon. In that case, the more things change, the more they are likely to remain the same. i.e., reliance on greater use of force as the main vehicle for restoring order. In Afghanistan, this is too long a road to peace for any one’s benefit.

When neighbouring states are as much reliant on each other for their prosperity as India and Pakistan are, they need to cultivate free trade zones between them and open borders, instead of stationing missiles pointed at each other or paramilitary private militias operating against each other. The window of opportunity provided by the new White House for new thinking must be availed by the regional elites in a spirit of multilateral cooperation before it is shut because the regional elite is incapable of new thinking.

The Kashmir problem need not fossilise Indo-Pakistani politics into a set mode. Arundhati Roy is right in saying India needs liberation from Kashmir. Pakistan too needs liberation from a Kashmir-centric view of India.

The most lucrative benefit that can accrue to the poor population of the scenic valley of Kashmir is revenue through tourism. The valley’s population, along with Pakistan’s Northern Areas, has its best chance at enrichment through attracting tourists from affluent societies of the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia and China. The 9/11 fallout has led to greater restriction on travel to the Euro-American region for the oil-rich population of the Muslim world. The wealthy population from these societies will be looking for new resorts.

Both India and Pakistan can turn the Kashmir valley into a jointly administered Peace Park and a hub of tourism. If the US and Russia can agree to share an international park in the Bering Strait, so can New Delhi and Islamabad in Kashmir. Dozens of peace parks envisioned by Nelson Mandela are operating successfully in Africa, providing a model for such efforts.

Years of counterinsurgency is defacing and de foresting the ecologically precious valley of Kashmir. Instead of India’s rampaging soldiers and suicidal freedom fighters or terrorists (perspective determines which one) let the Indian and Pakistani political elite envision a Kashmir with eco-tourism. Hot air balloons, Shikara carried bed and breakfasts, sky gliders, bungee jumpers, outdoor adventures operated by the best in international tourism industry regulated by local watchdogs to preserve the ecosystem of the valley, bringing peace, progress and prosperity to the valley and beyond is a vision that is entirely feasible if the Indian and Pakistani elite would allow themselves to envision it. Let vacationists like Donald Trump build golf courses in Kashmir. Let there be amusement parks where children scream in refreshing excitement instead of inhuman horror.

Instead of the Indian and Pakistani military personnel, Indo-Pakistani Rangers can jointly manage the area, patrolling and protecting both people and property. Their training can be imparted in dozens of military academies in India and Pakistan, such as India’s RIMC and Sainik schools and Pakistan’s cadet colleges at Jhelum, Risalpur, and Hasanabdal. These centres of excellence can produce Peace Rangers as successfully as they have been cultivating human war crop for the last six decades.

Foreign policies are driven by economic interests, not religious differences. This has been true since the period of the Khulafa-e-Rashideen in Islam. The surfacing of new geopolitical and economic interests requires the regional states to forge an alliance like never before.

Source: thenews.com.pk
The writer is an analyst of energy geopolitics based in Washington DC. Email: zeenia.satti@post.harvard.edu

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

THANK YOU MR. JASWANT SINGH

2009-12-08T17:56:00.006+05:00

[Note for WoP readers: In the following post, Ibn-e-Rehmat reviews the recently published book by Jaswant Singh (JS). This review being highly pertinent to the subject, I decided to abstain from writing a detailed review myself.

I read this voluminous book (it has 667 pages) and thought it best to put this wonderful work under review but due to reason mentioned above, refrained. However there are few points which, in addition to what Ibn-e-Rehmat has written in his post, specifically need to be considered.

JS has covered the personality traits and the thought process of the Qaid during those turbulent days of our history, in a lucid, absorbing and with much correctness. To read history books nowadays, particularly as voluminous as the one by JS one needs to have a lot of patience. The narration of events, however, as JS unfolds different episodes of subcontinent’s history chapter by chapter, right from the advent of Arab Muslims, up till its partition in 1947, is so absorbing that one doesn’t want to leave and wishes continue reading the book till the end.

