To Pakistan's Martyrs

Why has the US-backed Jundullah been attacking Shia mosques in Iran? To start a sectarian war.

The same thing is happening in Pakistan.

The rise in sectarian tensions from Lebanon to Pakistan after the Iraq invasion of 2003 is not all coincidental. It has taken a new more dangerous shape since America's Iraq war. It serves a purpose. It divides potential opponents of the US and provides strategic openings. Iraq has NEVER seen sectarian killings, never in its centuries-old cohabitation between Shias and Sunnis. Tensions didn't even rise after 1979 Shia Islamic revolution in Iran. The sectarian killing fields in Iraq were launched after the Americans landed there in 2003. This is an important fact: Shias and Sunnis never killed one another in Iraq before the US occupation.

At one point, even the puppet Iraqi regime caught British special ops agents dressed as sectarian killers. They agents were never able to explain what mission they were on. They were released after an extra-constitutional intervention from the top. Iraqis, Sunnis and Shias, will tell you many similar stories and recount similar incidents.

The war that the Saudis and Iranians have been fighting in Pakistan through proxy groups in the 1980s and '90s died and ended by the year 2000.

Don't confuse the recent attacks with the Saudi-Iranian proxy sectarian battles that Pakistanis witnessed in the '80s and '90s. The new attacks may have the same foot soldiers but there are new paymasters and masterminds.

What you are seeing now is new players entering the stage: Players located on the Afghan border, drawing support from inside Afghanistan, and attacking exclusively Pakistani Shias and other Pakistanis like the Ahmedis, and almost everyone else. Today, America's 'war on terror' has only one casualty: Pakistanis, by the dozens. Old cadres of sectarian groups, like SSP, and of other groups are low-level foot soldiers but the masterminds are no longer SSP and indigenous Pakistani groups. It's the new players on the Afghan border. And these new players will continue to receive money and arms and training from shadowy sources until the war racket in Afghanistan [and Pakistan] is ended for good.

All Pakistanis must be told this a hundred times: There is no sectarian clash in Pakistan but there are attempts being made to create one. The martyrs in Quetta, Karachi and Lahore over the past three days are OUR martyrs. It is important to avenge the blood of our brothers who died there by understanding the game and keeping Pakistanis united.

A Salute To Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi

Mr. Jatoi, right, in this undated file photo.

As our convoy approached the border between Iraq and Jordan, we were shocked to see the refugee camps. Egyptians, Indians, Philippinos, Sri Lankans and others were waiting for their governments in tents in the middle of a harsh and hot desert because the Jordanian government was not letting them in.

This was early September 1990.  Iraq had just invaded Kuwait.  The region was in a mess.

Imagine this: When these thousands were running after donations of food and water, Pakistanis by the thousands were the only nationality that was given immediate entry into Jordan and an impeccable treatment and arrangements after that.

Pakistani leaders rarely work like this. But it was Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi who came to the rescue of thousands of Pakistanis stranded in Kuwait and Iraq nineteen years ago.  He was just an interim Prime Minister, but he outperformed the governments of India, the Philippines, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and literally gave them a lesson in looking after their citizens abroad.

And Mr. Jatoi did it in an impressive way.

Thanks to his personal interest, thousands of Pakistanis received the kind of treatment that left the citizens of other countries in envy.

I was just 18 then.  And what I saw on that day on the Jordanian border and in the following three days made me immensely proud to be a Pakistani.

Thousands of Pakistanis were given priority treatment by border officers of the Jordanian army.  While others waited for days on the border, Pakistanis were allowed entry without hassle.

Once in Jordan, they were escorted all the way to the Jordanian capital, where a five-star accommodation awaited them in a sprawling, centrally air-conditioned complex. Families stayed for a maximum of three days before being flown on chartered Iberian Airlines flights to different cities of Pakistan. Once landed, every breadwinner in those families received a token financial gift from the Government of Pakistan as initial help.

This excellent and flawless arrangement was the work of Mr. Jatoi, a great Pakistani patriot who came from the a culturally rich part of Pakistan: Sindh.

I was one of the few or maybe the only Pakistani there who fluently spoke, read and wrote Arabic.  The Foreign Office Liaison Team picked me up to help them communicate with the Jordanians on small, day-to-day logistical issues.  I can't forget how, when a BBC crew visited the complex to meet the refugees, it refused to film because, as one of their team members said, what they saw did not look like a refugee camp. "This is a five-star hotel," he said. And it really was.

