The Mumbai Terror Apologists

Re: # 496
JAY...
"...each volume of Gandhi’s collected works can be bought for as little as Rs25 (free online), while each volume of Jinnah’s is between Rs2,500 and Rs4,750. It is surprising the Pakistan government does not subsidise the publications of its founder, as India does the publications of its early leaders...."
Pakistan's real founder is the other Muhammod (of 7 century arabia)...

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Re: # 533

There is nothing in Hinduism that encourages such killing, on the contrary everything discourages such behaviour.
The Koran on the other hand encourages the killing of infedels and kaffirs.The Koran encourages the Jihadi to kill the enemies of Islam with 72 Virgins, 26 boys and all the food and wine one could consume.. This is taught openly at Madressas.

What educated person would follow such dogma steeped in hate nd murder, not to mention pathetic treatment of womem

After reading what that self confessed wife beater Munir Akram says, I really think, it is in India's interest to ensure Pakiland dies slowly and horribly. It is already infected and instead of striking at it, we should quarantine it. I believe now that India should invest heavily into Internal security as well as go all out and get Baluchistan burning.

I also think we should take on the Jihaadis. Let them come and strike in India if they can. Each strike will drive a fresh nail in Pakistan's coffin.

#520 Posted by jayp

jayp,

However much you deceptive and murderous Hindus try, you cannot pull the wool over the eyes of the all-seeing Muslim public. It is very obvious what's going on. Bollywood extras, dressed up as "Islamic terrorists" (the very phrase is a laughable contradiction in terms! - just ask Masadi), are killing Indians under the direction and supervision of RAW, RSS, BJP etc.

And "helpless" and innocent Muslims in India and Pakiland get the blame!

No wonder that Muslims have to resort to "jihad" to counter this kind of evil!

#525 by SanityNow

It is despicable that biased writers like this Gautier guy are allowed to pick up a pen. If Muslims had their way, he would not be able to spread his lies.

Contrary to what he writes, Hindus are the true terrorists, while Muslims are merely trying to survive in peace and harmony with everyone. Ask Tahmed or Masadi if you don't believe me.

Such nonsense! Despicable!

#531 Posted by kcs

[When Muslims feel bad about terms such as "islamic terror" being used to tarnish their image...]

So true. It is very unfair to use the term "islamic terror" to tarnish the shining image of the Muslims.

Don't worry, kcs, the non-muslim world will one day admit to it's evil ways and be forced to publicly declare that Islam is all about peace, harmony, brotherhood and justice.

Eklavya,

Agree. I know and appreciate the way you think and see things. Unfortunately, not everyone will look at it that way.

When Muslims feel bad about terms such as "islamic terror" being used to tarnish their image, and take pains to correct the world's perception, there is nothing wrong in objecting to the use of terms that greatly exaggerate the wrongdoings of some unknown "Hindu leader" to create similar perceptions about Hindus.

Also, in India, it is very easy for anyone to self-proclaim himself or herself as a sadhu or saadhvi or swami and gain a decent following. That means nothing.

Happy new year to everyone!

-----------

kcs, why should it matter if most Hindus have not heard of the man. If he is a Hindu leader with some following among Hindus, then he is a Hindu leader, and should be identified as such.

Looks like Pranab Mukherjee got fed up with the daily "de-escalate!!" shouts from Pak :-)

http://www.dawn.com/2008/12/31/top2.htm

Also, some good news to herald the new year:

http://www.dawn.com/2008/12/31/top13.htm (Dayanand Pandey - so called "Hindu leader" whom 99.9% of Hindus had never heard of until he made the news with his indictment in the Malegaon blasts - confesses to his role in the blasts)

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Lashkar_commander_admits_hand_in_2 611/articleshow/3920987.cms (I can't believe he did that!!)

Enjoy! Wish everyone a happy and fruitful New Year!

Happy new year simply61 ( and others).

My very best wishes to Okla and Masadi and PeonOftheWest and Hamidm and everyone else. And thanks for the laughs in 2008.

Happy New Year to all fellow Chowkies.

Special wishes to my good friends Arjun, Harimau, VRV & Masadi.

May the year 2009 be a year of change, of new mindsets, of a fresh approach, of less negativity, of inculcating some respect for the intellect of the fellow man, in general of a new way of looking at life.

And to all the rest of us, the "peons of the west", "dimwits" and "bhaands", "rat droppings", "morons", as well as the "evil elite" -- May we all have a happy new year too.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Re: # 523
Publius ji and all the other Chowk walas,Happy New Year to all of you.Cheers and looking forward to more garma garam discussions on the site in 2009.

Of course simply61 jee. This looks like an extended discussion anayway. Take your time , as you ought to.

Re: # 517Arrey itne sarey article padne ko bhej diye aapne.Time to lagega na to read and then will react.OK?

Re: # 518

The munir guy and all other pakistanis conveniently forget that hi profile paki jihadis come to india. The LET leader asghar was arrested in india and was released after the pakis hijacked a plane to afghanistan.

The present mumbai mob also were planning to get the pakis in indian jails released.

4) The latest allegation implicating a so-called soldier of the Pakistan Army and two others in plans to attack targets in occupied Kashmir has been shown by the ISPR to be a lie (Dec 24). It turned out that he had deserted the army over two years back and the unit he is alleged to belong to is not even deployed in Azad Kashmir.

//the above is from dawn of today. India arrests a paki soldier and now they say that he was a deserter. Or rather deployed form the paki army as jihadist to india.

No one seem to recall the afghan hijacking incident, all of those pakistanis released by the hijackers have gone on to become heros in pakistan.

Re: # 518

The central premise of teh article is wrong. Mumbai attack has no links to kashmir, it is done by kashmir taliban at the guidanceof alquida.

It is an attack on the west and the jews and indians got killed inadvertantly. The targetting of the jews in india is significant.

This is classic alquida isi operation of global implications. No demands made, just slaughterer the jews and westerners.

simply61, the following the gives an honest picture of the Pakistani view. Apologies for the long c&P but it is a good piece.

Monday, December 29, 2008

The India-Pakistan challenge —Munir Akram

Despite Western media prognostication, there is no possibility of an extremist or jihadi government assuming office in Islamabad. Neither the Pakistani electorate nor the Pakistan Army would accept this

The India-Pakistan confrontation following the Mumbai attacks is the fourth such crisis in the last two decades. While India says it has provided enough evidence to Pakistan, Islamabad says what it has been given cannot be taken to a court of law for prosecution. Also, there is still no solid evidence that the Mumbai attacks were planned by a Pakistani group; or that the attackers were all Pakistanis. The audio recording of one of the attackers, available online, includes the use of Hindi words not in the Pakistani lexicon.

There is a strong sense in Pakistan that the Indian government’s allegations are designed to deflect attention away from India’s own security lapses, to safeguard against erosion of electoral support for the ruling party and to utilise the crisis to further de-legitimise the Kashmiri insurgency.

Western support for India’s largely unsubstantiated allegations has encouraged Indian hawks advocating military actions against Pakistan, especially airstrikes against alleged jihadi training camps. They see the continuing US Predator strikes against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan’s Western frontier as the example and precedent. But India is not the US and drone strikes have a more complex configuration.

No Pakistan government can acquiesce in such Indian strikes. As the Pakistan army chief has warned, any Indian attack will invite “a befitting response�. During the previous three crises, Pentagon game planners reportedly reached the conclusion that an India-Pakistan conflict is likely to escalate rapidly, including possibly to the nuclear level. Hopefully, as in 2002, the present Indian government will also reach the same conclusion and not allow the hawks to propel it into creating a South Asian catastrophe.

An Indian military strike, and consequent Indo-Pakistan conflict, would also imply the immediate termination of Pakistan’s cooperation with the US and NATO regarding Afghanistan. The use of the Pakistani airbase at Jacobabad; the NATO supply convoys through Pakistan to Afghanistan; intelligence cooperation on Al Qaeda and Taliban operations; the Pakistani military deployments and operations against Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the western frontier, would all end abruptly.

This is all the more likely because Pakistan’s collaboration with the US-NATO “war in Afghanistan� is highly unpopular in Pakistan and seen as the principal cause of the recent terrorist attacks on security and civilian targets within Pakistan.

Nor can President-elect Obama or New York Times editorials convince the vast majority of Pakistanis that the Taliban, not India, is the real enemy.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars. Indian military intervention dismembered Pakistan in 1971. India continues to brutally suppress the Kashmiri freedom movement and tolerates the systemic discrimination and occasional pogroms against its Muslim minority. It has deployed over 70 percent of its huge armed forces against Pakistan (not China) and seeks to establish its strategic dominance over South Asia and beyond. Indian intelligence agencies are supporting, if not organising, violence and terrorism in Balochistan and perhaps even helping some of the Islamist militants in the Frontier.

It is, therefore, naïve for the West to believe that the Pakistan government will forcibly suppress the militant groups which support Kashmir’s liberation struggle at least until Pakistan’s strategic differences with India, including Kashmir, are resolved.

Nor should there be Western expectations that political pressure and economic incentives would persuade any government in Pakistan to compromise on vital national issues, in particular its nuclear and strategic programmes that provide credible deterrence against Indian and any other foreign aggression.

Western discrimination against Pakistan on strategic issues, epitomised by the Indo-US nuclear deal, and the periodic unrealistic demands for the surrender or elimination of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, reinforce the common Pakistani view that the West is conspiring with India to weaken and destabilise, if not dismember Pakistan.

Also, Western chancelleries should not exaggerate their political and economic influence over Pakistan, even with the present government. Pakistan does not need to rely on US or Western military support. The most advanced Western hardware and technology will not be made available to Pakistan. The rest it can get, more reliably and cheaply, from China.

Economically also, a West preoccupied with saving its own broken financial institutions is in no position to provide Pakistan with the magnitude of financial and development assistance it requires for economic stabilisation and rapid growth. Here again, it is China, which has the financial reserves to come to Pakistan’s rescue.

This is not to argue that terrorism and extremism do not pose a threat to Pakistan, to its socio-economic development and its strategic objectives. However, unlike the threat posed by India, the threat of terrorism and extremism is not existential.

Despite Western media prognostication, there is no possibility of an extremist or jihadi government assuming office in Islamabad. Neither the Pakistani electorate nor the Pakistan Army would accept this. Ending extremism and its terrorist tactics, in Pakistan and the region will require a comprehensive and painstaking process of police and intelligence action and cooperation as well as the elimination of the political and economic grievances which create the justification for terrorism.

In this context it should be noted that all four recent India-Pakistan crises — January 1990, June 1999, January-December 2002 and this one — were linked, directly or indirectly, to the Kashmir dispute. Unless this dispute is resolved, such periodic confrontations will continue to erupt. Such a solution must be one that is acceptable, first and foremost, to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

Finally, a comprehensive strategy against terrorism in South Asia must also seek to end state terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism and Islamic as well as Hindu extremist violence, including that perpetrated by Hindu fascist organisations like the RSS, against Muslims in India.

simply61,

If it's experts you want here are a few who advocate something similar:

http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/10mumterror-8-things-india-inc- govt-must-do-against-pakistan.htm

http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/11mumt error-12-steps-to-shock-and-awe-pak-economy.htm

http://pragati.nationalintere st.in/

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/05pakistan-thus-far-and-no-further .htm

Of course, if you don't want even to listen to the other side, nobody can force you to.

Re: # 513 All of you are such experts at solving the "Pakistani problem",I am surprised that the governments of the two countries have not hired you as consultants so far!!!
Zardari and Pranab should stop their verbal fencing duels and come to chowk,take som etips and get all this mess straightened.

inbredistani troops move to the east...talibunnies take over pakiland and whack a bunch of pakis...

sweet....

Taliban Burning, Beheading Its Way Through Pakistani Valley

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region outside the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive.

The deteriorating situation in the former tourist haven comes despite an army offensive that began in 2007 and an attempted peace deal. It is especially worrisome to Pakistani officials because the valley lies away from the areas where Al Qaeda and Taliban militants have traditionally operated and where the military is staging a separate offensive.

"You can't imagine how bad it is," said Muzaffar ul-Mulk, a federal lawmaker whose home in Swat was attacked by bomb-toting assailants in mid-December, weeks after he left. "It's worse day by day."

The Taliban activity in northwest Pakistan also comes as the country shifts forces east to the Indian border because of tensions over last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, potentially giving insurgents more space to maneuver along the Afghan frontier.

Militants began preying on Swat's lush mountain ranges about two years ago, and it is now too dangerous for foreign and Pakistani journalists to visit. Interviews with residents, lawmakers and officials who have fled the region paint a dire picture.

#512 Posted by simply61 on December 30, 2008 7:22:25 am

it's not that hard...

cut off the water(it was already done once)

keep border tensions high...they have a 3% GDP growth rate and 25% inflation...

simply61,

Here are my ideas on how to punish Pakistan.
http://www.chowk.com/unplugged/t/60906

Re: # 510Pakistani establishment(whatever that is made up of) might just be playing that double game but what do you suggest be done to 'punish'Pakistan? The solution shud be a solution and not the beginning of a newer greater mess, is what I think.

Publius, I used to be like simply61 *sniff* the good old days.

simply61,

You don't believe that Pakistan is playing a double game w.r.t taliban. That it wants to retain the option of using it for controlling Afghanistan once again when it hopes the US will leave ?

By seeking to "help" Pakistan rather than punish it, you are not just violating natural justice( which requires that Pakistan be punished for the mumbai attack) but you could well be ensuring that it is the Pakistani agenda of using the Taliban and Jihadis that will ultimately succeed.

Re: # 507The blot of Godhra riots on his, otherwise great, CV can not be wished away but yes,if he can truly take Gujarat state forward with the Muslims and Hindus( and all others too) as equal participants in opportunities and progress then maybe history might judge him less harshly.

Re: # 506Thank you akcheema.Its fun to be here.Things do get overheated most of the time but still.....its worth it.

Why India needs Narendra Modi?
Suhel Seth
(from Financial Express, India)

Let me begin with a set of disclosures: I have perhaps written more articles against Modi and his handling of the post-Godhra scenario than most people have; I have called him a modern-day Hitler and have always said that Godhra shall remain an enduring blemish not just on him but on India’s political class. I still believe that what happened in Gujarat during the Godhra riots is something we as a nation will pay a heavy price for. But the fact is that time has moved on. As has Narendra Modi. He is not the only politician in India who has been accused of communalism. It is strange that the whole country venerates the Congress Party as the secular messiah but it was that party that presided over the riots in 1984 in which over 3,500 Sikhs died: thrice the number killed in Gujarat.

The fact of the matter is that there is no better performer than Narendra Modi in India’s political structure. Three weeks ago, I had gone to Ahmedabad to address the YPO and I thought it would be a good opportunity to catch up with Modi. I called him the evening before and I was given an appointment for the very day I was getting into Ahmedabad. And it was not some official meeting but instead one at his house. As frugal as the man Modi is.

And this is something that the Gandhis and Mayawatis need to learn from Modi. There were no fawning staff members; no secretaries running around; no hangers on…just the two of us with one servant who was there serving tea. And what was most impressive was the passion which Modi exuded. The passion for development; the passion for an invigorated Gujarat; the passion for the uplifting the living standards of the people in his state and the joy with which he recounted simple yet memorable data-points. For instance, almost all of the milk consumed in Singapore is supplied by Gujarat; or for that matter all the tomatoes that are eaten in Afghanistan are produced in Gujarat or the potatoes that Canadians gorge on are all farmed in Gujarat. But it was industry that was equally close to

his heart.

It was almost like a child, that he rushed and got a coffee table book on GIFT: the proposed Gujarat Industrial City that will come up on the banks of the Sabarmarti: something that will put the Dubais and the Hong Kongs of this world to shame. And while on the Sabarmati, it is Modi who has created the inter-linking of rivers so that now the Sabarmati is no longer dry.

He then spoke about how he was very keen that Ratan Tata sets up the Nano plant in Gujarat: he told me how he had related the story of the Parsi Navsari priests to Ratan and how touched Ratan was: the story is, when the Navsari priests, (the first Parsis) landed in Gujarat, the ruler of Gujarat sent them a glass of milk, full to the brim and said, there was no place for them: the priests added some sugar to the milk and sent it back saying that they would integrate beautifully with the locals and would only add value to the state.

Narendra Modi is clearly a man in a hurry and he has every reason to be. There is no question in any one’s mind that he is the trump card for the BJP after Advani and Modi realises that. People like Rajnath Singh are simply weak irritants I would imagine. He also believes that the country has no apolitical strategy to counter terrorism and in fact he told me how he had alerted the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the NSA about the impending bomb blasts in Delhi and they did not take him seriously. And then the September 13 blasts happened! It was this resolve of Modi’s that I found very admirable. There is a clear intolerance of terrorism and terrorists which is evident in the way the man functions; now there are many cynics who call it minority-bashing but the truth of the matter is that Modi genuinely means business as far as law and order is concerned.

I left Modi’s house deeply impressed with the man as Chief Minister: he was clearly passionate and what’s more deeply committed. When I sat in the car, I asked my driver what he thought of Modi and his simple reply was Modi is God. Before him, there was nothing. No roads, no power, no infrastructure. Today, Gujarat is a power surplus state. Today, Gujarat attracts more industry than all the states put together. Today, Gujarat is the preferred investment destination for almost every multi-national and what’s more, there is an integrity that is missing in other states.

After I finished talking to theYPO (Young President’s Organisation) members, I asked some of them very casually, what they thought of Modi. Strangely, this was one area there was no class differential on. They too said he was God.

But what they also added very quickly was if India has just five Narendra Modis, we would be a great country. I don’t know if this was typical Gujarati exaggeration or a reflection of the kind of leadership India now needs! There is however, no question in my mind, that his flaws apart, Narendra Modi today, is truly a transformational leader! And we need many more like him!

The writer is Managing Partner, Counselage...

Re: # 504; simply61

you are one sensible addition to chowk .. welcome!

Simply61, the battle would be in the open then, instead of having to fight with one hand behind our backs, so as not to endanger a "civilian" government.

Re: # 501 publius, the,gun is not empty.That much is sure....but yes Pakistan is also equally responsible for the creation of the monster now devouring its north west.....the nation's past leaders (and present ones too ,maybe) have a lot to explain to the Pakistani citizen.

United against the wrong enemy
Dec 18th 2008 | MURIDKE
From The Economist print edition


Pakistan has made a modest start against the likely culprits of the Mumbai killings. But fulminating against India is more fun

IF PAKISTAN’S leaders had ever united against Islamist militancy as they have against India over the past three weeks, their country would not be the violent mess that it is. Ever since India alleged, with subsequent corroboration from America and Britain, that Pakistani terrorists carried out last month’s mass murder in Mumbai, the country’s politicians, generals and fire-breathing journalists have been declaring themselves ready for war—if that’s what India chooses.

India’s government, despite huge pressure from its own bellicose media, has been more restrained. It has said it does not intend to attack its neighbour. But it has demanded that Pakistan dismantle an anti-Indian militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), that has carried out numerous atrocities in India, apparently including the outrage on Mumbai. It has so far relied on diplomacy, particularly through America and Britain, to make this point.

But India is frustrated. Pakistan has taken some steps against Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD), an Islamist charity that is a front for LET, which was formally banned by Pakistan, under American pressure, in 2002. But it is not clear at this stage how far they go. On December 11th, a day after the UN Security Council banned JUD, Pakistan said it had also banned it. It has since arrested the group’s leaders, including Hafiz Saeed, a professor of engineering, who founded LET and JUD in the 1980s. It has also arrested many JUD activists, sealed scores of the charity’s offices and stopped publication of at least six JUD newspapers.

Initially, it also said it would take over the group’s many hospitals and schools—allegedly including over 170 schools in Punjab province alone. But it has since seemed to backtrack on this. According to one minister, the government will set up a new charity to run these services. According to a senior official in Punjab, some of JUD’s facilities may be left in the same Islamist hands.

They may include a vast jihadist citadel that JUD operates in Muridke, a town close to the Indian border (its entrance is shown in our picture). It contains two schools, for 1,000 children, an Islamic college and a hospital that sees 100 outpatients a day. The campus’s manager, a courteous Islamist called Abu Ehsan, said 66 local villages depend on the services it provides, and he trusted that the government would not disrupt them. Shortly after JUD was banned, local police turned up on the campus. But they soon left and Mr Ehsan said he had heard no more from them.

So, for now at least, the schools at Muridke remain free to teach what Mr Saeed has preached for two decades: jihad against Hindu India, especially to drive it from the contested region of Kashmir. It was for this purpose that LET was founded, with support from the army’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI). For two decades, as the army’s proxy, it has waged an insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir that has cost over 40,000 lives. Though the ISI appears to have cut back its ties to LET since it was banned, its armouries and military training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir have remained in place.

The bearded and purposeful men who patrol the campus in Muridke with pyjama trousers hitched halfway up their shins might be graduates of these camps. They have an imposing bearing not usually acquired during teacher training. On the campus, a 12-year-old boarding student, Hamza Nazir, says he likes his school, “because we get Islamic education and we learn how to deal with our enemies.� Asked to elucidate, he offers an Urdu proverb: “A hint’s enough for a wise man.�

Foolishly, then, many Pakistanis, including some of the country’s most senior officials, are claiming that JUD is being victimised. “No JUD office is recruiting people for jihad,� says one of those responsible for closing the group down. Many also say they fear a violent backlash. Others fret that it will be difficult to make a case against JUD’s detained leaders, even if India supplies Pakistan with the evidence of their responsibility for the Mumbai attacks that it claims to have. These are legitimate worries. Yet, especially to Indian ears, they are starting to sound like familiar excuses.

In the current spirit of nationalism, it is hard to avoid an impression that many Pakistanis are relieved to be unified against the one enemy they can all agree on, India. By contrast, many remain deeply sceptical about their need to tackle terrorism and a Taliban insurgency at home, despite over 50 suicide bomb blasts in Pakistan last year. To explain these conflicts—though it is a stretch—it has become increasingly fashionable in Pakistan to blame them on India. The army seems convinced that India is supporting the Taliban. This makes Pakistanis especially loth to crack down on LET, historically at least their trustiest weapon against India.

This is worrying. So far, Pakistan should consider itself fortunate to have received such gentle handling after Mumbai. In the event of another catastrophic attack, India might be less cautious. Even as it is, great damage has been done. Pakistan really cannot afford anything less than peace with its neighbour. Facing a long war on its north-western border, it cannot keep up its decades-old readiness on the eastern one. Moreover for its moribund economy to grow, it needs urgently to improve trade and investment relations with India.

Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s commercially minded president, seemed to recognise this. He had been trying to coax life back into the once successful but now stagnant diplomatic effort to normalise relations between the two countries. But on December 14th India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, suggested that so long as Pakistan’s vicious sometime proxies remain unchecked, this will be impossible.

#501
I second Publius' opinion.
The gun is empty. Sure it is.
---------------------
Only the US barrels have bullets and bombs, right Publius?

"taliban ke saath border share karne mein bhi koi scene nahin hai eklavya. "

simply ji, you should consider the idea that the "trouble" is ,at least partly, just the appearance of trouble, created to fool the west, and the Pakistan pratcises a unique form of moral blackmail of holding a gun to it's own head.

That gun is empty ,simply ji, and there is no serious threat of Taliban taking over Pakistan.

Re: # 499 Apna goal nahin tha but taliban ke saath border share karne mein bhi koi scene nahin hai eklavya.

.the thing to discuss is how to get Pakistan out of the trouble it is in at the moment..

Huh? When did that become India's national goal?

Indians and Pakistanis can cry and fight,accuse and counter accuse till the cows come home..........the thing to discuss is how to get Pakistan out of the trouble it is in at the moment......how do we help them while ensuring that we will not be taken for a ride again by the pakistani army,ISI combine?

Nostradamus onm pakistan 2009.

It will be continuation of 2008 for pakistan. When ten pakistanis are killed by a lone predator, the educated of pakistan will lament the loss of paki sovereignity. When hundreds are killed every week in bomb blasts, the educated will treat that as sectarian killings, another word for jihadic killings, and accept them as religious rituals.

More areas of nwfp will be vacated, like swat valley. The alquida and taliban will entrench themselves there. pak afghan border will be rid of paki soldiers. Durand line will vanish. New borders for pakistan will be created.

nato raids in nwfp will increase. Taliban will bomb more of paki cities in response.

Pakistan will be faced with food shortages, more that what it witnessed in 2008.

More power cuts, black outs will reach ten hours in paki cities.

pakistan will need more of imf assistance.

paki army will again take control as western world further drives a wedge with focus on isi.

ach volume of Gandhi’s collected works can be bought for as little as Rs25 (free online), while each volume of Jinnah’s is between Rs2,500 and Rs4,750. It is surprising the Pakistan government does not subsidise the publications of its founder, as India does the publications of its early leaders.

Pakistanis who trawl through the Jinnah Papers will not find much illumination: Jinnah wrote little about his view of Islam, or its history or Pakistan’s future or form of government. His letters are about everyday life: motor car repairs, travel plans, statements of accounts, granting of appointments, telling people not to name their companies after him, accepting or declining invitations, a series of very brief exchanges with Liaquat, a rejection of Bombay Bar Association’s decision to honour his 50 years at the Bar in 1947, saying that the vote was carried narrowly.

//////////////
The above is from jang of today.

Just imagine the priorities of the man who coined TNT.

The fact is that TNT is simply another word, political operationalisation of jihad. That is the reason jinnah never had to explain anything and that is why pakistan has less than one percent non muslims today.

TNT and jihad are identical concepts and that is why the jihadis are controlling pakistan.

To carry out a military strike when pakistan expects it is the most stupid thing. Now the action should be focussed on creating teh right world opinion. Cut the water supply, cut all forms of trade to deny any foreign exchange earnings, the country is in the IMF trap, target paki exports as india has done in banning paki sea food exports to teh EU.

P)aki8 forces are on teh run in nwfp, in another few months yanks can call in the B52s hopefully by that time most of the civilians and paki army would have fled nwfp.

AS it happened in afghanistan, the taliban will move to paki cities. That si when joint india nato action is required ro resize pakistan.

Re: # 476

The plight of pakistanis.

Every week, leaders from teh west are coming to pakistan to lecture their leaders. Then the military men are coming to order the paki army. the sovereign pakistan cannot refuse any of them.

Thenm on chowk indians are lecturing to the pakis. Every where pakistanis are treated as terrorists, kuwait does not allow any pakistani to come, most of teh visa offices in pakistan have been closed. no wester airlines flies to pakistan.

It must be a terrible to be a pakistani.

HP: "I have never supported Pak army's control of Pakistan. In fact, I am totally against it for a long time."
----

I know that. in fact thats what I was attributing to you in my post.

Read the sentence where I mentioned your name again and see if I am saying "Pak in army control" or "that will help democracy in Pakistan and help keep pak army in control". Since you can't have democracy as well as full control of the army, complete context of this sentence is pak army under control of democratic government. that should have been "under" not "in". but context makes it clear.

ps: I will ignore your patronizing behavior as it has become your habit and you use it on everyone not just me.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

#490 Posted by salllman2003 on December 28, 2008 3:57:06 pm

india doesn't need to convince inbredistan...

the US and UK and pretty much the entire international community have accepted the indian version...hence the ban on the JuD..

Sankrant,
I'd like to come out of this state of denial but only if you or your media could convince me. While the red arm band story is not so convincing, the indian media stories are not very convincing either. The Indian govt has also failed to come up with any convincing evidence. You must've read a lot what you'd like to read but try listening to this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1dbjWRSkLE

And then ask your self if you are also in a state of denial?

I just read with disgust the news of yet another bomb blast in Pakistan, killing 37 people, mostly people lined up to vote: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/12/28/pakistan.bomb/index.html#cnnSTCText



I pray for the departed souls and for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.

The Pakistani Taliban has already claimed responsibility and justified it as retribution for the locals' turning against it and killing some of its members. This circumvents the possibility of the GoP blaming it on "Indian terrorists".

Wouldn't it be in the Taliban's and the Pakistani army's interest to actually blame it on India (or non-state actors from Indian terror cells :-))? The purported Indian angle to the Lahore blasts would have been good arsenal for Zardari, Kayani and co., but the Taliban played spoilport.

tahmed ji, you are a good person, with naturally generous insincts for your neighbors.

The argument that was being made was radically different, though. It said that while very few people outside of Pakistan (India, if you prefer) yet accepted Pakistan (India, again if you prefer) as a fundamentally evil state, a clear statement was needed to explain why that indeed was the case.

Strong and stable Pakistan (India), in this view, would clearly not be desirable for anybody except for those whose purpose this evil (Pakistan; or India, if you prefer) directly served.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

#480 Posted by Sheru1849"

I am sure that will help democracy in Pakistan and help keep pak army in control (hp's wish) and make terrorists weaker."

I have known for some time that your skills to argue any thing are pretty week, but I did not know that you are now following Sadna and Chatla in lying through you non existent teeth. I have never supported Pak army's control of Pakistan. In fact, I am totally against it for a long time. I think Indian screw up here would help the army and not the democracy.

Would you mind not relying on lying every so often?

it is pathetic to see Indians go to Uncle Sam with a complaint of bad behaviour against a much smaller adversary.
-----------

DM, it may not be entirely true..Pak army has US by the balls in Afghanistan/Fata...US might be anxious if something happens on the eastern front, it will totally screw their plans on the western front...They are probably begging india (not that India can do anything effective in this situation) to hold on and not upset their apple cart on the other side. Pak knows this. this whole exercise was probably orchestrated to make US realize its precarious position in this whole mess...and convey a message to the ambitious Obama not to act on this campaign promises re Pakistan.

tahmed, why don't you suggest to thepowers be in Pakistan send couple of more dastas of terrorists to Bumbai and this time Indians will make sure they just line up in queques so that terrorists can kill more of them and make sure media does not make noise either..after all it is only few hundred dead people. I am sure that will help democracy in Pakistan and help keep pak army in control (hp's wish) and make terrorists weaker.

are you guys gone mad or something?

tahmedji, was merely agreeing with you that most of the world does not consider Pakistan to be fundamentally evil. Only a (very?) small number of people have begun to suspect that may indeed be the reason for a great deal of instability around the world. One could even argue that a majority of these (small numbers of) people may be non-Muslim Indians.

