February’s B-side
February’s B-side will provide hope and pain in equal measure. The first article will bring readers endless joy, the second by Fatima Bhutto and will bring some pain as does the final article by Peter Preston.
February’s B-side contents are:
- Saluting Ali Moeen Nawazish by WASIM ARIF
- Pleasing Mr Obama by FATIMA BHUTTO
- Truckling to the Taliban by PETER PRESTON
Doom and gloom seems to be the default state of Pakistan. However the success of Ali Moeen Nawazish will make every Pakistani proud, I guarantee.
Saluting Ali Moeen Nawazish by Wasim Arif
Ali Moeen Nawazish is an example even an envy to the world for setting a world record in passing 22 A-levels. Ali’s achievements leave me struggling for words.
Ali’s story is spellbinding and it goes like this. Ali’s ambition from childhood was to win a place at the illustrious Cambridge university. Ali decided to study 7 A-levels initially but worried that he might not get into Cambridge still, Ali decided to sit another three A level exams, and three more and more and more culminating in him securing 20 A grades, one B and a C, wow!
Ali hails from Rawalpindi and studied at Rawalpindi’s Roots College International, hence his success is a success story made totally in Pakistan. When Ali filled out his university application form he struggled to find space to list his qualifications. Unsurprisingly he was successful in securing a place and he is now studying a computer science degree course at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
As the Daily Mail writes Ali also achieved a top score in the U.S. admissions test and was accepted by most Ivy League institutions, including Harvard and Yale. Apart from the core science subjects Ali is almost entirely self taught. He studied for up to 12 hours a day, using energy drinks to help concentrate yet still managed to keep up his leisure pursuits namely playing the guitar, cricket and table tennis, and editing his school newspaper. He even found time for a trip to America to attend a Harvard leadership course.
Ali Moeen Nawazish if you ever read this I want to say that Pakistan is so proud of you and personally I salute you. You represent the best of Pakistan and you have made all Pakistanis proud again to be from the land of the pure. I know that all readers of this post will echo my sentiments entirely.
Photo published in The Daily Mail
An excellent article on the missing people of Pakistan by the till now missing Fatima Bhutto!
Pleasing Mr Obama by Fatima Bhutto
Zachary represents scores of America’s most secretly guarded prisoners. When he meets his clients, they are often chained to the ground in shackles. He told me how some of the guards at the prison are 18-year-olds, suckered into the job with the lure of extra pay and the promise that they are a buttress against the aspirations of global terrorism. Visits from the Dallas Cowboys football cheerleaders and Victoria’s Secret lingerie models, who have dropped by to rally the troops, make the difficult job and the long hours away from home occasionally worthwhile.
But last June, when I met Zachary, a lawyer with Reprieve – the British organisation set up by Clive Stafford Smith to defend the rights of prisoners across the world – we weren’t there to talk about him. Reprieve, which has a tiny office in Islamabad, was trying to drum up interest in Pakistan for the seven of its nationals being held in Guantanamo. Reprieve staff made the rounds; they called up the foreign minister and other notables in the PPP-led government hoping to convince them to lobby for their prisoners. Not one bit; government officials did not seem to be terribly concerned.
Pakistan is a premier ally in the war on terror and it is with a certain amount of pride that the government proclaims that the road to Guantanamo started here in Pakistan. According to Reprieve, several Pakistani prisoners at Guantanamo were handed over for huge rewards, resulting in dubious profiteering by the state.
While other allies in the war on terror, including Britain under the divinely inspired Tony Blair and (surprisingly) Saudi Arabia, demanded the return of their citizens, calling their detainment at Gitmo unacceptable by their country’s legal standards, Pakistan seems not to have put up much of a fight. There are no Pakistani lawyers working directly on the cases of Pakistani nationals held at the prison, no local NGOs involved in the case of defending Pakistanis incarcerated abroad.
Katznelson was in Pakistan to speak about one citizen in particular – Saifullah Paracha, a businessman from Karachi who disappeared during a 2003 business trip to Bangkok. Paracha, who exported textiles to the United States, never left Bangkok airport or cleared immigration, and it was weeks before his family learned that he was being held at a US airbase in Bagram, Afghanistan. Paracha, whose eldest son was also taken into custody, was eventually moved to Guantanamo where, for the first two years, he had no legal representation.
He suffers heart problems, and has yet to see the complete evidence used to keep him as a guest of the US prison system.
