Death of the ‘Imam’

By Shemrez Nauman Afzal
ZoneAsia-Pk

Amir Sultan Tarar AKA Colonel Imam

Brigadier Retired Amir Sultan Tarar is suspected to have died in Taliban captivity, presumably because of cardiac arrest, but suspicions and conspiracy theories indicate that his captors, the Taliban, may have murdered him because of non-payment of ransom by his family. However, the official quarters including Military sources as well as the Frontier Corps are finding it hard to verify the reports saying they have no confirmed information in this regard.

“We have been told that his dead body has been seen near Danday Darpa Khel area in North Waziristan Agency, but the news could not be confirmed nor could we get any picture of the dead body of Colonel Imam”, a senior Army official told this scribe when contacted. Similar remarks were offered by the FC sources.

Read Complete Article Here: Death of the ‘Imam’

Let’s stop flattering India so much

Ayaz Amir

The centre of the Pakistani solar system is not the sun, as innocents may tend to believe, but our elephant-like neighbour to the east, from whose bosom once-upon-a-time we were carved: India. We may be fighting a war on our western frontier and the greatest threat to the idea envisioned by our luckless founding fathers may come from the forces of religious extremism – whose creation in present form and shape is one of the singular achievements of our defence establishment – but all our war doctrines are based on the real or presumed threat from the east.

Thus, while the world marches on we remain trapped in a time warp, fighting the battles of the past, obsessed with the perception of a threat which spurs us on to a nuclear arms race underpinned by no sense of logic or rationality…as the rest of the world understands these terms.

How much land does a man require?… famously asked Leo Tolstoy. How much nuclear security does a country require? In a reasonable world five nuclear bombs would be enough to ward off real or chimerical dangers. If Al-Qaeda had a single nuclear device the United States would not know how to deal with the threat. We may be a beggar country but, Allah be praised, we have enough nuclear bombs, and missiles to carry them, to spread death and destruction across the entire sub-continent.

Yet our supreme custodians of the national interest, self-appointed protectors of our ideological and geographical frontiers, are not satisfied, continuing to articulate and champion a national security doctrine out of sync with the times.

If the bombs at our disposal and more than half a million men, and mercifully a sprinkling of women, under arms are not enough to impart a sense of security to this putative citadel of Islam – another of our mythical notions – then Ares, the god of war, can descend from Olympus and we will not be secure.

Yes, we have problems with India and will continue to have them. But surely we are not envisaging a recourse to arms to settle these problems. We should stick to our viewpoint on Kashmir and, in this regard, be guided by the wishes of the Kashmiri people. If we have water problems with India we must talk to resolve them. If both countries are engaged in the most senseless of standoffs anywhere in the world – on the dizzying heights of the Siachen Glacier, the only way for common sense to make an appearance is through negotiations.

Except for the first Kashmir war, 1947-48, which allowed us to acquire the portion of Kashmir in our possession, all our subsequent wars with India were exercises in unmitigated folly. In the name of the national interest and, from Gen Ziaul Haq’s time onwards, in the name of ‘jihad’, our supreme keepers of the national flame have done things which in other countries would have called for the requisitioning of a determined firing squad.

Haven’t we gone through enough but must we still learn no lessons? Yes, the Pakistan-India border remains one of the most militarised frontiers in the world. Yes, there is an unbroken chain of military cantonments on the Indian side of the border, just as there is a similar chain – from the mountains of Kashmir to the sea – on our side. But we should be reversing this state of affairs, not advancing it.

Yes, we must remain eternally vigilant, I suppose an inescapable cliché in this sort of discussion. But the point is that we have enough, and to spare, to meet and even exceed the demands of vigilance. There may be sections of Indian public opinion hostile to Pakistan. But that shouldn’t cause us any sleepless nights. There are many things about official India which we don’t like. To hear Indians talk about their economic achievements, the implication being that Pakistan has been left far behind, can be tiresome, especially when repeated too often.

But the mark of being a civilized people is not to eliminate prejudice – it would be a dull world without anger and prejudice – but to keep it in check. We can indulge our fancies in private but when fancy and fantasy cloud public discourse or become substitutes for wisdom in government policy we invite trouble for ourselves.

Pakistan is not a morsel that can be chewed and swallowed. Contrary to what many in the chattering classes assert, Pakistan is not a banana republic. The United States does not run Pakistan and indeed could not, because some of our most glaring stupidities in the name of ‘jihad’ and national security are entirely indigenous, capable of concoction in no other laboratory.

Without under-estimating the ingenuity of the CIA, would the CIA have been able to create something quite like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi or the Lashkar-e-Taiba? The Kargil adventure could have been dreamt up only by the best and brightest in our own general staff. The fortress-of-Islam narrative can only be a Pakistani production. Making regular asses of ourselves in the name of religion is very much a home-grown talent.

So let us not run ourselves down and put India on too high a perch. India cannot harm us. Let us get this dangerous nonsense out of our heads. India is not about to attack Pakistan. Its leaders would have to be crazy – crazier than us – to even contemplate the possibility. India attacked us only once, in 1971, and even then we had made such a mess of East Pakistan that it was almost like inviting India to intervene. The rest of the times we attacked India, with nothing but disaster to show for it. We should get the balance of this accounting right.

Pakistan stands in greatest risk from itself, from our incapacity to look hard at our real problems and from our failure to confront those problems. Religious extremism especially in its Taliban and Al-Qaeda variety is a product of 30 years of distortion starting from the Zia era (or rather the 1977 rightist movement against Bhutto which set the stage for so much occurring thereafter). Reversing the tide of this extremist is not just a question of conducting military operations in one area of FATA or another but of reinventing the Pakistani state and making it less of a playground for theocratic forces.

This task of reinvention has to include the country’s most powerful institution, the army…which, unluckily for Pakistan, instead of having a reformist and progressive influence on the nation has been the smithy for the forging of some truly strange concepts and doctrines.

And the time for this reinvention is very short. The Americans begin to withdraw from Afghanistan, as they are priming themselves to do, and a new period of uncertainty, to put it no stronger than this, will begin in that embattled country. We have to get things right between now and then.

None of the principals in Islamabad (to name them is to spoil one’s mood) inspires much hope in this regard. But for the general staff at least, the self-appointed custodians of all that is holy, this should be a cue to change gears and spend less time fretting about India and more time in sizing up the threat of religious extremism – which won’t grow less when the Americans depart.

With all the nonsense assiduously cultivated over the years about strategic depth and our legitimate interests in Afghanistan, and the threat from India, we have managed to turn what could have been a perfectly beautiful country, a crossroads of East and West, the gateway on the one hand to India and on the other to Central Asia, into an abnormal country.

The foremost task facing us as a nation is to return to normality and make education and the march to civilization our central preoccupations, instead of the totem poles currently the greatest objects of our worship: bombs and nuke-carrying missiles.

Tailpiece: Shahzain Bugti being held by the scruff of his neck as he was arrested…a photo, in the context of Balochistan, about as damaging as the one which showed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry being pushed by the head into a waiting car. Will we never learn?

Email: winlust@yahoo.com

White House Afghan review divorced from war’s brutal reality

Michael Hughes

President Barack Obama today unveiled a self-fulfilling Afghanistan war assessment devoid of any substantial feedback from native Afghans and one wholly disconnected from the objective reality of retrogressing conditions on the ground.

President Obama is flanked by VP Biden and Sec of State Clinton while discussing the White House AfPak annual review Dec 16, 2010.

Driven by the ambiguous objective of “dismantling” Al Qaeda, the review fell short of adequately addressing two key reasons U.S. efforts will likely fail – the corruption and illegitimacy of President Hamid Karzai’s government and insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. In addition, physical security has been deteriorating throughout the country despite the administration’s claims to the contrary.

Obama underlined in the diagnostic, summarized on the White House website, that the overarching goal remains defeating Al Qaeda and preventing the region from threatening U.S. security interests in the future.

However, it is widely-held that Al Qaeda has a limited presence in the area and is much more of a threat in countries like Yemen, thus if that is truly the war’s premise it might be fair to conclude: AfPak mission accomplished!

But to most Afghans it seems like our obvious goal is defeating the Taliban – not Al Qaeda – and according to a recent poll a majority of Afghans in the South perceive the war to be an onslaught against Pashtuns while some even believe it’s an attack on Islam.

Matthew Hoh, former State department civilian officer and Director of the Afghanistan Study Group, recently explained why Obama’s rationale for war defies commonsense. Hoh described Al Qaeda as a virtual network of individuals spread out across the globe – a terrorist franchise lacking any of the characteristics common to a formal military organization that could be vanquished via conventional means.

The previous 10-year history of Al Qaeda’s attacks, such as the recent parcel bombs FedExed from Yemen, illustrate the terrorist group’s small-cell, decentralized and individualistic orientation.

Hence, Al Qaeda will not be “disrupted, dismantled and defeated” or affected in the least by the presence of brigade combat teams occupying Southern Afghanistan. It’s illogical to defend against an enemy scattered across dozens of countries by bogging down most of our military resources in one.

Hoh argued that 9 years ago 19 men hijacked four airplanes, yet here we futilely sit in Afghanistan 109 months later with 100,000 troops spending over $100 billion a year in a misguided effort against a movement that is fighting an occupation – not one with designs on transnational jihad.

Obama alleged troop withdrawal will begin in July with the dubious caveat that the scale of said extraction will be contingent upon “conditions on the ground”; meaning one might see a mass troop exodus or the U.S. could potentially be quagmired in Afghanistan until the end times.

Not to mention, at the recent Lisbon conference at the end of November the U.S. outlined a plan to keep forces in Afghanistan until 2014, clearly exposing the obfuscating pretense of a July, 2011 target as nothing more than a laughable political ruse.

