chaudhry javed iqbal

By Sajjad Tarakzai (AFP) – 13 hours ago

NOWSHEHRA, Pakistan — Six million children are suffering from Pakistan's devastating floods: lost, orphaned or stricken with diarrhoea, they are the most vulnerable victims of the nation's worst-ever natural disaster.

At relief camps in government schools and colleges, and in tent villages on the edge of towns and by roadways, children are prostate from the heat, sick from dirty drinking water, or simply trying to find work.

"These are the most bitter days of my life," said Iltaz Begum, 15, suffering from diarrhoea and stretched out in a government tent on the muddy outskirts of the northwestern town of Nowshehra.

"The weather has made our lives miserable," she said. "I had to leave my blind mother behind and there's no one to look after her as my father died two years ago."

The tent village has no electricity. The rains have gone, only to be replaced by heat and humidity. Flies buzz everywhere and the smell of faeces wafts through the camp.

Girls like Iltaz are just a drop in the ocean for the massive relief effort that the international community is trying to mobilise in one of the biggest ever UN aid operations.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, visiting Pakistan on Sunday, said millions had lost their livelihoods as he witnessed "heart-wrenching" scenes of destruction. Pakistan says 20 million people have been hit by the floods.

"Many have lost families and friends. Many more are afraid their children and loved ones will not survive in these conditions," said Ban.

Sami Abdul Malik, spokesman for the UN children's fund UNICEF, said six million children were affected by the floods.

"Currently we are in a life-saving phase," he told AFP. "We are distributing high-energy biscuits because malnutrition is a curse. It can lead to several other diseases.

"Children are always vulnerable. They cannot control their thirst, they will drink any type of water and may get watery diarrhoea, cholera, malaria and other diseases."

In addition, there are trauma and psychological problems facing children who have been orphaned or separated from their parents.

In the south, people fleeing flooded homes have headed towards tent camps near the city of Sukkur. Abdul Ghani, 14, arrived from the remote village of Karampur, the eldest of seven orphaned siblings.

"Both my parents died in the space of six months last year. Me and a younger brother of mine worked as labourers to support the family," said Ghani, wearing a worn grey shalwar khamis.

"Life was already so difficult, but now we're doomed.

"My four-year-old sister is hungry and ill but I have no idea what to do, where to go. No one is there to help us," he said.

Shakeel Ahmed, 15, another orphan, faces a similar problem providing shelter and food for his three younger siblings.

"We're too young and no one takes our problems seriously. No one listens to us. I tried to explain our problems but they shrugged me away," he said.

In a relief camp at a Nowshehra technical college, children are crying, many walk naked without shoes, and a foul stench pervades the air due to people urinating and defecating next to the tents.

Doctors at the camp's field hospital say most of the children are suffering from gastroenteritis, skin diseases and dehydration caused by filth and infection resulting from the destruction of sewers in the floods.

Twenty-five year-old Bushra Humayun, a labourer's wife, said she had given birth to twins in the camp, adding to her six other children.

She recalled losing her house in the flood and wading up to her neck through water while pregnant to reach the camp, two miles (three kilometres) away.

"I'm not getting enough food to feed my two infants and they're getting weak as they remain underfed," Humayun told AFP, sweat dripping down her face.

Her 12-year-old son Haroon had stomach pain and mosquito bites all over his arms and face. Life in the camp is their only prospect for the foreseeable future.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

A week before her death, travelling through the same lowland towns of the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan that are now half-buried under mud, Benazir Bhutto said to me: "Pakistan has changed Mr Burke, Pakistan has changed. And I need to learn about it once more."

Bhutto had returned to her native land three months earlier and after an eight-year exile, a comeback in large measure due to arm-twisting by the Bush administration's top officials and the British Foreign Office. With characteristic brio, she had thrown herself into campaigning for scheduled elections. Her comments came after she had halted her armoured vehicle to plunge into a market in the scruffy town of Pabbi to buy oranges. "I need to know the price of vegetables," she had told me as we got back into her vehicle. "I need to know about my people."

Bhutto's death, at the hands of a 16-year-old suicide bomber, marked the moment that Pakistan returned to the limelight after several years overshadowed by Iraq and terrorism in Europe and the UK. Since then, it has barely left centre stage. Home to al-Qaida, much of the Afghan Taliban, an astonishing range of indigenous militants, beset by economic and environmental disaster, Pakistan is one of the victims and the villains of the ongoing multidimensional conflict that is the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the now defunct war on terror. The Wikileaks on the Pakistani security establishment's support for the Afghan Taliban, David Cameron's statement in India that the state must stop sponsoring terrorism overseas and now the visit of Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower and president of Pakistan since August 2008, who arrived in the UK last week, have focused attention on Pakistan again.

Pakistan is usually viewed through three prisms. The first is that of the Orientalists. Experts, officials, spooks and diplomats still frequently cite Winston Churchill or even Kipling as a useful guide to the North-West Frontier. This is roughly equivalent to using Emile Zola to learn about modern France, Joyce about Ireland or Dickens about today's East End. There has probably been deeper and faster social change in Pakistan in recent decades than in the UK. If you think Thatcherism changed Britain, imagine what the roughly contemporaneous rule of General Zia-ul-Haq did to Pakistan. Or the coming of mass broadcast media and telephones to the smallest rural settlement, where high levels of illiteracy still persist, in the last decade.

