Pakistan’s General Anarchy

Muhammad Hanif's article in today's New York Times:

For those who have never had to live under his regime, the general/president can come across as a rakish, daredevil figure. His résumé is impressive: here’s a man who can manage the frontline of the Western world’s war on terrorism, get rid of prime ministers at will, force his political opponents into exile and still find the time to write an autobiography. But ask the lawyers, judges, arts teachers and students behind bars about him, and one will find out he is your garden-variety dictator who, after having spent eight years in power, is asking why can’t he continue for another eight.

General Musharraf’s bond with his troops is not just ideological. Under his command Pakistan’s armed forces have become a hugely profitable empire. It’s the nation’s pre-eminent real estate dealer, it dominates the breakfast-cereal market, it runs banks and bakeries. Only last month Pakistan’s Navy, in an audacious move, set up a barbecue business on the banks of the Indus River about 400 miles away from the Arabian Sea it’s supposed to protect.

It’s a happy marriage between God and greed.

Big Brother has taken his gloves off ...

Laughable or lamentable, you decide, - but definitely readable it is. If the "emergency plus" was aimed at fighting terrorists (as Great Leader proclaimed), it has missed the bull's eye way apart. Big Brother has taken his gloves off but to whom he wanna shows "who is the boss".. As Asma Jehangir said in her message:

... the President (who has lost his marbles) said that he had to clamp down on the press and the judiciary to curb terrorism. Those he has arrested are progressive, secular minded people while the terrorists are offered negotiations and ceasefires.

Our "Defining Moment"

It's not the first (and probably not the last) "defining moment" since its birth this crisis-ridden nation is currently passing though. Three days after the imposition of emergency, all private news channels remain off air - and hundreds of lawyers, political workers are under arrest or "in-house detention". All for one reason that C-in-C (Creep-in-Chief) is unwilling to go on leave.

Pen is Funnier than Sword

Some hilarious cartoons by Khalid Bendib!

Pathetic state of apathy

Pervez Hoodbhoy and Rasul Bakhsh Rais has pointed towards the sickening apathy of Pakistani civil society against the rising tide of religious extremism and terrorism. Ayesha Siddiqa provides her diagnosis of this sorry state of the nation:

As long as our honour is secure and we are not being insulted, why get up and fight. Unfortunately, today this is the mindset of most people. Everybody wants to secure his or her own space without bothering to stand up for the other.

I am reminded of the story of a king who ordered all his subjects to bring a pail of milk and empty it into the pond in front of the castle before dawn. Next morning when the king woke up, he found the pond filled with water and no milk. Everyone thought that others would bring milk so a bucket of water would suffice. This is pure realpolitik and pragmatism. People are encouraged not to fight for norms, values and principles but to save their interests. Power is the name of the game and people are meant to respect that.

How, then, can we expect a society, which could not snub two extremely arrogant agents of the state for insulting an educationist, to stand up against terrorists that kill innocent security personnel? This is not to justify the society’s complacency but an effort to understand the sickening apathy. Both the individual and the society he lives in do not have the strength to stand up to often violent humiliation at the hands of all sorts of rogue elements.

Flawed and failed

Razi Azmi has re-appeared on the pages of Daily Times after a long time, though not on a pleasnat moment and and not for a pleasant reason:


The famous French writer Victor Hugo once said that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, then as farce. One is tempted to see all the Pakistani governments from Ayub to Musharraf, indeed from Nazimuddin to Musharraf, in this light. Only it is hard to tell which phase constitutes tragedy and which farce.


Meanwhile, Daily Times is still harping on it's "transitionist" (aka pro-Mush) tone, blaming anyone but Great Leader for imposition of "emergency".

Desperate Measures: Emergency rule declared in Pakistan

Finally an end to rumors circling around for past few days! Commando resorts to desperate measures to stick to hold on to power and declares emergency rule today. PTV's newscaster referred to him as "Chief of Army Staff"rather than "Sadr-e-mamlikat" while breaking the news of emergency. All private news channels including BBC and CNN have gone off air (Thank God, they did not terminate internet connection - as yet at least). A drowning man catching at a straw! Or a stooge flaunting to his pay masters "who is the boss" in the "most dangerous country of the world" (State Department unambiguously opposed the idea of emergency or martial law in Pakistan).

