Tag Archive for ‘Terrorism’ at Asian Window

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Tag Archive for 'Terrorism'

Opening up to the world and its evils

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on March 12, 2010

in Economy and India

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Akash Kapur in the New York Times:

Pondicherry: A dark wind blew into this sleepy, coastal town recently — it carried the threat of global terrorism, of bombs and gunmen and unprovoked attacks on soft targets.

On Feb. 13, people thought to be Islamic terrorists bombed a restaurant in the northern city of Pune, killing 17 people. Speculation followed that the location had been chosen for its popularity with Western tourists. The government warned that terrorists appeared to be targeting foreigners in India, and soon a specific advisory was issued for this former French colonial outpost, a popular tourist destination usually associated with yoga, spirituality and the quest for inner peace.

A team of commandos in combat gear was seen driving around town in a jeep, automatic rifles at the ready.

At the French Consulate, on the beach road, where middle-aged pensioners take their evening walks, security forces set up roadblocks and sandbags.

The police and extra security were evident at hotels and tourist attractions. In a depressingly familiar — yet in these parts, utterly new — routine, visitors were frisked, and bags were examined. More:

The terror of Bollywood

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on March 5, 2010

in Movies

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While American blockbusters shy away from Islamist villains, Indian films give them a showing. Arun Venugopal in the Wall Street Journal:

In Indian movies, the terrorist isn’t some veiled abstraction: He’s your brother (“Fiza,” 2000) or house guest (“Black and White,” 2008) or the woman you couldn’t live without (“Dil Se,” 1998). Their torment—over Kashmir, or U.S. foreign policy, or killings at the hands of Hindus in Gujarat—is writ large. When it cannot be expressed through dialogue, it’s expressed through song.

Over the top? Yes, some of these films definitely are. They’re movies with big, bold emotions, featuring characters who care openly about their cause, whether they’re extremists trying to destroy the country or vigilantes trying to save it (“A Wednesday!” 2008). Indian films tackle the big questions: What motivates someone to commit mass murder? Can a terrorist be reformed? And can even a suicide bomber love, or be loved? By contrast, even Hollywood’s most engaging efforts on the subject, like the TV show “24,” are more about plot and pacing and getting to the bomb in time.

Bollywood has the enormous advantage of cultural proximity. India contains a large Muslim community, people who are not just watching movies but quite often scripting them, composing their soundtracks and starring in them as well. Some stereotyping aside, to a far greater extent than Western filmmakers, Indian filmmakers know how to capture the Muslim experience and critique it. More:

A literary festival in Karachi

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on February 18, 2010

in Books and Pakistan

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Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

Karachi is Pakistan’s largest and most diverse city, frequently plagued by religious and political turmoil, and those headlines will not go away. This week it was in the spotlight when it was revealed that the Taliban’s military leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been seized by Pakistani and US operatives in a slum on the city’s edge.

But Hanif and his collaborators have a different vision of the city. Their venture means Karachi will become the latest in a number of Asian cities that host increasingly high-profile festivals, with best-selling authors participating in talks and discussions at locations ranging from Shanghai to the Sri Lankan port of Galle. One of the best known, held every January in Jaipur, is organised by the British historian William Dalrymple.

Indeed, the organisers of next month’s event in Karachi hit upon the idea after attending last year’s festival in Jaipur, which has itself highlighted a number of Pakistani writers. More:

My Name is Khan

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on February 1, 2010

in Movies

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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:

Pow! Wham! Ka-chow!

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on January 15, 2010

in Art, Books and Media

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From Raj Comics: Saviour of Mumbai, Doga tries to save the country from another 26/11. A note left by a dying terrorist.. A virus has been activated..All the SIM cards of a particular phone company would turn into an explosive if used between 8:36 to 9:36 p.m. on 26/11 this year.

From The National:

The inevitable outpouring of mainstream “26/11” cultural production has yet to occur (although the Bollywood director Ram Gopal Verma surveyed the Taj Hotel’s burnt shell for material for his next film), but the first signs are showing up – in comics. In November, Raj Comics published 26/11, a fantastical re-imagining of the three days during which 10 gunmen stormed two five-star hotels and the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station, killing 166 people in the process. Though Raj Comics does not publish circulation figures, the comics they publish are probably among the most widely read comic books in India. In an interview with Tehelka magazine, Sanjay Gupta, Raj’s founder and studio director, estimated their circulation at about 70,000 copies per standard issue.

