The Haqqani Threat to the US-Pakistan Détente

By Michael Kugelman

America and Pakistan have seen relations improve in recent months. Unfortunately, the Haqqani network could derail this.

The Haqqani network — a family-run syndicate that happens to be one of South Asia’s most fearsome militant groups — has long been a source of tension for the volatile U.S.-Pakistan relationship. And it’s easy to understand why.

U.S. military officials often describe the Haqqani network as one of its biggest threats in Afghanistan. John Allen, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from July 2011 to February 2013, says the group wounded or killed more than 500 of his troops. It’s been blamed for an attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul. It held Bowe Bergdahl, the only U.S. POW in Afghanistan, in captivity. It has close associations with Al-Qaeda, and the State Department has formally designated it as a terrorist organization (this status does not apply to the Afghan Taliban, with which the Haqqani network is affiliated).

The Haqqani network also has links to Pakistan’s security establishment, which views the group as a strategic asset that limits the influence of archrival India in Afghanistan (it frequently assaults Indian targets in Afghanistan). In 2011, Mike Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, infamously described it as a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. An angry Pakistan rejected the accusation and threatened to cut off ties with Washington.

Last year, unknown gunmen assassinated Nasiruddin Haqqani, one of the group’s top leaders. Tellingly, he was not gunned down in an isolated, mountainous, tribal-area redoubt — but rather as he strolled into a bakery in the suburbs of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital (Rawalpindi, the city that houses military headquarters, is nearby).

For years, Haqqani fighters enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency. Washington (to the irritation of Islamabad) pressured Pakistan relentlessly to target this safe haven, but to no avail.

Then, in recent weeks, Pakistan changed course and launched a military offensive in North Waziristan. Islamabad insists that its offensive is targeting all militant groups, including the Haqqani network. Pakistani officials report that the offensive has driven the group into Afghanistan, and they are asking U.S. forces to go after it there. In effect, Pakistan wants the United States, and its Afghan allies, to serve as the anvil to Pakistan’s hammer.

This should all be music to Washington’s ears. Unfortunately, it is not. That’s because the offensive is happening several years too late, and because there’s little reason to believe Pakistan’s claims about targeting the Haqqani network are actually true. As a result, U.S.-Pakistan relations face a new crisis rooted in an old problem.

Had Pakistan’s North Waziristan operation been launched several years earlier, at the height of the U.S. military surge in Afghanistan, then U.S. forces would have been in a strong position to handle an influx of fighters from Pakistan. Yet today, U.S. forces are headed for the exits.

Afghan troops aren’t in much of a position to help either. They have their hands full with a resurgent Taliban, which is staging stepped-up assaults. These have produced offensives in Helmand and Kandahar provinces and actual takeovers of territory in areas outside the cities of Kabul and Jalalabad. Some might argue that Pakistan’s North Waziristan offensive, by unloading Haqqani network fighters into Afghanistan, is contributing to this increased unrest in Afghanistan. The Afghan government, for its part, has blamed the Haqqani network for two recent major attacks — a mass-casualty market bombing and an assault on Kabul’s airport.

In effect, at the very moment U.S. forces are seeking some semblance of a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan, a Pakistani military offensive is flushing some of the most ruthless anti-Afghan militants into that nation amid an intensified insurgency.

And it could get even worse.

Many Pakistani Taliban (TTP) fighters are based in eastern Afghanistan. The TTP (which mainly attacks the Pakistani state) and Haqqani network may focus on different targets, but they each share the same hardline ideology and loyalty to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar. This all suggests that Haqqani fighters could conceivably cooperate operationally with TTP (and Afghan Taliban) forces in Afghanistan. Incidentally, one of the TTP’s founding leaders, the late Baitullah Mehsud, was once a Haqqani network commander.

At the same time, there’s little reason to believe Pakistan’s security establishment truly wants to take on its long-time trusted asset. Why would it want to sever ties now, given the uncertainties of Afghanistan’s future amid the U.S. withdrawal, and given that reconciliation with India remains a distant dream?

There’s also little reason to believe Pakistan wants the Haqqani network to stay out of Pakistan. The latter derives leverage over the Haqqani network by hosting it on its soil. By denying it a sanctuary, Pakistan would lose this leverage — and risk having the organization turn on the Pakistani state. Consider that some Afghan Taliban members have expressed deep unhappiness about Pakistan, and that when Baitullah Mehsud was a Haqqani commander, the group launched several attacks on the Pakistani military.

Little wonder, then, that a range of sources — from U.S. officials to North Waziristan locals — believe the Haqqani network was tipped off about the offensive by the Pakistani military and fled in advance. Pakistan’s own ambassador to Washington admits that many Haqqani fighters left North Waziristan before the offensive (in his view, this is simply because the operation was pre-announced).

So, despite all the spin about taking definitive action against militants of all stripes, Pakistan may have more nefarious objectives in North Waziristan: Smash the sanctuaries of anti-state militants such as the TTP, but shield the Haqqani network by sending it to Afghanistan (and to other Pakistan tribal areas), where the group can exploit rising political instability (stemming from an ongoing election crisis) and aid an increasingly emboldened Afghan Taliban. Then, when the offensive in North Waziristan has ceased, the organization can return to its Pakistani sanctuary and resume its cross-border strikes on Afghanistan. This all has troubling implications for U.S.-Pakistan relations. Washington can’t be happy that Pakistan is merely displacing, rather than destroying, the Haqqani network — and especially into Afghanistan at such a delicate time. If the Haqqani network returns to its North Waziristan sanctuary and resumes attacks on Afghanistan, threats will likely intensify on Capitol Hill to reduce military aid to Pakistan. After all, a recent U.S. defense spending bill calls for $300 million in military aid to be withheld from Pakistan if the country has not “significantly disrupted” the Haqqani network’s “safe haven and freedom of movement.”

Such warnings won’t be received well in Islamabad, where officials often (and justifiably) note that Pakistan’s military has lost scores of soldiers fighting militant groups in the tribal belt, and complain that U.S. forces have failed to disrupt Pakistani Taliban safe havens in Afghanistan, which are used to mount attacks on Pakistan. Indeed, some of the TTP’s most vicious and hardline leaders — including supreme leader Mullah Fazlullah, who orchestrated the brief takeover of the Swat region in 2009, and TTP Mohmand tribal agency chief Omar Khalid Khorasani, who earlier this year ordered the execution of 23 Pakistani soldiers held in captivity — are reportedly based in Afghanistan.

The upshot? The current period of preternaturally placid U.S.-Pakistan relations could soon be shattered, thanks to the militant organization that so often bedevils them.

Bilawal Bhutto shocked at Karachi beach tragedy

http://mediacellppp.wordpress.com/

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Patron-In-Chief, Pakistan Peoples Party has expressed shock and condemned the deaths of over two dozen people, including innocent children who were drowned in Karachi beach during second day of Eidul Fitr.

PPP Patron-In-Chief expressed sympathies with the grieved families who lost their loved ones in the incident.

Pakistan's Sectarian killings : Spectacular strategies

by Shahram Ali

Sectarian killings continue to take their toll as four Ahmadis were murdered Sunday night in Gujaranwala while on Eid day a Shia named Ahsan Manzoor has been gunned down in Karachi. So let us protest and save Gaza! This country is at war in the tribal belt. So let us celebrate Eid in Medina and get some directives (maybe some cash) from the Saudi masters. Moreover our prayers inside the tomb of the prophet will lead to total defeat of the enemy! The Muslim Ummah should unite against Israel. So let us first celebrate three Eids in Pakistan before asking Ummah to unite on a single agenda!

There are many poor and needy in our vicinity badly in need of financial assistance.So let us fund Jahadis like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Sipah-e-Sahaba and the like; for sponsoring violent jehadis brings us greater respect and prestige in the comity of nations!At present the country is utterly in need of inter-faith harmony. So let us allow full freedom to ulema of various brands to issue “fatwas” (edicts) declaring others as heathens and non-believers! There is a high probability that terrorists would strike main cities during Eid holidays. So let us ban pillion riding and block mobile communication for a couple of days!

Our economy is badly suffering due to load-shedding. So let us build some overhead bridges and run metro buses in big cities!

Our industrial cartels and the business class are looting the common man. So let us give them some more incentives and tax concessions! Our literacy rate is not high and our education sector is in shambles. So let us build some more mosques, medressas and monuments! Facebook is carrying lot of undesirable material, damaging our “ideology” and “culture.”So let us ban it! The higher order functioning of the brains of both the brothers presently at the helm of affairs was deficient.Hence, as advised by an ayurvedic hakeem, both of them underwent hair-transplant! - See more at: http://lubpak.com/archives/318911#sthash.AbrzQy0P.dpuf

Pakistan: No space for Ahmadis

By Nasir Jamal

TWO policemen stand guard over the charred remains of Boota’s house in a narrow alley of Arafat Colony off Racecourse Road in Gujranwala. They were deployed there on Monday to protect the ashes. For further security, the police have locked up the house, inside which may lie evidence against the ‘unidentified’ rioters who had set it ablaze on Sunday night. The attack was part of the anti-Ahmadi violence that broke out in the neighbourhood over an alleged blasphemous Facebook post by an 18-year-old Ahmadi boy.

