The 'Critic Magazine' Blog

The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:43:18 PDT

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.
But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.
Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?
The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.
Afghanistan
The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year. While "success" in Afghanistan might always have been elusive, we would probably have been able to assert more control over the Taliban, and suffered fewer casualties, if we had not been sidetracked. In 2003 -- the year we invaded Iraq -- the United States cut spending in Afghanistan to $14.7 billion (down from more than $20 billion in 2002), while we poured $53 billion into Iraq. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we spent at least four times as much money in Iraq as in Afghanistan.
It is hard to believe that we would be embroiled in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan today if we had devoted the resources there that we instead deployed in Iraq. A troop surge in 2003 -- before the warlords and the Taliban reestablished control -- would have been much more effective than a surge in 2010.
Oil
When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008. We believe that the war and its impact on the Middle East, the largest supplier of oil in the world, were major factors. Not only was Iraqi production interrupted, but the instability the war brought to the Middle East dampened investment in the region.
In calculating our $3 trillion estimate two years ago, we blamed the war for a $5-per-barrel oil price increase. We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.
Federal debt
There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.
As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.
The financial crisis
The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.
Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.
Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.
The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.
* * *
Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America's standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger. The question today is: Can we learn from this costly mistake?

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, was chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. They are co-authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

This article first appeared on The Washington Times

Get another passport

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:58:15 PDT

The writer is executive director news and current affairs at Aaj TV syed.talat@tribune.com.pk

As if the ravages of the floods, the incompetence of the government, and the shenanigans surrounding cricket were not bad enough, there is an additional cause of national depression: a group — ‘Kondemn the whole Kommunity Klan’, or the KKK — is actively pushing the narrative that Pakistan is a failed state because this nation, culturally, does not have the attributes of a successful civilisation.

The madness in Sialkot seems to have triggered their wholesale laceration of Pakistanis. This incident has been mounted on the billboards of ridicule as the final verdict on this all those who live here. According to one member of the KKK, our entire history is so designed as to only produce violence and bloodbath. In other words, we as a people, are historically, culturally, and politically wish death and destruction upon ourselves and on others.

Other members of the KKK are busy in drawing rooms spreading the argument that Pakistan’s experiment in attaining the level of a civilisation has failed. As exemplified by the horror of the beating-to-death of two brothers, those who live in this land have become permanently unhinged.

The cause of their anguish is understandable — the horrendous sight of humans being bludgeoned to pulp can wreck any soul and make people shout from the roof-tops in anger and hurt. But their conclusion is downright racist and alarmingly malignant — that this incident is further proof of a barbaric nature of the whole nation.

While our grasp of world history may be faulty but we have poured over enough paper to know that the Indus civilisation does not have a monopoly over lynch mobs, witch-hunters, and stake-burners. Nor does the subcontinent species have beastliness built into its bones. The entire European history, as indeed British and American history is soaked in blood, sometimes shed in the name of religion, sometimes in name of carrying the white man’s burden, but mostly in brutal self-interest.

All colonialists were master killers. The British took the cake in managing meticulous elimination in the lands they occupied for gold, slaves and the glory of the crown. Today’s civilisational success — on whose merit according to the KKK, we don’t measure up — is built on yesterday’s systematic murder of weak natives.

These attitudes, though regulated and controlled, are still prevalent — as much in white, western societies are they are observed in the coloured eastern countries. Beneath the angelic calm of material achievement of these societies — which is enviable and laudable — lurks a blood-thirsty beast that demands annihilation every now and then. The US-led, British-backed war in Iraq is a manifestation of this beast. Need we recall how the Iraqis were, and are being killed? What transpired in those awful prison cells that were guarded by the progeny of successful civilisations? Need we talk about extermination in Afghanistan and the daily dance of death that goes by the name of collateral damage? Should we cite — again — the nuclear attack on Japan?

The KKK’s argument that Pakistanis are collectively responsible for the brutality of a few individuals is Hitlerian in accusation. It is absurd to say that since Pakistani film-goers used to lionise Sultan Rahi that means that they love violence. This is no more evidence of national penchant for violence than the Hollywood’s glorification of James Bond’s hi-tech mayhem and murder. And if we must take fictional characters as reflections of deeply-ingrained social attitudes, then Hollywood’s cannibals, flesh-eaters, vampires, mobsters, gangsters, rapists, torturers, and yes, ‘Terminators’ and paedophiles, have to be seen as mirror images of the inner self of the West.

In the same vein the English doctor Harold Shipman known as ‘Dr Death’ who killed 215 of his patients over a 23-year period can be seen as the way of the English. Or the burning of the Christians and pogroms of the Muslims should be seen as the collective intent of the Indian society. The point is that no society is collectively condemnable. No one nation can be held responsible for the sins of a few individuals. Millions of great men and women are at work serving their fellow human beings in this country. They should not be slighted and insulted by stereotyping them as failed human beings. The KKK should have a heart.

Or get another passport.

First Published in The Express Tribune, September 1^st, 2010.

Air Blue Crash: Plane Now Believed Hijacked, Heading for Nuke Facility

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:35:36 PDT

By Gordon Duff

August 29, 2010 Islamabad, Pakistan (Veterans Today exclusive) Informed sources in the Government of Pakistan have informed Veterans Today that they are developing “hard evidence” indicating the Jet Blue Airbus 320 that crashed August 28th outside Islamabad was a terrorist hijacking tied to rogue American security forces operating inside that country.

Sources indicate that the plane crash was an unsuccessful hijacking attempt intended to crash into the nuclear weapons facility at Kahuta, outside Islamabad. Such an attack may have been blamed on India and would likely have led to retaliation which could easily have escalated to a nuclear exchange between these two nations that have spent decades at each other’s throats.

Suspicions were raised inside Pakistan’s military and intelligence organizations when American military contractors employed by Blackwater/Xe showed up on the scene immediately after the crash, seizing the black box and “other materials.” There is no confirmation that parachutes or electronic equipment had been removed when Blackwater/Xe security relinquished control of the crash scene to Pakistani investigators.

Royal Television in Islamabad, owned by the brother of the head of Pakistan’s powerful JI (Jamate Islami), the Islamic political party, has reported that investigations are underway tying American based contractors to the planning of the attack.

Pakistan’s ISRP (Inter-Services Public Relations) has failed to confirm this but private sources indicate that an active investigation of these allegations is, not only underway but has established ties between an American group and the hijackers.

Military and intelligence officials inside Pakistan, in concert with the American embassy, are withholding all official details of the investigation and are likely to continue doing so.

This same facility had been the subject of an armed penetration by American contractors, believed to be employed by the State Department, in 2009. Four Blackwater employees, armed and possessing explosives were arrested outside the Kahuta nuclear facility in 2009. The four, driving a Jeep 4×4 and possessing advanced surveillance and jamming equipment of Israeli manufacture, were intercepted 1.5 miles from the Kahuta nuclear facility.

The four spoke fluent Pushtu and were dressed in a manner as to resemble Taliban fighters. The order for their release, given by Minister of the Interior Rehman Malik, is an issue of considerable controversy between the civilian government in Pakistan and the powerful military.

The passenger jet with 152 on board slammed into a hillside in what was believed to be Pakistan’s most serious air crash. At least 2 Americans were believed to be on board but, a month later, the US Embassy in Islamabad has left this unconfirmed. Reports received today, however, confirm that at least 5 Americans, military contractors said to be employed by Xe, may also have been on the craft but could not be identified as they had been traveling in local garb and had boarded with false identification.

Xe is an American based military and intelligence contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater and has been the subject of considerable controversy for activities inside Pakistan.

Scene of July 28 Air Crash Outside Islamabad, Pakistan

Sources indicate that the attackers stormed the cockpit in a hijacking attempt. The pilot is said to have jammed the flight controls, careening the Airbus 320 and all aboard into a hillside rather than allowing the plane to be used in a “9/11? type attack inside Pakistan or flown into Indian air space for a repeat of the 2008 Mumbai attack.

Pakistan has, at times in error, referred to American contractors employed by the Departments of Defense, State or the Central Intelligence Agency as Blackwater. However, it is believed the majority of such employees are, in fact, members of that organization or is derivitive, Xe.

Blackwater/Xe, has been subject to considerable controversy inside Pakistan for involvement in an incident in 2009 where several armed Blackwater employees were arrested in what was said to be an unauthorized ”penetration test” on the Kahuta Nuclear Plant, the same facility targeted in this attack.