The second prism is that of the fragmented failing state. Pakistan is yet to fulfil any of the multiple warnings of imminent collapse since its foundation in 1947. With 180 million people, a dozen different ethnicities, languages, Himalayan mountains and Gulf beaches, Pakistan certainly is diverse. But no more so than many other big countries. Its state and social structures may be catastrophically weak but it is astonishingly resilient. In the last decade, Pakistan has suffered several major natural disasters, a coup and a virtual coup, mass civil unrest, a series of insurgencies that amount to a civil war, the killing of its best-known political leader, massive and barely governed economic growth followed by a crash and many other blows. Somehow Pakistan keeps going. It seems likely to in the next decades.

The third prism is the vision of Pakistan as a "battlefield between the moderates and the extremists". This is perhaps the most misleading. It is true that the exact role of Islam within Pakistan has always been debated – is it a country of Muslims? Or a Muslim country? – and that there are both relatively secular "moderates" and religious extremists. But if the religious right is a fringe element, so too are the "moderates". The "battlefield" prism obscures the critical mass in the middle who, while the two fringes exchange brickbats, is quietly forging a coherent, potent and fairly homogeneous identity.

You often hear about the Arab Street but never the Pakistani Street. Yet the Pakistani Street – the man on the Gujranwala omnibus — is not only there but it – and he — is the future of the country.

Break Multan, once a provincial town in arid southern Punjab, is now a city of around 1.5 million where new hotels, shops, offices and religious schools are multiplying with equal rapidity. At a university on its outskirts, I spoke to some of the 14,000 students who, like their counterparts anywhere, sat, books spread around them, on the grass amid the buildings. They were the sons and daughters of the rapidly expanding Pakistani middle class, studying in a middle-ranking college, in a middle-sized town, of mixed ethnic origin, close to the geographic centre of Pakistan and the point where the country's four provinces meet. If anyone was representative of what Pakistan, where the average age is 21, will be and will think in a decade, they were.

The conversations we had were deeply depressing. Their view of the west, coloured by conspiracy theories about the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, a visceral anti-Americanism and a deep social conservatism, was overwhelmingly negative. The west's material conditions were undoubtedly attractive, many said, but there was no respect for women or the old and there was pornography, prostitution and Aids too. People should be able to choose whom they marry, they agreed, and women should work. But a balance none the less had to be kept.

Their patriotism was assertive and unabashed. "We are a proud and great country. We have nuclear weapons," said one. In Afghanistan and in Kashmir, Muslims were "as oppressed" as they were in Palestine, I was told. They all wanted "democracy" but said their politicians were corrupt and never helped the poor.

Though no one wanted clerics to rule, the laws of the country should however be in accordance with sharia. The students maintained a strict gender segregation. The girls were veiled. Many of the men were bearded. They were neither members of Jamaat-e-Islami, the big Islamist party, nor the ultra-westernised elite kids who party in Lahore or Karachi. They were "middle Pakistan".

A poll of Pakistanis released last month by the respected Pew Centre reinforced quite how widespread such views are. More people see al-Qaida, the Taliban and homegrown groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba more favourably than the US, it found. More than 80% supported segregating men and women in the workplace, stoning adulterers and whipping or amputation for thieves. Three in four endorse the death penalty for apostasy. And 80% said suicide bombing was unIslamic.

This is not just an issue for Pakistan. All militaries reflect the views and culture of the society that produces them and the half-million strong Pakistani army is no exception. An increasing proportion of soldiers come from the "emerging urban centres" which the historian of the Pakistani army, Shuja Nawaz, has noted are "the traditional strongholds of the growing Islamist parties and conservatism associated with the petit bourgeoisie".

After talking on al-Qaida at the army's headquarters, I was told off by senior officers for repeating the "lies of the western establishment". The "miscreants" against whom their comrades were fighting on the Afghan frontier had been "led astray" by India, the CIA or "the Jews", one colonel said. "We are the army of the nation," said another. It is a statement that is more accurate than many in the west care to think. It also explains policies, such as sponsoring the Afghan Taliban, which bewilder many western observers. This is not to say other values or perceptions do not exist – they do – but just that the views of students in Multan were thus mainstream.

So where does that leave Britain? David Cameron's visit in India last month revealed the vast gulf between how we now view India and Pakistan. We are happy with India's growing power and independence, not least in the hope it will counterbalance the far more frightening Chinese as the global eclipse of Europe accelerates. Yet for Pakistan, a decades-old policy continues. We ignore the increasingly powerful cultural and political influence of an increasingly conservative Middle East in the country. We hope our favoured English-speaking moderates, such as the Bhutto clan, can somehow fashion a new ally and partner out of this troublesome nation.

Yet what Benazir Bhutto had recognised a few days before her death was not just that Pakistan had changed but that the time for changing Pakistan had passed too. And this is the unpleasant new reality that Britain and America need to get used to. Pakistan's identity issues are steadily being resolved. But not how we would like them to be. Shout as much as we like, the man on the Gujranwala omnibus is increasingly unlikely to listen.