Having been born and educated in Arabic schools in the Middle East, this was the first time I heard the name Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi.

And I heard his name from the Pakistan Foreign Office Team stationed at the complex.  I was impressed at the arrangements so I asked them if this is how things were run in Pakistan.

"Not at all," laughed one of the diplomats. "This arrangement is thanks to Mr. Jatoi.  He was concerned at reports on the situation of Pakistanis stranded in the area."

A minority of pseudo 'liberals' and 'democrats' in Pakistan had the audacity to criticize Mr. Jatoi in their obituaries. This veiled criticism was focused on the fact that Mr. Jatoi accepted national duties, as in overseeing an interim government and national elections, when elected governments were removed by the Pakistani military.

I say what a lousy excuse this is to criticize a patriot like Mr. Jatoi.  As a Pakistani, I am proud of Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, who served his nation with honor. We want hundreds more like Mr. Jatoi to replace these fake democrats and corrupt politicians.

Mr. Jatori died in London this week at age 78.  He was buried in his hometown near Nawabshah.

I salute the Honorable Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, former Prime Minister of Pakistan.

May his soul rest in peace.

To Pakistanis: Italy Convicts CIA Chief

In at least two Pakistani cities, undercover US intelligence operatives have been arrested by Pakistani police. These American operatives are running an undercover operation in Pakistan that uses the cover of the US Embassy. On at least three occasions, these operatives, who presented themselves as US 'diplomats', were roaming Pakistani streets in cars with fake number plates and wearing Afghan dresses and sporting Taliban-style beards. Most importantly, these operatives were carrying sophisticated weapons that were not licensed to the US Embassy. Four such US 'diplomats' were arrested a few hours before the arrival of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Pakistan. When asked about the incident, she said she had no idea who those people were and what exactly they were doing. She was not lying. This is a standard procedure for US diplomats when US intelligence operatives get busted. Pakistani civilian and military officials have enough evidence of the illegal activities of CIA in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the American spy agency is using the help of Karzai's and India's spy outfits. Can Pakistan learn to stand for itself?

Click here to read the full story.

ALERT: Blackwater Recruiting Agents Fluent In Urdu & Punjabi For Pakistan

Report Suggests Pakistani Envoy In Washington Has Issued 360 Visas To Americans In One Month Without Consulting Islamabad


Blackwater USA is looking for mercenaries fluent in Urdu, Pakistan's national language, and Punjabi, the language spoken by natives of Pakistan's largest populated province. The US military already deploys officers and commando units manned by people fluent in Pashto, spoken in most of western Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Keeping in view the denials of the US embassy in Islamabad and the expanding American presence on Pakistani soil, these recruitments are obviously not meant for running call centers. Since Washington has unilaterally decided that Pakistan is now a 'war theater' after Iraq and Afghanistan, it is only natural that American terrorism will also be unleashed in Pakistan. Blackwater is in Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Blackwater USA has concealed its Web presence. If you type www.BlackwaterUSA.com, you will be redirected to the website of an organization called U.S. Training Center , which offers military and personal security courses. The website does not overtly say or indicate it is linked to Blackwater, but on Sept. 12 a media release was posted on the homepage defending Blackwater against accusations the private 'army' overbilled the US government for work in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.

The bigger news, however, is that 'Blackwater USA' is hiring in Pakistan. While BlackwaterUSA.com does not exist on the Web any longer, I 3an employment form on a secured page of the private security firm's website that clearly indicates the private mercenary army is hiring Urdu- and Punjabi-speaking agents. This would complement the existing Pashto-speaking agents that both Blackwater private mercenary army and its employer, the US military, have on the ground in Afghanistan and – as reports increasingly indicate – in Pakistan.

Snapshots of the screen from the page titled secure.blackwaterusa.com show that the page is part of the Blackwater Employee and Applicant Resource System (BEARS).

The snapshots shown here indicate that hiring continues as we speak for agents and for people with military training who can speak Urdu, Pakistan's national language, and Punjabi, spoken by the natives of Pakistan's largest populated province.

Obviously, agents with proficiency in the two languages will be operating in and around Pakistan since there is little utility for such agents anywhere else in the world.