The same group, often criticized for irregularities in Iraq, has been contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency to operate Predator drones inside Pakistan, operations that have resulted in a significant number of civilian deaths and said by political leaders of several factions to do little but recruit terrorists.

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensiveexperience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic officer of UN humanitarian groups. Gordon Duff’s articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is a regularly on radio and tv. This article first appeared on Opinion Maker.

The Flood, The Devastation, The Victims and a Humble Contribution by Team Karachi in Relief Efforts

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:30:48 PDT

The most devastating floods of Pakistan’s history have washed everything in its path except the will to survive and hope of the victims to rebuild their lives once again. Every bit of help going to the victims is like a drop in the ocean, and so were our relief efforts, which we planned to add our contribution to help raise the deserving to their feets, as per our limited capacities.

With intention to add a similar drop into the ocean, Kamran Somani, Mufti Zahid Sangharwi, Moulana Adil Digri and I (Omar Javaid) drove 450 km from Karachi to reach Khairpur Meerus, on Sunday 23rd August 2010.

After an eight hour long journey we reached our destination at around 4:45 pm in the afternoon. Our hosts were one of the most active organizers of relief work in the affected area around the city. This team of relief workers was headed by Mufti Mir Mohammad Meerak, and the lead organizer Moulana Abdullah Samad.

Through a network of Madressahs, schools and other camps these individuals and their associates were coordinating with donors and fund raisers coming in from other cities, and directing their donations, charities or Zakat amount to where it was mostly needed. This way aid was forwarded to around three thousand flood victims on regular basis.

After our arrival Mufti Mir Muhammad and Moulana Abdullah Samad briefed about the situation and suggested the best way of helping the refugees. We were told that the victims were provided with food and medicine in reasonable quantities by various welfare organizations, NGO’s and the government however the victims had no means to fulfill needs other then food and medicine.

To have an idea about the extent of devastation in Khairpur Meerus outskirts please check the following clips:

During our visit to the camps we confirmed that each of the family in the camps had unique needs; like they were in need of soaps, detergents or any items to maintain hygiene, utensils to eat or cook food, feeders for infants, cloths, shoes, quilts etc, therefore the best way to help was to provide cash, of course only to the genuinely deserving.

Moulana Samad also told us about the experience of other relief workers who came to help and attempted to distribute ration at the camps. The refugees out of desperation went out of control and plundered the guy leaving him with only a Shalwar on his body.

When we visited the camp we saw a similar situation being created over a Toyota Hiace which came to distribute drinking water in a refugee camp. Keeping the situation in view we then decided rather to invite the confirmed refugees, i.e. only those who have been identified and whose particulars has been recorded by Moulana Samad and his associates, at a neutral location and distribute cash.

The very next day we executed the plan. Moulana Samad informed all those camps to send only the confirmed refugees whose names and particulars were also documented and available to Moulana Samad.

The victims were invited at Jamia Islamia Hamadia in Shehbaz Colony. Till 12 pm around 600 of such individuals arrived at the distribution point. Once envelops for 600 recipients were ready with apt amount of cash, Moulana Samad and his associates then begin to announce the names from the list he had, the individuals begin to show up and were provided with Rs. 1000 each. 75 year old Mufti Mir Muhammad Meerak also took active part in the distribution. To maintain the discipline and to avoid any unpleasant situation a couple of police officers were also brought on the scene.

By 3 pm all the cash was distributed to around 600 individuals or family heads. Around 42 families were identified in extremely bad condition. Mufti Zahid and Moulana Adil went to market and bought basic food items of Rs. 62,000/- for them separately. This way a total of Rs. 660,000/- of Zakat, Charity or Donations reached to the deserving families.

The experience was heartening. Particularly to have a firsthand account of the devastation and then forward a helping hand to make a small amount of difference in the life of those who has lost every thing.

It was also very sobering to see the extent to which an individual can degrade his self respect to feed himself and his children. It would be height of ignorance on our part if we don’t realize from the experience that it is only a matter of chance or more aptly the will of God that it is them not us who have been affected by this disaster. Perhaps any kind of natural disaster can struck any individual at any time, let it be a hurricane, earth quake, tsunami or even an epidemic of a virus. The likely hood of being struck by such a calamity is equal for every individual. Keeping this in view we need to get rid of any sense of arrogance (Am I a sinner of lesser degree then the victims in the eye of God?) and rather replace it with a sense of humility, humbleness and sense of thankfulness towards the Almighty God, for the blessings he has bestowed on us and repent day and night for the sins we have committed. It is indeed due to His (SWT) will that we found ourselves among those who can give or contribute something, instead of the recipients end. Wise men says that God send such calamities to bring his servants closer to him … If this is happening then we can expect a quick recovery, if not then let us prepare for a disaster of a magnitude greater enough to wake us up from the slumber.

Murder of Two Brothers in Sialkot is only Tip of the Iceberg

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:38:29 PDT

I cannot agree to the idea that this is an isolated incident. Any random crowd doing such a horrendous act cannot assume to have just gone unimaginably violent ... such a collective crime cannot occur unless the tendency to commit such an act is already present! not in an individual but among all the spectators who preferred to watch and make videos of the entire scene through their mobile phones.

Before the lava erupts from a volcano, the volcanic activity gradually builds up until the time it explodes ... and once it does there is no turning back, unless God wills so ... the societies corrupts in the same way perhaps ... and this video show's just an example of such an eruption ... can there be chance for our collective self to retreat back ... ?

From corrupt politicians, to war on terror, to the recent flood crisis are all signs for those who can understand, realize and repent ... but thats only a fraction of the population and when the wrath of God arrives, no one is spared.

Perhaps it is only a matter of time ...

"Amul Chotay Ustaad Do Deshon ki Ek Awaz" against Pakistan's Culture and Islam?

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:50:26 PDT

By Sajid Saeed Khan

Amul Chotay Ustaad Do Deshon ki Ek Awaz is a singing competition backed by a program AMAN ki ASHA, did anyone noticed that the advertisement of AMAN ki ASHA is on-air from last six months and they started that Chotay Ustaad program on 24th July 2010 (weekly episodes) prior to 2 weeks of Ramadan Kareem, doesn’t it smell fishy?

Analyze it.

When the program was started at the time of introduction of kids, what they were showing a kid from Pakistan is in masjid meeting with Moazzan and performing namaz, praying to be a best singer, in one clip kid is in masjid praying and in next clip he is singing my god see the relation they are creating between praying and singing.

Singing / dancing is prohibited in Islam and it was not even the culture of Pakistan [to the extent it is today] before cable tv.

Now what I observed the purpose behind this is to burst up Ramadan Kareem, people of Pakistan use to pray in Ramadan Kareem and in this month we are totally different people in all aspects we try to oppose all those things which we usually do in normal days and by these sort of programs they want to divert our attention from prays they want us to get indulge ourselves in the delight of singing / dancing which is literally throwing us away from our religion / our culture even in Ramadan Kareem. [Just to quote on example] One episode in which Asha Bhosle joins as a guest, would u guyz believe one of Paki kid father says “ap say mil lia mera hajj hogaya” nauzubillah a muslim saying to hindu “ap say mil lia mera hajj ho gaya” damn it, after this I can say these families are chosen families and they are making us use to of these words so we wont be able to find differences in Islam and Hinduism or between Paki and Indian Culture.

Geo tv exaggerating the emphasis on the India Pakistan friendship by broadcasting this program, they are using kids and a message of friendship as [psychological] weapons this time [as well].

[We shouldn't be totally blaming anti Pakistan or anti Pakistan elements around us for such a cultural or psychological onslaught. We also need to look ourselves in the mirror to see and realize that it is primarily due to our internal weakness which is giving opportunity to those elements within us and outside the boundaries of this country to do all what is necessary to disconnect us from our traditions, culture, history and religion. More then us they realize that what has allowed us to recover our strength and stand tall among other civilization, repeatedly again and again through the history, despite in-numerous downturns and crisis faced by our civilization, mostly due to internal weaknesses. With every passing day I find it getting more and more important for us to realize who we are, where did we came from, what is our history and traditions, only and only if we want to be who we really are ... but on the contrary our enemies are realizing it's importance and trying their best to make us or remain anything but ... Muslims i.e. servants of Allah SWT, and Followers of Muhammad-e-Mustafa SAW

Omar Javaid, Administrator, Critic Magazine Blog]

Why no one invades Switzerland?

