Pakistan After The Assassination: Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy Masadi u moron...he is a phd in sciences....u r a phd in idiocy. One cannot debate with idiocy. One can only ridicule it....that is what I do. You middling fool....your views and logic are replete with idiocy thus explaining ur station in life.

Us kicked you out.....pak will kick you out soon, you idiot!!

I wiped ur dumb ass all over chowk before...- I will do it again. You dumbass islamisocialist monkey!

Pakistan After The Assassination: Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy they have also nice graphs which can make the understanding of large numbers rather easy for even a trisomy 13 baby like yourself. You product of a cousin marriage you!! :P

Pakistan After The Assassination: Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy god, masadi you an idiot http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp

now shut the fk up and go blow the CW Mills doll while dressed up as Beverly Sills.

Pakistan After The Assassination: Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy Bhutto Killing Roils Province,
Spurring Call to Quit Pakistan
Sindh Is Latest Fault Line
In a Fractured Country;
Like 'Occupied Territory'
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
January 8, 2008

HYDERABAD, Pakistan -- Thousands of mourners who filed past the grave of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in her ancestral village aired more than their fury with her assassins.

"We hate Pakistan," they chanted. "We don't want Pakistan."

Ms. Bhutto, chairman for life of Pakistan's largest party, headed the mightiest aristocratic dynasty here in Sindh, the second-largest of Pakistan's four provinces. In the wake of her Dec. 27 assassination, Sindh has been swept by nationalist rage. Many Sindhis, the province's majority ethnic group, have started calling for outright independence. Support for separatism has surged among rank-and-file members of Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party here. Sindhi nationalists outside the PPP have begun to speak of launching an armed insurgency.

Sindhis' anger is directed against neighboring Punjab, Pakistan's most-populous province. Punjab, with its ethnic Punjabi majority, dominates the country's army and federal bureaucracy and has long taken a disproportionate share of the country's resources, many here say.


Yaroslav Trofimov
Pashtun family by their burned truck at the entrance to Hyderabad
"The Punjabi elite treats us as a slave nation, and Sindh as an occupied territory," says Qadir Magsi, head of the nationalist Sindh Taraqi Passand movement. "Benazir Bhutto was the last hope to keep Pakistan united. Now, this Pakistan must be broken apart."

Upheaval in Sindh adds to the centrifugal forces already accelerating throughout this nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 160 million. In the Northwest Frontier province, dominated by the Pashtun ethnicity, central government authority has withered in recent years as large areas fell under Taliban control. In Baluchistan, the Pakistani army has been embroiled for decades in a war against Baluch separatist guerrillas.

The deadly unrest that erupted across Pakistan following Ms. Bhutto's assassination in the Punjabi city of Rawalpindi was at its worst in Sindh. The province of 38 million people includes Hyderabad -- a metropolis of 1.5 million, distinct from the historical Indian city of the same name -- and Karachi, the country's financial and industrial hub. Rioters here torched hundreds of government offices, police outposts, railway stations and banks, all seen as symbols of the Pakistani state. According to Karachi's chamber of commerce, damage in the province exceeded $1.3 billion.

Mobs targeted with particular vigor the trucks on Sindhi highways that link the Punjab with seaports. In Hyderabad, a major crossroads, hundreds of burned-out vehicle wrecks, some still smoldering, lined roads in every direction for several days. Truckers, virtually all of non-Sindhi origin, camped nearby, some still wearing torn and bloodstained clothes.

A 'Racial' Element

Such attacks prompted Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf to caution in a televised address to the nation last week that the violence in Sindh had acquired a "racial" element. He deployed Pakistan's army across the volatile province, pledging that soldiers and federal rangers will keep patrolling Sindh for the foreseeable future.


Strong forces are working against Sindhi secession. The Pakistani military's formidable firepower means that the country isn't likely to fracture immediately. There are no clear legal avenues for Pakistani provinces to break away. And despite many PPP members' calls for independence, the party's new leaders -- Ms. Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and her son, Bilawal -- say they are committed to keeping the country united.

