[The Nation (Pak)] With Operation Zarb-e-Azb ..the Pak offensive against Qaeda in Pakistain and the Pak Taliban in North Wazoo. The name refers to the sword of the Prophet (PTUI!)... in full swing, can a politicised silent Shia-Sunni majority challenge the prevalent status-quo sponsored narrative of religion? Tahirul Qadri ...Pak politician, and would-be dictator, founder and head of Tehreek-e-Minhajul Quran and Pakistain Awami Tehrik. He usually resides in Canada, but returns to Pakistain periodically to foam at the mouth and lead demonstrations. Depending on which way the wind's blowing, Qadri claims to be the author of Pak's blasphemy law. Other times he says it wasn't him... has pitted himself against more extremist Deobandi groups and sectarian issues boil just below the surface. The Shuhada Foundation of the Lal Masjid ...literally the Red Mosque, located in Islamabad and frequented by all sorts of high govt officials. The proprietors, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, unleashed their Islamic storm troopers on the city, shutting down whorehouses and beating people up who weren't devout enough. The Musharraf govt put an end to the nonsense by besieging the place. Abdul Aziz Ghazi was captured while he was trying to escape dressed up like a girl. BBC reported that the corpse count at 173, but other claims, usually hysterical, say there were up to 1000 titzup. Among their number was Abdul Rashid Ghazi. Everyone then said tut-tut and what a nice guy he had been... clique openly call him a terrorist while Qadri rejects any comparison of the Model Town massacre to the Lal Masjid incident. He says the Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) workers are not demanding Sharia by force, ordering people to close down markets, banning female education, or restricting their free movement as is being enforced by their ideological brethren in the Middle East. With the rise of Dr Qadri, Deobandi hardliners and TTP sympathizers appear to be wary of the alliance of Shia and Sunni Barelvis--a rare occurrence. The Ahl-e-Sunnah-Wal-Jamaat (ASWJ), formerly Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistain ...a Sunni Deobandi organization, a formerly registered Pak political party, established in the early 1980s in Jhang by Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi. Its stated goal is to oppose Shia influence in Pakistain. They're not too big on Brelvis, either. Or Christians. Or anybody else who's not them. The organization was banned in 2002 as a terrorist organization, but somehow it keeps ticking along, piling up the corpse counts... , a Takfiri faction of Deobandis, has said this is an internationally sponsored conspiracy to start a civil war in the country.
Apart from using Qadri to balance PML-N in the Punjab by state created parties like PML-Q, Qadri has also been important for the MQM. His Barelvi support base can be instrumental in countering the Taliban influence and the militant Sunni Tehreek. PAT's struggle is as political, constitutional and democratic as PTI's and if compared with other religious entities, they have not attacked anyone nor made any threatening statements against the army. Rather, they are constantly expressing full support of the Zarb-e-Azb operation, and have portrayed their inclusive stance reaching out to the Majlis-e-Wahadatul Muslimeen and even Non-Muslim groups.
One of the biggest gripes that Barelvi mullahs had was that their madrassas and mosques were being forcibly occupied by Deobandis as they had greater money to spend and modern weapons to intimidate. Now the Sunni Ittehad Council ...an Islamist(aren't they all in Pakistain?) political party which claims to represent the Barelvi school of Sunni Islam. Member parties of the Sunni Ittehad Council includes the Aalmi Tanzeem Ahle Sunnat of Pir Afzal Qadri (of Gujrat) and Jamiat Ulema e Pakistan - Sawad e Azam of Sayyid Mahfooz Shah Sahib Mashadi... , a large alliance of Sunni Barelvis that opposes the Taliban ideologically, supports him. His long march has been well organized and peaceful. His 10-point normative agenda is also clear. He wants social welfare and condemns terrorism (in his famous 600 word fatwa). What is questionable is the funding behind him, the actual extent of political power he has acquired and the sustainability of such a movement already laden with enormous opposition and structural thorns. As for huge public support, let us not forget that agencies can easily put processions together. Qadri is not in charge of a monolithic Barelvi movement as much as he would like to believe. The Barelvi vote does not follow closed-group dynamics so it is unclear how deep Qadri's tendrils are into the Sunni population.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/19/2014 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[DAWN] It was billed by Imran Khan ... aka Taliban Khan, who ain't the sharpest bulb on the national tree... himself as the speech of a lifetime, but even before he had begun, it had been obvious for days that the PTI chief had miscalculated disastrously and painted himself and his party into a corner.
