Police sacrilege Ahmadiyya Mosque and houses in Lathianwala

Faisalabad, Pakistan; Aug 10, 2009: Couple of days ago a case under anti-Ahmadiyya clauses (PPC 298) was registered by some activists of Sunni Tehreek against 32 Ahmadis accusing them of inscribing Holy scriptures at their houses and place of worship which allegedly hurt the feelings of complainants in village Lathianwala located some 25KM away from Faisalabad at Sheikhupura Road. Police at the behest of some bigots also added Blasphemy clause PPC 295-C (Use of derogatory remarks, etc; in respect of the Holy Prophet) to the FIR (First Information Report) which carries death penalty. At this outrageous act of Police a three member delegation of Ahmadis approached high ranking police officials to get the Blasphemy charges dropped and settle the matter peacefully without unjustifiably hurting innocent Ahmadis implicated in the case.

In the morning of August 10, 2009 around 300 strong contingent of Police, gathered from whole district, stormed the Mosque and 28 houses belonging to Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and removed Holy inscriptions, comprising Names of Allah and Kalima (Muslim creed) etc. According to reliable sources the terror and frightful operation continued for 8 hours. Police sacrilege was led by Deputy Superintendent of Police Rai Muhammad Hussain and Station House Officer Mian Muuneer Ahmed of Police Station Khururianwala while the matter was still pending decision with high ranking police official Senior Superintendent of Police Kamran Yousuf. At the time of operation Ahmadiyya delegation was waiting for a meeting with Deputy Inspector General of Police.

Police used chisels, cement, paint etc to do this dreadful act of shameful sacrilege and removed every Arabic word they could find on Ahmadiyya Mosque and houses. It is worth noting that media was kept at distance thereby not allowing to cover this act. After what happened at Gojra and Mureedke last week; Police is still busy to appease the religious extremists and bigots. Religious minorities feel insecure and helpless in this hostile environment.



32 innocent Ahmadis still face the charges of anti-Ahmadiyya laws and Blasphemy, arrests and prosecution which may lead to from three years imprisonment to death.

Hamas Crushes Islamist Group in Gaza

Some 22 militants died in fighting in Gaza between Hamas and the Army of God's Helpers on Friday, the latter being a radical fundamentalist cult that took some of its cues from al-Qaeda and the Taliban and demanded the imposition of a rigid understanding of Islamic law in Gaza, as well as plotting global holy war. Hamas, though it is fundamentalist, is more of a regional political party and less of a cult, and it has a strict policy against hitting the US or other international targets beyond Israel itself. Hamas is focused on Palestinian-Israeli issues, not on global jihad. Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections in both Gaza and the West Bank and so is the legitimate government of both, but it was removed from the West Bank when it clashed with the secular Palestine Liberation Organization of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Aljazeera English reports on the fighting:



It appears to me that Hamas was earlier made by Western media and politicians to take the blame for things that the Army of the Helpers of God actually did.

As for why some people at a mosque in Rafah turned to this extremist organization, it has to be remembered that Gaza is under siege by the Israelis and faces shortages, including of food. Rebuilding from Israel's war on little Gaza has still not been allowed to begin. The Israelis have only allowed in what is need for basic survival, as is pointed out in the below film from Dissident Voice.

Gaza Under Siege from Lily Keber on Vimeo.

Israeli policies are what have turned Gaza into a powder keg. And we haven't heard the last of al-Qaeda-type organizations growing up there if the Israeli siege continues.

Remembering Nazia Hassan

Nazia Hassan was hailed as the queen of pop music in South Asia during the 1980's. — White Star

KARACHI: Thursday marks the death anniversary of Pakistani musician Nazia Hassan, a pop icon who endeared herself to millions across the Indian subcontinent.

Nazia Hassan was one the most popular and influential female singers in South Asia during the 1980’s, and is regarded as a pioneer of Western-style pop music in the region.

Nazia burst on to the scene when she provided vocals for the song ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ in the Bollywood film Qurbani in 1980, making her hugely popular across India.

She then collaborated with UK-based Indian music producer Biddu, who was then relatively unknown, to produce the album Disco Deewaney in 1981. The album was a huge success, breaking sales records in Pakistan and receiving considerable international acclaim.

 

She subsequently worked with her brother, Zohaib Hassan, to release four more albums: Star/Boom Boom (1982), Young Tarang (1984), Hotline (1987) and Camera Camera (1992).

The brother-sister duo also made numerous appearances on Pakistan Television (PTV) throughout the 1980s, and jointly hosted the show Music’89.

She was one the first South Asian performers to perform disco-inspired dance music, helping to shake up the then-moribund popular music scene. The new music and attitude that the London-educated singer is credited with paving the path for popular 1990s acts such as the Vital Signs and the Jupiters.

