Category Archives: Politics

Why does Pakistan support Jaish and Lakshar? [updated]

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I have a most un-mutinous confession to make – there are lots of things in the world I don’t understand, yet I still blog about them. One of these things is the Pakistani government’s continuing support of Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, two Pakistan based militant/terrorist groups that claim Kashmiri independence as their goal. As I mentioned earlier, the Pakistani government has a very soft policy towards these two organizations:

Some security analysts in Pakistan have been critical of the government’s seemingly soft stance in relation to Harkat and Jaish – wondering why they have not been dealt with as severely as some of the other groups. [BBC]

These two groups were implicated in the attack on the Indian Parliament that came just a few months after the 9/11 attacks in the USA:

The atrocity of 13 December [2001] when five terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament, killing eight officials and a gardener, has given New Delhi the high moral ground. New Delhi insists that the five were Pakistanis and belonged to two Pakistan-based terrorist groups – Jaish-e-Mohamed (Army of the Prophet Mohamed) and Lakshar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pious). Islamabad has denied the claim and refused to accept the bodies. [cite]

They’re also the only terrorist group linked with the first group of British bombers:

Not only is there no clear link between the two sets of suspects, there is no established link between either group and al-Qaeda or any other known terror network, say British officials. There are lots of tantalizing links back to Pakistan from the July 7 gang, three of whom had parents born there. When Shehzad Tanweer — who killed seven on a train near Aldgate station — and Mohammed Sidique Khan — who killed six at Edgware Road station — left Leeds to visit Pakistan in 2004, they were frequently seen with members and recruiters of the banned militant organizations Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, according to several people in Samundri, a town near the village where Tanweer stayed with his uncle. [cite]

Here’s the question – why does Musharraf continue to support these two groups, given the high costs involved?

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Were the bombers BBCDs?

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Around half the British bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 were of Pakistani origin, the other half of African or Caribbean origin. The NYT now spins the Pakistani group as victims of cultural confusion:

“They don’t know whether they’re Muslim or British or both…” They are alienated from their parents’ rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward… they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has.

‘Give me mango lassi and aloo gobi in every grocery store, or give me death’ (which they actually have in the UK, bless Sainsbury’s little heart). The sale of desi exotica and Apu on The Simpsons irritate thin, sunlight-deprived snarkidesis into penning high-class rants on blogs, like the class nerd hitting the football star with a rubber band sneak attack and then running like a coward. But did Apu push the 7/7 murderers over the edge?

It’s pretty silly when you put it that way, of course. And the UK has one of the richest desi diasporic subcultures anywhere, so there’s no lack of musicians, movie stars and models for teens to identify with. Naturally, it’s not about cultural chiseling. IMO the Beeston milieu boils down to three factors: the reverse psychology of teen rebellion, the in-your-face racism of working-class Britain and standard-issue criminality. The perversity of rebelling by being more conservative than your parents is by far the strangest one.

The second gen is much more demanding of their rights as Britons than their immigrant parents who just want to keep their heads down and earn a paycheck:

The British Raj officially ended on Aug. 15, 1947, but its relationship to its subjects did not. In the following decades men of the Indian subcontinent came to Britain en masse to supply cheap, unskilled labor for factories, foundries and, especially, textile mills in northern Britain…Mr. Hussain, now 54, worked in factories and mills, drove a taxi, and has run a corner minimart for 15 years… Integration was minimal, thanks to barriers of race and language, culture and religion. The migrants were the colonized who came to live among their former colonizers. “When we came, we were like servants,” Mr. Hussain said…

The children of the immigrants have shed the servility, and passivity, of their parents, Mr. Hussain said. They want their rights, even if they have to fight for them. This inspires both pride and unease in him… Arshad Chaudhry, an accountant and member of the Leeds Muslim Forum, sees it differently. “They were very timid,” he said of the first wave.

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Work an Hour

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Asha for Education is in the midst of its annual “Work an Hour” campaign. Seems like they are well short of their goal at the moment. Having worked in an NGO in India whose focus was also education for underprivileged children, I have a soft spot for this cause and thought I’d try and help out their campaign with a post.

What is work an hour?

Each year volunteers from around the world come together in a show of great human spirit, to help educate underprivileged children in India. Work An Hour, or WAH, as it is popularly known, is a simple concept. We ask you to symbolically contribute one hour of your time towards the cause of children’s education by donating an hour’s worth of your salary or more. The event symbolically begins on July 4, the American Independence Day, reaches an apex on August 15, the Indian Independence Day, and finally culminates on September 5, which is celebrated as Teachers’ Day in India.

How much should I donate?

You can donate any amount. We encourage you to donate an hour’s worth or more of your salary.

Where does the money go?

100% of all funds collected through Work an Hour go directly towards the selected projects. Keeping with Asha’s long-standing policy, Asha volunteers bear all administrative expenses.

