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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Re: [ALOCHONA] Jang/News - Ammar Ali Jan on The Indian Threat

Hello Robin Hood
 
Annoyed? a typical response. Isn't it?
 
yes yes. Toba astak firrulla! What a poet said in Urdu
 
Dekha Jo Teer Kha K Kameen Gah Ki Taraf
Apne Hi Dosto Se Mulaqat Ho Gaee
(When looked back after get heart, noticed our own FRIENDS)
 
Let's have a little talk about friends, which we thought as our brothers in East Pakistan and which you thought about India.
 
As far as our experience with our brothers/friends is concern, Mr. Qutubuddin Aziz explains this in the following way.
 
As the victim did not die in a single bayonet strike, another Mukti-Bahini killer plunged his bayonet in to the writhing Bihari's chest. Dead bodies of Bihari and Bengali victims lie strewn over the execution ground as Mukti-Bahini killers and their accomplices watch the butchery with sadist pleasure
 
 
And as far as your experience with your NEW FRIEND is concern. Hmmm
 
RAW AND BANGLADESH is an illuminating book written by Mr. Zainal Abedin, a senior Journalist of Bangladesh and published by Fatema Shahad in November 1995. It is printed by Madina Printers and distributed by Madina Publications, 38 Banglabazar Dhaka - 1100, Bangladesh
 
 
'The realization of what lay in store for us started soon after I crossed over to India. The attitude of our Indian handlers and trainers indicated that they treated us (the Freedom Fighters) not as friends but as agents. The real Indian face lay bare after the surrender of Pakistani forces, when I saw the large scale loot and plunder by the Indian Army personnel. The soldiers swooped on everything they found and carried them away to India. Curfew was imposed on our towns, industrial bases, ports, cantonments, commercial centres and even residential areas to make the looting easier. They lifted everything from ceiling fans to military equipment, utensils to water taps. Thousands of Army vehicles were used to carry looted goods to India. History has recorded few such cruel and heinous plunders. Such a large scale plunder could not have been possible without connivance of higher Indian authorities
 
 
 
So When the surrender deed, which you mentioned Mr. Robin Hood, had signed, Your NEW FRIEND started showing its real face to you.
 
I can easily understand you must have not dare to investigate that too. Just like you did not dare to investigate the actual number of death toll in your liberation war.
 
Whatever floats your boat is fine with me TOO! As long you are happy & contented.
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 8:58 PM
Subject: Re: [ALOCHONA] Jang/News - Ammar Ali Jan on The Indian Threat

Dear Sajloo the "independent" comedian:

Whatever floats your boat is fine with me! As long you are happy & contented.

Whats a few thousand among dosts!

The fact is your piara Pakistani Army Bhaiyas (regular forces or otherwise) did surrender to the "INDOO" enemy.

Tauba tauba! astak firrulla!

Your admirer

Robin Hood

PS: In case you have forgotten but as a CPA/CA (in your day job) you will appreciate the original document. Dont you agree? No numbers mentioned but you get the picture old boy!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:InstrumentOfSurrender.jpg

-----Original Message-----
From: Saj
Sent: Oct 24, 2008 2:33 AM
To: Alochona
Cc: rkhundkar@earthlink.net
Subject: Re: [ALOCHONA] Jang/News - Ammar Ali Jan on The Indian Threat


Hello Robin Hood.
 
Yar, there is not only this single article. But you can find numbers of others. Such as one publsihed in Jang, assissting Army Chief to take over the country and install martial law.
 
Just like any other country, we also not short of culprits and you copied the article of one of them. May be because he is your like mind? whatever...
 
This so called columnists, just like you, do not know that Gen. Niazi did not surrendered 90,000 troops. Infact, less than half of them were military men and under his command. The rest were picked up by your masters to make the large number. What kind of columnist he is? He failed to demonstrate his knowledge by not acknoledging that those 90,000 also include employees and families of employees of different organisation. Such as shiping company, PIA, Railway etc etc. What you say.
 