The document also unconvincingly claimed that the regime of President Hamid Karzai was committed to increasing transparency, reducing corruption and improving “national and sub-national governance” while the U.S. “supported and focused investments in infrastructure that would give the Afghan government and people the tools to build and sustain a future of stability.”

Yet there is little evidence the Karzai administration has the will or capacity to change its praetorian ways, as the Afghan President continually abuses power and interferes in the prosecution of reprobate government officials while still being perceived by the population as a U.S. puppet who has seized and retains power through patent electoral chicanery.

Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali, with his stranglehold on Kandahar, a province that is the birthplace and spiritual cradle of the Taliban and one he runs like a mob boss, is single-handedly fueling the insurgency according to countless credible tribal sources.

WikiLeaks cables revealed that U.S. officials in Afghanistan and individuals within Karzai’s own cabinet have characterized the leader as paranoid, erratic and corrupt. Juan Cole, another member of the Afghanistan Study Group, rightly wondered why soldiers in the Afghanistan National Army would be willing to risk their lives for such an untrustworthy figure.

It should ignite the outrage of all Americans that our troops are sacrificing themselves in a self-defeating effort on behalf of a government that is a destabilizing force and is the leading factor for the growth of the Taliban movement especially in the last five years.

As written in a New World Strategies Coalition white paper, if it is true, as French army officer and counterinsurgency theorist Roger Trinquier put it, that “the sine qua non of victory in modern warfare is the unconditional support of a population”, and if the U.S. wholeheartedly believes in the most basic precepts of COIN strategy – then Karzai’s very existence as head of state is irreconcilable with capturing Afghan hearts and minds.

Not only is NATO struggling militarily but it’s losing on the development and humanitarian aid fronts as well, due to billions being misspent on wasteful projects, according to Patrick Cockburn, as dollars invested have simply fed a corrupt patronage system while relief workers are getting killed at a record clip.

The recently deceased U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, once pointed out that “our [U.S.] presence is the corrupting force” in Afghanistan as contractors paid by the US government have been paying off the Taliban.

According to Bob Woodward, Holbrooke said that Obama’s 30,000 troop surge in December 2009 would not work. Per The Washington Post, Holbrooke’s last words to his Pakistani doctor were: “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

The review also indicated that the U.S. and Pakistan have “strengthened their relationship” but that strengthening has not led Pakistan to do a thing about militant safe havens in places like North Waziristan and Quetta that inflict havoc upon U.S. operations on the Afghan side of the border.

WikiLeaks reports revealed that U.S. officials believe, supported by U.S. intelligence reports, that no amount of aid will incentivize Pakistan to shift its obsessive focus from India.

And intel assessments have also validated that Pakistan’s intelligence services have continued its covert support for the Afghan Taliban in defiance of U.S. demands and despite Pakistan being the recipient of billions in U.S. aid earmarked for rooting out these insurgents.

General David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and war supporters like Peter Mansoor and Max Boot have been adamantly proclaiming military “progress” has been made against the insurgency and have personally witnessed how the population has been made more secure, which makes one wonder what color the sky is in their world.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), an organization which has an up-close-and-personal view of casualties on a daily basis and rarely makes public statements, reported that levels of violence are at the highest they’ve been in 30 years.

2010 alone has been the bloodiest year of the war with nearly 700 foreign troops being killed. Yet civilians have borne the brunt of the casualties. According to the UN, 1,271 civilians were killed in the first six months of this year, a 21% increase versus the same period in 2009.

The ICRC has also reported a spike in the number of wounded patients admitted to the main hospital in southern Kandahar which has attended to more than 2,650 patients with weapons-related injuries in 2010 compared to 2,110 in 2009.

Where is the evidence of this so-called progress and what data exists that would lead any rational individual to conclude that Afghanistan is any more secure than it was since the overthrow of the Taliban?

Until something is done about the Karzai government and militant safe havens in Pakistan “conditions on the ground” shall never likely meet U.S. standards to justify a withdrawal of any material proportion.

Furthur, Obama’s report was based on data collated by Petraeus and company with close to zero indigenous input, accounting for its delusional outlook.

Obama advisors are correct in their assertion that the review was not “prescriptive” in nature, but then again how could such an assessment ever produce any meaningful recommendations considering it was derived from skewed perspectives and fantasy?

No analysis on earth akin to the White House’s rubberstamp of Petraeus’s policies will ever lead to coherent solutions, especially one oblivious to certain particulars called facts – regardless the level of inconvenience they might pose to U.S. chimerical aspirations.

Taliban Exposed by Embedded Journalist in Riveting CNN Documentary

By Michael Hughes

CNN provided me with an advance copy of the film and helped arrange a discussion with the steel-nerved filmmaker, Norwegian journalist Paul Refsdal, who risked his life embedding himself in a Taliban fighting unit in Kunar province – a move supposedly blessed by Taliban leadership.

However, as Refsdal described to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the video, his heart-rending experience of going from invited guest to kidnap victim certainly forced him to question his decision.

Although Refsdal did escape, it was not before converting to Islam in an effort to save his own life after an Al Qaeda member informed him he would be executed as a spy. But it is interesting to note that, to this day, Paul still considers himself a Muslim.

Refsdal is no stranger to combat zones, spending the last 26 years reporting from the frontlines of intense conflicts the world over, including a trip to Afghanistan in 1984 when he covered the Mujahideen during their U.S.-funded jihad against the Soviets.

I asked Paul if he saw many differences between the Mujahideen of the 1980s and today’s Taliban holy warriors. Refsdal explained that while the Mujahideen had more advanced weaponry (as a result of U.S. funding via Pakistan’s intelligence service) – including RPGs and portable heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles called Stingers – they were less serious and less devout than the Taliban.

The Taliban seem more mature and take the conflict more seriously but, then again, they have no choice considering they’re fighting against the world’s most advanced combined military forces.

The Mujahideen, on the other hand, were fighting against a waning Soviet empire that used old tanks, refused to fight at night and bombed the countryside indiscriminately as opposed to employing more sophisticated guerilla tactics.

Refsdal was struck by how his hosts defied the popular depiction of the Taliban as narrow-minded fanatics. The Taliban commander was actually bound by Pashtunwali, the Pashtun moral code, to protect and treat his guest well because hospitality is a key virtue in Afghan tribal society (of course, the sub-commander broke these laws when he later kidnapped Paul for ransom – watch the documentary for the details).

Refsdal was able to capture their humanity on film during long hours of downtime between ambushes, showing the Taliban singing, praying and playing games to kill time, such as seeing who could throw a large stone the farthest.

Paul constantly asked them not to modify their behavior or routines in the least, because Refsdal was less interested in filming action scenes and more focused on capturing images such as the Taliban playing with their children – images that portrayed the realities of everyday life (which they didn’t quite understand).

The film also shows the Taliban readying for battle, and in one clip their commander gives a pep talk that is actually profound in light of the current debate in Washington surrounding the war’s rationale and validity. The commander posed a series of rhetorical questions to his troops:

“We [the Taliban] are fighting for our religion, our freedom, our honor and our land. What are their [NATO's] goals? For what purpose are they fighting us? Are they oppressed? Have they been treated unfairly? Are they living in a dictatorship?”

According to Refsdal, most Taliban are motivated to fight because of foreign occupation rather than jihadist ideology. Although Islam is important to them – it is but one aspect of their national identity.

The Taliban Paul met seem nationalistic – religion has nothing to do with why most of them joined the Taliban in the first place. As Paul told me:

“They are not fighting because of Islam or jihad – they are fighting against occupation. If they were all Hindus, the Afghans would still be trying to drive out the outsiders.”

During the film a Taliban commander mentioned that his funding came from Pakistan – which touches upon a very controversial issue between U.S. and Pakistani leaders. Paul said, from what he gathered, many of these contributions flowed in from Salafi Taliban spiritual leaders and businessmen based out of Peshawar, but he was unsure of (and they would never tell him) if Pakistani intelligence or military were involved.

Finally, I asked Paul when he looked around at the 30-year old weapons, dirt floors, and clay outposts, combined with the fact the Taliban never really train during downtime – was it hard to believe NATO hasn’t achieved its objectives?

He answered my question with a question – a good one at that: “What are NATO’s objectives?” And not unlike the type of questions posed by the Taliban commander cited earlier, I assumed Paul’s also was rhetorical in nature.

Michael Hughes writes similar articles as the Afghanistan Headlines Examiner and theGeopolitics Examiner for Examiner.com.

Hillary Widens Pak-US “Historic Distrust”

General Mirza Aslam Beg
Former Chief of Army Staff
Email: friendsfoundation@live.co.uk

Diplomats are very careful in choosing their words, when dealing with other countries. They are polite, articulate, courteous and convey even very tough messages with a touch of grace. But the Secretary of United States, Hillary Clinton, on her recent visit to Pakistan, appeared much jilted, emotionally disturbed, and displaying a strange logic, she hit-out to “decrease the Historic Distrust”. She said:

• One: “Should an attack on United States be traced to Pakistan, it would have a very devastating impact.” This means, another demonstration of “shock and awe” over Pakistan, as on Afghanistan in 2001, but with a difference, that India would also join them, as they are also having jitters after the Mumbai attack.
• Two: “I believe, Mullah Omar and Osama are here in Pakistan and you know they are here. Don’t double cross. Help us to get them.” For over nine years, the Americans and their allies have been trying to get them and having failed, now expect the Pakistan Army to ‘produce the rabbits from the hat’, failing which Pakistan has to remain prepared to face the wrath of the sole super-power of the world.
• Three: “Pak-China nuclear deal is a matter of great concern. We can trace the export of nuclear information and material from Pakistan, through all kinds of channels, to many different countries. We are fulfilling our commitment, but it is not a one way street.” Whereas, both China and Pakistan have explained umpteen times, that China-Pakistan nuclear deal is fully covered by the IAEA guarantees and should not be a matter of concern for any one. But this is the case of the ‘lion and the lamb’ where the water flows from down upwards and therefore Pakistan is to be prepared to face the onslaught of the ‘global-anti-nuclear-proliferation-regime of USA, Israel and India,’ ready to take out Pakistan’s nuclear assets and capabilities.
• Four: “Pakistan is double-crossing us in dealing with the terrorists. They are shielding the Haqqani group in particular, who are causing all the trouble for us in Afghanistan. It is time for Pakistan, now, to make sure, that we are on the same page on Afghanistan” and “There is a gulf between how the Pakistanis define the good and bad Taliban and what Washington calls reconcilable and irreconcilable Taliban.”