If donating money isn’t your thing then consider volunteering your time for Asha or another similar organization. You can volunteer both here in the States and obviously in India. It is better than living in your parent’s basement while you figure out what you want to do with your life 🙂

The objectives of this group are:

-To provide education to underprivileged children in India.
-To encourage the formation of various local groups across the world to reach out to larger sections of the population.
-To support and cooperate with persons and groups already engaged in similar activities.
-To raise the required human and other resources to achieve the group objectives.
-To provide opportunities to individuals living outside India who wish to participate in Asha activities in India.
-To address, whenever possible, other issues affecting human life such as health care, environment, socio-economic aspects and women’s issues.

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Too Little Too Late

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The BBC reports that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has ordered all foreign students, some 1,400 pupils, to leave the country’s madrassas.

Madrassas have been in the spotlight after one of the London bombers was reported to have studied at one. The move against foreigners at the madrassas also applies to Pakistanis holding dual nationality, the AFP news agency reports. Gen Musharraf also told journalists that action would be taken against any of the madrassas that did not register with the authorities. After the 11 September attacks on the United States the Pakistani government tightened the rules around madrassa visa applications, saying that the visas would become invalid once a student ceased to study at the school. [Link]

Four years after September 11th, this is a bit too little and too late. Sounds like Rumsfeld or Condoleezza must be applying the ‘camel clutch’ on him. Continue reading →

One step forward, two steps back

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Herr Musharraf, whom one commenter claims is our ‘best option,’ is reportedly training the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan:

Afghan officials allege that Taliban and allied fighters who fled to Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 are learning new, more lethal tactics from the Pakistani military at numerous training bases. “Pakistan is lying,” said Lt. Sayed Anwar, acting head of Afghanistan’s counter-terrorism department. “We have very correct reports from their areas. We have our intelligence agents inside Pakistan’s border as well… They say they are friends of Americans, and yet they order these people to kill Americans…” [Link]

Clearly Anwar hasn’t had any PR training — he has the balls to call a spade a spade. In contrast, newspapers always hasten to add the Pakistani military’s denial, injecting artificial ‘balance’ by spreading that threadbare lie.

Zulfiqar Ali, a Pakistani journalist who freelances for the Los Angeles Times, recently reported that at least some training camps that were closed on Musharraf’s orders have been reopened. The government denies that there are training camps. But Ali, who also writes for the Pakistani magazine the Herald, visited one camp and found armed militants with fresh recruits as young as 13 undergoing 18-day “ideological orientation” and weapons training. Several sources said 13 militant camps had been reactivated in the Mansehra region alone in the first week of May…

“Our transport fleet is back, electricity has been restored and the communications system is in place,” a militant guide reportedly boasted to Ali. The reported reopening of militant training camps in Pakistan coincides with the discovery of the high-tech bombs in Afghanistan. [Link]

The triggers consisted of long-range cordless phones attached with black electrical tape to electronic boxes… “These phones are Pakistani-made phones,” he said… “They have Pepsis in the mountains while I can’t find them here in the city,” Nooristani said. “That means they are well supported.” [Link]

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Gandhi Was Right

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September’s Atlantic magazine has a breakdown of how countries fared after the takedown of an authoritarian government.

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It is by now a truism that ousting an authoritarian regime is often far easier than sustaining freedom afterward. A recent study from the human-rights organization Freedom House argues that “people power,” rather than top-down reform or armed revolt, has the best chance of achieving that result. Researchers examined sixty-seven such political transitions over the past thirty-three years, and found that those countries in which regime change was brought about by nonviolent civic resistance were more likely to be “free” or “partly free” today than countries in which political elites alone had launched the transition or opposition groups had used violence to topple the government. Five of the forty-seven countries that experienced generally peaceful transitions are currently rated “not free,” compared with four of the twenty countries in which the opposition employed violence. As for Iraq’s future, the study offers no guide: only three of the transitions examined were driven by external interventions, with one state (Panama) currently rated “free,” one (Bosnia) “partly free,” and one (Cambodia) “not free.”

View the entire report “How Freedom Is Won: From Civic Resistance to Durable Democracy,” (pdf) here. Continue reading →

The Pakistan Border…. again

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One of my fav milbloggers – Belmont Club – takes up the ever so interesting story of “just WTF is going on in Waziristan?“. It’s got Mushie mad at Abizaid –

The Winds of Change reports that President Pervez Musharraf warned General John Abizaid against cross border operations into Pakistan. President Gen Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday warned Pakistan would not tolerate future violations of its frontiers and would thwart infiltration into its controlled areas on the pretext of war of terror. Talking to Gen Abizaid, the chief of US Central Command, who called on him at Army House in Rawalpindi, the president said Islamabad was offering every possible support and cooperation to the US and the international community for fighting terrorism and extremism, however it could not allow anyone to violate its borders under the pretext of anti-terror campaign.

