visioninthedark

I quote you above:

so ... from 1767-1819 ... that 52 years .... yes ... FIFTY-TWO YEARS .... and ... you decribe it as "quite a long time" ....


on the other hand;

you describe a period of 70 years ... seventy years ... as "only" .... giving the impression that 70 years in not a long time ...

so .... does the definition of a "long time" vary in your mind depending upon which place was ruled?

in Kashmir 52 years is described as a "very long time" .... while for the same Afghan rule of Dehli .... 70 years is described as "only" ... meaning a shorth period?

__________________

Please visit http://www.visiongwadar.com/platinum/index.html

visioninthedark

and the above is another quote posted by you roshan ...

here too ... 85 years is presented by you as a fairly short time ...

roshan

Vision, my first post was in the context of certain people who were claiming that the Mughals, Slaves, Ghaznavids, Ghorids and all the others were Afghans and thus Afghans ruled India for hundreds of years. Thus, 85 and 70 became "only" compared to the much larger hundreds of years.

Ray

The flash point where Afghanistan meets Pakistan

Barnett R. Rubin IHT
Monday, January 12, 2004

A crucial border

NEW YORK Over lunch at the loya jirga in Kabul - the recent meeting that discussed and adopted Afghanistan's new constitution - I asked a delegate from Kandahar Province, a supporter of President Hamid Karzai, whether the Taliban's resurgence there was due mainly to support from Pakistan or conditions in Afghanistan. "Without the support of Pakistan," he answered, fixing me with his gray-green eyes, "the Taliban cannot do anything." Pakistan, he said, "never wants a strong government in Afghanistan, because if we have a strong government we will reclaim our land, all the way to Gwadar" - a Pakistani Indian Ocean port.

This is one view, unsurprising in a delegate from a Pashtun area. The Pashtun ethnic group, predominant in Kandahar, not only is the largest in Afghanistan, but populates territory nearby in Pakistan, and many Afghan Pashtuns feel a unity with those lands. An opposition leader I spoke with at the loya jirga saw things differently, urging that Afghanistan's constitution "recognize the borders of the country" as they are now. As he saw it, the refusal to recognize Pashtun tribal territories as part of Pakistan had destabilized Afghanistan's South and East for decades. In principle, Karzai agreed. He knows peace and prosperity require full cooperation and recognized but open borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there is hope this problem might finally be resolved as part of a regional settlement in South Asia.

Over breakfast on the second day of the loya jirga, Karzai argued that Afghanistan needed partners in Pakistan for a dialogue. Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, added that the status of the tribal areas had become a huge question mark for Pakistan. After Sept. 11, 2001, the Pakistani Army entered the tribal areas for the first time, yet the government still assumed no responsibility for governing them. Pakistan's northwest frontier with Afghanistan, like its northeast frontier with India, where armies face each other in Kashmir, is contested and unrecognized. And these two border areas have long been dysfunctionally linked. In 1947 the nascent Pakistani Army recruited Pashtuns from both sides of the frontier to fight in Kashmir. During the 1980's the Pakistani military used the weapons and training aid intended for the Afghan mujahedeen to train a new generation of guerrillas for Kashmir. And Pakistan allowed Al Qaeda to establish itself in Afghanistan partly in return for Qaeda help in training Kashmir fighters.

Madrasas in the tribal areas trained a generation of militants from among the impoverished youth of the tribal areas, both Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. They marched off to fight in Afghanistan, Kashmir or both, and now such militants have twice nearly assassinated Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf.

Now forces are coming together that could finally bring about some progress on the border issues. The loya jirga consolidated the strength and legitimacy of Karzai, and it showed that Pashtuns could assert influence while accommodating other groups.

In Pakistan, Musharraf, after his close calls with assassination, has once again sent the Pakistani Army to battle extremists in the tribal territories and seems finally to have agreed to cease using extremists in Kashmir. This may be the time to push him to rein in cross-border activities by the Taliban.