Meanwhile, I am faced with another personal emergency. Travel agent told me that I won't be able to leave for Dublin tomorrow. Instead, I have a chance to get ticket on 9th and he will give further details on Monday. Sigh!

Rape Conundrum

It was kinda shocking to know that in UK, less than 5% of reported rapes lead to conviction, not to mention that majority of sexual assaults remain unreported. Joanna Burke suggests a re-examination of masculinity as one of the possible remedies to this problem:

A politics of masculinity that focuses upon a man's body as a site of pleasure (for him and others), as opposed to an instrument of oppression and pain, demands a renewed focus on male comportment, imaginary, and agency. People discover sex: they learn its performance. Indeed, phallic masculinity represents a turning away from a complex model of pleasure, draining it (in the words of feminist Catherine Waldby) of "erotic potential in favour of its localisation in the penis, taken to be the phallus' little representative". Adopting a "good sex" model will enable men to love and be loved in more fulfilling ways.

The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy

Here is a a review of John Mueller's article "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat? The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy".

Sayonara Swat and Rawalpindi

A suicide bomb blast near Pakistan Army's General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi killed seven people and injured 11 others . I agree with Anjum Niaz's view in today's The News that while His Enlightened Moderation should get his due share of criticism, we should allow other actors in this fatal game to beat the rap under the guise of "anti-Mush"or "anti-imperlialist/US" - as these are the actors who are (unfortunately) likely to outlive Mush and bound to stay with us long after Mush is gone.


it is time we moved beyond the spectre of a lame-duck general and apportion equally the blame on others who with their unfettered greed have eviscerated the law and ruled over us as if Pakistan was their personal fiefdom.

Why have we fallen in a Musharraf rut? We rarely question the malfeasance of the mullah, the military and bureaucracy that have kept the majority of 170 million Pakistanis poor, illiterate, unskilled, and chained to medieval religious beliefs that over time have ripened into rabid faith often exhibiting itself in the worst of inhuman practices like suicide bombing, beheading, lashing, honour killing, slaughtering and stoning to death of helpless victims.

Where is the nazim? Where is the police head? Where is the military commander? Probably cooling their heels in some temperature-controlled, crony-infested, delicacies-laden 'office' while Stone-Age brutalities get daily enacted in their own backyard. And what are the politicians doing? Plotting who the next caretaker prime minister will be and who will be his/her cabinet of chamchas.

Pity the nation

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion;

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave;

That eats a bread it does not harvest;

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero;

Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dreams, yet submits in its awakening;

Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral; That boasts not except among its ruins;

Pity the nation that will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block;

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking;

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpeting again;

Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
- Khalil Gibran

Mullahs - alive and kicking

Yesterday, Sheikh Rashid said in a press conference to the effect of, "Do not underestimate Fazalur Rehman. He has a big role to play".

Rashid's comments side apart, Fazl is indeed making smart moves and playing his cards very wisely, much to the chagrin of "moderates". From today's editorial of Daily Times:



Second Editorial: MMA returns from the brink?

After an explosion of mutual criticism, the two clashing Pushtun leaders of the clerical alliance Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Maulana Fazlur Rehman, have met and, if reports are to be credited, made up. The Maulana went and asked after Qazi Sahib at his home where the latter was recovering from an illness. Apparently all is mutually forgiven, the Maulana’s dilly-dallying over dissolution of the Peshawar Assembly and Qazi Sahib’s “stab in the back” through vacation of the same assembly and destruction of JUIF’s majority there.

One has to first note the sophistication of conduct among the clerical leaders as opposed to the rough and tumble of the non-clerical leaders of the political parties. Most TV discussions are unwatchable because of the way the politicians shout at each other, exchanging defamations that would put to shame any “bhaand” (the village wit known for his foul tongue) of the lower order. One also has to appreciate the clerical realisation after 2002 that they can make their political presence felt only by sinking their “unbridgeable” confessional differences. The roles have reversed: there was a time when mainstream politicians used to make fun of the clerics for not “praying together”; now we have a complete lack of consensus among the politicians.