Jamaat-i-Ahmadiyya leaders in Gujranwala say that the police didn’t budge when a 3,000-strong mob vandalised and burnt homes belonging to their community. “The police were there. They didn’t do anything to stop the attackers. They let them have their way. Our homes were plundered and burnt, our people abused, beaten and killed,” said Munawar Ahmed Nasir, a Jamaat leader. He described the events as the worst anti-Ahmadi attacks in the city since 1974.

“Instead of controlling the mob, the police turned back the fire brigade and ambulances,” he added.

Boota lost much more than his house and belongings in that fire; his mother and two daughters died of suffocation while his sister miscarried. “It is very sad that the woman and her granddaughters lost their lives in the attack. It [the Facebook post] wasn’t their fault; they were punished for someone else’s sin,” said one of the two policemen.

Boota’s was one of the five Ahmadi houses burnt down by the attackers who had begun gathering when the word spread that the alleged blasphemous picture had been shared by the 18-year-old suspect. Several other Ahmadi houses and their shops in the area were vandalised and looted in the attacks that began soon after Iftar.

“A police party headed by Peoples’ Colony police station in-charge Malik Asghar reached there by 9pm. Instead of controlling the attackers, who were quite small in number in the beginning, the SHO tried to placate them by offering to register a case against the suspect. His offer didn’t satisfy the bloodthirsty hounds and their number continued to swell as workers of a religious party also joined them,” alleged a young Jamaat-i-Ahmadiyya leader.

In a street, a little away from Boota’s home, a police joint investigation team (JIT) was filming another burnt house, owned by Aslam, on the main road and collecting ‘evidence’. “We cannot say anything right away. Let us complete our work,” JIT head Naeem Kausar said curtly. “So far we don’t have any evidence or a statement against anyone named in the FIR [registered by Boota against the attackers].”

All the 28 Ahmadi families living in the area have left their homes for safe places since the attack. They are not the only ones to have left their homes. Saddam Hussain, 18, who had accused his friend of having shared the blasphemous picture on Facebook, is said by his neighbours to have left for Sindh to “participate in a family wedding”. Mohammad Hakim, the Peshimam of a nearby mosque, who the Ahmadis allege incited the attacks on their homes, has returned to his village to “celebrate Eid” with his family.

“It was a very unfortunate incident. The mob was uncontrollable. The police appeared unwilling to intervene,” recalled Asghar Farooqi, a homoeopath whose clinic is just opposite Aslam’s house. “They spared my clinic only when I told that I was a Muslim and owned that property.”

In the colony’s market, a group of young men in their early 20s threatened to ‘react’ even more severely if any Muslim named by Boota in the FIR was arrested. The blasphemy suspect “abused Saddam and dared him to do whatever he could when the latter confronted him about his Facebook post. He also shot at Saddam and others from the rooftop of his cousin’s house, injuring Zakriya, the teenage son of Peshimam Hakim. What kind of treatment did they expect after that?” asked Malik Suhail.

Another man, Lateef Minhas, however, claimed that “the rioters did not belong to our neighbourhood”. “They came from outside. I did not recognise anyone of them. We, the neighbours, even rescued women and children who had shut themselves inside after their houses were set on fire,” he said as he showed his ears that got burnt during the effort.

Senior police officials are said to have reached the scene only when the situation spun out of control. “The police also brought Qari Zahid Saleem, chairman of the local peace committee. But instead of cooling down the situation, he endorsed the mob action against the Ahmadis and praised the attackers for punishing the community,” said an elderly Ahmadi leader Chaudhry Amin. “Khurram Dastgir Khan, the federal minister from the area, came at around three in the morning when our homes had been burnt, our children killed and the mob had dispersed. There’s not a single word of condemnation from Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif or any political leader from the ruling party. Perhaps they are scared of standing by the most persecuted community in the country.”

Pakistan’s shrinking minority space

By FARAHNAZ ISPAHANI

The desire of Islamist extremists to ‘purify’ Pakistan has resulted in a major catastrophe for the minorities. The country cannot emerge as a modern pluralist state until the reversal of this culture of intolerance.

The murder in Gujranwala of an elderly woman, a seven-year-old girl and an infant in a mob attack on members of the Ahmadi community highlights the continuing deterioration of Pakistan’s treatment of its religious minorities. The mob was incited by an Ahmadi youth allegedly sharing blasphemous material on his Facebook page. But the cause of incitement is hardly relevant. Pakistan has been described by several human rights organisations as one of the nations with the least tolerance in religious matters.

The latest incident should be viewed as part of a tragic pattern that has evolved over decades. Ironically, the intolerance that is now widely associated with Pakistan had little to do with its founder’s vision of a country where “in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

The Ahmadis consider themselves Muslim but their beliefs are deemed by the orthodox as falling outside the tenets of Islam. The community recognises Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadian as messiah and an emissary from god, a concept that runs contrary to the Orthodox Muslim notion of Khatm-e-Nabuwwat or Finality of the Prophethood. Anti-Ahmadi agitations have often been used by religious-political groups, particularly in the Punjab, as an instrument of polarisation. Violent attacks on Ahmadis in 1953 resulted in Pakistan’s first instance of limited martial law being imposed in the city of Lahore.

Growing discrimination

In 1974, another wave of violence led to Pakistan’s Parliament amending the Constitution to declare Ahmadis as non-Muslims for legal purposes. It was argued at the time that once the Ahmadis’ apostasy is legally recognised and they are classified legally as non-Muslims, their orthodox Muslim critics would be satisfied and anti-Ahmadi violence would decline. But that has not happened. Instead, attacks on Ahmadis have continued unabated and along with other minority religious communities, there is an effort to marginalise the community, convert them or push them out of Pakistan.

Currently, the Ahmadis are barred by law from calling themselves Muslim or using Islamic terminology like “masjid” to describe their places of worship. Violation of that law entails criminal proceedings and imprisonment. But the community is not afforded any legal protection even as a non-Muslim minority. Over a one-and-a-half year period in 2012-2013, there were 54 recorded mob attacks against Ahmadis.

The latest incident stands out because of the frivolousness of its ostensible cause and the innocence and helplessness of its victims. A grandmother and her seven-year-old granddaughter or an infant could hardly pose a threat to Islam in Gujranwala, a large city with millions of inhabitants and hundreds of mosques and madrasas.

The desire of Islamist extremists to “purify” Pakistan has resulted in a major catastrophe for the country’s minorities. The violence of Partition denuded Pakistan of the majority of its Hindus and Sikhs, who would have otherwise constituted almost 20 per cent of the new country’s population based on the 1941 census.

Now that a sizeable swathe of Pakistan’s Muslim population has been turned into zealots, communities such as the Ahmadis, who were considered Muslim at independence, have joined the ranks of endangered minorities. Even the Shia, almost 20 per cent of the populace, are being attacked by extremists who do not acknowledge them as being a part of Muslim society. The attempts to describe Shias as non-Muslims are particularly ironic in view of the fact that Pakistan’s founder, Quaid-e-Azam (the great leader) Muhammad Ali Jinnah was himself a Shia Muslim.

Jihadist groups created and trained to fight “infidel” communists in Afghanistan and “Hindu” India have become a threat at home and no one in a position of power seems to have the will or the courage to shut them down. Such is the sway of extremist ideology that the murder in cold blood of Ahmadis, Shias, Christians, Hindus and now increasingly Barelvi or “soft Sunni” Muslims and other religious groups who do not belong to the majority Sunni Muslim interpretation of Islam no longer seems to have any shock value left. According to reports, crowds celebrated all night on July 27 after the bloodshed in Gujranwala.

Erosion of diversity

That this occurred in the month of Ramzan, a month meant to be spend praying and asking for forgiveness of one’s earthly sins, indicates the absence of any connection between violence against minorities and any notion of religious piety among the orthodox Sunnis who victimise them.

More than three days have passed since the Gujranwala attack and most Pakistanis have seen the television images of the crowd who perpetrated this calumny, dancing in the streets all night in celebration. However, there was no condemnation heard from either the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif or his brother, the Chief Minister of Pakistani Punjab.

The utter irrationality of the rejection of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan is encapsulated in the manner in which one of its most famous sons, Dr. Mohammad Abdus Salam was spurned by his country. The physicist was the first and the only Pakistani as well as the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize in science. After his death in 1996, Salam’s remains were returned to Pakistan and buried in an Ahmadi cemetery, with his tombstone describing him as the “First Muslim Nobel Laureate.”