Musharraf's agreement with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India for a serious dialogue on Kashmir sets the stage for critical agreements. And at the recent South Asia summit meeting, leaders spoke of a need to overcome barriers to trade and investment barriers in their region as a step to joining the global economy - more reason to settle the old disputes. As the dialogue on Kashmir starts, so must a parallel effort on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. The United States has already supported a working-level discussion of the Afghan-Pakistan border through intelligence cooperation. This should be raised to the political level. And reconstruction aid that will accompany the deployment of security teams into the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan should be complemented with development aid for the Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan, where for too long smuggling, drug trafficking, looting and migration have provided the only avenues to wealth.

The writer is director of studies and senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

http://www.iht.com/articles/124546.html

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

tarek

Ray

Pakistan's problems are very deep and generally associated with the lack of will to "nation build" -- actually, Pakistan has been "de-evolving" from a nation state into a series of tribal associations -

Our cult of disagreement
K haled Ahmed’s A n a l y s i s

After Musharraf what?


Had the mainstream parties not been alienated the big change after 9/11 would have been managed with a soft landing. Both the PPP and the PMLN tried to break through the anti-India brainwash in the 1990s by making overtures to New Delhi, but were punished by the army with overthrows. The big change of policy initiated by General Musharraf was made difficult by the revolt of the army's traditional allies, the religious parties. They sank their differences and netted the anti-change vote in the 2002 elections as one party

For defenders of democracy in Pakistan this is a tough moment of choice mainly because the army is not doing what it should do as a rule. It is recreating the secular state while it should be defending the ideological state. It is destroying an important pillar of this ideology by banning the jihadi militias and normalising with India. And those who want the army to go back to the barracks are not sure if the political vacuum created by the exit of General Musharraf will be filled by forces helpful to the survival of the state of Pakistan

t is commonly said in Pakistan that, since the level of disagreement between the federal government and the provinces has increased, the country’s social contract may have broken down. This means that the various components of the nation state no longer wish to be together. Sub-nationalisms cropping up in the provinces demand that a new Constitution be framed to take account of the changed realities in the country. Some commentators link the destruction of the social contract to economic decline and the growing incidence of poverty in the country. While one group of challengers of the social contract may want constitutional change, another may actually need only a change of government.

The prevalence of disagreement in Pakistan is not only centre-province and inter-provincial, it is also intra-provincial. The provinces no longer think the centre is fair to them in the allocation of resources. One can’t ignore the fact that the smaller provinces view Punjab – whose representation forms over 60 percent of the National Assembly – as the enemy that dominates the state structure and deprives them of their rights. Most national schemes favoured by the federal government are also backed by Punjab but rejected by the provinces. Lastly, within the provinces too there is disagreement over governance. Where the parties have split to form the new PML mandate there is frequent quarrel over the legitimacy of the political order.

Pak army and Pak nationalism: The most prominent emblem of the federation is the Pakistan army. It has played a major role in the formulation of Pakistan’s posture to the outside world. It has used its influence to also shape the internal order of the state. Pakistan’s nationalism – particularly its identification of ‘the other’ – has given the army a central role in the determination of Pakistan’s politics. It is not easy to determine whether the Pakistan army itself shaped Pakistan’s early nationalism, but it certainly has guarded its initial manifestation as a part of its defence of the national security state. Today, a measure of the national dissension stems from a popular questioning of the role of the army.

Internal disagreement revolves around the two political parties with grassroots appeal: the Pakistan Muslim League (PMLN) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Despite repeated military rule, Pakistan became a bipartisan state with its well defined liberal and conservative poles much before India. But both parties had to pay due regard to the paramountcy of the army after the decade of General Ayub’s military governance. Since all armies tend to be rightwing, Pakistan army sided with the PML against the ‘threat’ of the PPP’s leftwing and liberal worldview. General Zia’s interregnum may have been seen Islamisation as a deliberate stratagem to secure Pakistan against the dominance of a liberal worldview.

