Extremism And Terrorism (Important Articles)
 

[B][CENTER][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Afghan Saga: Killing One Innocent Person is killing the Humanity – Man in Search of Humanity[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]
March 27, 2012
Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD
Exclusive Article

[I]In its search for change and progressive future-making, the global mankind is oppressed and victimized by the systematic intransigence and arrogance of the few affluent class of people managing the global institutions, militarization and governance – the perverted insanity lacking basic understanding of the Human Nature and of the working of the splendid Universe in which we enjoy coherent co-existence. The mankind continues to be run down by the cancerous ego and cruelty of the few Western warlords. Killing unjustifiably one innocent human being is like killing of the whole of the humanity. The global warlords represent cruel mindset incapable to see the human side of the living conscience. Madness of the perpetuated war on terrorism and its triggered insanity knows no bound across the global spectrum. Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and species, nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the humanity have and continue to do so at an unparallel global scale without being challenged by any global organizations or leaders. Torture and massacres of innocent civilians are convenient fun games to be defined as “collateral damage” and a statistic. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral, spiritual and intellectual values and progressive agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most powerful nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap to EH Carr’s precious thoughts of human history.[/I]

Continued insanity of the on-going Terrorism of Wars got jolt to commit past mid night massacres of the 17 innocent civilians – women and children in Kandhar- the occupied and poverty stricken Afghanistan. Not one soldier but claims Sayed Ishaq Gillani the head of the Afghan Parliamentary Investigation inquiry that perhaps 15-20 US troopers were involved in the massacres of the afghan women and children in two-three villages. Another report accuses troopers of rape of two women during the vicious attacks. US war thinking news media reports of the Afghan ‘host’ reactionary language of silent protests – the journalistic front page headline sketch of the poor-man’s pain and anguish, but not telling the truth that American forces and NATO are not their ‘invited guests’ but ‘aggressive occupiers’ with an established pattern of behavior to kill civilians and destroy human habitats for extended fun and enjoyment. Afghan investigator Hamizai Lali told BBC that “If the international community does not play its role in punishing the perpetrators, the Wolesi Jirga [parliament] would declare foreign troops as occupying forces.” Other voices of Reason call for public trial of the accused soldier (s) in Afghanistan to be witnessed by the grieving people. In his prompt follow-up phone call, President Obama made his” saddened” impressions known to Hamad Karazi – the US installed puppet president of Afghanistan. Nonsense, in situations of adversity and crisis, competent and intelligent leaders show no feelings on the war fronts nor a Commander–in-Chief of the most powerful armies in the world, would spell out emotions as war code dictates “do or die” and nothing in between. Obama appears smart and tactful at least in his secured outlook, fighting and killing people thousands of miles away from his drawing room without any repercussions to the self- his inner soul and human conscience.

Strange as it was, the US mainstream news media never bothered to ask the names of the 17 women-children massacred by its soldiers, the children birthdates, about their toys if they had, and how they were massacred while asleep – something the US media is used to portraying in its journalistic cultural context. You cannot blame the US military psyche either because they are doing a job. They went there to kill people, and this is what Obama calls the invincible armies. Under the NATO, the Western allied nations use media as a weapon to manage innovative battlefield and defeat the perceived enemies in lands far away that the US military minds could not understand – its people, their psychology or cultural identity. One of the biggest hurdles that American strategists face is that they are disconnected and ignorant of the social, moral and civilizational culture of Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed to comprehend its vitality in fighting successfully. To put a pattern to the context, first it was the US marines photos of pissing on the dead Afghani corps, then the unknowing burning of the Muslim Holy Book Qura’an, and now the added new massacres of the innocent civilians. The American history narrates that Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the American Constitution had three volumes of the Holy Al-Qura’an in his library that he used to devise the legal, moral and ethical stipulations for the American Constitution. Does it mean that the American populace is not aware of their own history? The US armed forces are trained and represent the US culture of thinking, sense of freedom and liberty and justice, moral values and political indoctrination, strangely, why should the Commander-in-Chief be ‘saddened’ for these latest atrocities against the people who never harmed nor threatened the US national interests. Does hypocrisy and cynicism have another name? To invest in favorite perversion, torture, corruption and massacre of the innocent people happening frequently to portray sadistic political governance, and the world can watch the bloody atrocities with deafening silence and inhuman complacency but what kind of glorification would it produce for the generations to come to understand the norms of humanity? Deliberate massacres of the innocents need no explanation or psychological clarification, massacre is massacre. To distort the facts and misinform the public, media outlets bring hourly paid intellectuals and subject experts to discuss the war stigma and psychological imprints on the soldiers leading them to commit massacres. The media exercise shields the actual crimes and creates TV imagery on screen as if it is unreal, no blood – no killing, all unknowingly and “a lone marine”- the Obama explanatory note. The informed and conscientious global community wonders, when rationality would replace the drudgery, hypocrisy of wars and killings of the innocent people? History will judge the people and leaders by their actions, not by their claims.

Looking at the Nature of Things, the universe encompasses many challenging opposites – time, space, sun, moon, gravitational rotation of the earth, fire, water, air, sand, floods, earthquakes, tsunami, disasters, explosions, wars, destructions, bombing and all that can be imagined to destroy the mankind and endanger the continued movement of the splendid, inspiring and harmonious Universe. How it is that Man – a creation of God cannot co-exist with fellow Man? Is Man by nature a blood thirsty creature? Perhaps, the invisible forces of culture and environment and societal indoctrinations frame and shape that mindset.

There is growing trend of “Big Thinking” in American politics that often overwhelms the powerful nation to drain out its abilities to see the mirror for a critical self-analysis and reconstruction of policy and strategic behavior in a situation of primary crisis management conflict resolution. Throughout its two centuries of evolving history, the US government has been continuously engaged in more than 220 wars. What a tragedy and loss to human thinking, intellect and values – Immanuel Kant, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Shakespeare and Bertrand Russell and their souls put to tormenting torture – the treatment they did not deserve from George Bush, Barrack Obama, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Rumsfeld and so many others full of embittered conscious and cancerous ego to annihilate the mankind.

Deceit and dishonesty of the Bush manufactured War on Terrorism and its short-long terms crippling impacts on the present and future of the mankind will continue to hold the future generations hostage for change and peaceful co-existence. Individually paranoid and intellectually insane, the men who are universally hated and feared cannot be source of hope and positive thinking to envision change and promising future for the humanity. America appears at a crossroads being unable to ward off the in-waiting crucial challenge of history that it will no longer be seen as a viable superpower and more susceptible to change of global status and to be replaced by another nation or group of new emerging Asian nations of economic and political leadership as the next power (s) of the 21st century and new global age of politics, human integrity and peaceful co-existence. America is skeptical being unable to command the ethical and intellectual spirited power of the global echelon to be a great nation of the world. President Obama claimed “Yes We Can” to America’s change phenomena but political cynicism and lack of proactive commitment stumbled his convenient political slogan for personal choices. On wishful thinking, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded to Obama the Nobel Peace prize but now the people across the globe are questioning and Nobel Committee is reviewing it consideration if the Obama award should be recalled. That should send a strong message to President Obama to rethink if he is a suitable candidate for the presidential re-election in 2012.

Robert Pape, Professor, University of Chicago’s, and author of the Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, 2005, points out the alarmingly failing record of the US Empire in war engagements:
“America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony.”
Late Chalmers Johnson (Dismantling the Empire) warned:
“We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and it will Help Bankrupt us.

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan’s modern history — to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947…..”
Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, points out Chalmers Johnson, that the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union’s, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

To change the world, it is incumbent upon the intellectuals, academics, visionaries, poets, philosophers and the thinking people to perceive and articulate new and creative ideas, new political imagination for the 21st century organizations to be functional for the people, by the people and accountable to the supremacy of the people’s will. Thus facilitating opportunities for dialogue and reason to deal with issues of primary national conflicts, competing economic and political discords, freedom, justice, human rights, and to invent new terminologies of diplomacy, peacemaking and co-existence between Man, the Humanity and the encompassed Universe. Peace and global security are not the properties or the exclusive domains of any superpowers, UNO or the Security Council or corporate entity. The global mankind enjoins rational optimism to see the ideas and ideals of peace and human security as it’s own collectively, not of the few.

Leaders create leaders. The Mankind looks to the Thinking People of new ideas, imagination and commitment to transform the helpless and degenerated present unto hall marks of positive hope and plausible future for all the humanity living on One Planet. But the raging wars and new emerging conflicts are undermining the future of the mankind. The global community views the current US- Israel warmongering against Iran with great dismay and active disapproval. The US and Israel are isolated and even Europeans appear reluctant to offer enthusiastic support for the Iran attack.

Time and encompassing opportunities warrant New Thinking, New Leaders and New Visions for change and the future-making. But change and creativity and new visions will not emerge from the obsolete, redundant and failed authoritarianism of the few insane leaders. None have the understanding of neither peace nor respect for human life and co-existence in a splendid Universe. To challenge the deafening silence of the US and Europeans for global peace and security, the humanity must find ways and means to look beyond the obvious and troublesome horizons dominated by the few warlords and continued to be plagued with massacres, barbarity against human culture and civilizations, destruction of the habitats and natural environment as if there were no rational being and people of Reason populating the God-given Universe. The informed and mature global community looks towards those Thinkers, educated and honest proactive leaders enriched with coherent unity of moral, spiritual, intellectual and physical visions and abilities to be instrumental to rescue it from the planned encroachment of the few Western warlords. The March 2011 Japan’s natural disasters – tsunami, earthquakes and nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima have further heightened the tormenting uneasiness, pain and anguish of the mankind across the globe. Environmental experts, technological inventors and nuclear scientists seem to invent things but failed to manage the operational outcomes and accidents, essentially signaling major flaws between what is thinkable for the good of human change, progress and advancements and the divide between what could purge the human existence because of the ignorance of their own thinking and action, arrogance, warmongering and inconsistency and continued confrontations with the Nature of Things.

“If the human nature is in part wicked and in part foolish, how can human beings be prevented from suffering from the result of their wickedness and folly?” C.E.M. Joad (Guide to Modern Wickedness), the 20th century proactive thinker offers a rational context to the prevalent facts of life:

“Men simply do not see that war is foolish and useless and wicked. They think on occasion that it is necessary and wise and honourable, for war is not the work of bad men knowing themselves to be wrong, but of good men passionately convinced that they are right.”

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution and comparative Western-Islamic cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest one: Arabia at Crossroads: Arab People Strive for Freedom, Peace and New Leadership. VDM Publishers, Germany, September 2011. Comments are welcome at: [email]kmahboob@yahoo.com[/email])

The article is contributed to pkarticleshub.com

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Battling Al Qaeda[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
March 29, 2012
Ian Bremmer and David Gordon

It’s been nearly 11 months since the killing of Osama bin Laden and almost 11 years since 9/11 thrust Al Qaeda to the forefront of US national security.

Since then – in fits and starts after 2001, and at an accelerated pace in the last five years – the United States has been remarkably successful in degrading Al Qaeda’s operational capacity and splintering the organisation, culminating in the raid in Abbottabad last May.

To state the obvious, all this is good news. The US homeland is safer, the world is a better place, and a reduced jihadist threat is allowing the United States to make a shrewd strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.

But what is less appreciated is that while the threat to the homeland is diminished, the demise of “Al Qaeda central’’ is coinciding with a resurgence of radical extremist political activism. The two trends are connected, and present a growing challenge to US interests.

The fracturing of Al Qaeda has reversed Bin Laden’s signal achievement: defying the truth that all politics is local and focusing the efforts of the most extreme elements on attacking the “far enemy,’’ the United States.

In the absence of a leader, these groups, buttressed by the dynamics of the Arab Awakening and the US withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, have re-entered domestic politics throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Their activities add a layer of complexity, uncertainty, fragility and danger to the region’s trajectory and create enormous problems for US foreign policy.

Osama himself was aware of this development. According to reports of correspondence taken from his Abbottabad compound, Bin Laden fretted constantly that his operatives were too eager to direct their activities to local dynamics rather than the overarching anti-US cause.

These tensions – and the temptation among Qaeda operatives to strike softer local targets – sharpened as the US vise tightened and the operational control of an increasingly isolated Bin Laden weakened.

The killing of Bin Laden, continued US pressure, and the ascension of the unpopular Zawahri to leadership have reinforced the shift of Al Qaeda affiliates toward local issues, making the various regional branches less receptive to dictates from Zawahri, an Egyptian.

This new focus on the local is driving a resurgent influence for the most radical elements in areas in which Al Qaeda had in recent years become deeply unpopular. The US withdrawal from Iraq intensifies extremist opposition to the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri Kamal Al Maliki, as it’s more clear than ever that it’s his sect, not his ties to Washington that fires the radicals.

In Mali, the increased local activities of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb have contributed to a deteriorating security environment that allowed the long-simmering Tuareg rebellion to strengthen and fueled the discontent that led to last week’s coup. For the United States, which had promoted Mali as a regional success story of flourishing democracy, this is a troubling development.

The return of extremists and their increasing influence in North Africa has surprised and disoriented even the region’s moderate Islamists, with the electoral success of the Salafist Al Nour Party in Egypt challenging the Muslim Brothers and Tunisia’s Ennahda-led government struggling to prevent Salafist influence from deterring much-needed foreign investment.

An influx of returning jihadists in Libya is injecting a radical ideological element to a transition already fraught with ethnic and tribal tensions. Here, as in South Asia and the Sahel, the localisation of the most extreme elements is changing the game.

It is in Syria where this dynamic is most acute and most challenging for the United States. The uprising against the Assad regime is in many ways a strategic plus for the United States, especially given the close cooperation between Damascus and Tehran. But sectarian dynamics in Syria make it very difficult for the United States to exploit or even manage its advantage.

The inability of the Syrian opposition to unite or gain purchase among ethnic and sectarian minorities results to a great extent from the perception that the strongest elements of the opposition to the Alawite Shia Bashar Al Assad are Sunni extremists. Minority groups fear they will treat them even more harshly than Assad has treated much of the Syrian population.

And the very fractiousness of the opposition that extremism fosters is increasingly allowing extremist elements to define the anti-Assad forces – fueling further fractiousness and, in a vicious cycle, creating even more openings for extremists.

Zawahri’s call for jihad against the Assad regime – Al Qaeda’s first such exhortation that is not against the United States or a close US ally – is both a testament to and a driver of these local dynamics. All of this makes rhetorical or military support for the Syrian opposition from the United States, Turkey or Saudi Arabia very difficult, and contributes to the stalemate we’re now seeing.

America’s very success in the war on Al Qaeda has created a paradox: While the most extreme elements have shifted their focus away from the United States, the complexity of the challenge that they pose for US foreign policy has only increased. The war on terror may be winding down, but managing its aftermath is just beginning.

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group.’ David Gordon is head of research at Eurasia Group and former director of policy planning at the State Department
Source: Khaleej Times

[B][CENTER][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Impact of Terrorism on Global Security in 2011:
A Pakistani Perspective
*[/SIZE][/FONT][/CENTER][/B]
Raheela Asfa
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Dr. Mughees Ahmed

[url]http://berkeleyjournalofsocialsciences.com/February122.pdf[/url]

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Al Qaeda’s tactical creed[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
April 2, 2012
M. Zaidi

IDEOLOGY may have been the forte of Al Qaeda ideologues promoting global jihad, but it has also combined with a military tactical doctrine to make it look more pragmatic to millions of ‘jihobbyists’ around the world.

Since this becomes a conflict between good and bad, good has to necessarily triumph over bad, since without an alternative vision for the future, no ideology can hope to succeed.

The faithful are implored to shun inertia and spring into action, since only from action can that alternative vision for future be achieved. The vision that inspires Al Qaeda is the ouster of foreign occupiers in Muslim lands, the removal of all vestiges of cultural pollution that violate the laws of God and the application of laws that are informed solely by the Holy Quran.

The US is the main antagonist, one against whom Al Qaeda ideologues have laid out an ideological strategy. As a typical example, Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi has tended to argue in his works that the US is weakening, while the jihadi movement led by Al Qaeda is on the rise around the world.

For example, in a 2002 article A Lesson in War, he performs a nuanced distillation of Carl von Clausewitz, a pioneer of war studies and tactics. Qurashi postulates that Americans are too entrenched in Clausewitz’s ‘centre of gravity’ doctrine, which emphasises fighting a centralised hostile adversary with a unified command structure, which becomes redundant when fighting a fluid organisation like Al Qaeda. Qurashi argues that Americans are totally inept when it comes to understanding Al Qaeda’s tactics, and deconstructs Ray Cline’s arguments about power.

Qurashi interpolates variables that Cline argues are vital for any entity to acquire power, within which territoriality , economic capability, military ability, strategic purpose and a will to accomplish that purpose are essential elements. Qurashi argues Al Qaeda has significant potential power and territorial bases in the shape of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. It has
the will, and territory will be hugely helpful for acquiring economic capability.

Qurashi interpolates research by another American military strategist T.N. Dupuy, who identifies fighting power (P) as being constituted of the number of troops (N), multiplied by variable factors (V), multiplied by the quality (Q) of those troops: P, in fact, is equal to NVQ.

He says that even though the US may have a central pool of troops, the jihadis can recruit Muslims from all over the world, offsetting the numerical ratios of American troops. He also postulates that the qualities of Islamist warrior (jihadis) are undeniably higher, since they fight out of conviction, not monetary gains, and live hard lives and thus are inherently
conditioned for war.

Abu Musab al-Suri also stresses on Islam being under attack by the establishment of the ‘new world order’ comprising the Jews and ‘Crusaders’, spearheaded by America, with France, Britain and Nato, and the ‘apostate’ Arab regimes. Suri has also equated Islamic scholars who denounce jihadism with the enemy within, who lead Muslims astray under the guise of
Islamic injunctions.

The need for edifying action is also demonstrable in his Call for Islamic Global Resistance. Suri has laid out a ‘battle doctrine’ against primarily America, which stipulates that mere words will not save the ummah in the face of the enemy’s “machineguns, flogging, rape and defamation”. Suri’s emphasis at all times is on the fact that jihad against the US cannot be
waged through words and non-violent means, and only this philosophy is the way forward.

As regarding asymmetric warfare, for Qurashi the asymmetrical confabulation of jihadi vs US forces is not such a bad thing since the fluid nature of jihad makes it more flexible, creative and resilient, besides making good propaganda material. This has been effectively utilised particularly by Al Qaeda to project itself as a small but dedicated populist force
seeking to defend the freedom of the oppressed and downtrodden challenged by the American Goliath.

Qurashi points to various asymmetrical trajectories which he argues can be effectively utilised. America’s superiority in forces’ strength, he argues, has not defended it against the weaker side’s intelligence and will power. The superiority of American information technology has not defended the US against the economic aftermath of 9/11 since images of the
subsequent stock exchange crashes were transmitted by the enemy’s own media centres.

He then posits the largest fissure in the American armour — America is seeking to protect the narrow ideal of a state while Al Qaeda is fighting for the people; America is trying to uphold democracy while Al Qaeda espouses a higher divine cause which gives it the leverage to operate throughout the world, while the US is limited by its territorial imperatives.

Qurashi tries to show that America is still reliving the Cold War military doctrine when engaging Al Qaeda, which is ineffective against the entity’s cell-based, fluid and constantly morphing tactics. For Al Qaeda, the scatter of forces created by engaging in Iraq at the same time as in Afghanistan shows the lack of creativity of American thinking.

On the other hand, the jihadis gain their strength from the same troop diffusion process by opening up too many fronts for Americans to handle at one time. This ‘too much everywhere — too little effectiveness’ theme also resonates with another top Al Qaeda strategist and ideologue, Abu Bakr Naji, who argues that even though US has the capability to crush jihadism
and Al Qaeda, only hegemony will not be enough.

Remote countries will become graveyards for the Americans unless the US legitimises itself in the eyes of the people of those countries. This would mean a reversal of its foreign policy in some cases. Reliance on proxy regimes, Naji argues, will not work since they in turn lose legitimacy by allying with the Great Satan.

The writer is a security analyst.
-Dawn

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]A liberal Pakistan?[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
April 5, 2012
Niaz Murtaza

AGAINST the backdrop of creeping radicalisation in Pakistan, the vision posed in the title above may seem a utopia restricted to the imagination of delusionary liberals.

However, since even totalitarian regimes could not constrain dreams and since dreams often sow the seeds of progress, it may be worthwhile to evaluate the prospects for a liberal Pakistan.

The immediate difficulty in doing so relates not to Pakistan’s inhospitable terrain but to defining liberalism, which means different things to different people. Liberalism comes from the Latin word ‘liber’ (free). Thus, the hyper-free market economies espoused by the likes of Reagan are often defined as economic (neo) liberalism, even though they are antithetical to liberal left-wing thought. Consequently, a clear definition of liberalism is essential.Political liberalism was the first liberal strand to emerge, as a movement against absolute monarchies. It is often seen as emerging during European Renaissance although its roots go back much earlier and spread more globally to the various uprisings against tyranny since antiquity. Thus, democracy, equality of rights (especially for minorities and women) and individual freedom represent the core of political liberalism.

Economic liberalism includes economic individual freedom, equity and equality of opportunity. This economic vision rejects both Reaganism and communism. Among existing economic systems, the ones in Scandinavia, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka and Bhutan come closest to true economic liberalism.

Cultural liberalism encompasses multiculturalism and a willingness to evolve cultural norms in line with changing societal needs. Liberals also espouse secularism based on the long history of manipulation of religions by governments and the unspeakable horrors committed against religious minorities. Secularism aims not to banish religion but to get the state out of the way to allow people to practise religion freely according to their own wisdom. While liberals reject Taliban-style religion, mystical interpretations of religion are primary sources of inspiration for many liberals.

