New US Strategy Needed in Afghanistan and Pakistan
I do not agree with Fisk's conclusions but I do agree with this article that the war in Iraq, as far as the United States is concerned, is now nothing less than a waste of resources. I still think that Islamic militarism has to be defeated, because in its very basic nature it is a nihilistic philosophy. This is going to be a generational war and its final outcome will not be decided or based upon final body counts.
A reed that bends in the wind does not break, but a reed that does not bend, breaks easily. I agree, that it is cliche, but it does make the point well that Islam's biggest handicap in this war is Islam's rigidity to change, because as this war evolves, the capacity to die for a cause or the willingness to kill for a cause will became meangingless.
The next phase of this war would be about ideas; whose ideas are better and the side, which is able to convince the world opinion of it's ideas as the better alternative, will emerge victorious.
Incidently, Zeemax, insulting me does not prove your points and so far, you have not disputed one of my arguments. The first person to insult another in an argument is the first one to admit that s/he has lost the argument. If your ideas are better than mine, than convince me of your ideas being better than mine. You only will convince me by changing my mind and not by seeking to issue fatwas against me or killing me because by killing me you will only have my dead body but not my acceptance to your ideas. :)
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 19, 2008 11:56 pm
re: zeemaxI do not agree with Fisk's conclusions but I do agree with this article that the war in Iraq, as far as the United States is concerned, is now nothing less than a waste of resources. I still think that Islamic militarism has to be defeated, because in its very basic nature it is a nihilistic philosophy. This is going to be a generational war and its final outcome will not be decided or based upon final body counts.
A reed that bends in the wind does not break, but a reed that does not bend, breaks easily. I agree, that it is cliche, but it does make the point well that Islam's biggest handicap in this war is Islam's rigidity to change, because as this war evolves, the capacity to die for a cause or the willingness to kill for a cause will became meangingless.
The next phase of this war would be about ideas; whose ideas are better and the side, which is able to convince the world opinion of it's ideas as the better alternative, will emerge victorious.
Incidently, Zeemax, insulting me does not prove your points and so far, you have not disputed one of my arguments. The first person to insult another in an argument is the first one to admit that s/he has lost the argument. If your ideas are better than mine, than convince me of your ideas being better than mine. You only will convince me by changing my mind and not by seeking to issue fatwas against me or killing me because by killing me you will only have my dead body but not my acceptance to your ideas. :)
Ciao
New US Strategy Needed in Afghanistan and Pakistan
**************************************
The Little Men and the Inferno
The Hell-Disaster of Iraq
By ROBERT FISK
www.counterpunch.org
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry--but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people--the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world--not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning--of which more later--but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror--I recommend the Battle of Borodino--along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.
"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.
On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia--"Mission Accomplished"--and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians--ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents--annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.
To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair--as we should always have called this small town lawyer--should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war--and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper--daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship.
Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie?
Question 2: How did he get away with it?
But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us--be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism"--are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.
Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.
But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".
Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".
On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved--even just a few tears for a minute or so--for the Iraqis?
For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies"--they did, by the way--and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.
Of course, when I was at school, our leaders--Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States--had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen--Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz--have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.
Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.
It is a grotesque truism that today--after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago--we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).
They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq--176--is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq--29,395--is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).
Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead--they range from 350,000 up to a million--these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom--60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded--from 1940 to 1945.
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or--more terrible still--two Hiroshimas.
Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.
America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?
We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto--in Afghanistan--unheard of suicide bomber.
And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror--yes, our terror--of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right.
*****************************
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 19, 2008 08:36 am
One of the most brilliant and most damning articles on the Anglo-American experience in Iraq, which I have read in a long time! **************************************
The Little Men and the Inferno
The Hell-Disaster of Iraq
By ROBERT FISK
www.counterpunch.org
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry--but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people--the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world--not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning--of which more later--but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror--I recommend the Battle of Borodino--along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.
"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.
On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia--"Mission Accomplished"--and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians--ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents--annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.
To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair--as we should always have called this small town lawyer--should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war--and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper--daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship.
Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie?
Question 2: How did he get away with it?
But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us--be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism"--are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.
Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.
But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".
Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".
On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved--even just a few tears for a minute or so--for the Iraqis?
For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies"--they did, by the way--and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.
Of course, when I was at school, our leaders--Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States--had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen--Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz--have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.
Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.
It is a grotesque truism that today--after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago--we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).
They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq--176--is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq--29,395--is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).
Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead--they range from 350,000 up to a million--these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom--60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded--from 1940 to 1945.
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or--more terrible still--two Hiroshimas.
Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.
America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?
We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto--in Afghanistan--unheard of suicide bomber.
And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror--yes, our terror--of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right.
*****************************
Ciao
New US Strategy Needed in Afghanistan and Pakistan
The last few years, while the attention was riveted to Iraq, US-NATO was building up the logistics inside Afghanistan and recent raids into FATA are the start of this new campaign to regain the political-military advantage lost when the attention was turned to Iraq. The United States' withdrawal from Iraq will see an increased level of committment in Afghanistan, because the United States has accepted the reality that real GWOT will be lost or won in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan and not in Iraq.
Pakistan will have two choices, both of which will be against its' interests in this new strategy. One will be to support the GWOT and if not; then risk being isolated and invaded and lose any semblance of sovereignity. The politicans who are chest-beating about leaving the GWOT are naive and do not understand the consequences of their rhetoric. Pakistan is mortaged to the hilt and there is no option but to swallow the bitter bile and say "thank you".
