The 'Critic Magazine' Blog

The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond

2010-09-05T22:42:00.001+05:00

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.
But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.
Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?
The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.
Afghanistan
The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year. While "success" in Afghanistan might always have been elusive, we would probably have been able to assert more control over the Taliban, and suffered fewer casualties, if we had not been sidetracked. In 2003 -- the year we invaded Iraq -- the United States cut spending in Afghanistan to $14.7 billion (down from more than $20 billion in 2002), while we poured $53 billion into Iraq. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we spent at least four times as much money in Iraq as in Afghanistan.
It is hard to believe that we would be embroiled in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan today if we had devoted the resources there that we instead deployed in Iraq. A troop surge in 2003 -- before the warlords and the Taliban reestablished control -- would have been much more effective than a surge in 2010.
Oil
When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008. We believe that the war and its impact on the Middle East, the largest supplier of oil in the world, were major factors. Not only was Iraqi production interrupted, but the instability the war brought to the Middle East dampened investment in the region.
In calculating our $3 trillion estimate two years ago, we blamed the war for a $5-per-barrel oil price increase. We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.
Federal debt
There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.
As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.
The financial crisis
The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.
Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.
Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.
The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.
* * *
Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America's standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger. The question today is: Can we learn from this costly mistake?

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, was chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. They are co-authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

This article first appeared on The Washington Times

Get another passport

2010-09-02T12:58:00.000+05:00

The writer is executive director news and current affairs at Aaj TV syed.talat@tribune.com.pk

As if the ravages of the floods, the incompetence of the government, and the shenanigans surrounding cricket were not bad enough, there is an additional cause of national depression: a group — ‘Kondemn the whole Kommunity Klan’, or the KKK — is actively pushing the narrative that Pakistan is a failed state because this nation, culturally, does not have the attributes of a successful civilisation.

The madness in Sialkot seems to have triggered their wholesale laceration of Pakistanis. This incident has been mounted on the billboards of ridicule as the final verdict on this all those who live here. According to one member of the KKK, our entire history is so designed as to only produce violence and bloodbath. In other words, we as a people, are historically, culturally, and politically wish death and destruction upon ourselves and on others.

Other members of the KKK are busy in drawing rooms spreading the argument that Pakistan’s experiment in attaining the level of a civilisation has failed. As exemplified by the horror of the beating-to-death of two brothers, those who live in this land have become permanently unhinged.

The cause of their anguish is understandable — the horrendous sight of humans being bludgeoned to pulp can wreck any soul and make people shout from the roof-tops in anger and hurt. But their conclusion is downright racist and alarmingly malignant — that this incident is further proof of a barbaric nature of the whole nation.

While our grasp of world history may be faulty but we have poured over enough paper to know that the Indus civilisation does not have a monopoly over lynch mobs, witch-hunters, and stake-burners. Nor does the subcontinent species have beastliness built into its bones. The entire European history, as indeed British and American history is soaked in blood, sometimes shed in the name of religion, sometimes in name of carrying the white man’s burden, but mostly in brutal self-interest.

All colonialists were master killers. The British took the cake in managing meticulous elimination in the lands they occupied for gold, slaves and the glory of the crown. Today’s civilisational success — on whose merit according to the KKK, we don’t measure up — is built on yesterday’s systematic murder of weak natives.

These attitudes, though regulated and controlled, are still prevalent — as much in white, western societies are they are observed in the coloured eastern countries. Beneath the angelic calm of material achievement of these societies — which is enviable and laudable — lurks a blood-thirsty beast that demands annihilation every now and then. The US-led, British-backed war in Iraq is a manifestation of this beast. Need we recall how the Iraqis were, and are being killed? What transpired in those awful prison cells that were guarded by the progeny of successful civilisations? Need we talk about extermination in Afghanistan and the daily dance of death that goes by the name of collateral damage? Should we cite — again — the nuclear attack on Japan?

The KKK’s argument that Pakistanis are collectively responsible for the brutality of a few individuals is Hitlerian in accusation. It is absurd to say that since Pakistani film-goers used to lionise Sultan Rahi that means that they love violence. This is no more evidence of national penchant for violence than the Hollywood’s glorification of James Bond’s hi-tech mayhem and murder. And if we must take fictional characters as reflections of deeply-ingrained social attitudes, then Hollywood’s cannibals, flesh-eaters, vampires, mobsters, gangsters, rapists, torturers, and yes, ‘Terminators’ and paedophiles, have to be seen as mirror images of the inner self of the West.

In the same vein the English doctor Harold Shipman known as ‘Dr Death’ who killed 215 of his patients over a 23-year period can be seen as the way of the English. Or the burning of the Christians and pogroms of the Muslims should be seen as the collective intent of the Indian society. The point is that no society is collectively condemnable. No one nation can be held responsible for the sins of a few individuals. Millions of great men and women are at work serving their fellow human beings in this country. They should not be slighted and insulted by stereotyping them as failed human beings. The KKK should have a heart.

Or get another passport.

First Published in The Express Tribune, September 1^st, 2010.

Air Blue Crash: Plane Now Believed Hijacked, Heading for Nuke Facility

2010-08-30T06:35:00.000+05:00

By Gordon Duff

August 29, 2010 Islamabad, Pakistan (Veterans Today exclusive) Informed sources in the Government of Pakistan have informed Veterans Today that they are developing “hard evidence” indicating the Jet Blue Airbus 320 that crashed August 28th outside Islamabad was a terrorist hijacking tied to rogue American security forces operating inside that country.

Sources indicate that the plane crash was an unsuccessful hijacking attempt intended to crash into the nuclear weapons facility at Kahuta, outside Islamabad. Such an attack may have been blamed on India and would likely have led to retaliation which could easily have escalated to a nuclear exchange between these two nations that have spent decades at each other’s throats.

Suspicions were raised inside Pakistan’s military and intelligence organizations when American military contractors employed by Blackwater/Xe showed up on the scene immediately after the crash, seizing the black box and “other materials.” There is no confirmation that parachutes or electronic equipment had been removed when Blackwater/Xe security relinquished control of the crash scene to Pakistani investigators.

Royal Television in Islamabad, owned by the brother of the head of Pakistan’s powerful JI (Jamate Islami), the Islamic political party, has reported that investigations are underway tying American based contractors to the planning of the attack.

Pakistan’s ISRP (Inter-Services Public Relations) has failed to confirm this but private sources indicate that an active investigation of these allegations is, not only underway but has established ties between an American group and the hijackers.

Military and intelligence officials inside Pakistan, in concert with the American embassy, are withholding all official details of the investigation and are likely to continue doing so.

This same facility had been the subject of an armed penetration by American contractors, believed to be employed by the State Department, in 2009. Four Blackwater employees, armed and possessing explosives were arrested outside the Kahuta nuclear facility in 2009. The four, driving a Jeep 4×4 and possessing advanced surveillance and jamming equipment of Israeli manufacture, were intercepted 1.5 miles from the Kahuta nuclear facility.

The four spoke fluent Pushtu and were dressed in a manner as to resemble Taliban fighters. The order for their release, given by Minister of the Interior Rehman Malik, is an issue of considerable controversy between the civilian government in Pakistan and the powerful military.

The passenger jet with 152 on board slammed into a hillside in what was believed to be Pakistan’s most serious air crash. At least 2 Americans were believed to be on board but, a month later, the US Embassy in Islamabad has left this unconfirmed. Reports received today, however, confirm that at least 5 Americans, military contractors said to be employed by Xe, may also have been on the craft but could not be identified as they had been traveling in local garb and had boarded with false identification.

Xe is an American based military and intelligence contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater and has been the subject of considerable controversy for activities inside Pakistan.

Scene of July 28 Air Crash Outside Islamabad, Pakistan

Sources indicate that the attackers stormed the cockpit in a hijacking attempt. The pilot is said to have jammed the flight controls, careening the Airbus 320 and all aboard into a hillside rather than allowing the plane to be used in a “9/11? type attack inside Pakistan or flown into Indian air space for a repeat of the 2008 Mumbai attack.

Pakistan has, at times in error, referred to American contractors employed by the Departments of Defense, State or the Central Intelligence Agency as Blackwater. However, it is believed the majority of such employees are, in fact, members of that organization or is derivitive, Xe.

Blackwater/Xe, has been subject to considerable controversy inside Pakistan for involvement in an incident in 2009 where several armed Blackwater employees were arrested in what was said to be an unauthorized ”penetration test” on the Kahuta Nuclear Plant, the same facility targeted in this attack.

The same group, often criticized for irregularities in Iraq, has been contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency to operate Predator drones inside Pakistan, operations that have resulted in a significant number of civilian deaths and said by political leaders of several factions to do little but recruit terrorists.

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensiveexperience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic officer of UN humanitarian groups. Gordon Duff’s articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is a regularly on radio and tv. This article first appeared on Opinion Maker.

The Flood, The Devastation, The Victims and a Humble Contribution by Team Karachi in Relief Efforts

2010-08-26T12:37:00.002+05:00

The most devastating floods of Pakistan’s history have washed everything in its path except the will to survive and hope of the victims to rebuild their lives once again. Every bit of help going to the victims is like a drop in the ocean, and so were our relief efforts, which we planned to add our contribution to help raise the deserving to their feets, as per our limited capacities.

With intention to add a similar drop into the ocean, Kamran Somani, Mufti Zahid Sangharwi, Moulana Adil Digri and I (Omar Javaid) drove 450 km from Karachi to reach Khairpur Meerus, on Sunday 23rd August 2010.

After an eight hour long journey we reached our destination at around 4:45 pm in the afternoon. Our hosts were one of the most active organizers of relief work in the affected area around the city. This team of relief workers was headed by Mufti Mir Mohammad Meerak, and the lead organizer Moulana Abdullah Samad.

Through a network of Madressahs, schools and other camps these individuals and their associates were coordinating with donors and fund raisers coming in from other cities, and directing their donations, charities or Zakat amount to where it was mostly needed. This way aid was forwarded to around three thousand flood victims on regular basis.

After our arrival Mufti Mir Muhammad and Moulana Abdullah Samad briefed about the situation and suggested the best way of helping the refugees. We were told that the victims were provided with food and medicine in reasonable quantities by various welfare organizations, NGO’s and the government however the victims had no means to fulfill needs other then food and medicine.

To have an idea about the extent of devastation in Khairpur Meerus outskirts please check the following clips:

During our visit to the camps we confirmed that each of the family in the camps had unique needs; like they were in need of soaps, detergents or any items to maintain hygiene, utensils to eat or cook food, feeders for infants, cloths, shoes, quilts etc, therefore the best way to help was to provide cash, of course only to the genuinely deserving.

Moulana Samad also told us about the experience of other relief workers who came to help and attempted to distribute ration at the camps. The refugees out of desperation went out of control and plundered the guy leaving him with only a Shalwar on his body.

When we visited the camp we saw a similar situation being created over a Toyota Hiace which came to distribute drinking water in a refugee camp. Keeping the situation in view we then decided rather to invite the confirmed refugees, i.e. only those who have been identified and whose particulars has been recorded by Moulana Samad and his associates, at a neutral location and distribute cash.

The very next day we executed the plan. Moulana Samad informed all those camps to send only the confirmed refugees whose names and particulars were also documented and available to Moulana Samad.

The victims were invited at Jamia Islamia Hamadia in Shehbaz Colony. Till 12 pm around 600 of such individuals arrived at the distribution point. Once envelops for 600 recipients were ready with apt amount of cash, Moulana Samad and his associates then begin to announce the names from the list he had, the individuals begin to show up and were provided with Rs. 1000 each. 75 year old Mufti Mir Muhammad Meerak also took active part in the distribution. To maintain the discipline and to avoid any unpleasant situation a couple of police officers were also brought on the scene.

By 3 pm all the cash was distributed to around 600 individuals or family heads. Around 42 families were identified in extremely bad condition. Mufti Zahid and Moulana Adil went to market and bought basic food items of Rs. 62,000/- for them separately. This way a total of Rs. 660,000/- of Zakat, Charity or Donations reached to the deserving families.

The experience was heartening. Particularly to have a firsthand account of the devastation and then forward a helping hand to make a small amount of difference in the life of those who has lost every thing.

It was also very sobering to see the extent to which an individual can degrade his self respect to feed himself and his children. It would be height of ignorance on our part if we don’t realize from the experience that it is only a matter of chance or more aptly the will of God that it is them not us who have been affected by this disaster. Perhaps any kind of natural disaster can struck any individual at any time, let it be a hurricane, earth quake, tsunami or even an epidemic of a virus. The likely hood of being struck by such a calamity is equal for every individual. Keeping this in view we need to get rid of any sense of arrogance (Am I a sinner of lesser degree then the victims in the eye of God?) and rather replace it with a sense of humility, humbleness and sense of thankfulness towards the Almighty God, for the blessings he has bestowed on us and repent day and night for the sins we have committed. It is indeed due to His (SWT) will that we found ourselves among those who can give or contribute something, instead of the recipients end. Wise men says that God send such calamities to bring his servants closer to him … If this is happening then we can expect a quick recovery, if not then let us prepare for a disaster of a magnitude greater enough to wake us up from the slumber.

Murder of Two Brothers in Sialkot is only Tip of the Iceberg

2010-08-21T11:38:00.000+05:00

I cannot agree to the idea that this is an isolated incident. Any random crowd doing such a horrendous act cannot assume to have just gone unimaginably violent ... such a collective crime cannot occur unless the tendency to commit such an act is already present! not in an individual but among all the spectators who preferred to watch and make videos of the entire scene through their mobile phones.

Before the lava erupts from a volcano, the volcanic activity gradually builds up until the time it explodes ... and once it does there is no turning back, unless God wills so ... the societies corrupts in the same way perhaps ... and this video show's just an example of such an eruption ... can there be chance for our collective self to retreat back ... ?