The common philosophical foundations for these different strands are provided by liberalism’s vision of human nature. The main focus of lower animals in life is on material consumption and on competing with others to access the natural resources needed for it. However, liberalism believes that the main determinants of high quality of human life are non-material pursuits, e.g. aesthetical interests, cooperative endeavours, scientific investigations and altruistic and spiritual concerns.

Consequently, unlike with lower animals, the pursuit of high quality of life by humans is not in conflict with but is intrinsically linked to ensuring the rights of other groups, societies, species and generations. Thus, conservatism, with its focus on power, materialism, domination and xenophobia, is humanity’s evolutionary inheritance from lower animals and a puzzling desire to cling to those anachronistic origins. Conversely, liberalism reflects a desire to transcend those origins and attain humanity’s full potential and hence the focus on equality, cultural diversity and democracy under liberalism.

Liberalism is often rejected as a western import in Pakistan. However, liberalism’s origins are highly diverse. Its central tenets like human rights, equality, and above all the emphasis on spirituality are also emphasised within non-western religions and philosophies such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Moreover, while liberals embrace many western practices (e.g. the emphasis on human rights), they reject others, e.g., over-materialism, over-individualism and neo-imperialism.

What are the prospects for liberalism in Pakistan? In line with the liberal creed, my focus here is on investigating the electoral prospects of liberal parties, for liberalism can be achieved not through revolutions or dictatorships but through democracy only. Viewed so and surprisingly, many liberal beliefs provide powerful strategies for winning elections in Pakistan.

Liberal positions on economic justice and equality could find a sympathetic audience among the majority of Pakistani systematically deprived of fair economic opportunities since before Independence. A party that develops cogent positions on the mechanisms utilised by the elites to deprive the majority of their rights and practical strategies for overcoming them (beyond populist but empty slogans about reducing corruption by half in nine days) stands a good chance electorally.

The emphasis on equality of rights and cultural diversity are also relevant for the majority of Pakistanis, who are a collection of minorities and lack a majority group since no ethnic group constitutes 50-plus per cent of the population (once the Seraiki are treated separately). Unsurprisingly, ethnic parties are quite popular in Pakistan. Moreover, since dictatorship leads to the dominance of one or two ethnic groups in Pakistan, democracy can also be sold as the best way of ensuring the rights of all ethnic groups.

Other liberal tenets may unfortunately find less sympathetic reception within Pakistan, e.g. women’s equality, cultural relativism and secularism. However, people do not vote for a party only if it reflects their worldview on every issue, for such complete consonance is rare. They normally vote for parties which address their most important concerns.

Moreover, the most important electoral issues globally are usually economic and political ones rather than cultural ones. Thus, a party which resonates politically and economically with the majority could win even if it is culturally somewhat out of sync.
Its economic and political resonance can also provide it with a solid platform to gradually influence people’s positions on other issues.

Thus, the biggest obstacle for liberal parties in Pakistan is not an out-of-tune agenda. It is that they have failed to develop a strong grass-roots presence in villages and slums. Marginalised people can only be weaned away from patronage-driven and right-wing reactionary parties if liberal groups and parties demonstrate the superiority of their agenda through community-level work and then use that foundation to sell an agenda stretching up to the national level. A liberal Pakistan may then no longer remain a distant dream.

The writer is a political economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

[email]murtazaniaz@yahoo.com[/email]
-Dawn

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Should we put Pakistan at stake for Hafiz Saeed?[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
April 10, 2012
Aisha Fayyazi Sarwari

There are many fellow travellers I am not proud of sharing my green Pakistani passport with but I am particularly not proud of sharing this passport with Hafiz Saeed. His organisation is a declared terrorist outfit by the United Nations Security Council. He is a source of embarrassment to every Pakistani who wants to see Pakistan’s economy thrive and who prays for reclamation by this country of its rightful place in the international community. Who would want to do business with a country where a renowned hatemonger is given state shelter?

Even more disturbing is that the Pakistan government does not agree with the charge and continues to support and protect Saeed’s movements in the country, where he holds rallies under the Difa-e-Pakistan Council umbrella and preaches hatred for fellow Pakistanis who disagree with his totalitarian vision of a theocracy.

Born in 1950, Saeed is the head of the Jama’at-ud-Da’wah (JuD), a charity organisation that is considered a front for Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), which is as stated above a banned outfit. The bounty politics and the diplomatic maneouvring by the Indian lobby in the US are of no consequence to me as a Pakistani. Here is what I know: time and again, the LeT and JuD have taken to the streets. In response to the caricature controversy in Denmark, this organisation systematically burnt down a great part of the Mall Road, Lahore. Last month, the JuD is said to have spearheaded a movement to ban the right to worship of a peaceful community in Rawalpindi. Is there no accountability for acts of terror aimed at citizens of this country let alone violence aimed at other nations?

Saeed’s hate speeches at mass rallies, which have gained prominence, include inciting violence against the “enemies of Pakistan”, even though on a television show on Geo TV, he has denied that he supports terrorism. His popularity has grown since the US announced a bounty of $ 10 million on his head. He is being hailed as a defiant hero instead of being held accountable for what he did.

The bounty was a long time coming. The statements against Saeed had been mounting. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and adviser to Barack Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan in an interview to the Daily Telegraph said that the evidence showed that Osama bin Laden played a key role in planning the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people died, including four Americans. There is also proof that both Hafiz Saeed and Osama bin Laden communicated through a courier until bin Laden died.

Saeed does not shy away from this association. It was he who led the funeral prayers for Osama bin Laden after the Americans eliminated him in a strike in Abbottabad on May 4, 2011, to the embarrassment of the ISI. He cried while he read the prayers for the world’s most wanted terrorist and called him a “martyr” and a “fellow Muslim brother”.

Meanwhile Saeed mocks the bounty, clearly emboldened by the Pakistan government’s appeasement of the ISI that supports him. “I am here, I am visible. America should give that reward money to me,” he added, “I will be in Lahore tomorrow. America can contact me whenever it wants to.”

The problem is not just that Saeed continues to spread ideology advocating terrorism despite the bounty, but that the government thinks he is important enough to take a stand for, against both the US and India. This is the same government that backed off after the murder of Salmaan Taseer, and rather than crack down on the Blasphemy law, it let flowers be garlanded on the murderer. This constant soft peddling runs the risk of Pakistan being perceived as a nation that has no capacity to act on its own. In this case, it may again be shamed if the US undertakes a unilateral strike against Saeed as it did for Osama.

The phrase ‘due process’ has been thrown around quite a bit. This is quite ironic. Our courts, which have repeatedly trampled on due process rights of its citizens, are willing to use this principle to defend someone who openly advocates violence and terrorism. Our selective application of legal principles has a Machiavellian tone to it. This country, which has hauled up dissidents and patriots alike for far lesser a slight, is incapable of jailing Saeed because of due process. The whole idea is a joke.

By deliberately sending the world a message that someone so clearly connected to violence in a very direct and deliberate manner, running a group on the fringe, has more freedom in this country than a normal citizen is not very dignified.

We do not need Hafiz Saeed with his dubious background to be the one to champion the cause of the rights of the Kashmiris, or the drone attacks — we have our politicians for that. By not sending a ‘we are on the same page’ message to the US on this one, the government is fueling the right wing sentiments in Pakistan that view Saeed as a religious scholar and not a terrorist. The state radio refers to him as “Professor Hafiz Saeed”.

We also threaten the gradual progress, especially on trade, made with India, when we fail to carry out a joint investigation into the allegations against Saeed. His recent vitriolic remarks against India came at a time when President Zardari was due to visit India for a personal trip. This visit would help in thawing the diplomatic channels given that the Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, is travelling with him and that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is to hold a lunch in the visiting delegation’s honour.

The bounty on Saeed’s head is a direct result of Pakistan’s inaction; it can now either enter wholeheartedly into a world of international isolation and defy cooperation on this issue, or act like a responsible country and work effectively to put Saeed behind bars.

The types of Hafiz Saeed are not good for Pakistan’s image, for its economy and consequently for the poor people of this country. How long are you going to feed them a diet of misplaced zeal, misguided sense of honour and a sheer misreading of the events of our time? Tell them the truth. Let them figure out if they really want the dystopia that people like Hafiz Saeed want it to be or whether they stand for something different. My bet is on the latter.

The writer is a technology and media professional and a freelance writer based in Lahore. She can be reached at [email]aisha.f.sarwari@gmail.com[/email]
-Daily Times

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Stop blaming Fata[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
April 25, 2012
Ayaz Wazir

Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been in global limelight since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The subsequent invasion of that country by the US once again focused the world’s attention on Fata, but for all the wrong reasons this time. The Americans made Fata a scapegoat in the war against terror. Its people are presumed offenders of the worst sort, without the Americans taking the trouble to understand the people and the problems faced by them.

They never differentiated between militants and the ordinary tribesmen. They simply put all the blame on the people of Fata, accusing them of sheltering militants, without acknowledging that Fata’s problem is not of the creation of its inhabitants. Earlier they had washed their hands of any responsibility for the situation in Fata after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and returned there only after their pride was dashed to the ground in New York.

In their haste to exact revenge the US pressured the military dictator in Pakistan to deploy the Pakistani army in the tribal area to stop militants from crossing the Afghan border. The orders were obeyed blindly. However, there are no signs yet of the war coming to an end. Whenever a terrorist incident takes place anywhere in the world the US and Nato never miss the opportunity to point accusing fingers at Fata, particularly the two Waziristans. The Pakistani media is not permitted by the government to operate independently in Fata, and therefore it is not possible for it to investigate the veracity of US/Nato allegations.

The tribesmen have no way of countering claims against them. And if someone does dare to do so, he disappears and later his disfigured body bearing marks of torture is found on the roadside. So whatever is said by the media in the West or even in our own country becomes the lead story within no time all over the world and is accepted as the universal truth.

Having failed to defeat insurgency in Afghanistan the US invariably resorts to the blame game to cover its own weaknesses. Whenever an untoward incident happens in that country they immediately accuse Fata of having a connection with it. The recent attacks in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Logar, Paktia and Nangarhar provinces are a case in point. Instead of accepting responsibility for its own security lapses, the United States put the blame on Waziristan, because it allegedly gave shelter to the Haqqani network which allegedly masterminded the attack.

What stops the Americans from pursuing and apprehending Haqqani and members of his network, which is so dangerous that the embassies it targets in Kabul include that of the US? The Taliban’s success in breaking those high security parameters in Kabul speaks volumes of the lapses on the part of the US security forces.

Meanwhile, the government in Islamabad does not miss an opportunity of blaming Fata for any unpleasant incident taking place anywhere in the country. Be it an attack on important personalities or installations, the blame comes straight to the tribal area and Waziristan becomes an easy excuse for the hiding the government’s own shortcomings. Our interior minister has conducted many inquiries and collected the heads of many suicide bombers. But the findings, if any, are yet to be shared with the nation. What is he doing with all those inquiries and the heads he collected?

When will our government learn to be more realistic in handling the affairs in Fata? When will it learn to stop blaming people there instead of accepting its own mishandling of the situation? By simply adopting resolutions in parliament it cannot absolve itself of the responsibility of saving its people from the devastation wreaked on them by continuing to follow the ill-conceived policies of a long-gone dictator. This is what the government has to look at seriously if it wants to bring peace to Fata and take the nation out of the gloomy situation that it has been in for so many years.

Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Afghanistan, did not lose time blaming Waziristan for what happened in Kabul recently. Similarly, our media also tried to shift the onus of responsibility for the jailbreak in Bannu to North Waziristan nearby. Instead of those responsible being dismissed or the government resigning, it is Fata which receives the blame. Neither has the US admitted its security failure for the attack on Kabul nor has Pakistan owned up to lapses which led to the jailbreak in Bannu.

The people of Fata are as loyal to the country as people anywhere else in Pakistan. They have rendered tremendous sacrifices for the sake of the country. Their sacrifices on the eastern border gave us Azad Kashmir. They defended the western border for a very long time, a job which is now being done at a huge cost by the regular troops deployed there.

Not a single day passes without some trouble in the area. The people there have rendered once again the sacrifice of vacating their houses and becoming IDPs, with no assistance from the government, to enable the army to clear the area of militants. It is another matter that the operations have not yielded positive results but in the process the people suffered the utmost with their houses destroyed, businesses crippled and children deprived of education, a field in which they were already far behind compared to children of all other areas in the country. The militancy and military operations have sent them back to the Stone Age, something our valiant commando general was afraid of when the agreed to make Pakistan an ally of the Americans in their war against terror.

Despite the ill treatment meted out to them the tribesmen have raised no voice against the country or revolted against the state. The injustices committed against them are numerous but they are still loyal to the country. Instead of developing the area the government has made its inhabitants’ lives even more miserable by imposing on them “Regulations in Aid of Civil Power.” These regulations give sweeping powers to the army to take drastic action, without any accountability, even it merely suspects someone of being involved in activity against army personnel or the government.

Whatever little hesitation the army had in resorting to punitive action, while it worked in the area under the FCR, has now gone after the introduction of this Regulation. The norms that were followed over centuries by successive governments for resolution of disputes are now ignored and force is used, which only adds to problems, rather than resolving them.

We do not seem to have learnt lessons from what we did in East Pakistan. We are treating FATA like a colony and using uncalled for harsh measures by adopting wrong policies of administering that area. The problems that led to the use of brutal force could have been resolved with the help and involvement of the locals, but that was not done and punitive was action taken on one pretext or another.

The treatment meted to the people there is still fresh in their minds. Their silence does not mean that they do not what happened to their lives and properties. They are waiting for the government to come forward and redress their grievances. They should be treated as a part of the solution and not part of the problem otherwise Fata will remain restive and the country will continue to suffer as a result.

The writer is a former ambassador hailing from FATA. Email: [email]waziruk@hotmail.com[/email]
-The News

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Terrorism has no place in Islam[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]


Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta


Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri is one of the most renowned scholars of Islamic theology and jurisprudence from Pakistan. Formerly a professor of Constitutional Law in the University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan, he founded Minhaj-ul-Quran International, an organisation that teaches non-extremist Islam and is present in at least 55 countries.

He was in New Delhi recently to launch his book, Fatwa on Terrorism and Suicide Bombings. He has a huge following in the Islamic world and many have declared him the true leader of Islam. While talking to this writer, he tried to explain the meanings of Islamic theology and how it is being misinterpreted across the world for political reasons. Belonging to the Barelvi sect, historically seen as opposed to the Deobandi and Wahabi schools, he says differences of opinion always existed in Islam but none of the schools ever taught the killing of non-combatants.

Congratulations on your new book. In recent times, many Muslim scholars have tried to interpret the meaning of jehad politically, but you have tried to rationalise its meaning religiously to suggest that there is no place for terrorism and suicide bombings in Islamic philosophy.

I find some people within the religious circles justifying terror activities to achieve their ulterior aims. So, I thought it was necessary to explain that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, with the Quran, and with the Sunnah [habits, practices and teachings of the Prophet]. In order to establish that, it was necessary to look into the Hadith [Islamic law], Quranic commentaries and works of Islamic jurists followed by the Islamic Ummah [community]. Extremist interpretations are deviations from true Islamic teachings, which only emphasise peace and calmness.

For example, the words “jehad” and “shahadat” [martyrdom] or the concept of fighting were never used in any of the Islamic literature as killing of non-combatant non-Muslims. None of these terms means killing women and children or old people, priests or sick people. You are not allowed to do these. You are not allowed to demolish temples or churches or synagogues and other places of worships. These words are used only in the context of a “just” war or a war where you are only defending yourself. These words are valid only if there are two armies fighting each other in a battlefield, as is mentioned in various religious sources.

A separate group cannot declare jehad, as is being seen now. This is not their prerogative, not their right. And even when there is a war between two armies or countries, Islamic teachings have put lots of restrictions. You are not allowed to kill women, children and other such groups as I have mentioned. You are not even allowed to kill non-Muslim traders and farmers as they sustain our economy. You are not even allowed to cut trees unnecessarily. These are prohibitions, which the Muslim Ummah knows. But a few terrorist organisations have led the world to believe that Islam is a violent religion, and I, through my book, wanted to clarify all these doubts by examining the religious texts and other sources. These organisations have misinterpreted the Quran by propagating that the killing of a Muslim is equivalent to the killing of the whole of mankind. Instead, the Quran has specifically said that the killing of a “human being”, not just a Muslim, is equivalent to the killing of the whole of mankind. The word “Nafsan,” meaning human being, is used throughout in the Quran.

Most of the extremist organisations owe their allegiance to the Deobandi or the Wahabi theological schools. How does your book interpret their teachings?

I have interpreted the writings of all the great jurists belonging to all the Islamic schools of law in the world. If you talk of Deoband, I have devoted many pages in my book to talk about the Ulema [scholars] of the Deoband school. I have quoted scholars of the Wahabi, Salafi, Hanafi, Shiites, and all the other prominent schools. And none of them has disagreed with my point of view. I have not neglected a single school of law which is of academic concern in Islamic history.

Are you saying that it is the political agenda of organisations that has led to such construed understanding of Islamic law?

Not only political agenda or international agenda. There can be social and economic factors, local ideologies of governments, which may be responsible. Such violence, with its ideological understanding steeped in Islam, can also be an articulation of social and political frustration of people across the Muslim world. However, these political issues and religious understandings should not be intermingled. There can be democratic and peaceful ways to solve political problems. But it should be made amply clear that Islam and Islamic teachings do not allow killing of non-Muslims and even Muslims who are non-combatant. This is a prevailing phenomenon, which should not only be condemned but should be explained in the light of Quranic teachings.

You have argued in your book that terrorists are like the Kharijites, who appeared during the time of the messenger and formed a rebellious sect to fight against Muslims during the reign of Ali. You also say that Islamic scholars considered it a religious duty to fight and kill the Kharijites if they refused to renounce the violent doctrine. Could you elaborate on this aspect of Islamic history?

The theological school at Damascus had a political dispute with the fourth Khalifa, Ali (AS). There was a battle. Hazrat Ali (AS) had advocated arbitration between the two sides. It was then, when a few sentimental young people saw that the battle could be settled peacefully, they defected and raised the slogan of violence and took up arms. They formed a new group called the Kharijites, who believed in settling the issue through force. The Holy Prophet (PBUH) declared them as outside the ambit of Islam. I have tried to explain that violent means were not the ideas of our caliphs and our scholars but were, in fact, a deviation from Islamic principles. Violence has always been a Kharijite philosophy and of those who have political agendas. They believed that those who disagreed with them should be killed. Even in the present times, there are groups like these, though under different names.
In the present times, there is a positioning of modernism and its principles as a phenomenon that is against pre-modern religiosity. In this context, what do you have to say about theological states that believe in brutal punishments?
I would not like to comment on theological states and their functioning, but for me, there is no contest or contradiction between modern principles and Islamic theology. It depends on how you look at it. Islam is about restoring social order and dynamics. As I said, such brutalities are outcomes of only some people who misinterpret Islamic texts and have no knowledge of modern scientific principles.

Political interests have guided states, and the name of Islam is wrongly given to misguided decisions. In this context, dictatorships and monarchical rules have been there and improper decisions in the name of Islam are perpetuated to prolong those dictatorships and rules. Monarchical rules are not patronised by Islamic teachings. Democratic decisions are the basic tenets of Islamic teachings. Therefore, the basic principles of Islam and modern requirements of society have no contradiction, in my opinion. The Quran and the Sunnah are wrongly used for political reasons.

The book talks about liberal principles in Islam. Can you also, then, talk about the space for dissent in Islamic history and how it was justified theologically?

The differences of opinion are accommodated right from the 14th century. The Quran says “La-Iqra-Fi-Deen.” There is no compulsion on anybody to embrace Islam. And at the same time, there is no compulsion within the deen of Islam. That is why you find differences of opinions in many schools of jurisprudence in Islam. We have, in those schools, different verdicts for the same incidents in Islamic history which have been made because of different reasoning and different traditions. There is a universal framework, but within that there are different opinions. That is why different schools of jurisprudence were established. None of them, including the Shiite philosophy, has declared that kafirs [non-believers] are outside the ambit of Islam. They are also allowed to go for the Haj. The philosophy of Hadith-Ikhteda-Ummati-Rahmatul is stressed all the time. It means that the differences of opinion in good faith is mercy in the Ummah. It gives you alternatives, substitutes. In the last two years, young people have received this kind of understanding with great ease.

Finally, what is the history of fatwas?

The word “fatwa” originated in the Quran and the Sunnah. This word was commonly used during the days of the Holy Prophet and his companions as a governance tool. The problem with the word arose when some clerics, especially in South Asian countries, misused this word because of their personal prejudices. These clerics are to Islamic philosophy as quacks are to medicinal studies. Fatwa is a highly qualified juristic term. Qadis [judges] and muftis [lawyers] have used it constantly. Fatwa and Ifta are similar terms, which are used only in crucial judgments.

-Cuttingedge

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]America’s new crunch[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 1, 2012
Dilip Hiro

When Washington announced in April a $10 million bounty on the Lahore-based Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, it was aimed at bringing about the jihadist leader’s conviction. He has been the alleged mastermind for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, leaving more than 160 dead, including six Americans.

But the move has gone awry, adding to the tortuous relationship between Washington and Islamabad arising from the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border and closure of supply lines to NATO forces in Afghanistan. The defiance with which Saeed has treated the US threat has highlighted the power of the Pakistani street, an integral part of the country’s politics. At crucial points in Pakistan’s history such as the 1977 general election under the civilian rule of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, street power, fueled by Islamic fervour, trumped elected authority, and paved the way for the shift from democracy to military dictatorship.

