The Taliban in Pakistan

This is what the Taliban is doing to Pakistan!

© Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press

Collecting furniture from the rubble of a police station in Buner, 60 miles from Islamabad, that Pakistani officials said the Taliban destroyed Thursday.

Beautiful picture this! Reminds me of Steve McCurry's famous NG award-winning picture!

© Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

A relief camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, where thousands have fled fighting between troops and Taliban in the North-West Frontier Province.

Both of the above pictures from NYT article this morning which tells us that finally... Now, U.S. sees Pakistan as a cause distinct from Afghanistan 

Also, through a tweet by Prem Panicker, I learn that the National Magazine Awards were announced last night. (Above link contains links to many award winning articles. More need-to-read-later articles to bookmark!).. but note that the REPORTING award went to The New York Times Magazine for an article about the Taliban in Pakistan. 

“Whose side is Pakistan really on?” asks Dexter Filkins in his thorough, evocative piece on the Taliban’s presence in Pakistan, a key U.S. ally.

Related Reading from last couple weeks:

• The Roots of Pakistan’s Taliban Problem 

• U.S. Questions Pakistan’s Will to Stop Taliban

Three Cups of Tea

Nicholas D. Kristof, who extensively wrote about Mukhtar Mai and Darfur when few others in mainstream US media were talking about them, tells us today about the lone Montana man who...

... has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region (isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan) than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration.

The man is Greg Mortenson, who builds schools in the region, 'working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times.'

His superb book about his schools, Three Cups of Tea, came out in 2006 and initially wasn’t reviewed by most major newspapers. Yet propelled by word of mouth, the book became a publishing sensation: it has spent the last 74 weeks on the paperback best-seller list, regulPublish Postarly in the No. 1 spot.

..

Mr. Mortenson found his calling in 1993 after he failed in an attempt to climb K2, a Himalayan peak, and stumbled weakly into a poor Muslim village. The peasants nursed him back to health, and he promised to repay them by building the village a school.
Scrounging the money was a nightmare — his 580 fund-raising letters to prominent people generated one check, from Tom Brokaw — and Mr. Mortenson ended up selling his beloved climbing equipment and car. But when the school was built, he kept going. Now his aid group, the Central Asia Institute, has 74 schools in operation. His focus is educating girls.

More power to him! Instead of focusing on people like this, our media is too busy focusing on some babies that two celebrities had. (Sorry.. I refuse to link to the ridiculous frenzy over the Brangelina babies.)

And many thanks to Kristof for once again highlighting stories, through his NYT articles and his blog, that no one else talks about in mainstream media. There is so much there to learn about. For eg: A post a few days back highlights Students Crossing Boundaries, which is ...

... a diverse group of student leaders who have come together to empower each other and other students to explore realities of various conflicts, observe the social, cultural, economic and political conditions of the conflict and document and disseminate their experiences to the public.

Their first report on life in the West Bank is here and pictures from their visit can be seen here.

Bhutto's deadly legacy

Tragic as her death at the hands of extremist Islamic terrorists may be, William William Dalrymple, author of the recent book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (on my to-read list for a while now), reminds us that Bhutto's legacy should not be distorted by this tragedy. Far from being a paragon of democracy and a ambassador of peace and good-will, a quick review of history would enlighten us to how she baited India through support of the Kashmir insurgency and encouraged Islamist militant groups to flourish in Pakistan and Afghanistan during her two reigns as PM.

Everyone now knows how disastrous the rule of the Taliban turned out to be in Afghanistan, how brutally it subjected women and how it allowed Al Qaeda to train in camps within its territory. But another, and in the long term perhaps equally perilous, legacy of Ms. Bhutto’s tenure is often forgotten: the turning of Kashmir into a jihadist playground.

....

Benazir Bhutto’s death is, of course, a calamity, particularly as she embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis. But, contrary to the commentary we’ve seen in the last week, she was not comparable to Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Bhutto’s governments were widely criticized by Amnesty International and other groups for their use of death squads and terrible record on deaths in police custody, abductions and torture. As for her democratic bona fides, she had no qualms about banning rallies by opposing political parties while in power.

Within her own party, she declared herself the president for life and controlled all decisions. She rejected her brother Murtaza’s bid to challenge her for its leadership and when he persisted, he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances during a police ambush outside the Bhutto family home.

Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.

Related:

Pakistan's crisis: A nation unraveling

The country and the region are facing an array of disasters just waiting to happen.

The Economist cover story last week considers Pakistan to be the world's most dangerous place!

There are plenty of contenders for the title of "world's most dangerous place", but Benazir Bhutto's assassination strengthens Pakistan's claim. We look at the country's shaky prospects ahead of the postponed election, now due to take place next month.

Update: Just realized that Amit Varma has also blogged about Dalrymple's article.

An Ode to a Bush

Almost 10-days old news this...but it is hilarious enough to be mentioned as I commence blogging in a more traditional sense than the mess I created earlier ;)

Furore in Pakistan over Bush-praising poem in text books. Apparently, the poem originally appears on an educational materials site as part of a reading comprehension lesson.