General Ashfaq Kianis Sister Divorced by retired major husband

General Ashfaq Kianis Sister Divorced by retired major husband

Pakistani State sponsored 1981 PIA plane hijack: Brig Imtiaz

State sponsored 1981 PIA plane hijack: Brig Imtiaz

 

Moayyed JafriTuesday, July 19, 2011

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LAHORE: Brigadier (retd) Imtiaz Ahmed, former director-general of Intelligence Bureau (IB), who also served as the in-charge of ISI’s Internal Security Wing, has said that terrorism was introduced for the first time in the history of Pakistan with the hijacking of a PIA plane from Peshawar to Kabul in 1981, not by a stand-alone terrorist outfit, but through an organised state-sponsored terrorist act.

This information coming from someone perceived as a pro-establishment military and intelligence operative seems unusual, but the views expressed by once very powerful spy chief in an exclusive interview with The News challenge the tag associated with him, and even more.

“I disagree with the theory propounded with the purpose of convincing the general perception that there is an element left of the Centre which is aligning with the leftist world,” he said, adding the fact that the then military and intelligence leadership confused moderate individuals to be leftists and set out to protect and empower the rightist bloc, caused serious damage to the political and social future of the country.

“The irony of the matter is that when DG ISI or the CAOS says or does something, the recipients believe that it’s the voice of the organisation, but it is not true in all cases. There may be occasions where he is totally neglecting the consensus of his team and going by his personal opinion. Sometimes, he doesn’t even bother to consult his associates,” said the former senior operative of the ISI.

Contrary to this, he said, it is for the first time in the last three decades that the current chief of the Army staff takes into confidence his entire senior command over every challenge facing Pakistan. This determination of the establishment to insulate the Army from any kind of political interference came as a brute rebuff to those political forces, who misconstrue the ever-expected constitutional commitment of the current military leadership.

Imtiaz said: “With the Army and the intelligence agencies out of the political picture, the beneficiaries of the PNA (Pakistan National Alliance) and IJI (Islami Jamhoori Ittehad) will need to snap out of that dream world and learn to finally stand on their own feet.”

He said, “The political culture (in Pakistan) is infested with the fatal symptoms of self-centralism, greed, lust for power and instinct of circumventing the democratic principles as well as personality orientation in handling of national issues.

“In this perspective, I had always found the Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) psychologically obsessed about the uniform and the service intelligence. After a series of around six eyebrow-raising meetings between the two, the political romance of yesterday has suddenly turned into envy, with some ground realities, which are much different than being expressed or perceived,” he maintained.

“However, the PML-N is one of the national-level political forces and its extensive sudden onslaught is a matter of concern for any Pakistani. Criticism is the democratic right of any political leadership or individual, but the line has to be drawn between criticism and hate-speeches, because such a syndrome attitude by a domestic political force provides fertile hunting ground to foreign forces involved in anti-Army and ISI malicious campaigns. Such a situation is not being taken well by the people at large,” the retired brigadier said.

“The grand alliance being talked about in the prevailing scenario is overloaded with serious challenges, covering a wide range of economic problems, national sovereignty and people’s ever-growing magnitude of socio-economic plight. Such an exercise to destabilise the government outright goes against the national interest.

“In fact, if we look at the history of our political alliances, including the PNA Movement, MRD (Movement for the Restoration of Democracy), ARD (Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy), MMA (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal), and much talked-about CoD (Charter of Democracy), these alliances either ended up in reimposition of dictatorship or aggravating the magnitude of people’s miseries and socio-economic problems and, above all, germinating the national polarisation,” he added.

Being Brigadier Imtiaz is a choice not many would want to opt for, as it entitles one to enviable authority, but that, in the middle of clashing civilian and military establishments, both of whom only care enough to score through you, yet love to hate and disown you.

There are many who hold him at fault for not dissociating himself from the system if he did not agree with what was being asked of him. Imtiaz, however, sees it differently, saying, “It would have been much worse, had I stepped down, giving way to someone else. I did submit my resignation to Gen Naseerullah Babar, who put my resignation in the cold storage, as they wanted to keep a check so that I would not create any problems for them,” he added.

