Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad has once again stated that the September 11 attacks were a staged event, rejecting claims that his comments are a publicity stunt.

“What do I gain from a publicity stunt? I am merely going by a public statement. I am not going to be a Prime Minister anymore unless you (pointing to a journalist) want me to …” the former Malaysian prime minister told reporters on Friday. Read more »

DAWN

Saturday, 26 Dec, 2009

Lawyers shout slogans in support of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry outside the Supreme Court in Islamabad on December 16, 2009 after the decision on NRO. — AFP Pakistan
 

The Supreme Court’s verdict on the NRO and the way it has been decided to enforce it leaves no doubt in my mind that the establishment is once again out to get the PPP and bring back its favourite civilians to power.

Familiar forces are once again trying to seize the initiative they lost after a decade-long military rule which gave us the ‘war on terror’ and has brought us to a state where Pakistan is bracketed with Afghanistan and is considered one of the hottest spots in the world that can explode anytime.

Never mind the blunders of the masters of ‘strategic lack of depth’ and architects of the policies that have turned Pakistan into a client state of America with few friends; they seem to have decided to strike back again.

Now faced with the question of how to justify this attempt to take back power, they seem to have decided to divert the public’s attention to an easy target and a handy dog to whip; the government of Asif Zardari. It is even speculated that the very reason why the establishment facilitated the entry of Zardari into the corridors of power was because he was considered so vulnerable that getting rid of him would be a piece of cake.

When I wrote about this almost 14 months ago, some PPP stalwarts and senior media pundits dismissed the idea saying the United States was firmly behind him forgetting a basic tenet of Washington’s policy: the US is always with the Pakistan military.

The humiliation of Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar may have come as a shock to some but it was hardly a surprise as it was a demonstration of who really runs the country, a warning to Mr Zardari and an ominous sign of things to come. Read more »

Published in Daily DAWN

By Yousuf Nazar

December 5, 2009

The Americans blame the extremists and terrorists for Pakistan’s current woes. So do Pakistan’s liberals.—File photo

Pakistan’s so-called Islamic parties and groups never get tired of blaming America for all the country’s problems. The military has traditionally blamed the politicians.

The Americans blame the extremists and terrorists for Pakistan’s current woes. So do Pakistan’s liberals.

In the context of the recent past and Pakistan’s history, Pakistan’s biggest tragedy and the principal reason for its break-up was and has been the axis of trouble between America, Pakistan’s army, and the religious parties.

Until and unless the axis is broken, neither the reconstruction of the Pakistani state nor the so-called democratisation of Pakistan will bring peace or prosperity to the latter’s 170 million people, nearly eighty per cent whom live below the poverty line of $2 a day. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal

November 20, 2009

If it accomplished nothing else, the Obama administration’s announcement last Friday to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan blew the Nidal Hasan murders out of the news. The KSM fiasco deserves all the attention it gets. What Hasan represents, however, is a more immediate concern.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an old-school jihadi. They sit in far-off redoubts, assembling terror teams of foreign nationals who now must figure out how to get themselves and their plot inside the U.S. Not impossible, but harder than before 9/11.

Hasan is new school. He is what’s known as a homegrown terrorist. Virtually all the Islamic terrorist plots thwarted in the U.S. in recent years were homegrown, not designed from afar by a KSM. Read more »

I wrote this article almost two years ago in November 2007. I think it is as relevant today as it was two years ago. Benazir Bhutto, after reading the article,  repeated the theme on December 2, 2007 in Peshawar. She insisted that negotiation was the only viable option, in a major policy departure from her previous stance. I am posting this article here with a special request for the media. Please read carefully and between the lines!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

By Yousuf Nazar

The statement of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on November 11, 2007 that Pakistan’s unrest could distract its military’s War on Terror is appalling. The people of Pakistan with their country under emergency and thousands of freedom loving lawyers and activists in jail are worried about their country’s future, put at stake due to the blunders of a US-backed military general. They consider the insurgency on their northern frontiers – War on Terror for the US – a disaster brought upon them by a thoughtless American-designed and American-funded military campaign. Senator Joe Biden likens Pakistan to Iran in 1979. Both views appear to lack depth and show inadequate understanding of the issues. War on Terror is not at stake nor is Pakistan Iran of 1979. Pakistan could however become another post-2001 Iraq or God forbid, another, Balkan, if the US continues to use the two-pronged approach of military rule (direct or in disguise with a civilian facade) in Pakistan and military approach to the War on Terror in Afghanistan as a solution.   Read more »

By Dr Mubashir Hasan

 A state is nothing but an instrument of coercion, an organisation of armed men of police and military along with magistrates, prisons, tax collectors and secret service. In order to be strong and durable, the state has to have full support of its citizens and that is exactly what the state of Pakistan has increasingly lacked

Reconstruct or perish, the choice before the ruling elites of Pakistan is clear. They have worked the country into a state of turmoil; call it an incipient civil war or a general uprising. The forces against what is left of the governing capacity are lawless, destructive, cruel and unorganised, yet they are powerful and aggressive, much too strong to be resisted by the present set up of the state which is decayed and predatory, with links abroad, and not truly national. Read more »

October 28, 2009 

By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

Read more »

The Decapitation of Pakistan by its own Military!

