Tag Archive for 'Taliban'

Salman Ahmad, lead singer of Pakistani band Junoon, on Sufism, jihad and peace

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on March 19, 2010
in Entertainment, Faith, Music and Pakistan
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Sally Quinn in The Washington Post:

There is something unusually compelling about his combination of total coolness, gentle innocence and self-deprecating humor. At 46, he still has a child’s heart. At last year’s Brookings Institution conference on Muslim-American relations, in Doha, Qatar, he sort of owned the place: With every appearance, he was immediately surrounded by admiring wonks, wanting to bask in his aura of peaceful energy. There is even a healing quality about him. Perhaps it’s because he has just been dowsed.

Samina, Ahmad’s wife, whom he met and fell in love with at age 17, is a holistic health counselor. Both are, in fact, physicians--though he had always wanted to be a musician, his parents persuaded him to become a doctor. She’s also accomplished in the kitchen and for six years had her own cooking show on television. She was, he says, the Martha Stewart of Pakistan. Samina recently learned to dowse, which is done with a pendulum-like mechanism. “It’s like prayer,” he says. “It uses positive energy from the universe. It’s not distant from the Muslim tradition.”

“I know,” he says with a laugh, “that it sounds like hocus-pocus, and I was skeptical at first. It’s like a spiritual ouija board. It raises people’s energies.” He says it’s certainly hard to describe, and that it’s not like the divining rods that westerners used to find water. His wife started dowsing him in June, and when she does, he recites a Muslim prayer: I seek refuge in the Lord of Daybreak. He focuses on a specific issue that may be bothering him, making him melancholy or anxious. “It’s a cathartic process,” he explains. “Through prayer and talking, you lift yourself out of it.” More:

Forgotten victims Of great games

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on March 14, 2010
in Afghanistan, Books and Travel
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Also see here and here

They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs -- infidels -- and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan. C.M. Naim in Outlook:

My Heartrendingly Tragic Story By Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan ‘Azar’. Edited By Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt. Oslo: Novus Press, 2006

One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used “Kafir” to describe the boys’ ancestors, and “Kafiristan” for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion “Nuristan” (“The Land of Light”).

The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two “Sahibs” fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day’s catch to the Sahibs’ camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris’s servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status. More:

See Kafiristan in Wikipedia:

Prof. Georg Morgenstierne travelled extensively throughout South Asia, but the most unique were his visits to the inaccessible areas of The Hindu Kush Mountains. Read his account here.

Them and US

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on March 6, 2010
in Af-Pak, India and Pakistan
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Shekhar Gupta in The Indian Express on what a weak America means for India:

There was nothing un-Holbrooke-like about his utterly insensitive statement that the Kabul attack had not particularly targeted Indians. The use of really awful language, “I do not accept [that this was like the attack on the Indian embassy]” and “let’s not jump to conclusions”, was also true to form. In fact, coarse directness of this kind is so much his hallmark that, talking about him when his appointment was announced, a former American envoy — who himself was not exactly some Mr Congeniality — told me, “You guys will learn to deal with Holbrooke… he will make me look so diplomatic to you.” It follows, therefore, that there was also nothing so unusual about what should normally have been shocking insensitivity. What kind of a guy — other than Holbrooke, of course — speaks like this when four Indian victims of that terror attack are still battling for life in the hospital? His tone was dismissive, almost an admonition of those (read the Indian government) who “jumped to the conclusion” that this was an attack specifically on Indian interests. More:

A choice for change

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s former information minister and currently a member of Parliament’s National Security Committee, in The Times of India:

There is no denying that the only game-changer in the battlefield can now be a shift in anti-Taliban operations across the Durand Line. By arresting much of the dreaded Quetta Shura Taliban, Islamabad has demonstrated two things: that it can swoop down tactically where the US has been unable to tread, and that if given the right strategic incentive, it can draw down on fresh reserves of political will. India was at pains to avoid the word mediation, but clearly, New Delhi hopes that the Saudi card may give it a seat at the Afghan table, as well as open a channel as interlocutor to Islamabad.