Jason Burke, The Observer

The daughter of an internationally acclaimed artist has accused the president of Pakistan of helping to steal her mother's paintings and wants the Metropolitan Police to question him during his visit to Britain.

Dean Nelson and Gordon Rayner
Published: 11:01PM BST 03 Aug 2010

Laila Shahzada's daughter has accused the president of Pakistan of helping to steal her mother's paintings Photo: BARCROFT

Shaheen Shahzada has lodged court papers in Pakistan claiming President Asif Ali Zardari colluded with her brother to steal 93 paintings from her flat in Karachi.

The canvases, most of which were shipped to London, were the work of her mother Laila Shahzada, who gained international acclaim before her death in 1994.

Miss Shahzada has already asked Scotland Yard to help recover the paintings, worth up to £300,000 in total, and now hopes officers will contact Mr Zardari after he flew to London for a meeting with David Cameron.

Miss Shahzada's brother, however, has insisted the paintings were left to him in their mother's will, and that they are rightfully his. Mr Zardari denies any wrongdoing.

Miss Shahzada said: "The Metropolitan Police should question Zardari about it while he is in London. My brother took the paintings from the Karachi flat with the help of Zardari in 1994. No one could have touched him at the time because they were in power."

Mr Zardari has faced repeated allegations of corruption in Pakistan, where he earned the nickname "Mr 10 per cent" following claims that he had amassed a £1.1 billion fortune by taking personal commissions on government contracts.

Before he became president, he was also under investigation in Switzerland, where prosecutors discovered he had £37 million in assets, though investigators have suggested Mr Zardari had up to £740m hidden in Swiss accounts.

The Laila Shahzada paintings went missing in 1994 immediately after the artist died in a gas explosion at her home.

According to a petition lodged by Miss Shahzada at Pakistan's Supreme Court, Mr Zardari and her brother Sohail, a long-standing friend of the president, took the paintings to London and Florida, where the president has a home.

Mr Zardari has claimed in the past that he was simply looking after the paintings for Sohail Shahzada, but Miss Shahzada, 61, is adamant that they should have been shared equally between the artist's three children.

Miss Shahzada claims 53 of the paintings were destined for Rockwood House in Surrey, a £5m mansion owned by Mr Zardari and his late wife Benazir Bhutto which was later sold amid allegations it had been bought with the proceeds of corruption.

In 2005 Miss Shahzada discovered that the paintings were being stored in a warehouse in Golders Green, north London, together with a 1920s Rolls-Royce belonging to the Bhutto family.

She took photographs of the paintings and made a complaint to Scotland Yard, who she says later helped her stop some of the pictures being sold at auction. The current whereabouts of the pictures are unknown.

A spokesman for Mr Zardari said he was not aware of the paintings, while sources close to the Pakistani president have previously dismissed the allegations as "rubbish".

The Met police officer who dealt with the original complaint was unavailable for comment.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in Oxford, 2008 (Photo: Eddie Mulholland)

I was in Pakistan the day after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, and I was talking to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the country’s former prime minister, and his cousin Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, who was then the chief minister of Punjab. The country was in uproar: members of their political party were being attacked by members of Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party, who suspected them of involvement in the plot.

Ch. Pervez introduced me to his son Moonis, the next generation of leadership for their Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid) party. Then we talked about what would become of the Pakistan Peoples Party – who would lead it now? I expected him to mention names like the veteran caretaker, Makhdoom Amin Fahim. But no: Benazir’s son, Bilawal, he said, will be the next leader.

At that time Bilawal was barely 19, studying at Oxford, and had shown no interest in politics. What could such a young man offer, I asked? “In Pakistan, politics is a family business,” he replied.

So this Saturday, the Bhutto-Zardari family will present Bilawal Zardari, or “Bilawal Bhutto Zardari” as he is now known, as the PPP’s new leader, head of the family business, at a party rally in Birmingham. Despite his tender age and minimal experience of Pakistan, the young scion of one of the country’s wealthiest feudal families will take over the reins of the country’s largest political party.

It’s an alarming state of affairs. As leader he will have influence over how the war on terror is waged and will play a key role in negotiating relations between civil society and the military, which looms menacingly over the country’s shaky democracy.

It’s a position for which there was neither contest nor welcome contestants. While the PPP has a number of promising up-and-coming MPs, like Palwasha Khan, or inspirational and able veterans like Aitzaz Ahsan (the former interior minister who led the successful lawyers’ movement to reinstate the deposed chief justice), merit simply doesn’t come into it.

If ever a country needed its leaders to be elected on merit, or an environment where the best talent can rise to the top, it’s Pakistan.

Yet Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto played a key role in the “East Pakistan” fiasco which led to the creation of Bangladesh; his daughter Benazir dragged the country to the edge of bankruptcy; and her husband treated the country’s customs and excise departments as part of the family business. Pakistan, it seems, is doomed to be saddled with Bhuttos forever, regardless of how good they are at governing.

It is often forgotten that Bhutto Pere was a tyrant, and that it was Benazir who aided the rise of the Taliban, despite warnings from women’s rights campaigners who let her know just how brutal its leaders were. It’s also forgotten that it was not the beautiful “daughter of the east” who abolished the Hudood Ordinance, under which rape victims were jailed for adultery, but the whisky-loving dictator, General Musharraf.

