Mustafa Qadri

Negotiating with the Taliban is too little, too late – western allies need to fix the socioeconomic mess started long before 9/11

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 February 2010 08.00 GMT

Memory spans are short in modern politics, but even by those standards the relative ease with which the discourse on Afghanistan has shifted from fighting the Taliban to negotiating with them is remarkable.

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Getting out of Afghanistan won’t be cheap. Mustafa Qadri takes a look at the West’s new hope for a solution to its Afghanistan problem

After much anticipation, Western leaders have finally put some meat on their previously bare-bones proposals for stabilising Afghanistan over the next few years. The short story is that President Obama is sticking to the plan he outlined in his speech at West Point last year, whereby he intends to hand responsibility for the country’s governance and security back to the Afghan authorities over a five-year period starting from 2011.

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Faced with terrorism, a flagging economy and a raft of potential lawsuits, how long can Pakistan’s president survive?

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 January 2010 15.10 GMT

With his chequered past and unlikely rise to the top, it is understandable that Asif Ali Zardari has faced constant calls to resign ever since becoming president of Pakistan two years ago. The central focus of the grievances has been Pakistan’s supreme court where a raft of charges have been submitted against Zardari and most of the senior leaders of the ruling Pakistan Peoples party by a motley mix of political parties, private citizens, and the court itself.

But in the glasshouse that is Pakistani politics the risk is that perceptions of judicial independence will be shattered by all the stone throwing. To understand the fracas it is necessary to consider recent history. After public pressure forced the Zardari government to reinstate Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, there was widespread celebration that at last Pakistan had found one institution that was above the cronyism that has plagued political life here.

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Already ravaged by high inflation, massive energy shortages and political turmoil, Pakistan has been shocked by bombings in most of its major cities, writes Mustafa Qadri

Pakistan is enduring the most brutal spate of political violence since the Punjab-dominated Army was implicated in mass slaughter in 1971. Despite military victories in large swathes of the tribal areas that are home to the Taliban, Pakistan’s major cities have been rocked by an escalating series of violent events that, according to one estimate, have claimed 544 lives in a little under three months.

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Journalism is a dangerous profession in Pakistan. But a vibrant, relatively free press still exists in this volatile country

For as long as anyone cares to remember, journalism has been a dangerous profession in Pakistan. Although of late much of the attention has focused on the risks to foreign journalists, the situation for local reporters is equally, if not more, parlous.

First consider that virtually all the on-the-ground news you read from Pakistan, especially from conflict zones, has been gathered by a local reporter under considerable personal risk. That is certainly the case for journalists working in the northwest frontier where the Taliban are most active. “I [do some] work for Voice of America,” one veteran reporter, who requested anonymity, told me in the safety of a hotel room in Islamabad. “Even now, I do not tell [the Taliban he interviews] that. It would mean certain death.”

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Barack Obama’s surge in Afghanistan worries Pakistan – when the US leaves, it will still have to deal with the Taliban

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 December 2009 16:00 GMT

There is more to President Obama’s policy shift in central Asia than more boots in Afghanistan. For Pakistan it represents an escalation of US drone strikes in the tribal areas and continued pressure on its army to immediately engage the Taliban and al-Qaida despite the practical complexities of the task.

The fundamental problem for Pakistan is that Obama’s acceleration of the war against the Taliban has been calculated largely on the basis of domestic US political demands and not those of the region, let alone Pakistan. Already under intense pressure at home from the financial crisis and the unpopularity of the US presence in Afghanistan, Obama must deliver some semblance of victory before he bids for a second term as commander-in-chief in 2012.

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Now that an amnesty providing immunity to thousands has expired, Pakistan’s supreme court has the chance to showcase its merits

· Mustafa Qadri
· guardian.co.uk, Saturday 5 December 2009 18.00 GMT

It may be more a matter of wits than weapons, but the battle for control of Pakistan’s executive branch of government is as significant for the country as the war against the Taliban. Resolving this latest crisis, the fiercest tussle over the stewardship of the country since Pervez Musharraf was ousted from the presidency in August 2008, will determine the future of Pakistan’s parliamentary democracy for many years to come.

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A troop surge AND a withdrawal by July 2011? Despite the fuss, Obama’s Afghanistan speech marks very little in the way of new policy, writes Mustafa Qadri

“Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Those were President Obama’s confident words as he announced a major US troop surge into Afghanistan earlier this week.

The US may have entered Afghanistan to clean out what was believed to be the key haven for the international terrorist network known as al Qaeda. But in the intervening eight years, America’s main opponents in the deserts and towns of Afghanistan have been the young men of rural Kandahar, Uruzgan, Helmand and so many other areas fighting not for global jihad but for independence from foreign interference. There are key differences between the war in Afghanistan and that in Vietnam — but a lack of a broad-based popular insurgency is not one of them.

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Amid daily suicide attacks, the Pakistan Army is closing in on Taliban strongholds — and this time they seem to have the support of the Pakistani people, reports Mustafa Qadri from Islamabad

Pakistan’s once sleepy capital Islamabad has been transformed into something of a fortress, with checkpoints, cement barriers and police dotting the tree-lined streets. There is no doubt about it: Pakistan is at war, and the signs are everywhere. As of last week, the police alone say they have prevented 67 individuals from carrying out suicide attacks, most recently in a dramatic confrontation at a barricade in Islamabad.

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Blame for the recent spate of bombings is being laid at the door of foreign powers by many ordinary Pakistanis. Why?

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 November 2009 12.00 GMT

Although the Taliban have openly claimed responsibility for the recent epidemic of suicide bombings against civilian targets in Peshawar and Islamabad, many Pakistanis appear convinced that the real culprits are India or the United States.

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Leading Pakistani humanist and anti-nuclear scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy gives Mustafa Qadri his take on the current crises facing his country

For three decades Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of Physics at Qaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, has been promoting science and humanism in Pakistan. His was one of the earliest voices to sound the alarm on the perils of developing nuclear weapons, and on the danger posed by the country’s deepening religious intolerance — issues that have gone on to damage the country’s reputation. His respected scientific work has been published widely, but in 2001 when the Pakistani Government wanted to present him with a national award, Hoodbhoy refused it, saying that Pakistan’s misuse of such awards had eroded their own credibility. Recently I spoke to Professor Hoodbhoy about science, Islam and the challenges facing Pakistan.

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The Diplomat’s Pakistan correspondent, Mustafa Qadri, meets refugees from the conflict in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and finds anger, trepidation and hope as they return home after this summer’s counter-Taliban military offensive.

Travelling along the road leading to the Swat valley is a memorable experience. As the narrow dual carriageway snakes around impossibly steep mountain ranges, the breathtaking vista of snow-capped peaks come into view as they loom over an emerald green valley pierced by the Swat River. It looks too perfect to be natural.

‘The beauty of Swat is unmatched in the world,’ says Ashraf, a Swati villager and journalist who agreed to take me to the region. When I ask if anyone maintains the near perfectly manicured grasslands and pine forests he laughs and shakes his head. Described in local poetry as heaven on earth, for centuries Swat has been home to saints and soothsayers–first those hailing from Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and in more recent centuries mystical Sufi Islam.

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by Mustafa Qadri

29 October 2009

Karachi, Pakistan – Access to justice is a major concern in Pakistan. Pakistan was ranked 134 in the world, lower than Rwanda and Libya, in the 2008 annual Corruption Perception Index released by Transparency International. In fact, one reason some communities in the North West Frontier Province cautiously welcomed the Taliban was the promise of a more efficient, less corrupt justice system.

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As Pakistan’s new campaign in Waziristan gears up, Mustafa Qadri examines the cost of the war for the increasingly dislocated civilian population

There was a time not so long ago when the violence emanating from Pakistan had a mythical quality. In no region of this troubled country has the hyperbole of terrorism been so thoroughly lathered than South Waziristan, the tribal agency bordering Afghanistan where, since last weekend, Pakistan’s army has been waging a massive campaign against the Taliban’s most robust stronghold.

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The US has promised Pakistan $7.5bn of aid over five years – if it agrees to oversight of its most sensitive security issues

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 October 2009 20:00 BST

You would think that the citizens of a developing country promised $7.5bn over five years would be dancing in the streets. Instead, last week’s approval of the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act, formerly the Kerry-Lugar bill, by Congress met with widespread howls of condemnation in Pakistan.

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In the Pakistani army’s offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan, the line between victims and villains remains unclear

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 16.30 BST

The Pakistan army’s invasion of the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan this week brings few surprises. For years observers in Washington and Brussels have been pressing for an assault on this scale. The army says its aims in Operation Rah-e-Nijat (“Road out of Misery”) are to finally eliminate the main sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan and, according to army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the foreign and local “elements” that given them succour.

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The proposed truth and reconciliation commission is a fine idea. But a lack of historical distance will make it politically thorny

Grievance is at the heart of Pakistani politics. Almost all of the elites that dominate political life here have faced the deprivations – poverty, harassment, imprisonment or exile – experienced by the ordinary citizen at some point in their lives. When at the height of their strength, the powerful always invoke the myriad injustices that plague the common citizen to rally popular support.

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Few people take more risks than the locals who help foreign correspondents in conflict zones, writes Mustafa Qadri. So why don’t the Western media give credit to their fixers?

Investigative journalism can be a dangerous profession because, by its very nature, it seeks to uncover the lies and scandals that someone, somewhere, is trying to suppress. As work descriptions go, few civilians face as many life-threatening situations as those who aid foreign investigative reporters in conflict zones.

Generally known in the profession as “fixers” — but very often respected local journalists in their own right — these brave reporters are asked to arrange anything and everything required by a foreign media outlet: from interviews with hostile governments and militants in hiding, to transportation and accommodation. They risk their lives not only by working in dangerous situations but by virtue of fact that, being citizens of developing nations, the western media outlets that employ them generally place little value on their lives.

