Music Video - #Valentines - Justina Valentine- Heavy Breathin

Video - Trump's Friends At Fox Don't Like The Bipartisan Deal - The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Video Report - 'An armed conflict with a nuclear power would be insane'

Video Report - Visitors find racially offensive book in congressman's office

Video Report - US says former Air Force specialist spied for Iran

Music Video - #Valentines - Alireza Ghaderi - Golpari joon

Music Video - #Valentines - Is Raat Ko Jaane Na Do -

Music Video - #Valentines - Mere Khuda -

Music Video - #Valentines - Jeene Bhi De Duniya Me

Music Video - #Valentines - Aaj Tera Mera Saath Hai

Music Video - #Happyvalentineday - Sab Tere Liye

#Pakistan - #Valentine's Day in the land of the arranged marriage

By Rafia Zakaria

The first time I fell in love, it was from a distance. I was a teenager, and Pakistan, where I lived at the time, had only just emerged from nearly a decade and a half of martial law and Islamization, in which the general in charge had imposed rules based on his definition of Islam.

I had recently and very fleetingly heard of a thing called Valentine's Day and its associations with romantic love. Regardless, I hoped on February 14, 1990, like many still do today, for a miracle. In the particular case, I wanted the boy I was in love with, a gangly character (whom I had never seen any closer than from across the street) to call me on the telephone.

Not surprisingly, that boy I longed for from across the way never reciprocated. He had probably never heard of Valentine's Day or more likely of me, despite all my doleful staring. As a middle-class Pakistani girl from a conservative family, I was not allowed to speak to boys, let alone fall in love with them. I didn't let this keep me from either, pursuing both love and forbidden conversations with boys with great resourcefulness and assiduity.

I fell in love with the boy who dropped his telephone number in my lap through the open car window while my mother was not looking. I fell in love with a boy whom I beat in a debate competition and the boy who called several evenings in a row demanding to speak to a different Bollywood character each time. Some reciprocated my feelings; most had little clue about Valentine's Day unless I told them.

Of course, they also did not really know me. Falling in love in those pre-Instagram, pre-cell phone days was understood as a mysterious matter, where facts and the onerous "getting to know each other" played little part. Some of this was understandable. Where marriage was a matter of careful arrangement, love had to be left wild and chaotic, without being hemmed in by the constraints of data or some similar bubble-bursting encumbrance.

Things have changed in Pakistan. Not only is Valentine's Day a pretty big deal now -- there are specials at florists and displays at stationery shops and tinsel-wrapped candy everywhere -- the encroachment of the "semi-arranged" marriage, on the realm between love and arranged marriage, seems to have altered the path and pattern of both. These semi-arranged marriages, particularly popular among the growing urban middle class, seek to add a little of love's mystery to the once standard arranged marriage, whose closely chaperoned interactions leave little room for romance and where the two being wed do not know each other at all.

In the semi-arranged marriage, there may be room for a few solo coffee dates. And the newly paired duo can announce to their friends that they are "in love," while their parents can insist that the match was entirely arranged. In other words, parents can find possible spouses who meet a certain combined checklist of qualities identified by both the bride or groom-to-be and the parents. Veto power, however, lies with the young couple.

Added volume to the Valentine's Day business comes from the virtual realm that has made most everything including love and/or marriage a competitive sport. Cheaply available cell phones are everywhere in Pakistan, and nearly all are equipped with social media, such that everyone can see the presents that those in love are bestowing on one another.

In addition, celebrating Valentine's Day gives the upwardly mobile urban couple's love the legitimacy of individual choice -- with roses, chocolates and jewelry adding a bit of luster to the worn and antiquated patina of an arranged marriage. If the celebration is attended to with some gusto, even an entirely arranged match can be passed off as one in which the parties fell in love without any machinations of their aunt or uncle or the neighbor lady-turned-matchmaker who lives three doors down.

Even in rural Pakistan, where marriages are still generally arranged and love is a separate realm, Valentine's Day is now a known, if not openly, celebrated quantity. Where trysts between lovers can be arranged via the ubiquitous cell phone, any excuse to meet in the sugarcane field -- including Valentine's Day -- is used. Men and women who may have to endure spouses chosen by mothers, fathers and the village council, one theory goes, are especially entitled to a bit of fun on the side.

Love in Pakistan may seem like a tale from a very distant elsewhere, but one could argue that the slightly waning popularity of Valentine's Day here (or at least the cynicism that hangs over some) is for reasons remarkably similar, if reverse, from those seen in Pakistan.

While Pakistanis may have moved from the arranged to the semi-arranged sort of marriage, Americans have moved from the love by accidental chance or serendipity to a more calculated -- if not algorithmic-driven -- sort of love. In the data-driven, virtually-infused and forever-impatient realm of finding a partner, social media and the internet provide a ton of information faster than the spark of attraction.