The charges against Paracha are tenuous and vague. It is alleged that he helped al-Qaeda and that he ran a terror network. He did not. He had met, through his business dealings, several dubious sorts, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “principal architect” of the 11 September 2001 attacks, and even Osama Bin Laden, but these meetings occurred before the men became infamous, no money has changed hands, and no contact or links were maintained.
Paracha’s 16-year-old daughter, Zahra, has not seen her father for six years. “It’s mind-boggling to me to even think about my father and brother because they are, in essence, political prisoners of a cold war between America and imaginary terrorists,” she wrote in an email to me. Now, she despairs at getting justice under the new US administration because already, in 2009, the issue of Guantanamo is beginning to seem stale: a talking point a new president discusses at press conferences, a faraway jail we’ve never been bothered enough about to deal with.
Barack Obama’s administration has pledged to close down Guantanamo; the closure of the prison is a priority, it has been said. But the president’s conservative opponents won’t give up Gitmo without a battle, warning that an exodus of prisoners is unlikely to make America a safer place.
In an article in the Washington Post on 5 February, Jim Riches, a retired firefighter who lost his son Jimmy in the 11 September 2001 attacks, is reported as saying this of President Obama’s decision on Guantanamo: “I want to let them [the government] know that these men are dangerous.”
Zahra, who created a website to publicise her father’s case when she was 13 years old, thinks the “average American doesn’t give a damn” about the illegality of her father’s and brother’s arrest and detention. She might be right. Unfortunately, it seems that the average Pakistani doesn’t care much, either.
In Pakistan, the government is hard at work ensuring that Afghanistan doesn’t turn out to be Obama’s Vietnam, as ominously declared by Newsweek this month. Since the new administration took office, Pakistan’s northern areas have been subject to three unmanned drone attacks. President Asif Ali Zardari made the bizarre choice, in the run-up to these attacks, of presenting the US assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher (they call him Richard Butcher here in Karachi) and Joe Biden with the national Hilal-e-Imtiaz award for their “services to Pakistan”.
So, nothing has changed since Obama’s election, for Pakistan at least. Nor, with talks of an Afghan surge and troop increase, are they likely to change for the imprisoned Pakistanis any time soon.
Published in the New Statesman
WASIM VIEW- The fact that General Musharraf sold his own people like Saifullah Paracha to the guesthouse at Guantamo Bay is tantamount to a war crime against the Pakistani people . Fatima Bhutto does well to highlight this key issue and it is an issue that has played on the conscious of the West who are contemplating the real costs of the war on terror.
A few oceans away, the impotent and uncaring government of Pakistan does not care very much it seems, except for thundering statements occassionally about the real cost of the war on terror. I knew that Pakistani blood spilled at the behest of the West (as we serve as their proxy yet again) is of no value for our masters and not friends. Indeed it will be worse I suspect under change-we-cant Obama.
To end an article by Peter Preston caught my eye, do read why …
Truckling to the Taliban by Peter Preston
Listen, for far in the distance one can hear the sound of a great tin cup rattling. The president of Pakistan tells the newest president on the block (via the Washington Post) that his country could be “the most critical external problem” facing the US.
And he wants “aggressive, innovative action” against the forces of darkness. But for Pakistan to defeat the extremists, it must be stable – and economically viable. So give us the money, and necessary military hardware, too. Then together we can try to do something about Afghanistan and our collapsing region – your slightly desperate friend, Asif Ali Zardari.
Well, that’s the story of the last 30 years – perhaps even the basic story of Pakistan’s short existence. Hang tight with whoever happens to be in the White House and hope that he delivers enough goods to keep us afloat. But now, perhaps, there’s a new answer building. Ask not what the US treasury can do for you – ask, rather, what you can do for America. And, first, ask Pakistan’s million-plus military. (Immediately deployable men, 650,000; plus 350,000 paramilitary, and reservists and reserve reservists, making 1.4 million in a crisis – the seventh biggest national defence total in the world.)
Turn those big figures inside out. Short of resources to fight the Taliban inside Pakistan as Nato’s secretary general rattles his own tin cup? Anxious, if you’re Obama, to wind down Iraqi deployments so you can bring critical mass to bear from Kabul to Helmand to the long, infinitely porous border with Pakistan? Then look at the troops already there or thereabouts on the ground.