Regardless, Ms. Bhutto's assassination has already led to a realignment of many Sindhis' allegiances. The daughter of one of the country's most popular leaders, Ms. Bhutto was considered a guarantor of her home province's voice on the national stage, even when she was out of power. The Bhuttos' prominence in national politics for more than four decades helped to keep Sindh's deep-rooted separatist feelings in check.

"Many believed that our survival is through the parliamentary system. But now, after the killing, the people realized this is not the case, and that we have to fight," says Ghaffar Bhutto, a Sindhi writer and politician who says he is distantly related to Ms. Bhutto. "We don't need Pakistan, and we no longer see our future in it."

Pakistan's new federal government, which Ms. Bhutto had hoped to head as prime minister, will be chosen in parliamentary elections scheduled for Feb. 18. Voters will also pick a new administration for the province of Sindh. Analysts expect the PPP to capture a sizable part of the national vote and also return to power in Sindh, which was governed in recent years by Mr. Musharraf's allies.

PPP leader Mr. Zardari has already warned that any government attempt to rig the upcoming election will be met with massive street protests. Renewed turmoil in this crucial province could further devastate the Pakistani economy and destabilize the country.

Punjab Dominance

Welded from disparate Muslim-majority sections of the Indian subcontinent six decades ago, Pakistan -- meaning "Land of the Pure" -- has always been an artificial creation. It has been held together by the Islamic religion of most of its citizens and a strong military that frequently interfered in politics, replacing civilian leaders in a series of coups. The country split in half once already. In 1971, East Pakistan -- an ethnic Bengali province some 1,000 miles from the rest of Pakistan -- became the independent country of Bangladesh following a civil war that triggered a military intervention by arch-rival India.

Bangladesh's secession left a Pakistan of four provinces, each dominated by a different ethnic group with its own customs and language. Towering above the other three is Punjab, with 56% of Pakistan's inhabitants. Because of their prominence and numbers, Punjabis tend to identify with the Pakistani state as a whole, rather than with their home province alone.

Neighboring Sindh maintained a distinct identity. One of the world's most ancient agricultural areas, with a settled civilization stretching back 5,000 years, Sindh hugs the fertile lower reaches of the Indus River. Following 8th-century Arab conquests, it became the first part of the Indian subcontinent to convert to Islam. With its countryside dominated by feudal landowners, Sindh largely follows Sufism, a tolerant and mystical strand of the faith that disdains Taliban-style extremism.

The subcontinent's traumatic partition of 1947 was particularly disruptive in Sindh, as local Hindus -- who accounted for much of the province's urban middle class -- fled to India. Their homes and jobs were taken by millions of so-called Muhajirs, the Urdu-speaking Muslim refugees from northern and central India, a community that includes Delhi-born Mr. Musharraf. In later years, the province attracted a steady stream of Punjabi and Pashtun immigrants as well, reducing ethnic Sindhis to a minority in their homeland's main cities.

Resentment against this influx, coupled with the general flowering of ethnic identities following Bangladesh's secession, turned Sindhi nationalism into a powerful force for the first time in the early 1970s.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a Sindhi feudal landlord and Ms. Bhutto's father, deftly harnessed these feelings as he rose to power in 1971. In the rest of the country, he campaigned as the champion of Pakistan's poor, promising "roti, kapra aur makan" -- bread, clothing and shelter for the impoverished masses.

But in Sindh, Mr. Bhutto -- who served as Pakistan's president and then as prime minister -- garnered overwhelming support as someone who finally upheld Sindhi rights. Working with his cousin, then-Sindh Chief Minister Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, he made Sindhi the province's official language alongside Urdu, and established quotas for ethnic Sindhis in colleges and government jobs.

Mr. Bhutto eventually ran afoul of the Pakistani military. He was ousted in a coup and hanged in 1979 in Rawalpindi, the seat of Pakistan's military headquarters, on the orders of dictator Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, a Punjabi.

