PAKISTAN and Jordan were accorded non-member ally status by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) earlier this year. In the wake of monumental catastrophe that devastated parts of Azad Kashmir and adjoining areas of Frontier Province, NATO like other friendly Governments, U.N. and other international agencies, NGOs, etc. rushed to help on humanitarian consideration the Government of Pakistan in rescue and relief operations in the quake zone which till today presents a horrifying spectacle of incredible human disaster. Relief supplies and financial assistance from all over started pouring in. The rescue phase is over but relief effort continues. Damaged roads and other infrastructure are being repaired. Relief supplies including food items, medicines, tents, blankets are being distributed amongst over five million affectees. Field hospitals and tent cities have been established for treatment of the survivors and for providing shelter to the homeless. Pakistan Army has sent around seventy thousand soldiers including engineers and medical personnel to undertake relief work. They are being assisted by volunteers, foreign NGOs and teams of experts from abroad and Armies of various countries including U.S., Britain and NATO. Every one is doing a tremendous job to bring back smiles on the faces of millions of traumatised survivors who have lost tens of thousands of their dear and near ones. NATO like other countries has positioned around one thousand engineers, construction workers and medical personnel in the quake zone. With start of snowfall, distribution of relief goods including food is a daunting task. Commander Andrew Walton of Disaster Relief Team of NATO in Pakistan told newsmen on Monday at his base near Bagh, the hardest hit area in Azad Kashmir, that his team would now focus on delivering relief goods and food amongst survivors living in hill top villages. His team assigns top most priority to this task because the survivors living at altitudes of 5,000 feet and above face death due to exposure. His team has been repairing roads and supplying filtered water to survivors in the disaster area. He is expecting British and Italian contingents to join his team soon with heavy equipment to bolster their infrastructure repair work. The foreign troops mainly engineers and medical personnel are on short term assignments. After completion of their relief duties, they will soon leave.
Unfortunately misplaced criticism is being made against presence of NATO troops. It has been thoughtlessly alleged that NATO has come to stay in Pakistan. All kinds of wild allegations are being levelled. Rumours about their intentions are being spread. This indeed is a sinister propaganda designed to create misunderstanding about involvement of foreign troops in relief operations. This attempt on the part of enemies of Pakistan can not be condemned in adequate words. The people of Pakistan are enormously grateful to our friends from abroad, specially NATO troops, who are doing a wonderful job. President Pervez Musharraf observed on Monday at Islamabad at a function held to mark the formation of Universities chapter of National Volunteers’ Movement that NATO troops had not come to occupy the territory of Pakistan. He stated that NATO troops had come to do humanitarian work and that they had no other purpose.

Euromed summit

The Euromed summit ended yesterday in Barcelona without agreement between EU states, Mediterranean Arab states and Israel, on a clear statement deploring international terrorism. The Arab delegations were not prepared to endorse a document that did not admit the right of a people to fight against occupation by a foreign power. By seeking to push through a politically loaded deal, the joint hosts, Spain and Britain, missed the opportunity to agree on the far more important statement that what makes modern terrorists such reprehensible criminals is that they target innocent civilians. The problem is that European governments in particular seem incapable of talking about the inhumanity of the latest terrorist depravity, without then relating the crime to their own political agenda.
This is nothing new. What is lost in this debate is the fact that whatever insurgents call themselves or are called, the majority of their victims are civilians. The calculation is as simple as it is sordid. If the populace can be terrified by bombs and murder, civil society will break down, the authorities will collapse and the insurgents will triumph. Therefore the more innocent blood that is shed and the more grotesque the butchery, the greater the impact for the terrorists’ cause. The real definition of terror is the indiscriminate taking of the lives of people whose only guilt is to be living in the society that is under attack. And it is not just Al-Qaeda and its murderous offshoots that have committed terror crimes. In the closing days of World War II, when Germany was all but beaten, British and American bombers obliterated the city of Dresden, slaying maybe 100,000 civilians. That was an act of terrorism. The Germans were already broken and just seven weeks away from collapse.
And if killing civilians to terrify them into submission is accepted as the definition of terrorism, then some of those most passionate warriors against it may have reasons to scale down their rhetoric. That definition fits Al-Qaeda attacks. It also fits “shock and awe” that the Pentagon spelled out as the strategy of the Iraq offensive. It was repeated in Fallujah and many other cities with a concentration of civilian population. Any effort to outlaw terrorism, no matter how few the victims and how crude the weapons or delivery systems is welcome. But when the definition comes along with a caveat that if the number of the dead runs into thousands and if the weapons used are bunker busters and the delivery weapons missiles and Stealths, it is not terrorism, it will not be easy to get that viewpoint endorsed by those who have suffered terrorism of both kinds. It does not matter whether the man who gives the order for the murder of innocents wears a uniform or not; killing people who have nothing to do with a conflict is “terrorism”, plain and simple. Any attempt to shave this or that meaning off the word is nonsense.

—Arab News