A Work In Progress

Sure, pakiland is in an important position these days. Its position is about exporting terrorism or threats of that nature. Look what pakis are up to ...

http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/dec/17ram.htm

Peace,
###16 by faisaluno on Janauary 7, 2003 8:20am PT
so if people are not happy with the settlement reached 55 years ago, why dont they do what jinnah did. why dont they get of their butts and work to create a system that will provide peace and prosperity to the region ##
thats exactly was the biggest mistake of these great visionaries Jinnah, Nehru, and Gandhi, all three of them had a great vision of India, they all tried to achieve their goals and at some point got at odds with each other while at certain point found themselves in the same bed. However they had a basic flaw in their vision all three of them, they thought that this vision of the future of India is shared by the people of India, that was the basic flaw of their vision. The Indians of then and today, with exception of say 10%(i know its exagerated), are the poor, lazy, non thinking, people who had no vision or sense of a life with a goal. They have always been a herd of sheep herded into doing things by the Great visionaries from Ashoka, to Bhutto...
But they all waisted their time on the assumption that these people actualy wanted to live a good life...

Peace

articles you won`t see in Pakistani newspapers

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KASHMIR QUAGMIRE
America has no dog in the fight
By Satu P Limaye

The 50-year-old Kashmir dispute has all the attributes T S Eliot assigned to history. It has ``many cunning passages, contrived corridors`` and ``deceives with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities``. During the past year, as India and Pakistan faced off militarily and the US searched for al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists nearby, the dispute seemed especially dangerous, US interests in the subcontinent compelling, and America`s influence and Pakistani as well as Indian receptivity to US mediation high. Many called for US mediation to resolve the dispute. These calls, however well-intentioned, are misguided.

Kashmir`s dangers and costs, US influence, and Indian and Pakistani receptivity to mediation are overstated. United States interests in Kashmir are negligible; and the value of resolving Kashmir to improving relations with India and Pakistan and achieving wider strategic objectives are debatable. Anyway, the prospect of a Kashmir compromise is remote. Most problematic is the dispute`s ``whispering ambitions``. Kashmir is not the lone or even most important cause of India-Pakistan enmity. Irreconcilable nationalisms, India`s growing power asymmetry with Pakistan, and India`s desire for regional pre-eminence and Pakistan`s determination to prevent it are the cores of discord.

Pakistan, which most seeks mediation, can least afford compromise. An option for the US is to offer Pakistan a security guarantee in exchange for a Kashmir compromise, and simultaneously move to ``transform`` relations with India. This approach has two limited merits. First, it could resolve Kashmir. Second, it would call the subcontinent`s two enduring bluffs. India`s is that it is reconciled fully to the creation of Pakistan. Pakistan`s is that it fears only Indian hegemony, but does not harbor ambitions to be equal to it - whether by pulling India down or pushing itself up. The major demerit of such a policy is the requirement for a massive US commitment of diplomacy, cash, military equipment, security guarantees - and possibly military presence. US interests in India, Pakistan, or their amity, do not justify such a profound commitment. Behind-the-scenes facilitation and episodic crisis management, though cumbersome and unsatisfying, are effective and commensurate with US interests.

Kashmir`s exaggerated dangers and costs
India and Pakistan have fought two brief, limited wars over Kashmir since their independence in 1947. Given India and Pakistan`s overt nuclearization and shared penchant for brinksmanship, today`s dangers seem greater. Divergent risk assessments exist about the possibility of nuclear war. Still, policymakers must consider its humanitarian costs and strategic implications. India and Pakistan pay for Kashmir in lives, treasure and reputations. Kashmir thwarts India`s global ambitions, as does the diplomatic and perceptual hyphenation with Pakistan it produces. Pakistan is being undermined by the Kashmir conflict`s guns, violence and radicalism. The Kashmiris bear the brunt of conflict.

