Noam Chomsky

November 8, 2009 at 2:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

Noam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar. A philosopher of language and political campaigner of towering academic reputation, who as good as invented modern linguistics, he is entertained by presidents, addresses the UN general assembly and commands a mass international audience. When he spoke in London last week, thousands of young people battled for tickets to attend his lectures, followed live on the internet across the globe, as the 80-year-old American linguist fielded questions from as far away as besieged Gaza.

But the bulk of the mainstream western media doesn’t seem to have noticed. His books sell in their hundreds of thousands, he is mobbed by students as a celebrity, but he is rarely reported or interviewed in the US outside radical journals and websites. The explanation, of course, isn’t hard to find. Chomsky is America’s most prominent critic of the US imperial role in the world, which he has used his erudition and standing to expose and excoriate since Vietnam.

Like the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spoke out against western-backed wars until his death at the age of 97, Chomsky has lent his academic prestige to a relentless campaign against his own country’s barbarities abroad – though in contrast to the aristocratic Russell, Chomsky is the child of working class Jewish refugees from Tsarist pogroms. Not surprisingly, he has been repaid with either denunciation or, far more typically, silence. Whereas a much slighter figure such as the Atlanticist French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy is lionised at home and abroad, Chomsky and his genuine popularity are ignored.

Indeed, his books have been banned from the US prison library in Guantanamo. You’d hardly need a clearer example of his model of how dissenting views are filtered out of the western media, set out in his 1990’s book Manufacturing Consent, than his own case. But as Chomsky is the first to point out, the marginalisation of opponents of western state policy is as nothing compared to the brutalities suffered by those who challenge states backed by the US and its allies in the Middle East.

We meet in a break between a schedule of lectures and talks that would be punishing for a man half his age. At the podium, Chomsky’s style is dry and low-key, as he ranges without pausing for breath from one region and historical conflict to another, always buttressed with a barrage of sources and quotations, often from US government archives and leaders themselves.

But in discussion he is warm and engaged, only hampered by slight deafness. He has only recently started travelling again, he explains, after a three-year hiatus while he was caring for his wife and fellow linguist, Carol, who died from cancer last December.

Despite their privilege, his concentrated exposure to the continuing injustices and exorbitant expense of the US health system has clearly left him angry. Public emergency rooms are “uncivilised, there is no health care”, he says, and the same kind of corporate interests that drive US foreign policy are also setting the limits of domestic social reform.

All three schemes now being considered for Barack Obama’s healthcare reform are “to the right of the public, which is two to one in favour of a public option. But the New York Times says that has no political support, by which they mean from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.” Now the American Petroleum Institute is determined to “follow the success of the insurance industry in killing off health reform,” Chomsky says, and do the same to hopes of genuine international action at next month’s Copenhagen climate change summit. Only the forms of power have changed since the foundation of the republic, he says, when James Madison insisted that the new state should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”.

Chomsky supported Obama’s election campaign in swing states, but regards his presidency as representing little more than a “shift back towards the centre” and a striking foreign policy continuity with George Bush’s second administration.

“The first Bush administration was way off the spectrum, America’s prestige sank to a historic low and the people who run the country didn’t like that.” But he is surprised so many people abroad, especially in the third world, are disappointed at how little Obama has changed. “His campaign rhetoric, hope and change, was entirely vacuous. There was no principled criticism of the Iraq war: he called it a strategic blunder. And Condoleezza Rice was black – does that mean she was sympathetic to third world problems?”

The veteran activist has described the US invasion of Afghanistan as “one of the most immoral acts in modern history”, which united the jihadist movement around Al Qaeda, sharply increased the level of terrorism and was “perfectly irrational – unless the security of the population is not the main priority”. Which, of course, Chomsky believes, it is not. “States are not moral agents,” he says, and believes that now that Obama is escalating the war, it has become even clearer that the occupation is about the credibility of Nato and US global power.

This is a recurrent theme in Chomsky’s thinking about the American empire. He argues that since government officials first formulated plans for a “grand area” strategy for US global domination in the early 1940s, successive administrations have been guided by a “godfather principle, straight out of the mafia: that defiance cannot be tolerated. It’s a major feature of state policy.” “Successful defiance” has to be punished, even where it damages business interests, as in the economic blockade of Cuba – in case “the contagion spreads”.

The gap between the interests of those who control American foreign policy and the public is also borne out, in Chomsky’s view, by the US’s unwavering support for Israel and “rejectionism” of the two-state solution effectively on offer for 30 years. That’s not because of the overweening power of the Israel lobby in the US, but because Israel is a strategic and commercial asset which underpins rather than undermines US domination of the Middle East. “Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the US in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.”

Half a century later, corporations like Lockheed Martin and Exxon Mobil are doing fine, he says: America’s one-sided role in the Middle East isn’t harming their interests, whatever risks it might bring for anyone else.

Chomsky is sometimes criticised on the left for encouraging pessimism or inaction by emphasising the overwhelming weight of US power – or for failing to connect his own activism with labour or social movements on the ground. He is certainly his own man, holds some idiosyncratic views (I was startled, for instance, to hear him say that Vietnam was a strategic victory for the US in southeast Asia, despite its humiliating 1975 withdrawal) and has drawn flak for defending freedom of speech for Holocaust deniers. He describes himself as an anarchist or libertarian socialist, but often sounds more like a radical liberal – which is perhaps why he enrages more middle-of-the-road American liberals who don’t appreciate their views being taken to the logical conclusion.

But for an octogenarian who has been active on the left since the 1930s, Chomsky sounds strikingly upbeat. He’s a keen supporter of the wave of progressive change that has swept South America in the past decade (“one of the liberal criticisms of Bush is that he didn’t pay enough attention to Latin America – it was the best thing that ever happened to Latin America”). He also believes there are now constraints on imperial power which didn’t exist in the past: “They couldn’t get away with the kind of chemical warfare and blanket B52 bombing that Kennedy did,” in the 1960s. He even has some qualified hopes for the internet as a way around the monopoly of the corporate-dominated media.

But what of the charge so often made that he’s an “anti-American” figure who can only see the crimes of his own government while ignoring the crimes of others around the world? “Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept,” he retorts. “The very notion is idiotic. Of course you don’t deny other crimes, but your primary moral responsibility is for your own actions, which you can do something about. It’s the same charge which was made in the Bible by King Ahab, the epitome of evil, when he demanded of the prophet Elijah: why are you a hater of Israel? He was identifying himself with society and criticism of the state with criticism of society.”

It’s a telling analogy. Chomsky is a studiedly modest man who would baulk at any such comparison. But in the Biblical tradition of the conflict between prophets and kings, there’s not the slightest doubt which side he represents

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Hinduism

November 8, 2009 at 2:19 pm · Filed under Religion ·Tagged ,

Can one tell a history of the Hindus through their stories? That is the challenge that American scholar and Sanskritist Wendy Doniger sets herself in this book, a culmination of many years of teaching and engagement with Hindu thought and writing. One thing those years have made clear to Doniger is the difficulty of defining Hinduism. The term itself lacks any roots within India—only after the seventeenth century can we find the first usage of the title ‘Hindupati’ or Lord of the Hindus—and there is no agreed doctrine, founder, or church-like institution with which it is identified. There is no Hindu canon. Nor do the Hindus themselves form a race, or inhabit a narrowly specified territory.

