The World We Live In !!

Shahid R. Siddiqi began his career in the Pakistan Air Force, and later joined the private sector where he was until recently in a senior management position. At the same time, he worked as a broadcaster with Radio Pakistan and was the Islamabad bureau chief of the English weekly magazine, “Pakistan & Gulf Economist“. In the U.S. in 1994, he co-founded the Asian American Republican Club in Maryland to encourage the participation of Asian Americans in the mainstream political process. He now writes columns, with articles appearing in the Pakistan daily Dawn and The Nation, among others. He is a contributing writer for Foreign Policy Journal.

In an interview with Foreign Policy Journal, Mr. Siddiqi explains Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive against militant groups in the Swat district and the context in which the government made the decision to launch it. He explains why the Pakistan Taliban had support in the Swat Valley, how a peace deal between the militants and the government came about, and why it collapsed.

The Western media reported at the time that the peace deal between the Pakistani government and militants linked to the Pakistan Taliban would allow Shariah, or Islamic Law, to be implemented in the Swat district. But in an interview President Asif Ali Zardari suggested that this wasn’t really an accurate characterization of the deal. What exactly was the truce agreement between the government and the militants?

The issue of the so-called Shariah law, which in fact was Nizam-e-Adal (meaning “The System of Justice’), was quiet simple but somehow got distorted due to involvement of the group of religious militants that espoused it, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or “Pakistan Taliban”), who had now expanded their terrorist activities into the settled area of Swat moving in from the adjoining Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where they were operating under Baitullah Mehsud.

Until about a decade back this area was under a similar law until the government of Pakistan decided to change this situation and extend into it the same law that covered the rest of the country. The old law made life easy and simple for the local folks who understood it, and it enabled them to get quick justice at their doorstep. They were unhappy with the change because now the courts were distantly located, corrupt, and utterly inefficient. Clearly, the militants had the support of the local population in this demand. Read more…

The issue of militancy and the Taliban continues to be framed erroneously — most recently as a variant of the “with us or against us” choice: either one supports the military operation in Swat and Fata or one is supportive of the Taliban. Just as the Bush choice has been largely responsible for the chaos and radicalisation in the Muslim world, so the Pakistani variant doing the rounds currently misses the real issue. After all, there is and always has been a consensus in Pakistan that militant extremism should be crushed and the writ of the state and government established.

The disagreement is over how to go about achieving this objective. Should there be an attempt to go to the root causes of militancy and then to resolve the issue through a multi-pronged strategy including dialogue backed by state power as well as policies to bring in the marginalised population by giving them a viable stake in the system? Or does the solution lie in simply unleashing indiscriminate military force to establish the writ of the state while the roots of the problem continue to fester?

Having just returned from a visit to the US organised by the Pakistani community to raise money for Shaukat Khanum Hospital, as a result of meetings arranged by the community I had the opportunity to meet with Senator John Kerry and Congressman Gary Ackerman, both influential players in the context of our region. I was surprised to find both quite open to rethinking their present Afghan strategy. In fact, they have realised that the continuation of the military-centric Bush approach has failed and new options must be examined. There is, therefore, a need to engage with those in the US seeking more viable alternatives for this region as well as with members of the Obama administration. A meaningful engagement can be done through sending a delegation of experts who understand the tribal areas and Afghanistan – not simply the self-anointed “experts” — referred to by one analyst as “native Pakistani informer(s) — who speak what the traditionalists in the US want to hear. I am convinced that a powerful presentation can be made about the need for a US exit strategy from Afghanistan and I believe the Obama Administration can be made to see the following points: Read more…

Israeli forces killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians and destroyed thousands of homes in Gaza in attacks which breached the laws of war, Amnesty International concluded in a new report published on Thursday. Operation ‘Cast Lead’: 22 days of death and destruction, is the first comprehensive report to be published on the conflict, which took place earlier this year.

“Israel’s failure to properly investigate its forces’ conduct in Gaza, including war crimes, and its continuing refusal to cooperate with the UN international independent fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone, is evidence of its intention to avoid public scrutiny and accountability,” said Donatella Rovera, who headed a field research mission to Gaza and southern Israel during and after the conflict.