Kashmir`s dangers and costs are sobering, but should not be overdrawn. Brinksmanship is used by all parties to purpose. Weaker Pakistan ratchets up tensions to gain US pressure on India to negotiate. India uses coercive diplomacy to get US pressure on Pakistan to halt the infiltration of militants. Both seek these ends without war: Pakistan because it might lose; India because it might not win. Each wants the US to hold them back, while pushing their interests forward. Militants use dramatic attacks to loosen India`s grip on Kashmir, and warn Pakistan against reducing commitment to their cause. Outsiders use acute tensions to leverage influence. Tensions employed carefully are creative. Outsiders should not be ``guided by vanities`` that they are the most important bulwark against war.

Nor should the negative implications of nuclear war in the subcontinent be exaggerated. Horrific as the humanitarian costs would be, they must be set against the staggering existing humanitarian challenges in the region. Second, many feared that India and Pakistan`s 1998 nuclear blasts would unhinge the nuclear order. They did not. Similarly, if India and Pakistan use nuclear weapons, other countries involved in disputes with their neighbors will not necessarily follow. A nuclear war in the subcontinent could give a fillip to nonproliferation efforts. Resolving Kashmir would remove a nuclear flashpoint, but not the capabilities and underlying antagonisms that make nuclear war possible.

Kashmir is not the magic formula for fixing the subcontinent`s ills or America`s difficulties there. Identifying it as such allows India and Pakistan to blame only each other and manipulate the US.

Illusory US influence and regional receptivity
A beguiling but illusory notion is that US leverage and Indian and Pakistani receptivity to it is at a peak. India`s reliance on Washington to wring and validate commitments from Pakistan to halt infiltration into Kashmir, and its desire for closer ties do not make New Delhi receptive to mediation. India is peeved at Washington`s new-found friendship with Islamabad and doubts that Washington will hold Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to his pledge to permanently end infiltration. Pakistan suspects that the US has been complicit in India`s coercive diplomacy and is disillusioned that Kashmir is seen as a terrorism problem rather than as a freedom struggle. India and Pakistan`s grievances indicate that the US is well placed to play a mediatory role. But they also show that neither is really ready to receive it.

America has no dog in the Kashmir fight
America`s interests in Kashmir are limited. Kashmir`s future is not the target of a unified, powerful lobby within domestic politics or the subject of US domestic laws. Its intricate history rarely and fleetingly overlaps with American history. The dispute is unfamiliar to most Americans save a few academic and government specialists. Kashmir contains no resources the US, or its allies and friends, must have. Its dispensation does not involve clear ideological values that America holds dear. US allies and friends are not directly threatened by the dispute or clamoring for its resolution. The chance of another power displacing America`s centrality in the subcontinent and addressing the dispute to America`s detriment is negligible. The dispute sometimes detracts from other US priorities, but not unsustainably so. American credibility depends far more heavily on the outcome of other flashpoints. Long-standing US commitments are not at stake. The Kashmir dispute is not equivalent to the cross-strait quandary involving China and Taiwan. Kashmir`s line-of-control (LoC) is not Korea`s demilitarized zone. Simply put, the US does not have a dog in the Kashmir fight.

The dispute does complicate US relations with India and Pakistan and wider strategic objectives (eg, the war on terrorism) but not unmanageably so. During the Cold War and during a decade of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, America relatively successfully pursued its core interests while managing rather than resolving India-Pakistan tensions or the Kashmir dispute. The global war on terrorism need not be different. Indeed, pressing for resolution of Kashmir now threatens to hamper, not ease US relations with India and Pakistan and the pursuit of wider strategic objectives.

Pakistan can least afford compromise
An irony of the Kashmir dispute is that Pakistan, which most wants mediation, can least afford compromise. First, Kashmir is central to Pakistan`s national identity in a way it is not for India. Second, any reasonable compromise would involve a tacit recognition of the current LoC, a position India already accepts but Pakistan does not. Musharraf recently reiterated that the LoC is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Third, the Kashmir dispute allows Pakistan to assert parity with India in perceptions and diplomacy - if not real power. Kashmir is the hyphen in the India-Pakistan relationship; a punctuation mark vital to Pakistan`s grammar of geopolitics. If Kashmir is resolved, Pakistan loses a way of blunting India`s ambitions for regional pre-eminence. Even Pakistan`s possession of nuclear weapons does not afford the same parity. Pakistan`s nuclear weapons especially matter when they are linked with the Kashmir conflict. Finally, the Kashmir dispute serves Pakistani leaders as a domestic pressure release valve. Musharraf, mocked at home for behaving like Busharraf (ie, too cooperative with President George W Bush in the global war on terrorism), makes like Musharrafat - hedging by supporting the Kashmir freedom struggle.

