Int’l help needed to fight terrorism
Mohammad A. Suhail

President Pervez Musharraf has reaffirmed Pakistan’s commitment to fight terrorism and extremism to the best of its abilities. At the same time he called upon the international community to help and assist Pakistan to combat this menace that have caused problems for the country after the defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan. He was addressing the Oxford Union Debating Society of the Oxford University.

Dilating on the history of terrorism in the region, he said “Mujahideen, who were brought, trained and financed by the West to fight Soviet troops, joined together to form Al Qaeda after the withdrawal of the invading troops.” What is more, “the Taliban from religious schools were also recruited, financed and armed by the United States and the West, and supported by Pakistan against the Soviet forces.”

It is a well known fact that after the Soviet defeat the West hurriedly packed its baggage and left Afghanistan. Pakistan was in a helpless situation. It had to deal with 30,000 Mujahideen and over four million Afghan refugees. In this background it is becomes quite evident that terrorism is not a “Pakistani phenomenon but an import to the country. Therefore the entire international community is to blame for this global menace that has threatened international peace and security.

He flayed attempts by those who criticize Pakistan as an extremist country. While vast majority of people of Pakistan are moderate and tolerant, there are handful of people that are involved in terrorist and militant activities. Pakistan has adopted a holistic strategy to fight terrorism and extremism, as it firmly believes that military action alone is not the answer and will not wipe out terrorism. The fight against terrorism cannot meet with success unless the problem of extremism is adequately addressed. For this reason it is giving enough attention to the other equally important ‘aspects of addressing the underlying causes’ of this phenomenon.” While going after the terrorists on its own soil and extending full cooperation in international efforts to combat terror, Pakistan is doing something which is clearly in its own interest.

Thus “Pakistan is fighting terrorism in its own national interest. It also happens to be in the interest of the global community and so, therefore, we are collaborating with the United States and the West. Pakistan is perhaps the only country which has fully understood the environment that had undergone a change with focus shifting from al-Qaeda to Taliban and introduction of new phenomenon of Talibanisation” which can be described a state of mind.

However unlike other countries, Pakistan is pursuing a comprehensive approach in dealing with the terrorist threat understanding the actual environments prevailing in the country. Although it has deployed 75000 troops on its western borders to check the activities of al-Qaeda and Taliban activists as well as other extremists in the country, it recognizes the fact that “military action is not an end in itself, as it does not and cannot provide an enduring solution to extremism.”

While military force may be applied against terrorists as a short term measure, but long term measures are necessary against extremism, which is clearly a ‘thought process’ and cannot be handled through military means only. “Other instruments must also be used to tackle the issue of terrorism and extremism in its entirety. “Military (intervention) only buys you time for using other instruments to get to the core of the problems.” It is therefore important to adopt a long-term approach of addressing political disputes, removing grievances and addressing the socio-economic issues.

Clearly, war on terrorism has to be a continuing process. As a short term measure military operations are required to frustrate terrorists’ designs, but in the long-term some kind of mechanism should be devised paying due attention to the causes that provide the “terrorists the peg to exploit the sentiments of ordinary people regarding genuine grievances.” International community must realize that global war on terrorism cannot be won without “focusing on the long-festering political disputes, perceived or real humiliation, sense of alienation and deprivation, under-development, poverty and other socio-economic issues facing the Muslim world.”

It is in this context that Pakistan has been calling upon the international community especially the United States and the West to help and assist Pakistan in fighting this menace. It is also urging them to help facilitate “just solutions to longstanding disputes like Palestine and Kashmir to eliminate the root causes that have been a major source of generating extremism in Muslim societies. At the same time, “It is important to help Afghanistan and Iraq move towards stability, security and peace, as the conditions prevailing in the two war-torn countries ‘were causing deep anxiety among Muslims everywhere in the world.”

It is a matter of record that Pakistan’s armed forces have arrested over 700 al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives. No other country in the world has done what Pakistan has done. In this regard President Musharraf pointed out: "We’ve taken over their sanctuaries. Where they were in the hundreds, now they are only in the dozens around in the mountains and we are chasing them…Which country in the world has arrested 700 al-Qaeda people, all the important ones?”

