Tag Archives: Taliban

Abbas Zaidi Comments on The Future of the Taliban in Pakistan

04 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Leaving aside the false binary of good-bad Taliban, one must understand the inter-textuality of the Taliban and their supporters. One cannot understand the Taliban phenomenon in 2013 without understanding that they are financed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, apart from the Pakistani diaspora in various countries. In turn, one cannot discount the significance of these four factors in the economic survival of Pakistan. And one cannot underestimate the support for the Taliban within Pakistan itself.

You will be absolutely wrong if you thought that the Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) are three different outfits, and not three incarnations of ‘Islamofascism’.

Zaidi, Abbas. “The Future of Taliban.” Viewpoint, May 30, 2013.

Sociolinguist Abbas Zaidi, knows the Pakistani character and its politics with keen sensibility, and so I thought to pass the above link into the BackChannels information stream.

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FTAC – Paul Watson’s Passage – How Mullah Omar Got His Start

31 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Afghanistan, Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Pakistan, Regions

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“Talib” means student.

I’ve gone to the trouble to look this up, so I’m going to share it with you:

“After U.S.-backed mujahideen forced Soviet troops to end their almost decade-long occupation in 1989, Washington turned its back on Afghanistan as it collapsed into a ferocious civil war. Five years later, as local legend has it, members of a warlord’s militia kidnapped and gang-raped two teenaged girls at a checkpoint in his home village of Singesar, in the dust-blown badlands an hour’s drive from the southern city of Kandahar. It was a common crime, one that normally would have faded into the brutal monotony of violence that was strangling Afghanistan in 1994. but this time the atrocity changed the destiny not only of a country, but the world.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, an obscure country cleric and mujahideen veteran who lost an eye to shrapnel during the war against the Soviets, decided he had had enough. He mustered a small group of fighters, attacked the checkpoint, and then hanged the militia commander from a tank barrel. He then fled across the Pakistan border to the province of Baluchistan, where with the help of military intelligence, he recruited fighters fired up for a new jihad by the puritanical Wahabi theology exported from Saudi Arabia and taught in hundreds of Pakistan’s madrassas, or Koranic schools.”

_Watson, Paul. _Where War Lives_. 167-168. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 2007

Does that legend not fit with the assortment of bits and pieces everyone here knows?

While it would seem perfectly rational of me to have become computer literate — I was probably the last graduate student to run an 80-column card set through the Univac at the University of Maryland — to keep up with computers, to acquire broadband, to leave the virtual shore by exploring foreign news on English-language web sites (first stop: Somalia; second: Pakistan), to become involved with blogging (first), and to open a Facebook account (second), there is nothing rational about my sharing the curiosity of 2007 and a book purchased then with virtual friends on a growing forum in Islamabad.

Watson, Paul. _Where War Lives_. 167-168. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, 2007.

For years I have remembered the story but not whether it was written by Paul Watson, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist, or Dexter Filkins, who most certainly ranks among the best war journalists ever.

What I wonder about today is not what motivated Mullah Omar, of course, of what the movement has led to in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the world itself, but rather what possessed the warlord and his crowd to rape two village girls: from whence came that evil?

The “heavy half” of readers seem most often to want to get their eyes on the latest first edition, but I cannot too highly recommend revisiting Paul Watson’s 2007 reflection and remembrance of the wars he had covered to that time — and God has blessed him: he is still out in the field.

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FNS – ISW – A Measure of How Bad Things Are Going

24 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, India, Pakistan, Politics

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The parameters for the upcoming peace deals, the concessions and capitulations on which they will be wrought are yet unknown. It is not known for example if women will completely be banned from obtaining an education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or just limited to a fifth-grade education.

Zakaria, Rafia.  “A Note from Obama: A No from Pakistan.”  Dawn, May 24, 2013.

In the previous post, I played around with an hypothetical concept possibly undergirding the west’s approach to the Islamic Small Wars: “The Least War Possible”.  What is there to greet me when I’ve finished with it?  The above referenced article in Dawn.

Here I’m arguing for managed change, evolutionary adjustment, a slow but least costly working out of many things, and with many things to be observed and discovered as we go, and the news from overseas is telling me that someone’s idea of progress divides over whether ” . . . women will be completely banned from obtaining an education . . . or just limited to a fifth-grade education.”

