Goodbye Pinky I admire Benazir for her courage. I bet all of you would have been on the next flight out if your convoy had been bombed. Give her credit where its due.

Do You Have a Substitute? It is really sad that Salman Aneel seems to have not learned anything as a student in America--I wish that money could be spent on someone else who was willing to learn rather than blindly support a man who is guilty of more than Benazir, Nawaz or any of the politicians--if Salman doesn't get it or doesn't want to get it then perhaps nobody can teach him.

Living in America he is not aware of the situation--people are being denied basic freedoms and rights--there is no water or even a toilet where respectable human rights activists (NOT politicians) are being detained. It is not the politicians Musharraf is fighting (Benazir is almost complicit) neither is it the extremists--he is fighting the truth, justice and the intelligentsia--his targets are the judiciary, media, lawyers and human rights activists.

The New Jews Jay..you said >>Well, well, a little known fact, Ehdi is a maulana. If >>Maulana Abdus Salam were to win a nobel prize, it would have been a >>different story. This is the extend to which the educated have been >>brainwashed.
Edhi is not a maulana; in a recent interview he said that he has never read the Quran. Edhi never talks about religion and to the crazy fundos he says that the true Jihad is helping your fellow human beings, which obviously requires more work than bombing and killing people. He has donated to people without taking their race or religion into account(he donated to the WTC fund); the Edhi welfare stores are in some of the largest cities of the world (London, NY etc) serving the local people. You think every muslim with a beard is a maulana!
Regading your general comments about Dr. Abdus Salaam, many people in the Pakistani academic community lement the treatment accorded to him by our Government. This by no means dimishes the high regard many of us patriotic Pakistanis have for Dr. Abdus Salaam. Our feelings for Dr. Abdus Salam are by no means diluted due to his faith (that was his own business).
I have no qualms about admitting where our society or government has failed its people. You on the other hand should take a long and hard look at your society, starting with yourself, and see if you are doing yourself justice by blatently bad mouthing Muslims in general and Pakistanis in particular....people about whom you obviously dont have a clue.

The New Jews arjun....Kuwait DOES hand out citizenships in certain cases and used to more openly about 20 years ago when I assume Khalid Sheikh Mohammad`s father would have been there. Get your facts right
before you crawl back under that rock.
Hey didn`t the Indian army name a tank after you? Is that because you and others of your ilk (RSS, VHP etc) were instrumental in the rape and murder Indian muslims in Gujarat?

The New Jews arjun & rsaxena & scout...I see it gives you quite a bit of pleasure to see a few Pakistani/Muslim weaklings whine about the INS and the workings of the US government. In the overall scheme of things all this is irrelevant. Islam has been under attack before and it managed to survive and I am sure it will this time too. Now we might not be around to see that but that is fate and you cannot fight fate friends; no matter how many cruise missiles and daisy cutters are used. So let the weaklings wine and let the self-righteous ones gloat. In the meantime all you Paki bashers call up the INS or the FBI on your suspicios looking ``Paki`` or muslim neighbor i.e. if you already havent done so. Revenge is sweet!

The New Jews yo Jay & company....you said
>>..core belief of islam, jihad, the killing of non-innocents. What all >>these islam white washing authors fail to recognise is that
>>world is against only one aspect of islam, the preaching that individual >>muslims have to search out and kill the non-innocent.
you must have been getting your limited information from Fox News or did you get the Islam for Dummies from your local Borders? Jihad is not the killing of ``non-innocents``....and by the way what is a ``non-innocent``? Oh yeah...every morning I get an email from God with the names of the ``non-innocents`` I have to kill...no let me use the word Liquidate...sounds more cold you know....more Muslim. See you at your next anti muslim reply.

SameerJB....whats the JB for?...BJ sounds better....dude I grew up in Pakistan and knew quite a few Pakistani and non Pakistani Christians and have never heard the name ChohRa given to them. You must have been a sick pup to spend your days hating Christians and calling them ChohRa`s. Lets get the facts straight boy; you probably spent your days looking for sex in Islamabad and when failed you started calling them ChohRa`s. And so what if the shopkeepers charged the foreigners more....big deal havent you heard of the tourist trap?