Covert war and political alienation: In the decade of the 1990s the army kept the post-Zia politics under scrutiny through the system of ‘troika’ created by General Zia’s 8th Amendment. This is the period of the covert war in Kashmir, the rise of the army-supported jihadi militias, and the decline and fall of the national economy. It is in this period that both mainstream parties developed differences with the army high command. These differences were aired in an alternating process: when the PPP was in power, the PML ‘appealed’ to the GHQ to intervene; when the PML was in power the PPP made a similar appeal. Both parties went through a process of alienation from the army using a rhetoric that was self-contradictory. But the alienation was real rather than tactical. This logic of alienation was violated only by the alternation in power of the two parties.

General Pervez Musharraf took over in 1999 and did something that the army had never done before. He flouted the rule of alternation. Instead of removing the PMLN and bringing in the PPP, he ousted both of them from the political arena by keeping their leaders in exile. Both parties had gone through internal wear and tear in the 1990s and were vulnerable to splitting politics in varying degrees. By the very nature of the development of political parties in Pakistan, leader-less parties were not able to take the big decisions required of them by the crisis of 11 September 2001. The discord of the post 2002 order was exacerbated also by the violent rhetoric unleashed by the splitting of the mainstream parties.

Saying no to the 9/11 change: Under pressure from the UN Security Council resolution 1373, the Pakistan army has reversed its past policies. Since these policies were underpinned by over 50 years of brainwash against India and 20 years of brainwash in favour of cross-border low intensity conflict called jihad, the nation did not accept the volte face in short order. Had the mainstream parties not been alienated the big change would have been managed with a soft landing. Both the PPP and the PMLN tried to break through the anti-India brainwash in the 1990s by making overtures to New Delhi, but were punished by the army with overthrows. The big change of policy initiated by General Musharraf was made difficult by the revolt of the army’s traditional allies, the religious parties. They sank their differences and netted the anti-change vote in the 2002 elections as one party.

As result of this, Pakistan has its history’s strongest opposition in the National Assembly. In the Senate, where the provinces are represented equally, the voice of dissent and protest is even stronger. On the streets, where most people repeat the discourse learned from the nation-building process of the past, the support to the dissenting opinion is quite strong. Since all parties have always relied on religious rhetoric, the MMA has the upper hand because of its ability to reach out and touch familiar chords more authoritatively. (A PPP leader on 8 September 2004 attended a seminar in Lahore celebrating PPP’s apostatisation of the Qadianis.) Outside electoral politics, the ‘nationalists’ in Sindh and Balochistan have been emboldened by the disagreement arising in ‘indoctrinated’ Pakistan. Leftwing and anti-America in their outlook, they see their appeal dovetailing with the ambience of general disagreement more effectively than ever before.

Pak army reverses its role: The army has been felled by the stroke of 9/11. It has reversed its role and is doing things that it was inhibiting in the past. It has abandoned the Taliban and consequent Talibanisation of Pakistan that it was presiding over before 2001. It has softened its hostile approach to India and allowed a level of normalisation with it that the political parties had never thought of. It has liberalised the political system by mandating joint electorates and women’s seats through the LFO. It would have allowed the detoxing of the anti-India textbooks had the opposition and some of the PMLQ leaders not scared it off the project. The madrassas that once threatened the survival of non-theocratic governance in Pakistan were for the first time challenged by it. The religious militias that informally stole half the accoutrements of power from the PPP and the PMLN in the 1990s were banned by it.

The army is doing all these things at the behest of the world community that stood behind the UN resolution 1373. The resolution is often ignored and most people simply refer to America as the great arm-twister and accuse the army of selling out to Washington which they see as an ally of India. After fifty years of ‘flexibility’ Pakistan’s civilian population wants the country’s sovereignty back. Nawaz Sharif had gone to the United States to get the army disentangled from the Kargil Operation; he had agreed with President Clinton that he would help him capture Osama bin Laden and had allowed the establishment and training of a special force in Pakistan for this purpose. After 1999, General Musharraf asserted Pakistan’s sovereignty and disbanded the facility.