From corrupt politicians, to war on terror, to the recent flood crisis are all signs for those who can understand, realize and repent ... but thats only a fraction of the population and when the wrath of God arrives, no one is spared.

Perhaps it is only a matter of time ...

"Amul Chotay Ustaad Do Deshon ki Ek Awaz" against Pakistan's Culture and Islam?

2010-08-20T18:40:00.001+05:00

By Sajid Saeed Khan

Amul Chotay Ustaad Do Deshon ki Ek Awaz is a singing competition backed by a program AMAN ki ASHA, did anyone noticed that the advertisement of AMAN ki ASHA is on-air from last six months and they started that Chotay Ustaad program on 24th July 2010 (weekly episodes) prior to 2 weeks of Ramadan Kareem, doesn’t it smell fishy?

Analyze it.

When the program was started at the time of introduction of kids, what they were showing a kid from Pakistan is in masjid meeting with Moazzan and performing namaz, praying to be a best singer, in one clip kid is in masjid praying and in next clip he is singing my god see the relation they are creating between praying and singing.

Singing / dancing is prohibited in Islam and it was not even the culture of Pakistan [to the extent it is today] before cable tv.

Now what I observed the purpose behind this is to burst up Ramadan Kareem, people of Pakistan use to pray in Ramadan Kareem and in this month we are totally different people in all aspects we try to oppose all those things which we usually do in normal days and by these sort of programs they want to divert our attention from prays they want us to get indulge ourselves in the delight of singing / dancing which is literally throwing us away from our religion / our culture even in Ramadan Kareem. [Just to quote on example] One episode in which Asha Bhosle joins as a guest, would u guyz believe one of Paki kid father says “ap say mil lia mera hajj hogaya” nauzubillah a muslim saying to hindu “ap say mil lia mera hajj ho gaya” damn it, after this I can say these families are chosen families and they are making us use to of these words so we wont be able to find differences in Islam and Hinduism or between Paki and Indian Culture.

Geo tv exaggerating the emphasis on the India Pakistan friendship by broadcasting this program, they are using kids and a message of friendship as [psychological] weapons this time [as well].

[We shouldn't be totally blaming anti Pakistan or anti Pakistan elements around us for such a cultural or psychological onslaught. We also need to look ourselves in the mirror to see and realize that it is primarily due to our internal weakness which is giving opportunity to those elements within us and outside the boundaries of this country to do all what is necessary to disconnect us from our traditions, culture, history and religion. More then us they realize that what has allowed us to recover our strength and stand tall among other civilization, repeatedly again and again through the history, despite in-numerous downturns and crisis faced by our civilization, mostly due to internal weaknesses. With every passing day I find it getting more and more important for us to realize who we are, where did we came from, what is our history and traditions, only and only if we want to be who we really are ... but on the contrary our enemies are realizing it's importance and trying their best to make us or remain anything but ... Muslims i.e. servants of Allah SWT, and Followers of Muhammad-e-Mustafa SAW

Omar Javaid, Administrator, Critic Magazine Blog]

Why no one invades Switzerland?

2010-08-20T12:10:00.000+05:00

Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan

2010-08-13T17:01:00.001+05:00

By William Dalrymple

As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.

In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

It is difficult to imagine the current military adventure in Afghanistan ending quite as badly as the First Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that slowly descended into what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow.

Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being swept away by General Stanley McChrystal's surge, are instead regrouping, ready for the final act in the history of Hamid Karzai's western-installed puppet government. The Taliban have now advanced out of their borderland safe havens to the very gates of Kabul and are surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahedin once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late 1980s. Like a rerun of an old movie, all journeys by non-Afghans out of the capital are once again confined largely to tanks, military convoys and helicopters. The Taliban already control more than 70 per cent of the country, where they collect taxes, enforce the sharia and dispense their usual rough justice. Every month, their sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai's government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.

Just recently, on 17 May, there was a suicide attack on a US convoy in the Dar-ul Aman quarter of Kabul, killing 12 civilians and six American soldiers; the following day, there was a daring five-hour-long grenade and machine-gun assault on the US military headquarters at Bagram Airbase, killing an American contractor and wounding nine soldiers, so bringing the death toll for US armed forces in the country to more than 1,000. Then, over the weekend of 22-23 May, there was a series of rocket, mortar and ground assaults on Kandahar Airbase just as the British ministerial delegation was about to visit it, forcing William Hague and Liam Fox to alter their schedule. Since then, a dozen top Afghan officials have been assassinated in Kandahar, including the city of Kandahar's deputy mayor. On 7 June, the deadliest day for Nato forces in months, ten soldiers were killed. Finally, it appears that the Taliban have regained control of the opium-growing centre of Marjah in Helmand Province, only three months after being driven out by McChrystal's forces amid much gung-ho cheerleading in the US media. Afghanistan is going down.

Already, despite the presence of huge numbers of foreign troops, it is now impossible - or at least extremely foolhardy - for any westerner to walk around the capital, Kabul, without armed guards; it is even more inadvisable to head out of town in any direction except north: the strongly anti-Taliban Panjshir Valley, along with the towns of Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat, are the only safe havens left for westerners in the entire country. In all other directions, travel is possible only in an armed convoy.

This is especially true of the Khord-Kabul and Tezeen passes, immediately to the south of Kabul, where as many as 18,000 British troops were lost in 1842, and which are today again a centre of resistance against perceived foreign occupiers. Aid workers familiar with Afghanistan over several decades say the security situation has never been worse. Ideas much touted only a few years ago that Afghanistan might become a popular tourist destination - a Switzerland of central Asia - now seem to be dreams from a distant age. Lonely Planet's guidebook to Afghanistan, optimistically published in 2005, has not been updated and is now once again out of print.

The present war is following a trajectory that is beginning to feel unsettlingly familiar to students of the Great Game. In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of sexed-up intelligence about a non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically driven hawks to create a scare - in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion - thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and entirely avoidable war.

Initially, the hawks were triumphant - the British conquest proved remarkably easy and bloodless; Kabul was captured within a few weeks as the army of the previous regime melted into the hills, and a pliable monarch, Shah Shuja, was successfully placed on the throne. For a few months the British played cricket, went skating and put on amateur theatricals as if on summer leave in Simla; there were discussions about making Kabul the summer capital of the Raj. Then an insurgency began and that first heady success slowly unravelled, first among the Pashtuns of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. It slowly gained momentum, moving northwards until it reached Kabul, so making the British occupation impossible to sustain.

What happened next is a warning of how bad things could yet become: a full-scale rebellion against the British broke out in Kabul, and the two most senior British envoys, Sir Alexander Burnes and Sir William Macnaghten, were assassinated, one hacked to death by a mob in the streets, the other stabbed and shot by the resistance leader Wazir Akbar Khan during negotiations. It was on the retreat that followed, on 6 January 1842, that the 18,000 East India Company troops, and maybe half that many again Indian camp followers, were slaughtered by Afghan marksmen waiting in ambush amid the high passes, shot down as they trudged through the icy depths of the Afghan winter. After eight days on the death march, the last 50 survivors made their final stand at the village of Gandamak. As late as the 1970s, fragments of Victorian weaponry and military equipment could be found lying in the screes above the village. Even today, the hill is said to be covered with the bleached bones of the British dead.

One Englishman lived to tell the tale of that last stand (if you discount the fictional survival of Flashman) - an ordinary foot soldier, Thomas Souter, wrapped his regimental colours around him to prevent them being captured, and was taken hostage by the Afghans who assumed that such a colourfully clothed individual must command a high ransom. It is a measure of the increasingly pertinent parallels between the 19th-century war and today's that one of the main Nato bases in Afghanistan was recently named Camp Souter after that survivor.

In the years that followed, the British defeat in Afghanistan became pregnant with symbolism. For the Victorian British, it was the country's greatest imperial disaster of the 19th century. It was exactly a century before another army would be lost, in Singapore in 1942. Yet the retreat from Kabul also became a symbol of gallantry against the odds: William Barnes Wollen's celebrated oil painting The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck - showing a group of ragged but doggedly determined British soldiers standing encircled behind a porcupine of bayonets, as the Pashtun tribesmen close in - became one of the best-known images of the era, along with Remnants of an Army, Elizabeth Butler's image of the wounded and bleeding army surgeon William Brydon, who had made it through to the safety of Jalalabad, arriving before the city walls on his collapsing nag.

For the Afghans, the British defeat of 1842 became a symbol of freedom from foreign invasion. It is again no accident that the diplomatic quarter of Kabul is named after the general who oversaw the rout of the British in that year: Wazir Akbar Khan.

For south Asians, who provided most of the cannon fodder - the foot soldiers and followers killed on the retreat - the war ironically became a symbol of possibility: although thousands of Indians died on the march, it showed that the British army was not invincible and a well-planned insurgency could force them out. Thus, in 1857, the Indians launched their own anti-colonial uprising, the Great Mutiny (as it is known in Britain) or the first war of independence (as it is known in India), partly inspired by what the Afghans had achieved in 1842.

This destabilising effect on south Asia of the failed war in Afghanistan has a direct parallel in the blowback that is today destabilising Pakistan and the tribal territories of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). Here the Pakistani Taliban are once more on the march, rebuilding their presence in Swat, and are now surrounding Peshawar, which is almost daily being rocked by bombs, while outlying groups of Taliban are again spreading their influence into the valleys leading towards Islamabad. Across much of the North-West Frontier Province - roughly a fifth of Pakistan's territory - women have now been forced into the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards and more than 125 girls' schools have been blown up or burned down.

A significant proportion of the Peshawar elite, along with the city's musicians, have decamped to the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi, while tens of thousands of ordinary people from the surrounding hills of the semi-autonomous Fata tribal belt, and especially the Bajaur Agency (or tribal area), have fled from the conflict zones blasted by US Predator drones and strafed by Pakistani helicopter gunships to the tent camps ringing the provincial capital.

The Fata, it is true, have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have always been unruly, but the region has been radicalised as never before by the rain of shells and cluster bombs that have caused huge civilian casualties and daily add a stream of angry foot soldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-western religious and political extremism continues to flourish, as ever larger numbers of ordinary Pakistanis are driven to fight by corruption, predatory politics and the abuse of power by Pakistan's feudal elite, as well as the military aggression of the drones. Indeed, the ripples of instability lapping out from Afghanistan and Pakistan have reached even New York. When CIA interrogators asked Faisal Shahzad why he tried to let off a car bomb last month in Times Square, he told them of his desire to avenge those "innocent people being hit by drones from above".

The route of the British retreat of 1842 backs on to the mountain range that leads to Tora Bora and the Pakistan border, an area that has always been a Taliban centre. I had been advised not to attempt to visit the area without local protection, and so last month I set off for the mountains in the company of a regional tribal leader who was also a minister in Karzai's government. He is a mountain of a man named Anwar Khan Jegdalek, a former village wrestling champion who made his name as a Hezb-e-Islami mujahedin commander in the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s.

It was Anwar Khan Jegdalek's ancestors who inflicted some of the worst casualties on the British army of 1842, something he proudly repeated several times as we drove through the same passes. "They forced us to pick up guns to defend our honour," he said. "So we killed every last one of those bastards." None of this, incidentally, has stopped Anwar Khan Jegdalek from sending his family away from Kabul to the greater safety of Northolt, Middlesex.

He drove himself in a huge 4x4, while a pick-up full of heavily armed Afghan bodyguards followed behind. We left Kabul - past the blast walls of the Nato barracks built on the very site of the British cantonment of 170 years ago - and headed down a corkscrewing road into the line of bleak mountain passes that links Kabul with the Khyber Pass.

It is a dramatic and violent landscape: fault lines of crushed and tortured strata groaned and twisted in the gunpowder-coloured rock walls rising on either side of us. Above, the jagged mountain tops were veiled in an ominous cloud of mist. As we drove, Anwar Khan Jegdalek complained bitterly of western treatment of his government. "In the 1980s when we were killing Russians for them, the Americans called us freedom fighters," he muttered, as we descended through the first pass. "Now they just dismiss us as warlords."

At Sorobi, where the mountains debouche into a high-altitude ochre desert dotted with encampments of nomads, we left the main road and headed into Taliban territory. A further five trucks full of Anwar Khan Jegdalek's old mujahedin fighters, all brandishing rocket-propelled gren ades and with faces wrapped in keffiyehs, appeared from a side road to escort us.

At the crest of Jegdalek village, on 12 January 1842, 200 frostbitten British soldiers found themselves surrounded by several thousand Pashtun tribesmen. The two highest-ranking British soldiers, General Elphinstone and Brigadier Shelton, went off to negotiate but were taken hostage. Only 50 infantrymen managed to break out under cover of darkness. Our own welcome was, thankfully, somewhat warmer. It was my host's first visit to his home since he had become a minister, and the proud villagers took their old commander on a nostalgia trip through hills smelling of wild thyme and rosemary, and up on to mountainsides carpeted with hollyhocks, mulberries and white poplars. Here, at the top of the surrounding peaks, lay the remains of Anwar Khan Jegdalek's old mujahedin bunkers and entrenchments. Once the tour was completed, the villagers fed us, Mughal style, in an apricot orchard: we sat on carpets under a trellis of vine and pomegranate blossom as course after course of kebabs and mulberry pulao was laid in front of us.

During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the various places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, I asked them if they saw any parallels between that war and the present situation. "It is exactly the same," said Anwar Khan Jegdalek. "Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, 'We are your friends, we want democracy, we want to help.' But they are lying."

“Whoever comes to Afghanistan, even now, they will face the fate of Burnes, Macnaghten and Dr Brydon," said Mohammad Khan, our host in the village and the owner of the orchard where we were sitting. The names of the fighters of 1842, long forgotten in their home country, were still known here.

