Indian News channels are a security hazard?

Instead of questioning the narrative, news television and some print outlets have instead blatantly beaten the drums of confrontation, hyping even relatively calm statements by the army chief into belligerent displays of national machismo. Coming at a time when the government is attempting to move forward on dialogue with Pakistan that is very much in the national interest, the question should be asked: are some of India’s news channels, and their pursuit of eyeballs, turning into a national security hazard?

A handful of bellicose television supremos cannot be allowed to dictate a foreign policy that hurts the interest of India’s citizens.

Editorial in Business Standard. Here

Now it has dawned to Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy has just made his own study, in 1500 interviews, of the wounds of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan — among the searing and decisive memories of his own boyhood in Calcutta. The snippet that leaps out at him now is that 40 percent of his sample called up stories of themselves and others being helped through that orgy of blood and death by “somebody from other side.” In no other genocide, Nandy says, can he find a comparable measure of mercy. “There is that part of the story, too,” he is saying. “That is South Asia.”

I have seen other faces of Pakistan too, other faces of the Pashtuns who have supplied us with the Taliban and hosted Osama Bin Laden. Gandhi called them the finest non-violent freedom fighters of India. Not once, more than once. So there is another story, which is no longer told, which seems very old-fashioned, which doesn’t seem to have a place in contemporary statecraft and contemporary political culture. I find that very odd. Human potentialities are not adequately recognized. I think we live with stereotypes, and once a stereotype becomes unfashionable, then pick up another stereotype. But there is another way of looking at it: the potentialities that are inherent in some of the cultures in this part of the world have never been fully explored. People are afraid of them, they become so nervous about the darker side of human nature that they do not like to know of them; they think this would be a compromise with realism, a compromise with statecraft. …
What we saw during the Partition was ultimately not only the pathology of rural India and urban India, but also the forces that can be mobilized for a different kind of effort, to fight the violence… I think my study of partition violence has made me more respectful towards ordinary Indians and Pakistanis, and I would in the future be more open to the multilayered selves of people in this part of the world, perhaps people everywhere.

Ashis Nandy with Chris Lydon, at home in New Delhi, mid-summer 2011.

Ashis Nandy in Radioopensource. Here

Drones, death, and USA

Large or small, drones raise questions about the growing disconnect between the American public and its wars. Military ethicists concede that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian casualties and, with no Americans directly at risk, more easily draw the United States into conflicts. Drones have also created a crisis of information for analysts on the end of a daily video deluge. Not least, the Federal Aviation Administration has qualms about expanding their test flights at home, as the Pentagon would like. Last summer, fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into Washington's restricted airspace.

Within the military, no one disputes that drones save American lives. Many see them as advanced versions of “stand-off weapons systems,” like tanks or bombs dropped from aircraft, that the United States has used for decades. “There's a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,” said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view it is not always a problem if they lower the threshold for war. “It is a bad thing if we didn't have a just cause in the first place,” Mr. Baker said. “But if we did have a just cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that just cause.”

To Mr. Singer of Brookings, the debate over drones is like debating the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom has barely begun. “We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of this,” he said.

Elisabeth Bumiller & Thom Shanker in The Hindu. Here and Here

Nobody could be more hawkish, patriotic than holier-than-thou Arnab Goswami

Given the toxic history of India-Pakistan relations, it's perhaps only natural that establishments on both sides are obsessed with each other. But since when has media become part of establishment? Whatever happened to its fabled independence and objectivity?

While when it comes to dealing with the reviled neighbor next door everyone is vying with everyone else to appear more hawkish and patriotic, few can beat Times Now and its insufferable, holier-than-thou Arnab Goswami. The bespectacled news anchor, who also happens to be the network's editor in chief, is forever presiding over an all-season hate Pakistan fest, day after day feigning an air of pompous solemnity. It's as if he's got the responsibility of resolving the Kashmir conundrum or leading the billion plus nation resting on his shoulders.

