The Pakistan Update

By Adnan Rehmat

Is Pakistan set to implode in its exasperating persistence to define itself in only security terms vis-à-vis India as did the Soviet Union with the United States in a nuclear-shadowed Cold War that lasted 40 years, a numbing fear that consumed three generations, but ended in a barren inevitability 20 years ago of the former collapsing into 13 new countries?

It seems more likely than not, given the few signs that a fundamental rethink in underway in Pakistan in determining what it stands for rather than what it doesn’t stand for, which passes for its schizophrenic identity.

Two specific WikiLeaks cables published in Dawn in recent weeks reveal more than just what is already known about Pakistan’s paranoid obsession with India and the authorship and control of the policy of paranoia by the military establishment. In the first, President Asif Zardari, the commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s armed forces, counters the suggestion of Senator John Kerry that New Delhi is interested in pursuing peace with Islamabad by arguing that India has five times more tanks than Pakistan and that these are Pakistan-specific because the Sino-India border terrain cannot support a tank battle. In the second cable, severe civil-military tensions are revealed over access to and control of American aid flows to Pakistan with the army insisting for, and getting, direct aid and refusing to share details with the elected government even during drafting of the annual budgets.

The oversimplification of the link between military prowess and bilateral relationship – no doubt handed to Zardari in briefings from the military leadership – is disturbing. If Pakistan has to match India tank to tank, plane to plane, soldier to soldier, frigate to frigate and missile to missile before making peace, then it’s a lost battle in perpetuity. If matching military might was the precondition to peace then the world would have been blown up 200 times over because the unending Indo-Pak tensions and Indo-Pak like wars would have been replicated on every shared national border on the planet. What use was there to acquire super-expensive nuclear capability if it didn’t solve the problem of imbalance in conventional military capability? No two nuclear powers have fought a conventional war. Tensions are one thing but war is another. So why still sacrifice national prosperity at the cost of national dignity, as Army chief General Kayani said days after Osama bin Laden was taken out.

The farcical civil-military equation in Pakistan that has kept political forces emaciated and socio-cultural progress stunted is insulting enough it itself but for the military to have its cake (of American aid) all these decades and eat it too is going too far for even weak states. The military is twice richer and the elected governments twice the poorer when it comes to foreign aid. America has been Pakistan’s biggest civilian and military aid provider. In the last 10 years alone it has received over $21 billion in American aid. General Kayani and his corps commanders may have gingerly offered recently that the US military aid to Pakistan may be diverted for civilian development spending but it is neither here nor there since it managed to prevail on the government to secure the highest ever defense budget in the country’s history this year (over Rs500 billion).

Tellingly, seven of the last 10 years have been ruled by the military. So they have ended up getting $17 billion of this aid, whether military or ‘civilian’ (the “uniformed” Musharraf had a ‘civilian prime minister’). The civilian government – in place for the last three years only – has received barely $3 billion but the bulk of this too has gone to the military and spent on fighting a war on terror. No wonder there is nearly a trillion-rupee budget deficit crippling Pakistan at the joints – this is why the economy is tanking, social development is at a standstill and unemployment, starvation and poverty are soaring according to the government’s own statistics. Pakistan is fighting a war with its own proxies who also take money and dictation from al Qaeda.

The two WikiLeaks cables on Pakistan’s security obsession with India and the skewed civil-military equation are at the root of Pakistan’s sorry state. The deficit of trust between Washington and Islamabad that is so wide that despite being allies the former had to invade Pakistan militarily to eliminate bin Laden has thrown up for public debate – and pressure on the military – the need to define “sovereignty”, the concept that the military has traditionally used to reinforce its stranglehold over the national polity.

The military early on crafted a national security doctrine that helped it manufacture a national security state (as opposed to a national welfare state). This is based on the supposed “clear and continuing” danger from India to unravel Pakistan. The doctrine extrapolates that this “perpetual threat” is a projection of India’s supposed “capacity” to hurt Pakistan rather than its intention to make peace.

