Tag Archive for ‘Pakistan’ at Asian Window

« Older Entries

Tag Archive for 'Pakistan'

Great Himalayan Trail: trekking’s holy grail

Published

asianwindow

on March 12, 2010

in Sport

. 0 Comments

From The Guardian:

Have you got six months off? Do you fancy a long walk? If so, World Expeditions may have just the holiday for you. They have become the only trekking outfit to offer a guided trip along the first completed section of the Great Himalayan Trail (GHT).

Stretching for 1,700km along the length of Nepal, the GHT will take you a mere 157 days to complete. You’ll see eight of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000m, including Everest, and cross passes reaching up to 6,000m, climbing a total of 150,000m. That’s a Snowdon every day for half a year. Oh, and it will set you back £20,500.

The GHT isn’t the world’s longest long-distance footpath. The Continental Divide Trail in the US is 5,000km and the Trans Canada will be three times that. But this steroidal version of the Pennine Way looks like being the most coveted of all. Eventually, the trail’s originators hope it will stretch from the mighty 8,000m peak Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, considered the westernmost outlier of the Himalaya, to Namche Barwa in Tibet. It will connect five Asian countries – Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan. More:

http://www.thegreathimalayatrail.org/

The blight of Hindustan

Published

asianwindow

on March 3, 2010

in Culture, India, Religion and Society

. 0 Comments

Namit Arora at Shunya’s Notes:

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—in the sense that the subgroups were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas: the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshtriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four varnas appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda, and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society.

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy, turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The principle of hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahminical ‘knowledge’. More:

Love and death in Pakistan

Published

asianwindow

on March 1, 2010

in Terrorism

. 0 Comments

From The Guardian:

The story began with a chance meeting on a train between a British care worker and a young Pakistani chef. It ended in tragedy this week when Belinda Khan was among eight people killed by a suicide bomber in a marketplace in troubled northern Pakistan.

Yesterday relatives and friends told the tragic story of how Khan, a 44-year-old woman from Cardiff, came to be in one of the world’s most dangerous places. They described how her relationship with pizza chef Yahya Khan ended when he was shot dead in Pakistan by the Taliban two years ago, and how she married Yahya’s younger brother, Saeed, just a fortnight before she was caught up in the suicide bomber’s attack.

Saeed, 25, also spoke of the horror of the moment when he and his new wife were caught in the terrorist bombing as they paused for a snack at a market in the Swat valley in the country’s North-West Frontier province.

He said he wished he could have died with his bride. “Me and my family are missing her very much,” he said. “She was a brave woman and gave a lot of love to me and my family members.”

Belinda’s journey to the Swat Valley began some five years ago when she stepped on to a train in the UK and met Yahya Khan. Their backgrounds were very different. More:

Whitman-meets-Puff Daddy

Published

asianwindow

on February 20, 2010

in Books

. 0 Comments

In Mint-Lounge, Veena Venugopal meets Husain Naqvi, author of Home Boy:

H.M. Naqvi

You moved from Karachi to New York and worked in a financial institution. How much of Chuck, your protagonist, is based on you?

Home Boy is not a memoir, it is fiction. Chuck, the narrator, draws on my experiences but he is a construction. I guess he is some sort of an incarnation of me; he is my literary doppelgänger. First novels inevitably draw from the author’s life. So Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, Salinger’s (The) Catcher in the Rye, Michael Chabon’s (The) Mysteries of Pittsburgh are all very close to the author’s lives. And you have this imperative to exorcise yourself especially in the first novel. And there are some novelists who remain with this imperative through the course of their oeuvre and some that manage to move away from it.

Where were you when 9/11 happened?

I am wary of answering that question. Geographically, I was close by. In the novel, 9/11, the event, actually never takes place. I want to inhabit the figurative space between the paragraphs where I don’t want to commit to my proximity to the event. It unnecessarily colours the perception and I want the reader to think of it only as a background, not in the foreground. More:

India worries as China builds ports in South Asia

Published

asianwindow

on February 16, 2010

in Business, China, Economy, India and Sri Lanka

. 0 Comments

Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times:

Hambantota, Sri Lanka: For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China.

Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.

As trade in the region grows more lucrative, China has been developing port facilities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and it is planning to build railroad lines in Nepal. These projects, analysts say, are part of a concerted effort by Chinese leaders and companies to open and expand markets for their goods and services in a part of Asia that has lagged behind the rest of the continent in trade and economic development.

But these initiatives are irking India, whose government worries that China is expanding its sphere of regional influence by surrounding India with a “string of pearls” that could eventually undermine India’s pre-eminence and potentially rise to an economic and security threat. More:

The case of the cricket snub

Published

asianwindow

on January 26, 2010

in Politics and Sport

. 0 Comments

Salil Tripathi in the Wall Street Journal:

Call it the curious incident of the forgotten cricketers. After nearly two hours of a keenly watched auction on Jan. 19, the Indian Premier League’s eight cricket teams bought 11 of the 66 players from 11 countries on offer. But not one Pakistani player was picked.

India and Pakistan have long been enemies on the pitch, but such a public rejection of some of Pakistan’s best players (who are also some of the region’s best players) represents a dangerous new low. The auction process is an important part of the Premier League’s “Twenty20 cricket,” an entertaining, made-for-television, abbreviated form of the sport played in 16 countries.

Twenty20 cricket is not the traditional, seemingly endless version where men in white take a break for tea. Here a match lasts around three hours, with each team playing only 20 overs, trying to amass as many runs as possible and using unconventional techniques. Busty cheerleaders encourage them. And international players are traded just like they are in Major League Baseball or the English Premier League. The changes have drawn new, younger crowds and attracted millions of dollars of television advertising and a recent deal with YouTube. More:

An even pitch

Published

asianwindow

on January 23, 2010

in Sport

. 0 Comments

Ayaz Memon in Mint-Lounge on India-Pakistan cricketing relations:

My late friend Omar Kureishi (whose crusty voice on radio brought Pakistan cricket alive for millions of followers from the 1950s till his death in 2005) had a simple solution for the subcontinent’s most vexing issue. “Keep the ruddy politicians out, and cricket will keep the people of India and Pakistan together.”

This came shortly after the Karachi one-day match had been disrupted by young men who had run on to the field and assaulted India captain Krishnamachari Srikkanth, ostensibly to advocate the “Kashmir cause”. Like a quintessential cricket romantic, Omar, despite his privileged education and understanding of realpolitik, could be reduced to utter dismay at the volatility of Indo-Pak relations, in which cricket would often become the first casualty.

“In 1961-62,” he related to me, after the Karachi incident, “Hanif Mohammad had his hand slashed by a ruffian’s blade. Why would anybody want to deprive millions of people from watching a master like Hanif, or a young prodigy like Tendulkar (who was making his international debut then) play unless they have been weaned on prejudice?” More

The editorial in Dawn, Karachi: The IPL uproar

It may well be true that reasons of politics sealed the fate of Pakistan’s T20 celebrities. Even so, there is no cause whatsoever for the Pakistani government to question the workings of a private venture in India that is first and foremost a moneymaking enterprise. And even if New Delhi is being duplicitous, as some allege, Islamabad should show more grace and refuse to mix politics and sports. Pakistani fans and players have every right to be outraged. Not so the Government of Pakistan. More:

Also from Dawn: News and comments from the Indian press in the aftermath of the exclusion of Pakistani cricketers from the Indian Premier League.

Daniel Mueenuddin: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Published

asianwindow

on January 23, 2010

in Books

. 0 Comments

Via 3quarksdaily:

Nanga Parbat film restarts row over Messner brothers’ fatal climb

Published

asianwindow

on January 20, 2010

in Movies and Sport

. 0 Comments

From The Guardian:

A film retelling mountaineer Reinhold Messner’s legendary ascent of Nanga Parbat, in which his younger brother was killed, has reignited a bitter mountaineering row and prompted fellow climbers to attack as “false” the version of events being portrayed on the screen.

A group of climbers who accompanied Messner, now 65, and his brother Günther on the 1970 expedition have criticised the makers of Nanga Parbat for telling only one side of the story – and have threatened legal action.