A magistrate subsequently ruled that the word “Muslim” on an Ahmadi grave was blasphemous and ordered it to be sanded off. It seems that nobody in Pakistan remembers Jinnah’s comments when confronted with the demand to exclude Ahmadis from the fold of Islam. Jinnah had said, “If someone describes himself as a Muslim, how can I judge him otherwise. Let God decide that matter.”

When Pakistan was born on August 14, 1947, the new country’s capital, Karachi, was home to a religiously diverse community. The city’s architecture, too, reflected the traditions of several religions.

In addition to mosques of various Muslim denominations, there were Catholic and Protestant churches, a Jewish synagogue, Parsi (Zoroastrian) fire temples, as well as Jain and Hindu temples devoted to various deities. The Muslim call to prayer (Azan) was called on loudspeakers by Shias, Sunnis and Ahmadis five times a day. Various religious holidays were observed openly and often across communities.

Sixty seven years later, Karachi is no longer Pakistan’s capital. The country’s federal government now conducts its business from a purpose built capital, Islamabad, whose very name suggests a close relationship between Pakistan and Islam. Karachi’s synagogue has shut down as have several of its churches. The few remaining churches have a dwindling number of worshippers. Many Pakistani Christians have emigrated to North America or Australia. Most Jain and Hindu temples have either been destroyed or taken over by squatters or land-grabbers and property developers. The Parsi populations have also declined though their temples exist. The Muslim call to prayer no longer sounds from Ahmadi places of worship.

Incremental intolerance

Pakistan’s incremental intolerance in matters of religion is exemplified by the brutal assassination of former Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer and its aftermath. Taseer had attempted to help a poor unlettered Christian woman, Asia Bibi who was facing false blasphemy accusations. He was accused of being a blasphemer himself and killed by his own bodyguard. His murderer, Mumtaz Qadri, was garlanded and showered with rose petals by educated middle class lawyers outside a courthouse at his arraignment.

According to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), the country’s problem is the tolerance of “pervasive intolerance” in the country. The commission’s director, I.A. Rehman, asserts that “Pakistan continues to offer evidence of its lack of respect for the rights of religious minorities.” He attributes it to “the virus of intolerance” that he maintains “has infested the Pakistani people’s minds.” Human rights advocates like Mr. Rehman demand “visible action to end abuse of minorities’ rights” instead of “half-truths and subterfuge in defending the state,” which they feel have been consistently employed by Pakistan officials over the years.

Pakistani laws, especially the one that deals with blasphemy, deny or interfere with the practice of minority faiths. Religious minorities are targets of legal as well as social discrimination. Most significantly, in recent years, Pakistan has witnessed some of the worst organised violence targeting religious minorities. Over an 18-month period covering 2012 and part of 2013, at least 200 incidents of sectarian violence were reported, that led to 1,800 casualties, including more than 700 deaths.

Those of us who have been born in Pakistan have seen and experienced the effects of the hatred fed to us through our textbooks, television sets, newspapers, religious clergy and military dictators about the purity of only one religion and one version of Islam. Their need to destroy any threat to its purity, and therefore the purity of the state, has ensured that the well of tolerance has by now been well and truly poisoned. Pakistan cannot emerge as a modern pluralist state until the reversal of this culture of intolerance.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/pakistans-shrinking-minority-space/article6268754.ece

Asfandyar Wali : Handing over Islamabad to army: Nawaz provides opportunity to army to interfere in politics

Awami National Party chief Asfandyar Wali Khan has criticised the federal government for handing over the federal capital to the army for maintaining law and order, adding that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif provided another opportunity to army to interfere in the democratic process. Talking to party workers at Wali Bagh, Charsadda, Asfandyar said that ANP in no way could support invoking of Article 245 to handover Islamabad to the army.

He said his party supported across the board operation in North Waziristan and it should be taken to its logical conclusion as soon as possible. "Constitution allows peaceful protest to every one including Imran Khan and no one can be denied of this constitutional right," he added. However, he said, the protest should be completely peaceful and orderly. He said the PTI chief could not see rigging during elections but after the passage of one year, he was raising rigging issue to derail democracy.

The ANP Chief came hard on the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, saying that due to its inefficiency, Rs 90 billion development budget went back to the central pool as the development projects could not be initiated. He claimed that the ANP government carried out record development work and gave the province its own identity.

Pakistan: Tales of horror, from Gaza to Gujranwala

By Murtaza Haider

It was supposed to be a month of peace and tolerance. It turned out to be anything but. A mob attacked homes belonging to Ahmadis in Gujranwala, causing the death of three innocent civilians. In the backdrop of religious chants and slogans, the youth ransacked private property and set alight homes belonging to Ahmadis. The police, as usual, stood idle.

These scenes of extremism were no different from the ones in Ayodhya in 1992 when Hindu extremists destroyed the Babri Mosque, or from the recent scenes of wanton destruction of Palestinian homes in Gaza.

The murder of Ahmadis in Gujranwala is a manifestation of hate that appears to be deeply ingrained in Pakistan, which was founded on the basis of religious distinction. Having religion being considered the sole raison d'etre for a nation state breeds extremism.

It consumes diversity in all its manifestations, leaving hate in charge of the streets and society.

The mob in Gujranwala that burnt and killed, and those who are now hiding and protecting the miscreants, are no better than others doing the same elsewhere. Remember, Muslim mobs rampaging through homes in Ramazan does not make their murderous acts halal.

Imagine the predicament of parents who lost children either in Gaza or in Gujranwala days before Eid.

What should they do on Eid with the surviving children?

Should they dress them up, as they must have planned weeks earlier?

Or should they mourn in silence and remain in hiding from shells in Gaza and murderous mobs in Gujranwala?

The mob in Gujranwala caused the death of an elderly grandmother and her granddaughters, seven year old Hira and 10 months old Kainat. The victims were citizens of Pakistan and innocent of any crime. Still, it did not deter the mob from attacking them because the zealots found the three victims guilty by association.

Somehow being a minority in Pakistan has become a crime. Ahmadis, Shias, Christians and others have been killed for being different. This discounted model of citizenship will continue to divide people and consume the society from within.

Pakistan has evolved into one of the world’s least tolerant places. Dozens are murdered on suspicion and rumours. While the world is getting more connected with the Internet, Pakistan is moving in the opposite direction.

Already, YouTube is banned in Pakistan for carrying material that some Muslims find offensive. After the Gujranwala incident that was allegedly provoked by a Facebook update, Facebook may be next to be banned in Pakistan by the government.

The sustained failure of Pakistan’s criminal justice system has strengthened militant groups and mobs, who are encouraged by the knowledge that they will most likely escape justice.

For instance, those behind the murder of 94 Ahmadis in Lahore in May 2010 have not been brought to justice. Countless other religious fanatics turned mass murderers have won their freedom from the courts.

The lack of religious tolerance in Pakistan has brought the country to such lows that a recent report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIR) observed that Pakistan represented “the worst situation in the world for religious freedom for countries not currently designated by the US government as ‘countries of particular concern’.”

The report further lamented that though the recent transfer of power from one civilian government to another was a step in the right direction, still both the old and the new government tolerated egregious violations of religious freedoms. The blasphemy laws continue to be abused in Pakistan. USCIR observed that blasphemy laws have put 17 individuals on death row and another 19 are serving life sentences.

Ahmadis in Pakistan are treated even worse, where those accused of blasphemy have been killed while in police custody.

Mr Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, observed yesterday in Jeddah that only democracy could being a revolution in Pakistan. An odd statement to make in Saudi Arabia, a ruthless monarchy. Pakistan, however, needs law and order along with democracy.

If there were law and order in Gujranwala, Hira, Kainat and their grandmother would have been alive today.

Pakistan: Unfair rules of Balochistan board destroying education

The officials of Government teachers Association have said in a statement that unfair rules made by Balochistan board of intermediate and secondary education are destroying education in Balochistan.

Balochistan board has made a new rule according to which students younger than 14 years of age can’t sit in 9th grade exams. This rule will waste educational years of those students who have started their education at a young age, complained the GTA officials. GTA officials also lamented the incompetence of Chairman Balochistan Board Saadullah Tokhai. According to them, Saadullah Tokhai was removed from the position of Director Colleges due to its incompetence and now He is destroying intermediate and secondary education.

The educational situation in the provinces is abysmal and as a corrective measure, current government has increased the educational budget considerably. Government should also ensure that Balochistan Board should not make discriminatory laws which are against the interest of the students. Government of Balochistan should also make good its promise of establishing two new educational boards in Balochistan in Turbat and Zhob.

Most parts of Karachi are without electricity after a technical fault suspended power supply.

http://dunyanews.tv/

Electricity supply to most parts of Karachi, including Landhi, Korangi and Sultanabad, was suspended on early Friday after a technical fault. According to Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) spokesman, power supply to 12 out of 64 grid stations in the city was suspended. The spokesman further said that teams had been dispatched for a repair work.