The problem with this contention is that India may have the same stance on Pakistan, which means this is a formula for an unending arms race and not a remedy to war, which should be state’s priority. India’s ruling elites may have been averse to the idea of Pakistan and hostile to the new country in the early decades but it follows that after the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan and their testing in 1998, the deterrent has demolished any existential threat to Pakistan from India. The Lahore summit between the popularly elected civilian governments of both countries (Sharif’s in Islamabad and Vajpayee’s in New Delhi) within a year of the nuclear tests was an affirmation of this new reality. So why no let-up in the paranoia even 15 years down the line?

If 9/11 (New York) was the moment America and 27/11 (Mumbai) that India changed forever, 2/5 (Abbottabad) could be Pakistan’s crossroads of opportunity to likewise choose the path of being a state that protects its own people by fighting terrorism unconditionally. Sovereignty is not about nurturing dubious proxies to fight your wars but to fight against the instinct to do so. The real violation of sovereignty is the imbalance in receiving foreign aid flows in-country and then not accounting for it. It is the civil-military imbalance within Pakistan that has distorted the nature of civil society and crippled the economy, thus opening up the space for non-state actors and terrorists to appropriate the sovereignty by propelling the country into a suicidal conflict with America and India instead of forces like al Qaeda and Taliban that espouse violence and extremism. Having plans in place in perpetuity to fight India and not even contemplating plans to fully and decisively fight the terrorists (foreign and local) in the border regions (particularly North Waziristan) of your own country – this is not stuff sovereignty is made of. A German delegation that met Kiyani last week was quoted by a local newspaper as saying to them that Afghanistan’s stability is not a priority for Pakistan Army if its strategic interests don’t match it.

Of course, like any country that has the resources to do so, Pakistan should have a robust military and adequate defense preparedness not only against an overarching India but also an unstable Afghanistan. But India throwing its weight around and building its military muscle is a function of its political, economic and cultural stability and durability, not the other way round. After all, doesn’t Pakistan do the same when it comes to the other six states in South Asia? Pakistan wants political and military parity with India (without matching the democratic and economic stability that India has) but how come it is in a virtually one-sided relationship with Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan who can’t match it in military terms?

The only way to protect Pakistan against threats, perceived and unperceived, is to build trust, peace, trade and interdependence with India, Afghanistan and Iran and key global allies like America and Europe that have deep interest in the region’s stability. Safety and protection will not come from the military’s policy of paranoia to serve in ‘national interest’ which forces the unwilling country to weaken or leverage regional and international players by internal and external state and non-state provocations. These include supporting some militant organisations allied with al Qaeda and Taliban while going after others and by both doing little and seen to be doing even less to stem the involvement of people in attacks or attempted attacks in India, Afghanistan, the US and Europe.

There is no shame in acknowledging that some things are wrong and accepting that these need to be set right. Pakistan must stop equating sovereignty with defiance. Sovereignty is neither abstract nor absolute but a function of power, which in turn is also not absolute or abstract. Power is relative to the demonstrated power of others and dependent on the discipline of political and economic stability both of which elude Pakistan. Beneficial and lasting power flows from the social contract between a people and its rulers via a consensus constitution in which universal rights are adopted and elected civilian parliaments are supreme and empowered to make all policies, including security and foreign policies, both of which are the military’s handmaidens in Pakistan and therefore without public support or sanction.

Pakistan needs rigorous and sustained accountability of outmoded, unchanging self-serving institutional doctrines that don’t have public sanction and which have propelled Pakistan into an unsustainable arms race with India and are seeking to control Afghanistan, and which seek to leverage terrorist non-state actors against even allies. It is due to these policies that, according to yet another WikiLeaks cable published by Dawn, a French national security advisor told an American envoy “Pakistan is an army in search of a country.”