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It’s unlikely Richard Goldstone’s report into the Gaza bombings will result in ICC prosecutions but it may mark a turning point in the conflict, writes Mustafa Qadri

This week the United Nations released an explosive report on Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip in late December last year. It finds both Israel and armed Palestinian groups guilty of war crimes and, potentially, of crimes against humanity. Over 1400 mostly civilian Palestinians (including over 300 children) and 13 Israeli (including nine soldiers) were killed during Israel’s massive invasion of the Gaza Strip, the most densely populated region on the planet.

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The greatest militant threat facing India comes not from the Islamists who attacked Mumbai but Naxalite Maoist rebels

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 September 2009 09.00 BST

Last November’s fedayeen-style attacks on Mumbai may have reminded the world that India was not immune to terrorism. But few outside the subcontinent are aware that the greatest source of militancy in this diverse country comes not from Islamists but Maoists.

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Suicide attacks have become so common in Pakistan that they often don’t even make the Western press. Mustafa Qadri meets the father of a suicide bomber in the country’s North West Frontier Province

Darra Adam Khel, just south of Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, has always been a dangerous transit zone between Afghanistan, Peshawar, and the southern most regions of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Until recently it was also part of the Taliban heartland.

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Last month’s attack on a Pakistani Christian community by a mob of Sunni Muslims is a worrying development in a country that purports to fight extremism, writes Mustafa Qadri

“Make mincemeat of the Christians” blared the mosque loudspeakers.

This was not the Taliban speaking, nor was it in the frontier of Pakistan along the Afghan border. The setting was the Christian Colony of Gojra in rural Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous and powerful province.

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The knives are out when dictators fall from power, but the politics of retribution is rarely clean or cathartic

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 30 August 2009 17,00 BST

The tables turn quickly in politics, but for dictators the shift from all-powerful to powerless can be rather sudden. Over a period of 12 months, the last Shah of Iran went from feared dictator to refugee who struggled to find asylum in three different continents (including the US, his one-time staunchest supporter).

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By Mustafa Qadri Mustafa Qadri is our Middle East and South Asia correspondent and has been based in Pakistan for two years. In this slideshow, he talks about some of the people he has met in his travels Over the past two years Mustafa Qadri has travelled widely throughout Pakistan. In this time he has [...]

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This month Pakistan celebrates Independence Day. In 1947 Pakistan became the first post-colonial nation in the world but the journey has not been easy. This week Pakistani police arrested 13 militants suspected of plotting to bomb targets in the Punjab. After 62 years as an independent nation, challenges ranging from extremism to energy shortages mean [...]

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If the West needed a credible election in Afghanistan to help prove that its war there is a good idea, it sure didn’t get it, writes Mustafa Qadri

In the wake of last week’s seriously flawed election in Afghanistan, NATO staff have expressed their “desperation” to pull out of the country.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an analyst with close contacts inside NATO headquarters in Brussels cited plunging domestic support within member countries for the war, as well as the worsening violence inside Afghanistan as factors contributing to their desire to end military involvement.

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Mustafa Qadri

Last Updated: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:24:00 +1000

People in a Pakistani frontier region threatened by the Taliban are trying to preserve a culture rich in poetry and dance from religious extremism.

The culture of the ethnic Pashtun peoples often delights in worldly pleasures – like sex and alcohol – considered un-Islamic by religious conservatives.

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Much of Afghanistan’s Pashtun-dominated south and east has been tense during for the recent presidential elections, but just over the border in Pakistan, outside Peshawar, the battle rages for cultural control of the community. The Taliban are trying to outlaw traditional poetry and dance, which they consider un-Islamic.

Presenter:Mustafa Qadri
Speaker: Fazal Maula, Peshawar-based non-government organisation

QADRI: Following my travels through northwestern Pakistan where millions fled the war against the Taliban, I met members of an anti-Taliban lashkar or army in the tribal district of Badaber. To describe Badaber as an outpost would be something of an understatement. Both the Taliban and government security forces have wrestled for control of this vitally strategic tribal region. Fazal Maula from a local non-government organisation explains.

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Communal stability is at risk as the rollout of Zia ul-Haq’s Islamisation continues unabated

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009 10:00 BST

In decades past, the town mullahs decried the use of megaphones during the call to prayer. Now they have embraced the technology in Pakistan. In every city the loud blare of the muezzin echoes throughout the streets, although they rarely call out in unison. For centuries Muslims have bickered over prayer times, and much else.

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As Pakistan celebrates Independence Day, Mustafa Qadri looks at the country’s unstable beginnings, troubled history and the miracle of its continued existence

“The religious bigot considers me an infidel
And the infidel deems me to be a Muslim!”

With these immortal words, Pakistan’s national poet Mohammad Iqbal captured the eternal quandary that is Pakistan.

The nation created for the subcontinent’s Muslims has always struggle to define itself — is it meant to be an Islamic state or a state for Indian Muslims?

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In recent years. there have been increasing attempts to reform Pakistan’s much-maligned religious schools, known as madrassas. At a conference in Islamabad, WPR contributor Mustafa Qadri spoke to religious scholars and teachers about their attempts to broaden the pedagogical scope of Pakistan’s seminaries. The program, funded by the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, based [...]

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Pakistan has seen rapid change and frequent conflict in its 62 years. Its resilience is a testament to its people

· Mustafa Qadri

· guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 August 2009 19:00 BST

Karachi’s Saddar Town is the frenetic heart of Pakistan’s commercial capital. A retail hub where anything and everything from cameras to salwar kameez can be purchased, it was once the economic gateway into the northern reaches of British India. That legacy is still visible in Saddar’s fading colonial terraces, but the intricate wooden shutters are mostly gone and the Victorian entrances have been converted into street stalls. Today most are too busy trying to survive to notice the heritage.

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India was once a bulwark against cold war militarism – but now, under US influence, it is buying weapons at an alarming rate

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk Saturday 8 August 2009 15.00 BST

“We both seek a more secure world for our citizens,” wrote US secretary of state Hillary Clinton on the eve of her recent visit to India last month.

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The United States is playing a dangerous game of roulette with India and Pakistan, writes Mustafa Qadri

When it comes to US policy in South Asia, it’s a case of do as we say, not as we do. Consider, to begin with, the rhetoric.

The Obama White House has gone to great lengths to demand that Pakistan end its support for militants targeting India. It wants the Pakistan Army to end its “obsession” with India-inspired oblivion by moving its large reserves from the Indian border to engage the Taliban and al Qaeda on the eastern frontier. Most of Pakistan’s active armed forces are located on the tense border with India where they are more than matched by the much larger Indian military.

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Updated August 6, 2009 11:42:34

To many foreign observers, Pakistan is the global centre of extremist Islam, and its madrassas – or religious seminaries – are where the violence starts. However, this kind of scaremongering hides a more complex reality.

Presenter: Mustafa Qadri in Pakistan
Speaker: Professor Qibla Ayaz, Peshawar University; Abdul Ghani, organiser of education conference in Islamabad; Azi Hussain, International Centre for Religion and Diplomacy in Washington DC

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QADRI: There are believed to be 2 million madrassa students in several thousand seminaries throughout Pakistan. But exact figures are hard to verify because most operate independent of government supervision. Although madrassas have ominous connotations in the West…

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Many of the world’s most dangerous Islamic extremists have learnt their approach in Madrassas, or religious schools, that offer a restricted curriculum that fails to reflect the modern world. In Pakistan madrassas also have a reputation for breeding extremists: but a plan to reform them is in motion, writes Mustafa Qadri.

“One cannot deny the very real role played by madrassas in fomenting extremism in Pakistan. I have met several members of the Taliban and a Lashkar-e-Tayaba operative. All had either been recruited or taught at madrasssas.”

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Ordinary Pakistanis still suffer from energy shortages – and are unlikely to benefit from their country’s rich natural resources

· Mustafa Qadri
· guardian.co.uk, Sunday 2 August 2009 17:00 BST

Few things are as oppressive in Pakistan as the summer heat. In colonial times, the British would shift their garrison headquarters from Rawalpindi to the cool peaks of Murree, just north of present day Islamabad. Today, the elite are more likely to skip the country entirely or barricade themselves in the air-conditioned comfort of their cars and homes.

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Reviewed by Mustafa Qadri

Sunday, 21 Jun, 2009 | 10:04 AM PST |

‘Never again’ was the world’s reaction to the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps. Sadly, those words continue to ring hollow over six decades later. In this timely book Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, charts international attempts to put an end to mass atrocities once and for all.

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Frequently demonised in the West as hotbeds of terrorism, Pakistan’s religious seminaries are actually a vital institution, not the evil dens they are made out to be, writes Mustafa Qadri

According to many security analysts and world leaders, Pakistan is the global centre of extremist Islam. Much of that reputation has been built upon the country’s madaris, or religious seminaries (also sometimes referred to as madrassas), which have been described as jihadi factories spreading terrorism internationally.

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The latest pieces in America’s Afghanistan jigsaw puzzle have started falling into place. Indeed, parts of the picture had already begun to emerge earlier this year, with US President Barack Obama making good on his election campaign promise to increase the US troop presence from 30,000 to 50,000. He then replaced the traditionalist Gen. David McKiernan with the counter-insurgency expert Gen. Stanley McChrystal as effective military commander of all Afghan national and foreign forces in Afghanistan.

In addition, there have been the controversial missile strikes against suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Although the strikes have been mainly focused on Pakistan, they have targeted insurgents operating in Afghanistan – a clear signal the United States is happy to escalate the war in the territory of key ally Pakistan.

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Bring peace to the troubled frontier

Grassroots attempts to foster peace in Pakistan provide hope for communities torn apart by war with the Taliban

· Mustafa Qadri

· guardian.co.uk, Saturday 25 July 2009 16.00 BST

There has been much soul-searching in Pakistan of late, and with good reason. Although the Army claims to have largely pushed the Taliban out of the Swat Valley, the most developed part of the country yet infiltrated by the insurgents, the war continues in all of its brutality and uncertainty.