As if, this was not enough, Pakistan and Afghanistan delegates were huddled together at Islamabad to sign the Afghan Transit Trade Agreement, while Hillary stood behind like a headmistress with a rod in hand, to ensure compliance. The entire process was completed in such a hurry, that the Pakistani delegate didn’t have the time to discuss the matter with the parliament, or at least with the members of the Cabinet. And our Prime Minister, who should not have been there, in any case, stood, hand folded and cheered, at the signing of the agreement, with a cynical smile on his face.

Hillary Clinton scored another point, by forcing the government of Pakistan, to restore the privilege of our Ambassador in Washington, to issue, one year, multiple visit visas to the Americans visiting Pakistan. This privilege was abused in the past by the American citizens visiting Pakistan working for Blackwater and other such shady organizations. It means that the old ‘cloak and dagger’ game is on, once again.

It is not only Hillary, but also, Admiral Mike Mullen, who tried to further decrease the “historic-gap”, by revealing from New Delhi, that: “Mumbai carnage had demonstrated how a small group of extremists could have a ‘strategic impact. I’ve worried a great deal about a repeat attack of something like that and am making sure this doesn’t happen again. But there is an implication that there is zero-sum game here, that if we increase our interactions with Pakistan we are somehow diminishing India. I can’t even imagine why any one would think that India is being diminished. Our goal is to have full transparency with India on what’s going on in Afghanistan. The links between the ISI and the Taliban are a problem in this respect.”

Hillary Clinton’s next stop was Kabul, where she met the ‘seventy countries group, trying to find the resources to rebuild Afghanistan. Strangely enough, Hillary was totally mellowed down and in a reconciliatory mood. She remarked: “The July 2011, date captures both our sense of urgency and the strength of our resolve. The transition period is too important to push off indefinitely. This date is the start of the new phase, not the end of our involvement.” This statement of the American Secretary of State, read in conjunction with Karzai’s proposal, is in fact a tacit acceptance of the first two demands of Mullah Omar, as the pre-conditions for talks. The demands are:

• One: A definite time of withdrawal from Afghanistan which has now been given as July 2011, and seventy countries attending the conference are a witness to it.
• Two: Release the fifty Taliban leaders in the custody of the occupation forces and the black list be removed immediately.

This indicates a big shift in the American stance, to enter into dialogue with the Taliban. The melt-down has started, setting a very fast pace of development, which will overtake the ‘American resolve to maintain their involvement till the year 2014.” Raising an Afghan Army of 170,000 and a police force of 30,000, as a bulwark against the Taliban, is not workable. The reality has been accepted, that, without the participation of the Taliban, who have won the war and also are in majority, no stable government can be formed in Afghanistan.

What role Pakistan can play, to ease-out the exit process of the occupation forces and facilitate the establishment of a stable government, is the moot question. There is a big trust deficit between the Afghan Taliban and the government of Pakistan, Pakistan Army and the ISI. And there is no magic solution to bridge this gap and no visible effort either on part of Pakistan, to achieve this purpose. On the other hand, Karzai appears to be playing a more sensible game. He has succeeded in gaining the acceptance of the first two demands of the Taliban. And through this process he may well succeed on a cease-fire, followed by a Loe-Jirga, to decide the future of Afghanistan. As of now, he appears to be a safe bet, while Pakistan has more than enough at hand to respond to Hillary Clinton’s charge-sheet.

In her attempt to decrease the “Historic Distrust”, Hillary’s utterances can be taken as a befitting gift to Pakistan, “the most allied ally, the strategic partner and the non-NATO ally of all times.” Yet, we would say: “As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that, unless it is absolutely biased,” (John Vorster). Hillary’s criticism and allegations are outrightly biased, lacking substance and reality.

Afghan Taliban deny being supported by Pakistan

By BILL ROGGIO

The Taliban’s executive council has denied a recent report that stated the Pakistani military and government provides direct support to the Afghan group.

In a statement released on it website, the Voice of Jihad, the Afghan Taliban described a study released by the London School of Economics as “a merely baseless propaganda launched to promote British and American interests” and “a dictated drama of the political rulers of the West.”

The Taliban claimed that it is fighting the US and Afghan governments with the support of the people in Afghanistan and that it has no need for Pakistani support.

“The current Jihad and resistance against the invaders are being led by the leadership of the Islamic Emirate based inside Afghanistan – obviously with the help and support of the Afghan Mujahid people,” the statement read. “The enemy itself admits, the Islamic Emirate has control over 70% of the Afghan soil. The Islamic Emirate does not need to have such councils outside the country in order to continue the current popular resistance.”

The Afghan Taliban have long attempted to portray their movement as a localized, nationalist insurgency seeking only to restore the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, and they did so again in yesterday’s statement denying links to Pakistan. “The present resistance is completely an home-grown Afghan Islamic resistance against the aggression of the invaders,” the statement read.

The Taliban said that it wasn’t “rational” for the Pakistani government to back them as Pakistan has declared its support of the US and that “manifestations and impact of their support would have categorically become visible.” The Afghan Taliban offered no criticism of Pakistan or the Pakistani military, however, while repeatedly lashing out at the US, Britain, and NATO.

The London School of Economics report, titled “The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents,” was released last weekend and created a stir as it accused the Pakistani military, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, and even the Pakistani government itself of providing support across the spectrum for the Taliban.

“Interviews strongly suggest that support to the Afghan insurgency is official ISI policy,” the paper stated.”It appears to be carried out by both serving and former officers, who have considerable operational autonomy.”

The London School of Economics report even claimed that top political leaders, including Asif Ali Zardari, have met with detained Afghan Taliban leaders and promised to free them as soon as was politically expedient.

Direct Pakistani support for the Taliban has been an open secret for years. The Pakistani government, through the ISI, helped found the Taliban and helped it gain power during the 1990s. Pakistan was one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government.

After the US ousted Mullah Omar from power in 2001 and 2002, the Taliban and al Qaeda regrouped in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan as well as in northwestern Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban teamed up with Pakistani Taliban factions and maintain safe havens and training camps in Pakistan to this day. The Quetta Shura, the Afghan Taliban’s executive council, is named after the Pakistani city where it is based. The ISI, through the Haqqani Network, is known to have directed suicide operations against the Indian Embassy and other targets in Kabul. Several Pakistani military officers have been detained inside Afghanistan in connection with terrorist attacks on Afghan soil, while numerous Afghan Taliban commanders have admitted to receiving support from the Pakistani military over the past several years.

Full text of the denial of Pakistani support by the Quetta Shura

A Study Team of the London School of Economics has claimed in a report that the intelligence agency of Pakistan has been supporting the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan militarily and logistically. It has claimed that Pakistani intelligence officials practically participate in meetings of the alleged Quetta Council and impose their discretions on members of the Leadership Council.

While considering this report of the London School of Economic as a merely baseless propaganda launched to promote British and American interests, the Islamic Emirate, meanwhile, declares its stand as follows:

1. The military power of the Evil Coalition including American, British and NATO forces have failed to prevent the victorious operations of the Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Now they want to utilize their academic and research institutes in the work of the occupation of Afghanistan and for oppression of the Afghan Muslim people. The baseless report of the London School of Economics is a case in point. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan believes, the said report by the so-called research institute is a dictated drama of the political rulers of the West. It is not an investigative report based on facts and reasons, ethically carried out by academic research institute.

2. The current Jihad and resistance against the invaders are being led by the leadership of the Islamic Emirate based inside Afghanistan – obviously with the help and support of the Afghan Mujahid people. The enemy itself admits, the Islamic Emirate has control over 70% of the Afghan soil. The Islamic Emirate does not need to have such councils outside the country in order to continue the current popular resistance.

3. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has always emphasized that the present resistance is completely an home-grown Afghan Islamic resistance against the aggression of the invaders. It is not possible to lead such resistance simply by foreign support instead of the native support of the Afghan masses. Had a foreign support rather than indigenous support , ever played a role in such cases, then the surrogate administration of Karzai has military, espionage, economic and political support of 49 countries, why it has failed to prevent the growing national resistance of the Afghan Mujahid nation despite the support of the foreign invaders that the Administration enjoys?

4. Rulers of the government of Pakistan claim that they are the frontline pioneers of the American ignited war. They have not spared to do whatever was in their capacity to do. Hence, it is not rationale to say that they are supporting the jihad and resistance against the Americans in Afghanistan. Had Pakistan supported the Mujahideen, then manifestations and impact of their support would have categorically become visible.

5. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan openly invites all academic and research institutes, military and intelligence entities of the world including the London School of Economics to come to Afghanistan and behold the ranks of the Islamic Emirate with their own eyes that whether the Afghan gallant people or any foreigner make up the Mujahideen and leaders of the Jihad. Then again, they should check the ranks of the Karzai stooge administration to see whether their leaders are the gallant Afghans or the open enemies of our country and the invaders. After that, they should put, their academic and investigative report conducted on the basis of the ground realities, at the disposal of the public of the world. Had they done so, these academic institutes would have abided by their recognized norms and principles; would have saved their caliber and reputations, and produced useful academic report. At least, it would not have been a fabricated drama, ironically ordered by the arrogant powers.

6. To end, the Islamic Emirate calls on all independent countries of the world, particularly, the neighboring countries to extend their support to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to put an end to the occupation of the arrogants so that our oppressed and suffering countrymen can get rid of the occupation of the tyrants and form an independent system.

Leadership Council

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The Afghan spy chief’s resignation

By Rahimullah Yusufzai

Such is the level of mistrust of Islamabad and the hatred against it among many Afghans that Amrullah Saleh, until recently Afghanistan’s intelligence chief, described Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as his country’s “enemy number one.”

Saleh is so convinced, on the basis of the intelligence that he and his men have been gathering about the ISI’s work in Afghanistan, that he doesn’t feel the need to provide proof to back up his claim. He was quoted in a recent interview as saying: “The ISI is part of the landscape of destruction in this country, no doubt. So it will be a waste of time to provide evidence of ISI involvement. They are part of it.”

If Saleh hates Pakistan so much and considers the ISI responsible for Afghanistan’s destruction, one could safely presume that this is the dominant feeling about Islamabad in his country’s intelligence setup, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) that he headed since early 2004. And since Saleh is an ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, the native place of the late Afghan mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Masood, it would not be wrong to say that all other Masood followers and supporters grouped in his Shura-i-Nazar faction of the Jamiat-i-Islami party of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani share the same feelings of hostility towards Pakistan and the ISI.

This sentiment of mistrust and hatred cannot be one-sided. It is, therefore, natural that the ISI people also don’t like Saleh and his men. In fact, a running battle has been going on for years between the ISI and Afghan intelligence, which has functioned with different names, including KHAD and WAD during the rule of Afghan communists, and partnered new allies such as the KGB, the CIA and RAW at various stages of the conflict in Afghanistan. Given the state of their animosity towards each other over the years, it would be impossible for them to cooperate even in facing a common threat.

The Americans would surely want the ISI and Afghanistan’s NDS to join forces with the CIA to defeat Al-Qaida and the Taliban, but the mistrust keeps the Afghan and Pakistani spies apart and prevents them from cooperating with each other. Asking them to work together is like wanting ISI and RAW agents to join hands after their having conspired and plotted against each other throughout their existence.

Saleh has spent years doing intelligence work in Afghanistan and abroad. He was based in Peshawar for sometime during the Afghan jihad against the Soviet occupying forces when Masood, Rabbani and the rest of the Afghan mujahideen leaders enjoyed Pakistan’s hospitality and received support from the ISI, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Saleh also operated out of Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe to coordinate the Northern Alliance’s battle against the Taliban with assistance from countries seeking to oust the regime led by Mulla Mohammad Omar in Afghanistan. Following the Taliban defeat as a result of the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, he was made deputy head of the NDS, with Muhammad Arif Sarwari taking over as its director.

In fact, the entire intelligence setup of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was installed in the NDS, bringing it to all those who hated Pakistan and considered the ISI responsible for Afghanistan’s woes. In due course of time, many former Afghan communists and mujahideen who had done intelligence work and were always suspicious of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan were in control of the NDS. As always, the Afghan intelligence agency and the ISI were in rival camps and, in Saleh’s words, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency was the foremost enemy of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s fine ethnic balance that is so crucial to the country’s stability also wasn’t maintained in the NDS, or subsequently in the Afghan National Army, the police and other institutions, as the majority Pakhtuns remained underrepresented. This obviously had its own pitfalls and the Taliban fully exploited it to find recruits from among Pakhtuns dissatisfied with their circumstances.

Saleh’s enmity with Pakistan has its origins in the Afghan jihad. His leader, Masood, was critical of Pakistan and the ISI at the time for preferring his rival Gulbadin Hekmatyar over him and providing him greater resources. Gen Ziaul Haq had clear preference for the more fundamentalist Afghan mujahideen groups, such as those led by Hekmatyar, Rabbani, Yunis Khalis and Abdur Rab Rasul Sayyaf, not only because of his own conservative choices but also due to the better battlefield performance of their committed fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Masood and his party leader Rabbani belonged to fundamentalist Jamiat-i-Islami, but it seems they were less willing to take orders from Islamabad than the others. This became evident in later years when Masood and Rabbani defied Pakistan and built up their own alliances with Iran, Russia and France and, in the post-9/11 period, with the US and its Western allies. Ziaul Haq and the ISI at that point in time felt more comfortable working with Hekmatyar than Masood and Rabbani.

Though Ziaul Haq was wise enough not to say it publicly, it was obvious that Islamabad’s policy in Afghanistan was, and always has been, generally pro-Pakhtun. It was felt that befriending Afghanistan’s Pakhtuns was in Islamabad’s interest because Pakistan has a significant Pakhtun population of its own and the Pakhtuns lived on both sides of the Durand Line. Gen Pervez Musharraf, an fimpulsive man keen to take credit for his forthrightness, on at least two occasions publicly declared that Pakistan’s Afghan policy was pro-Pakhtun. It was irresponsible on his part to make this statement as it alienated the Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmen and other non-Pakhtuns in Afghanistan and made them realise that their friendship wasn’t a priority for Pakistan. In fact, many Afghan Pakhtuns also found Musharraf’s statement offensive. Some of them at the time commented that they didn’t need Musharraf’s or Pakistan’s support as they were themselves capable of winning their rights and maintaining Afghanistan’s unity, being the founders of the Afghan state named after them.

Saleh’s resignation on June 6, along with that of Interior Minister Muhammad Hanif Atmar, following the audacious attack four days previously in Kabul on the occasion of the landmark Consultative Peace Jirga, not only exposed the strife in President Hamid Karzai’s laboriously built and complex ruling coalition but also thrust Pakistofan into the limelight. Though Saleh and Atmar’s resignations were linked to the security lapse that enabled the suspected Taliban militants to come close to the venue where about 1,500 jirga members were meeting, despite the presence of 12,000 soldiers and police, there was more to it than meets the eye. Atmar, a former communist official who earned praise from Western governments for his effective style of leadership and honesty, isn’t talking after quitting the interior minister’s job. But Saleh, who too was praised by Western authorities for his work, is all over the place, granting interviews in which he is blaming Pakistan for Afghanistan’s problems and raising questions about Karzai’s motives. He is unhappy with Karzai for going soft on Pakistan after criticising it all these years and is opposed to his plans to release Taliban prisoners and reconcile with Mulla Omar and his men.

Saleh’s views represent those of many Afghans who are non-Pakhtun and supporters of the erstwhile Northern Alliance. Some Pakhtuns who have stood up to the Afghan Taliban and suffered as a consequences are also against bowing to the militants and giving Pakistan a role in Afghanistan’s affairs. Such divergent views have exposed the rift in the Karzai-led ruling coalition with regard to reconciliation with the Taliban, ties to Pakistan and the relationship with the US-headed Nato forces bent upon an elusive military solution of the Afghan conflict. Though Karzai’s managed to get support for his policy of reintegrating the Taliban into the political mainstream from the Consultative Peace Jirga, his government would encounter problems and suffer from further splits as he proceeds on the path of peace and national reconciliation.

The writer is resident editor of The News in Peshawar. Email: rahim yusufzai@yahoo.com

Muslim rocker on his ‘jihad’ against extremists

Pakistani-born rock star Salman Ahmad says he is using music to fight the cultural battle against Muslim extremism. Currently in the UK, he has been speaking to the BBC’s Caroline Hawley about his own personal “jihad”.

Salman Ahmad has a huge following among Pakistan’s youth

His rock band have been described as South Asia’s U2. They have sold about 30 million albums around the world.

And now the pony-tailed, Pakistani-born Muslim rocker Salman Ahmad is in the UK to sell his message of tolerance and non-violence to Muslim groups, and promote his autobiography, Rock & Roll Jihad.

Ahmad is fighting a cultural battle against those he calls “murderous thugs masquerading as holy men”.

India: Women’s bill can wait

By Kuldip Nayar

Jihad has different meanings. Islamist terrorists have one meaning. Leaders of Other Backward Classes (OBC) in India have another.

Indian Parliament House. -File Photo

The latter have used the word ‘jihad’ to raise the standard of revolt against the government. The Congress party had the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, endorse the controversial Women’s Reservation Bill.

The OBC, a caste between the upper castes and the lowest caste, fear that the 33 per cent reservations in the two houses of parliament and the state legislatures would benefit primarily the elite and the affluent (today 68 per cent of woman MPs are millionaires) and leave their womenfolk still more backward.

Many male MPs of different parties are also having second thoughts. The bill when enacted will curtail 181 seats for men in the 545-member Lok Sabha, the lower house. It is laid down that after every general election, reservations for women will rotate to embrace new constituencies. The process, covering the entire country, will end after 15 years when the reservation period ends.

The three OBC leaders who are leading the agitation are Mulayam Singh Yadav from UP, Lalu Prasad Yadav from Bihar and Sharad Yadav, president of the Janata Dal (United). They have threatened not to allow the government to function if their castes are not accommodated. Their apprehension is exaggerated. Yet they have a point when they argue that reservations may come to work against the women from their castes and the minorities.