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:10:45 PDT

Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:01:52 PDT

By William Dalrymple

As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.

In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

It is difficult to imagine the current military adventure in Afghanistan ending quite as badly as the First Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that slowly descended into what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow.

Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being swept away by General Stanley McChrystal's surge, are instead regrouping, ready for the final act in the history of Hamid Karzai's western-installed puppet government. The Taliban have now advanced out of their borderland safe havens to the very gates of Kabul and are surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahedin once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late 1980s. Like a rerun of an old movie, all journeys by non-Afghans out of the capital are once again confined largely to tanks, military convoys and helicopters. The Taliban already control more than 70 per cent of the country, where they collect taxes, enforce the sharia and dispense their usual rough justice. Every month, their sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai's government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.

Just recently, on 17 May, there was a suicide attack on a US convoy in the Dar-ul Aman quarter of Kabul, killing 12 civilians and six American soldiers; the following day, there was a daring five-hour-long grenade and machine-gun assault on the US military headquarters at Bagram Airbase, killing an American contractor and wounding nine soldiers, so bringing the death toll for US armed forces in the country to more than 1,000. Then, over the weekend of 22-23 May, there was a series of rocket, mortar and ground assaults on Kandahar Airbase just as the British ministerial delegation was about to visit it, forcing William Hague and Liam Fox to alter their schedule. Since then, a dozen top Afghan officials have been assassinated in Kandahar, including the city of Kandahar's deputy mayor. On 7 June, the deadliest day for Nato forces in months, ten soldiers were killed. Finally, it appears that the Taliban have regained control of the opium-growing centre of Marjah in Helmand Province, only three months after being driven out by McChrystal's forces amid much gung-ho cheerleading in the US media. Afghanistan is going down.

Already, despite the presence of huge numbers of foreign troops, it is now impossible - or at least extremely foolhardy - for any westerner to walk around the capital, Kabul, without armed guards; it is even more inadvisable to head out of town in any direction except north: the strongly anti-Taliban Panjshir Valley, along with the towns of Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat, are the only safe havens left for westerners in the entire country. In all other directions, travel is possible only in an armed convoy.

This is especially true of the Khord-Kabul and Tezeen passes, immediately to the south of Kabul, where as many as 18,000 British troops were lost in 1842, and which are today again a centre of resistance against perceived foreign occupiers. Aid workers familiar with Afghanistan over several decades say the security situation has never been worse. Ideas much touted only a few years ago that Afghanistan might become a popular tourist destination - a Switzerland of central Asia - now seem to be dreams from a distant age. Lonely Planet's guidebook to Afghanistan, optimistically published in 2005, has not been updated and is now once again out of print.

The present war is following a trajectory that is beginning to feel unsettlingly familiar to students of the Great Game. In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of sexed-up intelligence about a non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically driven hawks to create a scare - in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion - thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and entirely avoidable war.

Initially, the hawks were triumphant - the British conquest proved remarkably easy and bloodless; Kabul was captured within a few weeks as the army of the previous regime melted into the hills, and a pliable monarch, Shah Shuja, was successfully placed on the throne. For a few months the British played cricket, went skating and put on amateur theatricals as if on summer leave in Simla; there were discussions about making Kabul the summer capital of the Raj. Then an insurgency began and that first heady success slowly unravelled, first among the Pashtuns of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. It slowly gained momentum, moving northwards until it reached Kabul, so making the British occupation impossible to sustain.

What happened next is a warning of how bad things could yet become: a full-scale rebellion against the British broke out in Kabul, and the two most senior British envoys, Sir Alexander Burnes and Sir William Macnaghten, were assassinated, one hacked to death by a mob in the streets, the other stabbed and shot by the resistance leader Wazir Akbar Khan during negotiations. It was on the retreat that followed, on 6 January 1842, that the 18,000 East India Company troops, and maybe half that many again Indian camp followers, were slaughtered by Afghan marksmen waiting in ambush amid the high passes, shot down as they trudged through the icy depths of the Afghan winter. After eight days on the death march, the last 50 survivors made their final stand at the village of Gandamak. As late as the 1970s, fragments of Victorian weaponry and military equipment could be found lying in the screes above the village. Even today, the hill is said to be covered with the bleached bones of the British dead.

One Englishman lived to tell the tale of that last stand (if you discount the fictional survival of Flashman) - an ordinary foot soldier, Thomas Souter, wrapped his regimental colours around him to prevent them being captured, and was taken hostage by the Afghans who assumed that such a colourfully clothed individual must command a high ransom. It is a measure of the increasingly pertinent parallels between the 19th-century war and today's that one of the main Nato bases in Afghanistan was recently named Camp Souter after that survivor.

In the years that followed, the British defeat in Afghanistan became pregnant with symbolism. For the Victorian British, it was the country's greatest imperial disaster of the 19th century. It was exactly a century before another army would be lost, in Singapore in 1942. Yet the retreat from Kabul also became a symbol of gallantry against the odds: William Barnes Wollen's celebrated oil painting The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck - showing a group of ragged but doggedly determined British soldiers standing encircled behind a porcupine of bayonets, as the Pashtun tribesmen close in - became one of the best-known images of the era, along with Remnants of an Army, Elizabeth Butler's image of the wounded and bleeding army surgeon William Brydon, who had made it through to the safety of Jalalabad, arriving before the city walls on his collapsing nag.

For the Afghans, the British defeat of 1842 became a symbol of freedom from foreign invasion. It is again no accident that the diplomatic quarter of Kabul is named after the general who oversaw the rout of the British in that year: Wazir Akbar Khan.

For south Asians, who provided most of the cannon fodder - the foot soldiers and followers killed on the retreat - the war ironically became a symbol of possibility: although thousands of Indians died on the march, it showed that the British army was not invincible and a well-planned insurgency could force them out. Thus, in 1857, the Indians launched their own anti-colonial uprising, the Great Mutiny (as it is known in Britain) or the first war of independence (as it is known in India), partly inspired by what the Afghans had achieved in 1842.

This destabilising effect on south Asia of the failed war in Afghanistan has a direct parallel in the blowback that is today destabilising Pakistan and the tribal territories of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). Here the Pakistani Taliban are once more on the march, rebuilding their presence in Swat, and are now surrounding Peshawar, which is almost daily being rocked by bombs, while outlying groups of Taliban are again spreading their influence into the valleys leading towards Islamabad. Across much of the North-West Frontier Province - roughly a fifth of Pakistan's territory - women have now been forced into the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards and more than 125 girls' schools have been blown up or burned down.

A significant proportion of the Peshawar elite, along with the city's musicians, have decamped to the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi, while tens of thousands of ordinary people from the surrounding hills of the semi-autonomous Fata tribal belt, and especially the Bajaur Agency (or tribal area), have fled from the conflict zones blasted by US Predator drones and strafed by Pakistani helicopter gunships to the tent camps ringing the provincial capital.

The Fata, it is true, have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have always been unruly, but the region has been radicalised as never before by the rain of shells and cluster bombs that have caused huge civilian casualties and daily add a stream of angry foot soldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-western religious and political extremism continues to flourish, as ever larger numbers of ordinary Pakistanis are driven to fight by corruption, predatory politics and the abuse of power by Pakistan's feudal elite, as well as the military aggression of the drones. Indeed, the ripples of instability lapping out from Afghanistan and Pakistan have reached even New York. When CIA interrogators asked Faisal Shahzad why he tried to let off a car bomb last month in Times Square, he told them of his desire to avenge those "innocent people being hit by drones from above".

The route of the British retreat of 1842 backs on to the mountain range that leads to Tora Bora and the Pakistan border, an area that has always been a Taliban centre. I had been advised not to attempt to visit the area without local protection, and so last month I set off for the mountains in the company of a regional tribal leader who was also a minister in Karzai's government. He is a mountain of a man named Anwar Khan Jegdalek, a former village wrestling champion who made his name as a Hezb-e-Islami mujahedin commander in the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s.

It was Anwar Khan Jegdalek's ancestors who inflicted some of the worst casualties on the British army of 1842, something he proudly repeated several times as we drove through the same passes. "They forced us to pick up guns to defend our honour," he said. "So we killed every last one of those bastards." None of this, incidentally, has stopped Anwar Khan Jegdalek from sending his family away from Kabul to the greater safety of Northolt, Middlesex.