Even in Swat it is unclear whether the Taliban are really vanquished. The government may have told the millions made homeless by this conflict that it is safe to return, but the army’s inability to eliminate key Swat Taliban leaders and the existence of huge pockets of remote mountainous terrain incapable of ever being properly secured make the possibility of a Taliban return a real threat…

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With the death of another Australian soldier in Afghanistan this week, what are the prospects for peace in the region? Mustafa Qadri reviews political and strategic developments

As the Australian Defence Force mourns its 11th soldier to die in Afghanistan, Private Benjamin Ranaudo, and more than 400 additional troops prepare to travel to the region, many Australians are asking what the future of the conflict holds.

After much anticipation, the United States has finally started to reveal its political and military strategy in the country.

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A snapshot of life in Pakistan’s refugee camps

Updated July 16, 2009 11:48:55

Although the fighting in Pakistan’s Swat valley has ended and some refugees have started to head home, many remain wary of returning.

An estimated 2 million fled the conflict between Pakistani troops and the Taliban, and some ended up at a displaced person camp two hours north of the capital Islamabad.

Presenter: Mustafa Qadri
Speakers: Purmanari, displaced person; Mohammad Yahya, a former town mayor; Ziauddin Yousufzai, School teacher; Mannu, school student

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Public Unites Against Taliban in Pakistan

Mustafa Qadri | 16 Jul 2009

KARACHI, Pakistan — There has been a perceptible shift in the battle against militancy in Pakistan. The massive army operations that recently concluded in the Swat valley, the largest ever conducted by Pakistan against the Taliban, are but one facet of it. For the first time, the government is also winning the propaganda war.

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Fixing Pakistan’s madrasas

Pakistan’s madrasas have a bad reputation. But is it justified, and will a new programme of reform improve standards?

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Pakistan madrasas: ‘We focus on how to live together and respect diversity’

Mustafa Qadri reports on a programme to reform madrasa curriculums in Pakistan

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Displaced Pakistanis speak out

by Mustafa Qadri

16 July 2009

Karachi, Pakistan – Pakistan is in the middle of its largest operation against the Taliban in the troubled Swat Valley and adjacent areas.

Although a small first wave of refugees has begun to return as part of the government’s efforts, up to 2.5 million people are believed to have fled the once quiet, scenic mountain ranges. At a camp in Risalpur, 50 miles south of some of the fiercest battle zones, I spoke with some of the displaced.

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All Eyes On Iran

The fallout from its controversial presidential election has left Iran in a similar position to that faced by Iraq in the lead-up to the US-led invasion, writes Mustafa Qadri

At no point in recent memory has the Islamic Republic of Iran dominated headlines as it has these past four weeks. Virtually all Western governments and mainstream commentators have rushed to condemn the Iranian Government’s violent crackdown on opposition protesters.

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The report by the Sindh Chapter of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan on politically motivated murders in Karachi should worry every citizen, for it constitutes an indictment of the country’s politicians and gives a fair indication of the kind of violence-prone society we have become.

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US President Obama recently spoke to Dawn News in Washington. It’s something of a coup for Pakistani journalism given that such opportunities are few and far between. Still it’s a fairly sycophantic thing and hence quite disappointing. For instance, there are no hard questions on the around 800 Pakistanis killed by US drone strikes in [...]

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Interviews with Pakistan’s “disappeared persons” for Amnesty International’s Human Rights Defender Magazine – June/July/August edition 2009.

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Lost Victims Of War

Mustafa Qadri

As Pakistan announces it has cleared 90 per cent of the country’s north west of Taliban militants, Mustafa Qadri visits the refugee camps sheltering civilians who have been forced from their homes by conflict.

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Late last year I interviewed “Mullah Noor Allam”, a middle ranking Taliban commander from the Swat valley. The interview was published in Australia’s Canberra Times newspaper on 17 January 2009. You can view the story…

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The Karachi king

After a bloody conflict in Karachi, much-feared political boss Altaf Hussain fled to London, but he is no less powerful in Pakistan

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 July 2009 18.00 BST
o Article history

With his healthy plume of gravity-defying hair and chunky tinted glasses, Altaf Hussain is as colourful in appearance as his reputation suggests. Perhaps no other Pakistani politician has as big a list of enemies as the one-time cabbie and university student who transformed himself into one of the most feared political bosses in the country. That he has directed his Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) party from the distant shores of the UK since 1994 speaks volumes for his enduring influence in the treacherous political life of Pakistan.

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Bigger Than Bin Laden Beitullah Mehsud, the man analysts describe as more dangerous than Osama bin Laden, continues to evade death in Pakistan, writes Mustafa Qadri Ever since he was labelled more dangerous than Osama bin laden, Beitullah Mehsud has been the single greatest target of US drone attacks. Remarkably, he has evaded death on [...]

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Pakistan’s divided Taliban

Despite internal divisions and a bloody army crackdown, the Pakistani Taliban are a long way from being defeated

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 June 2009 16.00 BST
o Article history

Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban warlord from Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal agency, often described as Emir Baitullah, is widely seen as the movement’s leader in the country. For at least the past two years, Pakistani authorities have sought to attribute most of the terrorism that occurs in this troubled nation to him. According to the North West Frontier Province governor Owais Ahmed Ghani, Baitullah is “the root cause of all the evil”.

Perhaps that is why he was targeted in what was probably the latest and deadliest US drone attack in Pakistan. While the strike failed to kill Mehsud, it did leave the charred remains of anywhere between 40 and 100 people scattered amid the wreckage of a South Waziristan mosque. This has become a dirty war, and neither insurgents nor counterinsurgents have hesitated to attack places of worship.

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Homeless in the mountains of Pakistan

19 Jun 2009 12:39:00 GMT

Written by: Mustafa Qadri

Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author’s alone.

The Pakistan Army is in the middle of its largest ever operations against Taliban forces in the troubled region bordering Afghanistan. Up to 2.5 million are believed to have fled the once quiet, scenic mountain ranges. At a camp in Risalpur, 50 miles south of some of the fiercest battle zones in the Swat valley, I talked to schoolgirl Mannu.

Among the bare dwellings of Risalpur’s industrial area, buildings donated to the displaced by local businessmen that have been transformed into miniature cities, I met eleven-year-old Mannu, a fearless young student unfazed by the traumas that have, for the time being at least, destroyed her ancient village community.

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Mustafa Qadri: Stuck between India and the Taliban The idea that Pakistan is inherently dangerous is a mantra used by those who ignore history and avoid the complicated reality According to Kapil Komireddi in these very pages, the demise of Pakistan is “inevitable” because it has since foundation been a source of division and extremism. [...]

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Did Ahmadinejad Steal The Election?

Five days after the election, Iran is still in the grip of massive protests. Now the offer of a partial recount isn’t going to put the genie back in the bottle, writes Mustafa Qadri

Did Ahmadinejad steal the election? That is the question being asked by so many in Iran and around the world.

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Mumbai bombing suspect’s release raises many concerns

Mustafa Qadri 10-Jun-2009

Has South Asia really only brought us grief, Madhav? I don’t think that’s entirely fair, though I admit I’ve increasingly found myself asking that very same question while travelling through the southern mega city of Karachi last week.

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The Battle Has Only Just Begun

Thanks to massive army operations in the Swat valley, Pakistan’s Taliban movement is in retreat for the first time, writes Mustafa Qadri

Ever since Nek Mohammad began the first insurgency from Waziristan in 2003, the loose confederation of warlords known as the Pakistan Taliban Movement have either advanced or obtained de facto government recognition in large parts of Pakistan’s Pakhtun tribal areas. Before the current Pakistan Army operations in the Swat valley, one analyst estimated that the Taliban had a presence in over 10 per cent of the country.

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Don’t write the Taliban off just yet

Although the Taliban is on the back foot in Pakistan, the war is far from over and thousands of civilians have been left homeless

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 June 2009 09.30 BST

The Taliban have suffered their heaviest defeat in Pakistan since first erupting into open insurgency in 2003. Before May, the loose network of warlords that have invoked the Taliban franchise here have expanded into large swaths of Pakistan’s Pakhtun tribal areas. Prior to current events, some estimates placed the Taliban in 11% of Pakistan, almost all of that being in the North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas that are presently the centre of military operations by Pakistan and the US.

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The Taliban Has No Plan B

By Mustafa Qadri

The Taliban is stepping up its violent attacks but ordinary Pakistanis have had enough and the organisation is losing popular support, reports Mustafa Qadri from near the Swat valley…

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Isolating the Taliban

Violence in Pakistan can only be tackled if the state listens to devastated communities and recognises the Taliban threat

Mustafa Qadri

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 18.30 BST

It was really only a matter of time before we would see this. A day after a bomb ripped through central Lahore, three explosions rocked Peshawar – two at the famous storytellers’ market, and another near the city’s railway station, destroying significant amounts of property, lives and livelihoods. It is too early to know what motivated these latest attacks in Peshawar. Like so much of the North-West Frontier Province, however, Peshawar businesses, particularly book music shops and women’s clothing stores, have been heavily hit, often after being told to shut for being unIslamic.

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Time to end the insecurity and fear

Mustafa Qadri 28-May-2009

If you speak to most Pakistanis – even the rank and file of the army, as I sometimes do – the answer, Madhav, would be: yes, Pakistanis are ready for more open trade links with India. This shouldn’t be surprising. According to an International Republican Institute poll released a few weeks ago, the priority for most Pakistanis is the economy.

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The human cost of war on the Taliban

Pakistan’s operations against militants have won praise from Washington but displaced thousands of innocent people

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 May 2009 14.03 BST

The latest chapter in Pakistan’s war with the Taliban has been a humanitarian disaster for ordinary villagers from Malakand Agency, the region in Pakistan’s lower Himalayas where the battle is now being fought.

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Critics say that in a country where up to 40% of its 160 million population live on less than $1 a day or less, Pakistan’s ruling elite wants to keep its perks and privileges at all costs. They say the country’s rulers have no hesitation in slashing development expenditure, eliminating subsidies, going cap in hand [...]