The remedy they suggest is, however, worse than the disease. They demand a quota within quota, 10 per cent for the OBC and five per cent for Muslims. This proposal may evoke a feeling of separation.

There is no doubt that the legislation fulfils the call by parliamentary democracy for gender equality. But was it necessary to take such a step when the country is plagued by numerous problems, from Maoist violence to dismal poverty? True, the bill has been languishing for 14 years. But no span of time is long enough when the alternative is cleavage in society.

India has not yet developed into a polity where differences over caste or religion have been allayed, much less settled. Indeed, it is tough for a liberal or a democrat to ignore what the modern world achieved long ago. Yet a nation has to define its own priorities. I do not think that the bill should have been on top of the agenda when consensus was lacking.

Prosperity and pluralism may make exploitation in the name of caste and creed irrelevant one day. Till such time, the leaders have to resist the temptation to hit the headlines, because the gain of a few may spell the ruin of millions.

Unfortunately, all three OBC leaders have played the caste card. They are trying to reignite the fire that was quenched some 20 years ago by implementing the Mandal Commission report and giving reservations to OBC. Still the country remained on the boil till the report was implemented. A similar situation can take place if the women’s bill is sought to be passed. Hamlets and neighbourhoods would become a warfront. OBC leader Lalu Prasad has said that the bill would be passed over his dead body.

A better suggestion is that political parties should be legally bound to allocate 33 per cent of seats to women in parliament and the state legislatures. I am told that all parties except the Left are agreeable to the proposal.

Why the communists are against it is not understandable. Another suggestion that Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has given is that the 33 per cent seats can be converted into dual constituencies so as to accommodate women.

There is no option to conciliation. The Congress which has in the Lok Sabha 208 seats, 65 short of a majority, cannot afford to alienate the Yadavs because their support is crucial to the government’s viability. The Congress has, perforce, assured parliament that all parties would be consulted before proceeding further.

The party should not be in hurry. In any case, it has already announced that it would present the bill after the budget was passed. The ugly scene witnessed in the Rajya Sabha, resulting in the physical ouster of seven members, brought parliamentary democracy to the level of a mobocracy.

The demolition of the Babri mosque was the fallout of the Mandal agitation. Bharatiya Janata Party leader Atal Behari Vajpayee admitted after the demolition that if the Mandal agitation had not taken place, “we would not have picked up kamandal (a vessel used by hermits)”. The nation is still paying for the sins committed at that time. Must we add to our miseries?

It is welcome to see Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s nemesis catching up with him. This is also a slap in the face of the leading industrialists who gathered at Ahmedabad some weeks ago to announce that the next Indian prime minister should be Modi.

The corporate sector should realise that the people elect a ruling party which in turn appoints the prime minister. Moneybags have a limited say. What Modi did was to spread extremism which the industrialists should know is the anti-thesis of development.

Modi has at last been summoned by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) on the basis of a complaint filed both by the wife and the son of former Congress MP Eshan Jaffrey. The latter rang up everyone, including Modi, for help when his house was surrounded by rioters during the Gujarat carnage. No help reached him until 69 people were butchered and the house burnt.

The SIT was appointed by the supreme court to inquire into 10 cases relating to the murder of Muslims in the Gujarat pogrom in 2002. The report may not set every wrong right. Yet it is expected to name the guilty. Families of the victims have been waiting for the last eight years to see that those whose hands are soaked with blood do not go unpunished.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi.

India’s Composite Culture: Emerging threats

What Muslims Need To Do To Neutralise Them

By Sultan Shahin

One of the pillars on which our composite culture stands is our sense of unity of religions, what Maulana Abul Kalam Azad called wahdat-e-deen. Many thinkers have intuitively perceived a symbiosis between Islam and Hinduism, though not described it as such. But despite this sense of symbiosis, serious threats to our composite culture have emerged in recent years. We have already reached a stage where many mainstream Muslims are shifting, willingly or unwillingly, from the Indian mainstream to Muslim ghettoes, intellectually and spiritually as much as physically. The recent case, the heart-rending story, of a part of India where both Hindus and Muslims informed a department of the government in writing that they cannot live in mixed localities is known to all of us. While sections of both communities are responsible for this state of affairs, I would like to confine myself to introspecting as a Muslim and trying to see if there is something we Muslims can do to improve the situation and neutralise the growing threat.

But first, let me focus a little on the symbiosis of our religious traditions that has sustained us, and kept us together, for centuries and, I am sure, will continue to sustain us in future.

The one Indian saint who saw this most clearly was Swami Vivekanand.

On June 19, 1898, he wrote:

“I see in my mind’s eye the future perfect India rising out of this chaos and strife, glorious and invincible, with Vedanta brain and Islam body.” (Letters of Swami Vivekananda, p. 380).

He explains:

“Principles that we practise in our day-today life constitute the philosophy of nature and is likely to be a more acceptable religious philosophy of the enlightened future generation. Except in the religious ideology brought by Muhammad, I do not see this aspect effectively and practically implemented and well entrenched. It is my humble assertion that, though Hindu Vedic philosophies are immensely beautiful, without the day-today practical applications and approaches of Islam, they (Vedic principles) may not adequately serve the humanity.”

One of the greatest Islamic scholars and mystics, Ibn Arabi, affirms in his masterpiece al-Fusoos his belief in the unity of all religions: “Beware of restricting yourself to one particular religion and disbelieving in everything else, so that great good would be missed by you, indeed you would miss attainment of knowledge of the affair in the form he is following. Rather be ready to accept all forms of belief. This is because Allah is higher and greater than to be comprehended by one belief to the exclusion of others. Rather all are correct, and everyone who is correct receives award, and everyone who is rewarded is fortunate, and everyone who is fortunate is one with Whom He is pleased.”

It is hardly surprising in this backdrop that many Sufi saints in India, among them prominent names like Mazhar Jan-i-Janan accepted Hazrat Ram and Hazrat Krishna as Prophets of God as Allah has stated in the Qur’an that He has sent prophets to all nations in all ages who preached to their ummah in the local languages. Allama Iqbal, as is well-known, called Hazrat Ram Imamul Hind. No wonder students of comparative religion have discovered passages in Hindu and Islamic literature corresponding to each other almost word for word.

But, while we intuitively realised the symbiotic nature of our religions and remained together, seeking intercession for the betterment of our daily lives from the same saints, for instance, we did not articulate this fully involving the masses of our people. It seems to me, that even Swami Vivekanand did not fully realize the truly great importance of his own intuitive vision. For, he did not develop the idea further. If developed further in his age and time his intuitive insight could have saved India from a century of strife and perhaps the tragedy of partition. It can still save India from future wars that are staring us in the face. But we will need to understand the colossal import of Swamiji’s vision. We will need to flesh out the idea, develop a consensus around it, and try to translate it into reality.

Now what can we, as Muslims, contribute to this project. How can we help reduce the impact of the fanatics and divisive forces in our own community?

The first task before us, admittedly a rather difficult one, is to recognise our own mistakes: the aspects in which we have betrayed our religion’s teachings. The list is long; so I will confine myself here to just a few. God told us in the Quran, our Prophet told us repeatedly in the Ahadees, that Islam is not a new religion; it is the same religion that God has been sending to this planet through tens of thousands of prophets in all parts of the world in all times. We were told that the Holy Quran is merely a reiteration and validation of the messages that were sent before and in some cases are partially or fully lost in the mist to time. We were specifically told not to fall in the trap of considering ourselves the chosen people, a mistake that some of our predecessors had committed and paid for. But we did not listen. We developed an ideology of Islam-supremacism, contrary to all Islamic teachings. We have developed a theory under the tutelage of our jahil ulema that Muslims alone will go to Heaven, all others are going to be consigned to Hell, no matter how righteous. It was the job of our ulema, the scholars of Islam to stop us from taking this route, but the vast majority of them not only did not do so but actually encouraged this phenomenon and continue to do so. Clearly any one who harbours a feeling of superiority over others, indeed even a feeling of contempt for the others’ beliefs, cannot possibly expect to have good relations with them.

Then we have allowed a section of Muslims to spread among us a version of exclusivist Islam that wants us to get away from each and every pre-Islamic tradition. Pre-Islamic traditions like Hajj and veneration of Kaaba sharif are intrinsic to Islam itself. But we are told that we should behave and even look different from followers of all other religions and forego all our local cultural traditions. Indeed we should even stop going to seek intercession from our saints venerated by followers of all religions. We are told this amounts to kufr and that these saints themselves were kafir, deviants and apostates, deserving of being killed. Tens of billions of petrodollars are being spent to propagate this pernicious ideology and we have been silently falling for this petrodollar Islam; we are surrendering our mosques and their imamships to people belonging to this creed. Supporters of petrodollar Islam are becoming more and more aggressive, particularly in the matter of installation of imams from their institutions.

A derivative of this same petrodollar Islam is what is known as Jihadi Islam. This Jihadi Islam is taking away our youth, brainwashing them and turning them into human bombs. It is using some verses of the Holy Quran as weapons of war. We all know that the Prophet had to fight existential battles to safeguard Islam. Had he not done so there would have been no Islam. These verses were revealed then to buttress the war effort. Today they are valuable to us as pointers to the insurmountable difficulties the Prophet had to face in establishing the word of God for us to benefit from. They tell us the story of how he did it. We have to learn from the spirit of generosity and forgiveness he displayed towards all non-combatants and the forgiveness he showed even to the war criminals, some of whom had mutilated the dead bodies of his own beloved relatives. So there is much we can learn from these war verses, particularly how a Muslim should behave even if he is forced into war. But these war verses are not meant for us to act upon today.