“Since the British went, we've had the Russians," said an old man to my right. "We saw them off, too, but not before they bombed many of the houses in the village." He pointed at a ridge of ruined mud-brick houses.

“We are the roof of the world," said Mohammad Khan. "From here, you can control and watch everywhere."

“Afghanistan is like the crossroads for every nation that comes to power," agreed Anwar Khan Jegdalek. "But we do not have the strength to control our own destiny - our fate is always determined by our neighbours. Next, it will be China. This is the last days of the Americans."

I asked if they thought the Taliban would come back. "The Taliban?" said Mohammad Khan. "They are here already! At least after dark. Just over that pass." He pointed in the direction of Gandamak and Tora Bora. "That is where they are strongest."

It was nearly five in the afternoon before the final flaps of nan bread were cleared away, by which time it had become clear that it was too late to head on to the site of the British last stand at Gandamak. Instead, that evening we went to the relative safety of Jalalabad, where we discovered we'd had a narrow escape: it turned out there had been a huge battle at Gandamak that morning between government forces and a group of villagers supported by the Taliban. The sheer scale and length of the feast had saved us from walking straight into an ambush. The battle had taken place on exactly the site of the British last stand.

The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I heard about the current government, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity has helped give an opening for the return of the once-hated Taliban.

As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation, and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jegdalek, the villagers were waiting for them, and had called in the local Taliban to assist. In the fighting that followed, nine policemen were killed, six vehicles destroyed and ten police hostages taken.

After the jirga was over, one of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green tea. "Last month," he said, "some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, 'Why do you hate us?' I replied, 'Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.'"

What did he say to that? “He turned to his friend and said, 'If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?' In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this."

The defeat of the west's latest puppet government on the very same hill of Gandamak where the British came to grief in 1842 made me think, on the way back to Kabul, about the increasingly close parallels between the fix that Nato is in and the one faced by the British 170 years ago.

Now as then, the problem is not hatred of the west, so much as a dislike of foreign troops swaggering around and making themselves odious to the very people they are meant to be helping. On the return journey, as we crawled back up the passes towards Kabul, we got stuck behind a US military convoy of eight Humvees and two armoured personnel carriers in full camouflage, all travelling at less than 20 miles per hour. Despite the slow speed, the troops refused to let any Afghan drivers overtake them, for fear of suicide bombers, and they fired warning shots at any who attempted to do so. By the time we reached the top of the pass two hours later, there were 300 cars and trucks backed up behind the convoy, each one full of Afghans furious at being ordered around in their own country by a group of foreigners. Every day, small incidents of arrogance and insensitivity such as this make the anger grow.

There has always been an absolute refusal by the Afghans to be ruled by foreigners, or to accept any government perceived as being imposed on the country from abroad. Now as then, the puppet ruler installed by the west has proved inadequate to the job. Too weak, unpopular and corrupt to provide security or development, he has been forced to turn on his puppeteers in order to retain even a vestige of legitimacy in the eyes of his people. Recently, Karzai has accused the US, the UK and the UN of orchestrating a fraud in last year's elections, described Nato forces as "an army of occupation", and even threatened to join the Taliban if Washington kept putting pressure on him. Shah Shuja did much the same thing in 1842, towards the end of his rule, and was known to have offered his allegiance and assistance to the insurgents who eventually toppled and beheaded him.

Now as then, there have been few tangible signs of improvement under the western-backed regime. Despite the US pouring approximately $80bn into Afghanistan, the roads in Kabul are still more rutted than those in the smallest provincial towns of Pakistan. There is little health care; for any severe medical condition, patients still have to fly to India. A quarter of all teachers in Afghanistan are themselves illiterate. In many areas, district governance is almost non-existent: half the governors do not have an office, more than half have no electricity, and most receive only $6 a month in expenses. Civil servants lack the most basic education and skills.

This is largely because $76.5bn of the $80bn committed to the country has been spent on military and security, and most of the remaining $3.5bn on international consultants, some of whom are paid in excess of $1,000 a day, according to an Afghan government report. This, in turn, has had other negative effects. As in 1842, the presence of large numbers of well-paid foreign troops has caused the cost of food and provisions to rise, and living standards to fall. The Afghans feel they are getting poorer, not richer.

There are other similarities. Then as now, the war effort was partially privatised: it was not so much the British army as a corp oration, the East India Company, that provided most of the troops who fought the war for Britain in 1842, just as today both the British and the Americans have subcontracted much of their security work to private companies. When I visited the British embassy, I found that many of the security guards at the gatehouse were not army or military police, but from Group 4 Security. The US security contracts offered to Blackwater/Xe and other private security forces under Dick Cheney's ideologically driven policy of privatising war are worth many millions of dollars.

Finally, now as then, there has been an attempt at a last show of force in order to save face before withdrawal. As happened in 1842, it has achieved little except civilian casualties and the further alienation of the Afghans. As one of the tribal elders from Jegdalek said to me: "How many times can they apologise for killing our innocent women and children and expect us to forgive them? They come, they bomb, they kill us and then they say, 'Oh, sorry, we got the wrong people.' And they keep doing that."

The British soldiers of 1842 found the same reaction in their day. In his diary of his time with the British army of retribution, which laid waste to great areas of southern Afghanistan as punishment for the massacres on the retreat from Kabul earlier in the year, the young Captain N Chamberlain reported how his troops inflicted horrible atrocities on any Afghan civilians they could find. One morning he met a wounded Afghan woman dragging herself towards a stream with a water pot. "I filled the vessel for her," he wrote, "but all she said was, 'Curses on the feringhees [foreigners]!' I continued on my way disgusted with myself, the world, above all with my cruel profession. In fact, we are nothing but licensed assassins."

However, there are some important differences between Britain's first defeat in Afghanistan and the current mess. In 1842, we were at least reinstalling a legitimate Afghan ruler and removing one who could genuinely be cast as an illegitimate usurper. Shah Shuja, the British puppet, was a former ruler of the Sadozai dynasty, from the leading Pashtun clan, and a grandson of the great Ahmed Shah Durrani, the first king of a united Afghanistan. As the traveller and pioneering archaeologist Charles Masson observed: "The Afghans had no objection to the match; they merely disliked the manner of the wooing."

This time, we have been clumsier, and Nato has helped instal a former CIA asset accused by a high-ranking UN diplomat of drug abuse and of having a history of mental instability, with little to recommend him other than that he was once run out of Langley. Although Karzai is a Pashtun of the Popalzai tribe, under his watch Nato has in effect installed the Northern Alliance in Kabul and driven the country's Pashtun majority out of power.

The reality of our present Afghan entanglement is that we took sides in a complex civil war, which has been running since the 1970s, siding with the north against the south, town against country, secularism against Islam, and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban - and they have very good reason for doing so - the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.

Yet it is not too late to learn some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842. Then, British officials in Kabul continued to send out despatches of delusional optimism as the insurgents moved ever closer to Kabul, believing that there was a straightforward military solution to the problem and that if only they could recruit enough Afghans to their army, they could eventually march out, leaving that regime in place - exactly the sentiments expressed by the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, on his visit to Afghanistan last month.

In 1842, by the time they realised they had to negotiate a political solution, their power had ebbed too far, and the only thing the insurgents were willing to negotiate was an unconditional surrender. Today, too, there is no easy military solution to Afghanistan: even if we proceed with the plan to equip an army of half a million troops (at the cost of roughly $2bn a year, when the entire revenue of the Afghan government is $1.1bn - in other words, 180 per cent of revenue), that army will never be able to guarantee security or shore up such a discredited regime. Every day, despite the military power of the US and Nato and the $25bn so far ploughed into rebuilding the Afghan army, security gets worse, and the area under government control contracts week by week.

The only answer is to negotiate a political solution while we still have enough power to do so, which in some form or other involves talking to the Taliban. This is a course that Karzai, to his credit, is keen to pursue; he made it clear that his peace jirga at the start of this month was open to any Taliban leader willing to lay down arms, and that jobs and monetary incentives would be available to former Taliban who changed their allegiance and joined the government. It is still unclear whether the new Tory government supports this course; Barack Oba ma certainly opposes it. In this, he is supported by the notably undiplomatic US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, described by one senior British diplomat as "a bull who brings his own china shop wherever he goes".

There is something else we can still do before we pull out: leave some basic infrastructure behind, a goal we notably failed to achieve in the past nine years. Yet William Hague and Liam Fox oppose this policy - as Fox notoriously said in his 21 May interview with the Times, which infuriated his Afghan hosts: "We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country." The Tories could do much worse than consult their own newly elected backbencher Rory Stewart. He knows much more about Afghanistan than either Fox or Hague. As Stewart wrote shortly before he entered politics, targeted aid projects that employ Afghans can do a great deal of good, "and we should focus on meeting the Afghan government's request for more investment in agriculture, irrigation, energy and roads".

In the meantime, Obama has announced that he will begin withdrawing troops in July 2011. The start of the US withdrawal is likely to begin a rush to evacuate the other Nato forces located in pockets around the country: the Dutch have announced that they will be pulling out of Uruzgan this summer, and the Canadian and Danes won't be far behind them. Nor will the Brits, despite assurances from Hague and Fox. A recent poll showed that 72 per cent of Britons want their troops out of Afghanistan immediately, and there is only so long any government can hold out against such strong public opinion. Certainly, it is time to shed the idea that a pro-western puppet regime that excludes the Pashtuns can remain in place indefinitely. The Karzai government is crumbling before our eyes, and if we delude ourselves that this is not the case, we could yet face a replay of 1842.

George Lawrence, a veteran of that war, issued a prescient warning in the Times just before Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War in the 1870s. "A new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country," he wrote. "Although military disasters may be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be as politically useless."

William Dalrymple's latest book, "Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India", won the first Asia House Literary Award in May, and is newly published in paperback (Bloomsbury, £8.99). His book on the First Anglo-Afghan War is planned for release in autumn 2012

Air Blue Crash Conspiracy

2010-08-13T08:18:00.002+05:00

I don't know why but since the day one I had very similar thoughts in my mind about this incident. Something was telling me that the pilot has intentionally sacrificed the entire aircraft to safe Pakistan from colossal catastrophe, something similar to catastrophe faced by Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 false flag attack ...

The very next day of this crash, I was of the opinion that perhaps this flight was hijacked and was destined to crash on some high profile target like American Embassy etc ... and then the blame would have been put on Al-Qaeda or Osama B.L for planning this attack, and that OBL is hiding in tribal belt of Pakistan, ... and the spectators would have seen history of Iraq and Afghanistan repeating on the Pakistani soil ... or perhaps American's would have brought Pakistan on the front foot in the entire region in this so called war on terror allowing itself to operate only as a financier, hence spending only a fraction of the total current expenditure ...

I personally think that this is something, not exactly, but closer to the truth ...

Courtesy - Nawa-e-Waqt Newspaper

Is Pakistan among the Luckiest Nation in the world

2010-08-01T11:30:00.003+05:00

By Omar Javaid ...

I often think that Pakistan is among the luckiest nation in the world! … Surprised? Or thinking that the author must have gone nuts? Lost his senses perhaps? … Please hold your judgments for a minute and go through a couple of lines before jumping on to conclusions. Have you ever thought why we often jump on to conclusions despite realizing that the information we have isn’t sufficient enough … impatience perhaps? And Pakistanis are impatient indeed … haven’t you driven across the busy streets in Karachi or any other metropolis?

I was thinking, why so? We drive frantically and yet we are mostly late on our commitments! How many the people you know qualify as punctual ones? … Are we too busy or overburdened? … Too busy to not let the ambulance pass by on a busy street … too busy to block the traffic by parking our car at the wrong place … or to stop on the read light (in Karachi at least) … or to make judgments without sufficient knowledge … or to get any where on time … but hey I was to explain how we are among the luckiest nation on this planet, when I am gona do that? … hold on dear, are you too busy as well to wait a couple of minutes before I make my point …?

Dear readers if you need an answer then you must allow me to solve this riddle i.e. why we seem too busy and yet we miss out many important things … but hey it can also be our carelessness … we lack the civic sense that is needed … it not necessarily because we consider ourselves busy … or perhaps it is our arrogance, Nawab mentality i.e. considering ourselves above the law, even moral law … hmmm may be that’s the reason, we only act as if we are too busy … perhaps this also explain why we consider it as our right to park our car in the center of the road and blocking the flow for hundreds of car behind … or consider it our right to import and drink tea of Rs. 2.2 billion per year, i.e. caffeine despite realizing that it has more detriments then benefits … or consider it our right to sleep as late as possible and waking up as late as possible despite realizing that our this behavior alone burns out hundreds of megawatts of electricity … or consider it our right to elect the same politicians who have venomously bitten us many times already … or consider it our right to increase prices of products when public needs it most, like during the month of Ramadan, like the fares of taxi and rickshaws when its raining, like price of mineral water bottles at railway station particularly when the train gets late … or consider it our right to watch Indian channels without realizing the influence it’s creating on our morality, traditional and cultural values … or consider it our right or even take pride in speaking English despite and consider those who doesn’t as inferior … or consider it our right to loot, plunder and destroy property of public in protest of a bomb blast or murder of a politician … or consider it our right to immobilize the whole city in the love of our Prophet (SAW) again on his presumed day of birth or destroy public property on his (SAW) insult … the list can go on and on and I am sure that the readers can add to the list, only to provide more proofs in favor of hypothesis that ‘we as a nation are slowly on a course of collective suicide’ … the citizen of this nation are like termites gone crazy, eating the foundation of their own abode in order to survive … and I haven’t yet counted the external threats being faced by Pakistan today … hasn’t been this our national character since many decades?