Misplaced bravado does not make pride and there’s no shame in desiring peace with someone we’ve painted as an enemy. The only way the delusional mindset that ill-serves Pakistan will be righted is when the national security doctrine puts the people, not the military establishment, at the center of Pakistan’s raison d ‘etre. We have tried India as an enemy and it has cost us dearly. It’s time to try India as a friend because the cost of being a friend is far, far less than the cost of being an enemy. For this to happen, what we need to do in Pakistan is what Peter Feaver suggested as the perfect civil-military equation: “The civil-military challenge is to reconcile a military strong enough to do anything the civilians ask with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorize”. Good luck Pakistan!

This article originally appeared in Dawn

Adnan Rehmat is a journalist, analyst and media development specialist. He heads Intermedia, a Pakistani media support NGO.

Tags: General Kiyani, India, John Kerry, Osama Bin Laden, Pak-India Relations, President Zardari, Soviet Union, United States, US military aid, wikileaks

Posted in Blog, India | 1,705 Comments »

by Dr. Manzur Ejaz

Sufis were witnessing the misuse of religion by qazis and other ‘pillars’ of religious institutions. They were aware of the corruption, nepotism and injustice being practiced in the name of Islam. Therefore, to save the spirituality of religion, they preached the separation of religion from the state and other worldly affairs

Once again Muslims are celebrating Eid on two different days, some on Tuesday and others on Wednesday. I wonder if most of the countries with Muslim majority populations were secular, they may have fixed one day for everyone. This raises the question — is a secular state necessary to keep the spirituality of religion unpolluted?

Usually, Pakistanis and many other Muslims take the word secular as being equivalent to atheism and an anti-religious system of governance. On the contrary, the founders of the US constitution argued that religious purity can only be maintained if it is kept away from the business of the state. US politicians, from the president downwards, go to their places of worship regularly but they do not bring their personal faith to the affairs of the state. They enjoy the spirituality of their faith without encumbering the state.

When George Washington and his colleagues were debating the foundations of the US constitution, they were quite aware that statecraft required strategies of reconciliation that may not be justified through religious ideology. Therefore, if the constitution is based on religious ideology, matters of faith will be polluted by the state’s own specific needs. To address this question, George Washington wrote, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

The founders of the US constitution had witnessed widespread persecution on the basis of religion and sectarianism. They were aware of the role that the Catholic clergy had played in corrupting Christianity. Early US history was no different than that of Europe, where witch-hunt trials were burning/drowning hundreds of women on allegations of witchcraft. Therefore, they were clear that to save the spirituality of religion, it had to be separated from the business of the state.

Contrary to this, Muslim rulers in the subcontinent used religion as the basis of their system of justice and other institutions created to rule society. A whole system comprised of hundreds of thousands of qazis was put in place. These qazis were educated at religious monasteries before taking over state jobs. Sometimes, the ruler persecuted the people who belonged to a different sect. Aurangzeb’s onslaught against Shia Muslims is a known fact of history. Consequently, the spiritual aspect of Islam may have been polluted and compromised.

This is the main reason that Sufis in the subcontinent kept emphasising the spiritual essence of religion. They were witnessing the misuse of religion by qazis and other ‘pillars’ of religious institutions. They were aware of the corruption, nepotism and injustice being practiced in the name of Islam. Therefore, to save the spirituality of religion, they preached the separation of religion from the state and other worldly affairs. In practice, this meant that religion should be practiced on an individual level leaving the state to be run by the worldly rulers. This was the reason that Muslim Sufis had a following of people from every religion. It is known that the majority of Shah Hussain’s followers were Hindus.

From Baba Farid to Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah, everyone emphasised the separation of individual spirituality from the state-sanctioned formal religion. Recurrence of the concept of embracing shoh (the beloved) was meant to induce spiritual purification on an individual level. Baba Farid’s lifestyle was such that the qazi and ruler of Pakpattan ganged up against him and his family.