As it stands, the motors that work to tip the scales on this razor-edge between war and peace are predictably already at work. Almost as soon as Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, crossed the Wagah border into Lahore, the debris from the Taliban attack in Kabul, where Indians were also killed among others, infected the air. The Jaish-e-Mohammad disclaimed its hand in the incident, blaming it on a fidayeen Afghan attack, but the terrorists who always seek to disrupt talks reminded everyone how they can affect both headlines and deadlines in this terrain. More:

Former Pakistani officer embodies a policy puzzle

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on March 5, 2010
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Carlotta Gall from Rawalpindi in The New York Times:

With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.

A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Today those Taliban forces are battling his onetime mentor, the United States, and Western officials say Colonel Imam has continued to train, recruit and finance the insurgents. Along with a number of other retired Pakistani intelligence officials, they say, he has helped the Taliban stage a remarkable comeback since 2006.

In two recent interviews with The New York Times, Colonel Imam denied that. But he remains a vocal advocate of the Taliban, and his views reveal the sympathies that have long run deep in the ranks of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. More:

Taking on the Taliban

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on March 3, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Books, Pakistan and Terrorism
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Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs. Back in the day, Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s account of his high-level relations with Pakistani intelligence.

While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” More:

In Pakistan raid, Taliban chief was an extra prize

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on February 19, 2010
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From The New York Times:

Only after a careful process of identification did Pakistani and American officials realize they had captured Mullah Baradar himself, the man who had long overseen the Taliban insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan.

New details of the raid indicate that the arrest of the No. 2 Taliban leader was not necessarily the result of a new determination by Pakistan to go after the Taliban, or a bid to improve its strategic position in the region. Rather, it may be something more prosaic: “a lucky accident,” as one American official called it. “No one knew what they were getting,” he said.

Now the full impact of Mullah Baradar’s arrest will play out only in the weeks to come. More:

Rings of terror: A guide to Al Qaeda’s leadership

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on February 17, 2010
in Af-Pak and Terrorism
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Lydia Khalil in Foreign Policy:

1. Al Qaeda’s original leadership. The first group is made up of al Qaeda’s original leadership — and it is shriveling up like the roster of the local VFW. This crew still has a few big names: still-at-large figures like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Yahya al-Libi. But the original core of al Qaeda is shrinking fast. No one knows the exact composition of this highest-level group, nor its exact whereabouts. But the best intelligence suggests the members live somewhere in the vicinity of Pakistan.

2. Al Qaeda’s regional subsidiaries. Next, there are members of al Qaeda’s regional subsidiaries, local terrorist or insurgent groups that have declared allegiance to the group. This includes outfits such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ansar al-Sunnah in Iraq, al-Shabab in Somalia, and segments of the Taliban. These organizations do not take operational direction from al Qaeda’s core, but accept broad strategic guidance. They are often critical to al Qaeda’s efforts to expand its jihad throughout the globe. Al Qaeda, in turn, exploits these proxy groups, often mired in regional conflicts, to co-opt nationalist struggles into its broader narrative. Often, the senior leaders of these regional insurgent-cum-terrorist groups are in contact with original senior al Qaeda leadership. More:

An American admiral, a Pakistani general, and the ultimate anti-terror adventure

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on February 17, 2010
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Michael Crowley in The New Republic (via 3quarksdaily):

On August 26, 2008, Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, touched down for a secret meeting on an aircraft carrier stationed in the Indian Ocean. The topic: Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The summit had been arranged the previous month. Mullen had grown anxious about the rising danger from Pakistan’s tribal areas, which Islamic militants were using as a base from which to strike American troops in Afghanistan and to plot terrorist attacks against the United States. He flew to Islamabad to see the country’s army chief of staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Kayani is Pakistan’s most important general, commanding its 550,000-man army. By some accounts, he is also the ultimate source of power in a militarized society that reveres its generals more than its politicians. Mullen had been blunt with Kayani: The United States needed Pakistan’s army to take on the militants flourishing along the border, he said. The days of Pakistan looking the other way–cutting deals and playing double games with the radicals–had to end.