The film, by the director Josef Vilsmaier, is being advertised under the slogan “two brothers, one mountain, their fate” and promises to reconstruct the events when Günther disappeared after apparently following Reinhold down Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, the ninth highest mountain in the world and one of the most treacherous to climb. From the start the film, much of which was shot on location, makes clear that it is telling the story “from the point of view of Reinhold Messner”. More

South Asian threat? Local nuclear war = Global suffering

Published

asianwindow

on December 17, 2009

in Conflict

. 0 Comments

A regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan could blot out the sun, starving much of the human race. Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon in Scientific American:

India and Pakistan, which together have more than 100 nuclear weapons, may be the most worrisome adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today. But other countries besides the U.S. and Russia (which have thousands) are well endowed: China, France and the U.K. have hundreds of nuclear warheads; Israel has more than 80, North Korea has about 10 and Iran may well be trying to make its own. In 2004 this situation prompted one of us (Toon) and later Rich Turco of the University of California, Los Angeles, both veterans of the 1980s investigations, to begin evaluating what the global environmental effects of a regional nuclear war would be and to take as our test case an engagement between India and Pakistan.

The latest estimates by David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security and by Robert S. Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council are that India has 50 to 60 assembled weapons (with enough plutonium for 100) and that Pakistan has 60 weapons. Both countries continue to increase their arsenals. Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons tests indicate that the yield of the warheads would be similar to the 15-kiloton explosive yield (equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT) of the bomb the U.S. used on Hiroshima.

Toon and Turco, along with Charles Bardeen, now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, modeled what would happen if 50 Hiroshima-size bombs were dropped across the highest population-density targets in Pakistan and if 50 similar bombs were also dropped across India. Some people maintain that nuclear weapons would be used in only a measured way. But in the wake of chaos, fear and broken communications that would occur once a nuclear war began, we doubt leaders would limit attacks in any rational manner. This likelihood is particularly true for Pakistan, which is small and could be quickly overrun in a conventional conflict. More:

Tycoon, contractor, soldier, spy

Published

asianwindow

on December 13, 2009

in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Photo from “U.S. Training Center.” If you do a Google search for Blackwater and click on blackwaterusa, it directs you to the “U.S. Training Center.”

Blackwater, renamed Xe (pronounced zi) earlier this year, is a private military company and claims to operate the world’s largest tactical training facility. According to its Wiki profile, it is currently the largest of the US State Department’s three private security contractors.

Erik Prince, the founder of the company, has been called “America’s best-known mercenary” by the London Times: He “packed a mobile phone on one hip and a handgun on the other as he flew in and out of the world’s troublespots.”

Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, and the company's old and new logos. Photos: Wiki

In a long profile of Prince, Vanity Fair reveals that the CIA had asked Blackwater to kill Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan but the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger.

From Vanity Fair:

In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien, has become the screenwriters’ darling. In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp.) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder. On the Fox series 24, Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince, whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for use against U.S. targets.

But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.

Click here to read the full article.

The US political weekly The Nation had earlier carried an article titled “Bush’s Shadow Army” adapted from a book by Jeremy Scahill, ”Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Below, an excerpt:

Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince–the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince’s private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was “to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training.” In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party’s takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.

While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the “war on terror” that the company’s glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. “I’ve been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security,” Prince told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shortly after 9/11. “The phone is ringing off the hook now.” More here in The Nation.

Headley: Making of a terrorist

Published

asianwindow

on December 9, 2009

in Af-Pak, India and Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Philip Shenon at The Daily Beast:

The Daily Beast has since learned that Headley’s connections to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s murky intelligence unit—which I confirmed yesterday—might have played a role in his alleged conversion to terrorism. Additionally, sources at a foreign intelligence agency tell me that he might have been a double agent who turned on the U.S.