Catches win Matches Firaq..I agree! We have to bat first and go for the big score...I think the mentality should be either we win by the right margin or we lose because I would much rather see Zimbabwe go through rather than England. Eventhough I think Shoab chokes at the first challenge we need him because we have to get wickets. He has to bowl fast, short and go for the batsman`s upper body...let them try to hook it!

Preventing Military Take Overs NEW DELHI, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The VHP backed on Tuesday a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq, saying the conflict would weaken the militant Islamic forces that threaten India and Western powers.
``If we want to fight Pakistan, then we should support the fight against Iraq. The way to Islamabad is via Baghdad,`` the general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Pravin Togadiya said.
The VHP`s views clash with those of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government which has urged the United States to solve the issue through the United Nations.
Togadiya said one way of uprooting what he called ``jehadis led by Pakistan`` was by supporting a U.S.-led war against Iraq.
India accuses Pakistan of sending Muslim militants across the border into Jammu and Kashmir to join the revolt there.

A Work In Progress harimau...#78...>
>>If you people understand the meaning of one-man-one-vote as >>practiced in democratic elections, you would have seen that the 80%>>+ Muslim population of what is now Pakistan would elect Muslims to >>positions of power and they then would be able to provide patronage >>to Muslims in the economic and education fields

yeah...sell this to the muslims of Gujrat.

USA and Muslims Keshto....in your post #107, as usual you blab on without having a clue. The South Waziristan scouts are not part of the Pakistan Army but are border guards with 100% recruitment from the Tribal areas. The Pakistani law doesnot apply in the tribal areas, a mandate since the British times. The Pakistani Army has to work through the political agent, again a relic of the British rule. The last time the Pakistani army tried to force its will in the Khyber Agency, 1983, they got their behinds kicked enough that they didnt try again. Neither the British could, nor the Pakistanis can control the tribal areas hence they are what they are - Pushtun lands where the Durand Line is irrelevent.
Hekmatyar, is not an ISI man, until recently he was hiding in Iran because the Taliban were his mortal enemy. Most of Hekmatyar`s money comes from Saudi Arabia but he doesnot have a strong presence in the Tribal areas becuase of strong ideological differences between his Wahabi dominated Hizb-e-Islami party and the Pushtun psyce - where cultural affinity comes before religion. ISI could only exert influence on Hekmatyar when they had US supplied arms to distribute - now specially after the ISI chose the Taliban over Hekmatyar, Hekmatyar doesnot need the ISI.
FazlurRehman, who is not from the Tribal area, is not as strong as you show him to be. In the Nawaz Sharif elections sweep he barely won from Mussarat Shaheen, a movie actress, not known for her artistic abilities. FazlurRehman`s recent rise to power is purely incidental as he is the head of the six party alliance; it wont be long that the MMA dissolves due to infighting - remember two of the six parties in the MMA are Shia. The MMA rise to power is purely a protest vote against the US operations in Afghanistan seen as anti pushtun - which is why the MMA only won in the NWFP and partly in Baluchistan. If the US wants to control the border areas they would have to work with the Pushtuns in the area otherwise they would never be able to control that area no matter how many daisy cutters they use.

USA and Muslims Sameer....I initially didnt comment about the article because I got bored after the first paragraph. Didnt see anything I dont view on FOX news or read on your mainstream American press. Infact I am quite surprised it made it on Chowk. Then I read your reply #73 to Saminashah and found it, for lack of a better word, quite pathetic.
In your reply you wrote
>>Imagine if Germany and Japan had lived and believed the life of a >>lion or some other Iqbal`s verse about shaheens (eagles). There >>would be no Sony walkman, no Toyotas, no Hondas and no Karuna >>Shinsho.......Aren`t Japanese glad for not standing up to bully like >>Gen. McArthur at that moment in history?
Is this the culmination of an intellectual debate? set aside your principles because otherwise there will be No walkman, No Toyotas, No Hondas for you! And then that statement about the Japanese not standing upto McArthur...what are you on drugs? By the end of the war the Japanese had been decimated, it is not that they didnt want to standup to McArthur, they COULDNT.
At the end you state>>Irritiating politics and irritating stands are >>hallmark of Muslim extremists
As if extremists of all other ilk are warm and fuzzy and tend to compromise on irritating stands. That is why they are called EXTREMISTS! because they have extreme views i.e. views not shared by the vast majority.
In order to fully digest your reply I had to endure through reading the full article. Your reasoning, or lack thereof, is at best juvenile and reminds one of a drawing room chat with a teenage adloescent.
I would like to take this opportunity to plead with Chowk editors to hold published articles to a certain literary and academic standard.