The morning the world woke up to the big news from Abbottabad, our hero was up in the air within a couple of hours of Obama's ‘we-have-done-it” moment. Aided by his battery of familiar talking heads, Goswami began what was to be an endless orgy of thrashing and trashing Pakistan. He was on a familiar turf, doing what he does best: Whipping up a collective hysteria against the neighbor.

Indeed, this time around he went a step further. Even as Pakistan's befuddled politicians and men in khaki tried to make sense of the Abbottabad affront, the guardian of our national interest was calling for burning Pakistan at the stake. "If Americans could fly into Abbottabad cantonment and take out the man responsible for 9/11, what prevents us from doing the same and taking out those responsible for 26/11?" he repeatedly demanded referring to the 2008 terror strikes on Mumbai.

It was an invitation to his guests — many of them former diplomats and at least two of them being former envoys to Pakistan — to move in for the kill as they implored India to hit at its separated-at-birth twin. This is payback time as Pakistan is at its most vulnerable right now, they seemed to suggest, openly debating the options of surgical strikes or US-style assassination to take out characters like Hafiz Saeed, Masood Azhar and of course Dawood Ibrahim.

I found it hard to believe my ears and eyes. Do they really mean that? Do the pundits realize the calamitous ramifications of their call? And they were supposed to be former diplomats!

And how irresponsible the media can get in its attempts to sell itself? Well, everyone in this business is always looking for a larger slice of the pie and more readers, more viewers and more revenues. Which is fair enough. But are there no rules in this game? No sense of right and wrong? Whatever happened to good ol' honesty and noble ideals that once inspired and drove Indian journalism?

Aijaz Zaka Syed in Arab News. More Here

Who will account and pay for the millions killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan?

Now that Osama is dead and Obama’s re-election is in the bag, could we please move on? I hate to rain on the president’s victory parade and dampen the endless celebrations in America but the departure of one long isolated and ailing figure changes nothing.

In the words of Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online, “all that really happened in Pakistan is that a small group of American soldiers shot and killed an ageing, sickly man in a mansion, who was the nominal head of a small and increasingly fractured terrorist organization.”

Of course, Bin Laden was no saint and may very well have been guilty of the crimes he has been accused of, including the 9/11 outrage. But even Bin Laden, much reviled and hated as he was, deserved a day in the court to explain himself, didn’t he? How do we know for sure he’s the one who ordered the 9/11 attack. Even the FBI admits there’s no proof linking him to 9/11. Where’s the body of evidence?

Besides, even Nazi mass murderers like Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann, responsible for sending millions to their death during the World War II, were penalized only after elaborate, and transparent, trials by a UN war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. Adolf Otto Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Jewish Holocaust, who was captured much later in 1960 by Israel’s Mossad in Argentina, received a fair trial before being hanged in 1962.

I really hate to bat for someone who in his zeal to avenge the Western crimes against the Arabs and Muslims may have ended up targeting hundreds of innocent people, most of them his fellow believers. But there’s something called the due process. Every criminal and accused — even the terrorists — is innocent until proven guilty.

This is the principle that is at the heart of international justice system and no one is an exception, not even the superpower. Following the release of thousands of incriminating US government cables by the WikiLeaks, Bin Laden had declared: “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate.”

But law-abiding nations do not go to war over flimsy excuses or send armed commandos to invade a foreign country and blow up the brains of an unarmed man in front of his 12-year-old daughter and dump his body into the ocean.

In doing so, Uncle Sam has once again acted as the prosecutor, jury, judge and executioner all rolled into one. Not very different from the Texan-style justice celebrated in numerous Hollywood westerns. Might is right. The old jungle law still holds good and the powerful can do whatever they want.

Nearly 2,800 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Doubtless a heinous atrocity and crime against humanity for which the perpetrators deserve nothing but severest punishment. What about all those innocents though who were killed — and continue to be killed — as a direct consequence of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? More than a million people have perished in Iraq alone and hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past 10 years. Who will account and pay for them?