Scripted in street Hindi, with the action laid out in busy, multi-frame pages, each Raj Comics instalment features one of a cast of a nine primary characters – including the half-man, half-snake Nagraj and the brawny, dog-mask wearing vigilante Doga – tackling challenges ripped from the headlines. Recent Raj plots recount the discovery of nine dead children in the house of an upper-middle class family in a Delhi suburb; a scandal involving the sale of contaminated blood to hospitals; and even the fate of an imaginary winner of Indian Idol.

In 26/11, the real-life Mumbai attacks are only a precursor to an international plot involving Russian arms dealers, Somali pirates, and a fictitious Pakistani terror group, the Lashkar e Aaka, that is determined to hijack the INS Viraat, India’s sole aircraft carrier. Nagraj and Doga clear the city’s besieged hotels with relative ease, only to discover an unholy international criminal nexus that threatens to destroy all of its residents. More:

Waziristan: The last frontier

Published

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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:

Obama’s quest for a Pakistan policy

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on November 6, 2009

in Afghanistan and Pakistan

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Mushahid Hussain in the News, Pakistan:

Hillary Clinton’s visit with a difference was probably the most significant event in Pakistan-American relations since the advent of President Barack Hussein Obama. She came, she saw, but while she did not quite conquer the “hearts and minds” of Pakistanis, Hillary at least earned their grudging admiration. She showed more guts than the bunkered-up Pakistan rulers, who refuse to leave the comfort and safety of their “5-star prisons” in Islamabad.

Unlike the aloof and abrasive Holbrooke, Hillary reached out to the “real” Pakistan. She got a peep into the emerging Pakistani society — dynamic, vibrant, outspoken and self-confident. She seemed taken aback, used as visiting high-level Americans are to a sanitised Islamabad, where the officially-certified truth of the fawning ruling elite links sycophancy and servility to their self-perpetuation.

A profile of this “new” Pakistan is instructive, with three key ingredients. First, while the “old” Pakistan was politically a “one-window operation” — monolithic and centrally-guided — today’s multiple power centres go beyond the military-security Establishment or the traditional political elite, and these now include the fiercely-independent media, an assertive civil society, confident young men and women with faith in their country’s future, and a free judiciary that for the first time is truly an autonomous player. More:

A school bus for Shamsia

Published

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on August 21, 2009

in Afghanistan

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Dexter Filkins, the author of “The Forever War,” in the New York Times Magazine:

Even before the men with acid came, the Mirwais Mena School for Girls was surrounded by enemies. It stood on the outskirts of Kandahar, barely 20 miles from the hometown of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder. Just down the road from the school, in an area known as Old Town, residents had built a shrine to Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban commander with the fiercest reputation, who made his name by massacring members of the Hazara minority. He was killed in an American-led operation in 2007. Also nearby sat the Sarposa Prison, where, in June 2008, Taliban fighters and suicide bombers attacked, freeing more than a thousand criminals and comrades. The area around the Mirwais Mena School is the Taliban heartland. Teaching girls to read was not something that would escape their notice. Across the country, the Taliban have made the destruction of schools, particularly schools for girls, a hallmark of their war.

The Mirwais Mena School – L-shaped, cement, two stories, with canvas tents donated by the United Nations – was built in 2004 with a grant from the Japanese government. A plaque out front gives the date; it hangs on the 10-foot-high cement wall built to shield the students. Kandahar’s Mirwais Mena neighborhood sits just off the national highway. A rutted mud path called Panjwai Road cuts through the center of the neighborhood and up an outcropping of bare rock that rises 500 feet. A single electrical wire runs into Mirwais Mena from a pole along the highway; no one can remember the last time it carried any current. More:

Eyewitness: Pakistan

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on July 12, 2009

in Books

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In the New York Times, Joshua Kurlantzick reviews “To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan,” by Nicholas Schmidle:

Taking office in January, Barack Obama promised a radically different vision of foreign policy from that of his predecessor. But on perhaps the most critical issue, the new king looks a lot like the old one. In Pakistan, President Obama has retained the Bush administration’s targeted drone missile attacks against suspected militants and may quietly be expanding the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert battle against jihadis along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

As Nicholas Schmidle, a contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Slate, reveals in a richly reported book based on his two years traveling across Pakistan, United States policy does not change because Pakistan, sadly, does not change. Birthed in 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the lawyer son of a rich merchant, the country remains in the grip of venal, feudal, wealthy politician-landlords like the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, for whom democracy means one vote one time, after which the victors go on to dominate indefinitely. Worse, greed and graft have led Islamabad’s ruling class to ignore large portions of the population, who remain illiterate, and their incompetent governance has opened the door to Islamists’ offering average Pakistanis promises that the first Mayor Daley would have recognized – safe and orderly streets – not through machine politics but through the brutal application of Shariah law. More:

Diversity before wicket

Published

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on July 12, 2009

in Cricket, Politics and Sport

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When Pakistani journalist Abid Shah visited Sri Lanka, everyone wanted to talk to him about the attack on their national cricket team in Lahore, and Shah began to see South Asia’s differences through the prism of the sport. From the National:

Something was wrong. The heat was there, the sun strong; the streets were hustle-bustle, the bazaars too; and clogging the roads were freewheeling three-wheeler taxis which in Pakistan I called rickshaws, but here are called tuc-tucs. Everything told me this was still South Asia, that Colombo was not very different from Lahore, that somehow our regional bond held. Yet, something was very different, and I was struggling to pinpoint it.

On the train, its carriages rattling as it hugged Sri Lanka’s western coast and chugged south, I fell into conversation with the man next to me. Arriva deSilva was a retired medical technician with spectacles, a short-sleeved shirt and wispy hair. He was a man of firm opinions, and he started grilling me about Pakistan with growing indignation.

Why, he asked, were so many Pakistanis illiterate, when Sri Lankans were so educated, when Sri Lanka boasted a literacy rate above 90 per cent? How could a democracy work with so many illiterate people?

It was not, I assured him, because Sri Lankans ate so much fish, but because of Pakistan’s feudal history, because of its unstable dictatorships and its ingrained class system. This was unacceptable to deSilva; no wonder Pakistan was such a mess. More:

Kashmir: Paradise once again?

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on July 1, 2009

in India, Politics and Travel

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Dal Lake, Srinagar. Photo: shahbasharat / cc

The beauty of Kashmir has been shunned by tourists in fear of terrorism, and kidnapping. But that may be about to change. Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:

At Kashmir’s Royal Springs golf course, Javed Ahmed looked through the large glass windows of the clubhouse on to the manicured fairways.

The official was understandably proud; the course has been voted the best in India and one of the finest in the region. The fifth hole, which looks out across lakes to the mosques of the Srinagar’s old quarter, is especially famed. Part of his job is to promote the course to the world, to show there’s another side to the Kashmir of newspaper headlines. “We are trying to get the tourists to come,” said Mr Ahmed. “This is one of the top 10 golf courses in the world. We want them to come and enjoy themselves.”

Barely an hour earlier, in a graveyard shaded by walnut trees, the body of Firdous Ali Dar was laid to rest. According to the police, Mr Dar had been making a bomb when it exploded, fatally injuring him. His body was wrapped in a white winding sheet before being covered in a red blanket. Blood seeped from his head.

Kashmir, long fought over by India, Pakistan, and Kashmiri “nationalists”, may be at a cross-roads. Twenty years after the start of a separatist insurgency and a subsequent military operation that has killed at least 70,000 people and turned this once-peaceful valley of fruit trees and farmland into one of the most militarised regions in the world, Kashmir may be poised to turn a corner in its battle between the Kashmir of old and the Kashmir of limitless potential. More:

Risking the Taliban to confront the deadliest of peaks, K2

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on June 28, 2009

in Sport and Technology

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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:

Why I left Pakistan to give birth in the U.S.

