Friday Humor: Waqas Zaka Edition

This little gem dates back to the mid-nineties and features the VJ Waqas Zaka. Waqas can be found these days on The Musik channel ripping off reality shows like the Fear factor while bringing  his bloated ego and moral  self-righteousness to the table. Enjoy!

P.S. In case you were wondering where you heard that tune before it’s from Rednex’s version of Cotton-Eyed  Joe.

The PPP Media Team

The TV media is abuzz with Zardari’s statement at a political rally that  ‘a handful of political actors’ are trying to destabilize the current government. It is being interpreted as a swipe at the Jang group and specifically at Shahid Masood. Shahid Masood has recently accused the PPP of putting pressure on the UAE govt., from where he broadcasts his show, in order to shut him down.  This is presently being denied by government spokespeople.

The dynamics of a typical Pakistani TV news channel chat show, very popular with the public, usually take the shape of four versus one. It’s the government spokesperson versus the rest of the three member panel, a guest caller and the TV anchor who has most often an anti government bias. This anti-government anchor bias, which became pervasive in the Musharraf era, still continues and in the case of a few anchors has become more prominent.

There have been news reports after the PPP Executive committee meeting that Zardari was not happy with the performance of his media team. It is being speculated that this is why he felt the need to take this recent swipe at the media. No one can honestly blame him for  feeling insecure after witnessing Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira or Information Secretary Fauzia Wahab get skewered almost every night on Pakistani TV channels. Kaira is so woeful that he makes Maj. Athar Abbas look like Alistair Campbell. As far as Ms.Wahab is concerned the less said about her the better.

So there I was lamenting the fact that the government desperately needs to revamp its media team when I switched over to  the Dunya TV channel where a verbose Faisal Raza Abidi, who I had never seen before, impressed me a great deal. Faisal, who holds the position of being the political secretary to the President, is smart, aggressive and able to get his point across clearly and quickly.  The problem with Kaira is that he is neither very bright nor has the rhetorical ability to challenge some of his peers from other parties. Like PML-Q’s former Information Minister Muhammad Durrani, Kaira also has trouble getting his point across in a short space of time and sometimes ends up looking like a bumbling blithering idiot. I could not find the video of last nights show in which Faisal took part however I looked at another video of one of his appearances where he goes toe to toe with the experienced rhetoricians Sheikh Rashid and Ahsan Iqbal. The look of Sheikh Rashid’s face ,when Faisal points out that he is being hypocritical by berating the PPP govt. for not repealing the 17th amendment  when he never raised the issue while he was in government, was simply priceless.  It can be compared with Kaira’s chat with Talat Hussain last night  here. 

The ineffective and inconsistent narrative for the war against the  Taliban is contributing to a loss of confidence in the state. Pointless rhetoric such as Rehman Malik’s anti-india diatribe is counterproductive. In Rehman’s case it simply lent credence to the  fear mongering of conspiracy theorists who also call  the PPP govt.  US stooges. This is something which comes under the purview of a media manager. Someone who can co-ordinate with the various ministers and effective spokespeople to help deliver a consistent and solid message to the public. It is time, for the PPP, to change its current media team and bring in more effective personnel.

Blackwater Inside Pakistan

(Updated Below)

It was only a matter of time before Jeremy Scahill, the definitive source of news on Blackwater, got to the bottom of the story about Blackwater’s operations in Pakistan. He had been expressing his concern about the sheer number of private security contractors working in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for some time now. The extensive report, which mixes on-the-record credible sources with multiple anonymous ones, appears to be reliable.

This story is bound to garner significant attention in Pakistan given the public hysteria surrounding previous allegations of Blackwater’s presence in Pakistan. The Interior minister Rehman Malik, only a few days ago, said that he would resign if it was proved that Blackwater is operating in Pakistan. It remains to be  seen how long he lasts, given that  a reshuffle of the federal cabinet has already been publicly announced.