USA and Muslims BTW the article that I just posted is from Jan 10, 2003 Washington Post.

USA and Muslims Oh yeah a little help by the justice department can further help Muslims like Ayub A. Khan in getting home and explaining the ``American Way``. I hope Sameer wont mind if Ayub indulges in some ``baseless loathing of USA`` in Hyderabad.

HYDERABAD, India -- Nine years after he set out to chase the American dream, Ayub Ali Khan returned home with nothing more than a white mesh bag, bearing his prison identification number, slung over his shoulder. Pulled off a train in Texas the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Khan spent more than a year in U.S. jails -- an ordeal he calls ``a long night of terror.``

Khan, 36, an Indian Muslim, was arrested and questioned about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but eventually was ruled out as a suspect. Deported late last month after pleading guilty to credit card fraud and serving 13 months in prison, he sat last week in the cramped living room of his home by the winding alleyways of Hyderabad`s old city, 100 miles northeast of Karachi, Pakistan, and spoke in detail about his detention.

Grueling interrogation, solitary confinement and what seemed like endless mental torture, he said, left him ``as good as a dead man.`` ``I feel I am the real victim of the attack`` on Sept. 11, Khan said. ``Just look at how much my family and I suffered due to the faulty American investigation.``

Khan, a thin, balding man with a soft voice and piercing eyes, said he was confined to a small cell on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. While acknowledging that the physical hardships he was subjected to were mild by the standards of Indian jails, he said he underwent interrogation so severe that he was not sure he would survive it.

``The interrogation rounds terrorized me,`` he said. ``Five to six men would pull me in different directions very roughly as they asked rapid-fire questions. . . . Then suddenly they would brutally throw me against the wall.``

Khan described repeated questioning about possible links with terrorist groups or other terrorism suspects, and about anything he may have overheard about preparations to attack the World Trade Center.

``They even asked if I ever discussed the situation in Palestine with friends,`` he said. The officers would flash newspaper articles with his mug shot, he said, and tell him: ``You will be here for a long time. You are going to die in prison.``

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Bryan Sierra, declined to comment on Khan`s specific claims of mistreatment while in U.S. custody. Any civil rights complaints can be investigated by the department`s inspector general, he said. ``The department is committed to civil rights and civil liberties in the course of any investigation,`` Sierra said. ``That commitment does not waver.``

FBI and Justice Department officials have strongly defended their treatment of Khan and a friend, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, also an Indian Muslim, arguing that they were arrested under obviously suspicious circumstances in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Khan`s saga began when he and Azmath boarded a flight at dawn on Sept. 11 in Newark, bound for San Antonio. The men, who shared an apartment in Jersey City and had recently lost their jobs at a newsstand at the Newark train station, were traveling to Texas to live with friends and take up new jobs. Khan said it was his first trip outside the New York area in eight years of living in the United States.

But when hijacked jetliners struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that morning, U.S. authorities ordered all air traffic grounded. The plane carrying Khan and Azmath landed in St. Louis, and they decided to finish their journey by train.

The following day, near Fort Worth, ``my humiliating ordeal began as soon as the four officers barged into the Amtrak train and began searching my luggage,`` Khan recalled. ``I was shocked and asked why. One of them curtly replied, `Disturbing behavior.` `` When the officers discovered Khan and Azmath were carrying about $5,000 in cash, black hair dye and box cutters -- similar to those believed to have been used as weapons by the Sept. 11 hijackers -- the two men were handcuffed and taken into custody.

``We were singled out. It was based on racial profiling,`` Khan whispered softly, his hands trembling.

He said he routinely used the box cutters in his work at the newsstand. ``I was caught because I was a Muslim,`` he said.

Like most of the roughly 1,200 people detained nationwide immediately after Sept. 11, Khan was held on immigration charges. His papers showed that his visa had expired and that he was therefore in the United States illegally. Khan and Azmath were kept in isolation in high-security cells in Brooklyn and subjected to several rounds of intensive interrogation without access to a lawyer.

``The maltreatment, denial of rights, no lawyer, no court date, no respite from the solitary cell, severe incarceration in shackles and repeated questioning. . . . It was no mere immigration inquiry,`` Kahn fumed.