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on June 26, 2009

in Pakistan and Society

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Ayesha Javed Akram at DoubleX:

Lahore, Pakistan: When I saw two pink lines slowly emerge on the home pregnancy kit I keep hidden in a cupboard in my bedroom, I sat down on the bathroom floor in shock. Within minutes, I realized the lines weren’t going to disappear no matter how intently I stared at them. Rushing to our bed, I shook my husband awake, placed my mouth close to his ear, and shrieked, “I’m pregnant.” And then, after a pause, “We can’t have the baby here.”

When other excited first parents would have become engrossed in preparing a nursery and shopping for baby clothes, my husband and I began getting our visas sorted out, making travel arrangements, and applying for time off from work. We were headed to America to have a baby.

As Pakistan’s military desperately fights Taliban in the north, and the rest of the country suffers through frequent suicide bombings and security threats, those with money have silently begun purchasing residences abroad. Others have started applying for Canadian or U.K. citizenship. And upper- and middle-class Pakistani mothers, desperate to provide their children with exit options, have started indulging in what’s commonly called birth tourism. Almost every pregnant Pakistani woman I know is scheduling a trip abroad in her sixth month of pregnancy, so that she can stay and deliver the baby in a country that allows your child to become a citizen if he or she is born there. As of 2009, only a handful of countries permit birth-right citizenship. The most prominent are Canada, Mexico, and the United States. More:

Whither Pakistan? A five-year forecast

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on June 18, 2009

in Pakistan

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Pervez Hoodbhoy at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Hoodbhoy is chairman of the physics department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad:

First, the bottom line: Pakistan will not break up; there will not be another military coup; the Taliban will not seize the presidency; Pakistan’s nuclear weapons will not go astray; and the Islamic sharia will not become the law of the land.

That’s the good news. It conflicts with opinions in the mainstream U.S. press, as well as with some in the Obama administration. For example, in March, David Kilcullen, a top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, declared that state collapse could occur within six months. This is highly improbable.

Now, the bad news: The clouds hanging over the future of Pakistan’s state and society are getting darker. Collapse isn’t impending, but there is a slow-burning fuse. While timescales cannot be mathematically forecast, the speed of societal decline has surprised many who have long warned that religious extremism is devouring Pakistan.

Here is how it all went down the hill: The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan devastated the Taliban. Many fighters were products of madrassas in Pakistan, and their trauma partly was shared by their erstwhile benefactors in the Pakistan military and intelligence. Recognizing that this force would remain important for maintaining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan–and keep the low-intensity war in Kashmir going–the army secretly welcomed them on Pakistani soil. Rebuilding and rearming was quick, especially as the United States tripped up in Afghanistan after a successful initial victory. Former President Pervez Musharraf’s strategy of running with the hares and hunting with hounds worked initially. But then U.S. demands to dump the Taliban became more insistent, and the Taliban also grew angry at this double game. As the army’s goals and tactics lost coherence, the Taliban advanced. More:

Battle Taliban with… Saffron?

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on June 14, 2009

in Afghanistan and Conflict

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From Wired news:

If you think the U.S. military isn’t serious about this soft power, hearts-and-minds stuff, it’s worth considering a recent report by an Army Human Terrain System research team on saffron.

That’s right: The U.S. Army commissioned a detailed, heavily footnoted 22-page report on saffron as a potential cash crop for Afghan farmers – and as a potential alternative to growing opium poppy. In a nice touch, the report even includes a recipe for sabzi pilau: a Persian rice dish with saffron, spinach and meat. Delicious!

Devising alternative livelihoods for Afghan farmers involved in the poppy trade is a serious business, and thus far no one has been able to come up with a viable and sustainable alternative. For Afghanistan’s impoverished farmers, opium is almost ideal: it is a high-value, low weight crop that requires minimal water; the paste collected during the harvest is easy to store and transport; and the buyers come to directly to you. More:

A head start for India’s next premier

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on May 14, 2009

in Indian elections 2009

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Aravind Adiga in Financial Times:

Visitors to India are dazzled by the chaos and unpredictability of life here, but those who observe its politics are bewildered by the opposite. Crises are visible from a distance and grow to size in full public view, yet still seem to catch the government by absolute surprise. We have to wait until May 16 – or perhaps even longer – to know whether India’s next prime minister will be the incumbent, Manmohan Singh, or his Hindu nationalist rival, L.K. Advani, or someone from a smaller party. But this much is already clear: the new prime minister will almost certainly have to deal with four emergencies in the course of his term.