Pakistan's Shia Genocide: Two Hazara men shot dead in Quetta

Two young men were gunned down on Sabzal Road on the first day of Eid in an apparent sectarian targeted killing.

According to the police, Zakir Hussain and Jawad Hussain – both in their early 20s – were on a motorcycle when armed assailants on another motorbike opened fire at them, killing them instantly. “The victims were Hazara and it is a clear sectarian targeted killing,” a senior police officer told The Express Tribune.

The attackers managed to flee from the scene. The victims were shot in the head and chest, said medics at the Bolan Medical Complex (BMC). The slain men were residents of Alamdar Road, a predominantly Hazara neighbourhood. More than 2,000 people belonging to the Hazara community have been killed in targeted attacks in and around Quetta for the past one decade.

According to human rights organisations, more than 10,000 Hazara families have migrated from Balochistan because of the increasing sectarian violence.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) has earlier claimed credit for most of the deadly attacks. However, there have been no claims for the latest attack.

The police have started an investigation into the killings. “The police are too weak to arrest these criminals,” said the parents of the victims who came to receive the bodies at Bolan Medical Complex.

Pakistan: poorest in the region

According to the recently released United Nations Human Development Report 2014 titled "Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Enhancing Resilience", Pakistan has retained the objectionable ranking of the lowest within the region at 146 in the category of low income countries. Sri Lanka, ranked in the high development category, was awarded a significantly higher ranking at 73 which, no doubt, seriously compromises the validity of the standard normal raison d'etre offered by our governments (past as well as present) for blaming terrorism/insurgency for their poor performance in improving human development index components that include, life expectancy, education, health and income level.

The typical response of Federal Finance Minister Ishaq Dar with respect to government's failure to improve the human development index (HDI) is that after the 18th Constitutional Amendment social sectors were devolved to the provinces; and it is no longer the centre's responsibility. While this is certainly true yet the Finance Minister fails to consider his inordinately heavy reliance on provincial surpluses to meet the federal budget deficit targets agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF): 2013-14 budget envisaged Rs 23 billion as a provincial surplus which was revised upward to Rs 183 billion by the end of the fiscal year while in the current year's budget the provincial surplus is earmarked at Rs 289 billion. Or in other words, not enough allocations are possible with the pressure on provinces to generate surpluses. In addition, the salutary anticipated effects of the 18th Constitutional Amendment with respect to reducing the annual federal budgetary allocations to those ministries that have been devolved have also not been achieved. In other words, the devolved ministries have neither led to a commensurate decline in the federal annual expenditure and nor has this constitutional change led to greater allocations by the provinces to improve the quality of life of people. Be that as it may, Dar may do well to recall that prior to devolution the centre's annual allocation on HDI components particularly education and health had been well below the minimum proposed by the United Nations and this situation prevailed even during Nawaz Sharif's government when the Finance portfolio was held by Dar.

The UNDP report also notes that 2.2 billion people world-wide are subjected to growing inequality and structural vulnerabilities with responsibility laid at the doorstep of financial crisis, natural disasters, soaring food prices and violent conflict; however, it acknowledges that poverty is on the decline. Of relevance in terms of reducing poverty levels is the IMF's recently downgraded global growth forecast - from 3.7 percent in April to 3.4 percent. The reason, some negative surprises from China and the US and geopolitical risks associated with ongoing conflict in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria and Israeli attack on Gaza) and Ukraine. In this context it is relevant to note that Pakistan has projected a growth of 5.1 percent well above the global average and this projection pre-dates the Ukrainian and the Middle East crisis.

While the IMF has projected a growth of 4 percent for Pakistan in the current year (IMF's assessment of GDP growth for 2013-14 was 3.3 percent as opposed to the government's unrealistic 4.1 percent) yet even if one takes the over ambitious government target of 5.1 percent for the current year as having been achieved the heavy focus on reducing the deficit through generating provincial surpluses would dampen growth and not raise the HDI. Dar in his second budget as well has failed to strike a balance between growth and deficit reduction for which the vulnerable would pay the heaviest price.

India Says ‘No Change’ in Policy Towards Russia

India has so far been able to ignore Washington's imperative to turn its back on Russia in a bid to tighten US sanctions grip after the Indian foreign policy chief said Thursday the nation’s policy toward Moscow remained unchanged. “There is no change in our policy. We think that foreign policy is in continuity. Foreign policy does not change with the change in the government,” Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said in a comment on India’s relations with Russia following the deadly crash of the Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine.

On Thursday, Sushma Swaraj met in New Delhi with US Secretary of State John Kerry who is on a mission to restore America’s crumbling ties with India in the wake of the NSA phone hacking scandal.

Talking about US sanctions on Russia, Kerry said Washington “will obviously welcome India joining in with respect to [sanctions] but its India's choice.”

The United States is reportedly mounting a campaign in Southeast Asia to press some of its nations into toeing US line on Russia, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On Wednesday, the daily cited a senior US State Department official as saying he had met government officials in China, Singapore and South Korea this week to provide “a briefing on what we've done, answering questions and seeking support,” according to the report.

"It's certainly our hope that countries in this region — which includes many significant financial and commercial centers — would join us in putting pressure [on Russia]," the senior official said.

The diplomat didn’t give details of the results of the talks but noted that "good and open exchanges of views" took place.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for South Korea's Foreign Ministry told The Wall Street Journal that Seoul hasn't committed to any sanctions against Russia. The representative added the talks with US officials involved not only Russia but also other issues, including Iran.

On Tuesday, the Chosun Libo newspaper reported that Peter Harrell of the US State Department arrived in Seoul in order to persuade South Korea to impose sanctions against Russia.

The same day, the United States as well as the European Union announced new rounds of sanctions against Russia, once again accusing Moscow of supporting militia forces in eastern Ukraine.

Kerry says compromise with India on WTO possible

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday that he still hoped for a compromise to end India's opposition to a global deal that would address its concerns and help advance trade liberalization, just hours before a deadline passed.

New Delhi has insisted that, in exchange for signing a trade facilitation agreement worked out in Bali last year, it must see more progress on a parallel pact giving it more freedom to subsidize and stockpile food grains than is allowed by World Trade Organization rules.

"We are obviously encouraging our friends in India to try to find a path here where there is a compromise that meets both needs, and we think that's achievable. We hope that it's achievable," Kerry told reporters after talks with Indian leaders as part of an annual strategic dialogue.

India's new nationalist government has demanded a halt to a globally agreed timetable on new customs rules and said a permanent agreement on food stockpiling and subsidies aimed at supporting the poor must be in place at the same time, well ahead of a 2017 target set last December in Bali.

"Our feeling obviously is that the agreement that was reached in Bali is an agreement that, importantly, can provide for food security for India," Kerry said.

"We do not dismiss the concerns India has about (the) large number of poor people who require some sort of food assurance," he said.

Kerry, who was accompanied by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, held talks with Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj in a bid to revitalize ties that have soured over differences on trade, climate change and slowing Indian reforms.

He will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. The Indian leader, who swept to office in May with the strongest mandate in 30 years, is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama in September.

Nabee Rajabl-: ‘Bahraini oil bought intl silence & UK seized my passport’

Benghazi 'falls to al-Qaeda-linked rebels'

Factions including Ansar al-Sharia say they have taken over Libyan city after defeating forces of renegade general.

Armed groups claimed to have taken control of Libya's second largest city, Benghazi, after defeating units loyal to a renegade general, taking over thei barracks and seizing tanks, rockets and hundreds of boxes of ammunition.

The main police headquarters was on Thursday still smoldering after it was hit by shelling a day earlier, and smoke rose from the barracks of al-Saiqa soldiers loyal to General Khalifa Haftar, once the strongest security body in the city until it was overrun earlier this week.

The armed groups' sweep through Benghazi was a heavy reversal for Haftar, who for months had led his loyalists in a self-declared campaign to stamp out "terrorists" and "extremists".

His forces now appeared to only hold the airport on the city's edges.

Those opposing him belong to a newly-formed umbrella group called Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries, made up of multiple armed factions.

Among the factions is Ansar al-Sharia, the group accused by the US of leading a September 11, 2012 attack on a diplomatic facility in the city that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.

"We are the only force on the ground in Benghazi,'' a commander of one of the coalition's factions told the AP news agency on Thursday.

He said the coalition's fighters had driven all fighters loyal to Haftar out the city, and congratulated his followers on their "victory and conquest".

The Shura Council was formed after US troops abducted a top commander, Ahmed Abu-Khatala, and accused him of involvement in the attack on the US embassy.

On July 14, the coalition said it took over a Benghazi army barracks that is one of the biggest in eastern Libya, called Barracks 319. Over the past week, they took control of more than five other barracks, including the Saiqa camp.