Replacing Mr. Bhutto at the helm of the Pakistan People's Party was his young daughter Benazir. The PPP's campaign against military rule was strongest in Sindh, where an armed uprising erupted in 1983. Some 800 Sindhis were killed as Pakistani troops hunted down the rebels, razing villages and burning crops. Ms. Bhutto, who was detained at the time by Pakistan's military, wrote in her memoirs that the bloodshed in Sindh brought back "dark memories of the army's rampage in Bangladesh" in 1971.

Once democracy was restored and Ms. Bhutto became a prime minister in 1988, and again in 1993, she reached out to Punjab and sought an accommodation with the country's military establishment. But she also rallied ethnic Sindhi support by cracking down on the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a Muhajir party that dominates the province's main cities through the local administrations and its armed militia.

Power to Provinces

After returning to Pakistan from self-imposed exile in October, Ms. Bhutto spoke passionately about the need to save Pakistan's federation from an implosion, by giving more power to the provinces. She pledged, if elected, to end military operations in Baluchistan, and made a condolence visit to the father of a slain Baluch guerrilla chief.

Mr. Musharraf blamed the shooting and suicide bombing attack that killed Ms. Bhutto on Islamic extremists affiliated with a Taliban tribal commander from the Pashtun area of South Waziristan. Ms. Bhutto's supporters accused Mr. Musharraf, and elements of his security services, of orchestrating the tragedy. He angrily denied any involvement.

Yet it's now common to hear in conversations across Sindh that Ms. Bhutto had been targeted not because of her politics but because she was a Sindhi -- and therefore unacceptable to the Punjabi security establishment.

"Since the inception of Pakistan, all we are getting from the Punjab are the dead bodies of our Bhuttos," said M.B. Chand, a local PPP leader, as dozens of activists, some wearing black armbands, sat cross-legged on a rug for a mourning ceremony in a Karachi suburb. "In our system, if you are Sindhi, you remain poor and get nothing," interjected another mourner, Abdulhafiz Wassan. "If you are a Punjabi, you get everything."

The Trickling Indus

To demonstrate what they call Punjabi oppression, many Sindhis point to the Indus River, which is shared by the two provinces. In recent decades, damming and diversions in upriver Punjab have transformed the once-mighty Indus into a narrow sliver in areas like Hyderabad. A multibillion-dollar dam planned for the Punjabi area of Kalabagh, championed by Mr. Musharraf despite nearly universal opposition from Sindhi politicians, would divert even more water, some of it to Punjabi agricultural lands that had been allotted to retired military officers.

"They've already taken virtually everything, turning Sindh into a desert," says Rasool Bux Palijo, a leftist Sindhi intellectual who heads a small political party and is a leading opponent of the Kalabagh dam. "What they want is for our peasants to be forced to sell their land, and to turn into beggars."

Ghulam Murtada Shah, who farms 60 acres of the Indus plain near Hyderabad, has already seen the canals leading into his farm go dry. Three years ago, the 68-year-old farmer says, water scarcity forced him to cut down 22 acres of banana plantations. Last year, he chopped down 12 acres of mango trees.

"If the dam is built, even the few drops of water that reach us today will no longer arrive," he says, pointing to a dried-up pond nearby. "This will be death for us."

Adjusting a red skullcap traditionally worn by Sindhi men, Mr. Shah blamed Punjab. "Benazir Bhutto was killed because she wanted equal rights for the Sindhi people," he said, wiping away tears. "And now we have lost our hope."

Ms. Bhutto's widower and her party's new leader, Mr. Zardari, is trying to defuse such separatist sentiment. He repeatedly countered mourners' chanting in the Bhuttos' ancestral village, Naudero, with his own call of "Yes, we want Pakistan." Some of the PPP bodyguards who died alongside Ms. Bhutto in the suicide bombing and shooting attack, he reminded the crowd, were Punjabis. "The PPP would not allow anyone to dismember the country," he said.