The Pakistan Army has it's hands full with the insurgency in the FATA and which is now sweeping into the interior. The growing radicalization of Southern Punjab, which is the mainstay of jihadi organizations and the patronage of local Taliban and their Al Qaeda masters, means that the army has problems in its own backyard. The United States' emphasis will be on the army fighting GWOT and not meddling in politics.
To this intent, the army will leave Musharraf to sort out his problems and it will/may not side with the present Supreme Court against the present parliament. The army's second task is to rebuild its shattered image and it will leave the politicans and judges to solve their own problems, so the blame for failing expectations rests with them and not the military.
As long as the military's institutional interests are secure, it will not intervene in politics again, but should they be threatened, then one should be prepared for another round of martial law and emergency rule. Here is the problem. The PPP in the center realizes that to carry the mandate, it will have to coopt the army's interests in the GWOT and that means taking ownership of the war itself. PML-N does not want to share power with the PPP in the center because it wants to avoid the backlash of Pakistan's continued association with the GWOT and heap the potential electoral benefits, when PPP loses the popular goodwill.
Nawaz Sharif, in order to achieve this, will turn a blind eye towards the jihadi organizations located in Southern Punjab and the trend from this policy suggests that the GWOT will move beyond FATA into Pakistan proper itself. Nawaz Sharif has a soft corner for the jihadi organizations and in fact, had accepted election money from Osama bin Ladin to defeat Benazir Bhutto, who was seen as a threat by bin Ladin in the 1990s.
With the Pakistani economy failing on all fronts and the last eight years of governmental inaction catching up, the new government will get the blame as the misery index of the people in Pakistan continues to climb. Therefore, Pakistan is looking ahead to festering political instablity and lingering issues of mal-governance and therefore, the life-expectancy of this present parliament is not judged to be more than 1 year by most observers.
This parliament has to take hard decisions and given the mathematics of the power distribution, PML-N will be the first one to stab PPP in the back to gain milage from PPP's problems and so far, it has not shown any inclination towards accepting the choices it has to confront. The United States will support PPP and not PML-N, because United States wants the restoration of the superior judicary but not the personal judges to the pre-November 3, 2007 status quo ante.
PML-N, that is Nawaz Sharif, and the United States do not agree on this issue; United States favors the restoration of the institution as opposed to the judges personally and Nawaz Sharif favors the restoration of the personalities and not necessarily that of the institution itself. Nawaz Sharif knows that pre-November 3, 2007 judges will invalidate Musharraf's elections and legally remove Musharraf from the presidency and at the same time, allow him to become the PM for the third time; something that Zardari is not really too keen about. The legal community has tilted with Nawaz Sharif in this matter, which means that it is leaning against the United States. On top of all of this, Aitzaz Ashan has signaled a climb down from his earlier position and is now willing to accomodate a space between the extremes of the PML-N's stated position and the United States' sub voca intentions.
PPP is silent on the issue? Why? It does not want a confrontation with the Presidency and the Judicary and should that happen, two of the three branches of the government will be at war with one another and the United States' interests in GWOT on terror cann affoot afford a destablized Pakistan, when the GWOT inside Afghanistan is about to heat up. Pakistani bureaucracy will generally be against the parliament as it has been in the past and has always supported the executive against the legislative.
Hence, Asif Zardari knows and understands the limitations, but cannot make Nawaz Sharif understand this calculus and to appease Nawaz Sharif and carry PML-N with him, and more importantly share the blame, he is willing to sacrifice Amim Fahim as the candidate for the Prime Minister's slot. Nawaz Sharif has made the issues personal and from that point he is not willing to climb down, but in doing so; he is fostering a politics of confrontation that will eventually lead to a degradation of the democratic process in Pakistan and in the undermining of Pakistan's interests in the GWOT.
Politics is like whoring, if the interests are right; all sorts of positions are acceptable and a person engaged in politics, should not expect virginity in every issue or choice. Nawaz Sharif needs to understand this that there is no honor in politics, but only the horse sense to survive another day in power.
There is a solution to this and that is, most actors/players in this drama are realizing that politics of confrontation ala 1990s is suicidal and will gradually inch towards a reconcilation of their rhetoric with the political reality. The downside of this will be a loss of public support and confidence, because the Pakistani electorate is still not mature enough to understand that Pakistan has no options in this issue and from their emotive state of perception, will castigate the present parliament for going against the wishes of the people.
The media, which could have informed the public of the dilemma facing Pakistan, will abdicate its responsibility and "play the gallery" as it did in the aftermath of Lal Masjid.
Again, all of this could be proven wrong, but what is for certain is that the year will a long, difficult one for all concerned and if this nation wants to survive and exist in its present shape and form, it will have to make life-altering choices. The irony of the situation is that Pakistan, a nation created in the name of religion, might just end up being destroyed in the name of religion.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 18, 2008 07:25 am
The United States' and NATO's strategy has changed. There will be an increased level of operations along the Pak-Afghan border and frequently across it into Pakistan.The last few years, while the attention was riveted to Iraq, US-NATO was building up the logistics inside Afghanistan and recent raids into FATA are the start of this new campaign to regain the political-military advantage lost when the attention was turned to Iraq. The United States' withdrawal from Iraq will see an increased level of committment in Afghanistan, because the United States has accepted the reality that real GWOT will be lost or won in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan and not in Iraq.
Pakistan will have two choices, both of which will be against its' interests in this new strategy. One will be to support the GWOT and if not; then risk being isolated and invaded and lose any semblance of sovereignity. The politicans who are chest-beating about leaving the GWOT are naive and do not understand the consequences of their rhetoric. Pakistan is mortaged to the hilt and there is no option but to swallow the bitter bile and say "thank you".