Arab Leaders, Viewing Hamas as Worse Than Israel, Stay Silent

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Battling Palestinian militants in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end the fighting.

Not this time.

After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.

“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents. “I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas,” he said. “The silence is deafening.”

Although Egypt is traditionally the key go-between in any talks with Hamas — deemed a terrorist group by the United States and Israel — the government in Cairo this time surprised Hamas by publicly proposing a cease-fire agreement that met most of Israel’s demands and none from the Palestinian group. Hamas was tarred as intransigent when it immediately rejected it, and Cairo has continued to insist that its proposal remains the starting point for any further discussions.

But as commentators sympathetic to the Palestinians slammed the proposal as a ruse to embarrass Hamas, Egypt’s Arab allies praised it. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt the next day to commend it, Mr. Sisi’s office said, in a statement that cast no blame on Israel but referred only to “the bloodshed of innocent civilians who are paying the price for a military confrontation for which they are not responsible.”

“There is clearly a convergence of interests of these various regimes with Israel,” said Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to Palestinian negotiators who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. In the battle with Hamas, Mr. Elgindy said, the Egyptian fight against the forces of political Islam and the Israeli struggle against Palestinian militants were nearly identical. “Whose proxy war is it?” he asked.

The dynamic has inverted all expectations of the Arab Spring uprisings. As recently as 18 months ago, most analysts in Israel, Washington and the Palestinian territories expected the popular uprisings to make the Arab governments more responsive to their citizens, and therefore more sympathetic to the Palestinians and more hostile to Israel.

But instead of becoming more isolated, Israel’s government has emerged for the moment as an unexpected beneficiary of the ensuing tumult, now tacitly supported by the leaders of the resurgent conservative order as an ally in their common fight against political Islam.

Egyptian officials have directly or implicitly blamed Hamas instead of Israel for Palestinian deaths in the fighting, even when, for example, United Nations schools have been hit by Israeli shells, something that occurred again on Wednesday.

And the pro-government Egyptian news media has continued to rail against Hamas as a tool of a regional Islamist plot to destabilize Egypt and the region, just as it has since the military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood one year ago. (Egyptian prosecutors have charged Hamas with instigating violence in Egypt, killing its soldiers and police officers, and even breaking Mr. Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders out of jail during the 2011 uprising.)

The diatribes against Hamas by at least one popular pro-government talk show host in Egypt were so extreme that the government of Israel broadcast some of them into Gaza.

“They use it to say, ‘See, your supposed friends are encouraging us to kill you!’ ” Maisam Abumorr, a Palestinian student in Gaza City, said in a telephone interview.

Some pro-government Egyptian talk shows broadcast in Gaza “are saying the Egyptian Army should help the Israeli Army get rid of Hamas,” she said.

At the same time, Egypt has infuriated Gazans by continuing its policy of shutting down tunnels used for cross-border smuggling into the Gaza Strip and keeping border crossings closed, exacerbating a scarcity of food, water and medical supplies after three weeks of fighting.

“Sisi is worse than Netanyahu, and the Egyptians are conspiring against us more than the Jews,” said Salhan al-Hirish, a storekeeper in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. “They finished the Brotherhood in Egypt, and now they are going after Hamas.”

Egypt and other Arab states, especially the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are finding themselves allied with Israel in a common opposition to Iran, a rival regional power that has a history of funding and arming Hamas.

For Washington, the shift poses new obstacles to its efforts to end the fighting. Although Egyptian intelligence agencies continue to talk with Hamas, as they did under former President Hosni Mubarak and Mr. Morsi, Cairo’s new animosity toward the group has called into question the effectiveness of that channel, especially after the response to Egypt’s first proposal.

As a result, Secretary of State John Kerry turned to the more Islamist-friendly states of Qatar and Turkey as alternative mediators — two states that grew in regional stature with the rising tide of political Islam after the Arab Spring, and that have suffered a degree of isolation as that tide has ebbed.

But that move has put Mr. Kerry in the incongruous position of appearing to some analysts as less hostile to Hamas — and thus less supportive of Israel — than Egypt or its Arab allies.

For Israeli hawks, the change in the Arab states has been relatively liberating.

“The reading here is that, aside from Hamas and Qatar, most of the Arab governments are either indifferent or willing to follow the leadership of Egypt,” said Martin Kramer, president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and an American-Israeli scholar of Islamist and Arab politics. “No one in the Arab world is going to the Americans and telling them, ‘Stop it now,’ ” as Saudi Arabia did, for example, in response to earlier Israeli crackdowns on the Palestinians, he said. “That gives the Israelis leeway.”

With the resurgence of the anti-Islamist, military-backed government in Cairo, Mr. Kramer said, the new Egyptian government and allies like Saudi Arabia appear to believe that “the Palestinian people are to bear the suffering in order to defeat Hamas, because Hamas cannot be allowed to triumph and cannot be allowed to emerge as the most powerful Palestinian player.”

Egyptian officials disputed that characterization, arguing that the new government was maintaining its support for the Palestinian people despite its deteriorating relations with Hamas, and that it had grown no closer to Israel than it was under Mr. Morsi or Mr. Mubarak.

“We have a historical responsibility toward the Palestinians, and that is not related to our stance on any specific faction,” said a senior Egyptian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. “Hamas is not Gaza, and Gaza is not Palestine.”

Egyptian officials noted that the Egyptian military and the Red Crescent had delivered medical supplies and other aid to Gaza. Cairo continues to keep open lines of communication with Hamas, including allowing a senior Hamas official, Moussa Abu Marzouq, to reside in Cairo.

Other analysts, though, argued that Egypt and its Arab allies were trying to balance their own overriding dislike for Hamas against their citizens’ emotional support for the Palestinians, a balancing act that could grow more challenging as the Gaza carnage mounts.

“But I am not sure the story is finished at this point.”

Justin Bieber - One Time

Arabic belly dance - Sadie Belly Dance 2013

pashto new song 2014 | Rahim Shah

AHAMD RUSHDI - HIP HIP HURRAY

Imaandaar - Aur Iss Dil Mein Kya Rakhha Hai Tera Hi Dard - Suresh Wadker

Intl Religious Freedom Report 2013: Pakistan's Blasphemy Laws: Symbol Of Intolerance

http://www.state.gov/

In 2013, the world witnessed the largest displacement of religious communities in recent memory. In almost every corner of the globe, millions of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others representing a range of faiths were forced from their homes on account of their religious beliefs. Out of fear or by force, entire neighborhoods are emptying of residents. Communities are disappearing from their traditional and historic homes and dispersing across the geographic map. In conflict zones, in particular, this mass displacement has become a pernicious norm.

All around the world, individuals were subjected to discrimination, violence and abuse, perpetrated and sanctioned violence for simply exercising their faith, identifying with a certain religion, or choosing not to believe in a higher deity at all.

Militants in Pakistan killed more than 400 Shia Muslims in sectarian attacks throughout the year and more than 80 Christians in a single church bombing; the government arrested and jailed a number of those responsible for sectarian attacks, but it generally failed to prevent attacks.

In Pakistan, authorities continue to enforce blasphemy laws and laws designed to marginalize the Ahmadiyya Muslim community; these laws continued to restrict religious freedom, and remained the most visible symbols of religious intolerance.

On International Religious Freedom Day, Secretary Kerry stressed that “nations that protect this fundamental freedom will have the partnership of the United States and the abiding commitment of the American people as we seek to advance freedom of religion worldwide.” It is our hope that this year’s report not only identifies the abuses, problems and violations, but also sparks the areas for change, action, and accountability. We invite governments, community groups, faith-based and secular organizations, students, activists, human rights defenders, change makers and every-day citizens to use this report to defend and advance international religious freedom, a universal right which we are all entitled.

- See more at: http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm#wrapper

Pro Saudi SSP militants killed 3 Shias on Eid day in Pakistan

http://www.abna.ir/

Two Shia Scouts martyred in SSP terrorist attack in Quetta on Eid Day

Two Shia Scouts embraced martyrdom due to a targeted attack on their lives by militants of Sipah-e-Sahaba in Quetta on the day of Eid-ul-Fitr.

The terrorists opened fire upon Syed Zakir Hussain and Syed Jawad Hussain on Sabzal Road in Quetta. They were martyred due to fatal wounds.

Shia trader embraces martyrdom in Karachi

Shia trader, who was seriously injured due to terrorist attack by Sipah-e-Sahaba militants during Ramadan, breathed his last in hospital on Wednesday, second day of Eid-ul-Fitr.

Noman Raza Abidi, a Shia trader of Kareemabad was ambushed near Sohni Mobile Market in Kareemabad of Karachi’s district central. He was under treatment since July 22 (Ramadan 23) at the hospital where he breathed his last on Wednesday.

