Shoved to the bottom of an irrelevent news-piece in The News is this revealing admission by Akbar Bugti’s son:
In reply to the allegations that many youth of Balochistan were going to Afghanistan and getting training in warfare, he asked what else they would do when they were not being treated as equal citizens of Pakistan.
Its a pity that these traitors are allowed to operate freely on Pakistan’s soil.
General Petraeus’ Afghan ‘surge’ is an attempt to whack the Taleban round the head because they will not negotiate unless they are hurting. This is, broadly speaking, what Henry Kissinger believed of the Vietcong in 1968. The US increased troop numbers to drive them to the table to make concessions.
Rory Stewart has witnessed both our major conflicts. Here, in an extract from a speech at Chatham House, he suggests a new way forward.
Restoration of the chief justice and other judges may be the end of a political crisis that has caused a rebellion in the PPP and brought down its popularity graph, but President Asif Zardari is about to face another crisis of credibility from his own family members, sources close to the Bhutto family told this correspondent.
Even the Chairman of PPP, Bilawal Zardari, at this young age, may have to come in public and support his beloved Aunt Sanam Bhutto against his father’s claims of material and political inheritance of his Shaheed mother Benazir Bhutto.
Why would President Asif Zardari accept reinstatement? Why Prime Minister had to do it at 5:45 AM? Was it really the lawyers Movement? What role did Army Chief General Kyani play? How was this decision taken? What will Nawaz Sharif get out of this? What is the litmus test for Chaudhry Iftikhar? Will he challenge NRO?
Listen to Zaid Hamid’s detailed analysis of these and many other questions that you may have regarding the current political circus in Pakistan.
20 trucks reduced to ashes – Exclusive images
Farzana Shah
Peshawar, 16 March, (Asiantribune.com): Militants attacked a NATO supply terminal and set fire to about 20 trucks carrying supplies to Western forces in Afghanistan on Sunday.
Militants attacked the supply depot situated at Ring Road in the jurisdiction of Yakatoot Police Station, Peshawar– capital of North West Frontier Province.
The west can no longer afford to impose its values and notions of democracy on countries that neither want nor need them
Pakistan has very grave problems. In the last two years, I have reported on bloody ethnic and political riots, on violent demonstrations, from the front line of a vicious war against radical Islamic insurgents. I spent a day with Benazir Bhutto a week before she was assassinated and covered the series of murderous attacks committed at home and abroad by militant groups based in Pakistan with shadowy connections to its security services. There is an economic crisis and social problems – illiteracy, domestic violence, drug addiction – of grotesque proportions. Osama bin Laden is probably on Pakistani soil.
For many developing nations, all this would signal the state’s total disintegration. This partly explains why Pakistan’s collapse is so often predicted. The nation’s meltdown was forecast when its eastern half seceded to become Bangladesh in 1971, during the violence that preceded General Zia ul-Haq’s coup in 1977, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, when Zia was killed in 1988, during the horrific sectarian violence of the early Nineties, through sundry ethnic insurgencies, after 9/11, after the 2007 death of Bhutto and now after yet another political crisis. These predictions have been consistently proved wrong. The most recent will be too. Yesterday, tempers were already calming.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—The Pakistani military will not intervene to protect President Asif Ali Zardari or his nemesis Nawaz Sharif. Although firmly opposed to intervention as per the wishes of Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani military is nonetheless exploring all options to deal with the looming specter of a total collapse of government leading to anarchy across the country.
There is a common feeling in military circles that Pakistan’s elite political class should bear the responsibility for its decisions. The full range of the public administration abilities of these politicians, many of whom have been elected more than twice and thrice, are exposed as sharply lacking. The political class consists of people who are recycled, tried, tested and failed.
Talha Mujaddidi
It is of prime importance to understand the role of U.S in all this. The common perception is that U.S is trying to diffuse the situation. This is not really the reality, and is only part of the background power play. Within the U.S there are two different approaches towards Pakistan; one is the traditional view of U.S congress, and State Department, which calls for a collective approach to neutralize Pakistan from within.
Read the rest of this entry ?
The publication of the Jain Commission Report for the Indian Government has confirmed what many in South Asia had suspected all along: That Indian intelligence services Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) has been fomenting violent destabilisation within the domestic polities of the South Asian states. This helps to explain why dissenting political movements in countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan – as well as in the other South Asian states – suddenly became more militant and violent in their political behaviour. Why did India feel the need to get into this form of activity within its neighbouring states? The answer to that question lies in understanding India’s power ambitions.