This is the latest in a pile of circumstantial evidence that supports the growing concerns within the Pakistani public opinion that private US security firms are setting up shop in Pakistan, bringing to the country the same mayhem that has engulfed Iraq and Afghanistan, possibly with the permission of influential people in the Pakistani government.

A petition has been submitted to the Supreme Court of Pakistan today requesting that the government of Pakistan be ordered to explain why the US embassy in Islamabad is building a fortified embassy the size of an international airport, spread over 52 to 54 acres. The petitioner, who is a private Pakistani citizen, has accused the United States of constructing a military base in the heart of the Pakistani capital in the guise of an embassy.

On Aug. 5, PakNationalists/AhmedQuraishi.com broke the news of how a Washington-incorporated private company that calls itself an NGO and executes contractual humanitarian work for the US government in conflict zones is suspected of acting as cover for Blackwater in Peshawar.

On Jul. 27, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur [DPA] reported that residents of an upscale suburb in Peshawar have formally complained to the Pakistani government that armed private Americans were spreading fear in the area.

We also received a statement issued by Mr. Richard Snelsire, the spokesman for the US embassy in Islamabad, denying these reports:

Since 2002, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has committed more than $3.4 billion in humanitarian and development assistance to the people of Pakistan in relief, health, education, and economic development programs.

Creative Associates is one of many organizations USAID engages to deliver this assistance, which also includes the Government of Pakistan, local non-governmental, and international humanitarian institutions. This organization has no link to any international security firm, nor is it affiliated in any way with an intelligence service.

Recent allegations against USAID partners such as Creative Associates are false, and place individuals delivering humanitarian and development assistance to the people of Pakistan at risk.

Richard Snelsire

Despite these denials, the Pakistani government and the US embassy are unable to explain several incidents in Peshawar and Islamabad over the past few weeks that involved privately armed American citizens, especially accounts by private citizens confirming they have seen and interacted with these foreign agents in public places. In at least three incidents, these privately armed Americans were released by police authorities under pressure from the government despite involvement in altercations with local Pakistanis. In one case, an armed US citizen physically assaulted a Pakistani police officer and uttered obscenities against the host country.

The alarming part of this story is that the embassy of Pakistan in Washington is reported to have issued several hundred entry permits and visas to individuals without seeking clearance from the country's security departments. In one recent report, it is reported that the Pakistani ambassador issued 360 visas to US citizens in one month, sometime this year, from the ambassador's discretionary quota of visas and again without clearance from Pakistani security departments.

Who are these Americans who are arriving in Pakistan in the tens and hundreds at a time when the US embassy in Islamabad follows a strange practice where a staffer personally calls any US citizen in the United States in order to warn them about coming to Pakistan for personal reasons or pleasure, apparently because of the security situation?

From An Iraqi Widow To An American Widow

Yesterday , my dear sister !, in my dream,

I saw a cascade of tears from your eyes;


When asked about the cause of your grief,
You showed me the image of your husband.


You hurled abuses at me, as he was killed,
By a brutal terrorist in my land.


I recognized him, because he was the one,
Who, with his friend, barged into my house;


Raped my teenage daughter before our eyes.
When we resisted, they, out of dignity,


Shot her dead, and also riddled,
The chest of my husband with bullets.


As a sign of greatness of a great nation,
They showed mercy to me and my only son;


Spared us, and left with a triumphant pace.
Alas! My son was ungrateful,


In return to their benevolent gesture;
One day, he, with himself, blew them apart.


I was under the siege of emotions,
The raging inferno in my mind and heart;


Could defy the power of all the oceans,
Its flames could burn the entire world.


But your tears, shimmering like pearls,
Extinguished it, and made me ashamed.


I was unable to share your pain,
With a few drops of tears in your lap;


In a downpour, they all had been shed,
Over the bodies of my husband and daughter,


And also in the memory of my only son.
Now my eyes are stony, pallid and dry.


Your tears have generated in my soul,
A turmoil which will never be set at rest;


Unless you forgive me, as I am the mother,
Of the person who killed your husband.


To atone for my sins, and show repentance,
I declare my son ‘ a condemned terrorist ’.

