President Zardari's return to the country from Dubai has proved rumor-mongers wrong, said Information Minister on Monday.
Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan said that those who were making speculations about the President Zardari's trip to Dubai for medical treatment should apologize.
Rumors arose following Zardari's sudden leave for Dubai for medical treatment about two weeks ago. There were reports saying that President Zardari would resign due to the Memogate issue in which President Zardari was allegedly involved in seeking the U.S. help in reining in the Pakistani army following the May 2 raid by the U.S. special task forces, which killed the former al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan's northwest city of Abbottabad.
Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan said that President Zardari would consult his legal team for submission of reply in the Supreme Court on memogate issue.
She said that everyone would be informed about the best outcome of the discussion of the president and the legal team.
The minister also said the government, in the leadership of President Asif Ali Zardari, is ready to face any challenge.
President Zardari returned to Pakistan on Monday after nearly two-week-long medical treatment in Dubai. He arrived by a special plane at a Pakistan Air Force base in Karachi in the wee hours of Monday.
Prior to Zardari's return, media quoted the Presidential spokesman as saying that Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani had phoned Zardari and during the conversation the army chief had inquired about the health of the President.
A spokesman for Bilawal House, Zardari's official residence in Karachi, said that President Zardari would resume political activities and meet party leaders from Monday.
The spokesman also said that the president will leave for Islamabad after spending some days in Karachi.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
North Korea state TV says Kim Jong-il has died
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died Saturday on a train trip, a tearful state television announcer, dressed in black, reported Monday.
President Zardari arrives in Karachi from Dubai
President Asif Ali Zardari, who was in Dubai for nearly two weeks for medical treatment, arrived in Karachi on late Sunday night, Geo News reported.
The President arrived in a special plane that landed at PAF base Masror. The plane landed two minutes late.
In the President's plane all medical facilities as well as his personal doctor and other medics were also present. The President was accompanied by his daughter.
Earlier, the medical team of President Asif Ali Zardari declared him completely fit, allowing him to resume his official activities.
The President arrived in a special plane that landed at PAF base Masror. The plane landed two minutes late.
In the President's plane all medical facilities as well as his personal doctor and other medics were also present. The President was accompanied by his daughter.
Earlier, the medical team of President Asif Ali Zardari declared him completely fit, allowing him to resume his official activities.
President Zardari expected to return tonight: sources
President Asif Ali Zardari
is due to arrive in Karachi in tonight. The Presidential Spokesman Farhatullah Babar also hinted on the early arrival of Zardari.
According to the sources the arrival arrangements for President Zardari are in its final stages. He is expected to arrive in Karachi where he will stay at his residence Bilawal House.
There have been tight security arrangements made for his route from Shahrah-e-Faisal to Bilawal House. Sources also said the president has been declared healthy by a team of doctors in Dubai.
The Chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is also expected in Karachi before the arrival of the president.
Arrests as Occupy Protest Turns to Church
NYT.COM
From his spot at the center of Duarte Square in Lower Manhattan, Matt Sky watched on Saturday as hundreds of protesters streamed into the public areas of the triangle-shaped space at the center of an ideological tug of war between onetime allies turned adversaries: Occupy Wall Street and Trinity Church. That began a long day of demonstrations and marches that extended as far as Times Square and resulted in at least 50 arrests.
By noon, protesters had streamed into the square from all directions under cold, cloudy skies to reinforce the vibrancy of a movement swept last month from another space, Zuccotti Park, and signal a resolve against ecclesiastical leaders resisting their wish to set up an encampment on property owned by the venerable Episcopal church.
“Everything about this movement is momentum,” said Mr. Sky, 27, an Internet consultant from the East Village. “We need to show people that we are still relevant.”
Even before the protesters were displaced on Nov. 15, Trinity gave many of them hot chocolate, blankets and a place to rest at a space owned by the church. But when the Occupy movement expressed an interest in setting up an organizing camp on vacant Trinity property at Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, the church said no.
The Occupy Wall Street forces then directed their skills at the church: They took their arguments to the streets. In familiar fashion, police officers converged on the area, standing around the perimeter.
A flier distributed by protesters summed up their mood: “While the event may include a reoccupation, the event itself is a broader celebration and expansion of Occupy Wall Street,” it said. It also advised people to bring backpacks, warm clothes and sleeping bags.
About 3 p.m., several hundred people began to slowly march along the blocks around the park. They went about five blocks north, then circled back. They were carrying homemade wooden ladders, draped with yellow banners. At Grand Street, the protesters made a move: They threw a ladder fashioned into a portable staircase against a chain-link fence separating the sidewalk from the church’s property.
Many people went over the fence that way. Others lifted the fence from the bottom, allowing protesters to squeeze into the space. The protesters were joined by a few clerics, including Bishop George Packard, a retired former supervisor of Episcopal military chaplains.
Within minutes, police officers began taking people into custody. About 4:15 p.m., Bishop Packard was led into a police van.
On the sidewalk, other officers pushed into a line of protesters, ordering them to disperse.
But hundreds of demonstrators marched up Seventh Avenue on Saturday evening, in the street and on the sidewalk — and against traffic.
Police vehicles — cars, scooters, vans — followed, and there were more arrests.
“Is there a problem?” said one protester, who was on a bicycle, as a police officer grabbed him on West 29th Street, near Seventh Avenue.
“The problem is you’re under arrest,” an officer replied.
Earlier in the day, the Rev. Stephen Chinlund, 77, an Episcopal priest who retired seven years ago, held a placard reading: “Trinity Hero of 9/11. Be a Hero Again.”
The mission of the church was to help those in need, he said.
The church’s rector, the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, expressed sadness over the protesters’ actions on Saturday.
“O.W.S. protestors call out for social and economic justice; Trinity has been supporting these goals for more than 300 years,” Dr. Cooper said in a statement. “We do not, however, believe that erecting a tent city at Duarte Square enhances their mission or ours.”
From his spot at the center of Duarte Square in Lower Manhattan, Matt Sky watched on Saturday as hundreds of protesters streamed into the public areas of the triangle-shaped space at the center of an ideological tug of war between onetime allies turned adversaries: Occupy Wall Street and Trinity Church. That began a long day of demonstrations and marches that extended as far as Times Square and resulted in at least 50 arrests.
By noon, protesters had streamed into the square from all directions under cold, cloudy skies to reinforce the vibrancy of a movement swept last month from another space, Zuccotti Park, and signal a resolve against ecclesiastical leaders resisting their wish to set up an encampment on property owned by the venerable Episcopal church.
“Everything about this movement is momentum,” said Mr. Sky, 27, an Internet consultant from the East Village. “We need to show people that we are still relevant.”
Even before the protesters were displaced on Nov. 15, Trinity gave many of them hot chocolate, blankets and a place to rest at a space owned by the church. But when the Occupy movement expressed an interest in setting up an organizing camp on vacant Trinity property at Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, the church said no.
The Occupy Wall Street forces then directed their skills at the church: They took their arguments to the streets. In familiar fashion, police officers converged on the area, standing around the perimeter.
A flier distributed by protesters summed up their mood: “While the event may include a reoccupation, the event itself is a broader celebration and expansion of Occupy Wall Street,” it said. It also advised people to bring backpacks, warm clothes and sleeping bags.
About 3 p.m., several hundred people began to slowly march along the blocks around the park. They went about five blocks north, then circled back. They were carrying homemade wooden ladders, draped with yellow banners. At Grand Street, the protesters made a move: They threw a ladder fashioned into a portable staircase against a chain-link fence separating the sidewalk from the church’s property.
Many people went over the fence that way. Others lifted the fence from the bottom, allowing protesters to squeeze into the space. The protesters were joined by a few clerics, including Bishop George Packard, a retired former supervisor of Episcopal military chaplains.
Within minutes, police officers began taking people into custody. About 4:15 p.m., Bishop Packard was led into a police van.
On the sidewalk, other officers pushed into a line of protesters, ordering them to disperse.
But hundreds of demonstrators marched up Seventh Avenue on Saturday evening, in the street and on the sidewalk — and against traffic.
Police vehicles — cars, scooters, vans — followed, and there were more arrests.
“Is there a problem?” said one protester, who was on a bicycle, as a police officer grabbed him on West 29th Street, near Seventh Avenue.
“The problem is you’re under arrest,” an officer replied.
Earlier in the day, the Rev. Stephen Chinlund, 77, an Episcopal priest who retired seven years ago, held a placard reading: “Trinity Hero of 9/11. Be a Hero Again.”
The mission of the church was to help those in need, he said.
The church’s rector, the Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, expressed sadness over the protesters’ actions on Saturday.
“O.W.S. protestors call out for social and economic justice; Trinity has been supporting these goals for more than 300 years,” Dr. Cooper said in a statement. “We do not, however, believe that erecting a tent city at Duarte Square enhances their mission or ours.”
Pakistan’s elected parliament must remove Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry
Author: Ahmed Iqbalabadi
Recently our fellow contributor and supporter, Peja Mistri wrote an excellent article titled “IMC – A monumental failure”. The article was written by Peja with apparent frustration due to the approach of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry’s conduct in court and the lofty hopes people had pinned with the restored judiciary. This article never reached Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry as it was not published in The News and Jang, which are the two newspapers IMC and his fellow judges reach. It was not covered by Geo News, which is the channel they see and for sure it was not penned by Ansar Abbasi, Shaheen Sehbai, Hamid Mir or Mohammed Mallick that would require Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry to pounce on any opportunity to make a joke of the judicial system he is supposed to head and protect.
Last week, a renowned columnist, Kamran Shafi penned an open letter to Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry which had all humble submissions for him to consider. Published in a newspaper which apparently doesn’t go through the partial views of Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Express Tribune, Kamran Shafi has very simply asked “that if Mansoor Ijaz is considered to have told the truth about exactly who wrote the memo and at whose behest, surely he has spoken the truth about the ISI and its dreaded ‘S’ Section too?”.
A few weeks back, a big time supporter of Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and a Pervez Musharraf hater (read Pervez Musharraf and not military rule hater), Matiullah Jan conducted an interview of Justice Khalil ur Rehman Ramday and called referred to the Lawyers Movement that will be noted in history “sunheray huroof” (Golden letters). Let’s hope Matiullah was being sarcastic, but knowing his love for the Lawyers Movement, we think he was quite serious.
There are some questions that we would like to pose to the readers on the conduct of the Lawyers Movement and the restored judges, specifically the CJP.
* Was it the Lawyers Movement that dislodged Musharaf or was it the result of 2008 General Elections that paved the way for the ouster of the General?
* Hasn’t the Lawyers Movement restored some of the most biased and compromised judges in Pakistan; judges that had validated a military coup and sustained it for 8 years and were all PCO and LFO judges having given an Oath, not the Constitution of Pakistan but to a military dictator?
* Hasn’t the Lawyers Movement restored judges that are brazenly Pro- PML N, Pro-murderers, pro-terrorists and anti-PPP and anti-folk singers?
* Hasn’t the Lawyers Movement restored judges (LHC CJ) made public statements of bigotry where the blame Pakistan’s persecuted and peaceful Hindu community for terrorism and NOT the Taliban who shameless take credit for them.
* Hasn’t the Lawyers Movement restored judges completely ignored judicial reforms and inducting and promoting judges on merit to the higher judiciary.
* Haven’t the restored judges openly interfered in the executive and legislature and undermined the elected government?
* With the Constitution the will of the people’s representatives, haven’t the restored judges entertained petitions against legislation passed by parliament?
* Is it not the restored judges have placed themselves above the constitution with such invented / borrowed terms as “Basic Structure”
* Have not the restored judges banned social media and search engines in order to placate and please their important Jamaat-e-Islami backers?
* Hasn’t the restored CJ openly made public statements of intent of opposing legislation that would make Pakistan a secular country?
* The anjuman-e-tehseen bahami judges addressed rallies and give each other extensions?