What would Malala say?

I am not the only one asking the question.

How should the young Malala see the incoming Prime Minister’s reaching out to the Taliban? They are her tormentors but he wants to mend fences with them.

Much of the foreign invasion of Afghanistan was advertised as a measure to liberate the Malalas from the patriarchal country’s hand-reared medieval rulers. Are we looking at a U-turn ahead, on both sides of the Durand Line?

Naqvi, Jawed.  “If Malala were an Indian.”  Deccan Chronicle, May 24, 2013.

In the direction suggested by each article, Prime Minister Sharif’s Pakistan may be heading toward the kind of freedom known to North Koreans, i.e., an isolated state  of affairs best preserves the narcissist’s bubble.

However, as elsewhere among the Muslim-majority states of the world, that bubble has been popped in some places and pressured in others: mining, productivity, and trade remain essential to the world’s economies, and none are so grand or great as to get away with removing themselves from the world altogether.

Perhaps with more assuredly secure dangerous nuclear power sources and fragile alternative energy systems in place, state reliance on deep global economic integration and cooperation may be reduced, giving local to regional cultures greater ability in “sustainable development” (hark ye back to McRobie and Schumacher and Brown).

However, the world will not get there with women held captive in cruelly imposed ignorance.

Associated Reference

Reuters.  “Pakistan should consider IMF deal after reforms in place: Sartaj Aziz.”  May 24, 2013.

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FTAC – Why Drones

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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“So far, the TTP has carried out 200 suicide attacks killing 561 security personnel and 2,403 civilians. At least 702 security men and 6,125 civilians were injured in these attacks. It has also carried out 1,300 IED attacks killing 2,060 security men and 2,073 civilians, and injuring 1,532 troops and 2,309 civilians. The group has blown up more than 300 schools during this period.”

Shehzad, Mohammad.  “Brotherhood of Bombs.”  The Friday Times, November 9, 2012.

A state might send in massive force, including investigative force, and attempt to shut down the social and physical machinery producing so much death and misery, but it risks also not succeeding completely — e.g., of seeing its outposts raided and officers murdered with impunity — as long as obsession continues to motivate the party that can neither contain, discipline, nor restrain itself.

Malala’s Story

17 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan

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Q: What is the cruelest thing an adult may do to a child?

A: Fail to educate the same.

There are zero dull days for anyone “tracking” conflicts via the World Wide Web, but the past several days have been especially touched by the attempted murder of Malala Yusufzai, a 14-year-old schoolgirl braving the Taliban — insulting them, actually — by merely taking ownership of her right to go to school.

This video featured Malala in 2009, and it starts this way: “In the area where I live, there are some people who want to stop educating girls through guns.”

Given the rush of expanding attention those intending to “stop educating girls through guns” have brought upon themselves by demonstrating the kind of thing they themselves seem to have learned to do best, they may have brought to the Swat Valley Region of Pakistan a more committed and vigorous national and international effort to renew civility, education, and global modernity — its freedoms and its values — all around themselves.

A couple of hours ago, Angelina Jolie donated $50,000 to editor and publisher Tina Brown’s Women in the World Foundation (read it in the Hollywood Reporter).

Reported by Reuters yesterday: “”We targeted her because she would speak against the Taliban while sitting with shameless strangers and idealized the biggest enemy of Islam, Barack Obama.”

If you think that’s a bit upside-down, considering what the conservative right in America and elsewhere has been saying about Obama these past and long four years, consider the same source said to Reuters, “The Quran says that people propagating against Islam and Islamic forces would be killed.”

A careful and close reader might catch the ambiguity and ambivalence embedded in that claim.

Reference

Afridi, Waheed.  “Police make progress in Malal Yousufzai case, three arrested.”  The News Tribe, October 12, 2012.

Ahmed, Qanta.  “Dying for education in the Swat Valley.”  Haaretz, October 16, 2012.

Amir, Ayaz.  “Forked tongues of the holy armies.”  The International News, October 12, 2012.

Aziz, Mudasser.  “Karzai telephones Zardari, condemns attack on Malala Yousafzai.”     The News Tribe, October 10, 2012.

