Thousands rally against Musharraf

to protest rising unemployment and inflation

The Qur'an is perfect -- but of course, it predates Adam Smith, von Mises, and Keynes. Perhaps if Mohammed actually knew anything about modern financial economics, he might have been wise enough to include the tenets in his handbook so that his followers 1,300 years later would have a clue as to how to function in a modern economy. But of course, usury is a no-no and we wouldn't want to emulate the sons of the pigs and monkeys beheaded in Medina.

And for the evil doing of those Jewry, we have forbidden them certain good things that were permitted to them and for their barring from God's way. And for taking usury, that they were prohibited, and we have prepared for the un- believers among them a painful chastisement." know! Say, 'My Lord has only forbidden indecencies the inward and the outward, and sin, and unjust insolence, and that you associate with God that for which He sent down never authority and that you say concerning God such as you know not' ". (Al-Aarat 32, 33).

I am here on the ground seeing it, getting sucked in. At first I thought this movement is amazing and unexpected, as President Mushi is the best man we have had for a while. However thinking about it again I am not so surprised particularly the “pandering to America” bit, this is the strand of policy that people cannot stomach.

The American connection is sweet and bitter. Sweet because there is little sense in being on bad terms with the bully on the block but bitter because of the unequal nature of this relationship.

When September 11 happened, falling in with American wishes was the only option in town. The skeletons in the government’s cupboard left them with no other option. General Zia’s Afghan policy, with its crowning glory “the rise of the Taliban”, was an unmitigated disaster, (but it is still amazing how people still want to support them over the Americans).

IMHO the Afgan policy could never be sustained over the long-term anyway. It has also had a bit of a blow back effect in that real (external struggle) jihadi elements within Pakistan are spinning around to attack the government, despite what Mushi says. He is trying to control them but this is easier said than done.

The military command now woos the mainstream parties and denounces the mullahs for 'extremism' but they are not finding it easy as they have a lot of support.

Again IMHO the Americans are not all bad, people forget to remember that while peace with India was a long overdue, the push for it came from American tutelage, possibly the only one positive aspect of our American connection, people here however have short memories of that.

The American interest however in Pakistan is getting us to focus the on the Pakistan-Afghan border, and stripping the veil from our nuclear secrets. They ask “With the Americans are all over Pakistan now, will the centrifuges in the Khan Research Laboratories be allowed to spin, why should this be up to the bully on the block. This has left our (small but powerful) nuclear community is in a state bordering on panic, it means that our nuclear programme is frozen.

You cannot imagine the intensity of feeling about this…this is our pride & joy …something only this nation of Islam has managed to do.

What hurts people is when the Americans say “bend” we fall on our knees, our zeal is taking us beyond necessity, even you Americans are surprised not quite expecting the lengths to which Mushi went to meet their demands. It is this bending that is so hated.

“So, no more bending , We can manage without them, we can defend ourselves, our allegiance should be with our Taliban brothren….they are the Umma…they and our nucleur capability is our friend…..the infidel American is not”

These are the kind of shouting that I hear at the moment and it is scary….for the future is unknown, I don’t want to see a military crackdown, and equally our policy should be dictated by us.

I hope that the government sees that there is no future in supporting the Taliban, that experiment must be behind us. We have 145 million of our own people that need their support.

Naseem:

What kind of idiot logic do you and your country men employ that states that if someone acts in accordance with the wishes of the US government that it is inherently bad and that the only viable option is to throw your lot in with the Taliban and other Islamists?

Pakistan has been the rogue state and bully boy of the Indian subcontinent at least since Zia Al-Haq's days, if not earlier. It has received a lot of foreign aid from the West over the years as an inducement to change its ways, so quit your whining about US dominance. They are a far more benign if not benevolent wielder of power than Pakistan will ever be.

Nuclear weapons are Pakistan's only national pride? Why would such destructive weapons be a source of 'pride' for anyone?

Geoff

The Pakistani poster above reports that he, and many Pakistanis, consider America to be"the bully on the block."That is quite a judgment, after four decades of the American government supporting Pakistan to the hilt, supplying it with every sort of advanced weaponry (partly because American officials loved dealing with those ramrod-straight, mustachioed, sometimes Sandhurst-educated Pakistani generals, all very pukka sahib as opposed to those nasty leftists, some of them from the Christian, but also Marxist, Indian state of Kerala, and of course those Bandung-conference leftover leftists such as Krishna Menon). The Cold War, for the United States, meant that Islam was a Good Thing. For though no one knew a damn thing about Islam, they knew that Religion and Atheistic Communism Did Not Mix, and who was more religious than those devout Muslims. Of course it was true -- Islam and Communism don't mix. But the Nazis and the Communists did not mix, either (though all three Total Systems have much in common), and yet, during World War II, we had no difficulty in making common cause with Soviet Russia.