Re: #476

And who exactly are these "helpless" people inside India?

#473 eklavya sahib: please dont distort what i write. that serves no purpose other than further fool yourself.

#472 exactly. indians are alone in their hatred for pakistan...the rest of the world has better things to do than channel their frustrations at some nation or religion. so enjoy venting your frustrations on chowk and on helpless people inside india!

Re: #474

I meant they only wanted to kill non-muslims. But do you see that being discussed in the Indian media - nope, not a chance. And Muslims in India are deeply touched - their beradars DO care about them, after all!

Eklavya, unfortunately, for countries like ours with large, uneducated masses and fifth columnists in the media and elsewhere masquerading as "liberals", the only way statements are made is by hundreds of innocents dying. We need to make statements in the language of strength which is the only one, unfortunately, the world understands. A great example there is China. Getting away with whatever it wants because it has the US (and therefore the world) by the balls.

We need to get stronger - much stronger - economically. The Pakis know this - hence Mumbai-style attacks. Also, we need to try and be much much less dependent on oil from Muslim countries. And EQUALLY IF NOT MORE importantly, we need a permanent seat in the UN with veto power.

Articulating our position will not be easy - look at the news channels like HT, Sahara Samay etc. - "declaring war" on terrorism while at the same time parading Muslim victims of the Mumbai massacre - thus whitewashing the fact that the Muslims dying there was NOT a desired goal of the terrorists - they ONLY wanted to kill Hindus.

ajeya, tahmedji is right in that while some people have begun to suspect that Pakistani state may be evil, in its basic essence, that statement has not been coherently made.

There is a need, for those of us who sincerely believe so now, to make that case.

#469 Posted by tahmed32

"What you forget is that the rest of the world...sees a strong, stable, prosperous Pakistan as the solution."

I have talked to many people from all around the world. Rest of the world does not give two hoots about Pakistan. They would like to see it disappear from the face of the planet like a bad memory - or, to quote Madeline Allbright, a bad migraine.

tahmed32 ji, what you say is quite true. A lot of Indians too believe that a 'strong and prosperous' Pakistan would be good for India. For what it is worth, I shared that belief until recently.

Those of us who now believe that Pakistani state is irredeemably 'evil' (for Indians and for all non-Pakistanis) have to make a case, and we have not done so.

Re# myself on 466

Typo correction to Point 6) : I meant "deported".

#467 DM: What you forget is that the rest of the world does not share the Indian desire to "break up Pakistan" - rather it sees a strong, stable, prosperous Pakistan as the solution. That is why decades of Indian propaganda against Pakistan impresses no one other than the propagandists.

#466 ajeya: "We need a strong leader who will ... Break up Pakiland"

What you need is a strong cup of coffee.

tahmed32:

I agree that threats that cannot be backed with action are useless at best and make a mockery of the Indian state at worse. But they are essential for domestic consumption and to put pressure on foreigners, esp the US to put pressure on Pakistan.

Frankly, it is pathetic to see Indians go to Uncle Sam with a complaint of bad behaviour against a much smaller adversary.

#462 Posted by tahmed32
[ever read the story of the monkey that got two giants to start fighting one another by tossing a rock at one of them?]

Okay. So India is one of the 2 giants, and Pakiland is the other one?

Nobody in the world outside of Pakistan considers Pakiland to be a giant. It is a small country with a relatively weak army that gets treated in the way the US is treating it. Would the US DARE to do the same to India? I think you know the answer.

Oh, the "nuclear deterrant" is only useful in the case of mass suicide. For conventional wars, it is useless. Has the "nuclear deterrant" deterred the US? It would not deter a determined India either. Another Mumbai-style attack, and the US would not have any face to ask India to keep its hands off.

We need a strong leader who will do the following:

1) Break up Pakiland into Balochistan, Sindh, Talibanistan (NWFP) and Pakistan (West Punjab).

2) Take back what is rightfully ours - POK.

3) Resettle millions upon millions of people from Tamil Nadu and elsewhere (the darker in complexion the better) to Jammu and Kashmir in the style of what Pakistan's closest friend - China has done in the Xinxiang province and Tibet.

4) Institute the "One peep out of your mouth and your a$$ is toast" policy towards Muslims - again, in the style of China's policy in Xinxiang. Encourage (in a modified Spanish version) conversion of Muslims in India to any other religion of their choice. I personally recommend the Shinto faith.

5) Actively and vigorously deport ALL Indian Muslims who create trouble or resist - if nobody will take them, then just dump them inside Pakiland (west Punjab) outside of the Indian border.

6) Any Muslims caught coming over the border from Bangladesh or Pakiland should be put to hard labor - like building roads etc.for 6 months before being departed. A stated policy like this will discourage any further immigration.

Keep up on 4), 5) and 6) until there are NO muslims left in India.

7) Actively join hands with other countries fighting the Muslim scourge.

dm: and i answered the question you had below for romair. seems like it was a rhetorical question, since you ignored the answer.

dm #462 "the govt. will have no alternative but to take some strong action"

Like what, dm sahib?

I think you missed the point I was making below: threats that cannot be backed by action ("surgical strikes", "demarches" to handover individuals, finger-pointing, threats of war) are counterproductive (i.e. they merely help the mumbai attackers achieve their goals).

tahmed32:

The media will be media. After an event like that, it would be totally unrealistic for the media to behave like diplomats. And the fact is that if there is another Mumbai like attack, the govt. will have no alternative but to take some strong action even though MMS would know that it would be counterproductive, or risk losing the elections in April. Democracy has its own compulsions, especially on the eve of elections.

eklavya bhai sahib: we need to help ourselves. unless you enjoy helping the terrorists achieve their goals behind mumbai.

ever read the story of the monkey that got two giants to start fighting one another by tossing a rock at one of them?

lol, tahmed ji, Indians/Hindus can't help being Indians/Hindus. There are some intelligent ones, but the rest of can't help ourselves. :)

#458 Talk of Indian stupidity and...lo and behold Eklavya is there!!

further to #457 even musharraf reared his ugly head from out of the spider hole he has been hiding in to talk the "commando" talk again - thanks again to Indian stupidity.

and now I see on Geo the former secretary Tanvir Ahmed Khan (representing the non-militarists in Pakistan) trying valiantly to put Javed Nasir in his place - saying that "manmohan sahib naiN koi warlike baat nahin kee". In return - the compere reminds him of the belligerent Indian media.

Hope this brief description of the Geo discussion in this post and the one below illustrates the point I am making in #456.

Homework for today

Complete the sentences -

Thanks to the Indians, the following went wrong for Pakistan.

Thanks to the Hindus, the following went wrong for Muslims.

further to #456 i am watching Geo right now, and arch-militarist Gen. Javed Nasir is having a gala time repeating this talk from Indians of "surgical strikes" and so forth and talking about "moon tor jawab" from Pakistan. Javed Nasir and co. had been hiding in spider holes all of 2007, and lone of them (Gen Hamid Gul) had even lost his nerve and had apologized to the nation..now, thanks to Indians using the mumbai tragedy as an opportunity to live out their fantasies, these boys are walking tall again.

And civilians - even President Zardari himself - are trying their best in the face of the stupidity of the Indian press and leadership that is raw meat to the militarist opportunists inside Pakistan. Thus yesterday, even Zardari was forced in his speech to remind India that issuing "demarches" to Pakistan was not the way to go - and Pakistan would tackle terrorists out of self-interest, not because of indian "demarches".

dm #455 "How could India do this?"

By not trying to live out the fantasies expressed by the arjuns and jayps on chowk. e.g. While it no doubt the fantasy of "surgical strikes" stoked Indian egos, all it did was lend credibility to militarists in Pakistan.

HP:

Low credibility for the US does not mean high credibility for Pakistan.

"There was a good chance to dismantle the Pak army's influence but seems like it is gone awry"

How could India do this?

The paki army actions of withdrawing from nwfp c;early shows that the mumbai was an isi operation to provide a relief for the paki army from being slaughtered by taliban. India has said that they will not attack, but still there is accelerated army withdrawl from nwfp.

this is good for india, the nwfp will be finally part of afghanistan, an india should open a consulate there. That action will be at par with bangladesh. Nwfp is at last free with the help of nato.

Next wave of jihadi attacks will be in islamabad and other cities of pakistan.

As I have said always, punjab should be renamed pakistan. Any where in the world army defends teh borders, in the case of pakistan, the army has moved out of afghan border, in any case durand line was never accepted by afghanistan

Sindh should become an independant country, with punjab the pakistan. the rest divied up by the neighbours.

obama talks about 25 years of fighting terror, and the above scenario is the only solution, to be realised in ten years.

Re: # 452 Arjun

"...paki forces move to the east, taliban takes over pakiland...."

Epilogue: America takes over Talibanland. India takes over non-Punjab Pakiland. Everyone lives happily ever after.

paki forces move to the east, taliban takes over pakiland..


Taleban 'will kill school girls'


Taleban militants in the Swat valley in north-west Pakistan have threatened to kill girls who attend school.

A local Taleban commander ordered parents to stop sending their daughters to school by 15 January.

In comments broadcast on an illegal radio station, he threatened to blow up schools which enrolled female students.

This year alone, Taleban militants have destroyed more than 130 schools in the Swat valley. They want to bring in Islamic sharia law in the region.

Militant attacks on schools in the region have deprived more than 17,000 students of education.

'Severe blow'

Although schools for girls have come under attack on numerous occasions in the past, this is the first time Taleban militants have issued a complete ban on girls attending them, the BBC's Ethirajan Anbarasan says.

A Taleban spokesman said the prohibition would remain in place unless and until Islamic sharia law was fully implemented in the region.

State-run schools are seen by the insurgents as key symbols of the government.

Now the militants have threatened to destroy private schools as well.

These schools are not Islamic religious institutions and the students are taught courses based on the government syllabus.

Locals say the ongoing attacks on schools have dealt a severe blow to education of girls and young women in the Swat valley.

Those who can afford it have already moved out of the region, but the poor have no other option than keeping their daughters at home, our correspondent says.

Al-Qaeda and Taleban militants are active in the Swat valley, which has been the scene of an insurgency since August 2007.

Hundreds of people have been killed since then in battles between security forces and militants led by Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric with links to the Pakistan Taleban movement.

Hahah! Phat gai or US did not give permission?

Mukahrji after meeting with Saudi FM says he is converting to Islam because it is a religion of love and affection...Some gaandu! Bring Rani with you too...even tho she is getting old...

NEW DELHI: India has informed Pakistan that it has not engaged in any sort of troop build-up along the frontier and sought firm action against terrorist camps and militant groups operating from the Pakistani soil.

New Delhi has also told Islamabad that it has no plans for a military action, but wanted a combination of “executive action and judicial processes� against terrorist elements like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its front organisation Jamaat-ud-Daawa, which have been linked to the Mumbai attacks.

“A lot of issues are being raised in relation to the Mumbai terror attacks. It is unfortunate that an atmosphere has been created in Pakistan, some sort of war hysteria,� External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said while addressing an international seminar of Parsi teachers here.

“I appeal to Pakistan and Pakistani leaders, do not unnecessarily try to create tension. Do not try to deflect the issue. A problem has to be tackled face-to-face. Evading a problem will not help to get rid of it,� he said.

“The issue is not the defence of Pakistan, the issue is not war, the issue is the terrorist attack on Mumbai, the unprecedented scale, magnitude, ferocity as well as audacity all clearly demonstrated that it was not only pre-planned, but also well planned,� he said.

“The issue is how to prevent terrorism. The issue is how to direct the international community to face the terrorist challenge and eliminate terrorism from the face of the world,� he said.

The fight against terrorism, he said, was not directed at any country, nation or religion. “The issue is how to prevent terrorism and against the mentality which gives birth to terrorism, and against the set-up that aids terror.�

Mukherjee said terrorism had no religion and no respect for borders. “Terrorism is not linked to a particular religion or community. I totally reject such an idea. Islam propagates love and affection.�

Referring to his meeting with Saudia Arabia’s Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal on Friday, the minister said that both countries spoke in the same voice against terrorism.

Re# 443, HP

"If credibility was the criteria in defining a country's place in the international affairs than the US has even less credibility in the world than perhaps even Afghanistan. The US has the lowest credibility even in the western world. Credibility is intangible. What is tangible is where you are and what you have. Indians love for Bush does not make him the most popular man in the world. Your line of argument is pure garbage."

LOL.. I find it funny too!

But nobody has accorded more credibility to the US (or Bush)than Pakistan which has welcomed the US troops into its own territory to clean up its own backyard (or, in your words, pure garbage?).

hehe...

Indian cabinet okays Kishanganga project

* Indian home minister says power project strategically important, approved despite Pakistan’s objections

By Iftikhar Gilani

NEW DELHI: The Indian cabinet on Friday approved the controversial 330-megawatt Kishanganga hydropower project on the Ganges River in Indian-held Kashmir (IHK) in a bid to win rights over river water before Pakistan does.

Recently, Pakistan also awarded a $1.5 billion contract to a Chinese consortium to build a 960MW hydropower project on the Neelum River – which is the continuation of the Ganges into Pakistan. According to the Indus Water Treaty (IWT), whoever builds the project first will acquire the rights on river water.

“Now that Pakistan has begun work with the help of a Chinese firm, we have to put our project on a fast track,� said a senior official at the Union Ministry of Water Resources.

New Delhi and Islamabad have been locked in a dispute over the proposed Indian project for years. Pakistan believes the project will not only impact its Neelum-Jhelum hydroelectric project just across the Line of Control (LoC) but will also adversely affect 133,209 hectares of agricultural land in Neelum valley and Muzaffaraabd district. But India says that satellite pictures show Pakistan is exaggerating its agricultural usage.

#444 Posted by HP on December 26, 2008 10:31:33 pm


So I think it would not be prudent for Pakistan to let up on defense.


perfect....chalk up minus 1% on the GDP rate...

DM #442:

Sorry, had missed reading # 309/310 earlier. Yes, except for the article link, my post was only a less articulate version of what you'd written there.

PAKI ARMY CHOICE

India has formally informed pakistan that there is no troop build up or has any plans to attack pakistan.

This gives the pakis the option of getting slaughtered as usual by the taliban. This is a better option, to be killed by the jihadis assures both, the killer and the slaughtered, jihadic heaven. To be slaughtered by the kafir indians is not good for any paki muslim.

India going to attack paki targets in the short term ( one or two years) is total nonsense. Like the Mrs Gandhi days, " India is obliged to create situation for teh return of refugees" eventually led to bangladesh.

The situation is similar, india is obliged to root out terror central.

Time is not yet ripe and in politics, always postpone, there could be a better time. The present strategy of dealing with democratic govt while attackling the army and ISI is the correct one. It has to mature, and the situation in pakistan has to worsen. It may take a little more than a year. No pint in striking when pakistan expects it.

Further the cold start doctrine weapon systems are not yet ready.

#441 Posted by dost_mittar
"However, the govt. reaction is now quite sober while the Pakistani official reaction is becoming more and more hawkish"

Sounds like your information is not accurate. What I am hearing is that India is waiting for the green light from the US to attack. So I think it would not be prudent for Pakistan to let up on defense. Though I wish Indians had shown more maturity. There was a good chance to dismantle the Pak army's influence but seems like it is gone awry.

#441 Posted by dost_mittar

"I had said that Pakistan's crditibility in the world is zero, not its importance. As for its importance, it has never been more important and is perhaps uppermost in the minds of Obama, but uppermost is the sense of a huge headache and not as an asset."

I always find it funny that how loosely people use the world as if the US and the west is the world and rest of the people live on some other planet.
If credibility was the criteria in defining a country's place in the international affairs than the US has even less credibility in the world than perhaps even Afghanistan. The US has the lowest credibility even in the western world. Credibility is intangible. What is tangible is where you are and what you have. Indians love for Bush does not make him the most popular man in the world. Your line of argument is pure garbage.

The bigger headache for Obama is Iraq and then Afghanistan where the US armies are fighting and not Pakistan. Pakistan did not force the US fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US interest in Pakistan is getting the Pak army support to take care of fleeing and returning Taliban. Since the US is losing the Pak army's support, its headache in Afghanistan are going to grow. The drama in Mumbai seems like is backfiring and now the US is scrambling to tone down the rhetoric. The CIA chief and the Saudi FM were not in India for picnic and now as you say India is coming down from high pedestal it perched itself. I wonder it is the US CIA chief's order or the Saudis informed them of the consequences.

"India would have wanted to cooperate with Zardari although it knew that when it comes to Pakistan, Zardari counts for nought."

That is one more BS argument that you can only hear from Media inspired Indians. You deal with the foreign office in Pakistan no matter who the FM is or you deal with government. You send message to the government and no matter who the president wishes to confer with, what matters to you is what the response is.
India tried to play a game not knowing what the internal configuration in Pakistan is and sounds like they ended up eating crow.

This is unbelievable that after turning the heat up for almost 4 weeks Indians now are blaming Pakistan for responding.

About Indian status quo less said the better. Status quo always means you are putting off a problem for some other time. I guess that time has now come. The question is: is India ready to take the game to the logical conclusion or still wanna have a repeat of 2001 when after eight months of hostilities all it did was deliver Pakistan to the US.

India is following the same path because there is no one who can afford a war in the area. Too bad instead of dealing with the Problems, Indian inept, almost incompetent government ended up destroying whatever little was left to redeem from a bad situation.

KeeRoa#437:

How is it different from what I wrote in 310?

Romair#428:

I had said that Pakistan's crditibility in the world is zero, not its importance. As for its importance, it has never been more important and is perhaps uppermost in the minds of Obama, but uppermost is the sense of a huge headache and not as an asset.

I think your analysis of India is incorrect because you have not properly specified her goals vis-a-vis Pakistan which are to maintain a status quo including in Kashmir. Since, this status quo is not acceptable to Pakistan, all disturbance to the equilibrium are initiated by it and India is generally in a reactive mode. Eklavya would want to change this and Indian policy more proactive but he is not in charge yet.

India would have wanted to cooperate with Zardari although it knew that when it comes to Pakistan, Zardari counts for nought. India's reaction to Mumbai was to initially make a lot of noises although the public/media reaction was much more hawkish than the govt.'s. However, the govt. reaction is now quite sober while the Pakistani official reaction is becoming more and more hawkish. It would appear as if Pakistan feels frustrated that its acts had not had the desired effects of India launching an attack which would have let it off the hook in its war on terror. While war would be counterproductive for India, I think that the govt. would have no choice but to act if only to not risk losing the next election in April. This is why I think that Pakistan would soon launch another Mumbai type act to force India to act.

"I did all my schooling in India (in the most reviled state of Gujarat) and there was not an iota of derogatory references to Pakistan. Even if Jinnah was not really idolized, he was portrayed as an erudite pragmatist who successfully managed to convince the powers that were that partition - however painful - was the only way out."

This is absolutely true..........frankly speaking nobody cared about Pakistan in our school........Pakistan was never a reference point in our culture or any point of existence.........and we were all brought up on honky-dory history books written by marxist authors who never talked about Islamic jehad inspired violence on hindus......

that is why most of indian hindus are gullible fools who cannot comprehend the true import of the Islamist nonsense from some Pakistanis...

HP sahib,

I wish that we attack falsehood rather than personalities.

I don't want to know about Arif Mohammed Khan's character. All I asked is if the article has any element of truth.

If it does not, I am happy.

Arif Mohammed Khan is known liar and a tout of BJP. Marrying a Hindu girl does not give him a license to lie.

I usually find Barkha Dutt a model of dhimmitude, but feel that for a change she is spot on, in this piece:

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=Hom ePage&id=157549be-0d7d-4773-a3c2-20be051b8529&MatchID1=4874&TeamID1= 1&TeamID2=3&MatchType1=1&SeriesID1=1229&PrimaryID=4874&Headl ine=Why+war+isn%e2%80%99t+an+option

The Mumbai attacks may well be the means chosen by the Pakistani military to claw its way back to power, regain some of its recently lost popularity, and give itself an excuse to discontinue going after the Taliban loonies. By reacting with missile strikes now, India will only play into the hands of the elements who are its biggest enemies.

#435 kcs:

..and this is in the propah schools. The only good thing about it- extremely tolerant when you compare it with the syllabus of some madarsas :-)

An article by Arif Muhammed Khan, former Union Minister of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Pakistani_textbooks_build_hate_culture _agains t_India/articleshow/3898659.cms

I don't believe all media stories (all the more so if they were authored by politicians) just like that, so I would like my enlightened Pakistani brothers on this forum to confirm if this is indeed true.

I did all my schooling in India (in the most reviled state of Gujarat) and there was not an iota of derogatory references to Pakistan. Even if Jinnah was not really idolized, he was portrayed as an erudite pragmatist who successfully managed to convince the powers that were that partition - however painful - was the only way out.

Re: # 432

S3, first things first!

(1) Only an idiot will think that rational individuals are running Pakistan’s policies versus India. It is being run by individuals who are already convinced inside that THEY know what is in Pakistan’s “best interest� and THEY will make sure THOSE “best interests� are served – no matter what.

(2) Only an idiot will think that Pakistani establishment will EVER defer to the civilian outfit. Only an idiot will think so because even the civilian outfit is not that ignorant – or it would not change its tune so easily.

(3) Only an idiot will think that having accomplished (in its own mind) nuclear “parity�, Pakistani establishment will not try to take advantage of it to carry out an active campaign for the dismemberment of India.

In its own mind, the Pakistani establishment is convinced that India is a SOFT country – about ripe and ready to be broken up because it is not a believer in anything because it is not a believer, period.

All negotiations with the devious Pakistanis are a waste of time. What India needs to do is to develop an effective nuclear shield (analogous to the SDI defenses the US pursued during the cold war days) and outspend the devious Pakistanis – so either the devious cry “uncle�, or the devious Pakistanis break up like the Soviet Union, or the devious Pakistanis go bankrupt.

Re: # 431 Romair.... Both countries are in trouble. We have more and "better" nulkes than india as I read so we have advantage in atom war, so it is possible and winnable.

But atombomb is over rated and like monster. It destructive capacity is limited. USA rumsfield said their study shows some 5 million people will be killed in Indo Pak war. May nuclear disease will kill say 10 more millions. All numbers are insignificant. Mopulation increase on 2 to 3 years will be much more.
As both countries on verge of trouble by communists in India and Talibans in Pakistan. # states of India gone communist and over 30% of pakistan is controlled by nongovt people. The country which can preserve itself withoout braeking will prevail. Neither country will like to take over other. Not it is game of patience and who will last long. We have sea of people so both countries are industrictible. Good night. It is good you are taking Indians to school and teaching basics of things may teach them little management and mr. Z also.

Romair,

Thanks to the XMas break, I have a few minutes to dabble in this armchair politics.

""this is something Pakistani thinkers have not understood.....they still want to go head to head with India......when in fact, they need to change their strategy.....previously a 5 foot tall Pakistan was playing basketball against a 6 foot tall India......now India is 7 foot tall and growing taller....(while Pakistan will start shrinking towards 4 foot, if it doesn't quickly change its outdated strategies, vis-a-vis India)......""

Does that hypothetical strategist realize is that is exactly what happened because of his bad strategic advice.

Let has destroyed the Kashmir cause.
When the cross border infiltration stopped, Kashmiri Indians benefited. They could see their cousins in PoK. New trade routes were opening up. The recent non violent protests were giving tangible results. Now its back to square one.

Lets not argue about "proof" OK..If the British, Americans & even the ever neutral Swedes are convinced, and have publicly stated that there is a Pakistani hand in this; its more than enough. Of course, when you start playing "defence lawyer" & try to tease out what is REAL proof, we are going to go nowhere. Heck, even Blago's lawyer is saying he has a "good case"!:)

Its Pakistan on the defensive, not India. The only reasonable option that was left to mend fences with India. To his credit, the Zardari administration seemed to be doing just that. If there was no terrorist attack, FMs were working towards a tangible deal. He must be very disappointed.

Well, at least we know, that the Pak army is not going to let the civilian govt mend fences with India. It wants to wind down the unpopular war on the western front . As long as it can raise the Indian bogeyman, they will be well funded.

The Al-Qeeda/ militant nexus doesn't want Indo-Pak rapprochement. Doesn't matter what Pakistanis believe, those "freedom fighters" are terrorists in the eyes of the whole world. There is no such thing like a "good" freedom fighter & a "bad" freedom fighter.

Of course, "there is no question of war". Thank God India has a sane man like Manmohan Singh as PM. World opinion is on India's side. The the GoP, world opinion is vital; otherwise the politicians & generals wont be able to send their kids to American schools.

I hope this strategist realizes that his nuts are in a vice. Thanks to his policies, Kashmir is nowhere near "freedom". India is still growing economically. Pakistan is tethering on bankruptcy. Can someone sane tell Pakistani leaders that the war of the 1000 cuts is killing Pakistan?!

Eklavya #: "Romair, sure, go ahead. Why not?"

....there are two paradigms shifts that have occurred in indo-pak relations, which neither country has adjusted to.....

.....up til a decade or so ago, economic growth was paksitan's advantage over india, and military power was india's advantage over pakistan...

.....pakistan's historical economic growth rate was, traditionally around 40% or so higher than india's till the early 90s.....this allowed pakistan to spend, %-wise more money on its armed forces, than india and to keep a 3:1 balance (which is what is needed for conventional defence)......

.....india was a much stronger country, militarily, still....and it knew that if it had to, it could defeat pakistan in a long drawn out war...which it could.....

......however, now, things have turned around.....india's economic growth is higher than pakistan's.....this combined with india's large size has now about to take india out of pakistan's league in int'l affairs.....this is something pakistani thinkers have not understood.....they still want to go head to head with india......when in fact, they need to change their strategy.....previously a 5 foot tall pakistan was playing basketball against a 6 foot tall india......now india is 7 foot tall and growing taller....(while pakistan will start shrinking towards 4 foot, if it doesn't quickly change its outdated strategies, vis-a-vis india)......

......in case of india, its strategies are still based on assuming that it can put enough military pressure on pakistan, to, eventually intimidate it......however, now india and pakistan, are in military partiy, due to nuclear deterence......

.......india thus has no military superiority over pakistan...regardless of how many tanks, aircraft carriers, fighter-bomber aircraft it purchases.....nor will it ever have any military superiority over pakistan, in the future...

..hence the one thing india should not do, is to every take any disagreement/conflict etc. with pakistan down the military route......it is a route on which it cannot win.......and will thus, eventually, have to backtrack....this will look like a defeat.....this is what happened when india piled up its troops a few years ago, and then withdrew......

......thus, why go down a path, which one knows to be dead end......in this crisis, india should not have introduced anything related to military, in the equation.....this includes surgical strikes, bombings etc....pakistan replied in kind.....the rest of the world got worried.....and india started seeming like the aggressor.....and that too in the one area where it cannot aggress.....

......this is step one for india, in my opinion......devise a new paradigm to handle/destroy pakistan, which has no military aspect attached to it......

the rest in upcoming replies....

"comment as an indian strategist, on what i think india should do to achieve its goals........"

Romair, sure, go ahead. Why not?

The basics to keep in mind:

(1) For India, changing any policy with regard to Kashmir or Muslims anywhere is off the table.

(2) India believes that Pakistanis either don't want to make any change with respect to India or are unable to do so, and that this situation in Pakistan will not change. So Pakistanis will continue to attack India, and will continue to do all they can to destroy India, without any let up. Anytime between two attacks or anti-India efforts that Pakistan has is the time Pakistan uses to prepare for those attacks or anti-India efforts.

(3) There can be no question of trusting anything anybody in Pakistan says with respect to India.

Importance of mumbai attacks.

The targets in mumbai attacks were the westerners and the jews, carried out by kashmir jihadis, as subcontractors to alquida.

This is an activity far more on the global jihadic agenda than anything related to kashmir.

This is more in tune with the afghan operations where more and more punjabis are going to fight. The latest lahore bombing is another example where at last pakistanis are responding to teh predator attacks as being teh same as paki army attacks. The alhore attack, coming closely after a predator attack on punjabi taliban is revealing and indicates that paki jihadis are uniting. The pounjabi, the kashmiri and the alquida are uniting, and is a good thing for the world.

dost-mittar #: " these agencies continue to feed the monster even after it has turned into a frankenstein.....However, this is not my comment on the Lahore bombing situation. And, no, Pakistan does not have to prove to Indians but it has to prove it to outsiders.'

...whenever i comment on this site, i do not state my personal opinions.....unless i specifically add the phrase, "in my opinion,"......i may actually disagree with what i am arguing at a personal level.....

....however, if one truly wants to analyze, understand and argue int'l dynamics, strategies etc., one has to, totally, set aside, one's one opinions and motivations etc.....this is what is done in military wargaming scenarios......one party is made the enemy forces......and their job is to, totally, think like the enemy.......in certain us excercise, they actually (used to) dress like soviets, and behaved like them also......

......unfortunately, this is missing on this site.....everyone is too emotionally caught up in whatever they say......thus, intelligent objective discussions are not possible on conflict resolution, military gaming etc.......

......the only person whom i have run into, who i can feel is able to, totally, disengage his personal views from his analyses is eklavya.......ironically, he is the one person, who personally, feels pakistan should be destroyed......though he is able to keep that out of (most of) his analysis.....

