Pervez Musharraf Declares Emergency in Pakistan The Mahabharata tells a story about how Guru Dronacharya, the teacher of the great warrior Arjuna, demonstrated Arjuna's superiority as a warrior to his jealous rivals, by hanging a fish from the branch of a tree and asking them to compete by shooting an arrow through its eye. As they drew their arrow however Dronacharya asked each of them what they saw, and they all described the surroundings of the fish in remarkable detail. But when Arjuna was asked, "What do you see?" his reply was, "The eye of a fish."

Like Arjuna, we must also separate the inessential from the essential. It may (or may not) be true that the media are freer under Musharraf, that you can use abusive language on state television, the alternatives to Musharraf are worse, that foreign investment may decline, that young professionals may have fewer good jobs in banking and IT, that the "mullahs" (or some other bete noir) will "take over" (whatever that means), that India may gain or lose from change, etc. But surely these are not the most important issues.

Surely, the key issue is will some people be above the law in Pakistan, or will the law (any law) be above all persons? In establishing the supremacy of law (any law) we must guard against allowing those who refuse to submit to the law to divide us by playing upon our fears and prejudices. A group of people who refuse to submit to the law, and use violence to terrorise the people when threatened, are terrorists; and terrorists must be resisted, even at the expense of being called terrorists ourselves.

Inside Story of Nawaz\'s Cooked Up Return to Pakistan Interesting story, but Richard Boucher is only a messenger. I missed a mention of his master, John Negroponte, a jewish American, dual citizen of Israel, and former US intelligence czar (21 April 2005 - 13 Feb 2007) who was pulling the strings mainly on behalf of Israel. Negroponte has a history of supporting repressive governments and turning a blind eye to human rights abuse and other lawless activities.
Negroponte has also worked closely with Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, while Muqrin was the Saudi intelligence chief (October 2005 - now), and Muqrin's presence in Pakistan was also on behalf of Israel-US. The Israeli hand is also evident from Benazir's recent meeting in the US with Zalmay Khalilzad (who hand picked Karzai and Nouri Al Malki) and even Israel's Ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman.
The chairman of the American Jewish Congress, Jack Rosen, who welcomed the meeting between Ms. Bhutto and Gillerman, has visited General Musharraf in Islamabad in the spring of 2005. And who can forget what Israel's then Foreign Minister, and now President, Shimon Peres said in November 2001: "I never thought that as a good Jewish boy, I will go to bed praying for the long life of the President of Pakistan."

The Driving Ideology Behind Al Qaeda In modern wars seizing minds (and if possible, winning hearts) is as if not more imortant than seizing lands and killing your enemies. CNN -- along with other prominent media outlets like Fox, New York Times, etc. -- is a major propaganda outlet of the US/Israeli war machine. Just as we would not have been wise in forming our opinion of Mahatama Gandhi (or for that matter, Adolf Hitler) by reading British or French military handouts, so we should be careful about forming an opinion of those America has chosen to identify as its enemies, and of their motives, from CNN reports.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 the US military-industrial complex faced the seemingly impossible task of justifying the enormous US ``defense`` budget in the absence of any credible enemy. It is a remarkable feat of propaganda that Americans today believe that one man and his friends and sympathisers -- holed up in caves in Afghanistan -- pose a bigger threat to the security of the United States (and perhaps Western civilization) than the rockets, inter-continental ballistic missiles, and other military hardware of the superpower that was the Soviet Union. Based on selling this ``threat`` to the American people US military expenditures that had stagnated for much of the 1990s rose from $230 billion in 2000 to $345 billion in 2004 (and may well be close to $460 billion today). It is this US defense establishment that is the source of almost everything we know about OBL and Al-Qaeda, whom no one had heard of 15 years ago.

As for ``taking the lifes of thousands of innocent civilians,`` the jury is still out on who carried out the 9/11 attacks. Certainly, OBL has consistently denied it:

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those Muslim countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia? Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Muslim countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Muslims. [Emphasis added.]