It was hardly a painless request; the Pakistani military is organized for warfare against its arch-nemesis India, and many of its mid-level officers are sympathetic to the Taliban and, at best, wary of the United States. More:

Kabul makeover

Published
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on February 11, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Fashion, Society, Terrorism and Women
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Reality-TV shows like Afghan Model are rewiring Afghan culture—for better and for worse. Kim Barker in The Atlantic:

Anita Khalwat wears heavy makeup, fake eyelashes, and a green spangly head scarf, loose dress, and pants fit for an Afghan wedding. But she’s no bride. She’s a warrior in heels and metallic nail polish, preparing to appear on Afghan Model, a new TV show that aims to find the top fashion star in a war-torn nation where neither of the two main languages has a word for “model,” and where threats by the TV-hating, women-loathing Taliban have turned an appearance before the cameras on a rickety, rainbow-lit white stage into a political statement.

“Hide your hair today,” one judge, Hozair Amiri, tells Khalwat before a recent taping. “Please.”

Khalwat, her green head scarf showing off a good part of her highlighted brown hair, looks at Amiri almost fiercely. With less than perfectly white teeth, a generous nose, an average body, and a hip thrust more fitting for a hockey rink than for a runway, the 23-year-old Khalwat would never make the tryouts for America’s Next Top Model, the Tyra Banks vehicle that Afghan Model tries to emulate. More:

Understanding Afghan tribes

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on February 1, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Culture, Society and Terrorism
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From The New York Times:

The Afghan leader’s hat

Published
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on January 27, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Culture, Design, Fashion, Leaders and Politics
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From the New York Times:

Known as a karakul hat, and made of the pelt of fetal or newborn lambs of the karakul breed of sheep, traditionally it was something worn by Tajiks and Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan. When Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun from the turban-wearing south, took office in 2002, the karakul hat was part of his attempt to devise a wardrobe that was Afghan rather than ethnic or regional.

It was a move widely praised at the time, in Afghanistan and abroad. The American designer Tom Ford called the Afghan president “the chicest man on the planet.” Afghans looking for national symbols after decades of ethnic strife inspired a brisk trade in the hats, made of lambskins from Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and fashioned by Kabul’s hatters, whose shops lined both sides of Shah-e-do Shamshera Wali Road.

Now, a tainted presidential election later, and with efforts to make a truly multiethnic government foundering, the sheen is off the shimmery fur headwear.

Young men no longer wear it; Mr. Karzai’s opponent in the aborted election runoff, Abdullah Abdullah, a northerner, preferred a hatless suit-and-tie ensemble. All but 12 of the hatters shops have closed on Shamshera Road, also famous for its shrine covered in pigeons. Those remaining say they are lucky to sell a hat a day. More:

My Life with the Taliban

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on January 25, 2010
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Abdul Salam Zaeef was a founder of the Taliban and his memoir, My Life with the Taliban, offers a fascinating if dispiriting insight into the movement. From The Telegraph:

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founder of the Taliban in 1994 and a minister during its short-lived regime, has much to say about the wars in Afghanistan and the roles he has played in them. As a teenage refugee from the Soviet invasion, he joined the mujahideen, and a few years later was fighting alongside Mullah Omar when the future Taliban leader lost an eye.

He has written a fascinating account of his own remarkable life which gives real insight into why the Taliban was formed, what motivates it, and what it is now trying to achieve. It is what he has to say about hopes of ending the current war, however, that will be of most interest to the spooks and diplomats in Kabul, Washington and London; they will have been hoping that Mullah Zaeef would point the way towards a negotiated end to the fighting. But he does not, and what he has to say suggests that ending the bloodshed could prove extremely difficult, if possible at all. More:

Politics, Karachi style

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on January 23, 2010
in Pakistan
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From Foreign Policy:

Two days ago, armed Sindhi and Pashtun activists exchanged tit-for-tat murders in the middle class Gulistan-e Jauhar area. Since the start of this year, targeted killings have claimed the lives of over 41 political workers. And in the last six months of 2009, there were 256 political assassinations in the city, according to Pakistan’s interior ministry.

An uptake in ethnic and political violence in Karachi is cause for concern for the prospects for Pakistan’s political stability and national cohesion. Karachi is a microcosm of Pakistan as virtually all of its ethnic groups and power brokers are represented there.