........please take a look at what you are stating......and compare it to india's strategic goals.......what is the indian govts.' strategic goal in this crisis:

- is it to, totally, disband any militant outfit in pakistan
- is it to, totally, annihilate pakistan
- is it to win the next election
- is it to stop terrorism in india
- is to ensure that pakistan's options on kashmir - both militantly or through un - are totally turned to zero

........now, is india achieving its objectives throught the means it is using......was it in a stronger position one day after the attack, internationally, or is it in a stronger position now......

......is pakistan's position in the int'l community, truly, zero, vis-a-vis terrorism.....or is pakistan one of the main countries in that the world, and specifically the usa is relying on to fight terrorism.....

.....if it is zero, then why did the un's terorism committee recently give pakistan a clean chit......why is usa trying to ensure that pakistan keeps its troops on the western front.....why is the usa proposing huge amounts of aid to pakistan.......why did china recently give a subtle statement in support of pakistan....why did the interpol secretery general say india has not provided any evidence to interpol.....keep in mind that interpol has 186 (?) member countries.....

......interestingly, indian govt. should try to analyze why pakistan, apparently, itself told china to not veto the un resolution against JuD.......

........in think the indian govt. is losing the initiative it had gained initially......i think it made a mistake of pushing the military option so strongly.......knowing fully well that this option is not viable in a nuclear scenario....and is thus a dead end.....i stated this a few years ago, also, when india piled its troops on the border......

........i think it missed a trick in dealing with zardari and co., who actually wanted to go after these groups.....but now, with so much talk of miltiary attacks from india, are in no political position to do so now......

......i also think the indian govt. stepped ahead of the proof it had, when it, immediately, piled up everything on pakistan......this we will still have to wait on......if india is, deliberately, holding back proof then it maybe a good decision.....if it doesn't have anything, beyond kasab or it points in other directions, i think india could get stuck.......

........in any case, the main aim of any strategy should be to achieve one's aims.......not to, merely, show one's anger......achieving one's aims, in many cases, may not even involve the most ethical paths......it may involve contradictory stands (i.e. india asking for a un security counsel resolution, while it is, itself, in violation of 12 on kashmir....)......

......on the other hand, if a country has enough military power, it can, simply bomb the crap out of other countries, with or without rules......like us did in iraq.....

......india has huge advantages over pakistan.....size, military, economic, int'l recognition, political system etc........yet it has not been able to utilize them efficiently..... .most of the times pakistan has, "lost" to india have been due, more to its own internal mistakes, rather than any brilliant strategic actions from india.....

in that sense, i think, for a long time, india was in the paradigm that if worse came to worse, it could militarily beat up pakistan in a long war.......which it could.....however, now with nukes, this option is gone.......yet i think india's strategic thinkers have not adjusted their strategy to this reality......

their strategy needs to center around some other means to achieve their goals, vis-a-vis pakistan......i have yet to see any other strategy to achieve the list of goals i stated above that india may want to achive......including in this crisis.....

once again, my aim is to have an objective discussion.....not to defend or pursue any personal or emotional goals.......in fact, i would be more than happy to comment as an indian strategist, on what i think india should do to achieve its goals........

dost-mittar #: "As I said, I know a punjabi when I hear one and I have no doubt about this guy."

.....i am afraid this is not enough of reason to discard what that terrorist stated....though if you want to remain convinced of it, that is upto you.....i would suggest you look at what is in front of you......you maybe right and the person maybe a punjabi from pakistani.......but that is not what is in front of you.....

one thing i would like to ask you....punjab is a vast area, with a population equal to japan......there is a vast array of punjabi accents and wordages.....i can tell the difference between them immediately.....there is the saraiki of multan.....there is the mixed saraiki-punjabi as one moves northwards from multan.....there is the punjabi of the mianwali area.....there is the potohari punjabi of jehlum to pindi.....there is the pahari punjabi as one moves into kashmir, via mirpur.....and there is the punjabi of lahore, which, pre-partition, probably, extended into amritsar etc......

i have noticed the punjabi spoken by indian punjabis, like yourself, to be quite different from that spoken in pakistan, now......specially the punjabi spoken by indian sikhs.....i assume punjabi, within india, changes from region to region.......that spoken in delhi maybe different from that spoken in amritsar.......

......if you recognize it as punjabi, wouldn't that imply that he is an indian punjabi......since that is the punjabi you speak......if not, then why not.....and which area of punjab, in pakistan, would you trace back his accent to.....and what is the basis of your familiarity with these regions and accents in pakistan's punjab.......

Pakistan not to tolerate surgical strikes: FM

Friday, December 26, 2008
Teleconference with Chinese counterpart today
MULTAN: Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Thursday expressed the hope that India would not commit the mistake of carrying out surgical strikes. “We will be compelled to respond if it happens,� he told reporters on his arrival at the airport here.

Responding to a question whether the possibility of war could be ruled out, he said: “If you are asking me, I am not ruling out anything. But if war is imposed, we will respond to it like a brave nation.� He said: “I want to convey this message to India that we are the torchbearers of peace and remain committed to our desire for peace.�

above is from jang of today.

The minister also added that pakistan welcomes surgical strikes by teh americans, as long as they can be attributed to unmanned aircraft.

The minister quoted the book, sura 1309,12 which states that man is teh supreme which implies that unmanned aircraft are stateless. The minister emphasised that it is the same logic for mumbai bomb9ings, if the man is not a pakistani and is not an indian, then he is stateless, very similar to the predators bombing pakistan.

such bombings are similar to honour killings, where no crime has been committed, implying no killing has taken place.. similarly a predator bombing is a case where no bombing has happened, and no one is killed.

Depicting the soul of Pakistan at 60
Friday, December 26, 2008
by Qudssia Akhlaque

Islamabad

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has come up with an extraordinary book on Pakistan, which has nothing to do with international affairs or diplomacy, but is a welcome departure from its run-of-the-mill publications.

It is a fabulous 250-pages hardcover coffee table book titled ‘Pakistan,’ which is essentially a pictorial narrative of the country. It gives an overview of Pakistan’s diverse and magnificent topographies, its people, rich cultural heritage and contemporary times.

“The portrayal includes brief descriptions of the country’s geography, its history spanning over seven millennia and the life of its people and their old and new traditions,� says the foreword of the book.

The above is from jang of today

The book also contains the latest events of pakistani history, includes an interview with shaik mahamood before he was handed over to the americans. It contains the photo of the house of pakistani army major where sheik was arrested.

It also has welcomig photos of asghar as he was released by the indians in response to hijacking as he went on to create lasker e toiba.

Good to see that at last pakistanis are becoming honest in tehir reporting of their country.

y our correspondent

"PESHAWAR: A previously-unknown pro-Taliban group, Ansar Wa Mohajir, has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s bomb explosion in Lahore and the earlier rocket attacks on Dera Ismail Khan.

Toofan Wazir, identifying himself as a commander and spokesman of the group, phoned The News from somewhere in North Waziristan to claim responsibility for the two attacks. He threatened more attacks against the security forces and the government installations to avenge the two recent US missile strikes in North Waziristan in which several militants belonging to the Punjab were killed.

According to Toofan Wazir, the US drones fired the missiles at Pakistani targets with the agreement and cooperation of the government of Pakistan. He said revenge would be taken from both the Americans and the Pakistan government. In Pakistan, he warned, suicide bombings would be carried out and bombs would be planted and exploded at important government installations."

Above is from jang of today.

General Romair masood, head of ISI also claimed that teh above group is supported by the indians and have bases in afghanistan.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Re #421: Romair

"at the some time, pakistanis do not consider militant attacks in kashmir, against indian soldiers, to be terrorism......they consider it to be a freedom fight......"

How about militant attacks on common people, in public places? Do you sincerely think only Indian soldiers have been the victims of this "freedom fight"? Grow up. Of course you can't grow up on what the so-called free press (thoroughly exposed post-Mumbai) in Pakistan feeds you, so you have to look at other options too.

"consider the indian govts. actions in kashmir to be state terrorism.......this is where the disconnect happens to be between indians and pakistanis.....indians consider militant attacks in kashmir to be terrorism and indian forces killings of civilians are not acknowledged......"

That is but natural, isn't it? One man's freedom fight (if violent) is another's terrorism. From your viewpoint (and that of the majority of Pakistanis, it appears) the US military's actions in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan probably form the biggest terrorist attacks ever. For that matter, Indian radical freedom fighters in British India were considered terrorists by the British police too. That doesn't mean anything :)

If Pakistan had not covertly (and overtly) aided the "freedom movement" in Kashmir, the Indian state (or army) would have had far less provocation to commit the excesses (which as anyone would tell you are a necessary evil in the suppression of terrorism) that you refer to as state terrorism. And there would have been far more international pressure on India in this regard (and India is a responsible country that has to pay heed to it; it can't get away with duplicity). Probably we would already have attained an amicable solution to the Kashmir issue by now (of course, that may not be the solution that Pakistan wanted; it may been the solution that Kashmiris wanted). Pakistan has undermined the Kashmiri movement more than anyone else - period.

As for asking the people of Kashmir themselves as to who the real terrorists are, it depends: if you selectively survey the people that were victims of army excesses, you will get the answer you seek and can lick your tongue in glee and write one more post about it. If you seek more objectively, you will find that a large majority of the people there is fed up of both the terrorists and the security forces, and just want to lead a normal life first. Basic necessities (food, shelter, steady income, development) are on top of their minds, not aazaadi (which might still be in the top ten). The problem with sustained militancy (oh, i am sorry, your freedom fight) is that it hampers basic development in the name of aazaadi, frustrating people no end. There are people who have lived their entire lives amidst violence - I shudder to think of that.

So here's the bottomline, and I can repeat this a hundred times: the Pakistani establishment (which is dominated by the military) has a blind, vindictive agenda - going far beyond their interest in just aazaadi for Kashmir - the aim of which is to simply go full steam and covertly abet violence in Kashmir and other parts of India (they can also send their own soldiers, without uniform, as militants and claim that they are all home-grown Indian militants). Then, when India reacts legitimately, they will cry wolf and say we want peace, it is India that wants war. What a cry-baby! And the bigger tragedy is that the US has been pampering this cry-baby for a long time now.

It does not matter what the common man in Pakistan thinks. As long as these merchants of deceit and terror are occupying the seats of power, nothing will change. Nothing short of a full-blown civil revolution in Pakistan can change things - and I doubt this will happen in the near future. Maybe the next generation is game enough??

anil #: "Going back to your analogy, if I would have withdrawn from the assignment"

....this is the correct answer, in my opinion......one should not take the assignment, one doesn't feel professionally comfortable with......however, one cannot fire the client giving the assignment.....in this case, the assisgnment was offered to neutral consultant eklavya......you made a bid on your own initiative for the contract...

"You have yourself said that Pakistani awam does not vote for terrorism or terrorists, to put forward you have pointed to election results"

....yes pakistanis do not support terrorism or terrorists, electorally or politically.......the only confirmed terrorist to ever be elected in any election is a member from lashkar-e-jhangvi - a sunni terrorist organization, which targets shias in pakistan.....

at the some time, pakistanis do not consider militant attacks in kashmir, against indian soldiers, to be terrorism......they consider it to be a freedom fight......the consider the indian govts. actions in kashmir to be state terrorism.......this is where the disconnect happens to be between indians and pakistanis.....indians consider militant attacks in kashmir to be terrorism and indian forces killings of civilians are not acknowledged......

....setting aside the 1% pakistan liberal english media, there is, actually, quite a bit of support (and maybe admiration) amongst common pakistanis for militants fighting indian forces in kashmir......these militants are (were) financed greatly by donations.......much like there is a great deal of support and admiration in india for indian soldiers fighting in kashmir....

.......as for mumbai, i think you will have to look long and hard to find any pakistani who doesn't consider it terrorism.....it is obviously terorrism.....the only item pakisanis are asking for is evidence to decide pakistanis' level of involvement.....they feel that india is, incorrectly, placing 100% blame on pakistan.....

.....i don't think too many pakistanis would have much problem with militants fighting indian forces in kashmir......they would have a problem if these militants started fighting in inida, or starting killing civilians.....or got out of control and started joining al-qaeda, etc........

i think the best way to solve this, is to ask the kashmiris who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter in kashmir....i.e. indian state vs. militants (pakistanis and kashmiris)......

i don't think you will get too many disagreements though on the bombings in pakistan and in india being viewed as terrorism, from both sides......

....i still think my theory is correct.....interestingly, al-qaeda joined with lashkar-e-jhangvi to destroy marriott.....(this has now been stated by pakistani security)......and if my analysis is correct, al-qaeda joined with some pakistanis and some local indian groups to destroy the taj and oberoi.....

taj opened yesterday and marriott is about to open......

...in this whole scenario, from marriott to taj, i think, strategically, the biggest winner is al-qaeda....it has achieved exactly what it wanted......every one else will lose out.......

Re: # 416

Romair:

The most important quality needed is that consultant must not be professionally dishonest. He / she should walk away rather than continue on the job, if he thinks his client is dishonest. When Arthur Anderson went along with not CEO Steve Ballmar, but Enron's, they lost everything.

You have yourself said that Pakistani awam does not vote for terrorism or terrorists, to put forward you have pointed to election results. If you are saying that Pakistani awam supports terror, or terrorists in any disguise that is a different point.

Going back to your analogy, if I would have withdrawn from the assignment (and have done so in my career) than make wrong recommendation.

Romair#415, 417:

"....i think the main reason is the nuclear deterrence.....i am surprised you have not included the fact that all of india and pakistan could be up in flames, if a war started....i am sure this is also being put into the equation by india....."

I agree with this. Nuclear factor plays a major role.

Regarding Lahore explosion and the arrest of Indians, it is too early for me to make a comment. I am still waiting for more facts to come out in public.

However, there is no equivalence between India and Pakistan except in the Pakistani thinking. Pakistan has zero credibility in the world opinion. India has yet to reach that position. Pakistan stands condemned universally by the whole world as a sponsor of terrorism. Unless one is living on another planet, one cannot escape the daily deluge of articles and reports refusing to accept that lashkars, taleban, etc. are acting without support from state agencies; these agencies continue to feed the monster even after it has turned into a frankenstein.

However, this is not my comment on the Lahore bombing situation. And, no, Pakistan does not have to prove to Indians but it has to prove it to outsiders. Maybe Pakistan will also be able to convince foreigners that Indians had sent terrorists in Lahore on a bombing expedition. Until then, I'll wait.

Romair#414:

As I said, I know a punjabi when I hear one and I have no doubt about this guy. Which non-urdu accent do you think he has? nb or Majumdar will tell you that he is no bengali and VRV or masanmuthu will tell you that he is no 'madrasi', so which other non-urdu or even hindi speaking person could he be?

In any case this is a fruitless discussion. The point you are making is that there are Indian collaborators in the Mumbai attack and I have no problem in accepting that, nor does any other Indian. The Indian police is already investigating that angle and at least two Indians are in police custody (and no, it is not the person who sold sim cards in Kolkotta who is suspected of a Kashmir police agent.

I did not say that Pakistan is a thief because India has accused it of. The whole world has accused Pakistan of being dishonest and duplicitous and of playing murderous games. India has convinced the powers that be who have conducted their own independent investigations. India does not need to give any evidence to Interpol at this stage. It will do so only when investigations are complete, a person has been found guilty and is believed to be in a foreign country so that Interpol can issue a red alert for this person. This applies to Ibrahim Dawood, Memon, Chota Shakeel and other persons for whom Interpol's help has been sought.

dost-mittar #: "LAHORE: Intelligence agencies of Pakistan arrested three more Indians on the pointation of Indian national Satish Anand on Wednesday.

The intelligence agencies earlier on Wednesday arrested the Indian citizen Satish Anand and recovered from him maps and documents containing sensitive information.

Later, on the pointation of Satish Anand, the agencies raided different parts of Lahore and arrested three more Indians. A camera and pistol were recovered from them, sources said." (www.jang.com.pk)

.....there was a bomb explosion in a posh area of lahore yesterday.....killing one lady....pakistan has stated that it caught an indian named satish, related to this....and has now caught three more indians, through him.......

.......do you feel it should be pakistan's responsibility to prove its claim(s) to be true.......or do you think, since, india has been accused of this, "theft," hence it is india's responsibility to prove it is not the thief......

in my opinion, it is pakistan's responsibility to provide the facts and proof......and it needs to put satish (if he exists) in front of a cross-examination......until then, india has a legitimate right to ask for proof, to support any scenario pakistan's puts forward......

anil #: "This would not change my conclusion because "vendor" has to be loyal to his profession "art of consultancy" and give the conclusion."

........suppose steve ballmer hires you to get your advice on whether he should purchase yahoo or not....suppose you believe that steve ballmer is totally incompetent, or was not appointed correctly as the ceo of microsft....and that larry ellison should be the ceo of microsoft......would you advise him on yahoo......or would you try to get him fired?

"I also pointed out that "awam" elects the "strategic thinker" and should be able to fire, unless the system does not reflect awam's voice."

....why are you assuming that the awam has not elected the strategic thinker?.....

a good quality of a consultant is that he/she should not let his/her personal biases and opinions impact the project.....

dost-mittar #: "Indians are not going to attack Pakistan or any targets there. That would be playing into the Pak military strategists who are looking for an excuse to get out of FATA and Waziristan mess."

....i don't think this is the reason....i think the main reason is the nuclear deterrence.....i am surprised you have not included the fact that all of india and pakistan could be up in flames, if a war started....i am sure this is also being put into the equation by india......

in addition, until all the evidence it laid out on the table, one has to consider the fact that india may not (or may) have the facts to back up the scenario it has portrayed so far......hence it does not want to risk an all out war, on incomplete evidence.......

......though that could be a tactical move by india, and it very well may disclose everything at some critical point......i, personally, think india is losing the advantage it gained, internationally, the longer it waits to put up its case with proof.....

my guess is that we will soon see a video recorded testimony from kasab, where he will state everything that india has stated......however, he will not be allowed to be cross-examined or questioned by any int'l or pakistani sources.....

this will be enough to satisfy the one group the indian govt. definitely wants to satisfy, prior to elections....i.e. the indian electorate......though i doubt it will satisfy the int'l community......

in any case, i have never figured out why anyone would not want to openly disclose evidence......the only time i have seen this situation is in cases like 9/11 or iraq, where a massive media campaign creates a public opinion, and then the evidence gets lost in the background......

......i am not sure if india has the media power to create such a campaign.......

you have, stated that there is no need for india to put forth any evidence.....and that it is pakistan's responsibility to disprove india's scenario, rather than india's responsibility to prove it......based on this, do you think that if an explosion occurs in pakistan, it would be india's responsibility to disprove its responsibility, as well?.....

in any case, do you think there is a strategic advantage for india to not put any evidence forward, or do you think it is not even required....

dost-mittar #: "I know punjabi accent and Babar's accent is punjabi."

....i suppose this statement is enough to ensure that the guy was a punjabi.....apparently, there will, always be some pakistanis who will never be convinced that kasab is a pakistani and some indians who will never be convinced that a person, himself, stating a cause, speaking hindi, using hindi words is an indian.....

.....imgaine if he had said, "mein tussan dae gkhaar jawaan gae tae tuwwaddaw ahl-khana noon maar dawaan ga.....tussaan marhay pakistani prahwaan dae naal panga litta ae"

....now if someone, from india, said a person is speaking punjabi, talking about pakistan, using punjabi words, and must be a pakistan.....and if some pakistani said, well, actully he used the world ahl-e-khana (which sounds lucknawi), hence he must be an urdu-speaking indian......

there is a chance that he a person speaking hindi, talking about indian issues (plus kashmir) is not an indian...however, there is more of a chance of him being whom he says he is......

"As for evidence, I had already responded to that. Pakistan is accused of theft and of trying to hide his theft, there is no point in giving evidence to the thief. But others seem to be already convinced with the evidence provided."


......what you seem to be suggesing is that, as long as one accuses someone of theft, it is the responsibility of the thief to respond, not the responsibility of the accuser to provide the proof.......

....i am not sure if others are as convinced as you seem to think.....the interpol guy would not have stated that he has no evidence, while in pakistan.....i think india will lose the momentum it had initially gained, if it does not disclose the evidence, on the basis of which it has constructed the whole scenario around this terrorist act.....

what does india gain from not disclosing evidence.....when uk caught the subway terrorists.....it, immediately, released all the evidence......when usa was planning to bomb iraq, it even disclosed evidence that was totally a lie.....but it still wanted to present some evidence.....

now while pakis with flag t-shirts may delude themselves into thinking otherwise, nobody is buying the paki lies..

UK joins US pressure chorus



By M. Ziauddin


LONDON, Dec 24: Right on the heels of a stern alert delivered personally by Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullan, an equally stern advice has gone from Britain on the same day to Islamabad emphasising that after the Mumbai carnage the Indians were losing patience with Pakistan and that the UK was worried that lack of cooperation from the Gilani government could provoke some unwanted developments.

Expressing its appreciation of the difficulties facing Pakistan, Britain, however, is said to have made known its no-confidence in the middle-ranking officials of the ISI as it feared that these officers were not carrying out orders from the political leadership faithfully.

Britain is said to have suggested that if Pakistan started working on the prosecution of the arrested persons (of Jamaatud Dawa), it will make a big difference.

It is also said to have urged that some legal process was needed to be initiated against Dawa chief Hafiz Mohammed Saeed.

Diplomatic circles here said Britain had offered help in the investigation into the Mumbai attacks.

They said Britain had taken the position that evidence concerning terror activities launched from Pakistan in India was already there with Pakistan recalling that in 2005 Pakistan had publicly stopped ISI’s help to the militants in their attacks across the LoC.

However, according to these circles when Britain offered help in the efforts to rein in the jihadists, the ISI reportedly said it would continue to control Lashker-e-Taiba and would only move the LeT’s training camps from the LoC to farther inside Azad Kashmir.

It is claimed by these circles here that Britain believes that the training still continues in those camps as Pakistan does not have a proper and effective control of those training camps which need to be dismantled.

They said that in the opinion of the British government, Pakistan army’s policy of ‘coordination with and control of militant groups’ had not worked and needed to be replaced by a new policy.

Britain has also asked about any mechanism in place in Pakistan to know what the ISI is doing and to influence it. In this connection Britain offered that Pakistan could benefit from Britain’s experience of transparency and accountability of the agencies.

Britain is reported to have said that the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism at the Home Office would very much like to work with Pakistan to develop the counter-terrorism strategy of Pakistan and Britain.

Britain is said to be heavily dependent on inputs from Pakistan in regard to the counter-terrorism part of its own national security strategy.

However, Prime Minister Brown, it is said, was not satisfied with the work on counter-radicalisation and, therefore, coordination with Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior and FIA is being sought to be improved.Britain is also said to have sent an assessment of situation in Mohmand agency, Peshawar and Swat prepared by the British High Commission in Islamabad which has described the situation as ‘quite gloomy’.

Britain, it is said, accepted that Pakistan army’s counter terrorism capacity was limited, but was worried by the emphasis in training at the Staff College Quetta that tells that the enemy is India.

Britain is said to have also offered to help in capacity building but wants to know about Pakistan’s strategy and the entity which is driving the political/ comprehensive strategy in Fata and any single point of contact whom Britain can support financially.

Britain is said to believe that the Friends of Pakistan will want to know this when the Trust Funds are established for NWFP and Balochistan.

Britain is also said to have told Pakistan that it wants to see President Zardari and President Karzai taking strategic ownership of the border areas and that at the moment Pakistan’s strategy on Fata looked ad-hoc.

Britain is said to have also emphasised the need to formalise/institutionalise coordination between Pakistan and Afghanistan at the political/strategic level.

bubba:

Indians are not going to attack Pakistan or any targets there. That would be playing into the Pak military strategists who are looking for an excuse to get out of FATA and Waziristan mess. But they may take action on diplomatic front, such as closing consular office, recalling high commissioner and reducing diplomatic staff in Pakistan.

During the Gujral years, India dismantled its human intelligence operation in Pakistan. They may have rebuilt some in Afghanistan since then, although Pakistani propaganda about 16 consulates is just that, I have searched the internet and the only ones I can find are in Kabul, Kandhar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat(?).

nb:

'Hai mera Lahore' jouranlists are keeping low these days.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Re: # 405
n.b.
"Bengalis were also transplanted, no one else carries on like that"

Nothing wrong nb mohajir in karachi also are nostalgic about lucknow Delhi bihar ..

And being bengali u know hindus and muslim bengalis are hai hai reason for b desh . i know its not 100% or All

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Hmmm... So the author suggests that when a nation is blamed they should simply accept the charges otherwise they will appear as apologists and in denial?? Really? And if everyone points fingers at you it is you who is at fault. This is based on some form of demented view of democracy, if it is finger counting that will find the culprit then here is one from the other side

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1dbjWRSkLE

I am interested in an article that has more of a systems, contextual and all encompassing stakeholder view to analyze what happened here. Game theory anyone?

All the questions about proofs and verification is just for drama purposes.

I don't think Pakistan wanted proofs from Colin Powell or it asks for verification before every hellfire missile drops on a Pakistani inside Pakistan.

Just realised that sounded mean, but most of us have had enough of Hai mera Lahore. I mean, Sindhis and Bengalis were also transplanted, no one else carries on like that.

Which ones? The Indian media is full of sorrowing Punjabis writing about Lahore, they should be on your side.

nb:

Media reports.

"I do not like to quote Indian sorces which I find questionable"
Which sources are these, dostmittar?

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

good...now can india stop giving visas to paki kids seeking heart surgery and whatnot in India...no point in showing any kindness to snakes...remember the 80-20 rule for poisonous snakes...if only 20% of snakes were poisonous, you still wouldn't let your kids play with snakes..

Flow of goods from India continues
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
By Jawwad Rizvi

LAHORE: The flow of goods from India to Pakistan has continued uninterrupted through different routes despite the war hysteria created by New Delhi after the Mumbai attacks last month.

No slowdown has been noticed in imports of different products from India, however exports of Pakistani goods to India have plunged due to non-serious behaviour of traders and government of the neighbouring country.

A study conducted by The News has found no major impact on imports from India by the Mumbai incident. But on the export side, downtrend has begun. Pakistan mainly exports cement to India through rail and sea routes and its exports has sharply declined due to non-tariff barriers.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Romair, two things: if that is a "slight" Punjabi accent, I dread to think what yours is like.
And Azhar was under trial, he had not been tried. OTOH, in Pakistan, he was treated like a hero.

he..he..

The following is for serious folks. Others please don't read.

I think Mumbai attack is an inside job done by BJP.

Maulana Masood Azhar and Narendra Modi are evil twins and they communicate using secret satellite phones.

.......the following, and subsequent interacts, are for people who are interested in having an objective discussion on conflict resolution, strategic planning, terrorism/anti-terrorism and int'l relations.....all those who cannot leave their nationalistic baggage behind, will be wasting their time, reading it.....

....i read some interesting items in india's outlook magazine.....apparently india had maulana masood in custody for three years, however, india never tried him......one of the persons, whose name the un has given to pakistan, to be arrested is, actually, dead......and pakistan has actually requested china, itself, to not veto the resolution against JuD, indicating that it wanted to move against them......

1........i have tried to analyze the indian govts.' action so far.......it indicates that india either has a great deal of evidence, which it will present, in one big bang, thereby, totally, putting pakistan into a corner......

.....the other thing could be that india actually does not have the evidence, beyond kasab.....however, due to the massive media frenzy, and the mobilization of the indian public, the indian govt. is locked into a stance, which it, now, cannot back out of.....

.....the third thing could be that india has gotten a lot of evidence, and some of it is pointing to directions that the indian govt. does not want to pursue......i.e. some of it is pointing to local indian militancy, being involved......

2. .....the pakistan govt., after declaring that masood azhar was under house arrest, has, now, stated that he is not in the country...quite strange.....in addition, the paksistan govts' stance has become more stern....

....initially, pakistan seemed to be going out of its way to move in the direction india wanted.....it may have even asked china to not veto the un resolution....it, immediately, arrested the individuals named by un......it, even accepted the involvement of LeT and JuD etc. without asking for proof, and closed down all JuD offices.....

......however, now it is asking for evidence......this could be due to two reasons.......one is that, the leaders under arrest will soon go to court for their release.....and the court will have to release them, without any evidence....

.....the second could be that pakistan may have done its own internal investigations.....it may have contacted one of the handlers on the inside....and it may have discovered the real story, which may imply that local indian groups were involved also.....or perhaps that kasab was an al-qaeda resource, indicating a presence of al-qaeda in india as well.......

after finding this out, pakistan has let masood azhar go and told him to disappear, as he may be the mastermind from the pakistan side.....thereby foregoing the option of handing him to india, or trying him in pakistan.....

it is now, betting that india will not be able to disclose any evidence, because it will not match, totally, with the picture india has presented of, everything being done from pakistan.......with zero internal indian involvement......

.....the fact that interpol has also stated that india has not given any evidence to them, may further make pakistan's stand more stern on evidence......

......the indian govt. is either way ahead of everyone in planning and is, merely crossing the i's and dotting the t's, and will throw all the evidence into the open in one go........or it is, now, stuck because, due to the media hype, it was forced to over-step to ensure the opposition did not steal the debate away......and now cannot disclose the evidence as it may not totally support the story it has put out......

......it has, now, been a month......yet ohter than knowing that a person named kasab is in custody........nothing new is, physically, coming out......

dost-mittar #: "You say that the terrorist has a punjabi accent but say that thinking of him as anyone other than an Indian is believing in conspiracy theory? Why?"

please read what i wrote, clearly.....i wrote the following:

".....the terrorist does have a slight punjabi accent....it could also be construed as a non-urdu accent, which could be of any language.....i did not notice a pushtoo accent....."

....i did not say the terrorist has a total punjabi accent....i said he has a non-urdu accent and could be of any, "language,"...it, basically, implies that he has a non-urdu accent....he does not have an accent of an urdu speaker from lucknow, or delhi (or even karachi)......his accent could be from anywhere.....punjab, sindh, or even hyderabad, or tamil nadu.....