What`s so funny about behind-the-scenes facilitation and episodic crisis management? By providing Islamabad with a security guarantee and economic and military assistance, the US theoretically could make a Kashmir compromise palatable to Pakistan. US protection of Pakistan would also serve as a restraint on it. India might accept such an arrangement if US support helped Islamabad feel secure, end support for the Kashmiri militancy completely, marginalize its domestic extremists, stabilize its economy, and establish a sustainable democracy. Once Pakistan is secure, a US-India relationship to include military sales, technology transfers and economic cooperation could theoretically develop. Is it worth it? Not now. Such an approach would lock the US in a relentless and expensive engagement; more enduring and costly than trying to resolve Kashmir - much less manage it.

At a time when Washington seeks solutions to international problems rather than to manage them, behind-scenes-facilitation and episodic crisis management might seem an unsatisfying sop - even an abdication of bold leadership. But management of the Kashmir dispute saves the US from making promises it cannot keep, making commitments that outweigh benefits, and hitching itself to a region whose importance to the US must not be over-sold. Calibrating levels and types of engagement with interests is a tricky and dynamic challenge. Currently, US efforts call for management, not mediation of the Kashmir dispute.
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Ref YLH2 #8

[..... you have shown me that you too have the same mischievious streak as apparent in the more rabid and fanatical of your countrymen on these boards.]

Yasser, dear boy, don`t tell me you have forgotten my name already. I am SOOO hurt (sniff).

Considering Mr Akram has argued for recognition of the Taleban in the past I wonder if Islamic law applies to Pakistani UN envoy.

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U.S. Asks Pakistan to Lift U.N. Envoy`s Immunity After a Violent Quarrel
By JULIA PRESTON

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 7 — The State Department has asked Pakistan to withdraw the diplomatic immunity of its envoy here, Munir Akram, after New York City prosecutors sought to bring misdemeanor assault charges against him as a result of a quarrel with a woman, United States and New York City officials said today.

Marjorie Tiven, the city commissioner in charge of United Nations issues, wrote to the United States Mission here on Dec. 26 requesting that the envoy`s immunity be removed, according to Edward Skyler, the mayor`s spokesman. Mr. Skyler said the Manhattan district attorney`s office had advised city officials that it was prepared to prosecute if Mr. Akram`s immunity was lifted. Pakistan has not yet informed the United States of any decision.

The legal dispute comes at a bad time for the ambassador. On Jan. 1, Pakistan took a seat on the 15-nation Security Council for a two-year term, just when the Council will be weighing whether to authorize war on Iraq.

On Dec. 10 at 1:36 a.m., the New York City police were summoned by an emergency 911 call to a residence at 47 East 92nd Street in Manhattan, police officials said.

Marijana Mihic, 35, told the 911 operator that a man whom she identified as her husband had smashed her head into a wall and that her arm hurt, according to the police dispatcher`s notes of the conversation. She said the man had hit her before.

``Female caller states husband has diplomatic immunity,`` the dispatcher noted.

When police officers arrived, Ms. Mihic said that Mr. Akram was her ``boyfriend`` and that after an argument with him she had tried to leave.

``He prevented her from leaving, he grabbed her and she fell,`` said Lt. Brian Burke, a police spokesman. The police officers at the scene reported that Ms. Mihic had a bruise on her head, he said.

Mr. Akram, who is 57, was at the residence when the police arrived and identified himself as an ambassador.

``There was nothing really that the officers could do,`` Lt. Burke said. United Nations envoys enjoy immunity from local criminal prosecution.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Mission said today that Mr. Akram and his friend had reconciled.