Pakistan has been the real victim of America’s decade-long disastrous campaign. Its once healthy economy is bankrupt; its institutions are falling apart and its complex religious and ethnic mosaic of society is unraveling fast. The country has been in a free fall since it was forced to join the US war.

It has lost nearly 40,000 people, including 7,000 military personnel, to this conflict. In fact, as early as 2009, Pakistan’s toll — 12,000 deaths — had exceeded that of Afghanistan. Last year, nearly 10,000 people were killed as a result of US drone strikes and reprisal attacks by militants.

Despite continuing demonstrations and perfunctory protests by politicians, the pilotless drones continue to hit Pakistan almost on a daily basis, feeding the growing groundswell of anger against America. Last year witnessed 111 drone attacks mostly targeting civilians. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says at least 957 victims of drone strikes in 2010 were innocent civilians.

I wonder if the Americans, who burst out on the streets to celebrate the killing of Bin Laden last week, really know what their government has been doing in their name around the world? If yes, do they care? How would they react if some unmanned planes sent by another country were to come raining death and destruction over their cities and towns?

Aijaz Zaka Syed in Arab News. More Here

Pakistan is playing dumb

If everyone was so clever and the U.S. had been privy to bin Laden's not-so-secret location (Pakistan claims to be, as ever, the last to find out) since August 2010, how does one explain the ferocious drone campaign that took place from September to December of that year?

In the span of 102 days, an unprecedented 52 drone strikes were launched against Pakistan, none targeting Abbottabad or its environs. President Obama ratcheted up the drone war almost immediately upon entering the White House—ordering his first strike against Pakistan 72 hours after assuming the presidency.

Some 2,000 civilians have been killed, none of whom happened to be bin Laden or any of his dastardly lieutenants like Mullah Omar or Ayman al Zawahri, and yet the U.S. defense budget has called for a 75 percent increase in funds to continue and enhance drone operations. This is a frightening development.

Fathima Bhutto in The Daily Beast. More Here.

Americans could not have killed Osama without the help of Pakistanis

Obama and others enjoying the spectacle of the gruesome execution of unarmed Osama

The best accounts of the operation which killed bin Laden are not to be found in the US media, which is behaving as if it is embedded with the CIA like American journalists were with the US forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and swallowed army propaganda for which newspapers like The Washington Post later apologised.

Revealing details about Sunday’s Abbottabad operation are to be found in the Chinese media, especially China’s official news agency, Xinhua, which has no pretensions to media freedom unlike its American counterparts.

The Chinese have the best sources in Pakistan, given the all-weather friendship between Islamabad and Beijing.

Xinhua says electricity was cut off to Abbottabad as the operation to kill Osama began. That shows complicity with the Americans not only within the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi but down the line to the local administration that controls the electricity switching stations.

Xinhua says security forces cordoned off the entire area near Osama’s safe house before the Americans attacked it and no one was allowed to enter or leave the operational surroundings during the attack. That only means the Pakistanis knew what was going to take place, although it is only logical that reasons for sealing off the area would not have been communicated down the line to the local police or paramilitary units.

Xinhua also says residents of Abbottabad took videos and cellphone pictures from their rooftops as the spectacular helicopter landing and firefight was under way. But Pakistani security forces went round from house to house collecting memory cards from cameras and seizing videos from residents soon enough so that the pictures were not transmitted freelance by what modern TV would call citizen journalists.

All this could not have been organised by the Pakistanis after the event, which means, circumstantially, that the killing of Osama was a well co-ordinated US-Pakistani operation down to local ward-level in Abbottabad. Besides, Abbottabad is the seat of a brigade of the second division of Pakistan’s Northern Army Corps and several other sensitive army establishments, including a key military training academy.

Metaphorically, even a fly cannot circle the skies of that city without escaping the attention of the defence network that guards Abbottabad.

It is for this reason and to keep up the fiction that the US and Pakistan did not co-operate in killing Osama that an official statement was issued in Islamabad today that “US helicopters entered Pakistani airspace making use of blind spots in the radar coverage due to hilly terrain”.