"Because he can use a few hindi words?"

....he did not use a, "few" hindi words....he is, clearly speaking hindi as a langauge.....he is not speaking urdu or punjabi.....he may have used an odd urdu word....but the language he is speaking is, clearly, hindi....

one needs to go by they physical evidence in front of us.....a terrorist speaking hindi, describing his situation.....now, he could be a pathan, disguising as a punjabi, further disgusing as a hyderabadi, speaking hindi....he could, very well be french, who learned hindi....he could be a tamil, trained to speak hindi in a non-urdu accent.....

.....if one wants to follow that line of thinking...i.e. believing a conspiracy, prior to believing what has physically been seen and/or heard, then why stop here.......

......maybe kasab is not the terrorist that was in the attack.....maybe india caught someone names kasab earlier, and is now stating that he is the terrorist........maybe kasab was, actually, caught three years ago....

however, that would be conspiracy.....one has to believe the facts in front, till proven otherwise......not vice-versa.....

at the moment, there is one pakistani terrorist, and one indian terrorist.....based on physical proof........to believe otherwise, would require evidence eradicating the physical proof......

#382 akcheema

Noted, Can you also check out if another half a billion or so will take up the supreme sacrifice of as many as Indians and Pakistanese to swap places.

I know it will be several generation of australians. See if Kangaroos will come forward.

#362 Tahmed32 "How then do you propose to separate good pakis from bad pakis?"

Not now, Urstruly may be reading.

I thought this thread was dying in the manner of all threads, it's got a second wind. Congratulations to the author.

#383 by RiazHaq

This entire piece is premised on a strong belief (or rather bias) that all terror in India emanates from Pakistan and there are no other possible reasons or causes for violence in India.

And just what gives you that impression? No one denies that terrorism in India has a local angle to it as well, but Paki involvement has taken it to a different level. India will deal with the local terrorists as it deems fit, but it is Pakistan's responsibility to take care of its "non-state actors" (a euphemism for the cannon-fodder Pakistan uses for its nefarious ends). If you can't do it, then let us do it.

In fairness, having gone through the comments thread (I must say some of the posts on strategic options and constraints were good reads), it does appear that more than a few Pakistanis have accepted that at least the live terrorist is in fact a Pakistani national and it does seem that his family has been located in Pakistan. Too bad the other 9 aren't alive (or maybe just as well). That some of them, if not all, are also Pakistanis is quite probable. We'll just need to wait for the videos of Kasab's interview to be posted on youtube. It doesn't really benefit a lame duck US government to inflame the situation by supporting fake claims (and they havent done so in the past with respect to India-Pakistan issues)

#383: Riaz, I dont know what world you are living in. There are plenty of violent Indian outfits (maoists, ulfa etc.) and if you recall both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi were killed by Khalistani and LTTE sympathisers. I dont understand why this would preclude presence of pakistani, islam inspired terror groups to be involved in mumbai and many other major terror incidents (the list is too large to recap here)

Romair:

You say that the terrorist has a punjabi accent but say that thinking of him as anyone other than an Indian is believing in conspiracy theory? Why? Because he can use a few hindi words? Of course he had to use a few hindi words as he claims to be an Indian. But those hindi words can easily be taught or even picked up by someone watching Indian TV. The thing to notice is that he uses these words with a punjabi accent. Incidentally, any Indian talking to an Indian media person will use either hindi word 'adhikaar' or simple urdu word 'haq' but not 'huqooq' which this terrorist uses.

So, are you suggesting that this person is an Indian punjabi muslim?

As far as not providing evidence to Pakistan is concerned, you do not provide evidence to the accused but to the court which, in this case is the international opinion, esp. western countries. It seems that such evidence has been provided as both the US and UK are convinced that the terrorists are from Pakistan. As the Kasab case proves, any evidence made available will be used by Pakistanis for the opposite purpose for which it is provided, i.e., to cover the tracks and protect the guilty. Not only this case, even a senior CIA officer had remarked that they are reluctant to share all intelligence with Pakistan as the evidence reaches those against whom it is intended. I presume that the same may apply in case of interpol as that evidence would be supplied to all member countries, including Pakistan.

anil ji, is it your argument that you know Pakistan better than romair does, or that Pakistan must have your values and preferences regarding Kashmir?

-----------

Warpster, since this has come up a few times before, I will restate the Pakistani position as fairly as possible.

Those attackers may be Pakistani (although from all descriptions and circumstantial evidence they don't look it at all) but no reliable evidence has been provided to establish that fact. And in absence of reliable evidence not much can be done.

Congratulations to Chowk for getting Mr. Sanu as a contributor (I hope it is more than this one piece).

I find it astonishing beyond belief that most Pakistanis on this forum are still in denial about the fact that the planners, trainers, and perpetrators of 26/11 were based in Pakistan and that the 10 lads sent on this murderous mission were Pakistanis. Regardless of the contextual and historical issues this is simply a fact.

But then what does one expect of a country where a large percentage believe that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy or reveres Osama?

Surely the people who frequent this board are different? Other than hamidm, I cant see anyone (maybe there are a few that I missed) who don't contest that the 26/11 murderers were Pakistani nationals.

This entire piece is premised on a strong belief (or rather bias) that all terror in India emanates from Pakistan and there are no other possible reasons or causes for violence in India. And those who disagree with this author's premise are labeled as apologists or deniers or conspiracy theorists.

The author wants every one to buy into one truth and one explanation for Mumbai, the version offered by Indian government and media who offer their knowledge of the Americans' and Brits' agreement with it as sufficient proof. They all seem to forget that the Indians, Americans and the Brits do not have the monopoly on truth or a particularly good track record, whether on WMDs in Iraq or the absolute power and capability of the ISI to cause great trouble in India while the Indian authorities find themselves helpless in preventing it.

In fact, Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble, who is in Islamabad, said its only knowledge of what happened in Mumbai had come from the media. The Indian government or anyone else has shared no data or evidence to support the oft-repeated charge in the media trial being waged successfully against Pakistan.

Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

Re: # 358; Regards
[[It can be also done at a wider scale - to let populations of India and Pakistan also choose out the side of the border they want to live in.]]

I am game!

Re: # 378

Pinku what is your opinion of Jha & Rajaram Fake theory



Volume 17 - Issue 20, Sep. 30 - Oct. 13, 2000
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

Table of Contents COVER STORY

HORSEPLAY IN HARAPPA

The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax

MICHAEL WITZEL, a Harvard University Indologist, and STEVE FARMER, a comparative historian, report on media hype, faked data, and Hindutva propaganda in recent claims that the Indus Valley script has been decoded.



LAST summer the Indian press carried sensational stories announcing the final decipherment of the Harappan or Indus Valley script. A United News of India dispatch on July 11, 1999, picked up throughout South Asia, reported on new research by "noted histo rian, N.S. Rajaram, who along with palaeographist Dr. Natwar Jha, has read and deciphered the messages on more than 2,000 Harappan seals." Discussion of the messages was promised in Rajaram and Jha's upcoming book, The Deciphered Indus Script. For nearly a year, the Internet was abuzz with reports that Rajaram and Jha had decoded the full corpus of Indus Valley texts.

This was not the first claim that the writing of the Indus Valley Civilisation (fl. c. 2600-1900 BCE) had been cracked. In a 1996 book, American archaeologist Gregory Possehl reviewed thirty-five attempted decipherments, perhaps one-third the actual numb er. But the claims of Rajaram and Jha went far beyond those of any recent historians. Not only had the principles of decipherment been discovered, but the entire corpus of texts could now be read. Even more remarkable were the historical conclusions that Rajaram and his collaborator said were backed by the decoded messages.

Harappa, area of the 'parallel walls.' Courtesy of the Archaeological Survey of India, Punjab Photographic Volume 463/86.

The UNI story was triggered by announcements that Rajaram and Jha had not only deciphered the Indus Valley seals but had read "pre-Harappan" texts dating to the mid-fourth millennium BCE. If confirmed, this meant that they had decoded mankind's earliest literary message. The "texts" were a handful of symbols scratched on a pottery tablet recently discovered by Harvard University archaeologist Richard Meadow. The oldest of these, Rajaram told the UNI, was a text that could be translated "Ila surrounds th e blessed land" - an oblique but unmistakable reference to the Rigveda's Saraswati river. The suggestion was that man's earliest message was linked to India's oldest religious text.1 The claim was hardly trivial, since this was over 2,000 year s before Indologists date the Rigveda - and more than 1,000 years before Harappan culture itself reached maturity.

Rajaram's World

After months of media hype, Rajaram and Jha's The Deciphered Indus Script2 made it to print in New Delhi early this year. By midsummer the book had reached the West and was being heatedly discussed via the Internet in Europe, India, and the United States. The book gave credit for the decipherment method to Jha, a provincial religious scholar, previously unknown, from Farakka, in West Bengal. The book's publicity hails him as "one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars and palaeographer s." Jha had reportedly worked in isolation for twenty years, publishing a curious 60-page English pamphlet on his work in 1996. Jha's study caught the eye of Rajaram, who was already notorious in Indological circles. Rajaram took credit for writing most of the book, which heavily politicised Jha's largely apolitical message. Rajaram's online biography claims that their joint effort is "the most important breakthrough of our time in the history of Indian history and culture."

Rajaram's 'computer enhancement' of Mackay 453, transforming it into a 'horse seal' (From the book The Deciphered Indus Script, p. 177)


(Left) Figure 7.1a: The 'Horse Seal' (Mackay 453)
(Right) Figure 7.1b: The 'Horse Seal' (Artist's reproduction)

Boasts like this do not surprise battle-scarred Indologists familiar with Rajaram's work. A U.S. engineering professor in the 1980s, Rajaram re-invented himself in the 1990s as a fiery Hindutva propagandist and "revisionist" historian. By the mid-1990s, he could claim a following in India and in ‚migr‚ circles in the U.S. In manufacturing his public image, Rajaram traded heavily on claims, not justified by his modest research career, that before turning to history "he was one of America's best-known wor kers in artificial intelligence and robotics." Hyperbole abounds in his online biography, posted at the ironically named "Sword of Truth" website. The Hindutva propaganda site, located in the United States, pictures Rajaram as a "world-renowned" expert o n "Vedic mathematics" and an "authority on the history of Christianity." The last claim is supported by violently anti-Christian works carrying titles like Christianity's Collapsing Empire and Its Designs in India. Rajaram's papers include his "Se arch for the historical Krishna" (found in the Indus Valley c. 3100 BCE); attack a long list of Hindutva "enemies" including Christian missionaries, Marxist academics, leftist politicians, Indian Muslims, and Western Indologists; and glorify the mob dest ruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 as a symbol of India's emergence from "the grip of alien imperialistic forces and their surrogates." All Indian history, Rajaram writes, can be pictured as a struggle between nationalistic and imperialistic forces.

In Indology, the imperialistic enemy is the "colonial-missionary creation known as the Aryan invasion model," which Rajaram ascribes to Indologists long after crude invasion theories have been replaced by more sophisticated acculturation models by seriou s researchers. Rajaram's cartoon image of Indology is to be replaced by "a path of study that combines ancient learning and modern science." What Rajaram means by "science" is suggested in one of his papers describing the knowledge of the Rigveda poets. The Rigveda rishis, we find, packed their hymns with occult allusions to high-energy physics, anti-matter, the inflational theory of the universe, calculations of the speed of light, and gamma-ray bursts striking the earth three times a day. The l atter is shown in three Rigveda verses (3.56.6, 7.11.3, 9.86.18) addressed to the god Agni. The second Rajaram translates: "O Agni! We know you have wealth to give three times a day to mortals."

One of Rajaram's early Hindutva pieces was written in 1995 with David Frawley, a Western "New Age" writer who likes to find allusions to American Indians in the Rigveda. Frawley is transformed via the "Sword of Truth" into a "famous American Vedic scholar and historian." The book by Rajaram and Frawley proposes the curious thesis that the Rigveda was the product of a complex urban and maritime civilisation, not the primitive horse-and-chariot culture seen in the text. The goal is to link the Rigv eda to the earlier Indus Valley Civilisation, undercutting any possibility of later "Aryan" migrations or relocations of the Rigveda to "foreign" soil. Ancient India, working through a massive (but lost) Harappan literature, was a prime source of civilis ation to the West.

The Deciphered Indus Script makes similar claims with different weapons. The Indus-Saraswati Valley again becomes the home of the Rigveda and a font of higher civilisation: Babylonian and Greek mathematics, all alphabetical scripts, and even Roman numerals flow out to the world from the Indus Valley's infinitely fertile cultural womb. Press releases praise the work for not only "solving the most significant technical problem in historical research of our time" - deciphering the Indus script - but for demonstrating as well that "if any 'cradle of civilisation' existed, it was located not in Mesopotamia but in the Saraswati Valley." The decoded messages of Harappa thus confirm the Hindutva propagandist's wildest nationalistic dreams.

Rajaram's 'Piltdown Horse'

Not unexpectedly, Indologists followed the pre-press publicity for Rajaram's book with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. Just as the book hit the West, a lively Internet debate was under way over whether any substantial texts existed in Harappa - let alone the massive lost literature claimed by Rajaram. Indus Valley texts are cryptic to extremes, and the script shows few signs of evolutionary change. Most inscriptions are no more than four or five characters long; many contain only two or three characters. Moreover, character shapes in mature Harappan appear to be strangely "frozen," unlike anything seen in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt or China. This suggests that expected "scribal pressures" for simplifying the script, arising out of the repeate d copying of long texts, was lacking. And if this is true, the Indus script may have never evolved beyond a simple proto-writing system.


Mackay 453 before its 'computer enhancement' by Rajaram. When you look at the original picture, it is clear that the seal impression is cracked.

Once Rajaram's book could actually be read, the initial scepticism of Indologists turned to howls of disbelief - followed by charges of fraud. It was quickly shown that the methods of Jha and Rajaram were so flexible that virtually any desired message co uld be read into the texts. One Indologist claimed that using methods like these he could show that the inscriptions were written in Old Norse or Old English. Others pointed to the fact that the decoded messages repeatedly turned up "missing links" betwe en Harappan and Vedic cultures - supporting Rajaram's Hindutva revisions of history. The language of Harappa was declared to be "late Vedic" Sanskrit, some 2,000 years before the language itself existed. Through the decoded messages, the horseless Indus Valley Civilisation - distinguishing it sharply from the culture of the Rigveda - was awash with horses, horse keepers, and even horse rustlers. To support his claims, Rajaram pointed to a blurry image of a "horse seal" - the first pictorial evidence eve r claimed of Harappan horses.

Chaos followed. Within weeks, the two of us demonstrated that Rajaram's "horse seal" was a fraud, created from a computer distortion of a broken "unicorn bull" seal. This led Indologist wags to dub it the Indus Valley "Piltdown horse" - a comic allusion to the "Piltdown man" hoax of the early twentieth century. The comparison was, in fact, apt, since the "Piltdown man" was created to fill the missing link between ape and man - just as Rajaram's "horse seal" was intended to fill a gap between Harappa and Vedic cultures.

M-1034a

Once the hoax was uncovered, $1000 was offered to anyone who could find one Harappan researcher who endorsed Rajaram's "horse seal." The offer found no takers.

The "Piltdown horse" story has its comic side, but it touches on a central problem in Indian history. Horses were critical to Vedic civilisation, as we see in Vedic texts describing horse sacrifices, horse raids, and warfare using horse-drawn chariots. I f Rigvedic culture (normally dated to the last half of the second millennium BCE) is identified with Harappa, it is critical to find evidence of extensive use of domesticated horses in India in the third millennium BCE. In the case of Hindutva "revisioni sts" like Rajaram, who push the Rigveda to the fourth or even fifth millennium, the problem is worse. They must find domesticated horses and chariots in South Asia thousands of years before either existed anywhere on the planet.

Evidence suggests that the horse (Equus caballus) was absent from India before around 2000 BCE, or even as late as 1700 BCE, when archaeology first attests its presence in the Indus plains below the Bolan pass. The horse, a steppe animal from the semi-temperate zone, was not referred to in the Middle East until the end of the third millennium, when it first shows up in Sumerian as anshe.kur (mountain ass) or anshe.zi.zi (speedy ass). Before horses, the only equids in the Near East w ere the donkey and the half-ass (hemione, onager). The nearly untrainable hemiones look a bit like horses and can interbreed with them, as can donkeys. In India, the hemione or khor (Equus hemionus khur) was the only equid known before the horse; a few specimens still survive in the Rann of Kutch.

As shown by their identical archaeological field numbers (DK-6664), M-772A (published in Vol. II of Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions, 1991) is the original seal that seven decades ago created the seal impression (Mackay 453) that Rajaram claims is a 'horse seal.'
M-772A (flipped horizontally) Mackay 453


The appearance of domesticated horses in the Old World was closely linked to the development of lightweight chariots, which play a central role in the Rigveda. The oldest archaeological remains of chariots are from east and west of the Ural mountains, wh ere they appear c. 2000 BCE. In the Near East, their use is attested in pictures and writing a little later. A superb fifteenth-century Egyptian example survives intact (in Florence, Italy); others show up in twelfth-century Chinese tombs.

Chariots like these were high-tech creations: the poles of the Egyptian example were made of elm, the wheels' felloes (outer rim) of ash, its axles and spokes of evergreen oak, and its spoke lashings of birch bark. None of these trees are found in the Ne ar East south of Armenia, implying that these materials were imported from the north. The Egyptian example weighs only 30 kg or so, a tiny fraction of slow and heavy oxen-drawn wagons, weighing 500 kg or more, which earlier served as the main wheeled tra nsport. These wagons, known since around 3000 BCE, are similar to those still seen in parts of the Indian countryside.

The result of all this is that the claim that horses or chariots were found in the Indus Valley of the third millennium BCE is quite a stretch. The problem is impossible for writers like Rajaram who imagine the Rigveda early in the fourth or even fifth m illennium, which is long before any wheeled transport - let alone chariots - existed. Even the late Hungarian palaeontologist S. Bokonyi, who thought that he recognised horses' bones at one Indus site, Surkotada, denied that these were indigenous to South Asia. He writes that "horses reached the Indian subcontinent in an already domesticated form coming from the Inner Asiatic hors e domestication centres." Harvard's Richard Meadow, who discovered the earliest known Harappan text (which Rajaram claims to have deciphered), disputes even the Surkotada evidence. In a paper written with the young Indian scholar, Ajita K. Patel, Meadow argues that not one clear example of horse bones exists in Indus excavations or elsewhere in North India before c. 2000 BCE.3 All contrary claims arise from evidence from ditches, erosional deposits, pits or horse graves originating hun dreds or even thousands of years later than Harappan civilisation. Remains of "horses" claimed by early Harappan archaeologists in the 1930s were not documented well enough to let us distinguish between horses, hemiones, or asses.

All this explains the need for Rajaram's horse inscriptions and "horse seal." If this evidence were genuine, it would trigger a major rethinking of all Old World history. Rajaram writes, in his accustomed polemical style:


The 'horse seal' goes to show that the oft repeated claim of "No horse at Harappa" is entirely baseless. Horse bones have been found at all levels at Harappan sites. Also... the word 'as'va' (horse) is a commonly occuring (sic) word on the seals. The sup posed 'horselessness' of the Harappans is a dogma that has been exploded by evidence. But like its cousin the Aryan invasion, it persists for reasons having little to do with evidence or scholarship.
Rajaram's "horse," which looks something like a deer to most people, is a badly distorted image printed next to an "artist's reproduction" of a horse, located below a Harappan inscription.4 The original source of the image, Mackay 453, is a ti ny photo on Plate XCV of Vol. II of Ernest Mackay's Further Excavations of Mohenjo-Daro (New Delhi, 1937-38). The photo was surprisingly difficult to track down, since Rajaram's book does not tell you in which of Mackay's archaeological works, whi ch contain thousands of images, the photo is located. Finding it and others related to it required coordinating resources in two of the world's best research libraries, located 3,000 miles apart in the United States.

M-595a

Once the original was found, and compared over the Internet with his distorted image, Rajaram let it slip that the "horse seal" was a "computer enhancement" that he and Jha introduced to "facilitate our reading." Even now, however, he claims that the sea l depicts a "horse." To deny it would be disastrous, since to do so would require rejection of his decipherment of the seal inscription - which supposedly includes the word "horse."

Once you see Mackay's original photo, it is clear that Rajaram's "horse seal" is simply a broken "unicorn bull" seal, the most common seal type found in Mohenjo-daro. In context, its identity is obvious, since the same page contains photos of more than two dozen unicorn bulls - any one of which would make a good "horse seal" if it were cracked in the right place.

What in Rajaram's "computer enhancement" looks like the "neck" and "head" of a deer is a Rorschach illusion created by distortion of the crack and top-right part of the inscription. Any suggestion that the seal represents a whole animal evaporates as soo n as you see the original. The fact that the seal is broken is not mentioned in Rajaram's book. You certainly cannot tell it is broken from the "computer enhancement."

While Rajaram's bogus "horse seal" is crude, because of the relative rarity of the volume containing the original, which is not properly referenced in Rajaram's book, only a handful of researchers lucky enough to have the right sources at hand could trac k it down. Rajaram's evidence could not be checked by his typical reader in Ahmedabad, say - or even by Indologists using most university libraries.

The character of the original seal becomes clearer when you look more closely at the evidence. Mackay 453, it turns out, is not the photo of a seal at all, as Rajaram claims, but of a modern clay impression of a seal (field number DK-6664) dug up in Mohe njo-daro during the 1927-31 excavations. We have located a superb photograph of the original seal that made the impression (identified again by field number DK-6664) in the indispensable Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions (Vol. II: Helsinki 19 91, p. 63). The work was produced by archaeologists from India and Pakistan, coordinated by the renowned Indologist Asko Parpola. According to a personal communication from Dr. Parpola, the original seal was photographed in Pakistan by Jyrki Lyytikk„ spe cifically for the 1991 publication.

Like everyone else looking at the original, Parpola notes that Rajaram's "horse seal" is simply a broken "unicorn bull" seal, one of numerous examples found at Mohenjo-daro. Rajaram has also apparently been told this by Iravatham Mahadevan, the leading I ndian expert on the Indus script. Mahadevan is quoted, without name, in Rajaram's book as a "well known 'Dravidianist"' who pointed out to him the obvious. But, Rajaram insists, a "comparison of the two creatures [unicorns and horses], especially in [the ] genital area, shows this to be fallacious." Rajaram has also claimed on the Internet that the animal's "bushy tail" shows that it is a horse.

Below, on the left, we have reproduced Lyytikk„'s crisp photo of the original seal, compared (on the right) with the seven-decade-old photo (Mackay 453) of the impression Rajaram claims is a "horse seal." We have flipped the image of the original horizon tally to simplify comparison of the seal and impression. The tail of the animal is the typical "rope" tail associated with unicorn bull seals at Mohenjo-daro (seen in more images below). It is clearly not the "bushy tail" that Rajaram imagines - although Rajaram's story is certainly a "bushy horse tale."

Checking Rajaram's claims about the "genital area," we find no genitals at all in M-772A or Mackay 453 - for the simple reason that genitals on unicorn bulls are typically located right where the seal is cracked! This is clear when we look at other unico rn seals or their impressions. One seal impression, Parpola M-1034a (on the right), has a lot in common with Rajaram's "horse seal," including the two characters on the lefthand side of the inscription. The seal is broken in a different place, wiping out the righthand side of the inscription but leaving the genitals intact. On this seal impression we see the distinctive "unicorn" genitals, identified by the long "tuft" hanging straight down. The genitals are located where we would find them on Rajaram's "horse seal," if the latter were not broken.

Other unicorn bull seal impressions, like the one seen in Parpola M-595a, could make terrific "horse seals" if cracked in the same place. Unfortunately, Parpola M-595a is not broken, revealing the fact (true of most Harappan seals) that it represents not a real but a mythological animal. (And, of course, neither this nor any other unicorn has a bushy tail.)

Rajaram's 'computer enhancement' of Mackay 453 on the left; the arrow points to an object apparently stuck into the original image. On the right, pictures of Mohenjo-daro copper plates showing similar telephone-like 'feeding troughs.'


(Left) Figure 7.1a: The `Horse Seal' (Mackay 453)

A Russian Indologist, Yaroslav Vassilkov, has pointed to a suspicious detail in Rajaram's "computer enhancement" that is not found on any photo of the seal or impression. Just in front of the animal, we find a small object that looks like a partia l image of a common icon in animal seals: a "feeding trough" that looks a little like an old-style telephone. Who inserted it into the distorted image of the "horse seal" is not known. Rajaram has not responded to questions about it.

Below, we show Rajaram's "computer enhancement" next to pictures of Mohenjo-daro copper plates that contain several versions of the object.

'Late Vedic' Sanskrit - 2000 Years Before Schedule

The horse seal is only one case of bogus data in Rajaram's book. Knowledge of Vedic Sanskrit is needed to uncover those involving his decipherments. That is not knowledge that Rajaram would expect in his average reader, since (despite its pretensions) th e book is not aimed at scholars but at a lay Indian audience. The pretence that the book is addressed to researchers (to whom the fraud is obvious) is a smokescreen to convince lay readers that Rajaram is a serious historical scholar.

The decipherment issue explains why Rajaram continues to defend his "horse seal" long after his own supporters have called on him to repudiate it. He has little choice, since he has permanently wedded his "Piltdown horse" to his decipherment method. The inscription over the horse, he tells us, reads (a bit ungrammatically) "arko-hasva or arko ha as'va" - "Sun indeed like the horse (sic)." The reading clearly would be pointless if the image represented a unicorn bull. Rajaram claims that there are links between this "deciphered" text and a later Vedic religious document, the Shukla Yajurveda. This again pushes the Rigveda, which is linguistically much earlier than that text, to an absurdly early period.

As we have seen, Rajaram claims that the language of Harappa was "late Vedic" Sanskrit. This conflicts with countless facts from archaeology, linguistics, and other fields. Indeed, "late Vedic" did not exist until some two thousand years after the start of mature Harappan culture!

Let us look at a little linguistic evidence. Some of it is a bit technical, but it is useful since it shows how dates are assigned to parts of ancient Indian history.

The Rigveda is full of descriptions of horses (as'va), horse races, and the swift spoke-wheeled chariot (ratha). We have already seen that none of these existed anywhere in the Old World until around 2000 BCE or so. In most places, they did not appear until much later. The introduction of chariots and horses is one marker for the earliest possible dates of the Rigveda.

Linguistic evidence provides other markers. In both ancient Iran and Vedic India, the chariot is called a ratha, from the prehistoric (reconstructed) Indo-European word for wheel *roth2o- (Latin rota, German Rad). ( A chariot = "wheels," just as in the modern slang expression "my wheels" = "my automobile.") We also have shared Iranian and Vedic words for charioteer - the Vedic ratheSTha or old Iranian rathaeshta, meaning "standing on the chariot." Indo -European, on the other hand - the ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit and most European languages - does not have a word for chariot. This is shown by the fact that many European languages use different words for the vehicle. In the case of Greek, for example, a chariot is harmat(-os).

The implication is that the ancient Iranian and Vedic word for chariot was coined sometime around 2000 BCE - about when chariots first appeared - but before those languages split into two. A good guess is that this occurred in the steppe belt of Russia a nd Kazakhstan, which is where we find the first remains of chariots. That area remained Iranian-speaking well into the classical period, a fact reflected even today in northern river names - all the way from the Danube, Don, Dnyestr, Dnyepr and the Ural (Rahaa = Vedic Rasaa) rivers to the Oxus (Vakhsh).

These are only a few pieces of evidence confirming what linguists have known for 150 years: that Vedic Sanskrit was not native to South Asia but an import, like closely related old Iranian. Their usual assumed origins are located in the steppe belt to th e north of Iran and northwest of India.

This view is supported by recent linguistic discoveries. One is that approximately 4 per cent of the words in the Rigveda do not fit Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) word patterns but appear to be loans from a local language in the Greater Panjab. That language is close to, but not identical with, the Munda languages of Central and East India and to Khasi in Meghalaya. A second finding pertains to shared loan words in the Rigveda and Zoroastrian texts referring to agricultural products, animals, and domestic goods that we know from archaeology first appeared in Bactria-Margiana c. 2100-1700 BCE. These include, among others, words for camel (uSTra/ushtra), donkey (khara/xara), and bricks (iSTakaa/ishtiia, ishtuua). The evidence suggests that b oth the Iranians and Indo-Aryans borrowed these words when they migrated through this region towards their later homelands.5 A third find relates to Indo-Aryan loan words that show up in the non-Aryan Mitanni of northern Iraq and Syria c.1400 BCE. These loanwords reflect slightly older Indo-Aryan forms than those found in the Rigveda. This evidence is on e reason why Indologists place the composition of the Rigveda in the last half of the second millennium.

This evidence, and much more like it, shows that the claim by Rajaram that mature Harappans spoke "late Vedic" Sanskrit - the language of the Vedic sutras (dating to the second half of the first millennium) - is off by at least two thousand years! At bes t, a few adventurous speakers may have existed in Harappa of some early ancestor of old Vedic Sanskrit - the much later language of the Rigveda - trickling into the Greater Panjab from migrant "Aryan" tribes. These early Indo-Aryan speakers could have mi ngled with others in the towns and cities of Harappan civilisation, which were conceivably just as multilingual as any modern city in India. (Indeed, Rigvedic loan words seem to suggest several substrate languages.) But to have all, or even part, of Hara ppans speaking "late Vedic" is patently absurd.

But this evidence pertains to what Rajaram represents as "the petty conjectural pseudo-science" called linguistics. By rejecting the science wholesale, he gives himself the freedom to invent Indian history at his whim.

Consonants Count Little, Vowels Nothing!

