Friday, October 22, 2010
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
I would however like to refute an assertion you made in the piece: I am one of the expat Pakistanis; Canadian to be exact - and represent the expats whose political mindset you aptly attempt to read in your piece.
I've been here in Canada for the past 8 years having left home at 17 . I am now a 25 yr old employed man with an engineering degree and a house mortgage . So in effect I am no different than the thousands of others across North America and Europe making their comfortable and cozy living abroad.
Having said that, I sure hope that I havent come across a political zealot or nut job of any political figure or party. I do hold my independent political views of our country and as you will see have done my share to attain those views. However within the parameters of those views I believe that you are being uttery obtuse by bracketing Imran Khan with with Pervez Musharraf. Even referring the former as a fringe politician.
In March of this year I had a calling - an awakening of sorts - and I decided to use my annual vacation - significant because you allude to its "waste" by us expats - to make a journey to Pakistan to be in the eye of the storm. Being single n all, I packed my bags and decided to join the long march. I am not a politician nor a heir of one: just an average joe, who deeply craved political activism, a movement, a revolution, orange-purple whatever; anything which would forward and highlight public display of political awareness a- and luckily there stood a noble cause - a lawyers movement - reaching its climax - something so very unprecedented in the history of this nation or any third world country for that matter.
On Friday the 13th in the heyday of Rehman Maliks crackdown on the Longmarch. , I backpacked from Lahore ( my hometwon) to Islamabad to be in the midst of everything - They told me at the Lhr Railyway Station - this was supposedly the last train to Islamabad - for the next 4 days. As it so very often happens on trains - I met people.
A group of 4 - ISFers they called themselves - shared the adjacent bunkers. I saw a familiar face in one of them : he said his name was Hasaan Khan Niazi, Imran Khans college bunking nephew.
We have brought along table cloths , we'll wet them before we hit the streets. we are hoping our Islamabad chapter can arrange hockey sticks to kick the tear gas shells back to the police. We' gotta make sure we dont repeat the mistakes of the last Long March eh
Islamabad is a spacious city you know. The "Chairman" is gonna be close by most likely Pindi - he'll be there at 3pm on the 16th dont you worry--- Once on Shaharaye-Dastoor if thre is lathi charge you can easily escape in different directions - towards the margalla hills or the woods, but hopefully it wont come to that. They wont let us sit and protest and light candles at night. Rehman Malik is a coward - no matter how many containers he sets up we'll be there.
I am a first yr Arts student at LUMS - my name is Osama Khawar. He said that with Bolsheviks flare. He was reading Trochsky. You know what the fundamental problem with the communist idea was?
No , I said.
It lacks a value system. A submissive force largely holding the moral character of the governing class - something which can mutuality cause moral equilibrium between the governing and the governed.
I wonder if a fusion of a submissive code - like religion or Islam for instance and the marxist idea - would work.
You see Bhutto's idea of Islamic socialism ......
Ayesha, the followers for the supporters of the two camps which are vastly different in demographic and nature. the four days I spent in a hideout in Islamabad amongst the youth and student members of Imran Khans party changed my perception on the future of politics of Pakistan. Words simply wont do justice nor would an emotional overflow to convert one into a believer - only the experience of political activism - and the camaraderie of it can.
Perhaps todays article in Pak Tribune by Dr. Ghayur Ayub "Youth as a Political Force" can highlight the impact Imran Khan is having on the youth of Pakistan and the significance of stirring up this force.
Coming back to Long March. the group i was with included LUMS students, some of whom i initially thought i could converse with more easily than others, but mostly , students from a variety of backgrounds , from government colleges in central punjab to drop outs in primary and secondary school.
What i saw left me completely mystified. The political maturity in the average youth in that camp was dynamite. From admonishing me on composition and checks and balance of of govt between the Judicial - Executive - Legislative bodies to the mismanagement of nations resources by the legislators under the pretext of development plus the three tier education system in Pakistan ... they knew it all...
