Tragedy is the Direct Result of:

Ex-generals’ wisdom

February 07, 2008 Thursday Muharram 28, 1429

http://www.dawn.com/2008/02/07/ed.htm

MIRZA Aslam Beg’s views about the freedom struggle in Kashmir and his recipe for the territory’s liberation deserve to be taken note of, for they come from a retired general who played a leading role in Pakistan’s Afghan and Kashmir policies. Even though an elected government had come to power in November 1988, it was President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Mirza Aslam Beg as army chief who called the shots in foreign policy matters and succeeded through manipulative politics to sideline Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. It goes without saying that the Kashmiri uprising following rigged elections in 1987 had an indigenous character. It attracted world attention and drew the sympathy of freedom-loving people because it was a spontaneous reaction to an election that India had rigged to foist a puppet regime on the people of Kashmir. Till then, Islamabad’s policy had been to give moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmir people’s struggle. However, the induction of jihadi organisations in both Kashmir and Afghanistan with full support from the ISI transformed the situation to the disadvantage of the people of Kashmir. From then on, the world media would speak of terrorism from across the LoC rather than the freedom struggle in Kashmir.

The patronage of the militant organisations had disastrous consequences for Pakistan, for they became a government within a government. In Afghanistan, even after the Soviets pulled out, the ISI-supported Taliban captured the country after a protracted civil war whose ultimate victims were the Afghan people. Today, the remnants of those Taliban have turned Swat and Fata into battle zones, having inflicted on the army casualties which run into thousands. Now Mirza Aslam Beg would like to boost the jihadi organisations and in the process help Taliban terrorists kill Pakistani civilians and soldiers of the same army whose chief he once was.

The lot that gathered in Rawalpindi at Tuesday’s seminar, held by the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen’s Society on Kashmir Day, have nothing to their credit. Their conscience did not rebel when the men in khaki shred the Constitution, jailed or hanged prime ministers, flogged dissidents and gagged the media. Mirza Aslam Beg especially mouthed some outlandish ideas: he spoke of the ‘strategic defiance’ of America by Iraq in the run-up to the first Gulf War and then sent troops to Saudi Arabia for Gen Schwarzkopf’s benefit. He also had no qualms of conscience about shamelessly pressuring the judiciary and perverting the electoral process by distributing Rs140m to his favourite parties to create the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad to defeat the PPP in the 1990 election. The terror that stalks Pakistan today owes its birth in no small measure to the ex-ISI chiefs who were there at the Rawalpindi meeting. The least good these retired generals can do is to keep quiet. Their criticism of another retired general, President Pervez Musharraf, may be justified, but that does not make them heroes. It is amazing to note that what has stirred these men is not any love for principles but a spirit of vengeance against President Musharraf, who had some truth to say about his community.

Reasons for Lahore Tragedy:

“QUOTE”

Excerpts from a Diplomatic Gathering in 80s

“”The Soviet Foreign Minister, Gromyko, speaking in New Delhi on February 12, 1980 had warned that, “If Pakistan continues to serve as a puppet of imperialism in the future; it will jeopardize its existence and its integrity as an independent state.” The United States, too, could in certain circumstances accept the dismemberment of Pakistan as it did in 1971. Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State during President Nixon’s administration, had said: “In my conversation with Ambassador Jha I reiterated my constant theme that we considered Indian and American long term interests as congruent …. I emphasized that the United States did not insist that East Bengal remain part of Pakistan. On the contrary, we accepted autonomy as inevitable and independence as possible. A war was senseless; Bangladesh would come into being by the spring of 1972 if present procedures were given a chance. We differed over method, not aim.”On October 7, I told WSAG meeting that if India would accept an evolutionary process, it would achieve most of its objectives with our assistance. If they would co-operate with us we could work out 90 per cent of their problems, like releasing Mujib or attaining some degree of autonomy for Bangladesh, and these steps would lead eventually to their getting it all.” With the return of a Republican administration and keeping United States global interests in mind, it would be prudent to assume that should the US interests in the future be better served by sacrificing Pakistan or a part of it, Henry Kissinger’s successors would not hesitate to do so. Pakistan must, therefore, strive to keep itself together by weakening those forces that are pulling it apart and this cannot be done by force of arms. The use of strong arm methods has shown that the situation did not, to say the least, improve.”