Taliban in Pakistan's Wild Wild West

Jason Burke writes in The Observer about recent developments in Pakistan's "Wild Wild West".

Across an area that stretches through Pakistani cities such as Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi, through Kabul and Kandahar, to remote villages and Nato bases in southern Afghanistan, it is possible to unpick the intricate detail of the battle for the strategic centre of the War on Terror. What emerges is a picture not of a single movement or insurgency called 'the Taliban', but of a new state without formal borders or even a name, a state that is currently nothing more than a chaotic confederation of warlords' fiefdoms spanning one of the most critical parts of the world and with the potential to escalate into a very real presence - with devastating consequences for global security.

That's the region where all players suffer from lack of certainty about their borders, enemies, and strategies. The only faction that seems to have a clear vision of all that is - Taliban.

According to Brigadier Shah, the Pakistani army is 'currently fighting blindfold', and western intelligence agencies admit a 'lack of visibility' in the tribal areas.

Reminds me of Bertrand Russell, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt".

Zardari has a point

An interesting, though not necessarily a convincing take on Oct. 18 bomb blast:

While Baitullah Mehsud may still try to kill Benazir and may even decide to do it with a bomb, he is likely to come forth and own the deed. So who has been going about exploding anonymous bombs in Pakistan in the name of terrorists, and in the latest instance, who is behind the Karachi attempt?

Let’s venture a guess. It is quite clear that Benazir’s return makes none of the power players in Pakistani politics happy except the United States and perhaps also General Musharraf, who, though unhappily, might have had the sense to think that his own survival now depends on this unholy alliance with Benazir. He would have had this sense because he would know, one hopes, that there is quite clearly a part of the establishment — a powerful part — which has consistently tried to destabilise him for some time now.

The Chief Justice episode and its subsequent handling was not the result of incompetence on the part of the government, because no government, not even this one, can be so horribly incompetent. The police attacks on lawyers in Lahore two days in a row, the attack on TV channels, the manhandling of the Chief Justice, the bomb blast in Islamabad before the Chief Justice’s address to the bar and the May 12 incidents in Karachi were not just instances of ‘mishandling’.

Someone was surely up to something and this someone is obviously part of a setup, if not the setup itself, that has the wherewithal to make all this happen. Earlier on, while the “deal” between Musharraf and Benazir was being discussed and had not yet been finalised, these people would have had to eliminate only Musharraf from the scene. Now, however, there is another party: Benazir.

These people, with end goals that are perhaps not very different from those of the ‘fundamentalist terrorists’, are obviously hard at work. But while they may or may not be able to succeed, for all their campaign in the press about security threats from ‘terrorists’, it seems that Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto and this writer will remain unconvinced.

It is our war

And sadly we seem to be on retreat! Hoodbhoy is spot on that most Pakistanis are not die-hard Islamists but by keeping their mouths shut in the wake of creeping Talibanization, they end up playing into the hands of these dreadful Islamists.


An overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s citizens do not want harsh strictures imposed on their personal liberties. They do not want enslavement of their women, their forced confinement in the burqa, or for them to be denied the right to education. Instead, they want a decent life for themselves and their children. They disapprove of Islam being used as a cover for tribal primitivism. But there is little protest.

We must understand this. Why is there no mass movement to confront the extremist Taliban of Miramhah and Waziristan, or the violence-preaching extremist mullah in Mingora, Lahore or Islamabad? This is because ordinary people lack the means and institutions to understand, organise, and express their values and aspirations. We do not yet have the democratic institutions that can give politics meaning for ordinary people. Depoliticising the country over the decades has led to paying this heavy price.


As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Bloodshed in Karachi

Everyday some bad news awaiting for the mere mortals of "land of the pure". No need to go to Islamic Emirate of South Waziristan to see the "writ of state" in tatters. "Daughter of the East" arrived at Karachi today after cutting a "deal" with His Enlightened Moderation and tow bomb blasts on her procession killed 139 and injured 550 others. Conspiracy theories and blame games are in the air (not unexpected in a polarized polity like Pakistan), though the involvement of suicide bomber points finger to the jihadist connection. As is the case in Pakistan, we may never know. Meanwhile, sorrow and grief for many !!

