Sunday, November 8, 2009

Pakistan: We are a Crowd, not a Nation, not an Ummat …!

Recently Critic Magazine conducted a survey to prove or disprove a hypothesis that “There is a difference of opinion among the masses about the top 5 problems, i.e. every other person focus on different agendas thus there is no channelized effort toward any single issue”
After receiving replies we complied the data (shown below), which depicts that every person had a different opinion about the problems, there is some agreement on the issues but the ranking given to that issue differed greatly, some agree on macro level, but disagree on details. The data made us think that we are infact a gigantic crowd living at the same geographical location called Pakistan, we are not connected by any means.
From this analysis we would like to build another hypothesis that as a whole, our disintegrated minds and souls are infact our biggest weakness / problem … we just can’t unite, simply because, in religious terms, our qibla is unique to others … we prioritize as per our own ideals, needs and wants and analyze the world in the same context … In other words for each individual the problem are those elements of society which stand against his own needs or ideals, thus his conclusions stands contrast of others accordingly…
Would you agree? please give us your feedback at editor@criticmagazine.pk or omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk

Rank given by Percentage of Respondents
Total
Problem
5th
4th
3rd
2nd
1st
Corruption
3.88%
4.85%
5.83%
4.85%
0.97%
20%
Illiteracy
2.91%
0.97%
1.94%
5.83%
2.91%
15%
Injustice
0.97%
2.91%
0.97%
0.97%
5.83%
12%
Attitude
2.91%
0.97%
2.91%

3.88%
11%
Leadership
0.97%
0.97%

2.91%
2.91%
8%
Political Instability

1.94%
0.97%
0.97%
2.91%
7%
Army
0.97%
1.94%

0.97%
0.97%
5%
Economic instability
0.97%
0.97%
1.94%
0.00%
0.00%
4%
Prioritization
0.97%


0.97%
1.94%
4%
Taqleed over Ijtehad
0.97%
0.97%
1.94%


4%
Economic disparity

0.97%


0.97%
2%
Secular world View




1.94%
2%
Feudalism
0.97%



0.97%
2%
Media

0.97%

0.97%

2%
Intolrance

0.97%
0.97%


2%
Lack of use of national resources
0.97%

0.97%


2%
Grand Total
17%
19%
18%
18%
26%
100%

Time Has Come For Pakistan To Decide

History has proven that some of America’s most trusted friends and allies have been the recipients of her most insidious and deadly intrigues.  Pakistani leaders are delusional if they think that their friendship with the United States is stronger than that of Italy or Germany. The CIA turned Pakistan into the “epicenter of terrorism” for a reason.  The Army and the ISI were always intended to be America’s scapegoat.  That time has come. The recent assassination of Pakistan’s other “ace in the hole, Qari Zainuddin, has destroyed Pakistan’s last chance to restore the writ of the state without resorting to all-out civil war.  Either Gen. Kayani submits entirely to Obama’s will, including the planned submission to Indian domination afterwards, or he stands-up to the United States, meaning he stops the drone attacks and reveals the entire ugly scenario that the CIA cannot allow anyone to reveal.