Guru Nanak was much more open and critical of the alliance between the state and clergy of every kind. For example, when Babar was ruining the Indian landscape, Baba Nanak taunted the Muslim religious leaders for their useless prayers to stop the invasion. Similarly, he laughed at the Hindu clergy who had assured the Indian ruler that their mantras would destroy Babar. And, Nanak jeers at them because Babar made no differentiation between mosques and temples or between Turk (Muslim) and Hindu women. Baba Nanak ridiculed both Muslim and Hindu ritualistic practices and projected spirituality devoid of any state manipulation or ritualistic routine.

Shah Hussain rejected the role of the qazi and mullah when he said, “Mullan qazi mattin dainde…Ishq keeh lagge rah de nal” (The mullah and qazis tell us about the right path but love has nothing to do with it). He reiterates spiritualistic integrity as separated from state and other worldly affairs.

“Badshahan nu badshahian, shahan nu ugrahian

Mahar nu pind graon di aasaan, Talab sain de naam di.”

(Kings are busy in their kingdoms, the moneylenders are collecting their debts and the tiller is concerned about his village. We only seek the pleasure of our sain (lord, beloved)).

Sultan Bahu also rejected a religious establishment that sells religious knowledge. For him the mullah’s service to the ruling class in every shape and form pollutes the religion, where scholars become bargaining commodities.

“O dohin janin muthay Bahu jinhan khahdi waich kmai hoo.”

(The ones who sold their scholarship are dejected in both worlds.)

Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah were much more openly critical of the state’s use of religion. For example, when Bulleh Shah says, “Bulhia rab kaho na kaho, aai soorton sacha raho” (Oh Bulla, it is immaterial if you openly profess God or not. However, the important thing is that you should be truthful in a given situation).

Waris Shah’s entire creation of Heer was meant to show and denounce the unholy alliance between the rulers and the religious establishment. He maintains, throughout his creation, that qazis are the thoroughly corrupt and illegitimate partners of the ruling elite. He repeats the theme of “Qazi rishwatan mar ke koor keete” (Qazis have been blinded by bribery). His implicit argument is that to save the spiritual aspect of religion, it has to be kept away from the state and its institutions.

Unfortunately, the Sufi tradition has been grossly neglected in Pakistan. This has led to social decay as well as the pollution of religious spirituality. Allama Iqbal’s one line has been quoted to shut down the discussion on secularism:

“Judah u deen siasat se tu reh jati he Changaizi” (Separation of religion and politics leads to barbarianism).

The fact of the matter is that, “Milae jab deen siasat se tu ban jati he Changaizi” (when religion is mixed with politics, it leads to barbarianism).

The writer can be reached at manzurejaz@yahoo.com

Tags: Aurangzeb, Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah, catholicism, Christianity, eid, europe, george washington, Guru Nanak, Islam, Pakistan, Religion, Shah Hussain, shias, sufis, Sultan Bahu, United States, us constitution, Waris Shah

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by Karen Brulliard

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — Some reports are deemed “a paranoid fabrication,” such as the claim that all Pakistanis are stripped naked in U.S. airports.

Others are “false and malicious,” such as the one about the Americans moving Pakistani Taliban leaders to Afghanistan to prepare them for a battle against Pakistan’s army.

So says the U.S. Embassy here, which for nearly eight months has issued statements countering every major error about American foreign policy that it finds in Pakistan’s boisterous media.

It’s a herculean task that embassy officials say has been undertaken by no other U.S. mission in the world — because nowhere else, those officials say, does U.S. policy face such disdain and misrepresentation.

The statements — called “Corrections for the Record” — are issued a handful of times a month. Whether they are effective is hard to measure, though embassy officials express confidence. Taken together, the missives serve as a chronicle of the uphill battle the U.S. government faces in Pakistan in its sometimes clumsy efforts to influence opinion.

Much is at stake. The Obama administration views Pakistan as a crucial partner in its fight against Islamist terrorism, and it has spent the past year trying to convince Pakistanis that the United States is a steadfast, well-intentioned ally. So far the public has not been swayed: A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 17 percent of Pakistanis view the United States favorably, and only 8 percent expressed faith in President Obama — his lowest rating in 22 countries surveyed.