For those actively and intentionally looking for love, a dizzying array of apps, many with the ability to match a staggering set of data points -- looks, income, language, location -- can help with pairing with far greater precision than the most enterprising set of Pakistani parents. In some, bucket lists and credit reports can be exchanged even before the trouble of a first meeting. Why waste a couple of hours when artificial intelligence can tally up the possibility of true love using hundreds of variables? Mystery is the enemy here and data is the friend; love is made (like Valentine's Day) utterly predictable.

In Pakistan, the United States and likely anywhere on our data-driven globe, the role of Valentine's Day is changing. In the West, marketing departments of dating apps can rely on the fact that many more will sign up for their love-on-demand services on or around that day. In Pakistan, even those betrothed who have spoken barely a sentence to each other will send cards, flowers and chocolates.

In different ways, love is a status symbol, a badge of desirability. And Valentine's Day is a perfect showcase to make sure that everyone in the virtual audience knows it.

US trophy hunter Bryan Kinsel Harlan pays US$110,000 to kill rare Astore markhor mountain goat in Pakistan. Is he helping save the species?

It took a few seconds to realise that the animal, a rare, wild Astore markhor, was dead. The caption described the man as an American hunter who had paid a record US$110,000 to shoot it on a tourist expedition to Pakistan’s northern Himalayan region of Gilgit-Baltistan.

“It was an easy and close shot. I am pleased to take this trophy,” the hunter, identified as Bryan Kinsel Harlan, was quoted as saying.

His home state or city was not identified, but his Pakistani guides said he is from Texas, and a man by the same name and appearance who features with kills on internet hunting sites is a Dallas mortgage banker.

The story drew immediate expressions of sorrow and indignation on social media here.

Some Pakistani commentators asked why there was no legal ban on hunting the markhor (Capra falconeri), which is the official national animal. Others suggested that foreign tourists be taken to photograph the exotic goats, not shoot them.

But there is another, more benign, rationale behind allowing Harlan, along with two other Americans, to pay enormous sums to kill three long-horned markhors in northern Pakistan in the past month.

According to Pakistani officials and conservation groups, the practice has actually helped save a rare and endangered species from potential extinction.

For decades, the population of markhors, which are native to the Himalayan ranges of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, has been dwindling, the result of local poaching for meat, deforestation and logging, military activities, competition with livestock and uncontrolled domestic trophy hunting for their splendid horns. By 2011, there were only an estimated 2,500 markhors left.

Several years ago, regional officials and conservationists began taking action to save them. India designated five sanctuaries for markhors in the mountainous border state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan banned all local hunting but started allowing a small number of foreign hunters to shoot 12 male goats per season in “community conservation areas” in Gilgit and elsewhere.

Most of the funds are supposed to be distributed to the impoverished, isolated residents in the goats’ mountainous habitat areas, which get 80 per cent of the fee as well as income as hunting guides and hosts – all extra incentive not to poach the markhors. Government wildlife agencies get 20 per cent.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service, in an effort to encourage US trophy hunting of markhors as a conservation method, also reclassified the animal as “threatened”, rather than endangered, which allowed hunters to bring back trophies such as their horns, which can grow as long as five feet (1.5 metres).

As a result, the markhor populace had rebounded enough by 2015 that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature upgraded the species from endangered to “near-threatened.”

According to the conservationist website Green Global Travel, the comeback of the markhor is “one of the world’s great but little known conservation success stories.”

Pakistan has a mixed track record on protecting rare and endangered animals.

Officials routinely allow parties of royals from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to shoot internationally protected birds called houbara bustards (Chlamydotis undulata), which Pakistanis are banned from hunting.

In 2014, a Saudi prince reportedly shot more than 2,000 bustards despite having a permit to kill just 100, creating an international uproar.

In Pakistan’s public zoos, neglect and disease have periodically led to the deaths of exotic animals. In the past four years, the main zoo in Islamabad has lost several zebras, lion cubs, an ostrich and deer.

In the past month, four antelopes called nilgais have died of cold or infections. There are numerous private zoos in Pakistan, where wealthy people keep wild cats and other animals without supervision.

In some other countries, promoting trophy hunting as a conservation tactic has backfired, with some programmes charging high fees but failing to regulate the hunts.

But in Pakistan, the tactic seems to have been unusually successful. Tabarak Ullah, a professional hunter from Gilgit who has guided Harlan and other Americans, said the high-priced permit funds are used for local health and education as well as preserving species.

“This is not just about hunting,” Ullah said in a telephone interview. “The number of animals is increasing, and these foreign hunters are millionaires who go back and tell the world that Pakistan is safe.”

He noted that after the attacks of September 11, 2001, foreign visits to Pakistan fell sharply. “Now, more and more tourists are coming.”

Harlan, for one, appears to see himself as participating in a conservation effort as well as an exotic escapade.

In a video recorded on his recent visit to Gilgit, Harlan was shown climbing a cliff, shooting a male markhor that was sitting next to a young goat, and then high-fiving his local guides.