However, while the Jihadi Islam is using these verses to brainwash our youth into following these dictates to the letter even today, the petrodollar Islam helps the process by saying repeatedly from all platforms available to it that every word, letter, comma, full stop, in the Quran is of equally universal significance, clearly implying that the call to war contained there has the same value as the call to prayer, for instance, or the call to righteousness. They have turned Jihad, in the sense of Qital, into the sixth pillar of Islam.

Obviously the petrodollar Islam and the Jihadi Islam are two sides of the same coin. We mainstream Muslims are silent spectators. We are allowing both of them to devastate our societies, create permanent fissures in our relations with other communities. We are allowing them to suck the spiritual content out of our religion and fill it with a desiccated, dry, desert version of Islam in which there is no room for any of the Islamic heritage buildings, any art or music, anything that is cheerful or beautiful. Incidentally, one of the attributes of God is beauty, but there is only ugliness and strife in the hearts of petrodollar Islamists.

Mainstream Islam is still mainstream. These exclusivist and warring sections are still small, though with the infusion of massive money power they have grown quite aggressive lately.

But if we want to contribute to the safeguarding of India’s composite culture, we will have to take the bull by its horns. Time for dilly-dallying is long past. We will have to go back to our roots, our Quranic roots, our philosophical roots, our greatest saints and their teachings.

WE will have to once again inculcate the broadmindedness of our saints, the generosity and forgiveness, the attitude of gratitude that was the hallmark of our prophet. It has now become a question of safeguarding not only our religion and our composite culture but also our children, our youth from being whisked away to Jihadi camps and active and sleeper cells. The very least we can do to safeguard our own youth as much as India’s composite culture is to explain the following to our community loudly and repeatedly:

1. That we are not a chosen people; Islam-supremacism is nonsense and that the ummah of all prophets are equal in the eyes of God who will judge them according to their own faith, not ours. It is nonsense to believe that only Muslims will go to Heaven.

2. That the Holy Quran is not a book that was revealed in one sitting. The war verses in the Quran were meant for wars being fought then and do not apply to situations today. These verses were revealed to the prophet as guidance for the situations he found himself in. As those situations cannot be replicated today, that particular course of action is no longer applicable to us. This is important to defeat the Jihadis who are using these verses as weapons of war to brainwash our youth and turn them into human bombs.

3. That Islam is not the exclusivist religion that the Petrodollar Islam is preaching. It is a religion of co-existence encapsulated in the verse lakum deenakum waleya deen (For you be your religion and for me mine). It is also the religion of La Ikraha fid Deen (There can be no compulsion in religion.)

4. That the Sufi saints who brought Islam to this sub-continent and to the entire South-East Asia are not, God forbid, religious deviants as Petrodollar Islam proclaims them to be. It is because of them that we are Muslim today. It is they who gave us access to the teachings of Islam. It is not wrong for Muslims to show reverence to them along with people belonging to other communities.

5. That Islam itself teaches us Ijtihad, rethinking, so that we can adjust to the newer realities of changing times. We have to rethink every postulate of Islam in the light of today’s realities.

6. That religious freedom is indivisible. If we as a minority community need freedom, it becomes our duty to also fight for the religious freedom of minorities in Muslim lands, particularly in the Indian sub-continent. It is shameful that when two Sikhs were recently beheaded in Peshawar, reportedly for refusing to convert to Islam under compulsion, our ulema remained completely silent. We have been completely unmindful of the plight of religious minorities in both Pakistan and Bangladesh while enjoying full citizenship rights in our country. This must change.

Let us pray that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s doctrine of Wahdat-e-Deen once again gains converts. Let us try to flesh out and translate into reality Swami Vivekamad’s vision quoted before: “I see in my mind’s eye the future perfect India rising out of this chaos and strife, glorious and invincible, with Vedanta brain and Islam body.”

In order to be ready to become a part of the Vivekanad project, however, the Islam body will have to rid itself of the many viruses it is harbouring in its system today.

This essay was presented at a seminar organised by UrduTahzeeb.net on “Terrorism: the response of India’s Composite Culture” in Mumbai on 28 February, 2010.

The burqa champions

Ishtiaq Ahmed

When Field Marshal Ayub Khan introduced the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, he was assailed by all the reactionary ulema because it regulated polygamy, introduced a minimum age for marriage and gave a share in property to grandchildren from their grandfather’s property even when their own father had passed away

My recent op-ed, ‘The French burqa ban’ (Daily Times, February 2, 2010), has elicited spirited responses in the Pakistani English-language newspapers. That is a sign of healthy exchange of views. As always the liberal-left defence of reactionary practices is the most hypocritical because it derives from not some deeply held commitment to reactionary culture. When the Taliban or al Qaeda defend the burqa as obligatory dress for pious women and then use the same to carry out terrorist attacks in their twisted reasoning, the burqa has served a double purpose: it has preserved the chastity of their female suicide bombers while enabling them to fight in the jihad. Additionally, if the burqa can be used by men to evade inspection then too it has served a ‘noble’ purpose.

In ‘The French burqa ban’, I had based my opposition to it on two factual bases: one, that it can be used to mortally harm other, innocent human beings, and two, that it was a later accretion to the Muslim female dress code and was not part of the pristine Islamic community founded by the Prophet (PBUH). Nobody challenged my second argument, so I will not go over it again.

I will address the first argument because on that occasion I only mentioned that the burqa can be used for terrorist activities. Now, I will give concrete evidence that should incontrovertibly establish the burqa as a dress code that has been used in recent times on a number of occasions to carry out terrorist acts in not only Pakistan and Afghanistan but elsewhere too. The Kuwait Times of December 12, 2009, under the caption ‘Veiled suicide bomber was Danish says Somali Speaker’ (http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTE5Mjc4MzEwOA) narrates the tragic story of a suicide bomber, allegedly a 26-year-old Danish citizen of Somali descent, who killed 22 people including three government ministers in Mogadishu disguised as a veiled woman. The Speaker of the Somalian Parliament, Sheikh Aden Mohamed Madobe, remarked: “It is unfortunate that a child whose parents escaped Somalia’s conflict and raised him in Europe came home with extremist ideologies and blew himself and innocent people up.” His father denied the charges, but the fact remains that whosoever succeeded in getting close to the Somalian politicians was wearing a burqa.

The Daily Times of February 9, 2010, informed that the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has dispatched eight female suicide bombers to target Punjab. Intelligence reports suggested that they were veiled and wore gloves and socks to conceal their identity. During 2007-2009, the Afghan and Pakistani media have reported several cases of burqa-clad terrorists. I need not labour the point that a similar crime can be committed anywhere in the world, including Europe, with the help of a burqa.

Some years earlier, the French had banned the headscarf in school for girls because it was realised that a concerted campaign of the ulema in combination with mainly young male adults from families were preventing Muslim girls getting a modern education and developing awareness about their rights under French secular law, which upholds equality of both the sexes. The ban did not apply to girls who had become majors or when they were not at school. There were protests on that occasion but when the French government (a socialist one at that time) did not give in, the protests petered out quickly because by and large the young Muslim girls favoured an end to their inferior status in the conservative Maghreb culture.

Another time when the sob-story about a powerless minuscule minority did not hold much water was when cases of female genital mutilation or female circumcision were reported from all over Europe. This barbaric practice was found among both Muslim and Christian immigrants in France from sub-Saharan Africa. I remember some crazy female American postmodernist freak protesting that it was white European men interfering in the cultural autonomy of African immigrants!

When Field Marshal Ayub Khan introduced the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, he was assailed by all the reactionary ulema because it regulated polygamy, introduced a minimum age for marriage and gave a share in property to grandchildren from their grandfather’s property even when their own father had passed away. The government stood its ground and the first step towards social reform was taken after 1,400 years.

I am reminded of the Shah Bano Case (1985) in India in which cultural rights and freedom of choice were put forth as arguments to disqualify divorced aged Muslim women from claiming financial support from their ex-husbands. On that occasion it was not a question of the freedom of an individual but that of a community. Shah Bano, 64, was divorced by her husband of several decades, Mr Khan. On the advice of some well-wishers she applied for financial help from him as was granted to Indian citizens in such situations. Muslim conservatives took the stand that in Islam the ex-husband has no other obligation to support his former wife beyond iddat (a period of roughly four months to check if pregnancy had not occurred prior to divorce). The Indian Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Madhya Pradesh High Court that had fixed a nominal amount per month.

Conservative Muslims, including the ulema, mobilised the largely uneducated and ignorant Muslim masses against the reform. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi caved in because he did not want to risk alienating the Muslim vote bank. Therefore, the Indian Parliament passed a law exempting Muslim women from benefitting from a progressive change in law. The opponents took the position that the Indian state had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of the Muslim community. On that occasion the Hindu Right came out in favour of abolition of Muslim personal law, but earlier when in the 1950s Jawaharlal Nehru had introduced legislation to reform Hindu personal law to improve the rights and status of Hindu women, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS had opposed such measures. Their support of the abolition of Muslim personal law was surely hypocritical, but should that have been enough to dissuade progressives from supporting reform? I wonder.

I probed this strange attitude of Pakistani progressives with the grand old man of the Pakistani left movement, Dada Amir Haider, in 1972. I wanted to understand why characters who pretended to uphold the emancipatory ethos of the French and Russian revolutions were no different in practice from those who believe that since the end of the Islamic Golden Age the world is constantly going astray. He gave a wry smile and said, “Such progressives have grown their beards deep inside their stomachs.”

Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isasia@nus.edu.sg

Political economy of insurgencies and protests

Ishtiaq Ahmed

The ideas of human dignity and decency as understood by modern people are anathema to the Taliban. Wherever the Taliban juggernaut has run roughshod, it has crushed under its deadweight

A colleague made an interesting comment that the Naxalite-Maoist movement in India and the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the result of economic factors. That is indeed very true. While both are fuelled by economic deprivation, still one cannot assume that economic deprivation automatically leads to armed resistance or aggression. The recorded history of the last two to three thousand years shows amply the constancy of economic deprivation in all societies and all cultures. On the other hand, the story of resistance is discontinuous; it has come and gone. There have been long periods of history when the wretched of the earth meekly submitted and did nothing to overthrow their oppressors. I sometimes wonder how a handful of Englishmen ruled India for 200 years without encountering any resistance when nationalist writers tell us that British imperialism drove this region from prosperity into poverty. Moreover, overthrowing oppressors has not always been achieved through violence. India’s freedom struggle under Mahatma Gandhi and the civil rights movement of the African-American underclass of the southern states in the US are cases in point. Perhaps more important to analyse is the type of vision and programme that resisting groups want to implement.

The Indian Maoist movement originally emerged as an armed struggle laced in Marxist revolutionary ideology in the late 1960s in West Bengal against landlords and corrupt and brutal officialdom, but after the parliamentary Communists of the CPI-M came to power, it petered out in that province. It then emerged as a violent confrontation between Dalits and upper caste Thakurs (landowners) of Bihar and eastern UP. It spread to the tribal people of Orissa and also to other parts of India where pockets of abject poverty exist. Unable to eke out even a miserable livelihood in the tribal habitats, more and more of such oppressed sections of society joined the Naxalite movement. Maoist insurgencies are now found even in southern India. As far as I know, the Naxalites want poor men, women and children to get adequate food, education and shelter. In popular imagery the movement wants to transform the living hell in which they now live into some idyllic paradise on earth. Naxalites do not prey on young boys of impoverished families and use them as suicide bombers to indiscriminately attack men, women and children.

In contrast the Taliban agenda is just the opposite. The ideas of human dignity and decency as understood by modern people are anathema to the Taliban. Wherever the Taliban juggernaut has run roughshod, it has crushed under its deadweight girls, their schools, flogged women for stepping out of their homes without a male escort, stoned to death men and women for alleged adultery and so on. Their victims are almost invariably the poor and weak sections of society. So, the social and economic agenda of the two movements is diametrically opposite one another. To ascribe to the Taliban the role of social emancipators is a bad joke. The so-called Islamic emirates that the Taliban established in Swat and Malakand Agencies threatened parents to be ready to marry their girl-child of 9 or 10 to Taliban warriors. The purpose of life on earth according to the Taliban is to do jihad and build peace and prosperity, and then one enters paradise after exiting his life on earth.

The political economy of democratic protest in the West to economic deprivation is different. Thus the Corn Laws and New Poor Law of early 19th century England and the medical and unemployment benefits introduced by Chancellor Bismarck of Prussia paved the way for more welfare reforms in the 20th century. The Thatcherite-Reaganite onslaught on the welfare state heralded in the neo-liberal era of unbridled capitalism. It could only partially succeed in denting the social and economic reforms but failed to dislodge the welfare state. Politicians could not undo that because the electorate would never allow that to go too far. Therefore, democracy prevented the demolition of the welfare state in Western Europe. In the US, laissez faire capitalism had a stronger base. Therefore, the welfare state was never very advanced, though Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson and now Barack Obama have been developing an American type of welfare state. Thus for example the economic crisis of 2008 has not devastated American lives the same way as economic crises do in the Third Word.

The political economy of Third World economic deprivation is entirely different. Here there is no welfare state but there used to be once upon a time a developmental state that actively sought to promote education and unemployment. No doubt the developmental state was afflicted by massive corruption, yet it did deliver some social services. However, when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war broke out it greatly undermined the developmental state. As the price of oil rose, so did the prices of all other commodities. Suddenly one after the other Third World states began to see their foreign debt explode, causing an insurmountable balance of payments problem.

They headed to the World Bank and IMF, which prescribed the so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP). SAP had a standard recipe for states in distress: cut spending on non-productive activities. In practice it meant cuts in spending on schools and hospitals, retrench on employment in the public sector. Since the private sector was poorly developed and millions of people were laid off from their jobs, there was now a sea of humanity available for all sorts of insurgencies. I remember visiting Senegal with a research team from Sweden in 1994. The streets were full of young men who were willing to steal anything. However, just a few years earlier they used to be employed as teachers and office functionaries by the state. SAP ruined their lives.

Fortunately for the affluent world the African masses had no particular ideology to mobilise them. Therefore the most badly hurt part of the world was the least politically involved in armed struggles. Rather African warlords and Western gold and diamond hunters began to use them for civil wars over precious stones and minerals. In the Middle East the unemployed youths were forced to look for succour from other sources than the state. The only alternative left was the mosques. We all know that the Islamists exploited such opportunities to recruit cadres from among the young people facing anomie in the cities where they had come looking for work. The Afghan jihad absorbed some of them but not all. Thus while the economic origin of insurgencies and protests is undeniable, the forms of protest and resistance are mediated by many other factors as well.

Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isasia@nus.edu.sg

The Insidious Indian Propaganda

INDIA IS A WAR MONGERER

Dr S. M. Rahman

The internet has become a vehicle to fan preposterous propaganda by the agencies in India, in order to promote ‘Hindutva’ sensibility to raise scare and trepidation among the Hindus that Pakistan in collusion with Bangladesh and Indian Muslim are now planning for a second partition of the subcontinent to carve our a much bigger chunk of territory out of India, which they have named ‘Mughalistan’, which will comprise Pakistan, Bangladesh, including all of North and Eastern India. The so called Mughal Muslim state will merge Pakistan and Bangladesh through a large corridor of land running across the Indo Gangetic plain – the heartland of India. Jinnah’s Pakistan was envisaged to have the whole of Bengal and the Punjab – besides a corridor which could provide land link between the ‘West’ and the former “East Pakistan.” The moth-eaten Pakistan was accepted only ‘temporarily’ as Jinnah thought it expedient to accept what was made available, under the exigencies of the circumstances, but the idea of ‘greater Pakistan’ was shelved for an appropriate time, as a necessary outcome of the partition, which the Hindu India had to reconcile with.

For propaganda message to appear credible a source had to be identified. It was deemed expedient to select Bangladesh, where this idea of Mughalstan was conceived and covertly planned at Jahangir Nagar University, jointly supported by the ISI of Pakistan and DGFI (Director General Forces Intelligence of Bangladesh). In propaganda parlance, this is called Black Propaganda source, which is based on total distortion as the real originators are operating from somewhere else. It is for our intelligence agencies to find out as to from where such “hate propaganda” is being disseminated. They have also concocted an organization called Mughalstan Research Institute (MRI) at Jahangir Nagar University. The objectives of the propaganda are focused on the following themes so that Indian Hindus see the so called vicious game the Muslims are playing to further divide the Hindu India and that they are no content with the creation of Pakistan – an Islamic Republic and Bangladesh though apparently ‘Secular’ nourishes deep Islamic ethos:

• The Punjabis pronounce Mughalstan, ie, what is against the usual Urdu pronunciation Mughalistan. This is to establish that ISI (Punjabi dominated organization of Pakistan) is the contributor of the name. Such little details are meant to establish the credibility.
• The Islamic jehadis in India are being funded and organized by the Muslim countries, like Saudi Arabia and others.
• Osama Bin Laden is behind the concept of greater Pakistan to liberate the Muslims of India from the domination of Hindus. The Bombay bombings of 1993 was led by Karachi based Dawood Ibrahim (a fugitive who is very much wanted by India for his crimes, he committed) besides Jamat-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Hizbul Mujahideen all are involved in planning a greater Islamic country in the subcontinent. Indian Mujahideen are also involved and the students of Islamic Movement in India (SIMI) are partners in this mission.
• Hindus are declared enemies by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, and besides liberating Kashmir, they have vowed to hoist the Islamic flag atop the historic Red Fort after capturing Delhi and the rest of India.
• Establishment of Islamic caliphate is the objective of SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India) and as such they have launched jihad in the Indian States as secularism, democracy and nationalism – the key stone of Indian states-hood, are antithetical to Islam. The Indian Mujahideen have claimed responsibility for bombings in Lucknow, Vanarsi and Faizabad, Banglore, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and New Delhi in 2007 and 2008. Their role models are Mohammad Bin Qasim, Mohammad Ghouri and Mahmood Ghaznavi. They consider ‘Hindu blood’ as the cheapest of all mankind, and taunt Hindu history as full of subjugation and humiliation.
• Muslims, wherever they are in majority in India, for example Kashmir, hundreds of Hindu temples were raised. Hindus were forced to flee and their women were raped. There has been mass genocide of Hindus or they were converted to Islam. Kashmiri Muslims despite having special status – through Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, are still complaining of discrimination, the idea being that they are ungrateful people.
• Muslims population is steadily rising in the UP state, as it has risen to 18% and in Bihar 17%. A vast number of Madrassas and mosques are disproportionately growing through excessive funding by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
• Muslim Banghbhoomi comprises various districts along the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bangladesh borders. Bangladesh is craving for Taliban type militants and madrassas are teaching that the Muslims are the best in the world and that the non-Muslims are “to be converted, beaten, killed and their women are to be raped as maal-e-ghaneemat. Atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh can be seen from the fact that there is no single woman between the ages of 7 to 70, who has not been raped.
• Bangladeshis have succeeded in infiltrating into Maripur, Mizoram, Meghalaya. Arunchal Pradesh and Tripura etc. In other words, they are responsible for fanning fissiparous trends in many of the states of India.