Seeking regional hegemony and recognition as a major global actor since independence, India initially relied on military force to expand its borders as well as intimidate its neighbours into accepting Indian diktat. India’s military moves into Kashmir and Goa emboldened it enough to get embroiled in a military encounter with China in 1962. The ensuing defeat at the hands of the Chinese as well as the stalemated war with Pakistan in 1965 made India rethink its overt military tactics in order to assert its hegemony regionally.
Thus it shifted its focus vis-a-vis South Asian states and China (as reflected in the refuge given to the Tibetan dissidents and the Dalai Lama) to covert interventions aimed at destabilising the domestic polities of its neighbours. It was for this purpose that RAW was created in 1968. The extent of RAW terrorist activities in neighbouring South Asian states is only now formally coming to light with the publication of the Jain Commission Report which establishes a clear link between the Indian government and the LTTE terrorists in Sri Lanka which eventually led to the murder of Rajiv Gandhi.
However, RAW began its activities much earlier in what was then East Pakistan. The short-sightedness and neglect of Bengali sensitivities by successive Pakistani governments since independence provided the perfect milieu for RAW to lay the seeds for wrecking Pakistan from within.
Dmitry Shlapentokh
With the administration of United States President Barack Obama treating the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan as a priority, given the resurgence of the Taliban, Russia has become an important player in the region.
Moscow has indicated its apparent support for the US by allowing the transit of supplies for Afghanistan through its territory. On the other hand, the decision by the government in Kyrgyzstan to close the US base at Manas is attributed to Russian pressure.
There therefore remains a widespread perception in the West that Russia is enjoying the US’s struggles in Afghanistan, given the history of the Soviet Union’s quagmire in that country during the 1980s.
There might be some truth in this, but Russia has a compelling reason to be involved in Afghanistan. This is not because of any grand ideas of empire-building; rather it is to be prepared for the possibility of the US’s failure there.
A must watch press session, after which Musharaff gets a standing ovation from a hostile crowd.
PART 1 / 11
All 11 parts below
The Zaranj-Delaram project, consequently, has direct ramifications for the three participating countries, and impacts on Pakistan by default. Afghanistan, the host country that is still a long way away from recovery, continues to be a playground for competing foreign policy agendas and the ‘new great game’ that is evidently being played out on its soil.
The Taliban detests India’s proximity with the Hamid Karzai regime and leaders of the erstwhile Northern Alliance. The Taliban / Al Qaeda combined and the trans-national jihadi groups have consequently and continuously targeted Indian nationals and interests since India began reconstruction operations in Afghanistan, particularly in southern Afghanistan and in the Herat area bordering Iran.
Read Full Article | A Khokar
Its a sad state of affairs when our own government defends the actions of our enemies when instead we should demand action and threaten air-strikes at the bases of VHP, RSS, Bajrangdal etc. Watch this eye-opening video:
At the current rate, the US is unlikely to ever get out of Afghanistan with anything resembling success. After more than 7 years at war there, the Afghan Army is reported to have only a single battalion (far less than a thousand soldiers) who can operate independently. Incredible.
Read Full Article | Michael Yon
Watch these hilarious training videos:
More videos below.
Thanks to PakAlert
The Israeli arms firm Rafael displayed this Bollywood dance number-based marketing video at the recently held Aero India 2009 in Bangalore. This video had been uploaded to Youtube for the purpose of embedding on the Defense and Strategic Affairs Online News Magazine, StratPost with the permission of Rafael.
Times, London
So you’re an arms dealer, you want to win a contract in India, and you rather liked the look of those dancing scenes in Slumdog Millionaire. What do you do next?
Well, if you’re the Israeli firm Rafael, the obvious (but no less excruciating) answer is to make a Bollywood movie promoting your military hardware.
For those who savor historical irony, the Soviet Empire collapsed in the years 1989-1991 because of an implosion of its economy brought on by a ruinous arms race with the United States and the heavy costs of occupying Afghanistan.
Seventeen years later came the turn of the world’s other great imperial power, the United States. Lethally bloated by runaway debt, and burdened by 50% of the world’s military spending, the house of cards known as the US economy finally collapsed.
Time to face facts in Afghanistan | Eric Margolis
MOSCOW — The old diplomat sighed as he recalled his years in Afghanistan, and then leaned forward and said in a booming voice that no escalation of troops would bring lasting peace.
As the Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986, Fikryat Tabeyev saw the numbers rise to more than 100,000 troops without any possibility of victory against a growing insurgency.
Even with President Barack Obama’s plan initially to send 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to that mountainous nation this year, the combined NATO-American force will be smaller than the Soviet contingent was. Moscow’s failure to pacify Afghanistan, which broke the back of the Soviet Union, doesn’t mean that the same fate awaits Obama’s efforts, but ignoring a decade of experience there would be a mistake, former envoys and generals warn.
