The two countries share everything including blood

Bin Laden raid debacle leaves Pakistan’s rulers scrambling

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ISLAMABAD— May 5^th 2011...As the world’s press continued to buzz around Osama bin Laden’s hideout, the real action in Pakistan was taking place on a military base on the outskirts of the beleaguered country’s capital.

Four-star general Ashfaq Kayani, chief of Pakistan’s army, convened a special corps commanders meeting Thursday, a strategy session for some 18 to 20 three-star generals and their top staffers.

His agenda: crafting a response to the storm of criticism levelled at Pakistan’s army and intelligence agencies following Monday’s raid by U.S. Special Forces.  

Rick WestheadSouth Asia Bureau

Ironically ... As the fact stands  Pakistan was the favoured protégé of United States .......At the end of the Second World War, the United States had to decide on the world order it wanted as victors......Part of its game plan was ....what to do about two vast just partitioned, poor, densely populated countries in Asian subcontinent.

America chooses one of the countries and became its benefactor.

 Over the decades, it poured billions of dollars into that country’s economy, training and equipping its military and its intelligence services.

The stated goal is to create a reliable ally with strong institutions and modern, vigorous democracy.

 The other country, meanwhile, is spurned because it forges alliances with America’s enemies......

USSR...And becomes the torch bearer for the consortium of Non-Aligned Countries.

The country not chosen was India.....paradoxical as it may seem India goes on become what Pakistan could not.

The main beneficiary of U.S. largesse was the Pakistani military, it has never won a war, but, according to “Military Inc.,” by Ayesha Siddiqa, it has done very well in its investments: hotels, real estate, and shopping malls. Such entrepreneurship, however corrupt, fills a gap, as Pakistan’s economy is now almost entirely dependent on American taxpayers. In a country of a hundred and eighty million people, fewer than two million citizens pay taxes, and Pakistan’s leaders are doing little to change the situation. In Karachi, the financial capital, the government recently inaugurated a program to appoint eunuchs as tax collectors. Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_wright#ixzz1Tn8C9gbf

The Pakistani daily, The Daily Times (June 17) carried a commentary titled “Pakistan needs a people’s revolution”, castigating  the “rot” in the country where the militant Islamists were taking Pakistan back to the dark ages and the country’s political elite including the ruling PPP dare not oppose them. People who dared to voice opposition, from Punjab Governor Salman Taseer to journalist  Saleem Shahzad,  are silenced. The commentary was exasperated over Zia-ul-Haq’s  Blasphemy  Law,  a draconian and archaic statute, which the so-called liberal leaders failed to eradicate in fear of retribution from the radical Islamists.   

Can this rot be stemmed by the new resurgence in the Pakistani civil society?

Hopefully, maybe....The India stereotype appears to be under scrutiny.

In an article in The Daily Times (June 14) Sheikh Asad Rahman, in his commentary 

 Sheikh Asad Rahman,

“Myths versus realities” quotes Air Marshal (Rtd) Asghar Khan ’s recent talk at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI).

The redoubtable former Air Chief said that all the four wars with India were started by Pakistan, and the Maharaja of Kashmir decided to accede to India under the “Indian States Protocol” in 1948 when Khan  Abdul  Qayyum Khan  sent the tribal Lashkars to Kashmir who looted and raped the Kashmiris. In effect, the Air Marshal put the Kashmir issue at rest. It was settled in 1948 that Kashmir had acceded to India according to the rules set by the British and agreed to by both Pakistan and India.  

      

 Myths versus realities —Analysis by Sheikh Asad Rahman

The Abbottabad Osama incident where a foreign power has been able to ingress deep into a military cantonment area has thrown up many questions of the competence of our various military

and civilian intelligence agencies. Conspiracy theories abound.