What does connect them and set them apart, Doniger argues, is the fact that their imaginations, and many of their social practices, are structured by a vast web of stories—texts that spin across and through the languages and cultures of the subcontinent. Doniger calls it ‘intertextuality’, the self-conscious reference to stories that came before, all the way back to the Rig Veda. And from there on, the Brahmanas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Shastras, Puranas, Tantric texts, the philosophical schools whose networks extended from the Tamil South up to Kashmir, the poetry and song of the Bhakti movements. There is no comparable output in any of the other great instances of the moral and religious imagination still available to us today.

Such texts can’t, however, be read as open windows on the societies that produced them. We don’t even know when some of the most fertile Hindu texts were composed. The Mahabharata and Ramayana, for instance, can only be dated to some time between 300 BC and AD 300 and 200 BC and AD 200 respectively. Still, Doniger is interested in the tensions between history (what exactly happened) and what societies tell themselves about what is happening. Her passion is the human imagination.

Doniger calls her book an ‘alternative history’ because she believes the other histories overemphasise the Brahminic wellsprings of Hindu stories. She argues, effectively, that the ‘high’ texts have quite often fed off low tales. She shows in particular how the voices of women, Dalits and tribals have energised many Brahminic scripts. So too, she makes us hear the voices of Buddhist and Jain thought, and later of Islam and Christianity, in dialogue with the Hindu texts. Just as those lower in society sought to Sanskritise and Kshatriyise, so the Sanskrit texts were permeable to what she terms ‘deshification’—the absorption of local, ‘small’ traditions.

She draws out the layered cruelties and conflicting natures of Hindu texts with verve, among them the story of Ekalavya, the expert tribal archer in the Mahabharata. He displays his skill by unleashing arrows into the mouth of a dog. Arjuna, outraged that someone of lower caste can do this and threatened by his prowess, tells Ekalavya’s guru, Drona, to put a stop to it. Drona requires Ekalavya to cut off his thumb, which he does. The story reveals and revels in the injustice of caste. But Doniger also cites other versions—for instance, a Jain text in which Arjuna is shown as cruel and vindictive. These constitute what Doniger calls the ‘intertextual’ argument and conversation of the Hindus—with the Mahabharata as a central clearing house for this vast network of disputation. One of her arresting comparisons likens the Mahabharata to ‘an ancient Wikipedia, to which anyone who knew Sanskrit…could add a bit here, a bit there’.

But the central insight driving her argument concerns the Hindu way of telling stories, a capacity to make not just art, but ethics, out of ambiguity. It’s a characteristic embodied in the Sanskrit figure of speech known as ‘slesha’. Slesha—literally ‘embrace’—holds together at once two different stories or images, allowing the listener or reader to switch between them. This is essentially a metaphoric capacity: to see something as something else. It also offers a way out of any impasse. As E.M. Forster put it, ‘Every Indian hole has at least two exits’.

In such a universe, meaning is never settled—and so, neither, is authority. Claimants to authority, from the gods themselves to the human scribes who record their doings to modern-day gurus who hold forth on the texts, climb up ladders but also slide down snake chutes. This fosters an internal pluralism: within the individual, the possibility of internal conflict between the demands of society’s moral code and a more universal ethics is never resolved or far from the surface. The recognition of ambiguous meaning also enables, though in more complex and sometimes attenuated ways, an attitude of pluralism towards other moral cosmologies and religions.

The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put this capacity for pluralism down to polytheism, a religious view that saw nature as distinguished not by order and beauty, but “by the various and contrary events of human life”. “So sociable is polytheism,” wrote Hume, “that the utmost fierceness and aversion which it meets with in an opposite religion is scarcely able to disgust it and keep it at a distance”. Now, this sociability is hardly one that would guarantee survival in a biological species; and polytheism has been a characteristic mainly of ancient religions, which rarely got beyond the lower branches of the Darwinian tree of human belief systems. Why, then, has Hinduism been able to survive, with some vigour, across such a span of human history? Some, of course, over the past century and more have feared that it possibly cannot—and have hoped to make Hinduism more mono in its theism.

It’s precisely the capacity of the Hindu imagination to keep telling and re-telling stories, rather than to box them up into a single authorised narrative or code, which has kept it in business—and enabled it to flourish within a society at once of great internal complexity and which has also regularly encountered tough external pressures.

Doniger takes an obvious joy in the stories she analyses, and one of many pleasures in the book is her consideration to animals in the Hindu world—as objects of sacrifice, consumption, devotion and protection, sometimes all at once. The idea of non-violence, ahimsa, is first developed in relation to the treatment of animals—a matter of public concern to rulers, who encouraged forms of casuistry to justify animal sacrifice. The cow, of course, figures. But Doniger more interestingly tracks the importance of dogs. The Mahabharata, she notes, begins and ends with stories about justice for dogs. She also brings the horse back to the centre of the Hindu imagination. From the great Ashvamedha sacrifice, described in shudder-inducing detail in the Vedas, to the raging hooves of Kalki, it is the horse—an animal not native to the subcontinent—that has fascinated Hindus.

But for all the delights in Doniger’s scholarship, there is a deeper question she might have done well to confront. How did the Hindu capacity for moral pluralism actually stand in relation to Indian society? Doniger notes and celebrates the presence in many texts of challenges to hierarchy and caste. She shows that caste was not invariably an intellectual or philosophical prison. It was possible to think oneself out of it, to criticise its injustice, mock its absurdities. But she doesn’t probe a central paradox: Why did such critical thoughts and stories gain such little purchase on the social order? The astonishing plurality of Hindu thought—its vast ocean of polydox beliefs—is only matched by its equally staggering orthopraxy, the unchanging rigidity of social patterns and practices. The old Hindus seem to have perfected ‘repressive tolerance’ well before Herbert Marcuse discovered it in California.

Similarly, Doniger sets out but does not fully unravel some of the central dilemmas embodied in texts like the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata poses the problem of the world’s moral irrationality. If the concept of Karma appears to suggest a rational moral economy—that my present action will have a future pay-off—this idea is constantly subverted in the Mahabharata, where one more throw of the dice again and again determines the moral horizon. “The Mahabharata sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind every victory,” Doniger writes, and so every moral choice and act is somehow the wrong choice. In fact, the notion of Karma so diffuses the location of merit and de-merit, makes them such mobile and transferable qualities that it is impossible to track causality. Sinners too, can go to heaven, despite their intentions—if they happen simply to be in contact with some salvaging ritualistic practice. What sort of moral universe can be sustained if there is such a weak relation between intention and consequence?

More disappointing in this important book is Doniger’s treatment of recent history. Kipling and Foster are her orienting stars in discussing the colonial period, and she conveys little sense of the intellectual ferment in India at the time—the many experiments with religion, politics, caste, and the different meanings that Hindu ‘reform’ came to hold. This leads directly to the book’s greatest weakness—the absence of any serious explanation of Hindutva. Doniger has a potent—indeed, quite felt—sense of its presence and projectile capacity, and has had occasion to reflect on it. But while she has roustabout fun at the expense of the adepts of Hindutva, she doesn’t stop to ask what it is about the potentialities within Hinduism, and what it is about the Hindus at this point in their history, that have conspired to breathe life into such versions of Hinduism. Her capacity for ‘double vision’, for empathy and criticism, here fails.

Doniger is an unstoppable teller of tales and a brilliant interpreter of them also. Yet, occasionally, one feels that, rather than delve deeper into the contradictions of history, she too, like her subjects stretching back many thousands of years, prefers just to tell one more story.