Brumfield, Ben.  “Who are the Pakistani Taliban.”  Article with video narrated by Fionnuala Sweeney.  CNN, October 17, 2012.

Dawn.  “Skewed Narrative.”  October 15, 2012.

Haberler.Com.  “Pakistanis Love Conspiracy Theories.”  October 16, 2012.

Farooq, Ahmed.  “Altaf threatens to expose Ulema if they don’t condemn Taliban’s attack on Malala.”  The News Tribe, October 11, 2012.

Farooq, Ahmed.  “Pakistani clerics condemn Taliban attack on Malala.”  The News Tribe, October 12, 2012.

Fazle-Haider, Syed.  “Malala Has Won.”  The New York Times, Op-Ed, October 11, 2012.

Freedom From the Forbidden.  “Young Malala Yusufzai Shot: praying for her safe recovery.  October 9, 2012.

Jolie, Angelina.  “Angelina Jolie: We All Are Malala.”  The Daily Beast – Women in the World Foundation, October 16, 2012.

Khan, Hamza.  “Pakistan child activist facing ‘critical’ 24-36 hours.”  The News Tribe, October 12, 2012.

Nomani, Asra Q.  “Wake Up, Pakistan: Shooting a Teenage Girl Should Be a Tipping Point.”  The Daily Beast, October 11, 2012.

Paracha, Nadeem F.  “We Are All Malala: Why can’t Pakistanis condemn the Taliban for sho.oting a 14-year-old girl?”  Foreign Policy.  October 10, 2012.

Reuters.  “Taliban says its attack on Pakistani schoolgirl justified.”  October 16, 2012.

Rodriguez, Alex.  “Pakistan outraged over girl’s shooting, but crackdown on Taliban unlikely.”  Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2012.

Sadar, M. Husain.  “So, Pakistanis are praying for Malala!”  Viewpoint, October 12, 2012.

Shah, Haider.  “Attacking Malala: the soul of Pakistan, Daily Times,13/10/12”.  Note: Dr. Haider Shah’s blog.

Shahid, Kunwar Khuldune.  “Don’t blame the Taliban.”  Pakistan Today, October 12, 2012.

Shamsie, Kamila.  “What has Malala Yousafzai done to the Taliban?”  The Guardian, October 10, 2012 (Facebook page).

Siddiqa, Ayesha.  “Get well Malala, and find another home, because we can’t protect you.”  The Express Tribune, October 17, 2012.

Synovitz, Ron.  “Malala Yousafzai, the Girl Shot by the Taliban, Becomes a Global Icon.”  The Atlantic, October 12, 2012.

Szarkowski, Lisa.  “Standing with Malala.”  CNN World, October 16, 2012.

The Express Tribune.  “Altaf advises people to only pray behind leaders condemning Malala attack.”  October 12, 2012.

The Frontier Post.  “Communist Party flays attack on Malala.”  October 12, 2012.

The News.  “Private Schools Remain Closed.”  October 11, 2012.

The New York Times.  “World: Class Dismissed in Swat Valley.”  Video.  October 13, 2009.

Organizations

All Pakistan Women’s Association.

Child Care Foundation of Pakistan.

Foundation for the Future.

The Citizens Foundation.

Women in the World Foundation.

UNICEF Gender Equality.

Dying for education in the Swat valley – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

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“I first traveled to the Swat valley, home of Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, the victim of a Taliban assassination attempt, when I was a girl of seven, with my Pakistani father. I recently returned there this spring under the protection of Pakistan’s Rangers in the Northwest Frontier Corps. The valley was just as beautiful as my vivid childhood memories had remembered, reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands; I immediately understood the stories of Churchill’s entrancement by the area. Only later I discovered that my paternal grandmother had been born in a village three hours from here. These were my people. I was theirs.

But the Swat valley of today is known better for its violence and intimidation rather than its landscapes. . . .  (more) — Dying for education in the Swat valley – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.

Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Library, Religion

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Civilizational Narcissism

Everything you wanted to know about why what is wrong with Islam — that abysmal present soaked in blood, dependence, hate, ignorance, and failed or failing or drifted states from Asia to Africa to the Middle East — may be covered in Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg.