Two points are noteworthy in this quote: (1) OBL denies his involvement in 9/11; and (2) he gives the reasons why he is upset at America and Israel; and these reasons have nothing to do with Islam, and everything to do with the suffering of ``common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam`` (i.e. non-Muslim and Muslim victims of tyranny).

To return to the killing of civilians, in terms of body count, 2,996 persons are thought to have died on 9/11 (including 48 unconfirmed reports of the dead or missing). The ``driving force`` behind this murder was not Islam, as the US/UK/Israel have been at pains to argue, but a reaction to 50 years and more of atrocities against Palestinians (Muslims and Christians), Iraq (Muslims, paying for US/Israeli reprisals against the secular-socialist government of Saddam Hussain), and the ``indifference`` of Europe and the US to the rape, mass murder, and ``ethnic cleansing`` of Bosnian Muslims by Serb Christians, and Chechnyan Muslims by the Russians, as OBL has argued. The Americans, naturally, have effectively suppressed any mention of the obvious fact that when justice is denied to victims of tyranny, they resort to violence against perpretrators of violence; instead, they have insisted that Muslims kill because they are Muslim, not because they are victims -- thus, there is no point in talking to them or trying to alleviate their grievances, the only solution is to convert them (to Christianity, or ``moderation``) or to kill them.

By constrast to the 2,996 victims of 9/11, a study by New Hampshire professor Marc Herold says 3,767 civilians died just in the first 9 weeks of bombing of Afghanistan (Oct-Dec 2001); and based on reports from US, NATO and Afghan officials, 2,800 people have died so far this year (2006). In Iraq civilians reported killed by the US military intervention is estimated at 100,000 (mostly women and children) by the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet. This excludes the half million children who died as a result of US-backed UN sanctions imposed in the wake of the first Iraqi war (this is more than the number of children who died in Hiroshima). The ``driving force`` behind these murders is a combination of racism, imperial ambition, and Christian evangelism.

As for OBL`s denial of involvement in 9/11, it is consistent with the fact that even the FBI`s Most Wanted poster for Osama bin Laden does not directly connect him with the events of 9/11. When asked why this was so, Rex Tomb, chief of investigative publicity for the FBI is reported to have said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama Bin Laden`s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” As for the official version of the events of 9/11 a quick google search will yield any number of references that document numerous holes in the official story (google: ``9/11 theories``).

In these circumstances we may never know the truth about 9/11 and bin Laden. In terms of personality, however, the Wikipedia entry on him describes him as ``a soft-spoken, mild mannered man; and despite his rhetoric, he is said to be charming, polite, and respectful.`` This, and the overall Wikipedia entry, conveys quite a different picture from Osama Shahid`s entry on Osama bin Laden. As for an exploration of the roots of modern violence we should look not only at Islamic extremism, but at all other kinds of extremism -- including most especially racism, nationalism, and imperialism.

Sehra Correction: In #17 ``dhammah`` should be ``kasrah`` -- kasrah is zer, dhammah is pesh.

Sehra Re: # 2

As Naqshbandi points out the words sehr = dawn, and sihr = magic are commonly confused. As a footnote, it could be said that while the zabar on `h` in both sehr and sihr is commonly dropped, sehr may perhaps be better pronounced as sehar (better still, sahar - for reasons below); and sihr, as sihar.

Why do we say sehar? In Arabic there is a greater distance between the fathah (zabar) and dhammah (zer) sounds: almost an ah (short alif) and an ee (short chhoti yay). In Urdu, following Farsi, the zer becomes an ay sound (rather than the Arabic ee): thus while the Arabs would say ``li eelAfi Quraysh...`` most Persian/Urdu speakers would say ``lay ilAf-e Quraysh...``. Although the zabar is not pronounced too differently from the fatha, it is perhaps said with the mouth slightly less open. This is why in Urdu there is often very little difference in the way sahar and sihar are commonly pronounced.

I enjoyed the couplets too.