Shia parties and leaders have condemned the genocide against Shiites. They vowed, they would not sit in comfort and would do everything they can, to stop Shia genocide in Pakistan. They demanded the government to order military for countrywide operation against banned Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi now renamed as ASWJ and all their affiliated takfiri terrorists. They also demanded public hanging of the condemned terrorists.

Amnesty calls for probe into Pakistan Ahmadi attack

http://www.ucanews.com/

Pakistan's government must investigate the deadly attack on the minority Ahmadi community in Punjab province, Amnesty International said on Wednesday. Amnesty called on citizens to write Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, "urging them to investigate the mob violence." The violent attack occurred on July 27 after an Ahmadi youth posted a picture on the social networking site Facebook that was deemed blasphemous.

A 55-year-old woman and two young children were killed in the attack. One of the injured, a pregnant woman, later miscarried in the hospital. Amnesty also urged people to call on authorities to ensure no charges of blasphemy are brought against members of the Ahmadi community. Saleem ud Din, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community, said state authorities are not investigating the case, even though the community has identified numerous suspects. "Those involved in the brutal attack are roaming free in the city while the Ahmadi people are still in hiding due to fear and the tense situation," he said.

The Ahmadi community are a religious minority that consider themselves Muslim but are regarded as heretics by most Muslims in Pakistan. They were declared non-Muslims by a constitutional amendment in 1974. In the 1980s, Pakistan's government made it a crime for the Ahmadis to publicly preach or claim they are Muslim, an offense carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment or death under blasphemy laws. Pakistan's independent Human Rights Commission said the attack on the Ahmadi community "represents brutalization and barbarism stooping to new lows". "The people who were killed were not even indirectly accused of the blasphemy charge. Their only fault was that they were Ahmadi. Torching women and children in their house simply because of their faith represents brutalization and barbarism stooping to new lows."

Read more at: http://www.ucanews.com/news/amnesty-calls-for-probe-into-pakistan-ahmadi-attack/71560

Polio's Surge In Pakistan: Are Parents Part Of The Problem?

What do the parents think? That's always a crucial question when it comes to vaccinating kids. And it's particularly important in Pakistan, which is one of the last places in the world where the polio virus is still making kids sick.

Health workers in Pakistan are trying to convince millions of parents to allow their children take the polio vaccine. But the program faces vehement — and at times violent — opposition.

So researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health recently did a poll to find out if parents are part of the problem. The results surprised them.

Imagine you're a parent in northwest Pakistan. You live in a remote village, perhaps in a mud hut on top of a mountain. Every few weeks some strangers carrying vials of a clear liquid come knocking on your door.

"Frankly, if someone came to my house and said, 'You know, you don't know me from Adam, but I'd like to vaccinate your child,' I wouldn't let them," says Sona Bari, of the World Health Organization.

But eradicating polio worldwide depends on these parents in Pakistan saying yes.

Strangers showing up at your door isn't the only hurdle to getting children vaccinated. In Pakistan, the Taliban threaten to kill parents who immunize their kids. More than 60 vaccinators have already been killed in the past two years.

India: Army gave befitting reply to Pakistan on beheading of soldiers:

Delivering a very strong message to the country's hostile neighbour, the outgoing Army chief General Bikram Singh on Thursday said that his men have avenged the beheading of Indian jawans by the Pakistani troops last year.

“We have responded to Pakistan at a tactical level to prevent the recurrence of such incidents in future,” Gen Singh said during a farewell ceremony held here.

"We are carrying out tactical operations at the LoC. It is an ongoing process and our soldiers are doing their job...," General Bikram Singh added.

When pressed by the reporters to elaborate on the issue, Gen Singh said, “It was done by the local commanders.” On the use of force against Pakistan, he said, “We have always responded to Pakistan at the tactical level on the borders. Use of force has been from tactical to operational to strategic level.”

Gen Singh also praised the 1.3 million strong Indian Army and said that it is prepared to take on any challenge.

“Indian soldiers are prepared for the line of duty, up for any challenge,” Bikram Singh said.

The outgoing Army Chief also extended his good wishes to his successor Dalbir Singh Suhag and said that the Indian Army under him will reach unparalleled heights.

"Army is a robust organisation, very very accountable, very responsive, very potent and a very relevant instrument of national power with the capability to take up any challenges," the outgoing army chief said.

Lt. Gen Dalbir Singh Suhag, whose appointment as Army chief had kicked up a row, today took over as the next head of the 1.3 million strong force succeeding General. Bikram Singh. Gen Singh also visited the Amar Jawan Jyoti before demitting office.

After paying tribute to the martyred Indian soldiers, Gen Singh wrote a few words in the visitor's book before departing from the venue.

On January 8, 2013, an Indian soldier Hemraj was beheaded by the Pakistani troops in the Mendhar area of Jammu and Kashmir – an incident which further strained the bilateral ties between India and Pakistan. Gen Bikram Singh had then warned Pakistan, saying India reserves the right to retaliate at the "time and place" of its choosing.

Gen Singh also said the beheading was "unacceptable" and "most unpardonable" and the troops would respond immediately, aggressively and offensively if provoked.

INDIA-PAKISTAN THROUGH THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE MIRROR

War on the Rocks

Myra MacDonald

If you think reconciling the Israelis and Palestinians is hard, try the Indians and Pakistanis. The latest war in Gaza has laid bare India’s and Pakistan’s different views about the Middle East, revealing a great deal about how these countries view themselves and each other. The newly elected Indian government of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has become more confident about showing sympathy for Israel, bringing to the surface a relationship that has been growing for more than two decades. Pakistan refuses to recognize the Jewish state and its outrage over Palestinian deaths in Gaza is colored by its identity as a country bristling to defend the rights of Muslims around the world, from Palestine to Kashmir. These different worldviews could ultimately exacerbate the historical animosity between the two countries, and pit the pro-Israel Hindu right in India against the hawkish pro-military establishment in Pakistan.

In the early decades after independence in 1947, it was India rather than Pakistan that was particularly vocal about the Palestinian cause. The partition of Palestine to create the state of Israel in 1948, coming just one year after British India was partitioned to create Pakistan, was seen in South Asia as a legacy of British imperialism. India’s commitment to champion the Palestinian cause fitted, therefore, with the anti-colonial spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement of which it was a leading member. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — disliked by Pakistan for her role in its defeat in the 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh — got on particularly well with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat. In addition to its anti-colonial stance, India had powerful domestic political reasons for supporting the Palestinian cause. The Israel–Palestine conflict is viewed monolithically in South Asia as one primarily between Muslims and non-Muslims. Indian governments, wary of alienating Muslim voters who make up roughly 14% of the electorate, had an incentive to side with the Palestinians. Finally, India was determined to prove its secular credentials. Support for the Palestinians — which was then a leftist cause — was one way for governments in New Delhi to show they could fairly represent both Hindus and Muslims, thus demonstrating that Pakistan had been wrong to insist on the need for a separate homeland for Muslims.

While Pakistan also viewed Israel as having been imposed on Palestine as a result of European colonialism, it was nonetheless more circumspect because of its alliance with the United States during the Cold War. Islamabad’s close ties with Washington also meant it was regarded with suspicion by Arab nationalists and kept at arm’s length. Though Pakistan refused to recognise Israel, Pakistani support for the Palestinians in the early decades after 1947 came from the public rather than officials, who had a different message. Its future military ruler, then-Brigadier Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, massacred Palestinians on behalf of Jordan in the Black September civil war in 1970.

The end of the Cold War, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and subsequent defeat by the United States, and India’s own economic liberalization in 1991, all forced New Delhi into a major reappraisal of its policies towards the Middle East. The ideological approach that inspired the Non-Aligned Movement was replaced by a more pragmatic one designed to secure India’s economic and security interests. After siding mainly with secular Arab nationalists in the past, India began to improve relations with Saudi Arabia, a close ally of Pakistan, to secure its energy needs. Its new pragmatism also led it to give full diplomatic recognition to Israel in 1992. The two countries had much in common in terms of security. Both were status quo powers, with less incentive than their enemies to try to change the existing set-up — Israel when it came to Palestinian statehood and India in its conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir. Both were non-Muslim democracies that faced a threat from Islamist militants. Growing defense and security cooperation between the two countries bore fruit during the border war between India and Pakistan in the Kargil region of Jammu and Kashmir in 1999. At the time, India was facing sanctions over its nuclear tests the year before. When India ran short of artillery shells, Israel stepped in to supply them. India and Israel have steadily increased defense cooperation ever since. Among other things, Israel provides India with high-tech defense equipment that New Delhi has traditionally failed to get from the United States because of U.S. laws about transferring sensitive equipment. This includes Israeli Phalcon airborne warning and control systems that could be used against Pakistan.