The electoral system is weighed in favour of feudal lords since a large majority of voters live in villages whereas day-to-day politics are played out in urban areas. In towns and cities, Islamist groups have wide support among the lower middle and working classes, prone to taking to the streets on any issue related to Islam. Little wonder that in the current episode, Saeed has emerged as the epitome of street power, a formidable force that poses an unprecedented challenge to the US. Though a civilian government has been running Pakistan since 2008, its military high command has not abdicated its traditional authority to decide policies concerning national security, an area that covers a vast ground, domestic and foreign. Its Inter-Services Intelligence directorate which plays a vital role in securing or enhancing Pakistan’s internal and external security became the primary tool to execute Islamabad’s crafty policy of making India bleed through “a thousand cuts” in the three-fifths of Kashmir it controls. In turn, the ISI used various non-governmental organisations to implement the official policy.

The provincial Punjab government’s attempts to deactivate Saeed as a political-religious leader have failed due to the judicial verdicts. Twice during 2009 the Lahore High Court released Saeed from house arrest due to lack of evidence. That is why a US State Department spokesman explained that the bounty on Saeed was for evidence that would stand up in court – a tall order as recent events in Pakistan show.

The retreat of the civilian and military power elite in the face of murderous intimidation heartened jihadist leaders like Saeed. Broadening their support base are US drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt adjoining Afghanistan, which are condemned almost universally in Pakistan.

Determined to block the reopening of Pakistan’s land routes into Afghanistan for NATO traffic under any circumstances, Saeed cobbled together an umbrella organisation of 40 political and religious groups under the Difa-e Pakistan Council (DePC), Defence of Pakistan, in December. Its leaders immediately took to addressing rallies in major cities. Their rallies draw huge crowds. Council leaders combine patriotism with religious piety in an environment where a large majority of Pakistanis believe that Washington’s “war on terror” is a war on Islam. The latest opinion survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center, published in June 2011, shows that 75 per cent of Pakistanis have an unfavourable view of the US, and 68 per cent consider it as “more of a threat.”

The council decried Washington’s bounty on Saeed, calling it “a nefarious attempt” to undermine its drive to safeguard Pakistan’s sovereignty. The Council’s hands have been strengthened by the Parliament’s resolution on April 12, demanding an end to US drone attacks and hot pursuits by US or NATO troops inside Pakistan.

When the Obama administration and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani review mutual relations on the basis of the Pakistani Parliament’s resolution, they will find the shadow of Saeed lurking over them. More than the leading representative of militant jihadism in Pakistan, Saeed has come to epitomise street power. Recent episodes in Pakistan show that when it comes to a crunch, street power trumps electoral authority. The US thus faces a formidable foe in Pakistan whose cooperation it badly needs to withdraw from Afghanistan in an orderly and dignified fashion by 2014.
Dilip Hiro’s latest book is “Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia”

© Yale Center for the Study of Globalisation

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Bin Laden complained of group’s disaster[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 2, 2012

Osama bin Laden bemoaned “disaster after disaster” inflicted by the US onslaught on Al Qaeda before his death a year ago and even mulled changing his terror group’s name, a top US official said.

President Barack Obama’s top counter-terrorism aide John Brennan on Monday also argued that a US drone campaign had left Al Qaeda seriously weakened, and unable to replace wiped-out leaders.

Brennan said in a speech in Washington that the terror group was losing “badly”, was a “shadow” of its former self, and that its core leadership would soon be “no longer relevant”.

He said the Al Qaeda leader’s frustration at the demise of his group, which was behind the September 11 attacks in 2001, poured out in documents seized from his Pakistan compound by US Navy SEAL commandos who killed him a year ago. “He confessed to ‘disaster after disaster’” for Al Qaeda, Brennan said, noting that some of the captured material would be published online this week by the Combating Terrorism Centre at the US Military Academy at West Point.

Brennan also said that subsequent US operations to wipe out senior Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan had left the group reeling. “Under intense pressure in the tribal regions of Pakistan, they have fewer places to train and groom the next generation of operatives, they’re struggling to attract new recruits.

“Morale is low,” Brennan said in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars, which was briefly interrupted by a Code Pink anti-war demonstrator who was hauled out of the room by a burly policeman.

News of Bin Laden’s death broke in Washington late on May 1, 2011, and in Pakistan on May 2, owing to the time difference.

Brennan said that the documents gathered at Bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad, outside Islamabad, show the late Al Qaeda leader urged subordinates to flee for places “away from aircraft photography and bombardment.”

Things got so bad for the group which plotted the 9/11 attacks, the deadliest terror strike in US history, that Bin Laden considered changing the group’s name in a rebranding effort, he said.

Brennan’s speech will likely prompt new claims by Republicans that the Obama campaign is exploiting the anniversary of the Bin Laden raid to boost the president’s prospects of reelection in November.

Senior Obama aides are clearly using the president’s decision to launch the high-risk raid as an implicit comparison to the character of his presumptive Republican rival Mitt Romney.

The president himself implicitly suggested in a news conference on Monday that Romney may not have ordered the high-stakes raid last year.

Brennan also claimed that the administration’s tactics against Al Qaeda had made it harder than ever for the terror network to plan and execute large-scale, potentially catastrophic attacks.

“Today, it is increasingly clear that compared to 9/11, the core Al Qaeda leadership is a shadow of its former self,” Brennan said.

“Al- Qaeda has been left with just a handful of capable leaders and operatives, and with continued pressure is on the path to its destruction.

“And for the first time since this fight began, we can look ahead and envision a world in which the Al Qaeda core is simply no longer relevant.”

Brennan’s speech amounted to the administration’s most comprehensive public survey about the state of the struggle against Al Qaeda. He spent considerable time defending strikes by unmanned US aerial drones in nations like Pakistan, crediting them with dismantling Al Qaeda’s top leadership and causing Bin Laden’s distress.

Despite lauding the administration’s achievements in hammering top Al Qaeda leaders and the group’s capacity, Brennan also warned that global terror threats were still potent, particularly those emanating from Africa.

“As the Al Qaeda core falters, it continues to look to its affiliates and adherents to carry on its murderous cause,” Brennan said, warning that the group’s merger with the Shebab group in Somalia was “worrying.”

He said that Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) remained a threat, despite the strike that took out radical US-born cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, who directed its external operations.
Source: Khaleej Times

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Killers lurking in the shadows[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 2, 2012
KIMBERLY DOZIER

A year after the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda is hobbled and hunted, too busy surviving for the moment to carry out another September 11-style attack on US soil.

But the terrorist network dreams still of payback, and US counterterrorist officials warn that, in time, its offshoots may deliver.

A decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that has cost the US about $1.28 trillion and 6,300 U.S. troops’ lives has forced Al Qaeda’s affiliates to regroup, from Yemen to Iraq. Bin Laden’s No 2, Ayman Al Zawahri, is thought to be hiding, out of US reach, in Pakistan’s mountains, just as bin Laden was for so many years.

“It’s wishful thinking to say Al Qaeda is on the brink of defeat,” says Seth Jones, a Rand analyst and adviser to US special operations forces. “They have increased global presence, the number of attacks by affiliates has risen, and in some places like Yemen, they’ve expanded control of territory.”

It’s a complicated, somewhat murky picture for Americans to grasp.

US officials say Bin Laden’s old team is all but dismantled. But they say new branches are hitting Western targets and US allies overseas, and still aspire to match their parent organization’s milestone of September 11, 2001.

The deadliest is in Yemen. “They are continuing to try to again, carry out an attack against US persons inside of Yemen, as well as against the homeland,” White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said Sunday on ABC’s This Week.

“We’re working very closely with our Yemeni partners to track down all these leads,” he said.

Brennan says there’s no sign of an active revenge plot against US targets, but US citizens in Pakistan and beyond are being warned to be vigilant ahead of the May 2 anniversary of the night raid. US helicopters swooped down on Bin Laden’s compound in the Pakistani army town of Abbottabad, killing him, one of his sons, two couriers and their wives.

The last view for Americans of the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks was that of a wizened old man sitting in front of an old television, wrapped in a blanket.

The world may never see photographic proof of his death. US District Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington ruled last week that the Obama administration, under the Freedom of Information Act, would not have to turn over images of Bin Laden during or after the raid.

“Verbal descriptions of the death and burial of Osama Bin Laden will have to suffice,” Boasberg wrote in his ruling on the lawsuit by the public interest group Judicial Watch.

Bin Laden’s killing and Al Qaeda’s stumbling efforts to regroup are now the national security centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

The White House frequently cites the president’s decision to approve the raid, with only a 50-50 chance that Bin Laden was even at the compound. Obama could have gone down in history as the man who put the Navy SEALs and the relationship with Pakistan in jeopardy, while failing to catch the Al Qaeda leader.

“Al Qaeda was and is our No 1 enemy,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said last week. “So it’s a part of his foreign policy record, obviously, but it’s also part of a very serious endeavor to keep our country safe.”

How safe remains in question.

US officials say Al Qaeda is less able to carry out a complex attack like September 11 and they rule out Al Qaeda’s ability to attack with weapons of mass destruction in the coming year. These officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they say publicly identifying themselves could make them a target of the terrorist group.

US counterterrorist forces have killed roughly half of Al Qaeda’s top 20 leaders since the raid. That includes US-born cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, killed by a drone in Yemen last September, less than six months after Bin Laden’s death.

Only a few of the original Al Qaeda team remain, and most of the new names on the US target lists are relative unknowns, officials say.

“The last terror attack (in the West) was seven years ago in London and they haven’t had any major attacks in the US” says Peter Bergen, an Al Qaeda expert who once met Bin Laden. “They are recruiting no-hopers and dead-enders.”

Yet Zawahri is still out there. Though constantly hunted, he has managed to release 13 audio and video messages to followers since Bin Laden’s death, a near record-rate of release according to the IntelCenter, a private intelligence firm. He has urged followers to seize on the unrest left by the Arab Spring to build organisations and influence in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, and back rebels in Syria — a call that US intelligence officials say is being heeded.

US attempts to deliver a “knockout punch” to Zawahri and his followers in Pakistan have been hamstrung by a breakdown in relations with Pakistan’s government over the Bin Laden raid.

“Our efforts are focused on one small kill box and, we’ve hit them hard, but they still maintain a vital network throughout Pakistan” says Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal, which tracks US counterterrorism efforts worldwide.

Al Qaeda also takes shelter in Pakistan’s urban areas, as shown by the Bin Laden raid, and the CIA’s efforts to search those areas is often blocked by the Pakistani intelligence service.

By the numbers, Al Qaeda’s greatest presence is still greatest in Iraq, where intelligence officials estimate up to a 1,000 fighters have refocused their campaign from striking now-absent US troops to hitting the country’s government.

Yemen’s Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is becoming a major draw for foreign fighters as it carves out a stronghold in the south of the country, easily defeating Yemeni forces preoccupied battling tribal and political unrest. The White House recently agreed to expanded drone strikes to give the CIA and the military greater leeway to target militant leaders.

This Al Qaeda group has been a major threat since 2009, when one of its adherents tried to bring down a jetliner over Detroit.

Al Qaeda affiliates such as Al Shabab in Somalia are struggling to carry out attacks in the face of a stepped up CIA-US military campaign, and a loss of popular support after blocking UN food aid to some four million starving Somalis, officials say.

Many US officials cite the Yemen model as the way ahead: a small network of US intelligence and military forces working with local forces to selectively target militants.

“The key challenge will be balancing aggressive counterterrorism operations with the risk of exacerbating the anti-Western global agenda” of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, says Robert Cardillo, a senior official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In other words, adds Jones: “It is a war in which the side that kills the most civilians loses.”
Source: Khaleej Times

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Truth and terror[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 2, 2012
Rafia Zakaria

THE compound has been demolished and the wives shipped off to Saudi Arabia. In the one year since Osama bin Laden’s death the physical evidence of his presence, his home and household have all but been eliminated from Pakistani soil.

If these demolitions and departures were indicators of the end of an era, the dislocation of terror and its tentacles in Pakistani soil then Pakistanis could all have heaved a collective sigh of relief on this day and marked it as the moment when they kissed terror and its bloody legacy good bye.

As history or fate would have it, such sentimental scenes are not destined for Pakistan. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, the country saw 476 major incidents of terrorism (major classified as involving three or more deaths) in 2011.

The worst of them came not before but after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, when 90 people, paramilitary and civilians were killed as two suicide bombers attacked an FC training centre in Charsadda.

The attacks have continued unabated since, the period from January until April of this year 2012 already having witnessed 201 bomb blasts with hundreds killed and injured. The year and a half period from 2011 to the middle of 2012, has seen more people die of terrorist attacks in Pakistan than Americans in the whole decade since 9/11.

Pakistan’s casualties from terror are not simply those who have died in the attacks themselves. Every dying man and woman to fall in the unfortunate path of the suicide bomber or automated blast has left behind him or her an unseen mourning horde of those that must live on, lives forever interrupted, inexplicably and unjustly.

The conflict between security forces and terrorists has wreaked its own havoc in the enactment of Pakistan’s terror tragedy. A few weeks ago, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, announced that 208,000 internally displaced people are now living in the Jalozai camp in Nowshera since January of this year, a number said to represent only 15 per cent of the actual people displaced from their homes.

Many of these wandering victims of terror, homeless and hungry, are just as hapless as the dead According to Oxfam, nearly half a million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance, with a recent influx of 63,000 families putting tremendous stress on the resources available. Nearly 80 per cent of the displaced families have no access to healthcare or medicines.

When the death of Osama bin Laden was announced a year ago today, those assessing the success or defeat of the war on terror from the safe distance of faraway lands rejoiced and believed. A poll conducted in Pakistan days after found Pakistanis unsure.

Conducted by YouGov, in collaboration with Polis at Cambridge University, the poll found that 66 per cent of educated Pakistanis did not believe that Osama Bin Laden was killed in the attack.

Another poll, conducted by Gallup International also conducted in the immediate aftermath of the raid, found that only 25 per cent of Pakistanis actually believed that the person attacked in Abbottabad that day was Osama bin Laden.

When asked whether terrorism would increase, decrease or remain unchanged, nearly three-quarters of Pakistanis believed that it would increase or at best remain unchanged.

As the ensuing year’s numbers have shown, they were right. Counting casualties, direct and indirect, dead or almost dead, maimed by bombs or bullets delivers a prognosis that shows terror living well and claiming much, hiding in cities and towns and felling young and old with hate or hunger. But the doubt over Osama bin Laden’s death amid the continuation of the very disease it was supposed to cure points to another casualty.

The first decade of the war on terror, punctuated by today’s anniversary of the death of the mastermind most visibly associated with it, has produced not only casualties of flesh and blood but also of truth and belief.

Pakistanis did not doubt Osama bin Laden’s death because the crystal balls or nocturnal visions indicated no cessation in bombings and killings, or because of secretly nursed sympathies that venerated a mass murderer, or any of the other explanations bandied about by those who would magnify the death of the man into an epic victory.

Pakistanis did not believe in the death of Osama bin Laden, because the most tragic, heartrending and invisible casualty of terror in Pakistan has been the death of truth itself.

With the proliferation of terror has come the elevation of secrecy, a new creed practised by governments and intelligence agencies, foreign governments and spymasters, extremist outfits that change names with the seasons and all those who shelter them. This intricate web of the unknown that weaves through every event and breathes souls into the corpses of doubt has meant the end of fact in Pakistan. The bomb blast at a train station, the murder of a journalist, the verdict of a court nothing can be solved or explained or predicted because nothing can be believed.

There are many scars inflicted on the suffering by conflict, this one cast on one and all bleeds everyday and is never bandaged, draining drop by drop the spirit that sustains a nation.

Bleeding internally and externally, one year after Bin Laden’s death, Pakistan is not misunderstood and the truth more so. As the reason for deaths, the causes of catastrophes, the elusiveness of justice or accountability present day-after-day new tableaus of anarchy, it seems laughable and even cruel to consider that many in the world thought and still think that the death of a single evil man could mean much or anything when the deaths of so many innocent others have meant absolutely nothing.

The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.

[email]rafia.zakaria@gmail.com[/email]
-Dawn

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]The post-Osama terror factory[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 3, 2012 by admin786| Leave a comment
Jawed Naqvi

I MUST confess I was among the feckless journalists that wouldn’t believe for days after the event a year ago that Osama bin Laden was killed or could be killed without the help of Pakistani intelligence.

Many analysts staked their reputation over the inevitability of Pakistani collusion in Osama’s death. The true story remains mired in claims and counter-claims.

So much so that President Obama was ticked off by officials of the US Navy SEALs for claiming undue credit. There was a story this week about a vital tip-off the Americans got from Pakistani intelligence on Osama’s secret courier whose movements were tracked and eventually led to the Al Qaeda chief’s lair near a Pakistani army cantonment. The debate continues, drawing new battle lines, killing old alliances, building new ones.

It was such an incredibly daring operation fraught with risks. After all, in 1980 another Democratic president lost a second bid for the Oval Office after a similarly daring operation went wrong. The attempt to rescue American hostages from their captors in Tehran misfired in a stormy Iranian desert.

Pictures of President Obama and his team watching the real-time execution of Osama bin Laden added to the pervasive sense of achievement that followed and lingered on for weeks, months, across the oceans.

And yet, in political cat and mouse, rarely does the assassination of an adversary lead to an anticipated dénouement. The meticulously planned elimination of Osama in his lair last May appears today at best to have been a vendetta killing of a macabre villain. By all accounts, the threat of religious terrorism associated with the 9/11 mastermind remains very much alive and ready to mutate into more ominous forms of horror.

According to a recent CNN news alert, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin could represent new forms religious terror may acquire. He has been questioned by police in Berlin since May last year after he had returned from Pakistan. Lodin’s interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards. Buried inside them was a pornographic video and a file marked ‘Sexy Tanja’.

After sustained efforts to crack a password and software to make the file nearly invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the video a treasure trove of intelligence — scores of Al Qaeda documents that included clues about plots and a road map for future operations.

These plots, according to CNN, include the idea of seizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants on Mumbai in November 2008.

US intelligence sources told CNN that the documents uncovered are “pure gold”; one source says that they are the most important haul of Al Qaeda materials in the last year, besides those found when US Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

One Al Qaeda document makes it clear that the group is aware it is being followed. “It specifically says that western intelligence agencies have become very good at spoiling attacks, that they have to come up with new ways and better plotting.”

While the document ‘Future Works’ does not include dates or places, nor specific plans, it appears to be a brainstorming exercise to seize the initiative and again install Al Qaeda on front pages around the world. The question remains: is the world really much safer after Osama bin Laden.

As assassinations go, Osama’s killing seems almost passé in its import against some other individual fatalities, including the less immaculately planned and nearly spontaneous assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in the Balkans in 1914.

Those two bullets fired on a Sarajevo street on a balmy June morning in 1914 set in motion a series of events that shaped the world we live in. The First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War and its conclusion all trace their origins to the gunshots that interrupted that summer day.

By contrast, Osama’s killing will at best find an echo in the American presidential race in November this year. But even President Obama who ordered the assault will not be quite so sure that the proverbial trophy of the victim’s head was good enough to see him home and dry against the gathering Republican challenge. Who knows, but had the Al Qaeda chief been nabbed alive the secular world and probably President Obama himself would have benefited more.

The cynical cost-benefit factor in the bizarre terror hunt has all the potential to make ordinary people wary of the shifting motives behind the global dragnet. What would make any serious observer suspicious about celebrating the anniversary of Osama’s death as some kind of a game-changer in the big fight is the palpable shift in focus about the quarry. From Al Qaeda and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba it spawned, suddenly out of the blue, a new battle cry has brought Iran in the crosshairs of global
terror hunt.

As an Indian journalist I have watched together with other angry colleagues how a fellow journalist has been made a pawn in the new chess game between Iran and its detractors, with India playing a cowardly facilitator, in a post-Osama terror hunt.

An alleged bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat’s car in Delhi was without a moment’s pause declared to be the handiwork of Iran.
Until this incident, all the alleged villains were Sunni groups variously based in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. Suddenly, Iran, which itself was and reportedly still is a target of Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based allies, has become the terrorist-in-chief.

I wonder how Syed Mohammed Kazmi, now lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail for the alleged attack on the Israeli car, a charge he has vociferously denied, will observe the anniversary celebrating Osama bin Laden’s death. As far as his friends are concerned, and they are highly respected Indian journalists, Kazmi was by far the best informed correspondent who had enviable contacts in nearly all the countries of the Middle East. He challenged the West in Syria, in Iraq and on Iran.

The terror factory works both ways. It spawns a culture of indiscriminate mass murderers. It also enables the most applauded democracies to turn slowly, unobtrusively, into police states.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

[email]jawednaqvi@gmail.com[/email]
-Dawn

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda story
[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]

S Iftikhar Murshed
Sunday, May 06, 2012

Last Wednesday marked the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Within three days of his death the myth that he commanded the absolute loyalty of all Al-Qaeda factions began to unravel. Reports sourced to Al-Qaeda insiders surfaced in the Arab print media that it was the outfit’s Egyptian component led by Ayman Al-Zawahiri that had tipped off American intelligence through a Pakistani intermediary about Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad.

At first glance this seems like an outlandish conspiracy theory, but Al-Zawahiri’s murky past is replete with instances of treachery and outright betrayal of his close associates. In 1981 he disclosed the whereabouts of Essam Al-Qamari, a co-conspirator in the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat, which resulted in Al-Qamari’s execution; in 1989 he was allegedly involved in the killing of Abdullah Azzam, the ideological founder of Al-Qaeda.

Against this background, reports have also recently emerged that information was indirectly divulged to US intelligence by Al-Zawahiri loyalists about the precise location of several non-Egyptian Al-Qaeda commanders. These included Ilyas Kashmiri (Pakistan) who was killed in a drone strike on June 4 last year, Atiyah Abdul Rahman (Libya) was similarly eliminated on August 22, Badar Mansoor (Pakistan) was successfully targeted on February 9 this year, and several others.

