Indian ISI Spy: The Interpreter Who Debunked Indian Lies

The warmongers in the Indian establishment just can't get over it. First they said she didn't have access to anything important. Now she's a possible Muslim. Well good for her. She was an Urdu translator in the embassy. I thought all that propaganda about Pakistan and India sharing the same language and culture was true [as if!]. If we share all that, why the need for a translator inside the Indian Embassy in Islamabad? Indian warmongers use this shared-culture propaganda to convince the world that Pakistan's independence was a mistake and it didn't need to happen [Who says 'India' existed before 1947? It was a British colony, and a Muslim colony before that. Pakistan secured freedom from the Brits, not from Indians. And which is it, 'India' as named by the Brits, or 'Hindustan' as named by the Muslim emperors who spawned Pakistan, or 'Bharat' as the Indians called themselves before the Pakistanis and Brits came along?].

Anyway, a message to our warmonger friends in New Delhi: Stop hiding terrorist Brahamdagh Bugti in Kabul, and stop kidnapping and brainwashing Pakistani kids from Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and flying them to India from Kabul for terrorist training.

[P.S. Also check all your other embassies everywhere, an Indian ISI agent might be lurking there!]

[P.S. To all Pakistanis, don't rub it in. It must really be hard. First Sania Mirza sells out to the Pakistanis. Most Indians said, 'So what! she's a Muslim. Treason is in her genes. But then Madhuri Gupta sells out too, to the Pakistanis!]

What Kayani Can Learn From Putin

By allowing foreign militaries a free reign in our tribal belt to kill hundreds of innocent Pakistanis, Pakistan is committing the same mistake as Putin’s, who initially did well a decade ago by crushing the rebellion in Chechnya but now is creating more rebels because of highhandedness. Also, Pakistan has no business eliminating the Afghan Taliban, who survived the 2001 war thanks to US mismanagement. The problem should be solved inside Afghanistan, not Waziristan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—It was brave on the part of Pakistan army chief to publicly apologize for mistakenly bombing and killing tens of innocent Pakistanis in a Khyber Agency village. In a similar incident in 2006 during the reign of his predecessor, where a US missile killed up to 80 children in a school, the action was not only defended but the Pakistani military was forced to own it, giving the first signal to everyone that innocent Pakistanis can be killed with impunity as part of the war on terror. Since then, more than a thousand innocent Pakistanis have lost their lives as collateral damage in these ‘successful’ drone attacks. This would remain one of the darkest spots in our history where our rulers shirked their responsibility for the protection of every Pakistani citizen on our soil.

But the army chief’s apology is also an opportunity to review whether it is acceptable to have allowed ourselves and our American allies to import their methods of dealing with occupied populations in Iraq and Afghanistan to be used with our own people inside our own homeland.

This review is important because these imported methods of dealing with occupied populations are not only unsuitable here but are radicalizing our own citizens instead of pacifying them, producing more disgruntled citizens for our enemies to recruit, brainwash and use to kill more Pakistanis and spread mayhem.

In using these imported methods we are committing the same mistake that President Putin, now a prime minister, has been committing in Chechnya for the past decade. He successfully curbed the insurgency and ended the ability of the US and other countries to use Chechnya to bleed Russia by covertly supplying weapons and intelligence to the insurgents. But instead of building on that success, Mr. Putin continues to use aggressive tactics in Chechnya, breeding more insurgents and more opportunities for outsiders to meddle. [The latest suicide attacks in Moscow involved a young woman who blew herself up because Russian military killed her husband].

The same is happening in our tribal belt. Just when we have stamped out insurgents and criminals in some pockets [thanks to Gen. Kayani and his team], here comes the collateral damage – both from CIA drones and our own occasional mishaps – to create additional pools of disgruntled citizens ready to be picked up by anyone who has resources to use them against the Pakistani state.