In another, wearing a feathered local cap and robe, Harlan said he had been “welcomed with open arms” and encouraged other Americans to follow him, calling Pakistan a safe place for tourists.

“This is a perfect example of hunters and villagers coming together for a common goal of game conservation,” he said.

#PashtunRejectStateTerrorism - #Pakistan Must Embrace, Not Collide With, #PTM

By Hussain Nadim

Securitizing the movement has put the state in an impossible situation. It’s time to de-escalate.

Pakistan is locked in a game of chicken between the state and the Pashtun Tahafuz 

Movement (Pashtun Protection Movement or PTM) — a classic game-theory scenario. It is unfortunate that the state has got itself entangled in this situation with a section of its own people. What is more unfortunate is that the state’s response so far has been contradictory to what any strategist would adopt in such a setup. By invoking a “foreign funded conspiracy” label on PTM, the state has brought the otherwise local rights movement under the national security discourse, not only elevating it to the national and global stage but also in the process securitizing the movement itself by framing it as an existential threat to Pakistan.

With the two now set on the collision course, it does not matter who is funding the car — the fact is that both have citizens of Pakistan as passengers. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t – no scenario of this game can ever work in favor of the state. The only way out for the state is to let the civilian leadership take control of the policy, to de-escalate and exit the game that it has naively drawn itself into. One way to do that is to end this clash of narratives and instead embrace what the state otherwise sees as a threat from its parochial security lens. The state is big enough to absorb the diversity without collapsing on its knees. And why shouldn’t it?

Pakistan has been in a state of war for over 17 years and there is not an individual that has not been affected by it. But let’s call a spade a spade: The war has taken the greatest toll on the tribal regions and Pashtuns living in there, for whom the war goes back to 1970s. For a long time the ruling elite in Pakistan has treated the voices of people in the tribal area and elsewhere with sheer neglect and shoved them under the rug. Much of this was because the affected Pashtuns did not have true representation and were far from the comfort of Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad. To some extent Imran Khan, with his anti-war and anti-drone stance, did become the voice of this lot but as Khan grew in politics, his concerns became more diverse and national, leaving the local Pashtun connection diluted because of high politics. Jamiat Ulema-e Islam (JUI), Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), and the Awami National Party (ANP) have all been in politics too long to capture the youth bulge that has been brewing in the tribal region. This vacuum allowed PTM to get traction; it became the voice of dissent and the unrepresented, and for all the right reasons. Not even the security establishment denies that PTM has genuine grievances, and in the beginning appeared serious to allay these concerns. The problem, however, is the toxic turn of narratives that snowballed into a standoff where bot the state and PTM have taken strong positions.

For the state, the anti-Pakistan Army slogans, and racial overtones of PTM are a deep reminder of the past that causes panic. They see it as old tactics, and now part of the fifth generation warfare being funded from across the border. They do have a point. With a quick look into the social media trends on PTM, one can observe a significantly large presence of Afghan officials, and foreign trolls, pushing through this racial and anti-army agenda. Especially with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and former Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh endorsing PTM, it sends the security establishment in overdrive, not realizing that this is the very trap it must avoid. The state sees PTM as contradictory in its stance, maintaining the mantra of nonviolence while continuing its treasonous discourse calling for a mutiny in the armed forces. Military strategists that have dealt with such scenarios before therefore start to conceive of PTM as a foreign-funded movement that wears the façade of nonviolence now to get enough traction to pursue violent means eventually.

The core problem here is that if you are a military strategist, you are vulnerable to make assessments in these deeply securitized terms. This is exactly why it is so important to have the civilian government and civilian strategists formulate the state policy on such issues to avoid turning basic human rights and justice issues into national security ones. Not every nail needs hammering.

For PTM, its conundrum is that it cannot be heard unless it takes up an offensive narrative. How do marginalized people get state attention when for decades the state has continued to ignore their grievances? These racial tactics and anti-Pakistan army slogans thus become a necessity to bring the state to the negotiating table. The state strategists need to see the anti-state rhetoric for what it really is: a cry to be heard, not treason. By continuing to label such voices as treasonous, the state is essentially reinforcing the very anti-state discourse that it seeks to reject. However, as necessary as it may be for PTM, such anti-state and racially charged discourse is also counterproductive in terms of alienating the populace.

For PTM or any other social movement, the key is to recognize at what point to stop, reflect, and transform the narrative. PTM has the state’s attention; however, there appear to be forces that are pushing it into a collision course with the state. In such a case PTM may lose support and risk delegitimizing itself. Social movements in their growth period are delicate and risk collapsing due to competing internal agendas. Unless the aim is to collide with the state to justify racial and ethno-based nationalism, it is about time for PTM to make a bargain. As for the state, it must have the civilian government make the call on this to desecuritize the issue and instead of alienating its own people embrace their very grievances. It may just save the state from a head-on collision with its own people.

Video - Bilawal Bhutto Speaking at Harvard University College