According to Rajaram and Jha, the Indus writing system was a proto-alphabetical system, supposedly derived from a complex (now lost) system of pre-Indus "pictorial" signs. Faced with a multitude of Harappan characters, variously numbered between 400 and 800, they select a much smaller subset of characters and read them as alphabetical signs. Their adoption of these signs follows from the alleged resemblances of these signs to characters in Brahmi, the ancestor of later Indian scripts. (This was the scri pt adopted c. 250 BCE by Asoka, whom Jha's 1996 book assigns to c. 1500 BCE!) Unlike Brahmi, which lets you write Indian words phonetically, the alphabet imagined by Jha and Rajaram is highly defective, made up only of consonants, a few numbers, and some special-purpose signs. The hundreds of left-over "pictorial" signs normally stand for single words. Whenever needed, however - and this goes for numbers as well - they can also be tapped for their supposed sound values, giving Rajaram and Jha extraordin ary freedom in making their readings. The only true "vowel" that Jha and Rajaram allow is a single wildcard sign that stands for any initial vowel - as in A-gni or I-ndra - or sometimes for semi-vowels. Vowels inside words can be imagine d at whim.

Vowels were lacking in some early Semitic scripts, but far fewer vowels are required in Semitic languages than in vowel-rich Indian languages like Sanskrit or Munda. In Vedic Sanskrit, any writing system lacking vowels would be so ambiguous that it would be useless. In the fictional system invented by Jha and Rajaram, for example, the supposed Indus ka sign can be read kaa, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc., or can also represent the isolated consonant k. A script like this opens the door to an enormou s number of alternate readings.

Supposing with Jha and Rajaram that the language of Harappa was "late Vedic", we would find that the simple two-letter inscription mn might be read:


mana "ornament"; manaH"mind" (since Rajaram lets us add the Visarjaniya or final -H at will); manaa "zeal" or "a weight"; manu "Manu"; maana "opinion" or "building" or "thinker"; miina "fish"; miine "in a fish"; miinau "two fish"; miinaiH "with fish"; muni "Muni", "Rishi", "ascetic"; mRn- "made of clay"; menaa "wife"; meni "revenge"; mene "he has thought"; mauna "silence"; and so on.
There are dozens of other possibilities. How is the poor reader, presented with our two-character seal, supposed to decide if it refers to revenge, a sage, the great Manu, a fish, or his wife? The lords of Harappa or Dholavira, instead of using the scrip t on their seals, would have undoubtedly sent its inventor off to finish his short and nasty life in the copper mines of the Aravallis!

If all of this were not enough to drive any reader mad, Rajaram and Jha introduce a host of other devices that permit even freer readings of inscriptions. The most ridiculous involves their claim that the direction of individual inscriptions "follows no hard and fast rules." This means that if tossing in vowels at will in our mn inscription does not give you the reading you want, you can restart your reading (again, with unlimited vowel wildcards) from the opposite direction - yielding further al ternatives like namaH or namo "honour to...," naama "name," and so on.

There are other "principles" like this. A number of signs represent the same sound, while - conversely - the same sign can represent different sounds. With some 400-800 signs to choose from, this gives you unlimited creative freedom. As Raj aram puts it deadpan, Harappan is a "rough and ready script." Principles like this "gave its scribes several ways in which to express the same sounds, and write words in different ways." All this is stated in such a matter-of-fact and "scientific" manner that the non-specialist gets hardly a clue that he is being had.

In other words, figure out what reading you want and fill in the blanks! As Voltaire supposedly said of similar linguistic tricks: "Consonants count little, and vowels nothing."

A little guidance on writing direction comes from the wildcard vowel sign, which Rajaram tells us usually comes at the start of inscriptions. This is "why such a large number of messages on the Indus seals have this vowel symbol as the first letter." Wha t Jha and Rajaram refer to as a vowel (or semi-vowel) sign is the Harappan "rimmed vessel" or U-shaped symbol. This is the most common sign in the script, occurring by some counts some 1,400 times in known texts. It is most commonly seen on the left side of inscriptions.

Back in the 1960s, B.B. Lal, former Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, convincingly showed, partly by studying how overlapping characters were inscribed on pottery, that the Harappan script was normally read from right to left. Much other hard evidence confirming this view has been known since the early 1930s. This means that in the vast majority of cases the U-sign is the last sign of an inscription. But here, as so often elsewhere, Rajaram and Jha simply ignore well-establi shed facts, since they are intent on reading Harappan left to right to conform to "late Vedic" Sanskrit. (In times of interpretive need, however, any direction goes - including reading inscriptions vertically or in zig-zag fashion on alternate lines.)

The remarkable flexibility of their system is summarised in statements like this:


First, if the word begins with a vowel then the genetic sign has to be given the proper vowel value. Next the intermediate consonants have to be shaped properly by assigning the correct vowel combinations. Finally, the terminal letter may also have to be modified according to context. In the last case, a missing visarga or anusvaara may have to be supplied, though this is often indicated.
How, the sceptic might ask, can you choose the right words from the infinite possibilities? The problem calls for a little Vedic ingenuity:


In resolving ambiguities, one is forced to fall back on one's knowledge of the Vedic language and the literary context. For example: when the common composite letter r + k is employed, the context determines if it is to be pronounced as rka (as in arka) or as kra as in kruura.
The context Rajaram wants you to use to fill in the blanks is the one that he wants to prove: any reading is proper that illustrates the (imaginary) links between "late Vedic" culture and Indus Civilisation. Once you toss in wildcard vowels, for example, any rk or kr combination provides instant Harappan horseplay - giving you a Vedic-Harappan horse (recalling their equation that arka "sun" = "horse") long before the word (or animal) appeared in India.

Why did the Indus genius who invented the alphabet not include all basic vowel signs - like those in Asoka's script - which would have made things unambiguous? It certainly could not be because of a lack of linguistic knowledge, since Rajaram claims that the Harappans had an "advanced state of knowledge of grammar, phonetics, and etymology," just as they had modern scientific knowledge of all other kinds. But vowels, of course, would rob Rajaram of his chances to find Vedic treasure in Harappan inscript ions - where he discovers everything from horse thieves to Rigvedic kings and advanced mathematical formulae.

Peculiarly, in contrast to the lack of vowel signs, Jha and Rajaram give us a profusion of special signs that stand for fine grammatical details including word-final -H and -M (Visarjaniya and Anusvaara; if these are missing, you can just toss them in); special verb endings like -te; and noun endings such as -su. All of these are derived from Paninian grammar more than two thousand years before Panini! They even find special phonological signs for Paninian gu Na and vRddhi (that is, u becomes o or au) and for Vedic pitch accents (svara).

Although the scribes lacked vowels, they thus had signs applicable only to vowel combination (sandhi) - which is remarkable indeed, given the absence of the vowels themselves.

A Hundred Noisy Crows

It is clear that the method of Rajaram and Jha is so flexible that you can squeeze some pseudo-Vedic reading out of any inscription. But, with all this freedom, what a motley set of readings they hand us! Moreover, few of their readings have anything to do with Harappan civilisation.

What were Indus seals used for? We know that some (a minority) were stamped on bales of merchandise; many were carried around on strings, perhaps as amulets or ID cards. Many of them were lost in the street or were thrown out as rubbish when no longer ne eded. Sometimes a whole set of identical inscriptions has been found tossed over Harappan embankment walls.

In their usual cavalier way, Rajaram and Jha ignore all the well-known archaeological evidence and claim that the inscriptions represent repositories of Vedic works like the ancient Nighantu word lists, or even the mathematical formulae of the Shulbasutras. The main object of Harappan seals, they tell us, was the "preservation of Vedic knowledge and related subjects."

How many merchants in the 5000-odd year history of writing would have thought to put mathematical formulae or geometric slogans on their seals and tokens? Or who would be likely to wear slogans like the following around their necks?


"It is the rainy season"; "House in the grip of cold"; "A dog that stays home and does nothing is useless" - which Rajaram and Jha alternately read as: "There is raw meat on the face of the dog"; "Birds of the eastern country"; "One who drinks barley wat er"; "A hundred noisy crows"; "Mosquito"; "The breathing of an angry person"; "Rama threatened to use agni-vaaNa (a fire missile)"; "A short tempered mother-in-law"; "Those about to kill themselves with sinfulness say"; or, best of all, the refreshingly populist: "O! Moneylender, eat (your interest)!"
By now, we expect lots of horse readings, and we are not disappointed. What use, we wonder, would the Harappans have for seal inscriptions like these?


"Water fit for drinking by horses"; "A keeper of horses (paidva) by name of VarSaraata"; "A horsekeeper by name of As'ra-gaura wishes to groom the horses"; "Food for the owner of two horses"; "Arci who brought under control eight loose horses"; an d so on.
The most elaborate horse reading shows up in the most famous of Indus inscriptions - the giant "signboard" hung on the walls of the Harappan city of Dholavira. The "deciphered" inscription is another attack on the "no horse in Harappa" argument:


"I was a thousand times victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of my wealth of horses!"
In the end, readers of Jha and Rajaram are likely to agree with only one "deciphered" message in the whole book: apa-yas'o ha mahaat "A great disgrace indeed!"

Vedic Sanskrit?

Before concluding, we would like to point out that the line we just quoted contains an elementary grammatical error - a reading of mahaat for mahat. The frequency of mistakes like this says a lot about the level of Vedic knowledge (or lack thereof) of the authors. A few examples at random:


- on p. 227 of their book we find adma "eat!" But what form is adma? admaH "we eat? At best, adma "food," not "eat!"
- on p. 235, we find tuurNa ugra s'vasruuH. No feminine adjectives appear in the expression (tuurNaa, ugraa), as required by the angry "mother-in-law" (read: s'vas'ruuH!).

- on p. 230, we read apvaa-hataa-tmaahuH, where hataatma might mean "one whose self is slain," or the "self of a slain (person)," but not "those about to kill themselves." In the same sentence, apvaa does not mean "sinfulness" (whic h is, in any case, a non-Vedic concept) but "mortal fear."

- on p. 232, we have amas'aityaarpaa, supposedly meaning "House in the grip of cold." But amaa (apparently what they want, not ama "force") is not a word for "house," but an adverb meaning "at home." The word s'aitya "cold" is not "late Vedic" but post-Vedic, making the reading even more anachronistic than the other readings in the book.

- on p. 226, we find paidva for "horses," in a passage referring to horse keepers. But in Vedic literature this word does not refer to an ordinary but a mythological horse.

Many similar errors are found in the 1996 pamphlet by Jha, billed by Rajaram as "one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars and palaeographers."

None of those errors can be blamed on ignorant Harappan scribes.

History and Hindutva Propaganda

It might be tempting to laugh off the Indus script hoax as the harmless fantasy of an ex-engineer who pretends to be a world expert on everything from artificial intelligence to Christianity to Harappan culture.

What belies this reading is the ugly subtext of Rajaram's message, which is aimed at millions of Indian readers. That message is anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-Indological, and (despite claims to the opposite) intensely anti-scientific. Those views pr esent twisted images of India's past capable of inflicting severe damage in the present.

Rajaram's work is only one example of a broader reactionary trend in Indian history. Movements like this can sometimes be seen more clearly from afar than nearby, and we conclude with a few comments on it from our outside but interested perspective.

In the past few decades, a new kind of history has been propagated by a vocal group of Indian writers, few of them trained historians, who lavishly praise and support each other's works. Their aim is to rewrite Indian history from a nationalistic and rel igious point of view. Their writings have special appeal to a new middle class confused by modern threats to traditional values. With alarming frequency their movement is backed by powerful political forces, lending it a mask of respectability that it do es not deserve.

Unquestionably, all sides of Indian history must be repeatedly re-examined. But any massive revisions must arise from the discovery of new evidence, not from desires to boost national or sectarian pride at any cost. Any new historical models must be cons istent with all available data judged apart from parochial concerns.

The current "revisionist" models contradict well-known facts: they introduce horse-drawn chariots thousands of years before their invention; imagine massive lost literatures filled with "scientific" knowledge unimaginable anywhere in the ancient world; p roject the Rigveda into impossibly distant eras, compiled in urban or maritime settings suggested nowhere in the text; and imagine Vedic Sanskrit or even Proto Indo-European rising in the Panjab or elsewhere in northern India, ignoring 150 years of evide nce fixing their origins to the northwest. Extreme "out-of-India" proponents even fanaticise an India that is the cradle of all civilisation, angrily rejecting all suggestions that peoples, languages, or technologies ever entered prehistoric India from f oreign soil - as if modern concepts of "foreign" had any meaning in prehistoric times.

Ironically, many of those expressing these anti-migrational views are emigrants themselves, engineers or technocrats like N.S. Rajaram, S. Kak, and S. Kalyanaraman, who ship their ideas to India from U.S. shores. They find allies in a broader assortment of home-grown nationalists including university professors, bank employees, and politicians (S. S. Misra, S. Talageri, K.D. Sethna, S.P. Gupta, Bh. Singh, M. Shendge, Bh. Gidwani, P. Chaudhuri, A. Shourie, S.R. Goel). They have even gained a small but vo cal following in the West among "New Age" writers or researchers outside mainstream scholarship, including D. Frawley, G. Feuerstein, K. Klostermaier, and K. Elst. Whole publishing firms, such as the Voice of India and Aditya Prakashan, are devoted to pr opagating their ideas.

There are admittedly no universal standards for rewriting history. But a few demands must be made of anyone expecting his or her scholarship to be taken seriously. A short list might include: (1) openness in the use of evidence; (2) a respect for well-es tablished facts; (3) a willingness to confront data in all relevant fields; and (4) independence in making conclusions from religious and political agendas.

N.S. Rajaram typifies the worst of the "revisionist" movement, and obviously fails on all counts. The Deciphered Indus Script is based on blatantly fake data (the "horse seal," the free-form "decipherments"); disregards numerous well-known facts ( the dates of horses and chariots, the uses of Harappan seals, etc.); rejects evidence from whole scientific fields, including linguistics (a strange exclusion for a would-be decipherer!); and is driven by obvious religious and political motives in claimi ng impossible links between Harappan and Vedic cultures.

Whatever their pretensions, Hindutva propagandists like Rajaram do not belong to the realm of legitimate historical discourse. They perpetuate, in twisted half-modern ways, medieval tendencies to use every means possible to support the authority of relig ious texts. In the political sphere, they falsify history to bolster national pride. In the ethnic realm, they glorify one sector of India to the detriment of others.

It is the responsibility of every serious researcher to oppose these tendencies with the only sure weapon available - hard evidence. If reactionary trends in Indian history find further political support, we risk seeing violent repeats in the coming deca des of the fascist extremes of the past.

The historical fantasies of writers like Rajaram must be exposed for what they are: propaganda issuing from the ugliest corners of the pre-scientific mind. The fact that many of the most unbelievable of these fantasies are the product of highly trained e ngineers should give Indian educational planners deep concern.

In a recent online exchange, Rajaram dismissed criticisms of his faked "horse seal" and pointed to political friends in high places, boasting that the Union government had recently "advised" the "National Book Trust to bring out my popular book, From Sarasvati River to the Indus Script, in English and thirteen other languages."

We fear for India and for objective scholarship. To quote Rajaram's Harappan-Vedic one last time: "A great disgrace indeed!"

© Michael Witzel & Steve Farmer, 2000

Michael Witzel is Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and the author of many publications, including the recent monograph Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages, Boston: ASLIP/Mother Tongue 1999. A collecti on of his Vedic studies will be published in India by Orient Longman later this year. He is also editor of The Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, accessible through his home page at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm.

Steve Farmer, who received his doctorate from Stanford University, has held a number of academic posts in premodern history and the history of science. Among his recent works is his book Syncretism in the West, which develops a cross-cultural m odel of the evolution of traditional religious and philosophical systems. He is currently finishing a new book on brain and the evolution of culture. He can be contacted at india@safarmer.com.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------

For the UNI dispatch, see http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/.../0212000l.htm. Typically enough, in light of what we show below, Rajaram misidentified the early text discovered by Meadow, working o ff a photo of a different potsherd published in error by a BBC reporter. For the story of this Rajaram fiasco, with links, see http://www.safarmer.com/meadow.html.
N. Jha and N.S. Rajaram, The Deciphered Indus Script: Methodology, readings, interpretations, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 2000; pages xxvii + 269, Rs. 950.
See the comment by Meadow and Patel on Bknyi's work in South Asian Studies 13, 1997, pp. 308-315.
For the original story of the debunking of the "horse seal," with links to other evidence, see http://www.safarmer.com/horseseal/update.html.
For linguistic details, see M. Witzel, "Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rigvedic, Middle and Late Vedic)," Electronic Journal of Vedic Sanskrit, Vol. 5 (1999), Issue 1 (September), available in PDF format from http://www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs/ej...01article.pdf. See also F. Staal in The Book Review, Vol. XXIV, Jan.-Feb., 2000, p.17-20.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

Graphics source credits:
Frontline and the authors thank Asko Parpola, Professor of Indology, University of Helsinki, Finland, for permission to reproduce the photographs of M-1034a, M-772A, M-595a, M-66a, H-103a in this article.

M-1034a, Vol. 2 of A. Parpola's photographic corpus (**) = DK 5582, Mohenjo Daro Museum 778, P 694; photographed by S.M. Ilyas. Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan.

M-772A, Vol. 2 (**), DK 6664, Mohenjo Daro Museum 742, JL 884; photographed by Jyrki Lyytikk. Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan.

M-595a, Vol. 2 (**), HR 4601a, Lahore Museum, P-1815; photographed by S.M. Ilyas. Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan.

M-66a, Vol. 1 ((sup)*(/sup), HR 5629, ASI 63.10.371, HU 441; photographed by Erja Lahdenper. Courtesy ASI, Government of India.

H-103a, Vol. 1 (*), 2789, ASI 63.11.116, HU 601; photographed by Erja Lahdenper. Courtesy ASI, Government of India.

(*) Jagat Pati Joshi & A. Parpola, Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions 1. Collections in India, Helsinki 1987.

(**) Sayid Ghulam Mustafa Shah & A. Parpola, Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions 2. Collections in Pakistan, Helsinki 1991.

All other photographs are from N. Jha and N.S. Rajaram, The Deciphered Indus Script, cited earlier, except for the three animals on the right in the photograph on page 10, which are taken from John Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization, Vol. III, plates cxvii-cxviii, London 1931.




---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------
[ Subscribe | Contact Us | Archives | Table of Contents]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --
[ Home | The Hindu | Business Line | Sportstar ]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --
Copyrights © 2000, Frontline.

Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited
without the written consent of Frontline.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----


[This message has been edited by FYI (edited March 07, 2002

Re: # 328

Romair:

For argument sake you can state what you are saying. Pakistani awam should be the ultimate arbiter, and any and all "strategic thinkers" must be accountable / replaceable by them. If you say Pakistani awam wants it, I would accept it. But then I would also say that you are contradictory when you say that such "strategic thinkers" do not get voted in. This points to some serious problems in Pakistani system that does not produce results reflecting "awam".

Even in this case, according to me, "strategic thinkers" must be fired. The system must allow for this to happen in peaceful way. 150-million Pakistanis have showed that they are capable of voting out, just as anyone else in the world.

The relationship is not vendor that I am pointing out. It is who is the boss and ultimate authority. Of course if that is violated, then you run the danger of "strategic thinker" (= vendor to awam) will carry on with his agenda.

Re: # 376

[Pakistanis are not fools]

You could have fooled me!

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

375 Posted by tahmed32 on

tahmed,
you should first learn how to be honest in thinking... i gave you all that material so that you do not end up fooling yourself.. not me...

you don't know since when it is called India and for how long..... and somebody told you that it was Pakistan..... Do you know who lived in Pakistan then? Hindus... people who used to recite Vedas, Upanishads and who developed sanskrit.... Do you know patilputra and the university??? Do you know what is mean by being a Brahmin??? I told you that kautliya was a Brahmin.. but you need to know what being a Brahmin used to mean in the days of kautliya.... or theoretically even now...

perhaps you won't understand till i speak boldly...

Do this yourself and with your friends who do not know anything about history and who simply want to believe in whatever can protect their lies....

1. Check in wikipedia or anything else to know the time of Kautilya.... roughly around 350-300 BC

2. Now check this article on wikipedia..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahajanapadas

the time period of Mahajanapadas is 700BC to 300 BC or earlier, not later....

check the are of India covered by these MahaJanpadas, all of it together was called AryaVarta.....

3. Now try to imagine that in 500Bc much before even Kautilya, Budhdha was born in Nepal, you know how far away it is from your Pakistan? Then check the history of Magadha/Patilputra/Kosala or whatever and history of Budhdha and Varanasi to understand what was there before Kautilya...


1, 2 and 3 will give your brain enough clues to hide your face in sand for at least a couple of hours....

After that, my dear friend, you can attempt to face truth again, in all its serinity.... think how can muslims get name of India to a land where slave mentality lives and hates the people who were known by the name of India???? Think out of 16 Mahajanpads how many Pakistan covers???

India was those people, those MahaJanpads, their generations prior to and after MahaJanpads, those Hindus, not the converted/coward slaves of Arabs... Al Beiruni, Ibn Sina, Al Kindi, they didn't learn anything from those converted Moslems who hate their own forefathers, they learned from those Brahmins/Hindus... Charaka, Kautilya, Shushrutha were Hindus.... those were people for whom India was known...



As a hindu of some sort I feel bad for muslims in Pakistan, you have been cheated double by your history/destiny, first you were converted by force and terror with rape/killing and all, and later you had to reject much better ideas to protect worse ones and had to diswon your own history, your own forefathers... what worse could have been done???

romair, we can skip those analytical details because given her goals, Pakistan's current strategy is the best and the most effective one. It shows that Pakistanis are not fools - as some Indians here seem to be convinced. They can change their goals (as all Indians here are pressing you to do), but that is not a matter of intelligence, but of preferences and values. And those, as you rightly pointed out, are for Pakistanis alone to decide!!

---------------------

Pinku bhai and dm ji

May I ask a question?

Is there something that makes Pakistan a bit unique? Or, is Pakistan, in your view, pretty much the same as all other Muslim countries, like Bangladesh, for example?

pinku #371: i ask you a simple yes/no question, and you avoid answering it, and instead start telling me what i think, toss in some AryaVicharias how much the persians despise islam, and generally beat around the sindhu bush. tsk..tsk...

Anyway, being a generous man, I will assume the answer to my question is "yes" but you are afraid that this was a trick question (after all, i did study just a few miles away from where kautliya got his education).

No trick question, my friend. Going back to #369, the point of my question was simply this - Contrary to what you said, it is what is now Pakistan that was known to everybody, and what is now India was considered a "backward area" by the civilized world - worthy not even of a separate name other than in association with the indus valley, i.e. what is now Pakistan.

My own preference would have been to retain the name India for what is now Pakistan and to tell you people to stop calling yourselves after our river and call yourselves Injunland or something. But if chaudhury rehmat ali (a fellow gujjar and a family friend) managed to get the name switched to Pakistan - that is fine with me. After all, a rose by any name smells just as sweet.

Regards #: "to let populations of India and Pakistan also choose out the side of the border they want to live in."

.......that would be a very good idea....much like europe...i believe jinnah, actually, bought land in simla (?) before the partition......and i believe he did not sell his properties in india, before partition (or after).....hence he seemed to have thought the above is what would happen, after all the partition dust settled....

......however, i am not sure if the relationship between the two countries has reached this level of trust.....

india being, by far, the largest country, would be the one which would have to initiate such an initiative....

eklavya/dost-mittar #: .....it is a tough call on whether the break up of pakistan would be good for india or not.....i used to think it would really benefit india.....however, now i am not too sure......

....if it leads to a destablized pakistan, then it, certainly, cannot benefit india......it will have four entities to deal with, rather than one......

on the other hand, if pakistan remains stable, then it may help india......it could deal, separately, with sind and punjab on its borders.....and it would not have to worry about nwfp and baluchistan, which would not border with india.......and these states would be weaker if separate......

....having said that, i think one of the best things that can happen to pakistan is it federates into four or more autonous units, which exist under one federation.....much like uae......it would actully strengthen pakistan not weaken it......

.....in fact, i think pakistan should form such a unit, now, with bangladesh.....

you are correct about bangladesh....they still support pakistan instead of india....at least in the cricket matches.......this is something i cannot understand.....since they would not exist and have independence, if india had not fought a war on their behalf......one would thing, they would adore india.....

dost-mittar #: ....i have heard the terrorist interview multiple times......i am quite a big believer in evidence, and do not like conspiracy theory..

.....the terrorist does have a slight punjabi accent....it could also be construed as a non-urdu accent, which could be of any language.....i did not notice a pushtoo accent......

.....however, his use of hindi words is quite detailed.....and he lays down his demands clearly....so one would have to say based on the available evidence, he is an indian.....to say otherwise, would be more of a conspiracy theory...

......interpol has, now, stated that india has not provided any evidence to them either...

india has caught two individuals, locally......i believe one of them has turned out to be someone who was, actually, an undercover agent for indian security forces.....however, i have not heard a public statement from india that any local indians are involved.....or were amongst the terrorists......or were working in the hotels....etc......

.....one would have to assume that indian security forces have quite a bit of information now......kasab must have given a lot of information........autopsies of the other dead terrorists must have given some information.....tracking the ammunition used must have provided information also....

....in such situations, it is very difficult to gather enough evidence, which will convict someone in court.....however, there is, usually, enough to put blame on some entity.....for example, kasab being a pakistan, on its own, has gotten pakistan involved......so evidence does put moral pressure on parties, even if no conviction occurs.....it sets up the public opinion.....

i think india should put all the evidence on the table as soon as possible......the indian media has raised qutie a bit of hype, and the public has bought, totally, into it.......

the indian govt., so far, had handled this very well (in my opinion)......however, now they will have to cater to the public and media opinion, for the elections......the easiest way to, totally, corner paksitan and put even more pressure on it, is to start putting all the evidence into the open....including an open cross examination of kasab...though i am not sure if it would be possible, if local indians are involved......

......complex terrorist attacks (like 9/11 or the mumbai attacks) tend to have a lot of entities attached to them......

#369 Posted by tahmed32 on December 23, 2008 5:51:23 am

[[
pinku #366 do you know where india got its name?
]]

and you think you know more about it???? and you think you know how it will affect what I am saying???

The name AryaVrat is what Aryans used to call India.

As per westerners the explaination is as below, though hindus themselves can give you much more than that....
In Sanskrit word Sindhu means a ocean-river. The Indus river was called Sindhu river and Greek and Arab/Persian people started calling people living around and east of Sindhu in Indian subcontinent as Indian or Hindu. Those people themselves used term AryaVrat and in times of MajaJanpads they used to start with AryaVrat and then sub-regions of it, like Magadha etc.. Even today at the time of YagyoPaveet ceremony or any other ceremony you have to give your region starting fromAryaVatra and then old sanskrit names of region where your "kul" family originally belonged to.

Do you know since when people know about India??

Now can you tell me what all you know about it and where you find Pakistan??? Don't try to find Pakistan and Islam everywhere, and if you do don't think you are close to truth.... and if you do, don't think you won't look illusioned to others....

Read on MahaJanpads and where they existed and when.... check Greek/Persian history since when they know of India... And don't feel happy that Persia is ruled by Islam now, you have more people there who despise Islam for what it did to their culture than in other muslim/Islamic countries...

eklavya #: still have not seen your analysis......can we assume that the problem is too difficult to provide any solution to.......

pinku #366 do you know where india got its name?

Re: # 330 Romair

Dear Genius of Kakul:

Even after being slapped every generation or two, you still don't get it, do you? No wonder, your country is such a mess.

First of all, any half-way decent 'consulting company' will walk away from an incorrigible client like you. No self-respecting consulting company would want to be associated with a sinking ship, and be a part of 'advising' them, since the most prescient advice would be to 'cool it, reform self and look to grow economically'. If the 'client' won't take this advice, the best will simply walk away.

You are a reckless fool if you think that the Pakistan Army can withdraw from FATA, put the NATO supply lines at risk, jeopardize the $15bn IMF lifeline and just sit back and fight a little war with India, and everyone will be happy ever after. You think that NATO will simply say, 'Uh-Oh! We can't fight anymore. Pack your bags and return!'. Perhaps, you didn't read my post #240.

NATO is itching to pound the hell out of the Taleban safe havens in FATA, and by walking away from it, the Pak Army will invite NATO in. After all, the Pak Army is doing this unpleasant FATA cleanup only under a NATO threat to do the job themselves. Can Pakistan fight NATO and India simultaneously? India knows this too - don't you think that India could use this to its own advantage at a time of its own choosing?

Do you know that NATO is looking to develop alternate supply routes via Central Asia and China to Afghanistan? That is a prudent thing to do even without the above scenario unfolding.

PS: Your 'local assistance' theory in Mumbai attacks may or may not be true. What matters is that the US and Britain are not accepting that non-state actors are not Pakistan's responsibility. They are convinced that the masterminds are from Pakistan and this time Westerners and Israelis (in fact, citizens of 22 countries) were killed.

"and if Kautilya was Brahmin and "

there is no if here, just a typo

"Kautilya was Brahmin"

#362 Posted by tahmed32 on December 23, 2008 4:54:08 am
[[

#360 Regards: OK, good to know we wont get bombed by India. How then do you propose to separate good pakis from bad pakis?

PS: Kautliya, btw, was from Taxila University, Pakistan. He is no doubt living happily ever after with 52 sacred cows in heaven.

]]

Only India was known to anybody, Pakistan was created by people who needed it for Islam and if Kautilya was Brahmin and if he knew you would write taxila as "Taxila University, Pakistan" he would have moved to Kerala instead.

#348 Posted by akcheema
[[
Re: # 347; harish mian
[[But Pakis still believe we are out to get them ]]

after reading more than a few of your compatriots' interacts here, are they completely unjustified in that paranoia?