A rather unfavorable consequence of this report will be to lend credence to the likes of Shireen Mazari, Zaid Hamid, Ahmed Qureshi and their ilk.  They have been harping on about Blackwater in Pakistan for ages as it nicely fits in with their conspiracy theories.  However, this pales in comparison to the impact this story will have on the public perception of the war against the Taliban. With conspiracy theories abound, the sad fact is that it will now be even harder to convince most Pakistanis to take responsibility for the current security situation in the country.

The primary job of Blackwater operatives in Pakistan, according to Scahill’s report, is to plan drone strikes and operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives inside Pakistan for the CIA and the JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) and assist in intelligence gathering. It appears that they do not provide private security service to high value targets inside Pakistan which is what they became notorious for in the first place.  There is though a twist in the tale:

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral’s forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as “frontier scouts”). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater “is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral’s folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they’re having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they’re executing the job,” he said. “You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas.” He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. “You’ve got BW guys that are assisting… and they’re all going to want to go on the jobs–so they’re going to go with them,” he said. “So, the things that you’re seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that–in some of those cases, you’re going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house.” Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. “That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, ‘Hey, no, we don’t have any Westerners doing this. It’s all local and our people are doing it.’ But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work.“

Of all the numerous security firms in the United States, someone in the Pakistani establishment thought it was a bright idea to to go out and hire the one with the notoriously bad reputation in Pakistan. I believe it was probably the Pakistani army that gave the go ahead for such an arrangement. It would be hard to believe such an arrangement could exist without their explicit authorization. I would be interested in learning who among the civilian govt. knew about this and how much did they know. Since the Blackwater personnel were working with the Frontier Constabulary which is under the Interior Ministry surely Rehman Malik  knew what was going on.

The Islamabad security firm, through which Pakistan employs Blackwater has been identified in the report as Kestral Logistics. Recently there was a report in the DAWN newspaper about retired special forces commandos who started working for a private security firm thinking that they would be providing security for high value targets. They were, according to the news report, taken to a fortified compound and then trained by American instructors.  The story relied  on, what appears to be at best, a couple of anonymous sources which is why I didn’t think much of it at the time. It, however, fits in perfectly with Scahill’s report:

The training pushed the retired commandos to their limit and beyond, while maintaining high standards — familiarising them with a new system of combat effectiveness and understanding the importance of being proficient to accomplish collective tasks and missions.

However, the mystery about their objectives gradually started to unfold. “That was when it was realised that their mission was more than just providing protection to Americans heading out into the tribal areas from Peshawar against increasingly violent elements.

“Some of us were getting convinced that the mission may include fighting on the front, if need be,” said a former commando.

Read the complete report by Jeremy Scahill here.

UPDATE: As far as I’ve been able to find out The Nation ( The Pakistani daily) was the first to publicly out Kestral’s connection with Blackwater.  This report which was published on the Oct 20th this year accuses Kestral of storing arms and ammunition for Blackwater. This was preceded by a report on  Sep 24th about a Pakistani trading company (Kestral Trading it appears) that was blacklisted by the PAF. I have it on good authority that Kestral has not only been blacklisted by the PAF but also the Ministry of Defense meaning that it cannot  legally work for the Govt. of Pakistan.

While Kestral may have subcontracted Blackwater to provide counter terrorism expertise to the Govt. of Pakistan in 2006 it is  unclear if this arrangement still continues under the PPP govt, as Scahill alleges, because of the blacklisting of Kestral. It also  seems that Kestral  provided  logistical and other support services to Blackwater and its affiliates in Pakistan and probably earned a hefty amount for it too. It is however, not clear whether this continues to date. I have not yet seen any reaction to Scahill’s report in the Pakistani media. It would be great if someone can shed more light on Kestral’s operations in Pakistan.

It’s the Indians, Stupid!

It seems a near consensus has been reached by all the major political parties in Pakistan, except the MQM,  that India is aiding the Taliban in Swat and Waziristan.