It’s a vicious cycle that destroys the massive nation-building work that our military is conducting in places such as Swat, with the military’s own money and often without any support from incompetent civilian governments in Islamabad and Peshawar. For example, few people know that our soldiers donated two days’ pay to collect US$1.2 million to renovate more than half of the 400 schools in Swat destroyed by terrorist groups. The army is building roads and restoring water supply lines in Swat, even organizing cultural and musical events to provide much need entertainment to a disturbed population and restore normalcy. Not to mention achieving the impossible by restoring two million refugees back to their homes in less than a year.

But all of this good work is eaten away by the kind of massive bloodshed that occurred on April 10 at remote Tirah Valley of Khyber Agency. Despite the brave apology, the accident will create new rebels and revenge seekers. It also brings into focus an old complaint about the veracity of intelligence that the Americans have and share with our military. Once again, the insurgency within our tribal belt is directly linked with the American mismanagement in Afghanistan. Allowing the Americans or anyone else to set up spy networks inside our territory and unleash private defense contractors in beards and local dresses is like allowing our own people and territory to be treated in the same manner as Iraq and Afghanistan, which are foreign occupied zones. This foreign element, including collateral damage and the faulty intelligence that causes it, is also sending a wrong message to ambitious criminal and tribal leaders and politicians, and that message is: the Pakistani state and its military are too weak to check foreign meddling and thus taking matters into their own hands is a legitimate option.

Another mistake that is bound to breed more enemies for the state is our faulty policy of not clearly asserting that the Afghan Taliban along with any other Afghan parties are legitimate Afghan political players. Fighting them is not and should never be Pakistan’s responsibility. The presence of some Afghan Taliban on Pakistani soil is expected to due to close ties between Pakistani and Afghan Pashtuns, but the solution is not for Pakistan to help US eliminate them but to resolve the deadlock inside Afghanistan that has resulted in the Afghan Taliban escaping their country to take refuge here.

Make no mistake about it: rebels who terrorize and kill Pakistanis must be eliminated by force and without mercy. But allowing outsiders to kill our people directly or through faulty intelligence means we will see suicide attackers for a long time to come.

This op-ed was originally published by The News International in Pakistan under the title, Waziristan And Chechnya.



This work by PakNationalists is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

A Wedding To Start A War

How the wedlock between a Pakistani sportsman and an Indian tennis player is a PR disaster for India and holds implications for relations with Pakistan

A sign of Pakistan-India peace? Hardly. Read how the celebrity wedding was loaded with the kind of symbolism that rattled India and sent the wrong signals to Pakistan

By Ahmed Quraishi

Thursday, 22 April 2010.

WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Trust me, this is a wedding that India never wants to see again. Ever. 

Never before has a wedding tested India's relations with Pakistan and created new misunderstandings that will echo for a long time to come. [Yes, we're still talking geopolitics.]

American and British commentators piled over each other to welcome the wedding between Pakistan's ace cricketer Shoaib Malik and India's star tennis player Sania Mirza as an event that would bring Pakistan and India closer.

  Hindu extremists burning Sania Mirza's effigy for marrying a Pakistani celebrity

Instead, it exposed ugly Indian insecurities, especially the rampant anti-Pakistanism in India not just in New Delhi but also among ordinary Indians. This is in sharp contrast to the warmth shown to Indians at all times in Pakistan, regardless of tense official relations.  

While most Pakistanis innocently celebrated the wedding as a chance for peace, Indians wore long faces, like a parent angry at a daughter who's ran away to marry the wrong man. Forget peace, Indians fretted that Mirza, a Muslim, might ditch India and start representing her husband's country Pakistan at international tournaments.

Indians, both in and out of government, did everything they could from day one to scuttle the wedding. When nothing worked they unleashed saffron-clad Hindu extremists to scare Sania Mirza and her parents for 'betraying' India. When that failed, New Delhi confiscated the Pakistani sportsman's passport on a lousy excuse while the Indian media went digging up dirt on the Pakistani young man to dissuade Mirza's family from going ahead with the wedding.   

Did Sania really ditch India?

The irony is that India's few noisy bottom feeders in Pakistan staked their reputations on this wedding; almost convincing Pakistanis that the wedding was a sign India was dying to be friends with their country. They never dreamed that India would instead be dying of jealousy and petty antagonism. 