* Are the movement’s restored judges immune to practicing cronyism as many of them are related to the PML N provincial government leaders and ministers?
* Wasn’t it the CJP who gave an epic judgment that a super store be brought down and amenity plot brought back to its previous state? The previous state was a dumping ground in Lines Area, Karachi. We are talking about Makro judgment! Where in the world investors would consider such a judgment as pro-business?
* Wasn’t it the CJP who gave judgment on McDonalds in a public park in Islamabad, which was operating since 2006?
* Didn’t the Supreme Court cause a lot of worries on the Reko Diq project in Balochistan, forcing the operating company to publish full page ads defending themselves? Aren’t these judgments/cases good enough to keep an investor from doing business in the country? (Company Rejoinder, Fact Sheet)
* Didn’t the Supreme Court give a Judgment against promotion of civil servants despite the executive prerogative of a Prime Minister to promote bureaucrats to grade 22?
* Didn’t the CJ called for a conclave of judges last year on rumors that the government was to take away the executive order that restored them?
* Isn’t Khwaja Sharif one of the restored judges who is likely to appear on behalf of Mumtaz Qadri in his appeal against a death sentence?
* Wasn’t it the restored judiciary who freed the rapists of Mukhtaran Mai, which was nothing but a disgusting verdict? Some judge mentioned “How can two brothers rape someone at same time? In our society there’s so much respect for elder brother”
On top of this, we got the shocker of our life when we read that the CJP has accepted a letter written by a Canadian Pakistani as a petitioner in the “memogate” scandal and issued fresh notices to the President, Prime Minister, ISI Chief and former Ambassador Husain Haqqani!!!! Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, please read our website and use the material against yourself, your partners in judiciary, media and the intelligence to take suo moto notices!
Looking at all the points mentioned above, we can safely say that during the last two and half years, Chief Justice and his colleagues have made a mockery of the judicial system only focusing on the political government and playing to the galleries that has their mai-baaps (Army) and humnawas (Media) sitting! Question is, will another Naeem Bukhari stand up and write a letter demanding action against CJP? Will Pakistan’s elected parliament stand up to the challenge and take appropriate action by removing Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry from his current post in view of his political bias and anti-democracy tactics? We hope so!
PPP demands commissions on Siachen, Kargil, East Pakistan
Daily Times
Former federal minister and Pakistan People’s Party Senator Dr Babar Awan said on Saturday that commissions should be formed on Siachen, Kargil and East Pakistan for fixing responsibility, like the commission set up recently to probe into a “piece of paper”. Addressing a Rai Ahmad Khan Kharl conference organised by Kharl Sangat Pakistan at Alhamra, he said that no one could snatch from the people the right to vote and work in line with the constitution, adding the masses wanted to know the truth behind many issues of national importance.
Babar also said that no institution could derail democracy in the country. Addressing office-bearers of Shakargarh Bar Association at a state guesthouse on Saturday morning, he said that Sub-Article 2 of Article 6, inserted in the constitution when he was law minister, protected democracy from any unconstitutional act.
He said that lawyers would play their role if anyone tried to derail democracy, adding that secret doors had been closed and that only the door of election was open for coming to power. Babar warned that the people would not allow any unconstitutional government, adding that only a constitutional government could function in the country now. He said some people, who remained silent and mum during dictatorships, were trying to target parliament, which was now very strong and functional. Advising the opponents, Babar said their return to country was ensured by the efforts of Benazir Bhutto, parliament and votes of people but they were now conspiring against the democracy. He said the PPP had protected the rights of the people for the last four years and expressed the determination that it would play a positive role in ensuring people’s rights in future as well. He further said the PPP wanted to restore the confidence of the people in elections and the democratic process and added that the PPP would never allow any body to ambush democracy.
Former federal minister and Pakistan People’s Party Senator Dr Babar Awan said on Saturday that commissions should be formed on Siachen, Kargil and East Pakistan for fixing responsibility, like the commission set up recently to probe into a “piece of paper”. Addressing a Rai Ahmad Khan Kharl conference organised by Kharl Sangat Pakistan at Alhamra, he said that no one could snatch from the people the right to vote and work in line with the constitution, adding the masses wanted to know the truth behind many issues of national importance.
Babar also said that no institution could derail democracy in the country. Addressing office-bearers of Shakargarh Bar Association at a state guesthouse on Saturday morning, he said that Sub-Article 2 of Article 6, inserted in the constitution when he was law minister, protected democracy from any unconstitutional act.
He said that lawyers would play their role if anyone tried to derail democracy, adding that secret doors had been closed and that only the door of election was open for coming to power. Babar warned that the people would not allow any unconstitutional government, adding that only a constitutional government could function in the country now. He said some people, who remained silent and mum during dictatorships, were trying to target parliament, which was now very strong and functional. Advising the opponents, Babar said their return to country was ensured by the efforts of Benazir Bhutto, parliament and votes of people but they were now conspiring against the democracy. He said the PPP had protected the rights of the people for the last four years and expressed the determination that it would play a positive role in ensuring people’s rights in future as well. He further said the PPP wanted to restore the confidence of the people in elections and the democratic process and added that the PPP would never allow any body to ambush democracy.
Pakistan's "madrassah jail"
EDITORIAL Drug rehabilitation in seminaries
www.brecorder.com
Not a week goes by when Pakistanis aren't left in shock at the preposterous and heinous events unfolding around them.
The latest story of a "madrassah jail" being operated in Karachi in which more than 50 students - ages
7 to 45 - were kept in chains in its basement is just one addition to this chain.
The picture which has emerged from preliminary reports - based on interviews with those held in captivity and statements given by local police - is demonstrative of the ignorance and desperation of the families of these boys and men.
Many of the captives were reportedly drug addicts, and their families had entered them in the seminary for rehabilitation.
A few were apparently mentally ill and were put there to ward off "evil spirits".
What happened in that madrassah is sheer cruelty and abuse of power by the seminary's administration.
The torture marks on many of the captives' bodies, and their verbal statements before the media, are evidence of the kind of "treatment" they were being given.
Forced to live in sub-human conditions, physically tortured, and emotionally isolated from the rest of the world, these boys and men went through more psychological trauma than therapeutic recovery.
But unfortunately, with nearly half the seminaries operating in the country unregistered, there is no way for the authorities to monitor their activities.
This effectively means that they can get away with just about anything as long as it is being done inside their four walls.
Ironically not only did the families willingly bring their children to this jail, but even after they found out about the madrassah's barbaric treatment, some still showed willingness to let their children stay.
This kind of attitude, this acceptance of inhumane treatment, is the result of lack of knowledge about the reality of addiction and mental illnesses.
Studies have indicated that in the last 30 years, drug users in Pakistan have gone up from 50,000 to over 8 million.
There is no credible aggregated data on people with mental health issues, because either people can't identify mental illness or are too ashamed to admit it.
Coupled with this, absence of any effective public awareness campaigns by the government, means that a good percentage of people don't even know who to turn to for help.
Thus it is understandable when parents, falling prey to superstition, rely on the local clerics for help in all matters of life.
Their blind trust on seminaries doing what is best for their child leads to their acceptance of whatever abuse their children might face.
To combat this mindset, there needs to be a decisive policy on eliminating torture, whether in state jails or in religious institutions.
Also, a lot more work needs to be done disseminating information about drug addiction, mental illness and their treatment.
On Tuesday, the police had already started handing over children to their parents after they had been questioned.
Predictably, no parents decided to file a case against the seminary officials.
For those families who had admitted their loved ones for drug addiction treatment, there won't be any follow-up to monitor what they will do next.
As things go, there probably won't be any effort to educate the families about the options available to them to rehabilitate their family members.
The raid was a result of a news package which pointed out human rights violations in the vicinity of the madrassah.
It is hoped that the seminary officials are captured and made to face the consequences of their actions.
But what the media, our policy-makers, city district government, and concerned citizens, must also focus on is what happens to the captives after they return home and the story has run its usual news cycle.
This raid has not changed the challenges they and their families are facing.
It is up to us to make sure a recurrent fate does not await them in some other seminary.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor launches anti-polio campaign
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor, Barrister Masood Kausar formally inaugurated the 3-day Sub-National Immunisation Campaign for Polio eradication; starting from Monday (tomorrow) in selected districts of the province as well as all the tribal agencies and certain frontier regions of FATA by giving polio drops to children in Peshawar on Saturday.
Governor said that it is a matter of grave concern that an increase in the reported cases of polio has been noted in our country during the current year, as against the preceding year.
In the backdrop of the reality that the fatal disease has been wiped out from all over the world, he added, this is a matter of extremely grave concern that our motherland, Pakistan is not only numbered amongst couple of those countries where not only re-emergence of the disease has been noted but increase in reported cases has also be recorded.
Pointing towards a large number of health professionals, faculty members and students of the Khyber Medical College; the Governor said that prevention and care is far better than treatment and therefore, there is a dire need to make this campaign a real success.
Provincial Special Secretary Health Noorul Aiman was also present on this occasion.
It is worth to mention here that under the campaign almost 36,72,628 children of up to five years have been targeted to be vaccinated in Buner, Bannu, Charsadda, D.I.Khan, Dir Lower, Dir Upper, Hangu, Haripur, Karak, Kohat, Malakand, Mansehra, Mardan, Peshawar, Swat, Swabi, Tank and Torghar districts of the province for which 11174 vaccination teams have been deputed, while in FATA 937329 children of the desired age in all the tribal agencies as well as frontier regions of Tank, Bannu, Kohat and Peshawar have been targeted for vaccination through 2778 mobile teams.
Governor said that it is a matter of grave concern that an increase in the reported cases of polio has been noted in our country during the current year, as against the preceding year.
In the backdrop of the reality that the fatal disease has been wiped out from all over the world, he added, this is a matter of extremely grave concern that our motherland, Pakistan is not only numbered amongst couple of those countries where not only re-emergence of the disease has been noted but increase in reported cases has also be recorded.
Pointing towards a large number of health professionals, faculty members and students of the Khyber Medical College; the Governor said that prevention and care is far better than treatment and therefore, there is a dire need to make this campaign a real success.
Provincial Special Secretary Health Noorul Aiman was also present on this occasion.
It is worth to mention here that under the campaign almost 36,72,628 children of up to five years have been targeted to be vaccinated in Buner, Bannu, Charsadda, D.I.Khan, Dir Lower, Dir Upper, Hangu, Haripur, Karak, Kohat, Malakand, Mansehra, Mardan, Peshawar, Swat, Swabi, Tank and Torghar districts of the province for which 11174 vaccination teams have been deputed, while in FATA 937329 children of the desired age in all the tribal agencies as well as frontier regions of Tank, Bannu, Kohat and Peshawar have been targeted for vaccination through 2778 mobile teams.
Veena Malik has been found
Veena Malik has been found. The actress is allegedly staying at a service apartment in Juhu for the last two days. Her manager Prateik Mehta told TOI, `` I am on my way to meet Veena who is at Oakwood Park. I have only spoken to her briefly.''
The Pakistani actor had gone missing from Aarey Milk Colony road from Friday morning. She had been shooting for the film Mumbai 135kms for the last 15 days.
The film's director Hemant Madhukar told TOI, "Veena was shooting with us from 6pm to 6am for the last 15 days. From Thursday evening to the time she disappeared from the movie sets, Veena seemed distracted and upset."
Around 5.30am, she was advised to go to her vanity van. "I told her we would call her once the shot was ready. When my assistant went to the van, she was not there," said Madhukar. The production team sent a car daily to pick up and drop Veena. On Friday morning, she didn't use the car. "I know there was a car waiting for her for nearly three hours. Maybe she took the car but I am not sure," said Madhukar.