The statement added that “US helicopters’ undetected flight into Pakistan was also facilitated by the... efficacious use of latest technology and ‘nap of the earth’ flying techniques”. At the same time, the Pakistan Army did not want its people to lose faith in Rawalpindi as the guardian of their country’s borders and their defence. Hence, a paragraph in the statement which asserts that “it may not be realistic to draw an analogy between this undefended civilian area and some military (and) security installations which have elaborate local defence arrangements”.

But to think that American helicopters carrying heavily armed personnel who attacked Osama’s hideout could have violated Abbottabad’s air space without help from Pakistan is pure fiction that is meant for the masses who are vulnerable to jihadi sermons in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Inflaming those masses could mean difficulties for the Americans everywhere.

Of the greatest significance, however, is the revelation in the statement that “as far as the target compound is concerned, ISI has been sharing information with CIA and other friendly intelligence agencies since 2009. The intelligence flow indicating some foreigners in the surroundings of Abbottabad, continued till mid-April 2011”.

The Pakistani statement is remarkable for its candour between the lines because it is admitting that in April 2011, the ISI stopped sharing information about Osama with the Americans because of strains between their respective intelligence outfits.

As a result, the Americans had to put off their plans to kill or capture bin Laden in mid-April, plans which began when Pakistan shared that intelligence from 2009, because the operation could not be undertaken without Islamabad’s full support.

K. P. Nayar in The Telegraph. More Here 

Make no mistake. It was a Joint venture

Make no mistake about it: The operation that killed bin Laden was a joint Pakistan-United States Special Forces operation. There is no conceivable way that the Americans could have got anywhere near that part of Pakistan on their own. (Abbottabad is also the sensitive “gateway” to the Karakoram Highway leading to China.) Nor could the Americans have obtained such “real time” intelligence that bin Laden was passing through Abbottabad without the involvement of the Pakistani agencies.

The big question, therefore, is why the Pakistani military leadership finally decided to turn in bin Laden – and the timing of it. Everything hinges on the answer to that question. What needs to be factored in is that bin Laden has always been the “trump card” that Pakistani military was expected to play at an appropriate time. Historically speaking, Pakistani military and intelligence have been extremely adept at modulating their working relationship with the Pentagon and the CIA. Quite obviously, Pakistani military estimated that doing a favourable turn to the US president Barack Obama at this precise juncture would optimise the “returns”.

The American public opinion has lately turned against the Afghan war and is plainly dissatisfied with Obama’s handling of the war. Obama is badly in need of a “success” story from the Hindu Kush. And bin Laden is a highly emotive issue for the American people. Obama will now be riding a wave of patriotic fervour all across America and that can have interesting fallouts for his re-election bid in 2012.

A regards the Pakistani military leadership, what counts most at this juncture is that the endgame of the Afghan war is beginning. Pakistan has never been so close to realising its objective of gaining strategic depth in Afghanistan, devolving upon the return of the Taliban to the power structure in Kabul. But in order for this to happen, American acquiescence is a vital pre-requisite. And, lately, tensions had arisen in the equations between the US and Pakistani military and intelligence. The killing of bin Laden comes as the ultimate litmus test of the trustworthiness of the Pakistani military as an ally. In sum, Pakistani military leadership will expect a quid pro quo from Obama.

M K Bhadrakumar in Strategic Culture. More Here

President Obama is a liar

The story of Raymond Allen Davis is one familiar to me and I wish our government would quit doing these things - they cost us credibility.  

Davis is the American being held as a spy working under diplomatic cover out of our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. You can understand why foreign countries no longer trust us and people are rising up across the Middle East against the Great Satan.

In the Vietnam War the country of Laos held a geo-strategic position, as does Pakistan does to Afghanistan today.  As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using the CIA.  

I was a demolitions technician with the Air Force who was reassigned to work with the CIA’s Air America operation in Laos. We turned in our military IDs cards and uniforms and were issued a State Department ID card and dressed in blue jeans.  We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive. 

We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. We also knew that if killed or captured that we would probably not be searched for and our families back home in the U.S. would be told we had been killed in an auto accident of some kind back in Thailand and our bodies not recovered.  

