I found it very sad, as a massive fan of Imran Khan the cricketer (far better than Botham, in my opinion) to find out how he has been hypocritically pandering to Islamists in Pakistan in his later guise as Imran Khan the politician.
Khan Artist
Imran Khan, the man who sparked the Newsweek riots: Islamist politician by day, London playboy by night
Weekly Standard
31/05/2005
With 17 people dead and anti-American sentiment even higher than usual in the Muslim world, people are looking for someone to blame for the riots that flowed from Newsweek's Koran story. So far, it has been pinned on everyone from Mark Whitaker to the U.S. military. But the real villain is Pakistani politician Imran Khan.
On Friday, May 6 Khan catapulted the 300-word Newsweek story about a Koran being flushed down the toilet into headline news across the Muslim world by brandishing the article at a press conference and demanding that Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from George W. Bush for the incident. It is unlikely Khan chanced upon the item. Just days before, Khan had tried to spark a similar firestorm over a Washington Times cartoon depicting the Pakistani government as America's lapdog. Clearly in search of grist for the anti-American mill, Khan's demagoguery speaks to his own two-facedness and to a downside of military rule in Pakistan.
Khan embodies the hypocrisy of Muslim elites who inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by night. ... After his playing career ended in 1992, Khan entered politics under the tutelage of Lt.-Gen. Hamid Gul, the former Pakistani intelligence chief famous for fueling the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. (Gul believes that September 11 was a U.S. conspiracy.) Khan, a man who once captained the Oxford University cricket team and was a feature at London's trendiest places, now turned against the culture he had previously enjoyed.
In 1995 he denounced the West with its "fat women in miniskirts" (presumably the skinny ones in miniskirts Khan had dated were okay) and proclaimed that the "West is falling because of their addiction to sex and obscenity." He also chastised Pakistanis who looked to the West for ideas, saying "I hate it when our leaders or elite feel that by licking the soles of the feet of foreign countries we will somehow be given aid and we will progress."
...
Even his political allies find Khan's duplicity hard to take. In 2002 one of his party leaders remarked: "Even we are finding it difficult to figure out the real Imran. He dons the shalwar-kameez and preaches desi and religious values while in Pakistan, but transforms himself completely while rubbing shoulders with the elite in Britain and elsewhere in the West." Khan claims that his marriage proved he wasn't a politician but his divorce and his recent demagoguery show that he now is one, albeit one of the worst sort.
----------------------
US threatened to bomb Pakistan, says Musharraf
Telegraph
22/09/2006
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the US threatened to bomb his country if it did not co-operate with America's war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Gen Musharraf, in an interview with the CBS news magazine show 60 Minutes, that will be broadcast at the weekend, said the threat came from the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, and was given to Gen Musharraf's intelligence director.
"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Gen Musharraf said. "I think it was a very rude remark." Not long afterwards Pakistan announced it was standing with America and its allies in fighting terror. It granted permission for US fighter jets to use Pakistani airspace as the attack began on the Taliban and al-Qa'eda, which were protected by the Afghan militia.
But Mr Armitage told CNN that he never threatened to bomb Pakistan, would not have said such a thing and did not have the authority to do it. He said that he did have a tough message for Pakistan, telling the Muslim nation that it was either "with us or against us," but did not understand how his message was recounted so differently to Gen Musharraf.
----------------------
Musharraf lashes out on US 'book tour'
Telegraph
26/09/2006
General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, has attacked his Afghan counterpart on his controversial tour of America.Gen Musharraf, who is visiting the US with the twin aims of promoting his memoirs and representing his country, told Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, that he should stop blaming Pakistan for his own country's instability.
Responding to Mr Karzai's claims that Pakistani religious schools are fanning terrorism across the border, he said: "The sooner that President Karzai understands his own country, the better." He added that Mr Karzai - who is also in the US - was partially to blame for disenfranchising the majority Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan, and warned that the Taliban cannot be defeated by military might alone.
The leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan are due to meet with President George W Bush on Wednesday to discuss ways to bridge their differences.Gen Musharraf is causing a storm in the US with his book, In the Line of Fire, in which he claims that America threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it failed to support the war on terror after the Sept 11 attacks. He also criticises the invasion of Iraq for making the world "more dangerous", and claims that the United States and Saudi Arabia created an extremist "monster" by supporting Islamic groups fighting the Soviet Union's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan.
11 comments:
Pervez Musharraf interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
Almost funny, yet not. Check out the pics of the burkha brigade in Islamabad.
March of the Burkha brigade
Daily Mail
04/07/07
Red Mosque in Rebellion
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
July 17, 2007
Imagine that an Islamist central command exists — and that you are its chief strategist, with a mandate to spread full application of Shariah, or Islamic law, through all means available, with the ultimate goal of a worldwide caliphate. What advice would you offer your comrades in the aftermath of the eight-day Red Mosque rebellion in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan? Probably, you would review the past six decades of Islamist efforts and conclude that you have three main options: overthrowing the government, working through the system, or a combination of the two.
