NYT Blog – Huma Yusuf – Taliban PR
” . . . progress in the war of words is progress in its war for power.”
Credibility : Integrity –> Lose either, lose both for a long time.
NYT Blog – Huma Yusuf – Taliban PR
04 Tuesday Feb 2014
Tag Archives: Pakistan
Abbas Zaidi on the Masking of Sunni Persecution of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan
03 Monday Feb 2014
Tags
Pakistan, political, politics, religion, religious persecution, sectarian conflict, Shiite, Sunni
Pakistan – Abbas Zaidi on the Masking of Sunni Persecution of Shiite Muslims
“Dawn’s obfuscation of the Shia genocide in the aftermath of Mastung massacre”, Let Us Build Pakistan – 2/2/2014.
Pakistan – Drones Down, Jets Up!
24 Friday Jan 2014
Tags
air power, air strikes, conflict, drone program, drones, Islamic Small Wars, ISW, Pakistan, suppression, Taliban, war, war fighting
Pakistani jets started to bomb the militant hideouts on Monday, January 20.
Is Pakistan finally going after the Taliban? | Asia | DW.DE | 23.01.2014
Islamabad’s share of Washington’s anti-al-Qaeda-type-organization drone program seems to have been premised on the idea that it was the least the west could do in its efforts to diminish the plans of its deeply anti-western and devolutional old enemy.
While drone strikes would take innocents along with targets, they impact would be much, much less than that of any other war fighting method beyond the unfeasible one of sending out a Frontier Corps posse to collect a villain.
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The purpose of this database is to provide as much information as possible about the covert U.S. drone program in Pakistan in the absence of any such transparency on the part of the American government. This data was collected from credible news reports and is presented here with the relevant sources. It was updated with information from the latest Pakistan strike, which occurred on December 25, 2013.
Drone Wars Pakistan: Analysis | The National Security Program – updated to 12/25/2013.
The above cited New America Foundation report notes a steep decline in drone strikes in Pakistan over the past four years, with about 125 operations launched in 2010 and fewer than about 30 in 2013.
The Top Story piece, with which this blog post has started, notes a part of the run-up to Pakistan’s deployment of air power in North Waziristan: “Pakistani officials say that some of those killed were involved in a January 19 attack on the country’s paramilitary troops in the northwestern city of Bannu, and a double suicide bombing on a Peshawar church in September last year, which killed more than 80 people.”
As such, the emerging war would seem to contain two dimensions of interest to most Pakistanis: reprisal for the deaths of innocents; defense and suppression of a force that would commit similar crimes repeatedly until it exclusively held the nation in subjugation.
Compared to this week’s developments, Washington’s drone war — a war vociferously criticized from the Far Left, and claimed it contribute to the growth in ranks of terrorists — starts to look in conflict terms like “lowest intensity conflict” (probably, mafia activity goes lower, but, bear with me, here are some headers from this week’s war in Pakistan):
Blast kills 20 soldiers in Pakistan, military says – World News – NBC – 1/19/2014; At least 13 killed, 24 hurt in bomb blast near Pakistan army HQ – World News – 1/19-20/2014 (the event appears to have taken place Monday morning in Pakistan but the story published in the west Sunday evening); More than 20 dead in Shi’ite pilgrim bus bomb in Pakistan | euronews, world news – 1/21/2014; Pakistan bombing is latest in wave of attacks on polio workers – latimes.com – 1/22/2014; Six Pakistani police officers are shot dead protecting Spanish cyclist | World news | theguardian.com – 1/22/2014.
What sovereign government charged with defending its people and the guests of its people would not rise to the occasion?
So: Pakistan bombs militant hideouts in North Waziristan for first time in years – World News – 1/21/2014.
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Since May, F-16 multirole fighter jets have flown more than 300 combat missions against militants in the Swat Valley and more than 100 missions in South Waziristan, attacking mountain hide-outs, training centers and ammunition depots, Pakistani military officials said.
Pakistan Injects Precision Into Air War on Taliban – NYTimes.com – 7/29/2009!
Déjà vu.
Pakistan has a problem even as its military prowess improves: it may dampen the brush fires set by the Taliban, but it would seem constitutionally incapable of removing either the motivating variables, however we may parse them, or the intellectual component and cover from which the Taliban design their strategy and tactics.
Instead of solving a security problem, flying jets against caves merely cycles it down to where it may simmer, bubble, and boil over again. Mix metaphors and call that a Sysiphean Hell. The Taliban roll out their program; the state rolls it back; the Taliban regroup, revive, and the state has to fuel its jets again for strikes within its own writ.