The Pakistan Army has it's hands full with the insurgency in the FATA and which is now sweeping into the interior. The growing radicalization of Southern Punjab, which is the mainstay of jihadi organizations and the patronage of local Taliban and their Al Qaeda masters, means that the army has problems in its own backyard. The United States' emphasis will be on the army fighting GWOT and not meddling in politics.
To this intent, the army will leave Musharraf to sort out his problems and it will/may not side with the present Supreme Court against the present parliament. The army's second task is to rebuild its shattered image and it will leave the politicans and judges to solve their own problems, so the blame for failing expectations rests with them and not the military.
As long as the military's institutional interests are secure, it will not intervene in politics again, but should they be threatened, then one should be prepared for another round of martial law and emergency rule. Here is the problem. The PPP in the center realizes that to carry the mandate, it will have to coopt the army's interests in the GWOT and that means taking ownership of the war itself. PML-N does not want to share power with the PPP in the center because it wants to avoid the backlash of Pakistan's continued association with the GWOT and heap the potential electoral benefits, when PPP loses the popular goodwill.
Nawaz Sharif, in order to achieve this, will turn a blind eye towards the jihadi organizations located in Southern Punjab and the trend from this policy suggests that the GWOT will move beyond FATA into Pakistan proper itself. Nawaz Sharif has a soft corner for the jihadi organizations and in fact, had accepted election money from Osama bin Ladin to defeat Benazir Bhutto, who was seen as a threat by bin Ladin in the 1990s.
With the Pakistani economy failing on all fronts and the last eight years of governmental inaction catching up, the new government will get the blame as the misery index of the people in Pakistan continues to climb. Therefore, Pakistan is looking ahead to festering political instablity and lingering issues of mal-governance and therefore, the life-expectancy of this present parliament is not judged to be more than 1 year by most observers.
This parliament has to take hard decisions and given the mathematics of the power distribution, PML-N will be the first one to stab PPP in the back to gain milage from PPP's problems and so far, it has not shown any inclination towards accepting the choices it has to confront. The United States will support PPP and not PML-N, because United States wants the restoration of the superior judicary but not the personal judges to the pre-November 3, 2007 status quo ante.
PML-N, that is Nawaz Sharif, and the United States do not agree on this issue; United States favors the restoration of the institution as opposed to the judges personally and Nawaz Sharif favors the restoration of the personalities and not necessarily that of the institution itself. Nawaz Sharif knows that pre-November 3, 2007 judges will invalidate Musharraf's elections and legally remove Musharraf from the presidency and at the same time, allow him to become the PM for the third time; something that Zardari is not really too keen about. The legal community has tilted with Nawaz Sharif in this matter, which means that it is leaning against the United States. On top of all of this, Aitzaz Ashan has signaled a climb down from his earlier position and is now willing to accomodate a space between the extremes of the PML-N's stated position and the United States' sub voca intentions.
PPP is silent on the issue? Why? It does not want a confrontation with the Presidency and the Judicary and should that happen, two of the three branches of the government will be at war with one another and the United States' interests in GWOT on terror cann affoot afford a destablized Pakistan, when the GWOT inside Afghanistan is about to heat up. Pakistani bureaucracy will generally be against the parliament as it has been in the past and has always supported the executive against the legislative.
Hence, Asif Zardari knows and understands the limitations, but cannot make Nawaz Sharif understand this calculus and to appease Nawaz Sharif and carry PML-N with him, and more importantly share the blame, he is willing to sacrifice Amim Fahim as the candidate for the Prime Minister's slot. Nawaz Sharif has made the issues personal and from that point he is not willing to climb down, but in doing so; he is fostering a politics of confrontation that will eventually lead to a degradation of the democratic process in Pakistan and in the undermining of Pakistan's interests in the GWOT.
Politics is like whoring, if the interests are right; all sorts of positions are acceptable and a person engaged in politics, should not expect virginity in every issue or choice. Nawaz Sharif needs to understand this that there is no honor in politics, but only the horse sense to survive another day in power.
There is a solution to this and that is, most actors/players in this drama are realizing that politics of confrontation ala 1990s is suicidal and will gradually inch towards a reconcilation of their rhetoric with the political reality. The downside of this will be a loss of public support and confidence, because the Pakistani electorate is still not mature enough to understand that Pakistan has no options in this issue and from their emotive state of perception, will castigate the present parliament for going against the wishes of the people.
The media, which could have informed the public of the dilemma facing Pakistan, will abdicate its responsibility and "play the gallery" as it did in the aftermath of Lal Masjid.
Again, all of this could be proven wrong, but what is for certain is that the year will a long, difficult one for all concerned and if this nation wants to survive and exist in its present shape and form, it will have to make life-altering choices. The irony of the situation is that Pakistan, a nation created in the name of religion, might just end up being destroyed in the name of religion.
Ciao
Pakistan: The War of Drones
Please do not be overly concerned with redflagging of your posts. Those of us, myself included, who read you, will read your posts regardless of the color of the flag attached to it. :)
Even though we disagree, I think you provide an alternative viewpoint that is missing from the mainstream viewpoint and your comments are welcome in generating a discourse on Chowk.
As to ilogs, my ilogs also do not show up on FP and I think there is a glitch and maybe the Chowk care-takers can look into it and resolve it.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 17, 2008 06:33 am
re: MasadiPlease do not be overly concerned with redflagging of your posts. Those of us, myself included, who read you, will read your posts regardless of the color of the flag attached to it. :)
Even though we disagree, I think you provide an alternative viewpoint that is missing from the mainstream viewpoint and your comments are welcome in generating a discourse on Chowk.