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Pakistan’s Allegiance to America has come home to Bite the Generals in the Asses

November 7, 2009 at 2:47 pm · Filed under Talibanization, Terrorism in Pakistan ·Tagged , ,

Waging War Upon Ourselves

By:  Peter Chamberlin

911It is easy to see why Pakistan has been chosen as the battleground of the century, but it is a real shame to us all that we have allowed our governments so much unsupervised freedom of action that they could get away with the things you are about to read about in the following article.  It is a difficult story to tell, since an accurate narrative requires the merging of multiple streams of information into one.  The story of the war in Wana is a tale of strange religions, secret alliances and governments that wage war upon themselves.

It would be nice to believe our governments, that they were actually doing their utmost to defend our lives and our freedom in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that they were really marshalling all of our forces and our most advanced military technology to defeat an army of rabid terrorists who were out to destroy us…but that in no way resembles the situation that we have created there on the ground.  The “war on terror” is a great psycho-drama, staged to convince us that the world is out to get us and we must accept living in a state of permanent war.

The first thing that must be understood is that Pakistan’s allegiance to America in the past has come home to bite the generals in the asses.  Running America’s militant/terrorist training camps, creating “Islamist” foot soldiers for the CIA to send all over the world, is suddenly a big deal.  The world has finally recognized that the training program is a vast criminal enterprise, which Musharraf and his generals are all set to take the fall for, except there at home in Pakistan, right in the middle of world war III.

The Pakistani people are the most abused of all the victims of CIA/ISI terror.  The Army is busy there staging a fake terror war, pretending to be fighting the TTP, in a modern remake of a farcical drama that last played in the Roman Coliseum.  Thousands of Pakistani civilians and hundreds of soldiers and policemen have been sacrificed to convince the world that terrorists are waging war indiscriminately across FATA and the NWFP, even though their every action seems calculated to justify an American invasion.

The good people of Pakistan are greatly troubled, trying to understand the situation that they have been trapped in.  Even as the government relocates millions of its citizens to fight entrenched terrorists who live among them, the news of the day (attack on GHQ) once again links “ex-officers” of the Army and ISI with terror attacks.  Other news reports that hit men in sectarian attacks carried ISI identification.  What could possibly motivate some military and government officials to participate in a plan to bring war to Pakistan?

If the evidence really proves military involvement in actual terrorism in the past and in the present, then it becomes a question of motive—Why would dedicated military men, who have taken oaths to serve and protect the Nation, kill innocent Pakistanis, or worse, their fellow officers?   It seems that there could be only three possible answers to this question—money, insanity, or patriotism.

Patriotism stands-out as the most likely answer, since military minds see duty differently than civilian folks.   It is conceivable that perhaps some Army or ISI guys could have been convinced that certain people were a threat to national security and had to be eliminated.  This could explain how the following names of so many officers could be linked to confirmed terrorists:

Mr Aqeel , Aliases Dr Usman, who was named in Daniel Pearl’s murder and the GHQ  attack   Amjad Farooqi namesake of the (TTP) umbrella group which attacked GHQ                           

Maj. Gen. Zaheer ul Islam Abbasi, who led an attempted coup against Benazir Bhutto, or former SSG commando Ilyas Kashmiri who alleged killed SSG Gen. Faisal Alvi.                            

Khalid Khwaja, retired air force officer who led Daniel Pearl to Omar Sheikh                      

dozens of active-duty military officers.… arrested for helping Amjad Farooqi try to kill Musharraf.

People in Pakistan have been exposed to this sort of news for many years, among them, there has been  little doubt that the Army has always served American interests and the Army has always trained and used militants as part of this service.  The terrorism in Pakistan, mostly the sectarian terrorism, has been committed by government-trained militants/terrorists, so much so that the people blame the Army for every bomb in a mosque.

The “militants” who have been trained by the professionals who had joined radical outfits are really no different than those who have trained them—both are radical extremists who are ready to kill or die for their country or for their religion.  As long as the terror that they have unleashed upon their neighbors and countrymen was in the name of America, Pakistan, or Islam, then the terror was for a “just” cause.  This kind of thinking causes military men like ISI Directorate chief Lieutenant-General Pasha to call men like Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah “true patriots,” for offering to fight India, just like Reagan called the contras “freedom fighters.”

There is a theory making the rounds and gaining ground in Pakistan that tries to explain how the military/militant nexus that was openly nurtured to fight in Kashmir was applied covertly to the situation in FATA and NWFP.  That theory attempts to explain how the Army could allow American and British intelligence agencies to secretly use India’s RAW and the Mossad to manipulate certain adherents of a local religious cult, the Ahmadiyya (a schism from Sunni Islam), to create a new series of schisms within Pakistani society.  

The theory seems to gain some validity due to certain facts that apply to many members of the cult—many are embedded within the Pakistani officer corps, a lot of them hold high positions in the government bureaucracy and their movement was founded in what is today the epicenter of sectarian terror, around the town of Jhang.

The basic reality of everyday life for Ahmadis within Pakistan makes them ideal candidates for recruits in a secret army, especially if the mostly poor Ahmadis are paid exceptionally well—because of religious persecution, they have always had to hide their religious identities; they advocate reunification with India; they prefer British rule over the status quo in Pakistan.  If the world was being reordered by the Americans and British in a manner that would reunite India or bring all the Muslim people in Pakistan under the control of one organization that was America-friendly, perhaps also leading to Indian reunification, then surely the Ahmadi and some of their leaders could be counted upon to cooperate in bringing the plan about.

The Pakistani Taliban are the key to the entire psyop.  Understanding who they actually are and what master they really serve is vital to understanding what is going down in the homeland of the “Islamic bomb.”

The Tehreek Taliban emerged from S. Punjab, spreading from there to S. Waziristan.  Contrary to popular deceptions, they are an “anti-Taliban” force.  Like everything else in Pakistan, they were meant to play a “double-game,” pretending to be part of the real Pashtun Afghan Taliban, while waging war in secret upon them.  Musharraf and his generals created this “Taliban” force that was not really Taliban, by utilizing “Islamists,” who were not really Muslims.  They were created to serve as a safe “loyal opposition,” who pretended to wage a fake war of terror for American audiences, without risking a fight with real rogue terror groups.  The plan was to use military men to lead the criminal gangs of real revolutionaries and ordinary rabble,

The Tehreek Taliban are not really “Taliban,” they are more accurately described as a      counter-Taliban force, an “anti-Taliban.”  Like all the real Taliban, they follow a counterfeit Saudi Wahabi version of Islam.  

Unlike the real Afghan Taliban, their warped Wahabi Islam has been blended with another, even more radical “Islam” from India, Deobandi Islam.  The result is the most sectarian bloodthirsty form of Sunni Islam yet devised, to them, anyone who doesn’t follow this perverse Wahabi-Deobandi fusion, just like them, is “Kfir,” the unbelievers.  We are discussing the religious faith of people like Baitullah and Hakeemullah Mehsud, the same people who are now waging war in Pakistan.

The “Islamists” of FATA and NWFP wage sectarian war against all unbelievers in their areas of control, under the direction of ISI controllers.  They also provide targets for American drones, using spies under ISI control to plant tracker chips on expendable “militants.”  Whenever militant leaders, or criminal gangs working under their direction, get out of control, military action takes them out.