In contrast to India, Pakistan has become, if anything, more ideological in its worldview. After the independence of Bangladesh undermined the raison d’etre for Pakistan as a homeland for India’s Muslims, it became more strident in asserting its Islamic identity. The anti-colonialism fuelling support for Palestinians was viewed through a distinctly Muslim historical narrative , which implied that undivided India might have been freed from British rule far sooner had its Muslim inhabitants not been let down by the Hindus. This narrative also conflated anti-Hinduism with pan-Islamist sentiment in which Pakistan became the defender of all Muslims. This worldview gained in strength over the years as the Pakistan-run jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan melded into its longstanding anti-India stance. Thus, for example, in one typical textbook for “Pakistan Studies” — a compulsory course in the country’s history and ideology — Hindus under the British Raj were players of a double game who let down the Muslims “on account of their primordial psyche.” The Pakistan Studies textbook, this particular one published in 2012 for use at the Islamia College University, Peshawar links Palestine to Kashmir, describing a resolution of both conflicts as integral to Pakistan’s national interests. Importantly, it stresses that Pakistan is committed to the peaceful resolutions of all conflicts, whitewashing Pakistan’s own role in nurturing Islamist militants to counter India, including in Kashmir. The narrative of victimhood, of a peaceful country forced to defend Muslims against threats both near in India and far in Israel, has served Pakistan’s security establishment well, allowing it to justify a large and politically powerful army. It is also self-perpetuating. Pakistan’s external behaviour — exerting influence through the use of Islamist proxies — has led to such difficult relations with India and Afghanistan that it can reasonably claim to be faced with hostile neighbors on both sides. This in turn empowers the military, reinforcing its role in domestic politics. The national narrative — which enmeshes Palestine and Kashmir, pan-Islamism with anti-Hinduism — has so far proved extremely difficult to challenge, whether in seeking peace with India, demanding a stronger role for democracy, or the full-scale dismantling of militant networks inside Pakistan.

The different worldviews of India and Pakistan have been on full display since the latest crisis over Gaza erupted. In New Delhi, the BJP-led government made a show of support for Israel by refusing to allow a resolution in parliament condemning it for the strikes on Gaza. In 2006 , Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat state, visited Israel and promised to return. India’s support for Israel is somewhat hesitant and discreet for now. It voted in favor of a United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution launching an investigation into Israeli strikes in Gaza. BJP hawks, however, are calling for India to be much more vocal in supporting Israel. Domestically, the government appears to have room to do so. Having won national parliamentary elections this year despite suspicions over Modi’s role in presiding over the killings of Muslims in communal violence in 2002, the BJP is in a strong position to override any objections at home to warming ties with Israel.

Internationally, India has discovered that its relationship with Israel does not prevent it from building ties with Muslim countries, in part due to the Arab world’s own pragmatism and divisions on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and in part reflecting its own growing political and economic clout. Notably, it has been able to improve ties with Saudi Arabia — a country that is militarily close to Pakistan — while maintaining positive relations with Iran, a Saudi and Israeli rival. Growing world anger over high Palestinian civilian casualties might limit India’s public support for Israel in the short term. But the trend is clear. Neither concern about Muslim voters at home, nor traditional “Third Worldism” apply any longer to India’s policies towards Israel.

Pakistan responded to the crisis in Gaza by sponsoring the UNHRC resolution setting up an independent commission to investigate Israel’s behavior in Palestinian territory. It also promised to observe a day of mourning for the Palestinians by flying its flag at half-mast. On social media, popular outrage occasionally spilled into outright anti-Semitism — at one point #IfHitlerWasAlive was trending on Twitter in Pakistan. Clearly, Pakistan is not alone in being angered by the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza. In other Muslim countries, resentment over Israeli policies is usually wrapped together with dislike of the West. Where Pakistan is unusual, however, is in its degree of hostility toward the United States, Israel’s main backer. The two countries have been at odds since the 1990s over Pakistan’s support for the Islamist militants it nurtured to counter India and exert Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. The U.S.-led overthrow of the Afghan Taliban in 2001 exacerbated these differences without ever fully bringing them to the surface, so that Pakistani public opinion is both deeply hostile and suspicious of anything the United States says or does. Pakistan also has the distinction of mourning Palestinians rather more than its own people at a time of a major domestic refugee crisis. Close to a million people have registered as internally displaced persons after fleeing a military offensive in North Waziristan and there are increasing reports of civilian casualties in an operation that Pakistan, like Israel, says is to eradicate a threat from terrorism.

As the only country created specifically as a homeland for Muslims, and one that sees itself as an ideological Muslim state defending Muslim rights worldwide, Pakistan is particularly susceptible to the influence of external events. When Muslims are perceived to be ill treated by non-Muslims, in Palestine or Kashmir, Pakistan bristles with the sense of victimhood that allows it to justify maintaining a hyper-nationalist militarized state. In turn, it becomes a country that thrives on conflict, and where the military establishment dominates despite its incomplete transition to democracy. This is not necessarily the intention of many Pakistanis standing up for Gaza, but it is the effect. Outrage over Palestine feeds a carefully cultivated national narrative that wraps it together with perceived ill treatment of Muslims in Kashmir and conflates anti-India sentiment with pan-Islamism. Its stance will have no impact on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; for all its talk of human rights abuses, Pakistan cannot afford to annoy Saudi Arabia by siding too closely with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Hamas.

The different approaches to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and to the Middle East as a whole, have long been a source of tension between India and Pakistan. By trying to steer a pragmatic course and maintain good relations with all players for its own economic, energy and security interests, India is increasing its diplomatic clout in the Muslim world, the very constituency Pakistan would like to consider its own. In doing so, it is pulling far ahead of its smaller, pricklier neighbor, accentuating Pakistan’s sense of victimhood. India is also using its relationship with Israel to build its high-tech military capabilities, giving Pakistan another cause for anxiety and another reason to prioritise defense spending.

While this is a longstanding issue, the latest crisis in Gaza comes at a particularly delicate time for South Asia. Both Kabul and New Delhi fear that as the United States prepares to withdraw more combat troops from the region, Pakistan will step up support for Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Pakistan denies this. Yet in its stridency over Gaza, wearing its support for Palestine as a badge of national honor, Pakistan is showing no sign of stepping away from its national narrative. It is one that leaves no room for pragmatism or compromise. It is not the kind of mood authorities would normally encourage if they planned on making peace with Pakistan’s neighbors. Rather it is one that has spilled into open conflict with India in the past, while reinforcing the power of the military at home.

Acid attacks on women cast pall of fear in Balochistan

A recent spate of acid attacks in Balochistan has sparked an impassioned debate about rising Islamisation that is forcing an increasing number of women to stay at home. The horrific crime, which disfigures and often blinds its overwhelmingly female victims, has long been used to settle personal or family scores with hundreds of cases reported every year.

But two fresh attacks on consecutive days in the province last week, where until a few years ago such assaults were unheard of, suggests a new pattern is emerging.

Last Tuesday, two men on a motorcycle sprayed acid using syringes on two teenage girls who were returning from a market in Mastung town, 40 kilometres from the provincial capital Quetta.

The day before, four women aged between 18 and 50 had suffered the same fate in Quetta, in the market area of Sariab. They were partially burned.

“In accordance with our Baloch traditions, they were wrapped in big shawls as well as covering their faces. That... saved (them) from severe injuries,“ said Naz Bibi, mother of two of the victims.

Asked about the attackers, she said: “I can only request that they should not treat women in such a cruel way.“

In most acid attack cases around Pakistan, the majority of victims know their attackers. When caught, relatives found guilty speak of punishing their victims for having sullied their “honour” or that of their family with “indecent” behaviour.

But, in these latest cases, the victims had no known connection to their assailants — which has led campaigners to suggest the attacks are part of rising religious extremism in the region.

Vast and sparsely-populated but rich in resources, Balochistan has long been racked by a separatist insurgency that has staunch leftist secular elements — including strong participation by women — and which reveres Communist icons like Argentine revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.

Separatists say the attacks on women are the latest battlefront in an ideological war between the rebels, who are fighting for a greater share of the region's mineral and gas wealth, and state-backed Islamist proxies who want to terrorise the population into acquiescence.

“The aim of these inhuman acts is to prevent women from participating in education, as well as social, political and economic aspects of life by creating a climate of terror,” said Jahanzaib Jamaldini, vice president of the Baloch National Party, which is fighting for greater autonomy.

This week, three more women suffered injuries to their legs and feet in yet another attack — though police and senior officials have so far said the latest incident was a case of a “family feud”.

Mohammad Manzoor, a brother of one of the victims, lamented that the attackers were still at large. “They roam the area on motorcycles and the local people have spotted them, “he said.

Militant involvement?

In the Sariab district of Quetta, the scene of one of last week's attacks, Islamist groups like the Ahl-e-Sunnat Wal-Jammat (ASWJ), are increasingly coming to the fore.

Dressed in Arab garb, they are able to roam the area armed with automatic weapons without fear of molestation -- leading many to believe they are given tacit state backing.