Emergency One: Terrorism is a part of daily life in India now, but at some point during the new prime minister’s term there will be a spectacular strike – on a plane, temple, parliament or nuclear installation. When the strike takes place, it will be found that the local police did not have enough guns, walkie-talkies, training or manpower to fight back quickly. Co-ordination between local security agencies and elite commando forces in Delhi will prove to be poor. When the terrorists are overpowered, they will probably say that they received training and assistance from jihadists in Pakistan; they may even be Pakistani nationals. More:

The defiant poets’ society

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on April 26, 2009

in Afghanistan

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Christina Lamb returns to Afghanistan seven years after the fall of the Taliban and finds a country still rife with the persecution of females. In the Sunday Times:

On a stony hillside overlooking the ancient city of Herat stands the graveyard of its most illustrious citizens, where every Friday local people gather for picnics. But there is one tombstone at which many women stop and genuflect. It is that of a 25-year-old woman called Nadia Anjuman, and the flowery Persian engraving describes her as a poet who risked her life to keep writing under the Taliban. What it doesn’t say is that she was killed by her own husband.

Nadia’s death is seen by her friends and women across Afghanistan as symbolising the betrayal by the international community of all their promises to free Afghan women – given as one of the main reasons for ousting the Taliban regime 7Å years ago. “What happened to Nadia should make the world bow its head in shame,” says her friend and fellow writer Leila Razeqi. “Your prime ministers and presidents promised freedom to us Afghan women. That someone like Nadia is under the soil and her husband walks free should make you ask what is really going on here.”

I first came across Nadia Anjuman on a bitterly cold morning in November 2001, in the exuberant first few days after the fall of the Taliban, when everyone was shaving off beards, casting off burqas and flattening Coke cans with hammers to fashion satellite dishes to watch TV – for so long banned. I was walking along Cinema Street in Herat when a sign caught my eye. It said Herat Literary Society, and beyond was a path leading to a small white bungalow.

Caught on camera: Taliban shoot couple dead for adultery

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on April 26, 2009

in Society

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Click on the image to see the video at the Telegraph site. Warning: contains distressing footage

Saeed Shah in the Telegraph, UK:

Their deaths were squalid, riddled with bullets in a field near their home by Taliban gunmen as the execution was captured on a mobile telephone.

In footage which is being watched with horror by Pakistanis, the couple try to flee when they realise what is about to happen. But a gunman casually shoots the man and then the woman in the back with a burst of gunfire, leaving them bleeding in the dirt.

Moments later, when others in the execution party shout out that they are still alive, he returns to coldly finish them with a few more rounds.

Their “crime” was an alleged affair in their remote mountain village controlled by militants in an area that was only recently under the government’s sway. It was the kind of barbarity that has become increasingly familiar across Pakistan as the Taliban tide has spread. More:

Inside the Taliban’s ‘grave error’

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on April 26, 2009

in Afghanistan and Pakistan

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From MSNBC [via 3quarksdaily]:

Taliban Commander Fateh in Buner, Pakistan.

“The Taliban finally made a grave error,” said Javed Siddiq, editor of the influential Urdu language daily Nawa-e-Waqt. “Once they challenged Pakistan’s constitution as un-Islamic, Islamic scholars and the Pakistani people no longer saw them as the self-styled defenders of Islam against western infidels – but infidels themselves who want to dismantle the Pakistani state.”

Siddiq said that challenging the constitution was a wrong step and believes it has backfired. Pakistan’s constitution was carefully forged by a board of Islamic scholars in 1973 – every tenet was crafted to make sure it conformed to the principals of Islam.