Do I need to produce a long long list of articles, research reports etc to prove that what this culprit, your brother, had wrote, is wrong? Oh, I am not going to do that, as everone knows, what he intending to say and what you intending to do.
 
Keep visiting the same site and they will have plenty of material for the ill minded people like you to copy here and there.
 
____________
 
We all need to unite and stand as one against the common enemies
 
Sajjad Ahmad
 
Freelance Writer & Researcher
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
 
 
Author and Moderator
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 3:58 AM
Subject: [ALOCHONA] Jang/News - Ammar Ali Jan on The Indian Threat

The 'Indian' threat

The notion that everything wrong with Pakistan was India's fault was the most popular perception of the 90s and its now creeping back in

By Ammar Ali Jan

The News

http://jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2008-weekly/nos-19-10-2008/dia.htm#5

As a child of the nineties, I remember how India was the number one whipping boy with our establishment and the government-controlled media. Every night, on PTV Khabarnama, we would hear about the atrocities being committed by the Indian army against the "freedom fighters" in Jammu and Kashmir. Not only was there an outright condemnation of everything Indian, there was also a plethora of songs and TV serials (my childhood favourite being Alpha Bravo Charlie) in favour of the jawans. At the same time, we were told that everything wrong that happened in Pakistan was somehow a "Hindu" conspiracy. Like many other kids my age, I believed the only way to be patriotic was to hate India and to love the Pakistani military.

This depiction of India as enemy number one has been the main reason for the army's enormous influence in all the decision-making in Islamabad .This concerted effort to glorify the army was being carried out when the establishment was also busy vilifying all politicians as corrupt and "national security threats". This perception ensured the smooth takeover by the military on Oct 12, 1999. The fact that Musharraf could not act as strongly as he promised vis-a-vis India not only meant that public attention was diverted from the "Indian" threat, it also undermined the rais'on d'etre(reason for being) for a powerful national security state.

However, with the return to civilian rule, we are witnessing another attempt by the establishment to demonise the Indian state and to portray the civilian government as "weak" on national security. Unfortunately, people like Ansar Abbasi and Shireen Mazari, who otherwise supported the democratic movement against the generals, have started taking an extraordinarily hawkish line on India in their recent articles. From the Balochistan insurgency to suicide bombings to the trouble in the tribal regions, everything is being blamed on the Indians. Knowing the disastrous consequences (read military takeover) of a view that depicts civilians as weak on national security, it is important to demonstrate the problems with this hypothesis and also to show how no one but our own national security apparatus has to be blamed for the mess we find ourselves in today.

To begin with, we must review the history of our India policy. Immediately after partition, Pakistan went to war with India in 1948 over the disputed territory of Kashmir. This resulted in the formulation of India as an existentialist threat for the new state, at least in the minds of our establishment. Pakistan moved closer to the US with the signing of the Baghdad pact in 1954 in order to counter India's strategic partnership with the Soviet Union. Relying on our friend Uncle Sam, our establishment tried to "liberate" Kashmir by launching operation Gibraltar in 1965. In this operation, the Pakistan army sent in fighters and arms into Kashmir in order to ignite a rebellion in the State. This adventure was a terrible failure and lead to the 'surprise' attack on Lahore by the Indians.

Colonel SG Mehdi, who was heading the SSG just before the 1965 war, wrote a fascinating article in 1998 that demonstrated how childish the entire plan was and why he opposed this needless provocation on part of the Pakistani military high command. He also states in the same article that if a thorough inquiry had been conducted into the failures of the 1965 war, we could have avoided the 1971 debacle. (http://www.defencejournal.com/july98/1965war.htm) However, our official historians celebrate the 6th of Sept as Defence day by narrating the heroics of the Pakistan army in saving Pakistan from a disaster. They never explain how the army high command created that disaster to begin with.

During this time, our establishment played the India card to quell any opposition to the state. Wali Khan, leader of the National Awami Party (NAP), was declared an Indian agent and hence incarcerated. Nationalist leaders in Balochistan, Sindh and East Pakistan met the same fate. In fact, a military operation was launched against the people of East Pakistan on charges that they had joined "Hindu" India in a conspiracy to break the "Muslim" Pakistan.

This nonsensical conspiracy theory for the 1971 war is endlessly repeated in our history books. What this analysis ignores is the treatment meted out to the Bengalis by the Pakistani state. They were denied provincial autonomy and control over their resources, their leadership was jailed, their demands were rejected and on top of all that, a brutal military operation (termed genocide by the Bengalis) was launched against the eastern wing resulting in thousands of casualties.

Keeping in mind the track record of the establishment in dealing with its subjects, is it fair to put the entire blame of this defeat on the shoulders of a foreign player?

Those who thought the '71 defeat would instill some sense into our establishment were to be disappointed. Rather than attempting to improve the relationship between the two countries, ZA Bhutto's government devised the "strategic depth" policy in which Afghanistan was supposed to give strategic depth to Pakistan in case of a war with India. Islamabad needed a friendly government in Kabul and for this purpose Rabbani's men were trained in Pakistan to set-up a friendly regime in Afghanistan. During General Zia's time, this theory was implemented by added intensity, especially after the Soviet invasion. The Pakistani state, in collaboration with the US, set-up a network of training camps inside Pakistan to wage the Afghan "Jihad". Thousands of youngsters were trained and sent to "liberate" Afghanistan from the Soviet occupation. madrassahs mushroomed all over the country, giving "strategic depth" to the Mullahs in our society. Anyone who opposed this made in Washington policy was thrown into Zia's notorious jails as a communist sympathiser or an Indian/Hindu agent.

After a victory in a shattered Afghanistan, our establishment now took upon its shoulders the task of liberating its Kashmiri brethren. The boys from the Afghan Jihad were redirected to Kashmir in 1989 and for the next 13 years, our state gave full support to the Kashmiri "freedom fighters". This, of course, changed in 2002 when General Musharraf declared these groups as terrorists and rounded up its cadres. Many remain missing even today.

Today, we are witnessing the blowback effect of an incredibly short-sighted policy by our establishment. The tribal areas are in a complete rebellion, the list of suicide bombings is increasing at an alarming rate and a security threat is posed by the madrassahs as demonstrated by the Lal Masjid crisis. Those jihadis nurtured by the state for the past thirty years, supposedly to protect us from the Indian threat, have been a threat to the very survival of the Pakistani state.

In such circumstances, those who are blaming India for all the security problems being faced by Pakistan are delusional at best. We can't be sure what role India is playing in escalating these tensions, but we should have a consensus that the role played by our security apparatus, the agencies that are suppose to protect us, has been terrible to say the least. While those in charge of the security apparatus have made a fortune for themselves, as shown by Ayesha Siddiqui in her book Military Inc., they failed miserably in their real job of protecting Pakistanis by adopting policies without a clear vision.

Even if we take the hawkish line that some journalists and political parties are taking these days, have the army generals fared any better than the civilians even on that account when they were in power? Ayub Khan conceded defeat at Tashkent in 1966, General Niazi surrendered his ninety thousand soldiers to the Indian army at Dhaka, General Zia conceded defeat on Siachin and General Musharraf banned all those groups whom he use to refer to as freedom fighters. Not a heroic record by any stretch of the word!

This does not mean that the Indian security apparatus is any better. They have consistently pointed their fingers at Pakistan whenever something goes wrong. The Indian establishment, much like ours, has failed to recognise its own mistakes, especially in Kashmir where the Indian army has been particularly brutal.

Khalil Jibran in his play Satan makes the point that the priest needs Satan if he wants to remain in business. The same is true for the establishments of India and Pakistan. They need to create fear of the other in order to justify their own existence. What we need is a genuine, people's peace movement in both these countries that can challenge this concept of a national security state. Especially in Pakistan, we need to stop blaming India for the current mess we find ourselves in. Identifying the real culprits will facilitate true accountability, weaken the grip of the army on our state and consequently, will help the democratisation of our State and society.

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[Disclaimer: ALOCHONA Management is not liable for information contained in this message. The author takes full responsibility.]
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