 
Dr. Mustafa Kamal Sherwani, LL. D., Chairman, All India Muslim Forum
Lucknow, U.P. India.

Indian Predicament In Kashmir

Just like the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indian army is cornered in Kashmir. If a war breaks out in the region, Indian soldiers have no doubt they will be facing enemy soldiers from the front and Kashmiris gunning for their necks from back.

Here is a groundbreaking report that shows, in the language of ground realities, India's lost battle in occupied Kashmir.

The report is titled, Indian Elections In Kashmir: The Impact On Freedom.

Here is the conclusion:

"State assembly elections have been held in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir in the past and are likely to continue to be held in the future. If history is any guide, it can safely be inferred that they will neither be accepted by the people of Jammu and Kashmir as a substitute to the right to self-determination or plebiscite, nor they diminish freedom sentiments in the valley."

CLICK TO READ THE FULL REPORT HERE

McDemocracy In Iraq And Pakistan

"Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of bricks and made it a city of marble. Baghdad was another city of bricks, and a coterie of American generals turned it into a city of cement." -- Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid;

But it wasn't just a 'coterie of American generals.'

The worst culprits in America are the think-tank types in Washington and New York who believe they can sit in their cozy air-conditioned offices watching Fox and CNBC and come up with kooky ideas about shaping the politics in other nations. Read for some of them and you'd wonder how could the peoples of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan live for so many centuries without the wise and sage advice of American think-tank types.

The latest victim of American McDemocracy is Pakistan, where a nation that had Asia's best performing capital market before 2004 has been utterly destabilized by Washington in order to bring a McDemocractic government to power.

Pakistan is destined to suffer as long as it continues to allow the Americans inside Pakistan buying and cajoling politicians and public figures, while the American military messes up whatever is left of Afghanistan.

Roxana Saberi And The Am-Brit Media Lies

Since 2007, two nations – Britain and the United States – have been mounting a venomously anti-Pakistan campaign with variations on a single theme: Pakistan is falling apart, the nukes could fly around, Taliban will take over, and Pakistan needs the saviors, an Anglo-American military intervention to save the day.

The campaign has been based entirely on conjecture and insinuations that eerily match the latest U.S. plans for Pakistan. The more Washington talked about Pakistan’s double game, more ‘Pakistani Taliban’ and other shady terrorists and insurgents crossed from Afghanistan to terrorize Pakistanis and attack the military.

The Am-Brit media campaign against Pakistan is as colorful as the one run by the same Anglo-American media against Iraq before the invasion, all of course based on outright lies, doctored pictures and CIA-planted stories. None of these Am-Brit news organizations ever apologized later for becoming a tool in the hands of the CIA, the U.S. military and the U.S. government.

And just as in Iraq’s case, this campaign against Pakistan is exclusively an Am-Brit campaign, meaning that no one else is involved in running it except the Americans and the Brits. The occasional role of the Indian poodle doesn’t count. You don’t see the German media, or the Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Saudi, or any other media in any other country mounting this campaign.

It’s an Am-Brit operation. People in the military call it psy-ops, short for psychological operations.

The masterpiece in this regard was the October 2007 Newsweek cover story that decided that Pakistan and not Iraq was the most dangerous place on earth today [conveniently overlooking Iraq and Afghanistan were American and British secret ‘death squads’ were busy in murdering Iraqis.]

The latest masterpiece is BBC’s report released recently where BBC has concluded, while sitting in London, that only 38% of the NWFP province is in fact under Pakistan’s sovereign control.

Two weeks ago, it was CNN’s turn. It made the fall of Islamabad in the hands of a few terrorists the lead story for two days, raising a global scare. Then the Pakistani military strongly protested at this scare campaign which was false. That’s when the U.S. puppet Zardari government in Islamabad, and Mullen, Petraeus, Clinton, Holbrooke and the rest of the Obama admin came out to deny this and feign ignorance about the origin of these lies being feverishly peddled by the Am-Brit media.

According to BBC’s findings, a disorderly bunch of terrorists have suddenly defeated the world’s sixth largest standing army, and a professional one at that, and are now almost in control of one of the four federating Pakistani provinces.

And what was BBC’s source for this story that most Pakistanis missed in their own country? Well, 18 months of news reports filed by BBC correspondents from areas within Pakistan where terrorism incidents have occurred. BBC’s strategists concluded that this was ample proof the territory was no longer under Pakistani control.