“Now, all the different sects of the Sunni and Shiite, the religious scholars, the army, the politicians and every Pakistani is against the Taliban,” Siddiq said. “They have lost.” More: [Photo: NBC News]

The criminals running the Af-Pak border

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on April 24, 2009

in Afghanistan

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Gretchen Peters, author of the forthcoming “Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda,” at Foreign Policy:

In the last eight years, the Afghan Taliban have greatly expanded their illicit activities, morphing into a force more violent and ruthless than when they were in power from 1996 to 2001 and building up an economic empire worth almost half a billion dollars. Their activities are diverse: In some parts of the south, they collaborate with drug traffickers to dictate poppy output. They provide armed protection for opium convoys leaving Afghanistan’s farm areas and protect heroin labs along the Pakistan border. In addition, they work with kidnapping rings that have snared diplomats, journalists, U.S. contractors, and wealthy local businessmen. They cooperate with gunrunners, human traffickers, and the smuggling gangs that illegally export millions of dollars worth of Afghan antiquities.

They also extort monthly payments from legal Afghan businesses, terrorizing village shopkeepers and even nationwide cellphone providers, attacking their homes and premises if they don’t comply. District-level Taliban commanders collect fees as high as $250 per truck passing through their control zones from import-export firms and trucking companies, even “taxing” the tankers carrying jet fuel to NATO air bases in Kandahar and Bagram. More:

U.S. experts: Pakistan on course to become Islamist state

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on April 20, 2009

in Pakistan

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Jonathan S. Landay at McClatchy [via 3quarksdaily]:

A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there’s little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan’s terrorist haven did before 9/11.

“It’s a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution,” said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

Pakistan’s fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the U.S.-led effort to pacify Afghanistan; and for the security of India, the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia, the U.S. and its allies.

Inside Kasab’s Mumbai courtroom

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on April 17, 2009

in India

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Ajmal Amir Kasab, the face of the Mumbai attacks.

Geeta Anand attends the trial of the Mumbai terrorist. In the Wall Street Journal:

The most impressive thing about the start of the trial of the lone gunman captured in the Mumbai terror attacks was the security.

On Wednesday, it was an orderly, impressive show of force by a sea of khaki-wearing state police and assault-rifle carrying border patrol officers. They filled the streets, corridors and windows in and around Mumbai’s Arthur Road jail in the city center.

Journalists, court stenographers and lawyers were frisked three different times as they made their way down the long alleyway from the street to the bomb-proof courtroom built solely for the trial of 21-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Kasab.

Along the way, we were all stripped of our handbags, mobile phones and even our pens, which police stored in numbered plastic bags. Police handed each of us a single candy-cane colored ballpoint pen to replace the ones that had been temporarily apprehended.

Pakistan: One step forward, marching to the brink

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on April 17, 2009

in Pakistan

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Karachi-based economist and political analyst Haris Gazdar says in the Economic and Political Weekly that “President Zardari’s bungling and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif’s irrational ambitions brought a welcome relief to the jihadi apparatus at the precise moment when the noose around it looked like tightening.”

Strategic affairs analyst and deputy editor at The Hindu, Siddharth Varadarajan, says he agrees with Gazdar’s “compelling if contrarian assessment of the ‘revolutionary movement’ led by the lawyers and Nawaz Sharif, its implications and consequences for the power of the military and the growing threat posed by the Taliban.”

Gazdar’s article in EPW was edited down from a longer piece by him which Siddharth has on his blog, Reality, one bite at a time:

Beyond the Sharif-Zardari tussle, political parties collectively lost ground to other forces. The most obvious gainer is the military which as guarantor occupied a dominant position with respect to both parties. We wait to see what its pound of flesh will be. The lawyers and the “restored” judges too might feel that they have emerged as an autonomous power centre. But for all the talk of the rule of law the judges are unlikely to challenge the de facto power of the military.

The “independent” electronic media which continued its denial chorus, emerged as another power centre. Regardless of whether the rightwing domination of the electronic media is choreographed or genuine, the effect is the same. A minority opinion, if measured in terms of electoral arithmetic, is projected as the national view. This view is defensive about jihadi militancy, hostile to good relations with Afghanistan and India, and prickly about any discussion of nuclear proliferation — all the elements that led Pakistan to be labelled “the world’s migraine”. More:

How many steps from my 37 lashes?

