India’s Foreign Policy: An Analysis

....the best book i have read on south asian history, or of an era in that history is, ``The White Mughals,`` by Dalrymple.....it is a classic and a must read for anyone who wants knowledge about the British era of the Sub-Continent, based on very very detailed research.....

....i had always wondered about the social changes that were taking place in the Sub-Continent during the British days....it couldn`t have been as simple as East is East and West is West or the White Man`s Burden.....

....South Asia was one of the most developed and richest areas in the world....it was not a backwaters conquered by the White man.....it had industry, created art, poetry, architecture etc.......

...it is said that, in retrospect, when history is written, the british time in south asia will be of little consequence.....a brief 200 year blimp....however it was instrumental in creating three or four countries - two out of which, i.e. India and Pakistan are completely artificial and would not have come into existence had the british not arrived......

.........it is interesting to read about the way the mughal empire had totally disintegrated and local powers were declaring their indepenendence.....these local powers would have formed their own countries.....hyderabad, marathas, mysore, punjab, etc......much of pakistan was actually afghanistan and would have been afghanisan today had young british soldiers not conquered these regions......

.........however, the most interesting part is the merging of britishers and locals....contrary to popular belief by the late 18th century, british had started heavy intermarraiges with the locals and were well on their way to merging into the local population, like the previous rulers of south asia........i dont` remember the exact figure, but 1/3rd (?) of the britishers had local wives.......they wore local clothes and spent their whole lives in south asia, barely ever returning to england.......

........it was only in the late part of the 18th century, 1780 or so, that the british stopped this integration....the british viceroy/governor general passed a law that children who were a product of the joint white-local marriages would not be considered full british subjects...they would not be sent to england for education.....they could only join british military and civil services at low posts etc......this was to discourage the intermingling of races....

....cornwallis - the governor general - had been defeated by the americans in the revolutionary war, before being assigned to india........i assume he saw a new, ``race`` emerge in america - a combination of english marrying with others - which considered itself different from its originating english race.....perhaps he feared the same thing happening in south asia.......thereby bringing in the above laws......

it is, thus, only after the late 18th century that the separation of whites and locals really began.....this is when kipling`s east is east, west is west, never the twain shall meet, became the norm.....perhaps kipling himself did not know the history of the area he was living, where east and west were quite close to meeting, infact had met already, prior to his days......

Re: # 259

you are the same dude who thinks mullahs and the Taliban have a popular base without their ISI masters.


At Border, Signs of Pakistani Role in Taliban Surge
By CARLOTTA GALL
QUETTA, Pakistan — The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?

The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.

Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.

More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.

The evidence is provided in fearful whispers, and it is anecdotal.

At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.

Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers and fighters.

One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested — or even mysteriously killed — after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.

“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.

Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously.

The Pakistani military and intelligence services have for decades used religious parties as a convenient instrument to keep domestic political opponents at bay and for foreign policy adventures, said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to several of Pakistan’s prime ministers and the author of a book on the relationship between the Islamists and the Pakistani security forces.

The religious parties recruited for the jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan from the 1980s, when the Pakistani intelligence agencies ran the resistance by the mujahedeen and channeled money to them from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani said.

In return for help in Kashmir and Afghanistan the intelligence services would rig votes for the religious parties and allow them freedom to operate, he said.

“The religious parties provide them with recruits, personnel, cover and deniability,” Mr. Haqqani said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Inter-Services Intelligence once had an entire wing dedicated to training jihadis, he said. Today the religious parties probably have enough of their own people to do the training, but, he added, the I.S.I. so thoroughly monitors phone calls and people’s movements that it would be almost impossible for any religious party to operate a training camp without its knowledge.

“They trained the people who are at the heart of it all, and they have done nothing to roll back their protégés,” Mr. Haqqani said.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, President Pervez Musharraf, under strong American pressure, pledged to help root out Islamic extremism, and, as both head of the army and president, he has more direct control of the intelligence services than past civilian prime ministers. But according to several analysts, Pakistani intelligence officials believe it is more prudent to prepare for the day when Western troops leave Afghanistan.

Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” or a friendly buffer on its western border.

In Pashtunabad, a warren of high mud-brick walls and narrow lanes in Quetta, the links of the government, religious parties and Taliban commanders to a local madrasa are thinly hidden, said a local opposition party member who lives in the neighborhood.