If so then why shouldn’t I call this country among the luckiest nation despite it being on the course of suicide since a very long time, is still alive and holds strategic significance on international fronts …?

Or perhaps I am too naïve … or perhaps I don’t know that nations take more time to collapse … it’s the last year or perhaps the last decade we are living in … or may be not …

I don’t claim to know everything, that’s why I can’t give a definite answer, but who can? … what I do know is that something is keeping us alive till date … why we haven’t experienced something as yet like what Bosnians did during 1990s, or like Chechens, or like people of Darfur, or like Iraqis, or like Afghanis, or like Tajiks, or like Palestinians experiencing today etc … may be the endogenous or exogenous circumstances they faced were unique … wait, wait, wait … Kashmir is a part of Pakistan and the people there are suffering no different then Palestinians or like Bosnians did some years back …

Hmmm … can we assume that Kashmiris are paying off for our national sins? Is it due to their sacrifices that rest of Pakistanis are still at peace though relatively! …

Imagine if Kashmir wouldn’t have been a bone of contention among India and Pakistan, then what kind of relations India might have with Pakistan? I know, some of you would never dare to think that in absence of Kashmir issue Indian attitude toward Pakistan would be much more aggressive because Indian would have a huge battery of resources available for a greater cross-national mischief! … a recent survey by an international research agency has revealed that majority of Pakistan consider Indians as the greatest threat to the country … but perhaps the same majority elects all corrupt politicians! ... then how can we trust the majorities opinion … or perhaps the politicians don’t get elected by majorities opinion!!! Which of these two points are correct?

We were trying to find out what’s keeping Pakistan safe … I must rather ask, should we really need to find it out? This ‘Something’ which is keeping Pakistan away from a fatal catastrophe is perhaps serving its purpose only because it’s hidden either within our souls or within the boundaries of our nation … no it’s the not the Nukes stupid … that ‘Something’ is perhaps even guarding those nukes … no it’s not the army or ISI or any other agency or institution, stupid! … that ‘Something’ is even keeping some of these critical institutions or agencies to perform duties, or perhaps they are also not aware of it … don’t try to guess it … that ‘Something’ is serving its purpose only because its hidden away from majority of the population … and that ‘Something’ must be very precious because it has the power to keep this nation away from a fatal catastrophe … and that ‘Something’ can only serve its purpose only if remains hidden unless majority among us develops the ability to protect it; rather we as a nation have a tendency to plunder and squander every good thing we get our hands upon … or sell it off against pennies to our international masters ... so it must remain hidden! ... Only those who have the ability to protect it know what it really is, and that’s only few of us … and at least I am not among them!

It is this ‘Something’ which is making this nation among the luckiest nations of this planet, and I only intends to point your attention toward this ghostly thing only to remind you that Al-Mighty hasn’t already become hopeless from us … if you are intelligent then you must have guessed it … the time for us to confess and repent is not over yet … and as a nation we still have a chance … but if we don’t chose to wakeup and fix our attitude and character then what really our Creator (SWT) would do to save us from becoming the next Bosnia? ... The choice has always been ours.

Why the world needs WikiLeaks

2010-07-27T09:51:00.001+05:00

The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and videos.
Founder Julian Assange, who is reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished and what drives him.
Click here for more information on TED.
This video is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

2010-07-26T16:15:00.000+05:00

Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom?

2010-07-24T18:49:00.000+05:00

Krista Bremer holds her daughter Aliya in the scarf the child decided she wanted to wear.

Nine years ago, I danced my newborn daughter around my North Carolina living room to the music of "Free to Be...You and Me", the '70s children's classic whose every lyric about tolerance and gender equality I had memorized as a girl growing up in California.

My Libyan-born husband, Ismail, sat with her for hours on our screened porch, swaying back and forth on a creaky metal rocker and singing old Arabic folk songs, and took her to a Muslim sheikh who chanted a prayer for long life into her tiny, velvety ear.

She had espresso eyes and lush black lashes like her father's, and her milky-brown skin darkened quickly in the summer sun. We named her Aliya, which means "exalted" in Arabic, and agreed we would raise her to choose what she identified with most from our dramatically different backgrounds.

I secretly felt smug about this agreement -- confident that she would favor my comfortable American lifestyle over his modest Muslim upbringing. Ismail's parents live in a squat stone house down a winding dirt alley outside Tripoli. Its walls are bare except for passages from the Quran engraved onto wood, its floors empty but for thin cushions that double as bedding at night.

My parents live in a sprawling home in Santa Fe with a three-car garage, hundreds of channels on the flat-screen TV, organic food in the refrigerator, and a closetful of toys for the grandchildren.

I imagined Aliya embracing shopping trips to Whole Foods and the stack of presents under the Christmas tree, while still fully appreciating the melodic sound of Arabic, the honey-soaked baklava Ismail makes from scratch, the intricate henna tattoos her aunt drew on her feet when we visited Libya. Not once did I imagine her falling for the head covering worn by Muslim girls as an expression of modesty.

Last summer we were celebrating the end of Ramadan with our Muslim community at a festival in the parking lot behind our local mosque. Children bounced in inflatable fun houses while their parents sat beneath a plastic tarp nearby, shooing flies from plates of curried chicken, golden rice, and baklava.

Aliya and I wandered past rows of vendors selling prayer mats, henna tattoos, and Muslim clothing. When we reached a table displaying head coverings, Aliya turned to me and pleaded, "Please, Mom -- can I have one?"

She riffled through neatly folded stacks of headscarves while the vendor, an African-American woman shrouded in black, beamed at her. I had recently seen Aliya cast admiring glances at Muslim girls her age.

I quietly pitied them, covered in floor-length skirts and long sleeves on even the hottest summer days, as my best childhood memories were of my skin laid bare to the sun: feeling the grass between my toes as I ran through the sprinkler on my front lawn; wading into an icy river in Idaho, my shorts hitched up my thighs, to catch my first rainbow trout; surfing a rolling emerald wave off the coast of Hawaii. But Aliya envied these girls and had asked me to buy her clothes like theirs. And now a headscarf.

In the past, my excuse was that they were hard to find at our local mall, but here she was, offering to spend ten dollars from her own allowance to buy the forest green rayon one she clutched in her hand. I started to shake my head emphatically "no," but caught myself, remembering my commitment to Ismail. So I gritted my teeth and bought it, assuming it would soon be forgotten.

That afternoon, as I was leaving for the grocery store, Aliya called out from her room that she wanted to come.

A moment later she appeared at the top of the stairs -- or more accurately, half of her did. From the waist down, she was my daughter: sneakers, bright socks, jeans a little threadbare at the knees. But from the waist up, this girl was a stranger. Her bright, round face was suspended in a tent of dark cloth like a moon in a starless sky.

"Are you going to wear that?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said slowly, in that tone she had recently begun to use with me when I state the obvious.

On the way to the store, I stole glances at her in my rearview mirror. She stared out the window in silence, appearing as aloof and unconcerned as a Muslim dignitary visiting our small Southern town -- I, merely her chauffeur.

I bit my lip. I wanted to ask her to remove her head covering before she got out of the car, but I couldn't think of a single logical reason why, except that the sight of it made my blood pressure rise. I'd always encouraged her to express her individuality and to resist peer pressure, but now I felt as self-conscious and claustrophobic as if I were wearing that headscarf myself.

In the Food Lion parking lot, the heavy summer air smothered my skin. I gathered the damp hair on my neck into a ponytail, but Aliya seemed unfazed by the heat. We must have looked like an odd pair: a tall blonde woman in a tank top and jeans cupping the hand of a four-foot-tall Muslim. I drew my daughter closer and the skin on my bare arms prickled -- as much from protective instinct as from the blast of refrigerated air that hit me as I entered the store.

As we maneuvered our cart down the aisles, shoppers glanced at us like we were a riddle they couldn't quite solve, quickly dropping their gaze when I caught their eye.

In the produce aisle, a woman reaching for an apple fixed me with an overly bright, solicitous smile that said "I embrace diversity and I am perfectly fine with your child." She looked so earnest, so painfully eager to put me at ease, that I suddenly understood how it must feel to have a child with an obvious disability, and all the curiosity or unwelcome sympathies from strangers it evokes.

At the checkout line, an elderly Southern woman clasped her bony hands together and bent slowly down toward Aliya. "My, my," she drawled, wobbling her head in disbelief. "Don't you look absolutely precious!" My daughter smiled politely, then turned to ask me for a pack of gum.

In the following days, Aliya wore her headscarf to the breakfast table over her pajamas, to a Muslim gathering where she was showered with compliments, and to the park, where the moms with whom I chatted on the bench studiously avoided mentioning it altogether.

Later that week, at our local pool, I watched a girl only a few years older than Aliya play Ping-Pong with a boy her age. She was caught in that awkward territory between childhood and adolescence -- narrow hips, skinny legs, the slightest swelling of new breasts -- and she wore a string bikini.

Her opponent wore an oversize T-shirt and baggy trunks that fell below his knees, and when he slammed the ball at her, she lunged for it while trying with one hand to keep the slippery strips of spandex in place. I wanted to offer her a towel to wrap around her hips, so she could lose herself in the contest and feel the exhilaration of making a perfect shot.

It was easy to see why she was getting demolished at this game: Her near-naked body was consuming her focus. And in her pained expression I recognized the familiar mix of shame and excitement I felt when I first wore a bikini.

At 14, I skittered down the halls of high school like a squirrel in traffic: hugging the walls, changing direction in midstream, darting for cover. Then I went to Los Angeles to visit my aunt Mary during winter break. Mary collected mermaids, kept a black-and-white photo of her long-haired Indian guru on her dresser, and shopped at a tiny health food store that smelled of patchouli and peanut butter. She took me to Venice Beach, where I bought a cheap bikini from a street vendor.

Dizzy with the promise of an impossibly bright afternoon, I thought I could be someone else -- glistening and proud like the greased-up bodybuilders on the lawn, relaxed and unself-conscious as the hippies who lounged on the pavement with lit incense tucked behind their ears. In a beachside bathroom with gritty cement floors, I changed into my new two-piece suit.

Goose bumps spread across my chubby white tummy and the downy white hairs on my thighs stood on end -- I felt as raw and exposed as a turtle stripped of its shell. And when I left the bathroom, the stares of men seemed to pin me in one spot even as I walked by.

In spite of a strange and mounting sense of shame, I was riveted by their smirking faces; in their suggestive expressions I thought I glimpsed some vital clue to the mystery of myself. What did these men see in me -- what was this strange power surging between us, this rapidly shifting current that one moment made me feel powerful and the next unspeakably vulnerable?

I imagined Aliya in a string bikini in a few years. Then I imagined her draped in Muslim attire. It was hard to say which image was more unsettling. I thought then of something a Sufi Muslim friend had told me: that Sufis believe our essence radiates beyond our physical bodies -- that we have a sort of energetic second skin, which is extremely sensitive and permeable to everyone we encounter. Muslim men and women wear modest clothing, she said, to protect this charged space between them and the world.

Growing up in the '70s in Southern California, I had learned that freedom for women meant, among other things, fewer clothes, and that women could be anything -- and still look good in a bikini. Exploring my physical freedom had been an important part of my process of self-discovery, but the exposure had come at a price.

Since that day in Venice Beach, I'd spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of attraction -- wanting to be desired, resisting others' unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing.

I'd spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror -- admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it -- and it sometimes seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, written a novel, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.

On a recent Saturday morning, in the crowded dressing room of a large department store, I tried on designer jeans alongside college girls in stiletto heels, young mothers with babies fussing in their strollers, and middle-aged women with glossed lips pursed into frowns. One by one we filed into changing rooms, then lined up to take our turn on a brightly lit pedestal surrounded by mirrors, cocking our hips and sucking in our tummies and craning our necks to stare at our rear ends.

When it was my turn, my heart felt as tight in my chest as my legs did in the jeans. My face looked drawn under the fluorescent lights, and suddenly I was exhausted by all the years I'd spent doggedly chasing the carrot of self-improvement, while dragging behind me a heavy cart of self-criticism.

At this stage in her life, Aliya is captivated by the world around her -- not by what she sees in the mirror. Last summer she stood at the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway, stared at the blue-black outline of the mountains in the distance, their tips swaddled by cottony clouds, and gasped. "This is the most beautiful thing I ever saw," she whispered. Her wide-open eyes were a mirror of all that beauty, and she stood so still that she blended into the lush landscape, until finally we broke her reverie by tugging at her arm and pulling her back to the car.

At school it's different. In her fourth-grade class, girls already draw a connection between clothing and popularity. A few weeks ago, her voice rose in anger as she told me about a classmate who had ranked all the girls in class according to how stylish they were.

I understood then that while physical exposure had liberated me in some ways, Aliya could discover an entirely different type of freedom by choosing to cover herself.

I have no idea how long Aliya's interest in Muslim clothing will last. If she chooses to embrace Islam, I trust the faith will bring her tolerance, humility, and a sense of justice -- the way it has done for her father. And because I have a strong desire to protect her, I will also worry that her choice could make life in her own country difficult. She has recently memorized the fatiha, the opening verse of the Quran, and she is pressing her father to teach her Arabic. She's also becoming an agile mountain biker who rides with me on wooded trails, mud spraying her calves as she navigates the swollen creek.

The other day, when I dropped her off at school, instead of driving away from the curb in a rush as I usually do, I watched her walk into a crowd of kids, bent forward under the weight of her backpack as if she were bracing against a storm. She moved purposefully, in such a solitary way -- so different from the way I was at her age, and I realized once again how mysterious she is to me.

It's not just her head covering that makes her so: It's her lack of concern for what others think about her. It's finding her stash of Halloween candy untouched in her drawer, while I was a child obsessed with sweets. It's the fact that she would rather dive into a book than into the ocean -- that she gets so consumed with her reading that she can't hear me calling her from the next room.