In addition to this ISI-controlled war in FATA and NWFP, there is another rogue element that is staging terrorist attacks outside of Army control, an American/British/Israeli/Indian force within the anti-Taliban themselves.  The killers in this super-secret group are even worse bloodthirsty and hate-driven zealots than the Mehsuds.  Pakistani writers refer to them as the “Punjabi Taliban,” because that is where they first sprang-up.

Rise of Punjabi Taliban

“Today the bulk of attacks in heartland Pakistan are carried out by Pakistanis from Punjab or Sindh, or by Pashtun fighters assisted by heartland Pakistanis,” says Rohan Gunaratne, author of Inside Al Qaeda.

“Punjab-based groups… were initially the creatures of the Inter-Services Intelligence, and had a Kashmir focus,” says Teresita Schaffer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The change began when President Pervez Musharraf outlawed two Punjabi militant groups (2002) —Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) — because of outrage over their attacks on Shias.

Many Jhangvi fighters then moved to the NWFP.

“Jhangvi is now the eyes, ears and operational arm of Al Qaeda and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan [based in Waziristan],” says Gunaratne. “It is hard to distinguish between the three.”

The task of the Punjabi Taliban is to radicalize the TTP even more.

All the leaders in the Tehreek Taliban movement have been educated in Deobandi madrassas, where they studied under Muftis who had been steeped in the sectarian hatred of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, the founder of the mother of all terror outfits in Pakistan, Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP).  All Tehreek Taliban leaders came from SSP’s militant wing, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), or one of its sub-groups.

To counter the activities of the Shia organisation, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with the blessings of the USA, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, encouraged a group of Deobandi Muslim migrants (Mohajirs) from the districts of what constitute the Indian Punjab and Haryana of today to counter the activities of the TNFJ [Shia].  Thus came into being the Ajuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (since re-named as the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan–SSP) on September 6,1984, under the leadership of Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, a semi-educated Khateeb who had his religious education in Darul Uloom, Kabirwala, and the Khairul madrasa of Multan in Pakistani Punjab.

There is a river of terror running through the heart of Pakistan, flowing down every highway, road and goat path.  Wherever progress has gone, the terror has followed, carried by rabble-rousing mullahs/muftis, from the central reservoir of hatred in the town of Jhang, in southern Punjab.  It is more sickening than it is ironic that the architects of the reservoir sit in Washington and criticize the Pakistani engineers for following their blueprint too precisely.

All the sectarian terror in Pakistan flows from this reservoir of hatred dug deep in the town of Jhang, in the southern Punjab Region.  Of all the regions of Pakistan, the ISI knew that only Jhang could produce a common mindset that would both feed the sectarian hatred and convince otherwise sane individuals to join the effort to defend Pakistan by waging war within it.

Since its inception the SSP has relied on a core constituency of Sunni peasantry who felt exploited by Shi’a landlords and aristocrats.  The Ahmadi are a merchant class who have lived under the thumb of Shia since first coming to Pakistan.

In Jhang a center of sectarian hatred and terror already existed, embraced by an ignored hidden cult, or schism within Sunni Islam, known as Ahmadiyya, or “Qadiani.”  The record clearly documents a movement of anti-Shia hatred from Punjab, to Peshawar, to S. Waziristan, to Khyber, and beyond.  There is no way to document how many of the terrorists that infiltrated NWFP and FATA were Qadians, but we know for certain that they were all Sipah/Lashkar Jhangvi.

Basically, Ahmadiyya may be the most glorified personality cult of all time, based on the ego of one man who thought that he could convert the religions of the world by the power of his reasoning skills.  The end product was a type of pseudo-Islamic intellectualism which could be described as a “Hindu-ized” version of Islam, misrepresenting itself as all things to all believers, clearly an abomination to all true Muslims.

The Ahmadiyya believe that their founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian (1835-1908) was the Mahdi of Islam, the last incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu and the embodiment of the Christian Messiah.  The followers of Ahmad settled on 1034 acres of land near Jhang in Punjab.

It is no coincidence that Jhang is the epicenter of sectarian terrorism in Pakistan, since it is also home to both the outlawed Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP) and its most evil stepchild, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

Jhang had all the ingredients and Gen. Musharraf had all the proper credentials to go forward with the CIA plan to create an anti-Taliban force there, from an assortment of disillusioned Ahmadis and others from the mohajir community, who were fed-up with life’s burdens.  Gen. Musharraf, a mohajir general, was supposedly a Berelvi-Sunni, but many Pakistanis claim that he is a secret Ahmadi.   

The evidence reveals that in 2003, the dictator sought the help of MQM leader, Altaf Hussein, who is known as a willing servant of American and British interests, to use MQM fanatics to manipulate the local mohajir community as part of the plan.

2003 was a pivotal year in the plan, as US forces withdrew most of their assets from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in March.  Bush clearly just dumped the entire operation into Musharraf’s lap.  Musharraf was expected to “give pursuit” to the “al Qaida” militants who had taken refuge in Waziristan.  This was never the real mission, the alleged “mission” was only another part of the psyop; Musharraf’s job was to stall.   He was to wage a pretend war to buy time for American forces to eliminate Saddam Hussein.  For this, he needed a new “Taliban” force, one to fight inside Pakistan.

The moment that Bush passed Afghanistan to Musharraf, he began to call together the old Taliban alliance, under Mullah Omar.  After being clearly routed in Afghanistan by American bombers and Northern alliance troops (who were mostly Shia), Omar needed a new army of zealous militants, fueled with a new desire to wage jihad against American and Afghan forces.

He needed a Pashtun publicity campaign that would follow the American model of motivational speakers, on “lecture circuits,” conducted by brave inspiring role models, such as Mullah Dadullah, to persuade young Pashtun men to go to war.  For this task, nothing seemed to work better than using veteran Afghan Taliban, who were missing limbs, or eyes, such as the one-legged Mullah. 

He was brought into S. Waziristan, along with one-legged Abdullah Mehsud, who was probably released from Guantanamo just for this reason.  After sufficient CIA brainwashing, he was released into Afghanistan, where he inspired an army of Uzbek fighters of IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) to follow him into S. Waziristan. 

 These Uzbeks were reported in the media as “al Qaida,” as they terrorized the land and ran training camps around Wana, undoubtedly under direct ISI control.

In 2003, at the instance of the ISI, Mulla Omar, the Amir of the Taliban, reconstituted the Taliban army to launch a new jihad in Afghanistan—this time against the Western forces. He asked Mulla Dadullah, who continued to enjoy the confidence of the ISI, to act as the chief military commander of the new Taliban army, which consisted of experienced jihadi fighters of the pre-October 7, 2001, vintage as well as new recruits from the madrasas and Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan.

The new Taliban army was trained by the ISI and started operating in the Pashtun majority areas of Southern and Eastern Afghanistan from sanctuaries in Balochistan and in the Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

In its issue of October, 2003, the “Newsline”, the reliable and well-informed monthly of Karachi, gave the following account of the re-constitution of the Neo Taliban army and the role of Dadullah in it:

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of youths from religious schools across Pakistan  have joined the ranks of Taliban cadres that have regrouped in Afghanistan in the last few months. According to one estimate, at least 5,000 youths including former Taliban soldiers who went underground after the fall of their regime in December 2001, and students from religious seminaries from Balochistan, have joined their compatriots in Afghanistan. Many of these young men are known in the ranks as ’sarbaz’ (those who have given their lives to the cause and readily sacrifice them in suicide missions). Regrouped, reorganised and rearmed, these warriors are now all set to launch a new guerrilla war for as long as it takes to expel what they call the ‘infidel forces’ from Afghanistan.