Headley was allegedly valuable to Lakshar-e-Taiba—the Pakistani terror group that pulled off the Mumbai attack—because as an American he traveled easily and undetected between the U.S., India, Pakistan, and Denmark (where he’s been linked to a plot to kill a Danish cartoonist who angered fundamentalist Muslims with his lampooning cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad). Born in Washington, but raised mostly in Pakistan, Headley’s father was a former Pakistani diplomat and his mother a onetime Philadelphia socialite. It’s there that Headley moved in the 1970s to live with his mother and attended a community college. More:

Also read in The Daily Beast: Headley’s ties to visa companies

Mumbai Massacre: Secrets of the Dead

Published

asianwindow

on December 5, 2009

in Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Watch this brilliant PBS documentary, Mumbai Massacre, in its Secrets of the Dead series:

Estimated nuclear weapons locations 2009

Published

asianwindow

on November 26, 2009

in India and Politics

. 0 Comments

"Israel probably has about four nuclear sites, whereas the nuclear storage facilities in India and Pakistan are – despite many rumors – largely undetermined."

Hans M. Kristensen in Federation of American Scientists Strategic Security Blog: [via 3quarksdaily]:

The world’s approximately 23,300 nuclear weapons are stored at an estimated 111 locations in 14 countries, according to an overview produced by FAS and NRDC.

Nearly half of the weapons are operationally deployed with delivery systems capable of launching on short notice.

The overview is published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and includes the July 2009 START memorandum of understanding data. A previous version was included in the annual report from the International Panel of Fissile Materials published last month. More:

India’s faff-Pak policy

Published

asianwindow

on November 14, 2009

in India

. 0 Comments

Gloating over every terror attack in Pakistan and outsourcing India’s future to the Americans is delusional, says Shekhar Gupta in the Indian Express:

But you have to now debate if it will be good for India that Pakistan continues to slide. Or, do we have the wherewithal to deal with whatever is left behind, if Pakistan does not survive? Can we deal with five anarchic, angry “stans” instead of one next door to us, with no central authority to share a hotline with? Would we prefer to live with a nuclear-armed anarchy that listens to nobody? What use will coercive diplomacy be then? Who will we bomb?

It is time therefore to stop jubilating at the unfolding tragedy in Pakistan. India has to think of becoming a part of the solution. And that solution lies in not merely saving Pakistan — Pakistan will survive. It has evolved a strong nationalism that does bind its people even if that does not reflect in its current internal dissensions. It is slowly building a democratic system, howsoever imperfect. But it has a very robust media and a functional higher judiciary. Also, in its army, it has at least one national institution that provides stability and continuity. The question for us is, what kind of Pakistan do we want to see emerging from this bloodshed? What if fundamentalists of some kind, either religious or military or a combination of both, were to take control of Islamabad? The Americans will always have the option of cutting their losses and leaving. They have a long history of doing that successfully, from Vietnam to Iraq and maybe Afghanistan next. What will be our Plan-B then? More:

Are nuclear warheads safe in Pakistan?

Published

asianwindow

on November 10, 2009

in Pakistan and Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Seymour M. Hersh in the New Yorker:

In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.

Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated eighty to a hundred warheads, scattered in facilities around the country. The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military’s control over nuclear weapons.” Clinton—whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs—added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, “we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state.”

Clinton’s words sounded reassuring, and several current and former officials also said in interviews that the Pakistan Army was in full control of the nuclear arsenal. But the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead. More:

George W. Bush on India and Pakistan

Published

asianwindow

on October 31, 2009

in India

. 2 Comments

Former US President George W. Bush is in New Delhi as a private citizen to participate in the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit. He spoke to Pramit Palchaudhuri of Hindustan Times about his present life, why he sought to change the Indo-US relationship, and the global role he sees India fulfilling:

Q. How do you keep yourself busy these day?

I’m giving a lot of speeches, some thirty are lined up. I’m also working on a book. Making speeches is an interesting way to make a living, gives me a chance to share some of the experiences I had as president. The book will be about the decisions I made as president and as you know I had some pretty consequential decisions to make. I just want people to get an idea of what it was like. It’s really going to be a book for history. It’s not going to be a slash and burn type book. It will be a book about the environment in which I had to make some tough calls. And then it will let the reader to make up his own mind as to what he would have done. There is an autobiographical component to it. But it’s really about my days as president. We are having a good time. The book should be out, hopefully, next year.