I watched her kneel at the entryway to her school and pull a neatly folded cloth from the front of her pack, where other kids stash bubble gum or lip gloss. Then she slipped it over her head, and her shoulders disappeared beneath it like the cape her younger brother wears when he pretends to be a superhero.

As I pulled away from the curb, I imagined that headscarf having magical powers to protect her boundless imagination, her keen perception, and her unself-conscious goodness. I imagined it shielding her as she journeys through that house of mirrors where so many young women get trapped in adolescence, buffering her from the dissatisfaction that clings in spite of the growing number of choices at our fingertips, providing safe cover as she takes flight into a future I can only imagine.

By Krista Bremer, who is the winner of a 2008 Pushcart Prize and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She is associate publisher of the literary magazine The Sun, and she is writing a memoir about her bicultural marriage.

This article First appeared on: O, The Oprah Magazine

1/3rd of Women in US Military Raped

2010-07-24T12:01:00.000+05:00

If this is how they treat their own women, then how do we expect them to treat Muslim women of Afghanistan and Iraq?

By Ole Ole Olson @ NEWS JUNKIE POST

According to NPR, “In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed.”

The BBC recently reported on The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq by Helen Benedict. This book examines the extreme difficulties female soldiers have in serving abroad. Benedict interviewed several women in the military to get a deeper understanding of the issue, and some of their stories were real eye openers.

Army specialist Chantelle Henneberry spoke of some of her experiences in Iraq, “Everybody’s supposed to have a battle buddy in the army, and females are supposed to have one to go to the latrines with, or to the showers – that’s so you don’t get raped by one of the men on your own side. But because I was the only female there, I didn’t have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife.”

Another study concluded that 90% of all women serving are sexually harassed. Another one estimates that 90% of all the rapes do not get reported, despite supposedly easier ways to report the crime with confidentiality since 2005. Either way, this appears to be an epidemic that needs to be dealt with.

An online discussion from a former soldier whose identity is being protected had this to say, “At least a rape ends. It’s the day-to-day degradation that eats at you. None of my friends who were raped on active duty reported it. Or if we tried, we were told to shut up for ‘morale.’ Working with your rapist on a daily basis isn’t a lot of fun, believe me.”

How the military is dealing with this appears to demonstrate a pattern of sweeping it under the rug. In 2008, 62% of those that were convicted of sexual assault or rape received very lenient punishments such as demotion, suspension, or a written reprimand.

The culture of sexual violence against women that is allowed to exist in both the US military and private contractors needs to come to an end. When almost a third of all women serving are raped, and over two thirds sexually assaulted, this problem is rampant and systemic.

Quaid-e-Azam’s Concept Of Pakistan As State

2010-07-20T13:08:00.000+05:00

By Rizwan Ahmed (Marhoom) @ In Pakistan's Ideology on July 14, 2010 at 8:06 am

There seems to be a controversy and misinterpretation in some elite circles on the Presidential Address of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 about the concept of Islamic state of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 about the concept of Islamic state of Pakistan. If we candidly and reasonably examine his speech wherein he stated. “We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State….Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Quaid-i-Azam in these words emphasized with remarkable wisdom and foresight the idea of complete toleration and freedom of religion and conscience in the way of life of the Muslims and Hindus alike as clearly adumbrated in the Prophet’s Madinah State.

Moreover the immediate reason behind the use of the said sentence, in my opinion, seems to be first to counter the intense propaganda that the Hindus will be ill-treated in the Islamic State, and secondly, as the enmity between Hindus and Muslims was at its height in the whole subcontinent, to cool down the high tension generated during the partition and independence movement and to normalize the animosity as well as to do away with the hatred, for the benefit of both the Dominions in the interest of peace as the Quaid was the most peace loving leader of his time. There being no ill-will between the Muslims and Christians or Parsis, Quaid did not mention these two important minorities to cease to be as such. Thus Quaid’s words only that in course of time the Hindus and Muslims would cease to be as such. To my mind, it does not purport to mean that the concept of Pakistan would become “secular in any form”. It will be an insult to Quaid-i-Azam if he is said to have reversed the ideological basis of Pakistan. He never used this western terminology of secularism throughout his life.

There is not an iota of truth about his wish to inaugurate secularism in his speech. It is only a prejudicial concept to bewilder the common people and distract them from his (Quaid’s) most sincere faith in Islam.

While delivering his speech at Karachi session of the All India Muslim League on December 26, 1943, he referred to the Glorious Quran thus: “It is the great Book Quran, that is the sheet-anchor of the Muslim India. I am sure that as we go on and on, there will be more and more of oneness – one God, one Book, one Prophet and one Nation.”

During his speech on the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday at Karachi bar Association, January 25, 1948, he said: “Today we have meet here in a small body to pay tribute to the Great Man for not only he has reverence of millions but also commands the respect of all the great men of the World. What tribute can I a humble man, pay to this Great Man.

“The Prophet was a great teacher. He was a great law-giver. He was a great statesman and he was a great sovereign who ruled. No doubt, there are many people who do not quite appreciate when we talk of Islam. Islam is not only a set of rituals, traditions and spiritual doctrines. Islam is also a code for every Muslim which regulates his life and his conduct even in politics and economics and the like. It is based on the highest principles of honour, integrity, fairplay and justice for all. One God and the equality of manhood is one of the fundamental principle of Islam. In Islam there is no difference between man and man. The qualities of equality, liberty and fraternity are the fundamental principles of Islam. The Prophet of Islam was the greatest man that the world had ever seen. Thirteen hundred years ago he laid the foundation of democracy.”

The Quaid further said that “he could not understand a section of the people who deliberately wanted to create mischief and made propaganda that the Constitution of Pakistan would not be made on the basis of “Shariat”. The Quaid-i-Azam said” Islamic principles today are as applicable to life as they were 1300 years ago.”

Allama Iqbal also has rightly said that in Islam religion and politics or stage cannot be separated, otherwise it would become a rule of Changez Khan and give vent to an autocratic rule. He expressed thus:

جدا ہو دین سیاست سے تو رہ جاتی ہے چنگیزی

In Islam there is no priesthood. Everybody is his own priest. In the west the priest ruled the state under the cover of the church and called it theocracy. All the western terminologies like theocracy, secularism, fundamentalism, socialism, national socialism, communism and other “isms” are alien to Islam. It believes in Muslim Ummah or Ummate Muslima. Therefore, the Quaid-Azam in October 1947 declared to build “Pakistan as a bulwark of Islam” in a public meeting at Lahore on October 30, 1947.

Earlier in 1943 before the Muslim League session at Karachi when Nawab Bahadur yar Jung observed in front of the Quaid-i-Azam that “there is no denying the fact that we want Pakistan for the establishment of an Islamic Stage on the Quranic system, the Quaid did not oppose it. He was a very vocal and straight forward man. H would have without waiting for a second contradicted it at the spur of the moment. This was the characteristic nature of the Quaid-i-Azam. He did give his support to the statement.

“Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim ideology, which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope, others will also share with us,” said the Quaid in a message to the Frontier Muslim Students Federation on November 18^th, 1945.

There are other occasions on which the Quaid expressed his views about an Islamic state. A few of them are as under: In Eid message, 1945, he said:

“Every one, except those who are ignorant, knows that the Quran is the general code of the Muslims, a religious, social, civil, commercial, military, judicial, criminal penal code. It regulates everything from the ceremonies of the religion to those of daily life, from the salvation of the sol to the health of the body; from the right of all to those of each individual; from morality to crimes, from punishment here to that in the life to come and our Prophet has enjoined on us that very Mussalman should posses a copy of the Quran and be his own priest. Therefore, Islam is not merely confined to the spiritual tenets and doctrines or rituals and ceremonies. It is a complete code regulating the whole Muslim society, every department of life collectively and individually.”

“The establishment of Pakistan for which we have been striving for the last ten years is, by the grace of God, an established fact today, but the creation of a state of our own was a means to an end and not the end in itself. The ideal was that we should have a state in which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where the principles of Islamic social justice could find free-play.” The Quaid expressed these words while addressing the officers of Pakistan Government at Karachi on October 11, 1947.

In a public speech at Lahore on 30^th October 1948, he said: “you are made of sterling material and are second to none. Why should you also not succeed like many others, like your own forefathers? You have only to develop the spirit of “Mujahids’. You are a nation whose history is replete with people of wonderful grit, character and vision. Live upto your tradition and add to it another chapter of glory. All I require of you now is that every one of us whom this message reaches must vow to himself and be prepared to sacrifice his all if necessary in building up Pakistan as a bulwark of Islam, as one of the greatest nations whose ideal is peace within and peace without. Along with this, keep up your morale. Do not be afraid of death. We should face it bravely to save the honour of Pakistan and Islam. There is no better salvation for the Muslims than the death of a martyr for a righteous cause.” Is this secularism or any other ism? Certainly it is Islamic ideology purely for the Mussalmans of the State.

The Quaid-i-Azam in his broad-cast talk on Pakistan to the people of the United States of America in February 1948 said, …”I am sure that it (constitution) will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principles of Islam. Today, they are as applicable in actual life as they were 1300 years ago. Islam and its idealism have taught us democracy. It has taught equality of man, justice and fairplay to everybody. We are inheritors of these glorious traditions and are fully alive to our responsibilities and obligations as framers of the future. Constitution of Pakistan. In any case Pakistan is not going to be a theoracratic stage to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Parsis, but they all are Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan.” This is the real and clear cut concept of the state of Pakistan which the Quaid-i-Azam envisaged in his speech of August 11, 1947. In that speech the sentence. “you may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state,” should be read in the light of the broadcast of February 1948. If the state is run on the pattern of the Madinah State of the Prophet, 1300 years ago, it will not affect any body’s religion or caste or creed even now. But if it is upheld that religion and state have two separate entities then the whole edifice and structure of Pakistan will collapse and the concept of Islam as a complete code of life; will have no meaning.

“The tolerance and goodwill that great emperor Akber sowed to all the non-Muslims (as suggested by Lord Mountbatten) is not of recent origin. It dates back thirteen centuries ago when our Prophet (peace be upon him) not only by words but by deeds treated Jews and Christians after he had conquered them with the utmost tolerance and regard and respect for their faith and beliefs.”Speech of the Quaid on Inauguration of Pakistan Constituent Assembly at Karachi: August 14, 1947.

Further in the same spirit of consistency the Quaid-i-Azam in a speech at Sibi Darbar on February 1948 said, “It is my belief that our salvation lies in following the golden rules of conduct set for us by our great law-giver, the Prophet of Islam. Let us lay the foundations of our democracy on the basis of true Islamic ideals and principles. Our Almighty has taught us that our decisions in the affairs of the state shall be guided by discussion and consultations.”

While addressing the Officers and Men of Ack-Ack Regiments, Malir on February 21, 1948, the Quaid-i-Azam said: “you have fought many a battle on the far flung fields of the globe to get rid the World of the fascist menace and make it safe for democracy. Now you have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.”

All these meaningful observations of the Quaid-i-Azam are exactly in consonance with the spirit, intention and ideology of the Pakistan Movement for which lacks of Muslims sacrificed their lives and wealth. These ideals set up by the Muslims of the subcontinent and also proclaimed by the leaders of the Pakistan Movement led under the dynamic personality of the Quaid-i-Azam are dear to the Muslims. “Islamic principles today are as applicable to life as they were 1300 years ago”. The constitution of Pakistan would be made on the basis of Shariat. These ideals are the Magna Charta of Pakistan.

Excerpt from “Saying of Quaid-e-Azam” published by “Quaid Foundation” in 1970.

Credit: http://kashifiat.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/quaid-i-azam’s-concept-of-pakistan-state/

Google data about Pak ranking in porn sites false: ISPAK

2010-07-17T10:53:00.000+05:00

Saturday, July 17, 2010

By Abrar Mustafa @ The News Newspaper

ISLAMABAD The FOXNews report - quoting Google - that Pakistan is at No 1 in using porn sites at the Internet is false and showed inaccurate data when it comes to identifying searches from various regions, said Pakistan’s Internet association.

There are 1.5 to 1.8 billion Internet users worldwide and Pakistan has only 5 to 8 million Internet users, less than 0.5% of global users and Internet penetration is less than 5% of total population, Wahajus Siraj, spokesman for Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK), said in a statement issued here on Friday.

The FOXNews story refers to Google Insights and Google Trends, he said, adding, Google Trends shows the searches coming from countries as well as their cities. In some searches like “how to make bomb”, New Zealand ranks No 1 and one of its cities is at No 2. This shows that if a country is ranking number one in a global search, some its cities should also be among top ranking cities. But if someone searched “horse sex” as reported in the story, Pakistan is at the top whereas none of Pakistani city is among the top ten. Similarly if someone tries all other words reported in the story, Pakistan comes on top but its cities don’t come on the top 10. This means that this data is badly managed and fabricated.

He said that if one goes to Google Insight and uses key porn words as mentioned in the story, Pakistan comes on the top. But if word “optical fiber” is typed, Pakistan also comes at No 2. Not many Internet users even know what fiber optic means and have little interest in it. Similarly, if word “missile” is typed, Pakistan again comes on the top. For word “nuclear”, Pakistan is on top again. For word laser printer, Pakistan is on sixth ranking and for “wimax”, Pakistan is on 4th number.

Anyone having little knowledge can understand that not many Pakistanis would be using these sophisticated and high tech searches. This means that data and analysis of Google is false and not correct.

Now if someone is searching Google for a particular porn website, the user must be viewing that site. If websites with key words reported in the FOX story are searched in the Google and then their names are matched from the Google’s own record of users accessing that site from a particular country, those websites are not accessed from Pakistan but from the USA and other countries.

