Pakistan-Afghanistan Relations: The Choice Between Alliance and Acrimony

Re: # 22

If you want to claim Pusthoons are under-represented in Afghanistan government or Afghanistan Army please provide hard facts. List out all Afghan ministers, generals and members of Parliament by ethnicity.

If Pakistani newspapers/Pakistanis on Chowk want to recite Goebels type propaganda hundred times it does not constitute truth.

There are problems in Afghanistan. Ethnic under-representation ain`t one of them.

Re: # 27

Is Karzai preventing the Pakistani government from mining the border and building a fence ?

Salim sahib:

``Row over burqa ban in Maha gold shops

Mumbai, Dec. 28: Muslim clerics, opposing a plan by some Pune jewellers to bar women in burqas from entering their shops....``

If you had a gold shop what would you have done?

Re: # 32

Hamidm Sahib:

``......... i trust only white people .........``

Yeh kya doodh ke dhule hain?

Paki army = pussies

Victim of the war on terror
By Rahimullah Yusufzai

Maimoon Zameen is one of the countless people caught in the open-ended, misguided and unwinnable US war on terror. He concedes his helplessness in avenging the five deaths in his family as a result of a missile strike that destroyed a madressah in a remote village in Bajaur tribal region and killed 80 people. Like many other victims of bombings that have caused more collateral damage than actually harming those being targeted, he wonders as to how such a callous use of force could win hearts and minds and defeat real and imagined terrorists.

The world changed for Maimoon Zameen on Oct. 30. On that fateful day, he lost his 15-year old son, Yahya, three nephews, Ikramullah, 17, Rahatullah, 15, and Fazle Subhan, 18, and a cousin, Mohammad Salim, 17. Ikramullah and Rahatullah were Hafiz-e-Quran and brothers, both sons of Maulana Sultan Zameen, a village pesh imam, or prayer leader. Fazle Subhan was an orphan, his father having died some years ago and his widowed mother now mourning his death every hour and every day.

In a way, Inayatur Rahman, another casualty of the airstrike on the madressah, also formed part of Maimoon Zameen’s family. The 12-year old boy and his father, Fateh Rahman, and their family lived in a house owned by Maimoon Zameen. Such families who don’t own land and a house are known as “hamsaya,” literally neighbours, but in practice dependent on the landowning family for everything. Inayatur Rahman’s death was like a death in the family and was mourned with the same intensity and sorrow as those of Maimoon Zameen’s son, nephews and cousin. Besides, they were all killed in the same madressah and by the same missiles. Each one of them was innocent, falling prey to someone else’s war.

The 45-year old Maimoon Zameen belongs to Damadola, the sleepy village in Bajaur made famous when a pilotless US Predator plane operated by the CIA fired two Hellfire missiles at three houses on Jan. 13 this year and killed 13 men, women and children. His home was at some distance from the houses that were hit but the airstrike made him realise that the war with all its consequences had reached Damadola. Nine-and-a-half months later his family was to suffer a similar tragedy.

Sitting in his shop in Inayat Qala town selling honey and mustard oil, the bearded Maimoon Zameen calmly relived the moments when he came to know that the madressah in Chingai village, barely one-and-a-half kilometre from Damadola, had been attacked with missiles. He and his family members rushed to the site to find out the fate of his son and nephews. With much effort and pain, they found remains of his son Yahya, who was Hafiz-e-Quran after having memorised the Holy Quran by heart, and nephews Rahatullah and Fazle Subhan. Their bodies were barely recognisable but they were able to bury the identifiable body parts and reassure themselves and everyone else that the graves contained the remains of the three young men. This wasn’t true in case of Ikramullah, Mohammad Salim and Inayatur Rahman, whose bodies had been dismembered by the two missiles that had hit the madressah. Even now they don’t know if the body organs in their graves are theirs or of someone else’s.

Overcome by grief, Maimoon Zameen says it was cruel on the part of the attackers to target and destroy a religious school that was packed with 80 students, mostly teenagers, and their few teachers. In his words, it was worse than the cruelties inflicted by Mongol conquerors Genghis Khan and Hulagu Khan on vanquished people. In this case, he argued that the young victims were studying religion in a madressah and there was no evidence that they had caused harm to anyone. Reminding that he too had studied in madressahs, Maimoon Zameen remarked that he had sent his son and nephews to the seminary to study Islam and not to become terrorists. He said the madressah in Chingai had good reputation and had well-known teachers. More importantly, it was not far from their village. It never occurred to him that the madressah in question could be attacked because it was run by Maulana Liaquat Ali, a leader of the black-turbaned, Islamic group Tanzim-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) and supporter of the Taliban. Why would someone attack and kill so many innocent students just to get the Maulana, he wondered.