Air Marshal (retd) Asghar Khan

Some years ago I wrote, “In the early formative years Pakistan needed the military for defending its borders but now the military needs the country for its own existence.” I have surprised myself with this prophetic analysis because the military is proving my contention as an irrefutable reality. The other day I heard Air Marshal (retd) Asghar Khan’s talk at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI). He proved without doubt that India never attacked Pakistan, as we have been given to believe; instead, it was Pakistan that always initiated all four wars. According to him the Maharaja had not acceded to India till after Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan sent the tribal lashkars into Kashmir to force him to accede to Pakistan in 1948. The Maharaja had made representation to the Liaquat Ali government under the Indian states protocol but was not entertained due to the preoccupation and deteriorating health of Jinnah. In the environs of Srinagar the lashkars began a spree of rape, looting and returning to their respective areas with truckloads of loot. The Maharaja escaped to Jammu and signed the accession papers with India. That was the time the Indian army was flown into Kashmir.

Lal Bahadur And Ayub Khan

In 1965 Ayub Khan first tested our military capability in the Rann of Kutch, a short limited skirmish over the Sir Creek unmarked border even today. According to Asghar Khan, he retired from the Air Force in August 1965 and was appointed Chairman PIA. On reading in the newspaper that our tanks had entered the Chamb-Jaurian area of Jammu he immediately went to Ayub and asked him if Pakistan was going to war over Kashmir and did he realise that the Indians would react and attack in Punjab? Ayub replied that the foreign ministry (Zulfikar Bhutto) had assured him that the Indians would not

On September 3, Asghar Khan visited the Ops room at Air Headquarters and found officers running this way and that and knew that the war was about to start across the Punjab border. I personally remember that the Indian advance recon jeeps turned back from the Engineering University, Lahore, thinking that the lack of resistance was a trap on the morning of September 6. Little did they realise that the Pakistan Army was not even deployed as a defensive measure but sleeping in their barracks! The only resistance they faced was from a Rangers company deployed along the BRB canal, which held up the Indian attack till the army woke up and came to its rescue.

Surrender......And Birth of Bangladesh

The 1971 war was also instigated by Pakistan when the military establishment in power at the time did not hand over power to the Awami League of Sheikh Mujib, while attacking the people of East Pakistan on their agitation against this injustice. It is alleged that three million people were killed, thousands of women raped and even babies brutally murdered. The Indian army was invited by the Awami League to save them from the genocide being perpetrated by the Pakistan Army. Instead of learning some basic political and strategic lessons from the infamous defeat and surrender of 90,000 Pakistani troops, the Pakistani military strategists seem to have only hardened their India enemy mindset. In the Kargil episode after suffering another defeat, bodies of the Light Infantry Regiment based in Gilgit were not acknowledged as Pakistani COAS (Musharraf) claimed that these were Kashmiri guerrilla fighters and not Pakistani soldiers. More soldiers sacrificed at the altar of the top brass’s political ambitions.

Kargil: A Debacle or A Lost Opportunity?

 On the day of Vijay Divas of Kargil, my question is who achieved what in Kargil

Gen. Musharraf would have been acquitted and punished for his misadventure that killed a lot of people


Nobody achieved nothing, but lot of people lost their loved ones


Let everybody understand that Generals, Politicians and Religious leaders sit in their comfortable chairs and flare up the emotions and kill innocents.

The 1948, 58, 62-68, 73-77 and the ongoing wars, extrajudicial murders in Balochistan can only be described as colonial repression by military conquest. Comparisons continue to be made between the East Pakistan (Bangladesh) conflict and the 63-year-old conflict in Balochistan. The genocide in East Pakistan was a concentrated campaign as it was against high concentrations of population centres and geographically confined, while in Balochistan the population is small and scattered over a vast barren, mountainous and desert area, thereby dictating different tactics to achieve the same ends, a gradual genocide of the Baloch.

One always thought that the military academies who receive recruits with basic intermediate qualifications impart graduate education, a BA degree on graduation, meaning all the BA subjects, military history, political, social sciences, economics, languages, geography and other relevant subjects for professional soldiers. The recently appointed commandant at the Kakul Academy has changed the syllabus in a very interesting manner. He has in his wisdom stopped the teaching of political and social sciences and introduced Management Sciences for BBA and MBA to develop the future military officers into professional managers. Good idea, as the rapidly expanding military industrial and commercial empire will need managers and what better than to have them from their own ranks instead of hiring civilians.