Upon first look You would dismiss these kids as a waste of talent gone down the drain. But they aren't. These kids have been glued to tv set to decide and judge for themselves the people who have been responsible for the state of affairs.... the media
Even if my optimism is adventurous and miscalculated and these were the very select few amongst millions - it still gives me hope that they saw a leader and a visionary in a person and were inspired make a journey to risk their lives make a journey to stand up against the. This i know i know in the heart of my heart, they simply would not have done that for a fringe politician
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Friday, November 07, 2008
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Muhammed Khurshid's Message at the very end of the article is simple and articulate, and I find it appropriate to preamble the article with the authors introduction:
Authors Website: www.voiceforpeace.8m.com
Authors Bio: My name is Muhammad Khurshid, a bonafide resident of Bajaur Agency, situated on Pak-Afghan border. Basically I am a journalist, but nowadays I have been working for peace in Bajaur Agency Tribal Areas. During my three years struggle I have conveyed a message to the people that they should abandon terrorism and work for peace. Now the tribal people have decided to extend a helping hand to the civilised world in war against terrorism, but in return they demand of the world to provide them opportunity of education. Education is the only mean of defeating terrorism.
July 23, 2007
Who Will Be Our Leader?
By Muhammad Khurshid
Failure of the rulers in war on terrorism has proved that they have not launched the war with sincerity. Actually they have used the war on terrorism for earning more and more.
Pakistan has been passing through from a critical phase of history. Operation in Lal Masjid, Islamabad in which a large number of people including women and children were killed sparked heated debate. Newsmen, writers and politcians have been holding rulers responsible for the carnage.
They said that the government could avoid the bloodbath in Islamabad if they showed sincerity in the earlier stage of drama. Some of them have been calling for democracy in Pakistan.
One writer Syed Sharfuddin wrote that Lal Masjid nightmare is finally over and so is the All Parties Conference. But the soul-searching that has just begun will remain with us for a long time to come. If we address these questions correctly and draw the right lessons from it now, there is hope for the future.
If we ignore the aftershocks and carry on doing business as usual, the problems that underlie the surface will not vanish on their own. The next showdown with the discontented sections of society may be uglier and far more costly in terms of national interests.
During 2005-6, I visited the Maldives many times to facilitate a Commonwealth-brokered dialogue between the government and opposition political parties on democratic reforms.
Opposition political parties believed that as long as President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was aiming a gun at the political opposition, a dialogue with the government would achieve nothing. Ironically, this metaphor applies more accurately to the situation in Pakistan where a president is indeed holding a gun in his hand in his capacity as chief of army staff for the last eight years. It is also a double irony that perhaps with the sole exception of Ghulam Ishaq Khan, none of the presidents of Pakistan left his office with dignity.
President Musharraf claims to break from the past by allowing the assemblies to complete their full term, but he has shown no sign of leaving his office voluntarily. He should not stay in office until he is forced by circumstances to leave in disgrace following the precedent of his infamous predecessors.
The recently concluded Lal Masjid operation has once again underlined the point which is often ignored by those in the media limelight and high places. That is, no person, group or institution should be permitted to challenge the sovereign authority of the state by taking the law in his or its own hands.
Regrettably, the military establishment has always assumed that it is exempt from this fundamental principle of democracy. Not only have Pakistan’s past military rulers violated the Basic Law, they have also tinkered with it to evade subsequent judicial trails. True democracy has no room for preferential treatment for one institution over the other, nor does it allow double standards to be applied to different individuals.
The Lal Masjid operation has also exposed the poor performance of the intelligence agencies. Contrary to their reports, there were no top-seeded Al Qaeda militants guiding the siege, no belted suicide bomb squads, no hand-held missile launchers nor any land-mined fields in the Lal Masjid compound.
In the absence of such deadly paraphernalia, it is a shame that about 76 half-trained religious teachers, students and militants, with a limited number of Kalashnikovs and light arms kept the elite commando unit of the Pakistan army at bay for eight days.
The authorities should have known each and every person, pillar and beam in the Lal Masjid compound through its intelligence network. If they did not know a public building and its access and cut out points in their own capital city, then either the intelligence agencies failed totally in performing their duty, or there is something missing in the story, namely, that vital information was kept from the authorities to cause them maximum embarrassment in the rescue operation.
If none of this is true, can this inefficiency be ascribed to the fact that our uniformed men have got used to the comforts and complacency of civilian outfits because of their involvement in politics, instead of remaining a professional force concerned only with the defence of the country and attending to extraordinary emergency situations?
If a religious band of extremists can give a tough time to the army for such a long period on its own ground, how can the nation trust the military to defend the country against an external enemy that may have more sophisticated weapons and a superior support base? We might as well adopt a compulsory national defence service for all male adults instead of keeping a large defence force. Is that the reason why our president goes a long way to please those foreign powers that keep asking him to “do more” to achieve their global strategic objectives?