Post-Musharraf dangers: Opposing President Musharraf entails a number of dangerous consequences. As a democratic purist you want the army out of politics and back in the barracks. This means that Musharraf goes and another army chief takes over. He may be ‘secular’ but he may not go as far as Musharraf did in pursuing the ‘secular’ agenda. He may halt a very significantly different kind of normalisation with India from the one that Musharraf had begun. He might go back to mending the fences with the army’s old allies, the religious parties, and thus reinvigorate the army’s political strength within the country’s civil society. He might choose to follow rather than oppose the popular voice. He might reverse the policy on Afghanistan and become overt in his support for the Taliban on the run from the ISAF in Afghanistan.

Musharraf’s reversal of the army’s old role did one thing. It took Pakistan out of its ten years of international isolation. (This isolation was at the root of UN resolution 1373 which China did not veto. The term ‘rogue’ is another name for the maximum level of isolationism.) The ouster of Musharraf from the political system might mean a return to international isolation - regionally from India and the neighbouring Islamic states, and internationally from the important trading partners in the West. Neither the PPP nor the PMLN is in a position to take the rudder and steady the post-Musharraf listing of the ship of the state. Popular demands will be for full assertion of sovereignty in foreign and domestic policies. But a change in Afghan policy will bring about the collective reaction of Russia, Iran, the Central Asian states and Turkey, with no one siding with Pakistan and its ally, the Taliban. A re-intensification of conflict with India might force the army to permit the religious alliance to become co-regents and rule in Pakistan.

Disagreement in the form of tribalisation: President Musharraf’s economic achievement is dismissed by practically everyone in Pakistan as a 9/11 fallout although foreign critics see it as a positive development after a decade of near-default in Pakistan. The trend in favour of tribal societies in Balochistan and the NWFP has fostered tribalisation of the mind in settled areas too. Panchayats and jirgas are convening in Punjab and Sindh to by-pass the state institutions. Tribal societies are based on the device of disagreement as a legitimising mechanism as much as the elements of ‘asabiyya’ (cohesion). In this atmosphere it is almost impossible to inculcate a public attitude of national self-interest at the cost of mostly theoretical claims on sovereignty. It is usually the job of the politician to give a popular spin to anti-sovereignty policies. The politician has been forced out of this role to challenge Musharraf and demand sovereignty at all cost.

For defenders of democracy in Pakistan this is a tough moment of choice mainly because the army is not doing what it should do as a rule. It is recreating the secular state while it should be defending the ideological state under threat from all directions. It is destroying an important pillar of this ideology by banning the jihadi militias and normalising with India. And those who want the army to go back to the barracks - for the first time with a national anti-army consensus - are not sure if the political vacuum created by the exit of General Musharraf will be filled by forces helpful to the survival of the state of Pakistan."

Ray

Tarek,

As far as nation build is concerned, Ayub Kahn was the first who tried, Zia Islamified and if there is any chance of nation build, Musharraf is the only man.

I maybe wrong, but that is my belief.

Please add the link of this article.

tarek

I agree with that, especxially about Musharaf and nation building - but there is the problem of a basic consensus about Pakistan that is missing - this is a huge threat - the article I presented was long but it's worth reading

Ray

Tarek,

I have saved the article since it was a very good resume.

However, without a link, no one will beleive a word.

Please be a sport and post a link.

tarek

Ray

You and I cannot hope to make anybody believe anything they are not inclined towards. The Author Khalid Ahmed writes for "The Daily Times" and "The Friday Times" - I article I posted appears in this weeks' edition of "The Friday Times" and you may access it at www.thefridaytimes.com -- now U may have to register and if u do not apply immediately, there is a chance that the article will not be available until the archive sytem is up and running.

Who will believe and who will not, is not, ought not be, our problem, but that of the individual reader.