But, it needs to be emphasized that Pakistan has done it for its own sake, as disorder and havoc caused by acts of terror is not in country’s best interests. “Pakistan would seek to promote economic growth and respect for the rule of law while undercutting militant and extremists. Such a renaissance would enable Pakistanis to understand the true peace-loving nature of Islam. It is quite evident that peace is a precondition in order for the country to stay on the path of economic progress.



Have the terrorists won?
Adnan Gill

Almost immediately, the primitive instinct of self-preservation kicked in. Fearing reprisals, I was franticly calling and sending instant messages to family and friends advising them to stay indoors and avoid crowds as most of them happened to be Muslims and/or dark skinned.

An even more disturbing fact is that instead of feeling grief for the untimely death of the New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, I was relieved to have learnt the pilot’s identity.

Initial reports of the crash had all the hallmarks of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The crash rattled America’s nerves so bad that within 10 minutes of the crash, NORAD scrambled fighter jets over several major American cities. US Coast Guard positioned several patrol boats and a Coast Guard cuter in the East River. While, literally, hundreds of first responders harmoniously took to their rehearsed duties. The drama and anxieties about a possible terrorist strike were mounting by each minute. As soon as the drama climaxed, to everyone’s relief, it fizzled away with news about the identity of the pilot.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one elated to have learnt about the pilot’s identity; even the whole American media seemed to have sighed a breath of relief. In what appears to be a maddening rush, joining the media chorus, even the New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in a news conference declared the plane crash to be an accident, as he appropriately patted the first responders on the back for a job well-done.

As if we wanted to be in denial, we desperately glued to our TV sets in a hope that any moment our leaders would declare the crash to be an accident. And the leaders didn’t disappoint us. Our hopes were so strong that we didn’t spare even a moment to contemplate other possibilities, like if the accident could have been an attempted suicide or a possible murder? Barely six hours later, a day that had started with revisiting the traumatic 9/11 memory lanes, it concluded with a comforting ease, that we survived another day without experiencing another terrorist attack.

Is this the state-of-mind of a nation that is winning the war on terror? Or have the terrorists already won the war of nerves? We have become a nation of paranoia, where dark skinned citizens are forced to disembark airplanes for merely passing a cell phone to each other, and the possibility of terrorism is immediately and unanimously ruled out upon learning the identity of the Caucasian pilot of a crashed plane.

President Bush, close to 3,000 brave American soldiers, and thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians have been sacrificed to the Gods of your so-called war on terror, but that hasn’t even given us a rudimentary sense of security. How about we look for political solutions to snuff out the ambers of terrorism?



The IgnoramUS
Anwaar Hussain

Most Americans don’t know that such was the state of the awareness of a man about to be handed over the reins of the most awesome military machine of the most powerful country on planet earth and let loose upon the world.

Most Americans don’t know that their country’s foreign policy has been held hostage to the wellbeing of the state of Israel for the past about four decades and all the world’s major crisis, including the so called ‘war on Terror’, can be traced, one way or the other, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and America’s extremely partisan Israel-centric role in that.

Most Americans don’t know that a large section of American diplomatic and military experts have long held the view that U.S. support of Israel is often contrary to and, in fact, enormously damaging to U.S. interests.

Most Americans don’t know that this blind allegiance to the tiny state of Israel, apart from increasingly endangering American lives, hurts America’s relations with 1.2 billion Muslims world-wide and bleeds off the much-needed resources from domestic American requirements to fight a shadow ‘war on terror’ that is contrary to American principles of equality, democracy and fairplay.

Most Americans, in fact, don’t know the ABCs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Consider the following.

Most Americans don’t know that for 2,000 years there was no such conflict and that the land of Palestine was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs and that in 1850 these consisted of approximately 80 percent Muslims, 15 percent Christians, and only 5 percent Jews and for centuries these groups had lived in absolute accord.

Most Americans don’t know that in the late 1800s a fanatic minority group of the world Jewish population in Europe, known as the “Zionists”, decided to colonize this land to create a Jewish homeland, and at first considered locations in Africa and South America, before finally settling their sights on Palestine for their colony.