Al-Zawahiri began his jihadist enterprise as a stalwart committed to the reversal of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, but by the mid-2000s he had become an agent of Russian intelligence. This was disclosed in July 2005 in an interview to the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita by Alexander Litvinenko, a senior official of the Soviet KGB and subsequently its Russian successor, the Federal Security Services (FSB). Litvinenko, who was killed on November 23, 2006, disclosed that Al-Zawahiri was an “old agent of the FSB” who had been trained for six months by Russian intelligence in Dagestan in 1997. This was later confirmed by the former KGB agent Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, as well as by FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko.

The Doha-based daily Al-Watan was told by disgruntled Al-Qaeda leaders last May that “the Egyptians wanted to control the organisation since its inception, but found their biggest opportunity after Osama bin Laden’s illness in mid-2004.” It was at this point in time that Al-Zawahiri prevailed upon Bin Laden to relocate to Abbottabad and then took effective command of Al-Qaeda. This was also corroborated by the US State Department which disclosed on April 30, 2009, that Al-Zawahiri had emerged as Al-Qaeda’s operational and strategic commander, whereas Osama bin Laden had become only the ideological figurehead of the organisation.

The Al-Qaeda leader’s health had actually deteriorated sharply towards the end of the 1990s. This was also conveyed to me by Mullah Omar during several of our meetings in Kandahar in 1998 and 1999. On one occasion he said “Osama will not live much longer. The sooner he dies the better for Afghanistan.”

Bin Laden was acutely aware that he was living on borrowed time and this explains his hurry to pull off 9/11. The planning for this event had begun in early 2000. This is evident from a letter of September 10, 2010, from Al-Libi Noman Benotman, a former Bin Laden associate and leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, to the Al-Qaeda chief. Al-Libi recalled that Bin Laden had invited him for breakfast at his “simple mud house in Kandahar in the summer of 2000,” where Al-Zawahiri was also present.

In the meeting Al-Libi reminded Bin Laden that on several occasions Mullah Omar had asked him “to stop provoking and inviting American attacks on his country.” This was also the advice of senior Al-Qaeda ideologue and religious thinker Sheikh Abu Hafs Al-Mauritani (real name Mafouz Ould Al-Walid), who had also categorically stated that by defying Mullah Omar, Al-Qaeda “was making a mockery of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” To this Bin Laden replied that one more operation was underway and he could not stop it.

Even Abu Muhammad Al-Zayyat, the head of Al-Qaeda’s military committee, had vehemently objected to Bin Laden’s “final” operation as that was “illegitimate without Mullah Omar’s permission.” But the Al-Qaeda chief had made up his mind and went ahead with the fateful 9/11 attacks. This brought ruin to Afghanistan and eventually resulted in his own inglorious death.

Referring to 9/11, Al-Libi told Bin Laden: “Your actions have harmed millions of innocent Muslims and non-Muslims alike. How is this Islam or jihad? For how much longer will Al-Qaeda continue to bring shame on Islam? ...Muslims across the world have rejected your calls for wrongful jihad and the establishment of your so-called ‘Islamic state’...Even the Palestinians consider your ‘help’ to have had negative repercussions on their cause.”

Similar opinions have been expressed by Muslim scholars and leaders worldwide, but some of the influential politicians of Pakistan, a breed of middle-aged mediocrities, think differently. A few days after the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Jamaat-e-Islami organised a massive rally in Lahore in which he was eulogized as a “martyr of Islam.” Representatives of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Nawaz Sharif’s faction of the Muslim League and the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba were prominent among the participants. Speaker after speaker extolled the valour of the slain terrorist and severely reprimanded the government for the US commando raid that killed their hero.

This was not an isolated event as several similar demonstrations have been held. The most recent being the March 18 public meeting in Chakwal during which Jamaat-e-Islami chief Syed Munawer Hassan proclaimed Bin Laden a “great martyr” and President Asif Ali Zardari the “biggest traitor.” The Al-Qaeda leader, he said, had been “martyred” for standing up to that “great Satan,” the United States.

Pakistan thus has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world where politicians, not only from the religious right but also from the mainstream political parties, have taken out processions and held rallies commemorating the arch terrorist of our times as a martyr for the cause of Islam. It makes little difference to them that an estimated 35,000 civilians have been killed in terrorist acts perpetrated by extremist groups affiliated to Al-Qaeda.

Shortly before his death, Bin Laden had also worked out a blueprint for direct Al-Qaeda attacks against Pakistan. This was apparent from the evidence gathered by the Americans from Osama’s Abbottabad compound, which they shared with their Pakistani counterparts during talks in Islamabad last week.

Al-Qaeda was formally launched in Peshawar on August 11, 1988, and in the near quarter century since then, it was dominated by Osama bin Laden. Researchers have described five distinct phases in its development: (i) the beginning in the late 1980s, (ii) the “wilderness” period from 1990-1996, (iii) the “heyday” period 1996-2001, the network period of 2001-2005, and (v) a period of fragmentation from 2005 to today.

But what the scholars have not said is that by 2005, Al-Qaeda had deviated from its original objectives and had started killing Muslims, as was apparent from the assassination attempt on then-president Hosni Mubarak and the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. By 2006 it had degenerated into a sectarian outfit with the killing of Shias in Iraq. Muslims have been the main victims of Al-Qaeda’s jihad.

It is said that “the evil that men do lives after them,” and so it is with Osama bin Laden. He will always be remembered as the arch terrorist of his times. The influential Saudi cleric, Sheikh Salman Al-Ouda, said it all when he asked Bin Laden: “How many innocent people, children, elderly people, and women have been killed...in the name of Al-Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions of victims on your back?”

The writer is the publisher of Criterion quarterly. Email: iftimurshed @gmail.com

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Religious intolerance in Muslim societies[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 7, 2012
Yasser Latif Hamdani

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan made Ahmedis non-Muslims for the purposes of the law and constitution. Exclusivist and arguably ultra vires the scope of parliamentary power as it was, it did not impose any restrictions on the freedom of religion of Ahmedis, including their right to call themselves Muslims. To do so would have been a negation of Article 20 of the Constitution, which promises every citizen freedom to profess and propagate his religion.

Then in 1984 came Ordinance XX, which criminalised the very freedom the constitution bequeathed on Ahmedis as citizens of this country. Hitting at the root of the Ahmedis’ faith, the Ordinance took away the right to say salaam or even recite the Holy Quran. Ironically, Christian painters were given the task of whiting out Quranic verses on Ahmedi graves. It was forbidden for Ahmedis to call their places of worship mosques. They were forbidden to make any structures that remotely resembled a mosque. What, one wonders, does a mosque look like is anybody’s guess. Does the Shah Faisal Mosque in Islamabad look like a mosque? How about Ranjit Singh’s Marri? Does it not look like a mosque? In any event, some vague idea of what a mosque looks like was forbidden to Ahmedis.

Last Thursday, in Lahore, the Misri Shah police scratched out Quranic verses from an Ahmedi place of worship and destroyed parts of it to make it look less like a mosque. It reminded me of another incident not long ago in Switzerland where a ban on minarets for mosques was proposed. Ironically, that incident which had the entire Islamic world up in arms against the Swiss government pertained to an Ahmedi place of worship. Here Pakistan follows that fine Swiss tradition of forbidding religious freedom to a certain community and with a vengeance.

Complainants from as far as 15 kilometers away had become incensed at this small place of worship, which was suddenly threatening the spiritual well being and religious freedom of the good Muslims of Sultanpura and Misri Shah area.

The problem with Muslims in general is that they want themselves to be held to a different standard than that to which they hold others. In the west in general, Muslims seem to be perpetually outraged against ‘intolerant majorities’ for the slightest of slights. Goal posts change once it is a Muslim majority country. The human rights that Muslims assert in the west are almost always deemed as irrelevant to Muslim countries. There is no Muslim country in the world without a harrowing tale of minority persecution. From Coptic Christians in Egypt to Hindus in Pakistan and from the Druze to Ahmedis, almost every Muslim country has a minority or two that has been forcibly oppressed and targeted by a majority that is incapable of accepting diversity, not just vis-à-vis non-Muslims but also within Islam. Bahais and Sunnis face the wrath of the majority in Iran. In Syria, we have Alawites threatened and isolated. In Saudi Arabia, all non-Muslim modes of worship are banned and for expatriates living in Saudi Arabia, being a Shia may lead to deportation (though Saudi Shias are somewhat tolerated). The situation in Pakistan was considerably better until 1984 but since then, not just Ahmedis but Christians and Hindus have also faced systematic persecution. It is not enough to claim that Islam provides the most rights for non-Muslims; there should be some practical example of these rights. Going by what we have in the world today, that example seems to elude us.

At a time when the world was in darkness, Islam gave unprecedented religious freedom to non-Muslims. The Meesaq-e-Medina is evidence enough — Jews and others were declared one Ummat, one community, with the Muslims of Medina. That pact was perhaps the first genuinely pluralistic compact between a diverse people. Amongst the later Caliphs, Mamun-ur-Rasheed’s rule stands out for its acceptance of religious diversity and personal freedom. That his rule corresponded with the zenith of Islamic civilisation is no accident. The Ottoman Empire, in its heyday, was a prime example of this. Sultan Mehmet Fateh — the great conqueror of Constantinople — and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent were both known for their enlightened and tolerant religious policy towards the non-Muslims in their realm. Far from theocratic Caliphs, these masters of realpolitik realised the importance of keeping their non-Muslim subjects happy. Fateh even assumed, for a time, the title of the head of the Orthodox Christian Church and its protector. Much like Akbar the Great, the Mughal Emperor, Mehmet Fateh and Suleiman the Magnificent refused to give in to the whims of the Muslim clergy. Their courts were models of pluralism and heterodox ideas, which is why Jews and Christians, who together outnumbered Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, remained loyal subjects of the Empire. Even Aurangzeb — who was the most puritan and fundamentalist of the Mughal emperors — had to adopt a measure of religious tolerance and pluralism towards the Hindus of his realm though it was not nearly enough in the end.

None of these examples matter though. The truth is that lack of tolerance, a skewed educational system with misplaced priorities and outright bigotry — taught from the pulpit — has so fantastically distorted our worldview that one wonders how we will dig ourselves out of this hole. In terms of our treatment of minorities, our utter disregard for diversity and our zero-tolerance for dissent has begun to fracture our society in ways that we have yet to comprehend fully. How long will we allow this country of ours to remain on the wrong side of history and known for a land of narrow-minded bigots who are incapable of even accommodating a tiny minority?

The writer is a practising lawyer. He blogs at [url]http://globallegalorum.blogspot[/url] and his twitter handle is therealylh

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Crowing about Bin Laden’s death[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 7, 2012
By Doyle McManus

Americans are far enough away from it now that they can probably all agree: It was a mistake for former president George W. Bush to land on that aircraft carrier in a flight suit to proclaim “Mission Accomplished”. And not just because the war in Iraq was far from over at that point. Every president crows about his successes in war — assuming he has anything to crow about. But he should try to seem modest and statesmanlike while doing so.

President Barack Obama should have reminded himself of that lesson last week as he prepared to fly to Afghanistan to observe the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. The president didn’t actually use the words “mission accomplished,” but he came pretty close.

Obama and his campaign have managed to turn the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death into a weeklong celebration of the president-as-tough-guy. And they’re celebrating in a distinctly partisan way, suggesting that Mitt Romney would not have made the same decision. The impulse is understandable. Ever since Obama took office, the GOP has accused him of being weak.

Romney and other Republicans have painted him as a peacenik, as soft on defence, as a leader who makes preemptive concessions to tougher-minded adversaries. And these portrayals have persisted despite Obama’s refusal to play the part. Not only did he order the death of Bin Laden, he also approved relentless campaigns of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen and tripled the number of US troops in Afghanistan. Still, Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden would have done better not to turn the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death into an attack on Romney. It wasn’t presidential, and it wasn’t even necessary.

Troop withdrawal

The president deserved credit for a gutsy decision, but by the time he got to Kabul, his campaign had turned it into another cable television food-fight. And that micro-debate overshadowed a far more important foreign policy (and campaign) message of Obama’s trip to Kabul: The president is keeping his promise to wind down the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The tide has turned,” Obama said in Kabul.

“The goal that I set — to defeat Al Qaida and deny it a chance to rebuild — is within reach.” And so, he promised, thousands of troops will come home from Afghanistan this summer and fall — a good-news story that will recur long after the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death has faded.

His success in the fight against Al Qaida even emboldened him to try out a metaphor that hasn’t been heard in decades: It’s morning in America. After “a decade under the dark cloud of war … we can see the light of a new day on the horizon,” he said. “As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home, it is time to renew America — an America … where sunlight glistens off soaring new towers in downtown Manhattan.”

To a remarkable degree, Obama has won the debate on Afghanistan. There are still Republican critics, led by Senator John S. McCain of Arizona, who say the troop withdrawals are too fast and warn that the Taliban is simply waiting us out. Their position is reasonable and defensible, but it collides with a public that is sick and tired of the war and its costs.

An ABC News-Washington Post poll this month found that 66 per cent of adults say the war has not been worth fighting — and that included 55 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Indeed, Afghanistan was one issue you didn’t hear Romney talk about last week, perhaps because his positions aren’t likely to win many votes beyond his existing base of national security conservatives.

Romney has called for delaying troop withdrawals until at least the end of the year and has said he would stay in Afghanistan as long as it took to “defeat the Taliban.” Moreover, Romney has denounced Obama for seeking negotiations with the insurgents, even though the Afghan government (and McCain, for that matter) supports the talks as a way to bring the war to an end. It’s no wonder the Romney camp was bent out of shape last week.

Not only did Obama challenge his opponent’s manliness; he also kept the nation focused on Afghanistan rather than on the sorry state of the economy, where Romney stands a better chance of scoring points. Obama has every right to point out the progress he’s made in the fight against Al Qaida and the promises he’s kept in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he’s got every right to challenge Romney for apparent inconsistencies. But that’s what campaign debates are for. When the president wants to commemorate an act of military valour, he should keep politics out of the mix.
Source: Gulf News

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]A national counterterrorism policy[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 8, 2012
By Khawaja Khalid Farooq

AFTER 9/11, Pakistan has been beset by the twin menace of radicalisation and terrorism.

A national policy to deal with the menace of terrorism is a dire necessity, something which is one of the mandated tasks of the nascent National Counter Terrorism Authority of Pakistan (Nacta).

A national counterterrorism strategy has to be drafted and shared with the public, with civil society taking an active part in the deliberations.

This comprehensive strategy should not just have law-enforcement agencies and the military, but should also involve others, for example educationists, who could be required to evaluate outmoded curricula and replace them with more tolerant non-sectarian versions.

Scientists can be involved to jam illegal FM transmissions; the media can generate public-service messages and programmes promoting tolerance. The strategy should remain within the ambit of the rule of law, or it has the potential to become a monster almost as big as the insurgents.

The rule of law needs representative governance. With the arrival of civilian government representing this in 2008, the situation has gradually moved towards a national consensus against terrorism. Democracy must be nurtured in Pakistan, as this is the only way forward for nations to put their affairs in order.

Threat priorities need to be established for the future of the war on terror not only in the Pakistani but in the global context as well. One solution has been the establishment of a counterterrorism environment created by politicians through legislation, budgets and policy decisions.

Legislation will be a part of the directing tangential forces of counterterrorism. In Pakistan, this legislation resonates in the anti-terrorist acts passed by parliament, which need to be constantly reassessed with the changing dynamics of the situation on the ground.

The inherent global challenge would be balancing the rights of citizens and fundamental constitutional guarantees against the increasing threat from terrorism.

This is the delicate balancing act that counterterrorism in the future will continue to face, especially for the security agencies directly involved in these operations, and which perhaps affects the police the most.

Huge challenges for counterterrorism in the future will include coordination which seems to be exponentially increasing.

Future efforts in counterterrorism will require complex investigations involving multiple countries, a variety of types of communication and numerous sources of intelligence. Collectively, there will be an ever-evolving need for more sophisticated forms of counterterrorism and greater resources.

Long-term polices resembling the Blair government‘s CONTEST strategy in the UK need to be in place. The four areas identified as prevention, pursuit, protection and preparedness gain another dimension in the Pakistani context — that of containment, since we have been beset by an insurgency in our northern areas.

This has been reinvented according to our own situation under the government’s policy of dialogue, deterrence and development as the main area of thrust in Pakistan.

The pursuit of improved intelligence, the disruption of terrorist activity and better coordination with international forces fighting terrorism will require improved cooperation. Protection of homeland security installations will require improved domestic security of ports and public transportation systems.

Preparing for the threat of confrontation will require an ever-increasing readiness to respond to terrorist attacks.

The complete elimination of terrorism may not be possible, but adequate containment is the path to be followed. A sincere effort must be made to study individuals prone to radicalisation and who are thus potential recruits for terrorist groups.

Rather than just firefighting, we need to find out the causes: why is there terrorism, why are people becoming radicalised, how are they radicalised? Only then can we deal with these issues.

The future of counterterrorism will also be shaped to a certain extent by the relationships among the various organisations involved in the war against terrorism, which of course stands true for Nacta as well.

While the new threats resulted in the grant of emergency powers to governments to get more powers and additional resources, sometimes the evolution of coordination has been too reactive, short-term and politicised.

This has occasionally caused slow governmental responses to increase resources going into counterterrorism. Police forces are critical in the counterterrorism future, due to their presence on the ground and their ability to carry out arrests.

The key to long-term containment of terrorism, beyond tactical policing and security measures designed to detect and defeat zealots, is to reduce the supply of terrorists. It must be recognised that terrorism requires a small core of radicalised individuals bent on carrying out acts of violence.

What government policy must ensure is that these individuals are kept marginalised within their own communities. They must not be allowed to lead others along the path of violence. If they are isolated then they can be contained, either by the state or by their own communities. Without a support network, they pose a much smaller threat.

Summing up, successful counterterrorism in the future of a democratic society requires trust and confidence in the efficacy of the security forces because public cooperation is essential.

This can only be done after capturing the so-called hearts and minds of the citizens, particularly in those communities where terrorists are to be found, confronted and contained.

This winning of hearts and minds is what constitutes the core of counterterrorism in the future, not just in Pakistan but across the globe as well, and will continue to do so for times to come.

We have the resolve to fight terrorism, but not the entire panoply of resources needed.

Pakistan is a resilient nation, and will overcome these problems eventually. However, the road ahead needs to be paved with the soundest of policies bolstered by the international community in order to bridge the resource gap failing which, one would expect to see militancy problems continuing in the country.

The writer is head of the National Counter Terrorism Authority, Pakistan, and a former inspector-general of police.
-Dawn

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]One year after Bin Laden[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 8, 2012
Areeba Malik

A reporter asked President George W Bush six days after the 9/11 attacks: “Do you want Bin Laden dead?” “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive,’ “ the president answered.

Nearly a decade later, one of the most arduous manhunts in human history lead to an Osama bin Laden who was alive and well but was subsequently killed at his safe house in Abbottabad by elite American forces. The day was May 2, 2011.

One year after Bin Laden’s death, what lessons has Pakistan learnt? Does the network that the world’s most wanted terrorist commanded, the deadly Al-Qaeda, lie in ruins or is it adapting to the lack of a unifying force and recalibrating its methods and ideology?

Many in the West are making the argument that were Bin Laden alive today, he would find the world radically changed. No one can deny that the Al-Qaeda stands considerably weakened. The Arab Spring uprisings have eaten away at one of Al-Qaeda’s main ideological justifications – that dictatorships in the Muslim world could not be peacefully overthrown and the US had to be attacked as their chief sponsor.

Islamist radicals are now part of emerging governments in Egypt and Tunisia, pledging collaboration with US officials, while Islamic militants in eastern Libya, once a recruiting ground for Al-Qaeda suicide bombers going to Iraq, were last year closely cooperating with Nato to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi.

And finally, the US administration is now ready and willing to engage with militants of all shades who renounce violence and terrorism. It’s a far shot from the world Bin Laden dreamed of fashioning and ruling.

But dangers remain. America’s on-going battle against terror still requires that critical questions about the progress of the war be asked, especially concerning whether the current strategy is working.

No one can deny that the US has a tendency to embark on imperialistic escapades that land it in all sorts of troubles and from which it seems to learn few lessons. We know that on 9/11, Al-Qaeda’s goal was to draw the US into a protracted conflict and “bleed” and “bankrupt” the country – Bin Laden’s own words – and that is exactly what it did: by pitting the US against the larger Islamist world. When Bush invaded Iraq, as so many commentators wrote then, Bin Laden’s plans were realised.

But President Obama seems to be working on a reorientation of strategy and has tried to get his country out of the permanent war his predecessor plunged it in by acknowledging there really is only one Islamist group that attacked the United States directly: Al-Qaeda.

The rest, the US is willing to negotiate with now, as part of the broader Afghan peace process and to extricate itself from a conflict that seems to have no end but which it is desperate to conclude.

As for Pakistan, one year after Bin Laden’s demise, Islamabad has singularly failed to answer tough questions over whether its security forces were protecting the world’s most wanted terrorist or if they just failed to detect his presence in Abbottabad.

For a security establishment that is already accused of playing both sides in the campaign against militancy, providing straight answers are key, going forward. As for the civilian government, it has to take responsibility for Pakistan’s battle against militancy. If that is a lesson it hasn’t learnt one year after OBL’s death, then that is an admission that we are neither interested in getting on the right side of world opinion, nor in setting our own house in order.
-The News

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Reviewing the ‘war on terror’
[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]

Shamshad Ahmad
Sunday, May 13, 2012


The 21st century did not start well. We found ourselves burdened with the same old problems but in their acutest form. The world has never been so chaotic and violent. Wars of aggression and attrition, invasions in the name of self-defence, military occupations, massacres and genocides, human tragedies and humanitarian catastrophes, and a culture of extremism and violence came to define the new world disorder.