From this moment on, Pakistani proxies were at war with American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.  The creation of the anti-Taliban, the TTP, with the help of the British (See:  Unraveling the Anti-Pakistan Psyop), effectively acknowledged this fact and began to pit an American backed Pakistani proxy force, against Pakistan. 

 If we were in a real war and not just a massive dramatic production, then this would have been a serious matter.  As it was, it was just more geo-strategic chess, or “the great game,” as they like to call it on the sub-continent.

The forces organized under Dadullah had to fight a war within Pakistan that was totally convincing, one that was so intense that it would convince the world community that outside intervention (meaning: American intervention) was absolutely required to save Pakistan from itself.  The real mission required many more terrorists, who were sufficiently vicious to kill religious opponents without hesitation.  This required at least two more side psyops, both staged in areas that had already been marked by past sectarian conflicts—Karachi and Khyber.

In Karachi, Musharraf agitated the MQM supporters of Altaf Hussein.  A fake “ultimatum,” allegedly from an unknown militant group, was issued around Peshawar, threatening to wipe-out all Ahmadis who refused to either convert or leave Pakistan. 

The fear campaign had begun.  MQM agitators began recruiting for a “Sunni Tehreek,” to take the war to Pashtun militants.  An open deal with Musharraf was struck, which effectively closed-down a previous ISI-created anti-MQM faction, the MQM-Haqaqi, begun to undermine Altaf Hussain’s group, the MQM-H, the most violent of all the mohajir factions.   It was driven underground and group leader Amir Khan was arrested (June 29), effectively making thousands of potential recruits available from his organization for ISI missions.

On May 22, Ahmadi leaders met in Ranpur to make plans for dealing with the threat from the mullahs.  A wave of killing was unleashed upon the Ahmadi community, beginning in Karachi.  On July 14, Shia leader Allama Hassan Turabi was assassinated by a suicide bomber in front of his home in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal section of Karachi.

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How to Control Talibanization in Pakistan

November 7, 2009 at 2:36 pm · Filed under Talibanization, Terrorism in Pakistan ·Tagged ,

Pakistan: The Militant Jihadi Challenge

Asia Report N°164

13 March 2009

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The recent upsurge of jihadi violence in Punjab, the NWFP, the FATA and Quetta demonstrates the threat extremist Sunni-Deobandi groups pose to the Pakistani citizen and state. These radical Sunni groups are simultaneously fighting internal sectarian jihads, regional jihads in Afghanistan and India and a global jihad against the West. While significant domestic and international attention and resources are understandably devoted to containing Islamist militancy in the tribal belt, that the Pakistani Taliban is an outgrowth of radical Sunni networks in the country’s political heartland is too often neglected.

A far more concerted effort against Punjab-based Sunni extremist groups is essential to curb the spread of extremism that threatens regional peace and stability. As the international community works with Pakistan to rein in extremist groups, it should also support the democratic transition, in particular by reallocating aid to strengthening civilian law enforcement.

The Pakistani Taliban, which increasingly controls large swathes of FATA and parts of NWFP, comprises a number of militant groups loosely united under the Deobandi Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that have attacked not just state and Western targets, but Shias as well. Their expanding influence is due to support from long-established Sunni extremist networks, based primarily in Punjab, which have served as the army’s jihadi proxies in Afghanistan and India since the 1980s.

Punjab-based radical Deobandi groups like the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and its offshoot Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ) provide weapons, recruits, finances and other resources to Pakistani Taliban groups, and have been responsible for planning many of the attacks attributed to FATA-based militants. The SSP and LJ are also al-Qaeda’s principal allies in the region. Other extremist groups ostensibly focused on the jihad in Kashmir, such as the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, are also signatories to al-Qaeda’s global jihad against the West, and have been active in local, regional and international jihads. Their continued patronage by the military, and their ability to hijack major policy areas, including Pakistan’s relations with India, Afghanistan and the international community, impede the civilian government’s ongoing efforts to consolidate control over governance and pursue peace with its neighbours.

The actions of the PPP-led federal government, and the Punjab government, led until recently by Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, against Punjab-based jihadi groups for their role in November’s attack in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, are a step in the right direction. They must now be followed up by consolidating the evidence and presenting it in court. The two main parties, however, risk reversing the progress they have made by resorting to the confrontational politics of the past.

On 25 February 2009, the Supreme Court decided to uphold a ban, based on politically motivated cases dating back to Musharraf’s military rule, on Nawaz Sharif and his brother, Shahbaz, Punjab’s chief minister, from electoral politics. President Zardari’s subsequent imposition of governor’s rule in Punjab aggravated a political stalemate between the two main parties.

The aftermath of the Mumbai attack presents an opening to reshape Pakistan’s response to terrorism, which should rely not on the application of indiscriminate force, including military action and arbitrary detentions, but on police investigations, arrests, fair trials and convictions. This must be civilian-led to be effective.

Despite earlier successes against extremist groups, civilian law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including the Federal Investigation Agency, the provincial Criminal Investigation Departments, and the Intelligence Bureau, lack the resources and the authority to meet their potential.

The military and its powerful ISI still dominate – and hamper – counter-terrorism efforts.

The PPP government cannot afford to enforce the law only in response to a terrorist attack or external pressure. Proactive enforcement will be vital to containing religious militancy, which has reached critical levels; this includes checks on the proliferation of weapons and the growth of of private militias, which contravene the constitution; prosecution of hate speech, the spread of extremist literature and exhortations to jihad; greater accountability of and actions against jihadi madrasas and mosques; and ultimately converting information into evidence that holds up in court.

It is not too late to reverse the tide of extremism, provided the government immediately adopts and implements a zero tolerance policy towards all forms of religious militancy.

Unfortunately, on 16 February 2009, NWFP’s Awami National Party (ANP)-led government made a peace deal, devised by the military, with the Swat-based Sunni extremist Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), a militant group allied to the Taliban. The government agreed to impose Sharia (Islamic law) in NWFP’s Malakand region, with religious courts deciding all cases after 16 February 2009; dismantle all security checkpoints and require any military movements to be pre-approved by the TNSM; and release captured militants, including those responsible for such acts of violence as public executions and rape. In return, the militants pledged to end their armed campaign. This accord, an even greater capitulation to the militants than earlier deals by the military regime in FATA, entrenched Taliban rule and al-Qaeda influence in the area; made peace more elusive; and essentially reversed the gains made by the transition to democracy and the defeat of the military-supported religious right-wing parties in NWFP in the February 2008 elections.

The international response to the Swat deal was mixed, with several key leaders, including U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, viewing it as an acceptable compromise. Acknowledging the failure of unconditionally supporting the Pakistani military, the international community, particularly the U.S., must reverse course and help strengthen civilian control over all areas of governance, including counter-terrorism, and the capacity of the federal government to override the military’s appeasement policies in FATA and NWFP, replacing them with policies that pursue long-term political, economic and social development.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the Government of Pakistan:

1. Acknowledge that a credible crackdown on jihadi militants will ultimately require convictions in fair trials and take steps to:

a) vest significantly greater authority in civilian law enforcement agencies, including access to mobile phone records and other data, without having to obtain approval from the military and the ISI;

b) establish through an act of parliament a clear hierarchy of civilian intelligence agencies, including the FIA, the provincial Criminal Investigation Departments and the Intelligence Bureau (IB), with the IB as the primary authority in anti-terrorism investigations;

c) strengthen links between law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to build strong cases in court against religious extremists;

d) enhance the capacity of federal and provincial civilian law enforcement agencies, with a particular focus on forensics capabilities and crime scene investigations; establish national and provincial crime labs with modern equipment and internationally trained scientists, under control of the federal interior ministry and provincial home departments;

e) amend the Criminal Procedure Act to establish a witness protection program, and ensure the highest level of security for anyone agreeing to provide valuable testimony against extremists; and

f) enhance the role and guarantee the autonomy of Community Police Liaison Committees to enlist the public in the fight against militancy.