“I fail to understand as to why every critic sees resignation as a solution to every problem. It’s almost as if they are blind to the number of opportunists, each worse than the other, waiting to become a better and more unconditional yes-man.”

“The troika of power, namely the then president Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the then COAS Mirza Aslam Beg and the then DG ISI Hameed Gul, were calling the shots with or without regard to the popular institutional opinion,” he said.

Answering a question regarding the recent failures of security and intelligence, he said: “Our national horizon is overcast with the fallout of the attack on PNS Mehran and the perception in the post-Osama bin Laden scenario. A common man is suffering from some distortion about the professional capability of our intelligence system. Why is the ISI being blamed for everything whereas the IB and other networks are spread right down to tehsil level and are equally responsible?” he questioned.

Sharing his perception of the situation, he said the menace of terrorism cannot be associated with isolated incidents, which require isolated counter operations. We are fighting a war on terror for the last eight years and the intelligence system is operating in the war so there human resources are heavily overstretched and professional endurance has its own limits.

“In this perspective, there is a need to mention two dimensions: we are not fighting a war against terrorism, against terrorists because there are foreign sponsored terror activities taking place on our soil through the well-known channel of terrorist organisation,” he concluded.

The interview which had then become an intriguing discussion, drifted to the topic of Pakistan’s popular obsession with the blame that foreign elements are always at work to bring this country, especially its nuclear assets, down.

Imtiaz, as if almost anticipating this question, said, “The American CIA’s obsession with Pakistani nukes knows no bounds, although it has already caused them enough discomfiture in the 1980s when their diplomats were deported by Pakistan. The US launched an extensively expensive and widely based CIA covert operation to damage our nuclear program. They had placed a wide network of high-level CIA operators and had placed them in Islamabad and Karachi. They had even succeeded in cultivating a Pakistani engineer as their principal agent in Karachi. Seeking to obtain progressive information on the progress on nuclear program, the US operations were assuming steady progress when I single-handedly not only managed to pick up the lead, but also ran a counter-operation for about eight, nine months to the utter dismay, frustration and total embarrassment of the USA.”

He went on to say that despite this, and other occasions where the CIA has been caught red-handed aspiring to meddle with Pakistan’s nuclear program, they are currently pursuing the same motive with added conviction. To further their nefarious designs, they have now found a friend in India, we know it as RAW, and both are now collaborating for a highly dangerous and well-planned conspiracy to hit at the roots of the national security of Pakistan by targeting our nuclear program, armed forces and the ISI.

Lately, in the last seven days, three major articles have appeared in the ‘New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’ in which they have very ruthlessly and maliciously involved the armed forces in selling out the nuclear secrets to North Korea and involvement of the ISI in the killing of Saleem Shahzad and have labelled the Pakistan Army as the biggest danger to the people around the world. Above all, since after the Abbottabad operation, they have vigorously intensified their media campaign to make the international community believe that Pakistan’s nuclear assets are not in safe hands, he added.

With a lot said in between, Brigadier Imtiaz concluded by saying, “I am very unfortunate in the sense that I am the most misunderstood person in my own country whereas people outside my country, like the CIA, MOSSAD, RAW and KGB, not only understand me better but are aware of my achievements for my country more than my own people recognise and appreciate them. But I have no regrets because I learn a lot from what people have to say about me.” 

Why my Father Hated India-Aatish Taseer

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there wouldbe no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims,there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.
—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.

Aatish’s (Taseer) personal fire - A response to “Why My Father Hated India”!