He drove himself in a huge 4x4, while a pick-up full of heavily armed Afghan bodyguards followed behind. We left Kabul - past the blast walls of the Nato barracks built on the very site of the British cantonment of 170 years ago - and headed down a corkscrewing road into the line of bleak mountain passes that links Kabul with the Khyber Pass.

It is a dramatic and violent landscape: fault lines of crushed and tortured strata groaned and twisted in the gunpowder-coloured rock walls rising on either side of us. Above, the jagged mountain tops were veiled in an ominous cloud of mist. As we drove, Anwar Khan Jegdalek complained bitterly of western treatment of his government. "In the 1980s when we were killing Russians for them, the Americans called us freedom fighters," he muttered, as we descended through the first pass. "Now they just dismiss us as warlords."

At Sorobi, where the mountains debouche into a high-altitude ochre desert dotted with encampments of nomads, we left the main road and headed into Taliban territory. A further five trucks full of Anwar Khan Jegdalek's old mujahedin fighters, all brandishing rocket-propelled gren ades and with faces wrapped in keffiyehs, appeared from a side road to escort us.

At the crest of Jegdalek village, on 12 January 1842, 200 frostbitten British soldiers found themselves surrounded by several thousand Pashtun tribesmen. The two highest-ranking British soldiers, General Elphinstone and Brigadier Shelton, went off to negotiate but were taken hostage. Only 50 infantrymen managed to break out under cover of darkness. Our own welcome was, thankfully, somewhat warmer. It was my host's first visit to his home since he had become a minister, and the proud villagers took their old commander on a nostalgia trip through hills smelling of wild thyme and rosemary, and up on to mountainsides carpeted with hollyhocks, mulberries and white poplars. Here, at the top of the surrounding peaks, lay the remains of Anwar Khan Jegdalek's old mujahedin bunkers and entrenchments. Once the tour was completed, the villagers fed us, Mughal style, in an apricot orchard: we sat on carpets under a trellis of vine and pomegranate blossom as course after course of kebabs and mulberry pulao was laid in front of us.

During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the various places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, I asked them if they saw any parallels between that war and the present situation. "It is exactly the same," said Anwar Khan Jegdalek. "Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, 'We are your friends, we want democracy, we want to help.' But they are lying."

“Whoever comes to Afghanistan, even now, they will face the fate of Burnes, Macnaghten and Dr Brydon," said Mohammad Khan, our host in the village and the owner of the orchard where we were sitting. The names of the fighters of 1842, long forgotten in their home country, were still known here.

“Since the British went, we've had the Russians," said an old man to my right. "We saw them off, too, but not before they bombed many of the houses in the village." He pointed at a ridge of ruined mud-brick houses.

“We are the roof of the world," said Mohammad Khan. "From here, you can control and watch everywhere."

“Afghanistan is like the crossroads for every nation that comes to power," agreed Anwar Khan Jegdalek. "But we do not have the strength to control our own destiny - our fate is always determined by our neighbours. Next, it will be China. This is the last days of the Americans."

I asked if they thought the Taliban would come back. "The Taliban?" said Mohammad Khan. "They are here already! At least after dark. Just over that pass." He pointed in the direction of Gandamak and Tora Bora. "That is where they are strongest."

It was nearly five in the afternoon before the final flaps of nan bread were cleared away, by which time it had become clear that it was too late to head on to the site of the British last stand at Gandamak. Instead, that evening we went to the relative safety of Jalalabad, where we discovered we'd had a narrow escape: it turned out there had been a huge battle at Gandamak that morning between government forces and a group of villagers supported by the Taliban. The sheer scale and length of the feast had saved us from walking straight into an ambush. The battle had taken place on exactly the site of the British last stand.

The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I heard about the current government, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity has helped give an opening for the return of the once-hated Taliban.

As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation, and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jegdalek, the villagers were waiting for them, and had called in the local Taliban to assist. In the fighting that followed, nine policemen were killed, six vehicles destroyed and ten police hostages taken.

After the jirga was over, one of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green tea. "Last month," he said, "some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, 'Why do you hate us?' I replied, 'Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.'"

What did he say to that? “He turned to his friend and said, 'If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?' In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this."

The defeat of the west's latest puppet government on the very same hill of Gandamak where the British came to grief in 1842 made me think, on the way back to Kabul, about the increasingly close parallels between the fix that Nato is in and the one faced by the British 170 years ago.

Now as then, the problem is not hatred of the west, so much as a dislike of foreign troops swaggering around and making themselves odious to the very people they are meant to be helping. On the return journey, as we crawled back up the passes towards Kabul, we got stuck behind a US military convoy of eight Humvees and two armoured personnel carriers in full camouflage, all travelling at less than 20 miles per hour. Despite the slow speed, the troops refused to let any Afghan drivers overtake them, for fear of suicide bombers, and they fired warning shots at any who attempted to do so. By the time we reached the top of the pass two hours later, there were 300 cars and trucks backed up behind the convoy, each one full of Afghans furious at being ordered around in their own country by a group of foreigners. Every day, small incidents of arrogance and insensitivity such as this make the anger grow.

There has always been an absolute refusal by the Afghans to be ruled by foreigners, or to accept any government perceived as being imposed on the country from abroad. Now as then, the puppet ruler installed by the west has proved inadequate to the job. Too weak, unpopular and corrupt to provide security or development, he has been forced to turn on his puppeteers in order to retain even a vestige of legitimacy in the eyes of his people. Recently, Karzai has accused the US, the UK and the UN of orchestrating a fraud in last year's elections, described Nato forces as "an army of occupation", and even threatened to join the Taliban if Washington kept putting pressure on him. Shah Shuja did much the same thing in 1842, towards the end of his rule, and was known to have offered his allegiance and assistance to the insurgents who eventually toppled and beheaded him.

Now as then, there have been few tangible signs of improvement under the western-backed regime. Despite the US pouring approximately $80bn into Afghanistan, the roads in Kabul are still more rutted than those in the smallest provincial towns of Pakistan. There is little health care; for any severe medical condition, patients still have to fly to India. A quarter of all teachers in Afghanistan are themselves illiterate. In many areas, district governance is almost non-existent: half the governors do not have an office, more than half have no electricity, and most receive only $6 a month in expenses. Civil servants lack the most basic education and skills.

This is largely because $76.5bn of the $80bn committed to the country has been spent on military and security, and most of the remaining $3.5bn on international consultants, some of whom are paid in excess of $1,000 a day, according to an Afghan government report. This, in turn, has had other negative effects. As in 1842, the presence of large numbers of well-paid foreign troops has caused the cost of food and provisions to rise, and living standards to fall. The Afghans feel they are getting poorer, not richer.

There are other similarities. Then as now, the war effort was partially privatised: it was not so much the British army as a corp oration, the East India Company, that provided most of the troops who fought the war for Britain in 1842, just as today both the British and the Americans have subcontracted much of their security work to private companies. When I visited the British embassy, I found that many of the security guards at the gatehouse were not army or military police, but from Group 4 Security. The US security contracts offered to Blackwater/Xe and other private security forces under Dick Cheney's ideologically driven policy of privatising war are worth many millions of dollars.

Finally, now as then, there has been an attempt at a last show of force in order to save face before withdrawal. As happened in 1842, it has achieved little except civilian casualties and the further alienation of the Afghans. As one of the tribal elders from Jegdalek said to me: "How many times can they apologise for killing our innocent women and children and expect us to forgive them? They come, they bomb, they kill us and then they say, 'Oh, sorry, we got the wrong people.' And they keep doing that."

The British soldiers of 1842 found the same reaction in their day. In his diary of his time with the British army of retribution, which laid waste to great areas of southern Afghanistan as punishment for the massacres on the retreat from Kabul earlier in the year, the young Captain N Chamberlain reported how his troops inflicted horrible atrocities on any Afghan civilians they could find. One morning he met a wounded Afghan woman dragging herself towards a stream with a water pot. "I filled the vessel for her," he wrote, "but all she said was, 'Curses on the feringhees [foreigners]!' I continued on my way disgusted with myself, the world, above all with my cruel profession. In fact, we are nothing but licensed assassins."