Officer of Engineers

Gentlemen, date and the newspaper name is usually enough for verification purposes.

__________________
Chimo

Ray

Tarek,

Thanks for the link.

Ray

Tarek,

Thanks for the link.

I don't have Jinnah's speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (which Aryan posted) but if Musharraf does bring in a secular stae, even with the Islamic Republic stuff, it will be a great thing.

Let me tell you about the sea change Vajpayee and Musharraf has done. India lost to Pakistan in the cricket match two days ago. Did I see the lament that would be natural a few days back? NO. Most said the better team won and Yohanna was the toast of the town. They said that Ganguli was 'Gone Gogglied'! We can make fun at our expense as I am sure the Pakistans can.

Let's all contribute to better relationship and thing will slowly come into place.

Jay

Ray Sahab,
I dont see it coming any soon. Did you see the way Pakistan reacted for UNSC expansion. The same Pakistan asked us to let them in to ARF and they want us to let them thro ASEAN.

__________________
A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

Ray

Having seen enough of hatred and bloodshed in this game of oneupmanship, I have hope.

Jay,

Even though I maybe a military man, I have roamed the villages of Kashmir incognito. I can speak the language to some extent mostly broken(which I learnt on my own).

Notwithstanding what is the popular opinion bandied by all, the Kashmiris couldn't care less. They are least indoctrinated in the religion.

Now see their plight. The terrrorist would shoot them if they don't accept what the terrorists are saying or wanting. Indian 'abuses' can always be aired to the Western Press, Indian pinkos or Human Rights Commission. If you were in their place, which is the better option?

I allowed a dreaded terrorist to visit Keer Bhavani temple on the Kashmiris' special day. I visited it too. There were scores of Moslems; in fact, they were the vast majority!

It reminded me of Lawrence's statement in his book 'Vale oif Kashmir':


I attribute much of the delightful tolerance which exists between the followers of the two religions (Hindus and Moslems) chiefly to the fact tht the Kashmiri Mussalman never gave up the old religion of the country

Or, what the Sufi Saint Shah Gafoor wrote:

[i]Yut itz zanmas kenh chhuna larun,
Dharnai dharun Soham su,
Bashar travith gachhi Issar garun,
Isharus saiti roz sapdak, Ishar sapdith yi sharir marun,
Dharnai dharun Soham su,
Dabh chi Avtar zah lagina tahrum,
Meh zan prazlan naran chum,
Ram Ram barun gau nam sandarum,
Dharnai dharun....Sohum so

Translated it means:

Birth avails us nothing. Mditate therefore upon Soham, the Eyternal. Foregetting age seek Ishvara. Keep close to Ishvara to realise Him. Onve you ahve aschieved Ishvara, tnhis mortal be got rid of. Mediate upon the Eternal. There are ten incarnations of God. One should never be nervous. Narrayana dazzles like the moon. Peatition of the name of Rama leads to one's salvation. Meditate upon the Eternal. (Sir Walter Lawrence, Vale of Kashmir Page 274.

No matter who howls, that is what it is.

I don't take Kashniris are rabid terrorists. It is outsiders and some paid agents like Geelani (he was a jsut a lowly paid primary school techer. Just see his mansion today. Where did he get the money?). If the Kahmiris wree rabid, then it would have been Iraq long back. It is the Kashmiris whoa alerted the Indian Army in 1965 and Kargil of the infiltrations etc.

Likewise, Maharaja Gulab Singh tried his best to ensure Kashmiri Hindus did not eat food prepared by the Moslems. he failed! The Kashmiris still don't eat beef!

I love and admire them. They are the, as per me, the real soul of India.

tarek

Jay


It does not do to be as emotional as you seem to be inclined to be, when discussing policy and interests of nation states. Like many others you seem to get a nut at every real and imagined slight. It's not healthy, perhaps a more sober approach, while not as satisfying, may refllect reality more accurately.