Following the release of her last album Nazia shifted her focus to philanthropic work abroad, and also worked for the United Nations.

The shining light that was Nazia Hassan died in August 13, 2000 in London after a prolonged battle with lung cancer at the young age of 35.

Source: Dawn News

Spike in Bombings in Iraq Unrelated to lack of US Patrols

Bombings killed 8 and wounded 50 in Iraq on Tuesday. There were two bombings in eastern Shiite neighborhoods in the capital. A boy and two soldiers were wounded near Baqubah.

These attacks are likely to go on for a while. But despite what a lot of commentators imply, the recent bombings have almost nothing to do with the cessation of US patrols in the major cities.

As AFP lets slip, 437 Iraqis were killed by political violence in June, the last month of US military patrols, with 40 attacks per week.

In July, the first month in which there were no regular US patrols in the major cities, 275 Iraqis were killed in political violence and the number of attacks was 29 per week.

One month does not make a trend. The number of deaths in August could well be back up to the June level. But if deaths and attacks dropped by a third during the first month of no US patrols, it is not legitimate to suggest that the patrols need to start back up or their lack is the cause of increased violence!

Moreover, the bombing in Khazna north of Mosul would not have been in any way impeded by patrols of US troops in the big city of Mosul. Small villages have all along been vulnerable to attacks precisely because they are seldom garrisoned by US or Iraqi troops. In August of 2007, truck bombings of two Yazidi villages in the north killed an estimated 500 Iraqis. And that was at the height of the so-called 'surge.' US troops could not stop the hitting of a soft target like that 2 years ago, and Iraqi troops cannot stop it today. It is irrelevant to the question of the security fallout from the US withdrawal.

So, to repeat: Violence and monthly death tolls fell when the US troops stopped patrolling. And attacks like that at Khazna were happening when US troops had more security duties.

So whatever has been going on in Iraq during the past week is not an argument for the unwisdom of the troop drawdown. The journalists who are playing up this angle are just not doing the math.

Taliban Briefly Take Logar Capital Near Kabul; 12 Taliban Killed in Clashes, bombings; Taliban Warn against Voting

Shabakah-'i Ittila-Rasani-yi Afghanistan reports in Persian that on Monday, a squad of Taliban briefly took over the main government buildings in Pul-i Alam, the capital of Logar Province just south of Kabul (about 31 miles away). They began with a suicide bombing. Then they fired rocket propelled grenades and rushed the offices of the mayor, the police chief and the electoral commission, according to Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. Afghan News.net says that Afghan army and US/NATO troops rushed to the city and took back the government offices in hard fighting that left 2 Afghan soldiers dead and 4 Taliban. Reuters reporters The Persian source above claimed much higher casualties, and alleged that the governor and his deputy had been wounded. (More details in English are here.)

For 12 or so fighters to occupy government offices in the capital of the province abutting Kabul directly to its south on the eve of a presidential election is sort of like al-Qaeda taking over Richmond, Virginia in late October in an election year. The guerrillas could only have succeeded because the Pul-i Alam police and military faded away rather than fight them. Only Afghan army and ISAF units from the capital were able to dislodge the guerrillas.

Logar province is about 60 percent Pashtun and has large Tajik (Sunni) and Hazara (Shiite) minorities as well. It is the birthplace of presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani. During the Soviet period it was called "the Gate of Jihad" because it was on the route from Pakistan north to Kabul traversed by mujahidin such as Gulbadin Hikmatyar (once the CIA's favorite holy warrior but now the leader of a militant group attacking the US and the Kabul government).

I take it that it is this sort of thing that impelled Gen. Stanley McChrystal to say that the Taliban are growing in power (even if he did not say that they are getting the upper hand, as he now maintains.)

Meanwhile, airstrikes and clashes between US/NATO troops and guerrillas in southern Afghanistan killed 12 on Monday.

And the WSJ reports that the US and the Kabul government are recruiting tribal levies to fight Taliban and to safeguard polling stations in the August 20 elections.

I'm not sure most Afghan tribesmen are sufficiently non-partisan that they would make good guards of ballot boxes.

The USG Open Source Center translates from a jihadi web site the demand by "the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," i.e. the Taliban, that Afghans boycott the coming election (Sawt al-Jihad, p. 9, Aug. 9, 2009):

' . . . the Afghans and all the people of the world know that any election or step that is carried out under the occupation and by the orders of America and its allies will have no good consequences for the Afghan people and their interests. The election will not produce any government acceptable to the Afghans, and will not appoint anyone who will work for the benefit and interest of Afghanistan and its people.