SCARY SYMBOLISM FOR INDIA

What everyone missed was that the wedding was loaded with symbolism of the type that rattles India's nerves.

First, the Pakistani sportsman married a fellow Muslim. That undercut Indian government’s claim that Indian Muslims are not attracted to everything Pakistani, and vice versa.  Indian officials watch such happenings closely. Had the Pakistani married an Indian Hindu, Indian media managers would have seized the wedding to bolster their favorite line of propaganda about how Pakistan is a lost part of India that needs to atone for its sins and come home  [This is one of many historical delusions that Indians relish and which continue to inform official Indian mindset toward Pakistan, ignoring that India itself never existed before the Brits created it in 1947 out of what used to be a Muslim empire, but that's another story]. 

Then there's the symbolism of Sania Mirza's hometown Hyderabad-Deccan. The city-state was one of the richest Muslim princely states for centuries, ruled by Turkic-Persian Muslim elite whose descendants include people such as the Mirzas. The rich state almost joined Pakistan in 1947 when India invaded and forcibly annexed it. Pakistan was too weak then to contest the occupation. Now imagine the irony: a celebrity girl emerging seventy years later from that city to marry a Pakistani?  This is not good for Indian ego.

Interestingly, many Muslim natives of the city are Pakistani citizens who live in Pakistan. Local weddings involving a bride or a groom from Pakistan are common. And this freaks out Indian authorities.   

The third symbolism that rattles India is that Muslim natives of Sania Mirza's city face religious discrimination despite India's claim to secularism. Just a few weeks before the wedding, India's majority Hindus waged pitched battles in the streets and alleys against the city's Muslim natives.  A high-profile wedding that links these Indian Muslims to Pakistan is bad influence considering the timing.

Even worse as far as timings go, on the eve of Sania's wedding with Pakistan's star, an American-Indian Muslim group slammed Indian authorities for trying to protect Hindu extremist groups during the probe into the riots.

PAKISTANI PERSPECTIVE

But these are Indian insecurities from an Indian perspective. What Pakistanis saw from their side was confirmation of India's record of being hostile to Pakistanis despite lip service to peace.

Indian visitors have never been humiliated in Pakistan in the past 63 years. Not a single incident can be cited. In contrast, a Pakistani delegation that returned from India as recently as December 2009 spoke of mistreatment. One visitor said, "They treated us like dogs. Do we treat them like this when they come here?"

In fact, thousands of Indian pilgrims visit their holy sites in Pakistan each year. Year in and year out, they are received as heroes by Pakistani authorities in an effort to send them back as ambassadors of Pakistan in India. And this has been going on for at least the past two decades.

In return, Indian small-mindedness seems to know no bounds.

In 2006, when both Pakistan and India launched a friendship train called Samjota to help citizens visit both countries, 59 Pakistanis were burned alive when the train was returning from the Indian capital to Pakistan. It turned out that Indian military intelligence officers connived with Hindu terror groups to sabotage the train. The unlucky Pakistanis believed Indian media’s – and their own Pakistani media’s – hype about peace and traveled to India never to return alive.

Deep inside, Indians are vindictive when it comes to Pakistan. Indians have been given a steady dose of anti-Pakistanism over the past 63 years and told in as many words that Pakistan is an illegal construct, somehow ‘stolen’ from India. And justice must be done. I leave it to your imagination what that justice would look like if India has its way with Pakistan.

One Indian politician went as far as accusing Mirza of betraying her country because she married a Pakistani. The poor girl and her family were so terrified she finally had to release a statement insisting she married the man and not his country.

Facing this Indian meanness, Pakistan could have made small gestures to make its displeasure known but didn’t, mostly out of incompetence since Pakistani governments are not media savvy anyway.

Pakistan could have scored a point by issuing a statement on the anti-Muslim riots in Hyderabad-Deccan as a way of getting back at India for the way they treated Pakistani sportsman Malik. But Pakistan didn’t.  What’s even more startling is that the Pakistani federal minister who was ordered by Prime Minister Gilani to travel to India to attend the famous wedding refused to meet with the aggrieved local Muslims of the city in order not to embarrass the host government.