Maimoon Zameen had no doubt that the US military was behind the attack on the madressah. He and other villagers by now recognise the noise accompanying the US drones that frequently fly high over Bajaur. He could even find similarities between the terrifying bang that everyone heard when the missiles hit Damadola last January and the noise of the one which targeted the madressah in Chingai on Oct. 30. Maimoon Zameen said he and fellow villagers were happy when the Pakistani helicopter-gunships flew into the area sometime after the missile strikes because they thought help had arrived. It was much later that they realised that the choppers had come for some other purpose. It was to show that Pakistani helicopters had carried out the attack on the madressah instead of the US drone. It didn’t impress Maimoon Zameen but rather made him angry.

Maimoon Zameen is a member of the Tableeghi Jamaat and that could be the reason that he appears so calm and contented. He has been to many places in Pakistan to preach Islam and to try to reform his life and that of fellow Muslims. He isn’t angry that nobody in the government has offered him condolences. He doesn’t want any compensation from the government for the loss of his dear son, cousin and nephew. All that he seeks is justice. He feels a probe should be carried out by neutral people, all Muslims, to fix responsibility for the extra-judicial killing of 80 madressah students and teachers. It doesn’t bother him that no such probe is likely to take place.

For Maimoon Zameen, the most important thing is that Allah would do justice to all the bereaved families. Right now he admits his helplessness. He cannot seek justice because those who carried out the attack on the madressah refuse to concede their mistake or atone for the 80 killings. But he is convinced that such injustices would not go unpunished, if not in this world then in the Hereafter.

One cannot argue with such a man. He has suffered as a result of America’s war on terror. So has Atta Mohammad, the Afghan villager from Helmand province who lost 19 members of his family in a bombing raid by the US and NATO air force. The “collateral damage” that has traumatised ordinary people like Atta Mohammad and Maimoon Zameen would make it impossible for the US and its allies to win the hearts and minds of all those who could have proved instrumental in winning the war on terror.

The writer is an executive editor of The News International based in Peshawar.

Email: bbc@pes.comsats.net.pk

bbabu,
(The only thing Pakistan could do after 9/11 is to save your hide. Zalme Khalilzad is too busy in Iraq to be involved in Afghanistan).
How do u know that and what is he busy in?

(Why spout typical ISI propaganda ? Are you getting paid for it ? do you have any answer as to why all the violence is concentrated in provinces along Pakistani border ?)
Anyove who knows Afghan and Pashtoon history can vouch for this. This is the polarisation that shall lay the seeds of re drawing. OK. As for pay roll, its my opinion and conciense. The Government of Pakistan said it now. I said it immediately after 9/11. Please take time to read my interacts of that era.

(In the long run it is 80 million Punjabis in Pakistan versus 25 million Pusthuns in NWFP/Afghanistan. )
Yes, this is the wish list of many like you, giving urself away

Dear Zeerak

(and there is reliable evidence of its extensive role in supporting the growth and the remarkable military successes of the Taliban in Afghanistan)

This is one of the biggest misperceptions held about the ISI. ISI may have done everything during Soviet War. But when Taliban came, though there was contact of ISI with Taliban, bur Taliban were very much their own men and did what they liked. We even could not get our outlaws extracted out of Afghanistan.

When Taliban marched into Kabul, ISI was least aware of it and was totally taken aback. But it quietly lapped up all the credit & fame. There is much credit that goes to it undeservedly - and it quietly accepts it. Some guys, I believe, also got awards for the Taliban marching into Kabul.

Why it has now failed in North & South Waziristan if it had so much of influence?

In all this Afghanistan-Pakistan issue, a new interesting situation is developing - REVERSE PASHTUNISTAN. Unlike the Past, now the Pashtun centre of gravity has shifted to Pakistan.

How we can handle it or what will be its eventual consequences is a subject by itself.

nhk

Mohar bhai,

(once democracy takes firmer root)

Afghanistan and democracy???

Regards

Ayaz Amir has a new year`s wish...for Pakiland to stop being America`s beeyatch..

A New Year wish

By Ayaz Amir

AH, for some more disorder under the heavens. For only then can we hope to break out of our present condition where movement is frozen and time stands still. “Ke harkat tez tar hai, aur safar ahista, ahista”: movement so frenetic and journey so slow. How immortal Munir Niazi, now departed for the eternal shades, summed up our national condition long ago.

Why is the art of the proper obituary beyond our newspapers? Why so heedless of what an obituary is or what it should be? Not one decent obituary on the great poet of love and despair in all the torrent of newsprint pouring out on the morning after his death.

“Ik aur darya ka samna hai Munir mujh ko, Main aik darya ke paar utra to mein ne dekha...” A bad rendering of these haunting lines: ‘I crossed one river, Munir, and saw another in front of me. At journey’s end, another journey awaits you. Slay one dragon and others rise in its place.’