In a press conference today ANP leader and NWFP Chief Minister Ameer Hoti joined the fine group of Pakistani political leaders who have blamed India for the Taliban problem. This came after reports in the Pakistani media that Fazlullah had managed to escape safe and sound and was now residing peacefully in Afghanistan. It is indeed hard to fathom how the  NWFP govt.  could have possibly prevented  Fazlullah from escaping when the Indians are fully behind him.

The list of fine Pakistani political leaders who blame India for the Taliban problem also includes the PPP leader and current Interior Minister Rehman Malik.   ‘We have solid evidence that not only in Balochistan but India is involved in almost every terrorist act in Pakistan,’ said the Interior Minister. Yikes! Indians are behind almost every terrorist act?  Well, then the  minister must  know who the culprits are that carried out the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team. It would be wonderful if he could share this information with the public so we could, maybe, catch them.

JI chief Munawar Hassan is not only one of those fine politicians blaming India, but  he also believes that America are to blame for the security situation in Pakistan. While launching the ‘Go America Go’ drive aimed at ending US intervention in the country’s internal affairs he said that the Taliban had not attacked the GHQ, rather, India and the United States were directly behind the attack. Please note that the  JI’s current  ‘Go! America Go!’ drive aimed at ending American interference in Pakistan is not to be confused with JI’s ‘Go! America Go!’ drive in the 1980’s aimed at increasing American influence in Pakistan.

It is not yet known what evidence these incredible claims are based on, besides of course,  Munawar Hassan’s beard. Yes, its true, Munawar Hassan’s beard is proof of American and Indian interference in Pakistan. How could it possibly get so long and lush without  CIA and RAW support?

The Threat Within

We should all ask from our state and these right wing politicians:  Why?

Cross posted : Sherryx Weblog

Ayesha Siddiqa
Friday, 13 Nov, 2009. With thanks. Dawn online

A few days ago I came across a letter to the editor in Dawn in which the writer had protested against the use of the word ‘Taliban’ to describe the brutal killers currently terrorising the nation.

In the writer’s view, such people should be termed ‘zaliman’. I thought I would advise the writer to watch more television and read newspapers to get rid of his anger against the Taliban.

Perhaps the writer would have benefited tremendously by watching a programme aired recently on a TV channel in which three distinguished maulanas — including Jamaat-i-Islami leader Fareed Paracha — argued that the Taliban were being needlessly maligned since there was no evidence available to prove that the attacks were being carried out by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

Furthermore, it was said that the TTP’s claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks inside Pakistan did not add up to much since anyone could make those calls just to malign the organisation of non-state militants.

The above interview came a couple of days after the army claimed to have found evidence of India’s involvement in the conflict in Waziristan. Islamabad should take the evidence to the International Court of Justice since it does not hope to get a fair hearing from anyone else in the world, certainly not the US. Since India and America are viewed as being ‘hand-in-glove’, Pakistan cannot afford to share the above information with Washington as New Delhi did in the case of the Mumbai attacks.

The evidence of India’s involvement should be sufficient to put the aforementioned letter writer’s mind at rest. Now we no longer need to search for internal sources of violence.

Since the responsibility of the conflict in the region is now the responsibility of the US followed by India, we need not even look at the fact that Pakistan witnessed about 45 terrorist attacks before 9/11 which many in this country view as the sole cause of strife and bloodshed in the entire region. We can no longer argue that 9/11 just expedited the process of bringing to the surface all those elements or networks that later caused violence in the region.

I would go further and apprise the writer of another crucial fact that technically, there are no home-grown terrorists in Pakistan since there has never been any conviction in a major case of terrorism. The significant names that are associated with extremist terrorist activities such as Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, Riaz Basra and Malik Ishaq of the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)/Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), Qari Saifullah Akhtar of Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islami (HuJI) or Masood Azhar of Jaish-i-Mohammad (JM) and many others are foreign concoctions.