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Thousands Displaced by War in Pakistan

By Mustafa Qadri and Tahir Ali
Displaced villager

“We are ready to leave [Katcha Ghauri] to make room for our brothers from Swat,” says Kushdhil, who was displaced from Bajaur Agency, to the west of the current fighting. Photo: Mustafa Qadri

Last week a number of quiet mountain villages became part of the deadly frontline in Pakistan’s battle with Islamic militancy, report Mustafa Qadri and Tahir Ali…

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My latest article for NewMatilda.com is on ethnic tensions in Pakistan’s great port city of Karachi:

Shadowy Forces In Karachi

The recent gun battles across Karachi demonstrate that there’s a lot more to Pakistan’s problems than dealing with the Taliban, writes Mustafa Qadri

There were a number of Kodak moments for the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington last week. But back in their respective countries, the world’s media were transfixed by images of civilians suffering from the unending war with the Taliban. In Afghanistan the images were of the horrific bombardment of civilians in the southern province of Farah. And next door in Pakistan, there is little doubt that army operations against the Taliban along the foothills of the Himalayas are having a devastating impact on tribal societies.

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Pakistan’s displaced voice fear and anger

13 May 2009 17:10:00 GMT

Written by: Mustafa Qadri

A veteran of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan rues the misfortune of being homeless in his own country.

Mustafa Qadri in Peshawar and Tahir Ali in Rangmala talk to civilians displaced by a Pakistani army offensive against Taliban militants in the Swat valley that has uprooted hundreds of thousands…

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A 10,000-strong dedicated army unit reportedly guards the nuclear weapons sites, which are dispersed throughout secure parts of Pakistan. And although political instability has plagued the country for decades, the military has been its steely backbone.

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Loewenstein delves into the ‘Blogging Revolution’

Reviewed by Mustafa Qadri

Hot on the heels of his last book, My Israel Question (a history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine from the perspective of an anti-Zionist Jewish Australian), freelance journalist Antony Loewenstein delves into the ‘Blogging Revolution’ with a book of the same title.

The greatest virtue of this book is that it is written not from the distant comforts of the West but on the ground in six fascinating and misunderstood countries. In Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China, the reader is taken on a journey through the lives of a variety of people, including but not limited to activists, seeking to engage their society in a social debate on a range of topics from sex to religion and popular culture.

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The following report for The Guardian, published today, looks at the recent meetings between the Presidents of the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington D.C. and the risks to civilians caught up in the war with the Taliban:

‘Collateral damage’ in AfPak hurts the US too

The bombardment of civilians in Afghanistan undermines the security credentials of western forces in the region

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 May 2009 16.30 BST

The timing may have been a disaster for Washington, but for villagers in Afghanistan’s south it was far worse. A day after a US bombing killed up to 120 civilians in Afghanistan’s southern Farah province, President Obama asked the visiting presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari, to step up their attacks on Taliban and al-Qaida militants.

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Pakistan is not an ally or an enemy—it’s not coherent enough to be either. There is a free judiciary and a free press, but the there’s no civilian control of the army, especially the intelligence services, which have been backing the bad guys.

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My latest report for The Guardian is on the Pakistan army’s inability to defend Pakistan:

Pakistan’s army: as inept as it is corrupt

The answer to why Pakistan’s mighty army seems impotent against Taliban insurgents is that it is more mafia than military

Mustafa Qadri

No institution dominates Pakistan like its army. The armed forces account for 20% of Pakistan’s national budget, totalling $5bn last year according to official statistics. But the actual figure, already staggering for a country with high levels of illiteracy and malnutrition, is likely to be much higher. The army has been practically unaccountable since the very foundation of the country – last year’s figures were the first it has publicly released since 1965.

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Despite Afghanistan’s recent return to the spotlight, few among the public realize the full extent of the US’s historical meddling in Afghanistan. Sadly, many Americans will believe the version of events that were popularized by George Crile’s book-turned-Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson’s War.

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It appears the Pentagon is opposed to too much oversight of civilian aid to Pakistan, including a provision in a proposed bill that would prevent aid in the event of a military coup: After promising last month that U.S. aid to Pakistan would no longer be a “blank check,” the Obama administration is attempting to [...]

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My column for newmatilda.com this week is on the inherent failings of the Pakistan Army that make fighting the Taliban more difficult:

Is Pakistan’s Army a paper tiger?

They’ve huffed and they’ve puffed but they can’t blow the Taliban down. Why not, asks Mustafa Qadri

The Army is the most powerful force in Pakistan. So why how has a rural insurgency armed with basic weapons managed to overrun so much of the country? That is the question that Pakistanis, as well as many in the international community, are now asking.

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The Pakistan Army intensified its operation Tuesday against militants in the Lower Dir district in the country’s northwest. The operation, which began on Sunday, has already claimed the lives of 50 militants and 13 security forces. In response, the Pakistani Taliban have suspended their talks with the government.

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To understand why that is conservative, consider how much we spend on defense relative to both our purported rivals and our past. Our defense budget is almost half the world’s, even leaving out nuclear weapons, the wars, veterans, and homeland security. It is also more than we spent at any point during the cold war. [...]

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My analysis of the Obama Administration’s new AfPak policy for the Common Grounds News Service was published today:

Obama’s new “AfPak” strategy – the view from Pakistan
by Mustafa Qadri

30 April 2009

Karachi, Pakistan – People with a hammer only see nails. This well-worn maxim aptly describes the United States’ relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past several decades. As early as 1954, the United States identified the country as a bulwark against regional encroachment by the Soviet Union when Pakistan received its first substantial tranche of American military and economic aid.

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We’re now seeing a subtle, yet seismic, shift in the War on Terror narrative in Western capitals. The host of a recent CNN discussion on ‘Islamism’ tried to distinguish al-Qaeda from the Taliban, basically arguing that as rigidly conservative and chauvinist as the Taliban are, they are not, like al-Qaeda, interested in open conflict with non-Muslim societies and instead want to establish a ‘true Islamic state’.

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Not everybody is in a position to write a column, but may have a profound experience or perspective to share. In this feature we seek out such people and report back so the Unleashed audience can absorb and discuss unique, fascinating or moving stories.

In our latest instalment of “Unleashed Voices” Mustafa Qadri meets a boy from Pakistan who has trained to become a Taliban suicide bomber.

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In my hometown in Punjab, a businessman friend was inspired by the news from Swat. “If two hundred Taliban take over our town, then we can all start making our own decisions. Who needs this corrupt system anyway?” My friend is a typical middle-class conservative Pakistani, and people in cities across the country share his [...]

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So we have, at present, between 800,000 and 1.3 million “excess deaths” as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war.

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Ms Windisch said residents were also anti-Connex after the company recently won a $500 million 30-year contract to operate an “apartheid” light rail system in occupied Palestine that would acquire many Palestinian homes. (Thanks Antony)

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Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has said that suicide bombings that have rocked Iraq are a sign that fighters are afraid the Iraqi government is succeeding in restoring security… “I think in Iraq there will always be political conflicts, there will always be, as in any society, sides drawn between different factions, but [...]

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My latest column for The Guardian, on support for the Taliban in some of Pakistan’s tribal areas, was published today:

Why they love the Taliban

Rampant corruption, and the Pakistani government’s failure to provide, is driving people into the arms of the militants

* Mustafa Qadri
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 April 2009 20.30 BST

It may be difficult to understand, but in many of the tribal areas where Pakistan’s ethnic Pakhtun population live, the Taliban are very popular.

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Just back from a visit to Pakistan, Sen. John Kerry says the Obama administration’s plan for that volatile country, rolled out last month with great fanfare, “is not a real strategy.”

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Addressing a gathering at Friday prayers, the JI Amir said those who speak for Shariah and Islam including Maulana Sufi Muhammad deserve appreciation.

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My latest piece for newmatilda.com is based on a recent visit to parts of the Kohat and Dera Adam Khel tribal areas in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province where the Taliban has a strong presence:

Is Al Qaeda About To Conquer Pakistan?

Counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen believes that Pakistan could collapse “within months”. But Mustafa Qadri reports that in the tribal areas, it is actually the Taliban, not al Qaeda, that is gaining traction…

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My assessment of the Obama Administration’s newly announced AfPak policy was published in The Guardian today:

Obama’s charm offensive

Is Barack Obama’s change of strategy – switching focus from Iraq to Afghanistan – a real break with the past?

It was easy to be cynical listening to Barack Obama speak about the “new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” last Friday. Apart from a vast improvement in elocution, at first glance it was difficult to distinguish his rhetoric from that of his predecessor, George Bush.

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The following article was published in NewMatilda.com today:

Getting to Know Your Insurgents

Much of Pakistan is still trying to understand the mentality of the Taliban fighters who are mounting a worsening campaign of killings across the country, writes Mustafa Qadri

There were plenty of glimpses into the mindset of the Pakistan’s Taliban insurgents last week. On Tuesday a gang of heavily armed men dressed in police uniforms stormed a police training school in Lahore killing at least 12 and injuring close to another 100.

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My latest column for The Guardian, on the Taliban and the psychology of fear, was published today:

Taliban preys on Pakistani fears

The Taliban’s extreme version of Islam is the logical conclusion of the region’s violent past and feeds on insecurity

Pakistanis have been offered a frightening glimpse into the true character of the Taliban over the past weeks. Last Monday, 30 March, a group of heavily armed men in police uniforms stormed a police academy killing 11 and injuring close to another 100. Those traumatised police cadets that survived painted a grisly picture of bloodstained walls and body parts. The leader of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the umbrella network of pro-Taliban groups in the country, Baitullah Masud claimed responsibility for the attack.

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I read this after another casual stroll to the supermarket stocking up on goods I rarely think twice about… Background to the food crisis: origins, impact, and responses During 2007 and 2008, prices for staple foods such as rice, maize, and wheat increased greatly and at a rapid pace. For some crops, prices doubled in [...]