Veena hit headlines recently after a nude shoot for a magazine cover. She though denied participating in the shoot after a controversy broke out in Pakistan
Memogate fiasco: Claims and counter-claims
EDITORAIL:daily times
The balloon floated through Memogate has now been pinpricked by its very own author, Mansoor Ijaz. The whole edifice built around the controversial memo is unravelling under the weight of Mr Ijaz’s own contradictions. General James Jones, the intermediary between Ijaz and Admiral Mike Mullen, has declared the memo as unreliable. General Jones said, “At no time during the call do I remember Mr Ijaz mentioning Ambassador Haqqani, and he gave me no reason to believe that he was acting at the direction of Ambassador Haqqani, with his participation, or that Ambassador Haqqani had knowledge of the call or the contents of the message.” Mr Ijaz is not known for his credibility in the first place and with General James’ claim that he thought Ijaz himself wrote the memo, it further makes it clear how one man tried to manipulate many parties and tried to disrupt the system in Pakistan.
Prime Minister Gilani met army chief General Kayani for three hours to discuss the situation. Mr Gilani feels that there is no standoff between the army and the government. It seems that the tensions between the military establishment and the civilian government have defused to a certain extent. That in itself is a positive indicator. The National Assembly also debated the memo issue. PML-N MNA Ayaz Amir voiced his fear that it seems like there is another conspiracy afoot to dislodge a civilian government as happened back in 1977. Even though this is not the PML-N’s official line and is also an alarmist prognosis, all political parties should still pay heed to such warnings and tread with caution. If the PPP-led coalition government is ousted by undemocratic means, it would be a blow to the future of all political parties. Thus, it was not surprising that the PPP’s coalition partners, the ANP and the MQM, have vowed to stand behind the government. Another aspect that has now reared its head is Article 47, which says: “(1) Notwithstanding anything contained in the constitution, the president may, in accordance with the provisions of this Article, be removed from office on the ground of physical or mental incapacity or impeached on a charge of violating the constitution or gross misconduct...” President Zardari has ruled out this option as he is recovering from his illness and will soon be back in the country. The flurry of speculation and the scandalisation of his illness was further fed by media frenzy, especially the electronic media. This is not a good development. Any human being can fall ill and President Zardari is no different. Just because he was incapacitated for a few days does not mean he is not fit to run the country. Making a mountain out of a molehill should be avoided at all costs.
Even though the sense of crisis that had been created in recent days seems to have abated, there are lessons to be learnt from this whole fiasco. One, a clash between the executive and the judiciary and/or government and the military could have been caused due to an unreliable person’s claims. Two, if — God forbid — the democratic system is disrupted due to Ijaz’s claims, it means that anybody can get away with a conspiracy in this land of the pure without credible proof. All state institutions should be on their guard and not let someone with dubious credentials undo a system that has been mandated by the people of Pakistan.
The balloon floated through Memogate has now been pinpricked by its very own author, Mansoor Ijaz. The whole edifice built around the controversial memo is unravelling under the weight of Mr Ijaz’s own contradictions. General James Jones, the intermediary between Ijaz and Admiral Mike Mullen, has declared the memo as unreliable. General Jones said, “At no time during the call do I remember Mr Ijaz mentioning Ambassador Haqqani, and he gave me no reason to believe that he was acting at the direction of Ambassador Haqqani, with his participation, or that Ambassador Haqqani had knowledge of the call or the contents of the message.” Mr Ijaz is not known for his credibility in the first place and with General James’ claim that he thought Ijaz himself wrote the memo, it further makes it clear how one man tried to manipulate many parties and tried to disrupt the system in Pakistan.
Prime Minister Gilani met army chief General Kayani for three hours to discuss the situation. Mr Gilani feels that there is no standoff between the army and the government. It seems that the tensions between the military establishment and the civilian government have defused to a certain extent. That in itself is a positive indicator. The National Assembly also debated the memo issue. PML-N MNA Ayaz Amir voiced his fear that it seems like there is another conspiracy afoot to dislodge a civilian government as happened back in 1977. Even though this is not the PML-N’s official line and is also an alarmist prognosis, all political parties should still pay heed to such warnings and tread with caution. If the PPP-led coalition government is ousted by undemocratic means, it would be a blow to the future of all political parties. Thus, it was not surprising that the PPP’s coalition partners, the ANP and the MQM, have vowed to stand behind the government. Another aspect that has now reared its head is Article 47, which says: “(1) Notwithstanding anything contained in the constitution, the president may, in accordance with the provisions of this Article, be removed from office on the ground of physical or mental incapacity or impeached on a charge of violating the constitution or gross misconduct...” President Zardari has ruled out this option as he is recovering from his illness and will soon be back in the country. The flurry of speculation and the scandalisation of his illness was further fed by media frenzy, especially the electronic media. This is not a good development. Any human being can fall ill and President Zardari is no different. Just because he was incapacitated for a few days does not mean he is not fit to run the country. Making a mountain out of a molehill should be avoided at all costs.
Even though the sense of crisis that had been created in recent days seems to have abated, there are lessons to be learnt from this whole fiasco. One, a clash between the executive and the judiciary and/or government and the military could have been caused due to an unreliable person’s claims. Two, if — God forbid — the democratic system is disrupted due to Ijaz’s claims, it means that anybody can get away with a conspiracy in this land of the pure without credible proof. All state institutions should be on their guard and not let someone with dubious credentials undo a system that has been mandated by the people of Pakistan.
Memogate fiasco should end after Gen Jones’ statement
DAILY TIMES
A day after his late-night meeting with the army chief, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani dispelled the impression of any confrontation between the government and the military by categorically stating that the army and the judiciary were the supporter of democracy and that no one had any intention of derailing the democratic process in the country.
Denying any issues between the civilian government and the military leadership over the memo scandal, Gilani felt if any such impression was created by some circles, it had been removed by his meeting with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
Gilani also urged that the memogate fiasco should come to an end following the statement of former US national security adviser Gen James Jones.
The prime minister, who was talking to a selective group of journalists from the print media, looked composed and talked extensively on issues making headlines, ranging from memo the issue and relations with US to the political situation and future elections in the country.
Gilani called the memo case a non-issue and emphasised that Pakistan and its interest were supreme and made it clear that the government had never directed anyone to write such a memo.
He said that whatever the army chief and the ISI director general submitted in the apex court over this issue was in the ambit of the system and that their statements were routed through the appropriate government forums.
Gilani said that the army was the institution of the country and that he defended it more than them when the Abbottabad incident occurred and questioned what some people and the media wanted to derive from a piece of paper which contained nothing.
He said that the matter was now sub judice and recommended that the inquiry be allowed to take its course, adding that the government would act on whatever came from it. Gilani disclosed that the army chief also talked with President Asif Ali Zardari when he met him and that he received a phone call from the president during the meeting. About the president’s return to the country, he said that the president would be in the country on December 27 if the doctors allowed him to travel. The prime minister said that Pakistan a wanted relationship with the US in “black and white” with nothing hidden in the bilateral ties, declaring that a new understanding with the US would be empowered through the mandate to be given by parliament and the people of the country.
He said that in his meeting with US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter, he had put forward three suggestions to the US envoy to build bilateral ties on a durable and solid foundation.
Elaborating on the meeting with Munter, Gilani said that he had asked the US to give him the political space as the people of Pakistan wanted from their prime minister not to compromise on the national sovereignty and that he sought a guarantee that no incident like the Abbottabad operation would take place in future. On the military side, the US envoy was asked to sit with the Pakistani military to evolve a mechanism that would help avoid collateral damage by relying on information from Pakistan, particularly on drone strikes.
A day after his late-night meeting with the army chief, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani dispelled the impression of any confrontation between the government and the military by categorically stating that the army and the judiciary were the supporter of democracy and that no one had any intention of derailing the democratic process in the country.
Denying any issues between the civilian government and the military leadership over the memo scandal, Gilani felt if any such impression was created by some circles, it had been removed by his meeting with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
Gilani also urged that the memogate fiasco should come to an end following the statement of former US national security adviser Gen James Jones.
The prime minister, who was talking to a selective group of journalists from the print media, looked composed and talked extensively on issues making headlines, ranging from memo the issue and relations with US to the political situation and future elections in the country.
Gilani called the memo case a non-issue and emphasised that Pakistan and its interest were supreme and made it clear that the government had never directed anyone to write such a memo.
He said that whatever the army chief and the ISI director general submitted in the apex court over this issue was in the ambit of the system and that their statements were routed through the appropriate government forums.
Gilani said that the army was the institution of the country and that he defended it more than them when the Abbottabad incident occurred and questioned what some people and the media wanted to derive from a piece of paper which contained nothing.
He said that the matter was now sub judice and recommended that the inquiry be allowed to take its course, adding that the government would act on whatever came from it. Gilani disclosed that the army chief also talked with President Asif Ali Zardari when he met him and that he received a phone call from the president during the meeting. About the president’s return to the country, he said that the president would be in the country on December 27 if the doctors allowed him to travel. The prime minister said that Pakistan a wanted relationship with the US in “black and white” with nothing hidden in the bilateral ties, declaring that a new understanding with the US would be empowered through the mandate to be given by parliament and the people of the country.
He said that in his meeting with US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter, he had put forward three suggestions to the US envoy to build bilateral ties on a durable and solid foundation.
Elaborating on the meeting with Munter, Gilani said that he had asked the US to give him the political space as the people of Pakistan wanted from their prime minister not to compromise on the national sovereignty and that he sought a guarantee that no incident like the Abbottabad operation would take place in future. On the military side, the US envoy was asked to sit with the Pakistani military to evolve a mechanism that would help avoid collateral damage by relying on information from Pakistan, particularly on drone strikes.
Blast damages Khyber school bldg.
Militants set off explosives at a girls' high school at Ghundi in Tehsil Jamrud area of the northwestern region of Khyber, near the Afghan border.
The building was partially damaged, officials in the area said.
However no loss of life was reported.
Overall 53 schools were blown off in Khyber Agency during the last three years.
The building was partially damaged, officials in the area said.
However no loss of life was reported.
Overall 53 schools were blown off in Khyber Agency during the last three years.
People to drag Nawaz Sharif into court
Federal Minister for Law and Parliamentary Affairs Mola Bux Chandio has said that what could be a conspiracy bigger than PML-N leader Mian Nawaz Sharif’s declaring Parliament as useless and that too in the court of law, Geo News reported.
Talking to Geo News outside Parliament House, he said that the matter of President Asif Ali Zardari’s submitting his reply in the Supreme Court would be decided on his (President’s) homecoming.
Chandio said that Prime Minister was a part of Parliament, adding any conspiracy against Parliament would be a conspiracy against him (PM).
Criticizing Sharif he said that on hand he claimed to be an antagonist of all kinds of unconstitutional actions but on the other he had laid the foundation of a conspiracy against Parliament.
“Sharif would find himself standing in the dock of court if he ever tried to raise voice against the Parliament”, Chandio said categorically.
Talking to Geo News outside Parliament House, he said that the matter of President Asif Ali Zardari’s submitting his reply in the Supreme Court would be decided on his (President’s) homecoming.
Chandio said that Prime Minister was a part of Parliament, adding any conspiracy against Parliament would be a conspiracy against him (PM).
Criticizing Sharif he said that on hand he claimed to be an antagonist of all kinds of unconstitutional actions but on the other he had laid the foundation of a conspiracy against Parliament.
“Sharif would find himself standing in the dock of court if he ever tried to raise voice against the Parliament”, Chandio said categorically.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Zardari will remain president till 2013
Former law minister Senator Babar Awan on Friday claimed that the people had elected Pakistan Peoples Party co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari as president, who will complete his five-year tenure as head of state till September 2013.
PPP central leader Babar Awan avoided answering a question regarding a date for the return of President Zardari from Dubai, where he has undergone treatment.
Talking to newsmen along with PPP leader Raja Riaz in Lahore, the former law minister said that the noose was being tightened around the neck of an elected Parliament.