Believe you me, with hardly any face to face interactions between the two peoples, forums like this are always going to be the take home messages for both sides ... I stop making excuses for my blunders, you stop making excuses for yours ... and we are all fine ... how about that?

as I have no disillusions about Pakistani involvement in Indian affairs, I have little to believe complete honesty from the Indian side either

]]

Indians take lot of time in doing anything, owing to their genetic lethargy and practical democracy.... So Indians are quite honest if they say that they hardly did anything wrong to Pakistan... But Pakistan doesn't have any chance to accept anything as their is false/planned victimhood..... Also Indians are not against Pakistan, they are worried about the ideology that creates Pakistan/Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia..... the ideology that want to separate kashmir.... It is quite stupid to assume that India with such difficult task at hand in 1947 and managing through democracy, would have had any time to get involved with Pakistan... All involvement of India even in Bangladesh was reactionary... they never had time to get involved with Pak in non-reactionary ways...

So the problem is with Pakistan,there is hardly anything that India caan do except to create an international environment where Pakistan be forced to become a normal state...


only thing that fragmentation of pakistan can bring is its denuclearization...

#343 Posted by akcheema on December 23, 2008 2:42:42 am
Re: # 342; eklavya
[[
because that would leave you with four/five very bitter states, with the underlying ideology intact, and they would keep niggling under the surface til they are strong enough, either as individual states or even together! to continue to do what the current ONE state is doing (as per your pov)

it is the underlying ideology that needs to be reformed and brought in line with the times ... or be prepared to face four or five Pakistan in the not too distant future ... simple!

have you not learnt anything from the Bangladesh experiment?!

]]




akcheema is right, breaking up pakistan gives only some time to others... it is reforming the ideology that is solution.... but it is very difficult... so the question is what to do to create an environment that the solution can slowly grow in that environment and solve the situation/ideology over time...

1. first thing is to get rid of nukes

2. second to increase intolerance of intolerant ideas of such idologies..... fatwas, terrorism, sharia should be rejected at global/international level.... this is tough because US lives on Saudi oil and won't let anybody do it..

2. Make pakistan a secular state..... better make it illegal for any state to follow one religion, you have to be secular..

4. is to promote education (not religious or islamic/madarsa ones, even if they are of any help in short term)

4. Get rid of religion altogether, no "word of God" except the universe or world that exists.... no meddling of religion in politics (very very difficult given the way church still trying to regain its importance by fooling people)

[[
#338 Posted by harish_hyd on December 23,
#331 by akcheema

Cheema bhai, never thought the day would come when you have to agree with a certified chut!ya like Romair. How difficult is it for people to put on fake accents? I've never been to Punjab and am a pucca Madrasi, but I swear the Punjabi accent that I can put on can fool genuine Punjabis (on phone..otherwise my looks are a dead giveaway). Plus the red thread the terrorists were wearing on their wrists! As if that can fool people (it certainly seemed to have fooled some Pakis). If an individual can be trained to fight like a commando, how difficult would it be to train him to speak like an Indian Muslim?

And this chut!ya had to write a lengthy post to obfuscate the fact that Paki newspapers and TV channels themselves admitted to Qasab's hometown being Faridkot and worse, you had to read all of it and respond.

]]

harish you desrve some medal for quick honesty in these times of deception...:-)

#360 Regards: OK, good to know we wont get bombed by India. How then do you propose to separate good pakis from bad pakis?

PS: Kautliya, btw, was from Taxila University, Pakistan. He is no doubt living happily ever after with 52 sacred cows in heaven.

#308 Posted by masadi on December 22, 2008 6:54:40 pm

[[
pinku writes "Soon you will have only two groups, Islamists (or Morons) and rest of humans.."

Behold evidence of my contention of the moronic nature of Indians on Chowk. Unable to invent insults and being oblivious of any facts whatsoever the moron merely copies the insult hurled towards him by the opponent.
]]

masadi, the amount of insult that you and your islamist friends have been receiving is beyond your mind to comprehend. If you go through my posts, you will find a few of them. So many times you have cried in silence after reading so many posts for which all you can do is wish it was not true but can not accept the truth as such.

Believe me so far I am not trying to be innovative or inventive in insulting you or pakis. You anyway do not have much chance to handle anything.

The best thing you can do is to forget your education and start learning things with fresh mind.

#359 I never said I'll be bombing you.

I'm a descendent of Kautilya as you know and no huris waiting for me in afterlife. No jihadi kind of suicidal strategies.

Regards: That sounds much better. So does that mean you wont be bombing us into smithereens?

India is already sufficient fragmented. Central authority has little control. People have been moving from North to south. States are judged by the people according to their performance.

It can be also done at a wider scale - to let populations of India and Pakistan also choose out the side of the border they want to live in. (But any jihadi moving east and Bajrangi west will be bumped, no options given). Partition came when nobody knew what will be futur states. Now we know what Pakistan and India are about. Let everyone, who wishes so in Pakistan and India, be allowed to apply to move to other side. If after proper screening , option is acceptable as it is in Switzerland, he should be allowed to sell property and move to other side.

India is already sufficient fragmented. Central authority has little control. People have been moving from North to south. States are judged by the people according to their performance.

It can be also done at a wider scale - to let populations of India and Pakistan also choose out the side of the border they want to live in. (But any jihadi moving east and Bajrangi west will be bumped, no options given). Partition came when nobody knew what will be futur states. Now we know what Pakistan and India are about. Let everyone, who wishes so in Pakistan and India, be allowed to apply to move to other side. If after proper screening , option is acceptable as it is in Switzerland, he should be allowed to sell property and move to other side.

#355 how about india? any thoughts on separating the crooks from the civilized there? after all, charity starts at home.

#353 tahmed32 Just two: Jihadi and civilized.

Be my guest in India if anything goes wrong.

#352 "I am beginning to get convinced that the same phenomenon of fragmentation is beginning to happen in Pakistan."

now i am really scared...

#332 Regards: Now I am really scared. How many pieces do you think India would like to break Pakitan into?


brrrr.......(shivering with fear)

Kaal, you are right regarding Bangladesh. Separating it from (West) Pakistan created a much more favorable situation for India. India has to mostly focus on the west side. For one thing, even though Bangladesh is not always favorably disposed toward India, it does not act in concert with the Pakistani khakis and their Jihadi agents.

I am beginning to get convinced that the same phenomenon of fragmentation is beginning to happen in Pakistan. The Jihadi control over NWFP/FATA appears unbreakable. I doubt the Pakistani khakis have the ability to break it. Further, it is amply clear by now that the dominant part of the khaki leadership (the one which planned and executed the Mumbai outrage) is sympathetic to their causes and, at this time, basically controls Pakistan's state policies and as well as its military resources -- including the nukes. In that situation, further Talibanization of the rest of that country appears inevitable.

Therefore, a fragmented Pakistan in which some of the fragments retain sanity will be better than an artificially "whole" Pakistan which is held together merely by Jihadi ideology (and by the fear of Jihadis on the part of the awaam) which keeps injecting jihad into the various parts of the world, India being the most direct victim.

Good night Cheema bhai. All I can say is that were India to increase the level of involvement in Pakistan to the same extent Pakistan does in India, Afghanistan would seem like paradise.

eklavya:

I agree with akcheema. Bangladesh was a tactical success but a strategic blunder, much like Kargil for Pakistan. I too have been to Bangladesh and vouch for the fact that Bangladeshis do not harbour any good feelings towards India, even the Awami League types who think that while they helped India dismember Pakistan, India has not been helpful to them in economic and other matters.

On the other hand, if Bangladesh had been part of Pakistan, it still would have been a disgruntled part of that country and a sore thumb.

with that I'd have to take my leave gentlemen ... g'night

Re: # 347; harish mian
[[But Pakis still believe we are out to get them ]]

after reading more than a few of your compatriots' interacts here, are they completely unjustified in that paranoia?

Believe you me, with hardly any face to face interactions between the two peoples, forums like this are always going to be the take home messages for both sides ... I stop making excuses for my blunders, you stop making excuses for yours ... and we are all fine ... how about that?

as I have no disillusions about Pakistani involvement in Indian affairs, I have little to believe complete honesty from the Indian side either

#340 by akcheema

Cheema bhai, India does not wish for Pakistan to be broken up. India merely wishes that Pakistan left it alone. We have been doing well in the last decade or two and the last thing we would want is an Afghanistan-type neighborhood. But Pakis still believe we are out to get them and in their paranoid mindset imagine all sorts of conspiracy theories which would be funny if they weren't so pathetic. If an economically vulnerable Pakistan can exploit the fissures in India, wouldn't it be much easier for a better off (at least relatively speaking) India to do the same to Pakistan? You could also argue that India is already doing so, but wouldn't it find it easy to do this on a much larger scale, a few notches above what we've been witnessing Pakistan do here?

Re: # 345; eklavya

your statement No 1 pretty much answers it for you ... how would you handle four nation states all believing in the current ideology? ... and the bitterness that escalates as a result would only exacerbate the problem

Re No 2: how has Bangladesh been a success for India? may be in the short term initially ... let me tell you something ... as I see it, after interacting with many Bangladeshis, their new generation has absolutely no bitterness towards Pakistan ... India, that is another matter altogether!

Darn! I shouldn't have started this, but can't leave before one more post for now. Please do respond :)

-----------

Cheema ji,

(1) Let's take reforming the 'ideology' out for now. Let's assume that is not possible.

(2) Why do we assume Bangladesh has not been a spectacular success for India? Let's go back and consider India's situation had BD still been a part of Pakistan?

Romair#329,330:

The strategic thinker is facing two different situations and is therefore coming up with two different sets of recommendations.

In my scenario, the thinker's clients is the army brass who presents him with a set of problems six months BEFORE the Mumbai attacks. The Mumbai attacks is his solution to all thier problems.

In your scenario, Mumbai attacks have already taken place and the client is caught unaware. In that scenario, his recommendations make sense even though he has been given false assumption, namely, that the Indians are unwilling to consider the possibility of Indian collaborators. That possibility has been speculated upon from Day One and at least two Indian suspects, Amir Talah and Fahim Ansari, are in police custody and facing questions.

BTW, have you listened to Babar Imran's interview? I have. I fully recognize both Punjabi and non-punjabi accents and Babar's is a mixture of Punjabi and Pushtoon accents. No Muhajir or Indian Muslim will use such faulty Urdu (e.g., kya baat karta hai, instead of kya baat karte ho?). But he does use hindi words with a punjabi accent (e.g., parshaasan instead of prashaasan).

Re: # 342; eklavya

because that would leave you with four/five very bitter states, with the underlying ideology intact, and they would keep niggling under the surface til they are strong enough, either as individual states or even together! to continue to do what the current ONE state is doing (as per your pov)

it is the underlying ideology that needs to be reformed and brought in line with the times ... or be prepared to face four or five Pakistan in the not too distant future ... simple!

have you not learnt anything from the Bangladesh experiment?!

Cheema ji

From India's point of view, it would be MUCH MUCH better to (help) replace the current 'state' of Pakistan with smaller, more natural nation states which could then live freely, and be allowed to strike their own, independent relations with the world outside.

Why is that bad for the world?

Please leave your response here. I have to be gone for a few hours now! Thanks.

Re: # 337; eklavya

because I have always believed the two nations would (and should) have a symbiotic relationship without the bitterness that exists today ... and I for one donot wish either India or Pakistan to be broken up to serve the other's objective ... because it simply won't ... and I am sure if we all think this through, we are likely to come to similar conclusions

Re: # 338; harish mian

I don't doubt for a minute what you are saying ... I am simply elaborating the thinking on both sides from a political viewpoint.

I am under no disillusion as to the capabilities of LeT or similar minded organisations based in Pakistan to create havoc within and outside Pakistan.

Please read the full post and the ones that followed

harish bhai, the only thing akcheema ji is highlighting that

"at present it serves both their objectives ... if India admits to a 'local' element involved, it would be akin to a civil war scenario ... every Indian Muslim would be under suspiscion .. general unrest in civil society etc."

IMO, that is not at all true, but it is a reasonable for a Pakistani (or even any other outsider who thinks India is ruled by Thakre) to make that argument.

#331 by akcheema

Cheema bhai, never thought the day would come when you have to agree with a certified chut!ya like Romair. How difficult is it for people to put on fake accents? I've never been to Punjab and am a pucca Madrasi, but I swear the Punjabi accent that I can put on can fool genuine Punjabis (on phone..otherwise my looks are a dead giveaway). Plus the red thread the terrorists were wearing on their wrists! As if that can fool people (it certainly seemed to have fooled some Pakis). If an individual can be trained to fight like a commando, how difficult would it be to train him to speak like an Indian Muslim?

And this chut!ya had to write a lengthy post to obfuscate the fact that Paki newspapers and TV channels themselves admitted to Qasab's hometown being Faridkot and worse, you had to read all of it and respond.

"... that's like saying if India is broken up (Kashmir, assam etc) we'd be better off! clearly that won't be the case"

AKCheema, why won't it help Pakistan if India is broken up into smaller parts (Kashmir, Assam, etc)?

----------------------

I have to be extremely brief right now (am traveling).

Pursuing those goals, Pakistan cannot abandon, nor permanently sideline its state-controlled non-state actors.

The only decisions left are tactical in nature.

But overall, this is a risky strategy. So let's see if we have left somethings out.

------------

It's enemy's weaknesses are Pakistan's greatest resources. Can we think of some of India's weaknesses that Pakistan could use to make its strategy more effective and less risky for itself?

Evidence and pakistan,

We all know that pakistan is a country where people are charged, prosecuted based on evidence.

Samia sarwar was murdered in teh office of asma jahangir and no one was charged because per the paki law, it was a jihadic killing and no crime has been committed.

Hundereds of dead bodies are collected in teh streets of karachi every week, and no one gets charged, no case is registered, because they are all considered to be jihadic killings.

Mumbai is a jihadic killing

Resizing pakistan is teh only option that world has got. Smaller states like, renamed punjab as pakistan will give the other countries to nip the terrorists in their own homes.

The predator is doing a good job and that si what is required through out pakistan.

The shehdad has to be delivered to the jihadi on his door step.

Re: # 333

... that's like saying if India is broken up (Kashmir, assam etc) we'd be better off! clearly that won't be the case

Re: # 332; Regards

nothing can be gained by breaking up Pakistan. But pressure should be continued on the current administration to get rid of these elements (and the army should have a fair idea who/where they are!) ... and the results of such endeavours should be openly verified by the international community ... this will serve Pakistan in the long run more than anybody else

by breaking up the country you'd have multiple Pakistans to deal with

#307 tahmed32
On a serious note, when paksitani society & Government are in a denial mode of terrorism and what has happened in Mumbai, what do you expect Indians to do?

Either you take the challenge and bomb pakistan and worsen the problem for all or try to segregate rotten fruit from still healthy.

A smaller but healthier pakistani society will be good for all. A fragmentation like of Yugoslavia, Soviet Russia, Chekoslavakia gives a great socially responsible impetus as long as it does not make things easier for despots to take over.

Re: # 330; Romair

I agree with you on that ... at present it serves both their objectives ... if India admits to a 'local' element involved, it would be akin to a civil war scenario ... every Indian Muslim would be under suspiscion .. general unrest in civil society etc

the Pakistanis on the other hand are in denial and full of self-righteous thoughts as ever ... period!

....there is something that is not clear......as someone who believes, solely, in proof, and not in conspiracy theories, or media hype, i have so far only seen the following proof (i am still awaiting to see the proof the usa stated it had which linked 9/11 to have been lauched from afghanistan.......it has yet to be presented......sidenote: no, i don't think the jews did it)......

1. .....there is a pakistani person named kasab in indian custody......i would not belive this, until i got a chance to hear him speak and cross-examined.....however, the details provided by indian authorities, seem to match up with the research by local pakistani media......

.....so we can say with quite a bit of certainity that kasab is whom the indians say he is.......i.e. a pakistani......

a further cross-examination and questioning of him in public will validate the other claims india has assocaited with him......till then, those should be considered, simply, claims......

2. there is a live recording of one of the terrorists, named babar (?) during the attack......he has a a solid hindi accent, used hindi words, and describes his causes in detail.......this should be enough to prove that he is a local indian.....

these are, so far, the only two clear pieces of evidence in this case......all the other items being discussed in the media, may be true, or they may well not be.....so we have to wait till they are publicly presented......

what i cannot understand is why evidence no. 2 has totally been disregarded and is not being pursued.....someone publicly delcaring his cause, in a strong hindi accent, is a very important piece of evidence.......

would it have been pursued had babar had a punjabi accent, was speaking lahori punjabi and had declared himself to be from lahore?

.........still looks like a joint pakistani individuals and local individuals combined attack........india seems to be doing all it can to hide the local indian aspect.......and pakistan seems to be doing all it can to hide the pakistani element.......

in an ideal situation, india should be doing all it can to investigate the local indian element, and pakistan should be doing all it can to investigate the pakistani element......

dost-mittar #: "The same strategic thinker was hired by the same client six months ago with the following set of issues:"

.....this may well be true.....or it may well not be....you have given the analyses that the indian strategic thinkers may be carrying out right now.....on the basis of which they are, probably, planning their moves......

......allow me to present what the pakistani strategic thinker may be thinking and how he is planning his moves.....i may or may not personally agree with the analyses.....also the strategic thinker in this case is the joint military and democratic (ppp) leadership......

.....since 9/11, pakistan's otherwise successful strategy in kashmir, which had india in all kinds of stress has come apart totally, due to two reasons.......the pakistan economy hasn't grown......and most of all, after 9/11, india has successfully linked kashmir freedom fighter to gwot militants, internationally......

.......the govt. was able to control the lashkars, successfully, since then, indicating that they are actually state actors, and not rogue non-state actors.......since 2001, the infiltration in kashmir has come down to zero; which even the indians acknowledge.....pakistan is waiting for 9/11 dust to settle, and to see if india is genuine about peace in kashmir, before deciding the final fate of the lashkars......

......all of a sudden the mumbai attacks occur.....this was not planned by the govt. nor by the lashkar leaders, who have all gone into charity......and, always follow the govt.'s orders......and it makes no sense for pakistanis to target israelis, americans and brits......they never do that......and the indian attacks in paksitan and vice-versa are done through explosions.....fidayeen attacks are only carried out in kashmir....

.......it turns out that one terrorist is captured, and india is stating he is a pakistani.....strategic thinker does his internal checkup and it turns out that he is a pakistani.....so pakistan is now stuck......what to do.....

......int'l pressure does not increase on pakistan, at the same rate as after 9/11......israelis, who are, generally, very particular about even one of their citizens getting killed or captured, e.g. recent lebanon war, are totally silent.......brits and americans are not to aggressive either......

.....the reason is that the strategic thinker has, quietely told america the following things: if india starts a war, all the forces are moving from afghanistan to the eastern border, and they are never coming back.........and that pakistan will never hand over anyone to india, however, it will keep going out of its way to hand over any one usa wants, to usa.......

.....if pakistani forces move from the western border, the complete nato strategy is screwed......and if pakistan stops handing over people to usa, that is another problem......so the usa, quitely, tells israel and uk to not raise issues......and tells india that it can threaten, but there should, absolutely, be no attack........while usa will put pressure on pakistan......

.......pakistan understands that usa's pressure can only go so far, as it cannot fight without pakistan's help in afghanistan....and it feels it has a complete deterrence against india, via nukes....so it goes through the normal routine - puts some lashkar leaders under house arrest.......etc......these lashkars don't have any permanent infrastructure......they are all volunteer civilian students, shopkeepers etc.....hence they is no way to, "wipe" them out.....nor does pakistan want to wipe them out, until it sees whether india is sincere in a kashmir solution.......

.......now, with its borders secure, pakistan goes on a bit of an offensive......the strategic thinker does some reearch and finds out that kasab (and whomever worked with him) were rogue warriors....kasab may have been thinking that he was carrying out a mission to liberate kashmir (via mumbai), but his handlers had developed links with al-qaeda, and were using him.......

.....pakistan tracks down the handler and finds out the complete picture.....the operation was a joint operation between kasab and co. from pakistan and local militants from india; with everyone being backed by al-qaeda (hence the attack on israelis, americans etc.)......

......the strategic thinker, himself, realizes that there is no way lashkar members could move around in mumbai so efficiently and have so much ammunition available to them, without huge local help.....

.....in addition, the story of everyone getting on a boat from pakistan, seems fictitious......there would be too much risk of being caught......the handler also tells them that the paksitani team - kasab et al - entered from indian kashmir and took a bus to mumbai......where they were contacted by the local indian militants, who had the armament piled up......the local militants had also been working inside the taj, oberoi etc........

......the pakistani militant(s) were given the task of firing in the train station, while the local militants handled the more complex hotel firings.......they took a boat from one part of mumbai to another, so that the ammunition would not get caught on the road.......

a live interview of one of the attackers, on ndtv, during the attack, also confirms that he was a hindi speaking, with a strong hindi accent, local indian muslim named babar......

........realizing this, the strategic thinker goes on the offensive......they bet on the fact that india will never want the local link of the militants to be exposed.....they feel india has built up too big of a story on all the militants being from pakistan, without logically, answering how they knew mumbai so well, including the insides of the hotels........why their boats weren't caught by the indians, who regularly catch small fishing boats from paksitan......why the interview of the muslim indian militant is totally being ignored.......

.......so the strategic thinker asks india to, "give proof,".......india has so far only given proof, via media......no one has heard or seen kasab......and nothing else, has officially been put forward.......

.......when india says it has already given enough proof, the strategic thinker, further bets that india is holding something back......that the story it is presenting is only partially true.......so the official line of the paksitan president also becomes that we have not tracked much to pakistan, so we need proof.....

........the strategic thinker thinks that the world will also notice if india doesn't give all the massive proof linking everything to pakistan, which it is clamining.....while he knows kasab (and maybe a few more of the terrorists) are pakistani, he is convinced of local indian militant involvment.......

in such a situation, what is the next best step for pakistan........imagine you are a part of an int'l neutral strategic advisory group, and see what answers you can come up with..............as professionals and not as emotional expats

anil/dost-mittar #: "Strategic thinker needs to be replaced.....In your scheme of things, it seems "strategic thinker" is unaccountable and therefore, reports to no one."

....allow me to highlight the first rule of being a vendor....never tell the client he/she needs to be replaced....you will never get the contract....

.......the strategic thinker is a thought process, and not just a person.....and it is not the army, alone....it is a combination of the army, political leadership, public opinion, civil groups etc......

.....there seems to be an incorrect understanding amongst our colleagues from india, that it is only the army that sees india as a threat, and considers kashmir to be occupied....

.....this is far from the truth....all forces in pakistan, including the people, see india as a threat.....after all, the historical steps india took, of dividing pakistan etc., impacted the people also....and the current jingoism towards war, is also going to impact the people......

......as for kashmir, it is the only thing in the world that even hamidm mian and masadi agree on....that should give you an idea, of how wrong pakistanis think india's actions in kashmir happen to be.....even hp, who hates the army, agrees on this.......barring tahmad, i think ever pakistani agrees on this......there isn't a single political party in pakistan (out of the 72 parties) who accepts the status quo on kashmir as fair and legal.......

.....the only difference is how they feel these problems should be solved.....army, like all armies, thinks only in military terms....politicians and public think along economic lines also.....civil rights groups, think along human rights.......

....either eklavya is in heavy consultations to solve the problem.....or he has disappeared.....

Re: # 326

...with the few isolated exceptions of examples of sane voices like Dr. Hoodbhoy.

But people like him are powerless in that den of evil!

Re: # 325

DM-jee, these sala jihadis do not need a rationale for attacking India and will always invent one if needed. The Kayani is no different from any other khaki -- he rules behind the scenes.

Pakistan is screwed now, except the denizens of that country are too disconnected from the real world to realize it!

Urstruly:

If I remember correctly, I remember you saying that Islam has clear rules of war, including not targeting the innocent civilians. And before you say that the Indians are guilty of electing this govt., please remember that the electorate rejected the hindu nationalist govt and elected the one which opposed the hindu nationalist agenda.

Re: # 322

MiaN, that flag is courtesy of Masadi. However, self-flagging would be a great improvement over the self-flogging that brain-dead Pakistani automatons permanently display to the world at large to prove that they can "take it".

And Uncle Sam gives aplenty!

Re: # 321

[The time for sermons and riding moral high horses has come and gone in these eight years.]

Yet, here you are -- ass still parked on the website!

Re: # 320

and I see you self-flagged yourself too. At this age you lose eyesight doing self-flagging, so be careful.

Re: # 319 dost

I think we are in a state of war; the fine line between right and wrong is the first casualty of any war. The time for sermons and riding moral high horses has come and gone in these eight years. I am not sure anymore that the process that has set its own momentum now has remained reversible anymore. The wars and accidents do not happen instantaneously; it takes years and decades to set the wheels of war in motion.

Urstruly miaN, I stuck a red flag into you, too. Hope you don't find it too painful at your age.

Urstruly:

I watched an interview by Maulana Madni of Deoband. He says that according to the Quran, Kasab and others are Fasadis and not Jihadis. He also says that the other nine should be dumped in ocean and not buried according to islamic rites. What do you think?

HP:

I give you more credit than to think that an attack in Kashmir would have had the same effect as that in Mumbai.

I think a time has come that Hindus must stop whinning and start taking it like men. You must accept the fact that it is you who deliberately chose this war. You knowingly chose your sides, even when you were under no compulsion to do that. You were the ones screaming war cries for 8 years now. You were the one threatening and aiding and abbeting those who torture helpless and weak since then. And now that when you have started tasting the first fruits of war, you whine. You must also realize that everything that you plan to do in this war has already been done by the people who are thousands time more powerful and resourcesful than you, but to no avail. This is a war who has everything to lose against those who have nothing to lose. Guess who will lose this war?

#312 Posted by masadi
"dost_mittar writes "The same strategic thinker was hired by the same client "

What DM wrote is the official conspiracy theory..not yet given sanction by the Indian government. Since this is an Indian conspiracy theory you can't call it a conspiracy theory and it is the fact proven by nothing to back it up.It should in reality be the childish theory.
It is too early to discuss the whole thing but the simple question is why not pull this in Kashmir which is already under fire instead of Mumbai?

The drama in Mumbai has actually placed the Pak army in the eye of the storm. Which imo, is good and let us see how the Pak army responds and my thinking is that if it caves, it will be good for the civilians-Zardari or Nawaz- in local Pakistani politics.

Masadi miaN, before you take it out on anybody else, let it be known that it is I who has had the honor of stuffing those red flags deep down your flaming...posts!

dost mittar writes "How can we regain our popularity?"

That was achieved in Ferbruary, and it involves making the civilian government fail.....and that is going according to plan with US help, though time and again the hidden Pakistan Army hand behind the civilian government makes its appearance when both the PM and President are snubbed upon demand by them....

Have a nice day and get an education,

TNI Masadi

with a "lone survivor" ...

dost_mittar writes "The same strategic thinker was hired by the same client "

The strategic thinker (with the mentality of a moron) resides in the Indian establishment and the boss who hired them to squeeze Pakistan sits in Washington. The best they could come up with was a bollywood plot with a "long survivor" picked up from an Indian jail where he had been languishing for nearly two years, a "crack whore" wage storyteller who manufactured his tale, and an alleged "love letter" passed on to the Pakistanis as evidence in the grade school type of mentality, that is btw quite laughable. The Pakistan Army does not need to hire anyone, it still calls the shots in Pakistan and most of all it knows that the US depends on it as backup...

Get an education and have a nice day,
TNI Masadi

#305
Good editorial. Zardari must decide whether he too will run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.

Addendum to #309:

If the Indians don't react in the expected manner, mount another similar attack. With elections around the corner, the Indian govt. will not be able to afford to appear weak and will have to react in the expected manner.

Romair:

The same strategic thinker was hired by the same client six months ago with the following set of issues:

1. We are losing importance in the country. Everyone is blaming us for all the problems in the country. We have lost all respect. How can we regain our popularity?

2. We are fighting and killing our own people and their brethren across the border with whom they sympathise and who we created and will need again one day. What's worse, some of them have now started targeting us. We need an excuse to extricate ourselves from that unpopular war without angering powerful foreign countries on whom we are dependant.

3. The civilians are all talking of close friendship with India and saying that India is not a threat to us any longer. If India is not perceived as a threat, we lose much of our relevance in the country. We need to put an end to the normalisation of relationship with India.

4. India's economy is booming. It's fast becoming a tourist destination. It is now even bracketed with China in terms of importance. With its booming economy, India could emerge as a regional hedgemon which would make it as powerful in the region as its cricket board is now in international cricket. We need to do something to hurt India's tourism industry and to make it as unsafe a place to invest as Pakistan is perceived to be.

The Strategic Thinker's solution?

!. Send some of your suicide jihadis to mount a spectacular attack on India.

2. Choose the most prominent landmarks in the commercial hub of the country and the media is present in large numbers for 24/7 coverage of the attack. Choose a place where there are large number of western tourists.

3. This will instantly change the perception of India as a safe place. Tourism will plummet and foreign businessmen will think twice about coming to India for business.

3. India will be bound to react strongly. If it counters attacks or mobilises forces at the border, it will give you valid reason to bring your forces out of your Western front and your foreign friends cannot stop you from protecting your borders.

4. Once there is a confrontation with India, the whole country will mobilise behind you. You will once again be considered indispensable and claim all the resources of the country you want.

5. The civilians will be forced to support this position or risk losing popularity among the people.

6. The normalisation process with India will come to a complete halt.

7. On the downside, you will face a lot of international pressure to give up your assets. But you have several years of experience in how to deal with such pressure and it should be no different this time around. The risks are somewhat greater if one of the team in the mission is caught alive.

pinku writes "Soon you will have only two groups, Islamists (or Morons) and rest of humans.."