All in all, India wasted a great chance to win the Pakistani public opinion. As for Pakistanis, the whole episode confirms what we already know about the Indian intolerance and unease when dealing with anything that has to do with Pakistan. Hopefully, this analysis will also help our friends in the world understand the psychology behind Indian intransigence in resolving problems and making peace with Pakistan.

This work by PakNationalists is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

How Military Nurseries Produced Pakistan’s ‘Democratic Warriors’

Military-led governments in Pakistan have failed in creating long term stability and fostering national identity, like the ruling party did in China. This failure is well known. But Pakistan’s destructive politics can’t end without understanding another major failure: How Pakistan’s democratic elite is really not democratic at all.

Forget about building a great country and a healthy and prosperous people, Pakistan’s political elite divides Pakistanis by language, sect and violent politics because it has nothing else to offer in exchange for getting elected. And with the new amendments to the Pakistani constitution, which strengthen family-run dictatorships within parties, there is hardly any chance that the able and the willing among 170 million Pakistanis will ever get a chance to lead their homeland.

In 2008, these politicians got themselves elected in the name of democracy. But even that credential is questionable.

Retired Lieutenant General Faiz Ali Chishti, who played a major role during the military-led government of former President Gen. Zia-ul-Haq between 1977 and 1988, gave an interesting insight earlier this week in Lahore into the relationship between failed politicians and military coups.

His remarks are important because he said several things that are new and must be noted.

FAKE DEMOCRATIC WARRIORS

Mr. Chishti said that “Several (democratic) champions became leaders while sitting in the laps of army generals.” He listed them as follows:

1. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan [Benefactor: Field Marshal Ayub Khan].

2. Nawaz Sharif, former Prime Minister of Pakistan [Benefactor: Gen. Zia-ul-Haq]

3. Altaf Hussain, the exiled British-Pakistani leader of MQM [Benefactors: Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and Gen. Pervez Musharraf]

4. Jamaat Islami [Benefactors: Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and Gen. Pervez Musharraf]

The irony is that all of them claim that Pakistan’s military should not be involved in major internal decisions when necessary but they never explained why they accepted military help in ascending to power in the first place. Interestingly, despite being discredited as failed and inept, these politicians keep getting second and third chances thanks to the military’s failure to introduce real reforms after every coup. [Also thanks to frequent US and British meddling in our politics for their own objectives. Unfortunately, the Pakistani military has so far been unable to prevent it and, under Musharraf, even took it to new heights!]

Moreover, Pakistani military has maintained an unwritten alliance with this failed political elite, always handing power back to it after every intervention without any attempt to open doors to middle and lower-class Pakistanis to participate in running their country, especially when they have proven to be more creative in taking Pakistan forward in many areas.

One example is Gen. Musharraf, who came to power with a promise to inject new faces into a stagnant system. Eight years later, he not only failed to do that but ended up restoring some of the worst failed politicians back to power as his replacement. The only credible new political face from the late Musharraf period is Member of National Assembly Marvi Memon. To be fair to her, she was a late entrant who proved her mettle on her own in the two and half years since Musharraf’s departure. With her patriotic and inclusive views, a large segment of Pakistan’s younger generation identify with her. But she stands no chance of moving up in a system designed to keep people like her from exercising real power.

THE LOOPHOLE

Mr. Chishti pointed out another irony that exposes the duplicity of the present political elite in Pakistan. An independent Election Commission is what stops military interventionists from legitimizing their rule. So if someone wants to stop future military interventions being endorsed by the country’s courts and parliaments, creating such an independent election commission is the first step. But strangely, despite all the noise over the recent constitutional amendments, called the 18th Amendment, none of the political parties pushed for an independent election commission. The reason is that an independent election commission would also enforce democracy within the parties, challenging lifetime party presidents and ‘chairpersons’.

COUP DECISION INSTITUTIONAL

He said the decision to impose military rule, or Martial Law, is never a personal decision of one man but a collective one of the Army High Command and is a result of full spectrum assessment of the state of the nation.