“We are not afraid. We will neither move an inch beyond the Constitution nor move an inch backward,” he replied to questions about the controversial Memogate issue. He refused to comment on Memogate, saying the matter was subjudice before the law.
However, he strongly criticized the PML-N leadership for its stance on Memogate.
“The nation is being scattered at a time when it needs unity. The power does not matter, but sovereignty and solemnity of the country comes first,” said Awan.
He said that Nawaz Sharif only likes the Parliaments of his own party’s government.
The former law minister vowed that all the attacks being made on the Parliament would be foiled with the power of the public. Musharraf’s hands were strengthened by those, who signed an agreement and fled the country after tendering an apology.
He said his party had been criticized more than any other party. “PPP had always rendered sacrifices for the sake of democracy and would do the same even now,” said Awan.
PPP central leader Babar Awan avoided answering a question regarding a date for the return of President Zardari from Dubai, where he has undergone treatment.
Talking to newsmen along with PPP leader Raja Riaz in Lahore, the former law minister said that the noose was being tightened around the neck of an elected Parliament.
“We are not afraid. We will neither move an inch beyond the Constitution nor move an inch backward,” he replied to questions about the controversial Memogate issue. He refused to comment on Memogate, saying the matter was subjudice before the law.
However, he strongly criticized the PML-N leadership for its stance on Memogate.
“The nation is being scattered at a time when it needs unity. The power does not matter, but sovereignty and solemnity of the country comes first,” said Awan.
He said that Nawaz Sharif only likes the Parliaments of his own party’s government.
The former law minister vowed that all the attacks being made on the Parliament would be foiled with the power of the public. Musharraf’s hands were strengthened by those, who signed an agreement and fled the country after tendering an apology.
He said his party had been criticized more than any other party. “PPP had always rendered sacrifices for the sake of democracy and would do the same even now,” said Awan.
Mohamed Bouazizi: A fruit seller's legacy to the Arab people
Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation one year ago was an act which symbolized the frustration and desperation of millions in the Arab world, setting into motion a series of revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa.
His was a cry for dignity, justice, and opportunity, which continues to be heard around a region undergoing tumultuous change. In today's Middle East, people matter. Many are now engaged in what could be a life-long struggle to fight long-standing grievances and take greater control of their lives. This process must involve the creation of new democratic political systems, which ensure greater accountability of leaders, and level the playing field of opportunity for all, not just a select few.It has been a remarkable year. Three dictators have been toppled and one has transferred power to a deputy. Nonetheless, analysts and policy-makers continue to speak about the slow pace of change in the region and warn of the onset of an "Arab Winter." Such distinctions -- spring and winter -- are misleading. Many seasons will come and go in the transformative years that lie ahead for the Arab world. Revolutions take time to settle. The transformation of societies takes even longer. The colored revolutions of Eastern Europe, two decades on, are still developing. It took centuries for democratic systems to be refined in Europe. We cannot expect democracy in the Middle East to be solidified in only one year.
Still, across the region, there is cause for concern. Egypt's transition to civilian rule carries major worries, even as Egyptians continue to go to the polls. The concern remains that the ruling military council will relinquish power only under heavy pressure; and Egypt's economy and confidence are in nosedive as the populace awaits civil rule. Syrians meanwhile face a regime intent on killing and torturing its citizens to end their uprising. All this as a largely impotent international community argues over how to stop the increasing violence.
In Yemen, many are not convinced by a regionally brokered transition deal, which allows Saleh and his family immunity from prosecution as well as continued political influence. Bahrain continues to reel from the absence of a genuine national dialogue between its rulers and the underrepresented and relatively impoverished majority Shia community. Libya's revolutionaries now face the immediate challenge of building a state from scratch, based on the rule of law and democratic principles. To do so, they are learning, they will first have to put down their guns.While events elsewhere in the region have been less dramatic, the desire for change is still palpable. Under popular pressure, Morocco now has an elected prime minister under a revised constitution; Jordan's king has been forced to change the government twice this year; Oman's Sultan has devolved some powers to his consultative council. Only time will tell if people accept these changes as going far enough to meet their rising expectations.
As the respected Arab commentator Rami Khouri somewhat prophetically predicted last year, we are witnessing the "birth of Arab politics." For the first time, people have a voice and the opportunity to launch new parties and institutions, independent of the autocratic rulers and external interference that long stifled political development. Civil society organizations, the "software" of any democratic system, have mushroomed in transitional states such as Egypt and Tunisia. A truly democratic and accountable political culture is finally developing in the region.
Undoubtedly, the biggest political winners over the past year have been Islamist parties, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood movement. As real Arab politics emerges, this is not surprising. One should accept that today, the center of gravity of the region's societies' is religiously pious, socially conservative, and economically liberal. The rise of the Brotherhood and the more fundamentalist Salafi parties is a natural legacy of years of political exclusion, and economic corruption and stagnation. As the West looks on, it should be remembered that a faith-inspired vision led to the establishment of the American state itself.
The challenge for the Brotherhood will be to maintain their popularity and their discipline while meeting the demands of not just their supporters but of an entire nation. The wiser leaders among them may be realizing that winning at the ballot box, even exercising majority rule, does not entitle them to ignore their responsibilities to the minorities that may fear them. Mohammad Bouzazi's cry for the rights and responsibilities of all citizens provides a lesson that these new political actors and leaders would do well to heed.In this changed environment, international actors need to tread wisely. As regional and international participants in a recent Brookings seminar in Doha concluded, Western governments must embrace a wholesale reassessment of their foreign policies towards the region. This reassessment should reflect a "paradigm shift" towards genuinely inclusive and equal partnerships with the Middle East that do not seek to dictate democratic outcomes. Above all, people speaking for the first time must not be met with deaf ears. Western countries' engagement with newly emerging Islamist actors, then, should be based on the principles of mutual respect and establishing two-way communication.
Such a dialogue should also acknowledge the sorry legacy of past regimes that were considered key allies. Under the reign of such rulers, there was a mass campaign of victimization, torture, and marginalization against liberals and Islamists alike who posed a threat. While affected societies have established their own judicial processes to take their former leaders to task, it is also time for Western countries to acknowledge the pain and dislocation of those who suffered at the hands of these regimes. As certain dictators in the region continue to hound their people, the international community must not make the same mistakes again. When acts of brutality -- tantamount even to crimes against humanity -- are being perpetrated, as in Syria, the international community must act based on its responsibility to protect innocent civilians, and face down this evil.
Ultimately, the region needs to find its own state-builders and create new states that reflect the will of their people. What has become clear over the past year is that the people of the Middle East and North Africa are in no mood to give up their search for justice and dignity. It is fitting that one-year after Bouzaizi's desperate act, Tunisia will see the election and appointment of a president and prime minister -- one liberal, the other Islamist - both human rights activists imprisoned by the previous regime. Mohammed Bouazizi's true legacy may be the birth of a new democratic Tunisia where a wholly unique model of governance is emerging -- one in which Islamists and secularists govern and where political activists who have been imprisoned for their views now sit in government. The new Tunisia, not Turkey, Eastern Europe, or even Indonesia, will be the real model for the newly emerging Arab world.
Karzai: Freed rape victim has choice to marry attacker
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said that a rape victim freed from prison after he intervened on her behalf has the right to make her own choice about whether to marry her attacker.
In an exclusive interview from Kabul, Karzai told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that the woman's case appeared to be a "misjudgment" that had to be resolved.
The woman, identified only as Gulnaz for her own protection, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after she reported that her cousin's husband had raped her.
COAS telephoned President Zardari
Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has called President Asif Ali Zardari up and inquired about his health, Geo News reported.
Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar said that the Army Chief telephone President Zardari last night. During conversation the COAS inquired about the health of the President.
Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar said that the Army Chief telephone President Zardari last night. During conversation the COAS inquired about the health of the President.
Britney Spears ENGAGED to former agent Jason Trawick
Britney Spears is reportedly ready to walk down the aisle for a third time: the pop star is engaged to her longtime boyfriend Jason Trawick.
The Pakistanis Have a Point
Bill Keller
As an American visitor in the power precincts of Pakistan, from the gated enclaves of Islamabad to the manicured lawns of the military garrison in Peshawar, from the luxury fortress of the Serena Hotel to the exclusive apartments of the parliamentary housing blocks, you can expect three time-honored traditions: black tea with milk, obsequious servants and a profound sense of grievance.
Talk to Pakistani politicians, scholars, generals, businessmen, spies and journalists — as I did in October — and before long, you are beyond the realm of politics and diplomacy and into the realm of hurt feelings. Words like “ditch” and “jilt” and “betray” recur. With Americans, they complain, it’s never a commitment, it’s always a transaction. This theme is played to the hilt, for effect, but it is also heartfelt.
“The thing about us,” a Pakistani official told me, “is that we are half emotional and half irrational.”
For a relationship that has oscillated for decades between collaboration and breakdown, this has been an extraordinarily bad year, at an especially inconvenient time. As America settles onto the long path toward withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan has considerable power to determine whether the end of our longest war is seen as a plausible success or a calamitous failure.
There are, of course, other reasons that Pakistan deserves our attention. It has a fast-growing population approaching 190 million, and it hosts a loose conglomerate of terrorist franchises that offer young Pakistanis employment and purpose unavailable in the suffering feudal economy. It has 100-plus nuclear weapons (Americans who monitor the program don’t know the exact number or the exact location) and a tense, heavily armed border with nuclear India. And its president, Asif Ali Zardari, oversees a ruinous kleptocracy that is spiraling deeper into economic crisis.
But it is the scramble to disengage from Afghanistan that has focused minds in Washington. Pakistan’s rough western frontier with Afghanistan is a sanctuary for militant extremists and criminal ventures, including the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, the notorious Haqqani clan and important remnants of the original horror story, Al Qaeda. The mistrust between Islamabad and Kabul is deep, nasty — Afghanistan was the only country to vote against letting Pakistan into the United Nations — and tribal. And to complicate matters further, Pakistan is the main military supply route for the American-led international forces and the Afghan National Army.
On Thanksgiving weekend, a month after I returned from Pakistan, the relationship veered precipitously — typically — off course again. NATO aircraft covering an operation by Afghan soldiers and American Special Forces pounded two border posts, inadvertently killing 24 Pakistani soldiers, including two officers. The Americans said that they were fired on first and that Pakistan approved the airstrikes; the Pakistanis say the Americans did not wait for clearance to fire and then bombed the wrong targets.
The fallout was painfully familiar: outrage, suspicion and recrimination, petulance and political posturing. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the army and by all accounts the most powerful man in Pakistan, retaliated by shutting (for now and not for the first time) the NATO supply corridor through his country. The Pakistanis abruptly dropped out of a Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan and announced they would not cooperate with an American investigation of the airstrikes. President Obama sent condolences but balked at the suggestion of an apology; possibly the president did not want to set off another chorus of Mitt Romney’s refrain that Obama is always apologizing for America. At this writing, American officials were trying to gauge whether the errant airstrike would have, as one worried official put it, “a long half-life.”
If you survey informed Americans, you will hear Pakistanis described as duplicitous, paranoid, self-pitying and generally infuriating. In turn, Pakistanis describe us as fickle, arrogant, shortsighted and chronically unreliable.
Neither country’s caricature of the other is entirely wrong, and it makes for a relationship that is less in need of diplomacy than couples therapy, which customarily starts by trying to see things from the other point of view. While the Pakistanis have hardly been innocent, they have a point when they say America has not been the easiest of partners.
One good place to mark the beginning of this very, very bad year in U.S.-Pakistani relations is Dec. 13, 2010, when Richard C. Holbrooke died of a torn aorta. Holbrooke, the veteran of the Balkan peace, had for two years held the thankless, newly invented role of the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The antithesis of mellow, Holbrooke did not hit it off with our no-drama president, and his bluster didn’t always play well in Kabul or Islamabad either.