The corrections have challenged widely believed theories in a nation with a penchant for conspiracies: that Americans were behind deadly bombings (“absurd, baseless”) or plotting a “massive infiltration” by U.S. Marines of Pakistan’s militant-riddled tribal areas (“entirely false”).

The correction campaign comes as the media in Pakistan grow in size and influence. As of 2002, there was one state-owned television station in Pakistan. Now there are more than 90 private channels, many of which feature roundtable-style political debate, plus countless newspapers, magazines and journals.

The content is raucous and the journalists are free, within certain nebulous limits; many avoid criticism of the powerful security establishment, though they savage the civilian government. The United States, which is expanding its footprint here, often features as an all-powerful schemer, a depiction embassy officials complain is exacerbated when Pakistani journalists do not seek the American side of the story.

Some observers, though, say the real problem is the two nations’ spy novel-like relations. Secrets surround so many aspects of the relationship that the resulting vacuum is easily filled by rumors.

Against that backdrop, some Pakistani journalists say, official embassy denials carry little weight. “Our government does not have a history of giving out information. If the U.S. pulls another Pakistan on the Pakistani media . . . it’s only natural they would be hostile,” media analyst Adnan Rehmat said. “The hostility stems from this space where secrecy is the norm.”

That attitude has been compounded by confirmations — in the American press — of reports that initially seemed to be wacky conspiracy theories, said Huma Yusuf, a columnist for Dawn newspaper. Those CIA drones that strike militant mountain hideouts? Turned out they are indeed allowed by Pakistan, despite the government’s public denials. The rumors about U.S. troops on Pakistani soil? American officials confirmed in 2008 that U.S. commandos had conducted a ground raid and more recently that about 200 Special Forces are training elements of Pakistan’s military.

Still, Yusuf said, many of Pakistan’s newly minted journalists are learning as they go, and “making stuff up” is a common way to generate news.

“If you can take even the slightest thing and turn it into a story that proves the U.S. is the evil demon . . . it’s going to sell papers,” Yusuf said.

Embassy officials say that they have stepped up interaction with Pakistani media but that the embassy’s press shop — set to grow to five people by next year — is small for the job.

The U.S. special envoy for the region, Richard Holbrooke, has met with Pakistani journalists on many of his visits, as have many U.S. lawmakers while passing through, said Larry Schwartz, the embassy’s senior spokesman. They often focus on the less-clandestine aspects of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, such as aid for power plants and schools, even if the news media do not.

“We really are trying to develop a meaningful and supportive relationship with this country,” Schwartz said. “The distortions that we see in the media do need to be countered.”

In this duel, the embassy says its biggest foe is the Nation, an English-language newspaper. It has published photos of houses it says were rented by menacing American operatives employed by the security company Blackwater; in one case, according to a U.S. Embassy correction, the resident was a U.S. aid worker.

More recently, the newspaper reported what it called “stark confirmation of the vicious U.S. agenda”: Police had detained a U.S. military official driving an “ammunition-laden vehicle” and “trading heavy weaponry.” The embassy retorted that the truck carried “equipment” used in Special Forces training, with the consent of authorities.

Shireen Mizari, the editor of the Nation, responded to questions about its coverage and the embassy corrections in her column.

“If the police confirm a piece of information, we have no reason to doubt it,” she wrote of the article about the truck. Regarding the house photos, she wrote that “if we see anyone doing something suspicious, it is our job to report it.”

But the market for English-language newspapers is small. Television, where 70 percent of Pakistanis get their news and anti-Western venom flows, may be the biggest arbiter of public opinion. The embassy rarely issues corrections about television reports, which are too numerous to monitor.

Even so, the Americans might want to lighten up, Rehmat said. Given the surge in programming, most has nothing to do with the United States, and some is even positive, he said. Instead of corrections, the embassy should focus on getting more American scholars, scientists, artists and athletes — not just Washington officials — into Pakistan to mingle with journalists.