Coming to observation made by reviewer that the book might have been written with an explicit understanding of the Government of India, I doubt. Throughout his book, JS castigates All India Congress for being antipathic towards Jinnah. Such comments and that too in a highly researched book cannot provide much fillip to the ruling Congress in India. On the other hand it is quite possible that JS might be eyeing upon the Muslims’ vote in India and that too is quite logical. Every political leader has his vision, his party programme which he wishes to materialize by coming into power, so even if it be so, the ex foreign minister of India has all the rights to espouse such wishes and wants.

Though throughout the book his stance of being an impartial observer is demonstrated yet, in his concluding part, he adopts a stance which appears contradictory to his previous observations. In these chapters he laments over partition, particularly over the creation of Pakistan as an independent nation state. In so doing he condemns partition which almost every Indian does.

His main objection is the coinage of word Pakistan, which according to him as a country and nation lacks raison d’ etre. However, let it be known that Pakistan a geographic landmass, with a distinct cultural identity much different from its Gangetic counterpart, has existed since thousands of years. To say that such a historical reality as a geographic landmass lacks any raison d’ etre, is a negation of history. The area covering Pakistan, the harbinger of the great Indus civilization stretched up to Gujarat in present day India. The geographical corpus of Pakistan with its distinct cultural roots existed much earlier than the later Gangetic civilization that encompasses the present day India. The archeological findings of Pakistan’s world renowned historian late Prof. Ahmad Hassan Dani and Aitzaz Ahsan’s the Indus Saga are a testimony to this historical fact. Barring this part, the book is an excellent work of putting down facts in a standard format which JS work indeed is.

A highly useful part of the book are its 11 appendices which are a complete encyclopedic component, a book in itself. All religious, political and geographical terms as well as events have been elaborated in a manner that one does not need to browse through so many reference books.

The book is in hard cover with quality binding. Except a few typographic mistakes (which are indeed very few) the book is almost flawless. Readers, who are interested to learn about that vital part of subcontinent’s history, must read this book. They won’t repent reading a voluminous work which unfolds facts through eyes of an Indian statesman, a man who took the pen to write a book with a neutral and independent mind. Nayyar]

by Ibne Rehmat

We sometime say a word `wrong’ not knowing what does and how will it impact our generations for all times to come. It is u-turn from the Indian intransigence and their usual way of hatching and fomenting troubles, let alone the root cause of attitude and outlook problem.

Mr. Singh deserves a lot of praise for being realistic in saying “Between Jinnah and Nehru the differences got so bitter as to actually become a factor in the country’s vivisection. The Congress led by Nehru, was the political party that agreed to Partition; then later as the occupant of the seat of authority, and as the head of government of the day, he (Nehru) was clearly guilty of failing totally in his duty of preventing the bloodshed of millions of innocents. The fratricidal killing was of such unprecedented dimension that the blood that soaked our land then till today (it continues) to entrap Hindu Muslim relations into congealed animosities…how criminally short sighted. That is why Gandhi till the last had continued to plead for `independence first, Pakistan after’ that Jinnah would not agree, but then sadly, neither did Nehru nor Patel go along with the Mahatma”.

In any controversial debate, acknowledgement is the first step in the molding of opinions or perception. If we take more rational view, it appears that Jaswant Singh’s initiative has the tacit approval of the government. If it is, then it is clear that Indian government wants to change its previous culture after fully weighing what all it wants to transform.

During the last two decades it has totally switched over to the new cultural patterns and a similar major shift was also being hinted at in the political wisdom as well.

If both the countries demonstrate such an acumen and courage by taking one more step forward with firm resolve to make a radical departure from their outdated India or Pakistan eccentric mindset, most of the problems would be solved. That is why it is said that if you are not part of the solution, you are a part of the problem as well.

