Cole at Tomdispatch: Frenzy over the Pashtuns of Empire's Frontier
My essay, "Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!: A Century of Frenzy over the North-West Frontier," has just been posted at Tomdispatch.com.
Excerpt:
' Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That's certainly one for the record books.
And it hasn't ended yet. Not by a long shot. Not with the headlines in the U.S. papers about the depredations of the Pakistani Taliban, not with the CIA's drone aircraft striking gatherings in Waziristan and elsewhere near the Afghan border. This spring, for instance, one counter-terrorism analyst stridently (and wholly implausibly) warned that "in one to six months" we could "see the collapse of the Pakistani state," at the hands of the bloodthirsty Taliban, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the situation in Pakistan a "mortal danger" to global security.
What most observers don't realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It's at least 100 years old. . .'
Speaking of which, Reuters reports that on Monday, Pakistani helicopter gunships deployed against Pashtun militants in the Khyber region killed 20 of them. This group, led by Mangal Bagh, is unconnected to the Old Taliban of Mulla Omar but was suspected by the Pakistani military of 'planning some attacks.' The US and NATO in Afghanistan depend on the Karachi to Khyber route to get materiel to their troops in landlocked Afghanistan, but militants on the Pakistan side have attacked the convoys and closed off the route, forcing the US to depend on Russia for transshipment of materiel instead. The US has put pressure on the Pakistani government to put down the Pakistani Taliban and reopen the Khyber pass route.
About 500,000 or one fourth of the 2 million alleged to have been more or less expelled by the military and the fighting from the Swat Valley, have returned home, despite problems of sewage and potable water.
News also comes that the Pakistani government has arrested Pashtun cleric Maulana Sufi Muhammad, a founder of the Pakistani Taliban and leader of the Movement for the Implementation of Muhammad's Law. Sufi Muhammad was the one who brokered the controversial cease-fire in the Swat Valley between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban, led by his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah. The ceasefire broke down when the Taliban attacked neighboring areas and sought to expand the territory under their control.
Ironically, at the same time that Western observers lauded the Pakistani president's decision to arrest Sufi Muhammad and cut off negotiations with the Taliban in Pakistan, they continued to pursue peace talks with the Afghan so-called Taliban.
Meanwhile, Aljazeera English reports on British overtures to the dissident Pashtuns called 'Taliban' in the US press:
Aljazeera English reports on new tactics of the Taliban:
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/28/2009 12:53:00 AM
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10 Comments:
Naturally pashtons are born so violent that if you place 10 families of them in the paradise, after you will never be able to see peace in the paradise. One of the main reasons for the long unrests in Afghanistan and Pakistan is that these two country have pashton citizens. You can only find violence in those parts of Afghanistan where there is a few pashton family living. Their violent nature have no connection to Islam or the Muslim world or occupation of Afghanistan by foreign countries, it is just some kind of problem in their blood. One of the main reasons behind the lack of progress in the South-Asian sub-continent is because we have pashton warlords and virus existing there with so narrow minded ideas in the region for the past hundreds of years.
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In what is shaping up to be the biggest logistical challenge since the Vietnam War, the Pentagon is grappling with how to transfer out what a top official calls "mountains of equipment," along with 143,000 troops and a similar number of civilians, amid the continuing threat of roadside bombs, ambushes, and suicide attacks from insurgents and terrorists.
There are worries, too, that arms will fall into the wrong hands, or that the complex withdrawal will drain resources needed for the buildup of the war effort in Afghanistan.
'wealth of nations' comment is sheer nonsense. It is not only Pashtuns who are violent, entire Afghanistan is riddled with killing war lords. The Uzbek leader in Mazar-e-Sharif has killed nearly 1,000 Afghans by locking them up in cargo containers without food or toilet facilities for months on end, only the dead bodies emerged in the end. Similarly when Ahmad Shah Masood forces occupied Kabul briefly, they looted every house and raped every woman they could lay their hands on. In fact the Northern Alliance has proven much more cruel and ruthless.
General Stanley McChrystal says usa military must work for the safety of the Afghan people, even if it means temporarily allowing the Taliban to operate more freely in remote areas
Q & A with General Stanley McChrystal
The above comment is a classic example of bigotry and nonsense.
Iraqi police officers and soldiers raided a camp near Baghdad that is home to an Iranian opposition group, Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, that has supplied intelligence information to US forces but that has long been an irritant to Iran
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The first overland link to the Internet will drive down prices and bring more opportunities for Afghans, say officials. But security has prevented parts of the network from being finished.
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"Naturally ------- are born so violent that if you place 10 families of them in the paradise, after you will never be able to see peace in the paradise."
Definitive rotten racism.
FYI: “Armageddon at the Top of the World” is a kind of insider's = Middle Eastern scholars' homage to the book, War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet written by Eric Margolis ;-) His latest work, American Raj: Liberation or Domination? : Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World is, imho a great companion piece to the Professor's book, Engaging the Muslim World. Margolis, himself is a fascinating character: born into a fabulously wealthy family ~ his father a precocious investor; his mother, Nexhmie Zaimi was one of the first American female journalists to report from the Middle East. Unburdened by the rigors of academia (unlike our dear Professor), Margolis is a journalist - dilettante, dividing his time between Paris and TheStates... though anyone who's ever seen the Professor chillin' out in his black leather jacket and shades would swear that these two guys were two peas from the same pod {grin}
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