Pakistan-Afghanistan Relations: The Choice Between Alliance and Acrimony

Re: # 164

mohar,

...... i hate to burst your bubble, but i really can`t imagine any pakistani - not even the most morally decrepit - trying to pass himself off as an indian .............when my two girls fight and run out of the usual derogatory epithets like creep, butt-head, freak, zit, dweeb, witch and brittany, the ultimate insult is always, ``you look like an indian!``.............at this point the cussee starts crying and the cussor walks away triumpahtly ............

#164 by mohar11 on January 1, 2007 10:32am PT

The pakis were down with this when the taliban was doing the killing..now watch them come out from under their rocks and fake outrage..when the taliban was in power, the pakis were busy writing letters and making the case for the world to accept the ``ground realities`` and recognize the taliban government...

what goes around, comes around...

http://www.rawa.org/na-killings.htm

Mohammed arrived at Qala Zeini about 7 that evening. Several other container trucks were already waiting inside the fort. So were about 150 soldiers, all Afghans. At about 9, the prisoners—a mix of Afghans, Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens—arrived from Yerganak in open trucks and pickups. Soldiers ordered the prisoners down from the trucks and stripped them of their turbans, caps and vests. Then they herded the captives into the containers, as many as 200 to a truck. The fighters realized they were not going home, as promised. “F—k Shamuk Naseri,” one driver recalls a prisoner’s screaming. “He betrayed us.” The doors of the container trucks were locked.

The prisoners probably realized their fate. “Death by container” has been a cheap means of mass murder used by both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance for at —least five years. Abandoned freight containers—international standard size, 40 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet—litter the roads of Afghanistan, rusting reminders of the many tons of aid that have poured into the country over the past 20 years. It was reputedly a savage Uzbek general named Malik Pahlawan who first saw the container’s potential as a killing machine in 1997. After a Taliban assault on Mazar-e Sharif had been repulsed, Pahlawan—according to a subsequent U.N. report—killed some 1,250 Taliban by leaving them in containers in the desert sun. When the containers were opened, it was found the inmates had been grilled black. When the Taliban took Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, they in turn killed several hundred enemies in thesame fashion.

$750 FOR AN AIR HOLE

The following day, Nov. 30, a fresh convoy of seven trucks arrived at Sheberghan. The day after, Dec. 1, brought a third convoy—also seven trucks. NEWSWEEK has traced drivers from both later convoys. Their recollections are that most of those containers contained many dead bodies. But not all. The inmates of one truck in those convoys passed about 45,000 Pakistani rupees (about $750) to the driver through a crack in the floor as a bribe to cut air holes and spray in water through a hose. All 150 inmates survived. In at least one container, the prisoners themselves managed to rip holes in the wooden floor, and all of them survived.

Abdul, a 28-year-old pashtun, is one who lived. NEWSWEEK interviewed him in Sheberghan prison. He recalls that his container was packed to the breaking point. After nearly 24 hours without water, Abdul says, the prisoners were so desperate with thirst that they began licking the sweat off each other’s bodies. Some prisoners began to lose their reason and started biting those around them. Abdul’s was one of the containers in the third convoy to Sheberghan: by the time they reached the prison, he says, only 20 to 30 in his container were alive.

PACKED ‘LIKE CATTLE’

For some, the agony in the containers was intensified because they were tied up. This appears to have been a fate reserved for Pakistani—and perhaps other non-Afghan—prisoners. Mahmood, 20, says he surrendered at Konduz along with 1,500 other Pakistanis. All were bound hand and foot either with their own turbans or with strips ripped from their clothing, he says. Then they were packed in container trucks “like cattle,” he says. He reckons that about 100 people died in his container.

Coming back to Paki-Afgan relations: the other day I was watching ``road to gitmo`` movie... a bunch of brit pakis were in wrong place at wrong time and got their a$$es transported to Gitmo....

It showed how much afgans hate you pakis... Funny part was when their afgan captors ask for their names - the brit-paki gives his false name as ``Ramesh``... when chips are down, pakis always remember grandpa gopinath... :)

Re: # 161

mohar,

....... stop bothering maulana masadi - he is an armchair jihadi who fights his battles in lululand ........ he is not the type to go and sit in a cave with smelly bearded men of dubious sexual orientation and eat scorpions and termites - he is used to cheese supplied by usda .......... all he wants is tenure at prarie view a&m so that he can continue to rant and rave against the american elite, zionists, ahmedis, pigs and hindoos ............