Terrorism as an evil has afflicted humanity for centuries but it assumed global dimension as a scourge of the new millennium only after the 9/11 tragedy. Today, it transcends all boundaries deeply impacting the political, economic and security environment of all regions, countries and societies. It is a faceless enemy with no faith or creed and lurks in the shadows of fear and frustration, breeds despair and disillusionment, and is fed by poverty and ignorance. It is a violent manifestation of growing anger, despair, hatred and frustration over continuing injustice, oppression and denial of fundamental freedoms and rights.

Unfortunately, in the aftermath of 9/11, the detractors of Islam found an opportunity to contrive stereotypes to malign Islam and to mobilise a climate of antipathy against its adherents by focusing obsessively on the religion of the individuals and organisations allegedly involved in terrorist activities. What was being conveniently ignored was the fact that most of the perpetrators of violence were dissident runaways from their own countries long under Western-supported archaic despotic regimes and had a political agenda of their own in their misguided pursuits.

The problem is that the world does not even know how to define terrorism. Other than varied descriptions of violence in all its manifestations, there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism which is today generally viewed as “politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents.” A short legal definition used in the UN for an act of terrorism is the “peacetime equivalent of a war crime.” UN negotiations on long-outstanding draft international convention on terrorism remain inconclusive because of irreconcilable differences on the basic issues.

With the essence of the challenge including the legal scope of the proposed convention yet to be determined, the world is already engaged in what is labelled as a “global war on terror.” This US-led war is being fought on Muslim soils with the stated purpose of eliminating the “roots” of violence and religious extremism. But in effect, it is not the root but the symptom which is being targeted. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan today epitomize the worst case scenario of this botched and ill-motivated “war on terror.”

Pakistan, in particular, has become the ground zero of the war with a full-fledged military conflict going on within its tribal areas, which are suspected of being a “terrorism sanctuary.” There has been a huge collateral damage in this ongoing operation. The biggest casualty, however, is Pakistan’s own credibility. It has staked everything in this proxy war and has killed thousands of its own people, yet it is being blamed for “not doing enough.”

We never had extremism in our country. Gen Musharraf allowed this monster to grow only to remain relevant in the war on terror and thus prolong his military rule. We also didn’t have this intensity of violence before he took over. The only violence we knew was sectarian in nature. Our involvement in this campaign today complicates our tasks, both at home and at regional and global levels. Our territorial integrity is being violated with impunity. We are accepting the responsibility for crimes we have not committed. There seems to be no end to this incessant blame game.

The world also looks at us with anxiety and suspicion as we have unrivalled distinction of having captured the largest number of Al-Qaeda operatives and handing them over to the US. What is most worrisome at this juncture is that Pakistan is going through one of the most serious crises of its history. With a corrupt and externally vulnerable regime in power, the country is being kept engaged on multiple external and domestic fronts. The Salalah episode and its aftermath have amply tested this government which never had a clear strategic vision of its own and remains totally non-consequential on issues of vital national importance.

What our rulers need to understand is that use of military power within a state and against its own people has never been an acceptable norm. It is considered a recipe for intra-state implosions, a familiar scene in Africa. Excessive use of military force and indiscriminate killings instead of addressing the root causes is not only bringing the government and the armed forces on the wrong side of the people but also weakening the very cause of the war on terror.

After more than a decade-long war on terror, one thing is clear: terrorism will not disappear through campaigns motivated by retaliation and retribution alone. Nabbing or killing of few hundred individuals or changing the leadership in one or two countries will not bring an end to terrorism which in its deeper sense is an ugly manifestation of a mindset, a mindset rooted in a sense of despair and despondency. It is a perverse mindset that needs to be treated like a disease. If war is to be waged, it should be waged against poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy. It should be waged against oppression and injustice.

There can be no two opinions on the need to combat terrorism. But to eliminate this evil we must address its root causes. To address the root causes is not to justify terrorism but to understand it and then to overcome it. To win the war against terrorism we must win the hearts and minds of those who are sympathetic to those who commit terrorism. Having been victims ourselves, we have never condoned acts of terrorism and have been cooperating with the international community in combating this universal evil.

What the world now knows is that terrorism is the product of a broader mix of problems caused by bad governments, opportunistic politicians and militant leaders who exploit grievances. When there are no legitimate means of addressing the massive and systemic political, economic and social inequalities, an environment is created in which peaceful solutions often lose out against extreme and violent alternatives, including terrorism.

Only a steady, measured and comprehensive approach encompassing political, economic, and developmental strategies that focus on the underlying disease rather than the symptoms would bring an enduring solution to this problem. To address the underlying causes of this menace, the world community needs to build global harmony, promote peace and stability, pursue poverty eradication and sustainable development and ensure socio-economic justice as well as respect for fundamental rights of people, particularly the inalienable right of self-determination.

It is time to review our militant strategies and to wind down the costly military operations and domestic hostilities. Force solves no problems. Grievances, be they in Balochistan or in Waziristan must be addressed through political and economic means. If Afghanistan is at the heart of the war on terror, no strategy or roadmap for peace in Afghanistan would be complete without focusing on the underlying causes of conflict and instability in this whole region. For a global response to this challenge, the UN alone has the credentials and wherewithal to broker a US withdrawal as it did for the Soviet withdrawal in the 1980’s while also addressing this time the legitimate questions of Afghanistan’s neutrality and regional and global security concerns.

The writer is a former foreign secretary. Email: shamshad1941@ yahoo.com

The News

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Osama or no Osama[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 14, 2012
Aijaz Zaka Syed

It’s been one year since Osama bin Laden was killed in a Hollywood style operation in the picturesque town of Abbottabad. But his shadow still hangs over Pakistan and Afghanistan and the West’s decade-long war though. The man is dead; his oppressive legacy lives on.

The first anniversary of Abbottabad this month saw much chest-thumping in Washington with the US media revisiting Operation Geronimo and dutifully crowing about the deadly skills of America’s bravest against an aging, isolated figure living with his large retinue of wives, children and servants.

Questions have once again been raised about the implausibility of the ‘sheikh’ living right next door to the elite military academy in Abbottabad without catching the eye of the Pakistani agencies all these years. Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar now claims that Pakistan played a ‘vital role’ in the Abbottabad operation!

From beyond his watery grave, Bin Laden continues to cast a long shadow over the US presidential poll race as well. Barack Obama proudly flaunts the Bin Laden trophy as he burnishes his credentials as a war president who accomplished something that eluded his predecessor for eight years. The release of the carefully edited Osama letters last week was part of cashing the chips for the November vote.

On the first anniversary of Abbottabad, the commander-in-chief also paid a ‘surprise’ visit to the troops in Afghanistan before making Hamid Karzai sign on the dotted line in the dead of the night. The ‘strategic partnership pact’ that for most Afghans including their parliament remains the ‘unknown unknown’ – in Rumsfeld’s words – will perpetuate the US presence beyond 2014, when the coalition was supposed to end its military campaign in Afghanistan.

Washington is trying everything to entrench itself in the region, playing emerging players India and China against each other, on the one hand, and deepening the already yawning gulf between India and Pakistan on the other. Hillary Clinton began her trip to India last week in Calcutta with an unusual meeting with West Bengal leader Mamata Banerjee where she waded dangerously deep into the India-Bangladesh water dispute.

In New Delhi, she chose her meeting with Indian counterpart SM Krishna to accuse Pakistan of hosting Bin Laden’s successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, besides lashing Islamabad for not doing “more to fight terror.” In fact, Krishna was much more measured and reasonable in his statement while Clinton took apart America’s so-called ally and friend. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

The other issue on the agenda of course was persuading New Delhi to stop the import of Iranian oil. Although India has so far resisted the US pressure, the oil imports from Tehran are already down 33 percent.

I hate to go down the familiar road but it is precisely this overbearing attitude and divisive agenda that is at the heart of America’s issues with the world. This is what gave birth to the legend of Bin Laden.

Don’t forget Bin Laden wasn’t the founder of Al-Qaeda. It was the brainchild of the late Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Palestinian revolutionary and teacher who inspired and led thousands of Arab and Muslim fighters in the resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Bin Laden was one of those fighters.

Incidentally, the Arabs and Americans were all on the same side and fought alongside the mujahideen. Indeed, the Americans trained the Afghan and Arab fighters, including Bin Laden, with the help of Pakistan of course, driving the Russians out and eventually bringing down the ‘evil empire.’

Bin Laden and the gang turned against their mentors and allies following the first Gulf war and US military interventions in the Middle East. Their anger over the Western interventionist policies, coupled with their ire over Israeli persecution of Palestinians with the blessings of Uncle Sam, turned into an all-consuming rage, ostensibly culminating in the 9/11 and other spectacular attacks attributed to Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups.

Even if Al-Qaeda struck an emotional chord initially with some, the global community that it played to was repelled and outraged by its indiscriminate targeting of innocents in the name of Islam. Indeed the majority of its victims – and those of its fellow travellers – were ironically Muslims, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iraq.

It wasn’t just Bin Laden who had in the past few years become isolated and irrelevant, Al-Qaeda itself had become irrelevant and a spent force. Its ranks have fast depleted over the past few years.

According to Pentagon boss Leon Panetta himself, there are no more than 25 to 30 Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan-Pakistan today. And the credit for this goes not to Washington’s war but largely to the Muslims who have firmly rejected the terror network and its evil ideology and methods.

Over the past year and half, the democratic multitudes across the Middle East have sent a loud and clear message, rejecting not just the tyranny of their elites but the ideology of groups like Al-Qaeda and their claim to speak on their behalf.

But the end of Bin Laden and the near rout of the organisation that he headed isn’t the end of the cause that he championed. As Rami Khouri argued this week, Bin Laden may be dead; Bin Ladenism isn’t. For the causes or factors that gave birth to his cause continue to be around and thrive.

Western imperial games, occupation and militarism in Muslim lands have been the primary sources of the Muslim angst and were the powerful drivers behind the Al-Qaeda-style terror. Shameful and tragic as 9/11 was, many of us hoped it would serve as a wake-up call to America and its allies, leading to the much needed introspection and course correction.

However, it was not to be. Instead of healing the festering wounds of the past, new wars have inflicted fresh wounds, pouring fuel over an already inflamed world and providing ready recruits to Al-Qaeda and fellow travellers.

Double standards, old-fashioned hegemonic ambitions and Israeli lobbies continue to dictate the US policies no matter who’s in the White House. After a promising start, Obama has all but trashed his Mid East peace plan as he follows in the footsteps of his predecessor. No pretence of the peace process now. So much for the ‘change we can’!

So Osama or no Osama, this war will continue for a long time to come. As long as there is no real change in Washington, expect little to change around the world.

The writer is a commentator on Middle East and South Asian affairs. Email: aijaz. [email]syed@hotmail.com[/email]

-The News

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Bottomless pits of terrorism[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 16, 2012
Mahir Ali

GIVEN the possible consequences, it would be facetious to suggest there is anything amusing about the latest terrorist plot blamed on Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The entity’s focus on fundamental garments is nonetheless bizarre.On Christmas Day in 2009, a Nigerian identified as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab evidently attempted to detonate an underwear bomb on a flight to Detroit. Fortunately, the detonator did not work and he was taken into custody.

The explosives sewn into Abdulmutallab’s underpants are said to have been the handiwork of Ibrahim Al Asiri, who, undeterred by the failure, apparently endeavoured to finesse the concept, and is alleged to have come up with a device equipped with more than one detonator.

He failed again, this time because the person entrusted with delivering the deadly shock happened to be a mole rather than a dupe.

A couple of years ago, Al Asiri is claimed to have gone even deeper in an attempt to assassinate Saudi security chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. The bomb-maker’s brother, posing as a repentant jihadi, is said to have sought an interview with the prince while equipped with explosives concealed within an orifice proximate to his underpants. The detonator worked, the target survived.

This time the purported bomb — reportedly devoid of metallic elements and therefore potentially undetectable by most airport scanning devices — has ended up in the hands of the FBI. At the same time, the scanty revelations have stirred up something of a storm within the intelligence community, with a variety of former CIA operatives suggesting that absolute secrecy would have been the ideal option.

That’s not an altogether illogical opinion: it can certainly be argued that it would have been wiser to leave AQAP wondering about what had become of its latest underwear bomber than to make it clear that he was an infiltrator. Just a couple of a months ago, the terrorist organisation released a video that culminated in the execution of a purported Saudi spy. Last week’s news reports are bound to enhance its paranoia, thereby reducing the likelihood of successful infiltrations in the future.

At the same time, concerns about revealing the extent of collaboration between Saudi, American and British intelligence agencies is surely overblown. That they share information and at least occasionally act in concert could hardly come as a surprise to anyone. The mole, whose identity remains secret, was initially said to be a Saudi citizen, but subsequent reports indicated he was a British passport-holder of Yemeni provenance.

The UK passport meant he could travel to the US without a visa, which is believed to have increased his value in AQAP’s eyes.
Presumably it must also have meant he emerged unscathed from a thorough vetting procedure. Whether that would have sufficed for AQAP to simply hand him Al Asiri’s latest innovation and ask him to don it on any flight he chose to take to the US must surely be open to doubt. Such a lax, laissez-faire approach hardly conforms with the image of AQAP as the deadliest Al Qaeda affiliate on earth.

Which is a reminder that the leaks so vociferously decried by sections of the intelligence community have been decidedly selective. The Associated Press, the initial conduit for the information, apparently sat on it for a few days at the request of the White House, with the latter worried that premature publicity could compromise the targeted assassination of Fahd Al Quso, an AQAP leader said to have been wanted in connection with the USS Cole bombing of 2000.

It has been suggested that he was also involved in the most recent plot, and that intelligence from the mole was crucial in pinpointing his whereabouts.

The latter factor is also said to account in part for MI6’s reticence about the affair, given that British intelligence agencies have been forbidden for 50 years from taking part in plots involving assassinations.

No one suggests they have abided by this rule, but the British reputation for reserve comes in handy in such circumstances, and even the suggestion that Anglo spooks must be furious with their transatlantic cousins has come from American sources.

The Americans, on the other hand, have abandoned all qualms about playing judge, jury and executioner anywhere on earth, with parts of Yemen serving as the second busiest area of drone operations, after Pakistan’s border regions.

Those behind these acts of war will no doubt have drawn some comfort from documents found in Osama bin Laden’s last lair suggesting that the Al Qaeda figurehead was deeply concerned about the Predator and Reaper raids in Waziristan.

It’s hardly remarkable, incidentally, that during his recent visit to Britain Pakistan’s prime minister ascribed Bin Laden’s long-undetected presence in his country to “an intelligence failure from all over the world”, even as Islamabad has vociferously been denying American suggestions that Ayman Al Zawahiri is — at least for the moment — safely ensconced somewhere in Pakistan.

That’s not a particularly convincing stance in the light of the Bin Laden experience, and Yousuf Raza Gilani hinted as much when he pleaded ignorance in London, saying: “If there is any credible information please share it with us, so we can be quick and achieve our targets.”

“Achieving targets” is a curious notion in this context, although it may find resonance in the US, where faith in drone strikes — notwithstanding their moral dubiousness and the rather obvious parallel with terrorist actions — is considerably stronger than support for a continued military presence in Afghanistan.

“If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody,” Noam Chomsky told Democracy Now on Monday, “they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers. If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them.”

Barack Obama may have positioned himself on the right side of history in terms of gay marriage, but, notwithstanding occasional ostensible successes, his administration’s approach towards combating terrorism remains almost as excremental on the moral plane as the intentions of would-be underwear bombers.

[email]mahir.dawn@gmail.com[/email]
-Dawn

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]The pits of terrorism[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 16, 2012
Mahir Ali

Given the possible consequences, it would be facetious to suggest there is anything amusing about the latest terrorist plot blamed on Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The entity’s focus on fundamental garments is nonetheless bizarre.

On Christmas Day in 2009, a Nigerian identified as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab evidently attempted to detonate an underwear bomb on a flight to Detroit. Fortunately, the detonator did not work and he was taken into custody. The explosives sewn into Abdulmutallab’s underpants are said to have been the handiwork of Ibrahim Al Asiri, who, undeterred by the failure, apparently endeavoured to finesse the concept, and is alleged to have come up with a device equipped with more than one detonator.

He failed again, this time because the person entrusted with delivering the deadly shock happened to be a mole rather than a dupe.

A couple of years ago, Al Asiri is claimed to have gone even deeper in an attempt to assassinate Saudi security chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. The bomb-maker’s brother, posing as a repentant jihadi, is said to have sought an interview with the prince while equipped with explosives concealed within an orifice proximate to his underpants. The detonator worked, the target survived.

This time the purported bomb — reportedly devoid of metallic elements and, therefore, potentially undetectable by most airport scanning devices — has ended up in the hands of the FBI. At the same time, the scanty revelations have stirred up something of a storm within the intelligence community, with a variety of former CIA operatives suggesting that absolute secrecy would have been the ideal option.

That’s not an altogether illogical opinion: it can certainly be argued that it would have been wiser to leave AQAP wondering about what had become of its latest underwear bomber than to make it clear that he was an infiltrator. Just a couple of months ago, the terrorist organisation released a video that culminated in the execution of a purported Saudi spy. Last week’s news reports are bound to enhance its paranoia, thereby reducing the likelihood of successful infiltrations in the future.

At the same time, concerns about revealing extent of collaboration between Saudi, American and British intelligence agencies is surely overblown. That they share information and, at least, occasionally act in concert could hardly come as a surprise to anyone. The mole, whose identity remains secret, was initially said to be a Saudi citizen, but subsequent reports indicated he was a British passport-holder of Yemeni provenance.

The UK passport meant he could travel to the US without a visa, which is believed to have increased his value in AQAP’s eyes. Presumably it must also have meant he emerged unscathed from a thorough vetting procedure. Whether that would have sufficed for AQAP to simply hand him Al Asiri’s latest innovation and ask him to don it on any flight he chose to take to the US must surely be open to doubt. Such a lax, laissez-faire approach hardly conforms with the image of AQAP as the deadliest Al Qaeda affiliate on earth.

Which is a reminder that the leaks so vociferously decried by sections of the intelligence community have been decidedly selective. The Associated Press, the initial conduit for the information, apparently sat on it for a few days at the request of the White House, with the latter worried that premature publicity could compromise the targeted assassination of Fahd Al Quso, an AQAP leader said to have been wanted in connection with the USS Cole bombing of 2000. It has been suggested that he was also involved in the most recent plot, and that intelligence from the mole was crucial in pinpointing his whereabouts.

The latter factor is also said to account in part for MI6’s reticence about the affair, given that British intelligence agencies have been forbidden for 50 years from taking part in plots involving assassinations. No one suggests they have abided by this rule, but the British reputation for reserve comes in handy in such circumstances, and even the suggestion that Anglo spooks must be furious with their transatlantic cousins has come from American sources.

The Americans, on the other hand, have abandoned all qualms about playing judge, jury and executioner anywhere on earth, with parts of Yemen serving as the second busiest area of drone operations, after Pakistan’s border regions. Those behind these acts of war will no doubt have drawn some comfort from documents found in Osama bin Laden’s last lair suggesting that the Al Qaeda figurehead was deeply concerned about the Predator and Reaper raids in Waziristan.

It’s hardly remarkable, incidentally, that during his recent visit to Britain Pakistan’s prime minister ascribed bin Laden’s long-undetected presence in his country to “an intelligence failure from all over the world”, even as Islamabad has vociferously been denying American suggestions that Ayman Al Zawahiri is safely ensconced somewhere in Pakistan.

“Achieving targets” is a curious notion in this context, although it may find resonance in the US, where faith in drone strikes — notwithstanding their moral dubiousness and the rather obvious parallel with terrorist actions — is considerably stronger than support for a continued military presence in Afghanistan. “If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody,” Noam Chomsky told Democracy Now on Monday, “they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers. If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them.”

Barack Obama may have positioned himself on the right side of history in terms of gay marriage, but, notwithstanding occasional ostensible successes, his administration’s approach towards combating terrorism remains almost as excremental on the moral plane as the intentions of would-be underwear bombers.
Mahir Ali is a former assistant editor of Khaleej Times

Source: Khaleej Times

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]A love affair with violence[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 16, 2012
Syed Moazzam Hai

Anders Breivik, the self assured killer of 77 people in Utoeya, Norway, has been a diehard fan of violent computer games, he boasted in front of the court that he once played ‘Modern Warfare’ for 17 hours straight, he also explained that he used such computer games to plan out the police response and his best escape strategy.

Breivik was benefitted in his own preferred way from his lethal infatuation, however, people had to pay with their lives for his passion for violence. But Breivik is, of course, not the only fan of violent computer games around, there are seemingly infinite millions of virtual warriors amongst us who’d play the game as more than a game, including people as devoted as an American mother jailed last year for 25 years after her three year old daughter died from malnutrition as she played World of Warcraft reputed as one of the world’s most addictive computer games for long endless hours.

Psychiatrists, social scientists, intellectuals and other such men and women of academic wisdom would enlighten us on their theory that computer games and for that matter movies, TV programmes and other forms of violent ‘entertainment’ have actually got nothing to do with violence in our societies hence we must not blame them. In a way they have a point there. Violence is inbuilt and quite inseparable a component of human instinct. Same logic, however, does not go for the outside stimulus to violence. And to be realistic we do not need psychiatric commandments on the effects or no effects of violence, we do not need a scholastic discourse on something we observe daily with our non psychiatric selves. There are more than ever reported incidents of school and college violence, family violence is also up and violent crimes are getting uglier and more shocking in our societies.