Durinig the Cold War, this inability to see Islam for what it was, is, and will be -- a totalitarian threat at least as great, and probably a good deal greater, than Communism -- led to certain obvious failures, and certain failures that remain unobvious. Among the obvious failures was the CENTO military organization, with Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan enrolled in a supposedly non-Communist military alliance meant to mimic NATO, under American (and British) leadership. It came to nothing, for it was nothing -- except that the Americans were locked into the myth of stout Muslim allies.

The second was the firm entrenchment of the myth of a benevolent Saudi Arabia, our "staunch ally" a notion promoted by ARAMCO in its official publications and through a powerful network of Washington agents, beginning in the 1950s, and whose power only grew. No one knew much about Saudi Arabia, and Islam itself was hardly understood and, in the State Department, remains understood. Loy Henderson was not reading Arthur Jeffery or C. Snouck Hurgronje in 1948, or ever. Nor were those children of Beirut missionaries who comprised such a large percentage of what came to be called Arabists. They were akin in their attitudes, these non-Arab scions of Christian missionaries, to islamochristians, that is, Christians who, because of the pull of their Arab identity, had internalized, and then promoted views that are essentially Islamic (such as the impermissibility of Israel, as an Infidel sovereignty, to exist, whatever its size, and however long and devious the means to eliminate it, within the dar al-Islam). Curious, is it not, that no one has noted that the ethnic pull for Arabs (who even if Christian sense that the Arab claim to fame is based on Islam) trumps resentment over their treatment as dhimmis, whereas non-Arab Christians in Muslim-ruled lands – Christians in Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or Indonesia, not having this ethnic pull, do not identify with the Muslim besiegers of Israel).

That myth of Saudi Arabia as an ally effectively entrusted our energy fate, our energy policy, to the dreamy idea that Saudi Arabia would “moderate” oil prices “as a favor” to us. It never has, it never will. The Saudi oil policy is always based on one thing: cold calculation of how to maximize, over time, the total revenues to be obtained from Saudi oil reserves. This means a constant calculation of what rises in price will do, over what period of time, and with what elasticity, to demand for oil. Many factors – technological developments in other forms of energy (can coal be cleaned? Can nuclear energy be made safer, or solar energy be made cheaper?), the likely drops or rises in demand, and so on must all be factored in. But “friendship” and “doing favors” for America, however often this may be claimed, has never been a part of Saudi oil decisions. No matter how many times the absurdity of this proposition is demonstrated, it keeps coming back – because there is a powerful lobby of Saudi-funded agents, who recycle petrodollars for their personal benefit, as lawyers, investment bankers, public relations experts, and who are simply Saudi hirelings, and continue to attempt, with diminishing success, to fool us about Saudi Arabia. During the Cold War, of course, Saudi Arabia was a Stout Friend, and it was the Saudis who helped us in supplying the Muhajideen in Afghanistan. There are those who still feel that the Americans did the right thing in Afghanistan. There are others who may feel, at this point, that perhaps a Soviet puppet there would not have been worse than the Taliban, and that the Soviet Union would have crumbled on its own, for enough of its own elite began to understand its failures (which is why it crumbled) and did not need defeat in Afghanistan.

Still another country misperceived was Turkey. Turkish troops performed bravely in the Korean War. Turkey was a member of CENTO, so temporary and so silly as it was. Turkey was a place that supplied airbases and listening posts. And Turkey was both “secular” and straightforward, just like those mustachioed Pakistani generals who were so much more pleasing than the messy, fussy, dangerously leftist Indians (so they were perceived) in the 1950s and 1960s. So Turkey became a “staunch ally.” There was certainly more truth to this than in the same label affixed to Saudi Arabia. But it depended on Kemalism, on the constraints on Islam. And as we now know, when Islam came back, and it has come back (or rather, since it had never left, but had been tied down) to Turkey, that inevitably means the kind of anti-Infidel (i.e., anti-American) attitudes that can be seen in the Turkish press, and in the Turkish government, and the Turkish public. The secularists of Turkey were not sufficiently grateful to Ataturk; they thought Islam was permanently put in its rightful place, and that only their cooks and drivers, from the poorer sections of Istanbul, or the countryside, took Islam seriously – they are beginning to see that they were wrong. And they now may dimly understand that Erdogan is clever, and a real threat, and that they will have to hold fast to the army, rather than allow him to destroy the army’s power to step in.