The data from another renowned ranking site, alexa.com, that ranks top sites accessed from a country does not show any pornographic site among top 40 websites frequently accessed from Pakistan. Top website accessed from Pakistan is Google, followed by Youtube, Facebook and others.

Siraj said: “We demand an immediate apology from FOXNews for exploiting the data to let 170 million Pakistani people down as part of wicked campaign against Pakistan and also from Google on showing these wrong statistics and to correct its indexing.

Changing the World

2010-07-12T12:08:00.000+05:00

By Prof. Dr. Asad Zaman

For too long, we have been content to accept foreign analyses of our problems, instead of doing our own thinking. The Eurocentric worldview defines deviation from European norms as a problem, and advances towards European ideals as progress. On this view, we must liberalize, modernize, industrialize, and acquire good governance and democracy. To accomplish this, we need to promote the English language as a medium for instruction in Science and Technology, as well as modern culture. We need to educate our superstitious, ignorant and backwards people, make Pakistan safe, attractive and profitable for Western investors, etc. In short, we must do everything that competent administrators working on behalf of the British Raj would do.

Thinking of problems of Pakistan in our own terms, instead of thinking about how to get Pakistan to resemble England or USA, leads to dramatically different views about development. How can we improve the quality of lives of the people of Pakistan, the majority of whom are poor, illiterate, and live in rural areas or urban slums? This question is not even on the agenda of planners. After the failure of the development policies in the Washington Consensus, new revised and sophisticated versions of these policies make no mention of these people and are not informed by their problems. Close analysis of recommended policies reveals that their principal concern is to enable multinationals to be able to operate securely, enforce contracts, and repatriate profits.

Solutions to our problems lie in re-acquiring self-esteem and dignity shattered by colonial traditions. The vast majority of Pakistanis are warm, hospitable, generous and charitable people of integrity and honor, trusting and trustworthy. This is a treasure beyond price in today’s worlds. Our natural resources lie not in the coal mines of Thar, but in our Pakistani youth, which is capable of doing whatever we ask them to do. The challenge facing us as a society is to inspire them with worthwhile and ambitious goals and provide them with the means to facilitate the achievement of these goals.

The Quran (53:39) states that Man can have nothing but what he strives for. Today, we have set very low goals for our selves: leading comfortable personal lives, without caring for others. As a professor, I teach my students to lead lives of service – sacrifice personal comforts to bring comfort to others. The economics textbooks are wrong: man is fundamentally generous. The most luxurious meal at the finest restaurant cannot match the satisfaction derived from feeding the hungry. Doing relief work in North Africa, even the atheistic philosopher Sartre was moved to say that his philosophical works had no weight in comparison to the cry of a hungry baby.

The recent headlines about suicide/murder of a family due to poverty attracted the attention and concern of many. However, nearly all solutions proposed involved the government, or international agencies – in short everybody except for ME doing something about it. The simple Islamic solution to this problem is for everyone to take responsibility for forty house to the left and right. In a community where 80 neighbors are concerned for your welfare, cases of this kind will be rare to non-existent. We must revive the bonds of community eroded by modern views, where everyone cares only for himself.

Revolution begins at home. The key is to become agents of change. Instead of waiting for the world to become a better place, act to bring this about. Instead of talking about how bad things are, talk about how you and I can change things for the better. Instead of being spectators, become participants in the process of change. Given the abject poverty that exists in Pakistan, every reader of this column can easily change ten lives dramatically. Do it.

Credit: Mushtaq Ahmed

Pakistan’s Private Airlines map occupied Jammu & Kashmir as part of India

2010-07-09T12:09:00.001+05:00

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Credit: http://talkhaaba.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/occupied-jammu-kashmir-parts-of-india-pakistan-private-airlines’-maps/

Erdogan: the new hero of Islamic world

2010-07-02T12:21:00.000+05:00

The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stirred up international appreciation after he courageously blasted the Tel Aviv leaders for the bloody massacre of the peace activists aboard the Freedom Flotilla convoy of humanitarian aids which was heading towards the besieged Gaza strip to break the three-year-long blockade of the war-stricken enclave.

The beleaguered Gaza strip has been grappling with deteriorating economic and social situation over the past three years and needs urgent humanitarian aids to be disentangled from the growing crisis it’s facing. More than 80% of the Gaza strip’s 1.5m population lives under poverty threshold. The unemployment rate of the enclave hit 41.3% in 2008. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP), some 70 percent of Gaza’s population is food insecure and the vast majority is dependent on assistance from the United Nations to cover its basic needs.

According to the World Health Organization, 98 percent of industrial operations in Gaza have been shut down and there are acute shortages of fuel, cash, cooking gas and other basic supplies due to Israel’s blockade of the enclave since 2007.

Israel’s military operation in Gaza in the late 2008 and early 2009 led to the destruction of more than 7,500 Palestinian homes and displacement of some 3,500 families; however, Tel Aviv’s prevention of the entry of infrastructural and building materials have impeded the reconstruction of the ruined homes and those 3,500 families are still living without any shelter and protection.

According to the Gaza-based freelance journalist and photographer Sameh Habeeb, the Israeli forces launched a massive attack on Gaza’s infrastructures in June 2006 after an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was incarcerated by Hamas. Shalit is the only Israeli prisoner being kept in the jails of Palestinian authorities while the Israeli regime is keeping 7,383 Palestinian prisoners, 340 of whom are Children.

Habeeb reported that the key bridge linking the southern and northern areas of Gaza was totally devastated during the Israeli assault. The sole power plant of the Gaza strip was also destroyed after the Israeli military raided the city with heavy F16 squadrons. The only key motorway of Gaza, Salah El-Din was another vital construction in Gaza which the Israeli forces destroyed altogether. Although the Japanese government had proposed a plan to reconstruct the motorway, Israel never allowed this.

So far, all the international efforts to reconstruct Gaza and renovate its dilapidated infrastructures have been hindered by Tel Aviv. The majority of Gazans are deprived of sanitation, electricity, proper education, pure water and sufficient foodstuff.

Turkish Prime Minister had previously complained that Israel did not allow the entry of construction materials in the Gaza strip to accelerate the renovation process.

“This construction is still not allowed [by Israel]. Turkey is not allowed to build schools, houses, hospitals. The Israelis allow food and medicine to pass, but not the rest,” he had told the Philadelphia Inquirer in a 2009 interview.

As a harbinger of political transformations and ideological revolution in Turkey, the Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan who rose to power by the virtue of AK Party’s Muslim backgrounds has set off serious efforts over the past years to champion the cause of Palestinian people. He has become an outspoken critic of the Israeli regime and lambasted Tel Aviv on various occasions. In 2009, he inspired widespread global admirations after he walked out of a televised debate with the Israeli President on the sidelines of the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In a reference to the tragic massacre of the Palestinian citizens in the Gaza war, Erdogan told the Israeli President that he is “killing people” and then stormed out of the debate in presence of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, blaming the debate moderator’s refusal to allow him reply the fallacious statements made by Shimon Peres.

Canceling his visit to the Latin America in the wake of recent incidents in the Gaza strip, Erdogan stated before the Turkey’s parliament that Israel should be severely punished for its vicious massacre of the peace activists in the international waters: “The bloody massacre of Israel, committed against ships bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza, is a massacre deserving every kind of curse and condemnation.”

Trying to appeal to the Jewish minority of Turkey, Erdogan implied that his country’s response to such violent acts would be hard-hitting and decisive: “Turkey’s friendship is valuable; on the other hand, its enmity is violent. No one should test Turkey’s patience. The Turkish nation has always been in a historical friendship and collaboration with Jewish people. Here Jewish people understands who is the true culprit of these events.”

However, Erdogan’s message to Israel was unambiguous and clear: “A bloody regime, now in power in “Israel”, must be surely punished. Even pirates and bandits do not touch unarmed people, children, elders, and they did it. And these people try without shame to justify themselves.”

Turkey which has cancelled its recent joint military exercise with Israel is the only Muslim state which maintains full diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv. The parliamentarians of the country have called on the government to take practical steps to narrow its ties with the Zionist regime and, the government equally seems to be inclined to the restriction of ties; however, it seems that tourism and financial transaction with Israel which benefit Turkey monetarily are the only reasons which impede the way of Ankara’s detachment from Tel Aviv.

According to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Israeli citizens comprise more than 2.1% of the 20 million tourists who visit the country annually.

However, Mr. Erdogan who has determinedly warned Israel that it might lose one of its most important friends in the Middle East is gaining a growing popularity in the Muslim world due to his recent categorical statements about the Israeli regime. Reuters published a report on June 2, titled “Israel tension boosts Turkey’s popularity with Arabs” in which the rising esteem of Turkish Prime Minister has been discussed. The report reads: “Already popular for championing the Palestinian cause, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has further enhanced his status through calls for the Jewish state to be punished for the sea raid. The U.N. Security Council has condemned the deaths.”

Anyway, it seems that Israel, as a globally hated regime, brings popularity and reputation to whoever contests its unilateral, hypocritical and atrocious policies and actions.

Kourosh Ziabari is Iranian media correspondent, freelance journalist and the author of Book 7+1. He is a contributing writer for websites and magazines in the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, South Korea, Belgium, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. . Currently, he works for the Foreign Policy Journal as a media correspondent. He is a member of Tlaxcala Translators Network for Linguistic Diversity and World Student Community for Sustainable Development. Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and media correspondent. He has interviewed political commentator and linguist Noam Chomsky, member of New Zealand parliament Keith Locke, Australian politician Ian Cohen, member of German Parliament Ruprecht Polenz, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, former U.S. National Security Council advisor Peter D. Feaver, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry Kurt Wüthrich, Nobel Prize laureate in biology Robin Warren, famous German political prisoner Ernst Zündel, Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, American author Stephen Kinzer, syndicated journalist Eric Margolis, former assistant of the U.S. Department of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, American-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud and the former President of the American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sid Ganis.

Credit: http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/07/erdogan-the-new-hero-of-islamic-world/

When False Flags Don't Fly

2010-06-23T15:02:00.000+05:00

Introduction: The Corbett Report provides podcasts, interviews, articles and videos about breaking news and important issues from 9/11 Truth and false flag terror to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud and more.

When False Flags Don't Fly (Transcript): Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers an authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some sudden and senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero. It is at moments like this that the public—still in shock from the horror of the tragedy that has just unfolded before them—can be led into the most ruthless despotism: despotism that now bears the mantle of "security." Acts of terror and violence never benefit the average man or woman. They only ever benefit those in positions of power. This is why Nero fiddled while Rome burned: it gave him a chance to throw the Christians to the lions and rebuild the capital of the Roman Empire in his own image. This is why Hearst and the warmongers of the emerging American Empire were delighted by the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor: it gave them the excuse they needed in order to rouse the public into supporting the Spanish-American War. This is why Israel attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967 during the Six Day War, strafing and torpedoing it relentlessly for hours in a vain attempt to send it to the bottom: the Israelis believed that the loss of the Liberty could be blamed on Egypt and draw the Americans into war. This is why there are hundreds of documented examples of governments staging attacks in order to blame them on their political enemies. In every civilization, in every culture, in every historical period, authoritarians have known that spectacular acts of violence help to further consolidate their own power and control. And sadly, throughout history there have been all too many willing to allow attacks to occur, to pretend that attacks have occurred or even to attack their own population in order to further their political agenda. To think that such staged provocations and false flag attacks no longer occur would be as unrealistic as believing that human nature itself has changed, that powerful people no longer seek to increase their power, that influence is never used for deceit or manipulation, that lies are no longer told to satisfy greed or slake the thirst for control. It is to believe that our society is immuned from those things that we have seen in every other society in every other era. In short, it is a dangerous delusion. The people are once again learning the power of this delusion. They are learning the extent to which they have been lied to. They are once again studying their history. The Russians are learning how the FSB was caught planting bombs in Moscow in the 1990s during a terror scare that swept Putin into power and stirred the public into supporting the Second Chechen War. They are learning how their autocratic ex-President came to power campaigning on the graves of those his old FSB cronies had killed. The Israelis are learning how Mossad has been caught time and again posing as the very Muslim terrorists they claim to be opposing. They are learning how Israel uses the specter of terror to further extend their blank cheque drawn on American funds to expand their police state at home and maintain their hardline stance, the world's sixth-largest nuclear superpower supposedly threatened by the possibility that one of their neighbours may one day obtain a single nuclear weapon. The British are learning how their SAS officers were caught dressing up as Arabs in Iraq, driving around with trucks full of munitions, shooting at police to stir up ethnic tensions and insure that permanent bases could be built in the region. They are learning how Haroon Aswat, the supposed mastermind behind the 7/7 bombings, was working for British Intelligence.. They are learning how British military intelligence took part in IRA bombings. The Indians are learning how the Mumbai attack was helped by an U.S. Agent who is cooperating with investigators so that he won't face questioning by foreign authorities. The Canadians are learning how their own provincial police dressed up as protestors in 2007 and threatened violence against other police in order to force a crackdown on peaceful protests. And the Americans are learning that there were multiple bombs found, dismantled and taken out of the Alfred P. Murrah building on April 19, 1995. They are learning that Timothy McVeigh had written a letter to his sister in which he claimed to be in the Special Forces for the U.S. Army. They are learning the bombing was being directed by FBI informants, just as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was. They are learning about 9/11 and the Gulf of Tonkin and Operation Northwoods and their own Army Counterinsurgency Manuals that teach officers how to commit false flag attacks to blame on their enemies. In short, the people are learning the truth. And now we see the same build-up to a false flag event taking place that we saw in 1995. At that time the U.S. had a corporate media desperate to fling mud at anyone concerned by the actions of their government, and it had a government that was desperately unpopular in the face of growing dissatisfaction. Today we see the exact same factors at play. If anything, the situation today is worse than it was in the run-up to the Oklahoma City Bombing, with media consolidation meaning that groups of concerned citizens like the Oath Keepers are being attacked by the controlled minions on both the left and the right. And now it is not just the militia that is being demonized by the establishment: it is veterans and gun owners, third party supporters and libertarians, anti-war protestors and human rights campaigners, people who are upset with the government giving trillions to the banks that have engineered our current financial crisis in the first place. In short, everyone is now a potential terrorist, according to the governmental and media agencies that deign to limit our range of acceptable opinion and control dissent. Even the word 'terrorist' means something more than it did back in 1995, after the false flag anthrax attack allowed the passage of the Patriot Act, after the boogey of Al-CIAda gave the NSA the opportunity to announce that they were collecting everyone's emails and everyone's telephone calls, after the former Homeland Security Secretary came out and admitted that the Bush administration had made up terror threats in order to scare the people into supporting the government, now we know what the real definition of terrorism is. It is governments scaring their own populations into line. But there is something else that's different now from what it was in 1995. The people are learning something else about terrorism: they are not terrorists for speaking out against their government. They are not terrorists for wanting the government to stop selling their children into servitude to pay bankers their bonuses. They are not terrorists for pointing out that the FBI and the CIA and Mossad and MI6 are behind every major terrorist event. The people are not terrorists because they do not want to see more death. They do not want more destruction, the spilling of the blood of their fellow citizens is not in their interests. Death and destruction only ever serves the governmental and financial and industrial interests who always grow in power and wealth in the wake of every tragedy. Time and again, the people pay with their lives, and the governments and the banks and the war machine only grows and prospers. The people do not want terrorism because it does not benefit them. It only benefits the existing power structure. And this time, if there is another staged event to blame on the government's enemy of the day, the people will know who to blame. '''MJ''