Massive civil unrest in Karachi is an indicator of the strength of centrifugal tendencies inside multi-ethnic Pakistan, which has historically been deeply challenged in managing its diversity. More:

Taliban may be descended from Jews

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on January 17, 2010
in Science
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Click here to watch part 2 and here for part 3

The ethnic group at the heart of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan may descended from their Jewish enemy, according to researchers in India. Dean Nelson in the London Telegraph:

Experts at Mumbai’s National Institute of Immunohaematology believe Pashtuns could be one of the ten “Lost Tribes of Israel”.

The Israeli government is funding a genetic study to establish if there is any proof of the link.

An Indian geneticist has taken blood samples from the Pashtun Afridi tribe in Lucknow, Northern India, to Israel where she will spend the next 12 months comparing DNA with samples with those of Israeli Jews.

The samples were taken in Lucknow’s Malihabad area because it was regarded as the only place safe enough to conduct such a controversial project for Muslims.

Shanaz Ali a senior research fellow, will lead the study at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Tel Aviv. More:

Bin Laden: Digital mug shot

Published
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on January 15, 2010
in Terrorism
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[Digitally enhanced photo of Osama bin-Laden released by the US Department ofDefense and Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] which shows an age-progression imageof Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden. Click here]

From The Times:

Osama bin Laden has aged a little since he was last seen in September 2007 but has put on little or no weight in the arid surroundings of the Afghan-Pakistani border — that, at least, is the assumption made by FBI forensic artists as the agency continues its relentless search for the al-Qaeda leader.

Digitally enhanced photographs have been released showing how he might look today; one in his traditional outfit, the other showing him with trimmed beard and Western clothing.

The ”age-progression images” were produced in the latest effiort to find the elusive al-Qaeda leader. FBI forensic artists modified bin Laden’s facial features to show what they might look like today. More:

Growing up bin Laden

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on January 12, 2010
in Books and Terrorism
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In The National, a review of a new memoir of Osama bin Laden by his wife and son, “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” by Jean Sasson, Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden:

“I remember staring into his kindly eyes, tartly thinking to myself that my cousin was shyer than a virgin under the veil.” Thus Najwa Ghanem recalls a meeting with 16-year old Osama bin Laden shortly before she became his first wife: “My life progressed from childhood into adulthood by the end of that evening. I was a married woman in every way.”

It’s anyone’s guess how much money has gone into the quest for information about Osama bin Laden since he rose to prominence in the mid-1990s. Now, for less than Dh100, we can get details on his personal life that are more reliable than all previous works combined. The publication of Growing up bin Laden is astonishing, not because of its tame bedroom confessions, but because nobody in the bin Laden family has ever spoken publicly about Osama before. The development is so unlikely that one inevitably wonders: is this for real?

The sheer number of bin Laden biographies published in the past decade leaves room for doubt. A few of these books have been serious, such as Jonathan Randal’s Osama and Peter Bergen’s The Osama bin Laden I Know. However, the majority are filled with inaccuracies and in some cases sensationalist fabrications. In one dubious book, Adam Robinson wrote that bin Laden was an avid Arsenal FC supporter who regularly attended matches at Highbury stadium in the 1990s. In another, a woman named Kola Boof claimed – falsely, by most accounts – to have been raped by bin Laden in Morocco in 1996. And the fake rumour that bin Laden was a playboy in 1970s Beirut has proved remarkably persistent. More:

The terrorist mind

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on January 11, 2010
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Sarah Kershaw in The New York Times:

What moves people to kill themselves and innocent bystanders?

This mystery of the mind became an issue again in recent weeks as a suicide bomber in Afghanistan — a double agent — killed seven C.I.A. officers; a man plowed a truck full of explosives into a crowded playground in Pakistan, and a Nigerian man tried to blow himself up on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day.

Until recently, the psychology of terrorism had been largely theoretical. Finding actual subjects to study was daunting. But access to terrorists has increased and a nascent science is taking shape.

More former terrorists are speaking publicly about their experiences. Tens of thousands of terrorists are in “de-radicalization” programs around the globe, and they are being interviewed, counseled and subjected to psychological testing, offering the chance to collect real data on the subject. More:

Taliban — a risky ally in the war on polio

Published
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on January 10, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Conflict, Health and Terrorism
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From the Wall Street Journal:

Mehtar Lam, Afghanistan — Knocking on door after door, thousands of volunteers fan out every month across southern and eastern Afghanistan, vaccinating children against polio, a disease eradicated almost everywhere else in the world.