Our team knew when the UN inspectors and international media were scheduled to arrive - we controlled the airfields. We would disappear to our safe houses so we could not be asked questions.  It was all a very well planned operation, 60 years ago, involving the military and diplomats out of the US Embassy.   It had been going on a long time when I was there during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This continued for a long time, until we were routed and had to abandon the whole war as a failure.

In Laos the program I was attached to carried out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to U.S. goals.  It was called the Phoenix program and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina.  We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country, and still lost the war.  I saw one team of mercenaries I was training show us a bag of ears of dead civilians they had killed.  

This was how they verified their kills for us.  The Green Berets that day were telling them to just take photos of the dead, leave the ears.

Mel Gibson made a movie about all this, called Air America.  It included in the background the illegal drug operation the CIA ran to pay for their operations. Congress had not authorized funds for what we were doing.  I saw the drug operation first hand too.  This was all detailed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy.  I did not connect all this until the Iran-Contra hearings when Oliver North was testifying about it.  Oliver North was a leader of the Laos operation I was assigned to work with.

Our country has a long history of these type programs going back to World War Two.   We copied this from of warfare from the Nazis in WWII it seems. We justified it as necessary for the Cold War.  One of the first operations was T.P. Ajax run by Kermit Roosevelt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953to take over their oil fields.

In that coup the CIA and the State Department under the Dulles Brothers first perfected these covert, illegal and immoral actions. Historians have suggested that Operation T.P. Ajax  was the single event that set in motion the political force of Islamic fundamentalism we are still dealing with today.

Chalmers Johnson also a former CIA employee wrote a series of books too on these blowbacks that happen when the truth is held from the American public.  

If we had taken a different approach to our problems in those days an approach that did not rely on lying to our own and the people of other countries and killing them indiscriminately our country would not be in the disaster it is abroad today..  

I was young and foolish in those days of the Vietnam War, coveting my Top Secret security clearance, a big thing for an uneducated hillbilly from Appalachia.  We saw ourselves much like James Bond characters, but now I am much wiser. These kinds of actions have immense and long reaching consequences and should be shut down.

But I see from the Ray Davis fiasco in Pakistan that our government is still up to its old way of denying to the people of the world what everyone knows is true.  

When will this official hypocrisy end, when will our political class speak out about this and quit going along with the lies and tricks?  How many more of our people and others will die in these foolish programs?  

Davis is in a bad situation now because most of the people of the world, as we see across the Middle East, are now aware of the lies and not going to turn their head anymore.

I say “most” everyone knows, because our own public, the ones suppose to be in control of the military and CIA,  is constantly lied to.  It is so sad to see President Obama repeating the big lie.

Robert Anderson in Counterpunch. More Here

Urdu, India, Pakistan and Jews!

I am not much of a talker — never been one. 
And my wife never lets an opportunity pass to rub it in. While I read or endlessly flip television channels, her reproving glances drill holes in my whole being, for both not talking and not paying attention to whatever she’s saying. Lately, her focus has shifted to the kids. She thinks even they have locked her out of their universe, babble as they all the time do in that “stupid, firangi language.”

She keeps “shush”ing them, imploring them to speak in Urdu, their mother tongue. They reluctantly start off in the Deccani flavored Urdu but trail off soon, unconsciously switching to Queen’s English once again. It seems to come naturally to them. She keeps lamenting the fact that our children cannot read, write or even speak in the language that we are so proud of.  I couldn’t agree with her more although we seldom find ourselves on the same page on most of life’s absurdities.

In fact, it’s an issue that has had me worried for years now. As a student of literature and linguistics, I know that a language is not just a language. Like one’s beliefs, it defines one’s culture, identity and consciousness. It defines how we think, communicate and express ourselves.