Neither had the masses lined up in support of Mr Khan's interminable journey from Lahore to Islamabad nor could the PTI assemble more than a paltry number of protesters in support of his mission to oust the federal government.
So, despite the rhetoric of the PTI and overwrought coverage in the media, the possibility of the so-called independence march ending in anything but a damp squib was rather low.
Even the threat of violence, hyped in certain sections of the media and egged on by the PTI itself, as a way of bringing to bear pressure on the government was overblown: the protesters were too small in number to overwhelm the capital's security measures and much of the blame would have fallen on the PTI itself for blatantly and unconscionably instigating violence after being allowed to protest freely and fairly for days.
In the end, Mr Khan tried to exit from an embarrassing situation by attempting to obfuscate and confuse further.
While simultaneously announcing a so-called civil disobedience movement centred around the refusal to pay taxes and utility bills, Mr Khan also suggested the government has only a matter of days, if not hours, to secure the prime minister's resignation or else the PTI chief would not be responsible for party activists attempting to physically remove Mr Sharif from Prime Minister House, a short distance away from the PTI protest site.
At this stage, were Mr Khan's threat not so risible, it would be worthy of the severest condemnation. Here is the leader of a political party ostensibly invested in the democratic system who is advocating mob rule.
In addition, his recommended brand of civil disobedience involves starving his party's provincial government of funds, provinces in Pakistain being dependent to a significant extent on federally raised taxes to finance their running.
If it is a sad and ignominious path that a political leader with genuine public support just a year ago is now embarking on, there is still a significant burden of responsibility on the federal government.
The PTI's latest threats will likely peter out much as the independence rally did, but true political stability will only come if the PML-N too changes tack.
What is crystal clear in hindsight was also fairly evident in foresight: the greater threat to political stability came from the PML-N's slow response to the PTI's initially reasonable demands and then the panic mode that the PML-N leadership seemed to go into.
Now, the PML-N will again have some time and space to reshape the political narrative and the national discourse. Will it rise to the task?
Posted by: Fred ||
08/19/2014 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[DAWN] Let's start with some history: the current incarnation of the Pakistain Moslem League emerged as urban Punjab's manufactured alternative to the PPP during the late '80s. For a brief period of time in the province, it became immensely popular and coherent for a host of reasons — one was the pesky legal need for a non-uniformed right-wing political voice, and the other was the wound inflicted by Z.A. Bhutto's socio-economic agenda.
However, man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them... over the course of these last two decades, as Punjab urbanised, desired and flourished, its growing population of political elites has found it harder to coexist. Everyone is hungrier for more in what is essentially a zero-sum game. Some feel completely locked out of power, others feel they don't have enough. Most have tasted it at some point or the other. These fissures — partially catalysed by the army, and partially surfacing and haemorrhaging themselves — have given rise to separate sets of loyalties and hierarchies. This is precisely why the PTI and PML-N appear different, even though their real, material roots are the same.
They are ethnically comparable — both draw a sizable chunk of their core leadership, and their core electorate, from the urbanised districts straddling the GT Road and M-2 in Punjab. Neither are they differentiated by class. Both are led and financed by the wealthy (and the almost wealthy), intellectually augmented by members of the conservative middle-class, and voted for by the poor and the destitute. Even ideologically, both espouse variations of the same neo-liberal populism — one that promises a heady cocktail of development and good governance, shaken with efficiency or stirred by justice.
But perhaps nothing brings these two parties closer than their inability to think of Pakistain as a federal republic — one that extends beyond Attock in the north and Rahimyar Khan in the south. The ruling party, despite attaining power in Islamabad for a third time, has shown little interest in organising itself internally and branching out into other provinces. Their organization in Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... consists of an influential tribal head and his family; in Sindh, a few irrelevant fossils; and in KP, an elbowed-out elite of one Hindko-speaking division. Their relationship with the state remains fraught with insecurities and egoism; and their relationship with the federation, even now, even after all these years, oscillates between paternalistic attention and cold indifference.