Usually, the volunteers — sent by the government and sponsored by United Nations agencies — bring a single-page letter requesting people to cooperate, “for the benefit of our next generations.” The letter’s signatory: Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed supreme leader of the Taliban.

“We always carry a copy,” says Dr. Attar Wafa, the chief of polio vaccinations in the insurgent-infested province of Laghman, much of which is a no-go area for government workers and foreigners.

The antipolio campaign brings together the Taliban, President Hamid Karzai’s central government, Unicef and the World Health Organization in an uneasy but functioning partnership — one that recognizes the reality of the insurgents’ stranglehold over large chunks of the country. More:

Waziristan: The last frontier

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on January 8, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Conflict, Culture, Pakistan, Politics and Terrorism
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From The Economist:

“YOU should enjoy this,” said a Pushtun from Waziristan, the most remote and radicalised of the tribal areas in North-West Pakistan that border Afghanistan, as he proffered a bottle of Scottish whisky. It was an excellent Sutherland single-malt; but the man was referring to the bottle’s more recent provenance, not its pedigree.

He had been given it by a fellow Waziristani working for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. This spy had received the illegal grog from an American CIA officer. Your correspondent’s friend returned homewards, Scotch in hand, driven by another Waziristani, who is also employed as a fixer by al-Qaeda.

Waziristan, home to 800,000 tribal Pushtuns, is a complicated place. It is the hinge that joins Pakistan and Afghanistan, geographically and strategically. Split into two administrative units, North and South Waziristan, it is largely run by the Taliban, with foreign jihadists among them. If Islamist terror has a headquarters, it is probably Waziristan.

For terrorists, its attraction is its fierce independence. More:

‘Democracy is the greatest revenge’

Published
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on December 28, 2009
in Pakistan and Terrorism
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Asif Ali Zardari, President of Pakistan, in the Wall Street Journal:

Two years ago the world stopped for me and for my children. Pakistan was shaken to its core and all but came apart. Women everywhere lost one of their greatest symbols of equality. And Islam, our great religion, lost its modern face.

On Dec. 27, 2007, my wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. She was the bravest person I have ever known, and the second anniversary of her death is an appropriate occasion to reflect upon what she achieved for our country, and how her legacy must be preserved against those who would return Pakistan to darkness.

Twice elected prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir had an immense impact. She stood up and defeated the forces of military dictatorship. She freed all political prisoners. She ended press censorship. She legalized trade and student unions, built 46,000 primary and secondary schools and appointed the first female judges in our history. And she showed the women of Pakistan and the world that they must accept no limits on their ability and opportunity to learn, to grow and to lead in modern society. More:

Decoding the New Taliban

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on December 22, 2009
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Steve Coll reviews “Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field” and “Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan” by Antonio Giustozzi. In The National:

If the American-led war in Afghanistan fails to contain the Taliban, it will not be for lack of resources or military talent; it will be because American leaders have failed to see and analyse the conflict’s diverse human terrain. Afghanistan may be known as a graveyard of empires but it is also a graveyard of generalisations. As the US Commanding General in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, pointed out in his pessimistic assessment of the war last summer, international forces operating in Afghanistan have “not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley”.

The present American approach, derived from counterinsurgency doctrine, now presumes that political and economic tactics to pacify the Taliban will prove more effective than military force. But such a politics-first strategy, premised on forging a path toward negotiations with at least some Taliban elements, will require sharp eyesight about the Taliban’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as its place in Afghanistan’s social, tribal and cultural topography. More:

David Headley: A terror suspect’s life of contradictions

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on December 12, 2009
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From the Wall Street Journal:

CHICAGO: Federal authorities allege David Headley is a terrorist. Joy Tomme knew him as a ladies’ man.

“Girls fell on their faces for him,” said Ms. Tomme, who worked the day shift in 1984 at one of two Philadelphia bars owned by Mr. Headley’s mother. Mr. Headley worked nights and still went by his given name, Daood Gilani.