2. Take robust action against jihadi militant groups and their madrasa networks, including:

a) disbanding private militias, pursuant to Article 256 of the constitution;

b) disrupting communications and supply lines, and closing base camps of jihadi groups in the tribal belt and the political heartland of Punjab; and

c) enhancing oversight over the madrasa sector, including finances and enrolment, and conducting regular inquiries into the sector by provincial authorities, as recently conducted by the Punjab government, with a view to:

i. identifying seminaries with clear links to jihadi groups, closing them and taking action against their clerics and, where appropriate, students;

ii. keeping any seminaries suspected of links with jihadi groups under close surveillance;

iii. taking legal action where seminaries encroach on state or private land; and

iv. ensuring that accommodation and facilities meet proper safety and building standards.

3. Prosecute anyone encouraging or glorifying violence and jihad, including through hate speech against religious and sectarian minorities, and the spread of jihadi literature. 4. Acknowledge that political reform is integral to stabilising FATA and NWFP by:

a) invoking Article 8 of the constitution that voids any customs inconsistent with constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights, refusing to sign the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation Order 2009 for the imposition of Sharia (Islamic law) in the Malakand region, and refrain from entering into similar peace deals with religious militants elsewhere;

b) carrying through on its commitment to repeal the Frontier Crimes Regulations (1901), extending the writ of the state, the rule of law, including the courts and police, and ensuring FATA’s representation in the state legislature; c) integrating FATA into the federal framework by incorporating it into the NWFP, with the seven agencies falling under the executive control of the province and jurisdiction of the regular provincial and national court system and with representation in the provincial assembly;

d) extending the Political Parties Act to FATA, thus removing restrictions on political parties, and introducing party-based elections for the provincial and national legislatures; e) refraining from arming and supporting any insurgent group or tribal militia, and preventing the army from doing the same; and

f) relying on civilian law enforcement and intelligence as the primary tool to deal with extremism in FATA, limiting the army’s role to its proper task of defending the country’s borders.

5. Repeal all religious laws that discriminate on the basis of religion, sect and gender. 6. Resolve the political crisis between the PPP and the PML-N by ending governor’s rule and respecting the PML-N’s elected mandate in Punjab, and agreeing on a political and legal solution to allow for Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif to participate in electoral politics, either through an act of parliament, or an executive order.

7. Carry through on its commitment to repeal the 17th Amendment to the constitution, and any constitutional provisions, executive orders and laws that contravene the principles of parliamentary democracy.

To the International Community, in particular the U.S. and the European Union:

8. Provide financial and logistic support to civilian law enforcement agencies to expand their capacity, including in forensics and crime scene investigations, through provision of modern equipment and training of Pakistani scientists.

9. Condition military assistance on demonstrable steps by the Pakistani armed forces to support civilian efforts in preventing the borderlands from being used by al-Qaeda, Afghan insurgents and Pakistani extremists to launch attacks within Pakistan and from Pakistani territory to its region and beyond; if the Pakistani military does not respond positively, as a last resort, consider targeted and incremental sanctions, including travel and visa bans and the freezing of financial assets of key military leaders and military-controlled intelligence agencies.

10. Expand assistance to the hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the conflict in FATA and Swat.

Islamabad/Brussels, 13 March 2009 Source : http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=6010&l=1

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Insemination Aided by Position

November 6, 2009 at 10:24 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

Lie Back, No Need to Think

Related Topics: Fertility, parenting, women, Fertility, infertility, intrauterine insemination, iui, pregnancy

0dThe (possibly apocryphal) advice given to Victorian women who weren’t fond of sex to “lie back and think of England,” may actually be useful to increase the odds of conception, at least following intra-uterine insemination (IUI).

A new study found that 27% of women who were advised to lie still for 15 minutes after insemination became pregnant and had a successful birth—compared to just 18% of those who were told to get up and move around immediately after the procedure.

The study—which looked at 391 women who were randomized to either lie down or get up immediately afterwards—was published in the most recent edition of the British Medical Journal. During the IUI procedure, the woman lies on her back while sperm is introduced through the cervix into the womb. It typically takes only a few minutes and usually involves no more discomfort than a pap smear.

IUI can be done either “naturally” without advance administration of hormonal medications and timed to the woman’s ovulation—or it may involve hormones to stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs. Natural cycles carry no extra risk of multiple births—but medicated cycles frequently result in twins or higher numbers of multiples (Associated risks were covered by the New York Times in a sobering recent article here, which unfortunately failed to note that there is no increased risk for natural cycles).

Common sense would suggest that lying still after sex when trying to conceive might allow gravity to help the sperm reach the egg—but there has been only one small prior study suggesting that lying still after IUI does actually aid conception. Although there’s no data about whether this helps when trying to conceive the old-fashioned way– and none about whether what the woman thinks about matters– this suggests that 15 minutes spent lounging afterwards couldn’t hurt.

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Roti More Expensive than a SMS

November 6, 2009 at 10:21 am · Filed under Economy, Pakistan Under PM Gillani ·Tagged

SMS  and  ROTI  

2003
SMS Roti
Rs.   6.00 Rs.   2.00
   
2004
SMS Roti
Rs.   5.00 Rs.  2.50
   
2005
SMS Roti
Rs.   2.00 Rs.   3.00
   
2008
SMS Roti
Rs.   0.23  Rs.   5.00
   
2009
SMS Roti
Rs.   0.010  Rs.   7.00

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Child Prostitution Rampant on Brazilian Highways

November 6, 2009 at 9:46 am · Filed under Prostitution ·Tagged

girl3At least 1,819 places on Brazilian highways have been identified by the police where minor girls and teens offer sex to truck drivers.

The report based on a police study added that every 26.7 km stretch along these highways have spots where minors offer sex for as little as 2 reais ($1.10).

A map prepared with the help of the ILO shows the likely places for child prostitution. It includes all the petrol pumps, bars, restaurants and night spots along the highways. Many minors have been caught offering sex at these spots.

The police are now planning to use this study towards increasing their oversight, but the results will not be made public.

‘We believed that identifying the spots would stop crimes from being committed, but we found that it only causes a migration to other places,’ the president of the Human Rights Commission of the Federal Highway Police in Sao Paulo, Waldiwilson dos Santos, said.
‘Now we’re going to maintain secrecy so as not to undermine our operations,’ he said.

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Latest Media Curbs After the Waziristan Operation

November 6, 2009 at 9:38 am · Filed under Army's Involvement, Pakistan Under PM Gillani ·Tagged , , ,

!cid_9.2596823115@web56604.mail.re3The Pakistan army has imposed censorship by various means on the independent news coming out of the areas where the army is conducting operations against militants. Officers of the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), are reported to have been calling media officials to their offices and telling them to stop covering the news independently and to use only the ISPR press notes or information from the daily briefings of the ISPR.

Prior to the start of the South Waziristan operation (Oct 17),
representatives from the print and electronic media and also
journalists were reportedly asked by the army not to publish or air
independent views about the operation for fear that it will provide
assistance to the militants.