“The international community, led by the UN Security Council, must use all its leverage to ensure that Israel cooperates fully with the Goldstone inquiry, which now offers the best means to establish the truth.”

Impunity for war crimes in Gaza and southern Israel a recipe for further civilian suffering | Amnesty International.

Recently, I started using an old family friend as a travel agent. Before then, we’d never had occasion to email one another. From the start, I was shocked to find that she regularly wrote her emails exclusively in all uppercase letters. I politely mentioned that using all caps in an email is the equivalent of screaming in voice conversations and she said she appreciated the tip. Still, I couldn’t help wondering how a professional could get by today without mastering one of the most basic tenets of email manners.

And that’s not the only email etiquette breach that makes me scratch my head. Every time I have to scroll through 50 email addresses before reading a message from a colleague who used the cc rather than bcc function, I find myself wishing that some kind of licensing or training were required before people were allowed to get on email.

Since that’s never going to happen, here are a few ways to ensure that your email style makes you look as smart as possible and doesn’t annoy those on the receiving end of your messages.

• by Marci Alboher, Working the New Economy, on Sun Jun 28, 2009 7:22pm PDT

How to improve your email etiquette – Manage Your Life on Shine.

News corporation uses photo from pro-Ahmadinejad rally, claims it represents anti-government protest

The BBC has again been caught engaging in mass public deception by using photographs of pro-Ahmadinejad rallies in Iran and claiming they represent anti-government protests in favor of Hossein Mousavi.

An image used by the L.A. Times on the front page of its website Tuesday showed Iranian President Ahmadinejad waving to a crowd of supporters at a public event.

In a story covering the election protests yesterday, the BBC News website used a closer shot of the same scene, but with Ahmadinejad cut out of the frame. The caption under the photograph read, ‘Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests’.

The BBC photograph is clearly a similar shot of the same pro-Ahmadinejad rally featured in the L.A. Times image, yet the caption erroneously claims it represents anti-Ahmadinejad protesters.

See the screenshots below (click to enlarge).

“Well I guess it sure was a popular fictional rally for Mousavi, because I later noticed while browsing the news sites a familiar picture on the BBC’s lead Iran story – it shows the same crowd, zoomed in to cut out Ahmadinejad,” a reader told the WhatReallyHappened website. “It is clearly the same protest as in the background are the same tree and odd circular building. However, the BBC managed to outdo the LA times in quality reporting – their actual comment under the photo from the huge PRO-Ahmadinejad rally reads ‘Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests’ – a blatant lie and deliberately misleading description of what is actually occurring in Iran!”

BBC Caught In Mass Public Deception With Iran Propaganda.

We can all remember a moment when we gazed up at the sky and used our imagination to make familiar shapes out of the clouds.  In folk wisdom, seers practice aeromancy, a form of divination that involves observing atmospheric phenomena and nephomancy, the divination by studying clouds).

What we are witnessing in the Iranian situation resembles this practice, only now the clouds are made of information. This infosphere is not the same as the old chestnut, the “fog of war.” It’s more like what I call the fog-machine of war, and its analysts are performing infomancy.

People are seeing their hopes, fears, and their shadows in this data mist. One of these faith-based assertions is that more info equals more democracy. It’s not just that observers consider the anti-regime protests to be democratic, but they believe the use of social media is inherently democratic (i.e. more freedom of expression).  But we were given official notice early in Obama’s administration that cyberwar is a renewed threat, so why not take heed and understand Iran as a case of warfare? In that light, more info = more infowar; more information means more disinformation.  Propaganda used to come in print form and be dropped from the skies.  Now it’s laterally spread through peer-to-peer networks, creating a bottom-up disinfosphere.

What happens then?  Info droplets get absorbed by more traditional news outlets. Cable news now functions as a mechanism that selects from a haze of unverifiable information and amplifies its choices. CNN seems to be the best example.  At least they’re upfront about it: an anchor previewed an upcoming story by saying they’d be bringing us reports “true or not.” Jack Cafferty noted that the information from Iraq was “Alive but Cloudy”. Even their original segment on Green martyr Neda opened with the disclaimer “the facts surrounding her life and death are difficult to confirm.” This didn’t stop them from replaying the garish spectacle so often that it begs comparison with the paltry coverage of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani victims of US aggression. Read more…