While there was a sense of inevitability about Bilawal’s eventual leadership, his nomination – as the party mourned his mother’s death – surprised many, just as her own nomination of Zardari as interim leader baffled her closest aides.

Zardari had been frozen out of the PPP leadership by Benazir, and until her death they were living separate lives in different continents. She is said to have regarded him as tainted reminder of the corruption in her previous two terms in office. Yet when her widower produced Benazir’s will, her closest supporters were astonished to see him described as a man “of courage and honour”. She wrote:

I would like my husband Asif Ali Zardari to lead you in this interim period until you and he decide what is best. I say this because he is a man of courage and honor. He spent 11½ years in prison without bending despite torture. He has the political stature to keep our party united.

Although she never mentioned Bilawal in the will, Zardari suggested he serve as co-chairman, and later purged Benazir’s closest supporters from the party’s leadership.

Sadly, Pakistan is not alone in its fatal attraction to dynasty. Jarwaharlal Nehru made his daughter Indira a minister -she succeeded him as prime minister and in turn groomed her son Sanjay to do the same. Sanjay played a key role in her notorious emergency rule, in which thousands of opponents were jailed. When he died in a plane crash, she groomed his brother Rajiv for the Congress leadership. Like his mother, he was assassinated. Today his widow Sonia holds the fort while their son Rahul learns the ropes as Congress general secretary.

There is no doubt Rahul will succeed Manmohan Singh as prime minister, despite having no ministerial experience himself, and despite the fact that those who know them regard his sister Priyanka as the more natural politician.

A few years ago I met Rahul Gandhi and joined him on the stump in his mother’s Uttar Pradesh constituency. He was shy, reticent, and more bookish than charismatic. But the reception he got from ecstatic villagers as we crawled through in his convoy showed he was regarded more like a living God than a man. In India, being a Gandhi is more than enough.

A family friend explained that the subcontinent’s politics are dynastic because the “brands” built by those nations’ founders were so strong, and because their names had become so widely recognised in countries where illiteracy and ignorance are so prevalent.

So on Saturday Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will stand in the shadow of his assassinated mother, his executed grandfather, and his two murdered uncles, and succeed them not as the best man for the job or the best hope for saving one of the world’s most fragile countries, but simply as his mother’s son: the inheritor of the family firm.

"It is often forgotten that Bhutto Pere was a tyrant, and that it was Benazir who aided the rise of the Taliban, despite warnings from women’s rights campaigners who let her know just how brutal its leaders were. It’s also forgotten that it was not the beautiful “daughter of the east” who abolished the Hudood Ordinance, under which rape victims were jailed for adultery, but the whisky-loving dictator, General Musharraf." A very well written post by Dean Nelson at Telegraph.co.uk

Just the way you wouldn’t hand weapons to an untrained army, you wouldn’t hand cameras and a press pass to untrained media representatives. However, fact of the matter is that time and time again we are reminded that the latter has been taking place in Pakistan almost constantly.

A country expects its army to protect and defend them and similarly a country expects its media to responsibly broadcast news to them.

What we saw yesterday in the wake of an enormous national tragedy was not responsible reporting. We could not even wait a few hours before we started looking for suspects to pin the blame on. We couldn’t even wait to verify the death toll before reporting that there were 40 survivors. We couldn’t even let a day pass before inviting talk show guests to discuss conspiracy theories. And most of all, we couldn’t even focus on what the language we were using must sound like to a grief stricken nation.

Yes, 152 people died in the Margalla Hills. They perished. Their families are grieving. The rescue teams and media personnel who saw the crash site first hand must also be grieving. But we are a hasty nation. We want results, we want culprits named and we want to suck every emotion and thought out of your mind when we get a hold of you. And for all of that, we will tell you that the black box was found, even though headlines this morning state that is not the case. We can not play with people’s hopes and emotions – how do you even expect a nation to trust you?

Shoving the mic in the faces of crying relatives, the media asked “How do you feel?” How do you think they felt, respected colleagues? What was a reporter thinking when she boasted about running barefoot to be the first one to ‘break the news’ for her channel?

Later at night, news channels could have easily invited weather experts, CAA officials, air force pilots who fly in those areas, geologists to explain the terrain and possibility of survival, and impact experts – what we got instead were officials who discussed the possibility of planes being shot down near the no-go zone.

Anchors harassed Rehman Malik to explain what happened and how the tragedy took place. Why would you ask Rehman Malik this question? I understand he is a government official but he doesn’t even know how security lapses allow suicide bombs to go off everyday, so how would you expect him to explain the technicalities of a plane crash?!

Perhaps we have become used to covering terrorist attacks in the most blatant way possible but we could have shown some sensitivity here. Since there was nothing but debris to show on the screens, cameraman panned the tattered chequebooks and broken make-up kits of the crash victims. Yes, because if I had just been killed in a horrible accident, my family would definitely want to see my belongings scattered next to my remains.

The pilot of the “doomed flight” is not sitting at home with his family. Neither is he facing an investigation of the accident. He is among the dead too. He has a family too. He was not a terrorist who wanted to take a plane full of people down with him. But we didn’t consider that when we immediately starting pointing out his age, his fatigue and his medical conditions. Even if there was a problem or a mistake at his end, lets wait for CAA and Air Blue’s official statements and investigation results before brandishing him as the one responsible for the tragedy.