The country’s legal system is such that the onus of proving an individual or organisation’s responsibility in an act of terror lies on the state. So, if the police are unable to bring concrete evidence before the court it is difficult to convict those accused of terrorism by the law-enforcers. Moreover, the legal procedures take so long that the prosecution (being the state) is unable to hold on to witnesses. They either die, are killed or are too scared to give evidence against organisations and individuals with a particular reputation.

Technically, it is but fair to let people go if nothing can be proven against them. This was essentially the position which Pervez Musharraf took for not pursuing action against those who were swapped for the hostages of Indian Airlines flight IC 184 which was hijacked to Kandahar in 1999. Why arrest someone if even the enemy had failed to convict the people after keeping them in jail for so many years?

Hence, it is not surprising that there are hardly any convictions. In a couple of cases where this has happened, as in the case of American journalist Daniel Pearl’s murder, the death sentence has not been carried out. We now know that Khaled Sheikh Mohammad of Al Qaeda and not Omar Saeed Sheikh committed the murder. Probably, it was in appreciation of Sheikh’s innocence that his jailers in Hyderabad allowed him access to several SIMs and mobile phones that he then used for very naughty activities, which we will not report here as acts of potential terrorism.

One might just wonder about the killings of Shias in the country, which have been going on since the mid-1980s when the SSP was reportedly established to fight the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqh-i-Jafria by the state. We hardly notice that last year there were systematic killings of Shias in Dera Ismail Khan and before that of Shia doctors in Karachi. The killing of Shias in Balochistan by the Taliban also goes unnoticed by the media and the authorities.

Surely one cannot discuss Balochistan at all where there is much more serious evidence of India’s involvement. The maulanas might argue again that sectarian violence in Balochistan is an Indian/American conspiracy.

The person who wrote the letter might decide to respond to this piece and might argue that the behaviour pattern of the Pakistani establishment and the bulk of the people remains the same. We accused the East Pakistanis of being Indian agents and said the civil war was caused by Hindu teachers in collusion with the Indian state. Any signs of India’s involvement very naturally mar our ability to look at other possibilities or threats.

In East Pakistan’s case, for instance, the internal crisis had nothing to do with the unfair treatment of the Bengalis by the West Pakistani civil and military establishment. The only truth about that era was that the Mukti Bahini was trained by Indian intelligence.

We in Pakistan are coming close to a point where we can comfortably forget that we have elements within that want to take over (perhaps not physically) the state in pursuance of their pan-Islamic agenda. The war being fought by Pakistan due to international pressure is what has caused all the violence.

I would like to refer to the golden words of Punjab’s Law Minister Rana Sanaullah in response to the allegation of south Punjab turning into a hub of extremism and terrorism.

The minister felt there was no training taking place in the region and if people were getting recruited to fight in Afghanistan or other places, how could the government stop this. After all, we live in a free country. Under the circumstances, my only advice to the writer of the letter is that if he begins to feel unsafe vis-à-vis the presence of the ‘zaliman’ within, he/she should build additional bunkers outside the house. The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

(All emphasis in bold has been added)

In the Midst of Life

The Catholic Church, whatever its problems, nevertheless has a beautiful aesthetic culture. Nothing conveys Holiness better than a Gregorian Chant IMO.

(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)

Banned or Not Banned?: Pakistan’s War or Terror

How is violent Hizb-ut-tehrir able to publish and distribute these leaflets (on very good quality glazed paper) despite being banned?

Why are its websites not banned? If PTCL can ban Baloch websites why not Jihadi websites? Is a call to overthrow constitutional government and establish a pan Islamist caliphate allowed in Pakistan’s War on Terror?

This was distributed in homes of southern Punjab few days back. According to noted journalist Seymour Hersh this organization has infiltrated the army as well. A spokesman for the army has denied it, but we know that fundamentalist sections exist in the army and have tried to overthrow government and kill Musharraf as well.

