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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.

I saw this movie today and have to recommend it to anyone who wants to see the consequences of torture. Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney, and produced by Eva Orner and Susannah Shipman, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

The film focuses on the murder in custody of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base.

Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America’s policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defense of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularization of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24.

The film is part of the Why Democracy? series, which consists of ten documentary films from around the world questioning and examining contemporary democracy. As part of the series Taxi to the Dark Side was broadcast over 30 different countries around the world between the 8th and 18th of October 2007.

Description: wikipedia

Newsweek International has an interesting story penned by Fareed Zakaria about how the world should accept that a radical Islam exists and how to live with it.

It is not just in the Swat valley that Islamists are on the rise. In Afghanistan the Taliban have been gaining ground for the past two years as well. In Somalia last week, Al-Shabab, a local group of Islamic militants, captured yet another town from government forces. Reports from Nigeria to Bosnia to Indonesia show that Islamic fundamentalists are finding support within their communities for their agenda, which usually involves the introduction of some form of Sharia-Islamic law-reflecting a puritanical interpretation of Islam. No music, no liquor, no smoking, no female emancipation.

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Were he to hold Western, liberal views, Shinwari would have little credibility within his country. The reality-for the worse, in my view-is that radical Islam has gained a powerful foothold in the Muslim imagination. It has done so for a variety of complex reasons that I have written about before. But the chief reason is the failure of Muslim countries to develop, politically or economically. Look at Pakistan. It cannot provide security, justice or education for many of its citizens. Its elected politicians have spent all of their time in office conspiring to have their opponents thrown in jail and their own corruption charges tossed out of court. As a result, President Asif Ali Zardari’s approval rating barely a month into office was around half that enjoyed by President Pervez Musharraf during most of his term. The state is losing legitimacy as well as the capacity to actually govern.

What I would like to understand is why the United States continues to call them extremists and Islamists, while negotiating to bring them into power in Afghanistan? If the United States feels comfortable with Gulbadeen Hekmatyar in power in Afghanistan, how can you honestly criticize Pakistan for making a peace deal with the militants in Swat?

And for reference, when Swat was still a Princely state, prior to 1969, the rule of law in the area was Sharia. Justice was effective, quick and accepted by all, which today’s Pakistan doesn’t have. Being a native of Swat, I know the old system because my family was part of it. It was also part of the agreement made with the Government of Pakistan to when it was included in the Federation.

Is Sharia bad? No. It is an extremely effective form of justice, but it must be interpreted with the honesty and clarity of Solomon. The problem that most of us are concerned about is with the interpretation, not with Sharia itself.

Anxiety continues to grow in India over the Obama presidency, says John Elliott on The Daily Beast.

Pakistan has firmly believed that India had a special place in George W. Bush’s heart from turning a blind eye to the activities in Kashmir to the nuclear deal that allowed India to buy nuclear hardware from the international community without signing the Non Proliferation Treaty. But the undertones coming out of New Delhi shows an increasing anxiety about what Obama can and will do for India.

John Elliott lays out some of India’s arguments on The Daily Beast:

India is not against Obama. It recognizes that the world should be a better and safer place with him as president, but it has lost its best foreign friend. Bush brought it out of the cold and helped to make it an international player by instigating-with Condoleezza Rice-the U.S.-India nuclear pact that scraped through just before Bush took his fingers off the levers of power. The deal enables the U.S. and other countries such as France and Russia to sell nuclear plants and allied technology to India, which had been banned for many years since India developed nuclear weapons.

A particular concern has been India’s hope that Obama will not link two distinct issues: the urgent international issue of the Taliban and al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistan border with far less critical India-Pakistan differences over Kashmir. For its part, Pakistan has been arguing that a settlement of the Kashmir question would allow it to move troops from the Indian border to tackle the insurgents and terrorists on the Afghan side.

After a strenuous lobbying campaign in Washington, India has successfully persuaded Obama not to include India in the Pakistan-Afghanistan brief given to Richard Holbrooke, his new special envoy to the region. The lobbying was blunt. At one meeting, India’s emissaries told Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and a leading Obama adviser, that Holbrooke would not be welcome in Delhi if India was included in his brief. Albright apparently asked, presumably mischievously, if he would be given an Indian visa. Yes, came the reply, but not much else. Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this online today about a protest by some Pakistani-Americans in Chicago and am posting for your consumption. I noticed that Teeth Maestro had commented on this article on the original site, but I was shocked at some of the hatred that people show towards Pakistan.

A group of Pakistani-Americans and anti-war activists delivered a letter today to the Chicago office of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, calling on him to cool political rhetoric about bombing targets in Pakistan.

“We are particularly concerned with your public pronouncements earlier this week in support of violating the borders of our ally, the country of Pakistan…,” the letter says. “You must understand the sweeping dismay that your avowed support for U.S. military incursions into Pakistan … has elicited among untold numbers of Pakistani-Americans and peace activists across the country.”

Ifti Nasim, the host of a Pakistani radio show in Chicago called Sargam, said the U.S. was “making a mistake” by “attacking Pakistan and making Pakistan your enemy.”

He and other protesters criticized U.S. military incursions into Pakistan’s tribal areas in the northwest part of the country to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda targets. They also decried the Bush administration’s use of unmanned military drone aircraft, which has resulted in civilian deaths. Read the rest of this entry »

A very interesting interview with the Mayor of Kabul, President of Afghanistan to the rest of the world, Hamid Karzai.

I find it interesting to listen to his change in position on Pakistan and its involvement with the war on terror. But what is more interesting is how deftly he avoids questions about corruption and warlords in the Afghan parliament but a trying to talk about the great accomplishments he has been able to achieve. Seems like he went to the same diplomatic school as George Bush and Sarah Palin. Give it a listen and share your thoughts.

And if rumors are true, Zalmay Khalilzad will have some competition in his run for the Afghan presidency in the next elections since Karzai is planning to run again.