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Mr Sharif, a possible future prime minister, was sharply critical of US policy in Pakistan saying former US president George W. Bush had helped promote terrorism by backing military ruler General Pervez Musharraf. He said Mr Bush was against Pakistan’s return to democracy and deaf to advice. Interesting to see how his views are now [...]

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Pakistan could get $2.8 billion in military aid from the US in addition to the proposed $7.5 billion civilian aid package spread over five years, a defence official has been quoted as saying.

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THE Obama administration’s $500 billion or more proposal to deal with America’s ailing banks has been described by some in the financial markets as a win-win-win proposal. Actually, it is a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose.

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Israel might choose to attack Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear bomb, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East said today.

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My analysis of NATO’s supply conundrum in Afghanistan was published on the Foreign Policy in Focus website today:

NATO’s Frayed Supply Line

Mustafa Qadri | April 1, 2009

There was much fanfare as President Barack Obama announced the eagerly anticipated “AfPak” policy review, what the White House terms is “a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Many have argued, however, that the new AfPak policy is very much a continuation of the old policy with a few tactical grafts from the occupation of Iraq.

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At an international conference on Afghanistan at The Hague, in the Netherlands, the Iranian delegate, Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh, responded positively to Barack Obama’s new strategy for winning the war against the Taliban.

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Prince Naif is viewed as a conservative. Only days ago he told reporters he saw no need for women to serve in the shoura council, the consultative assembly, or for its mem­bers to be elected, as recommended by a human rights group report last week. His ministry has also been the target of accusations of [...]

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Here is my analysis of the Obama Administration’s new ‘AfPak’ policy for newmatilda.com:

Not All Terrorists Are The Same

Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is much more nuanced than Bush’s “war on terror”, writes Mustafa Qadri. As a starting point, it recognises that al Qaeda and the Taliban are distinct groups

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My latest column for The Guardian is on the quandaries of supplying NATO forces in Afghanistan:

NATO’s soft underbelly

Nato operations in Afghanistan depend on a precarious international supply system – and the Taliban have realised it

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The matter came before the Supreme Court, The petitioners, Jews and Arabs, argued that this measure contradicts our Basic Laws (our substitute for a nonexistent constitution) which guarantee the equality of all citizens. The answer of the Ministry of Justice lawyers let the cat out of the bag. It asserts, for the first time, in [...]

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There’s nothing new in Barack Obama’s foreign policy – but the way it is knitted together offers hope… See also TIME magazine’s appraisal: Did George Bush leave one of his old speeches in the Resolute Desk? As President Obama unveiled his Afghanistan-Pakistan policy Friday, it was hard to miss the echoes of his predecessor’s “surge” [...]

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I am going to miss Kabul. I have grown to love this country in a way I never thought I would. Afghanistan is like a teenage boy. Infuriating, recalcitrant, messy, always destroying things and disappointing hopes. But you love him anyway.

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Sindh High Court has summoned Pervez Musharraf and top lawyers from his regime to answer a treason charge.

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A Sudanese minister has told Al Jazeera that the US launched two air raids in the country earlier this year. Mabrouk Mubarak Salim, the state minister for highways, said on Thursday that Sudanese, Somalis, Ethiopians, and Eritreans were killed in the attacks in January and February.

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This is how the Taliban deals with its opponents: At least 10 people have been killed in a suicide bombing in north-western Pakistan, local officials say.

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If you ever wonder how a group as harsh as the Taliban is capable of getting support from ordinary Pashtuns consider the Pakistan Government’s near total indifference to their suffering in internally displaced person camps: …during three separate trips to Bajaur, we clearly saw the only way they could fight an entrenched Taliban was with [...]

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The Supreme Court ordered on Wednesday that the Punjab government regularise 97 ad hoc lecturers within three day…

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Here is my report on Australia’s military presence in Afghanistan and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s visit to the United States this week, published in NewMatilda.com today:

Don’t Mention The War

They managed to avoid the sticky subject of a troop increase. However, despite growing opposition back home, Rudd has backed the Obama Administration’s questionable strategy in Afghanistan.

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My latest report from Pakistan, a reflection on the nation on the 69th anniversary of the Lahore Resolution of 1940, was published in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Unleashed’ website today:

Ordinary People Power

Mustafa Qadri

Monday was Republic Day in Pakistan, the 69th anniversary of the moment when, under the Lahore Resolution, the idea of Pakistan was formally adopted by the subcontinent’s Muslim leadership. Seven years later, on August 14, 1947, the idea would turn into the reality of an independent state.

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An advocate on Tuesday filed a petition with the Supreme Court charging former president Pervez Musharraf with ‘high treason’ and seeking his trial under Article 6 of the Constitution.

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Now, as the Obama administration completes its review of strategy toward the region this week, his sudden ascent has raised an urgent question: Can Mr. Sharif, 59, a populist politician close to Islamic parties, be a reliable partner? Or will he use his popular support to blunt the military’s already fitful campaign against the insurgency [...]

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“Maulvi Sahib! What is Pakistan?” After careful thought he replied: “It’s a place in India where they make razors.”

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<!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:SimSun; panose-1:2 1 6 0 3 1 1 1 1 1; mso-font-alt:??; mso-font-charset:134; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 680460288 22 0 262145 0;} @font-face {font-family:”Cambria Math”; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 [...]

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The founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD) has given up on any solution coming from within Israel.

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The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is [...]

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Five days of gunbattles between the Indian army and separatist militants in Indian-administered Kashmir have left at least 25 dead — eight Indian army troopers, including one officer, and 17 militants, the Indian military said Tuesday.

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The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in Gaza, local Palestinian NGOs and mental health professionals are reporting increased incidents of domestic violence and sexual assault against women in Gaza since the beginning of 2009. (Thanks Antony).

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A threefold increase in civilian aid would come on top of more than $10 billion in mostly military assistance since 2001. In addition to the aid, the administration will seek similar contributions from other nations, the officials said, describing the conclusions of a strategy review on condition of anonymity because it has not been made [...]

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First, Sufi Muhammad, the TNSM leader who negotiated the deal on behalf of the Taliban, warned all lawyers and courts in Swat to pack up and leave as the shariat courts with qazis approved by the Taliban leadership will start functioning soon. Now, the Taliban have asked all NGOs in Swat to leave as well. [...]

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My latest piece on the situation in Pakistan for The Guardian was published today:

Rough Justice in Swat

The growing influence of the Taliban in the North-West Frontier Province is a direct threat to Pakistan’s fragile democracy…

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Registrar Office of Supreme Court of Pakistan has raised the objections on all the four review petitions filed by Federation early on Thursday against court’s verdict in Sharif brothers’ eligibility case. According to the SC registrar, the petitions miss necessary documents, including surety bonds, court fees, paper books and copy of the court’s earlier verdict [...]

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My analysis of the grassroots democracy movement that led to the reinstatement of Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry as Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court was published in the Los Angeles Times today:

Pakistan’s clear message to the West

It’s not all fanaticism and violence. A grass-roots democratic movement is making strides.

By Mustafa Qadri

March 21, 2009

Writing From Islamabad, Pakistan — Politics is never dull in Pakistan. This week, it was inspirational too.

On Monday, I watched people flock to the home of Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. A tense standoff between the government and a coalition of opposition groups over Chaudhry’s reinstatement as chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court had finally been resolved. After two years of government-enforced “retirement,” Chaudhry would return to the bench…

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The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories has said Israel’s military offensive on Gaza “would seem to constitute a war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law”.

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“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

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Pakistan’s prime minister said in an interview he would seek to tip the balance of power back toward parliament and away from embattled President Asif Ali Zardari, a move that could help restore democratic checks and balances in the turbulent nation and possibly help bring the opposition into the ruling coalition.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Pakistani leaders that some US lawmakers “may not feel inclined” to support aid to Islamabad if political chaos continues, a top US official said on Monday. But the official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, said Clinton presented the issue as a reality rather than a threat in [...]

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Kudos to Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani for honouring his repeated pledge, unlike his four predecessors, to keep the Army out of politics despite having been persuaded by a section of the establishment to pack up the present political dispensation and take over the reins of power at the time [...]

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Pakistan’s prime minister said in an interview he would seek to tip the balance of power back toward parliament and away from embattled President Asif Ali Zardari, a move that could help restore democratic checks and balances in the turbulent nation and possibly help bring the opposition into the ruling coalition.

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My analysis of the reinstatment of Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry as Pakistan’s Chief Justice was published in Crikey.com.au today:

Democracy revitalised by Pakistan’s Chief Justice

By demonstrating the importance of functioning and accountable institutions, Pakistan’s lawyers may well have paved the road upon which the long road from its present hell may be charted, writes Mustafa Qadri.

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President Obama and his national security advisers are considering expanding the American covert war in Pakistan far beyond the unruly tribal areas to strike at a different center of Taliban power in Baluchistan, where top Taliban leaders are orchestrating attacks into southern Afghanistan.

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Before Gilani could say anything, an uneasy Zardari abruptly told Sherry: “OK, please start talking, as you have five minutes.” To the surprise of both of them, all of a sudden, Sherry Rehman dropped a bombshell and said: “I am resigning from my ministry.” Even before Sherry could explain the reasons behind her dramatic decision, [...]

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The Tehrik-e-Nifaaz Shariat Muhammadi, a militant group, ordered government judges not to show up for work “because we are establishing a true Islamic justice system,” said Amir Izzat Khan, a spokesman. The group is introducing Sharia law in the region as part of a government truce with Taliban fighters.

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Here is my report for NewMatilda.com from the lawn of the Chief Justice’s residence in Islamabad the day of his reinstatement.

Long March ends in triumph

Instead of violent confrontation there was jubilation in Islamabad yesterday as the Government bowed to protestors’ demands and reinstated the sacked Chief Justice. Mustafa Qadri reports

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My report for The Guardian from Islamabad the day of the Chief Justice’s reinstatement has just been published here:

Democracy has been revitalised by Pakistan’s Chief Justice

President Zardari’s decision to reinstate Chief Justice Chaudhry has stabilised the country – and saved his political career

Mustafa Qadri

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The recent upsurge of jihadi violence in Punjab, the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan’s provincial capital, Quetta, demonstrates the threat extremist Sunni-Deobandi groups pose to the Pakistani citizen and state.