"The Afghan people have experienced before the procedures and the transparency of the election of Kabul's agent administration that was held four years ago. The votes of 30 million people were changed and replaced by the votes of a few people by force, and by methods involving cheating and deceiving which were approved by America. As a result of this past election, a corrupt regime and administration came into power and worked as a spy for the US forces. Due to this agent government, thousands of innocent civilians were killed and tortured, Afghan villages and houses were bombarded, prisons were filled with people, Islamic principles and Afghan traditions were insulted, poverty increased, corruption spread, the occupying forces came to Afghanistan, and all methods were used to deceive and destroy the next Afghan generation, and so it goes on...

"Now America is throwing dust in the eyes of the Afghans as it did before. Again it is trying to put its trained agents into power to rule the Afghan people, and to put the Afghans in a whirlpool of deception and trouble for more years!!

"As the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan-Taliban considers the serial of the so-called presidential election an insult and subjugation of religious and traditional Afghan principles, we call on the Afghan people not to expect from this anti Islamic US project any good for them, their country, or their beliefs.

"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan-Taliban urges the Afghan people to confront this US project as much as they can, prevent their families and relatives from participating, not support the infidelity and corruption with their votes, and not go to the election centers, which will be the target of mujahidin strikes.'

Aljazeera English has video on how the Taliban are targeting the elections:



Richard Engels reports from Kabul via Chris Matthews' Hardball on MSNBC that Gen. Stanley McChrystal maintains he was misquoted on Monday by the Wall Street Journal when it attributed to him the sentiment that the Taliban were gaining the upper hand. Engels says that eliminating the Taliban, an indigenous Pashtun movement, is impossible. He says the US commanders still hope to at least be able to pacify them.

Taliban,British Gen

McChrystal: Taliban Have Upper Hand;
Violence, Corruption Threaten Election;
British Gen. Pledges 40 Years in Afghanistan

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of US forces in Afghanistan, admitted in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Monday that the Taliban have gained the upper hand in fighting in Afghanistan. They are deploying small units that combine suicide bombings and ambushes, killing US troops at an unprecedented rate. McChrystal wants an addition 10,000 troops, with which to garrison the major western Pashtun city of Qandahar, a center of the Taliban insurgency.

McChrystal said that he only had about a year to turn things around in Afghanistan if the effort was not to lose the support of the US public. My own impression from lecturing around the country is that the American public is tired of wars, doesn't see the point of the current ones, can't any longer connect them to their security, and in view of the collapse of the economy thinks that there are better uses for the $4 bn. a month that the Afghanistan effort is costing. 54% of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, a big drop from May, according to a CNN poll. The Helmand operation in July, which caused casualties to spike, and awoke the public to the fact that there is a war, was probably implicated in its declining popularity. Some 58% of Britons in a recent poll said that the war is unwinnable. The likelihood is that a year is too short a time for the US military and NATO to turn the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan around, and that the fight for public opinion is likely to be lost well before that happens.

Last week, seven US and British troops were killed in a 24-hour period in Afghanistan. July was the bloodiest month of the war so far. Nearly 700 US troops have been killed in the Afghanistan operation since 2001.

Gen. James L. Jones, the National Security Adviser to President Barack Obama, said Sunday that the US would not be in Afghanistan for "ten years" as Australian security analyst David Kilcullen, now a staffer for Gen. McChrystal in Afghanistan, had suggested. Jones said that the US now had a new strategy in that country, which consisted of:

1. More security

2. economic development

3. better local governance

Jones denied that he had ruled out a further increase of US troops in Afghanistan.

The National Security Adviser said that the killing of Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud was 'not a turning point' but was good news for the war effort. The Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan, of whom Mahsud was a leader, give support to the Afghan Taliban just across the border. (Transcript at Real Clear Politics

The United Nations warns that an uptick in violence threatens citizens' ability to participate in the upcoming presidential campaign. The province of Ghazni in the Pashtun south is so beset with guerrilla violence that candidates cannot campaign (shades of Iraq in 2005!) There are also allegations of stolen ballot forms intended to be deployed to steal the vote in some districts.

The Afghan newspaper Hasht Sobh reports in Dari Persian that a candidate for the provincial council of the northern province of Juzjan was robbed and briefly held hostage by Taliban while out campaigning. Juzjan is in the north of the country, which is generally quieter than the Pashtun south. But there are a few Taliban even in the north, and the ones in Kunduz again wounded a German soldier on Sunday.

The UN mission in Afghanistan also complains that the government of incumbent President Hamid Karzai is deploying state resources to swing the election to him. Other candidates haven't been able to get on national television, and government trucks have been used for pro-Karzai campaigning.