Published

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on April 9, 2009

in Pakistan

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Huma Yusuf, features editor at Dawn, in The Indian Express:

Pakistanis are increasingly acknowledging that the war on terror is a war within, a war for us to fight, and a war that we might yet lose. Recent terrorist attacks have targeted Pakistanis on Pakistani soil, and with each assault, death tolls rise, the numbers of wounded soar, and the arbitrariness of the targets overwhelms. In Manawan, 13 were killed in an assault on a police academy. In Jamrud, a suicide bombing during Friday prayers killed 70 people and left 125 injured. In Dera Ismail Khan, an attack on a funeral procession killed 32 and left over 145 people injured. In Islamabad, what should have been the safest spot in the heart of the city – the barracks of the Diplomatic Protection Department – was targeted by a suicide bomber who left eight people dead. And in Chakwal, a formerly peaceful Punjabi district, a suicide attack at a Shia mosque killed 26 people and injured dozens – stoking sectarian tensions where previously there were none.

More:‘

My fanatic versus your fanatic’

Jawed Naqvi in Dawn:

THE flogging of a young girl in Swat by the so-called good Taliban has outraged civil society in Pakistan and elsewhere. However, only last month, a 75-year-old Arab widow was reportedly handed a similar punishment by a Saudi court.

Khamisa Sawadi, a Syrian who was married to a Saudi, was sentenced to 40 lashes for ‘mingling’ with two young men who were not her immediate relatives.

The two men, including one who was Mrs Sawadi’s late husband’s nephew, were evidently bringing her bread. They were also found guilty and sentenced to prison terms and lashes.

Why do we look the other way instead of confronting our double standards? Why does the image of barbarism in the case of the Taliban receive greater urgency and instil more palpable outrage than the scandalous happenings in Saudi Arabia, for example?

Baitullah Mehsud: Who is he?

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on April 1, 2009

in Afghanistan and Pakistan

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Imran Lalani and Qurat ul ain Siddiqui at Dawn:

Baitullah Mehsud, the man who claimed responsibility for the attack on a police training academy in Manawan (on the outskirts of Lahore) on March 30, is a veteran of the anti-Soviet ‘jihad’ of the 1990s, and has emerged to become the top Taliban commander in Pakistan. He claims to enjoy a ‘good relationship’ with the Afghan Taliban’s top most commander Mullah Omar. In addition to directly controlling sizeable militias who have waged overt war with Pakistani security forces in Waziristan, Baitullah has also been blamed for a number of terrorist attacks in the rest of the country, including the assassination of former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto. However, despite all of his exploits, he remains elusive and shrouded in mystery. More:

From Jane’s:

Baitullah Mehsud is a Pashtun from the Shabikhel sub-tribe of the Mehsud tribe. He was born in the early 1970s in a village called Landi Dhok in the Bannu region of the North West Frontier Province, which is some distance from the Mehsud tribe’s strongholds in South Waziristan.

With a reputation based on his record as a fearless fighter willing to die for the cause, Baitullah’s lack of a religious title has not held him back. Although he is the most powerful militant commander in Pakistan, he remains a shadowy figure with perhaps a larger-than-life reputation.

Such was Baitullah influence that the government signed a peace deal with him at Srarogha in February 2005. Under the terms of the agreement, the army withdrew from the areas controlled by Baitullah and agreed to deploy only paramilitary Frontier Corps personnel – who are drawn from the Pashtun tribes – at the five forts there. In return, Baitullah agreed not to harbour foreign militants, attack government officials or block development projects. More:

Lahore rampage shows reach of militants

Published

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on March 31, 2009

in Pakistan

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From The New York Times:

MANAWAN, Pakistan -- The attackers hopped over a crumbling brick wall, wearing backpacks and belts with dangling grenades. They were young and wore beards, and by 7:30 a.m. on Monday, they were firing automatic weapons into an unarmed crowd of young police recruits.

Pakistan’s most populous province, Punjab, came under attack for the second time this month. This time, militants hit several hundred police cadets caught off guard during a morning drill at their academy in this village near Lahore, Punjab’s capital.