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It is another irony that as football is the game of poor masses in Pakistan, the teams and players are given the lowest priority in terms of security. Bartalan Bisciki, the noted Hungarian football coach, was selected last month by the Pakistan football association to coach the national team, but he refused to take up [...]

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Here’s a list of breaking developments on the lawyers’ Long March to Islamabd (to restore the deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry): Allegations of torture of lawyers arrested by Police, from Imran Schah in Islamabad. With the US and UK’s blessing, have Prime Minister Gilani and Army Chief Kayani given President Zardari an ultimatum to [...]

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My report for NewMatilda.com from the start of the lawyers’ Long March in Karachi for NewMatilda.com was published today:

The Long March Begins

Protestors in Pakistan’s lawyers’ movement set out yesterday on their long march to the capital. Mustafa Qadri reports from Karachi on what has become a street-level vote of no-confidence in the Government

From across the country they took to the streets, re-enacting scenes from the darkest days of the Musharraf regime over a year earlier.

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Mustafa Qadri: History Repeats Itself In Pakistan

Guardian: Comment Is Free

By invoking a Raj-era law against public protest, the government demonstrates its inability to handle the country’s real problems…

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The crackdown began late Tuesday night, with the government invoking Section 144 of the 1860 Penal Code, a law from the British colonial era that forbids public gatherings of four or more people.

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Pakistan has arrested hundreds of opposition political activists in an overnight sweep ahead of a planned protest rally, as a looming political showdown presents the most serious challenge yet to the year-old government.

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Britain aligned itself with the U.S. position on Hezbollah, but has now seen its error. Bill Marston, a Foreign Office spokesman, told Al Jazeera: “Hezbollah is a political phenomenon and part and parcel of the national fabric in Lebanon. We have to admit this.”

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The Guardian has an excellent photo essay on working conditions in Pakistan for those who make many of the medical instruments used by the UK’s NHS.

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…if Barack Obama can’t stand up to the likes of Marty Peretz, Jonathan Chait, Steve Rosen, and other snarky critics, and if the White House can’t defend a critical intelligence pick when that person is savaged by Republican sharks smelling blood in the water, then how can we expect Obama to stand up to Bibi [...]

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Mustafa Qadri: Long March To Nowhere

As bickering politicians bring paralysis to Pakistan, will Washington give the army its backing?

It seems with each new week a fresh crisis is thrust upon the people of Pakistan. This year, in a little over two months, the nation has faced more traumas than most countries face in a generation. Last month authorities in the north-western Swat valley reached a peace deal with a religious group closely aligned to the Taliban. This week another peace deal was signed directly with the Taliban in the neighbouring Bajaur tribal agency after a series of successful if devastating operations by the Pakistani army.

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Until two or three years ago, Pakistan seemed to be a literary desert in both Urdu and English. Now, quite suddenly, it has produced a cluster of remarkable bright young novelists able to match anything coming out India: in fiction, Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif and Kamila Shamsie; and in non-fiction, Ahmed Rashid and [...]

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A test of progress will be if refugees in camps in Peshawar begin to head home. Despite the military’s declaration of victory against the Taliban in Bajaur late last month, many say it’s still too unsafe to return. Travelers and residents say the Taliban haven’t been flushed from two of nine districts there.

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A group of 35 Hindus, nearly half of them women, from Pakistan have crossed over to India and asked the government to allow them to settle in the country, Indian media reported Monday.

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Will Pakistan’s Army Chief step into the political fray the country’s civilian leadership is currently embroiled in? That’s the question I ask in my latest piece for newmatilda.com:

A New Dictator For Pakistan?

Speculation is mounting in Islamabad that a military coup is on the cards, writes Mustafa Qadri. And Pakistan’s most powerful ally doesn’t seem to mind…

Pakistan is facing its greatest political crisis since the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as president last year.

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Tuesday’s attack in the Pakistani city of Lahore on a convoy carrying Sri Lankan cricketers was carried out by disgruntled Punjabi militants seeking to extract concessions from the government, Asia Times Online has learned.

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A senior UN official says it will be nearly impossible to hold credible elections in Afghanistan in April, as ordered by President Karzai.

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A Gallup poll last month showed that 62 percent of Americans support either an investigation or prosecution of Bush administration officials for torture. Sources familiar with the administration’s thinking say Obama’s team has thoroughly thought through the concept of a torture investigation. President Obama, however, has remained cool to the notion in his public statements.

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One of the headlines coming out of the Gaza donors conference currently being held in Egypt is the US’s pledge of $900 million for the Palestinians. What is getting less attention is that only one third of that will actually go to Gaza and none of that can be used for rebuilding.

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When asked if, during his visit to Islamabad, White House Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke had expressed U.S. concerns about the release of Khan in his meetings with Pakistani leaders, State Department spokesman Robert Wood was at a loss: QUESTION: I’d like to stay on Pakistan for a second. Do you know [...]

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The failures of this government and its inability to defend the country’s interests or its population from drones or terrorist attacks are paving the way for the return of the army to power as a way of avoiding a serious split within its own ranks. All that is awaited is a green light from the [...]

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In an admission that its dependence on the Pakistani military has yielded few results against the Taliban, the United States is now seeking to change its relationship with Pakistan – the world’s sole Muslim nuclear power and home of Al Qaeda’s leadership.

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The Diplomat’s Middle East and South Asia correspondent, Mustafa Qadri, reports on Hamas’ future…

The latest edition of the excellent The Diplomat magazine, Australia’s only dedicated foreign affairs magazine, has an article by me on the future of the Palestinian Hamas movement following the recent Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. The article is available here via subscription.

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In January I interviewed a member of Lashkar-e-Toiba, the pro-Pakistan militant group believed to have been involved in the Mumbai attacks, for The Diplomat magazine. The interview has just been published in the latest edition of the magazine and is available online here.

JIHAD: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

02-Mar-2009

Mustafa Qadri investigates the organisations believed by many to have been behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks

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Outlook India has done an interview with Sufi Mohammad which you can read here. Sufi Mohammad is the religious leader who signed a peace deal with the government in Pakistan’s Swat region basically to replace existing, secular laws with the Sharia.

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Maj Gen Tariq Khan, the commander of military operations in five of Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies, said his paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) had driven extremists out of Bajaur, where Pakistani forces have waged a six-month long campaign.

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Addressing a press conference on Sunday, Sufi Mohammad warned that the TNSM would start setting up protest camps if the Islamic courts were not set up and prisoners not swapped by 15 March… The situation in Swat remains tense and the militants are yet to disarm or end their hold over areas they control.

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My first piece in a series on Iran was posted on NewMatilda.com today:

What did Iran ever to do to us?

In the first of a series of articles leading up to the Iranian presidential elections in June, Mustafa Qadri looks at how Iran became the pariah of the West…

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It was hoped that t he election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States would bring a change of course to the beleaguered US effort in Afghanistan. But word that representatives of the Taliban and the infamous Afghan drug trafficker and extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might be on the president’s list of possible [...]

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Pakistan’s supreme court on Wednesday nullified the election last year of a key opposition leader, sparking a wave of anti-government protests in the populous Punjab province and prompting worries over a new round of political instability.

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The following article appears on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Unleashed website today:

Taming the Taliban

Mustafa Qadri

This month the world reacted with surprise and trepidation at the news that Pakistan had reached a peace agreement with religious groups closely aligned to the Taliban. The accord relates to the mountainous Malakand division of the North Western Frontier Province that borders Afghanistan. It covers the beautiful Swat valley, the onetime alpine honeymoon resort, that, since 2007, has been gripped by a Taliban insurgency.

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The U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide has now been officially posted to the U.S. Department of State offical web page. Organizations involved in the drafting of this document included Department of State, Department of Defense, U.S. Agency for International Development, Department of Justice, Department of The Treasury, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Agriculture, Department of [...]

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My latest article, on the peace deal between a pro-Taliban group and the Pakistan Government in the mountainous tribal area of Malakand was published in NewMatilda.com today: WHAT WILL THIS ‘PEACE’ COST? By Mustafa Qadri Pakistan has agreed to entrench Sharia law in its North-West Frontier Province in exchange for peace, but locals are still [...]

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Muslim Khan, the Taliban spokesman in Swat, said the group claimed responsibility for abducting the administrator. “He is our guest. We have to discuss some issues with him. We will serve him with tea and then free him,” he told Reuters.

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U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that Washington could accept a political agreement between the Afghan government and Taliban rebels along the lines of a truce in neighboring Pakistan.

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“Its not easy being a hijra is this society, but is it our fault that we are like this?

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Pakistan’s constitution already contains provisions protecting against un-Islamic laws. Why then does the country need an agreement with violent extremists to ensure Islamic laws? And who will pronounce on these laws? The militants? And if the army is to remain in a “reactive” mode, as a government minister explained, will they stand by and watch [...]

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With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

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“Hamas has to change its policies,” Mr. Kerry said at the ruins of the American International School in Gaza, which was destroyed by an Israeli air attack in early January. “There is no change in our policy.” I can’t think of any other conflict on earth where the aggressor (the US, by supplying Israel with [...]

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Pakistan needs a modern day “Marshall Plan” to help it fight Taliban militants through economic development, President Asif Ali Zardari said, referring to the U.S. aid plan for Europe after World War II.

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Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari has been accused of launching a purge of his late wife Benazir Bhutto’s closest supporters within his ruling Pakistan People’s Party.

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Many Muslims believe that ancient Khorasan – which covers parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – is the promised land from where they will secure the first victory in the end-of-time battle in which the final round, according to their beliefs, will be fought in Bilad-i-Sham (Palestine-Lebanon-Syria).

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According to most regional analysts, the results of Israel’s recent election signal a profound shift to the right. But a deeper reading reveals a more pedestrian reality.