As Imran Khan said recently at the All Parties Conference in London, it is in the nature of pluralistic societies to have their own brand of extremists and militants. They are not specific to Pakistan or the Muslim world. You can find them in India, the UK, the US, Russia and any other country which is trying to grapple with multi-ethnic issues and complex economic and social problems.
There are two ways of dealing with militants. One is the American way — swift military response, no dialogue, massive injections of economic assistance for short-term results, but a huge collateral damage and more long-term instability that prolongs the conflict instead of subsiding it.
The other is the non-American way — remaining vigilant but patient, understanding the core issues and tackling them one by one, talking to the extremists with the aim of winning hearts and minds and preserving the law, democracy and human rights. The latter approach is less visible but more enduring. We need not follow the American way in dealing with problems that reside inside Pakistan.
In a true democracy, constitutions are written to be followed in letter and spirit; these are not amended every now and then to facilitate the long reign of dictators. A functioning democracy which is built on the Westminster model relies on parliament to enact legislation; it does not use the executive and the cabinet to promulgate ordinances to bypass legislature and introduce laws through the back door.
In a credible democracy, political agreements are honoured at all costs; these are not changed at the last minute to save a government. And above all, mature democracies are prepared to dump individuals through such instruments as voluntary resignations and democratic rotation of leaders to keep institutions strong; such societies do not sacrifice institutions to serve the whims of the ruling oligarchy. Apply this criterion to Pakistan one by one and judge for yourself where do we stand in scoring a pass mark in this democratic test.
The judiciary is one institution which was never affected by military coups. Yet, the judges who presided over the judicial case against the first martial law in Pakistan made the fundamental mistake of legitimising it under the infamous doctrine of state necessity. The higher courts that heard the cases of subsequent martial laws did not challenge this theory.
The causes of the judiciary’s compromise with the military rulers lie in two streams — the stream of tradition and the stream of convenience. Traditionally, the judiciary has never been independent in an Islamic polity. In fact, during the glory days of Islamic empires when Muslim armies came knocking at the gates of Europe and Central Asia, the caliph appointed only those chief justices who were prepared to back his policies. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. But by and large the primary role of the chief justice in a caliphate was to provide legal sanction to the acts of the executive.
Although Pakistan has a modern judiciary far removed from those forlorn days, the judiciary has traditionally continued its role of backing the executive (its recent verdict in the Chief Justice’s case being an important exception). Little wonder then that in their times, Justice Cornelius and Justice Dorab Patel did not feel the need to follow this archaic tradition because they were not Muslims.
The other reason why the judiciary favoured the executive is rooted in convenience. The judiciary chose to support military takeovers in Pakistan on the assumption that if it did not do so, it too would be replaced by military courts.
The judges may have been partially right because they saw how the military permeated the administrative, executive, legislative and political echelons of society under martial laws. But they did not realise that in saving the judiciary from military intervention, they were legitimising a rule which had no legal basis and could not last long on its own.
What is the point of having Article 6 in the Constitution if a court cannot invoke it to deter any one person, group or institution from violating the primary law of the land.
There is increasing demand for a full public enquiry to be launched into the Lal Masjid incident. It is only proper that a commission should be constituted independently under parliament in order to answer the scores of questions that are being asked about the preparedness of the government for dealing with militancy, hostage-taking, and the build- up of small arms in civilian institutions.
It is also important for the independent enquiry to focus on the larger context in which the Lal Masjid episode occurred. What can the state do to balance Islam with secularism, prevent social decay and continue to modernise itself, and manage conflicting views and expectations of people in a pluralistic society?
How can the human rights of prisoners be guaranteed to inculcate a sense of dignity? How can double standards be avoided in relation to treatment of persons, whether supporters or opponents of the government, who are involved in corruption and other criminal cases?
Can police be better trained to exercise its functions in a manner that gives full legal protection to the accused so that those arrested feel confident that they can defend themselves before the courts?
The independent enquiry should focus on lessons to be learnt on restoring the credibility of the government and bringing democratic values.
If this episode is allowed to pass quietly into history, the danger is that many other Lal Masjids will be hatching under the sun to challenge the authority of the state in more chilling ways than what Pakistan has so far witnessed. Wishing it away as paranoia without taking corrective positive action will not help.
The End
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The War as We Saw It
Baghdad
VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.
A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.
As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.
Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.
However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.
In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.
Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.
Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.
The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.
Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.
Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.
At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.
In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”
In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.