By Peter Chamberlin
Thursday, 2 July 2009.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The trusted watch-keepers of the world have turned their hearts to midnight plunder, while they carried-out their duty standing guard over mankind, who blissfully, unaware, continued to sleep.  Morning rapidly approaches and the householders are sure to demand an accounting.
The exploding world economy and the expanding war are but symptoms of the great mental sickness that afflicts society, waves of warning of the tsunamis that lie directly ahead.  The dominant
ideas and ideology that drive our world are all collapsing around us, falling from the weight of their own corruption and immoral baggage.
In the ongoing warfare of ideas, the selfish immorality of the old order is proving to be its downfall, as it meets the impenetrable resistance of the higher ideals of selflessness and human compassion.  When the heart of the people is exposed to the emotionally crippling images of the children of war, then and thereafter, their only concern becomes the ending of the scourge of war.
Human nature is naturally compassionate, no matter how much the person has changed from the innocence of their youth.  Even evil men must feel the heart’s emotional tugging at their consciences, no matter how deeply they have buried it, at the sight of such a suffering little one.  Knowing that you and your government did this to these children and thousands more just like them, just like your own children that you so dearly love.  We are the authors of what you see.
For God so loved the world that he sent us all sons and daughters, to melt our cold hearts and to expose our buried consciences.  Human suffering is probably the most powerful motivation for good on this earth.  It moves men to take-up arms to avenge it.  It motivates others to offer their own lives that others might suffer less.
Humankind has the means to save itself from itself, just as surely as it has the means to cause its own extinction, all that separates the two is the gulf of choice and human freewill.  Those of us who believe in a higher power, The One who created all things both great and small, know for certain that mankind will one day rise to the challenge before him.  We know that the promise of eventual world peace is a solid truth, just waiting for enough people to understand and choose to reach out with us.  Peace is truly just a handshake away, all that is lacking is the will to effect change and the desire to leave this world a better place.
The only question is how long before we as a people begin to care about our fellow man?  This is the one factor that determines how much the suffering will intensify before we arrive at our predetermined solution.  Efforts spent shoring-up the old collapsing political/economic structure only add to the suffering by adding to the length of the suffering and wasting limited resources in futile attempts to repair the rotten, immoral order that compelled mankind’s sprint to self-destruction.
Military adventures, intended to deflect the coming collapse merely increase our national guilt for having failed in our voluntary task of standing watch at the ramparts of freedom, guarding the rights of God’s creation with one arm, while we killed and indiscriminately erased both people and human rights with the other strong arm.  Our military became our means of plundering our brothers’ resources and rights, because we were trusted it to defend our friends against foreign aggressors.
We reach-out our hand to both friend and foe, expecting commerce, while preparing to wage covert war upon them.  We buy our friends in the world, the rest we simply intimidate or secretly undermine.  From behind the shield of nearly omnipotent military power we have bribed and browbeat the world into submission to our ideas, our ideology, our economic schemes.  Our cutthroat system of buying, selling and extorting our friends based solely on profit instead of need, therefore it is designed to weed-out everyone (regardless of their needs) who don’t have the cash to meet they need.  The “haves and have-nots” exclusionary economic system is about to be crushed under the impending weight of the hungry misery it spreads far and wide.
The immorality of the current system will bring forth a new moral economic system from the violence of the old one dying.  Each war or epidemic of violence that wracks the nations is a cry for help, as a segment of society explodes as a result of the local contradictions.
The war on Pakistan is a case in point.  Here we have compelled our most faithful ally to engage in full-scale civil war as the means to salvage our failing economic order, by way of seizing the Caspian oil and gas reserves.  We have forced Pakistan onto a path towards its own destruction as a feeble-minded calculated gamble to avert our own deserved dissolution. It seems only logical that a nation which feeds its own insatiable appetite for more of everything by depriving the poorest of the poor nations of the little that they have to call their own, would seek to avert its own profit loss by spreading death and suffering amongst the very people who have time and again proven to be among its best friends.
History has proven that some of America’s most trusted friends and allies have been the recipients of her most insidious and deadly intrigues.  Pakistani leaders are delusional if they think that their friendship with the United States is stronger than that of Italy, or Germany.
The CIA turned Pakistan into the “epicenter of terrorism” for a reason.   That reason went way beyond the mission against the Soviets, or else the training camps would have been shut-down and some attempt would have been made to clean-up the mess they had made when the Russians left Afghanistan.  The CIA kept the camps and the madrassas running, turning-out thousands of good jihadis.  By relying on the factor of “deniability,” they put the training camps in Pakistani hands.   This should have been understood by Pakistan’s leaders for what it was, a euphemistic way to express the reality that the Army and the ISI were always intended to be America’s scapegoat.  That time has come.
America has turned the tables on Pakistan.  Just as Pakistan has used their proxy army, the local Taliban to stage running battles (some were for real), in order to fool the United States about Pakistani intentions in the war on terror, the new administration is using their own creation, the “Pakistani Taliban” (TTP), to call the Army’s bluff about its latest war in its tribal region.  The generals can no longer get away with merely chasing the local Taliban from one agency into another, or anything less than waging total war in all of FATA and the NWFP.  Pakistan’s “double-game” is over, while America’s double-games have barely begun.
Gen. Kayani has been trying to follow in Musharraf’s footsteps, running a limited pretend all-out war production, even following the same order of the previous war on Waziristan, tribal jirgas, lashkars, economic siege, etc.  The General’s neatly dressed, never dirty, determined-looking soldiers faithfully posed for countless publicity shots, putting on a great show for the international circus media.  Army spokesmen claim to have killed 1,500 terrorists in Malakand and elsewhere, always taking place beyond the range of the camera’s lens.  There are no “embedded reporters” in Pakistan.  The only news coming out of the region is approved after passing through several layers of filtering by the controlling governments there, especially by the one all-controlling super government.  If Pakistan is really out to get Mehsud, as Kayani boasted, then it is because that is what Obama wants Pakistan to do.
The Predator strikes are the Pakistani strategy, intended to ease their citizenry into a renewed fight in S. Waziristan.  (SEE: Paramilitary Pretense, Who Controls the Predators?)  The last two attempts to carry the operation into the militant home base were met by fierce resistance on the ground, as well as in Pakistan’s streets.  The people became so enraged that this path of slowly boiling Pakistan’s “frogs” became the only feasible alternative.  This theory means that Mehsud is either an asset of the ISI or their CIA bosses. And the regular terror attacks upon Shiites and their shrines, even attacks on outposts of the Frontier Corp are likely the work of the ISI, just as the militants have been claiming in various interviews.  As unlikely as this all seems, no other theory explains the curious behavior of Pakistan’s government and military and mountains of circumstantial evidence linking the ISI to the militants.