Top Taliban leader Asmatullah Shaheen Bhittani, who briefly headed the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan after the death of Hakimullah Mehsud last November, 33 Uzbek nationals and three Germans, were among those killed in the night- long air strikes in North Waziristan Agency since Monday.
Pakistan air strikes kill top Taliban leaders, 33 Uzbek fighters – The Hindu – 1/23/2014.
Islamabad will have to do more than remove immediate radical targets from the field as it seeks to secure the safety of the state’s woefully victimized and terrorized constituents.
Additional Reference
Drones: The West’s Best Ethical Response to Terrorism | Diane Weber Bederman – 10/31/2013.
Drones propel hate in Pakistan for the U.S. Israel News | Haaretz – 12/11/2012.
Voice of a native son: Drones may be a necessary evil – 10/15/2012.
BBC News – Drones in Pakistan traumatise civilians, US report says – 9/25/2012.
Articles: Understanding the Taliban Insurgency: The Cause, Motivation, and Culture of Resistance – 6/19/2011.
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FTAC – Pakistan – Synopsis – Two Countries
17 Friday Jan 2014
Tags
Dear _____,
You are living today in two Pakistans.
One country has joined the world with sufficient affluence or capital for accessing the Internet, developing relationships, participating in global media, and enjoying, for better or worse, the world in English, good and bad, and expanded worlds in other languages. The people living in that country have climbed a great mountain that somewhere started with work or power and developed enough infrastructure and technology to do what it now does online.
The other country has found itself clinging to what it knows and believes, including what it believes it knows about itself and its civilizational and national mission. That world too has accessed the web but it has taken positions opposite the enthusiasms and values that produced its modern capabilities. That world wants to continue living in a perpetuated yesterday.
The two countries in tentative formation are skirmishing with one another in every way imaginable, from the bureaucracies of the state’s military down to deadly activity — assassins on motorbikes, suicide bombers, etc. — in remote precincts.
My correspondent had asked for help on a piece probably appearing soon in the Daily Times (Pakistan).
So I wrote the above and said, “quote me.”
That should make his endeavor a little easier.
* * *
We use the nation-state as our unit of interest in international politics, but in the real politics tying together across any region its host of leaders in business and investment, culture and religion, and then politics, it’s really quite weak in the areas in which Islamic Small War conflict has a presence. Clan, family, and tribal relations prove more powerful than state presence in many locales — and that’s true in remote areas or “dark space” outside of Islam as well.
Basically, the world just isn’t as organized and tidy as seemingly advanced, organized, and tidy states might prefer.
In the more anarchic regions, confusion and conflict travel together, and the process of reaching agreements and accommodations through other than fear and force seems a long process. However, it’s an unavoidable process where better functioning states and their values have an interface with more troubled regions.
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FTAC – On Civilized Firearm Ownership in Pakistan
28 Thursday Nov 2013
L., in our so-far cooperative, democratic, open society (let’s all memorize the phrase), Americans may purchase just about any firearm they wish — and then some.
Note that I said “just about” because efforts by gun-control advocates may (or have) imposed some limits on high-magazine automatic firearms, a move that immediately spurred sales of the AR-15 class of weapons and related munitions.
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Peterson inquired about the tank on the lawn. “It’s an M1A1, from World War II,” Clancy said, gazing over at it. “My wife gave it to me for Christmas.”
“Geez,” Peterson said, “how much does a tank cost?”
“I don’t know,” Clancy replied with a slight smile. “Do you ask your wife what your Christmas presents cost?”
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The American landscape is dotted with militia and sporting gun clubs and their ranges, and that includes private Muslim compounds as well as the enclaves of good ol’ Christian boys. In principle, what is legal and allowed for one group must apply equally to all, and that’s what we do. It takes the commission of a crime for the government, any level, to get into the business of a person or organization, gun owner or gun club.
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Where there are brakes involving the private ownership of firearms, the laws focus on behavior (required registration, training certification, etc.) rather than ownership.
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Finally, for the Facebook short-form of writing, lol, small home defense to corporate security involves a lot more than the mere possession of a weapon. As we have a reliable police force, outbound emergency communications count a great deal in any incident; as most American violence of interest involves domestic and personal issues (and alcohol), the paths to battery and murder may get far along and out of reach of both a weapon or telephone device; as regards break-ins, the fearful-with-guns often make mistakes involving their perception of intrusion and fatal accidents involving loved ones take place.
Perhaps the underlying threats in a peaceful land are largely psychological — and so are the comforts of owning some hardware.