Three students from the madrasa went to Afghanistan recently on suicide missions, he said. The family of one of the men admitted that he had blown himself up but denied that he had attended the school. The man’s brother suggested that he had been forced into the mission and that someone had recruited him for payment.

“Nowadays people are getting money from somewhere and they are killing other people’s children,” he said. “We are afraid of this government,” he said. His father said he feared the same people would try to take his other son and asked that no family names be used.

President Musharraf relies on the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, or J.U.I., which dominates this province, Baluchistan, as an important partner in the provincial and national parliaments.

At a madrasa, called simply Jamiya Islamiya, on winding Hajji Ghabi Road, a board in the courtyard proudly declares “Long Live Mullah Omar,” in praise of the Taliban leader, and “Long Live Fazlur Rehman,” the leader of J.U.I.

Members of the provincial government and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam are frequent visitors to the school, the local opposition party member said, asking that his name not be used because he feared Pakistan’s intelligence services. People on motorbikes with green government license plates visit at night, he said, as do luxurious sport utility vehicles with blackened windows, a favorite of Taliban commanders.

Maulvi Noor Muhammad, a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam representative from Baluchistan in the National Assembly, recently received a guest barefoot while sitting on the floor of a grubby district office in Quetta, a map of the world above him painted on the wall to represent his belief in worldwide Islamic revolution.

He denied providing the militants any logistical support. “The J.U.I. is not supporting the Taliban anymore,” he said. “We are only providing moral support. We pray for their success in ousting the foreign troops from the land of Afghanistan.”

On a recent morning, the deputy director of the Jamiya Islamiya madrasa, Qari Muhammad Ibrahim, declined to meet a female reporter for The New York Times but answered a question from a local male reporter.

He did not deny that some of the madrasa’s 280 students had gone to fight in Afghanistan. “In the Koran it is written that it is every Muslim’s right to fight jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Koran, and then it’s up to them to go to jihad.”

NATO officials and Western diplomats in Afghanistan have grown increasingly critical of Pakistan for allowing the Taliban leaders, commanders and soldiers to operate from their country, which has given an advantage to the insurgency in southern Afghanistan. In September, Gen. James L. Jones, then NATO’s supreme commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Quetta remained the headquarters of the Taliban movement.

Still, Pakistan has insisted that the Taliban leadership is not based in Quetta. “If there are Taliban in Quetta, they are few,” said Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan. “You can count them on your fingers.”

American officials and Western diplomats noted that, when put under enough pressure, Pakistan had come through with flashes of cooperation. But that only seems to reinforce the view that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are more in touch with what is going on in the Taliban insurgency than the government lets on publicly.

For instance, a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Osmani, who operated on both sides of the border, was killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan on Dec. 19, after Pakistan helped track him, an American official in Afghanistan said.

At the same time, a kind of dirty war is building between Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies. A senior Afghan intelligence official said one of its informers in Pakistan was recently killed and dumped in pieces in Peshawar, a border town. The Afghan intelligence service has also recently arrested two Afghan generals, one retired, who have been charged with spying for Pakistan, as well as a Pakistani suspected of being an intelligence agent.

President Musharraf has acknowledged that some retired Pakistani intelligence officials may still be involved in supporting their former protégés in the Taliban.

Hamid Gul, the former director general of Pakistani intelligence, remains a public and unapologetic supporter of the Taliban, visiting madrasas and speaking in support of jihad at graduation ceremonies.

Afghan intelligence officials recently produced a captured insurgent who said Mr. Gul facilitated his training and logistics through an office in the Pakistani town of Nowshera, in the North-West Frontier Province, west of the capital, Islamabad.

NATO and American officials in Afghanistan say there is also evidence of support from current midlevel Pakistani intelligence officials. Just how far up that support reaches remains in dispute.

At least five villages in Pishin, a district northwest of Quetta that stretches toward the Afghan border, lost sons in the recent fighting in Kandahar between the Taliban and NATO forces, opposition politicians said.

One village, Karbala, is a main center of support for the jihad, local people say. Unlike the other villages, which blend into the stark desertlike landscape with their mud-brick houses and compound walls, Karbala has lavish houses, mosques and madrasas, suggesting an unusual wealth.

Farther on, in the village of Bagarzai, lies the grave of Azizullah, a religious scholar who used only one name and acquired fame as a Taliban commander.

