[Dawn] After decades of waging the propaganda war against India for its highhanded treatment of Kashmiris, Pakistain is now the subject of a similar campaign by India who has highlighted the plight of Shias being murdered by sectarian cut-throats in Gilgit-Baltistan.
 The Asian News International reported recently that "in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistain's only Shia dominated province, ethnic cleansing is being carried out systematically." At the same time, the Shia-dominated town of Kargil
... three months of unprovoked Pak aggression, over 4000 dead Paks, another victory for India ...
in the Indian controlled Kashmire recently shut down the main bazaar in solidarity with the Shias of Gilgit and Chilas who were murdered in cold blood in early April. Several Sunni Mohammedans also bit the dust a few days later when sectarian violence broke out in the region.
The comparative statistics on terrorist violence between India and Pakistain speak volumes of how the tide has indeed turned against Pakistain. The data compiled by South Asian Terrorism Portal reveals that in the current year alone, approximately 150 civilians, mostly Shias, have died in sectarian violence in Pakistain. In comparison only 23 violent deaths were recorded in the Indian controlled Kashmire in 2012.
Even with a six-times larger demographic footprint, 62 civilians reportedly died in terrorist violence in India in 2012, whereas 734 civilians became victims of terrorist violence in Pakistain during the same time period. For decades, Pakistain had pointed finger at India and accused her of failing to protect the life and property of religious minorities. Today, Pakistain stands accused of the same where Mohammedans belonging to minority sects and others are being murdered while the state's machinery has failed miserably to protect their lives and property.
Sectarian violence has spread to all corners of Pakistain. Only last week several Shias belonging to the Hazara tribe were bumped off by the Sunni Death Eaters in a crowded market in Quetta. Later, Sunni hard boyz called local newspapers and grabbed credit for their murderous accomplishment. Over the past few years hundreds, if not thousands, of Shias have been murdered in  Kurram Agency
...home of an intricately interconnected web of poverty, ignorance, and religious fanaticism, where the laws of cause and effect are assumed to be suspended, conveniently located adjacent to Tora Bora...
by Sunni Death Eaters and Taliban factions who are reportedly aligned with Pakistain's intelligence agencies. In other parts of Pakistain Shias have been taken off buses, lined up, and bumped off.
As of late, the followers of majority Sunni sects, such as Barelvis, have increasingly become targets of hard boyz who are followers of radicalised Sunni sects. The attack on Data Darbar, the mausoleum of Lahore's patron saint, in July 2010 left almost 50 moderate Sunni Mohammedans dead. In an earlier post, I reported police statistics which showed that almost 90 per cent of incarcerated cut-throats in Pakistain were followers of the Deobandi sect.
It is only recently that the moderate Sunnis have been targeted by the followers of radical Sunni sects in Pakistain. However,
the way to a man's heart remains through his stomach...
for decades, Shias and other minorities were the only victims of turban violence. The majority Sunnis, who never agreed with the murderous agenda of the few radicalised groups, however remained complacent and maintained a deafening silence over the murders of Shias and others, which escalated during the dark days of General Ziaul Haq. It was during General Zia's time when madrassas were turned into military academies where intelligence operatives trained hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Arabs, and Paks in warfare; equipped them with Kalashnikov assault rifles and Stringer missiles; and marched them into Afghanistan.
The widespread distribution of small arms weaponised the Afghan society to such extremes that after the withdrawal of the Soviet Army in 1989 successive Afghan regimes collapsed because of the in-fighting that continued between heavily armed Afghan militias who could not agree on a post-Soviet governance formula. While Afghanistan imploded in the early 90s as a direct result of military interventions by the Soviets, Americans, Saudis, and Paks, several thousand alumni of the Afghan war returned to Pakistain to establish their own mini jihad factories in every nook and corner of Pakistain. For over a decade, the jihadis used Shias for target practice until they waged a full-fledged war against Pakistain's establishment in 2001.
The patron-in-chief of the jihadis, including the Taliban, has been General Hameed Gul, who headed Pakistain's Inter-Services Intelligence during the formative years when Russian-made weapons were shipped from Egypt and elsewhere to equip Afghans and others to fight the Red Army in Afghanistan. General Gul was recently confronted by an inimical group of Shias who were protesting outside the Parliament in Islamabad. As the crowd complained against his longstanding relationship with the hard boyz leading terrorist attacks against Shias, the General instead came off as the biggest dove as he addressed the crowd while his son whispered speaking notes in his ear. General Hameed Gul claimed to have initiated deweaponising the hard boyz before he was removed from ISI in June 1989.
I happened to meet General Hameed Gul in a suburb of Toronto in the mid-90s when he visited Canada. Sitting among a large group of devotees, General Gul spoke with pride of the "successes" achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan. I specifically asked the General if he was at all concerned about the excessive spread of small arms and assault weapons in Pakistain and Afghanistan. His answer then was quite different from what he stated on April 10 in Islamabad. General Gul looked at me with barely concealed disgust and observed that weapons were the ornaments for men. "It is the same weapons that will come in handy to ward off the enemy," proclaimed General Gul.
Since his proclamation in the mid-90s, the same ornaments have dispatched thousands of Paks to their graves and have brought the state and the society to a near default. In the comity of nations, Pakistain is increasingly being referred to as a pariah state. Even the overseas Paks now march outside Pak embassies to protest against the massacres of minorities that continue unabated. Wherea,s once Pakistain complained of human rights
One man's rights are another man's existential threat.
violations by India in the United Nations
...the Oyster Bay money pit...
, other are now accusing Pakistain of the same.
As the violence increases in Pakistain, the rest of the world loses its confidence in Pakistain's ability to meet her economic, legal, and moral obligations. If the sectarian and factional violence, which no longer targets only the Shias and other minorities, continues in Pakistain, it is likely that the state and the society will implode, as it has already in the neighbouring Afghanistan.
It is imperative for Pakistain's military and civilian establishment to recognise that the time to act decisively against Death Eaters in Pakistain has arrived. There is no room or time to play favourites and support the "good beturbanned goons" who may side with the establishment for a short while, but the same good hard boyz will most likely turn against their handlers, as they have done so repeatedly in the last few years.
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[ABC.NET.AU] Afghan officials and local residents say 22 civilians, mostly women and kiddies, were killed during a joint operation carried out by US and Afghan forces last week in the southern Helmand
...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'état plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...
His removal as chief of the premier spy agency by 
[TRIBUNE.PK] Nine people, including five in Lyari, were killed while five bodies were found in the city on Wednesday.
Thirty-year-old Zar Lal, son of Taj Muhammad, was also 
Milking a bull
President Asif Ali 
I don't know what Tariq Ali has been doing since then. I bought his novel but found it too difficult to understand for someone at my level of intellect. I could not read more than a few pages. 
Halva and Naswar at APC
Mr Bean of 
Nawaz Sharif
Mehmood 
Asif Ali