So while Pakistan’s dysfunction is entirely Pakistan’s fault, American naivete cannot get a pass because Pakistan is a basket case. In the Age of Obama, America has to do better. Anyone that was really interested in debilitating the Punjabi-dominated, Hindu-hating, right-leaning, military-dominated Pakistani establishment would have to be recklessly foolish if it went and helped rebrand the Pakistan army in the wake of eight years of Musharraf and a devastating and humiliating defeat at the hands of the country’s lawyers. Yet that’s exactly what President Zardari has done since the May 8 offensive was launched into Swat. The Swat offensive has helped rehabilitate the image of the military.”
If Pakistan was really pursuing a policy of “divide and rule” in its negotiations with Mullah Nazir, seeking to separate the powerful warlord from Baitullah Mehsud before launching a new war in S. Waziristan against him, then the Army would not have allowed the continuing Predator attacks on Nazir to take place, or go unanswered.  None of this happened.  If they were serious about overtures made to the Wana warlord then they most certainly would not have shelled his offices.

Obama is driving the former enemies together.  This is Langley’s intention.  Mullah Nazir has not been the sole target of drone attacks for the past year to thwart Pakistan’s peace initiatives with the militants (since Washington controls everything Islamabad does), the reason is much more sinister than that.
If the United States government was truly at odds with the Army over American attacks upon Pakistani citizens, carried-out in order to sabotage Pakistan’s war plans, then there would be swift reprisals, because such an affront to Pakistan’s sovereignty would be far worse than merely “counter-productive.”  Everything is going according to the Imperial game plan–American drones attack all pro-Pakistani militant leaders, ignoring everyone who is killing Pakistanis.  The targeted leaders coalesce into a powerful, motivated union.
The generous benefactors of Maulana Fazlullah and his TNSM forces were sponsors of state terrorism, directed mostly at girls’ schools and CD shops in the North West Region.  Their murderous rampage and deceptive Shariah pacts forced Army intervention.  Predator attacks upon Mullah Nazir intensify, until he begins to fight back, forcing the Army to scrap plans to divide the Taliban as a means to avoid a massive tribal war, focusing only on Mehsud.  Meanwhile, some unknown outfit bombs Shia mosques and shopping areas (Nazir blames the attacks upon the Army), stoking the war in Kurram.  Bahadur honors his pact with Nazir and Mehsud; he fights back, forcing the Army to broaden their planned offensive to include N. Waziristan against their better judgment.
Never once, do the generals complain, or offer resistance to American violations of sovereignty. Instead, they follow the orders of their American masters, while the President of Pakistan continues to represent the President of the United States, instead of his own people, who are being killed by the dozens and the hundreds by the good old USA!

