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The Crusades begin in Afghanistan!

A U.S. church raised money to send Bibles, printed in the Pashtu and Dari languages, to American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a report on Al Jazeera documented Sunday night.

It is against military rules to proselytize — a regulation one of the soldiers filmed by the network readily acknowledged. “You cannot proselytize, but you can give gifts,” says the soldier. It is a crime in Afghanistan to attempt to convert anyone from Islam to any other religion. “I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get Bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out.” The footage is said to be roughly a year old.

The Al Jazeera report also shows a military preacher urging army parishioners to “hunt people for Jesus.”

“The Special Forces guys, they hunt men. Basically, we do the same things as Christians. We hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the Kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business,” he says.

Read the whole story on The Huffington Post.

Do you have any ideas on what can be done to empower the people of the nation rather than complaining about not having the high-powered tools to fight terrorists after they have launched an attack?

I, like many other Pakistanis, have spent a lot of time getting pissed off over the sheer number of terrorist attacks within our borders. I have gotten pissed about the “inaction” of the government against the terrorists that cause havoc. I have blown my fuse over the surrender of my home Swat valley to terrorists. I have gotten tired of reading newspapers because every article is about the things that I just mentioned with no way forward. I have stopped watching domestic channels because of the non-stop discussions about what the government is doing wrong.

I have gotten tired of hearing about a “possible foreign hand” when amazingly everything is connected to either al Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban or Baitullah Mehsud. I find it insulting that Pakistan’s military is regularly chastised for it’s supposed links to terrorist organizations, while it continues to suffer the most military and collateral losses in America’s War on Terror. And most of all, I am most pissed at the Americans who have never left own state, much less their country, commenting on how Pakistan deserves everything happening to it, while the KKK, Neo Nazis and street gangs  roam their country outside the reach of justice.

At the same time, I, like many other Pakistanis, have noticed that while the government continues to call this our war, which I firmly believe, they don’t give us any tools to help them fight the battle against terrorism. While every political leader is quick to condemn these attacks, none is ready to come forward with a plan to end the problem forever – because it may alienate potential voters. I have seen that very few domestic channels spend anytime discussing the challenge facing Pakistan and tools that we need to defeat it. I am not talking about the military solution, I am talking about what we, as a nation, can do.

So, I jotted down a few things that can be done almost immediately and other can add to the list.

Make the NADRA database of Computerized National ID Cards available to everyone

The fact that some Afghan national who could not even speak Urdu, rented a house in Marawa 15 days prior the attack, and it didn’t raise any alarm bells, shocks me! How does someone like that not stick out like a sore thumb?

As the government keeps telling us, and many have learned first hand, there are numerous fake ID cards being used to open bank accounts, rent/purchase residential and commercial properties, and many other things. If the NADRA database could be made accessible from any location to check and verify that the ID card that is being used is a valid would be a great first step. Not only would this help to identify the terrorists, it would also help to identify numerous other people involved in illegal activities.

The database should be available to registered individuals that provide proof of identity and legitimate reason for use. Even if this service was made available through local police stations and NADRA centers.

Tell Us Who You Are Looking For

It’s not possible that the Government of Pakistan, Pakistan Army, Inter-Services Intelligence, Military Intelligence, Intelligence Bureau, CIA, FIA, and numerous other police and para-military organizations don’t have a Master list of people that they are looking for. Odds are that they probably have a lot of information about each individual including where they were last seen, what type of work they take to earn money, educational background, what they are suspected of, and maybe even a picture.

If this information was all centralized into a public database of wanted individuals, the people of Pakistan would be able to provide information as to where these individuals might be now. In the age of technology, this could be done via the internet so that anyone around the world would be able to provide information anonymously.

And hey, once a week, put a full page advertisement in the newspaper with photographs of the 10 most wanted people so that the people are part of the solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Markey, senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an interesting piece in Foreign Policy magazine called “Zardari’s War.” Markey sets forth a clear analysis of the current situation in Pakistan and where we could be heading if the political and domestic unrest continues.

This time, it wasn’t Islamist militants or al Qaeda stirring up trouble. Rather, Pakistan’s government — elected in the wake of former President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation — has gone to war with itself.

The country’s Supreme Court is once again implicated in the action, having disqualified from office the leaders of Pakistan’s main opposition party: former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother, the sitting chief minister of Punjab. Soon after the court’s decision, President Asif Ali Zardari imposed governor’s rule, effectively placing his own man in charge of his country’s most populous and politically dominant province.

In response, the Sharif brothers accused Zardari of manipulating the court and have vowed to take their case to the streets. This is no idle threat. According to public opinion surveys, Sharif is now Pakistan’s most popular politician. His party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), might well succeed in mobilizing violent street rallies that would test the capacity of state security and could even deliver a deathblow to the coalition government in Islamabad.