Behold evidence of my contention of the moronic nature of Indians on Chowk. Unable to invent insults and being oblivious of any facts whatsoever the moron merely copies the insult hurled towards him by the opponent.

Have a nice day and take it easy,

TNI Masadi


BTW: being the first to openly declare after the Mumbai attacks that the so-called "lone survivor" was picked up by the Indians (in their own plot in collaboration with the Americans and bollywood)from one of their jails where many Pakistanis are languishing without trial, I was recently confirmed by this news report:

Nepalese ambassador to Pakistan denies arresting Mumbai attack suspect


www.chinaview.cn 2008-12-20 22:46:04 Print

ISLAMABAD, Dec. 20 (Xinhua) -- Nepal's ambassador to Pakistan Saturday rejected the claim of a Pakistani lawyer that the only attacker arrested alive in the Mumbai attacks had been arrested inKathmandu in 2006 and handed over to the Indian authorities.

"The embassy wants to make it clear that Ajmal Kasab was neither arrested nor handed over to any other country," Nepalese Ambassador to Pakistan Bala Bahadur Kanwal told a news conference.

A Pakistani lawyer called C.M. Farooque said that Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the only suspect arrested alive in the Mumbai attacks last month, had gone to Kathmandu before 2006 on a business visit when he was arrested by Nepali police and handed over to India.

The lawyer also said that nearly 200 Pakistanis were held along with Kasab in a secret detention place so that they could be used to serve some ulterior designs later, the News Network International news agency reported.

"The people arrested in Nepal had gone there on legal visas for business but Indian agencies are in the habit of capturing Pakistanis from Nepal and afterwards implicating them in the Mumbai-like incidents to malign Pakistan," the lawyer alleged.

India said that Kasab belonged to Faridkot in Okara district of Punjab province but local elected representative and the people in the town said that no person in the name of Kasab had ever lived there.

Bahadur Kanwal said the Nepalese embassy in Islamabad had not issued visa to Ajmal Kasab and that he had never visited Nepal."


http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-12/20/content_10531371. htm



I had asked majumdar to post it when I was banned but apparently it hurt his Indian sensibilities....

Have a nice day and don't argue with morons just show them the goddamned mirror,

TNI Masadi

regards: i am glad to see you have it all figured out.

#288 Tahmed32 "the nuisance value includes nukes..."

No, You don't need your nukes for fragmenting Pakistan. They will kill you, if you do not know. You have enough Jihadi, Faujis, etc.. They will be enough to do all the break-up job. Besides pieces can be still subdivided later if it still does not work as it has been happening till now. Use them.

If you do not know how, I'm sure India will help you.

Time for Truth (Editorial, The Washington Post)

Pakistan's civilian leaders must face their country's responsibility for the Mumbai attacks.

Monday, December 22, 2008;

BY NOW, the evidence that the terrorist assault on Mumbai was planned and directed from Pakistan is overwhelming. The lone surviving attacker, a Pakistani national, has signed a statement describing how he was recruited and trained by the Lashkar-i-Taiba group. Intelligence officials say cellphone intercepts show that the attackers were communicating with Lashkar commanders in Pakistan during the attacks. During a visit to Islamabad, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke for the West when he openly blamed Lashkar-i-Taiba for the siege and added that "the time has come for action, and not words," from Pakistan.

Stunningly, however, Pakistan's civilian government is refusing to acknowledge the truth. In an interview with the BBC last week, President Asif Ali Zardari claimed that there is still no proof that the attackers came from his country. "There are disputed positions in the press. . . . I would not jump to a conclusion," he said. Several days earlier, he told Lally Weymouth of Newsweek and The Post that "I don't have any specific information" showing that the terrorists were trained in Pakistan. Under heavy pressure from the Bush administration, Mr. Zardari's government has placed the leader of Lashkar-i-Taiba under a loose "house arrest" and rounded up several dozen of its militants, including the man India has identified as the chief planner of the attacks. This unconvincing sweep looks bad in the light of history: After a Lashkar-sponsored assault on India's Parliament in 2002, the government arrested many of the same people and formally banned the group. Later the suspects were quietly released, and the organization reemerged under the name Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

Apologists for Mr. Zardari's civilian and democratically elected government point out that the president's bluster probably covers his lack of authority to crack down on Lashkar-i-Taiba or its allies in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Since Mr. Zardari replaced Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a master of duplicitous dealings with Washington, the army has stepped up attacks on Taliban militants in provinces bordering Afghanistan. The sponsors of the Mumbai attack no doubt wanted to undermine that campaign as well as steps toward peace by Pakistan and India.

Yet, if the war on terrorism is to be won, the excuses for Pakistan must end. The incoming administration should quickly act on President-elect Barack Obama's promises to condition aid, especially to the Pakistani military, on fundamental reforms. Officers who support the Taliban or groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba as a check on India must be purged, once and for all. Mr. Zardari and other civilian leaders should receive strong U.S. support only if they clearly ally themselves with this agenda. The first step is relatively simple: to stop denying the truth.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Romair mian take it easy and keep it simple. You cannot reason with morons whose only "intellectual" ability is roaming through the internet to locate a story where an elderly Saudi man married an 8 year old. That is the best they can muster, while conveniently overlooking the colossal stats of child abuse that exists in the US of A....

Have a nice day and treat morons like morons or you become a moron yourself,

TNI Masadi

In addition to #300 I say in the spirit of GWB (because that is the only language these morons understand)......"bring it on"

Have a nice day and take it easy,

TNI masadi

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

This link under tells me that that moronism of Indian "statesmen" has reached new heights.... I cannot stop wondering how such people "run" state affairs....but then I am reminded of their papa, GWB...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/world/asia/23india.html?ref=world




Have a nice day and take it easy,

TNI Masadi

HP sahib:

Did you write your article, I would love to read it. May be you can send it to me, if Chowk is not going to publish it.

#296 Posted by HP on

if BJP is a terror group then probably all muslim organizations in world are terror groups. Because muslim organizations by default use more community centric politics (just for muslims), have only muslim members (while BJP does have many non-hindus) and are eager to create threats of socio political nature.

Romair:

Strategic thinker needs to be replaced.

In your scheme of things, it seems "strategic thinker" is unaccountable and therefore, reports to no one.

That is never the case in workable system. Each is accountable, no one is excluded.

list of terror groups in India:

Hindu Terror Groups



1. Shiv Sena – Army of Shiva

2. Bajrang Dal

3. Durga Vahini-Women militants

4. BJP

5. A ragtag, government-armed Hindu militant groups have been raised in Kashmir and northern India during this decade

Indian Occupied Kashmir


Hizbul Mujahideen
Harkat-ul-Ansar or Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami
Lashkar-e-Toiba
Jaish-e-MohammadMujahideen E-Tanzeem
Jammu & KashmirLiberation Front
Tehrik-ul-Mujahideen
Al Badr
Dukhtaran-e-Millat
Al Barq
Al Jehad
Jamait-ul-Mujahideen
Jammu & Kashir National Liberation Army
People’s League
Muslim JanbazForce
Kashmir Jehad Force
Al JehadForce (combines Muslim Janbaz Force and Kashmir
Jehad Force
Al Umar Mujahideen
Mahaz-e-Azadi
Islami Jamaat-e-Tulba
Jammu & Kashmir StudentsLiebration Front
Ikhwan-ul-Mujahideen
Islamic Students League
Tehrik-e-Hurriat-e-Kashmir
Mutahida Jehad Council
Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqar Jafaria
Jamait-ul-Mujahideen
Al Mustafa Liberation Fighters
Tehrik-e-Jehad-e-Islami
Therik-ul-Mujahideen
Muslim Mujahideen
Al MujahidForce
Tehrik-e-Jehad
Islami Inquilabi Mahaz



ASSAM


Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT)
Dima Halom Daogah (DHD)
Karbi National Volunteers (KNV)
Rabha National Security Force (RNSF)
Koch-RajbongshiLiberation Organisation (KRLO)
Adivasi Cobra Force(ACF)
Karbi People's Front(KPF)
Tiwa National Revolutionary Force (TNRF)
Bircha Commando Force(BCF)
Bengali Tiger Force (BTF)
Adivasi Security Force(ASF)
All Assam Adivasi Suraksha Samiti (AAASS)
Gorkha Tiger Force(GTF)
BarakValley YouthLiberation Front (BVYLF)
Muslim United LiberationTigers of Assam (MULTA)
Muslim United LiberationFront of Assam (MULFA)
Muslim Security Council of Assam (MSCA)
United Liberation Militia ofAssam (ULMA)
Islamic Liberation Army of Assam (ILAA)
Muslim Volunteer Force (MVF)
Muslim Liberation Army (MLA)
Muslim Security Force (MSF)
Islamic SevakSangh (ISS)
Islamic United ReformationProtest of India (IURPI)
United Muslim LiberationFront of Assam (UMLFA)
Revolutionary MuslimCommandos (RMC)
Muslim Tiger Force (MTF)
People’s UnitedLiberation Front (PULF)
Adam Sena(AS)
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
Harkat-ul-Jehad




NAGALAND

National Socialist Councilof Nagaland (Isak-Muivah)– NSCN(IM)
National Socialist Councilof Nagaland (Khaplang)– NSCN (K)
Naga NationalCouncil (Adino) – NNC (Adino)
Tripura Liberation OrganisationFront (TLOF)
United Bengali LiberationFront (UBLF)
Tripura TribalVolunteer Force (TTVF)
Tripura Armed TribalCommando Force (TATCF)
Tripura TribalDemocratic Force (TTDF)
Tripura Tribal YouthForce (TTYF)
Tripura LiberationForce (TLF)
Tripura Defence Force (TDF)
All TripuraVolunteer Force (ATVF)
Tribal Commando Force (TCF)
Tripura Tribal YouthForce (TTYF)
All TripuraBharatSuraksha Force(ATBSF)
Tripura Tribal ActionCommittee Force (TTACF)
Socialist Democratic Frontof Tripura (SDFT)
All TripuraNational Force (ATNF)
Tripura Tribal Sengkrak Force (TTSF)
Tiger Commando Force (TCF)
Tripura Mukti Police (TMP)


Meghalaya
Hynniewtrep NationalLiberation Council (HNLC)
Achik NationalVolunteer Council (ANVC)
People’s LiberationFront of Meghalaya (PLF-M)
Left-wing Extremists
People's Guerrilla Army

Re: # 286 the blue water navy is for fishing crabs?
more than dozens indian consulate are spreading peace message in the world.lol.

Re: # 287 yeah some stupids think that way.
3 pakistans. what about snow balling effect on neighbors? 32 small manageble countries?

Re: # 290 what about it fails at the launch as most of your's did?

you talk of conspiracy theories, what about islamic bomb? why not indian or israili bomb.you kill thousands of kashmiris.that is ok?
indian occopied sikkim and bhuttan
trained and supported tamil separatists what is that?why u made atomic bombs? for killing malaria?
islam is religion of peace.dont blame.yeah killing innocent people whether in trident/taj or marriot islamabad is sin.
you people are pyscholgicallly ill of islamophobia coz muslim minority ruled the majority hindus.forget about that and do justice to others as well yourself. first put your house in order.

Re: # 290 Masanmuthu

Also, don't remind the Kakul Strategists that the vast nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union was of no use in preventing its breakup. Don't let these trivial details from spoiling their group think.

I think it is Ok for the Pakistanis to get attacked by the American masters. Maybe India can borrow a missile or two from the US and strike a few places in Pakistan.

it won't hurt the pride of Pakistan. :-)

nukes don't seem to help in stopping the missiles from the drones.. :-)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7794930.stm

A suspected pilotless American drone has fired two missiles in a border area of Pakistan, killing at least seven people, Pakistani officials have said.

#287 the nuisance value includes nukes...but dont let me interrupt you from spreading the cesspool in your mind on chowk...

#284 Romair "the population of pakistan, generally, agrees that india will further weaken pakistan, if pakistan lets its gaurd down, and that kashmir is being occupied against its will by india......"

On this Indian population population is in total agreement with Pakistani population. Infact the only way Indians, including kasmiris, can imagine living in peace is when Pakistan is sufficiently fragmented (and not included in India). Nuisance value will not disappear even then but can be brought to controllable proportions.

Re: # 285 BJ2

"...Romair miaN, why is Kashmir important to you (Pakistanis) if all you have gotten from it is trouble?!..."

In a country where there is no political consensus on anything, it is convenient to raise an external bogey to keep the military entrenched in power and to divert attention away from more pressing issues for which the military has no answer

Romair miaN, why is Kashmir important to you (Pakistanis) if all you have gotten from it is trouble?! What is there to indicate that they will be any less trouble under Pakistani rule?

anil #: "NOW, let me answer your question. I will FIRE that strategic thinker, and I hope Pakistan has the leadership to fire also. In such a equilibrium state – explosion first or implosion first – is not stable state, but a paranoid state."

.....the strategic thinker cannot be fired...he is your client....you are the vendor....the vendor cannot fire the client....

.....the strategic thinker is not hiring Eklavya, for Eklavya to tell the strategic thinker he (strategic thinker) is an idiot (which he may well be)....he is hiring him for advice, based on the parameters descrbied....

.....Eklvya has not been hired to give the indian point of view (which very well may be correct).....i.e. the view you have presented is the indian point of view (i.e. the enemy's view)....Eklvya is neutral and is from Switzerland and is only interested in making money for his company, by giving the best advice, based on the requirements given to him......

......there is amply historical data to justify pakistan's paranoia...at least from the pakistan's point of view.......while india has been talking peace since 47, it has taken one step after another to dismantle, destroy, weaken pakistan.....even now, india is heavily increasing its purchase of offensive armament, which can only be used against pakistan (and not against china).....the 8 billion person analogy is accurate in terms of population......

the paranoia is felt by the general pakistan public also....not just by the miilitary......

......kashmir, as far as the population of the client is concerned would join pakistan if any un resolution-based or human rights based solution was implemented.....the fact that india has 700k soldiers there justifies that it is being held by force.......and if the 700k soldiers are freed from kashmir, where will they go.......they will end up on the lahore and sind border (what other purpose do soldiers serve; they are not for display).......

.....in any case, the client is not just the army leadership, as your reply seems to indicate......the population of pakistan, generally, agrees that india will further weaken pakistan, if pakistan lets its gaurd down, and that kashmir is being occupied against its will by india......

#282 Romair: goal 1 (pakistan's security) is already taken care of - by civilian scientists who worked day and night to build the nuclear bomb on a shoestring budget in order to secure Pakistan. These civilians are the unsung heroes, the true patriots of Pakistan. Not the faujis who keep harping on the India.

Goal 2 (changing the status quo on kashmir) is the fauji goal of ensuring their relevence continued india-pakistan hostilites. As such, this goal is against the interests of the people of Pakistan, given the negative impact on badly needed investments and the siphoning off by the military of badly needed funds for education, health and infrastructure.

Goad 3 (to do the above without the heavy economic costs) is unachievable - taking loans from IMF and grants from the US is good for lining pockets of the musharrafs of pakistan, but is not a substitute for a stable political an environment.

Eklavya #: "How would I advise? It will depend entirely on

(1) what the GOALS?"

........here are the goals.......

........the first goal is to ensure pakistan's security, against india......the historical events have indicated that any time pakistan has shown any weakness, india has come breaking through and capitalized on it.....from splitting pakistan, to taking its rivers, to even occupying its glacier.....so india cannot be allowed to mass up 1.1 lakh soldiers and cannot be allowed to subjugate pakistan and turn it into bangladesh, sri lanka etc...

......the second goal is to force india to move away from the status quo on kashmir, and negotiate, based on un resolutions....this was starting to happen when the militants were crossing into kashmir.....but now, india is back on top again.......

......a third goal is to do all of the above, without pakistan, itself, turning into an economic nightmare and, thus, a failed state.........pakistan needs to grow economically also, and get back into the int'l supply chain....

(2) what were the RESOURCES available?

.......here are the resources.....

.....pakistan has nukes, which are enough to act as a pemanent long term deterrent against india......its conventional forces, on their own, are not enough to take on india, if the full indian force attacks pakistan

......pakistan still has the manpower and org structure of civilian militia lashkars under its control.....they are still, "state" actors, under state control.....and can be turned on, as needed......however, a small portion of them have become rogue and have joined al-qaeda etc....it will be hard to raise these lashkars again, if pakistan dissolves them, then its members will be very reluctant to join lashkars again....and some may turn on pakistan.......

.......pakistan has an economy that is in big trouble....it is dependent, now, on loans from imf.....however, if pakistan can fix its institutions, it has a relatively decent human resource base through which the economy can bounce back with investments from middle east, china etc....

(3) what the RISKS.....

here are the risks.....

.....risk no. 1 is that pakistan's economy is a basketcase in comparison to india's......the advantage of having 40% higher economic growth rates than india finished off 10-15 years ago......and now india, not only has a much larger size, it has a much better economic growth......

.....if the lashkars' fringe groups are not controlled, they could try to take on the pakistan govt., much like the taliban are now trying to do....they could do in punjab what taliban are doing in nwfp (taliban were also controlled by pakistan at one point; though the lashkars are much more under control, still)

......if the lashkars are dismantled, they could join the fringe groups.......and even if they don't, their members will be reluctant to rejoin lashkars and have faith in pakistan's strategy on kashmir......

......pakistan is being isolated, internationally, by the day, if it doesn't neutralize the lashkars.....india, has successfully, linked the lashkar's jihad in kashmir to usa's gwot.....it has also linked it to israel's goal of taking out pakistan's nukes......

.......if pakistan neutralizes lashkars, its only hope on kashmir is finished......and india will never budge from the status quo.....

In pakistan the paki army is bombing the paki muslims. The US are blasting them from the predators. The jihadis are killing the fellow pakis. why cant india also join in the jihadi shoot and train its military. Most of the Us weapon systems related to UAVs are tested in pakistan.

It is time that india also joins in to test weapons. The yanks are paying the paki generals, india can aslo pay them.

the good part is that a jihadi seeks death, and teh paki army and the us troops are, as I have argued all along, deliverinbg shehdad at teh door steps.

It si time that indi also join this great islamic endeavour and help the muslims.

Re: # 279

Good night, Matloob. Have sweet dreams -- hopefully devoid of any flame-filled dreams! :)

alright time to quit, BJ you have a good evening (based on my understanding that you happen to be in DC metro)

BJ, I ll never forget your lesson on showing the torch, when nothing works light up the torch with appropriate intensity flame using the right jet on the torch and the correct gases needed to melt the given metal.

Re: # 275
BJ the 2% are minority by choice you know that?

Re: # 271
But of course when things have to be done, they have to be done, and, yes the feeling is mutual on either side.

Re: # 273

[your idea of "minority handling" has been quite different from us so far.]

Sir, do indulge me and enlighten me on how you have "handled" your minorities in Pakistan. I was referring to the 2 percent non-Muslim population, of course.

BTW, urstruly miaN, I hope you did not loose too much money in the stock market crash.

If there is one thing more sad than a mullah being forced to live against his will in the USA, it is a mullah who is being forced to live against his will in the USA and who is also BROKE! :((

Re: # 272 No, actually we are both on the same page, regarding the social contract. There are 3% minorities still left in pakistan - they need to be "handled" to resolve our problems.

I hope you were referring to the pakistan's social elite as minorities. But since you are a hindu I need to double check; your idea of "minority handling" has been quite different from us so far.

Re: # 270

Is that your way of acknowledging that you really have no clear idea of what type of social contract you want to have in Pakistan?

Re: # 268

[it takes a lot of precaution to show a flame to the muffler bolt,]

Yes, but when it had to be done, it had to be done! You should not underestimate the ability of individuals to accomplish things on their own. In the end, all it took was the right tool.

One problem that many desis seem to have is that they have one standard for the goras and different standards for fellow desis. Take miaN Mushy for example, when Bajpayee extended the hand of friendship, he pulled a Kargil on him and thought he was being smart. When Colin Powell called at midnight -- he merely saluted, clicked his heels, and made a u-turn.

Like I said earlier, when something has to be done, it has to be done. There is nothing in life that is risk-free.

Re: # 269

you don't need to worry about these whys? and whats? Like I said, worry about keeping your house and savings for now. The people whose fight you are fighting have been eating them for lunch. Stay away from India.

Re: # 267

[Pakistan requires a fundamental change in its power structure - a new Social Contract, if you will.]

What kind of social contract you are talking about?! I thought that Pakistan is already an Islamic country. It has already gotten rid of its minorities. What else needs to be done or even could be done to bring about further changes???

Re: # 266
BJ there is no such thing as one solution to all kinda problems.

Like in the case of your muffler or rather your car's muffler had you tried to show it the flame you could have been declared a terrorist type of errorist coz all flames are not born equal neither could all flame users be equal, it takes a lot of precaution to show a flame to the muffler bolt, had you tried to do it yourself the Book for Dummies says you could have subjected yourself to an exploding fuel tank.

Be careful and don't try this at home and at your own.

Re: # 263

Your basic assumption that Pakistan has an elected government is wrong. Remember, just a year ago, this assembly came into power through an election which was orchestrated by the then dictator and his minions to keep him in power for the rest of his life. For this election, the crimes of all the crooks were forgiven; even the most blatant cases of corruption and murder; so that to gather around that mutherfukker the kind of people that would support his agenda.

On the other hand people of Pakistan had started retaliating against the attrocities committed by this m/f, such as the massacre of 2000 innocent school girls in Islamabad. The targetted attacks on police, army, and other state apparatus brought the whole state machinery to its knee with in a matter of weeks; which left no option for the dictator to leave alive or be assassinated by his minions itself. He left but the corrupt power structure that he had established for himself has stayed.

So in other words neither the elections nor the product of them is legitimate. Pakistan does not have a representative govermnet, period. More attacks, like Mumbai, and like those on Mariot hotel in Islamabad targetting Pakistan's social elites are written on the wall. Pakistan requires a fundamental change in its power structure - a new Social Contract, if you will. The ruling elite and their foreign masters have refused to deliver in ultimate arrogance. They are only delaying the inevitable of Natural Selection; making it even more painfull for themselves.

So I suggest, don't go to India for a while. Try to save your job, savings and your house here until the process of Natural Selection takes its course over there.

Re: # 264

Matloob, as recounted earlier on UP I was faced with a pair of extremely difficult rusty muffler bolts which I tried to remove using all the tools at my disposal. It took a considerable amount of time and effort and yet it failed in the end at which time I took it to a muffler shop where the matter was resolved in the space of five minutes by using a flame.

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the problems that plague Pakistan in its relations with India (and perhaps other countries) are just as intractable as my rusty muffler bolts. Since, like I did, all the cool solutions seem to have failed, we may be inevitably headed for the flame solution and that may be the only realistic way to address the problem.

In the end, what must be done must be done!

Re: # 254
mein koi jchoot bolaya! koi bhyee koi na

Re: # 263
BJ I may be wrong but it is my feeling that Zardari is a lot more than just 10%er now, the more I read the more I am convinced that he is a US proxy, he is responsible for his induction as a widower as well, while he continues to wear the reversible lungi ajrak on the outside and khaki on the inside.
BTW you did not mention about having resolved your rusty bolt-nut mystery.

Re: # 261

Matloob, most Indians and Pakistanis were under the false impression that that country had an elected government which exercised power. Now it is amply clear that the khakis were always in power, still are in power and miaN Zardari is the window dressing they use. Further, the khakis have very clear objectives in the region and they are going about it systematically.

And -- the whore that he is -- Zardari now plays their game. I am sure they promised him his ten percent.

Re: # 246
You mean to tell that these ullu ka patthas were holding these arms which are of military level ammo at a police station maalkhana while the lal masjid operation was supervised and carried out by the armed forces!
Thats a supreme blunder.

Re: # 258
BJ were you able to loosen your bolt out of that rusty nut? who knows what all else the 10%er has up his sleeve, perhaps he wears reversible lungi khaki on one side and ajrak on the other :)

Re: # 94
It would depend upon what he was able to get his hands on? or, he just ransacked the place and left?

Romair:

I agree with the first part of your analysis but not the second part. The strategy started coming apart with the Kargil operation and before 9/11. It was then that Pakistan found out that nuclear weapons were not enough to continue with the strategy of covert operations. Nawaz Sahrif had to rush to Clinton; nukes had instead become a problem rather than the solution.

Pakistan was on the verge of becoming a pariah and a failed state after Musharraf's coup. 9/11, in fact, came as a saviour when Musharraf played his cards very well. While seeming to agree with Colin Powell, he in fact acted only against "foreign" jihadis while protecting both Taleban and lashkars focussing on India. The strategy worked until the Taleban became powerful once again.

Re: # 257

Matloobzaman, miaN 10-percenter fooled India with his smooth talking while the Pakistani khakis were getting ready with their nefarious plans.

You guys need no elections -- only referendums.

Re: # 1
Yes the guardsmen were watching Somali Sea Pirates and too busy to look behind.

Valuable recap
This is not to say that innocents, Muslims and others, are not targeted by the Indian State or that the Indian police is not often sloppy, venal and corrupt. The problems with the Indian state are manifold and are the subject of other writings. However, the Indian state is by- and-large an equal-opportunity oppressor in addition to being blissfully incompetent. But its acts alone do not yield clues into the phenomenon of terrorism by Islamic groups in India.

Now whether Islam is properly or improperly used and how deeply the Pakistan state is implicated are reasonable follow-up research questions."

A preview of Jinnah's Pakistan -- probably just around the corner!


Taliban enforce sharia in parts of Orakzai

By Saboor Khan

HANGU: Local Taliban announced to impose sharia and to ban cutting forest trees in several areas of Upper Orakzai Agency on Sunday, local sources said.

The sources said the announcements were made in sermons from mosques in Khangarpur, Ghundako, Kundi Mushti and Qaum Aakhel areas of Orakzai Agency, adding the local Taliban had also banned the cutting of forest trees in the agency.

The announcements directed the residents of the tribal region to contact local Taliban centres in Ghalju and Kundi Mushti to seek solutions to their disputes, adding all disputes would be decided in accordance with sharia.

The political authorities of Orakzai Agency could not be contacted for comments despite repeated attempts.

The sources said sharia had also been imposed in Ghalju, Ghundki, Nawakali Khangarpura, Amir Zai Kalay, Sultan Masay, Moorcha Ghari and Sahibzadagano Kalay areas.

During the past year, the drive for sharia law implementation surged in Federally Administered Tribal Area and several settled areas of NWFP. While there have been several reports of Taliban setting up sharia or Qazi courts in Swat and Mohmand, Bajaur and Orakzai agencies, the NWFP government was also compelled by the locals in Malakand to pass a bill to establish such courts there in October.

The sources say tribesmen are turning to such forums because they are frustrated with the colonial system of Frontier Crimes Regulations, under which cases are still pending after decades of deliberations.

Re: # 253

Sir,

After seeing the interactions on Chowk, that name was the first one that came to my mind :-)

To your point- there is only a fine line between explanation and justification. All too often the former metamorphoses into "the context" which in turn gives terrorists a moral space they don't deserve.

KeeRolaPayaOye#221

[I like your name]

You are assuming explanation to be justification. Don't!

Re: # 250

Regards, NOTHING will help miaN Truly and Pakistanis like him! They are brain-dead!

I think there has been too much talking already and further talking is pointless now. Let's get it over with!

Come on, Jinnah ki aulaadoN! Ho jaaye hathapaai!

India steps up vigil along Rajasthan border
22 Dec 2008, 0302 hrs IST, Vimal Bhatia, TNN

JAISALMER: Even as India refused to take the military option off the table while asking Pakistan to rein in the terrorists, the Indian Army's and IAF's quick reaction teams (QRTs) were deployed along the borders in the Western Sector.

QRTs are also keeping a close watch on air space with the help of additional defence equipment. Security in and around defence air strips has been tightened.

These measures were taken following reports that Pakistan has deployed its forces along its border. IAF sources said security around places of strategic importance has been stepped up. They said more radars and QRTs have been deployed along the India-Pakistan border.

IAF had initiated these measures to strengthen its air defence to face any eventuality at a short notice. Additional hangars and runways have been prepared and all the radars have been put on high alert. Sources said tight radar surveillance is being maintained to keep a watch on any suspected movements along the border.

Air commandos have been deployed to ward off any possible retaliatory attack, they said, adding the entire border and its adjoining areas have been sanitised and the security situation reviewed. The commandos have also been deployed at borders (mainly at air-strips) in Jaisalmer, Uttarlai (Barmer) and Bhuj (Gujarat).

"Runways, hangars, main roads, ammunition stores and other sensitive places have been provided with additional cover. Sophisticated radars are installed at a few air bases and we are keeping watch on each and every cross-border activity," said an IAF personnel.

"Entry of unauthorised persons in defence areas has been prohibited and people's movement in the surrounding areas is being watched," he said.

Confirming extra deployment of Pakistan Rangers, DID, Rajasthan Frontier of BSF R C Sayani said, "We have inputs about Pakisan army officers frequently visiting the border areas."

Indian forces were on regular firing exercises at locations like Lathi Firing Range in Jaisalmer, Mahsan in Bikaner, Suratgarh and Ganganagar.

#244 Atif2 & 249 Ustruly

You have still not understood why pakistan broke up and then why you still need to keep fighting among yourself.

Reading back these threads later will help you understand the sequence of the disappearance of Pakistan.

Re: # 244 haha

"randi rona"; that brought back some memories. Thanks.

Re: # 247

Bhai! calm down. Hindus did go after non state actors and actresses working in India and expelled them to Pakistan. That is as much hindus can do against non state actors and actresses. My suggestion to them is to just "eat dust"; because that is what our superpower, its european chumchas and local testicles have been doing for the past 8 years.

Atif2 bhai,

It would be apropriate for us to go after the "non-state actors" with a vengeance. If we succeed in eliminating even 500 or so of these (proven or suspected or their traibners/financers etc..) we would have come a long way towards "doing enough". Please refer to my post #208.