Ms. Tomme, now a 78-year-old writer, said she was surprised during a visit to his apartment. “I thought it was going to be a love-nest,” she said. Instead, she saw posters of anti-capitalistic slogans and Islamic men bearing weapons.

Still tall and fit, the 49-year-old Mr. Headley is in custody, accused of helping coordinate the terrorist assault on Mumbai last year that killed more than 160 people. He is also accused of planning an attack on a Danish newspaper that had published unflattering cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. More:

Also in the Wall Street Journal:

How Daood Gilani became David Headley

1960: Daood Gilani is born in Washington, to a Pakistani father and an American mother. The family moves to Pakistan while he is an infant.

1970: After divorcing Daood’s father, Serrill Headley returns to U.S. and buys a bar in Philadelphia, which she renames the Khyber Pass.

1977: Serrill Headley brings Daood back from Pakistan, where he attended a military high school. He spends one semester at Valley Forge Military College. Then he lives above his mother’s bar and works there in the 1980s until it is sold. More:

5 US students linked to al Qaeda

One of the men, Ramy Zamzam, seemed just another harried dental student only days ago. The 22-year-old student at Washington’s Howard University was agonizing over big soccer matches in the Middle East.

On Nov. 28, days before landing in Pakistan, a friend posted a note on Mr. Zamzam’s Facebook page, joking about how much they had eaten on Thanksgiving: “I heard your parents had to buy a new scale after you stepped on it??”

“Me or you?” Mr. Zamzam wrote back. “You even packed some to take home!” More in WSJ

How to mend fences with Pakistan

Published
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on December 10, 2009
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Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, in the New York Times:

asif_ali_zardari4Now that President Obama has recommitted the United States to stand with Pakistan and Afghanistan in our common fight against terrorism, extremism and fanaticism, it would be useful for Americans and Pakistanis to consider what has brought us to this point — and what the conflict’s true endgame must be.

Despite the noise created by an often hyperactive press in Pakistan (an essential and preferable alternative to the censorship that prevailed during my country’s military dictatorships), and the doubts expressed in America, Pakistan’s democratically elected government is unambiguously on the right path toward establishing a moderate and modern nation.

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani and I are working closely with our national assembly and our military and intelligence agencies to defeat the Taliban insurgency and the Qaeda-backed campaign of terrorism. Simultaneously, we are pursuing policies that will re-establish Pakistan as a vibrant economic market and finally address the long-neglected weaknesses in our education, health, agriculture and energy sectors. This isn’t just rhetoric — it is an active policy with new budget priorities and a reoriented national mindset. More:

Also read in NYT: ‘Obama needs a ‘Plan B‘ by Anatol Lieven, a professor in the War Studies Department at King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation, and Maleeha Lodhi, senior fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center and a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington and London.

The war in Pashtunistan

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on December 6, 2009
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An intensifying war: NYT graphic

An intensifying war: NYT graphic

Scott Shane in the New York Times:

That land is not on any map, but it’s where leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban both hide. It straddles 1,000 miles of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistani border. It is inhabited by the ethnic Pashtuns, a fiercely independent people that number 12 million on the Afghan side and 27 million on the Pakistani side. They have a language (Pashto), an elaborate traditional code of legal and moral conduct (Pashtunwali), a habit of crossing the largely unmarked border at will, and a centuries-long history of foreign interventions that ended badly for the foreigners.

Whether Mr. Obama will have better luck there than President George W. Bush, the Soviet Politburo and British prime ministers back to the early 19th century remains to be seen. But it is there that the war will be fought, because it is there that the Taliban were spawned and where they now regroup, attack and find shelter, for themselves and their Qaeda guests. More:


The demons that haunt the Pakistanis

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on December 6, 2009
in Af-Pak and Pakistan
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Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times:

But there was something else, an anti-Americanism whose depth and intensity I could not fully grasp. So to find out where Pakistan’s head was, I sought help from one of the country’s top psychiatrists.

What I got was not so much an explanation as an illustration, in all its anger, of the embittered language in which a great many Pakistanis discuss their relationship with America — living proof of just how different America’s understanding of Pakistan is from its own view of itself.