``The ambassador and his friend both strongly believe that there is no basis for any legal action in this matter,`` said Mansoor Suhail, the spokesman. ``And they have both communicated that belief to the concerned authorities.``

Once the police officers arrived at the residence, Ms. Mihic seemed to become less alarmed, and she refused medical attention when an ambulance from the city`s Emergency Medical Service went to the scene, city officials said.

The district attorney`s office advised Ms. Tiven that Mr. Akram could be prosecuted for a misdemeanor charge of third degree assault, a law enforcement official said. She wrote to Patrick F. Kennedy, a senior diplomat at the United States mission here, and the State Department lodged its request with Pakistan on Dec. 28.

JINNAH was a war criminal.. Direct action day itself led to death of more than 20000 people.. Equal number died in the attacks by Kabailis in Kashmir...

People worshipping Jinnah do seem wanna make their kids follow his lessons and message: Rape and kill as many non-muslims as possible..

Thats Jinnah in nutshell..

Cant believe the women worshipping Jinnah, support the message of violence by Jinnah..

The author may wish to consult the work of Ayesha Jalal titled ``The Sole Spokesman`` (CUP 1985), which may well be definitive, as well as the chapter by FPR Robinson in ``Foundations of Pakistan`s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s``, edited by W. E. James and myself (Hawaii MS 1989, Sage 1993, Karachi OUP 1993). If the author happens to know of these or similar works already, I would be interested in hsi response to them.

Subroto Roy, PhD (Cantab.)
Professor, VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur,
India 721302.

i am convinced it must be in the blood of us Pakistanis to be `fasad di jurh` but it didn`t occur to me that we were also geographically `fasad di jurh`

chal i suppose it adds a bit of colour on things...

baqi tussi pagal Indian Pakistani lardey rahiyo...

Peace,
#25 by drsubrotoroy on Janauary 8, 2003 0:35am PT
I have heard about Ayesha Jalal, but was unable to find her titles at Amazon, and B&N. I have heard that she and some new authors have re-written the history of our region in the light of these new official documents of British Raj, released by the Crown, recently. Have read some excrepts of Ayesha`s work referenced in another book. Also would love see your work and am open to any more recomendations if you may make about the new authors on both sides of the divide. But please make sure I hate the apologists, or people with a narrow vision who do not see things with the historic perspective and think of our region in isolation.
Peace...

Thank you for this History of Pakistan, replete with previously unknown information. I would never have guessed all this happened if I did not read your article.
So it was Jinnah who founded Pakistan!! And Pakistan is located close to Central Asia. My, my. I always thought Pakistan was a small island in the Carribean, and that jinnah was merely a panjabi word for person. And this treasure trove of information you provide about the succession of tribal rulers of this place you call Pakistan - previously unheard of names like Ayub Khan, and Bhutto, and Bibi, and Nawaz Sharif, and lately Musharaff, and the light you shed on their shenanigans - will no doubt force anthropologists and historians to re-write history books. The light you shed on the geostrategic location of Pakistan will undoubtedly become required reading in military staff colleges the world over.

[ #26 by slodhi on Janauary 8, 2003 7:57am PT
...
I have heard about Ayesha Jalal, but was unable to find her titles at Amazon, and B&N.
...]

That is surprising because I was able to find ``The Sole Spokesman`` on Amazon site. May be you mistyped the serach words. I sometimes search the British and German sister sites of Amazon for highly academic books. But mostly I had to do that only for Math and Finance books. Most other books I always managed to find in main Amazon site. Also there is a site for O/P books: www.alibris.com. HTH

Found following at: http://iref.homestead.com/Messiah.html. I have cut-and-pasted beginning which introduces auhtor and few paragraphs which I wanted highlight. Deleted parts are shown with ``***``:

Partition

The Messiah and The Promised Land

Margaret Bourke-White was a correspondent and photographer for LIFE magazine during the WW II years. In September 1947, White went to Pakistan. She met Jinnah and wrote about what she found and heard in her book Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India,Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. The following are the excerpts:

***

What plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?