Jaswant Sigh’s book amounts to starting from square one to set the records straight. Such an approach is a positive move in the right direction, seldom displayed by Indian leaders. Pakistan has been praying and calling upon New Delhi to reciprocate gestures of `right sense of direction’. Sub-Continent will march towards its `Golden Age Era’ by reviving the bonhomie of the past. Its grandeur and magnificence could be restored, if our leaders’ sacrifice by showing flexibility and sense of accommodation. If France and UK can become allies after 100 years of war, nothing is impossible. We have suffered for a long time. It is not too late if we look back and take a more rationale look on our beaten track, provided we remember the golden universal principle, `Do Good and have Good’ or `Live and let others live’.

Let us make a new start from Kashmir, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Tamil Nado and Baluchistan even. Let the glory of Nepal, Sikkim take a new lease of life. Let us exterminate all the naughty idioms from our politics. India would be a paradise again when its leaders acknowledge that one wrong has set many strategies on the self-destructive course of actions. This book may prove a great achievement and a landmark event in the fractured and mutilated history of Indo-Pakistan. Had some of the Indian politician realized what price the people of this sub-continent are paying with their blood and souls by any degree of self-introspection, the issues like Siachen and Kashmir much of the troubles would have been averted.

By painting Nehru and Patel, in their true colors, no wrong has been committed. It amounts to heal some disease with the panacea of poison, as its true anti-dote. The role of these two leaders in the independence of India cannot be denied to, but much disillusionment prevails, that will certainly recede after Singh’s scholastic work. His study will help to set new era of change like Charles Dickens’ described in his famous book `A Tail of Two Cities’ – how Europe leaped out of Medieval Age. His book reveals how the blunder of one of the French Empresses when she offered monetary compensation to the parents of a child who was crushed under her chariot, triggered a chain of riots / upsurge leading to French Revolution which over-hauled the entire feudal system in Europe. The chain of subsequent events paved way for the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution.

Jaswant Singh could become a pioneer and harbinger of this transformation, provided he succeeds in bringing a positive change in the outlook of Indian leadership in future.

When somebody does some wrong, it may do good to others or many. The fact is that such a master stroke results into multiple effects at different times, in different set of events and at different political stages. Each group or individuals values such initiatives or moves through his own prisms of judgment depending upon the rewards or repercussions, they reap or suffer. Similarly, motives are the prime factors that determine the final outcome.

In past, the Indian government has been playing the confidence game through Islamic fake identity hoax or ploys. If Singh tried to replay the same, then it amounts to acting more as a ‘Kashmir Singh’ than Jaswant. In the history of Indian freedom struggle, leaders like Shaikh Abdullah and many other Congress Ulemas did in the past.. Acknowledged, Singh has shown remarkable courage to reciprocate historical facts, but other realities, like Junagadh tragedy, Hyderabad Deccan’s wheeling dealing, Congress – Muslim league’s intriguing past demands candid explanation. The fact that Muslims played a glorious part in the freedom of India but most of it still lies buried under the debris of Indo-Pakistan hostilities for any reason or rhyme. Mr. Singh’s book can stir up a passion storm, if Indian government shows their willingness to bring about a remarkable change through their actions. But such a change demands sincerity, objectivity, firm resolve for a change and firm faith in the golden principle of `doing good to reap good’ and `live and let others live’ to make India a living paradise once again.

(Author is free lance journalist, based in Islamabad)
{Source: Kashmir Watch}

9 IS NOT 11: MONSTER IN THE MIRROR

2009-03-18T07:56:00.000+05:00

Terror’s Proud Merchants: The VHP and the Bajrang Dal in Gujarat were indistinguishable from terror outfits, manufacturing and distributing bombs, rocket launchers and firearms across the state.

by Arundhati Roy

He has taken to naming, demonising and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces. My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to the camera; "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said, "I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting." For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today amounts to incitement as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.