Considering Urdu’s blood ties to the Arabic and Persian and the fact that most South Asian Muslims have come to know Islam by way of Urdu, the kids’ alienation from the language that connects them to the heritage of their parents and grandparents is disturbing. My children’s disconnect with Urdu is all the more painful because my own love for the language has been inherited from my father, an accomplished poet and author of numerous collections of short stories. I grew up attending “mushairas” (poetry sessions) with my father and singing gazals with my uncles and cousins.

Defying the prevailing social trend, my father didn’t send me to a convent but a seedy government “Urdu medium” school in the neighborhood. There were few teachers available to “manage” a class of over a hundred students. Prolific in both Urdu and English and a translator of Shelley’s poetry, my dad believed that you’ve got to know your mother tongue well if you are to master any other language. By the same logic, when you approach a subject in the language you grew up speaking at home, you learn it well.

Even though my “experiment” with Urdu education had to be abandoned midway thanks to the appalling condition of my school and I somehow ended up doing masters in English literature, my heart still beats for the language that is easily one of the finest and richest on the planet. For all my pretence to master an alien language and make a living out of it, I am still hopelessly besotted with Urdu. Yes, I love the language of Shakespeare, Keats and Dickens and I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t studied literature at university and taken to journalism. There are times though when I feel as if I’ve betrayed my first love, the language of Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz.

This sense of betrayal only deepens when one sees the condition of Urdu in the subcontinent and around the world. Abandoned by its own and denied its rightful place by successive governments, the language is dying in the land of its birth. One of the many unintended consequences of the partition has been the total marginalization of Urdu in India. The language that was born in South Asia as a result of the extraordinary encounter between Islam and Indian civilization has few takers today in the land that was/is its home. Once the universal appeal of Urdu stemmed from the fact that it was an ethereal and earthy blend of Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Turkic — all rich, ancient languages — and the Prakrit or khadi boli, the folksy dialect spoken and understood across much of the undivided subcontinent.

Evolving as a spontaneous mode of communication between the Muslim armies and native population (“Urdu” is derived from Turkish word “Ordu” meaning army), it soon became the lingua franca of the empire. As against more elitist Persian and archaic Sanskrit, Urdu became the democratic choice of the people from Afghanistan to Burma. Since the partition though it has come to be associated with, rightly or wrongly, and condemned as the language of Muslims even though vast majorities of all faiths spoke and wrote it until the British left India. It’s nobody’s baby today. People quickly dumped it for the more rewarding English and Hindi, actively patronized by independent India’s rulers, over the years.

Even Muslims are turning their back on Urdu. You can’t blame them considering the fact it gets them no jobs or social standing. Even if some parents, weighed down by a sense of guilt, want their offspring to learn it for identity’s sake, there are few opportunities available. If there are schools that offer Urdu as a second language, there are no teachers. Where teachers are available, there are no students. As a result, the language that had been the language of power and a symbol of prestige across the vastness of South Asia, today finds itself limited to madrassas, mosques and the Bollywood. (Even the Bollywood insists on calling it Hindi!)

Today, Urdu has been confined to pockets and cities like old Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad etc. I am not trying to take undue advantage of my position but if Urdu still remains a source of pride for both Hindus and Muslims anywhere in India today, it’s in Hyderabad. Home to three of nation’s largest circulated Urdu dailies and first Urdu university, the city remains faithful to the memory of its founder, Quli Qutub Shah, who was also Urdu’s first poet with an anthology to his credit. In the north, it finds itself increasingly unwelcome in cities that had once been the citadels of Urdu and culture that gave birth to it. It’s sobering to see north Indian Muslims trying hard to erase all signs of their association with the language that was once their identity. They’re more at home with the heavily Sanskritized Hindi than the language that gave the subcontinent the heart-warming “Sare Jahan Se Achcha” and slogans like “Inquilab Zindabad” (long live, revolution!) that shook the British Empire.

So what does the future has in store for this magical language? Well, I am no clairvoyant.

But if it has a future, it lies in our hands. Maybe we could learn a lesson or two in this respect from the Jews. They wandered all over the world for nearly 3,000 years but never allowed their ancient language to die, power or no power. They passed down the language, generation after generation, regardless of their circumstances, teaching their children to imbibe it still in their cradle. Not an easy act to follow, I know. But there’s no other way to keep Urdu alive.