Fighting talk: the language of power

2010-06-22T22:50:00.000+05:00

by Robert Fisk published at The Dawn Newspaper

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It’s Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror…

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters’ lexicon, is the same. Yes, let’s be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word “terror”? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. “Terror, terror, terror, terror”. Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it’s about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. Remember the “bunker buster” and the “Scud buster” and the “target-rich environment” in the Gulf War (Part One)? Forget about “weapons of mass destruction”. Too obviously silly. But “WMD” in the Gulf War (Part Two) had a power of its own, a secret code – genetic, perhaps, like DNA – for something that would reap terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. “45 Minutes to Terror”.

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and State Department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, between America and Israel.

In the Western context, power and the media is about words – and the use of words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history, and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power. Is this because we no longer care about linguistics or semantics? Is this because laptops “correct” our spelling, “trim” our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?

For two decades now, the US and British – and Israeli and Palestinian – leaderships have used the words “peace process” to define the hopeless, inadequate, dishonourable agreement that allowed the US and Israel to dominate whatever slivers of land would be given to an occupied people. I first queried this expression, and its provenance, at the time of Oslo – although how easily we forget that the secret surrenders at Oslo were themselves a conspiracy without any legal basis.

Poor old Oslo, I always think. What did Oslo ever do to deserve this? It was the White House agreement that sealed this preposterous and dubious treaty – in which refugees, borders, Israeli colonies, even timetables – were to be delayed until they could no longer be negotiated.

And how easily we forget the White House lawn – though, yes, we remember the images – upon which it was Clinton who quoted from the Quran, and Arafat who chose to say: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr President.” And what did we call this nonsense afterwards? Yes, it was “a moment of history”! Was it? Was it so?

Do you remember what Arafat called it? “The peace of the brave”. But I don’t remember any of us pointing out that “the peace of the brave” was used by General de Gaulle about the end of the Algerian war. The French lost the war in Algeria. We did not spot this extraordinary irony.

Same again today. We Western journalists – used yet again by our masters – have been reporting our jolly generals in Afghanistan, as saying their war can only be won with a “hearts and minds” campaign. No one asked them the obvious question: Wasn’t this the very same phrase used about Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam War? And didn’t we – didn’t the West – lose the war in Vietnam? Yet now we Western journalists are using – about Afghanistan – the phrase “hearts and minds” in our reports as if it is a new dictionary definition, rather than a symbol of defeat for the second time in four decades.

Just look at the individual words we have recently co-opted from the US military. When we Westerners find that “our” enemies – Al Qaeda, for example, or the Taliban – have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it “a spike in violence”.

Ah yes, a “spike”! A “spike” is a word first used in this context, according to my files, by a brigadier general in the Baghdad Green Zone in 2004. Yet now we use that phrase, we extemporise on it, we relay it on the air as our phrase, our journalistic invention. We are using, quite literally, an expression created for us by the Pentagon. A spike, of course, goes sharply up then sharply downwards. A “spike in violence” therefore avoids the ominous use of the words “increase in violence” – for an increase, of course, might not go down again afterwards.

Now again, when US generals refer to a sudden increase in their forces for an assault on Fallujah or central Baghdad or Kandahar – a mass movement of soldiers brought into Muslim countries by the tens of thousands – they call this a “surge”. And a surge, like a tsunami, or any other natural phenomena, can be devastating in its effects. What these “surges” really are – to use the real words of serious journalism – are reinforcements. And reinforcements are sent to conflicts when armies are losing those wars. But our television and newspaper boys and girls are still talking about “surges” without any attribution at all. The Pentagon wins again.

Meanwhile the “peace process” collapsed. Therefore our leaders – or “key players” as we like to call them – tried to make it work again. The process had to be put “back on track”. It was a train, you see. The carriages had come off the line. The Clinton administration first used this phrase, then the Israelis, then the BBC. But there was a problem when the “peace process” had repeatedly been put “back on track” – but still came off the line. So we produced a “road map” – run by a Quartet and led by our old Friend of God, Tony Blair, who – in an obscenity of history – we now refer to as a “peace envoy”. But the “road map” isn’t working. And now, I notice, the old “peace process” is back in our newspapers and on our television screens. And earlier this month, on CNN, one of those boring old fogies whom the TV boys and girls call “experts” told us again that the “peace process” was being put “back on track” because of the opening of “indirect talks” between Israelis and Palestinians. This isn’t just about clichés – this is preposterous journalism. There is no battle between the media and power; through language, we, the media, have become them.

Here’s another piece of media cowardice that makes my 63-year-old teeth grind together after 34 years of eating humus and tahina in the Middle East. We are told, in many analysis features, that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are “competing narratives”. How very cosy. There’s no justice, no injustice, just a couple of people who tell different history stories. “Competing narratives” now regularly pop up in the British press.

The phrase, from the false language of anthropology, deletes the possibility that one group of people – in the Middle East, for example – is occupied, while another is doing the occupying. Again, no justice, no injustice, no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly “competing narratives”, a football match, if you like, a level playing field because the two sides are – are they not? – “in competition”. And two sides have to be given equal time in every story.

So an “occupation” becomes a “dispute”. Thus a “wall” becomes a “fence” or “security barrier”. Thus Israeli acts of colonisation of Arab land, contrary to all international law, become “settlements” or “outposts” or “Jewish neighbourhoods”. It was Colin Powell, in his starring, powerless appearance as Secretary of State to George W Bush, who told US diplomats to refer to occupied Palestinian land as “disputed land” – and that was good enough for most of the US media. There are no “competing narratives”, of course, between the US military and the Taliban. When there are, you’ll know the West has lost.

But I’ll give you an example of how “competing narratives” come undone. In April, I gave a lecture in Toronto to mark the 95th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the deliberate mass murder of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish army and militia. Before my talk, I was interviewed on Canadian Television, CTV, which also owns Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper. And from the start, I could see that the interviewer had a problem. Canada has a large Armenian community. But Toronto also has a large Turkish community. And the Turks, as the Globe and Mail always tell us, “hotly dispute” that this was a genocide.

So the interviewer called the genocide “deadly massacres”. Of course, I spotted her specific problem straight away. She couldn’t call the massacres a “genocide”, because the Turkish community would be outraged. But she sensed that “massacres” on its own – especially with the gruesome studio background photographs of dead Armenians – was not quite up to defining a million and a half murdered human beings. Hence the “deadly massacres”. How odd! If there are “deadly” massacres, are there some massacres which are not “deadly”, from which the victims walk away alive? It was a ludicrous tautology.

YET the use of the language of power – of its beacon words and its beacon phrases – goes on among us still. How many times have I heard Western reporters talking about “foreign fighters” in Afghanistan? They are referring, of course, to the various Arab groups supposedly helping the Taliban. We heard the same story from Iraq. Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinian, Chechen fighters, of course. The generals called them “foreign fighters”. Immediately, we Western reporters did the same. Calling them “foreign fighters” meant they were an invading force. But not once – ever – have I heard a mainstream Western television station refer to the fact that there are at least 150,000 “foreign fighters” in Afghanistan, and that all of them happen to be wearing American, British and other Nato uniforms. It is “we” who are the real “foreign fighters”.

Similarly, the pernicious phrase “Af-Pak” – as racist as it is politically dishonest – is now used by reporters, although it was originally a creation of the US State Department on the day Richard Holbrooke was appointed special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the phrase avoids the use of the word “India” – whose influence in Afghanistan and whose presence in Afghanistan, is a vital part of the story. Furthermore, “Af-Pak” – by deleting India – effectively deleted the whole Kashmir crisis from the conflict in south-east Asia. It thus deprived Pakistan of any say in US local policy on Kashmir – after all, Holbrooke was made the “Af-Pak” envoy, specifically forbidden from discussing Kashmir. Thus the phrase “Af-Pak”, which completely avoids the tragedy of Kashmir – too many “competing narratives”, perhaps? – means that when we journalists use the same phrase, “Af-Pak”, which was surely created for us journalists, we are doing the State Department’s work.

Now let’s look at history. Our leaders love history. Most of all, they love the Second World War. In 2003, George W Bush thought he was Churchill. True, Bush had spent the Vietnam War protecting the skies of Texas from the Vietcong. But now, in 2003, he was standing up to the “appeasers” who did not want a war with Saddam who was, of course, “the Hitler of the Tigris”. The appeasers were the British who didn’t want to fight Nazi Germany in 1938. Blair, of course, also tried on Churchill’s waistcoat and jacket for size. No “appeaser” he. America was Britain’s oldest ally, he proclaimed – and both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

But none of this was true. Britain’s oldest ally was not the United States. It was Portugal, a neutral fascist state during the Second World War, which flew its national flags at half-mast when Hitler died (even the Irish didn’t do that).Nor did America fight alongside Britain in her hour of need in 1940, when Hitler threatened invasion and the Luftwaffe blitzed London. No, in 1940 America was enjoying a very profitable period of neutrality, and did not join Britain in the war until Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Similarly, back in 1956, Eden called Nasser the “Mussolini of the Nile”. A bad mistake. Nasser was loved by the Arabs, not hated as Mussolini was by the majority of Africans, especially the Arab Libyans. The Mussolini parallel was not challenged or questioned by the British press. And we all know what happened at Suez in 1956. When it comes to history, we journalists let the presidents and prime ministers take us for a ride.

Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power – though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered – is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases – I fear – better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language.

Over the past two weeks, as foreigners – humanitarians or “activist terrorists” – tried to take food and medicines by sea to the hungry Palestinians of Gaza, we journalists should have been reminding our viewers and listeners of a long-ago day when America and Britain went to the aid of a surrounded people, bringing food and fuel – our own servicemen dying as they did so – to help a starving population. That population had been surrounded by a fence erected by a brutal army which wished to starve the people into submission. The army was Russian. The city was Berlin. The wall was to come later. The people had been our enemies only three years earlier. Yet we flew the Berlin airlift to save them. Now look at Gaza today: which Western journalist – since we love historical parallels – has even mentioned 1948 Berlin in the context of Gaza?

Instead, what did we get? “Activists” who turned into “armed activists” the moment they opposed the Israeli army’s boarding parties. How dare these men upset the lexicon? Their punishment was obvious. They became “terrorists”. And the Israeli raids – in which “activists” were killed (another proof of their “terrorism”) – then became “deadly” raids. In this case, “deadly” was more excusable than it had been on CTV – nine dead men of Turkish origin being slightly fewer than a million and a half murdered Armenians in 1915. But it was interesting that the Israelis – who for their own political reasons had hitherto shamefully gone along with the Turkish denial – now suddenly wanted to inform the world of the 1915 Armenian genocide. This provoked an understandable frisson among many of our colleagues. Journalists who have regularly ducked all mention of the 20th century’s first Holocaust – unless they could also refer to the way in which the Turks “hotly dispute” the genocide label (ergo the Toronto Globe and Mail) – could suddenly refer to it. Israel’s new-found historical interest made the subject legitimate, though almost all reports managed to avoid any explanation of what actually happened in 1915.

And what did the Israeli seaborne raid become? It became a “botched” raid. Botched is a lovely word. It began as a German-origin Middle English word, “bocchen”, which meant to “repair badly”. And we more or less kept to that definition until our journalistic lexicon advisors changed its meaning. Schoolchildren “botch” an exam. We could “botch” a piece of sewing, an attempt to repair a piece of material. We could even botch an attempt to persuade our boss to give us a raise. But now we “botch” a military operation. It wasn’t a disaster. It wasn’t a catastrophe. It just killed some Turks.

So, given the bad publicity, the Israelis just “botched” the raid. Weirdly, the last time reporters and governments utilised this particular word followed Israel’s attempt to kill the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, in the streets of Amman. In this case, Israel’s professional assassins were caught after trying to poison Meshaal, and King Hussain forced the then Israeli prime minister (a certain B Netanyahu) to provide the antidote (and to let a lot of Hamas “terrorists” out of jail). Meshaal’s life was saved.