“UNQUOTE”

A renowned Writer Robert D Kaplan had predicted in Mid and Late 90s that several countries are not going to survive and India and Pakistan are amongst those countries. Such theories are launched off and on by the power that be [The USA, IMF and WORLD BANK]to prepare the children of the lesser god for more miseries.

Read the articles of Robert D Kaplan on Baluchistan and India.

Dr Abul Maali Syed’s book The Twin era of Pakistan:

Democracy and Dictatorship. Written in 1992, the book predicts an independent Balochistan in 2006. Dr Syed begins his book by saying ‘Who would have believed that Balochistan, once the least populated and poorest province of Pakistan, would become independent and the third richest oil-producing country after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.’ This may not be a serious venture, but it should be nevertheless worrying especially if one reads it along with the US National Intelligence Committee that spoke of Pakistan as a failed State in 2015.

The Lawless Frontier By Robert D. Kaplan Atlantic Monthly September, 2000

Baluchistan

This past April in Quetta, the bleached-gray, drought-stricken capital of the Pakistani border province of Baluchistan, I awoke to explosions and gunfire. In search of the violence, my translator, Jamil, and I jumped into a four-wheel-drive Toyota and raced through the section of town inhabited by Pashtoon tribesmen. Suddenly we were surrounded by Pakistani soldiers, who forced us out of the car and pointed assault rifles in our faces. While they searched us, I saw two other soldiers with automatic weapons run along a high wall a few feet from where we stood. Shots rang out from inside the adjacent compound. By 11:00 a.m. five people had been killed and twenty wounded, and a large cache of weapons had been confiscated in a raid on the Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami (Pashtoon National People’s Party), a group supporting an Independent “Pashtoonistan” created out of Pakistani territory. The party stood accused of murders and kidnapping. Security forces claimed victory, but reports later circulated that party members had filtered back into the area with weapons.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/future/0222rk.htm

THE COMING ANARCHY by Robert D. Kaplan

How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet

The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994

http://www.TheAtlantic.com/atlantic/election/connection/foreign/anarcf.htm

Pakistan’s problem is more basic still: like much of Africa, the country makes no geographic or demographic sense. It was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, yet there are more subcontinental Muslims outside Pakistan than within it. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan is a patchwork of ethnic groups, increasingly in violent conflict with one another. While the Western media gushes over the fact that the country has a woman Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, Karachi is becoming a subcontinental version of Lagos.

In eight visits to Pakistan, I have never gotten a sense of a cohesive national identity. With as much as 65 percent of its land dependent on intensive irrigation, with wide-scale deforestation, and with a yearly population growth of 2.7 percent (which ensures that the amount of cultivated land per rural inhabitant will plummet), Pakistan is becoming a more and more desperate place. As irrigation in the Indus River basin intensifies to serve two growing populations, Muslim-Hindu strife over falling water tables may be unavoidable.

“India and Pakistan will probably fall apart,” Homer-Dixon predicts. “Their secular governments have less and less legitimacy as well as less management ability over people and resources.” Rather than one bold line dividing the subcontinent into two parts, the future will likely see a lot of thinner lines and smaller parts, with the ethnic entities of Pakhtunistan and Punjab gradually replacing Pakistan in the space between the Central Asian plateau and the heart of the subcontinent. None of this even takes into account climatic change, which, if it occurs in the next century, will further erode the capacity of existing states to cope. India, for instance, receives 70 percent of its precipitation from the monsoon cycle, which planetary warming could disrupt.

http://dieoff.org/page67.htm

http://www.theatlantic.com/srch/?words=the+lawless+frontier

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