Only 25, he was killed with a group of 15 to 20 men in an airstrike in the Afghan province of Helmand on May 22, said his father, Hajji Abdul Hai. Thousands of people attended his funeral, including senior members of the provincial government, the father said.

Mr. Hai, 50, who is a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam member, denied that his son had been persuaded to fight by anyone. “From the start it was his spirit to take part in jihad,” his father said. “It’s all to do with personal will. If someone agrees, then he goes. Even if someone wishes to, no one can stop him.”

It is an argument that supporters of the jihad use frequently. But for some of the families mourning their sons, there is no doubt that the madrasas and the religious parties are the first point of contact.

That was the conclusion reached by the family of Muhammad Daoud, a 22-year-old man from Pishih who disappeared more than a year ago.

“In our search we went to many places and everyone said different things,” said his father, Hajji Noora Gul. “We went to the madrasa in Pashtunabad, but no one was ready to tell us his whereabouts.”

“Even the madrasa people did not know,” he added. “Behind the curtain of the madrasa, maybe there are other people who do this. Maybe there are some businessmen who take them.”

Then, he said, a Taliban propaganda CD came out showing his son with a group of others taking an oath before the Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah.

“He had a shawl over his head and was preparing for a suicide bombing,” Mr. Gul said. “He said, ‘I am fighting for God, and I am ready for this.’ ”

His eldest son, Alla Dad, 33, blamed the jihadi groups and the Inter-Services Intelligence. “We don’t know how he made contact with those jihadi groups,” he said. “There are some groups active in taking people to Afghanistan and they are active in Quetta.

“All Taliban are I.S.I. Taliban,” he added. “It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the I.S.I. Everyone says this.”

David Rohde contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

#244 muslim edge in civilization is being hotly debated on the ``in case of a wife being lewd`` thread.

#247 the 6-th chinese travellers to india marvelled at the fact that indian pupulance had at least one bath a day and wore fresh linen clothes as opposed to rags and skins that other populations he knew of.

Tahmed32,
There is no meaness about it nor any intent to take away credit from where it is due. Extreme sports is an area where there are no umpires or referees and the words of the person of the momment are taken as truth. She herself acknowledged that she had not moved ito the heart. I was just putting the record straight.

As humans, once we identify a high performer, we tend to overlook other shortcomings and glorify. I am just mentioning a fact to which I am a witness. I`ll just qoute two examples.

A friend Peerzada is a Pride of Performance inr mountaineering. He with a team of two other Pakistanis in poor visibility thought they scaled Nanga Parbat. Unlike the other two, Peerzada had doubts whether he had reached the actual summit or was it just an adjacent pinnacle a few meters below. Peerzada does not claim he scaled the peak.

Reinhold Messner lost his brother during descent from Nanga Parbat. People commented that because his brother had scaled the peak before him, he allowed him to wander off in the blizzard so that he alone could claim the summit. Messner maintained that he had occompanied his brother a considerable distance. Now after 25 years, he has recovered his brothers body to vindicate himself. Such is the character that makes extreme sports.

If I never felt for Raheela the way I did, I would never have written about her.

As for Dera Bugti, you get there via Kashmore. From there you go to Patthar Nullah and then onto the caves. Unless who have a heavey contigent of security, movement is dangerous. Another way to get to the caves is to travel by the track running from Dera Bughti to Pirkoh. Halfway, you abandon it for the route going to Kolhu. Enroute you will see a series of flattened type entrances. These are the caves. For Dhanasar, you move to Zhob from Quetta. Short of Zhob, you turn right along the Sulaiman range into the Neli Kach. Thats where you will find the caves.

By the way, how do we paste pics?
Cheerios

#255 by tahmed32

Yes her family was from Lahore. Thanks for posting her pics which are from her website which, interestingly, is now a matrimonial site.

I first came to know about her when guides in Hunza told me about her in 2000. This was after she had completed a two week trek from Gilgit to the base camp of K-2 through Fairy Meadows. The guide told me it was unbelievable how she wanted to keep on going when everyone else was collapsing ... including that guide who was sturdier than a horse.

Well .. R.I.P.

zeemax #240 Thanks for posting. She was actually a Norwegian citizen, but of Pakistani origin. And is now buried in Lahore. After having trekked around the world, from the arctic to across the sahara and also the amazon and of course within Pakistan. Here are a couple of more pictures of her I dug out of the internet.

I hope ijaz gul posts some more on his wanderings in baluchistan.