Violent actions and words entail a social cost that’s borne heavily by people and society, those profiting from promotion of violence should at least be paying more for their gains. We may not be able to ban violence in entertainment but we may make it a more costly pleasure for its producers and takers, we may tax it heavily and that maybe an initial step in discouraging the further pervasion of violent entertainment in scope and intensity. We the common folks have already too many complexities in life, businesses complicating them further with the stimulus of glamourised violence should be sharing more of their booty with the society.

We need global consensus and action for imposing a higher percentage of tax on violent computer games, movies and other entertainment elements. There should ideally be universally uniform tax ratio on violent forms of entertainment. The target of enhanced taxation should of course be the hardcore violence otherwise there’s violence even in Charlie Chaplin’s movies.

Human life has a value, which is presented as a grossly devalued commodity in violent forms of entertainment contributing to the increasing disregard for the value of human life around us. How long can we let it go unchecked?
Syed Moazzam Hai is a freelance contributor
Source: Khaleej Times

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Targeting the tombs[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 18, 2012
Shahab Usto

We have seen terrorists blow up the shrines of mystics and saints — Bari Imam, Data Ganj Baksh, Abdullah Shah Ghazi, Sakhi Sarwar — but now even poets and political icons are in the crosshairs of terrorism. Akora Khattak, a small city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has been twice hit by terrorism; one to destroy the mausoleum of Khushal Khan Khattak, a great Pashtun poet and freedom fighter of the 17th century, and then to destroy the under-construction tomb of Ajmal Khattak, a left-leaning politician and poet.

For years, Pakistan has been an eerie lab of extremism. Ever new arts and artifacts of terrorism are invented here to achieve religio-political objectives. Often the ingenious terror operators leave security and intelligence apparatuses dumbfounded. Bombing of shrines are not new in recent and contemporary history. In fact, shrine, seminary and mosque have respectively played a pivotal role in the Iranian revolution, the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Arab Spring.

Nevertheless, the sufis, saints and folk poets are much revered in the subcontinent. People feel affinity with their spiritual and emotional lores that transcend scholastic divisions and touch chords of humanism, love, amity and aesthetics. Indeed, the local mystical traditions have been anti-monarchical and anti-dogmatic clergy. No wonder, there are many shrines in Pakistan that are visited by both Muslims and non-Muslims.

And that explains why shrines came under parochial and sectarian eyes, particularly since the times General Ziaul Haq imported from Saudi Arabia a virulent (Salafi) narrative of Islam that, inter alia, berates ‘grave worshiping’ as un-Islamic. Salafism is akin to, or some would say, a branch of Wahabiism that stresses a narrow puritanical version of Islam. The House of Saud adopted it in the early last century. Its tenet — ‘going back to the basic of Islam’– was used to unite and turn the tribal Saudi peninsula into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Since Wahabiism and Salafiism, with its going back to basics slogan, developed as a reaction both to liberal Islamic and modern western traditions, the Wahhabi and the Salafi political message was to resist both diversity and modernity. The emergence of al Qaeda, and later the Taliban, are a case in point. Luckily, the subcontinental culture is too diverse and too variegated to fit into a narrow scholastic version. History witnessed socio-political conflicts whenever such an effort was made.

Indeed, many historians would agree that the unravelling of the centuries-old Mughal Empire began with Emperor Aurangzeb’s rise to the throne in the wake of a bloody fratricidal war in the 17th century. It was largely his narrow vision of Islam that disturbed the delicate balance between the minority Muslim and the majority non-Muslim populace crafted by that great syncretic king, Akbar, and continued by his successors. Aurangzeb kept the Mughal Empire alive with his sword. But the Indian subcontinent plunged into decay and anarchy soon after his death.

Pathans invaded Delhi from the north and west, the Hindu revivalists from the south, and the English from the east. Except for a brief interlude of the war of independence (1857-58) when a transient quest for redeeming India from the clutches of the English had transcended religious and social boundaries, the Muslims saw a continuous downturn in their social, economic and political fortunes vis-à-vis the Hindus and British.

Unfortunately, Pakistan has undergone the same trajectory since it was turned into a vehicle of promoting a narrow narrative of Islam in emulation, if not the wishes, of our Arab patrons. Like the House of Saud, General Zia used his narrow puritanical ‘Sharia laws’ to upstage liberal democratic forces, to use non-state actors in the region, to transform the professional ethos of the armed forces, his ‘political constituency’, into an army of Islam. And interestingly, like 18th-century Delhi, today’s Islamabad is also faced with existential threats from its northwestern and eastern borders.

But Pakistan is paying a heavy cost of this policy. Drawn into incessant ideological, political and sectarian conflicts, it has torn its social fabric, damaged its polity, surrendered its foreign policy, and suffered economic losses. Indeed, just as the post-Aurangzeb Mughal monarchs had turned helpless before the marauding forces, our central authority has been sapped to being ineffectual. The decision to reopen the NATO supplies to Afghanistan without achieving any reciprocal benefits debunks Pakistan’s costly image of being a great nuclear/regional power, thanks to our emotional and unwise international posturing.

Ironically, if our eastern borders have turned quiet, it is because India has successfully convinced the international community of the Pakistani state’s complicity in the Mumbai attacks. And if our traditional policy — strategic depth — is imperilled on the western borders, it is because the US-led 49 states strong ISAF won’t allow any ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan to be used against them in Afghanistan.

Neither did the long-awaited parliamentary resolutions demanding the stopping of drones operation and an apology from the US, nor the much trumpeted anti-US Difa-e-Pakistan rallies deter the world that is determined to stamp out terrorism from the region. Instead, Pakistan would have stood isolated if it had not reviewed its policies at a crucial time; rather, it would have been omitted as a stakeholder in the future of this region.

Thus, Pakistan stands caught in its own web, threatened by forces it nurtured. It is time the state shredded its ideological and partisan agenda to become a legally neutral, politically democratic, foreign-policy-wise peaceful, and socio-economically welfare-oriented state. It needs a supportive and mutually invested world that should not be accusing it of playing a ‘double game’ of simultaneously fighting and sheltering terrorists.

We must remember, destroying economic and administrative infrastructures is not different from targeting tombs and shrines — one scares off capital and investors, the other alienates the masses from a state that cannot protect their spiritual and emotional mentors. Either way, the state ends up losing its authority, legitimacy and face before its people and the world at large.

The writer is a lawyer and academic. He can be reached at [email]shahabusto@hotmail.com[/email]
-Daily Times

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Al Qaeda on the up?[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 18, 2012
Jonathan Power

The two bombs that went off last week in Damascus, killing 55 people suggest that Al Qaeda is out and about, not on the verge of defeat as appeared so after the death of Osama bin Laden.

The movement that claimed to be responsible, the Al-Nusra Front, whilst independent, almost certainly has ties with Al Qaeda. In an eight-minute video released in February Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, who took over from bin Laden, urged Muslims to help “brothers in Syria with all that they can”.

According to US intelligence Al Qaeda in Iraq responded by establishing terrorist cells in Syria. This is one reason why the US and the NATO don’t want to get militarily involved in Syria. They have, at last, learnt that it would radicalise more people and push them towards Al Qaeda. (Besides, the situation is not as straightforward as it was in Libya with one all-powerful strongman, one dominant religious sect and a fairly united armed opposition)

In Iraq Al Qaeda is active killing in January 132 Shia pilgrims. In Yemen it is in control of several southern provinces. It also nearly perfected, before the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia and the US got to know of it, an undetectable explosive-filled underpants to be worn by a suicide bomber intending to board a US airliner. Al Qaeda is the main supporter of Al Shahab in Somalia, which has wrecked much havoc although it is now losing strength. It is also increasingly active in North Africa with its influence reaching as far south as Nigeria. There appear to be connections with Boko Haram, the militant group in the north of the country, which has conducted many bombings of churches as well as UN headquarters in Abuja. Some observers believe that once US and NATO troops leave Afghanistan in 2014, the Taleban will invite Al Qaeda back in. However, others believe the organisation has now distanced itself from Al Qaeda and will continue to do so.

Al Qaeda’s reach depends on its franchise system. Without central control, only advice, these autonomous groupings could well increase in number. However, it is important to note that there hasn’t been a serious bombing in the US since 9/11 and not in Europe since the horrendous bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid in 2004.

Added to the positive list is the effect of the Arab Spring, which has brought non-violent change to Tunisia and Egypt and in Syria infuses the majority of protesters who are non-violent. The protesters and the democratic movements they have catalysed are largely insulating their countries from Al Qaeda proselytising.

Perhaps the biggest worry about Al Qaeda should be under-reported Bosnia.

I am convinced of this after reading a book by Shaul Shay, head of the Israeli Defence Forces’ Department of History. Although he doesn’t say this, there are Al Qaeda sleeper cells right inside Europe in a country that could in some years’ time join the European Union.

Al Qaeda and other militants went to Bosnia, he writes, when it was at war with Croatia and Serbia. They were involved in a number of atrocities carried out by the Bosnian army. As well a number of the suspected 9/11 bombers had been active in Bosnia. There are also militant cells in Albania, and parts of Kosovo and Macedonia.

Bosnia got off lightly in Western reporting of the war in ex-Yugoslavia that in a way concentrated on the attacks and massacres by Serbian and Croatian forces. It was usually overlooked that the leader of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, had encouraged the youth to fight with the SS-Waffen divisions during the war. Later, Izetbegovic had no scruples about inviting in the militants, some of whom had joined Al Qaeda, to help in the fight against Serbia and Croatia. That was overlooked, too.
Jonathan Power is a veteran foreign affairs commentator
Source: Khaleej Times

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Taliban resurgence[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]

Raza Khan

The attacks by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Lashkar-e-Islam have surged and yet again Peshawar is the victim. There have been more than five major attacks in less than three days, suggesting that the TTP militants have successfully regrouped.

This time round, the insurgents not only have targeted the police personnel but they have even attacked the civilians in Peshawar and that, too, in the Hayatabad locality, the most posh area of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa capital.
The attacks are not only disturbing for the residents of Peshawar, but suggest that the insurgents are far from being defeated. While inquiring after a friend who resides in Hayatabad, just after a barrage of rockets hit the area around 9:30 p.m. on May 11, he told the author that he just escaped the attacks, while the noise of the rockets hitting the area was deafening. The attack was made from the nearby Khyber Agency, where security forces are operating against the Lashkar-e-Islam militants. The attacks were quite unexpected, as one reckoned that the security forces must have taken extraordinary measures to secure Peshawar. However, the attacks have exposed the weak security of the provincial capital and now one should expect full-scale insurgent attacks on the city.

It may be mentioned, that only a day before the attacks on Peshawar, the LI commanders made a threat that if security forces would continue their operation in the Shalobar tribal area of the Khyber Agency, they would target Peshawar with rockets and other kinds of attacks, including on the city's airport. The ease and swiftness with which the insurgents carried out the attacks are, indeed, surprising. The rocket and mortar attacks on Hayatabad, although killing only one person and injuring around 15, which are relatively not significant losses, have terrified the residents of Peshawar, particularly those of Hayatabad. Many residents have already relocated to other places, while others are thinking of leaving the area.

According to an unnamed security official, who was quoted as saying by a section of the media, the heavy presence of the fighters of the TTP in Shalobar area of Bara forced security forces to launch military operations to clear the area. The same official said that militants of the TTP had moved into Shalobar and other areas of the Bara plains from the Tirah valley to carry out attacks against security forces with the support of the LI. The Shalobar area of the Khyber Agency is contiguous with Peshawar and the moving in of the TTP insurgents to that area has deeply endangered the security of Peshawar. The Tirah valley is located in the extreme west of the Khyber Agency bordering the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. The coming of the insurgents from Tirah valley to Shalobar in the vicinity of Peshawar is itself surprising.

Although the security officials have claimed that the new development has prompted a military operation in Shalobar area, the question arises that when the whole Khyber Agency has been under constant curfew and military operations than how come the TTP were able to shift so many insurgents to the backyard of Peshawar? Now, as the military operation would be intensified, there are fears of large-scale attacks on Peshawar. It seems that the insurgents have been able to come closer to their long-cherished desire of making large-scale attacks on Peshawar. This is, indeed, a colossal security challenge and one is at a loss that how the law enforcement agencies would negotiate the threat.

More disturbing is the fact of the LI making a common cause with the TTP. It has increased the threat manifold. However, a commander of the LI, Muhammad Hussain, reportedly has denied the presence of the TTP militants in Bara and their alliance with the group. He claimed that the LI has enough power and resources to resist the security forces and that outsiders were not required. It may be mentioned that the Khyber Agency has been the base of LI and the TTP has not been able to get a firm foothold in the region.
However, given the nature of the insurgent groups there have always been chances of both the groups coming close to each. In fact, both groups did come close to each other but there have also been disagreements between them resulting in killings between the two groups particularly. Several fighters freom the Tariq Afridi faction of the TTP and Commander Azam of the LI have been killed in the clashes. The latter has already lost other lives in the said clashes between the two groups. However, if the decision of inviting the TTP insurgents is taken, or has been taken by LI head Mangal Bagh, then there would be no impediment in the way of the TTP and the LI making an alliance and launching militant and terrorist attacks from the Khyber Agency.

If the Taliban are able to dominate the Khyber Agency, it would be a big blow to Pakistani and US-NATO anti-Taliban and al-Qaeda efforts. Because on the one hand, for the first time the most important area of the Pakistani Pakhtun tribal belt known as the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), on the border with Afghanistan, would be under Taliban virtual control. The allowing of the Taliban in Khyber Agency by the LI would come in the shape of handing over of the area to the Taliban because in comparison to the LI, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan is, by far, a bigger and more resourceful militant-terrorist organization. There is also a possibility that the LI, finding it hard to engage the government security forces, may resort to merger into the TTP, strengthening the latter at a time when it has come under repeated attacks from US drones and Pakistani security forces and needs critical support.

The history of the Pakistani Taliban shows that they took over control of various areas from other low-profile militant or clerical organizations. In South Waziristan, the TTP capitalized on the conditions after the killing of Nek Mohmmad Wazir in 2005 and Abdullah Mehsud in 2007, by security forces, while in Swat the government action against the non-militant clerical organization, the TNSM were fully exploited by Maulvi Fazlullah, also of the TTP. Once the Taliban have control in Khyber Agency, Peshawar would be in a constant line of fire.

-Cuttingedge

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]KP’s counterterrorism plan — not what but how[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 23, 2012
By Ejaz Haider

Apparently, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government has a plan to deal with terrorism and extremist violence. That’s good. The KP government also believes that the 3-D strategy (deterrence, development and dialogue) of the federal government is vague and falls short of a comprehensive state response to fight the terrorist groups. That’s even better.

So, what’s the KP plan?

Reports indicate the plan was presented before the KP cabinet, with the chief minister in the chair, through a presentation titled, Continuing Militancy, Challenge & Response. Full details of the plan are not known but some of the findings that have made their way into newspapers are interesting and, for the most part, apt.

The state is facing an acute internal security threat that requires a comprehensive response; the American withdrawal from Afghanistan will not put an end to it; the terrorist groups are motivated, well-trained and battle-hardened; a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan will provide strategic depth to these groups; the groups’ strategy is to corrode the state structure from the inside, ultimately eroding its writ; they have created space for themselves by acting as the government where there’s absence of the state’s writ; they rely on effective governance as well as coercion; the groups have propaganda, religious and political wings and have also developed a vast spy network.

As for the state’s response, the security forces are poorly equipped and trained, lack motivation, and the counterterrorism effort is disjointed. Solution: the state apparatus, all agencies and departments, will have to act in concert and implement a comprehensive strategy that goes beyond just relying on the use of force; the state will have to govern. So far it doesn’t.

The presentation has provided a set of measures that need to be implemented. That is where the rub lies. The presentation has warned that “failure is not an option”. And? Well, as one unnamed minister was quoted as saying: “It is a good plan but consistency, perseverance, implementation and accountability are not something we are known for.” Bingo!

Seems like the plan is doomed from the word go. But let’s not be harsh. It must be said that for a provincial government to take the lead on such a strategy is a good omen. The task is onerous and while plans can be made, implementing them is always the difficult part. There’s much theoretical literature on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. By now everyone knows what needs to be done. The problem is how and arises because of two crucial aspects that set the irregular war apart from the regular, inter-state armed conflict: the centre of gravity and the definition of victory.

As I have written elsewhere, the French soldier and theoretician, David Galula, proposed four ‘laws’ for COIN (counter-insurgency). The centre of gravity is the people. That being so, people’s support is crucial. The problem in actualising this is how to co-opt and secure that active and friendly minority in the larger population which can help the COIN force in reaching out to the neutral majority. Not easy. Support from the population is conditional and cannot be taken for granted. Also, the very minority a COIN force will target for co-opting, because it is inimical to the insurgent/terrorist groups, will be intimidated and destroyed by the groups.

The groups know that this population is the starting point of the COIN force. Destroying this population is therefore the primary objective of the groups. This is what has happened in Fata. By the same logic, if the neutral majority is to be turned around, this friendly minority must be protected. This is the arena where the contest unfolds and this is where security forces have badly failed so far.

A related second problem is defining victory. This is also the problem of timelines. How long will it take to completely defeat the groups? Generally, the operations needed to protect the population from the mortal threat and to convince it that the COIN force will ultimately win are of an intensive nature and have long time horizons. “They require a large concentration of efforts, resources and personnel. The insurgent must be driven away and the COIN force must be able to strengthen its presence by building the required infrastructure and developing a long-term relationship with the population.” The COIN force has to do this area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operations to conquer a neighbouring area, what has come to be known as the ‘Ink Spot Strategy’.

This also means that victory is not merely the destruction of the insurgent’s forces or groups, though doing so and leapfrogging from one area to another is important. The crucial task is the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, the strategy of dislocation. Unlike conventional warfare, where strength is assessed according to the military or other tangible criteria, such as the number of divisions, the position they hold, the industrial resources, etc, in this contest strength is to be assessed by the extent of support from the population. This is true for both the insurgent as well as the counterinsurgent.

This has often proven difficult in the Pakistani context because of the religio-political narrative used by the terrorist groups and its corresponding appeal in society. Terrorist cells hide in the urban centres for urban strikes and recruitment is easy to come by because of this. Add to these problems exogenous factors like the presence of the United States in the region and how effectively its hubris can bungle indigenous COIN/CT (counterterrorism) efforts, and the degree of difficulty in dealing with the groups and their narrative at home is increased manifold.

Even so, the very realisation that the state mayn’t be doing enough — which it is not — is a good beginning for which the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government must be commended. Equally, the very nature of this war and its spread is such that a provincial government alone cannot deal with the threat. The KP plan, therefore, must be adopted by the federal government which can pull in other provinces to allow for a coordinated implementation of this strategy.

The Express Tribune

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]The terror war and human rights[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 28, 2012
Sasuie Leghari

Nine days after the Sept 11 attacks George W Bush announced the launching of his “war on terror,” which he said “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Thus began what was a veritable war on human rights which continues to this day. Those suspected of being enemy combatants in the “war on terror” are detainable without trial. The United States has been responsible for torture and maintenance of secret prisons, and gulags such as Guantanamo Bay.

On October 7, 2001, the United States declared war on Afghanistan and thereafter opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The purpose of such a facility outside of US territory was for the US government to avoid extension of human rights to the prisoners there, which are guaranteed under the American constitution. On June 6, 2002, the United States imprisoned two of its own citizens, Jose Padilla and Yasser Esam Hamdi, as “enemy combatants,” denying them the right to legal counsel and the right of habeas corpus. On June 28, 2004, the US Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdi vs Rumsfeld case that the designation of US citizens as “enemy combatants” and their indefinite detention without trial was unconstitutional.

In 2004 world media published photographs documenting torture and inhumane and degrading treatment carried out by US soldiers and contractors against inmates of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In September 2006 President Bush admitted that the CIA had used “an alternative set of procedures” in interrogation of suspected terrorists. Under a ruling by the US Supreme Court on June 29, 2006, it was illegal for the Bush administration to create a third category of persons, namely “enemy combatants,” who enjoyed neither the protections afforded to civilians nor those afforded to non-civilians under the Fourth Geneva Conventions.

The existence of secret CIA prisons, which Bush referred to in a speech on September 6, 2006, was the ultimate breach of detainees’ human rights. In those prisons, as the US president euphemised, “alternative” interrogation methods were adopted. Meanwhile in Britain, the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair issued an order on November 11, 2001 suspending suspects’ right to liberty in cases falling under terrorism. That right is protected by Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The following day the British parliament passed the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act (2001). Section 4 of the act allows for indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. At the same time, their deportation to their own countries was ruled out under the pretext that they could be tortured or killed there.

Three years after their detention, the House of Lords ordered the release of three foreign nationals in 2004. It was the same Section 4 which had enabled the Blair government to imprison them without trial, or without even charges. At their trial the defendants were represented by two teams of lawyers. One of the teams was given security clearance to see evidence presented as grounds for the prisoners’ detention, but its members were not allowed access to the prisoners themselves. On the other hand, the second team of lawyers was allowed access to the detainees but not to the evidence.

The House of Lords ruled that the British government had acted in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights when it issued the order suspending the prisoners’ right to liberty. It also ruled that Section 4 of the 2001 Act was incompatible with the right to liberty protected by Article 5 of the Human Rights Act of 1998. The government responded by repealing Section 4 and replacing it with a regime of Control Orders, which was sharply criticised by human rights organisations. The Control Orders have now been replaced with the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures, which impose fewer controls on suspects but allow for greater surveillance.