Not to be left behind, the PTI matches them pound-for-pound by repeatedly stating its willingness to sacrifice their government in a smaller province for a power grab in central Punjab. Despite receiving a healthy mandate by the tired, violence-stricken population of a troubled province, its leadership continues to cast envious glances at Lahore. And while Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. stood still with flash flooding and heavy rain, their chief minister thought it better to protest against the results of the very election that saw him elected.
Part of this is simply because of Punjab's weight in the national electoral calculus. You can after all power through to Islamabad by winning seven out of the nine administrative divisions in Punjab. But more than that, what these cold numbers breed and eventually sustain is a political culture that's so completely inward-looking, and so harshly indifferent to all else, it repeatedly threatens to break the fragile edifice of democracy itself. Both the PTI and the PML-N, at different points in our recent past, have proven themselves to be proponents of this culture of indifference and entitlement.
So what we saw this past week was a particularly jarring episode of Punjab's long-running political soap opera. The PML-N's usage of thugs and the state machinery, and its inability to imagine political solutions provided half the plot, and the PTI's lust for power, and failure to deal with an (surely transient) electoral loss gave the remaining script. Tragically for the rest, while these two exchange blows under the callous, provoking eye of the military establishment, the real loser is the decidedly rickety transition towards democracy, civilian supremacy and federalism.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/19/2014 00:00 ||
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MOSUL, Iraq -- Just days after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized control of Iraq's northern cities of Mosul and Tikrit, the group's lightning offensive has reportedly ground to a halt after ISIS unsuccessfully attempted to use dozens of captured U.S. M1114 Humvees.
"We were considerably more mobile with Toyota Technicals," complained ISIS cell leader Ibrahim ibn Abdullah ibn Sabah Al-Rahman. "But once we captured these unreliable monstrosities, our leadership started worrying about our safety." Satire simply too good not to pass along.
Posted by: Besoeker ||
08/19/2014 00:00 ||
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#3
"A class-based, entitled exemption from the established law is the long-term goal."
This exemption is already the case for certain classes in our society, of which Jon Corzine is a prime example. Jon will be the co-host of a Ready for Hillary fundraiser in Wainscott, New York later this month. Jon will advise Hillary on robbing & ripping off the public.
#7
OTOH WORLD NEWS > [Examiner] JIHAD IN AMERICA: "ISIS HERE" SPOTTED IN FERGUSON PROTEST.
* FYI DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > "ISLAMIC STATE" MESSAGE TO AMERICA: "WE WILL DROWN ALL OF YOU IN YOUR [American] BLOOD" - YAHOO NEWS! INDIA.
* RELATED DAILY STAR.LB > "ISLAMIC STATE" VOWS TO "BREAK THE [Crusader] AMERICAN CROSS".
D *** NG IT, AL-BAGHDADI = ISIS, DATS DE JOB OF THE FUTURE US CONVERT TO ISLAM KNOWN AS THE ISLAMIC MAHDI/HIDDEN IMAM!
FTLG DON'T FORCE ME TO SEND MADONNA + KATY PERRY OVER THERE!
* GLOBALNATION.PH > ISLAMIC MILITANTS PLANNING SOUTHEAST ASIA CALIPHATE, ostensibly comprised of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, + Singapore.
Ayob Khan Mydin, Deputy Chief of Malaysia Police CT Division.
More indicia/evidencia Radical Islam = Rising China = is getting closer-n-closer to GUAM-WESTPAC.
* DEFENCE.PK/FORUMS > VIDEO: JAPANESE MAN EXECUTED BY ISIS.
Tokyo investigating alleged video depicting execution, death of Nippon Citizen Yoshiko Kawashima by the ISIS
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Even the threat of violence, hyped in certain sections of the media and egged on by the PTI itself, as a way of bringing to bear pressure on the government was overblown: the protesters were too small in number to overwhelm the capital's security measures and much of the blame would have fallen on the PTI itself for blatantly and unconscionably instigating violence after being allowed to protest freely and fairly for days.