(Left) Hands in Glove Nirendra Modi & Praveen Togadiya

So according to a man aspiring to be India's next prime minister, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police. This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake 'encounters'. This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world and yet refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they've escaped being 'encountered' by our encounter specialists. A country where the line between the Underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.

How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colours, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unravelling of the American economy and, who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire. (Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)

Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on US allies / agents (including India) and US interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11. George Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11, is a despised figure not just internationally but also by his own people. Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the war on terror?

Homeland security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbour, we have a military occupation in Kashmir, and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than a hundred and fifty million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If 10 men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half-a-million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

Nor for that matter will any other quick fix. Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than two per cent. They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go. Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.

What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.

The only way to contain (it would be naive to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says 'Justice', the other 'Civil War'. There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.

Concluded.

Source

9 IS NOT 11: NOVEMBER ISN'T SEPTEMBER

2009-03-15T00:14:00.001+05:00

Key BJP, RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal activists speak openly of how Narendra Modi blessed the anti-Muslim pogrom.

by Arundhati Roy

The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgement, the court acknowledged that there was no proof that Mohammad Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender. ” Even today we don't really know who the terrorists that attacked Indian Parliament were and who they worked for.

More recently, on September 19 this year, we had the controversial 'encounter' at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008.

The ‘Bravehearts’ of the Indian law enforcing agencies

An Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the Parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's many 'encounter specialists', known and rewarded for having summarily executed several 'terrorists'. There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress Party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists, all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. In response, the BJP and L.K. Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a 'Braveheart' and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying it was 'suicidal' and calling them 'anti-national'. Of course, there has been no inquiry.

The Police Justice!

Only days after the Batla House event, another story about 'terrorists' surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to the court, the CBI said that a team from Delhi's Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted 2 kg of RDX and two pistols on them, and then arrested them as 'terrorists' who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir). Ali and Qamar, who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.

(Left) Hemant Karkare

The ATS Chief who was killed in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Karkare digged out the possible role of Sangh Privar behind the Malegaon tragedy.

This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts, arrested a Hindu preacher, Sadhvi Pragya; a self-styled godman, Swami Dayanand Pande; and Lt Col Prasad Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian army. All the arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist organisations, including a Hindu supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat. The Shiv Sena, the BJP and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS, and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists". L.K. Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble-rousing speeches to huge gatherings, in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.

The Malegaon Blasts

On November 25, newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high-profile VHP chief Praveen Togadia's possible role in the Malegaon blasts. The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai attacks. The chances are that the new chief, whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.

While the Sangh parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television channel, has stepped up to the plate.

Source:

9 IS NOT 11: THE MEDIA

2009-03-14T18:47:00.001+05:00

Do media catalyse the war hysteria?

Forgotten man: Former PM V.P. Singh’s death passed without a mention

by Arunndhati Roy

Even as the Mumbai terrorists were being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of their action was magnified a thousand-fold by TV broadcasts.

Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Instead, we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?).

We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minister V.P. Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of upper-caste Hindus, pass without a mention. We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush's famous 'Why They Hate Us' speech. His analysis of why "religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim", hate Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness."

His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever." Didn't George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.

Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state. It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of 'pickings' is long gone. We're now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.

Dangerous, stupid television flash cards like the Police are Good, Politicians are Bad / Chief Executives are Good, Chief Ministers are Bad / Army is Good, Government is Bad / India is Good, Pakistan is Bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.

And Kashmir?

Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that the business of terrorism is a hall of mirrors in which victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles. It's an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the last 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we're still learning. (If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's beginning to look as though India will integrate / disintegrate into Kashmir.)

It was after the 2001 Parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation. Eventually the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including S.A.R. Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Shaukat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offense.

Source

9 IS NOT 11: ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

2009-03-14T18:34:00.000+05:00

Gujarat ’02: The elephant in the room

Terrorism needs martyrs. Ideology matters to all such groups. Hindu, Muslim and all others

by Arundhati Roy

Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. (The US and Israeli armies don't hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.) But this was different. And it was on TV.