And what’s driving the incursions – the frustrating search for Bin Laden –

Operation Enduring Freedom may have given the impression that Pakistan was the highway to Afghanistan, the reverse may be true. Ahmed Rashid wrote in the International Herald Tribune of the tantalizing view southeast: Gone are the days when U.S. officials said vaguely that bin Laden was somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA director, Porter Goss, have said that they know where bin Laden is and that he is not in Afghanistan – implying he is in Pakistan. Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Kabul who is now the U.S envoy in Baghdad, has been more blunt and said that bin Laden is in Pakistan.

And the brilliant irony of these forces carried to a certain logical ends –

by threatening the areas of weakest governance, organizations like Al Qaeda have driven those beleaguered states into the arms of the only power with means and mobility to come to their assistance. It would be the supreme irony if radical Islam’s lasting contribution to history turned out to be the establishment of a global American power.

Previous SM coverage – 1, and 2… Continue reading →

Tinted Tilly

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The August 1 issue of the New Yorker is la vie en sepia. It covers Charlie and the Chocolate Factory star Deep Roy, M.I.A.’s spinner Diplo and the Sri Lankan civil war. Roy is hilarious — I’ve never before seen an uncle in leather bellbottoms doing a KISS impersonation:

Inscrutable hybrids of Punjab and Marvin the Martian, their hair sculpted to resemble chocolate kisses, Roy’s Oompa Loompas are the film’s comic engine… As the Loompas, he sings, disco-dances, smashes guitars, and swims synchronically; he’s a chef, a barber, a shrink, a secretary, and exactly one hundred and twenty-one other things…

It took six months of fourteen-hour days to complete the filming of Roy’s four song-and-dance extravaganzas… Eugene Pidgeon, an actor and writer turned labor activist for dwarf performers [said]… “For every Deep Roy, there are a hundred and fifty of us who are forced to do wacked-out shit on ‘The Man Show…’ ” [Link]

Pop will eat itself:

[Wesley Pentz, aka Diplo] produced “Bucky Done Gun” for the British artist M.I.A.–it appears on her current album, “Arular”–and it consists in large part of chopped-up bits of a song called “Injeção,” by the Brazilian singer Deise Tigrona, which was recorded in da Matta’s studio. Both tracks incorporate a tiny sample of the horns from Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now,” the theme from “Rocky,” to create a stabbing, jittery effect that is both thrilling and irritating… “Bucky Done Gun” … has now been remixed by da Matta himself… [Link]

The baile funk infection spreads. All your remix are belong to us:

Pentz cued up his own remix of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” The song was already great–sharp-edged and minimalist–but Pentz had made it better, embellishing it with cantering, syncopated drums to create a swinging dance track. Under Stefani’s vocals, you could also hear snippets of baile funk–from “Feira de Acari,” a festive track that happens to have been produced by da Matta… [Link]

The Sri Lankan war article is not online yet, but it has a useful thumbnail summary of the war: The population split between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka is approximately 75%-25%, with Tamils concentrated in the north and the east of the island. Jealousy of the prosperous Tamil minority led to institutionalized discrimination: politicians reserved jobs and education for the majority and enshrined Sinhala and Buddhism as the country’s official language and religion. Tamils went from 50% of the medical and engineering students in the ’60s to 20% by the end of the ’70s. Discrimination against a prosperous minority is commonplace; in the Philippines, it’s erupted as a high rate of kidnapping of the ethnic Chinese, while we all know what happened to desis in Uganda under Idi Amin.

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Babbar Khalsa International “Roundup”

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jagtar singh hawara.jpgJuly has been a tough month. Besides the bombings in London, the shooting of an innocent man in London, the terrible bombing at a resort in Egypt, and the ongoing bombings occurring daily in Iraq, there have also been important developments involving terrorism that is home-grown to India.

The news is both good and bad. The good news is, Indian Express reports that the Punjab police have arrested more than 60 members of a Sikh militant group called Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), many of them with large caches of arms and explosives, including 53 kilograms of RDX and PETN (as specified here). The arrests took place mainly in Chandigarh and Delhi. The key arrest might be that of Jagtar Singh Hawara (pictured left; photo from Frontline), who masterminded the murder of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh some years ago. Hawara is clearly a brutal man bent on killing — a sort of criminal mastermind (he committed his first murder — of a Sikh Granthi — at the age of 15). He had escaped from a Chandigarh prison in February 2004, when he dug a 60 foot tunnel over several months that prison authorities claim they didn’t notice. He is, perhaps most importantly, the ringleader of BKI in India; we should all be glad this guy is behind bars again. Hopefully this time he will stay there.

The bad news is, there may be more terrorists as well as explosives out there. Since the BKI has been quiet since 1997-1998, when it initiated a bombing campaign in Punjab, Indian police hoped that the organization had gone defunct. Its current global leadership is based in Pakistan, where the leader, Wadhawa Singh is reportedly ailing. But the current arrests tell a different story. Not only is BKI not defunct, the police readily admit there are still known members as well as an alarming quantity of explosive material in India that has not been recovered. Continue reading →