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The following piece, on the recent peace agreement between the Pakistan Government and Islamic leaders in the northern Malakand district, was posted on the Guardian Comment is Free website today:

Peace or appeasement in Pakistan?

The recent deal between religious leaders in tribal Pakistan and the government legitimates the Taliban insurgency…

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The transparency group Wikileaks has issued a press release regarding a confidential NATO report that details the dramatic increase in civillians deaths, the rise in civil disorer and the lack of basic health care and education in Afghanistan. (Thanks to Reuben)

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The credibility of the international mission in Afghanistan was dealt a blow yesterday with the announcement that presidential elections have been put back by three months.

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U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan have killed more than 50 people in the past three days in what appears to be an escalation of the military campaign in the troubled region along the Afghan border

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Pakistan government officials said they struck a deal on Monday to accept a legal system compatible with Shariah law in the violent Swat region in return for peace.

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The Pakistani government should act immediately to protect hundreds of thousands of people from insurgents in the Swat valley and elsewhere in the country, Amnesty International said today. See also Amnesty’s “Swat deal threatens human rights”.

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

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Soviet veterans marking 20 years since their defeat in Afghanistan warned the United States it would never truly control the country, citing bitter memories of a fiercely proud people and unforgiving landscape.

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A gunfight between Australian forces and Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan killed five children who were caught in the crossfire, the Australian Defense Ministry said Friday.

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Britain appointed its own Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and named Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, currently its Ambassador to Afghanistan, for the post on the day US President Obama’s Special Representative for the two countries arrived in Islamabad. You may recall that Cowper-Coles was the British diplomat who got into a bit of hot water [...]

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Israel temporarily eased its blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Thursday to allow Palestinian flower growers to export 25,000 blooms to Europe ahead of Valentine’s Day. The amount of carnations allowed out of the Gaza Strip was only a fraction of what farmers produce. Many farmers say they have no choice but to feed [...]

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Famed for negotiating the 1995 Dayton accord that ended the war in Bosnia, Holbrooke is a relative newcomer to South Asian politics. Before two private visits since 2006, Holbrooke had only traveled to Afghanistan once, as a backpacker in 1971.

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Darwin did not believe there was evidence for God in nature; he consistently rejected the claim that such evidence existed, on purely scientific grounds… He sincerely wanted to believe in God but found that he could not, and his candour should not be used against him.

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Pakistan advised President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan on Tuesday to reach out to reconcilable elements of the Taliban movement as part of a strategy for peace in the region.

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And I gave an example of the fact that USAID had built forty-one courthouses at a cost of over $200 million, and the day the US ambassador went to the minister of justice to sort of hand over these courthouses, the minister of justice knew nothing about it and said, “Well, that’s very nice, that’s [...]

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At the request of Syria, we entered a phase of working together with Israel and Syria indirectly to get them to talk with each other. We are mediators in that process. This was an example of how much importance we put on peace in the Middle East. We had done this before with Pakistan and [...]

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Somewhere deep in the bowels of the BBC is a top secret document that could explain a great deal about the corporation’s decision to boycott the aid appeal for Gaza.

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Maulana Fazlullah, chief of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Swat chapter, on Friday announced relaxation in the ban on girls’ education by allowing students to attend school up-to fourth grade.

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The Thai distributor of the Economist said it had banned the latest edition of the news magazine, which carried a story about Australian writer Harry Nicolaides, who was jailed for insulting the monarchy.

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Police arrested three men Thursday who they alleged carried out a deadly bombing in 2006 in Pakistan on the orders of India’s intelligence agency, a top officer said. Lahore police chief Pervaiz Rathor told reporters the three Pakistanis had also been told to attack mosques as well as the virulently anti-Indian Muslim organization blamed for [...]

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The Australian Government has been gutless in its dealings with Indonesia over the five Australians detained in West Papua…

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The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has cancelled interviews with the BBC over its decision not to broadcast a charity appeal for Gaza.

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Nawaz announced that his party would extend full support to the long march of the lawyers’ community on March 9 for restoration of judges, expressing the hope that masses would give enthusiastic response to the event like they had done to the last long march. He, however, said they had not talked to the lawyers’ [...]

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I’ll be taking part in a discussion on ‘Just Wars in World Cultures’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London on Wednesday 4 February. The full details are…

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But in its ruling, the Tribunal said: “We have decided that the public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the formal minutes of two Cabinet meetings at which ministers decided to commit forces to military action in Iraq did not… outweigh the public interest in disclosure.” The Tribunal said its decision to rule in such [...]

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…was to Al Arabiya. You can read a transcript of it here. As has been his want in a still very young political career the rhetoric is top notch. But material changes from previous US Mid-East policies are yet to be seen.

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Mr Tarin said the country’s balance of payment position would improve after a loan of $700 million from donors was received by the end of March. He said the country would get $500 million from the World Bank in February and another $200 million from the Asian Development Bank. Pakistan has recently received loan of [...]

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The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education. But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian servants. Rubina was paid $1060 for [...]

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Hundreds of students angrily protested on Tuesday as a government official took over administrative control of an Islamic charity which is linked to the militant group accused by India to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks.

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“I want to caution my Indian friends: Be wary of your wishes, as they might come true,” Saeed said. “Because the diplomatic cornering of Pakistan, by way of sanctions, by way of coercive diplomacy . . . is going to [create] a tremendous reaction in Pakistan. Any government cooperation with the United States will be [...]

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Across much of the North-West Frontier Province—around a fifth of Pakistan—women have now been forced to wear the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards, and over 140 girls’ schools have been blown up or burned down. In the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city’s elite, along [...]

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Remotely piloted Predator drones operated by the Central Intelligence Agency have carried out 28 missile attacks in Fata since last summer, killing at least 132 people. The NYT, quoting Pakistani officials, reported that as many as 100 of them were civilians.

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The South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) and South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA) have jointly decided to take a Peace Mission from Pakistan to New Delhi from 21st to 24th January 2009. The 19-Member Delegation will interact with civil society, media and political leadership of India to stress the need to keep the peace [...]

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The mental anguish of the civilians who suffered the assault is so great that the entire population of Gaza could be seen as casualties, said Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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Mohammad Saad breaks into sobs and gut-wrenching moans when he details six years’ humiliation, interrogation and ill-treatment under US orders in Egypt, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

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“The President’s actions send a strong message about his leadership and his desire to support causes that will promote peace and dignity, equality for women and girls and economic development in the poorest regions of the world,” said Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, UNFPA Executive Director.

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Every night around 8 o’clock, the terrified residents of Swat, a lush and picturesque valley a hundred miles from three of Pakistan’s most important cities, crowd around their radios. They know that failure to listen and learn might lead to a lashing — or a beheading.

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Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwestern Pakistan yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President Obama’s commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there, even though Pakistanis broadly oppose such unilateral U.S. actions.

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Interesting that the Wall Street Journal has no qualms with Israeli soldiers who describe Palestinians as mosquitoes: Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military’s Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement [...]

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U.S. President Barack Obama has taken the Middle East by surprise with the speed of his diplomacy but his first statement on the conflict between Arabs and Israelis was strikingly similar to old U.S. policies.

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In fact, the Times’ Sanger reports that a top George W Bush administration official expressed his fears to him that “some groups could try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable [...]

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Hillary Clinton, on her first day as the secretary of state, telephoned President Asif Ali Zardari and told him that the Obama administration was appointing a special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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According to studies cited by the Afghan health ministry an astonishing 66% of Afghans suffer mental health problems.

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The fact is that India knows that war will accomplish nothing. Indeed, it is just what the terrorists want – a cause that would rally all Pakistanis to the flag and provide Pakistan’s army an excuse to abandon the unpopular fight against the Taliban and Al-Qaida in the west for the more familiar terrain of [...]

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Recently, the International Monetary Fund approved a 23-month US$7.6 billion bailout program for Pakistan. “American military officials played a crucial role in this approval,” commented the executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), Dr Farrukh Saleem, to Asia Times Online. “The purpose is to keep pace with Pakistan and its armed [...]

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“the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously…the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets…[but] purposely attacked civilian targets.” The reasons were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: “there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities.” The effect, [...]

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Icelanders were shocked to see Landsbanki listed alongside Al Qaeda and North Korea on Britain’s list of sanctioned “regimes.”

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The World Bank and UNICEF have reported that despite repeated requests Israel has forbidden the importation by any means — sea, air, or by land across the Egyptian border — of consignments of pumps, metal pipes, air and oil filters, and other goods that need to be obtained from outside Gaza; while allowing only a [...]

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The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was dealt yet another reeling blow by the recent U.S.-India nuclear deal. The Bush administration not only turned a blind eye to India’s development of nuclear weapons without signing the NPT, it lauded India for its strong nonproliferation record. When you preside over a nuclear arsenal the size of ours, [...]

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The scale of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government’s long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser [...]

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Mr Baheen said the Afghan government was committed to establishing rule of law. However, its efforts were being undermined as “the international community, including some powerful Nato member countries, has their own favourite warlords” who they back against the Karzai government, he charged.

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The official, who was not named by local media, said two Iranian AIDS specialists, whose arrests last year sparked concern in the West, are part of a group of four “ringleaders” who were recently convicted of involvement in an alleged U.S.-funded plot to overthrow the Islamic government. Dozens of others have been arrested and interrogated, [...]

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Businessman Ata-u-llah expressed the distrust of the Western intervention that is widespread in Afghanistan. “There will be no change because infidel countries always have the same politics against Muslim countries and their target is to give a bad name to Islam and extend Christianity and Judaism,” he said.

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Al Qaeda leaders no longer feel safe in Afghan-Pakistan border areas, where they face heavy U.S. and Pakistani pressure and their local welcome has worn out, CIA chief Michael Hayden said on Thursday.

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Chaudhry said the people are being denied justice as those who violated the law and the constitution still enjoyed unlimited and unchecked powers.