India’s Covert Support To Baloch Separatists
The past week was by all accounts a momentous one, as no less a person than former Pakistani President and former Chief of the Army Staff, Gen (Ret’d) Pervez Musharraf, assertively disclosed what has been a ‘no-go’ area for India’s mainstream media and the otherwise hyper-ventilating broadcast media thus far: that India’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) has, since 2002, waged a highly successful covert war against Pakistan by actively rendering all kinds of financial assistance to Balochistan-based separatists.
But mind you, such covert warfare has not been waged by the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), but by the tri-services DIA and Afghanistan’s Riyast-i-Amniyat-i-Milli, and in addition to his routine assignment as India’s Defence Adviser at the Embassy in Kabul, Brigadier Ravi Datt Mehta was officially dolling out huge financial assistance–as ordered by the DIA–to the Baloch separatists as and when required.
Fewer than 10 percent of Indian cities have a sewage system. Some 665 million Indians practice open defecation, more than half the global total. In China, the world’s most populous country, 37 million people defecate in the open, according to Unicef. Incredible indeed.
Read Full Article | Jason Gayle, Bloomberg
Related:
India Increases Defence Budget While Urging Poor To Eat Rats
BBC: Indians urged to eat rats
India malnourishment rates worse than Africa
Hunger in India alarming! India at bottom on Hunger Index in South Asia
Almost half of Indian women married as minors: Study
Neo-cons’ map for destroying, Russia, China & Pakistan; Still alive | Farzana Shah
BrassTacks Policy Paper on Neo-con game against Pakistan. The paper contains some stunning information and facts about who is creating and sponsoring terror in the country.
Related: BrassTacks Policy Paper: Indian Terrorism in Sri Lanka & Pakistan
Ahmed Quraishi
U.S. and U.K.-backed democracy is destroying Pakistan the same way it almost brought Russia to collapse in the 1990s. Pakistan needs a creative and unorthodox solution. This includes curtailing some of the chaotic aspects of democracy in order to help Pakistan heal and stabilize. The current system has a government installed by Washington pursuing the Anglo-American agenda of wiping out Pakistan to pave the way for an Indian role in Afghanistan and Central-West Asia and neutralize China, Russia and Iran. The way to counter this strategy is to extricate Pakistan from the American grip.
The expected has happened. Rupee News had already looked into the seeds of time and we had already predicted that one of these days the drone would be shot down. “Charlie Wilson’s War” gave too much credit to the stingers. The company line is that the CIA was responsible for the Russian defeat. While in reality it was the much maligned Pakhtuns who bled the Russians – stinger or no stinger.
Read Full Report | Rupee News
Talha Mujaddidi
The biggest problem facing Pakistan is not the so-called lawyers’ movement. It is external threats from our enemies and internal threats from these corrupt politicians. They are like wolves after a deer. Too many wolves will kill the deer and each other as well. We the people of Pakistan will not be duped this time around. This is now or never. We must take these politicians to task. This time Yahya Khan will not get a military burial, and Bhutto will not become Prime Minister. This time Jamat-e-Islami and its new found nuisance-spreading partner PTI will not be allowed to fool us. Nawaz Sharif will be the sore loser in all this. We don’t want this ‘Yankee-coated Democracy’.
India has expressed concern over the Chinese built Pakistani port of Gwadar. Indian Naval Chief, Admiral Sureesh Mehta said last week that the Gwadar port has “serious strategic implications for India.” “Being only 180 nautical miles from the exit of the Straits of Hormuz, Gwadar, being bulit in Baluchistan coast, would enable Pakistan take control over the world energy jugular and interdiction of Indian tankers,” he said. Admial Mehta’s statement coincides with the handing over of the port’s management to Singapore Port Authority which last year won a bid to operate the port for 40 years, and the government has exempted it from corporate tax and all import duties on equipment and machinery.
What is happening in this country? Where are we heading? Who is actually responsible for it? These are the questions which most of us are trying to answer. But the problem we face is that many politicians in this game are double-faced. They say one thing and do something else.
Read Full Article | PakistanFirst
Musharraf – in response to a question about alleged terrorist camps in Pakistan: “I am aware of what the Indian embassy is doing in Jalalabad and Kandahar. A terrorist from Kabul has been received by Indian intelligence agencies in India and looked after. I have documents to show this. Let us stop the blame game. India is a big country. You try to do damage to us, we will do damage to you. We should address the trust deficit between the two countries.”
Full Transcript Below:
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