But there are signs that Mr. Zardari and his 19-year-old son, Bilawal, don't have enough sway to contain Sindhi nationalism. Though Bilawal adopted the Bhutto surname after becoming PPP chairman, many Sindhis -- including parts of the Bhutto clan led by Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, the former Sindh chief minister -- have already said the move runs against local custom.

"He is a Zardari, not a Bhutto," said Ghaffar Bhutto, the writer. The Zardaris, these critics point out, are of Baluch rather than Sindhi descent.

Mr. Zardari's exhortations for Pakistan's unity already seem to fall on deaf ears among some hard-core PPP militants in the province. "We have nothing to lose, and we will fight for our rights," says Hakin Dad, a PPP veteran in a Karachi suburb who served as a personal bodyguard to Ms. Bhutto's father in the 1970s. "What we need is separation."

Pakistan After The Assassination: Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy Once again idiocy spouted by masadi is lacking facts. US doesn't spend more than rest of the world combined on military either in absolute dollar or on a % basis. rag tags drive planes through buildings which only chutiyas replete with unfounded logic can refute. A class of individuals that Masadi not only belongs to, but perhaps is one of the high priests.

Pakistan After The Assassination: Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy Masadi, you have nothing but conspiracy theories and derogatory language for interactors and personalities being discussed. Any discussion involving you, ultimately turns into you throwing personal attacks at the counterparty. You seem to be in love with your middling intellect and halfwitted posits. Here is what you should do...take your head, stick it up your ass and make out withoout with yourself from the inside. This will servie two purposes, we will not hear from you and you will finally get to first base. IDIOT!!

A Cursed Nation Manto, it was called MUSLIM LEAGUE...pakistan was created as a home for SOUTH ASIAN muslims...gandhi could have been ur khalifah...but to make the pakistan movement as some secular drive is the height of falsehood, disingenuity and franlky stupidity

Islam as a political weapon in Pakistan whatever the wishes of the founders of Pakistan..the reallity is the reality. Religion is a major force driving the nation. why hide from it?

Islam as a political weapon in Pakistan whatever the wishes of the founders of Pakistan..the reallity is the reality. Religion is a major force driving the nation. why hide from it?

Benazir Bhutto Killed in an Attack NY Sun is reporting that there were 4 renegade commandos behind this frm the ISI.

Benazir Bhutto Killed in an Attack masadi yaar, people get banned for different reason. I will get banned for using curses when addressing you. You get banned for just being a walking choot of a person.

Benazir Bhutto Killed in an Attack abay masadi, gov't school ka check kya late ho gaya bey? zyada uchal mat..

who made you the king of the third world causes? A billion Indians and chinese are using the capitalist system to their advantage..your model is intellectually bankrupt, devoid of solutions and only points towards creeating a victim mindset among the third world denizens. Now piss off and go stick your head back into the ass of whatever prophet or CW Mills or whatever other chutiya that did launday baazi with you.

Benazir Bhutto Killed in an Attack fakir yaar..why are you stuttering?

Benazir Bhutto Killed in an Attack and masadi blames america..lol!!

Abdul Latif Khalid (1944-2007) Sorry, that was for Manto not Neembu.

Manto, I would have rather had read this nice piece as something personal of yours on I-Log. I can feel your loss and I hope you gain strength from your father's experiences and life in general.

sincerely,
CH

Abdul Latif Khalid (1944-2007) Neembu, what is the purpose of this article/eulogy? Is it to invite condolences from the readers towards Manto's father's passing? If so, then fine..compare that directive on interaction with every other article written on FP and tell me whether such directives are expcted/issued towards the interactions.

Manto and family deserve all the compassion and condolences for their loss. It is better suited for I_log. If masadi or BJ wrote what they wrote on an i-log interact, I would be upset. But this is FP.

I am trying to understand what propelledd the editorts to post a eulogy about an everyday pakistani's demise, which is littered with political, religious, and nationalistic issues on FP? If this invites comments on the motive of the writer or the editors, or on the life of the departed on FP, why are you suprised? this is FP.