Factor in some of Zardari’s millions. “Unlike in the 1980s, we are surrogates for no one,” he writes. “We need no lectures on our commitment. This is our war. It is our children and wives who are dying.”
Very well. Then follow the logic and match his pretty desperate assertion against 60 years of war and constant tension. Pakistan’s army is the largest, most omnipresent political player in the country. Four of its leaders have doubled as military dictators – rivalling mere elected politicians in time served at the top. The army, in that sense, is effectively a political party itself, seizing power when the quasi-democrats fail and relinquishing it when their popularity begins to run dry.
And, within that neat game of pass the power parcel, there are well-oiled wheels within wheels. Retired top brass don’t go home to the Punjab and sit on their porches: they run corporations, found factories, open carpet emporiums and travel agencies. In sum, they accumulate nice little earners, wrapped safe by the nest-feathering activities of previous army generations. Putting on the braid is one of the best insurance policies in the world.
And who – as America pours in more billions of dollars – is the main enemy here? Not those involved in “our war, where women and children are dying”. No, as always, the alleged enemy is India, with Kashmir as casus belli. Military intelligence specialises in shadowy manoeuvres involving Kabul (where Indian influence is a supposed threat). Army deployment concentrates along the border with India, supposedly ready for any attack.
But it’s irrelevant now. Nuclear weapons on both sides has made it irrelevant. And see how the puppet masters pull the strings. An attack in Mumbai leaves carnage in its wake. India prepares to react. Islamabad orders its Afghan frontier forces to head east to another frontier fast. Implied message: you can have one proper line of defence, but not two. There’s an obvious answer to that.
Pakistan’s president is right. “This is our war” being waged now and increasingly lost – not just on the Afghan border, but right through the North-West Frontier, where extremists can shut the Khyber Pass for days. So why shouldn’t Obama make a totally fresh offer? Withdraw from the borders with India. We Americans will give all the guarantees necessary, plus some international troops on the ground to make that stick. And this, Mr Zardari, means you can flood the other border with your own surge. Instead of abandoning the Swat Valley and shrugging, you can take it back. Instead of truckling to the Taliban, you can do your own dirty work properly – and show, once and for all, whose side you’re on.
What’s the use of a 1.4 million military if it can’t or won’t fight the war it has on its hands? What’s the use of feeding a beast with no will to win? Maybe Helmand and the rest need more troops as those who are there go on dying – but, over that lethal, open border, there’s a mighty army busy doing not very much. Time for it to get on – or time for us to get out, and take our billions with us.
Published in the Guardian
WASIM VIEW – Where do I start with Peter Preston’s article as at best its juvenile journalism. Of course it doesnt help that the writer can refer to a article recently published by Pakistan’s beggar President Zardari to support his points.
Preston’s article is a litany of complaints against the Pakistan army and presents a charge-sheet against Pakistani efforts vis a vis the so-called war on terror. The tone of the article is condescending and almost colonial in its outlook reminding Pakistan of her servant status in carrying the white man’s burden.
Tragic as it is though Preston is right when he reminds us all albeit gloatingly of Pakistan’s transactional relationship with the West and with Uncle Sam especially. It is a strategy that he describes in the article as ‘hang tight with whoever happens to be in the White House and hope that he delivers enough goods to keep us afloat’.
The killing fields of Pakistan bear testament to the real cost of the war on terror to Pakistan. Yet Preston remains unsatisfied as per the Western script of ‘do more’ and reminds his readers that the Pakistan army ‘is the nation’s most powerful and omnipresent politial power. Implied in his words are that the army can call the shots as it chooses and can do much more.
Preston ignores the ground realities that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, furthermore he is pig ignorant of the fact that the Pushtuns will never cave in at Tora Bora or elsewhere to occupiers, full stop.
Preston also ignores the shared history and futures of the Pushtun people on both sides of the Durrand Line. I can bet my bottom dollar that Preston and other armchair pundits like him know not that 200,000 Pushtuns cross the impossible to seal 2,640km porous Pakistan-Afghanistan border each day.
The Preston article ends with a suggestion that the West should withdraw her billions if the Pakistan army is not up to the job. ‘Take our billions with us ‘ Preston warns, please do so I say and let Pakistan be.
- WRITTEN UNDER MARTIAL LAW (My thanks to cowards Tariq Pervez. Sabihuddin, Sardar Raza & Co for selling out)