As to ilogs, my ilogs also do not show up on FP and I think there is a glitch and maybe the Chowk care-takers can look into it and resolve it.
Ciao
Pakistan: The War of Drones
Appeasement never works. As to my death, it will happen when it will happen and no; I am not nervous. I live in Pakistan where life has no meaning and people have no rights. My life in this nation was worthless before September 2001 and it still is, Al Qaeda or bombs or no bombs.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 16, 2008 08:16 am
re: malik99 #781Appeasement never works. As to my death, it will happen when it will happen and no; I am not nervous. I live in Pakistan where life has no meaning and people have no rights. My life in this nation was worthless before September 2001 and it still is, Al Qaeda or bombs or no bombs.
Ciao
Pakistan: The War of Drones
It is a mistake to assume that Al Qaeda will cease its attacks on Pakistan if Pakistan leaves GoT. Al Qaeda is not interested in Islam or sharia but in gaining territory from which to continue its ideological mission. Pakistan offers that territory to Al Qaeda and in this mission, Al Qaeda is indifferent to the long term fate of Pakistan or Pakistanis.
Before 9/11, Al Qaeda did not need Pakistan because it had Afghanistan and Sudan. If not Pakistan, where do you think it will go? Back to Afghanistan? Iraq? Sudan? There was no reason for it target Pakistan pre-2001 but now, it wants to destablize Pakistan in order to gain a sanctury from which to sustain its logistical structure. FATA offers it the price and it will not leave it even if Pakistan leaves the GoT.
It would be criminally foolish and not to mention naive to think that appeasement is answer for aggression. It never is. Al Qaeda's leadership is ideologically motivated and it is not interested in peace treaties or compromies. It sees Pakistan and Pakistanis as weak and as kafirs and not as equals in the struggle against non-believers.
You said and quote, "so, please feel free to fight them wherever you want....just not in pakistan........my suggestion would be for them to fight it out in michigan, or for you to fight it out with them, by joining the us army, in afghanistan"
This is downright stupid! You fight the enemy where the enemy is and not where the enemy is not!!!! The battle ground is Pakistan and make no mistakes about it, Pakistan will suffer because our government by their past actions have sowed what we must now reap - the sins of our intolerances. The world will little think about Pakistan or its sovereignity and if the choice is between its future and Pakistan's; then Pakistan will lose and twice on Sunday!
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 16, 2008 07:21 am
re: bulleyaIt is a mistake to assume that Al Qaeda will cease its attacks on Pakistan if Pakistan leaves GoT. Al Qaeda is not interested in Islam or sharia but in gaining territory from which to continue its ideological mission. Pakistan offers that territory to Al Qaeda and in this mission, Al Qaeda is indifferent to the long term fate of Pakistan or Pakistanis.
Before 9/11, Al Qaeda did not need Pakistan because it had Afghanistan and Sudan. If not Pakistan, where do you think it will go? Back to Afghanistan? Iraq? Sudan? There was no reason for it target Pakistan pre-2001 but now, it wants to destablize Pakistan in order to gain a sanctury from which to sustain its logistical structure. FATA offers it the price and it will not leave it even if Pakistan leaves the GoT.
It would be criminally foolish and not to mention naive to think that appeasement is answer for aggression. It never is. Al Qaeda's leadership is ideologically motivated and it is not interested in peace treaties or compromies. It sees Pakistan and Pakistanis as weak and as kafirs and not as equals in the struggle against non-believers.
You said and quote, "so, please feel free to fight them wherever you want....just not in pakistan........my suggestion would be for them to fight it out in michigan, or for you to fight it out with them, by joining the us army, in afghanistan"
This is downright stupid! You fight the enemy where the enemy is and not where the enemy is not!!!! The battle ground is Pakistan and make no mistakes about it, Pakistan will suffer because our government by their past actions have sowed what we must now reap - the sins of our intolerances. The world will little think about Pakistan or its sovereignity and if the choice is between its future and Pakistan's; then Pakistan will lose and twice on Sunday!
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
Pakistani forces did not wage a complete offensive for many reasons. One, Musharraf was too pre-occupied with politics and too distracted to focus on the nature of the problem, which was that of a latent insurgency brewing in the FATA immediately after the Tora Bora campaign. Then there was the MMA government in NWFP, which was offering patronage to these groups and resisting army from undertaking a more determined approach to the problem. Then, there was a series of misquided and confused overtures to deal with the issue politically and the political mood-swings in Islamabad that ocsilliated between aggression and appeasement of the militants.
There was the media coverage of the issue, which tended to be emotional and at times a melodramtic varity of "Islam is in danger" discussions and the sight of civilian deaths being televised. The government completely mismanaged the PR campaign. The media and more crucially, the politicans failed to inform the people as to what the real parameters of this problem were and the politicans continued to harp the stilted logic that Muslims do not kill Muslims so there are no Muslim terrorists but "agency spys" doing the killing and giving Islam a bad name.
Lal Masjid was the wake-up call and suddenly the media, which had been screaming about the restoring the government's writ in Islamabad after the raid and hostage taking of the Chinese, turned Janus when the military action happened and totally denied its mea culpa in instigating the show-down between the government and militants. Instead of clarifing the issues, the media decided to ply the emotional angle and in doing so, not only misled the people, but also created a popular but misinformed public awareness of the issues, which then fused with the lawyer's movement to create a popular wave of anti-government sentiments.