However, there are some important differences between Britain's first defeat in Afghanistan and the current mess. In 1842, we were at least reinstalling a legitimate Afghan ruler and removing one who could genuinely be cast as an illegitimate usurper. Shah Shuja, the British puppet, was a former ruler of the Sadozai dynasty, from the leading Pashtun clan, and a grandson of the great Ahmed Shah Durrani, the first king of a united Afghanistan. As the traveller and pioneering archaeologist Charles Masson observed: "The Afghans had no objection to the match; they merely disliked the manner of the wooing."

This time, we have been clumsier, and Nato has helped instal a former CIA asset accused by a high-ranking UN diplomat of drug abuse and of having a history of mental instability, with little to recommend him other than that he was once run out of Langley. Although Karzai is a Pashtun of the Popalzai tribe, under his watch Nato has in effect installed the Northern Alliance in Kabul and driven the country's Pashtun majority out of power.

The reality of our present Afghan entanglement is that we took sides in a complex civil war, which has been running since the 1970s, siding with the north against the south, town against country, secularism against Islam, and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban - and they have very good reason for doing so - the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.

Yet it is not too late to learn some lessons from the mistakes of the British in 1842. Then, British officials in Kabul continued to send out despatches of delusional optimism as the insurgents moved ever closer to Kabul, believing that there was a straightforward military solution to the problem and that if only they could recruit enough Afghans to their army, they could eventually march out, leaving that regime in place - exactly the sentiments expressed by the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, on his visit to Afghanistan last month.

In 1842, by the time they realised they had to negotiate a political solution, their power had ebbed too far, and the only thing the insurgents were willing to negotiate was an unconditional surrender. Today, too, there is no easy military solution to Afghanistan: even if we proceed with the plan to equip an army of half a million troops (at the cost of roughly $2bn a year, when the entire revenue of the Afghan government is $1.1bn - in other words, 180 per cent of revenue), that army will never be able to guarantee security or shore up such a discredited regime. Every day, despite the military power of the US and Nato and the $25bn so far ploughed into rebuilding the Afghan army, security gets worse, and the area under government control contracts week by week.

The only answer is to negotiate a political solution while we still have enough power to do so, which in some form or other involves talking to the Taliban. This is a course that Karzai, to his credit, is keen to pursue; he made it clear that his peace jirga at the start of this month was open to any Taliban leader willing to lay down arms, and that jobs and monetary incentives would be available to former Taliban who changed their allegiance and joined the government. It is still unclear whether the new Tory government supports this course; Barack Oba ma certainly opposes it. In this, he is supported by the notably undiplomatic US envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, described by one senior British diplomat as "a bull who brings his own china shop wherever he goes".

There is something else we can still do before we pull out: leave some basic infrastructure behind, a goal we notably failed to achieve in the past nine years. Yet William Hague and Liam Fox oppose this policy - as Fox notoriously said in his 21 May interview with the Times, which infuriated his Afghan hosts: "We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country." The Tories could do much worse than consult their own newly elected backbencher Rory Stewart. He knows much more about Afghanistan than either Fox or Hague. As Stewart wrote shortly before he entered politics, targeted aid projects that employ Afghans can do a great deal of good, "and we should focus on meeting the Afghan government's request for more investment in agriculture, irrigation, energy and roads".

In the meantime, Obama has announced that he will begin withdrawing troops in July 2011. The start of the US withdrawal is likely to begin a rush to evacuate the other Nato forces located in pockets around the country: the Dutch have announced that they will be pulling out of Uruzgan this summer, and the Canadian and Danes won't be far behind them. Nor will the Brits, despite assurances from Hague and Fox. A recent poll showed that 72 per cent of Britons want their troops out of Afghanistan immediately, and there is only so long any government can hold out against such strong public opinion. Certainly, it is time to shed the idea that a pro-western puppet regime that excludes the Pashtuns can remain in place indefinitely. The Karzai government is crumbling before our eyes, and if we delude ourselves that this is not the case, we could yet face a replay of 1842.

George Lawrence, a veteran of that war, issued a prescient warning in the Times just before Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War in the 1870s. "A new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country," he wrote. "Although military disasters may be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be as politically useless."

William Dalrymple's latest book, "Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India", won the first Asia House Literary Award in May, and is newly published in paperback (Bloomsbury, £8.99). His book on the First Anglo-Afghan War is planned for release in autumn 2012

Air Blue Crash Conspiracy

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:27:30 PDT

I don't know why but since the day one I had very similar thoughts in my mind about this incident. Something was telling me that the pilot has intentionally sacrificed the entire aircraft to safe Pakistan from colossal catastrophe, something similar to catastrophe faced by Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 false flag attack ...

The very next day of this crash, I was of the opinion that perhaps this flight was hijacked and was destined to crash on some high profile target like American Embassy etc ... and then the blame would have been put on Al-Qaeda or Osama B.L for planning this attack, and that OBL is hiding in tribal belt of Pakistan, ... and the spectators would have seen history of Iraq and Afghanistan repeating on the Pakistani soil ... or perhaps American's would have brought Pakistan on the front foot in the entire region in this so called war on terror allowing itself to operate only as a financier, hence spending only a fraction of the total current expenditure ...

I personally think that this is something, not exactly, but closer to the truth ...

Courtesy - Nawa-e-Waqt Newspaper

Is Pakistan among the Luckiest Nation in the world

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:50:58 PDT

By Omar Javaid ...

I often think that Pakistan is among the luckiest nation in the world! … Surprised? Or thinking that the author must have gone nuts? Lost his senses perhaps? … Please hold your judgments for a minute and go through a couple of lines before jumping on to conclusions. Have you ever thought why we often jump on to conclusions despite realizing that the information we have isn’t sufficient enough … impatience perhaps? And Pakistanis are impatient indeed … haven’t you driven across the busy streets in Karachi or any other metropolis?

I was thinking, why so? We drive frantically and yet we are mostly late on our commitments! How many the people you know qualify as punctual ones? … Are we too busy or overburdened? … Too busy to not let the ambulance pass by on a busy street … too busy to block the traffic by parking our car at the wrong place … or to stop on the read light (in Karachi at least) … or to make judgments without sufficient knowledge … or to get any where on time … but hey I was to explain how we are among the luckiest nation on this planet, when I am gona do that? … hold on dear, are you too busy as well to wait a couple of minutes before I make my point …?

Dear readers if you need an answer then you must allow me to solve this riddle i.e. why we seem too busy and yet we miss out many important things … but hey it can also be our carelessness … we lack the civic sense that is needed … it not necessarily because we consider ourselves busy … or perhaps it is our arrogance, Nawab mentality i.e. considering ourselves above the law, even moral law … hmmm may be that’s the reason, we only act as if we are too busy … perhaps this also explain why we consider it as our right to park our car in the center of the road and blocking the flow for hundreds of car behind … or consider it our right to import and drink tea of Rs. 2.2 billion per year, i.e. caffeine despite realizing that it has more detriments then benefits … or consider it our right to sleep as late as possible and waking up as late as possible despite realizing that our this behavior alone burns out hundreds of megawatts of electricity … or consider it our right to elect the same politicians who have venomously bitten us many times already … or consider it our right to increase prices of products when public needs it most, like during the month of Ramadan, like the fares of taxi and rickshaws when its raining, like price of mineral water bottles at railway station particularly when the train gets late … or consider it our right to watch Indian channels without realizing the influence it’s creating on our morality, traditional and cultural values … or consider it our right or even take pride in speaking English despite and consider those who doesn’t as inferior … or consider it our right to loot, plunder and destroy property of public in protest of a bomb blast or murder of a politician … or consider it our right to immobilize the whole city in the love of our Prophet (SAW) again on his presumed day of birth or destroy public property on his (SAW) insult … the list can go on and on and I am sure that the readers can add to the list, only to provide more proofs in favor of hypothesis that ‘we as a nation are slowly on a course of collective suicide’ … the citizen of this nation are like termites gone crazy, eating the foundation of their own abode in order to survive … and I haven’t yet counted the external threats being faced by Pakistan today … hasn’t been this our national character since many decades?

If so then why shouldn’t I call this country among the luckiest nation despite it being on the course of suicide since a very long time, is still alive and holds strategic significance on international fronts …?