Islamists can use several catalysts to seize power. (I draw here on Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop: How Inevitable is an Islamist Future?" by Cameron Brown.)
* Revolution, meaning a wide-scale social revolt: Successful only in Iran, in 1978–79, because it requires special circumstances.
* Coup d'état: Successful only in Sudan, in 1989, because rulers generally know how to protect themselves.
* Civil war: Successful only in Afghanistan, in 1996, because dominant, cruel states generally put down insurrections (as in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria).
* Terrorism: Never successful, nor is it ever likely to be. It can cause huge damage, but without changing regimes. Can one really imagine a people raising the white flag and succumbing to terrorist threats? This did not happen after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981, or after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in America, or even after the Madrid bombings of 2004.
A clever strategist should conclude from this survey that overthrowing the government rarely leads to victory. In contrast, recent events show that working through the system offers better odds — note the Islamist electoral successes in Algeria (1992), Bangladesh (2001), Turkey (2002), and Iraq (2005). But working within the system, these cases also suggest, has its limitations. Best is a combination of softening up the enemy through lawful means, then seizing power. The Palestinian Authority (2006) offers a case of this one-two punch succeeding, with Hamas winning the elections, then staging an insurrection. Another, quite different example of this combination just occurred in Pakistan.
The vast Red Mosque complex, also known as the Lal Masjid, geographically in the midst of Pakistan's ruling institutions, boasts long-standing connections to the regime's elite, and includes huge male and female madrassas. But, turning on its benefactors, Kalashnikov-toting burqa-clad students confronted the police in January 2007 to prevent them from demolishing an illegally constructed building.
In April, the mega-mosque's deputy imam, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, announced the imposition of Shariah "in the areas in our control" and established an Islamic court that issued decrees and judgments, rivaling those of the government. The mosque then sent some of its thousands of madrassa students to serve as a morals police force in Islamabad, to enforce a Taliban-style regime locally with the ultimate goal of spreading it countrywide. Students closed barbershops, occupied a children's library, pillaged music and video stores, attacked alleged brothels and tortured the alleged madams. They even kidnapped police officers.
The Red Mosque leadership threatened suicide bombings if the government of Pervez Musharraf attempted to rein in its bid for quasi-sovereignty. Security forces duly stayed away. The six-month standoff culminated on July 3, when students from the mosque, some masked and armed, rushed a police checkpoint, ransacked nearby government ministries, and set cars on fire, leaving 16 dead.
This confrontation with the government aimed at nothing less than overthrowing it, the mosque's deputy imam proclaimed on July 7: "We have firm belief in God that our blood will lead to a[n Islamic] revolution." Threatened, the government attacked the mega-mosque early on July 10. The 36-hour raid turned up a stockpiled arsenal of suicide vests, machine guns, gasoline bombs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-tank mines — and letters of instruction from Al-Qaeda's leadership.
Mr. Musharraf termed the madrassa "a fortress for war." In all, the revolt directly caused more than 100 deaths.
Mosques have been used as places for inciting violence, planning operations, and storing weapons, but deploying one as a base to overthrow the government creates a precedent. The Red Mosque model offers Islamists a bold tactic, one they likely will try again, especially if the recent episode, which has shaken the country, succeeds in pushing Mr. Musharraf out of office. Our imaginary Islamist strategist, in short, can now deploy another tactic to attain power.
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West by Benazir Bhutto
The Sunday Times
February 17, 2008
Reviewed by Patrick French
How will Benazir Bhutto be remembered? Discussing Reconciliation on Radio 4’s Start the Week, the presenter Andrew Marr got so excited by her legacy and achievement that he said, “At the risk of straying across lines of neutrality, I think the more people that read this book, the better.” The book comes garlanded with acclaim from the likes of Senator Edward Kennedy and Madeleine Albright. But does the praise lavished on Benazir since her assassination bear any relation to what she actually did during her life?
Let me tell you about the former Pakistani prime minister, Mohammed Mohammed, an ugly man with a thick beard.
During his first term in office he failed to pass a single piece of legislation, and when he returned to government he and his family became extremely rich from kickbacks on official contracts. He bugged and harassed independent journalists. In the mid1990s, his paramilitary death squads eliminated activists from the rival MQM in Karachi and he was implicated in the murder of his own brother, as well as the deaths of three family retainers in his mother’s entourage. He funded a proxy war against India in Kashmir using Arab jihadis, and backed the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan; indeed, if he had not given cash, fuel, training and military spare parts to the Taliban, it would not have been able to rise to power.
