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Pakistan on the Brink by Ahmed Rashid: review


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9214669/Pakistan-on-the-Brink-by-Ahmed-Rashid-review.html

Pakistan on the Brink by Ahmed Rashid: review

By Duncan Gardham Last Updated: 12:26PM BST 23/04/2012
Ahmed Rashid’s new books reveals a Pakistan crippled by poor leadership, says Duncan Gardham

As Britain desperately tries to rescue some pride from its imminent withdrawal from Afghanistan, the best-case scenario may be that we leave behind a less stable and more corrupt version of Pakistan.

The vision of that country painted by Ahmed Rashid, one of the leading analysts of the “Af-Pak” relationship, is not an encouraging one. “Pakistan is now considered the most fragile place in the world… It is the most unstable country and the most vulnerable to terrorist violence, political change or economic collapse,” he writes in his latest book, Pakistan on the Brink.

While it is not yet a failed state, Rashid admits that its multiple long-term and short-term problems seem “insurmountable by the present military and civilian leadership”.

Among the myriad problems are the corrupt and rundown bureaucracy, judiciary and police force and an elite that “lacks all sense of responsibility towards the public, refuses to pay taxes and is immeasurably corrupt”. There is no drinking water for a third of the population, no electricity for up to 16 hours a day and half the school-age children do not go to school, meaning “young men face a future of little promise and are ready to sign on to jihad”.

The judiciary is a “broken instrument incapable of handing down judgments to the real criminals” and retired intelligence officers spread conspiracy theories and blame America on a plethora of high-octane chat shows.

Meanwhile, the West cannot afford to continue the fight in Afghanistan and the question is, in the words of one anonymous Western ambassador, “will there be an Afghan army and civil service to take over when we leave, or will we just switch off the lights?”

Even if you’re optimistic the Afghan state will still be a “basket case” dependent on receiving more than $8 billion (£5 bn) in aid each year, Rashid points out.

Pakistan is not much better, having sought bail-outs from the IMF 11 times since 1988 and completed just one of their programmes (under General Pervez Musharraf in 2001) and remaining dependent on $4.8 billion (£3 bn) in foreign assistance. Debt servicing and defence take up 60 per cent of the Pakistani budget and growth was just 2.6 per cent last year, compared with around 7 per cent next door in India.

Pakistan on the Brink follows on from where Descent into Chaos (2008) – on David Cameron’s summer reading list for his shadow cabinet – left off. It provides a much-needed update on what has happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past four years, particularly the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the rapid breakdown of the US relationship with Pakistan and attempts to make peace with the Taliban.

Rashid is as critical of President Barack Obama’s approach to Afghanistan as he was of President George W Bush in his last book. It was clear that the US gambled on Hamid Karzai losing the 2009 presidential elections and by the time he won, the relationship had disintegrated almost beyond repair.

“Handling a wary president preoccupied with keeping his own head requires a personal touch,” Rashid says of his old friend, before adding that “Karzai was his own worst enemy” who failed to accept that corruption undermined his legitimacy.

The problem is that the leadership in Pakistan is no better. “For too long the military and the political parties have neglected their one single task, which is to make life better for their people,” he concludes.

Rashid’s thesis is that the military is in the driving seat, deciding policy, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the detriment of both nations. That ignores the theory that the military is, in the words of one analyst, “the only institution that really works in Pakistan”, as well as Nato’s Herculean efforts in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, if Pakistan follows its present chosen path – a “paranoid insecure” state which uses “extremists and diplomatic blackmail” – it will, he warns, “lose everything in Afghanistan”.

This excellent book summarises the challenges faced by both countries – although the solutions are difficult to see. A former Daily Telegraph correspondent in Pakistan, Rashid has an eye for the big picture as well as a journalist’s nose for detail.

Pakistan has enormous latent goodwill and expertise in a generation of young Britons with their roots in Pakistan. Like their neighbours across the Khyber Pass, they have spectacular natural beauty, plentiful natural resources, a strategic position for trade, an evocative history and a people with eyes that sparkle with untapped potential – if only their leaders had more vision.

Pakistan on the Brink: the Future of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the West

by Ahmed Rashid

256pp, Allen Lane, £18 (plus £1.25 P&P) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £20, ebook £20)

Arrogance of being President while being Black


Arrogance of being President while being Black

This is an excellent article written by a someone who is realistic (and happens to be White).The very last paragraph says it all.

A little long but worth the read to the end

AUTHOR UNKNOWN but it is all over the web.

ALL I CAN SAY IS WOW!!!!!