That December, a senior law enforcement official said that ``after three months, there`s just no link between them and everything else in any respect.`` The following month, Khan and Azmath were indicted on charges of conspiring to commit credit card fraud. The indictments, which made no mention of the Sept. 11 attacks, accused the men of using false credit cards to run up bills of over $1,000 and selling cards and other bogus documents to others.

They remained behind bars, and their treatment, Khan said, did not change.

He said the ``daily brutality`` and the ``mean`` behavior of the prison guards made him feel utterly vulnerable. Every day, he would be escorted in shackles and handcuffs to a cell with a barbed-wire roof for ``an hour of fresh air.`` On rainy days, he said, ``they just left me standing there, drenched and in chains, for as long as four hours.``

Khan said that he watched guards throw away half of his food before handing it to him and that he lost 25 pounds during the incarceration. And when he would sit down to pray, the guards would deliberately start banging on his door.

``Sometimes the prison guard would tighten my ankle chain real hard, and it would hurt like hell when I walked. And then he would kick and trip me,`` he said. ``They would twist my handcuffed wrist and I would cry out in pain and beg them to stop.``

Khan said the mental trauma he and his family endured was crippling. All his money was taken. He did not get a lawyer until he had been in custody for 54 days. Five months passed before he could make a phone call to his family in India, whose frantic pleas for information about his case were largely denied on grounds of national security.

Now, Khan is home, and Azmath is expected to return this month.

``Although justice was finally done, I have to live with the stigma of being a 9/11 suspect forever now,`` Khan said. ``America has destroyed my future.``

He paused for a moment, remembering the late-night talk-show host he enjoyed watching when he lived in the United States. ``Jay Leno made fun of everybody,`` Khan said. ``I wonder if he ever cracked jokes about people like me caught endlessly in detention centers after 9/11?``

National Savings Scheme Jay...as I suggested to you earlier you should THINK before you type. These asylam seekers obviously cannot have that much money, dollars that is, being sent to banks in Pakistan that is resulting in this multi billion dollar FX reserve increases. It is not worth my time to argue with you as I am trying to explain an aspect of finance whereas you are more interested in bad mouthing a people - although if there was a nobel prize for stupidity you would have been the top contender.

National Savings Scheme Ajay...none of your reasons are rational
- If all Pakistanis are scared that their funds would be siezed then why would they send money to Pakistan? Isnt it easier to just not give any money at all?
- FX reserves going up because people dont have to finance educational expenses... Most of the educational expenses were paid from bank accounts in the US or through the hawala system which didnot go through the official sources. If less students are going to study in the US then why should the money find its way into official coffers?????? THINK THINK!
>>The great surge of the pak stock is simply a correction to the >>earlier down grading due to tyhe activities of the NAB in arresting the >>business people
Again think before you type..see if your logic makes any sense. NAB has been trying to arrest politicians not business leaders...even if business leaders were arrested is just that positive signal enough to rally the market by 90%..the same year the DAX fell 47%!!
->>A person who wants to start an industry in pakistan should be a >>confirmed lunatic
I guess the S&P and Moody`s rating agencies dont agree with you as they have just upgraded Pakistan`s debt to BB-/Stable.

I can tell from your post that you dont know much about Finance, are not on Chowk to learn or provide others with your knowledge but are here to malign a country and its people.

National Savings Scheme Amin...a good read for any one interested in the Pakistani domestic paper markets. Personally, I really think given the present positive sentiment for Pakistani economy and the relatively large retail dollar holding in the country Pakistan should try issuing domestic dollar based notes. I think people might be interested given the low dollar/euro govi rates available. I know the previous experience of dollar based investors has been bad but its a good time to test the water.

JAY...if the present Pakistani situation is so bad then you might want to explain the massive rally in the stock market (the highest return of any market), and the rally in the currency against the USD. Most emerging economies take hits off and on...take a look at Russia or the ex asian tigers. At the height of the 1998 Russian default the Russian dollar denomenated debt was trading at 10c on the dollar and now its bid only. Investors are fickle...greed and fear dominate the financial markets. No matter how hard a hit one takes people will always pile in when they see a rally. The investors that sold russia at 10c on the dollar are probably the same one that are now bidding it up at par!