From Aijaz Zaka Syed's column in Arab News. More Here

— Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Dubai-based commentator. Write to him at aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

Pakistan's shame

It is the most shameful moment in the history of cricket. Shame on Pakistan. Here is the video depicting the shameful event. The greed with which the guy gets the wads of currency from the 'dealer' is disgusting. Pakistan cricket team should be banned from playing.

And this has happened in the blessed month of Ramazan! Look at the eyes of the guy. They are full of greed. Look at his stretched hands. Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) said: "The upper hand is better than the lower hand" This man has lowered his hand with ulterior motives.

Betting, gambling and speculation are banned in Islam. How come betting and gambling thrives in Muslim societies? It is very sad. It is very bad. It is madness.

It is not exclusive to Pakistan alone. Indians too have been involved in spot fixing and match fixing for many many decades.India’s greatest cricket writer, Prem Panicker, managing editor of Yahoo! India, says that spot-fixing, like match-fixing, isn’t quite a 21st century phenomenon but a 20th century one. He writes in his blog:

There was once an opening batsman known as much for his impeccable technique as for his preternatural sense of the ebbs and flows, the rhythms, of Test cricket. The way he constructed an innings was both masterclass and template: the early watchfulness, the constant use of the well placed single to get away from strike and go to the other end, from where he could observe the behavior of pitch and bowler, the imperceptible change of gears and then, as the lunch interval loomed, the gradual down-shifting of gears as commentators marveled: ‘He is pulling down the shutters… he knows it is important not to give away his wicket just before the break… the onus is on him to return after the break and build his innings all over again… the man is a master of focus…’

I followed along, on radio first and later, on television, and I marveled along with the commentators, the experts. And then, years later, I heard a story — of how, when the toss went the way of his team and this opener went out to bat on the first day of a Test, a close relative would bet with not one, but several, bookies, about whether the batsman would get to 50 before lunch. Or not. ‘So he would get to 45 or so, and there would be 20 minutes to go before lunch, and he would defend like hell, and all these experts would talk about how he is downing shutters for lunch when the fact was, there was a lot of money riding on his not getting 50 before the break,’ is a paraphrase of what one of the bookies who suffered from such well-placed bets said.

That is just one story, of the dozens that come your way once you become a journalist, and gain entree into the Kabuki world of cricket.

 More Here.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, America is eyeing for the Pakistani blood

United States force totals in Afghanistan now exceed those in Iraq for the first time since early 2003.
Iraq is of course still complex, but mostly in regard to the political situation, not the military one. Despite incidents like the coordinated bombings last month that killed more than 100 Iraqis around the country, security trends are improving even as United States forces accelerate their drawdown.

In Pakistan, the army continues its “silent surge,” having moved more than 100,000 troops from the eastern border with India to the western tribal regions over the last few years. Pakistan has largely cleared several key areas of “miscreants,” as its officials like to describe extremists and insurgents.

From Ian Livingston, Heather Messera, Amy Unikewicz and Michael E. O'Hanlon's analysis in The New York Times. More Here.
Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Ian Livingston and Heather Messera are researchers at Brookings. Chart by Amy Unikewicz of JellyFever Graphic Design in South Norwalk, Conn.

Is it the tip of the ice berg?

Meena Menon in a thought provoking, tiring article Nanded case: of lost leads and shoddy investigation in The Hindu asks:

For some time now, there is evidence that all the blasts in the country are not the handiwork of terror groups supported by Pakistan or Bangladesh.

What are the resources of this right wing terror network, its reach and implications?

Only a sustained and meticulous investigation can give results and it is time the government and investigation agencies have learnt some lesson from the slip ups in Nanded. Investigations into the terror activities which seem disparate right now have to be coherent.

Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

To read the full article, click here.
Also Read : Anatomy of Sangh Parivar by Ram Puniyani
Also read: Communalism and the Myth by Ambrose pinto