Whose "un-professionalism"?

Commando-in-Chief has blamed the captured soldiers for acting "unprofessionally". Arguably they did, following the footsteps of their C-in-C.

Meanwhile, a brief insight into the sectarian paranoi of de-facto runners of de-facto Islamic Emirate of South Waziristan.

He and Mahmood are convinced that if opposition leader Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan in a power-sharing deal with President Musharraf, this pro-Americanism will get stronger.

"She is actually a Shia, so what else can we expect," he says.

This anti-Shia resentment is palpable.

In early August, Baitullah Mehsud's militants slaughtered a captured Shia soldier by cutting off his head.

And the way they like to execute the captives:

One militant, Faisal, said "cutting off the head is the best and most humane way to kill".

"When the head is removed from the body the soul is immediately released. Whereas when you hang a person, the soul has to struggle to escape from the mouth.

"If we want to punish someone, we cut his head from the back of the neck, instead of the throat," says Faisal.

"That is very painful and its takes a long time to die."

One of the group, we are told, has decapitated 53 men.

Fatah's 'morality police'

Using piety as an alternative to good and transparent govenance has been a time-tested formula in the lands of Islam. Fatah is simply following the fad. However, as in rest of the Muslim world, the idea of beating the Islamists on their home ground is more likely to boomerang on "non-Islamist moralists".


The new Palestinian Authority (PA) outfit's mission has been to bust anyone caught violating the fast during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month ending this week. That means potential arrests and jail time for simply chewing gum.

Although the enforcement of Ramadan customs is common in the Arab world, this is the first time the PA has instructed police to look for offenders. It's a move seen here as an effort by Fatah to compete with Hamas – seen by many Palestinians as the more pious and less corrupt Palestinian faction – for the hearts and minds of West Bankers.

Cleric stops opposing polio vaccination

Personal grief leads to restoration of sanity. A living case of that:

PESHAWAR: Maulana Merajuddin, an Afghan cleric living in Pakistan, stopped opposing the use of polio drops after his own child fell prey to the crippling disease – the first ever polio case detected in Khyber Agency, in January 2007.

Mirajuddin, who lives in the Mastak area of Bara tehsil, told Daily Times that his two-year-old son Gul Khan was paralysed in January 2007, and doctors at the Jamrud Civil Hospital told him that his son had fallen victim to polio. “I made a mistake by opposing the visit of a polio-vaccination team to my village. I was impressed by the maulvis’ propaganda,” he recalled, and said polio had paralysed his son and made him a burden on his family forever.

“My child is suffering from paralysis. We spent a lot of money and time but could not find signs of recovery,” he said.

A majority of clerics in the NWFP and FATA oppose the polio immunisation campaign. Maulana Fazlullah of Swat and Haji Namdar, head of hardline organisation Amer Bilmaroof Wa Nahi Anilmunkar in Bara tehsil of Khyber Agency, have often asked locals to boycott polio immunisation campaigns through their illegal radio stations. They say polio vaccines make children infertile and that the vaccination is a Western attempt to curtail the growing population of the Muslim world. Following directions from religious leaders, a number of people refused polio drops for their children and banned the entry of polio campaigners to their areas in FATA and NWFP. “Now I am sure that there are no infertility elements in the polio vaccine as a Muslim doctor has made it clear to me,” Mirajuddin said.

Eid Gifts

Charity begins at home. Ministry of Population tries to test this lesson. :)

ISLAMABAD: Senators and MNAs received a unique gift of 100 condoms each on the eve of Eidul Fitar from the Ministry of Population in a bid to encourage population control at the top level.

“Yes, the condom packs have been distributed among the male parliamentarians. Each MP has been gifted a pack of condoms containing 100 condoms,” said an official of the ministry. The distribution of condoms has enraged some opposition MNAs, who have taken it as an insult, and they have decided to take up the matter with National Assembly Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain.

“I will take up the issue with the speaker and move a privilege motion if need be. We are all educated people and know the benefits of contraceptives, but this move is meant to humiliate the MPs,” said a PPP MNA, who requested not to be named. He said that perhaps such “stupid acts” were the government’s way of showing the world its “moderate face”.