Author: mara.ahmed

As U.S. test scores drop below those of impoverished countries, some are saying it is time to demand sweeping change. “McCarthyism wasn’t such a bad thing after all” seems to be the mantra of a small band of right-wing extremists, who are running the program that determines what kind of education your kid will receive. These political extremists want to teach America’s kids a narrow and scaled down politically correct version of American history, where words as descriptive and innocent as “capitalist” finds its way onto the list of words “not allowed” in textbooks. Full article.

The point here is that there is every indication that the air war is going to intensify in Pakistan on two fronts. The US drone campaign appears to be escalating and the Pakistani military is building up, modernizing and elevating the lethality of its air force thanks to US training and the approval of military hardware sales. Full article.

shame on the pakistani army!

“OSLO: Pakistan suffered the highest number of internally displaced people in 2009 due to the Taliban insurgency and Pakistan’s military response, a United Nations study showed on Monday.” Full article.

This attitude, that some amount of suffering is necessary in the current [economic] system, and that any major changes in it would be self-defeating, is what I call Sacrificing to the Volcano God. We have turned economics into a religion, where the mistakes are common, yet the fundamental assumptions it is based on is beyond question. Gaping flaws in logic are ignored, or even held up as unanswerable mysteries that laymen could never understand. When the Volcano God rains ash and lava upon us, it is because we angered the Volcano God with our sins of minimum wage laws, child labor laws, environmental regulations, and worker safety laws. More sacrifices are needed or the Volcano God will destroy us all. Full article.

Texas is home to one of the fastest growing Pakistani communities in the United States. In the Dallas area alone, there are at least three places on the radio dial where you can get news and music in Urdu. And on two popular South Asian talk shows, the Pakistani-American hosts address the problem of Muslim extremism. Shomial Ahmad listened in. Full story here.

sign an aclu petition to protect ur privacy on fb here.

An estimated 100,000 people who disappeared during the 1936-39 Civil War are still unaccounted for, including Spain’s best known 20th-century poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. Garzon opened the investigation at the request of victims’ relatives in October 2008. Most of the disappeared were supporters of the Republican government against which Franco led a military uprising in 1936. Thousands of Franco supporters who were also killed have long since been tallied and commemorated. Garzon passed the case on to regional courts amid claims that the crimes were covered by a 30-year statute of limitations and a 1977 amnesty law passed during Spain’s tense transition to democracy. His trial stems from a lawsuit brought by the small rightist Manos Limpias union and the far-right Falange party, which was a mainstay of Franco’s dictatorship but is now marginalized. Full article.

According to a report from Alexandria’s Town Talk newspaper, LaSalle Parish Sheriff Scott Franklin prepared the assembled crowd for a violent day. “It’s going to be like Baghdad out in this community at five am,” he continued dramatically, explaining that their target was 37-year-old Darren DeWayne Brown, who owns a barbershop — one of the only Black-owned businesses in town — and his “lieutenants,” who Franklin said supplied eighty percent of the narcotics for three parishes. “Let me put it to you this way,” declared the sheriff, “When the man says, ‘We don’t sell dope today,’ dope won’t get sold.” Catrina Wallace, 29, was sleeping in her bed with her youngest child when her door was broken down and she awoke to the feeling of a gun to her head. When she opened her eyes, her small home was filled with police. “I never seen that many police at one time,” she recalled. “Everywhere I looked all I saw was police. There were six or seven just in my bedroom.” Full article.

It has been a hidden war ignored by the outside world. Up to last week nobody paid much attention to the fighting in north-west Pakistan, though more soldiers and civilians have probably been dying there over the last year than in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In reality this corner of Pakistan along the Afghan border is the latest in a series of wars originally generated by the US response to 9/11. The first was the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, the second in Iraq after the invasion of 2003 and the third the renewed war in Afghanistan from about 2006. The fourth conflict is the present one in Pakistan and is as vicious as any of its predecessors, though so far the intensity of the violence has not been appreciated by the outside world.

Western governments and media for long looked at the fighting in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan as a sideshow to the Afghan war. Washington congratulated itself on using pilotless drones to kill Taliban leaders, a tactic which meant that there were no American casualties and apparently no political fall out in the US.

I recently visited Bajaur, a well-watered and heavily populated hilly agency on the Afghan border north of Peshawar from which the army has driven the Taliban over the last two years. Colonel Nauman Saeed, the commander of the Bajaur Scouts, a 3,500-strong force made up of tribal levies, says that Taliban have been defeated and driven out of Bajaur and into Afghanistan and will never be able to return. The area looks as if it is wholly under military occupation with checkpoints every few hundred yards, little traffic on the roads and many shops closed in the villages. Col Saeed says that twelve villages have been completely destroyed.

It is the same story south of Peshawar. I drove down the main road running to Lakki Marwat just east of Waziristan where there continues to be frequent suicide bombings. One had demolished part of a village police station a few hours before we passed through, killing seven people. People are wary and there is an atmosphere of subdued menace. I was glad to be riding in a well-armoured civilian vehicle with bullet proof glass protected by the bodyguards of a powerful tribal leader, businessman and senator. “I tell people that this vehicle will only stop pistol bullets,” explained a former army colonel who was head of his security. “In this area if you tell them that your vehicle can stop an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] round then they will fire something even heavier at you.”

The Taliban had gone but nobody believes that they had gone very far. “People don’t want to cooperate with the army because they think the Taliban will find out and take revenge,” said one man from a nearby village. Probably they will never come back in full force, but they show on a daily basis that they are still a force to be to be feared. When one village called Shah Hassan asked the local Taliban to leave they retaliated by sending a suicide bomber into a crowd of young men playing volley ball where he detonated his explosives and killed one hundred people.

Civilians are being squeezed between two implacable forces. The army’s tactic is to order the civilian population out of whatever district it is trying to clear of Taliban and then freely use its artillery and air power on the assumption that all who remain are Taliban supporters.

It is a policy heavy on destruction which would be widely reported by the media if it occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan. In Pakistan it does not attract much criticism because places like Waziristan are almost impossible for Pakistani or foreign journalists to reach because they are too dangerous except under the protection of the army. But travellers who do go there are aghast at the extent of the devastation. “What I saw was stuff nightmares are made of,” writes Azyaz Wazir, a former Pakistani ambassador who travelled on a bus through South Waziristan. “Houses, shops, madressahs and even official buildings on the roadside stood in ruins or demolished. There was no sign of any human or animal life, except for a few cows wondering about in the deserted villages.”

As the army marched in, some quarter of a million refugees have come flooding out of South Waziristan according to the UN. The army is keen for them to return home but most are refusing to do so because they say it is not safe and they are almost certainly right. “The army has control only of the roads, and we are present in the forests,” one Pakistan Taliban commander was quoted as saying. A further reason is that the Pakistani army may be expert at blowing things up but the civilian government is not good at rebuilding them. Where ever I went along the frontier people complained of the absence of any help from officials sent by the central government. They complain that no representative of the government dared attend the funeral of the 100 young men playing volleyball killed by a bomber at Shah Hassan village.

From: “The Vicious War That Sent Shahzad to Times Square” by Patrick Cockburn
Counterpunch, May 11, 2010

robert pape who has studied terrorism and looked at the numbers talks sense – if u want to end suicide attacks, end occupation. farhana ali did not impress me. she’s an instructor for the u.s. afpak team so she’s obviously toeing the line.