The British government was complicit in many of the illegal actions against detainees by the Americans. These actions were in direct contravention of international human rights laws, specifically of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The question of human rights has assumed new urgency in the face of a war allegedly conducted to defeat terror. This time the atrocities have taken an “alternative” form.

The writer works at the Islamic Human Rights Commission in London.
-The News

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Terrorism bogey[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 30, 2012
Waqas Aslam Rana

It is not easy to get published in the New York Times, unless your name is Husain Haqqani. His article titled ‘How Pakistan lets terrorism fester’ published in the Times on May 10 did not surprise me in the least; anyone who has been following the man’s career would have the same reaction.

But Haqqani’s latest piece of writing included something new and dangerous; maligning the superior judiciary of Pakistan in the media of his de-facto homeland. One shudders to think that the person writing these words was our ambassador in Washington until recently.

Haqqani directly accused the courts of allowing terrorism to foster by releasing various militants captured by security forces. He very conveniently failed to mention that the burden of proof in any legal system lies with the prosecution, which in this is the government of his current patron Asif Zardari. He would have us believe that it is not just the army and ISI who are harbouring terrorists. The Supreme Court is in on the act as well. No wonder the American administration tried so desperately and succeeded in extricating Haqqani from the Memogate fiasco.

Yet Pakistanis everywhere should take heart. For the Supreme Court has shown that finally justice in the country can also bring the strong and not just the weak under its grip. And this is not just restricted to the civilian leadership. Have we not seen the Supreme Court taking up the Asghar Khan petition and forcing the former chief of the army staff, General (r) Aslam Baig to appear before it? Can the Haqqanis of this world not see the chief justice personally looking into the role of the Frontier Corps in the issue of missing persons in Balochistan? Haqqani’s false allegations are merely an attempt to divert attention from Pakistan’s single biggest problem; the current government’s record-breaking corruption.

Haqqani has accused both the judiciary and the media of distracting the nation’s attention from ‘the threat of jihadist ideology by constantly targeting the governing party’. He is writing the only thing ‘good’ Pakistanis are allowed to write in the mainstream American media since 9/11; that militant Islamic ideology presents an existential threat to the country, that it is all home-grown and that the only solution to it is an unending military campaign. Each of these is a myth, carefully cultivated by neo-conservatives in Washington and liberal fascists in Islamabad.

First, parties based on Islamist ideals have consistently failed to attract a significant share of the vote in general elections in our history. This includes even the Jamaat-e-Islami, the most mainstream of the Islamist parties. Second, terrorism in Pakistan today is as much a result of Nato presence in Afghanistan as it is due to domestic factors.

This reality is completely papered over in the collective narrative propagated by spin doctors in America and Pakistan. Third, even a casual reader of history will attest to the fact that no insurgency has ever been suppressed through military means alone. It is always a political solution that eventually brings such wars to an end.

The article by Husain Haqqani is especially worrisome because it comes at a crucial time in Pakistan’s history when two great developments have taken place. First, we finally have an independent apex that has displayed the determination to do all in its power to administer justice across the board and without fear of political considerations. Second, after a long time the people in the country are beginning to think of a change that does not involve the army taking over. In Imran Khan and the PTI, they see a possible political option for improvement in the state of affairs.

Regardless of how the party does at the polls, the massive rise in its popularity has shown Haqqani’s premise to be false. The people want an end to corruption; they desire rule of law and a chance to lead a life of dignity – not endless violence caused by fighting an unwinnable war.

The writer is currently pursuing a Master of International Affairs at Columbia University, with a concentration in economic and political development.
-The News

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Fighting the fight[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
May 31, 2012
By Talat Masood

Despite Pakistan’s deep involvement in the fight against terrorism and extremism for over a decade, it has yet to truly formulate a comprehensive policy and action plan to combat militancy. It is essential that we do this because militancy combined with extremism feeds directly into terrorism. The government has essentially relied on the army leadership to formulate and execute policy. In this vacuum, many political leaders, especially from the religious and rightist parties (including Imran Khan), have come out with their policy prescriptions based on the idea that militancy will go away once we disassociate ourselves from the US-led war in Afghanistan.

While it is true that the foreign occupation of Afghanistan has given rise to a strong nationalist impulse that feeds militancy in Fata, that alone has not resulted in the increase levels of militancy and extremism we are experiencing. Overlooking other major factors that have transformed Pakistan into what some call the ‘epicentre of terrorism’ would amount to self-denial. It is possible that if the militants feel vindicated and empowered following Nato’s departure from Afghanistan, they may turn their sights even more forcefully towards Pakistan itself.

The recent attempt by the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government to devise a strategy to combat militancy, albeit delayed, is an admirable initiative. It needs to be carried forward to its logical conclusion by the federal government. We have already witnessed how many tribal leaders favourable to Pakistan have been assassinated in Fata.

As a result of flawed external and internal policies pursued over decades, Pakistan today, faces multiple sources of terrorism. Although, by far the greatest threat comes from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), jihadi elements, sectarian and ethnic militants also remain a serious threat. Although the army’s selective operations in Fata have brought about limited success, the TTP remains a potent threat. Attacks have occurred on major military installations, intelligence headquarters and places of worship where different radical groups have acted independently or in unison with other groups with the object of weakening the state and capturing power.

Poor governance, weak state structures and flawed national policies have facilitated the rising power and influence of these groups. Illiteracy, unemployment, the elitist character of our society and pervasive corruption also contribute to extremism. We need to neutralise the sectarian and radical organisations that practice and preach violence. The state should stop pandering to jihadi groups as it damages the credibility of its anti-extremism policy.

In 2008, when the democratic government took over, people thought that it augured well for combatting terrorism. Prolonged military rule had contributed toward strengthening militants. But the verdict of the people against military rule and their rejection of religious parties were regrettably not channelled usefully against extremist forces. To clean the swamp of militants required economic development and political integration of Fata into the mainstream, along with a host of other measures. Terrorism can be beaten when moderate forces mobilise themselves to isolate and defeat its perpetrators, but by remaining a silent majority they allow a free hand to militants. The TTP and other militant groups have become media savvy and are putting across their narrative effectively. Pakistan needs a forceful and positive counter-narrative.

Apart from banning militant organisations and keeping a close watch on their activities, the government should attempt to get to the roots of such groups. What is their motivation level, source of funding and who is providing them patronage? The TTP pays its cadres from earnings acquired from criminal activity, drug trade, charities and collecting local taxes. Their financial inflows have to be squeezed. The government has to treat terrorism as a criminal offence.

There has been a large internal displacement of people during military operations, nearly 300,000 in South Waziristan alone. If not suitably rehabilitated, they will be exploited by the militants. With 70 per cent of the population unemployed, a female literacy rate of three per cent, and a large number of people under the age of 30, the government’s highest priority in Fata should be to focus on providing employment and education.

Militancy and extremism will not be defeated piecemeal. Without a comprehensive policy and a serious action plan, we will continue to drift into a dangerously downward spiral.

The Express Tribune

[CENTER][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Drivers of religious militancy[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/CENTER]
June 4, 2012
M. Zaidi

IN a report titled ‘The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism,’ published in 1999 by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, social scientists had warned that “Al Qaeda’s expected retaliation for the US cruise missile attack against Al Qaeda’s training facilities in Afghanistan on Aug 20, 1998, could take several forms of terrorist attack in the nation’s capital.”

Thus, even before 9/11, social scientists had come to grips with the etiology of terrorism, but 9/11 accelerated the process. The PsycINFO database, the largest psychology database in the world with entries dating back to the 1880s, shows that post-9/11 research on the phenomenon surpassed that of all the past years combined.

Several findings now find currency in social science, which suggest that compared to the ordinary citizen, terrorists do not exhibit unusually high rates of clinical psychopathology, irrationality, or personality disorders. Indeed, as shown by John Horgan in Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and Its Consequences, which has been edited by Andrew Silke, the archetypical “terrorist personality” is misconceived on shaky empirical grounds. In fact, sustainable terrorist activity requires a certain amount of ingenuity in evading the law, choosing targets, ensuring supplies of explosives and improvisation, and indeed a supply-chain management capability of a level not incomparable to a successful corporate manager running a successful company which also evades taxes, an analogy to the terrorists also evading the law in their own context.

Nasr Hassan put it succinctly during a 2002 lecture: “What is frightening is not the abnormality of those who carry out the suicide attacks, but their sheer normality.”

Another report, the American National Research Council’s Terrorism: Perspectives from the Behavioural and Social Sciences, says: “There is no single or typical mentality — much less a specific pathology of terrorists. However, terrorists apparently find significant gratification in the expression of generalised rage.”

This rage sometimes relates to events close to the terrorist’s perception horizon. Researcher Ariel Merari, for instance, found higher incidences of terrorist tendencies in Palestinian suicide bombers that had at least one relative or close friend killed or injured.

There is also a demographic profile. It has been shown time and time again that terrorists tend to belong to a male cohort between 15 and 30 years of age, the same that is likely to commit general crime, and the one least likely to be daunted by use of coercive force by the other side. Thus, it is not a coincidence that most commanders and diehard cadres of the Taliban in Pakistan tended to be within the same cohort.

Beyond that, there is no other template into which we can fit terrorists or their behavioural patterns. However, ideology has a definite part to play. The influential thinker Nichole Argo argues that ideological beliefs such as religious extremism do not “go out” to mould individuals, but exist as “sets of ideas that ‘are there’, as if on the shelves of a supermarket waiting for someone to make them their own”. Individuals who are not able to interpret their environment, or in other words do not find solace in the material world without these ideals, adopt this available ideology. It is not just the adoption of extremist ideas which comforts such individuals, but core values such as fighting for life, and giving it up for dignity and equality also bestow an emotional reward which is critical in itself.

“We need to be asking new questions,” she writes. “For what are normal individuals able to kill? A plausible answer is: their community, under threat. When does a person make costly sacrifices to do so? Within a social structure — a terror cell, a military unit, a family, or group of friends — that continually regenerates conviction to a cause, a feeling of obligation to do something about it, and a sense of shame at the idea of letting each other down. Whether one lands in a social group with religious-militant tendencies may be random. But the prerequisite for this path is perceived injustice”.

We live in a connected world no matter where we are, and religious militants are no exception. Argo narrates an interview with a militant who had joined the intifada because of television , reaching a conclusion that the ummah was threatened: “The difference between the first intifada and the second is television. Before, I knew when we were attacked here, or in a nearby camp, but the reality of the attacks everywhere else was not so clear. Now, I cannot get away from Israel — the TV brings them into my living room…And you can’t turn the TV off. How could you live with yourself? At the same time, you can’t ignore the problem — what are you doing to protect your people? …We live with an internal struggle. Whether you choose to fight or not, every day is this internal struggle.”

How many times have we seen programmes on television and inadvertently thought “this has happened to me”. What we see on television will be tinged with more reality if we relate to it to begin with, even if we were watching fiction. Thus affective reactions and cognitive appraisals shape our perception of reality after experiencing media such as television. We tend to interpret characters onscreen compared to how we feel about the topic to begin with. Thus, if you felt an empathy with the images of what you perceive as your group under attack, there are bright chances that you would interpret these images as the truth.

In today’s world, many of the religious militants do not necessarily come from war zones. But like many fighters foreign to the conflict theatres to which they gravitate, they see images of injustice, or have friends or family ‘there’, and feel obligated to help out. Such is the alluring appeal of group solidarity.

The writer is a security analyst.
-Dawn

[CENTER][B][U][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]The massacre shifts[/SIZE][/FONT][/U][/B][/CENTER]
By: M A Niazi | March 08, 2013

The blast in Abbas Town, Karachi, was not unparalleled, though it was a first for Karachi, already a strife-torn city, a dangerous place to live in.
If, on the one hand, they provided a reminder of the Quetta blasts and the targeting of the Shia community, they also provided a reminder that ghettoisation was no protection against the very danger it was supposed to protect against.

If it was shown most dramatically that the government did not pay enough attention to the plight of ordinary citizens, it also showed that the forces which wanted a postponement of the elections may well be still at work.
Also, by proving Interior Minister Rehman Malik right about Karachi being the next militant target, it seems that the evil hour is upon us. Not just the citizens of Karachi, but of the whole of Pakistan; for Karachi - the country’s sole port - and its industrial and financial capital, is not just home to almost a tenth of the nation, but is connected to almost every citizen.

The MQM, through Dr Farooq Sattar, the first MQM Mayor of this megalopolis, said that the citizenry should not look to any state institution, but should engage in self-help, for protection. In other words, the MQM could be of no help.

That was a normal thing for any political party to say, but since the MQM claimed Karachi as one of its strongholds, that amounted to telling the populace that it was not to depend on the MQM for protection.
The state institutions responsible for the protection of all citizens, the police, had other fish to fry on Sunday night.

The daughter of the President’s Secretary General was getting engaged to the son of a former FIA Director. As the daughter, was herself an Adviser to the President and the son was Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s Political Secretary, it was clearly a high-powered engagement.

It was attended by President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, not to forget Interior Minister Rehman Malik, himself a former FIA head. These VIPs all needed security and protocol, which was duly provided, allegedly at the cost of the security provided to the Abbas Town blasts.
One of the claims of ghettoisation, that this provides security, was disproved.
Ghettos achieved the most prominence in Nazi-occupied Europe, when the state enforced them for Jews. This was not intended for the Jews’ protection, but to assist the authorities in applying the ‘Final Solution’.

Perhaps because of this, a strand of opinion opposed the creation of Israel, it was argued that collecting so many Jews into one place made for an easier target. This was shown in the Quetta blasts, where the first blast, on Alamdar Road, took place in a snooker club, not the resort of choice for committed followers of any sect of any religion, with a reasonable certainty of killing members of the targeted sect.

The MQM appeal was thus something of a nonstarter, as it had already been tried, and failed. It might not have escaped notice that while the Hazaras of Quetta, apart from being of a minority sect, were also an ethnic minority, which had migrated there and thus would tend to settle in clusters.
This might be considered to apply to Karachi as well, where the Shias are part of the Mohajir community, and had mostly arrived in Karachi by migration, either after 1947, or after 1971, when they arrived from East Pakistan, having migrated there in 1947.

It is noteworthy that an attempt has been made in Karachi on sectarian lines. This leads to the conclusion that those attempting to foment sectarian strife cannot be friends of Pakistan. Interior Minister Rehman Malik, speaking before the attacks, had accused India of fomenting trouble in Balochistan.
It would also make sense for it to target Karachi, which is economically very central to Pakistan (it was disclosed after the Abbas Town blast that the cost to the economy ran into billions). Even if sectarian strife is not set off, the disruption would be immense.

Economic opportunities have ensured that Karachi is home to all ethnicities, but the MQM dominates. The Mohajir people migrated to Sindh from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the rest of India, at partition, but did not obtain an appropriate provincial identity.

As the constitutional scheme made provincial identity important, the MQM was forced to pursue local politics. However, Karachi was never out of the national mainstream, for it had never been merely a provincial capital.
Still, as the country’s largest city, it not only provides the most natural cover for intruders, but also the best opportunities, to the Raymond Davis-type networks that have been implanted. As the USA is intent upon making India dominant in the region, its participation in such operations cannot be ruled out.

Elections would provide a solution. However, the belief has been expressed that if they did, the last election should have produced a government which would have handled the problem.

Of the two major parties, the PPP has the most reason to have the polls postponed, particularly if a postponement was to allow the President to remain in office after his tenure ends in September.

If the PPP was to lose the election, the President would also lose the presidency, and with it the immunity of the office, which he has been using to avoid the corruption cases against him.

The Shia community in the two southern provinces have been attacked, with the result that the trauma is being felt all over the country. But this is not the first time it was under attack in Karachi. Previously, there was a more targeted approach, with the method of attack being the target killing, rather than the blast.

At that time, the targets were professionals, particularly doctors. Blasts are much more indiscriminate. In the previous episode, there was some involvement of real estate speculation, for deaths often meant that property came on the market.

Unscrupulous property dealers bought that property from grieving heirs, often enough fearful of their own fate, at rock-bottom prices. However, with the real estate market having bottomed out, this motive can, probably, be ruled out.

As the USA winds down its occupation of Afghanistan, with its withdrawal of military equipment already started, prior to a complete withdrawal in 2014, it is dangerous that there should be fresh outbreaks of violence in Karachi. This is no time to play politics, as the Interior Minister seems to be doing when he blames the Punjab government for protecting extremists.

Instead of making accusations, at the moment what is needed is to catch the culprits, try them and give them deterrent punishments. That may not stop them, for their motivation is divine reward, so the long-term approach should involve convincing them that these attacks are only going to bring down Divine punishment on the perpetrators.

There must also be trials of the perpetrators, who must be captured, which has not been done so far. So far, there have not been any such trials, and thus the real perpetrators remain undetected. Only trials would reveal not just the culprits, but also those behind them.

The writer is a veteran journalist and founding member as well as executive editor of TheNation. Email: [email]maniazi@nation.com.pk[/email]

[CENTER][B][U][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Enough is enough[/SIZE][/FONT][/U][/B][/CENTER]
By:Syed Hassan Belal Zaidi
Wednesday, 6 Mar 2013

Sri Lanka knew it was fighting the Tamil Tigers.We don’t seem to have a clue who the enemy is

I feel that I must make it clear that I am not a FATA expert. Nor am I in any way an informed commentator who can wax poetic about the evils of tacit military support for homegrown extremists. Neither can I trace with expert deftness the etymology of the various terror groups that abound in our fair backwater today and tell you with pin-point precision who-is-in-bed-with-who and who-finances-whose-gun running-operation.

In fact, this article will teach you nothing new. To those of you who were expecting this to become an army-apologist or a Taliban-apologist piece, I extend my sincerest apologies. Today, I must pose a vexing and pertinent-question; one which you are unlikely to be able to answer. If you do have an answer, please tell me before you have me summarily executed for treason; I’d hate to die without knowing.

Over the past half decade, our bastion of Islam has been plagued by insurgency, terrorist activity, sectarian strife, political subterfuge and ethnic genocide. While this is just the top 5, and the charts include hits such as necrophiliacs, “husband-curry” specialists and rapists of an order lower than the molten core of the earth, it is the more political forms of violence that interest me today.

GHQ, Kamra, PNS Mehran, Peshawar airbase, FIA headquarters; these were the attacks orchestrated against some of the country’s most well-protected security and defence installations. Alamdar Road, Hazara Town, Abbas Town; these were three of the deadliest attacks ever carried out against the Shia minority in our country. The attacks on polio workers, explosions at girls’ schools in KPK and FATA, the near-fatal attempt on Malala Yousafzai, the execution of Shia passengers in Mustung and Babusar Top, the assassination of Bashir Bilour; these were all some of the most high profile acts of violence committed in the past year, give or take. While this is not a representative sample by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it meet the rigorous requirements of comparative quantitative analysis, it will serve to illustrate my point.

The question that I pose to you today, dear readers, is this: Who was responsible for these attacks? It’s alright, take your time. There are no right answers to this question. This, in my humble and irrelevant opinion, is the single biggest threat facing our country today. Under Rajapakse, the government of Sri Lanka knew that it was fighting the Tamil Tigers. In Yugoslavia, NATO knew it was fighting Milosevic’s forces. On Omaha Beach, the Allies knew they were fighting the Germans and on the high seas, the Spanish Armada knew they were fighting everyone else. We, however, don’t seem to have a clue.

This is because ours is not a traditional war. It is not even a traditional guerrilla war. When ‘our’ Taliban were paradropped into Afghanistan in the 90s to capture Kabul, the Afghans had a fair idea of who was behind this rising tide of extremism and violence. But today, as the forces of evil overrun our towns and cities, we are no closer to understanding the complexity of the threat facing us. Tehreek-e-Taliban, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Islami; these are all simply names. We are yet to establish what their motives are and are reduced to playing amateur Cluedo with each incident, as it happens, in order to piece together whatever rudimentary understanding we have of these groups and their methods.

The media has a bigger part to play in this game that you would think. Day after day, blind murders and senseless killings are slotted into the attic of “terrorist attacks” and “target killings”, simply because it is too risky to dig any deeper. I have spoken to many journalists who, when they cover these incidents, can piece together pretty well the “who, why, what and wherewithal” of the typical hit. However, because the information they have is mostly hearsay or because they cannot afford to take that sort of pressure from unsavoury types, they are forced to report within the given template that characterises reportage of such attacks.

This is crucial, mostly because media coverage of attacks and bombings is admissible in court. It also serves as a historical record for people who want to retrospectively study the violence that plagues our country. When their sample is unnecessarily skewed by the countless “unknowns” and “unidentifieds”, it is difficult to imagine how anyone, let alone those that make and break policy in our state, can have a clear idea of who or what they are up against. Even intelligence briefings handed to senior security personnel consist of newspaper articles and TV reports.

This is not all there is to it. But information, or the lack thereof, is a major failing of our state and society as a whole. That those who have the knowledge are not talking to those who can actually do something with that knowledge is criminal. While I know that I sound like I’m making the case for security agencies picking up more journalists, I am actually calling for the opposite. Rather than taking an adversarial approach, the law enforcement apparatus needs to understand that a symbiotic relationship with the media will benefit it far more than an adversarial one. I know of many journalists who still have faith in the state and are willing to go that extra mile to make sure justice is served. After all, one can only see so much senseless killing in a lifetime before one decides enough is enough. It’s time the state and its various arms did the same.

Follow @mightyobvious on Twitter for more incoherence in 140 characters or less

[url]http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk[/url]

[CENTER][U][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]CTAB: what took so long?[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/U][/CENTER]
March 10, 2013 .