Click here to read the full interview.

Bush told Anil Padmanabhan of Mint: “I think the way out is for the United States to help the Pakistan government in dealing with these extremists.”

During your first visit to India you set the stage for the bilateral relationship between India and the US. Now you return as a private citizen. What are your thoughts?

First of all, the bilateral relationship forged with previous prime ministers is important for America and I believe it is good for the region and good for the world. India is an important country and it is one with which America shares values.

Secondly, its importance is becoming more relevant as the world recovers from the economic downturn. I think historians will look back and say that isn’t it interesting that one of the reasons behind the recovery is India and other emerging countries like her. That would not have been said 20 or 30 years ago. So, India is a country of vital importance. It is important for peace and prosperity. More here.

Can the Taliban really distance themselves from al-Qaida?

Published

asianwindow

on October 9, 2009

in Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Jason Burke in the Guardian:

The Taliban have always been adept communicators. Their latest effort – Statement of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on the Occasion of the Eighth Anniversary of the American Attack on Afghanistan – was posted on one of several websites they regularly use. Then it was emailed – in English – to individuals and organisations that the movement specifically wanted to reach. This is normal practice for any press officer for a government, NGO or major retailer anywhere in the world.

It is unclear whether the statement represents a genuine shift in position or a clever attempt to influence an ongoing debate. It could of course be both. The Taliban stand to benefit even if they are not serious, as their intervention will fuel the increasingly acrimonious and muddled debate on Afghan strategy in the west and the public disillusionment with the war. Or they will gain if the statement is taken seriously and they are genuinely interested in repositioning themselves as independent from al-Qaida. More:

Taliban claim they pose no threat to west

Network of militants is robust after Mumbai siege

Published

asianwindow

on September 30, 2009

in Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba has persisted, even flourished, since 10 recruits killed 163 people in a rampage through India’s financial capital. Lydia Polgreen and Souad Mekhennet in the New York Times:

Hafiz Saeed

Indian and Pakistani dossiers on the Mumbai investigations, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, offer a detailed picture of the operations of a Lashkar network that spans Pakistan. It included four houses and two training camps here in this sprawling southern port city that were used to prepare the attacks.

Among the organizers, the Pakistani document says, was Hammad Amin Sadiq, a homeopathic pharmacist, who arranged bank accounts and secured supplies. He and six others begin their formal trial on Saturday in Pakistan, though Indian authorities say the prosecution stops well short of top Lashkar leaders.

Indeed, Lashkar’s broader network endures, and can be mobilized quickly for elaborate attacks with relatively few resources, according to a dozen current and former Lashkar militants and intelligence officials from the United States, Europe, India and Pakistan.

In interviews with The Times, they presented a troubling portrait of Lashkar’s capabilities, its popularity in Pakistan and the support it has received from former officials of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment.

Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, helped create Lashkar two decades ago to challenge Indian control in Kashmir, the disputed territory that lies at the heart of the conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbors. More:

The Economist obit: Norman Borlaug

Published

asianwindow

on September 20, 2009

in Food, Innovation and Science

. 0 Comments

Wherever he went, Mr Borlaug showed the same impatience. Paperwork was spurned in favour of action; planting, advising, training thousands. In India, where he set up hundreds of one-acre plots to show suspicious farmers how much they could grow, he was so frustrated by bureaucracy that when at last his seed came, shipped from Los Angeles, he planted it at once despite the outbreak of war between India and Pakistan, sometimes by flashes of artillery fire. And when in 1984 he was drawn out of semi-retirement to take his seed and techniques to Africa, he forgot in a moment, once he saw the place, his plan to do years of research first. “Let’s just start growing,” he said.