“For us, America is either Obama or Bush, or it’s 50 Cent and Michael Jackson,” he said. “We’re missing all the other amazing spectrum.”

——

This story originally appeared in The Washington Post

Tags: Pak US relations, Pakistan Media, President Obama, United States, US

Posted in Around, Blog, News | 993 Comments »

What sales tactic is the most persuasive? Which emotion, when exploited, motivates human beings to reach for their wallets – or their guns?

The answer, of course, is fear.

And fear, when stoked by demagogues and poured over a volatile flammable mass only needs one match to create a frightful conflagration.

Witness the American “Tea Party” movement, a ragtag group whose initial goal of protesting the bank bailouts has devolved into a mass movement featuring silly costumes, misspelled signs glorifying racism and paranoia, and sometimes weaponry.

Those who wish to turn away from the Tea Parties and their embarrassing antics will find little solace in the Republican party. A recent Harris poll reveals that two-thirds of Republicans think Barack Obama is a socialist, 57 percent a Muslim—and 24 percent say “he may be the Antichrist.” Not surprisingly, respondents without a college education are vastly more likely to believe such claims, while Americans with college degrees or better are less easily duped.

To quote the 19th-century educator Horace Mann, “Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.”

Of course, the media don’t help.

It’s easy to blame FOX News and talk radio for this sorry and dangerous state of affairs. Their right-wing propaganda draws a large and loyal audience. But CNN, MSNBC and other mainstream networks are also to blame. By treating the more mentally unstable and incoherent members of the lunatic right with deference and respect in order to present “balanced” coverage, they have bestowed a kind of legitimacy on paranoid hate-mongerers, racists and the flat-out ignorant. Having a person on to argue that Barack Obama is not a native-born citizen of the United States serves no newsworthy purpose. It is an act of sheer provocation and showmanship.

Consumers of Pakistani media are probably familiar with this phenomenon – demagogues blathering nonsense from their media perches; the spreading of rumor and conspiracy as fact; an apparent lack of editorial control on the irresponsible material being broadcast or printed; blaming outside forces (Jews, the CIA, the Mossad, RAW) for internal problems, thereby alleviating the public of any responsibility for an ensuing catastrophe; suspicion of The Other…the list goes on and on.

So to those who think the Kerry-Lugar Bill is a Trojan Horse masquerading sinister imperialists scheming to erode your sovereignty, meet your comrades in arms: The Tea Party attendees who think passing universal health care will lead to death panels, fascism and Nazi death camps.

Tags: antichrist, CIA, CNN, Fox, ISI, jews, Kerry Lugar Bill, kerry-lugar, Media, mossad, MSNBC, Obama, Pak US relations, Pakistan, Pakistan Media, Republicans, tea party, United States

Posted in Blog, The Ballot Box | 672 Comments »

By Dr. Kamran Iqbal

Terrorism is like a devil’s tree. It has roots, main stem, branches, leafs, fruits and environment that nourishes it. Its roots are those ideologies where violence is used as a justification with no weight to conscience. Its main stem is constituted by those parent organizations that guard, promote and institutionalize it, its branches are the terrorist organizations like Talibans and Al-Qaeda. It leafs and fruits are the social poison of enmity, hostility, grievances, intolerance, hatred, discrimination, illiteracy that it disperses wide spread through different mediums.