Hard as they may try to set their own course, Pakistan’s generals have surrendered their souls to the devil when they plotted with American generals to deceive their countrymen into passively, even enthusiastically accepting the new war.  The war in Waziristan (both North and South) will be fought on Obama’s terms.
According to Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas:


In other words, for the first time, one of the silent generals dared to explain the Army’s position. ISI concerns about “shaping the battlefield” and confining the war in Wana to Mehsud didn’t amount to a hill of beans to Petraeus and Mullen, Obama insists that Pakistan go against the generals’ better judgment and incite a “tribal uprising.”

The attacks in N. Waziristan by Gul Bahadur and the artillery strikes upon Nazir’s headquarters, both a bi-product of the Predator prevarications, as well as the recent assassination of Pakistan’s other “ace in the hole, Qari Zainuddin, have destroyed Pakistan’s last chance to restore the writ of the state without resorting to all-out civil war.  Either Gen. Kayani submits entirely to Obama’s will, including the planned submission to Indian domination afterwards, or he stands-up to the United States, meaning he stops the drone attacks and reveals the entire ugly scenario that the CIA cannot allow anyone to reveal.  “Al Qaida” is fake.  The war on terror is a fraud.  The fraud is a plan for world war.  And we all know that neither Gen. Kayani, nor any other Pakistani official will ever reveal the “great game” or the plot to destroy the Islamic Republic.
The United States corporacracy is a monstrous devouring beast and “Islamist terror” is her illegitimate offspring.
Mr. Chamberlin is an American journalist who runs ThereAreNoSunglasses Weblog, Building An American Resistance Movement. This column is reproduced by permission. He can be reached at peterchamberlin@naharnet.com

Pakistan First!

To all Pakistanis:  When Beijing Olympics came under attack, a Chinese mountaineer took the torch to Mount Everest. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese-Americans and British-Americans. But not one came out to stage-managed protests on China’s Tibet. That’s the kind of nationalist Pakistani citizens we need to create.




By AHMED QURAISHI
Thursday, 8 May 2008.
.



ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—They tried to take China down. So the Chinese citizens took China to the top of the world.




Just when everyone thought they had pooped on China’s big summer Olympics party, ordinary Chinese citizens who love their country came up with something to shock all critics: They took the Olympic torch to the highest mountain peak of the world, Everest. That’s a first in the two-thousand-year history of the Olympics.


Match this, China haters!




When CIA and MI6 were busy in burying Beijing Olympics in news headlines under the fake crisis of Tibet, ordinary Chinese citizens came up with an idea that no news television network of the world could ignore: Olympic torch atop Mount Everest for the first time. Who could bury this story? The Dalai Lama will have to fly to Jupiter to match this one.




At this time, this was the biggest favor anyone could do for China. And it was done. By Chinese mountaineers who thought this is the time to give something back to the homeland.




There are millions of Chinese Americans. And they love America, their homeland. And America is good to its citizens, which makes it a great country. Its ugly foreign policy is a different story. Many of the Chinese are third- or fourth-generation Chinese-Americans. But when someone tried to organize anti-Chinese protests over Tibet in Los Angeles, they couldn’t find a single Chinese-American worth his or her name to participate. And this was California, home to probably the largest China town in America.