Hundreds and thousands of us have travelled this airline before and because of their safe landing, we are sitting in front of our computer screens today. Yet all of a sudden we are complaining on public forums about what terrible landings travellers of the air line have to face. Guess what angry people – tons of flights often have bad landings but you cannot use that excuse to justify what happened yesterday.

I believe we are a curious nation but I do not believe we are an insensitive one. The prayers, the tears and the shock yesterday proved we have emotions – television channels played with those emotions yesterday. They didn’t realise that a mother of a victim was in shock before asking her what her daughter was like in person. They didn’t realise that flashing “honeymoon couple dead” on their tickers, would not be any more hard-hitting that the deaths of all of those who were not on their honeymoon.

I expect illiterate people or unbothered citizens not to read this but the media can and should read this. What are you doing? I may be just a few years old in this field and I may not understand the implications of being in a media rat-race, but nothing can justify what we did yesterday. Instead of giving the nation the sensitive and true reports it needed, we gave them traumatizing visuals and crude commentary.

I have spoken out loud about media ethics before but never have I felt as embarrassed as I do today to be considered a part of this ‘industry’. If any one in a position of authority understands this, take action and train your team. It’ll be the best public service you could do for a nation of lost souls.

Shyema Sajjad is the Deputy Editor at Dawn.com

Much can be said of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani's bumbling on the floor of parliament a few days ago during a speech made in relation to the issue of fake-degree holders. About how I felt, I was going to die of embarrassment for him as he muttered one contradiction after another, as his face began to confess, painfully, that he himself had begun to realise that he was making absolutely no sense – even by the generally low standards set by his fellow parliamentarians.

But before saying any of this, I think the PM needs to get one thing straight: criticising the minimum education requirement for public representatives in no way justifies his canvassing for former MNA Jamshed Dasti. Dasti, who unceremoniously resigned rather than face more ridicule before the Supreme Court, is self-admittedly guilty of holding bogus educational qualifications–which doesn't make him a lowly victim of elitist policy-making. It doesn't make him a casualty of class repression or a symbol of resistance against an oppressive system.

It makes him a flaming cheater.

A con artist; a fraudster; a charlatan.

Aside from being charged with perjury, the least his party, the PPP, could have done was to ensure that he was whisked away from the forefront and asked to lay low, lest their image was hurt further.

But the PPP did what the PPP does, and what only the PPP can understand.

They gave Dasti a ticket to contest for the vacated seat once again; and, to push the incredible into the realm of absurdity, even got a party member no less than the country's chief executive to canvass for him.

In a speech a few days ago, Dasti, seemingly unashamed by the humiliation before court and country, thundered that he would seek the mandate of an adalat (court) much higher than the High Court or Supreme Court–i.e. the people's court.

Such defiance from a man who was too frightened to reappear before the Supreme Court after an intermission to consult with his lawyer. I say frightened, because it was obviously not embarrassment that sent him running for the hills. If it had anything to do with shame, then the man would have disappeared off the scene for a while.

Perhaps even changed his name.

But he didn't.

I admire the resolve of Mr Dasti, the man who was self-righteously screaming hoarse regarding match-fixing in cricket like he was no less than the pontiff himself, right before being found holding a fake degree.

There are assorted jokes of Mr Dasti's ridiculous replies to the queries of the judges regarding his educational qualification of Religious Studies – ranging from having studied the Quaranic Tafseer of Hazrat Moosa (Moses) to not knowing what the first chapter of the Holy Book was called.

However, that doesn't seem to shake the resolve of Mr Dasti.

Then comes along the PM, who decides to justify the problem of fake degrees in general and Mr Dasti in particular. I do not know exactly what prompted the PM to become so heavily involved in an issue that ought to be embarrassing for most public representatives, let alone the PM. But it can be assumed that it had to do it under pressure from party leaders who may find themselves in the same boat as Dasti.

Gilani called for parliamentarians to band together and protect the sovereignty of parliament, adding that there should be no prerequisites for running for public office. He also said something about some sort of parliamentary committee which gave Dasti the right to run for office.

Now, this is a straw-man argument. Parliament should be supreme. The issue regarding educational qualifications for members of the highest body of the land can be debated. But neither has anything to do with holding fake degrees. I beg the PM to not conflate these issues.

Gen Musharraf's reign can be used to justify many problems that the country faces today–but he certainly cannot be held responsible for this.

If the PM wants to talk about how things are done in "civilised countries," then he should also consider what would happen if a public representative there was found holding bogus qualifications. If the PM wants to talk about parties being vigilant against holders of fake degrees, then he should start from his own party, from a man who himself admitted to having forged his degree.

After the premier's debacle of a speech came the rescue party of assorted PPP leaders, who then decided to defend the PM. One of the more interesting defenders was one Ms Asma Arbab Alamgir, a PPP MNA and an advisor to the PM. Talking on a television channel, the lady actually shrugged off the problem saying, in effect, that everyone does such things. I have never heard this lady talk before, but judging from her arguments in this case, it could very well have been she who advised the PM on his sermon on fake degrees.