Aatish’s (Taseer) personal fire - A response to “Why My Father Hated India”!
Will Cuppy, American humorist and literary critic, was said to read some 25 volumes of history on average before penning his humorous sketches of historical figures contained in the delightful volume The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. That was then. Now we base our analysis of an entire country on a tweet. Welcome to Aatish Taseer’s Wall Street Journal article “Why My Father Hated India”!
There’s much thrown in here so let me try a flowchart of sorts.
Indian rocket test fails; father tweets to taunt at India’s misfortune; father’s attitude to India causes tension with Aatish (right!); Pakistan’s obsession with India; grounded in Partition; Pakistan’s search for identity; rejection of India’s culture; Islamisation; identity crisis; coups; Pakistani military is the villain; wants strategic depth in Afghanistan; plays a double game; imaginary threat from India; back to father’s tweet; veneer of bravado; arid pain and sadness; wounds of Partition to be healed.
How does one deal with a piece which throws in everything except the kitchen sink in order to construct a supposedly linear reality? The technique reminds me of the cross-examination of Stanley Weber by the two strange characters, Goldberg and McCann in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. From ‘why the chicken crossed the road’ and ‘you left the organisation’ to ‘why you defiled your mother’, the rhetoric becomes a nightmare for Stanley and leaves him catatonic. Taken separately, one can discuss issues and arrive at a balanced analysis. But that’s not the purpose of Aatish’s piece. Pakistan must be seen as a mistake, acting without stimuli. India is Professor Godbole sitting contentedly and doing nothing while Dr Aziz goes around raging and making a fool of himself. That is of course nonsense. But whoever controls the narrative wins.
Mercifully, contained within Aatish’s piece are pointers to greater complexity. The father was killed because he supported a Christian woman. How does that fit in with the article’s thesis that the father hated India (and Pakistan has to hate India and be Muslim) because that religious distinction lies at the core of its ‘other’-isation of India? Or is Pakistan more complex than is hinted in the article?
Aatish’s father did not ‘hate’ India. He was one of those who did much to open up Lahore — to Indians — by using the Basant festival. There is not a single viable political party in Pakistan that does not want to normalise with India. That is a matter of record. But Salmaan Taseer (Aatish’s eye for detail doesn’t inspire much confidence since he gets the spellings of his father’s name wrong), like others, was a proud Pakistani. We don’t need to ‘other’ India to be Pakistanis but neither can we ignore real problems that need to be addressed. Tackling those problems requires mature analysis, not reducing everything to Pakistan’s identity crisis vis-a-vis India.
But what of the Pakistani military, the villains in all this? Since Aatish began with India’s failed GSLV rocket test, let me put in some facts here for him.
The Indian Army, standing at over 1.1 million active-service personnel and 1.8 million reserves, is configured under six area commands (operational) and one army training command (ARTRAC). Three of these area commands — western, northern and southwestern — are totally Pakistan-specific. A fourth, central command, with one corps (1 Corps) is also primarily Pakistan-specific. The Indian Army has 13 corps, out of which eight, including one from the central command, are specific to Pakistan.
But more than the number of corps, it is the number of divisions — infantry, mountain, armoured — as well as independent armoured and artillery brigades that manifest the deployment pattern or order of battle (ORBAT) of the Indian Army. The Pakistan-specific area commands and corps have a much-higher number of lower formations, the actual fighting elements, than the eastern and southern Commands.
Aatish alleges that Pakistan army has diverted most of the $11 billion to arming itself against India. He has no details and is plainly wrong but let’s take what he says on face value. This money has come to Pakistan over 10 years, according to his own piece. Compare this with India’s defence expenditure especially in purchasing power parity terms and one would realise what Pakistan is up against. He can check the figures with SIPRI and IISS.
Finally, each of his points has inspired scholars to write books; he would do well to avoid reductionist analyses. Nor should he utilise his father’s clout to serve personal ends by making a sales pitch to audiences in both India and the US. On a personal note, his article would have extracted only a yawn from me but for a query from Shashi Tharoor who wanted to know why I had advised Aatish Taseer to stick to writing novels. Now, Mr Tharoor is serious business. And if he needs to be explained what was wrong with Aatish’s article, then we are in real trouble.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 19th, 2011.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/212319/a...personal-fire/

Beware of "Electronic pick pocketing"

Beware of "Electronic pick pocketing"

cost of 100+ lifes of Karachi- 2 seats in Kashmir

cost of 100+ lifes of Karachi- 2 seats in Kashmir

Link- http://www.jang.com.pk/jang/jul2011-...011/index.html

Shuja Pasha ISI Chief Surenders to CIA Demands

more CIA men are allowed to come in pakistan. gen. pasha has done his task