As a boy, he hadn’t known what hunger was. He came from a small Norwegian farm in Iowa, the land of butter-sculptures and the breaded tenderloin sandwich. But on his first trip to “the big city”, Minneapolis, in 1933, grown men had begged him for a nickel for a cup of coffee and a small, dry hamburger, and a riot had started round him when a milk-cart dumped its load in the street. He saw then how close to breakdown America was, because of hunger. It was impossible “to build a peaceful world on empty stomachs”. More:

Also see in AW: Norman Borlaug, who led Green Revolution

The Afghanistan impasse

Published

asianwindow

on September 17, 2009

in Books and Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan by Nicholas Schmidle (Henry Holt, 254 pp., $25.00);

Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda by Gretchen Peters (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 300 pp., $25.95)

On August 5, Baitullah Mehsud, the all-powerful and utterly ruthless commander of the Pakistani Taliban, was killed in a US missile strike in South Waziristan. At the time of the strike, he was undergoing intravenous treatment for a kidney ailment, and was lying on the roof of his father-in-law’s house with his young second wife. At about one o’clock that morning, a missile fired by an unmanned CIA drone tore through the house, splitting his body in two and killing his wife, her parents, and seven bodyguards.

His death marked the first major breakthrough in the war against extremist leaders in Pakistan since 2003, when several top al-Qaeda members based in the country were arrested or killed. Over the last few years, Mehsud’s estimated 20,000 fighters gained almost total control over the seven tribal agencies that make up the Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan.

Mehsud’s death plunged the Pakistani Taliban, composed of some two dozen Pashtun tribal groups, into an intense struggle over leadership, creating an opportunity for the CIA and Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to take action against the extremists. After ousting in April and May the militants who had seized the Swat valley-which is not in the tribal areas but north of the capital city of Islamabad-the Pakistani army is now pursuing the Pakistani Taliban with more determination: in mid-August, two of Mehsud’s senior aides were arrested, one in FATA and the other in Islamabad while seeking medical treatment. The US is anxious for Pakistan to continue its pressure by launching an offensive in Waziristan, the region in the southern part of FATA-first in South Waziristan to eliminate the Pakistani Taliban there and then in North Waziristan, where al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders are based. More:

Invoking a mystic Indian identity

Published

asianwindow

on September 11, 2009

in Books

. 0 Comments

In the Telegraph, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray reviews Jaswant Singh’s “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence“:

Jinnah and Gandhi

If Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the first Paki and Lord Mountbatten the first Paki-basher (as an old joke went), Calcutta’s Direct Action Day was the first Jehad. Jaswant Singh records that a leaflet warning the “Kafer” of “the general massacre” on August 16, 1946 also reminded Muslims they had once worn the crown and ruled this country but “had become slaves of Hindus and the British”. Displaying Jinnah’s picture, the leaflet spoke of “a Jehad in this very month of Ramzan”.

This is worth repeating because inspired gossip accuses the author of glorifying Jinnah as the apostle of Indian unity and of blaming Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel for demonizing him. Neither charge can be sustained, confirming that the contrived furore over the book reflects the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s dislike of the author and a demoralized Bharatiya Janata Party’s internal power struggles. The ambitions of the egregious Narendra Modi, who cannot have read this massive volume of 669 pages and probably would not have understood it if he had, obviously helped to whip up hysteria.

Modi’s understanding must not be faulted too much, however, for in his anxiety to be fair to all sides, Jaswant Singh often seems to contradict what appears to be his thesis. More:

The reporter’s account: 4 days with the Taliban

Published

asianwindow

on September 10, 2009

in Afghanistan, Media and Terrorism

. 0 Comments

Stephen Farrell, a reporter for The New York Times, and Sultan M. Munadi, an Afghan journalist working with him, were kidnapped by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Saturday. In a British raid to free them early Wednesday, Mr. Munadi was killed. This is Mr. Farrell’s account of their four-day ordeal:

Mid-to-late morning on Friday, Sept. 4, we in the Kabul bureau began hearing reports of an explosion in a Taliban-controlled area near the northern city of Kunduz.

It was clear that this was going to be a major controversy, involving allegations of civilian deaths against NATO claims that the dead were Taliban. Furthermore, it was in an area that was becoming increasingly newsworthy because it was becoming more troubled by insurgents.

My colleague Rich Oppel and I began discussing the story, and I forewarned the Afghan staff that they should at least begin thinking about logistics for a possible drive north, for a decision to be taken later.