Of course, all of this is a moot point. Dasti has already got the ticket. The PPP has got away with unnecessarily acting like a fool before, and probably will again. As I write this column, the by-poll is underway – and a tough battle is expected in Faisalabad.

The damage has already been done. If Dasti wins, it will be a sad day for this country; if he doesn't, it will be a sad day for the PPP. Given the drastic turn of events during the Australia-Pakistan T20 semi-final, I predict a Dasti win–because it will be a fitting way to round off a shocking weekend.

Gibran Peshimam writes about Pakistan People's Party's antics of making fraud and corruption acceptable in the society.

People with links to Pakistan have been behind a hugely disproportionate share of international terror incidents over the last two decades: the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks; Richard Reid’s failed shoe bombing in 2001; the so-called Bojinka plot in 1995 to blow up 12 planes simultaneously; the 2005 London train and bus bombings; the 2001 attacks on the Indian Parliament; and attacks on two luxury hotels and a Jewish center in Mumbai in 2008.

So it came as little surprise that the suspect in the attempted car bombing in Times Square, Faisal Shahzad, is a Pakistani-American.

Why does an ostensible “ally” seem to constitute more of a threat than, say, Iran? Or Lebanon or Syria or Iraq? Or Egypt, birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood brand of militant Islam? Or the West Bank and Gaza, where resentment of America’s Middle East policies is centered?

One answer, I think, is that Pakistan’s American-backed military leader of the 1970s and 1980s, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, drove the country off course, seeking to use fundamentalism as a way to buttress the regime. Instead of investing in education and infrastructure, he invested in religious sanctimony.

The public education system, in particular, is a catastrophe. I’ve dropped in on Pakistani schools where the teachers haven’t bothered to show up (because they get paid anyway), and where the classrooms have collapsed (leaving students to meet under trees). Girls have been particularly left out. In the tribal areas, female literacy is 3 percent.

There’s an instructive contrast with Bangladesh, which was part of Pakistan until it split off in 1971. At that time, Bangladesh was Pakistani’s impoverished cousin and seemed pretty much hopeless. Henry Kissinger famously described Bangladesh as an “international basket case.”

But then Bangladesh began climbing a virtuous spiral by investing in education, of girls in particular. It now has more girls in high school than boys, according to Unicef. This focus on education has bolstered its economy, reduced population growth rates, nurtured civil society and dampened fundamentalism.

Educated girls formed the basis of a garment industry, making shirts for Americans. This brought in currency, boosted employment and provided an economic lifeline to the country. Those educated girls went to work for poverty-fighting organizations like BRAC and the Grameen Bank.

In Pakistan’s tribal areas, you can hear American drones buzzing faintly overhead, a reminder of our focus on military solutions. Drones and hard power have their place, but not to the exclusion of schools and soft power. An important 2008 study from Rand, “How Terrorist Groups End,” concluded that “military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups.”

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is on visits to rural Pakistan to see fundamentalist Wahabi-funded madrassas as the only game in town. They offer free meals, and the best students are given further scholarships to study abroad at fundamentalist institutions so that they come back as respected “scholars.”

We don’t even compete. Medieval misogynist fundamentalists display greater faith in the power of education than Americans do.

Let’s hope this is changing under the Obama administration. It’s promising that the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid package provides billions of dollars for long-term civilian programs in Pakistan, although it’s still unclear how it will be implemented. One useful signal would be for Washington to encourage Islamabad to send not only troops to North Waziristan but also teachers.

We continue to be oblivious to trade possibilities. Pro-American Pakistanis fighting against extremism have been pleading for years for the United States to cut tariffs on Pakistani garment exports, to nurture the textile industry and stabilize the country. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, told me that his top three goals are “market access, market access, market access.” But Washington wants to protect North Carolina textile mills, so we won’t cut tariffs on Pakistani goods. The technical word for that: myopia.

Education and lower tariffs are not quick fixes, sometimes not even slow fixes. But they are tools that can help, at the margins, bring Pakistan back from the precipice. It has been reassuring to see the work of people like Greg Mortenson, whose brave school-building in Pakistan and Afghanistan was chronicled in “Three Cups of Tea.” Ditto for Developments in Literacy, or D.I.L., which builds schools for girls in Pakistan that are the most exhilarating things I’ve seen there.

It costs $1,500 to sponsor a D.I.L. classroom for a year, and that’s just about the best long-term counterterrorism investment available.

•

Nicholas D Kristof writes about the Pakistan problem with an unbiased viewpoint.

By FOUAD AJAMI

'A Muslim has no nationality except his belief," the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb's "children" are everywhere now; they carry the nationalities of foreign lands and plot against them. The Pakistani born Faisal Shahzad is a devotee of Sayyid Qutb's doctrine, and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was another.

Qutb was executed by the secular dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. But his thoughts and legacy endure. Globalization, the shaking up of continents, the ease of travel, and the doors for immigration flung wide open by Western liberal societies have given Qutb's worldview greater power and relevance. What can we make of a young man like Shahzad working for Elizabeth Arden, receiving that all-American degree, the MBA, jogging in the evening in Bridgeport, then plotting mass mayhem in Times Square?