As to destroying Al Qaeda, it is not a physical organization as much as it is the facade of an idea, by which the world identifies militant Islam. Even though Al Qaeda is a non-state actor, it still relies on the implements of state authority to establish its own writ; sharia courts, an armed force/militia to support its political message and likewise, has a military and political component to it organizational structure. The use of aircraft and artillery was used to destroy its physical hierarchy that was present in FATA and identified through its activities.
The Pakistani Taliban have been used by Al Qaeda for its own end, but both the Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban do not always agree to the same idea. Generally speaking, Al Qaeda is using Pakistani Taliban to wage its own proxy war against the state of Pakistan and using the Pakistani Taliban as human fodder for its activities; suicide bombers/bombing.
Ask yourself this question; how many Arabs, Uzbeks or Tajiks have blown themselves up in suicide bombings inside Pakistan on the behalf of Al Qaeda?
Al Qaeda, then, to paraphrase Masadi, is the elite which offers leadership, support and guidance to Islamic militant groups regardless of their nationality, with whom it shares a doctrinal dislike of the west and a generic version of Pan-Islamism as a motivating ideal and inspiration. Al Qaeda does not die for its believes, but makes others die so that its worldview can be advanced and takes credit, holistically, for any militant/terrorist actions that merge within, and support, its political aims.
Tahmed32 is correct. Remove the political support of Pakistani Taliban, and Al Qaeda will lose its "oxygen" which allows it to breed, move, fight, secure shelters and more importantly, it will lose the popular support upon which feeds its political ambitions. As mentioned, to defeat Al Qaeda, you do not necessarily have to fight a traditional conventional style military campaign against it, but you only have to destroy the supporting infrastructure that enables it to maintain its presence in FATA and still remain as a viable political-military entity.
Both Al Qaeda and Taliban are non-state actors and thus, references to their being in or out of political power are misleading and futile. Their intention is destabilize the political authority of Pakistan by not taking over power directly but to chip away political power from the fringes. Being non-state actors, they do not need the support of a state, but they do require the physical access to use a state's territory for their purposes.
This is the Achilles' Heel of Al Qaeda; its tangible and visible "foot print", which the Americans and the Pakistanis were attacking. If you would have followed the debate, which is presently going on in the American military, you will realize that the American military is refining its military tactics after lessons learned in Iraq, Afghanistan and FATA. Al Qaeda as an idea might not be militarily destroyed, but its political, military, and financial organization can be degraded and even destroyed.
You will see a new pattern and a new phase appear in this war and this would explain the target killing of Al Qaeda's leadership. Wars are not only won by defeating the enemy, but also by making the enemy react to your plans. For too long and without any visible results, the Americans and the Pakistanis and the world at large were fighting the war according to Al Qaeda's rules and suffering the bad press as result. The key is simple. If these actions can make the Pakistani Taliban or Al Qaeda change or shift its tactics and if it continues to lose its top leadership, in the final analysis it is hoped that a ripple effect will be created that not only expose the kinks in Al Qaeda's heirarchy, but make it lose the intitiative in this war to influence events but instead be influenced itself.
This war has moved away from the purely military approach into a psychological modus oprendi and what you are seeing as increased suicide bombing is a sort of self-confession by the militants that a "tipping off" point in this war is approaching.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 6, 2008 08:03 am
re: zeemax #121Pakistani forces did not wage a complete offensive for many reasons. One, Musharraf was too pre-occupied with politics and too distracted to focus on the nature of the problem, which was that of a latent insurgency brewing in the FATA immediately after the Tora Bora campaign. Then there was the MMA government in NWFP, which was offering patronage to these groups and resisting army from undertaking a more determined approach to the problem. Then, there was a series of misquided and confused overtures to deal with the issue politically and the political mood-swings in Islamabad that ocsilliated between aggression and appeasement of the militants.
There was the media coverage of the issue, which tended to be emotional and at times a melodramtic varity of "Islam is in danger" discussions and the sight of civilian deaths being televised. The government completely mismanaged the PR campaign. The media and more crucially, the politicans failed to inform the people as to what the real parameters of this problem were and the politicans continued to harp the stilted logic that Muslims do not kill Muslims so there are no Muslim terrorists but "agency spys" doing the killing and giving Islam a bad name.
Lal Masjid was the wake-up call and suddenly the media, which had been screaming about the restoring the government's writ in Islamabad after the raid and hostage taking of the Chinese, turned Janus when the military action happened and totally denied its mea culpa in instigating the show-down between the government and militants. Instead of clarifing the issues, the media decided to ply the emotional angle and in doing so, not only misled the people, but also created a popular but misinformed public awareness of the issues, which then fused with the lawyer's movement to create a popular wave of anti-government sentiments.
As to destroying Al Qaeda, it is not a physical organization as much as it is the facade of an idea, by which the world identifies militant Islam. Even though Al Qaeda is a non-state actor, it still relies on the implements of state authority to establish its own writ; sharia courts, an armed force/militia to support its political message and likewise, has a military and political component to it organizational structure. The use of aircraft and artillery was used to destroy its physical hierarchy that was present in FATA and identified through its activities.
The Pakistani Taliban have been used by Al Qaeda for its own end, but both the Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban do not always agree to the same idea. Generally speaking, Al Qaeda is using Pakistani Taliban to wage its own proxy war against the state of Pakistan and using the Pakistani Taliban as human fodder for its activities; suicide bombers/bombing.
Ask yourself this question; how many Arabs, Uzbeks or Tajiks have blown themselves up in suicide bombings inside Pakistan on the behalf of Al Qaeda?