Mohammed Mohammed never, of course, existed: I am talking here about Benazir Bhutto. She was brave, glamorous, feisty and articulate – and the midwife of the Taliban. To a western audience (which she always handled impeccably, flattering reporters with access) she came across as a secular democrat and a committed campaigner for women’s rights. On David Frost’s sofa, Benazir could change from cute to solemn in a moment. As the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country, she offered huge symbolic hope. Since her death, she has been praised extensively: a television anchor even wrote an article about introducing Benazir to the joys of buying lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. Ironically, it was left to the socialite Jemima Khan to puncture the balloon. Khan concluded from her own years of living in Pakistan – as the wife of Imran Khan, Benazir’s political rival – that Benazir was “as ruthless and conniving as they come — a kleptocrat in a Hermès headscarf”.
more
Mob forces Punjabi girl, 9, into marriage to punish father
Times
March 30, 2008
A report published last week by Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) revealed widespread sexual violence against women, often in attacks sanctioned by village councils. In 2007 the commission discovered 354 cases of gang rape, 377 rapes and 21 cases where women were stripped naked as a family punishment. Pakistan has faced condemnation for its failure to protect rural women in a number of high-profile cases in the past two years. Muktaran Mai and Ghazala Shaheen were both gang-raped by village elders to punish their families for alleged crimes committed by male relatives.
Related: Sri Lankan cricketers attacked in Pakistan
Fascinating insight into the Pakistan government's attempts to wrest control back of parts of their own country from Taleban elements, many of whom were created by the ISI (Pakistan's intelligence service). Anyone who, like me, is not enamoured of the prospect of a Taliban-like government having control over nuclear weapons will read this with some alarm, even though the immediate news is not too bad.
The Counterinsurgency in Pakistan
Statfor Geopolitical Intelligence Reports
August 13, 2009
By Kamran Bokhari and Fred Burton
A clear & simple policy prescription, rare in the Afghan context.
The only way to tackle al-Qaeda is to tone down the tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, in order to enable enhanced deployment of the Pakistani army in the tribal badlands. Any Western military action should be confined to the stealthy assassination of al-Qaeda's leadership and weapons experts.
---------
The Home Front
Standpoint Sept 09
Michael Burleigh
Throughout the summer, the news in Britain was dominated by the fatalities in Afghanistan and an acrimonious debate about military equipment. Realising that the war was unpopular, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, belatedly announced a "strategy", based on the inapposite and tired Northern Ireland model of talking to "moderate" terrorists. In southern Iraq, this led US officers to raise their eyebrows and mutter "not that again", before they had to sort out Basra after the British handed it over to gangster militias. Unlike the IRA provos, the Afghan Taliban have not been stalemated.
...
There are obvious problems with the British government's confused exercise in militarised nation-building. Andrew Robathan MP has asked what we are seeking to achieve in Afghanistan: "The Minister has spoken about narcotics, the economy, the government and all sorts of things. What exactly, succinctly and clearly, is the mission that our soldiers are pursuing, and to which their energies should be devoted?" Al-Qaeda is based in Pakistan, whence it is establishing a presence in Mali, Mauritania, Somalia and Yemen. Are we going to invade them too?
The only way to tackle al-Qaeda is to tone down the tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, in order to enable enhanced deployment of the Pakistani army in the tribal badlands. Any Western military action should be confined to the stealthy assassination of al-Qaeda's leadership and weapons experts, as has been done to some effect already. This is also cheap. While a projected $65 billion (£40 billion) is about to be frittered away next year hiring a lot of illiterate policemen to stiff Afghan motorists, a mere $80 million (£50 million) buys 800 Hellfire missiles, and $500 million (£300 million) 24 more Reaper drones to launch them. At least when governments bail out banks they expect to get some money back. Talk of a 30 years' commitment to Afghanistan is the equivalent of unlimited credit in a casino, where the odds are similarly stacked against the player. How do Brown and Miliband see a future Afghan state? Anyone who knows about the place says that their vision of a centralised "progressive" polity is doomed to fail in a mountainous country with ethnic rivalries, strong traditions of tribal autonomy and a conservative religious culture.
...
What a mess this country is in.
-------
Forever the shadow
For Pakistan, the cloud of match-fixing never really went away. The perception of it has woven itself into the very fabric of society at large
CricInfo
July 9, 2010
Two ghosts have haunted Pakistan this decade: Osama bin Laden and the Fixed Match.
...
India and South Africa made more or less clean breaks after their investigations in 2000. Sourav Ganguly and Shaun Pollock (and then Graeme Smith) immediately began new, successful eras for their sides as captain. Big existing fish such as Hansie Cronje and Mohammad Azharuddin were banned for life and smaller fish, such as Ajay Jadeja or Ajay Sharma or Henry Williams, were not only punished but never played for their countries again.