“Narcissism is a psychic state of extreme subjectivity.  The civilizational narcissists have mostly two alternating mental states: either they are perfectly unaware of the role of the world around them or if they are aware, they are sure that it admires or envies them.  This infatuation with their own charm renders them totally impervious to the beauty and merit of others.  Civilizational narcissism is therefore collective to the extent that all the admirers of their own civilization admire only abstract concepts; no living human or the existing pattern of civilization impresses them.”

With Pakistani street cred and cosmopolitan ivory tower brights and insight, Haider walks the reader through each dimension of cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, psychological, and social history and thought in laying out the case for an unbridled narcissism as the core component promoting the misery the Muslim Ummah continues to deal to itself and to others in the name of Allah.

In addition to the psychology, which I regard as rich and spot-on, Haider’s honesty and integrity in scholarship in and of itself stands signal to the kind of change the whole world wants as regards Islam’s ability to accept criticism, to develop by first developing itself (through other than alms and arms) and to enjoy — now these are my words — the world’s present and most assuredly future “cultural polyphony”.

I have found an implacability in conservative Muslim and American circles in which one party or the other is not only being victimized by the other, but reverting, or stuck, in the mechanics of the most woeful prejudice, which may be reduced to the statement, “they are all like that.” For some, every Muslim is a Jihadi-head (and it may be tragic for Muslims that whatever potential lay in the term “Jihad”, it really has become synonymous with “bombs on two legs” and the like); and for some opposite, every “right-winger” is Pamela Geller  or Robert Spencer (I like them both): my way out of that debacle has been through the window of a term I refer to as “shimmer” — i.e., for what’s coming over the berm, uncertainty as to who, in impassioned numbers, really wants what.

Not to be the “useful idiot” in this crowd, I have at this point engaged many Muslim friends (around the world too), most of whom I genuinely enjoy in an atmosphere as generous in mutual regard as I have ever experienced in conversation.

Nonetheless, in the hands of clerics, the Taliban, and the Arabs who profit mightily on religion — the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, may be valued at $30 billion annually according to a Gulf News report — the culture produced within the vaunted “religion of peace” has serious social issues with the rest of the world.

And it can’t stand to hear about them.

After so much delving into contributing cultures and history, Haider makes this general observation, which I feel should be taken to heart:

“In all these forms of contact — individual, tribal, and civilizational — supremacy of one over the other, i.e., ascendancy of one sex over the other, of one tribe over the other, or of one civilization over the other, is a bad arrangement.  It is less productive and cannot hold forever.  It has been observed that if clash is less frequent than kindness, in these forms of relationships, the resulting posterity is healthier and happier.  The concept of dominance seems to be the less developed form of behavior in human history.  That is perhaps why all doctrines and philosophies of wisdom preached against it.” (p. 174).

I would suggest our species more gregarious than not and altogether more inclined toward real goodness and good relationships than not.

However, be that as it may, a little farther on in a chapter titled, “Hate the Jew: And Do Not Ask”, Haider notes, “The tragedy does not lie in the inability of Muslims to learn or think” — here I interrupt to note my friends do learn and do think, wonderfully, but they may be neither representative of all nor few, a subject to be taken up at another time . . . but back to Haider’s telling sentence — “it lies in the absolute dominance of Islamic dogma that has been carefully defended, so that no critical approach could ever raise a finger . . . .  In Saudi Arabia, even now geocentric astronomy is taught as syllabus; Abdul Rahman bin Baaz, the head of Medina University received award of merit for his thesis that the Earth is static while the Sun and the Moon move.”

I believe the veracity of Haider’s anecdotal evidence.

Those who believe Abdul Rahman bin Baaz’s theory would seem capable of believing anything, not that anyone dare tell them that.

Reference

American Psychiatric Association. Personality disorders. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; 2000:717-731.

Ali, Jasim.  “Sweeping economic impact of the Haj.”  Gulf News, November 7, 2011.

Altaf, Waseem.  “We need multiple measures to start a return: Mobarak Haider.”  Viewpoint, n.d.

Ambardar, Sheenie and David Bienenfeld.   “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  Medscape Reference, updated May 24, 2011.  (References 2000 DSM-IV-TR).

Kreger, Randi.  “Don’t Diss the Narcissists!”  Psychology Today, May 24, 2010.