“ASWJ controls the area with dozens of armed men,” said one young resident, standing under the group's flag as it fluttered in the breeze, adding that their presence scared families into preventing women from being out in public.

The group said the accusations were “without any basis”. “We condemn these attacks,” Ramzan Mengal, the group's leader in Balochistan said.

The acid attacks also fit a wider pattern of a steady erosion of women's rights, especially in separatist and erstwhile relatively secular strongholds.

Al-Furqhan, an obscure militant group, recently appeared in the one-time separatist rebel stronghold of Panjgur district, which borders Iran, threatening private schools over the teaching of girls, according to residents.

In an atmosphere rife with fear, no suspects have so far been arrested and no group has claimed responsibility.

The first recorded acid attack in Balochistan came in 2010, with two more reported in 2012.

Mohammad Aslam, a women's tailor in Sariab, has seen sales drop by three-quarters since the market attack. “Women are afraid to step out of their homes or their men stop them from going,” he said.

Shopkeepers in Mastung reported a similar decline in sales.

“We fear that such incidents could increase and leave no space for women in an already male-dominated society,” said human rights activist Saima Jawaid.

Pakistan offensive disrupting militant attacks, U.S. says

By AOUN SAHI, SHASHANK BENGALI

A six-week Pakistani army offensive has succeeded in disrupting the militant groups that have long enjoyed free rein in the rugged North Waziristan tribal region along the border with Afghanistan, Obama administration officials say.

But proof of the operation's success, they say, will be whether groups such as the notorious Haqqani network are allowed to reconstitute themselves in North Waziristan or elsewhere and again plot attacks against U.S.-led forces in neighboring Afghanistan or elsewhere.

Previous Pakistani offensives in the tribal belt have either ignored groups like the Haqqanis — who are blamed for deadly attacks against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan — or allowed them to return. U.S. military officials believe that top levels of Pakistan's security establishment back the Haqqanis as a proxy force to maintain influence in Afghanistan.

But with most U.S. forces withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of the year, the U.S. military's ability to battle the Haqqani network is expected to diminish sharply. Obama administration officials have pressed Pakistan's military leaders in a series of meetings this month to ensure the group does not escape the current operation.

"We keep telling them they must go after all the terrorists and that they cannot cherry-pick," said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. "We've been quite emphatic about that."

Pakistan insists that no insurgent groups will be spared in the offensive, which began in mid-June and has resulted in the deaths of more than 500 militants and the seizure of large weapons caches and bomb-making factories, according to unconfirmed Pakistani army reports.

But some officials say that insurgents fled the area before the start of the offensive, which had been rumored for several months. U.S. officials have not received photographs or other visual evidence from Pakistan showing it has directly targeted the Haqqani network. In the end, the senior U.S. official said, "We end up having a good conversation but the bottom line is we have to be convinced there is no reconstituting of terrorist facilities and safe havens."

Some analysts believe that Pakistan is taking action now because of a provision in the 2015 Pentagon budget that could withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in counter-terrorism funding unless Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel certifies that Pakistan has "significantly disrupted the safe haven and freedom of movement of the Haqqani network."

Now that they have begun such an operation, "the Pakistanis are making an argument in Washington that they should be given continued coalition support," C. Christine Fair, author of "Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War," told the Times of India in an interview this week. Pakistan has received $28 billion in U.S. military and economic aid since 2002, and additional expenditures would be "outrageous," she said.

Pakistan has not given a timetable for the offensive, which began with airstrikes and has proceeded to ground operations in Miram Shah and Mir Ali, the largest towns in North Waziristan, which are now mostly controlled by the military. Pakistani officials declined to comment specifically on the Haqqani network, which analysts regard as one of the most experienced insurgent groups fighting in Afghanistan. The group, led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, is under the umbrella of the Afghan Taliban but is seen as being more closely linked to Al Qaeda's central leadership.

U.S. military leaders have long believed that Pakistan did not target the Haqqani network before because it does not carry out attacks in Pakistan. Afghan authorities also accuse Pakistan of sparing the Haqqani network in the current offensive, arguing that no senior commander in the group has been reported killed.

Last week, a spokesman for the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, alleged that Pakistan's security establishment had shifted Haqqani fighters to safe places before the operation began, prompting swift denials from Pakistani officials.

At a news conference the next day, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry said Afghanistan, whose army is struggling to contain a domestic Taliban insurgency, should take action against militants fleeing over the border from Pakistan. "It is … our expectation that action would be taken on the Afghan side to check the fleeing terrorists and not to allow Afghan territory to be used by anti-Pakistan elements," Chaudhry said.

Tribal leaders who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals from the militants have said the Haqqanis and other groups fled North Waziristan in the days before the operation began. With less than one-third of the tribal region reportedly under government control, many fighters are believed to have taken refuge in other areas of North Waziristan, including Datta Khel, the site of recent U.S. drone strikes, and in the thickly forested Shawal valley.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist who closely follows militant groups, said the current operation has displaced the Haqqani network but the insurgents, who typically operate in groups of about 20, would eventually be able to regroup and plot attacks in Afghanistan from elsewhere in the area.

"It would take some time for them to establish their training and communication facilities at some other place," he said, and targeting Afghan border provinces such as Khowst and Paktika soon "would not be a problem for them."

USA: State Dept. should act on Pakistan’s religious freedom violations, watchdog group says

Ahmadiyya Times

An independent religious freedom watchdog panel has welcomed the State Department’s annual religious freedom report and its list of the world’s worst offenders, which had laid dormant for three years. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) was created in 1998, and serves as an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom was created in 1998 as an independent, bipartisan body. Public domain image

The list of “countries of particular concern” had remained unchanged since 2006 — and hasn’t been formally issued by the State Department since 2011 — when Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Uzbekistan were cited.

In April, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that the list be doubled to include Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Vietnam, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and Egypt. Turkmenistan was the only new addition to this year’s CPC list, bringing the total to nine countries.

The State Department and the independent USCIRF have often been at odds on who makes the list of worst offenders, and in a statement, USCIRF noted the “disappointing omission” of Pakistan in particular.

“Pakistan represents the worst situation in the world for religious freedom for countries not currently designated by the U.S. government as CPCs,” said USCIRF Chair Katrina Lantos Swett.

Katrina Lantos Swett serves as Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

On Sunday (July 27) ,a violent mob torched at least eight homes in an Ahmadi Muslim neighborhood in eastern Pakistan after a member of the minority sect was accused of posting a blasphemous photo online. A woman, two children and an unborn baby died in the blaze.

Ahmadiyya Muslim Association UK reports that since 1984, 244 Ahmadis have been murdered in Pakistan because of their faith. Ahmadi Muslims are considered heretics in Pakistan, and it is a criminal offense for them to identify as Muslim. Those who do may be subject to harsh anti-blasphemy laws, which include the death penalty among other punishments.

Other religious minorities, including Shiite Muslims, Sufis, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Baha’is, have also been subject to attack in the Sunni-majority state.

Syria was also left off the CPC list, even as the country’s civil war continues to devolve along sectarian lines. Militants from the Islamic State have persecuted Syria’s Alawite Muslim sect and Christians in Syria and Iraq. The extremist group’s recent ultimatum to Iraqi Christians in Mosul that they convert to Islam or face execution will likely bring further pressure on the State Department to add both countries to its CPC list next year.

USCIRF also welcomed Monday’s nomination of a new ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, Rabbi David Saperstein. If confirmed by the Senate, Saperstein would be the first non-Christian to hold the position since its inception in 1998. The post has been empty since October.

Pakistan: Emergency operations centre set up at CM House to eliminate polio

http://mediacellppp.wordpress.com/

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah has established an Emergency Operations Centre at the Chief Minister’s House to provide a strong platform for the eradication of polio in the province. The centre will comprise representatives of the WHO and the UNICEF and 11 officers of the provincial government, said a handout issued here on Monday. A notification issued by the Sindh CM’s Principal Secretary stated that Deputy Secretary Fayaz Ahmed Jatoi will remain in contact with other members for coordination with the CM Secretariat. Besides, Project Director EPI Mazhar Ali will supervise immunization and VDP surveillance. The World Health Organisation (WHO) team leader Dr. Saleh, besides surveillance and immunization activities, will hold training workshops and capacity building programmes with Dr. Shaukat Chandio. Dr. Shaukat will also supervise social mobilization and communication in sensitive areas. District polio control rooms will also be set up where FELTP/N-STOP’s Dr. Manzoor Memon will coordinate with EPO. The Emergency Operations Centre will provide a strong platform with the coordination of several international organisations and it will play a vital role for the eradication of polio with the cooperation and coordination of national emergency centre, armed forces, parliamentarians, religious leaders and other stakeholders. The Emergency Operations Centre will gather relevant data with regard to polio-affected areas to devise a strategy to eliminate polio from the province forever.