The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the failures of the Islamic world but brought the ruin with them. They mock national borders and identities. A parliamentary report issued by Britain's House of Commons on the London Underground bombings of July 7, 2005 lays bare this menace and the challenge it poses to a system of open borders and modern citizenship.

The four men who pulled off those brutal attacks, the report noted, "were apparently well integrated into British society." Three of them were second generation Britons born in West Yorkshire. The oldest, a 30-year-old father of a 14-month-old infant, "appeared to others as a role model to young people." One of the four, 22 years of age, was a boy of some privilege; he owned a red Mercedes given to him by his father and was given to fashionable hairstyles and designer clothing. This young man played cricket on the eve of the bombings. The next day, the day of the terror, a surveillance camera filmed him in a store. "He buys snacks, quibbles with the cashier over his change, looks directly at the CCTV camera, and leaves." Two of the four, rather like Faisal Shahzad, had spent time in Pakistan before they pulled off their deed.

A year after the London terror, hitherto tranquil Canada had its own encounter with the new Islamism. A ring of radical Islamists were charged with plotting to attack targets in southern Ontario with fertilizer bombs. A school-bus driver was one of the leaders of these would-be jihadists. A report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service unintentionally echoed the British House of Commons findings. "These individuals are part of Western society, and their 'Canadianness' makes detection more difficult. Increasingly, we are learning of more and more extremists that are homegrown. The implications of this shift are profound."

And indeed they are, but how can "Canadianness" withstand the call of the faith and the obligation of jihad? I think of one Egyptian Islamist in London, a man by the name of Yasser Sirri, who gave the matter away some six years ago: "The whole Arab world was dangerous for me. I went to London," he observed.

In Egypt, three sentences had been rendered against him: one condemned him to 25 years of hard labor, the second to 15 years, and the third to death for plotting to assassinate a prime minister. Sirri had fled Egypt to Yemen, then to the Sudan. But it was better and easier in bilad al-kufar, the lands of unbelief. There is wealth in the West and there are the liberties afforded by an open society.

In an earlier age—I speak here autobiographically, and not of some vanished world long ago but of the 1960s when I made my way to the United States—the world was altogether different. Mass migration from the Islamic world had not begun. The immigrants who turned up in Western lands were few, and they were keen to put the old lands, and their feuds and attachments, behind them. Islam was then a religion of Afro-Asia; it had not yet put down roots in Western Europe and the New World. Air travel was costly and infrequent.

The new lands, too, made their own claims, and the dominant ideology was one of assimilation. The national borders were real, and reflected deep civilizational differences. It was easy to tell where "the East" ended and Western lands began. Postmodernist ideas had not made their appearance. Western guilt had not become an article of faith in the West itself.

Nowadays the Islamic faith is portable. It is carried by itinerant preachers and imams who transmit its teachings to all corners of the world, and from the safety and plenty of the West they often agitate against the very economic and moral order that sustains them. Satellite television plays its part in this new agitation, and the Islam of the tele-preachers is invariably one of damnation and fire. From tranquil, banal places (Dubai and Qatar), satellite television offers an incendiary version of the faith to younger immigrants unsettled by a modern civilization they can neither master nor reject.

And home, the Old Country, is never far. Pakistani authorities say Faisal Shahzad made 13 visits to Pakistan in the last seven years. This would have been unthinkable three or four decades earlier. Shahzad lived on the seam between the Old Country and the New. The path of citizenship he took gave him the precious gift of an American passport but made no demands on him.

From Pakistan comes a profile of Shahzad's father, a man of high military rank, and of property and standing: He was "a man of modern thinking and of the modern age," it was said of him in his ancestral village of Mohib Banda in recent days. That arc from a secular father to a radicalized son is, in many ways, the arc of Pakistan since its birth as a nation-state six decades ago. The secular parents and the radicalized children is also a tale of Islam, that broken pact with modernity, the mothers who fought to shed the veil and the daughters who now wish to wear the burqa in Paris and Milan.

In its beginnings, the Pakistan of Faisal Shahzad's parents was animated by the modern ideals of its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. In that vision, Pakistan was to be a state for the Muslims of the subcontinent, but not an Islamic state in the way it ordered its political and cultural life. The bureaucratic and military elites who dominated the state, and defined its culture, were a worldly breed. The British Raj had been their formative culture.

But the world of Pakistan was recast in the 1980s under a zealous and stern military leader, Zia ul-Haq. Zia offered Pakistan Islamization and despotism. He had ridden the jihad in Afghanistan next door to supreme power; he brought the mullahs into the political world, and they, in turn, brought the militants with them.

***

This was the Pakistan in which young Faisal Shahzad was formed; the world of his parents was irretrievable. The maxim that Pakistan is governed by a trinity—Allah, army, America—gives away this confusion: The young man who would do his best to secure an American education before succumbing to the call of the jihad is a man in the grip of a deep schizophrenia. The overcrowded cities of Islam—from Karachi and Casablanca to Cairo—and those cities in Europe and North America where the Islamic diaspora is now present in force have untold multitudes of men like Faisal Shahzad.

