My Boy, Jonaid

Two heroes, one story. The great father and the great son, salute to both of them. Thanks to the writer for projecting the bravery.

never read a more superficial piece of writing on chowk or anywhere else.

synthetic,burger family,misses the root causes,gets lost in the woods and sees the trees but not the woods.

fails to keep the larger perspective in mind about how the pakistani army used poor mans son as cannon fodder in the so called jihad.

chowk staff needs to be more choosy in publishing such myopic , pure and absolute non sense.

she is the typical mediocre type we see in lahore and islamabad chilling out at hot spot.

Re: # 24

What if I tell you there have always been jihad that were offensive. With the idea being to loot or convert perfectly nice people .... yeah .... ALWAYS.
Also, the initial point was - why would Muslims consider beheadings as gruesome when thier own prophet (cough, cough) indulged in it.

Bernard Lewis is an extraordinarily honest man if he can pinpoint that what is the truth. Even if politically uncomfortable. And edward said is no diff then the thousands of his kind .... apologists with a sense of victim-hood. By those standards, you can call yourself "Great" too. Since you are doing exactly what Edward Said is doing.

Satya Mev Jayate.

Briefly, jihad is defensive not offensive; the innocent (esp. women and children) are not to be harmed; there is no wanton destruction of property and prisoners are not to be tortured or killed. Deliberate suicide (as opposed to taking part in a near-suicidal attack on the enemy) is strictly prohibited by the Prophet himself; thus a suicide bombing negates the benefits of jihad.

You can try Bernard Lewis on Amazon and search inside his books if you want the views of someone who the great Edward Said dismissed out of hand as the Dean of Orientalists.

Re: # 22

Would you be kind enough to tell me the "proof" in a nutshell here.....


:D

Re: nkg

Because we're not too bright and thought we could use and control them; same way that RAW thought it could use and control Bhindranwale.

Re: wiseguy,

I suggest you read, say, Bernard Lewis on the Islamic ulema on jihad and what is and is not permissible. Since Edward Said 'proved' how biased Lewis is against Islam and Muslims, I'll assume that Lewis wouldn't whitewash Islam and the Islamic version of 'just war' theory.

So why would muslims consider beheadings as gruesome ?? Didn't that charlatan from 1400 years ago to do the same to his enemies ??


Puzzling..... Bery Puzzling.... :P

Re: # 17 Romair....I always feel the changes take place slowly and people change slowly due necessicity. It is long overdrawn process and one had to be patient. Only slowly non deliberate changes happened survive. As tutor many students I have helped for better changed only slowly. Some time some students use to express impatience and depressing view they are not following some portion of mathematics. I use to tell do not count progress in days, if you look in terms of change in days it appears nothing happens , same with months but you start looking in terms of year then there are changes which are appreciable. Lot will depend on demography/ numbers. With present rate of growth it looks impossible as projections are too high. Still birth rate is coming down. Before agerage women had 8 births in rural areas it has come down to 5.5 ( I made my on calcu;lations based on my observations in rural sindh ) The said rate of population is fabricated downwards. My calcujation is population will double in 22 years ( I took in to account normal death rate). Pakistan is now major urban population compared to 1947. This is blessing as living places are beyond capacity of 50% that leads to later marriages and urban women fertility is down.
The country is at cross road in many way but population wise we are in dangerous threshould. Number is strength when population was some 40 million of united Pakistan. Now mumber is burden like fat leaders of ours and they have to carry load of extra 35 KG. Water resources are getting less and less per capita , no much growth can take place on bringing on line new lands due to irrigation. The country is mostly desert except along Indus and tributaries. When travels out of Karachi one can note the desert landscape.
With best efforts and good planning also with such numbers is like fat man hoping to have strength of great runner.
Logically present is bad but future will be worse unless one believes in Miracles.
One of the best way to guage future is to look at leaders and their children, The are lucky they can ride two horses. Middle class is keen and observant and their actions are very logical. They want to move out , everybody wants to move to west.While others are risking lives of travelling to unknown destinations. THis is best indicator , these great number of people have survival sense and have right premonotion and they can hear future steps.

Demography will overweigh all major factors.
Good day.