The drivers made a few phone calls and said the road north appeared to be safe until mid- to late afternoon. It was close to the cut-off point, but if we left immediately we could do it. We left within minutes.

En route, I called in to the bureau to check with Rich on how the story was developing. He said the Kunduz police were saying that there were only adult male patients at the main hospital in Kunduz, leaving it unclear whether they were civilians or Taliban. More:

John Burns on Those Who Aid War Journalists

Sultan Munadi is dead, and a British paratrooper whose name we may never know. There may also have been other Afghan casualties, perhaps Taliban, perhaps not; that we also don’t know yet, for sure. But from where I am writing this, on a sunny autumn afternoon in rural England, the deaths of Sultan and the British commando seem like a grim black cloud darkening the landscape — a harbinger, perhaps, for the increasingly grim news that seems to await us all from a war that seems to be worsening by the day, and heading for worse yet unless our political and military leaders can find a way to turn the situation around.

Behind these deaths lie complex and highly emotive issues for those of us who have traveled to war zones for The Times and other news organizations, involving our responsibilities for the lives of the locally employed people who make it possible for us to operate in faraway lands — interpreters and reporters like Sultan, but also drivers, security guards and domestic staff members; altogether, in the case of The Times, at least 200 people in Iraq and Afghanistan over the years of those two wars. More:

Mohammed Hanif on his homecoming to Pakistan

Published

asianwindow

on August 20, 2009

in Books

. 0 Comments

Many thought he was crazy to swap London for one of the most dangerous countries in the world. But he’s happy to be home. From the Guardian:

After living and working in London for more than a decade, I moved back to Pakistan just over a year ago – and soon realised that the Pakistan I knew had migrated elsewhere. Mainly to the front covers of the sombre current affairs magazines you find in posh dentists’ waiting rooms. The world’s media had reached a consensus that I had boarded a sinking ship. Time, Newsweek and the Economist have all written an obituary of Pakistan, some twice over. The more caring ones are still holding a wake.

A couple of years ago when we decided to return, Pakistan wasn’t exactly the world’s safest destination. It was fighting its demons of poverty, the Taliban and a military dictatorship that fostered them. But it very much belonged in this world: a new bank was going up on every street corner and a new generation of media, telecom and property professionals was working overtime to sell bits of the country to each other. It seems that between us negotiating with the removal men and stocking up on jars of Marmite, the various editorial boards across the western world decided that the end of the world was nigh and it would all begin in Pakistan. Channan, my 11-year-old born-and-bred-in- London son, was so miffed by this that when he saw some white people at Karachi airport, he whispered furiously: “What are they doing here? Don’t they know it’s not a tourist country. They are always saying it’s a terrorist country.” More:

He who has seen Lahore

Published

asianwindow

on August 16, 2009

in Books

. 0 Comments

Ali Sethi, the Lahore-based writer, was recently in India to promote his first novel, The Wish Maker. From Outlook:

“And how does it feel?” said Mr Singh, the short, plump man who had shown me into my room at the hotel. I said, “It’s a lot like Lahore.” But that was only partly true. The way the leaves of trees hung above the roads of Delhi, obscuring the sky, and the meringue-like buildings on Connaught Place-these were like bits of Lahore. But there had also been temples on the way from the airport, and signboards that gave the names of streets in three different scripts. A woman was standing at the hotel entrance in a blue-and-red uniform, which was like the uniform worn by Lahore’s recently inducted female traffic wardens, but most of them had been quickly chased away by whistling car-drivers.

“There are some differences,” I said to Mr Singh. “But there are similarities too.”

And Mr Singh tilted his head, closed his eyes and smiled with all his gums, as though the question had been answered to his satisfaction. More:

Tales from rural Pakistan, lived and shared

Published

asianwindow

on July 27, 2009

in Books

. 0 Comments

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short stories about life in southern Punjab raise some of the biggest questions in Pakistan today. Sabrina Tavernise from Mueenabad, Pakistan, in the New York Times:

IN the steamy heat of central Pakistan, a novelist is writing. He describes a hidden world of servants and their feudal masters, the powerlessness of poverty and the corruption that glues it all together.