Most Americans don’t know that at first this immigration created no problems but when the extremist group’s designs for an exclusive Jewish state started surfacing, fighting between the two groups broke out with swelling waves of violence.

Most Americans don’t know that when finally in 1947 the United Nations did decide to intervene, under considerable pressure from high-placed American Zionists, the UN randomly divided up Palestine rather than adhering to the democratic principle of "self-determination of peoples" and ended up giving away 55 percent of Palestine to a Jewish state — despite the fact that this group by then represented only about 30 percent of the total population, and owned under 7 percent of the land.

Most Americans don’t know that when the inevitable Arab-Israeli war of 1948 broke out, the Zionist army consisted of over 90,000 European-trained soldiers and possessed modern weaponry, including up-to-date fighter and bomber airplanes while the Arab forces, very much a third-world army, consisted of approximately 30,000 ill-equipped, poorly trained men, leaving the outcome to little doubt.

Most Americans don’t know that by the end of that war the Jewish state, having now declared itself "Israel", had conquered 78 percent of Palestine — far more than that proposed even by the very generous UN partition plan— and three-quarters of a million Palestinians had been made refugees and over 400 towns and villages had been destroyed and a new map was being drawn up, in which every city, river and hillock would receive a new, Hebrew name and, according to that plan, all traces of the Palestinian culture were to be erased and in fact, for many decades Israel — and the US, following its lead — denied the very existence of this population and Golda Meir once even proclaimed that: "There is no such thing as a Palestinian."

Most Americans don’t know that in 1967 in the Six Day War, Israel conquered still more land and occupied the additional 22 percent of Palestine that had eluded it in 1948 — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — and that it also occupied parts of Egypt (which since were returned) and Syria (which remain under occupation).

Most Americans don’t know that currently out of the two core issues in this continuing and growing Middle Eastern conflict, the first one is of the inescapably detrimental effect of trying to maintain an ethnically preferential state, by the Zionist group of colonial origin, in a land that once comprised of 95 percent Muslim and Christian peoples and who are not being allowed to return to their homes in the current "Jewish state" to the extent that the Israeli peace negotiators refuse to even discuss the possibility of applying this UN guaranteed right.

Most Americans don’t know that the second core issue is of Israel ‘s continued confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza, and the resistance to that by the Palestinian inhabitants, and that it is these occupied territories that, according to the Oslo peace accords of 1993, were going to become a Palestinian state and that when Israel continued to take land in these areas and to move its citizens onto it, the Palestinian population rebelled and that uprising is called the "Intifada" (Arabic for "shaking off") which began at the end of September 2000 and continues to this day.

Most Americans don’t know that since the start of Intifada, 121 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 786 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis and 1,084 Israelis and 4,171 Palestinians have been killed, 7,633 Israelis and 30,670 Palestinians have been injured and that zero Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 4,170 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel.

Most Americans don’t know that the U.S. gives $15,139,178 per day to the Israeli government and military and $232,290 per day to Palestinian NGO’s and that the Israeli unemployment rate is 8.9%, while the Palestinian unemployment is estimated at 25-31%.

Most Americans don’t know that just one Israeli is being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 9,599 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel and that 60+ new Jewish-only settlements have been built on confiscated Palestinian land between March 2001 and July 11, 2003 and that there have been zero cases of Palestinians confiscating Israeli land and building settlements.

Most Americans don’t know that not all the world Jewry supports the noxious policies of the Zionist group running the state of Israel and in fact as recently as September 21, a group of Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish Rabbis met with President Ahmadinejad of Iran to discuss matters of mutual interest.

Above all, most Americans don’t know that Israel has had 65 UN resolutions passed against it in its atrocious past and the Palestinians have none.

Now if most Americans do not know what most Americans must know, should most of the world now call the US as the IgnoramUS?

Acknowledgement : I am deeply indebted to the administration of the website ‘If Americans Knew’ at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/index.html upon whose research I have drawn heavily and who have made it a goal to “to inform and educate the American public on issues of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media” and who want to let it be known that “Americans, through our blank check to Israel, are empowering the worst elements of Israeli society, and undermining those working for a just, peaceful, and nondiscriminatory nation.

We are driving the violence in this region.

We can stop it.”

Hats off to the truth seekers.