In short, Pakistan’s major political leaders are now in a no-holds-barred contest for political power. The time for unity and compromise appears to have passed; the era of stable democratic governance (and a loyal opposition) was fleeting.

Markey’s question of where this puts the Obama administration in terms of the US led War on Terror reveals startling options being considered by the powers that be in Washington. While Pakistan’s newspapers have been full of articles about the hustle and bustle of US and UK diplomats between President’s House, Prime Minister House and Raiwind trying to keep the political battle that has broken out between the Sharif led PML-N and Zardari’s PPP, but Washington is already considering its options if things spin out of control in Pakistan.

But three other, less pleasant outcomes are now more likely. First, Zardari could succeed in quelling Sharif’s protests, effectively sidelining his primary opponent and consolidating his own national standing. Second, Sharif could leverage street protests and existing cleavages within Zardari’s party to claw his way to power. Third, destabilizing violence and prolonged political uncertainty could convince the Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to reassert control and sideline both civilian contenders. Read the rest of this entry »

US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly stated that “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base.” At a time when Pakistan’s new leadership is facing problems of its own with the economy and terrorism, this revelation could shake the Pakistani nation. Quoting from the Chicago Tribune:

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistani opposition to the ongoing campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets along Pakistan’s northwest border.

“As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” she said of the planes.

The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counterterrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

The CIA declined to comment, but former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, confirmed that Feinstein’s account was accurate.

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Many in counterterrorism experts have assumed that the aircraft were operated from U.S. military installations in Afghanistan, and remotely piloted from locations in the United States. Experts said the disclosure could create political problems for the fledgling government in Islamabad.

“If accurate, what this says is that Pakistani involvement, or at least acquiescence, has been much more extensive than has previously been known,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “It puts the Pakistani government in a far more difficult position [in terms of] its credibility with its own people. Unfortunately it also has the potential to threaten Pakistani-American relations.” Read the rest of this entry »

I was reminded of a comment made by Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilani that Palestinians risked a “shoah,” the Hebrew word for a big disaster and for the Nazi Holocaust. While his colleagues insisted to the international media that he had not meant “genocide” the events of the past few weeks would lead us to believe otherwise.

In a fantastic article today on the Huffington Post website, David Bromwich puts forward a fantastic argument to the, as he calls it, “Bush-Sharon doctrine” of “if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction.”

What prompts the fantasy that you can “kill all the terrorists” without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed. They will be recorded as numbers, perhaps, but they will pass out of the awareness of the world. That is not the way things work, of course. There are people in the world — not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of millions — who feel more closely allied to the killed than they do to the killers.

“Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” In every culture and every civilization, to kill the innocent is evil. Fifty civilians who live in a neighborhood where one terrorist has built a hidden sniper’s nest are understood to be innocent. If you kill the fifty, you have done something worse than not killing the one.

Yet to put it like that brings up the revaluation of state terror that entered our language with the Sharon-Bush doctrine, first propounded in 2001-02. According to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction. This, no matter what the impediments on your freedom of movement, no matter how unconscious you may be of the existence of the terrorist, no matter how much your toleration of him may have been driven by fear. Read the rest of this entry »

While many of us in Pakistan have had our doubts about the dossier of the Mumbai attacks, while watching The Pulse with Jasmeen, another investigative report was referenced by India’s own Tehelka.com has done a critical expose on what happened before the Mumbai attacks. The information provided there makes me wonder how much more would be learned if a proper investigation is carried out.

Here are some excerpts:

If the Prime Minister chose to pointedly focus on the crucial issue of ‘information-sharing between various agencies’, it was with a reason. He knew that vital and critical intelligence had simply been ignored. It lay unattended in various files, in the offices of different premier intelligence agencies. He is aware that if all the intelligence that came in two months before the Mumbai terror attack on 26/11 had been put through a ‘sophisticated assessment and analysis’, senior officers could well have been able to join the dots and zero in on the fact that terrorists were going to use the sea route to come into Mumbai and attack five-star hotels. Incredibly, sources in the highest quarters in New Delhi have told TEHELKA that the mobile numbers that were used by the Mumbai terrorists were available with the Intelligence Bureau at least five days before 26/11.

Highly placed sources shared the contents of a ‘Secret’ note that contains 35 mobile numbers. Of the 35 SIM cards, 32 had been purchased from Kolkata and three from Delhi, by “overground” workers of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, and sent to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir by mid- November. The precise contents of the ‘Secret’ note could not have been more direct: “The numbers given below have been acquired from Kolkata by overground workers (OGWs) and have been sent through Pakistan trained militants based in Kashmir to PoK. These numbers are likely to emerge in other parts of the country. These numbers need to be monitored…” The note contains more: “These numbers need to be monitored and the information taken from these numbers regarding the contents of the conversation, current locations of the call detail records are required for further developing the information. The monitoring is possible at Kolkata.”

Read the rest of this entry »