#160 masadi: better glitter and no substance, than diatribes mixed with lies and insults and no substance. :-)

Re: # 157 masadi

indigineously staffed US occupation force ?? LOL... ha ha...

nevertheless - are you ready to fight the indigineously staffed occupation forces?... that will lead to civil war, you know....

mirasi-khan quoting Khalid Hassan <<< Conspiracy as a cause of events is a constant in Pakistan. The theory is packaged in a paradigm that can be slapped on any situation. In other societies conspiracy theories are marginal; in Pakistan they are mainstream >>>

A most ignorant and illiterate way to start any article. One wonders what ``research`` KH or Qadeer have done to arrive at that conclusion. Then one only needs to look at the paranoid atmosphere that the US elite have created all through their farcial war with communism and now with the ``Islamists`` to confirm that nobody but nobody gets more ``mainstream`` in conspiracy mongering than US society, as it dominates the media airwaves around the globe and dictates its agenda. Qadeer, judging by this article is a third rate, ``old wives tale`` spewing social scientist if at all. It is also no secret or conspiracy that the CIA sets up propaganda outfits to spew just such nonsense and the source from which mirasi khan is quoting quite possibly is one of their such outfits, like ``radio free Iraq``.

Glitter but no substance.....as usual

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mohar writes <<< masadi - talk to me.... are you ready to fight your own military? >>>

It is not our ``own`` military, it is an indigineously staffed US occupation force.

With due refrence to Khalid, he is better off writing on onions. He has chosen to seek pastures in a greener land rather than rough it here with his social capital.

1. Individuals in Pakistan like most countries in South Asia have very little influence on what the state does. In the Civil Society, the state occupies the major space and therefore is logically blamed for all the bad policies, corruption, inertia etc. There is very little left to the civic bodies to formulate and implement.

2. Nation States have more than often thrived on conspiracy theories. The Bay of Pigs, Bomber and Missile Gap are the few cases in point. The most recent is the Clash of Civilisations. The theme has become propriety of the commerer and anyone who has not even read it or its criticim, feels qualified to comment and endorse it. The present insatbility that engulfs the Muslim Ummah reinforces this perception.

3. Qadeer appears to be just another psuedo across the Atlantic with a mis directed pea shooter.

4. I wish BalluKhan can subsatiate this study with some good primary sources and research material.

5. For a change

Jheerios

POSTCARD USA: Ah! the Pakistani mindset! —Khalid Hasan

Conspiracy as a cause of events is a constant in Pakistan. The theory is packaged in a paradigm that can be slapped on any situation. In other societies conspiracy theories are marginal; in Pakistan they are mainstream

Finally, somebody has worked out as to what ails Pakistanis. The Columbus of this effort is Mohammad Abdul Qadeer, professor emeritus at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen’ University, Kingston, Canada. He lives in Toronto. I suppose you need to be physically at a distance from what you are observing to get its contours right. When you are close, you can’t see the wood for the trees.

Qadeer, who once wrote a book on Lahore from a sociologist’s and urban planner’s point of view, when told that Pakistan had won a hard-fought Security Council seat, beating India, observed, “What Pakistan needs is not a seat on the Security Council but more public toilets in Lahore.” He has just published a book in London on Pakistan and what our social strengths and foibles are. He has devoted a section of the work to the Pakistani mindset and he seems to have got it right.

Qadeer writes that the Pakistani way of perceiving and apprehending reality has been forged in the crucible of an agrarian economy and caste-clan relations. While being an evolving structure of many different parts, the Pakistani mindset is marked by a set of persistent assumptions. We tend to personalise the impersonal. Whether the event to be explained is a flood, poverty, a child’s truancy or marital unhappiness, it is attributed to someone else’s manipulation, malevolent intentions — and when it is something positive — to outside goodwill. The prime mover of every event is believed to be a person. Social or economic processes and even physical forces play a secondary role in the standard Pakistani narrative.