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In a dark echo of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, violent religious extremists in Pakistan are moving to restrict girls’ education as they seek to impose a draconian version of Islamic law on a beleaguered population.

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Is available here.

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In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

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The U.S. fuel shipments are part of a sustained policy that has widened the energy gap between Israel and its neighbors. Over the past few years, the Israel Defense Force has cut off fuel supplies and destroyed electricity infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Those embargoes and attacks on power plants have exacerbated a [...]

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This is why it’s generally hard to trust the mainstream Western press when it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict: <!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:SimSun; panose-1:2 1 6 0 3 1 1 1 1 1; mso-font-alt:??; mso-font-charset:134; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 680460288 22 0 262145 0;} @font-face {font-family:”Cambria Math”; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 [...]

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The tragedy spurred Simonsen. She has since helped raise funds to buy an ambulance for the foundation and secured a $20,000 grant from a UN development program. She is also establishing legal aid for women who want to testify against their attackers.

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A prominent Jewish MP has compared the actions of Israeli troops with Nazis who forced his family to flee Poland.

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“These techniques worked,” Hayden said of the agency’s interrogation program during a farewell session with reporters who cover the CIA. “One needs to be very careful” about eliminating CIA authorities, he said, because “if you create barriers to doing things . . . there’s no wink, no nod, no secret handshake. We won’t do it.”

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The government said on Thursday that it had shut down five training camps of the outlawed Jamaatud Dawa and Lashkar-e-Taiba, banned their seven publications and blocked all their websites.

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Three members of UN staff were injured when three Israeli shells hit the headquarters, setting it on fire. Thousands of tonnes of desperately needed food and humanitarian supplies were destroyed and about 700 refugees given shelter in the building had to be evacuated. UN officials said the shells were white phosphorus, believed to have been [...]

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Mr Pyne appeared to want the Liberal Party to become a greens party, “which is not consistent with its history and philosophy … and is not a particularly sensible recipe for returning to government”, Senator Minchin adds.

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To those who have an emotional need to maintain a belief in Israel’s inherent goodness, such views may well seem self-evidently true. To those of us who do not share this need, the evidence of recent weeks makes them seem bizarre. It is hard to imagine what the civilians of Gaza would make of the [...]

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India plans to break off business, transport and tourist links with Pakistan and isolate it from the rest of the world if it fails to help to investigate the Mumbai terrorist attacks…

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10,000 tourists go to the Maldives per week 330 tonnes of rubbish dumped on Tilafushi island every day Rubbish now covers 50 hectares or 120 acres. hand sorted by 150 Bangladeshi workers (Thanks to Shafiur)

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According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.

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Afghan and Pakistani officers at the center were barred from talking to a reporter during a recent visit. But a glance around the room showed several of them primarily engaged in watching a wrestling match on one of the big TV screens and playing computer solitaire. Their U.S. counterparts, meanwhile, sorted through e-mails from the [...]

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Will Obama be more hardnosed with the Israelis? I doubt it. Why would he? You’re not supposed to say out loud that there’s a big rich Israeli lobby, but everybody knows there is. And more to the point, what’s their counterweight? Who cares about the Palestinians, even in the Arab world, never mind DC? So [...]

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The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children — emaciated but alive — in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.

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NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

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Several rockets have been fired into northern Israel from neighbouring Lebanon, Israeli police say.

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While Americans may believe that the current violence in Gaza began Dec. 27, in fact Palestinians have been dying from bombardments for many weeks. On Nov. 4, when the Israeli-Palestinian truce was still in effect but global attention was turned to the U.S. elections, Israel launched a “preemptive” airstrike on Gaza, alleging intelligence about an [...]

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There are other pictures that haunt me. The Israeli army issued a video of the bombing of the Hamas-run government compound, which it posted on YouTube. In it, I also can see my home being destroyed, and I watch it obsessively.

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Pakistan’s private Geo television station quoted Gilani as saying Durrani had made unauthorised comments to the media confirming that the lone surviving Mumbai attacker was a Pakistani national.

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Dr. Mads Gilbert, a member of a Norwegian triage medical team working in Gaza, has documented Israel’s use of Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), which cuts its victims to pieces and reportedly causes cancer in survivors. Gilbert, who has worked in several conflict zones, said the situation in Gaza is the worst he has ever [...]

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“There is a growing number of Jews around the world, tens of thousands if not more in the last week, [who] if nothing else have spoken out forcefully against Israel,” he said.

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“Obama said that if rockets were being fired at his home while his two daughters were sleeping, he would do everything he could to prevent it,” Barak was reported as saying on Monday.

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The young in Gaza have nothing to do. There are no jobs. They have nowhere to escape to. They cannot marry because they cannot afford housing. They cannot leave Gaza, even for Israel. They sleep, sometimes 10 to a room, and live on less than $2 a day, surviving on United Nations or Hamas charities [...]

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And therein lies my problem. I came to the march to express solidarity with Palestinians and express my anger at Israel’s bombings. I didn’t come to express solidarity with Hamas, nor want to come to a religious march. If I wanted to hear “God is Great” I could have gone to a mosque or a [...]

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Here are some common assumptions about Pakistan and its citizens that I have come across in the Indian media…

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It has never been like this before. The assault is coming from the sky, the sea and the ground. The explosion of shells, the gunfire from the tanks and the missiles from planes and helicopters are incessant. The sky is laced with smoke, grey here, black there, as the array of weaponry leaves its distinctive [...]

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These groups have given sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda forces that fled Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion. They now fight alongside them against the United States and its allies in Afghanistan. They too consider themselves Pakistani nationalists. In the midst of the crisis triggered by the attacks on Bombay, Baitullah Masud, the leader [...]

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Ultimately, what is most notable about the “debate” in the U.S. over Israel-Gaza is that virtually all of it occurs from the perspective of Israeli interests but almost none of it is conducted from the perspective of American interests.

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“He said we must take our daughters out of all schools – private or public – by 15 January 2009 at the latest. Failing this, he said the schools will be bombed and violators would face death. He also said they will throw acid into the faces of our daughters if we don’t comply, like [...]

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Israeli officials have also enjoyed a clear edge with coverage. An Israeli foreign ministry assessment of eight hours of coverage across international broadcast media reported that Israeli representatives got 58 minutes of airtime while the Palestinians got only 19 minutes. Speaking for the Israeli military, Major Avital Leibovich said: “Quite a few outlets are very [...]

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The problems started after September 11, when the US forced the then-military government of president General Pervez Musharraf to abandon the Taliban. Up to 2001, Afghanistan had virtually been a fifth Pakistani province for which Pakistan arranged day-to-day expenditures. Even the communications network was run by the Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Limited.

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Meanwhile, NATO is looking to protect its supply lines and might have found assistance from Iran, which would reduce its dependence on Pakistan, where supply lines have come under heavy attack.

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Two major events are likely to mark the beginning of 2009 and decide the new rules of war and peace in the region. In Pakistan, the foremost is curtailing the powerful military dominated intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the second is the unveiling of a new strategy in Afghanistan.

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The first 187 names of those murdered in the ongoing Gaza massacre were released today.

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The day after Christmas, the wires buzzed with reports that Pakistan was moving 20,000 troops from its western border with Afghanistan to locations near the eastern border with India.

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At least one top leader of militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, or “Army of the Pure,” captured in a raid earlier this month in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, has confessed the group’s involvement in the attack as India and the U.S. have alleged, according to a senior Pakistani security official.

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But Hamas officials and analysts said Monday that the organization would actually like Israel to launch a ground operation; it hopes this would let it inflict such heavy losses on Israeli tanks and infantry that Israel would flee with its tail between its legs. (Thanks Antony)

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That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza.

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The Mohajot (Grand Coalition) alliance practically demolished its rivals, the centre-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist ally the Jamaat-e-Islami. All top leaders of the Jamaat lost their seats.

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The death toll by last night had climbed to nearly 290, with more than 700 wounded. This in reply to hundreds of rockets from Hamas militants which killed one Israeli in six months. But the equation is always like this. We also know that to have chosen to strike on a Saturday morning, when the [...]

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I am an individual who had done nothing wrong beyond express strong disapproval of policies of a sovereign state. More importantly, the obvious intention was to humble me as a UN representative and thereby send a message of defiance to the United Nations.

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I can’t bear to think what will happen if the bombing continues. There are not enough beds in the hospitals and they are severely short of equipment, including x-ray machines.

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Barack Obama yesterday appeared to line up behind the Bush administration in support of Israel’s attack on Gaza.

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One can travel from the farthest right fringe of the GOP to the heart of the Democratic Party leadership and hear exactly the same thing:  Israel is always right.  Israel must not be criticized.  Israel never bears any blame.  Any action taken by Israel is justified.  No matter the situation, that just gets repeated over and over [...]

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Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

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Palestinian medics say that at least 271 people have been killed and more than 600 injured in continuing Israeli bombardment of the impoverished Gaza Strip.

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Admiral Mullen met Chief of the Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Kayani and Director General ISI Lt-Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha in Islamabad and told reporters travelling with him that he made it a point to meet his Pakistani counterpart whenever possible.

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He went on to say if the government would not ensure the supremacy of the constitution, then there would be no difference between the present government and previous government of Pervez Musharraf.

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During a visit to Islamabad, Interpol chief Ronald Noble said Tuesday that Pakistan has agreed to cooperate with the global police force to find the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack. However, he said that India had not shared information about the gunmen.

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This exposes a gaping hole in the international financial system: the lack of an international, independent mechanism for countries to resolve disputes over potentially illegitimate and/or illegal debt or in the case of bankruptcy.

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Addressing a certificate distribution ceremony of National Vocational and Technical Commission (NAVTEC) here on Tuesday, the Prime Minister termed poverty, illiteracy and unemployment the root cause of terrorism and extremism.

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The unmanned drones have carried out over 30 missile attacks in the tribal region over the past three months, killing over 200 people.

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Zeb and Haniya are a living and vivid example of how much more there is to the Pashtun sensibility than the images of gun-toting renegades.

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