Its environment is constituted by the areas of conflicts where these things thrive at best under the shades of religio-nationalistic sentiments. The energy, money, time of current US war on terror is largely focused on cutting and severing branches only (i.e., terrorist organizations) and very little focus is put on its causes. (more…)

Tags: Pakistan, Taliban, Terrorism, United States, US

Posted in Around | 687 Comments »

By Dr. Kamran Iqbal

Technically speaking, the current war on terrorism is the war against guerilla warfare of unique nature and articulation, of which specific deadline cannot be given practically. It’s an unconventional and asymmetric war which defies any modern or conventional military warfare mindsets, a war for which US army may be trained but inadequately experienced. This kind of guerilla warfare thrives on time, space, will and local support. Giving deadline to intervention adequately provides these Mujahideen-turned-militants time to go underground, wait, see and prepare for US Army to leave Afghanistan and gather their will and organize further. (more…)

Tags: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Terrorism, United States, US Army, War on Terror

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By Dr. Kamran Iqbal

The history of Pakistan-US affairs has been one of love-hate relationships for many decades. But the strategic relevance of both the countries in the current war on terrorism binds the two countries closer than ever, and it’s not unusual for partners to occasionally snap, especially when confusion can sometimes prevail and definitions become murky. These definitions are largely based on misunderstandings, stereotyping and under-addressed gaping voids. This matter is, in many ways, becoming serious to an extent where failure of democracy in Pakistan can indirectly affect the Obama administration for the next term, as it would define the U.S.’s ability to operate in Afghanistan. (more…)

Tags: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taliban, United States, US, US Army, War on Terror

Posted in Around, Blog | 1,585 Comments »

One of former President John F. Kennedy’s favorite sayings was “success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.”

What would the assassinated President make of this week’s special election in Massachusetts, where a little-known Republican won the seat held by John and Bobby Kennedy’s younger brother Teddy for 47 years?  What would they make of the GOP sending one of their own to sit in the US Senate for the first time since 1978?

A Republican winning the “Kennedy seat” would have been a joke a few weeks ago, a fantasy so preposterous that not even FOX’s Glenn Beck would have spoken of it on his program.  That one of the most liberal states in the country, (more…)

Tags: coakley, cricket, democrats, imran khan, Obama, senate, United States, US

Posted in The Ballot Box | 1,396 Comments »

By Christopher Hitchens

Give credit to the vice president: He really does enjoy politics and “can’t see a room without working it,” as a colleague of mine half-admiringly remarked last Wednesday morning. We were waiting to enter the studio and comment after Biden had finished his interview with theScarborough/Brzezinski team, in which the main topic was Afghanistan. Exiting, he chose to stop and talk to each of us. Not wanting to waste a chance to be a bore on the subject, I asked him why he had mentioned India only once in the course of his remarks. Right away Biden managed the trick—several good politicians have mastered this—of reacting as if the question had been his own idea. Of course, he said, it was vexing that Pakistan preferred to keep its best troops on the border with India (our friend) rather than redeploying them to FATA—the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas—where they could be fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida (our enemy). My flesh was pressed, and it was on to the next.

The newspapers that morning revealed that Pakistani authorities showed no interest in apprehending a Taliban leader in Afghanistan whom they considered an important asset. The newspapers the following morning reported that Pakistan was refusing to extend the visas to U.S. Embassy and other American personnel, resulting in a gradual paralysis of everything from intelligence-gathering to the maintenance of helicopters.

(more…)

Tags: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Drone Attacks, Featured, Joe Biden, Pakistan, Taliban, Terrorism, United States, Vice President, War on Terror

Posted in News | 1,919 Comments »

QUESTION: The first question is in relation to the point you were discussing earlier, your visit to Pakistan. You went to mosque, you went to a (inaudible), you talked to students, you went to a police office where people were killed, you went to the museum of Iqbal, the man who (inaudible) Pakistan’s area. It was deemed in Pakistani media as a courageous act, your outreach. Even those who were critical of U.S. policy were appreciative of your courage and giving a message to the Pakistani leadership also.

What were the signs of hope, that in all that process, you saw in Pakistan?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first, the resilience and the courage of the Pakistani people. Everywhere I went, I met people who are speaking out and standing up and working hard, and that was extremely moving to me. I also felt like both the civilian government and the military leadership understood that the threat they faced had to be addressed.

(more…)

Tags: Afghanistan, Hassan Abbas, Hillary Clinton, Pakistan, Secretary Clinton, United States

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