This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can't wish it away. No strategy of winning "hearts and minds," no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can't conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere—Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

Jawed Naqvi's no nonsense plea

Behind the scenes of a Pakistani suicide bombing

By CHRIS BRUMMITT (AP) – 19 hours ago

LAHORE, Pakistan — Abdul Baseer sent the grenades and explosive vest ahead, then boarded a bus that would take him to his target, accompanied by the 14-year-old boy he had groomed as his suicide bomber.

But before they could blow up their target, a luxury hotel in Lahore where they believed Americans would be staying, the two were arrested and are now in jail — Baseer unrepentant about having plotted to send a boy to his death, and the boy saying he never knew what was in store for him.

The story that unfolded in an interview with The Associated Press offers a rare insight into the world of a Pakistani militant, from his education at hard-line Islamic schools, through his professed participation in an attack on a U.S. patrol in Afghanistan, up to his arrest by Pakistani police along with the the boy, Mohi-ud-Din.

His tale shares much with that of the thousands of other foot soldiers who make up the Taliban-led insurgency that is ravaging Pakistan, experts say. It also shows how the wars here and in neighboring Afghanistan bleed into each other.

The Associated Press, after several requests, was allowed to interview the two detainees, with police present for most of the meeting at a police interrogation center in Lahore, a political and military power center in eastern Pakistan.

Baseer was born in 1985 close to the Swat Valley, which last year was overrun by Taliban and recaptured by the Pakistanis.

The eldest of seven children, his father was a wheat farmer and earned barely enough to feed the family. Meat was reserved for guests, he recalled.

Like many who cannot afford a regular education, Baseer attended three Islamic boarding schools where children learn the Quran by heart and spend little time on secular subjects. The religious schools provide free board and lodging, but are widely criticized for indoctrinating students with an extreme version of Islam.

At least one of the schools Baseer attended, Jamia Faridia in the capital, Islamabad, has been linked to terror.

"Through my studies, I became aware that this is the time for jihad and fighting the infidels, and I saw that a jihad was going on in Afghanistan," said Basser, a rail-thin man speaking just louder than whisper. "I looked for a way to get there."

"A trip to Afghanistan is considered part of the profession for a militant," said Imtiaz Gul, director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. "It is almost like you need to do it for graduation.

"The American troops are there, and it's a cause of resentment."

Baseer said he spent three summer vacation periods in Kunar, an Afghan province just across the border from northwest Pakistan, which he reached through a network of sympathetic clerics.

On his first trip, in his mid-teens, he cooked for around 30 or 40 other militants, most of them Afghans, who were living in a large cave complex.

On his second stay he had military training and learned to make suicide jackets.

On the final trip he took part in the ambush of a U.S. patrol after he and other fighters had lain in wait in the snow for two days."I was happy to be in place where I could kill unbelievers," he said. "I thank God that we all returned safely and had a successful mission."

He said he was in the rear of the attack, in which automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades were fired. He said the vehicles were left smoldering and that later the assailants were told two U.S. soldiers were killed, but there was no way of confirming that.

Back in Pakistan, Baseer worked as a mosque preacher in the Khyber region, not far from the northwestern capital, Peshawar. He said it was there that he hooked up with a man named Nazir, a commander in the Pakistani Taliban, who was plotting the attack in Lahore. Baseer said he made 10 suicide vests for Nazir.

Lahore, a city of around 9 million, has suffered scores of attacks by gunmen and suicide bombers over the last 1 1/2 years. Last month, two suicide bombers killed 43 people in near-simultaneous blasts.

Baseer boarded a passenger bus along with the boy, Mohi-ud-Din, heading down the smooth highway to Lahore, where they were supposed to pick up the bomb and grenades.

Police officer Waris Bharawan, as well as Baseer, said the plan was to hook up with other militants and storm the PC International, one of Lahore's grandest hotels. They said the suicide vest for the attack was sent to the city before the strike.

Baseeer gave only a rough outline of the plan: He and others were to hurl the grenades around the lobby or entrance gate of the hotel, and then Mohid-ud-Din was to run in and detonate his explosive belt.

Did he feel any guilt about what lay in store for his traveling companion? No, he said. "I was feeling good because he was going to be used against Americans."

As he sat in Bharawan's office, handcuffed and dressed in robe and baggy pants, an officer brought in the vest, dropping it on the floor with a thud. The explosive pads studded with ballbearings looked like slices of honeycomb. Also in the evidence bag were 26 grenades.

Baseer obliged with a demonstration, miming the yanking of a white cable that would detonate the vest.

"My instructors used to say this was the most important weapon in the fight against the enemy," he said.

In the same lockup, a crumbling building built when Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent, police also briefly presented Mohi-ud-Din to the AP. He seemed nervous and tongue-tied, claiming only that he knew nothing about the alleged attack.

The pair were arrested as they arrived at the house of another suspect, just days before the attack was due to have taken place, said Bharawan, who led the arresting officers. He said they acted on surveillance work in Lahore, but declined to give details.

Torture and beatings are common inside Pakistani jails, according to rights groups. During a short time when no police were present, Baseer was asked how he was treated. He said he was beaten, but by members of Pakistan's shadowy and powerful intelligence agencies soon after his arrest, not by the police.

Police said Baseer and the boy would be tried for terrorist offenses behind closed doors and without a jury, as is customary in Pakistan.

Associated Press reporter Asif Shahzad contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.