The Qayyum report, on the other hand, was a classic Pakistani attempt at inquiry, one which bathes in its ambiguity and smells fresh of cover-up afterwards. Saleem Malik was banned for life, but he hadn't played for Pakistan for over a year. Similarly Ata-ur-Rehman had last represented the country in 1996. The rest, mostly big names, were absolved but in varying degrees. Even now we remain uncertain about the full extent of the involvement, if any, of Wasim Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Saeed Anwar and Waqar Younis.
...
That a match is fixed has become a casual belief, like the one that says the US, Mossad or RAW is behind all the trouble in the land. Man get out, match fixed; man go slow, match fixed; man drop catch, match fixed; man bowl wide, match fixed; man has money, match fixed.
It goes deeper than that as well, beyond the region's obsession generally with betting. Match-fixing feeds conveniently into a number of traditional Pakistani nerve centres. There is, for example, already a deep-seated distrust of public figures in the hearts of the vast majority of the population. This has developed steadily over the course of nearly 60 years of megalomaniacal leaders, corruption, cultish politics and extreme maladministration.
That a politician, a president, a judge, a policeman, an army general or a bureaucrat is corrupt is, and long has been, inevitable. It is a given. Cricketers used to be above this, but match-fixing simply dragged them down ...
Fixing also fits neatly into our thirst for a good ol' conspiracy theory, and nothing has more currency in Pakistan. Some newspapers and TV channels exist almost entirely on such fuel. Wives conspire against in-laws, employees against bosses, maids against other maids. Banks are, according to TV show kooks like Zaid Hamid, a Zionist conspiracy. The birth of Bangladesh was a vast conspiracy. The USA conspires against us on a daily basis. India is in a perpetual state of conspiracy against us. Attacks within the country's borders - even some outside it planned by Pakistanis - are a conspiracy against the country. Without such conspiracies, the state will fall down.
It is a convenient and cheap way out, and it suits everyone. There is no need to examine deeper causes because denial and inertia are easier than rational, analytical debate. So when Kamran Akmal drops four catches in Sydney, it has to be because he was paid to do it by some dodgy bookie. Unsubstantiated allegations are then hurled about around him. That he is unarguably a terrible wicketkeeper who has been doing precisely this for four years doesn't come into it: Cricinfo's ball-by-ball data from 2006 onwards shows that, at a minimum, Akmal has fluffed 31 chances in his last 25 Tests.
Pakistan's great comforter will happily tell you all those Tests have been fixed if you want him to. And he'll find enough supporters because even those who laugh when they say we go crazy for conspiracies add - with a worried laugh - that conspiracy theories have a way of coming true in Pakistan.
WikiLeaks and the Afghan War
Stratfor
July 27, 2010
By George Friedman
On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.
...
[T]he WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. ... [W]hat is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.
The view of the Taliban as a capable fighting force is, of course, widespread. If they weren’t a capable fighting force, then the United States would not be having so much trouble defeating them.
...
[T]he documents charge that the ISI has continued to maintain liaison and support for the Taliban in spite of claims by the Pakistani government that pro-Taliban officers had been cleaned out of the ISI years ago.
...
Let’s step back and consider the conflict dispassionately. The United States forced the Taliban from power. It never defeated the Taliban nor did it make a serious effort to do so, as that would require massive resources the United States doesn’t have. Afghanistan is a secondary issue for the United States, especially since al Qaeda has established bases in a number of other countries ...
For Pakistan, however, Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic interest. …
It is therefore irrational to expect the Pakistanis to halt collaboration with the force that they expect to be a major part of the government of Afghanistan when the United States leaves. …
Given that they don’t expect the Taliban to be defeated, and given that they are not interested in chaos in Afghanistan, it follows that they will maintain close relations with and support for the Taliban. Given that the United States is powerful and is Pakistan’s only lever against India, the Pakistanis will not make this their public policy, however. The United States has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.
This is duplicitous only if you close your eyes to the Pakistani reality, which the Americans never did. There was ample evidence, as the WikiLeaks show, of covert ISI ties to the Taliban. The Americans knew they couldn’t break those ties. They settled for what support Pakistan could give them while constantly pressing them harder and harder until genuine fears in Washington emerged that Pakistan could destabilize altogether. Since a stable Pakistan is more important to the United States than a victory in Afghanistan — which it wasn’t going to get anyway — the United States released pressure and increased aid. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants.
…
The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isn’t going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they won’t be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.
The Pakistanis also know that the Americans are leaving and that the Taliban or a coalition including the Taliban will be in charge of Afghanistan when the Americans leave. They will make certain that they maintain good relations with the Taliban.
...
Fascinating stuff that could equally well go in a science / global warming thread.
Will the Pakistan floods strike again?
BBC News
13 August 2010
Post a Comment