What is the purpose of these scare stories in the Am-Brit media? Well, London and Washington have been keen to hide the massive failures in their Afghan occupation and seize the opportunity to move the war into Pakistan and punish the Pakistanis for supporting the Afghan Taliban [the real Taliban] and for not accepting the great Am-Brit wider plan of turning the Pakistani army into a local police force, contain the nuclear weapons, and allow India to become the new regional Am-Brit slave-soldier in charge of Am-Brit interests.

No one in the Am-Brit media talks about the money and weapons that these terrorists inside Pakistan are receiving from ‘someone’ in Afghanistan. This is how Pakistan has been destabilized in less than four years. Have you heard about organized terrorists armed with anti-aircraft guns killing Pakistanis and fighting the Pakistani military before 2005?

The BBC story fits in perfectly with scores of reports, op-ed pieces, statements and intensive public brainstorming on the U.S. think-tank circuit on how Pakistan’s different ethnic groups should be made to fight with each other in order to hasten the collapse of the Pakistani state.

Just to conclude with the BBC story. The BBC report ended with a statement from a correspondent in Islamabad warning that it would be inaccurate to say Pakistan has lost control of its territory because the terrorists are not an organized entity and are made up of small groups mounting hit and run attacks and so there’s no need to exaggerate.

Wow, BBC.

So after creating a stir, the report is concluded with an exit that allows for a retraction in the future.

And so the Am-Brit media lies continue. Read them with a pinch of salt next time.

P.S. Roxana Saberi, an American journalist, has just been released. While the Americans would have us think she was this poor truth seeker imprisoned by a dictatorial regime in Iran, the real truth comes out to show, again, how the Am-Brit media is a willing and ready tool of the Am-Brit intelligence and military. In 2003, Ms. Saberi, then an Iranian citizen, apparently worked in Iran as a translator in a government department that dealt with national security issues. Now, six years later, she was sent to Iran as a U.S. journalist. She worked her contacts to get hold of classified documents and was naturally going to hand them over to CIA. That's how she was arrested. Not a journalist but definitely shown as one, courtesy of one of America's 'free' media organizations for sure.

Tweet This!

I checked out Twitter, the latest online sensation. And here’s my review:

IT SUCKS.

I mean, really, who has the time to ‘follow’ ten bozos whose life revolves around, ‘Hey, just landed in Bucharest today. Great weather’ and ‘I think I’m constipated. Will see a doctor later.’

I mean, DUH!

But if you watch CNN and follow the U.S. military, you’d think Twitter is the best thing to happen to mankind since The Flintstones invested the wheel. See how CNN is feverishly marketing Twitter. Someone should tell them it’s looking silly now. They ‘insert’ Twitter into stories where this thing is completely irrelevant. And you wonder why they’re doing this. A friend of mine who is a famous anchor at CNN told me the management there is really pushing all anchors to use Twitter and shut down Facebook and other social networking accounts. Really, this is no exaggeration. The next thing we’ll hear Larry King tweeting from the toilet. I don’t event want to think about it.

So CNN’s parent company might have a commercial interest here. That’s what I said to myself. Until the US military jumped in the fray.

This is what CENTCOM did: It flew the management of Twitter to Iraq to introduce them to the Arab tribal chieftains. And then CNN came out with this big story about how big a deal this was: Twitter in Iraq?! I mean here’s the story about how America lifted Iraq from the Stone Age into the 21st Century’s Twitter Civilization! Now everyone in Iraq will live happily ever after.

And you should’ve seen this Twitter co-founder acting like this cool ‘inventor’ who is doing humanity a favor by taking out a few days out of his previous work to introduce Iraq to Twitter. [Before landing in Iraq, he was obviously busy in tweeting, ‘Guess what guys, flying to Iraq. See u in Baghdad’ and ‘We just met Abdul Mohammed. Told him about Twitter. Blown away.’

So why is CNN and the US military promoting Twitter? It’s a funny idea. Some people might like it. But, really, who cares?

Here’s what the truth about Twitter:

“Apparently more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month and pre-Oprah more than 70 percent of Twitter users failed to return to the site according to David Martin, Vice President, Nielsen Online.”

Someone should tell this to CNN. And to US military too.