Arrogance of being President while being Black

I don’t think anyone was under some real illusion that the election of Barack Obama actually means the end of racism in America . I’m pretty sure that the president-elect knew it better than anyone. After all, he saw it every day, from the moment he announced his candidacy. To some degree, he saw it within his own party during the primaries. And he saw it in all ugliness during the general election. For half of this country, he was “That One”. No matter how big and clear his victory was. No matter how smart he is. No matter how decent he is. No matter what a true patriot he is. No matter how optimistic and positive his vision for America was. All that didn’t matter. Because at the end of the day, he was still black.

I’m quite old. I remember, vaguely, where my parents were on November 22, 1963. I’ve seen so many presidents. Some were feared, some were hated, some were adored, some popular and some not. But all of them, without exception, were treated with the highest respect deserving the office of the president of the United States .

That is until a black man won the right to occupy this office. It’s been 13 months now, and in the eyes of so many, Barack Obama is still that one. He is being disrespected and at the same time being held to the highest standard of any president I’ve ever seen – and not just by the Republican side! He has to perform three times better than any president in history, and even that may not be enough.

For the media, he is many more times just “Obama” than “President Obama”. They create scandals out of nothing issues. It took them at least 6 years to start giving Bush a small part of the shit he deserved. It took them 6 months to begin crap all over Obama because he’s yet to fix the catastrophe that was left for him.

They use condescending tones when they talk about him, and only mildly less condescending when they talk TO him. With anyone else, CNN wouldn’t dare go to commercials every time the president speaks, like they did during that summit on Thursday. They wouldn’t dare be counting how many minutes George Bush or Bill Clinton were talking. Chris Mathews wouldn’t dare make an issue out of Ronald Regan calling members of congress by their first name, like he is not actually the president. They fully cooperate with the Right-Wing smear machine when it comes to president Obama’s national security performance – even if almost every independent and military expert actually thinks that he’s a terrific Commander-in-Chief. You’ll never see them on TV, and virtually no one from the Left, in congress and outside, defend the president on this matter.

I don’t care about the Far-Right. They’re just crazy ignorant Neanderthals. It’s the way the beltway and the mainstream treats this president that is shocking. On Thursday, almost every Republican had no trouble interrupting him in the middle of a sentence. They looked like they’re going to vomit every time they had to say “Mr. president”. They all had this Eric-Cantor-Smirk whenever he spoke. Then they went out and started to spit their stupid talking points, to the delight of the media. Sarah Palin, a woman who can hardly read, thinks that he was “arrogant” towards John McCain, and somehow this is an important news. Because you see, “Obama’s Arrogance” is the talking point of the day.

Oh, those talking points. He is arrogant (because he knows the facts better than all of them combined). He is an elitist (because he uses big words that they don’t understand). He is weak on national security (because he actually thinks about the consequences). He divides the country (well, he did that the day he had the audacity to win the election). Worst of all, he actually thinks that he’s the president. He even dared to say so on Thursday. How arrogant of him. You’d think that previous presidents didn’t have any ego. Somehow it turned out that the one president who treats even his biggest opponents with the utmost respect – is the arrogant one. I wonder why?

I expected that his winning the Presidency would bring out some ugliness, but it’s been far worse than I imagined. The racism coming from the Right is obviously clear and shameless, but there’s also some hidden and maybe subconscious and disturbing underline tone behind some of the things that I read here and throughout the Left blogosphere, even before the end of Obama’s first year – ‘He’s weak, he’s spineless, he’s got no balls, primary him in 2012’. It’ll be dishonest to deny that.

The fact is that for millions in America , Barack Obama is this uppity black man (Not even a “real” black), who received good education only due to affirmative action, and has no right to litter the sacred Oval Office with his skin color. They just can’t accept the fact that the president is a black man, who unlike his predecessor, was actually legally elected. But what’s really sad is that it’s not just the fringe, its deep deep in mainstream America .

Barack Obama’s ability to remain above all this slob, to keep his optimism and his strange and mostly unjustified faith in people, while continuing to gracefully deal with an endless shitstorm – is one of the most inspiring displays of human quality I have ever seen. And I can only hope that the Cosmos is on his side because God is and He never makes a mistake.

Sometimes, they make me feel ashamed to be a white man!!

The Trash of Islam or Islam is a Trash ?


The Trash of Islam or Islam is a Trash ?

via Sultan
Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
.

 

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/11/friday-afternoon-roundup-sore-losers.html

 


The Egyptian city of Cairo, the largest city in the Arab world and the “timeless city” of Obama’s Cairo speech, is suffering from a garbage crisis. The crisis has a very simple cause, the pigs that used to eat the garbage were killed to prevent the spread of Swine Flu. The pigs living in “Garbage City” had served as both organic garbage disposal and food sources for the Zabaleen, families of marginalized Christian Copts who made a living by collecting the garbage, reselling the inorganic garbage and feeding the organic garbage to pigs. The system worked fine so long as there were pigs, but without the pigs, Cairo’s streets are filled with giant mounds of rotting garbage.