But Holbrooke paid aggressive attention to Pakistan. While he was characteristically blunt about the divergent U.S. and Pakistani views, he understood that they were a result of different, calculated national interests, not malevolence or mere orneriness. He was convinced that the outlooks could be, if not exactly synchronized, made more compatible. He made a concentrated effort to persuade the Pakistanis that this time the United States would not be a fair-weather friend.
“You need a Holbrooke,” says Maleeha Lodhi, a well-connected former ambassador to Washington. “Not necessarily the person but the role.” In the absence of full-on engagement, she says, “it’s become a very accident-prone relationship.”
On Jan. 27, a trigger-happy C.I.A. contractor named Raymond Davis was stuck in Lahore traffic and shot dead two motorcyclists who approached him. A backup vehicle he summoned ran over and killed a bystander. The U.S. spent heavily from its meager stock of good will to persuade the Pakistanis to set Davis free — pleading with a straight face that he was entitled to diplomatic immunity.
On May 2, a U.S. Navy Seals team caught Osama bin Laden in the military town Abbottabad and killed him. Before long, American officials were quoted questioning whether their Pakistani allies were just incompetent or actually complicit. (The Americans who deal with Pakistan believe that General Kayani and the director of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, were genuinely surprised and embarrassed that Bin Laden was so close by, though the Americans fault the Pakistanis for not looking very hard.) In Pakistan, Kayani faced rumbles of insurrection for letting Americans violate Pakistani sovereignty; a defining victory for President Obama was a humiliation for Kayani and Pasha.
In September, members of the Haqqani clan (a criminal syndicate and jihadi cult that’s avowedly subservient to the Taliban leader Mullah Omar) marked the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with two theatrical attacks in Afghanistan. First a truck bomb injured 77 American soldiers in Wardak Province. Then militants rained rocket-propelled grenades on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, forcing our ambassador to spend 20 hours locked down in a bunker.
A few days later the former Afghan president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, spread his arms to welcome an emissary from the Taliban to discuss the possibility of peace talks. As they embraced, the visitor detonated a bomb in his turban, killing himself, Rabbani and the talks. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, without any evidence that American officials are aware of, accused Pakistan of masterminding the grotesque killing in order to scuttle peace talks it couldn’t control.
And two days after that, Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took to Capitol Hill to suggest that Pakistani intelligence had blessed the truck bomb and embassy attack.
His testimony came as a particular shock, because if the turbulent affair between the United States and Pakistan had a solid center in recent years, it was the rapport between Mullen and his Pakistani counterpart, General Kayani. Over the four years from Kayani’s promotion as chief of the army staff until Mullen’s retirement in September, scarcely a month went by when the two didn’t meet. Mullen would often drop by Kayani’s home at the military enclave in Rawalpindi, arriving for dinner and staying into the early morning, discussing the pressures of command while the sullen-visaged general chain-smoked Dunhills. One time, Kayani took his American friend to the Himalayas for a flyby of the world’s second-highest peak, K2. On another occasion, Mullen hosted Kayani on the golf course at the Naval Academy. The two men seemed to have developed a genuine trust and respect for each other.
But Mullen’s faith in an underlying common purpose was rattled by the truck bombing and the embassy attack, both of which opened Mullen to the charge that his courtship of Kayani had been a failure. So — over the objection of the State Department — the admiral set out to demonstrate that he had no illusions.
The Haqqani network “acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” he declared. “With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck-bomb attack as well as the assault on our embassy.”
Several officials with access to the intelligence told me that while the Haqqanis were implicated in both attacks, there was no evidence of direct ISI involvement. A Mullen aide said later that the admiral was referring to ISI’s ongoing sponsorship of the Haqqanis and did not mean to say Pakistan authorized those specific attacks.
No matter. In Pakistan, Mullen’s denunciation led to a ripple of alarm that U.S. military “hardliners” were contemplating an invasion. The press had hysterics. Kayani made a show of putting the Pakistani Army on alert. The Pakistani rupee fell in value.
In Washington, Mullen’s remarks captured — and fed — a vengeful mood and a rising sense of fatalism about Pakistan. Bruce O. Riedel, an influential former C.I.A. officer who led a 2009 policy review for President Obama on Pakistan and Afghanistan, captured the prevailing sentiment in an Op-Ed in The Times, in which he called for a new policy of “containment,” meaning “a more hostile relationship” toward the army and intelligence services.
“I can see how this gets worse,” Riedel told me. “And I can see how this gets catastrophically worse. . . . I don’t see how it gets a whole lot better.”
When Gen. David H. Petraeus took over the U.S. military’s Central Command in 2008, he commissioned expert briefing papers on his new domain, which sprawled from Egypt, across the Persian Gulf, to Central Asia. The paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan began, according to an American who has read it, roughly this way: “The United States has no vital national interests in Afghanistan. Our vital national interests are in Pakistan,” notably the security of those nuclear weapons and the infiltration by Al Qaeda. The paper then went on for the remaining pages to discuss Afghanistan. Pakistan hardly got a mention. “That’s typical,” my source said. Pakistan tends to be an afterthought.
The Pakistani version of modern history is one of American betrayal, going back at least to the Kennedy administration’s arming of Pakistan’s archrival, India, in the wake of its 1962 border war with China.
The most consequential feat of American opportunism came when we enlisted Pakistan to bedevil the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Pakistan — with help from Saudi Arabia — created the perfect thorn in the Soviet underbelly: young Muslim “freedom fighters,” schooled in jihad at Pakistani madrassas, laden with American surface-to-air missiles and led by charismatic warriors who set aside tribal rivalries to war against foreign occupation.
After the Soviets admitted defeat in 1989, the U.S. — mission accomplished! — pulled out, leaving Pakistan holding the bag: several million refugees, an Afghanistan torn by civil war and a population of jihadists who would find new targets for their American-supplied arms. In the ensuing struggle for control of Afghanistan, Pakistan eventually sided with the Taliban, who were dominated by the Pashtun tribe that populates the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. The rival Northern Alliance was run by Tajiks and Uzbeks and backed by India; and the one thing you can never underestimate is Pakistan’s obsession with bigger, richer, better-armed India.
As long as Pakistan was our partner in tormenting the Soviet Union, the U.S. winked at Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. After all, India was developing a nuclear arsenal, and it was inevitable that Pakistan would follow suit. But after the Soviets retreated, Pakistan was ostracized under a Congressional antiproliferation measure called the Pressler Amendment, stripped of military aid (some of it budgeted to bring Pakistani officers to the U.S. for exposure to American military values and discipline) and civilian assistance (most of it used to promote civil society and buy good will).
Our relationship with Pakistan sometimes seems like a case study in unintended consequences. The spawning of the mujahadeen is, of course, Exhibit A. The Pressler Amendment is Exhibit B. And Exhibit C might be America’s protectionist tariffs on Pakistan’s most important export, textiles. For years, experts, including a series of American ambassadors in Islamabad, have said that the single best thing the U.S. could do to pull Pakistan into the modern world is to ease trade barriers, as it has done with many other countries. Instead of sending foreign aid and hoping it trickles down, we could make it easier for Americans to buy Pakistani shirts, towels and denims, thus lifting an industry that is an incubator of the middle class and employs many women. Congress, answerable to domestic textile interests, has had none of it.
“Pakistan the afterthought” was the theme very late one night when I visited the home of Pakistan’s finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh. After showing me his impressive art collection, Shaikh flopped on a sofa and ran through the roll call of American infidelity. He worked his way, decade by decade, to the war on terror. Now, he said, Pakistan is tasked by the Americans with simultaneously helping to kill terrorists and — the newest twist — using its influence to bring them to the bargaining table. Congress, meanwhile, angry about terrorist sanctuaries, is squeezing off much of the financial aid that is supposed to be the lubricant in our alliance.
“Pakistan was the cold-war friend, the Soviet-Afghan-war friend, the terror-war friend,” the minister said. “As soon as the wars ended, so did the assistance. The sense of being discarded is so recent.”
A Boston University-educated economist who made his money in private equity investing — in other words, a cosmopolitan man — Shaikh seemed slightly abashed by his own bitterness.
“I’m not saying that this style of Pakistani thinking is analytically correct,” he said. “I’m just telling you how people feel.”
He waved an arm toward his dining room, where he hung a Warhol of Muhammad Ali. “We’re just supposed to be like Ali — take the beating for seven rounds from Foreman,” he said. “But this time the Pakistanis have wised up. We are playing the game, but we know you can’t take these people at their word.”
With a timetable that has the United States out of Afghanistan, or mostly out, by the end of 2014, Pakistan has leverage it did not have when the war began.
One day after 9/11, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, summoned the head of Pakistani intelligence for a talking to. “We are asking all of our friends: Do they stand with us or against us?” he said. The following day, Armitage handed over a list of seven demands, which included stopping Al Qaeda operations on the Pakistani border, giving American invaders access to Pakistani bases and airspace and breaking all ties with the Taliban regime.
The Pakistanis believed from the beginning that Afghanistan had “American quagmire” written all over it. Moreover, what America had in mind for Afghanistan was antithetical to Pakistan’s self-interest.
“The only time period between 1947 and the American invasion of Afghanistan that Pakistanis have felt secure about Afghanistan is during the Taliban period,” from 1996 to 2001, says Vali Nasr, an American scholar of the region who is listened to in both academia and government. Now the Bush administration would attempt to supplant the Taliban with a strong independent government in Kabul and a muscular military. “Everything about this vision is dangerous to Pakistan,” Nasr says.
Pakistan’s military ruler at the time, Pervez Musharraf, saw the folly of defying an American ultimatum. He quickly agreed to the American demands and delivered on many of them. In practice, though, the accommodation with the Taliban was never fully curtailed. Pakistan knew America’s mission in Afghanistan would end, and it spread its bets.
The Bush-Musharraf relationship, Vali Nasr says, “was sort of a Hollywood suspension of disbelief. Musharraf was a convenient person who created a myth that we subscribed to — basically that Pakistan was on the same page with us, it was an ally in the war on terror and it subscribed to our agenda for Afghanistan.”
But the longer the war in Afghanistan dragged on, the harder it was to sustain the illusion.
In October, I took the highway west from Islamabad to Peshawar, headquarters of the Pakistan Army corps responsible for the frontier with Afghanistan. Over tea and cookies, Lt. Gen. Asif Yasin Malik, the three-star who commanded the frontier (he retired this month) talked about how the Afghan war looked from his side of the border.
The official American version of the current situation in Afghanistan goes like this: By applying the counterinsurgency strategy that worked in Iraq and relying on a surge of troops and the increasingly sophisticated use of drones, the United States has been beating the insurgency into submission, while at the same time standing up an indigenous Afghan Army that could take over the mission. If only Pakistan would police its side of the border — where the bad guys find safe haven, fresh recruits and financing — we’d be on track for an exit in 2014.
The Pakistanis have a different narrative. First, a central government has never successfully ruled Afghanistan. Second, Karzai is an unreliable neighbor — a reputation that has not been dispelled by his recent, manic declarations of brotherhood. And third, they believe that despite substantial investment by the United States, the Afghan Army and the police are a long way from being ready to hold the country. In other words, America is preparing to leave behind an Afghanistan that looks like incipient chaos to Pakistan.
In Peshawar, General Malik talked with polite disdain about his neighbor to the west. His biggest fear — one I’m told Kayani stresses in every meeting with his American counterparts — is the capability of the Afghan National Security Forces, an army of 170,000 and another 135,000 police, responsible for preventing Afghanistan from disintegrating back into failed-state status. If the U.S. succeeds in creating such a potent fighting force, that makes Pakistanis nervous, because they see it (rightly) as potentially unfriendly and (probably wrongly) as a potential agent of Indian influence. The more likely and equally unsettling outcome, Pakistanis believe, is that the Afghan military — immature, fractious and dependent on the U.S. Treasury — will disintegrate into heavily armed tribal claques and bandit syndicates. And America, as always, will be gone when hell breaks loose.