Al Qaeda, then, to paraphrase Masadi, is the elite which offers leadership, support and guidance to Islamic militant groups regardless of their nationality, with whom it shares a doctrinal dislike of the west and a generic version of Pan-Islamism as a motivating ideal and inspiration. Al Qaeda does not die for its believes, but makes others die so that its worldview can be advanced and takes credit, holistically, for any militant/terrorist actions that merge within, and support, its political aims.
Tahmed32 is correct. Remove the political support of Pakistani Taliban, and Al Qaeda will lose its "oxygen" which allows it to breed, move, fight, secure shelters and more importantly, it will lose the popular support upon which feeds its political ambitions. As mentioned, to defeat Al Qaeda, you do not necessarily have to fight a traditional conventional style military campaign against it, but you only have to destroy the supporting infrastructure that enables it to maintain its presence in FATA and still remain as a viable political-military entity.
Both Al Qaeda and Taliban are non-state actors and thus, references to their being in or out of political power are misleading and futile. Their intention is destabilize the political authority of Pakistan by not taking over power directly but to chip away political power from the fringes. Being non-state actors, they do not need the support of a state, but they do require the physical access to use a state's territory for their purposes.
This is the Achilles' Heel of Al Qaeda; its tangible and visible "foot print", which the Americans and the Pakistanis were attacking. If you would have followed the debate, which is presently going on in the American military, you will realize that the American military is refining its military tactics after lessons learned in Iraq, Afghanistan and FATA. Al Qaeda as an idea might not be militarily destroyed, but its political, military, and financial organization can be degraded and even destroyed.
You will see a new pattern and a new phase appear in this war and this would explain the target killing of Al Qaeda's leadership. Wars are not only won by defeating the enemy, but also by making the enemy react to your plans. For too long and without any visible results, the Americans and the Pakistanis and the world at large were fighting the war according to Al Qaeda's rules and suffering the bad press as result. The key is simple. If these actions can make the Pakistani Taliban or Al Qaeda change or shift its tactics and if it continues to lose its top leadership, in the final analysis it is hoped that a ripple effect will be created that not only expose the kinks in Al Qaeda's heirarchy, but make it lose the intitiative in this war to influence events but instead be influenced itself.
This war has moved away from the purely military approach into a psychological modus oprendi and what you are seeing as increased suicide bombing is a sort of self-confession by the militants that a "tipping off" point in this war is approaching.
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
Al Qaeda and the suicide attacks are the two sides of the same coin. Al Qaeda has identified the state of Pakistan as a soft target, because it has correctly identifed the causes. The reputation of the state of Pakistan is so low that it's word has no acceptance value on the street and the Pakistani street has been very successfully co-opted with the idea that Al Qaeda equals Islam whereas the Pakistani army, which is linked with the Pakistani state, equals western aggression against Islam itself.
The Pakistani public sees itself as the guardian of Islam and it believes, for reasons not entirely clear, that it has a better interpretation of what constitutes Islam than nearly billion other Muslims. The imagery of the Pakistani army has been linked to this idea for so long that now there is a visble chasm between the popular imagination that taught to see the army in its Islamic tints and the present reality, which sees popular imagination believe the army fighting the United States's war against its own people.
You cannot stop someone who is determined to kill himself and to seek to stop every individual suicide bomber, as you suggest, is like trying to hold grains of sand in your palm and hope none will spill out of your hand!
The means to stopping the suicide attacks in Pakistan is not to concentrate against the individuals, but seek out and destroy the infrastructure that disseminates the ideology and the logistical help in facilitating such actions. Indeed, these may be work of individuals, but who is providing the support, the training, the motivation, the finances, the materiels and expertise to carry out the suicide attacks in Pakistan?
Al Qaeda is on the defensive and it hopes to destabilize the Pakistani state to the extent that it is able to create a replacement sanctury for itself after losing Sudan, and Afghanistan. Do not mistake Al Qaeda with the Pushtuns or the Pathans, because no matter how rustic the Pathan tribes maybe, they do not violate their own tribal codes and one of those codes is that they do not blow up tribal jirgas. Pathan vendetta is, and has been based, on notions of redemning personal or family honor and never to preach or force a particular brand of Islam upon another person.
The Pathan tribal culture is not Wahabbi (sp?)and what you see in the tribal belt is mode of expression that is totally alien to the Pathan way of life. Neither does this expression exist inside Afghanistan and it was only with the emergence of the Taliban and their coming to power in Afghanistan that Afghanistan saw sectarianism institutionalized when the Taliban massacred the Shias in Mazar-e-Sharif. In Pakistan's northern aress, the Swat, sectarianism was a foreign concept until General Zia-ul-Haq started to support Sunnis Whabbism against the Shias and started the background process to Mullah Radio and his followers, and created a situation which the Uzbeks and others exploited when they were driven out of Uzbekistan and later Afganistan.
Bulleya, pull up the blinds and let the sun shine through and light up the room so you see the dirt in the dark corners! :)
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 6, 2008 05:23 am
Re: bulleya #93Al Qaeda and the suicide attacks are the two sides of the same coin. Al Qaeda has identified the state of Pakistan as a soft target, because it has correctly identifed the causes. The reputation of the state of Pakistan is so low that it's word has no acceptance value on the street and the Pakistani street has been very successfully co-opted with the idea that Al Qaeda equals Islam whereas the Pakistani army, which is linked with the Pakistani state, equals western aggression against Islam itself.