The message is loud and clear that Hindus must rise to stop this grandiose plan of the Muslims. Mughalstan is not a question of “If” or “but”, but “when”, unless we, “Hindus” stand up to unitedly counter the treacherous plan. Ii implicitly carries message of coercive policies against he Indian Muslims, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The ostensible purpose of the propaganda is to malign both Bangladesh and Pakistan for their hatred against the Hindus. The whole propaganda is motivated by a typical Kautalian sensibility to use deception, duplicity and deceit to fan hatred against the Muslims. It is also aimed at frustrating all the attempts to bring peace and cooperation among Pakistan and India through much dramatically publicized “Aman Ki Aasha”. One should interpret the outlandish proclamation by the Indian Army Chief General Kapoor that India was capable of defeating both Pakistan and China within 96 hours. Stereotyping Muslims justifies all actions to destabilize Pakistan and even to launch a war if necessary.

The hate against Muslims is a combined strategy of US, Israel and India. The so called ‘War on Terror’ has a covert design to suppress the Islamic resurgence and undermine its identity through a well orchestrated plan. Pakistan should not dismiss it as a ‘whimsical idea’. There is a method in madness. They have killed around 90,000 Muslims in Kashmir in alone notwithstanding regular communal riots like the one in Gujrat, where Muslims were cut into pieces like vegetables. Besides Muslims, Sikhs have been killed to the tune of 250,000 in the operation against Golden Temple. A significant number of Christians have been slaughtered only in Orissa. Dalits are being most brutally treated at the hands of Hindus and yet the propaganda is to whitewash the Hindu propensity for violence. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah was indeed a man of great foresight. He saw through the game, the Hindus were playing that they were the true inheritors of the British Empire and every one else was to be left high and dry.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world is uncritically accepting the Indian propaganda that it is a vibrant democracy, quite oblivious of the reality that India is notoriously following its apartheid repressive policy against its religious minorities. They are covertly planning to destabilize through subversion in Balochistan, tribal areas and extending it to Punjab and Karachi.

George Orwell said very rightly: “In time of universal deceit, telling to truth is a revolutionary act.” The truth must be heeded to and our countrymen must rise against Indian machinations.

Dr S M Rahman is Secretary General FRIENDS, a research centre established and headed by General Mirza Aslam Beg at Rawalpindi. He frequently contributes to Opinion Maker.

A Year After Losing A Father And Sons, A Gaza Family Copes

By Rami Almeghari
10 January, 2010
Electronic Intifada

Khaled Abu Jbarah with baby Lina and Jihad, whose father was killed in an Israeli missile strike on their Gaza home. (Rami Almeghari)

Gaza Strip: “Four months after the martyrdom of my husband and two of my sons, my granddaughter Lina was born — the daughter of my martyred son Basel,” said Fathiya Abu Jbarah. Fathiya is the widow of Jihad Abu Jbarah and mother of Basil, 30, and Usama, 21 who were killed on 4 January 2009 by an Israeli missile that struck their home in al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Their home was hit during Israel’s 22-day air and land attack that killed more than 1,400 persons and wounded thousands of others.

The Electronic Intifada visited the family a few days after the attack (see “Targeting a cup of tea in Gaza,” 12 January 2009) and came back one year later to see how they are coping.

Reflecting on the birth of Basel’s daughter Lina, Fathiya Abu Jbarah said, “My heart almost popped. What did this innocent baby do to be born without a father?”

“We Palestinian mothers like any other mothers, never want to see our children and grandchildren become orphans or for wives to become widows,” Fathiya who is in her mid-50s, said as she carried Lina in her arms. “We want to live in peace as any other nation in this world. Yet, the Israeli occupation never leaves us alone, they have continued to attack us regularly for decades now. Isn’t it time for us to live normally?”

In addition to the killings of Jihad and his two sons, a fourth family member, Khaled, 19, suffered severe shrapnel wounds to his abdomen and arms, and was transferred to a hospital in Saudi Arabia for treatment.

Khaled recalled the moment, just before 10:30pm on 4 January 2009, when the missiles struck the house. He had been sitting outside with his father and brothers. However, Khaled said, “The weather was cold, so I went in my room, while my brothers and father were keeping warm outside in front of a wood stove.”

Khaled then heard missiles striking near the home and rushed out of his room to see what happened. “I saw the three [Jihad, Basel and Usama] dismembered by the strike, but I did not know I was also hit.” Khaled recalled going out of the house to a nearby hospital.

The family’s rented home was badly damaged in the Israeli attack, but now they live in a newly-built three-room house. Khaled now lives there along with his brother Muhammad and other family members including a teenage brother, his mother, his sister-in-law, the widow of Basil and other nieces and nephews.

The Abu Jbarah home is one of the very few to be built in the past year, as thousands of homes damaged or destroyed in the Israeli attack remain unrepaired. Virtually no building supplies have come in due to the ongoing Israeli blockade, but the Abu Jbarahs built the house with the help of friends and family, and using building supplies smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt, and sold at inflated prices.

Muhammad Abu Jbarah, 24, explained that his late father had decided to build a family home in 2006, but due to the blockade he could never get the raw materials, which is why he rented the home that was attacked by Israel last year. After the attack, the family lived for months at the home of a relative, but with their needs, they decided to build the new house. It has been an enormous struggle.

“We have been building this new house for almost eight months, trying to get use of any raw building material available in local markets,” Muhammad explained. The cost has been enormous — about $70,000, much of which was borrowed from relatives or friends. “We owe about 70 percent of that amount,” said Muhammad,” and it will take us at least six or seven years to pay it off, but we have no choice.”

Despite the agony he has endured during the past year, Khaled Abu Jbarah sounded hopeful and looked forward to a better life in the new year. “I do look forward to a better situation, not only for me but also for these little children. We Palestinians want to live in peace and tranquility for generations to come, but unfortunately, every generation of us experiences the same suffering at the hands of this occupation, which never abides by ceasefire declarations, peace agreements, or any other international resolutions.”

Although the situation has been generally calm, Khaled pointed out that the “Israeli army continues to open fire from time to time [and] some people have been killed and wounded recently.”

The home provides some comfort now, but Fathiya Abu Jbarah said, “what you see can never compensate me for my loss. During Ramadan I cried a lot for my dear husband and children, while serving iftar [the fast-breaking meal] to the rest of my family.” As she spoke, the memory brought the tears back to her eyes.

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

Afghanistan CIA killings a major blow to US and Jordan

The revelation that the man who blew up himself, four CIA officers, three security guards and a Jordanian intelligence officer in Khost, Afghanistan, was a double agent is embarrassing for both the US and Jordan.

The CIA believed the bomber had vital information on al-Qaeda

For Washington, it risks making a mockery of the CIA’s attempts to track down and infiltrate the intimate circle of al-Qaeda’s leadership.

One can only imagine how much false intelligence this al-Qaeda double agent had been feeding his handlers, before he killed them.

For Jordan, this is a clandestine relationship it would much prefer to have kept secret.

The idea that Jordanian intelligence officers are working hand-in-glove with the CIA will be deeply resented by many in Jordan.

Fearsome reputation

Jordan’s intelligence service, the General Intelligence Directorate (GID), has a fearsome reputation in the Arab world.

Rivalling Egypt’s agency in its ability to uncover Islamist extremist networks, it has also been accused of human rights abuses and of colluding with the CIA’s programme of extraordinary rendition of al-Qaeda suspects.

The GID failed to prevent al-Qaeda in Iraq’s bombings of Jordanian hotels in Amman that killed 60 people in 2005.

But the following year it was patient, painstaking work by Jordanian human intelligence that led the Americans to their most wanted target in Iraq.

The CIA will now have to go through the depressing exercise of re-evaluating everything their supposed mole had told them

In June 2006, US special forces operating near the Iraqi town of Baquba were able to direct an airstrike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq who had come close to triggering a sectarian war between Iraq’s Shia and Sunni Muslims.

But now, following the disastrous blow to the CIA’s intelligence gathering delivered by the Jordanian suicide bomber in Afghanistan on 30 December, US intelligence officials will likely be taking a close look at their intelligence-sharing with Jordan.

Expertise lost

It appears that the bomber was, after all, an al-Qaeda “triple agent” who had supposedly been turned against extremism by Jordanian intelligence while in prison, recruited to spy on al-Qaeda, sent to the Afghan-Pakistan border region to try to get close to al-Qaeda’s leadership, but who all the while had never abandoned his jihadi affiliations.

Named as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian physician apparently completely fooled his Jordanian handler, named as Capt Sharif Ali Bin Zaid.

He convinced both him and the CIA that he had urgent information to pass on, so a mini-summit of intelligence officers was convened on Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost to hear what he had to say.

Since Jordanian intelligence had vouched for him, the bomber was never properly searched and, early in his bogus “briefing”, he detonated the explosives on his body.

For the CIA, this is a blow on many levels.

It has lost some of its most valued officers with expertise at the sharp end, it will now have to go through the depressing exercise of re-evaluating everything their supposed mole had told them, on the basis that it is probably false.

It will have to assume that everything the assassin had been told and taught by his handlers – methods, codes, aliases – will all have been passed to al-Qaeda, who will take a keen interest in such information.

And above all, it shows that far from the growing complacency mouthed by Western government officials – that al-Qaeda was on the run after CIA drone strikes killed 15 senior al-Qaeda leaders and one Taliban leader in Pakistan’s tribal belt since January 2008 – the fugitive organisation and its followers are, in fact, capable of striking back hard where it hurts.

• FOB Chapman operates from Khost Airfield 32km from Pakistan border
• Former Soviet base is reportedly used for launching US drones
• Airfield extended to allow C-130 transporter planes to land
• Named after Nathan Chapman, first US soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2002