The Abbottabad Osama incident where a foreign power has been able to ingress deep into a military cantonment area has thrown up many questions of the competence of our various military and civilian intelligence agencies. Conspiracy theories abound. The most plausible and somewhat verified from sources and residents close to the incident area seems to confirm the collusion theory. It is reported that an incident took place in Haripur some five to six years ago where ostensibly an Egyptian family of three women, a number of children and one or two men were involved in an altercation with police officials including shots being fired. An FIR was registered against them under section 302, etc, but within a few days was changed to some minor offences. The case was quickly decided with some financial penalties. The family was then moved to Abbottabad.

Neighbouring residents report that the Kakul Academy office lights were on till very late that night. When the choppers arrived and shooting started, many of them climbed their roofs and observed everything. The Pakistan Army arrived within three to five minutes and started pushing people into their homes. The choppers dropped the hit squads and flew to the Baloch Regiment grounds, waiting there to be called. It was in the attempt to pick up the squads that one of them malfunctioned and crashed. As soon as a relief chopper arrived to pick up the squad, which had remained behind to demolish the crashed chopper, and left, the Pakistan Army contingent moved in and secured the compound.

In the light of the tragic death of Saleem Shahzad for revealing infiltration of terrorists into the ranks of naval and military institutions, the story of Abbottabad makes more sense. The US was confident that Osama was there and put pressure on GHQ to cooperate or else face the consequences. GHQ, fearing a backlash from the TTP and al Qaeda, decided to collude but made it clear that they would deny knowledge. Again they miscalculated as the backlash came in the shape of the Mehran base, FC cadets and other attacks. Myths and reality do not mix.

The writer is Director Programmes Sungi Development Foundation. He can be reached at asad.rahman@sungi.org

Within the I.S.I., there is a secret organization known as the S Wing, which is largely composed of supposedly retired military and I.S.I. officers. “It doesn’t exist on paper,” a source close to the I.S.I. told me. The S Wing handles relations with radical elements. “If something happens, then they have deniability,” the source explained. If any group within the Pakistani military helped hide bin Laden, it was likely S Wing.

Eight days before Osama bin Laden was killed, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistani Army, went to the Kakul military academy in Abbottabad, less than a mile from the villa where bin Laden was living. “General Kayani told the cadets, ‘We have broken the backbone of the militants,’ ” Pir Zubair Shah, the reporter, told me. “But the backbone was right there.” Perhaps with a touch of theatre, Hamid Gul, the former I.S.I. chief, publicly expressed wonder that bin Laden was living in a city with three army regiments, less than a mile from an élite military academy, in a house that appeared to have been built expressly to protect him. Aside from the military, Gul told the Associated Press, “there is the local police, the Intelligence Bureau, Military Intelligence, the I.S.I. They all had a presence there.” 

Eliminating, or sharply reducing, military aid to Pakistan would have consequences, but they may not be the ones we fear. Diminishing the power of the military class would open up more room for civilian rule. Many Pakistanis are in favor of less U.S. aid; their slogan is “trade not aid.” In particular, Pakistani businessmen have long sought U.S. tax breaks for their textiles, which American manufacturers have resisted. Such a move would empower the civilian middle class.

Readmore http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_wright#ixzz1Tn96id1w

A fresh face is bringing new optimism to one of the oldest international spats. On her first visit to New Delhi, Pakistan’s new 34-year-old foreign minister said she is hopeful that a younger generation of Indians and Pakistanis can find peace.

“A new generation of Indians and Pakistanis will see a relationship that will hopefully be much different from the one that has been experienced in the last two decades,” said Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s youngest-ever foreign minister.

“A new generation of Indians and Pakistanis will see a relationship that will hopefully be much different from the one that has been experienced in the last two decades,” said Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s youngest-ever foreign minister.

One indication of that happening: Social-media interactions between the two countries are burgeoning. Facebook reports that their site is now logging more than 200,000 interactions between Indians and Pakistanis each day. That’s up from 70,000 a day in April.

 Despite Gen. Kayani’s “historic” vision that Pakistan does not have anything common with India in terms of history, religion and culture, the two countries share everything including blood.