General Malik studied on an exchange at Fort McNair, in Washington, D.C., and has visited 23 American states. He likes to think he is not clueless about how things work in our country.
“Come 2015, which senator would be ready to vote $9 billion, or $7 billion, to be spent on this army?” he asked. “Even $5 billion a year. O.K., maybe one year, maybe two years. But with the economy going downhill, how does the future afford this? Very challenging.”
American officials will tell you, not for attribution, that Malik’s concerns are quite reasonable.
So I asked the general if that was why his forces have not been more aggressive about mopping up terrorist sanctuaries along the border. Still hedging their bets? His answer was elaborate and not entirely facile.
First of all, the general pointed out that Pakistan has done some serious fighting in terrorist strongholds and shed a lot of blood. Over the past two years, Malik’s forces have been enlarged to 147,000 soldiers, mainly by relocating more than 50,000 from the Indian border. They have largely controlled militant activities in the Swat Valley, for example, which entailed two hard offensives with major casualties. But they have steadfastly declined to mount a major assault against North Waziristan — a mountainous region of terrorist Deadwoods populated by battle-toughened outlaws.
Yes, Malik said, North Waziristan is a terrible situation, but his forces are responsible for roughly 1,500 miles of border, they police an archipelago of rough towns in the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, and by the way, they had a devastating flood to handle last year.
“If you are not able to close the Mexican border, when you have the technology at your call, when there is no war,” he said, “how can you expect us to close our border, especially if you are not locking the doors on your side?”
Americans who know the area well concede that, for all our complaints, Pakistan doesn’t push harder in large part because it can’t. The Pakistan Army has been trained to patrol the Indian border, not to battle hardened insurgents. They have comparatively crude weaponry. When they go up against a ruthless outfit like the Haqqanis, they tend to get killed. Roughly 4,000 Pakistani troops have died in these border wars — more than the number of all the allied soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
“They’re obviously reluctant to go against the Haqqanis, but reluctant for a couple of reasons,” an American official told me. “Not just the reason that they see them as a potential proxy force if Afghanistan doesn’t go well, but also because they just literally lack the capability to take them on. They’ve got enough wars on their hands. They’ve not been able to consolidate their gains up in the northern part of the FATA, they have continued problems in other areas and they just can’t deal with another campaign, which is what North Waziristan would be.”
And there is another, fundamental problem, Malik said. There is simply no popular support for stepping up the fight in what is seen as America’s war. Ordinary Pakistanis feel they have paid a high price in collateral damage, between the civilian casualties from unmanned drone attacks and the blowback from terror groups within Pakistan.
“When you go into North Waziristan and carry out some major operation, there is going to be a terrorist backlash in the rest of the country,” Malik told me. “The political mood, or the public mood, is ‘no more operations.’ ”
In late October, Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad, leading a delegation that included Petraeus, recently confirmed as C.I.A. director, and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, Mullen’s successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Petraeus used to refer to Holbrooke as “my diplomatic wingman,” a bit of condescension he apparently intended as a tribute. This time, the security contingent served as diplomacy’s wingmen.
The trip was intended as a show of unity and resolve by an administration that has spoken with conflicting voices when it has focused on Pakistan at all. For more than four hours, the Americans and a potent lineup of Pakistani counterparts talked over a dinner table.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the dinner was the guest list. The nine participants included Kayani and Pasha, but not President Zardari or Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who provided the dining room at his own residence and made himself scarce. The only representative of the civilian government was Clinton’s counterpart, the new foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, a 34-year-old rising star with the dark-haired beauty of a Bollywood leading lady, a degree in hospitality management from the University of Massachusetts and, most important, close ties to the Pakistani military.
For a country that cherishes civilian democracy, we have a surprising affinity for strong men in uniform. Based on my conversations with American officials across the government, the U.S. has developed a grudging respect for Kayani, whom they regard as astute, straightforward, respectful of the idea of democratic government but genuinely disgusted by the current regime’s thievery and ineptitude. (We know from the secret diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks that Kayani has confided to American officials his utter contempt for his president and “hinted that he might, however reluctantly, have to persuade President Zardari to resign.”) Zardari, whose principal claim to office is that he is the widower of the assassinated and virtually canonized Benazir Bhutto, has been mainly preoccupied with building up his patronage machine for elections in 2013. The Americans expect little from him and don’t see a likely savior among his would-be political challengers. (As this article goes to press, Zardari is recovering from chest pains in a hospital in Dubai; there are rumors he won’t return.) So, Kayani it is. The official American consensus is less enamored of Kayani’s loyal intelligence underling, General Pasha, whose agency consorts with terrorists and is suspected of torturing and killing troublemakers, including journalists, but Pasha is too powerful to ignore.
The day after the marathon dinner, Clinton’s entourage took over the Serena Hotel for a festival of public diplomacy — a press conference with the foreign minister, followed by a town meeting with young Pakistanis and then a hardball round-table interview with a circle of top editors and anchors.
Clinton’s visit was generally portrayed, not least in the Pakistani press, as a familiar ritual of America talking tough to Pakistan. In the town meeting, a woman asked why America always played the role of bossy mother-in-law, and that theme delighted editorial cartoonists for days.
But the private message to the Pakistanis — and a more careful reading of Clinton’s public performance — reflected a serious effort to reboot a troubled relationship. Clinton took care to pay tribute to Pakistani losses in the war against terror in the past decade — in addition to the military, an estimated 30,000 civilian dead, the equivalent of a 9/11 every year. She ruled out sending American ground troops into Pakistani territory. She endorsed a Pakistani plea that U.S. forces in Afghanistan do a better job of cleaning up militant sanctuaries on their own side of the border.
Questioned by a prominent television anchor, she repudiated Mullen’s testimony, not only disavowing any evidence of ISI complicity in the attack on America’s embassy in Kabul but also soft-peddling the spy agency’s coziness with terrorists.
“Now, every intelligence agency has contacts with unsavory characters,” she said. “I don’t think you would get any denial from either the ISI or the C.I.A. that people in their respective organizations have contacts with members of groups that have different agendas than the governments’. But that doesn’t mean that they are being directed or being approved or otherwise given a seal of approval.”
That particular riff may have caused jaws to clench at the C.I.A. compound in Langley, Va. The truth is, according to half a dozen senior officials with access to the intelligence, the evidence of Pakistan’s affinity for terrorists is often circumstantial and ambiguous, a matter of intercepted conversations in coded language, and their dealings are thought to be more pragmatic than ideological, more a matter of tolerating than directing, but the relationship goes way beyond “contacts with unsavory characters.”
“They’re facilitating,” one official told me. “They provide information to the Haqqanis, they let them cross back and forth across the border, they let this L.E.T. guy (the leader of the dangerous Lashkar-e-Taiba faction of Kashmiri terrorists) be in prison and not be in prison at the same time.”
And yet the Pakistanis have been helpful — Abbottabad aside — against Al Qaeda, which is America’s first priority and which the Pakistanis recognize as a menace to everyone. They have shared intelligence, provided access to interrogations and coordinated operations. Before the fatal border mishap Thanksgiving weekend, one U.S. official told me, anti-terror cooperation between the C.I.A. and Pakistani intelligence had been “very much on the upswing.”
The most striking aspect of Clinton’s trip, however, was her enthusiastic embrace of what is now called “reconciliation” — which is the polite word for negotiating with the Taliban.
Pakistan has long argued that the way to keep Afghanistan from coming to grief is to cut a deal with at least some of the Taliban. That would also mean Afghanistan could get by with a smaller, cheaper army. The notion has been anathema to the Americans tasked with killing Taliban; a principled stand against negotiating with terrorists is also a political meme that acquires particular potency in election seasons, as viewers of the Republican debates can attest.
Almost unnoticed, though, reconciliation has moved to a central place in America’s strategy and has become the principal assignment for U.S. officials in the region. Clinton first signaled this in a speech to the Asia Society last February, when she refocused Afghanistan strategy on its original purpose, isolating the terrorists at war with America, meaning Al Qaeda.
The speech was buried beneath other news at the time, but in early October, Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, met Kayani in Abu Dhabi to stress to skeptical Pakistani leaders that she was serious. Clinton’s visit to Islamabad with her generals in tow was designed to put the full weight of the U.S. behind it.
Clinton publicly acknowledged that the ISI (in fact, it was General Pasha in person) had already brokered a preliminary meeting between a top American diplomat and a member of the Haqqani clan. Nothing much came of the meeting, news of which promptly leaked, but Clinton said America was willing to sit down with the Taliban. She said that what had once been preconditions for negotiations — renouncing violence, shunning Al Qaeda and accepting Afghanistan’s constitution, including freedoms for women — were now “goals.”
In diplomacy, no process is fully initiated until it has been named. A meeting of Pakistani political parties in Islamabad had adopted a rubric for peace talks with the Taliban, a slogan the Pakistanis repeated at every opportunity: “Give peace a chance.” If having this project boiled down to a John Lennon lyric diminished the gravitas of the occasion, Clinton didn’t let on.
Within the American policy conglomerate, not everyone is terribly upbeat about the prospect of reconciling with the Taliban. The Taliban have so far publicly rejected talks, and the turban-bomb killing of Rabbani was a serious reversal. There is still some suspicion — encouraged by Afghanistan and India — about Pakistan’s real agenda. One theory is that Pakistan secretly wants the Taliban restored to power in Afghanistan, believing the Pashtun Islamists would be more susceptible to Pakistani influence. A more cynical theory, which I heard quite a bit in New Delhi, is that the Pakistani Army actually wants chaos on its various borders to justify its large payroll. Most Americans I met who are immersed in this problem put little stock in either of those notions. The Pakistanis may not be the most trustworthy partners in Asia, but they aren’t idiots. They know, at least at the senior levels, that a resurgent Taliban means not just perpetual mayhem on the border but also an emboldening of indigenous jihadists whose aim is nothing less than a takeover of nuclear Pakistan. But agreeing on the principle of a “stable Afghanistan” is easier than defining it, or getting there.
After Clinton left Islamabad, a senior Pakistani intelligence official I wanted to meet arrived for breakfast with me and a colleague at Islamabad’s finest hotel. With a genial air of command, he ordered eggs Benedict for the table, declined my request to turn on a tape recorder, (“Just keep my name out of it,” he instructed later) and settled into an hour of polished spin.
“The Taliban learned its lesson in the madrassas and applied them ruthlessly,” he said, as the Hollandaise congealed. “Now the older ones have seen 10 years of war, and reconciliation is possible. Their outlook has been tempered by reason and contact with the modern world. They have relatives and friends in Kabul. They have money from the opium trade. They watch satellite TV. They are on the Internet.”
On the other hand, he continued, “if you kill off the midtier Taliban, the ones who are going to replace them — and there are many waiting in line, sadly — are younger, more aggressive and eager to prove themselves.”
So what would it take to bring the Taliban into a settlement? First, he said, stop killing them. Second, an end to foreign military presence, the one thing that always mobilizes the occupied in that part of the world. Third, an Afghan constitution framed to give more local autonomy, so that Pashtun regions could be run by Pashtuns.
On the face of it, as my breakfast companion surely knows, those sound like three nonstarters, and taken together they sound rather like surrender. Even Clinton is not calling for a break in hostilities, which the Americans see as the way to drive the Taliban to the bargaining table. As for foreign presence, both the Americans and the Afghans expect some long-term residual force to stay in Afghanistan, to backstop the Afghan Army and carry out drone attacks against Al Qaeda. And while it is not hard to imagine a decentralized Afghanistan — in which Islamic traditionalists hold sway in the rural areas but cede the urban areas, where modern notions like educating girls have already made considerable headway — that would be hard for Americans to swallow.