“The real terrorists are not the men in turbans we see on Al Jazeera,” said the psychiatrist, Dr. Malik H. Mubbashar, vice chancellor of the University of Health Sciences in Lahore. “They are wearing Gucci suits and Brit hats. It’s your great country, Madam.”

I asked him to spell it out. “It’s coming from Americans, Jews and Indians,” he said. “It’s an axis of evil that’s being supervised by you people.” More:

Mumbai Massacre: Secrets of the Dead

Published
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asianwindow
on December 5, 2009
in Terrorism
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Watch this brilliant PBS documentary, Mumbai Massacre, in its Secrets of the Dead series:

India & Pakistan: case for common defence

Published
by
asianwindow
on November 28, 2009
in Conflict, India, Pakistan and Terrorism
. 2 Comments

This article by Pervez Hoodbhoy was published simultaneously today in Pakistan (Dawn) and India (The Hindu):

So, how can India protect itself from invaders across its western border and grave injury? Just as importantly, how can we in Pakistan assure that the fight against fanatics is not lost?

Let me make an apparently outrageous proposition: in the coming years, India’s best protection is likely to come from its traditional enemy, the Pakistan Army. Therefore, India ought to help now, not fight against it.

This may sound preposterous. After all, the two countries have fought three-and-a-half wars over six decades. During periods of excessive tension, they have growled at each other while meaningfully pointing towards their respective nuclear arsenals. Most recently, after heightened tensions following the Mumbai massacre, Pakistani troops were moved out of North West Frontier Province towards the eastern border. Baitullah Mehsud’s offer to jointly fight India was welcomed by the Pakistan Army. More:


Pakistan in 2010

Published
by
asianwindow
on November 21, 2009
in Economy, Pakistan and Terrorism
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From the Economist:

By its recent chaotic standards, Pakistan had quite a good 2009. Admittedly, more than 2m people were displaced by fighting between the army and Taliban militants. The economy was in the doldrums. And a threat of political crisis, pitting President Asif Zardari against his main rival, Nawaz Sharif, loomed. Yet his government, a coalition led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), looked stable. An injection of IMF cash—and a promise from America of an extra $1.5 billion a year—kept its creditors at bay. And the army, despite much suffering, won the biggest victories of a floundering eight-year campaign on its north-west frontier. Without catastrophic violence—an important assassination or a terrorist attack in India—Pakistan will be messy, but stable after this fashion, in 2010.

The army will also make a bit more progress against the militants. Goaded into action in early 2009, after the Taliban seized areas of North-West Frontier Province alarmingly close to Islamabad, it pushed them back ruthlessly. Compounding the Taliban’s troubles, their supreme leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who was responsible for a two-year suicide-bomb spree (and allegedly for the 2007 murder of Mr Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto), was killed by an American missile last August. And in October the army launched an assault on his former fief, in South Waziristan. Alas, it has shown no interest in pursuing members of the other Taliban, Afghanistan’s former rulers, who have found refuge in Pakistan. More:

The Karzai I Know

Published
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asianwindow
on November 19, 2009
in Afghanistan
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As Afghanistan’s president is inaugurated for his second term, author Christina Lamb (photo), his former neighbour, on his transformation from an affable bon vivant to a paranoid shut-in. From The Daily Beast:

christina-lambWhen Hamid Karzai is re-inaugurated as president today after one of the world’s dodgiest elections, everyone from Washington to Whitehall will be watching for some sign that he will clean up his act. If he doesn’t, many—including U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry—believe it will be well nigh impossible to defeat the Taliban, however many troops President Obama might ultimately decide to send.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has described the Karzai government as a “byword for corruption” and warned he will “forfeit” international support if he doesn’t improve. The Obama administration has given the same message and suggested a list of clean names they would like to see in the cabinet. More:

CIA says it gets its money’s worth from Pakistani spy agency

Published
by
asianwindow
on November 16, 2009
in Pakistan and Terrorism
. 0 Comments

Greg Miller in the New York Times:

The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan’s intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency’s annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.

The payments have triggered intense debate within the U.S. government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.

But U.S. officials have continued the funding because the ISI’s assistance is considered crucial: Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan’s tribal belt, where ISI informant networks are a primary source of intelligence. More: