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2014-12-20 India-Pakistan
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It wasn’t the final atrocity
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 [DAWN] THE gut-wrenching massacre in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar
...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire.
's Army Public School has left Pakistain aghast and sickened. All politicians have called for unity against terrorism. But this is no watershed event that can bridge the deep divides within. In another few days this episode of 134 dead children will become one like any other.
All tragedies provoke emotional exhortations. But nothing changed after Lakki Marwat when 105 spectators of a volleyball match were killed by a jacket wallah in a pickup truck. Or, when 96 Hazaras in a snooker club died in a double suicide kaboom. The 127 dead in the All Saints Church bombing in Peshawar, or the 90 Ahmadis killed while in prayer, are now dry statistics. In 2012, men in military uniforms stopped four buses bound from Rawalpindi to Gilgit, demanding that all 117 persons alight and show their national identification cards. Those with typical Shia names, like Abbas and Jafri, were separated. Minutes later corpses lay on the ground.
Continued from Page 4
If Pakistain had a collective conscience, just one single fact could have woken it up: the murder of nearly 60 polio
...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set...
workers -- women and men who work to save children from a crippling disease -- at the hands of the fanatics.
Hence the horrible inevitability: from time to time, Pakistain shall continue to witness more such catastrophes. No security measures can ever prevent attacks on soft targets. The only possible solution is to change mindsets. For this we must grapple with three hard facts.
First, let's openly admit that the killers are not outsiders or infidels. Instead, they are fighting a war for the reason Boko Haram
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
fights in Nigeria, IS in Iraq and Syria, Al-Shabaab
... the personification of Somali state failure...
in Kenya, etc. The men who slaughtered our children are fighting for a dream -- to destroy Pakistain as a Moslem state and recreate it as an Islamic state. This is why they also attack airports and shoot at PIA planes. They see these as necessary steps towards their utopia.
No one should speculate about the identity of the killers. Taliban front man Muhammad Umar Khorasani released pictures of the eight 'deaders', justifying the killing of minors with reference to Hadith (a horrific perversion, of course). Dizzied by religious passions, the men roamed the school searching for children hiding under desks and shouted "Allah-o-Akbar" before opening fire. Shot in both legs, Shahrukh Khan, 16, says he survived by playing dead. Another surviving student, Aamir Ali, says that two clean-shaven gunnies told students to recite the kalima before shooting them multiple times.
Second, Pakistain must scorn and punish those who either support terrorism publicly or lie to us about the identity of terrorists. Television anchors and political personalities have made their fortunes and careers by fabricating wild theories. For example, retired Gen  Hamid Gul
The nutty former head of Pakistain's ISI, now Godfather to Mullah Omar's Talibs and good buddy and consultant to al-Qaeda's high command...
and his son Abdullah Gul have adamantly insisted multiple times on TV that suicide attackers were not circumcised and hence not Moslem. Though body parts are plentifully available for inspection these days, they have not retracted earlier claims.
Those on the state's payroll that encourage violence against the state must be dismissed. Maulana Abdul Aziz
...nutball holy man who runs the Lal Masjid in the heart of Pakistain's capital. After instigating a rebellion against the state in 2007, he was caught trying to sneak away dressed in a burka. He rejects democracy as un-Islamic, which it probably is...
of Islamabad's Lal Masjid
...literally the Red Mosque , located in Islamabad and frequented by all sorts of high govt officials. The proprietors, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, unleashed their Islamic storm troopers on the city, shutting down whorehouses and beating people up who weren't devout enough. The Musharraf govt put an end to the nonsense by besieging the place. Abdul Aziz Ghazi was nabbed while he was trying to escape dressed up like a girl. BBC reported that the corpse count at 173, but other claims, usually hysterical, say there were up to 1000 titzup. Among their number was Abdul Rashid Ghazi. Everyone then said tut-tut and what a nice guy he had been...
-- a government mosque -- led an insurrection in 2007 against the Pak state. He flatly refuses to condemn the Peshawar massacre. Other state employees have called upon all to not pray for army soldiers killed in action. At another level is Jamaat-ud-Dawa
...the front organization of Lashkar-e-Taiba...
's supremo, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed
...who would be wearing a canvas jacket with very long sleeves anyplace but Pakistain...
. He blames India for the Peshawar massacre and, ignoring ironclad evidence, misguides Paks about the identity of the enemy.
Among politicians, none is more blameworthy than Imran Khan
... aka Taliban Khan , who who convinced himself that playing cricket qualified him to lead a nuclear-armed nation with severe personality problems...
, the icon of millions of immature minds. He has never named the Taliban as murderous Moslems even when they grabbed credit for various atrocities. That the TTP may be involved in the Peshawar massacre is the first exception, but this is contained only in a tweet. For a man who uses the strongest language against political opponents and has hogged TV channels for months, he has yet to condemn TTP before a national audience. Why the reticence?
It was even worse earlier. In 2009, as the Taliban took over Swat, on Hamid Mir's Capital Talk he claimed that the Swat
...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat...
Taliban were fighting a war of liberation against the Americans. When I asked why they were fighting in Pakistain and killing our coppers and soldiers, he accused me of being an American agent and then, later, attempted to physically attack me. Readers can google this video.
Third, if Pakistain is to be at peace with itself then it must seek peace with its neighbours and begin disassembling the apparatus of jihad. The bitter truth is that you reap what you sow. Today, massive murderous Moslem establishments hold the Pak state hostage. They run their own training centres, hospitals, and disaster relief programmes. When Sartaj Aziz
...Adviser to Pak Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on National Security and Foreign Affairs, who believes in good jihadis and bad jihadis as a matter of national policy...
, adviser to the prime minister on foreign affairs, said that Pakistain was not going to target murderous Moslem groups which "did not pose a threat to the state", he accidentally spilled the beans. In fact he was merely restating Pakistain's well-known zero-sum paradigm -- we live to hurt others, not to better ourselves.
While bewailing the murder of our children, let us acknowledge that Pakistain's soil has been used time and again for inflicting grief and sorrow across the world. Today it is not just India and Afghanistan who accuse us, but also China and Iran.
By launching Zarb-e-Azb
..the Pak offensive against Qaeda in Pakistain and the Pak Taliban in North Wazoo. The name refers to the sword of the Prophet (PTUI!)...
, Gen Raheel Sharif has broken with his timid predecessor, Gen Kayani
... four star general, current Chief of Army Staff of the Mighty Pak Army. Kayani is the former Director General of ISI...
. North Wazoo should never have become the epicentre of terrorism. He has done well to meet President Ashraf Ghani
...former chancellor of Kabul University, now president of Afghanistan. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002 he was a scholar of political science and anthropology. He worked at the World Bank working on international development assistance. As Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery until the Karzais stole all the money. ..
in Kabul and demand the extradition of TTP's Mullah Fazlullah
 ...son-in-law of holy man Sufi Mohammad. Known as Mullah FM , Fazlullah had the habit of grabbing his FM mike when the mood struck him and bellowing forth sermons. Sufi suckered the Pak govt into imposing Shariah on the Swat Valley and then stepped aside whilst Fazlullah and his Talibs imposed a reign of terror on the populace like they hadn't seen before, at least not for a thousand years or so. For some reason the Pak intel services were never able to locate his transmitter, much less bomb it. After ruling the place like a conquered province for a year or so, Fazlullah's Talibs began gobbling up more territory as they pushed toward Islamabad, at which point as a matter of self-preservation the Mighty Pak Army threw them out and chased them into Afghanistan...
, now ensconced on the Afghan side. But what of Mullah Omar
... a minor Pashtun commander in the war against the Soviets who made good as leader of the Taliban. As ruler of Afghanistan, he took the title Leader of the Faithful . The imposition of Pashtunkhwa on the nation institutionalized ignorance and brutality in a country already notable for its own fair share of ignorance and brutality...
? The Pak Taliban and the Afghan Taliban are two sides of the same coin. I wonder if President Ghani asked General Sharif to help extradite Mullah Omar for facing justice before the Afghan people. 
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Posted by Fred 2014-12-20 00:00||
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Posted by JohnQC 2014-12-20 08:59||
2014-12-20 08:59||
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