Clinton herself sounded pretty categorical on that last point when she told Pakistani interviewers: “I cannot in good faith participate in any process that I think would lead the women of Afghanistan back to the dark ages. I will not participate in that.”
To questions of how these seemingly insurmountable differences might be surmounted, Marc Grossman, who replaced Holbrooke as Clinton’s special representative, replies simply: “I don’t know whether these people are reconcilable or not. But the job we’ve been given is to find out.”
If you look at reconciliation as a route to peace, it requires a huge leap of faith. Surely the Taliban have marked our withdrawal date on their calendars. The idea that they are so deeply weary of war — – let alone watching YouTube and yearning to join the world they see on their laptops — feels like wishful thinking.
But if you look at reconciliation as a step in couples therapy — a shared project in managing a highly problematic, ultimately critical relationship — it makes more sense. It gives Pakistan something it craves: a seat at the table where the future of Afghanistan is plotted. It gets Pakistan and Afghanistan talking to each other. It offers a supporting role to other players in the region — notably Turkey, which has taken on a more active part as an Islamic peace broker. It could drain some of the acrimony and paranoia from the U.S.-Pakistan rhetoric.
It might not save Afghanistan, but it could be a helpful start to saving Pakistan.
What Clinton and company are seeking is a course of patient commitment that America, frankly, is not usually so good at. The relationship has given off some glimmers of hope — with U.S. encouragement, Pakistan and India have agreed to normalize trade relations; the ISI has given American interrogators access to Osama bin Laden’s wives — but the funerals of those Pakistani troops last month remind us that the country is still a graveyard of optimism.
At least the U.S. seems, for now, to be paying attention to the right problem.
“If you stand back,” said one American who is in the thick of the American strategy-making, “and say, by the year 2020, you’ve got two countries — 30 million people in this country, 200 million people with nuclear weapons in this country, American troops in neither. Which matters? It’s not Afghanistan.”
Bill Keller, a former executive editor of The Times, writes a column for the Op-Ed page.
Editor: Greg Veis
Jones believes memo written by Ijaz Mansoor himself
Former US National Security Adviser Gen James Jones has declared the controversial memo as unreliable, saying he thought it had been written by Mansoor Ijaz, instead of Hussain Haqqani. General Jones said that he had known Mansoor Ijaz since 2006 and was contacted by him a few days prior to May 9, a private channel reported on Friday. It is pertinent to mention here that Ijaz claims he was first contacted by Haqqani on May 9. Jones said he was informed by Ijaz that he had a message from the top leadership of Pakistan and that he wanted to send it to Admiral Mike Mullen. Jones added that Ijaz never used the name of Haqqani during their conversation and that he informed Ijaz that he could not pass on a verbal message. He claims that in his opinion Haqqani had no knowledge about the memo. On May 9, Jones said he received an email from Ijaz, and he thought the memo was written by Ijaz himself. According to Jones, the type of language used in the memo was similar to how Ijaz would speak. The three-page testimony of the former senior US official, covering 11 points, informs that the memo flaunted an exclusive style typical of Mansoor Ijaz, and would be presented to the Supreme Court by Asma Jehangir on Monday.
Is sun freezing on Pakistan’s democracy again?
By Muhammad Akram
Daily Times
LAHORE: Is sun freezing on Pakistan’s democracy again? Or will it spurn out of the hovering black and chilly clouds of another military coup? Rests largely on how the democratic forces correct the move they made in haste over ‘memogate’ matter by shifting weight behind parliament that can offer a sea of solutions to a political problem instead of relying on the ‘independent lordships’ who are confined in the hallowed halls of the courtroom and laws and procedures of operational domain.
A rather late development, yet more significant and treasonous from the mouth of same Mansoor Ijaz on whose testimony the military establishment is seeking numerous heads on plate, can be of some help to be rational at least for one more year than staying aloof and pursuing an advice that would lead the nascent democracy nowhere.
The reported reaching out to Arab world by ISI Director General Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, whose satisfaction about the evidence on offer from Mansoor Ijaz had brought the country to the current impasse, requires to be looked into rather more urgently since the person in this case still holding the all-powerful office and the person implicated has already relinquished the charge.
The demand that ISI DG be made to resign on the similar grounds on which Husain Haqqani was forced to resign is not out of place. It would rather help defuse the persisting tension between the elected government and power military establishment besides allowing the extended bench of Supreme Court to reach a just decision, if it sees the petitions are maintainable and required to look deep into a matter parliament had already taken cognisance of.
The mainstream opposition PML-N, the petitioner in the memogate case and whose parliamentary party leader in the National Assembly Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has endorsed rather reluctantly the call of ISI DG’s resignation required to agitate this matter too as ferociously as it was pursuing the memogate case. Any selection on its part as to which matter should be pressed with how much intensity and which should be avoided would further make its political credentials doubtful. Coming out clean from the farce it has indulged in would be important for its left out political credential largely been tainted in the face of the allegation that the party approached the SC on memogate on the behest of the establishment for the sake of a working relationship with establishment whom it had abandoned and vice-versa since 1999 Gen Musharraf-led coup.
The PML-N is reportedly under a lot of stress following the emergence of Imran Khan’s PTI in its bastion, Punjab. Hence, the memogate petition in the Supreme Court to let the military establishment off the hook it was seeing itself over the May 2 Abbottabad fiasco, the following PNS Mehran shame and more recently the NATO attack on Salala border post which added another 24 numbers to the casualties the military faced at the hand of its ally in the war on terror.
However, the PML-N leadership had miscalculated the gains it was eyeing out of memogate case against the blunder it committed by letting the military off the hook and putting in place the PPP-led coalition government. Unfortunately, and this to the belated understanding in certain political circles of the PML-N, is allowing to sit on the driving seat those who had time and again proven themselves not just incapable but dangerous too for the job of proverbial repeated mantra of steering the country out of dangers.
For the PML-N, the party has already pulled the trigger by moving the court and it cannot take back the bullet it has fired so enthusiastically yet childishly without looking into the consequences the matter bore not just for the PPP but for itself too apparently in the run-up to appease the establishment.
The resilience the PPP-led coalition government is showing in the face of a manoeuvered ‘memogate’ scandal, with establishment pulling the strings from behind, suggests that it believes it can win the battle yet again. The steadfastness of its allies, particularly the PML-Q and the MQM, was remarkable so far since both were largely been dubbed as establishment embedded parties. They had to choose between the PPP and the establishment the time has already approached with the filing of replies to the apex court but their staying on the other side of the fence and not crossing it over yet suggests that either a defeat to their friend’s (PPP’s) enemy or perhaps the situation has not reached the boiling point where there need is felt by their real old mentors.
The knowledgeable political observers, however, see not so dark a scenario for the PPP believing the threat it can pose to the polity in case not allowed to come clean out of the fiasco would be disastrous for its detractors too. The PPP does not have the option to bow down before the might of the establishment this time round as its ranks and files are intact and contain the potential to wreck a matching blow to the foe since the memogate scandal could turn the tables on the conspirators who stand isolated on the war on terror against the regional as well as international diplomatic and security blocks.
Any effort to introduce the Bangladesh model of governance or a government of technocrats would fail as the establishment, the real forces behind such scheme of things, lacks resources and credibility to face the wrath of a PPP-PML-N combine besides the rest of political forces it has to left at bay to appease the political orphans it has to bring forth to run the state of affairs.
The Supreme Court too might sound uncertain to buy the argument of the establishment keeping in view of the pledges made by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry from time to time in recent past and the agony he and his brother judges faced at the hands of a military dictator.
The observers believe that the forces hell bent to destroy what the country had in shape of a struggling democracy had to see reasons sooner than later or they will be inviting more trouble for the institution they jealously guarding despite the act of omissions and commissions by their leaders since the day they decide to put their hand on the political system developed on lines of democracy and democracy alone.
Daily Times
LAHORE: Is sun freezing on Pakistan’s democracy again? Or will it spurn out of the hovering black and chilly clouds of another military coup? Rests largely on how the democratic forces correct the move they made in haste over ‘memogate’ matter by shifting weight behind parliament that can offer a sea of solutions to a political problem instead of relying on the ‘independent lordships’ who are confined in the hallowed halls of the courtroom and laws and procedures of operational domain.
A rather late development, yet more significant and treasonous from the mouth of same Mansoor Ijaz on whose testimony the military establishment is seeking numerous heads on plate, can be of some help to be rational at least for one more year than staying aloof and pursuing an advice that would lead the nascent democracy nowhere.
The reported reaching out to Arab world by ISI Director General Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, whose satisfaction about the evidence on offer from Mansoor Ijaz had brought the country to the current impasse, requires to be looked into rather more urgently since the person in this case still holding the all-powerful office and the person implicated has already relinquished the charge.
The demand that ISI DG be made to resign on the similar grounds on which Husain Haqqani was forced to resign is not out of place. It would rather help defuse the persisting tension between the elected government and power military establishment besides allowing the extended bench of Supreme Court to reach a just decision, if it sees the petitions are maintainable and required to look deep into a matter parliament had already taken cognisance of.
The mainstream opposition PML-N, the petitioner in the memogate case and whose parliamentary party leader in the National Assembly Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has endorsed rather reluctantly the call of ISI DG’s resignation required to agitate this matter too as ferociously as it was pursuing the memogate case. Any selection on its part as to which matter should be pressed with how much intensity and which should be avoided would further make its political credentials doubtful. Coming out clean from the farce it has indulged in would be important for its left out political credential largely been tainted in the face of the allegation that the party approached the SC on memogate on the behest of the establishment for the sake of a working relationship with establishment whom it had abandoned and vice-versa since 1999 Gen Musharraf-led coup.
The PML-N is reportedly under a lot of stress following the emergence of Imran Khan’s PTI in its bastion, Punjab. Hence, the memogate petition in the Supreme Court to let the military establishment off the hook it was seeing itself over the May 2 Abbottabad fiasco, the following PNS Mehran shame and more recently the NATO attack on Salala border post which added another 24 numbers to the casualties the military faced at the hand of its ally in the war on terror.
However, the PML-N leadership had miscalculated the gains it was eyeing out of memogate case against the blunder it committed by letting the military off the hook and putting in place the PPP-led coalition government. Unfortunately, and this to the belated understanding in certain political circles of the PML-N, is allowing to sit on the driving seat those who had time and again proven themselves not just incapable but dangerous too for the job of proverbial repeated mantra of steering the country out of dangers.
For the PML-N, the party has already pulled the trigger by moving the court and it cannot take back the bullet it has fired so enthusiastically yet childishly without looking into the consequences the matter bore not just for the PPP but for itself too apparently in the run-up to appease the establishment.
The resilience the PPP-led coalition government is showing in the face of a manoeuvered ‘memogate’ scandal, with establishment pulling the strings from behind, suggests that it believes it can win the battle yet again. The steadfastness of its allies, particularly the PML-Q and the MQM, was remarkable so far since both were largely been dubbed as establishment embedded parties. They had to choose between the PPP and the establishment the time has already approached with the filing of replies to the apex court but their staying on the other side of the fence and not crossing it over yet suggests that either a defeat to their friend’s (PPP’s) enemy or perhaps the situation has not reached the boiling point where there need is felt by their real old mentors.
The knowledgeable political observers, however, see not so dark a scenario for the PPP believing the threat it can pose to the polity in case not allowed to come clean out of the fiasco would be disastrous for its detractors too. The PPP does not have the option to bow down before the might of the establishment this time round as its ranks and files are intact and contain the potential to wreck a matching blow to the foe since the memogate scandal could turn the tables on the conspirators who stand isolated on the war on terror against the regional as well as international diplomatic and security blocks.