Or perhaps I am too naïve … or perhaps I don’t know that nations take more time to collapse … it’s the last year or perhaps the last decade we are living in … or may be not …

I don’t claim to know everything, that’s why I can’t give a definite answer, but who can? … what I do know is that something is keeping us alive till date … why we haven’t experienced something as yet like what Bosnians did during 1990s, or like Chechens, or like people of Darfur, or like Iraqis, or like Afghanis, or like Tajiks, or like Palestinians experiencing today etc … may be the endogenous or exogenous circumstances they faced were unique … wait, wait, wait … Kashmir is a part of Pakistan and the people there are suffering no different then Palestinians or like Bosnians did some years back …

Hmmm … can we assume that Kashmiris are paying off for our national sins? Is it due to their sacrifices that rest of Pakistanis are still at peace though relatively! …

Imagine if Kashmir wouldn’t have been a bone of contention among India and Pakistan, then what kind of relations India might have with Pakistan? I know, some of you would never dare to think that in absence of Kashmir issue Indian attitude toward Pakistan would be much more aggressive because Indian would have a huge battery of resources available for a greater cross-national mischief! … a recent survey by an international research agency has revealed that majority of Pakistan consider Indians as the greatest threat to the country … but perhaps the same majority elects all corrupt politicians! ... then how can we trust the majorities opinion … or perhaps the politicians don’t get elected by majorities opinion!!! Which of these two points are correct?

We were trying to find out what’s keeping Pakistan safe … I must rather ask, should we really need to find it out? This ‘Something’ which is keeping Pakistan away from a fatal catastrophe is perhaps serving its purpose only because it’s hidden either within our souls or within the boundaries of our nation … no it’s the not the Nukes stupid … that ‘Something’ is perhaps even guarding those nukes … no it’s not the army or ISI or any other agency or institution, stupid! … that ‘Something’ is even keeping some of these critical institutions or agencies to perform duties, or perhaps they are also not aware of it … don’t try to guess it … that ‘Something’ is serving its purpose only because its hidden away from majority of the population … and that ‘Something’ must be very precious because it has the power to keep this nation away from a fatal catastrophe … and that ‘Something’ can only serve its purpose only if remains hidden unless majority among us develops the ability to protect it; rather we as a nation have a tendency to plunder and squander every good thing we get our hands upon … or sell it off against pennies to our international masters ... so it must remain hidden! ... Only those who have the ability to protect it know what it really is, and that’s only few of us … and at least I am not among them!

It is this ‘Something’ which is making this nation among the luckiest nations of this planet, and I only intends to point your attention toward this ghostly thing only to remind you that Al-Mighty hasn’t already become hopeless from us … if you are intelligent then you must have guessed it … the time for us to confess and repent is not over yet … and as a nation we still have a chance … but if we don’t chose to wakeup and fix our attitude and character then what really our Creator (SWT) would do to save us from becoming the next Bosnia? ... The choice has always been ours.

Why the world needs WikiLeaks

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:53:57 PDT

The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and videos.
Founder Julian Assange, who is reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished and what drives him.
Click here for more information on TED.
This video is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:15:21 PDT

Bikini or headscarf -- which offers more freedom?

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 06:49:16 PDT

Krista Bremer holds her daughter Aliya in the scarf the child decided she wanted to wear.

Nine years ago, I danced my newborn daughter around my North Carolina living room to the music of "Free to Be...You and Me", the '70s children's classic whose every lyric about tolerance and gender equality I had memorized as a girl growing up in California.

My Libyan-born husband, Ismail, sat with her for hours on our screened porch, swaying back and forth on a creaky metal rocker and singing old Arabic folk songs, and took her to a Muslim sheikh who chanted a prayer for long life into her tiny, velvety ear.

She had espresso eyes and lush black lashes like her father's, and her milky-brown skin darkened quickly in the summer sun. We named her Aliya, which means "exalted" in Arabic, and agreed we would raise her to choose what she identified with most from our dramatically different backgrounds.

I secretly felt smug about this agreement -- confident that she would favor my comfortable American lifestyle over his modest Muslim upbringing. Ismail's parents live in a squat stone house down a winding dirt alley outside Tripoli. Its walls are bare except for passages from the Quran engraved onto wood, its floors empty but for thin cushions that double as bedding at night.

My parents live in a sprawling home in Santa Fe with a three-car garage, hundreds of channels on the flat-screen TV, organic food in the refrigerator, and a closetful of toys for the grandchildren.

I imagined Aliya embracing shopping trips to Whole Foods and the stack of presents under the Christmas tree, while still fully appreciating the melodic sound of Arabic, the honey-soaked baklava Ismail makes from scratch, the intricate henna tattoos her aunt drew on her feet when we visited Libya. Not once did I imagine her falling for the head covering worn by Muslim girls as an expression of modesty.

Last summer we were celebrating the end of Ramadan with our Muslim community at a festival in the parking lot behind our local mosque. Children bounced in inflatable fun houses while their parents sat beneath a plastic tarp nearby, shooing flies from plates of curried chicken, golden rice, and baklava.

Aliya and I wandered past rows of vendors selling prayer mats, henna tattoos, and Muslim clothing. When we reached a table displaying head coverings, Aliya turned to me and pleaded, "Please, Mom -- can I have one?"

She riffled through neatly folded stacks of headscarves while the vendor, an African-American woman shrouded in black, beamed at her. I had recently seen Aliya cast admiring glances at Muslim girls her age.

I quietly pitied them, covered in floor-length skirts and long sleeves on even the hottest summer days, as my best childhood memories were of my skin laid bare to the sun: feeling the grass between my toes as I ran through the sprinkler on my front lawn; wading into an icy river in Idaho, my shorts hitched up my thighs, to catch my first rainbow trout; surfing a rolling emerald wave off the coast of Hawaii. But Aliya envied these girls and had asked me to buy her clothes like theirs. And now a headscarf.

In the past, my excuse was that they were hard to find at our local mall, but here she was, offering to spend ten dollars from her own allowance to buy the forest green rayon one she clutched in her hand. I started to shake my head emphatically "no," but caught myself, remembering my commitment to Ismail. So I gritted my teeth and bought it, assuming it would soon be forgotten.

That afternoon, as I was leaving for the grocery store, Aliya called out from her room that she wanted to come.

A moment later she appeared at the top of the stairs -- or more accurately, half of her did. From the waist down, she was my daughter: sneakers, bright socks, jeans a little threadbare at the knees. But from the waist up, this girl was a stranger. Her bright, round face was suspended in a tent of dark cloth like a moon in a starless sky.

"Are you going to wear that?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said slowly, in that tone she had recently begun to use with me when I state the obvious.

On the way to the store, I stole glances at her in my rearview mirror. She stared out the window in silence, appearing as aloof and unconcerned as a Muslim dignitary visiting our small Southern town -- I, merely her chauffeur.

I bit my lip. I wanted to ask her to remove her head covering before she got out of the car, but I couldn't think of a single logical reason why, except that the sight of it made my blood pressure rise. I'd always encouraged her to express her individuality and to resist peer pressure, but now I felt as self-conscious and claustrophobic as if I were wearing that headscarf myself.

In the Food Lion parking lot, the heavy summer air smothered my skin. I gathered the damp hair on my neck into a ponytail, but Aliya seemed unfazed by the heat. We must have looked like an odd pair: a tall blonde woman in a tank top and jeans cupping the hand of a four-foot-tall Muslim. I drew my daughter closer and the skin on my bare arms prickled -- as much from protective instinct as from the blast of refrigerated air that hit me as I entered the store.

As we maneuvered our cart down the aisles, shoppers glanced at us like we were a riddle they couldn't quite solve, quickly dropping their gaze when I caught their eye.

In the produce aisle, a woman reaching for an apple fixed me with an overly bright, solicitous smile that said "I embrace diversity and I am perfectly fine with your child." She looked so earnest, so painfully eager to put me at ease, that I suddenly understood how it must feel to have a child with an obvious disability, and all the curiosity or unwelcome sympathies from strangers it evokes.

At the checkout line, an elderly Southern woman clasped her bony hands together and bent slowly down toward Aliya. "My, my," she drawled, wobbling her head in disbelief. "Don't you look absolutely precious!" My daughter smiled politely, then turned to ask me for a pack of gum.

In the following days, Aliya wore her headscarf to the breakfast table over her pajamas, to a Muslim gathering where she was showered with compliments, and to the park, where the moms with whom I chatted on the bench studiously avoided mentioning it altogether.

Later that week, at our local pool, I watched a girl only a few years older than Aliya play Ping-Pong with a boy her age. She was caught in that awkward territory between childhood and adolescence -- narrow hips, skinny legs, the slightest swelling of new breasts -- and she wore a string bikini.