The popular explanation, Qadeer writes, for the break-up of Pakistan in 1971 is Yahya’s, Mujib’s and/or Bhutto’s treachery. A more institutional explanation ends up blaming the Bengalis, India and/or the United States. Pakistanis studying at American universities have a standard explanation if they fail a course. “My professor was prejudiced because I am a Muslim or because I was a person of colour.” And if the student scores a success, it is attributed to his unassailable intellectual and academic superiority. In Pakistan, every occurrence has to have a human agent behind it. Over time, this has been reinforced by the corruption, nepotism and capriciousness of the state. Everyday life is based on ad hoc decisions and personalised dealings. This manifests itself in blaming others and weaving conspiracy theories.

Blaming others, Qadeer argues, has been burnished into a philosophy. He offers examples. The Pakistan Engineers Association blamed foreign consultants and the WAPDA chief for the Tarbela Dam’s cracks. Zionists and Hindus were blamed for breaking up Pakistan, ‘the citadel of Islam’. Terrorism and violence when it first occurred in Karachi was seen as the work of ‘the hidden hand’. NGOs are viewed as engaged in corrupting Pakistani women. If an employee fails to get promoted, it is attributed to the stronger connections of the person who did get promoted. It can also be the boss’s ethnic prejudice.

Qadeer writes that “from blaming others to believing in active plotting by enemies, imagined or real, is a short step. The Pakistani mindset is predisposed to presume conspiracy as the driving force of many events.” The roster of conspiring agents varies with the ideological disposition of the proponent and with the political or social tenor of times. In the 1960s, it was India, the communists and the CIA who were the plotters. The Jews and Israelis were added to the list after the 1967 war. Bhutto in his waning days proclaimed that the Americans had conspired to punish him for his friendship with China and for his fathering of the ‘Islamic’ bomb.

In the 1980s with the Soviets in Afghanistan, they were seen as primarily responsible for the turmoil in Pakistan. The Afghan ‘jihad’ spun out a new strain of conspiracy theories that have morphed into the militant Islamist creed of America, “the perpetrator of the clash of civilisations” and the leader of the infidels. The Ahmadis were blamed for most of the problems in Pakistan’s early days. Rival sects of Deobandis and Barelvis have blamed each other for Pakistan’s sectarian strife.

Qadeer points out that one person’s conspirator is the victim for the other side. Conspiracy as a cause of events is a constant. The theory is packaged in a paradigm that can be slapped on any situation. In other societies conspiracy theories are marginal; in Pakistan they are mainstream. Responsible people propound them and school textbooks offer them as historical truths. Then there is the Pakistani doublethink. The West is portrayed as immoral and yet almost everyone wishes to migrate to the West.

Road traffic in Pakistan is another example of doublethink. Drivers curse others for breaking the rules, yet routinely run red lights, drive on the wrong side of the road or tailgate. The archetype of the Mard-e-Mujahid or the Holy Warrior is embedded in the Pakistani psyche. Pakistanis also believe that given the right connections, anything can be fixed. The pursuit of the ‘fix’ feeds back on the state, making it all the more arbitrary. The ‘Dubai challo’ culture is strong and underscores Pakistani enterprise and the desire to pursue success and advancement in life. The Pakistani diaspora continues to grow.

Pakistanis, Qadeer notes, are verbose. Most people make speeches rather than ask questions. He ends by quoting that superb intellectual Eqbal Ahmed who wrote on the 50th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence, “The most striking feature of our national life has been the equanimity with which our elite has experienced disasters. We are consumed by appetites of life and devoid of moral instincts.”

And it will be a bold man indeed who will speak after Eqbal Ahmed has spoken.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net

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#151 by HP

LOL....

But seriously, there is a major difference between these comedians.

All the children of the world seem to love Santa and stand in line to take their pictures with him at the local mall. Mullahs, Maulanas and Sadhus however scare the bejesus out of the little ones. Mullahs and Maulanas seriously need to crawl out of their 7th century caves to discover the benefit of toothpaste and mouthwash. Sadhus however, well, may I suggest carwash ....

Re: # 145

urstruly,

...... you have nice legs !

masadi - talk to me.... are you ready to fight your own military?

Hey Urstruly,

Seems like both father and the son in that picture have poor luck with the law enforcement......
Don`t despair... here is Santa for you...


Along with another religious comedian known as Sadhu....