The attackers issued no demands but went on a rampage, killing at least eight recruits and instructors. One attacker was killed in the siege that followed and, in a gory finale, three detonated suicide belts, killing themselves. More than 100 people were wounded. More:

And in The Guardian:

Pakistani Taliban claim responsibility

The Pakistani warlord Baitullah Mehsud today claimed responsibility for yesterday’s assault on the police training academy in Lahore.

Mehsud leads the biggest faction of the Pakistani Taliban and is based in the lawless South Waziristan tribal region, which borders Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, the US put a $5m (£3.4m) bounty on his head, describing him as key commander of al-Qaida.

There was also a rival claim for the attack, from a little-known group, Fedayeen al-Islam, which took responsibility for the bombing of the Marriott hotel in the capital, Islamabad, last September.

However, Mehsud’s proclamation of guilt, which tallies with the initial government investigation, is likely to be the one taken most seriously.

A change won’t come

Published

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on March 27, 2009

in Conflict and India

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Four months after the terror attacks on Mumbai, Naresh Fernandes takes a walk around the city to discover what lessons – if any – have been learnt since 26/11. From The National:

On the wall outside Nariman House, the Jewish centre in the crowded Colaba Market area in southern Mumbai in which a rabbi and his wife were among the hostages killed, the shrapnel indentations have been incorporated into a simple mural. Red circles have been painted around the dozens of bullet pockmarks. Under it a sign in Hindi and English says, “We condemn the 26-11-08 terror attacks.” Next to it is a large Pepsi logo. The building is still empty but on one recent evening children darted down the lane playing catch, scurrying past prams heading to the bakery at the corner.

Down the road at the popular tourist hangout Cafe Leopold, the bullet marks no longer elicit attention. Until it was pointed out to her, a tourist from Argentina who gave her name only as Estephania didn’t even notice that her table was right next to a mirror punctured neatly by a bullet. Farhang Jehani, one of the owners, said that the proprietors had decided against repairing the damage as a reminder of the evening when 10 people, including two members of his staff, fell to a spray of automatic weapon fire. He reopened for business approximately 90 hours later. He didn’t believe that he was being especially brave when he rolled up his shutters. “Life,” he said, “must go on.”

[Photo of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus by bettadesign; under Creative Commons license]

Namaste, Mumbai terrorist tells judge, with a smile

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on March 24, 2009

in Conflict and India

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From The Telegraph: The 21-year-old, dubbed the “baby-faced killer” after being caught on camera with an AK-47 on the night of November 26, flashed his smile at least thrice during his brief appearance before special court judge M.L. Tahilyani through video-conferencing from Arthur Road jail. The session ended with his remand being extended till next week.

Read the full transcript in The Indian Express:

Judge Tahilyani: Naam? (Name?)

Kasab: Mohammed Ajmal Mohammed Ameer Kasab (holding the mike on the table next to him)

Swati Sathe gestures him to keep the mike down

Judge: Kaha se ho? (Where are you from?)

Kasab: Pakistan.

Judge: Kaha se? (From where?)

Kasab: Punjab muluq. (Punjab state)

On the trail of Osama bin Laden

Published

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on March 12, 2009

in Science

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Geographers at the University of California, Los Angeles, believe that they have a good idea of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts – assuming he is still alive. Using scientific tools, they have zeroed in on three buildings in Parachinar in Pakistan. They have published their analysis in MIT International Review also submitted it to the FBI.

From Boston Globe: Using satellite images, the researchers traced concentric circles at 10 kilometer intervals around Tora Bora. The scientists then charted possible urban hideaways within a 20-kilometer radius of his former Afghan lair. Parachinar seemed most likely. It’s accessible by mountain trail from Tora Bora while offering urban anonymity, has dependable electricity (as measured by nighttime satellite images of brightness), and offers effective insulation against US troops – Pakistan’s tribal districts are notoriously hostile, both in terms of terrain and local temperament.

From Scientific American: They fingered the spots based on two theories on the distribution of biological species. One of them, the so-called distance-decay theory, states that the similarity and correlation between species at two locations decreases as the distance between them increases. As such, the geographers figure bin Laden can’t have gone far-he is believed to have fled Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region at the end of 2001-if he wished to remain on similar terrain in a familiar cultural environment.

More also in Popular Mechanics. Click here to download pdf

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