The Pakistani public sees itself as the guardian of Islam and it believes, for reasons not entirely clear, that it has a better interpretation of what constitutes Islam than nearly billion other Muslims. The imagery of the Pakistani army has been linked to this idea for so long that now there is a visble chasm between the popular imagination that taught to see the army in its Islamic tints and the present reality, which sees popular imagination believe the army fighting the United States's war against its own people.
You cannot stop someone who is determined to kill himself and to seek to stop every individual suicide bomber, as you suggest, is like trying to hold grains of sand in your palm and hope none will spill out of your hand!
The means to stopping the suicide attacks in Pakistan is not to concentrate against the individuals, but seek out and destroy the infrastructure that disseminates the ideology and the logistical help in facilitating such actions. Indeed, these may be work of individuals, but who is providing the support, the training, the motivation, the finances, the materiels and expertise to carry out the suicide attacks in Pakistan?
Al Qaeda is on the defensive and it hopes to destabilize the Pakistani state to the extent that it is able to create a replacement sanctury for itself after losing Sudan, and Afghanistan. Do not mistake Al Qaeda with the Pushtuns or the Pathans, because no matter how rustic the Pathan tribes maybe, they do not violate their own tribal codes and one of those codes is that they do not blow up tribal jirgas. Pathan vendetta is, and has been based, on notions of redemning personal or family honor and never to preach or force a particular brand of Islam upon another person.
The Pathan tribal culture is not Wahabbi (sp?)and what you see in the tribal belt is mode of expression that is totally alien to the Pathan way of life. Neither does this expression exist inside Afghanistan and it was only with the emergence of the Taliban and their coming to power in Afghanistan that Afghanistan saw sectarianism institutionalized when the Taliban massacred the Shias in Mazar-e-Sharif. In Pakistan's northern aress, the Swat, sectarianism was a foreign concept until General Zia-ul-Haq started to support Sunnis Whabbism against the Shias and started the background process to Mullah Radio and his followers, and created a situation which the Uzbeks and others exploited when they were driven out of Uzbekistan and later Afganistan.
Bulleya, pull up the blinds and let the sun shine through and light up the room so you see the dirt in the dark corners! :)
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
The Daily Times article hints at the army offensive that started just before the elections and if you have been following the news story, the editorial - read Najam Sethi -argues that the army action in the FATA against the militants needs popular support and will be a failure if the people do not remove their blinkers and accept the reality of militancy in Pakistan. He also argues that Pakistani politicans of all hues and stripes need to speak out against the militants openly and as long as they do not educate the public, the cause of the militancy will continue to heap the benefits of a misquided public perception about the militancy.
For the last few weeks the paper has been suggesting that there is a conspiracy of silence and unless Pakistani public and its leadership comes out openly against Al Qaeda and the militants, their silence will prove a bigger undermining cause to the federation than the worst intentions of the militants. Surprisingly, the paper also mentions the need to support the army in its proper role in this war, but admits that the reputation of the army has suffered from its prolonged exposure to politics.
The interesting sub voce point of the editorials is that the army has been so infused with politics and its constitutional role so blurred, that the peoples' lack of support for it in FATA et al largely stems from the blurred nature of the military's role itself. In other words, Pakistani public has been so conditioned to a military influence in politics, that it cannot envisage a purely military response to a crisis without ascribing some political overtones to it.
In many ways and this may prove to be a speculative assumption, but the military and the civilian political leadership is evolving towards a dyarchy of shared political power and influence in Pakistan. In the interim, the military will hold the critical portfolios, but will be forced to hand them over gradually as the civilian leadership develops a required institutional support and dominance of the Pakistani politics. It is only hoped that this process is allowed to continue and is not short-circuited.
One can make the guess that maybe Asif Zardari learned this lesson, in prison, that when political parties and its leadership personalize their political grudges, the army is given a reason to abort the process. Maybe, that is why he talking about a government of national consensus instead of seeking to squaring off against the army, as PML-N seems to intent.
In either case, the die that has been cast since February 18, 2008 suggests that an invisible Rubicon has been crossed and because of which, the role and the influence of the army will never attain the highwater mark that it did duing the Musharraf interregum from 1999 to 2008.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 6, 2008 04:37 am
re: tahmed32 #92 & hamidm #83The Daily Times article hints at the army offensive that started just before the elections and if you have been following the news story, the editorial - read Najam Sethi -argues that the army action in the FATA against the militants needs popular support and will be a failure if the people do not remove their blinkers and accept the reality of militancy in Pakistan. He also argues that Pakistani politicans of all hues and stripes need to speak out against the militants openly and as long as they do not educate the public, the cause of the militancy will continue to heap the benefits of a misquided public perception about the militancy.
For the last few weeks the paper has been suggesting that there is a conspiracy of silence and unless Pakistani public and its leadership comes out openly against Al Qaeda and the militants, their silence will prove a bigger undermining cause to the federation than the worst intentions of the militants. Surprisingly, the paper also mentions the need to support the army in its proper role in this war, but admits that the reputation of the army has suffered from its prolonged exposure to politics.
The interesting sub voce point of the editorials is that the army has been so infused with politics and its constitutional role so blurred, that the peoples' lack of support for it in FATA et al largely stems from the blurred nature of the military's role itself. In other words, Pakistani public has been so conditioned to a military influence in politics, that it cannot envisage a purely military response to a crisis without ascribing some political overtones to it.
In many ways and this may prove to be a speculative assumption, but the military and the civilian political leadership is evolving towards a dyarchy of shared political power and influence in Pakistan. In the interim, the military will hold the critical portfolios, but will be forced to hand them over gradually as the civilian leadership develops a required institutional support and dominance of the Pakistani politics. It is only hoped that this process is allowed to continue and is not short-circuited.
One can make the guess that maybe Asif Zardari learned this lesson, in prison, that when political parties and its leadership personalize their political grudges, the army is given a reason to abort the process. Maybe, that is why he talking about a government of national consensus instead of seeking to squaring off against the army, as PML-N seems to intent.
In either case, the die that has been cast since February 18, 2008 suggests that an invisible Rubicon has been crossed and because of which, the role and the influence of the army will never attain the highwater mark that it did duing the Musharraf interregum from 1999 to 2008.
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
My old house was approximately 3km from the Naval War College and my new house is about 1km. In fact, it near (walking distance from) Aitzaz Ahsan and Imran Khan's house.
I agree, with you on the PPP dropping its stance on the judges in return for a clean bill of health on Zardari's account.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 5, 2008 09:48 pm
re: Dost-MittarMy old house was approximately 3km from the Naval War College and my new house is about 1km. In fact, it near (walking distance from) Aitzaz Ahsan and Imran Khan's house.
I agree, with you on the PPP dropping its stance on the judges in return for a clean bill of health on Zardari's account.
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
I think Romair would be better placed to answer that question.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 5, 2008 06:08 am
re: Urstruly #22I think Romair would be better placed to answer that question.
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
I am alright, and thank you, sir, for your concern. I was close enough to see the smoke from the blast and feel the shock waves. Today, I walked to the edge of the Mall from my work and realized that I was a lot closer than 800 meters; maybe 300-400 meters. :)
My house, which is right behind Aitchison College, felt the blast and the entire building reverbrated with the blast and the after shocks. Light fixtures in Aitchison College, opposite the NWC, were jarred loose by the blast and there were reports of ceiling plaster falling on the students, 5-7 years old, who were tramatized by the event.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 5, 2008 04:01 am
Re: bjkumar #5I am alright, and thank you, sir, for your concern. I was close enough to see the smoke from the blast and feel the shock waves. Today, I walked to the edge of the Mall from my work and realized that I was a lot closer than 800 meters; maybe 300-400 meters. :)
My house, which is right behind Aitchison College, felt the blast and the entire building reverbrated with the blast and the after shocks. Light fixtures in Aitchison College, opposite the NWC, were jarred loose by the blast and there were reports of ceiling plaster falling on the students, 5-7 years old, who were tramatized by the event.
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
Lahore has a signficant naval presence and yes; there is a naval headquarters in Islamabad. :)
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 5, 2008 03:47 am
Re: VRN #11Lahore has a signficant naval presence and yes; there is a naval headquarters in Islamabad. :)
Ciao
The Naval War College Bomb Blasts
The jihadi activity has been present but beyond the settled (urban) areas but now seems to have crept into the cities. According to most, this activity will see an increase as it moves towards an eventual tipping off point. There is a planned offensive in the FATA this spring and the ground logistics for it have been nearly complete.
The loss of MMA government has removed the cover of patronage from the jihadi groups and ANP will not be different since it also believes in the old concept of a jirga to attain peace, the developmental works hoped by ANP might meet with a positive response from the local population and that might be a worrying prospect for the militant groups.
The development of US military installations on the Afghan border mean that militants see Pakistan as a soft target and will concentrate here instead of Afghanistan this summer. Also, with Asif Zardari's recent statement on Kashmir, Kashmiri militant groups are not too pleased with the emerging post-election situation in Pakistan. In any case, we are gradually moving towards a new phase of this terrorist activity.
This is a calculated movement and highly sophisticated in identification of targets. The symbolism of the targets speaks to the intentions of the groups itselfs.
As to Chowk, I have idea on why Chowk did not post any obits on the dead generals.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 5, 2008 03:45 am
Re: majumder #1The jihadi activity has been present but beyond the settled (urban) areas but now seems to have crept into the cities. According to most, this activity will see an increase as it moves towards an eventual tipping off point. There is a planned offensive in the FATA this spring and the ground logistics for it have been nearly complete.
The loss of MMA government has removed the cover of patronage from the jihadi groups and ANP will not be different since it also believes in the old concept of a jirga to attain peace, the developmental works hoped by ANP might meet with a positive response from the local population and that might be a worrying prospect for the militant groups.
The development of US military installations on the Afghan border mean that militants see Pakistan as a soft target and will concentrate here instead of Afghanistan this summer. Also, with Asif Zardari's recent statement on Kashmir, Kashmiri militant groups are not too pleased with the emerging post-election situation in Pakistan. In any case, we are gradually moving towards a new phase of this terrorist activity.
This is a calculated movement and highly sophisticated in identification of targets. The symbolism of the targets speaks to the intentions of the groups itselfs.
As to Chowk, I have idea on why Chowk did not post any obits on the dead generals.
Ciao
Pakistan, a Different Country!
The post was in reference to your post #317 and #31 was a typo.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 1, 2008 10:24 pm
re: tahmed32The post was in reference to your post #317 and #31 was a typo.
Ciao
Pakistan, a Different Country!
Zardari's comments on putting aside Kashmir and improving trade between India and Pakistan was just what the doctor ordered. Hopefully, NS will give up the staid rhetoric on Kashmir and it is about time that Kashmir is put in the deep freeze for a very, very, very long time.
Ciao
Posted by
ferozk
Mar 1, 2008 10:22 pm
re: tahmed32 # 31Zardari's comments on putting aside Kashmir and improving trade between India and Pakistan was just what the doctor ordered. Hopefully, NS will give up the staid rhetoric on Kashmir and it is about time that Kashmir is put in the deep freeze for a very, very, very long time.
Ciao
- ferozk
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