It might be shocking for most people to realize that the trash collection system for the largest city in the Arab world, the capital of what passes for Arab Muslim civilization, depended on a class of “untouchable” garbage collectors as young as eight years old, and their pigs to keep the city from drowning in its own garbage. A system that is not simply medieval, but per-medieval, that seems positively Bronze Age. But that is only because the Arab Muslim nations are not actually civilizations in the modern sense, they are post-colonized tribal clumping with bits and pieces of borrowed governmental structures and technology that never quite work right.

And underneath them is something far darker and more primitive, a miserably brutal and ruthless Levantine existence defined not by moral laws, but by tribal ones. And underneath them all are the pigs. Kill the pigs, and the system collapses.

It isn’t just about the piles of reeking trash in Cairo’s streets. The Arab and Muslim world has been exporting far more dangerous forms of waste in the forms of immigration and Islamic radicalism.

Virtually every Arab rulers balances the tension between national allegiance and Islamic law by exporting terrorism abroad, whether it is Arab governments funding suicide bombers in Israel, rabid mosques in Oslo and Manchester or Al Queda hijacked planes racing toward Manhattan– the homelands of Islam have been calculated dumping the garbage they don’t want on foreign shores.

“Don’t fight a civil war, fight a global war”, has been the anthem of the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and numerous other Arab Muslim dictatorships, who extend one crooked hand to the West, and another to Islamic terrorists; dumping their exploding garbage in foreign laps.

The more the angry young men with fierce shovel cut beards go abroad, hoping for a shot at an American GI or an Israeli family or a Thai Buddhist schoolteacher, the more the House of Saud Barberia  can take a deep breath, count their oil revenues and buy another piece of Manhattan or London.

What they have developed is a cyclical system, much like Cairo’s pig trash consumption, except this one exports terrorists abroad where they will pose less of a threat to the endless collection of Princes littering up the endless palaces of the oil rich Gulf states. Wonderful – Science of Islamic Hygiene

Meanwhile the rulers themselves get to play moderates, offering their services to help moderate tensions, in exchange for the proper incentives of course. The benefits of the system allow them to live rich off their ill-gotten oil gains, while treating the toxic waste of Islam as an export they can cash in on.

And then there’s immigration.  This is How Moslims Think.. Wake up America.
Wake up America.The West suffers from low birth rates. By contrast the Ummah suffers from an uncontrollably high one. Just enough Western medicine has poured into Muslim countries to help improve infant survival ratios and mortality rates… but the countries themselves are non-Western and can’t even begin to handle the extra population.

With much of their social and economic systems still stratified based on familial and tribal ties, bribe economies discouraging innovation and foreign investment, and long lists of Islamic Thou Shalt Nots, Muslim nations cannot accommodate their growing populations. And so instead they export them to the West.

And who is it that goes to the West? The huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Not quite. Huddled, perhaps. Yearning to breathe free, not so much. Immigration to the West allows the Muslim world to export those who have few opportunities at the bottom of the ladder or the sons of those at the middle or the top who have trouble fitting in.

Very often those are exactly the type of people eager to listen to Jihad audio cassettes and seek out the angriest mosques. The types of people Egypt or Pakistan or Saudi would like to get rid of. Just more waste being dumped on Western shores.

It’s a bad system, but in a civilization whose major city can be overrun by garbage because all the pigs have died, it’s about as reliable as it gets. Muslim rulers export their waste, which the West seems to want, and in doing so by themselves a measure of immunity from Islamic terrorism, while investing in the possibility of a future Caliphate. Getting in on the ground floor of the Death of the West, so to speak. It’s a win-win situation, until the pigs die of course.

From the perspective of the “moderate Muslims” Exposing the Myth of Moderate Islam that we keep hearing so much about, Bin Laden pushed the limit, upsetting the cycle and bringing war into their own backyard. The result overturned the system and broke the cycle. Too much too soon, was the watchword there. The “moderate Muslims” had no objections to thousands of murdered Americans and other foreigners.

What they had an objection was exceeding the allowable tolerances of Americans and other foreigners for terrorism. Their policy has been to build a Caliphate made of garbage, to turn Europe, America, Canada and Australia into towering trash dumps consisting of Islamic radicals and Muslim immigrants. Enough trash to build into minarets, mold and sculpt into Sharia law and bring an end to the West.