The website which calls for establishment of a Caliphate is freely accessible in Pakistan:

http://www.hizb-pakistan.com/home/

Many secular, so called anti-Islam websites and many websites of Baloch nationalists cannot be accessed in Pakistan due to censorship by the government. What kind of War on Terror is this?

It’s the Taliban, Stupid!

• If something is evil (X) only because it had a role to play in the creation of something else that is evil (Y), then it cannot be more evil than the second thing. Though this is not logically necessary, it is commonsensical and intuitive. The only way X can be more or even equally evil as Y is if one makes the assumption that Y cannot be held equally accountable as X. I do believe that this assumption has been made by Pakistani talking heads who detract from the issue at hand (defeating the Taliban) by blaming the army instead of the truly evil people.
• Moral responsibility falls on everyone equally. When a person is coerced — for example, when a gun is put to her head — she cannot be held responsible at that time. But anything short of coercion, and you can hold her responsible. Now, notwithstanding the various problems with the idea of free will (only one problem, really, and that is how to reconcile causation with free will), people still have choice and should still be held responsible for their actions. Choice can exist without free will, and there are good practical reasons for holding people responsible in proportion to how much agency or freedom-to-choose they have. As such, given that neither the Taliban nor the army are being coerced, they both ought to be held responsible for their actions equally. And the Taliban are more culpable than the army for the crimes they themselves have committed, regardless of what role the army had to play in their creation.
• The army can be reformed, and let’s not forget there are people within the army who are secular-minded. The army should be kept under tighter control, certainly, if we are to live in a democracy. But at least the army can be kept under civilian control, in principle. The Taliban is not a state institution amenable to reform, with a mixture of good and bad elements. It is a criminal group not amenable to reform, with only bad elements.
• The army has a large number of good and decent individuals. I have relatives in the army who are fine, upstanding human beings. Some members of the army are corrupt, but that only makes the army partially evil, not wholly. The Taliban, on the other hand, is wholly evil.
• Pakistanis need to unite against the Taliban.
• We need to utilize proper propaganda. The Americans, Germans and Soviets have/had excellent propaganda machines. I don’t see why Pakistan can’t start using some cartoons, pamphlets, films etc. to generate anti-Taliban sentiment. The fact that we haven’t done that yet shows how unclever we are.
• For an idea of how to (psychologically) approach a just or holy war, I would recommend reading the Bhagavad Gita.
• To raise your spirits, I would recommend listening to this. Our soldiers should be made to listen to this before going to the field .

Note: I edited out one of the points I put in here regarding the creation of internment camps for the Taliban. I’ll have to think about it more clearly before I take a position.

Interview with a ‘Talib’

This is what lack of moral clarity does to a person:

And yet it is only the army that’s at fault, of course. *rolls eyes*

The Chronic Denial of the Pakistani Nation

NFP brilliantly cuts through the mythmaking and hearsay to tell it like it is in a recent blog post, ‘A nation of sleep-walkers’:

Take for instance the recent case of a famous TV anchorman who visited a devastated area in Peshawar that was bombed by a remote-controlled car bomb. He talked to about 10 people at the scene. More than half of the folks interviewed spouted out those squarely unproven and thoroughly clichéd tirades about RAW/CIA/Mossad being the ‘real perpetrators’ and that ‘no Muslim is capable of inflicting such acts of barbarity.’

A friend of mine who was also watching this hapless exhibition of the usual top-of-mind nonsense suddenly announced that he wanted to jump in, hold these men by the arms, and shake them violently so they could be ‘awoken from their dreadful sleepwalking state.’

Pakistanis routinely continue to deny the fact that the monsters who are behind all the faithful barbarism that is cutting this country into bits are the mutant product of what our governments, military, intelligence agencies, and society as a whole have been up to in the past 30 years or so.

A welcome relief from reactionary jingoistic “journalists” like Ansar Abbasi. Read the rest here.