The boy-terrorists' nonchalant willingness to kill—and be killed—mesmerised their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news. Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that's worth.

Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.) Throughout the stand-off, the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people and inflict as much damage as they could before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered.

Were the 26/11 boys a product of deprivation?

When we say 'Nothing can justify terrorism', what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it's precious. So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they've died, they've journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.

One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself 'Imran Babar'. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the 'terror e-mails' that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don't want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir. "You're surrounded," the anchor told him. "You are definitely going to die. Why don't you surrender?" "We die every day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It's better to live one day as a lion and then die this way." He didn't seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?

Terrorism needs martyrs, ideology matters to all such groups, Hindu, Muslim and all others…

Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in its calculations except as collateral damage. It has always been a part of—and often even the aim of—terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines.

The blood of 'martyrs' irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project. A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV.

Source: outlookindia.com

9 IS NOT 11: AND NOVEMBER ISN'T SEPTEMBER

2009-03-14T14:27:00.003+05:00

Afghan revenge: America's debris, our headache

by Arundhati Roy

Terrorism has global dimensions, its as much in Pakistan as its elsewhere

Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot-soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives, working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously. In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation-state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.

World’s Most deadly Terrorist Group LTTE was trained by India

In circumstances like these, air strikes to 'take out' terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not 'take out' the terrorists. And neither will war. (Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let's try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighbouring Sri Lanka, one of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.)

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening towards civil war. As recruiting agents for America's jehad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organisations. Having wired up these Frankenstein's monsters and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in the heart of the Homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently re-made.

A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders. Nobody, least of all the Pakistan government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more, than it does on India. If at this point India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of 'non-state actors' with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbours. It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it's the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front.

The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at 'ground zero' kept up an endless stream of excited commentary. Over three days and three nights, we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men armed with guns and gadgets exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation. While they did this, they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality.

9 IS NOT 11: AND NOVEMBER ISN'T SEPTEMBER

2009-03-12T09:29:00.019+05:00

THE SANGH PRIVAR

A young activist of one of the many Hindu militant outfits.

BY ANUDHATI ROY

The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and seven million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee, current Leader of the Opposition L.K. Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.

And if that's not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organisations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.

So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.

In this nuclear subcontinent, that context is Partition. The Radcliffe Line which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people—Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India—left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths.

Bajrang Dal flag with Nazi swastika

India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born. By 1990, they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992, Hindu mobs exhorted by L.K. Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre.

War on Terror – A sail for the Winds of Hindu militancy

The US War on Terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance, and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu Nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed. This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent, and of the Mumbai attacks.

It shouldn't surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Toiba is from Shimla (India) and L.K. Advani of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).

In much the same way as it did after the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express and the 2006 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the Government of India announced that it has 'incontrovertible' evidence that the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba backed by Pakistan's ISI was behind the Mumbai strikes. The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies, the Lashkar operates in India through an organisation called the 'Indian Mujahideen'. Two Indian nationals—Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a Special Police Officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Calcutta in West Bengal—have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks. So already the neat accusation against Pakistan

is getting a little mess

Courtesy: hhttp://www.outlookindia.com

9 IS NOT 11 (Part-II)

2009-03-10T19:22:00.002+05:00

AND NOVEMBER ISN'T SEPTEMBER

A Christian victim of violence from Hindu hard-liners looks on at a relief camp in Bhubaneshwar, India

by Arundhati Roy

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11". And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.

As tension in the region was building, US Senator John McCain warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the 'Bad Guys' he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on 'terrorist camps' in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America.

So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

It's odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops. lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara—one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts.

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously means something's going very badly wrong in this country.

If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai.

They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre. We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically, one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said 'Hungry, kya?' (Hungry eh?).

It then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Lalgarh in West Bengal; in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa; and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities. That war isn't on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially 'Islamist' terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.

Contd…..

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