Any effort to introduce the Bangladesh model of governance or a government of technocrats would fail as the establishment, the real forces behind such scheme of things, lacks resources and credibility to face the wrath of a PPP-PML-N combine besides the rest of political forces it has to left at bay to appease the political orphans it has to bring forth to run the state of affairs.
The Supreme Court too might sound uncertain to buy the argument of the establishment keeping in view of the pledges made by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry from time to time in recent past and the agony he and his brother judges faced at the hands of a military dictator.
The observers believe that the forces hell bent to destroy what the country had in shape of a struggling democracy had to see reasons sooner than later or they will be inviting more trouble for the institution they jealously guarding despite the act of omissions and commissions by their leaders since the day they decide to put their hand on the political system developed on lines of democracy and democracy alone.
All will go if system derails
Calling PML-N Chief Nawaz Sharif a Tara Masih, PPP leader Senator Dr Babar Awan on Friday said a conspiracy was being hatched against the Parliament and he (Nawaz) had been tasked to “tighten noose around the Parliament”.
Addressing a news conference at the residence of Opposition Leader Raja Riaz along with other PPP leaders, Dr. Awan also took jibes at the Army and the judiciary, though in an indirect speech, for their alleged anti-democracy posture.
He alleged that Mian Nawaz Sharif did not want to become part of the Parliament and was conspiring against it. He said Nawaz Sharif had also conspired against two elected governments of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto in 1990s. He said those conspiring against democracy should listen that decision regarding change of government would be made by ballot and not by bullet. Awan said it was collective responsibility of all stakeholders to restore people’s trust in the ballot.
Babar also accused Nawaz Sharif of using backdoors to come to power. He warned that if the present set up is rolled back, all will go home. “It is a whole package not confined to a single person”, he remarked.
Without going into details, the PPP Senator disclosed that son of a former chairman of Majlis-e-Shoora of General Zia had also become active to de-rail democracy. He, however, said that government will foil this conspiracy with people’s support.
Awan made mention of successive martial laws and said 1973 Constitution, which was 37 years old, had been held in abeyance for 21 years. The PPP leader said Fall of Dhaka should be celebrated as a day of resistance against dictatorship.
To a question, he said President Zardari will come back when doctors allow him. “He would definitely return to the country unlike Sharifs who left for Jeddah after signing agreement with a dictator.”
On a new PML-N petition filed in the Supreme Court on memo controversy, he said another conspiracy had been hatched on the day of fall of Dhaka.
On Mansoor Ejaz’ statement about General Pasha touring Arab countries to seek support for Zardari’s removal, Babar said either all of his statements were true or all were wrong.
“This is not possible that one day he speaks the truth while on some day he tells a lie.”
Replying to a question, he said that he had not uttered a single word on the memo case pending in the court. He said PPP will stick to the Constitution in any case.
Babar Awan said that credit went to the present democratic government for launching Swat operation when it was said that the militants were just 50 miles away from Islamabad. He said present government had written new history by confronting the world superpower unlike a dictator who surrendered to one call from a US military officer. But this time, around, he added, it was the Parliament and not a single person, which took the landmark decisions of closing supplies to NATO, vacating Shamsi Airbase and boycott of Bonn conference.
Awan said some political people were in the habit of issuing fatwas formurder and some came up with threats of courting arrests. “But we are not the ones who can be frightened. The PPP has already rendered sacrifices for democracy and would continue to do so in future as well”, he averred, adding that his party was a caravan of martyrs led by Shaheed Bhutto and Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.
Addressing a news conference at the residence of Opposition Leader Raja Riaz along with other PPP leaders, Dr. Awan also took jibes at the Army and the judiciary, though in an indirect speech, for their alleged anti-democracy posture.
He alleged that Mian Nawaz Sharif did not want to become part of the Parliament and was conspiring against it. He said Nawaz Sharif had also conspired against two elected governments of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto in 1990s. He said those conspiring against democracy should listen that decision regarding change of government would be made by ballot and not by bullet. Awan said it was collective responsibility of all stakeholders to restore people’s trust in the ballot.
Babar also accused Nawaz Sharif of using backdoors to come to power. He warned that if the present set up is rolled back, all will go home. “It is a whole package not confined to a single person”, he remarked.
Without going into details, the PPP Senator disclosed that son of a former chairman of Majlis-e-Shoora of General Zia had also become active to de-rail democracy. He, however, said that government will foil this conspiracy with people’s support.
Awan made mention of successive martial laws and said 1973 Constitution, which was 37 years old, had been held in abeyance for 21 years. The PPP leader said Fall of Dhaka should be celebrated as a day of resistance against dictatorship.
To a question, he said President Zardari will come back when doctors allow him. “He would definitely return to the country unlike Sharifs who left for Jeddah after signing agreement with a dictator.”
On a new PML-N petition filed in the Supreme Court on memo controversy, he said another conspiracy had been hatched on the day of fall of Dhaka.
On Mansoor Ejaz’ statement about General Pasha touring Arab countries to seek support for Zardari’s removal, Babar said either all of his statements were true or all were wrong.
“This is not possible that one day he speaks the truth while on some day he tells a lie.”
Replying to a question, he said that he had not uttered a single word on the memo case pending in the court. He said PPP will stick to the Constitution in any case.
Babar Awan said that credit went to the present democratic government for launching Swat operation when it was said that the militants were just 50 miles away from Islamabad. He said present government had written new history by confronting the world superpower unlike a dictator who surrendered to one call from a US military officer. But this time, around, he added, it was the Parliament and not a single person, which took the landmark decisions of closing supplies to NATO, vacating Shamsi Airbase and boycott of Bonn conference.
Awan said some political people were in the habit of issuing fatwas formurder and some came up with threats of courting arrests. “But we are not the ones who can be frightened. The PPP has already rendered sacrifices for democracy and would continue to do so in future as well”, he averred, adding that his party was a caravan of martyrs led by Shaheed Bhutto and Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.
Has Veena Malik gone missing?
When Mahesh Bhatt received a call on Saturday morning about the news of Veena Malik going missing, he was in two minds. Is this a truly tragic story of a Pakistani girl being victimized because of her daredevil attitude or is it a case of yet another ploy of gaining publicity?
Says Bhatt, "I was told that she has gone missing for 24 hours and hadn't reported to her shoot yesterday. The cops were being informed about her absence. I really don't know what to make of it. The last time I spoke to her was when I was asked to comment on her "nude" shoot. I spoke to both Veena and the editor of the FHM magazine who had commissioned the controversial shoot. I had advised Veena to report to the cops if she indeed felt victimized and also provide correct information to be circulated in the media by her PR.
Subsequently, as the story unfolded, I was told by my well-wishers in Pakistan not to involve myself in this issue. My friends told my wife, Soni, that Mr Bhatt is too precious a person in the Indo-Pak cultural bridge to be commenting on Veena's issue." When the filmmaker heard the news of Veena going missing, Bhatt had two different reactions. "We are living in dangerous times.
Veena has already earned the stigma of abusing the media to serve her personal interests and any information regarding her is now being met with cynicism. People today fear to give her the benefit of doubt since they believe she has engineered a lot to fit things into her landscape of profit. If she is doing this to keep the excitement alive about her, this will turn into a farce. But it would indeed be sad if nobody responds to her even if her missing tale is true. Veena's tale could become a wolf wolf story. It will be tragic if people take her story with a pinch of salt even if she were in some kind of serious trouble."
Says Bhatt, "I was told that she has gone missing for 24 hours and hadn't reported to her shoot yesterday. The cops were being informed about her absence. I really don't know what to make of it. The last time I spoke to her was when I was asked to comment on her "nude" shoot. I spoke to both Veena and the editor of the FHM magazine who had commissioned the controversial shoot. I had advised Veena to report to the cops if she indeed felt victimized and also provide correct information to be circulated in the media by her PR.
Subsequently, as the story unfolded, I was told by my well-wishers in Pakistan not to involve myself in this issue. My friends told my wife, Soni, that Mr Bhatt is too precious a person in the Indo-Pak cultural bridge to be commenting on Veena's issue." When the filmmaker heard the news of Veena going missing, Bhatt had two different reactions. "We are living in dangerous times.
Veena has already earned the stigma of abusing the media to serve her personal interests and any information regarding her is now being met with cynicism. People today fear to give her the benefit of doubt since they believe she has engineered a lot to fit things into her landscape of profit. If she is doing this to keep the excitement alive about her, this will turn into a farce. But it would indeed be sad if nobody responds to her even if her missing tale is true. Veena's tale could become a wolf wolf story. It will be tragic if people take her story with a pinch of salt even if she were in some kind of serious trouble."
Pakistan’s prime minister denies rift with army over ‘memogate’
alarabiya.net
Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has dismissed rumors of a rift with the country’s powerful army over a secret memo that sought U.S. intervention to prevent a feared military coup.
Tensions between the army and government appeared to have soared in recent days as intelligence chiefs demanded an inquiry into the scandal that threatens to implicate President Asif Ali Zardari, who is abroad following an illness.
The demand came after the political opposition asked the Supreme Court to find out who was behind the memo that sought U.S. help to prevent a coup and curb the power of the military after Osama bin Laden was killed in May.
But Gilani in a late Friday meeting at his residence with army chief Ashfaq Kayani “strongly rejected the notion”, his office said in a statement.
Gilani “reiterated that the Government of Pakistan and its institutions remained committed to their constitutional roles and obligations to a democratic and prosperous future for Pakistan,” it said.
“The Prime Minister and army chief underscored the significance of national unity to address the challenges faced by the nation.”
In separate responses submitted to the court late Thursday, the attorney general said the petition should be dropped, but Kayani said the memo impacted “national security”.
“Therefore, there may be a need to fully examine the facts and circumstances leading to the conception and issuance of the memo,” the army chief said in his response, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.
The move is significant in a country where the military has staged four coups and remains the chief power broker. It may also increase uncertainty over how long Zardari remains in office.
The existence of the document came to light when American-Pakistani businessman Mansoor Ijaz wrote in the Financial Times that Zardari feared the military might overthrow his government.
Ijaz accused Husain Haqqani, the president’s close aide and ambassador to Washington, of crafting the memo with Zardari’s support.
Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif then filed a petition in the Supreme Court on December 1, demanding to know who was responsible for the document delivered to the then U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Amiral Mike Mullen, on May 10.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has dismissed rumors of a rift with the country’s powerful army over a secret memo that sought U.S. intervention to prevent a feared military coup.
Tensions between the army and government appeared to have soared in recent days as intelligence chiefs demanded an inquiry into the scandal that threatens to implicate President Asif Ali Zardari, who is abroad following an illness.
The demand came after the political opposition asked the Supreme Court to find out who was behind the memo that sought U.S. help to prevent a coup and curb the power of the military after Osama bin Laden was killed in May.
But Gilani in a late Friday meeting at his residence with army chief Ashfaq Kayani “strongly rejected the notion”, his office said in a statement.
Gilani “reiterated that the Government of Pakistan and its institutions remained committed to their constitutional roles and obligations to a democratic and prosperous future for Pakistan,” it said.
“The Prime Minister and army chief underscored the significance of national unity to address the challenges faced by the nation.”
In separate responses submitted to the court late Thursday, the attorney general said the petition should be dropped, but Kayani said the memo impacted “national security”.
“Therefore, there may be a need to fully examine the facts and circumstances leading to the conception and issuance of the memo,” the army chief said in his response, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.
The move is significant in a country where the military has staged four coups and remains the chief power broker. It may also increase uncertainty over how long Zardari remains in office.
The existence of the document came to light when American-Pakistani businessman Mansoor Ijaz wrote in the Financial Times that Zardari feared the military might overthrow his government.
Ijaz accused Husain Haqqani, the president’s close aide and ambassador to Washington, of crafting the memo with Zardari’s support.
Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif then filed a petition in the Supreme Court on December 1, demanding to know who was responsible for the document delivered to the then U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Amiral Mike Mullen, on May 10.
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