International journalists in Afghanistan are frustrated, suspecting that the Afghan government has given orders to local officials to downplay guerrilla attacks and bombings and to give them a partial accounts from a heavily pro-government point of view. The allegation implies that these steps have been taken in order to cut down on bad press in advance of the August 20 presidential election.

In contrast to UN worries about security, the Dari Persian newspaper Hasht Sobh reports from Kabul that Gen. Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, was pledging that if you counted police, Afghan army forces, and US and NATO troops, the forces providing security for the August 20 presidential elections are 300,000 strong. He said that in warfare you can only typically commit one-third of your forces to actual fighting, but in peace-keeping you can deploy 100%. While this is technically perhaps true, in fact local police in Afghanistan are not for the most part up taking on the Taliban, even at checkpoints. The Afghan army is still poorly trained, relatively small, and lacks esprit de corps (there are also ethnic problems in its deployment). Most NATO forces are in the peaceful north and would be reluctant to come south where the fighting is. So if the question is whether campaigning and voting are safe in places in the Pashtun south like Qandahar and Ghazni, the answer is no.

Any plans by the US and NATO to negotiate with the Taliban have had to be postponed, since Taliban leaders have forbidden Afghans to vote and have threatened violence against polling stations.

Incoming head of the British Army, General Sir David Richards, is under fire from Labour Party cabinet ministers and by Tory and Lib-Dem politicians for his recent statement that Britain would be in Afghanistan for forty years . (He needs to have a trans-Atlantic talk with Gen. Jones.) To be fair, Gen. Richards appears to have been thinking of a long term nation-building effort rather than prolonged war-fighting, but the British public and much of its military is suffering from war fatigue, having lost hundreds of men in Iraq and Afghanistan for reasons that Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have never successfully articulated or in some cases for reasons that were patently false (as with Blair's breathless announcement that Saddam could have hit Europe with WMD-tipped missiles within 45 minutes of giving the order.) Richards appears to feel that the British role in Basra, Iraq, was less successful than it could have been because the military became isolated from the Iraqis and the UK did not attempt nation-building efforts on a large scale in the Shiite south where its soldiers were patrolling.

Gen. Richards distinguished himself earlier in the decade in Afghanistan, where he cultivated Pashtun elders and negotiated with the Taliban, avoiding the American tactics of massive firepower and resort to special operations forces. You can only imagine what then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thought of Gen. Richards. The British officer, born in Cairo into a military family, is an old Middle East hand of a sort lacking or sidelined in the United States until recently.

ITN has video of the "forty years" controversy:



The USG Open Source Center translated the response of the Afghan Taliban to Gen. Richards' comments, which appeared in the Pashto-language Afghan Islamic Press on Saturday August 8, 2009, under the headline, "Taleban criticize UK general's statement on Afghan operation." Taliban commanders said that Richards was revealing the real scheme of the Western imperialists, which was a perpetual occupation of Afghanistan. And they turned the remark against the Karzai government, pointing out that it had never set a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces:

'Considering the remarks by the incoming British head of the army as the real voice and intention of the British government, the Taleban Spokesman Qari Yosuf Ahmadi has told AIP: It is the fact that the Britons and other foreign countries are here to occupy this country, the statements by the incoming British chief of the general staff are the main voice and intention of all the Britons, in the one hand hopefully by the passage of every day the Britons and other foreigners are speaking about their intentions and on the other hand, we believe that the foreign invaders will never be able to occupy Afghanistan."

Considering the statements by the incoming British chief of general staff as the long term intention for occupation, another Taleban spokesman Zabihollah Mojahed has told AIP: The Britons will never achieve their objective, the father of General David Richards has also died in this hope to capture Afghanistan, but no doubt that no one can occupy and colonize Afghanistan due to the Afghans' Jehad and resistance. He has criticized the Afghan government and said that the Britons intend to stay in Afghanistan for 40 years, but so far the government and the parliament have not been able to set up timetable for the pullout of the foreigners, the latest statements by the incoming UK head of army indicates that the British forces would be involved for more than 40 years in Afghanistan.'

Whatever Gen. Richards' intent, his remarks had the effect in Afghanistan of raising nationalist hackles and so were unwise, insofar as they gave the Taliban a propaganda victory.

Reformists Boycott Ahmadinejad's Inauguration

Even the official Iranian site Press TV had to admit that of 70 reformist members of parliament, only 13 attended Ahmadinejad's inauguration.

AP has more on Wednesday's protests.

Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi called Wednesday for the regime to permit continued demonstrations by the reform faction. Freedom of assembly is guaranteed in the Iranian constitution. (But then it is in the US constitution, too, which didn't stop Bush from setting up 'protest zones' on the model of contemporary Egypt).

Aljazeera English now has video of the swearing in speech.