Zahir Ebrahim

Project Humanbeingsfirst

September 28, 2009 | Revised October 06, 2009

(fully footnoted oped in .doc, .pdf formats)

© Project Humanbeingsfirst^TM. Permission granted to use freely as per copyright notice

Document ID: PHBZE20090928 | URL: http://humanbeingsfirst.org. | Print | PDF | Comment.

Dateline California, United States

Who really killed Benazir Bhutto? I mean the prime-movers? Well let’s read it in her own lucid words, which have now been augmented, almost two years later, with the Pakistan’s Army Chief of Staff’s belated disclosures of September 21, 2009. Why belated? Well, please see these unpublished letters to many Pakistani newspaper editors on their repeatedly perpetuating the fiction of Who Killed Benazir Bhutto in cahoots with the ‘hectoring hegemons’ and their agents!

Read more »

Taxation system is unjust and so is the oil pricing formula. However, that has been the case for a long time. Carbon tax is nothing but a new name given to Petroleum Development Levy (PDL). In fact, Rs10 is less than the PDL of Rs. 10.54 that was being charged on petrol in June. Read more »

Operation Khanjar Begins

By GARY LEUPP

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. 
Operation Khanjar or “Strike of the Sword” in Helmand province is the first major operation under President Obama’s strategy to “stabilize” Afghanistan as he adds 21,000 more U.S. troops. Marine spokesman Capt. Bill Pelletier explains with no apparent sense of irony that the operation aims to show “the Afghan people that when we come in we are going to stay long enough to set up their own institutions. We do not want people of Helmand province to see us as an enemy, we want to protect them from the enemy,” he adds. Read more »

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/09/05/12/10313072.html

By: Peter Chamberlin

We are fighting a war that is like no other.  The illusion is made as real; the real is made as dust.  Nothing is as it seems in this war, even though this is the era of instant news.  This alteration of our very understanding of reality has been necessary for us to pursue a war policy of pure evil, even though we have paraded ourselves before the world as warriors in defense of truth and light.  The human race is begging for an end to the path of destruction that trusted American leaders have steered the world onto., longing to turn onto a permanent path of Light.  It is high time the United States either showed the world the way into the Light, or got out of the way of those who can. Read more »

“Within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state.”  

     David Kilcullen, adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander

April 5, 2009

New York Times Magazine Preview

By JAMES TRAUB

TO ENTER the office where Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, conducts his business, you head down a long corridor toward two wax statues of exceptionally tall soldiers, each in a long, white tunic with a glittering column of buttons. On closer inspection, these turn out to be actual humans who have been trained in the arts of immobility. The office they guard, though large, is not especially opulent or stupefying by the standards of such places. President Zardari met me just inside the doorway, then seated himself facing a widescreen TV displaying an image of fish swimming in a deep blue sea. His party spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, and his presidential spokesman, Farahnaz Ispahani, sat facing him, almost as rigid as the soldiers. Zardari is famous for straying off message and saying odd things or jumbling facts and figures. He is also famous for blaming his aides when things go wrong — and things have been going wrong quite a lot lately. Zardari’s aides didn’t want him to talk to me. Now they were tensely waiting for a mishap.

Read more »

The following story by the Los Angeles Times gives a new twist to the earlier story released by the US news agency  - the Associated Press (see the post before this one). The AP story said a group called Fedayeen al-Islam claimed responsibility. Now this LA Times story claims Baituallh Mahsud has. According to the LA Times, he has thretened to strike the White House. The timing of the attacks and the Mahsud’s statement is curious and provides a perfect justification for US military strikes (ground and air) anywhere inside Pakistani territories and conincides with the increasingly hostile statements made by the top U.S. military and political officials against Pakistan Army.

LA Times Story 

Read more »

March 31, 2009

By BABAR DOGAR of the Associated Press 

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — The militant group that claimed responsibility for the assault on a police academy said Tuesday it will carry out more attacks unless Pakistani troops withdraw from tribal areas near the Afghan border and the U.S. stops drone attacks against militants in the country. Read more »