Even at the risk of some innocent civilian casualties, if by and large the extremists, arms suppliers, financiers, trainers, taliban, ex army or ex-ISI are targetted and 500-1000 of these are eliminated, the situation will improve considerably on all fronts.

It is in Pakistan's long term interests to integrate into the world community, to try to become (economically & politically) more like India than like Afghanistan (in which direction we appear to be surely heading).

May good sense prevail.

Below is some good news from Isalamabad. Let’s pray to Allah that these arms are used in killing innocent muslims and not our infidel neighbors. Amen.

http://www.dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect/Dawn%20Content%20Library/dawn/news/ pakistan/lal-masjid-weapons-stolen-from-police-lockup-wk

ISLAMABAD: A large cache of arms, seized by security forces during the Lal Masjid operation were stolen under mysterious circumstances from the Aabpara police station's heavily guarded treasury (mallkhana), Dawn has learnt.

The advisor to prime minister on interior, Rehman Malik suspended the Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Ahmad Latif, and the Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Aabpara Shahzad Asif.

He ordered the registration of a case against the Station House Officer (SHO) Inspector Naeem Iqbal, and fourteen other police officials on charges of criminal breach of trust, theft and burglary.

All the accused nominated in the FIR were suspended and arrested.

A large cache of arms, including AK 47’s, rocket launchers, anti-tank mines, grenades and a huge quantity of bullets had been seized by security forces during the Lal Masjid operation that ended on July 11, 2007.

All the arms were stored in the treasury (malkhana) of the Aabpara police station, being the ‘case property’, along with other goods which had been seized by police from other stations.

Surprisingly, nothing else including liquor bottles, jewellery, or other items were stolen, since all those goods were intact inside the lockup.

A source close to the police revealed that no locks were broken during the theft. It is believed that duplicate keys might have been used by the culprits, who broke into the lockup in the basement of the police station building.

He said the theft came to light on Saturday night when police observed some suspicious movement inside the station premises.

After the incident came to light, the police station was sealed and a search was launched. Sniffer dogs were also used to trace the culprits, but the ‘half hearted’ efforts proved unproductive.

The staff of the police station was investigated and some employees of nearby markets were taken into custody for questioning, but the police remained clueless.

A joint investigation team comprising police and the Federal Investigation Agency has been formed to investigate the theft.

so, now, what do you advise as a strategic advisor to the pakistan security appratus.....?


If I'm the strategic advisor, I'd advise you to treat US as enemy no. 1 instead of India.

If Pakistan breaks up again, it will be due to US and not India.

hey hey, ho ho, yeh randi rona khatam karo, hey hey, ho ho


seriously hindoos, what is the statue of limitation for randi rona on bombay stuff? hasnt it already been like a month? havent we already had a dozen 500+ interact articles on FP about this topic? Havent we had endless threads on UP about the same shyte? how long will this last? I mean, we pakis mourn our dead one minute and the next minute we are back to fukking with the axis of hindoos and mirzaees, while shaming khatris at the same time.

i tried to break the spell of this randi rona by writing an article about Dubai. Garnered 80 interacts, far better than the 7-interact "travelogue" that kulharee wrote, but still nowhere close to yet another 300+ interact articles about the same bombay shyte?

its only a 150 dead hindoos for godsake! there are a billion more where these 150 came from. its not like we are talking about the poaching of endangered species!

can we put a moratorium on this randi rona, NOW?

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

#217 Dost Mittar: Based on what you say, India is irrelevant as far as Pakistan is concerned (the obsession with Pakistan and the desire to see it fail - as witnessed in the cesspool of posts below by Indians - notwithstanding).

I for once agree with you.

Re: # 231 Romair

Dear Genius of Kakul:

By the way, your ‘strategic’ analysis clearly shows how hollow your claims of ‘Kashmir freedom’ and ‘human rights’ are. That, though is not the subject of this post.

It is quite apparent now that Pakistan military is trying hard to provoke India into a military confrontation in order to create a pretext of withdrawing from the unpopular civil war raging in the FATA. This civil war far exceeds anything that the Indian Army ever did in quelling any of the insurgencies in India, including in Kashmir. Artillery, air power, collective punitive measures like flattening entire towns are being used. Thousands of internal refugees have been created. There is a news blackout in FATA.

Your military ‘genius’ and that of your Pakistani forefathers was never in doubt. In ’48, under the watchful eyes of Jinnah, the FATA tribesman delivered the Maharajah of Kashmir to India’s lap. Not quite the effect you wanted.

In ’65, Operation Gibraltar raised East Pakistani worries to the point that in ’71, the Pakistani Army delivered freedom to Bangladesh. Not quite the effect you wanted.

In ’99, General Musharraf climbed the hills of Kargil, only to be humiliated into a retreat and not even claiming the dead bodies of the men he sent. Not quite the effect you wanted.

TODAY, the Pakistani government and the Army are fully aware that the US and UK governments have the wireless intercepts of the conversations between the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the terrorists while operating in Mumbai about the full involvement of the LeT in the Mumbai strike and therefore are fully convinced about terrorism having its origin in Pakistani soil. In spite of this the demand from President Zardari, Prime Minister Gilani and the Pakistani media that India should produce proof to Pakistan highlights that Pakistani Army and its pawn government have decided to brazenly deny that the terrorism originated in Pakistani soil. Their purpose appears to be to blackmail US and to test the incoming President Obama’s will to assert his forthcoming surge strategy in Afghanistan. This too, will not produce quite the effect you want, to put it mildly.

By not walking into the Pakistani trap of provocation through terrorism, India has upset the plans of the Pakistani Army. India should now carefully assess the likely next moves of Pakistan. In all probability Pakistan Army will try other terrorist attacks on India to provoke India to retaliate through military measures. It is hoping to use that as an alibi not to cooperate fully with US in the war against Taliban and also to interrupt US supply lines through Taliban terrorist attacks on convoys. The Pakistani generals are hoping through this strategy they can continue to milk US aid, tire US and NATO forces and compel them to withdraw, take over Afghanistan under their control and bleed India through thousand cuts.

The likely result will be if the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban succeed in their resistance to the Americans, then the Pathans on the two sides of the Durand line may unite to form Pashtunistan, the long time time dream of Pathan tribesmen and secede from Pakistan. The Pakistani Army faces a greater threat from the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban than it does from the Indian Army. The one person who clearly understands this threat to Pakistan is the President-elect Obama. It is therefore highly likely that if Pakistani Generals attempt to blackmail the new US administration the US strategic community will counter them with the argument that if the Pakistan Army withdraws its forces from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) it may risk the integrity of Pakistan. If the Taliban tastes victory in ousting the Americans and the NATO from Afghanistan the secession of Pashtunistan is a virtual certainty. The Iranians are likely to intervene and help in the breakaway of Dari (Persian) speaking and Tajik and Uzbek areas from Afghanistan.

This will have an effect on China’s and Russia’s calculations as well regarding the long-term stability in Central Asia. Is it reasonable to conclude that this why the Chinese did not veto the UN move to declare the JeM a terrorist organization? I don’t know, but it definitely raises the possibility since they had opposed it several times in the past.

The world, except for a few countries like China and India, is in a recession. Pakistan itself needs the rescue of the International Monetary Fund package to be saved from bankruptcy. In the present circumstances with oil price being very low Saudi Arabia is unlikely to come to the rescue of Pakistan. Therefore there are limits to what Pakistan can do to defy the US and try to drive a hard bargain with it.

Once again, in fact the Pakistani generals are playing with fire and with the territorial integrity of Pakistan. Unfortunately the mistakes of the US Administration over the last eight years appear to have encouraged the Pakistan generals to believe that they can again cheat the US and get away with it. However Democratic President Obama cannot afford to fail in his surge strategy even as the departing President Bush is successful in the surge strategy in Iraq. No wonder, the US has indicated that they will double their troop deployments to Afghanistan even before Obama has assumed office.

A time has come for US and India to shed their unilateralism and consult each other in respect to their Afghan strategy. President-elect Obama has indicated that he would no longer persist in the counter productive unilateralist strategy. The Pakistani Generals are putting in Obama to test. You can be sure that their bluff is now fully understood, and will be called by the US and India. Both countries have huge stakes in the stability of Afghanistan. Once again, your country is on the wrong side of history.

Cheers!

Re: # 231 Romair

"....even if 99% of them are controlled (on state command), 1% of them as non-state actors are enough to get pakistan into trouble....."

If you every study Political Science 101, the definition of a state is an entity that has a 'monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory'. The day Pakistan raised these lashkars, it took the calculated risk that they will one day not listen to their handlers. That is why the military mindset is moronic and Pakistan is being called a failed state. It does not take a genius to understand this. So, the strategy was never sound to begin with.

Pakistan is now in a royal mess of its own making. Deal with it.

Re: # 225 Romair

".this (these) organizations are controlled by the paksitani intelligent agencies..."

Genius, you saw how the Taleban, once control of the Pakistani state, are now out of control and are creating a royal mess in FATA. The Taleban are doing what no BJP/RSS supporter could have done.

The LeT and JeM are also, depending on who you hear from, out of control. If indeed, they are under Pakistani military control, then India has every right to mount a military campaign to clip the Pakistani army's wings.

"what the GOALS were for anyone asking for advice"

That is where I differ from Kaal. I would never adopt a neutral attitude towards the goals themselves.

If somebody asked me how best to break Kashmir from India, I would say "go to hell".

Kaal ,otoh, would provide a detailed blue print , (all the while insisting that is not his personal goal).

beej, no, I am trying to think here as a Pakistani. As a Pakistani what Pakistan does makes good sense. Were I hired as a strategist, however, I would want to earn my living decently at least by drawing a fair attention to different factors that my employer might realistically want to keep in mind before choosing an optimal strategy.

Ultimately an advisor does not make policy/strategy decisions, he or she merely advises.

I feel like one of those brahmins of old talking to King Romair. He decides. :)

Kaal, asking Pakistanis "what would satisfy you as a deal?" is like asking a wolf how many chicken he wants to go away.

The Jihadi wolf will always come back for more.

Romair, again, a good description, although I do not see the situation quite in those terms.

Still, let's assume what you describe actually reflects the situation on the ground and its history.

How would I advise? It will depend entirely on

(1) what the GOALS were for anyone asking for advice. How important is it to be able to kashmir situation resolved to Pakistan's satisfaction (in relation to other competing goals)? To tie the Indian military down (again, vesus all other national goals)?

(2) what were the RESOURCES available? What's our ability to support and sustain these different actors? For how long? Do we even have the ability to take them out?

(3) what the RISKS were of following the current or altenative strategies - in relation to one or more goals we wanted to follow, asssuming a range of external conditions.


Once these questions are answered, it should be relatively easy to choose one strategy over another.

Now, is it fair to deduce the following?

(1) Zardari knew nothing about the whole operation. The army planned it, executed it and hoped to get away with it (which is what would have happened had not the one gunman got captured).

(2) Zardari initially blamed "non-state actors" because that's what he thought.

(3) The backtracking came after the army let him in on what had happened when the details came out about the captured gunman -- otherwise, he would have never known.

(4) Zardari, the weakling, who probably earlier cut a deal with the khakis, is in no position to punish/sacrifice the khakis who worked this out. They are probably holding a gun to his head -- threatening a coup. Zardari, who has never been a public leader, lacks the moral courage to put himself on the line and do the right thing.

(5) Sharif was not part of any khaki deals, so he can speak more freely. Besides, he is not in power -- so has little to lose. If tomorrow, the khakis let him in on the deal, he can always switch his position.

FAILED LEADERS!

FAILED PEOPLE!

FAILED STATE!

Terror finger points at Pak army
SUJAN DUTTA

New Delhi, Dec. 20: The Centre is now viewing the Mumbai attacks as the direct handiwork of Pakistan’s military that trained and armed the militants and planned the strike in detail, top government sources are saying.

This is a shift from India’s initial response when foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee led the government in drawing a distinction at two levels — first, between the government in Islamabad and rabid “elements in Pakistan� and, second, between the civilian administration led by Asif Zardari and the military led by Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

India’s security establishment has also begun a series of high-level meetings to review the state of defence preparedness. There are concerns that the military’s inventory is wanting. In one of the meetings today, defence minister A.K. Antony authorised a fast-track procurement of equipment for the coast guard.

The nuanced change in Delhi’s views follows the interrogation of gunman Mohammed Ajmal, an analysis of the attack by ballistics specialists in the military and the conclusion that the attackers were trained professionally.

Mukherjee today said the attack was planned meticulously and that Ajmal had given a “chilling account� of who his handlers and trainers were. “This was cold and calculated murder. One of the terrorists, who has been captured alive, has given us a chilling account of his handlers. A few months earlier, the Indian embassy in Kabul was the target of a terrorist attack. The impunity with which these attacks are carried out is possible only because the safety of the handlers has been assured,� he said.

Mukherjee began signalling the change in stand from Friday. “The Mumbai terrorist attack is the latest instance of how sub-regionalism, regionalism and multilateralism are threatened by non-state actors with the aid of para-state apparatus. In the face of the gravest of provocation, perhaps the time has come now to fine-tune India’s priorities,� he had said.

“Para-state apparatus� is a phrase usually adopted by military and espionage agencies to argue that non-state actors operate with the support and shelter of a state but ensure that the links are deniable.

In Delhi, the suspicion that Pakistan’s military and Kayani knew of the attack even if he did not authorise it, is being strengthened. Officials cite a New York Times report that quoted CIA analysts as saying Kayani had prior knowledge of the Kabul attack.

In India, the military has almost always argued that militants based out of Pakistan are actively supported by the Pakistan army. Most recently, it cited the ceasefire violations across the LoC this year when gunmen in civilian clothes near Pakistani army pickets fired at Indian positions.

Naval commandos and the army-staffed Special Action Group of the National Security Guard, who led the counter-terrorist operation in Mumbai, have pointed to the dexterity with which the attackers handled their weapons and used their ammunition.

The Indian Army believes such terror outfits cannot be curbed unless the Pakistani military’s war-waging potential is severely damaged. Delhi is now closer to this view than it was immediately after the attacks. But the Centre wants to convert the global sympathy for India into support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Mukherjee are likely to meet heads of Indian missions early next week in Delhi. Already, the government has shared information on the investigations with the heads of 13 missions of countries whose nationals were killed in the attacks.

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice today said the steps taken by Pakistan were “not nearly enough� and asked it to keep on working to “really deal� with terrorism to help ease the “crisis� with India, PTI reported from Washington.

Eklavya #: "some of your posts these days are exceptionally well-written, and this is one of them. I agree entirely. From Pakistani side, that strategy would seem to be a no-brainer."

thanks.....so i assume as a neutral strategic advisor to pakistan, you agree with what was going on......now lets move to the post 9/11 scenario, and see why and how this strategy failed......

.....uptil 9/11, pakistan, as explained below, finally, and for the first time in its history, possibly has india by its balls....and it wants to squeeze them to get back for everything india has done to pakistan, and to neutralize the indian threat.....

do keep in mind that the strategic military thinker/generals are they same people who fought as lieutenants and majors in 71 and want to humiliate india now....much like what india did to pakistan....

the two key factors in this cornering of india, are nukes and the civilian militias (or lashkars)......

.....pakistan is non-conventionally secure due to nukes.......it is conventionally secure as it has 1-1 parity on pakistan's borders, since 700k indian soldiers are in kashmir, trying to chase down the 2000-3000 civilians crossing into kashmir.....

.....and all of this is costing pakistan almost nothing.....the militia is self-supporting through donations......

now, if pakistan's economy grows, pakistan is set.....it can keep india occupied in kashmir forever, as there is an unlimited supply of mujahideen ready to cross into kashmir.....and indian soldiers are sick and tired of fighting civilians and uprising in kashmir.....the moral of the indian army is getting lower and lower......and india will, itself, not internationalize this, as it is in violation of un resolutions in kashmir........

........do tell me, why in the world would pakistan stop these lashkars, when they are proving to be such an asset.....it would be as stupid as india stopping mukti bahani, when it could divide east pakistan!!

.......then out of the blue 9/11 happens......

......the usa starts analyzing the area, and decides that some fringe elements of these lashkars are tied in with al-qaeda also, through common training facilities, and ideologies etc........usa decides to, in one full overhaul go after any civilian militias anywhere, who have any islamic leanings.....usa doesn't care whether they are fighting freedom wars or terrorist wars......they need to go......

.....so it declares all these militias to be terrorist organizations.......two days before 9/11, they were considered freedom fighters to a great degree......or at the very least, usa was not bothered much about them.....

......though india cannot put pressure on pakistan to stop these militias, usa certainly can......and does......not to mention the fact, that pakistan's economy hasn't grown, hence this part of pakistan's strategy isn't materializing......

.....so in one day, pakistan's complete strategy, with which it had cornered india goes out out the door......

now the tables are turned and pakistan is screwed......

.....some links tying some tiny portions of these militias to al-qaeda appear.....these are still very minor fringers but enough to give india ammunition to get these militias linked with al-qaeda and go after them, internatinally, as a threat to the world.......(without getting un resolutions on kashmir involved).......

pakistan tells the lashkar leaders to cool it.....but it is not going to close them down.......since they are the one weapon through which it can tie down india and reduce the massive indian threat to pakistan.....

.......however these lashkars now have their own ideologies and have gotten too big.....even if 99% of them are controlled (on state command), 1% of them as non-state actors are enough to get pakistan into trouble.....

......as far as the lashkar volunteers are concerned, they are fighting a noble ideological cause in kashmir.....they are not fighting to neutralize india strategically......they are fighting to liberate kashmir......with a very islamic motivation......

.....then usa attacks afghanistan and iraq......this goes agaisnt these lashkars ideological leanings......they want to fight in afghanistan and iraq also.....however, pakistan govt. only wanted them to fight in kashmir (and that too under its command, as state civilian militias in disguise; not as uncontrollable non-state actors)......

however, now portions (albeit small portions) of these lashkars are on their own.....the govt. cannot get rid of them, because it doesn't have a list of the volunteers......it also cannot get rid of them, because they will turn on pakistan, if it tries.....

......in addition, it cannot get rid of the top leadership of these lashkars, because it needs this leadership as its four arm of the armed forces to fight in kashmir again, once the 9/11 dust settles.......

......the top leadership of these lashkars follows the govt. orders, and starts running charities and, totally, within a few weeks stops all incursions into kashmir......the lashkars are banned by un also, without india having to link them to kashmir.....

....india is generally happy....it is back as the military occupying power in kashmir, without worrying about being attacked by civilian cross-border insurgents......it can now force whatever it wants in kashmir.....its 700k soldiers can be freed up to be on pakistan's border, as and when needed......the lashkars are banned, as it wants....and no un resolutions on kashmir had to be brought up......

.....so india gets into the dilly-dally negotiating on kashmir with pakistan.....pakistan knows india is never going to change the status quo, will never hold a plebescite either......while with the lashkars active, india was being forced in that direction, and after a decade or less would have done a deal, under pressure......

.......things move on......the fringe breakaway groups of these lashkars are tying in with al-qaeda and into the worldwide militant islamic freedom fighter/terrorist/jihadist network.....the cause of the fringer elements is now beyond kashmir.......it is usa, israel etc. and india etc.......

........one fine day, this spider web of militant organizations, joins in with local militants in india, and a devastating terrorist attack is launched in mumbai......one of the members of this fringe group is caught.......he is traced back to these lashkars......

the whole world jumps on pakistan......pakistan is totally stuck.....99% of the lashkar workforce had followed the govts. orders and had gone silent.....its leaders were quite and were leading charity organizations........

however, now, pakistan is asked to, totally, rip these lashkars out of their roots.....this totally finishes off the one chance pakistan had of successfully tying down india and defeating it in kashmir (something that was working pre 9/11)......

and if pakistan goes after the remaining 99%, a huge portino of them may turn on pakistan, for giving up on its ideology, and giving on kashmir independence.....also, if it turns on them, more fringe breakaway groups will form and they will become totally impossible to control.......

so pakistan is in a lose-lose scenario.......its controllable assets have become its biggest uncontrable liabilities......all because of something that happened in new york on 9/11.......

so, now, what do you advise as a strategic advisor to the pakistan security appratus.....?

good article..and good luck with getting anywhere with your main point...that the people of pakistan acknowledge the existence of jihadi terror coming from them....not going to happen.

There has been 30 years of propaganda and hate - starting with Zulfi Bhutto about islamic zeal and superiority...how do you turn around say - actually we are raising our children to be mass murderers!! No way - much easier to keep talking about india's failings - gujarat and kashmir and so on. Of course, only those that effect muslims, for everyone else india is a perfect heaven.

indians must raise the price of this kind of terror as high as possible. Special forces need to be raised, an open bounty should be declared against the key individuals and so on.

Re: # 225

Romair:

Good way to put forward this point of view. Now please you do the same and keep your mind open and consider.

“......now, considering you are not a hindutva supporter, but a pakistani strategic advisor, what advice do you give to pakistan's strategic thinkers, regarding these organizations?�

Before I answer this questions. Let me analyze the issues you have put forward.

“...to help you quantify this threat, india would have to threatended by 8 billion people in the world, to face an equivalent threat....in fact, there aren't enough people in the world to put india under an equivalent threat (i.e. 7 times its size).....the whole world ganging up on india is equal to india ganging up on pakistan......�

I am sure you please see the fallacy and weakness in the above analogy. India can never be equivalent to rest of the world. Even the U.S. could not, and only jokers, not strategic thinkers can think and build arguments on this.
“......so how do you deal with such a country.....do you give up all your rights, your lands etc. and live in a subjugated state.....or do you fight it out?.....�

Kashmir is not Pakistani land; at best (for Pakistan) the world-at-large has acknowledged it to be a disputed territory. Pakistan too recognizes it, and has negotiated, at the very least since 1971 Bangladesh war. Although there are records of negotiations that go back to Dulles period where Nehru had offered and Pakistan was negotiating on Kashmir.

“pretty soon, india has a huge headache on its head....it has to send 700,000 soldiers into kashmir.....it cannot take this issue to the un, because it is, itself, in violation of un resolutions.....however, it cannot control the militancy, nor these attacks.....

.....in one sweep, pakistan has solved its india problem.....with 700,000 indian soldiers in kashmir, the ratio of paksitan and indian army is now 1-1 on all other borders.....pakistan is on the offensive in kashmir......and pakistan's nuclear deterrent has neutralized any indian threat, anywhere.....�

The economy of scale analogy applies here. It is like Pakistan involving 100,000 troops in FATA NWFP, is how it is for Indian economy, or even less given the shape of two economies. Realism is absent here too.

“......now, if pakistan can stablize and grow its economy, it is all set...it has india in an unwinnable military conflict.....it's own borders and secured.....and sooner or later, india will be forced to negotiate on an issue, which it cannot internationalize....�

If this is the strategy to stabilize Pakistan – where internally it has a fourth colmn; externally it has eyeball-to-eyeball balance with its sworn enemy; then the strategy is flawed as it can both explode from outside and implode from inside. Both are visible to almost all.

“these militant organizations (as far as you know) are under your control.......you can switch them off and turn them on any time you want.....�

These militant organizations capable of taking on armed forces of the enemy seven time the size, according to your scenario, are under the control of Intelligence organization. It is like saying that entire military structure of say the U.S. is under the control of C.I.A., which in the best of times is not accountable to any democratic institution. Again the thinking of strategic Pakistani thinkers has left the mark. The country has been sold to the western bidder, institutions have been ransacked. It only shows that there is no control over such “strategic� thinkers.

NOW, let me answer your question. I will FIRE that strategic thinker, and I hope Pakistan has the leadership to fire also. In such a equilibrium state – explosion first or implosion first – is not stable state, but a paranoid state.

150 million Pakistanis who voted to show that a sensible democracy can exist in Pakistan are being cheated by such “strategic� thinkers.

I have a question for you, Romair. Why would such “strategic� thinkers evr change and give up unaccountable power?

P.S.:
I forgot to analyze "Mukti Bahini" comparison. 1. Mukti Bahini did not consist of Sikhs from the Punjab, unlike these forces who are Punjabi Muslims. I can further discuss absurdities of this analogy also, but some other time.

#225 Romair: My dear, 74% of Pakistanis live on less than $2 a day i.e. below the poverty line. To break their backs even more comprehensively we have inflation of over 20%, amongst the highest in the world. Which do you think is the bigger threat, India or the increasing misery of our own people,their illiteracy & unemployment, and the resultant rise in crime and civil unrest. Despite this our defense spending is over 5% of GDP ,higher than our combined development spending on health, education and water & power resources. Isn't it about time we forget about India and try to fix our own home before its too late?

romair, some of your posts these days are exceptionally well-written, and this is one of them. I agree entirely. From Pakistani side, that strategy would seem to be a no-brainer.

Re: # 225 Romair

Perhaps the problem is a thinking overshadowed by a military-strategic mindset. The Pakistani army and military strategist own the country based on amplifying this threat perception. One simple question--where has all their strategy and thinking got Pakistan? What is the situation of its people? What is its status in the world?

At some point one hopes the Pakistani people can escape from the clutches of its army. Then they can ask:

1. Is the threat perception from India real? Did India dismember them or did the Pakistani army?

2. Has the strategy of using non-state actors made Pakistan safer? Or has it increased the chance of war with India?

3. What has the cost been to Pakistani society of encouraging Islamic militancy?

What you will find is that military strategists may be able to fight a battle; but they cannot run a country. Unfortunately unless there is a real revolution in Pakistan it will remain subjugated by its army.

Kaalchakra #: "why has the Pakistani government only passively complied with UN resolutions wrt LeT?"

......allow me to answer your question, based on what i think pakistan's thinking happens to be.......you will need to open up your mind, however......for the moment, imagine that you are an advisor to the pakistan govt. on strategy, and your name is urstruly....

following is (was) the pakistan's strategic mindset, from what i have analyzed.....

......pakistan is under a constant threat from a country, which is seven times its size.....a country that from day one has done everything to destroy pakistan's geography, economics, unity etc.......

...to help you quantify this threat, india would have to threatended by 8 billion people in the world, to face an equivalent threat....in fact, there aren't enough people in the world to put india under an equivalent threat (i.e. 7 times its size).....the whole world ganging up on india is equal to india ganging up on pakistan......

.....this country has divided pakistan in two.....it has occupied kashmir, against un resolutions, which would make kashmir a part of pakistan......

......so how do you deal with such a country.....do you give up all your rights, your lands etc. and live in a subjugated state.....or do you fight it out?.....

....you don't want to be subjugated, and you are not big enough to fight this neighbor....what do you do?

....so you decide that you are going to engage india in kashmir.....you consider it your land, which india has occupied.......so you create a fourth arm of your military......the military already has an air force, army and navy arm......

....you create a volunteer civilian malitia.....kind of like civilian intelligence agents, who are not on visible payrolls of countries......this volunteer organization funds itself through collections.....it is trained by the army.....

....this (these) organizations are controlled by the paksitani intelligent agencies....all of a sudden, there is an uprising in kashmir....these organizations are infiltrated into kashmir (much like mukti bahani was sent into bangladesh by india)......they assist the uprising in attacking the indian army, in kashmir.....

pretty soon, india has a huge headache on its head....it has to send 700,000 soldiers into kashmir.....it cannot take this issue to the un, because it is, itself, in violation of un resolutions.....however, it cannot control the militancy, nor these attacks.....

.....in one sweep, pakistan has solved its india problem.....with 700,000 indian soldiers in kashmir, the ratio of paksitan and indian army is now 1-1 on all other borders.....pakistan is on the offensive in kashmir......and pakistan's nuclear deterrent has neutralized any indian threat, anywhere.....

......now, if pakistan can stablize and grow its economy, it is all set...it has india in an unwinnable military conflict.....it's own borders and secured.....and sooner or later, india will be forced to negotiate on an issue, which it cannot internationalize....

......so you neutralize india's strategic threat through nukes......and you beat up on india, in kashmir, through these organizations......

these militant organizations (as far as you know) are under your control.......you can switch them off and turn them on any time you want.....they are not causing any trouble for any other country, so no one is bothered, and they are considered a part of the freedom struggle in kashmir......if anything big comes up in un (where india will never go on any kashmir issue), you always have china to veto it.....

......now, considering you are not a hindutva supporter, but a pakistani strategic advisor, what advice do you give to pakistan's strategic thinkers, regarding these organizations?

-------

i will present post-9/11 scenario of these organizations, in another reply......but at the moment, it isn't in your wildest dreams, as a strategic advisor, that 9/11 will occur.......

I'd like to point out that sex offenders have often been victims themselves at some point, but they aren't given carte blanche to sexually assault kids as a result of that. Why is this so different?
Very few people would be in jails anywhere in the world if judges said, I won't put you in jail because you had a precipitant for your crime.

#212

tahmed32 writes:

{{Assuming your claim that

1. pakistani generals call the shots in Pakistan is correct (and to a significant extent it remains valid, although to a much lesser degree today than in the past),

2. that their relations vis-a-vis US are motivated by fear, and with vis-a-vis lack thereof is correct (and I dont think it is - no rational analyst would start and stop with "fear" as being the only, or even a significant, motivator),}}

Chacha, you are correct in asserting that fear is not the only motivator in the Pakistani generals' relations with the US (though I think it is one of the two primary ones).

The other primary motivator, of course, is greed. I believe that it is greed [the desire to live an easy life off Uncle Sam's largesse, without going through all the messy thankless hard work needed to build a nation; and to gain easy access to life in the US and the West for scions of the well-connected entitled elite] that lead the Pakistan Army and establishment to offer their country up as a catamite to Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam liked the original arrangement and wants it to continue indefinitely. Whenever the Pakistani establishment shows a desire to wriggle out from this too-close embrace, or to get the minion's benefits without the inconvenience of performing the minion's duties, fear of Uncle Sam's wrath and of his threats of violence is what keeps them in line.