``America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America,`` was Jinnah`s reply. ``Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed`` -- he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles -- ``the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves.`` He leaned toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. ``Russia,`` confided Mr. Jinnah, ``is not so very far away.``


This had a familiar ring. In Jinnah`s mind this brave new nation had no other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America`s military interest in other parts of the world. ``America is now awakened,`` he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. ``If Russia walks in here,`` he concluded, ``the whole world is menaced.``


In the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam`s thesis echoed by government officials throughout Pakistan. ``Surely America will build up our army,`` they would say to me. ``Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in.`` But when I asked whether there were any signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. ``No, Russia has shown no signs of being interested in Pakistan.``


This hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan`s own uncertain position as a new political entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state -- a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.


Jinnah`s most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. ....


No one would have been more astonished than Jinnah if he could have foreseen thirty or forty years earlier that anyone would ever speak of him as a ``savior of Islam.`` In those days any talk of religion brought a cynical smile. He condemned those who talked in terms of religious rivalries, and in the stirring period when the crusade for freedom began sweeping the country he was hailed as ``the embodied symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity.`` The gifted Congresswoman, Mrs. Naidu, one of Jinnah`s closest friends, wrote poems extolling his role as the great unifier in the fight for independence. ``Perchance it is written in the book of the future,`` ran one of her tributes, ``that he, in some terrible crisis of our national struggle, will pass into immortality`` as the hero of ``the Indian liberation.``


In the ``terrible crisis,`` Mahomed Ali Jinnah was to pass into immortality, not as the ambassador of unity, but as the deliberate apostle of discord. What caused this spectacular renunciation of the concept of a united India, to which he had dedicated the greater part of his life? No one knows exactly. The immediate occasion for the break, in the mid-thirties, was his opposition to Gandhi`s civil disobedience program. Nehru says that Jinnah ``disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people who filled the Congress`` and was not at home with the new spirit rising among the common people under Gandhi`s magnetic leadership. Others say it was against his legal conscience to accept Gandhi`s program. One thing is certain: the break with Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress leaders was not caused by any Hindu-Muslim issue.


In any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it had dragged through an anemic thirty years` existence, and took to the religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part, an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a popular movement which would threaten their special position. Then another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area, free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.


The trend of events in Pakistan would support the theory that Jinnah carried the banner of the Muslim landed aristocracy, rather than that of the Muslim masses he claimed to champion. There was no hint of personal material gain in this. Jinnah was known to be personally incorruptible, a virtue which gave him a great strength with both poor and rich. The drive for personal wealth played no part in his politics. It was a drive for power. ......


Less than three months after Pakistan became a nation, Jinnah`s Olympian assurance had strangely withered. His altered condition was not made public. ``The Quaid-i-Azam has a bad cold`` was the answer given to inquiries.

***

_______________________________________________________

In olden days there used to be magazines which sometimes carried serialized detective stories in which an episode would end with a terrible scream of a lady (or a gunshot) disturbing night. And then abruptly the episode would end there, remaining story ``to be continued`` in next instalment. That way author kept interest alive and subscriptions coming in. So...

So if you want to read what happened to after Quaid-i-Azam had bad cold, read it at the link provided or buy the book. ;)

re: this article
I think, as the Americans would say, Chowk has, with this article, hit rock bottom.
Sridhar

re:#6 by hrrehman
Yes. Your Qaid-e-Azam is a genius. The Pakistan he carved out left muslims in India in an insignificant minority, at the mercy of hindus (something which he claimed he was trying to prevent). Muslims of the newly independent nation proved so united that within 25 years of its existence, the eastern wing seperated out putting an end to the 2 nation theory. The western wing today is a theocracy, ruled by a military dictator constantly at war with its bigger neighbour. I hardly think Jinnah ever envisioned such a nation for muslims of India.
Sridhar

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AmericanExpress #27

The same non-Islamic law allows for the waiver of diplomatic immunity if the country of the diplomat (Pakistan) allows for it.

Even if USA does not get to prosecute Mr Akram will Pakistan prosecute him.
Or is Islamic law reserved for women, minorities only ?