Re: # 15
Fuz...
Unltil the death of Rajiv Gandhi, India was almost dictatorial and was far worse than Pakistan...Economic record of India upto 1989 was worse than Pakistan. Now, whatever problem India created for itself, what for you guys want to be in? Furthermore, Tamils have enough reason to be angry with Lankan administration...

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aisha_sarwari#: ....every country has young men who are willing to die for it.....i am, however, not sure if that can be used as a criteria for the strength of a country....

usa had so many young men (and women) willing to die for their country in iraq and afghanistan....however, that would not be the criteria for the country's strength....

.....the criteria is the character of the people who sent these young men to die for their country, and the society's response to these deaths......

pakistan ranks very low in the first category, and ok in the second....

....i think pakistan is on the fence at the moment.....it could go either way.....it certainly isn't vibrant, and so many people are leaving......i think it will remain like this, until the elitism of the society is broken......chowk itself is a super-elitist site......english speaking, western educated, first-world level wealth and lifestyle (with many expats) commenting on the conditions of a dirt poor populace....

until pakistan reaches a stage, where its chowks are in urdu, where every villager can participate in the discussion, and put out its views, it will continue in its current state.....

this is starting to happen, with the civil society movements.....even the anti-taliban strategy didn't start working, until the common pakistani turned against the taliban.....

Pavo,

So long as there are Pakistani men and women willing to fight and sacrifice for Pakistan everything like these brave martyrs, it will not be a failed state.

Failed people write mediocre book reviews

From where I see Pakistan, the corporate the vibrant and resilient country is waiting for its chance around the corner, it is a real view after traveling its cities and seing its bureaucratic and government setups function dispite all developing world issues, it is not a view I got from living in a bunker drinking myself silly in self loathing and keeping a kelidoscopic view of all humanity.

The only thing that is failed in Pakistan apart from resource distribution is people who talk from the fringes of society as if they belong or care to own both the errors and the wins.

How can anyone who has benefitted from the country have the nerve to call it failed?

Aisha Sarwari

Re: #14

Did you feel the same when the LTTE was torturing and executing captured Indian Army soldiers in Sri Lanka? If so, I apologize for this email. If not, then you know what you can do with yourself.

....while fighting the thugs it nurtured until not very long ago along its western borders.

Reading this, one doesn't understand whether to feel sorry for the Paki army or do a thumbs up saying the Paki army deserves everything it is getting and then some! This very same Paki army has no qualms sponsoring murderous thugs engaged in fighting the Indian army and killing several innocents (in a particularly gruesome incident, terrorists killed a Kashmiri man and his 4 month old son just last month) across Pakistan's eastern borders while fighting the thugs it nurtured until not very long ago.

The real tragedy here is scores of young men becoming cannon fodder for the Paki army's follies.

....one can only feel sadness for a father who loses a child in the prime of the child's life.......having said that, when one joins the military, one has to be ready for death.....but it can never be easy for a father....

.....after the very successful swat operation (far more successful than any anti-terrorism operation i have ever seen, probably because it had full support of the population), the popularity of the pak army is going up daily......the current, coas, is also non-political, which helps...

howeever, it will take a long time before the stables of pakistan are cleared.....having, now, spent a lot of time in pakistan, and having had a chance to deal with some of the stable owners, it has become clear to me that there are three entities, which need to be disengaged from certain areas, without which pakistan cannot progress....

1. the army's dominance of pakistan's budget and its ventures into business need to end....withtout this, pakistan's public and private sector will never have enough financing to grow....and will never be able to excercise its, otherwise huge potential......

2. the maulvi's dominance of pakistan's thought process needs to end......until this is done, pakistan will never be able to recognize the huge intellectual potential of this area which is a cradle of civilization...

3. the us dominance of pakistan's foreign policy, and too some extent, its domestic policy.....until pakistan cuts its ties with us foreign policy, it will continue to end up in one us war after another, doing all the dirty work, which when combined with 1 and 2, is doing huge harm to pakistan.....

....the first and third are policy decisions....the second is a social phenomenon.....once these three events happen, then the social structure of pakistan will change....it will become a less elitist society....the families of those of us on chowk will no longer dominate pakistan.....and a more equal and equitable society will emerge......