Her opponent wore an oversize T-shirt and baggy trunks that fell below his knees, and when he slammed the ball at her, she lunged for it while trying with one hand to keep the slippery strips of spandex in place. I wanted to offer her a towel to wrap around her hips, so she could lose herself in the contest and feel the exhilaration of making a perfect shot.

It was easy to see why she was getting demolished at this game: Her near-naked body was consuming her focus. And in her pained expression I recognized the familiar mix of shame and excitement I felt when I first wore a bikini.

At 14, I skittered down the halls of high school like a squirrel in traffic: hugging the walls, changing direction in midstream, darting for cover. Then I went to Los Angeles to visit my aunt Mary during winter break. Mary collected mermaids, kept a black-and-white photo of her long-haired Indian guru on her dresser, and shopped at a tiny health food store that smelled of patchouli and peanut butter. She took me to Venice Beach, where I bought a cheap bikini from a street vendor.

Dizzy with the promise of an impossibly bright afternoon, I thought I could be someone else -- glistening and proud like the greased-up bodybuilders on the lawn, relaxed and unself-conscious as the hippies who lounged on the pavement with lit incense tucked behind their ears. In a beachside bathroom with gritty cement floors, I changed into my new two-piece suit.

Goose bumps spread across my chubby white tummy and the downy white hairs on my thighs stood on end -- I felt as raw and exposed as a turtle stripped of its shell. And when I left the bathroom, the stares of men seemed to pin me in one spot even as I walked by.

In spite of a strange and mounting sense of shame, I was riveted by their smirking faces; in their suggestive expressions I thought I glimpsed some vital clue to the mystery of myself. What did these men see in me -- what was this strange power surging between us, this rapidly shifting current that one moment made me feel powerful and the next unspeakably vulnerable?

I imagined Aliya in a string bikini in a few years. Then I imagined her draped in Muslim attire. It was hard to say which image was more unsettling. I thought then of something a Sufi Muslim friend had told me: that Sufis believe our essence radiates beyond our physical bodies -- that we have a sort of energetic second skin, which is extremely sensitive and permeable to everyone we encounter. Muslim men and women wear modest clothing, she said, to protect this charged space between them and the world.

Growing up in the '70s in Southern California, I had learned that freedom for women meant, among other things, fewer clothes, and that women could be anything -- and still look good in a bikini. Exploring my physical freedom had been an important part of my process of self-discovery, but the exposure had come at a price.

Since that day in Venice Beach, I'd spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of attraction -- wanting to be desired, resisting others' unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing.

I'd spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror -- admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it -- and it sometimes seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, written a novel, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.

On a recent Saturday morning, in the crowded dressing room of a large department store, I tried on designer jeans alongside college girls in stiletto heels, young mothers with babies fussing in their strollers, and middle-aged women with glossed lips pursed into frowns. One by one we filed into changing rooms, then lined up to take our turn on a brightly lit pedestal surrounded by mirrors, cocking our hips and sucking in our tummies and craning our necks to stare at our rear ends.

When it was my turn, my heart felt as tight in my chest as my legs did in the jeans. My face looked drawn under the fluorescent lights, and suddenly I was exhausted by all the years I'd spent doggedly chasing the carrot of self-improvement, while dragging behind me a heavy cart of self-criticism.

At this stage in her life, Aliya is captivated by the world around her -- not by what she sees in the mirror. Last summer she stood at the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway, stared at the blue-black outline of the mountains in the distance, their tips swaddled by cottony clouds, and gasped. "This is the most beautiful thing I ever saw," she whispered. Her wide-open eyes were a mirror of all that beauty, and she stood so still that she blended into the lush landscape, until finally we broke her reverie by tugging at her arm and pulling her back to the car.

At school it's different. In her fourth-grade class, girls already draw a connection between clothing and popularity. A few weeks ago, her voice rose in anger as she told me about a classmate who had ranked all the girls in class according to how stylish they were.

I understood then that while physical exposure had liberated me in some ways, Aliya could discover an entirely different type of freedom by choosing to cover herself.

I have no idea how long Aliya's interest in Muslim clothing will last. If she chooses to embrace Islam, I trust the faith will bring her tolerance, humility, and a sense of justice -- the way it has done for her father. And because I have a strong desire to protect her, I will also worry that her choice could make life in her own country difficult. She has recently memorized the fatiha, the opening verse of the Quran, and she is pressing her father to teach her Arabic. She's also becoming an agile mountain biker who rides with me on wooded trails, mud spraying her calves as she navigates the swollen creek.

The other day, when I dropped her off at school, instead of driving away from the curb in a rush as I usually do, I watched her walk into a crowd of kids, bent forward under the weight of her backpack as if she were bracing against a storm. She moved purposefully, in such a solitary way -- so different from the way I was at her age, and I realized once again how mysterious she is to me.

It's not just her head covering that makes her so: It's her lack of concern for what others think about her. It's finding her stash of Halloween candy untouched in her drawer, while I was a child obsessed with sweets. It's the fact that she would rather dive into a book than into the ocean -- that she gets so consumed with her reading that she can't hear me calling her from the next room.

I watched her kneel at the entryway to her school and pull a neatly folded cloth from the front of her pack, where other kids stash bubble gum or lip gloss. Then she slipped it over her head, and her shoulders disappeared beneath it like the cape her younger brother wears when he pretends to be a superhero.

As I pulled away from the curb, I imagined that headscarf having magical powers to protect her boundless imagination, her keen perception, and her unself-conscious goodness. I imagined it shielding her as she journeys through that house of mirrors where so many young women get trapped in adolescence, buffering her from the dissatisfaction that clings in spite of the growing number of choices at our fingertips, providing safe cover as she takes flight into a future I can only imagine.

By Krista Bremer, who is the winner of a 2008 Pushcart Prize and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She is associate publisher of the literary magazine The Sun, and she is writing a memoir about her bicultural marriage.

This article First appeared on: O, The Oprah Magazine

1/3rd of Women in US Military Raped

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:01:21 PDT

If this is how they treat their own women, then how do we expect them to treat Muslim women of Afghanistan and Iraq?

By Ole Ole Olson @ NEWS JUNKIE POST

According to NPR, “In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed.”

The BBC recently reported on The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq by Helen Benedict. This book examines the extreme difficulties female soldiers have in serving abroad. Benedict interviewed several women in the military to get a deeper understanding of the issue, and some of their stories were real eye openers.

Army specialist Chantelle Henneberry spoke of some of her experiences in Iraq, “Everybody’s supposed to have a battle buddy in the army, and females are supposed to have one to go to the latrines with, or to the showers – that’s so you don’t get raped by one of the men on your own side. But because I was the only female there, I didn’t have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife.”

Another study concluded that 90% of all women serving are sexually harassed. Another one estimates that 90% of all the rapes do not get reported, despite supposedly easier ways to report the crime with confidentiality since 2005. Either way, this appears to be an epidemic that needs to be dealt with.

An online discussion from a former soldier whose identity is being protected had this to say, “At least a rape ends. It’s the day-to-day degradation that eats at you. None of my friends who were raped on active duty reported it. Or if we tried, we were told to shut up for ‘morale.’ Working with your rapist on a daily basis isn’t a lot of fun, believe me.”

How the military is dealing with this appears to demonstrate a pattern of sweeping it under the rug. In 2008, 62% of those that were convicted of sexual assault or rape received very lenient punishments such as demotion, suspension, or a written reprimand.

The culture of sexual violence against women that is allowed to exist in both the US military and private contractors needs to come to an end. When almost a third of all women serving are raped, and over two thirds sexually assaulted, this problem is rampant and systemic.

Quaid-e-Azam’s Concept Of Pakistan As State

omar.javaid@criticmagazine.pk (Omar Javaid) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 01:08:17 PDT

By Rizwan Ahmed (Marhoom) @ In Pakistan's Ideology on July 14, 2010 at 8:06 am

There seems to be a controversy and misinterpretation in some elite circles on the Presidential Address of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 about the concept of Islamic state of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 about the concept of Islamic state of Pakistan. If we candidly and reasonably examine his speech wherein he stated. “We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State….Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Quaid-i-Azam in these words emphasized with remarkable wisdom and foresight the idea of complete toleration and freedom of religion and conscience in the way of life of the Muslims and Hindus alike as clearly adumbrated in the Prophet’s Madinah State.