The National Assembly passed the National Counter Terrorism Authority Bill 2013 on Friday that provides for setting up a nationwide anti-terrorism cell under the direct command of the Prime Minister. There is hardly any doubt that it augers well for the beleaguered country but this should have been done as the first priority, soon after the PPP government took office five years ago. Did it need all this massacre of innocent human life to persuade the MPs that a special law was inevitable? The concerns of the Supreme Court that kept underscoring the need for lawmaking of the sort only fell on deaf ears, while the innocent Pakistanis were being butchered in streets, towns and even in their homes.

In all conscience, that is procrastination of the highest calibre, which was nowhere to be seen when the political parties’ own stakes came under threat. Instances of Parliament showing bipartisan character where egocentric laws were drafted overnight to be passed in a matter of days are plenty. The slumber of the ruling setup has had a disastrous effect on national security that has allowed the miscreants both foreign and local to grow so strong that the security apparatus – meant to shelter the people from the attacks – finds itself in terrorists’ crosshairs. It is a matter of debate how they would to be rooted out or would they, God forbid! assume more power.

[url]http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/editorials/10-Mar-2013/ctab-what-took-so-long[/url]

[CENTER][U][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Stopping Taliban juggernaut[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/U][/CENTER]
March 19, 2013 . 2

Stating that the army has not carried out a military operation in North Waziristan, Corp Commander Peshawar Lt General Khalid Rabbani said that it was up to the political government to decide whether it wanted to hold talks with Taliban or not.

Meanwhile, reports are coming in that the TTP has withdrawn the offer of talks over what it says is government’s non-serious attitude.

It should be clear that talks and bombs do not go together. To take up the TTP’s offer, the TTP would first have to lay down arms. Plainly enough, if the intention is to work towards a genuine peace agreement, as Gen Rabbani would have us believe -- the need is to quash local strongholds and check the forays of the Afghan Taliban from across the border some of which are already engaged with talks with the NATO forces. Peshawar was yet again attacked on Monday when terrorists stormed the Judicial Complex and suicide bombers caused the deaths of four and injuries to 30. In Karachi, a college principle was shot dead, aimed at further exacerbating the sectarian divide.
These never-ending attacks are emblematic of our failure to prevent the movement of insurgents from Afghanistan into our territory as well as the absence of a thorough policy to neutralise the TTP’s threat. Primarily, it is the indecision to deal with the problem with single-mindedness that has to be coped.

[url]http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/editorials/19-Mar-2013/stopping-taliban-juggernaut[/url]

[CENTER][U][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]NACTA bill gets through[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/U][/CENTER]

Raza Khan


Finally after delay of almost a decade the National Assembly of Pakistan on March 8, passed the National Counter-Terrorism Authority (NACTA) law bill setting up the much-needed framework to formulate counter-terrorism policy and see its implementation.

The bill which has already been passed by the Senate of Pakistan was moved by the Federal Law Minister Farooq H. Naek in the NA and was passed with some minor amendments from a couple of members. The passage of the bill is a milestone as far as the country's war against terrorism is concerned. Although NACTA as a body has existed for years but it could not play any role as it did not have any legal cover. Due to which other organizations have not been cooperating with NACTA due to which it had become a toothless body. This writer can recall a phone call from ex-head of NACTA, Tariq Pervez, after the former wrote a comprehensive article on the counterterrorism policy for Pakistan in a leading newspaper of the country. Pervez appreciated the article and wanted to have contact with Mr. Alex Schmidt, a former head of a UN anti-terrorism body and was interviewed for the article. It suggests the kind of help and resources available to NACTA.

A country which is struck by huge large-scale terrorist attacks for years must have a counterterrorism authority. The rationale for having a counterterrorism authority for the state is that only such a body could coordinate the activities and efforts of different law-enforcement agencies including intelligence agencies, and various relevant government departments. Without coordination among various departments and agencies countering the phenomenon of terrorism is simply impossible. In other words, without a counterterrorism authority efforts by different governmental institutions and bodies remain isolated and thus inconsequential. Pakistan's failure to effectively counter extremism and terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam has mainly been due to the absence of any counterterrorism policy. It is important to note that a state could have a viable counterterrorism policy if a counterterrorism body is in place. Although a parliament has existed in Pakistan, which reflects the collective wisdom of the people of the country, but keeping in view the complex nature of the phenomenon of terrorism and religious extremism in Pakistan it is really impossible for the parliamentarians to formulate a policy on their own. The track record of the outgoing government is enough to testify this incapacity of the parliament to formulate a counterterrorism policy. During this period no counterterrorism policy existed.

The outgoing government only declared strategy to negotiate the threat was based on the so-called Ps and Ds. Initially, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP)-led coalition government declared a strategy of three Ds to effectively quarantine the rampaging militancy and insurgency by religious extremist groups. The three Ds were explained as Dialogue, Development and Deterrence. Afterwards the government came with another strategy of three Ps representing Prevent, Protect and Pursue. A closer look at the three Ds and Ps reveals that they were more or less the same things. However, these strategies to counter religious extremism and terrorism have largely failed and this can be gauged from the ever-increasing number of terrorist attacks as well as the wider area these attacks are covering and the strengthening of the extremist forces in the country.

The element of dialogue with extremist and terrorist groups has been given a lot of chance to have an effect but it proved totally ineffective. Talks with militants by Pakistani authorities over the years instead strengthened the former. As during the last five years there has not been any elaborate counterterrorism strategy in place therefore the government emphasis on dialogue had been under compulsion and threats from religious and conservative political parties as well as the insurgents. However, the government could not pursue a meaningful dialogue because the United States pressurized it not to do so. Although the government engaged in dialogue with insurgents on several occasions, like in Waziristan and Swat, but the aim was to isolate insurgents then to defeat them. Moreover, the government did so to buy time as the insurgents got too strong to be eliminated through police or military action. However, the time thus gained by the government was also utilized by the insurgents to reinforce themselves and replenish their ranks.

The second of the Ds i.e. development could be termed as the most important strand of the counterterrorism strategy. Keeping in view the nature of religious extremism and terrorism in Pakistan which largely has its bases in the extremely remote and underdeveloped FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southern Punjab, the government should have came up with huge and extensive development projects in these regions particularly FATA. Unfortunately any such project and, through it, the overall development of these regions remains a pipedream.

The element of the third 'D' of deterrence is inherently anticipatory in nature which the government could not employ effectively; otherwise, the terrorist attacks instead of increasing should have come down.

So now when the law to constitute the counterterrorism authority has been passed the would-be counterterrorism authority has to take into considerations the failure of the strategies of Ps and Ds and only then it would be able to come up with an effective counterterrorism policy.

It is really important to note that the proposed NACTA would be under the prime minister instead of the Interior Ministry, which the previous body had been. The placing of the original NACTA under the control of the Interior Ministry has been the great stumbling block in the growth and viability of the body as the bureaucracy of the ministry tried to control the authority. The NACTA bill 2013 envisages that the body would be independent and it makes the body really important; still to be effective the body must be independent literally. The importance of the NACTA Bill can be gauged from the fact that the board of the authority would be chaired by the prime minister whereas federal ministers of interior, finance, defence, law; chief ministers of all provinces and Gilgit-Baltistan and prime minister of AJK along with DG ISI, IB, MI and FIA would be the members of the board. In the context of extremism and terrorism, FATA is the most important territory of the country therefore, Governor KP, who is ex-officio, the administrative head of FATA, should also be on the board.

The passage of the NACTA Bill is quite late, but it is a good beginning and it is hoped that the next government would try its utmost to make the body a really independent and viable institution.

[url]http://www.weeklycuttingedge.com/national01.htm[/url]

[CENTER][U][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]The invisible demons
[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/U][/CENTER]
By:Raoof Hasan

[CENTER][B]The nurseries of hate and their patrons must be confronted[/B][/CENTER]

In a welcome move, the top military leadership has reiterated its resolve to continue the fight against terrorism. The announcement came at the conclusion of a meeting presided over by the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and attended by the chiefs of the army, the navy and the air force. The reiteration was unequivocal that a “comprehensive strategy will be followed by the armed forces to combat the terrorist threat being faced by the country”.

The statement comes when the parliament stands dissolved and the country is moving towards the national elections on May 11. Apparently, the ruling coalition and the opposition appear to be struggling for a consensus on the induction of an interim government. But, like so much else that has lapsed into the realm of the impossible, this also appears headed in that direction and the matter, most likely, will be decided in the court of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) – the least of the desirables at the conclusion of a so-called five-year democratic rule!

Among the innumerable failures of the government, the most notable has been its inability to address the menace of terrorism. The whole country remained in the grip of bloody assaults which continued to increase in ferocity throughout the tenure of the government resulting in loss of strategic advantage, human lives and massive damage to infrastructure. This phenomenon has endered the country more vulnerable in facing this daunting challenge. Much against the wishes of the armed forces, and in spite of their repeated exhortations, the government failed in devising a political strategy to deal with this existential threat. Instead, it remained engrossed in making debilitating compromises with its partners and collaborators to stay in power. This inflicted a telling blow on its credibility and writ alike which never quite recovered from the damage. Absolutely mind-boggling is the fact that, for all its five years in power, the government never really got down to chalking out a comprehensive strategy to address the growing menace.

While the gun-and-suicide-bombs-carrying terrorists have been much projected, there is another breed of terrorism that has kept sprouting in our midst. This devious form has been perpetrated by leaders who have clandestinely collaborated with the extremist mindset to win political advantage. Included in such outfits are multiple banned organisations and their offshoots that have routinely sprung up in the country. In addition to the FATA region which is alleged to have traditionally harboured the terrorist forces, its other notable sanctuary has flourished under the patronage of the leaders of Punjab. These nurseries have supplied and nurtured the forces that have routinely unleashed destruction upon the innocent people of the country. Hidden behind these demonic forces are the invisible fundamentalists wearing the garb of deceit and deception. In public, they keep clamouring their irrevocable commitment to root out the menace from the country, but in plush drawing rooms and hidden from the glare of the cameras, they barter the sanctity of the country for a few more seats in the parliament. Their minds are corrupted and their hands tainted with the blood of the people.

They are the people who, not very long ago, nurtured the dream of being proclaimed the “Amir-ul-Momeneen” of the Republic when they were openly challenged by some sane voices in their midst. But, it is a dream they have not surrendered. Put away in the closet, they have nurtured it arduously and painstakingly and are clamouring to bring the demon out once given a chance by the electorate. To further their prospects, they strike electoral alliances with the operatives of banned outfits in exchange for continued governmental and personal patronage. No wonder the ones who have wreaked untold havoc on this country demand their guarantee as a precondition to initiating a dialogue with the government.

In the meanwhile, the country remains plagued with indecision, literally parched for a credible and sustainable policy and programme for initiating the long and difficult battle to banish the demon of fundamentalism from its midst. When the enemy is visible, it is easy to do an appraisal on its strengths and weaknesses and chalk out an effective strategy to overcome it. But, when the enemy is invisible, it makes the task enormously more difficult. It is this invisible threat wearing a deceptive garb that Pakistan needs to confront. It is this venomous demon that must be eliminated without any loss of time. The nurseries of fundamentalism reside in the sick brains of these power-grabbers. Their tricks need to be understood and their strategies confronted. If we keep concentrating only on the visible threat, these nurseries of hate and obscurantism will continue to feed the battalions of marauders that are out to permanently dismantle the liberal edifice and ethos that the founding father had outlined for Pakistan on that eventful day of August 11, 1947.

It is a miracle that, in spite of countless illicit assaults, that dream of a liberal and progressive Pakistan has survived the ravage. It has survived because this dream resides in the hearts of every Pakistani who wants to see his country freed from the tentacles of religious strife and ethnic and sectarian divisions, who wants to expedite the exit of the prophets of doom and who wants to work for the advent of a prosperous Pakistan. This will come about only when the nurseries of hate have been unearthed and their patrons and protectors indicted.

The writer is a political analyst. He can be reached at [email]raoofhasan@hotmail.com[/email]

[url]http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/03/23/comment/columns/the-invisible-demons/[/url]

[CENTER][U][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Military’s resolve[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/U][/CENTER]

Thursday, 21 Mar 2013

[CENTER][B]JCSC meeting declares commitment to elections, fighting TTP
[/B][/CENTER]
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) withdrawal of its earlier peace talks offer two days ago only paid lip service to what was already known. The pretext used was a ““non-serious attitude of the security forces and the government”. However, the recent attack outside a judicial complex in Peshawar which left four people dead had confirmed that the TTP had no intention of backing down and letting a smooth electoral season pass.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee meeting yesterday has come at an apt time. With the national assembly standing dissolved, the army has declared its commitment to both combating the terrorist threat and supporting the Election Commission of Pakistan in the upcoming elections.

A military spokesman declared that “all elements of national power would be utilised to combat and root out terrorism from the country”. The JCSC has declared its firm belief that the TTP and other Islamist militants will continue attacks – and perhaps only use peace offers to buy time to regroup.

On the face of it, the military’s declaration is a welcome policy statement. Terrorist groups must not only be deterred from launching attacks during the forthcoming elections but also defeated in the long term. The army’s task is to defend the country and its people, and not assert a security paradigm separate to the civilian government. It is hoped that the “Good Taliban, Bad Taliban” paradigm has been buried by the military top brass. The priority should be to eliminate foreign militants, who continue to use the tribal areas as a springboard for their activities. The writ of the state needs to be restored and the army has a critical role to play.

With the government having announced May 11 as the date of the election, the task of curbing the activities of terrorist groups has become ever more urgent. A comprehensive strategy is yet to be worked out and despite the loss of over 40,000 civilians and 4,000 military men in the war against the Taliban, doubts have continued to be asserted over the double role of the military. However, the JCSC meeting on the face of it shows that the military is now committed to what General Kayani declared more recently: internal terrorism is Pakistan’s biggest threat.

Whether or not this will yield action on the ground, or produce a more deadly response from the TTP, we shall have to wait and watch, and hope for the best.

[url]http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/03/21/comment/editorials/militarys-resolve/[/url]

[CENTER][U][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]Military operation in NWA
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[B]Terrorists won’t let up, so should we[/B][/CENTER]

If terror attacks are anything to go by, it is quite clear the terrorists have no intention of letting go of their arms and violent ways, peace talks offer accepted or not. They didn’t stop their attacks even when they had put the offer of talks for peace on the table. However, with time they have changed their tactics knowing fully well that the public won’t support their cause if they kept targeting the innocent. So a change of target was deemed necessary and what better target than security forces who fit their idea of an enemy or friend of an enemy.

The recent suicide attack on security personnel has left 22 dead and scores of injured with some in critical condition, raising fears of more casualties. How the troubled region has become a particularly favourite area for the terrorists to attack the security forces, can easily be inferred from the number of attacks on security personnel, security establishments and check posts during the past few years. Only last year, a number of soldiers were beheaded in a gruesome manner. The searing question is not about the ability of the terrorists to strike where or who they want, but how come after every drone strike Islamabad claims that that many foreign terrorists were killed and yet it has failed to launch a military operation in NWA to clean the area of all terrorists once an all.

The badlands on Pakistan’s western border have long been associated with providing safe havens to the terrorists, both of domestic and international variety. An operation in the South Waziristan had cleared the area of many militants, who then sought sanctuaries in the North Waziristan, the home of the Haqqani Network, a terror network with vast resources both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the one suspected of having links with Pakistan’s agencies, thus putting the standing of the country right at the edge of a precipice. With the international media portraying, and rightly so, the North Waziristan as a hub of international terrorism, Pakistan cannot afford to go easy on the militants and turn its head away, believing there is nothing wrong. That time is way past, and with the US and NATO winding up its operations by the end of next year, it would in no way justify having this monster grow up in our backyard as it would ultimately turn its attention inwards and tear apart the society and leave the country reeling under some deeper wounds, wounds that might make it impossible to heal in time. One stitch in time saves nine, or so they say. Military operation in NWA should be priority number one.

[url]http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/03/26/comment/editorials/military-operation-in-nwa/[/url]

[CENTER][U][B][FONT="Georgia"][SIZE="5"]How to get rid of terrorists?[/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/U][/CENTER]
March 27, 2013

Afshain Afzal

Pakistan Foreign Secretary, Jalil Abbas in a statement pointed out that terrorism would continue to affect Pakistan even after the withdrawal of NATO forces. He disclosed that Pakistan has released over two-dozen Taliban cadres at the request of the Afghan High Peace Council but same failed to produce results. He also disclosed that Islamabad is considering transfer of senior Taliban cadres to Qatar as part of efforts to facilitate the peace and reconciliation process in Afghanistan.

In another development, the All Pakistan Ulema Council (APUC) who had been scheduled to travel to Afghanistan for a meeting to process peace efforts has made a major breakthrough by brining whole warring factions of Mujahideen on one focal point. However, the recent statements of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen have earned a lot of criticism and APCU has demanded an unconditional apology from Karzai government. The recent secret visit of Afghan intelligence chief to Pakistan, no doubt, needs to be viewed in the same context. Since over a year, US and allies have withdrawn almost all the combatants from Afghanistan and have allowed only those supporting arms personnel to remain in Afghanistan who are either engaged in development projects or deputed on security/services duties at fortified bases. But Washington desire to have long term agreement with the coming Afghan government so the foreign interference is ensured.

In order to fail peace talks and allow Afghanistan and Pakistan bleed, the actors of the games have again started using blame game as tool to tarnish the image of Pakistan. News item published in the New York Times reflected that Pakistan Army carried out drone attacks in the month of February 2013 but same has already been rejected by the Army authorities in Pakistan.

An Inter Services Public Relations spokesperson while denying the report, termed the accusation a distortion of facts and disclosed that no operation including air strikes was conducted by Pakistan’s security forces in the Tribal Areas on 6 and 8 February. No one can deny the fact that certain Pakistanis, Afghan and Indian agents in the garb of inter-faith religious harmony are already working for foreign secret groups to eliminate orthodox Sunni Muslim leadership in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But, one wonders if Washington is not violating the diplomatic norms and international law by ignoring elected members of the parliaments and negotiate underhand directly with individuals, groups and institutions without the knowledge of elected government.

The issue of drone attacks by Pakistani authorities has been highlighted at a time when there seems to be bright chances that Islamabad would be able to resolve its internal security issues, without compromising the writ of the government. The drama of cold blooded murder of Pakistani troops by foreign agents to blame negotiating groups has created a lot of suspicions among the stakeholders. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan’s leader Hakimullah Masood many times has talked very high about the Pakistan Army and has ordered Mujahideen not to attack any Pakistani personnel, whatever may come.

It is evident from these developments that the terrorism and suicide bombing in various parts of the country, especially in Quetta, Abass Town Karachi and more recently in the attack on Pakistan Army personnel are aimed to fail peace talks and malign Sunnis leadership. It is pertinent to mention that during last decade, over 265,000 orthodox Sunnis including women and children have been killed in Pakistan alone, making a total of over 1.5 million, those killed together in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Today, US and allies are the main countries which are interfering in the internal affairs of the other countries and disturbing the world peace.
Terrorism has intentionally not been defined to allow certain countries to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. These countries are directly supporting and financing nationals of other countries to engage in acts of sabotage, espionage, treason, terrorism or sedition.

Let’s compare with the criterion of US being followed. One may fall in big trouble if his or her involvement is traced in support of training or advocacy of any act of sabotage, espionage, treason, terrorism or sedition or association or sympathy with persons who are attempting to commit or who are committing against the US. Same stands good for association or sympathy with persons or organizations that advocate, threaten, or use force or violence, or use any other illegal or unconstitutional means, in an effort to overthrow or influence the government of the US or any state or local government or prevent Federation or local government personnel from performing their official duties. And last but not the least involvement in direct or indirect support that prevent others from exercising their rights under the US constitution or other laws.

Disregard to the peace talks, Anders Fogh Rasmussen asked Pakistan to do more to rein in the extremist militants along its borders. Pakistan’s legitimately elected government is being put under constant pressure and blackmail.
The breach of sovereignty, self-respect and integrity has become a matter of routine. Intelligence high command in Dubai, New Delhi and Washington are deflecting peace talks so that own vested interests are achieved. In the recent Psychological Operations campaign, US’ intelligence agency claims to have arrested Reaz Qadir Khan on the grounds that he provided support to a suicide bomber, Ali Jaleel who participated in a 2009 attack at Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Sector Headquarters in Lahore that killed about 30 people and injured over 300. Reaz Qadir is suspected to have helped Ali in planning and financing to carryout attack. It has been claimed intercepted e-mails reflected that Ali wrote to Reaz Qadir divulging that he was about to enter training camp. Reportedly, shortly after the suicide attack in Lahore, Reaz Qadir dispatched around $750 from an Oregon store to one of Ali’s wives in Maldives.

These developments indicate that Maldives is the next target, basically because the nation happens to be orthodox Muslims. The fact cannot be denied Washington and New Delhi are much aggrieved from the leadership at Maldives on their orthodox Islamic stance. Other irritants include the Chinese-Pakistani-Maldives connection. Think tanks have openly suggested that one day countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Maldives etc may upset western and Indian designs. In fact, after the disintegration of erstwhile Soviet Union there is no imminent threat from the communism.

The Christian clergy has neither the will nor the capacity to stand on the path of evils in the modern societies. Islam and its followers are the only power left in the field to challenge the illegitimate authority of terrorists who are bent upon to destroy world peace. It would surprise many to learn that the people of western world and those who support them are not against any religion or nation but they are being misled by their governments.

There is a requirement that we must ensure that those involved in acts of sabotage, espionage, treason, terrorism or sedition or association or sympathy with them should be exposed and let all the nations of the world live as per their own aspirations without fear of any form of interference from outside. All the peace loving people of the world must support peace talks in Afghanistan and should not allow the terrorists governments to mislead about other nations.

[url]http://www.thefrontierpost.com/article/213905/[/url]