These lives, tucked away in the mango groves, grand estates and mud-walled villages of rural Pakistan, are rarely seen by outsiders. But the writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin, a Pakistani-American who lives here, has brought them into focus in a collection of short stories, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” published this year.

They are intimate portraits that raise some of the biggest questions in Pakistan today. Why does a small elite still control vast swaths of land more than 60 years after Pakistan became a nation? How long will landlords continue to control the law and the lives of the peasants on their land in the same way British rulers did before them?

Mr. Mueenuddin, 46, offers a richly observed landscape that is written with the tenderness and familiarity of an old friend. The estate Mr. Mueenuddin lives on in southern Punjab, Pakistan’s biggest province, belonged to his father, a prominent Pakistani civil servant, and he used to come here as a boy. More:

Failed States

Published

asianwindow

on June 29, 2009

in Lists

. 0 Comments

Pakistan, hit by insurgency and the worst-ever economic crisis, is among the “top 10 failed states” ranked by the Foreign Policy journal. In its annual Index of Failed States, the magazine ranks 60 countries, in various stages of failure, using 12 specific indicators generated by the Fund for Peace.

Top 20 failed states:

1. Somalia
2. Zimbabwe
3. Sudan
4. Chad
5. Dem. Rep. of the Congo
6. Iraq
7. Afghanistan
8. Central African Republic
9. Guinea
10. Pakistan
11. Ivory Coast
12. Haiti
13. Burma
14. Kenya
15. Nigeria
16. Ethiopia
17. North Korea
18. Bangladesh
19. Yemen
20. East Timor

Click here to read the full story, and here for the full list.

Risking the Taliban to confront the deadliest of peaks, K2

Published

asianwindow

on June 28, 2009

in Sport and Technology

. 0 Comments

Graham Bowley in the New York Times. Bowley is writing a book about the 2008 accident on K2 that left 11 climbers dead:

At midnight one evening earlier this month, I slipped out of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, heading north in a white Toyota minibus on a journey to find the second tallest mountain on earth, K2.

My purpose was to write a book about the mountaineers who dared challenge its deadly slopes – to get a taste, if not a full draught, of the danger myself. In the end, I got more than I bargained for, and not from Nature alone.

K2, which towers 28,251 feet above the border between Pakistan and China like an almost perfect white pyramid, is considered one of the most beautiful but also one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. By the opening of this climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered its summit and 77 had died trying.

But this year, just reaching the mountain had become perilous. I had to travel, in a minibus that felt like a bubble, on a long and treacherous road that skirted Pakistan’s Swat Valley. There, at that moment, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban were fighting for control, making the lowlands south of K2 another of the most hazardous places on Earth. More:

Science vs art in a clash of cultures

Published

asianwindow

on June 23, 2009

in Cricket and Sport

. 0 Comments

From cricinfo:

It’s first a clash of ethos, of philosophies and even of time, more than a semi-final. Here is truly man against machine, the art of cricket against the science of it, cricket’s future and cricket’s past. South Africa’s progress to this point has been smooth, well-planned, calculated and inevitable, as if their players were born to do this. Pakistan have got here in shambles – losing games, winning some, treating it all as a bit of fun – and the players not so much born to do this are struggling to discover why they are doing it at all.

South Africa lack nowhere and nothing. If Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith are the efficient drones at the top, there is heart in the middle, with the ever-frail skills of Herschelle Gibbs and the creativity of AB de Villiers. Even Albie Morkel, in whom there are glimpses of Zulu, thankfully smiles more. They’ve always had pace, but now they even have spinners, who are not batsmen forced to bowl. Sure, they are a little one-dimensional (watching videos of Umar Gul’s yorkers?), but they are spinners – South African and successful; how often have we said that in the past? More:

The world in refugees

Published

asianwindow

on June 17, 2009

in human rights

. 0 Comments

From the Guardian: Figures out on Wednesday show that the number of people forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution worldwide stood at 42m. And that’s NOT including the thousands displaced by violent conflicts in Sri Lanka and the Swat Valley in Pakistan.

Asian Window