The journalists are only allowed to remain at Dera Ismail Khan, where persons displaced by the military operations are arriving for
aid.

During the normal course of the day journalists are prevented
from entering operational areas and the restrictions are rigidly
applied.

It is only when the military is successful in some phase of
the operation that they allow media personnel to cover that specific situation. Since the operation started, the military has taken selected journalists on helicopter tours to the affected areas on only two occasions. The journalists have been taken from Islamabad, and from Peshawar. However, they were not allowed to move about freely or without supervision.

The BBC Urdu service, a popular radio programme in the country, is disliked by the army as it broadcasts interviews through telephone calls directly from the military operation zones. In the effort to stop the BBC Urdu programmes, particularly its Sairbeen programme, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) was used to stop the many FM radio stations who broadcast the BBC Urdu news on the hour, 16 hours a day. Those stations are: FM 103, FM106.2, FM 107, FM Apna, FM Ninety-One, FM Okara, FM Highway and FM Gujrat and Islamabad.
On the other hand the BBC Urdu broadcast was not stopped in Pakistani held Kashmir.

The BBC Urdu news has been broadcasting from different FM channels, under agreement with the BBC Broadcasting house for two years but PEMRA has turned a blind eye to their broadcasts. Since the start of the military operation in South Waziristan, however, PEMRA has been reportedly asked to put pressure on the broadcasting houses that relay the BBC Urdu news.

The ISPR has increased its pressure on the media and in the latest
development an official of the BBC Pakistan was called to the ISPR
head office, Islamabad on November 2, and asked not to
broadcast the interviews or statements of the militants as it would
create misunderstanding among the people of Pakistan. The officer who spoke to the BBC official asked him why Hakim Ullah Mehsood (the head of the Taliban, Pakistan) spoke directly to the BBC over the telephone. Hakeem Ullah Mehsood, the army declared, is a notorious terrorist. The previous week, a BBC Pakistan reporter stationed at Peshawar, was telephoned by an army officer and told not to interview the residents of the areas affected by the military operation and also not to entertain the Taliban in any way. On another occasion some journalists were told that human rights violations take second place to the importance of the army’s action against the militants and their activities.

According to a responsible authority at the BBC Pakistan office, the
Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Salman Basheer, spoke to the British High Commissioner at Islamabad on November 2, and asked him to pressurise the BBC Urdu news not to issue interviews of the terrorists and residents of the affected areas. This message was duly conveyed to the BBC Pakistan.

PEMRA has ordered some radio stations not to broadcast BBC Urdu-language news programmes, while Parliament, (at the same time), is preparing to ratify drastic censorship dating from the era of General Musharraf.

The parliamentary information committee chaired by an MP from the ruling PPP on 29 October, decided that legal provisions on electronic media set out in November 2007, should be incorporated into the PEMRA act. These articles ban TV stations
from broadcasting footage that could “disturb the public order”
including statements from extremist groups, or those ridiculing or
defaming the head of state, the armed forces or the judicial system.
Programme presenters are targeted in clause 6 that bans them from putting out any news “prejudicial to Pakistan’s ideology” and
state sovereignty.

These draconian provisions were revoked by the former information minister, Sherry Rehman, after the PPP was returned to power. This decision, which had been supported by some opposition parties, was linked to growing criticism of government management of public affairs.

The committee also planned to set up councils in the four provinces and the federal capital to accept complaints from citizens about media content.

The situation of undeclared censorship of the media by the Army and its organisations is alarming for the growth of healthy
journalism in the country. The actions of military and paramilitary
organisations provide a good space for the militant groups and other political groups to use force against the media which would be harmful for the development of democracy and democratic institutions. In the presence of civilian rule and civilian laws, the security agencies do not have any authority to influence the free working of the media.

According to all international norms and standards and the
Constitution of Pakistan access to information is the right of the
people and people cannot be denied this fundamental right.

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Demands of Balochistan

November 5, 2009 at 12:22 pm · Filed under Balochistan ·Tagged

UT0102315Immediate and complete cessation of military and paramilitary actions in all parts of Balochistan

A situation akin to 1971 is brewing in Balochistan.

Radical nationalists advocating a separate state of Balochistan are steadily gaining popularity at the expense of those who continue to look for a solution within the federal framework.

The reasons for this surge in separatism are quite apparent. The
people of Balochistan have a long list of grievances, and next to none have been addressed over the last 60 years. Instead of negotiations and redressing the wrongs, successive Pakistani governments have resorted to brute force in the form of five military operations starting as early as 1948.

The 1973 constitution provided for complete provincial autonomy within ten years. To date, this remains a meaningless promise on paper.

In fact, Balochistan continues to be ruled as a colony, its resources
benefiting the federal government and dominant provinces. Grueling poverty and deprivation defines much of the province. 88% of the population of Balochistan is under the poverty line. Balochistan has the lowest literacy rate, the lowest school enrollment ratio, the lowest educational attainment index, and the lowest health index relative to the other provinces. 78% of the population has no access to electricity, and 79% has no access to natural gas. The federal government’s presence is made apparent not through public welfare activities, but through violence and aggression. A large number of military and paramilitary troops (upwards of 37,000) have been stationed in different parts of the province and state-perpetrated violence has become a common feature of the political landscape of Balochistan. Disappearance of political activists and extrajudicial killings has become all too common. It is stating the obvious that such a situation has given rise to alienation, extreme resentment, and a feeling of enslavement to the Pakistani state.

As the injustices, crimes, rapes and genocide of 1971 unfolded before our eyes, too many Pakistanis were silent.

Today, as Balochistan treads down the same path, we are again silent. We are, as were then, beneficiaries of the economic exploitation. Sui gas is available in our homes but there is none in most of Balochistan. Revenues collected from goods and services originating in Balochistan are spent elsewhere.

As conscious citizens who recognize the injustice, and indeed the
danger, in this, we demand that the following steps be taken by the
federal government so as to end the oppression of the people of
Balochistan.

1. An immediate and complete cessation of military and paramilitary actions in all parts of Balochistan, withdrawal of the military and paramilitary forces to their barracks, and reduction of military and paramilitary forces to the level of the year 2000. No more cantonments should be built in Balochistan.

2. An immediate end to the torture, harassment, abduction and murders of the activists of Balochistan. All activists must be released unconditionally, and total amnesty should be declared for those who took up arms to defend their right and honour. Over 1300 people of Balochistan have been ‘disappeared’ – they must be produced in court as per the directives of the Supreme Court, and judicial inquiry made into their ‘disappearances’, their conditions during the period of ‘disappearance’, and the legality or illegality of these acts.

3. The provisions of 1973 constitution pertaining to provincial
autonomy should be enacted immediately, giving Balochistan and all other provinces control over all but four areas of governance
(defense, communications, currency, and foreign affairs). The
Concurrent Lists should be abolished.

4. The people of Balochistan should be the first beneficiaries of
their resources. Oil and gas originating in the province should first
benefit the people of the province and then the rest of the country. A formula for sharing resources should be worked out to the satisfaction of all provinces.

5. Comprehensive public infrastructure including schools, colleges, hospitals, water supply systems, roads, etc, must be built. Special attention must be given to creating a skilled labour force among the people of Balochistan that is capable of assuming professional responsibilities at every level.

6. Land owned or acquired by the armed forces for ‘strategic’
purposes should be handed back to the provincial government.
Construction of all new cantonments should cease immediately.
Likewise, all large ‘development’ projects, including Gwadar,
should be put on hold until the conflict is resolved and reservations of the people of Balochistan have been addressed.