Islam was not opposed to Communism because it was totalitarian and against human freedom. For Islam has much in common with Communism: it is totalitarian, it is against human freedom, and especially of freedom of conscience. It was a mistake to believe that Saudi Arabia was a “staunch ally” or an ally of any sort. It was a mistake to support Pakistan to the hilt, and to allow that country to acquire nuclear weapons, or to continue to bribe the Pakistani for their cooperation, which is limited to picking up Al-Qaeda members and not, much more importantly, at a minimum to sending A. Q. Khan to this country for interrogation, but which should include handing over the weapons he developed – or risking the complete destruction of the Pakistani economy and of supporting an Indian pre-emptive strike so as to ensure that no Muslim state, or group within that state, ever acquires weapons of mass destruction.

The notion that the Pakistanis, after their support of the Taliban, after A. Q. Khan helping to endanger the United States by selling the most detailed nuclear plans toNorth Korea, Iran, and Libya, and perhaps to Egypt (the Egyptians have put the $60 billion in American aid to purposes the Americans, endlessly trusting, never intended), after refusing to allow the Americans to interrogate Mr. A. Q. (tellingly, now a national hero in Pakistan), having received recently even more billions of dollars from the Americans in outright aid and debt relief, have cause for complaint – after decades of double-dealinig and meretriciousness in every way (the Taliban, A. Q. Khan, etc.) should dare to complain about America as a bully makes one’s blood boil. Pakistan cannot be trusted, not now, and not ever. It is a Muslim country. It is a country whose people do not recognize that they have no other history because, though they are obviously the descendants of Hindus forced to convert by the onerous conditions of dhimmitude, or forcibly converted at the point of a sword, they refuse to recognize their own ancestors, their own pre-Islamic history. All they have to sustain and console them is Islam. That’s it. Nothing else. They cannot bear reality. And they will be that way as long as they remain fervently, even fanatically, Muslim. All of their political and economic and social and intellecteual failures come from Islam – but this is the one thing, the thing above all other things, that they cannot allow themselves to recognize. It would disorient them, drive many of them mad.

And therefore, they must blame the Americans. It fits their conspiratorial view of the world, their crazed susceptibility to rumors, their hatred of the Infidels. Even educated Pakistanis have a milder, watered-down version of the same, that they feed to credulous foreigners and journalists, many of whom simply repeat these stories without criticial examination (see, e.g., David Rohde of The Times).

They can do no other. But we can. We are free to analyze things as they are, and to relate the failures of Islamic societies, and their danger to us, to the overwhelming fact of those societies, their Given – Islam itself.

Naseem,
Immediately in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush stuck a sword to Pakistan's neck and gave it a choice. Your President wisely made the correct choice (for your countrys sake). Bush's ultimatum in my opinion was a strategic masterstroke in the sense that your country did not get caught up in the Afgan war. Your citizen's should be grateful for this but most of us know that your people are too brainwashed by Islam to realize this. Your society is second only to Saudi Arabia in terms of racist, bigoted, fascist,(I could go on but you get the point) behaviour and make no mistake, if your islamofascits step out of line the bully on the block will bring his club down on all of your heads so you better hope Uncle Mushie prevails. Oh and don't count on your allah nukes saving your asses as they will never leave your airspace before detonating. Good luck to lyour country your'e going to need it!

Naseem,

The tripe you peddle is so typical of "your kind"
pakistan exists on American charity.
Your economy would collapse if the USA didn't give you paks or the the other useless non productive islamic world aid you would go belly up.

iF the USA is so evil how come so many moslems want to live there ?
does it offer something that an islamic state doesn't ?
like:
freedom, justice,equality, economic opportunity ?
Infact that's the gripe with islam isn't it.
The reality is it offers everything but delivers nothing.
Anywhere is better than an islamic country.
Thats why paks/bangladeshi stream across the border into India.

Tell me just how many bangladeshis were murdered by pakistan in 1970-72?, I believe the figure is about 3.5 million.

What was the name of the pakistani officer who commanded the pak brigade that suppressed the palistinians in jordan during Black September ?
I believe it was brigadier zia ul haq
sound familiar ?

You pakistani's are absolutly loathed by the arabs, yet still you grovel at the feet of your masters.
When pakistan plays cricket, the fans all wear those silly arab scarves/tea towels, pretending they are arabs.
Oh but yes you are all "brothers in islam" are you not ?
Is that why arab men can marry pak women, but arab women are not allowed to marry pak men ?
I believe SA specifically has banned women from marrying pak men.

but still the reality of islam is failure. This is why the islamic world indulges in these twisted juvenile conspiracy theories.

This URL has been posted before but it is worth doing so again.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=40236

Why is the islamic world so unproductive ?

Regards to all.
my deepest sympathy for you nasneen

AI

PS.
Although i have never met them I believe i have a couple of distant cousins in the US forces, no doubt they are doing the same thing as my cousins in the Indian forces.....kiliing beasts !