Green, symbol of hope and renewal, may be our national colour but khaki is the colour of our distress, our never-ending winter of discontent dyed a light shade of khaki. Any tryst with destiny made when Pakistan was born? Not easy to say because apart from the Quaid there were few men of vision or promise in our founding caravan. Even so, no one could have imagined our future would be this.

Pakistan surely wasn’t created for the pleasure of the general staff, or the convenience of the Pentagon, the Pakistan Resolution not passed in 1940 so that Pakistan, once born, should fight America’s wars.

Forget the past which can’t be undone. Why can’t we take heed of the present? As if one Afghan venture (in the 1980s) wasn’t enough, we are embroiled in another. All because our commanding warriors got cold feet when a gun, so to speak, was held to their heads post-Sept 11 and they rushed into a deal, more like a devil’s pact, whose consequences only now are becoming clearer.

True, in those first punch-drunk months, Pakistan was the flavour of the season and Gen Musharraf the virtual rock sensation whose hand everyone was trying to touch. But it couldn’t last and it hasn’t.

We already know what has come of American dictation, the army losing control of South and North Waziristan, the writ of government evaporating, to be replaced by the authority of the Taliban or the Mujahideen. On our own, with our better local knowledge, we could have handled the situation better. But the Americans, with their almost uncontrollable urge to turn a crisis into a catastrophe, pushed for precipitate action.

Our generals too were perhaps eager to prove their loyalty. The result could almost have been foreseen: fierce tribal resistance leading to heavy casualties, almost 700, a huge number which only a ‘peasant’ army could have sustained without causing a national outcry (the army rank and file drawn largely from the Punjab and Frontier peasantry.)

The North Waziristan deal leading to peace between the tribes and the army was dictated not by goodwill but necessity. Stuck in a hole there was no other way out for the army. Indeed Governor Aurakzai, the great Frontier peacemaker now, was the commander who ordered the initial deployment in South Waziristan. Talk of learning from experience.

America and its Nato allies are furious and for good reason, client states are not expected to think for themselves, especially when the patron is in dire straits. So Pakistan is under renewed pressure to do more, the decision to fence and mine the border at some places, another foolish move, reflecting this pressure.

The tribes won’t take to this kindly. But the Americans are looking out for themselves not us.

They have two Vietnams on their hands, one fully ripe in Iraq, the other growing in Afghanistan. Pakistan is the likely Cambodia in this scenario, the country which got wrecked and burnt because America dragged it into the Vietnam War. Cambodia has still not recovered from what the Americans did to it. And this was almost 30 years ago.

Should we allow ourselves to be sucked into America’s developing Afghan debacle? We will be unless we take our own decisions and keep our distance from the US.

This doesn’t mean cultivating American hostility, only that we stop being a US lackey. The real unfinished business of partition is not Kashmir but the reclamation of our sovereignty held in hock to US interests for far too long.

But that promise will remain unfulfilled unless Pakistan’s khaki spell is broken. The khaki mind, as it has evolved in Pakistan, is almost programmed to seek a dependent relationship with Washington, a consciousness of internal weakness and lack of legitimacy driving it in that direction.

Left to their own devices this spell is too powerful for the people of Pakistan to break. We lack spirit, conditioned more by history than climate to bow meekly before authority. The people of Thailand have more spirit than us, the people of South Korea a greater sense of right and wrong, even the Nepalese people more mettle than we dare think of.

Hezbollah has rewritten some of the old rules of conflict in the Middle East. Iran, now a regional power, is standing up to the US. The resistance in Iraq has proven itself heroic, and at times savage, beyond words. New winds blow across South America. Pakistan remains stuck on the wrong side of history.

Arjun if someone paid you for reading all those Pakistani papers, you would be a millionaire ....

while mushy likes to be compared like mr ataturk, this is what ataturk did. he acknowledged end of ottoman empire, stopped playing ``geo-political`` games, and consolidated turkish nationhood in mostly ethinic turki regions (keeping khurdish areas was the mistake) and abolished arabic scripts.

i think the comparison is so uncool.

#43 by jang

But did Ataturk get anywhere?

an ullu ka patha and his money are soon parted

......... thats what my uncle said when i asked him about the plans to fence and and mine the border ........ ``anyone who eats gundum and knows anything about the 1600 mile long border, knows it cannot be done - it is just another scam by the government and the thekedars to make money`` .......... so they are going to mine three miles of the border on each side of the chaman, torkham and a few other known border crossings, as if the pathan and his ass cannot figure out how to get around it - for god`s sake, even a mexican can figure that out ........

.... they`d be better off giving the money to the rascals that inhabit both sides of the border and telling them to cut it out - the scoundrels would sell their own mother for a few bucks ............

the fencing is a typical paki response..israel did it, india did it so inshallah we can too ;-)

#45 by hamidm2

I agree. (Shivers)

I dont know about the arabs and central asians nuts, but the capitalist pakhtun braaderaan will dig out the mines and sell them at a profit in the streets. :-)