But for Israel and its obedient Western journalists this became a “botched attempt” on Meshaal’s life. Not because he wasn’t meant to die, but because Israel failed to kill him. You can thus “botch” an operation by killing Turks – or you can “botch” an operation by not killing a Palestinian.

How do we break with the language of power? It is certainly killing us. That, I suspect, is one reason why readers have turned away from the “mainstream” press to the internet. Not because the net is free, but because readers know they have been lied to and conned; they know that what they watch and what they read in newspapers is an extension of what they hear from the Pentagon or the Israeli government, that our words have become synonymous with the language of a government-approved, careful middle ground, which obscures the truth as surely as it makes us political – and military – allies of all major Western governments.

Many of my colleagues on various Western newspapers would ultimately risk their jobs if they were constantly to challenge the false reality of news journalism, the nexus of media-government power. How many news organisations thought to run footage, at the time of the Gaza disaster, of the airlift to break the blockade of Berlin? Did the BBC?

The hell they did! We prefer “competing narratives”. Politicians didn’t want – I told the Doha meeting on 11 May – the Gaza voyage to reach its destination, “be its end successful, farcical or tragic”. We believe in the “peace process”, the “road map”. Keep the “fence” around the Palestinians. Let the “key players” sort it out. And remember what this is all about: “Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.”

Source: http://www.dawn.com

Wikileaks to expose US killings of Childern in War of Terror

2010-06-19T18:40:00.000+05:00

The founder of whistle-blower website, WikiLeaks, says he will release a secret Pentagon video of a deadly airstrike on children in Afghanistan.

Julian Assange, the Australian-born man behind WikiLeaks, said Friday that the video shows how dozens of Afghan children are killed.

Assange is in hiding since reports revealed that the Pentagon is set on arresting him, after detaining a US military analyst alleged to have provided Wikileaks with a classified video of an American apache killing civilians in Iraq.

Bradley Manning, the US analyst, is also accused of having uploaded 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables and intelligence assessments on the website.

Civilian death has become a major problem in Afghanistan with hundreds having been killed in Afghanistan in 2010.

A report by the UN says over 2,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2009, the largest number of civilian casualties since the 2001 US-led invasion.

Ninety five children were reported to have been among the 150 civilians killed in a US-led strike in the western province of Farah in May 2009. Afghan officials have confirmed the massacre.

The invasion of Afghanistan was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the country. Nine years on, however, Afghanistan remains unstable and civilians continue to pay the price.

------

Following is a Clip from the recent drone attacks in Yemen where many innocent children and Women were murdered in the attack by the USA Military.

Source: http://www.revolutionmuslim.com/2010/06/wikileaks-to-expose-us-killing-of-kids.html

Allama Iqbal - Iblees ki Majlis-e-Shura (English)

2010-06-18T16:02:00.001+05:00

How ignorant are we of the intellectual treasures of our tradition, how oblivious are we of the message they contain. Have we ever realized that our blind pursuit of English language and complete ignorance of Urdu has actually disconnected us with the intellectual treasures, glimpse of which is presented by this gentleman.

May Allah give due reward for the effort of this gentleman as he has done a marvelous job indeed by making an attempt to reconnect us with our traditional wisdom. This is just a glimpse as I already mentioned, there is loads and loads available very much in our reach.

Imagine!, I purchased Allama Iqbal's Zarb-e-Kaleem just for Rs. 70 yesterday. World of wisdom available for peanuts, but unfortunately due to my weak Urdu, I wasn't able to grasp not even a fraction of it. I though realized that its never too late and I still can improve, and most importantly I can encourage my next generation for the same as well.

We are indeed the worst nation on this planet, not because of our economic or political instability, but because of our shear laziness, that we cannot even use the treasures, as highlighted above, available at our disposal, and also because of our intellectual and spiritual feebleness which keeps us at a distance from such material, which if we use, will only help us to stand tall and proud in from of the Creator and the rest of the world.

Little surprise the humiliation we receive due to our slumber in turn.

23rd March Parade, went Missing, so what !

2009-03-30T21:10:00.001+05:00

The Parade on 23rd march was cancelled by the prime minister out of austerity. The cancellation was announced a couple of week back. Then 23rd march came and went without the grand event which was considered the hallmark of this day. It was astonishing to see the legacy getting broken and the reason that was cited, but most startling was the inaction, it didn't bothered anybody, never sparked any uproar, never ignited any heated debate, there wasn't any criticism, it almost went unnoticed.

The parade of 23rd march use to be morale booster, a blatant exhibit of Pakistan’s military strength, cultural diversity, and national integrity; for the masses it was an annual dose of self esteem and a sense of identity. This dose went missing this time, and didn’t bother anybody. It is unlikely that masses are stuffed or overdosed with self respect, confidence and esteem, rather the contrary seems more true, they are starved, their energies evaporated by continuous bombardment of negativity (there is hardly a good news in media), they are exhausted, disappointed, frustrated, contempt on present state of affair, politics, judiciary (though just been revitalized ... ?), role of military in northern areas, extremism, and most importantly the threat of unemployment for employed, torture of unemployment for unemployed, and all of this multiplied by crippling inflation.

From another perspective the earth shattering long march for the restoration of judiciary, seem to contradict my views expressed above. I think otherwise. This long march was probably the last outburst of the residue of energy. So narrow in focus, so fantasized with the slogans of justice, so desperate in approach, so much like the last outcry of a man before drowning. And so much in contradiction to the perception of the common man who has been bitten viciously by the corruption of judiciary in Pakistan. In a survey of 4000 respondents conducted in 2006 by www.trasparency.org judiciary was ranked 3rd most corrupt institution, more than 70% declared judiciary as corrupt. According to some senior judges, the number of pending cases are more than 1.5 million, according to others it could be double.

What a treat would it be for the vultures eyeing on the natural resources of Pakistan, The nuclear assets, the gold and copper mines, the oil and gas fields, the coal reserves, the diamonds underneath, various other minerals and finally to my horror, the starving women willing to sell their bodies to keep themselves and their children alive ... (checkout how Thailand's prostitution industry developed). But vultures approaches when they are sure the prey is dead! Not when there is still a spark of life remaining. The vultures are flying over, waiting, hence a spark of life (hope) remains.

Human civilization die off only when wrath of the Creator is unleashed after their condition become hopeless; if bestowed with mercy by the Creator, they bounce back. Looking at the present state, it seems like we are standing at crossroads, the grand finale is nearing, either we are at the verge of bouncing back, or at the threshold of a major catastrophe.

The silence over 23^rd missing hallmark is deafening, but I hope I am wrong on my hopelessness. The man might be drowning, but there could still be some breaths left, there could be a way out, judicial reform might not bring justice to a common man still (for example), if so there could be another uproar or standing against the judiciary (or any other excruciating issue), if so then the propensity of bouncing back will increase, if not, vultures will close on and do what they do best

by Omar Javaid

Sr. Editor, Critic Magazine

Muslims Are Their Own Worst Enemy

2010-03-13T09:45:00.000+05:00

By Paul Craig Roberts @ VDare

Muslims are numerous but powerless. Divisions among Muslims, especially between Sunni and Shi’ites, have consigned the Muslim Middle East to almost a century of Western control. Muslims cannot even play together. The Islamic Solidarity Games, a regional version of the Olympics, which were to be held in April in Iran, have been cancelled because the Iranians and the Arabs cannot agree on whether to call the body of water that separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf.

Muslim disunity has made it possible for Israel to dispossess the Palestinians, for the U.S. to invade Iraq, and for the U.S. to rule much of the region through puppets. For example, in exchange for faithful service, Egypt receives $1.5 billion a year from Washington, which enables President Mubarak to buy off opposition. The opposition had rather have the money than support the Palestinians. Therefore, Egypt cooperates with Israel and the U.S. in the blockade of Gaza.

Another factor is the willingness of some Muslims to betray their own kind for U.S. dollars. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman, head of the Foundation for Democracy, which describes itself as "a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran."

By now we all know what that means. It means that the U.S. finances a "velvet" or some "color revolution" in order to install a U.S. puppet. Just prior to the sudden appearance of a "green revolution" in Tehran primed to protest an election, Timmerman wrote that

"the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting 'color' revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques. Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds."

So, according to the neocon Timmerman, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, it was U.S. money that funded Mousavi’s claims that Ahmadinejad stole the last Iranian election.

During President George W. Bush’s regime, it became public knowledge that American money is used to purchase Iranians to work against their own country. The Washington Post, a newspaper sympathetic to the neocon goal of American hegemony and war with Iran, reported in 2007 that Bush authorized spending more than $400 million for activities that included "supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics."

This makes the U.S. government a "state sponsor of terrorism." For confirmation, one of the U.S. paid operatives, who conducted terror operations in Iran, has ratted on his terrorist supporters in Washington. Abdulmalek Rigi, leader of the Baloch separatist group responsible for several attacks, was recently arrested by the Iranians. Rigi admitted that the Americans in Washington assured him of unlimited military aid and funding for waging an insurgency against the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Read his confession here.)

Possibly Rigi was tortured into confession. It is the American way. If the "light of the world," the"indispensable people," and the "shining city on the hill" tortures people, perhaps the Iranians do as well. Rigi’s younger brother, himself on death row in Iran, has said that the U.S. provided direct funding to the separatist group and even ordered specific terrorist attacks inside Iran (see Antiwar.com, Feb. 23, 2010 and also here and here.)

The U.S. and its NATO puppets have been killing Afghan women, children, and village elders since Oct. 7, 2001, when the U.S. military invasion "Operation Enduring Freedom," a proper Orwellian title for a self-serving war of aggression, was launched. The U.S. installed puppet president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is bought and paid for with U.S. dollars.

The money that Washington gives Karzai finances the corruption that supports him. Karzai’s corruption and his treason against the Afghan people encourage the Taliban to keep fighting in order to achieve a government that serves Afghans instead of Washington, D.C. (Officials puzzle over millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane for Dubai, by Andrew Higgins, Washington Post, February 25, 2010.

Without the puppet Karzai selling out Afghans to Washington, the U.S. would have already been driven out of the country. With Karzai paying Afghans with American money to fight Afghans for the Americans, the war drones on into its ninth year.

Feminists, liberals, and naive American flag-wavers will say that what is written here is utter rot, that Americans are in Afghanistan to bring women’s rights and birth control to Afghan women and to bring freedom, democracy and progress to Afghanistan, even if it means leveling every village, town and house in the country. We, "the indispensable people," are only there to do good, because we care so much for the Afghan people who live in a country that most Americans can’t find on a map.

While this collection of naïf's rants on about America "saving" Afghans from whatever, the White House and the Congress are conspiring against the American people to cut $500 billion dollars out of Medicare in order to give the money to private insurance companies. Jobless benefits are about to run out for millions of Americans, whose jobs have been moved offshore in order to make the rich richer. The U.S. Senate failed on Friday, Feb. 26, to extend jobless benefits. A single Republican Senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, was able to block the bill because it would cost a measly $10 billion and "would add to the budget deficit."

The "fiscally responsible" Bunning supports blank checks for wars of aggression (war crimes under the Nuremberg standard), and payoffs to investment banks for wrecking the retirement plans of most Americans. Bunning sends the bills to the unorganized and unrepresented Americans, whose jobs have been stolen by corporate offshoring of jobs and whose retirements have been stolen by the endless greed of the Wall Street investment banks.

What fool believes that the U.S. government, which is totally indifferent to the fate of its own citizens, cares so much about Afghanistan that it will spend blood and treasure to bring"progress" and "women’s rights" to a country half a world away, while it drives its own citizens into the ground?

At Washington’s behest, the government of Pakistan is conducting war against its own people, killing many and forcing others to flee their homes and lands. The Pakistani government’s war against its own citizens has caused military expenses to soar, putting Pakistan’s budget deep in the red. Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin ordered the Pakistani government to raise taxes to pay for the war against its own people. (The puppet ruler, Asif Ali Zardari, complied with his American master’s orders. Zardari declared a broad-based value added tax on virtually all goods and most services in Pakistan. Thus, Pakistanis are forced to finance a war against themselves.

The "cakewalk war" in Iraq has lasted 7 years instead of the promised 6 weeks, and the violence is still ongoing with Iraqis killed and maimed nearly every day. The reason Americans are still in Iraq is because the Iraqis hate each other more than they hate the American invader. The vast majority of the violence in "the Iraq war" was committed between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shi’ites as they cleansed one another from neighborhoods.

The majority Shi’ites regarded the American invasion of Iraq as an opportunity to gain power over the minority Sunnis, who ruled under Saddam Hussein. Therefore, the Shi’ites never engaged the American invading forces. The minority Sunnis (20 percent of the population) gave most of their effort to fighting the Shi’ite majority, but in their spare time a few thousand Sunnis were able to inflict serious losses on the American superpower.

Finally realizing the power of lucre in the Arab world, the Americans put 80,000 Sunnis on the U.S. military payroll and paid them to stop killing Americans.

This is how the U.S. won the war in Iraq. Iraqis sold out their independence for American dollars.

Considering that a few thousand Sunnis were able to prevent superpower America from successfully occupying Baghdad or much of Iraq, had the Shi’ites joined with the Sunnis against the invaders, the U.S. would have been defeated and driven out. This outcome was not possible, because the Shi’ites wanted to settle the score with the Sunnis, who had ruled them under Saddam Hussein.

This is the reason that Iraq today is in ruins, with one million dead, four million displaced or homeless, and the professional class having fled the country. Iraq, under the American puppet Maliki, is an American protectorate.

As long as Muslims hate and fear one another more than they hate their conquerors, they will remain a vanquished people.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author ofSupply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. His latest book, How The Economy Was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.