WHY MILITARY INTERVENES

Since a military coup is not a one-man-show and hence there is no question of personal ambition, then the right question to ask, says Mr. Chishti, is ‘Why the military intervenes?’ He suggests that tackling the reasons would reduce the possibility of such interventions.

Wise words. But they are falling on deaf ears. The mother of all ironies is that when Pakistan Army has a chief who has gone out of his way to support democracy, and even rescued it on a couple of recent occasions, Pakistan’s democratic warriors are leading the country to a grand national failure of epic proportions with their failure to perform.

Nuclear Scare In India

This is a threat that the Nuclear Security Summit 2010 in Washington ignored. Pakistan's nuclear installations are close to troubled spots. But India's nuclear and strategic assets are right in the middle of a robust Naxalite separatist insurgency. A nuclear device can be detonated any day in any Indian city by Naxalite rebels who have the will to cause mass casualties in India.

A stunning report that records recent incidents when Indian nuclear security was compromised. Click here to read the full report.

How India Gets Israel's Protection

 

When Indian filmmakers invented synchronized dancing, they never thought a day would come when it would be used against them.  Here's a hilarious song that answers a fundamental question: How does India secure Israel's protection?  The answer of course is Bollywood-style.

A Pakistani Trainer Jet For The Indian Air Force?

Here is a chance that India blew to send a strong message for peace with both Pakistan and China.  An Egyptian diplomat based in New Delhi apparently offered recently to help Indian Air Force overcome its shabby pilot training program.

According to a report by the Indian magazine Business Standard, the Egyptian official offered a novel solution: An Egyptian Air Force training crew flown from Egypt to India to train Indian pilots using Karakoram-8, the multirole trainer jointly developed by both Pakistan and China and now used by a growing list of countries, including Egypt, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Namibia, not to mention the air forces of both Pakistan and China.

Says the Indian magazine: "Since the offer was not followed up in writing, the Indian Air Force (IAF) was spared the embarrassment of having to reply."

But the Egyptian diplomat was not playing dumb. He knew what he was saying.  The Egyptians are no novices in diplomacy.  Maybe he was just hoping to make a small indirect breakthrough in India's tense relationship with both Pakistan and China.  Cairo enjoys excellent relations with Islamabad and Beijing.

It would have been a smart move had the Indian air force accepted the offer. New Delhi has close ties to Egypt and extensive military-to-military relations. So there is no question of trust deficit.  Using a trainer developed by Pakistan and China would have said a lot about how confident India is about itself.  The move would have also made financial and practical sense.  Despite India's massive military procurement program, it's pilot training record is downright embarrassing. Again, here's a quote from the same report: "... the IAF’s notoriously unreliable basic trainer, the HPT-32 Deepak, was grounded after a horrific crash that killed two experienced pilots. In 17 Deepak crashes so far, 19 pilots have died."

This move would have done good where Indian diplomacy in recent years has done little to improve relations with its two neighbors.

The list of Indian hostile messages to Pakistan and China is long [acquiring Pakistan-specific weapon systems, building Pakistan- and China-specific bases near the two borders, quietly supporting terrorism inside China in Tibet in Xinjiang and Inside Pakistan's Balochistan and in cities close to Pakistan's border with India.

The Karakoram-8, and its several recent upgraded models, is jointly developed and produced by China Nanchang Aircraft Manufacturing Corporation and Pakistan Aeronautical Complex.  The plane is called K-8 Karakorum after the mountain range that separates China and Pakistan. Although it is a trainer, the jet can be used for light air-to-ground combat roles with easy modifications. [See specifications here].

India's New Army Chief Has China In Sight

Over the past few months, the Indian army was divided in two: half supporting former army chief Gen. Kapoor, and the other half supporting Gen. Singh, then in-charge of the eastern command who succeeded this month in dislodging the army chief. Now Gen. Singh’s first task is to reunite a divided army. But that’s not all. This is an in-depth look that reveals how Gen. Singh comes with some other interesting plans.  Our friends in China must know about this one.

Read the full report here.