And when that has happened, the moderate Muslim regimes of all the terrorists and Islamabad fancy that they might be the ones left standing to take up the Mohammedan Man’s Burden once again.

9/11 endangered their trash deliveries and woke up some in the West to what was being dumped on their front lawns. 7/7 rang even more alarm bells. Islamic conversions went up, but so did the status of people who had been talking all along about the dangers of immigration and Islamic radicalism. Push. Push-back. And with it comes the rising fear of an end to immigration.

And if the Muslim world can’t export its excess populations and Islamists to the West, where will they go? Asian countries might send out their excess populations as labor contractors, but not even Muslim cities like Dubai are too keen on importing fellow Arabs to do the work, mainly because they know quite well that’s a formula for insuring that no work will get done.

And all those angry young men hanging around Cairo and Riyadh, reading tracts about getting back to authentic Koranic truths, and looking over bomb instructions are another kind of formula, a formula for Islamic regime change at home.

In Cairo, the trash piles are beginning to stink. Worms and rats, and worse things have made it their home. The cycle has been broken and there is no way to fix the system. True civilizations are tool users. Muslim civilizations are tool borrowers who layer text messaging and cell phones over institutions that would make the Dark Ages seem positively enlightened.

There is no way such a system can accommodate real change, or provide opportunities for growing populations. There is no way it can do anything but dump the garbage on someone else’s street and run away.

To talk of a Clash of Civilizations is in some ways futile, because there are no Islamic civilizations, only former colonies and splinters of former colonies, run by whoever was left in charge after the British or the French left, or whoever managed to clamber to power since then. And by their close relatives and friends, and by their son in-laws, second cousins and good friends.

They call themselves Presidents, Ministers and Colonels. They have huge bank accounts and large-scale investments abroad. They have a veneer of technology and cultivated manners. But the aerial shots of skyscrapers and urban nightcaps, storefronts and maps are a facade of civilization, like a well-lit movie set. Underneath it all, there are still pigs eating the garbage.

Israel did not win multiple wars only because of its army’s superiority, but because of the inferiority of its opponents, not in a strategic sense, but in their inability to conduct large-scale warfare. Saddam’s forces demonstrated the same inability to use his giant toy box of Soviet arms and tanks in two wars against the United States and its allies.

Nor could any of his neighbors have done much better. Even Saddam himself understood this, and by the second war, fell back on the default tactic that the Arab world has used against Israel for the last 35 years, to go to ground and focus on hit and run raids, on terrorism and guerrilla warfare. To revert in other words to the way of the bandit and the nomad, to shed any pretense of civilization and focus on pure murder and terror. To shed human skin in favor of the savage that had always been lurking underneath.

The rise of Islam is the manifestation of more than just frustration with Western civilization or globalism; but a frustration with their own incompetence at grasping and implementing the structures and achievements of those civilizations at home. Muslims are either terrorists or potential terrorists

Lusting after the glory of a worldwide Caliphate and the imaginary perfection of Islamic law, is the way that those who have failed at aping Western civilization can drown their inferiority complexes in rituals of blood and death.

Inwardly they know that there is no golden collection of Minarets ruled by a wise Caliph waiting for them at the end of the road. The virgins with their raisins are a better bet, because they are a more plausible endgame, than the idea that even a few million Muslims could get along, let alone the whole billion. The dream of a Caliphate wasn’t broken at the gates of Vienna or with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

It was never real and could never be real, because Arab Islamic civilization had never reached the point where it could run anything that size without a lot of outside help, and could never keep it together without breaking down into infighting because it lacked any political structure besides nepotism and bribery.

Islam has become the magic token, the catchall idea for some higher wisdom that will fix all of the faults of the Muslim world, without its followers having to actually confront social problems and initiate real reforms– and most of all to break out of their rut and actually advance a few runs up the ladder of civilization. Instead Islam wills them to sink deeper still, to toss aside Western civilization while hanging on to whatever choice bits are useful for Jihad, and to answer all difficult questions with the blade of a sharpened sword.

It is no wonder that this form of bloody magical thinking is most popular in the shadow of the West itself, in the suburbs and ghettos hiding from the light, whose denizens are faced with either trying to be something they’re not, or trying to impose their dominance on a civilization, who through the light of faith suddenly appears degenerate and inferior.

The Russians made that same choice with Communism, emerging as a horde to plunder the wealthier and more accomplished nations of Eastern Europe. The Germans made that choice with Nazism to demonstrate their superiority by subjugating all their former enemies and neighbors.

The Muslim world is making that choice again with Islamism. And by treating their trash as if were the finest gold, we are helping them make it. And covering our own streets with the trash of Islam.