7. The 80,000 or so people reportedly displaced by successive military operations should be rehabilitated immediately.

8. Political manipulation at all levels by the federal government and intelligence agencies, including pitching tribes and political groups against each other, should cease immediately.

9. Priority should be given to the people of Balochistan in staffing
all institutions, particularly government, in Balochistan. The federal quota for the people of Balochistan should also be increased.

10. The people of Balochistan should be compensated for the economic exploitation that they have been subject to for the past 60 years.

The situation in Balochistan is grave and demands for independence are growing stronger. The above steps are the minimum that must necessarily be taken if justice is to be done. If they are not taken, then self determination will be the logical and justified demand of the people of Balochistan. It is high time that Pakistan woke up.

We sign this to express our agreement with the above statement and demands.

 Signature
 Name
 Address + Phone (optional)

Please post the signed statement to P. O. Bx 3395, GPO Islamabad

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Economic Deprivation of Baloch People

November 5, 2009 at 12:17 pm · Filed under Balochistan ·Tagged

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18 out of the 20 most infrastructure-deprived districts in Pakistan are in Balochistan.

The percentage of districts that are classified as high deprivation stands as follows: 29 per cent in Punjab, 50 per cent in Sindh, 62 per cent in the NWFP, and 92 per cent in Balochistan. If Quetta and Ziarat are excluded, all of Balochistan falls into the high deprivation category. And Quetta’s ranking would fall if the cantonment is excluded from the analysis.

The percentage of population living in a high degree of deprivation stands at 25 per cent in Punjab, 23 per cent in urban Sindh, 49 per cent in rural Sindh, 51 per cent in the NWFP, and 88 per cent in Balochistan”.

Province’s 48 percent of the total population lives below poverty line whereas 26 percent in Punjab, NWFP 29 percent, and 38 percent urban and 27 percent rural population in Sindh.

The national literacy rate in Pakistan is 50 percent, the province has 23 percent literacy rate with only 7 percent female literacy rate. 

Only 4 out of total 30 districts have gas supply while the province has been a major producer of gas for the total domestic, commercial and industrial needs of the country from early 50s. The capital of the province, Quetta, was provided gas in 1986.

78 percent population has no electricity.

79 percent has no gas facility while the province has a very low gas consumption of the country especially as compared to 64 percent of Punjab.

Mega development projects

The local population remains largely deprived of the benefits of mega development projects such as Gwadar port, Mirani dam, Kachhi canal, coastal highway, cantonments, and Pasni oil refinery plant etc.

Mostly outsiders benefit from such development schemes. The province has witnessed an influx of more than 5 million people to Gwadar port and other development areas.

Non-Baloch technicians and workers are hired while Balochs are only hired as unskilled workers.

Out of 1200 employees at Saindak copper-gold project, only 50 belong to Balochistan. Similarly, 130 engineers from Balochistan were trained at Karachi to be employed at Gwadar Port but they were denied jobs.

Land developers and investors from outside Balochistan are allowed purchase of Balochistan land.

Conflict-generating history

The current military operation in Balochistan is the fifth in the series. The first one was in 1948, the second in 1958, the third in 1962, the fourth in 1973. All the operations were to curb resistance to interference from the Central Government.

Historically, Balochistan or Kalat has never been a part of Indian state.

After the British conquered a part of the State of Kalat in 1839, the British pledged to respect the independence of Kalat and also gave it subsidies to maintain local loyalty for protecting British interests.

Mir Ahmed Yar Khan and the people of Balochistan supported the movement for the creation of Pakistan but at the same time they envisioned Kalat as a separate, independent and sovereign state after the departure of British from India.

Jinnah himself was the champion of independence and sovereignty of Kalat. In 1946, Mr. Jinnah pleaded before the Cabinet Mission for complete independence and sovereignty for Kalat as it existed before the agreements and treaties of 1841, 1854 and 1876 with the British. The Marri and Bugti Tumandars also joined the plea demanding their regions to be included with the Kalat federation. Quaid-i-Azam won the case.

Thus Kalat and Pakistan signed a standstill agreement on 4th August 1947 in which Pakistan recognized Kalat as an independent sovereign state, while future relations between Kalat and Pakistan regarding defense, external affairs and communications were to be negotiated later.

While Pakistan announced its independence on 14 of August 1947, Kalat announced its independence on the very next day, 15 August 1947.

But soon after independence, Kalat was pressurized to merge itself with Pakistan in the ‘interests of both’.

The Khan of Kalat refused to agree and tabled this desire of Pakistan in the Kalat State Houses of Parliament, Dar-ul-Umra and Dar-ul-Awam, which unanimously refused to merge Kalat with Pakistan. However they partially agreed to have an agreement with Pakistan for having a joint currency, defense and external affairs while keeping Kalat an independent and sovereign state.

The members, however, pledged to strongly resist any coercive action from Pakistan even with force. 

Pakistan illegally annexed Kalat’s sub-states Makran, Kharan and Lasbella.

Pakistan ordered its garrison commander to invade Kalat and keep the Khan under house arrest until he signs the document of annexation.

Khan eventually went to Karachi and signed a controversial but conditional merger document with Pakistan on 27th March 1948 in his personal capacity despite strong opposition of both Kalat legislators.

This forced annexation gave birth to this conflict erupting in a low-scale resistance in Kalat led by the younger brother of Khan, Agha Abdul Karim, who was governor of Makran that had been part of Kalat for 300 years. However, the rebellion was overcome by military as the resistant leaders were arrested      over a deceptive agreement on Holy Quran but were imprisoned as well as fined. Agha Karim spent seven years in prison.

In a personal meeting in 1958, President Iskandar Mirza asked the Khan of Kalat to mobilize sardars for the restoration of the Khanate of Kalat., and then on the pretext of this activity, sent in Pakistan Army under the command of Tikka Khan. The army arrested the Khan and sent him to an internment in Lahore. As soon as Ayub Khan took charge, he sentenced Prince Karim to another 14 years of jail term. In May 1959, Nawab Nauroz Khan Zehri came down from mountains on assurance of amnesty on Quran. He was immediately arrested together with his sons and grandsons and sent to Hyderabad jail, where they were tried for treason. Seven of his associates, including his sons were sentenced to death and hanged in Hyderabad. The ninety years old Nawab Zehri died in captivity in Hyderabad.    

In 1962, Ayub Khan sacked Ataullah Mengal, Nawab Khair Bukhsh Marri, and Nawab Akbar Bugti from their hereditary positions as sardars of their tribes. This led to resistance, which was again quelled with an army action, arrests, long incarcerations, etc.

From this resistance emerged a movement (1962 to 1968) which resisted the one unit regime imposed by Ayub Khan in West Pakistan to provide population parity between the two wings of the country. One unit was finally disbanded in 1969 and Balochistan gained the status of a province in 1970.

Another resistance started in 1973 when the federal government of Z. A. Bhutto sacked the elected government of Balochistan on the flimsy charge of conspiracy against the state. The Army again went in to crush the resistance, but this time with the help of the Shah of Iran, and using most sophisticated equipment including helicopter gunships. It was the bloodiest conflict. The resistance ended when General Zia’s military dictatorship announced a general amnesty in 1978.

The current resistance and military action started during the military dictatorship of General Musharraf in response to the assassination of Nawab Akbar Bugti.

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