Moreover the immediate reason behind the use of the said sentence, in my opinion, seems to be first to counter the intense propaganda that the Hindus will be ill-treated in the Islamic State, and secondly, as the enmity between Hindus and Muslims was at its height in the whole subcontinent, to cool down the high tension generated during the partition and independence movement and to normalize the animosity as well as to do away with the hatred, for the benefit of both the Dominions in the interest of peace as the Quaid was the most peace loving leader of his time. There being no ill-will between the Muslims and Christians or Parsis, Quaid did not mention these two important minorities to cease to be as such. Thus Quaid’s words only that in course of time the Hindus and Muslims would cease to be as such. To my mind, it does not purport to mean that the concept of Pakistan would become “secular in any form”. It will be an insult to Quaid-i-Azam if he is said to have reversed the ideological basis of Pakistan. He never used this western terminology of secularism throughout his life.

There is not an iota of truth about his wish to inaugurate secularism in his speech. It is only a prejudicial concept to bewilder the common people and distract them from his (Quaid’s) most sincere faith in Islam.

While delivering his speech at Karachi session of the All India Muslim League on December 26, 1943, he referred to the Glorious Quran thus: “It is the great Book Quran, that is the sheet-anchor of the Muslim India. I am sure that as we go on and on, there will be more and more of oneness – one God, one Book, one Prophet and one Nation.”

During his speech on the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday at Karachi bar Association, January 25, 1948, he said: “Today we have meet here in a small body to pay tribute to the Great Man for not only he has reverence of millions but also commands the respect of all the great men of the World. What tribute can I a humble man, pay to this Great Man.

“The Prophet was a great teacher. He was a great law-giver. He was a great statesman and he was a great sovereign who ruled. No doubt, there are many people who do not quite appreciate when we talk of Islam. Islam is not only a set of rituals, traditions and spiritual doctrines. Islam is also a code for every Muslim which regulates his life and his conduct even in politics and economics and the like. It is based on the highest principles of honour, integrity, fairplay and justice for all. One God and the equality of manhood is one of the fundamental principle of Islam. In Islam there is no difference between man and man. The qualities of equality, liberty and fraternity are the fundamental principles of Islam. The Prophet of Islam was the greatest man that the world had ever seen. Thirteen hundred years ago he laid the foundation of democracy.”

The Quaid further said that “he could not understand a section of the people who deliberately wanted to create mischief and made propaganda that the Constitution of Pakistan would not be made on the basis of “Shariat”. The Quaid-i-Azam said” Islamic principles today are as applicable to life as they were 1300 years ago.”

Allama Iqbal also has rightly said that in Islam religion and politics or stage cannot be separated, otherwise it would become a rule of Changez Khan and give vent to an autocratic rule. He expressed thus:

جدا ہو دین سیاست سے تو رہ جاتی ہے چنگیزی

In Islam there is no priesthood. Everybody is his own priest. In the west the priest ruled the state under the cover of the church and called it theocracy. All the western terminologies like theocracy, secularism, fundamentalism, socialism, national socialism, communism and other “isms” are alien to Islam. It believes in Muslim Ummah or Ummate Muslima. Therefore, the Quaid-Azam in October 1947 declared to build “Pakistan as a bulwark of Islam” in a public meeting at Lahore on October 30, 1947.

Earlier in 1943 before the Muslim League session at Karachi when Nawab Bahadur yar Jung observed in front of the Quaid-i-Azam that “there is no denying the fact that we want Pakistan for the establishment of an Islamic Stage on the Quranic system, the Quaid did not oppose it. He was a very vocal and straight forward man. H would have without waiting for a second contradicted it at the spur of the moment. This was the characteristic nature of the Quaid-i-Azam. He did give his support to the statement.

“Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim ideology, which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope, others will also share with us,” said the Quaid in a message to the Frontier Muslim Students Federation on November 18^th, 1945.

There are other occasions on which the Quaid expressed his views about an Islamic state. A few of them are as under: In Eid message, 1945, he said:

“Every one, except those who are ignorant, knows that the Quran is the general code of the Muslims, a religious, social, civil, commercial, military, judicial, criminal penal code. It regulates everything from the ceremonies of the religion to those of daily life, from the salvation of the sol to the health of the body; from the right of all to those of each individual; from morality to crimes, from punishment here to that in the life to come and our Prophet has enjoined on us that very Mussalman should posses a copy of the Quran and be his own priest. Therefore, Islam is not merely confined to the spiritual tenets and doctrines or rituals and ceremonies. It is a complete code regulating the whole Muslim society, every department of life collectively and individually.”

“The establishment of Pakistan for which we have been striving for the last ten years is, by the grace of God, an established fact today, but the creation of a state of our own was a means to an end and not the end in itself. The ideal was that we should have a state in which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where the principles of Islamic social justice could find free-play.” The Quaid expressed these words while addressing the officers of Pakistan Government at Karachi on October 11, 1947.

In a public speech at Lahore on 30^th October 1948, he said: “you are made of sterling material and are second to none. Why should you also not succeed like many others, like your own forefathers? You have only to develop the spirit of “Mujahids’. You are a nation whose history is replete with people of wonderful grit, character and vision. Live upto your tradition and add to it another chapter of glory. All I require of you now is that every one of us whom this message reaches must vow to himself and be prepared to sacrifice his all if necessary in building up Pakistan as a bulwark of Islam, as one of the greatest nations whose ideal is peace within and peace without. Along with this, keep up your morale. Do not be afraid of death. We should face it bravely to save the honour of Pakistan and Islam. There is no better salvation for the Muslims than the death of a martyr for a righteous cause.” Is this secularism or any other ism? Certainly it is Islamic ideology purely for the Mussalmans of the State.

The Quaid-i-Azam in his broad-cast talk on Pakistan to the people of the United States of America in February 1948 said, …”I am sure that it (constitution) will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principles of Islam. Today, they are as applicable in actual life as they were 1300 years ago. Islam and its idealism have taught us democracy. It has taught equality of man, justice and fairplay to everybody. We are inheritors of these glorious traditions and are fully alive to our responsibilities and obligations as framers of the future. Constitution of Pakistan. In any case Pakistan is not going to be a theoracratic stage to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Parsis, but they all are Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan.” This is the real and clear cut concept of the state of Pakistan which the Quaid-i-Azam envisaged in his speech of August 11, 1947. In that speech the sentence. “you may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state,” should be read in the light of the broadcast of February 1948. If the state is run on the pattern of the Madinah State of the Prophet, 1300 years ago, it will not affect any body’s religion or caste or creed even now. But if it is upheld that religion and state have two separate entities then the whole edifice and structure of Pakistan will collapse and the concept of Islam as a complete code of life; will have no meaning.

“The tolerance and goodwill that great emperor Akber sowed to all the non-Muslims (as suggested by Lord Mountbatten) is not of recent origin. It dates back thirteen centuries ago when our Prophet (peace be upon him) not only by words but by deeds treated Jews and Christians after he had conquered them with the utmost tolerance and regard and respect for their faith and beliefs.”Speech of the Quaid on Inauguration of Pakistan Constituent Assembly at Karachi: August 14, 1947.

Further in the same spirit of consistency the Quaid-i-Azam in a speech at Sibi Darbar on February 1948 said, “It is my belief that our salvation lies in following the golden rules of conduct set for us by our great law-giver, the Prophet of Islam. Let us lay the foundations of our democracy on the basis of true Islamic ideals and principles. Our Almighty has taught us that our decisions in the affairs of the state shall be guided by discussion and consultations.”

While addressing the Officers and Men of Ack-Ack Regiments, Malir on February 21, 1948, the Quaid-i-Azam said: “you have fought many a battle on the far flung fields of the globe to get rid the World of the fascist menace and make it safe for democracy. Now you have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.”

All these meaningful observations of the Quaid-i-Azam are exactly in consonance with the spirit, intention and ideology of the Pakistan Movement for which lacks of Muslims sacrificed their lives and wealth. These ideals set up by the Muslims of the subcontinent and also proclaimed by the leaders of the Pakistan Movement led under the dynamic personality of the Quaid-i-Azam are dear to the Muslims. “Islamic principles today are as applicable to life as they were 1300 years ago”. The constitution of Pakistan would be made on the basis of Shariat. These ideals are the Magna Charta of Pakistan.

Excerpt from “Saying of Quaid-e-Azam” published by “Quaid Foundation” in 1970.

Credit: http://kashifiat.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/quaid-i-azam’s-concept-of-pakistan-state/