Many of these Chinese-Americans may have political issues or disagreements with the government in Beijing. They may or may not express these differences on Internet blogs, articles, or through direct interaction with Chinese officials. But they have something in them, in their blood, about their parents’ and grandparents’ homeland. It’s called patriotism. And I never knew you could pass it on to your children until I met Chinese Americans. That’s pure. You can’t fake it.




There’s a lesson in there for us in Pakistan. We – the successive governments, the military, politicians, teachers, journalists, poets, novelists, students, parties, filmmakers, and television anchormen and anchorwomen – we all need to institutionalize this sense of patriotism in ordinary Pakistanis. We need to instill it in our children at home.




When my teenage nephew came to me with a joke he received on his cell phone as SMS text, making fun of Pakistan because of the power and flour shortages here these days, and he enjoyed the joke, I smiled with him and said, ‘It’s good but delete it. Don’t forward it. Don’t allow anyone to make fun of your homeland. The dirt of your homeland’s soil cannot be measured by a bag of flour.’




The Americans needed 9/11 to revive patriotism. The Israelis needed the holocaust. The Indians waited for Bollywood films to gel together their nationhood. Pakistanis never needed any of that. They have a fascinating story to tell, a story that transcends a thousand years, that brings together honorable peoples from diverse and magnificent backgrounds, whose descendants created a weak country in 1947 and transformed it in half a century into an emerging business hub and one of the world’s impressive military powers.


Be proud. Learn from the Chinese.

Pakistan: What Can We Do?

We know how they are destroying Pakistan from the inside. It’s like a checklist. They overthrow a government through chaos, bring in their cronies, and then spread terrorism. When the army is close to ending this terrorism, they start Sunni-Shia riots. I am a confused Pakistani that loves every inch of this great land of ours, likes the cool of Murree as much as the heats of Nawabshah and the cold of Ziarat and Quetta. There isn’t a day that goes by without thinking about it. This is a genuine request for some advice.

By ZEESHAN KHAN
Wednesday, 25 February 2009.
pakistan-flag2
HONG KONG, China—I am sure this question flashes in your heads from time to time: What can we, as young overseas nationalist Pakistanis, do to benefit or contribute to Pakistan?

This question is even truer nowadays with the current situation in our homeland. It is as if a game is being played out in front of our own eyes, whose direction has been painstakingly predictive. It is like a checklist, isn’t it:

First, remove the government through mass propaganda, aide the lawyers’ protests, scare the investors, creating false/negative news to create a sense of paranoia.

Once that has been taken care of, put in place an incompetent, corrupt and to some extent idiotic government that is so cut off from the local Joe on the street and from reality for that matter. A government that is rewarding their party goons with lost jobs and government ministries and foreign travel incentives to beg governments for money, giving national honorary medals to the likes of CIA’s chief, the same medals that were given to our brave soldiers who paid with their blood when it came to the name of Pakistan. A government whose officials, instead of reassuring their people about the security of the country are instead raising alarm bells in Washington by saying the country is being taken over by the Taliban. [President Zardari did this in a TV interview to an American channel.]

Simultaneously, pump money to insurgents in different parts of the country, and if the army somehow tries to get close to defeating them, then try plan B that is create Shia/Sunni violence. Create fear that the strongest, most disciplined Muslim army has some outlaws in its ranks and that the nuclear assets will be soon in control of some bearded officers that are ready to ship them out and explode a dirty bomb in midtown Manhattan, miraculously bypassing their intelligence agencies, their airport security and their radars and checkpoints.


Now back to my opening statement, what are we do to help our homeland in the midst of all this propaganda and deliberate terrorism and destabilization?

