Ignore Guardian's Claim Of 'Fake' India WikiLeaks

The Guardian newspaper is claiming this report is 'fake'. Here is why you should disregard Guardian's claim for being biased:

WikiLeaks is not saying this. UK's Guardian newspaper is. It's one of 4 or 5 newspapers that have been selectively releasing the Wiki cables. About 1,200 have been released so far out of 251,000 or so. Guardian and others have manipulated the leaks to release material that supports US policy on Pakistan, specifically on Pakistani nukes and Pakistani policy on Afghanistan, India and Kashmir.

This selective approach was not limited to Pakistan. It extended to countries such as Russia and China, in addition to Pakistan, countries with whom US foreign policy is at odds.

WikiLeaks handed over the entire stash of cables to these 4 or 5 newspapers. What these papers did is to hold off everything and target these few countries in a surprising overlap with US objectives.

So the good work of WikiLeaks has been hijacked by these newspapers, including the Guardian.

Now there is this story in the Pakistani media and The Guardian is horrified that there is someone else practicing manipulation besides them.

Substantial parts of the story in Pakistani media is correct. It's only that The Guardian and the other newspapers are misleading the world public opinion by a selective focus on the things they want from WikiLeaks cables.

WikiLeaks did a good job of exposing US bully diplomacy, and here comes NYT, Guardian and 2 or 3 other 'partner' newspapers of WikiLeaks to selectively release the material to suit US policy objectives.

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.

Naveen And Olmert

This comes a couple of weeks late because of the pressing situation in and around Pakistan. The Kazakh government hosted the annual Eurasia Media Forum in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan.

This media forum is fascinating mainly because it is not a western [read 'British-American'] take on international issues. The Kazakh forum approaches the issues from a wider, internationalist perspective. This means, for example, that the war in Georgia last year was debated from both the Russian and the western angles instead of just the Georgian perspective that was heavily promoted by the American and the British media.

So it was refreshing to watch Naveen Naqvi, a Pakistani journalist who works for Dawn News, give a tough time to the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as she interviewed him via a satellite link. At least twice Mr. Olmert paused, appeared at a loss for words, and repeated twice smilingly, 'You are a smart, you are smart.'

Mr. Olmert couldn't stop himself from trying to soften Naveen by appealing to her ego. He kept sending subtle flirty signals and at one point expressed the desire to meet Naveen and have tea with her. But the beautiful and tough Pakistani lady wouldn't budge. Click below to see a clip of the event from my cell phone. The quality is not good but the entire Naveen-Olmert interaction will be posted at the PakNationalists Channel on Youtube very soon.

The debate over Georgia was itself very fascinating. Alexey Nikolov [pictured on this page with me and the Leonardo DiCaprio lookalike] who is the deputy editor of Russia Today television network, handed to me a DVD that showed how footage of Russian tanks filmed by one of his cameramen was used out of context by CNN as evidence that Russian forces were invading Georgia.

I was invited to speak as a panelist on media and blogs. But fun started when a senior official from OSCE, which is kind of an offshoot of NATO countries in Eurasia, began his remarks with a pressure tactic against the host government. The Rep almost condemned a bill that the Kazakh parliament is debating on regulating political blogging. My response turned the whole session into a trial of western interference in other nation's domestic issues. My argument was simple: The Americans and the Brits [The Am-Brits] destabilized Pakistan through interference in our local politics. They shouldn't be allowed to do the same to Kazakhstan. [Click here to check out clips from the session. The sound quality is low and the full version will be posted soon.]

The Leorardo DiCaprio lookalike [real name Ruslan Zhemkov] is a close aide to Dr. Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of the Kazakh president and a stateswoman in her own right. Zalmay Khalilzad and Richard Holbrooke both call him Leonardo during their frequent trips to Kazakhstan. Those frequent trips are in themselves an interesting subject of a new column I'll be writing shortly.

I leave you here with a photo with Dr. Dariga Nazabayeva, daughter of the President, and Alex Kogen, a journalist from Israel.