In Pakistan, you are perhaps out on the edge of a wild frontier, but even so, what are the crimes that would be forestalled by the robed man of the house descending a staircase with a revolver? Would it not be better to call the police and retire to a safe room?
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It may be a fair test of American democracy and the values of the people that, overall, we are armed to the teeth and haven’t even one mainline domestic issue sufficient to launch even one general internecine low-intensity conflict. Instead, from time to time, organizations on the political fringe arm up, go “off the hook”, commit a crime or several — assassinations, bank robberies, bombings, etc. — bringing on a thorough reaming by the FBI and the invitation to sit in an electric chair or look forward to “three hots and a cot” for life.
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▶ Light Engineering In Darra Adam Khel, Pakistan amazig) – YouTube – Posted 8/24/2013.
Watch out Beretta, Remington, and Ruger — Darra Adam Khel‘s been getting practice on knock-offs for years.
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From Russia with good humor —
▶ Ultimate Glock Torture Test – YouTube – Post4ed 1/13/2012.
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What ticks Tom Clancy off? – The Washington Post – 10/2/2013.
How Glock Became America’s Favorite Legal Handgun – ABC News – 3/22/2013.
AR-15 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Reference Pakistani Political Attitudes, Taliban, Arab Influence, Heroin, Cash, UAE, and The Marines
11 Monday Nov 2013
Ours is a culture of guilty eschatology: hereafter is real, and here is fake, but we are more here-bound than hereafter-bound; we are not genuine Muslims because we are not Arab. We live in Pakistan, but we belong to the holy lands in the Middle East. Our political-economy is borrowed, stolen, and fake.
Refuge of failures – Abbas Zaidi – 11/7/2013 – ViewPoint.
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We gave those camels [a derogatory Afghan term for Arabs] free run of our country, and they brought us face to face with disaster. We knew the Americans would attack us in revenge.
Haqqani as quoted by Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau – The Taliban’s Oral History of the Afghanistan War – Newsweek – 9/25/2009.
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Their base of operations logically became FATA, and they began to establish (or re-establish keeping in mind the 1980s) training camps in Pakistan. These camps included not only Afghans, but also constituted many new Pakistani recruits, and the Pakistani militant groups were actively involved, especially in South Waziristan. The organizing effort also brought an influx of money to the region, coming from various international sources hoping to help the resistance (Yousafzai & Moreau, 2009). Fighting against the foreign troops in Afghanistan and re-establishing Taliban rule served as the primary motivations, as well as profiting from control of drug routes out of Afghanistan (Acharya, 2009)
(30) Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan: Reaction or Revolution? | Muneeb Ansari – Academia.edu – Pp. 5-6 – 5/2/2011.
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The reading, whether for background, retrospective analysis, or, frankly, pleasure proves illuminating.
If you are a BackChannels irregular, 20/20 hindsight rehashes of the Lal Masjid tragedy (2007) and more recent battles in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theaters may summon old memories, directly experienced or mediated.
Web searched first-page reference to data on the Taliban’s narcotics trafficking seems to trail off for 2013, but relayed at the bottom of this post, there’s combat footage from early 2013 posted just six days ago.
Afghanistan supplies 90% of the opium and heroin global markets.
The Afghan farmer who grows opium poppies could earn as much as $230 for a kilo to opium. Processing the opium into heroin turns it into one of the world’s most profitable commodities, fetching between $175,000 and $850,000 wholesale depending on the level of purity and availability.
The Illicit Drug Economy & The Case Against Cornflakes – 6/7/2013.
Cornflakes?
The authors, Rachel Ehrenfeld and Walton Cook, discuss western attitudes toward “war on terror” countermeasures and high-tech agronomy.
Related Reference
International Institute for Counter-Terrorism. “The Taliban’s Assets in the UAE”. (WikiLeaks Project, 2012). Related: US embassy cables: Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network using United Arab Emirates as funding base | World news | theguardian.com – 12/5/2010: “Mendelsohn praised the UAE for its contribution to building a stable and moderate Afghanistan. He thanked the SSD and GDSS for its commitment, per the directive of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, to disrupt any Taliban-related financial activity that can be identified in the UAE.” The upshot from the IICT piece: organized crime — drugs, extortion, kidnapping, etc. — provides Taliban funding with cash (!) assembled and carried by courier out of the UAE.