I am a confused Pakistani that loves every inch of this great land of ours, likes the cool of Murree as much as the heats of Nawabshah and the cold of Ziarat and Quetta. There isn’t a day that goes by without thinking about it. This is genuine request for some advice. 
Zeeshan is a young Pakistani living and working in Hong Kong, China. He can be reached at zeeshank16ATgmail.com

Pakistan, A Sleeping Superpower

In the 60s the building that we all know as Habib Bank Plaza in Karachi was the tallest building all the way from the Middle East down to Singapore. In the 1960s almost every army, navy and air force in the Middle East was manned by Pakistani officers and men. We literally raised those armed forces. Many airlines that operate from the Gulf have actually been trained, organized and manned by PIA.  Sure, Pakistan has fallen on tough times. But let all Pakistanis take strength from the fact that this great country needs to be put back on the track from which it got derailed in the 1960s. We Pakistanis have to once again regain our lost glory. 

 
By MASOOD SHARIF KHAN KHATTAK
Wednesday, 10 June 2009.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Way back in the 1960s Pakistan was truly on the move.

The early Ayub years gave us the “Green Revolution” because of the construction and commissioning of dams such as Mangla and Tarbela. Barrages were erected all the way down to the Guddu near Hyderabad.

These dams and barrages gave birth to an efficient network of canals and small distributaries which in the sixties not only made Pakistan self-sufficient but surplus in agricultural products.

In the 60s the building that we all know as Habib Bank Plaza in Karachi was the tallest building all the way from the Middle East down to Singapore. In the 1960s almost every army, navy and air force in the Middle East was manned by Pakistani officers and men. We literally raised those armed forces.

Many airlines that operate from the Gulf have actually been trained, organized and manned by PIA staff when they initially started operations. Today they are amongst the best in the world while PIA is in a total mess.
In 1972 it was Pakistan that created history and paved the way for the world to move in the direction that it actually has moved by being instrumental in bringing about President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing (then Peking). That visit helped both China and USA equally and opened the world to be shaped as it is today. Not long after that, in 1979, if Pakistan had not taken on the USSR on its own initially, along with the Afghan Mujahideen, the world today would have been very different.


One can go on recounting many more aspects of Pakistan to show what a potently viable country it should have been today with an economy strong enough to stand it in good stead for exercising an independent foreign policy as well as in bringing about an environment in which the country would have had a content population which would, in turn, have excluded space to all sorts of disruptions.

What, then, went wrong and why do people now talk in terms of whether Pakistan will be able to outlast its present crisis?

Pakistan indeed lost its way in the years that followed the incidents I have quoted; military coups, the judicial murder of an elected prime minister, frequent derailing of the political process, an erratic foreign policy pursued by a bunch of minds that were driven by reasons other than prudent statecraft, importing of self-seeking bankers and making them prime ministers, denying of provincial autonomy to the federating units, allowing ethnic and other kinds of militancy to grow, letting fiefdoms be created right under the nose of the state, making talent become subservient to cronyism, treating education as if it was insignificant and so much more is all responsible for the dire straits we find ourselves in after having made a great start in the early years of our freedom.
It is said that South Korea laid its foundations for progress and prosperity on Pakistan’s First Five Year Plan. Pakistan never made a second five-year plan and in fact the First Five Year Plan was followed by unplanned improvisation. Who knows, had Pakistan followed its own First Five Year Plan like South Korea did, in the subsequent years Pakistan too may well have been one of the biggest economies of the world today. (South Korea is now the fourth-biggest of Asia and the world’s 15th.)
Most Pakistanis are known to have a strong faith in the country’s ability to bounce back from the wilderness. Pakistan is not a country that can be written off because a handful of insurgents have taken the state on frontally and because the state has not responded as responsibly as it ought to have ever since the crisis was evolving. Reacting to situations when crises explode in the face cannot be the best of situations for any state.  


The present crisis should never have gotten to where it now stands. Now that it has and now that it has to be handled, let all Pakistanis take strength from the fact that this great country needs to be put back on the track from which it got derailed in the 1960s.

We Pakistanis have to once again regain our lost glory and win back our rightful, respectable and dignified place in the comity of nations. We can and must do it.

The writer is former director general of the Intelligence Bureau and former vice president of the PPP Parliamentarians. This column was published by The News International. Email: masoodsharifkhattakATgmail.com