Middle East Policy Council | Protecting Jihad: The Sharia Council of the Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad – 2013. “This article analyses al-Maqdisi’s efforts to protect jihad by looking at his actual criticism of certain jihadi militants and, conversely, at his attempts to support and praise “good” jihadis in several countries. The article then focuses on the successful attempt by al-Maqdisi to set up a council of like-minded scholars in order to provide guidance and advice to youngsters dealing with religious questions about a host of issues, including jihad, and what advice this council has actually given. Using mostly Arabic primary sources taken from the internet,11 including the collections of fatwas published by the council, this article argues that these radical scholars may well have an important impact on the future of jihad and as such are worthy of both scholars’ and policy makers’ attention.”
Malhot, Aditi. “Understanding the Ghazi Force.” Center for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), November 15, 2012: “Pakistan’s once feared terrorist group, the Ghazi Force is back in the limelight. This time for the reported revival of their funding sources and its resurrection to inflict greater damage on the Pakistani state. a recent report from the Pakistani intelligence agency obtained by BBC urdu states that banned jihadi groups are reviving their local and international funding sources, after their affiliates started opening local and foreign currency accounts under pseudonyms.”
TTP— from Deobandi link to Salafi influence – DAWN.COM – 9/7/2013.
WikiLeaks Project — Afghanistan: A Haven for Low-Budget Terrorists. Related: British troops seize £50m of Taliban narcotics | World news | The Guardian – 2/17/2009. Related: How Opium Profits the Taliban – United States Institute of Peace – August 2009. Related: US adds Taliban shadow governor of Helmand to narcotics kingpin list – The Long War Journal – 11/16/2012. Related: Narco-Terrorism in Afghanistan: Counternarcotics and Counterinsurgency | International Affairs Review – n.d. but 2008 or later (A World Bank paper cited dates to March 2008: “Responding to Afghanistan’s Opium Economy Challenge: Lessons and Policy Implications from a Development Perspective.”
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▶ Marines Storm Taliban Opium Factory In Helicopter Raid | Part 1 – YouTube – Posted 11/5/2013 (from Helmand Province, Afghanistan, early 2013).
Related: ▶ Narcotics and Corruption in Afghanistan – YouTube – video (40:56), Posted by U.S. Army War College, posted 6/24/2012. Col. Lou Jordan asks, “What is the relationship between the poppy and the money?”
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Cannabis was found to be the most commonly used drug in Pakistan, with by 3.6 per cent of the adult population, or four million people, listed as users. Opiates, namely opium and heroin, are used by almost one per cent of overall drugs users, and the highest levels of use are seen in the provinces which border principal poppy-cultivating areas in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Drug Use in Pakistan 2013 Summary Report reveals high levels of drug use and dependency.
The Whole Business Romanticized
Posted to YouTube by MI5MI6GCHQ February 21, 2015.
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Believe It – I Read It in the Daily Times – Pakistan
04 Monday Nov 2013
Last month, Sudan was roiled by a backlash of anti-austerity demonstrations. A media blackout was imposed after the seat of governance Khartoum became the bull’s-eye of the target for irate citizenry. I made an appointment to sit down with a man who lives in my area, a Sudanese who is well acquainted with the political climate in Khartoum.
Mohamed Elhassan was nominated as the presidential candidate . . . .
Tammy and I chat, mostly chatype, and she comments on this blog now and then, one of the few — perhaps the only serious regular participant here, so far. She is a powerhouse of a pundit, maintaining her own blog at http://tammyswofford.blogspot.com/ and publishing elsewhere. Her column appears in Pakistan’s Daily Times reliably every Friday.
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Ansar Abbasi proves his ignorance not just of worldly education and the modern world but also about Islam itself in his column. He claims that only Islamic knowledge is real knowledge, and therefore, all other knowledge is fake by implication. Nothing militates more against the spirit of Islam than this statement.
Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – COMMENT : A rose by another name — Yasser Latif Hamdani – 11/4/2013.
Facebook’s English-speaking culture and civilization has brought to my own desktop a global network, a distributed and deepening layer of progress-inducing intellectuals, and I may append that with the preposition, “from Riyadh to Islamabad”.
I and the author of the above quoted passage have seven Facebook buddies in common: for the time being, however, I’ve elected to follow the writer on Facebook. I’m not full up on cyber associates, colleagues, and sources — and I’m way short on clients (editorial and research) and sponsors (say, for example, for this blog or more focused and private research) — but what a world one has at a computer’s keyboard for getting around: for several to many Pakistanis, I am the first conservative Jew they have ever met, and with a few, have talked face to face with via Skype.
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As per the Education Emergency of Pakistan (EEP) report, Pakistan is second in the global ranking for the total percentage of out-of-school children. As of now, seven million children are deprived of proper primary education and three million have never seen a classroom. Only 1.5 percent of the GDP is allocated for education, which is less than the subsidy the state gives to corporations like PIA, Pakistan Steel and Pepco. Across the country, over 21,000 schools have no buildings, only 39 percent have electricity, and 64 percent of schools are said to be in an unsatisfactory condition.
Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – VIEW : An overview of education in Pakistan — Haroon Mustafa Janjua – 11/3/2013.
Haroon Mustafa Janjua has made himself a fixture in my Facebook experience. He has an extraordinary collection of oral history interviews with survivors of Partition and another set involved with the plight of women in contemporary remote village life — and he knows he’s welcome to share on this blog a short article or excerpt from that work.
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There is no need to name names but rather heed the warning that for any society, autocratic leadership, corruption, exploitation, injustice and violence may in part represent the expression and end products of having made way for the demands of a malignant narcissist.
An in-bounds narcissism may be part of the prerequisite for leadership — every would-be leader has to have the want of the role, the ambition to pursue it, and some good-feeling vision about seeing himself in it and modestly heroic — but the leap into the grandiose travels far beyond that. Consider, for example, Saddam Hussein’s genocidal persecutions of the Kurds and of the Marsh Arabs taking place beside the construction of Tikrit Palace and the building or maintenance of another 80 similarly opulent residences.
Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – COMMENT: Beware the malignant narcissist —J S Oppenheim – 4/7/2012.
Yours truly.
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The concerns, desires, and observations formed today by an emerging global intelligentsia may be having effects in news reflection, specifically, i.e., how we encounter online our own image — individually, collectively — delivered and suspended in the language of remote others.
Expect normative adjustment from that interaction.
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The old saying “Think globally; act locally” may need to be modified some by The Awesome Conversation and related capability in influence slowly working its way down into issues in remote (to one party or the other) regions, essentially producing around each intellectual node its own locality — it’s own intellectual geography — in cyberspace.
Distilled: there is nothing to keep a mind from working on either local or impossibly remote problems and participating in their management or solutions as if they were all taking place down the hall, next door, or one building over.
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FNS – ISW – War Fighting and Politics
17 Thursday Oct 2013
Tags
Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, ISW, Pakistan, politics, Somalia, Syria, war fighting
Using these sources and methods, the Small Arms Survey has calculated that, worldwide, state militaries hold roughly 200 million small arms, out of a total of some 875 million firearms of all kinds.
Key findings of the Research Note include:
Just two countries (China and Russia) hold almost 25 per cent of the global total; and the top 20 countries hold 50 per cent;
Globally, military procurement of newly manufactured weapons outstrips destruction of surplus firearms;
A standardized international reporting system would be a great advance for global transparency and policy-making.
Small Arms Survey – Highlight: Research Note 34 – 9/2013
The organic qualities attending contemporary warfare may be underplayed by the mainstream press. In swimming in the politics daily, it seems to me rare to see pieces on arms routing and supply.
Not too long ago and with Viktor Bout out in the wild, some interest seemed reflected in the press and in film (e.g., Lord of War, Blood Diamonds), but the etiology for the popular mind seems to have been let to go by the wayside, so here it may be refreshing as well as scary to NYT piece by former U.S. Navy Ordnance Disposal Officer John Ismay.
Apart from that, a fast tour of the war news looks about as usual — another bombing in Pakistan, a piece indirectly on the level of cooperation between anarchic Somalia and the Untied States, and some input on the field politics taking place in Syria between rebel forces less interested in theocracy and those hell bent on establishing just that.
Iraq
Al-Qaida surges back in Iraq, reviving old fears – Las Vegas Sun News – 10/17/2013.
Insight Into How Insurgents Fought in Iraq – NYTimes.com – 10/17/2013.
Report Examines MANPADS Threat and International Efforts to Address It – The FAS Blog – 10/11/2013.
This chart shows that the Iraq war was worse than we think – 10/16/2013.
Pakistan
Pakistani official killed in suicide bombing – Central & South Asia – Al Jazeera English 10/16/2013.
Somalia
We were informed of U.S. raid: Somali President – The Hindu – 10/14/2013:
“In the case of Barawe, we were informed. The way it happened, and the way it was planned was okay with us,” President Mahmoud said, describing Barawe as a target for further military action as the port had emerged as a safe haven and financial centre for Al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda affiliated militia that took responsibility for last month’s attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi.
Syria
BBC News – Syria crisis: Who is fighting in the conflict? 10/17/2013.
Blast in Southern Syria Kills 21, Activists Say – ABC News – 10/15/2013.
Yemen
The Weekly Wonk | Drones Exposed & Wearable Galaxies – 10/17/2013.
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BackChannels 