Jawed Naqvi No one is asking Home Minister P. Chidambaram to resign because of the Pune attack, but must he indulge in legal casuistry and deny that the attack in Pune was avoidable and therefore constituted a security breach? – File photo CATCHING the once-a-week flight from Delhi to Karachi last Monday, I overheard a riveting exchange between the immigration officer who was handling my Indian passport and a worried man who rushed to speak to him in a hurry, I suspect, after seeing my bearded profile from a distance. In my banterish way I engaged both of them in … Continue reading Only Indians killed, so no security breached?

Posted by Nadeem F. Paracha  The day President Asif Zardari supposedly unleashed yet another round of the so-called clash between the judiciary and the executive – nay, an ‘independent judiciary’ and a ‘tainted, corrupt executive’ – I rushed home to catch the action on television. You see, the impact and the action that accompanies most ‘political crises’ in Pakistan these days is hardly ever found on the streets of the country; instead, all the hoopla in this respect takes place on TV screens, with most local news channels shifting into the usual hyperbolic, melodramatic mode, screaming bloody apocalypse! As my … Continue reading Clashing and massaging egos whilst Pakistan burns

Bad romance In Pakistan, we hate often, and easily. A friend recently posted a YouTube link for the trailer of a new documentary and Sundance Film Festival entry titled Bhutto on Facebook. The trailer opens with these words: “From one of the most dangerous places on earth… a land where women didn’t matter… comes the story of a woman with the courage to accept her destiny.” The clip draws from interviews of Benazir Bhutto on international television and with private reporters, shots of her from the 1980s, and glimpses of Z.A. Bhutto and her brothers. Young Pakistanis – at home, … Continue reading In Pakistan, we hate often, and easily.

The Islamists Are Not Coming BY CHARLES KURZMAN, IJLAL NAQVI  Do Muslims automatically vote Islamic? That’s the concern conjured up by strongmen from Tunis to Tashkent, and plenty of Western experts agree. They point to the political victories of Islamic parties in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey in recent years and warn that more elections across the Islamic world could turn power over to anti-democratic fundamentalists. But these victories turn out to be exceptions, not the political rule. When we examined results from parliamentary elections in all Muslim societies, we found a very different pattern: Given the choice, voters tend to … Continue reading Religious parties in the Muslim world are hardly the juggernauts they’ve been made out to be.

Eurabian Follies The shoddy and just plain wrong genre that refuses to die. BY JUSTIN VAÏSSE  By 2050, Europe will be unrecognizable. Instead of romantic cafes, Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Germain will be lined with halal butcheries and hookah bars; the street signs in Berlin will be written in Turkish. School-children from Oslo to Naples will read Quranic verses in class, and women will be veiled.  At least, that’s what the authors of the strange new genre of “Eurabia” literature want you to believe. Not all books of this alarmist Europe-is-dying category, which received its most intellectually hefty treatment yet with the … Continue reading Eurabia- the just plain wrong genre that refuses to die

Welcome to Qaedastan Yemen’s coming explosion will make today’s problems seem tame. BY GREGORY D. JOHNSEN  In 2010, Yemen will celebrate the 20th anniversary of national unification. But it won’t be much of a party: This could well be the year Yemen comes apart. Even the brutal 1994 civil war failed to threaten the structural integrity of this country chronically teetering on the verge of disintegration as much as the current crises, all of which may be coming to a head in 2010. Yemen has so many dire problems that it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Al Qaeda is growing in … Continue reading Qaedastan – will make today’s problems seem tame

After Pharaoh Hosni Mubarak’s death — or worse, his failure to give up power — could throw the largest country in the Arab world into chaos. BY ISSANDR AMRANI  Of all the crises that threaten to shake Barack Obama’s presidency, few are more volatile than the ticking time bomb in Egypt, especially terrifying for the very reason that no one knows when it might explode. Hosni Mubarak, the 81-year-old former Air Force marshal who has ruled Egypt as a police state since 1981, might leave office sooner than anyone is expecting, opening a power vacuum that could send this U.S. … Continue reading After Pharaoh Hosni Mubarak’s death?

KSM Doesn’t Deserve to Be a War Criminal BY TOM MALINOWSKI As the U.S. Congress threatens to block funds for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s (KSM’s) civilian trial, critics of President Barack Obama’s approach to prosecuting terrorism have a common refrain: KSM is a combatant, not a criminal. As Sen. John Barrasso recently put it, “These people are at war against the United States and our values. They deserve a military judge and jury.” But does KSM really “deserve” the honor of a military trial? That is a privilege normally reserved for defendants entitled to call themselves warriors. It’s no surprise that … Continue reading Treating terrorists like warriors is exactly what they want.

Charles Ferndale Some time in October last year a thoroughly unpleasant group of extremists proposed that they be allowed to march through the small Wiltshire village of Wootton Bassett, carrying a coffin for every Muslim killed during the war in Afghanistan and along Pakistan’s north-western border. Wootton Basset is near the Royal Air Force base at Lyneham, and all British personnel who die in the Af-Pak conflict are carried through the main street of the village, so mourners can pay the nation’s respects to their fallen soldiers. Clearly, the group which proposed carrying coffins through the streets of Wootton Bassett … Continue reading If coffins were carried in Wootton Bassett

Talat Masood Gen Musharraf spoke ad nauseam on fighting extremism and terrorism. And the West and many of our fellow citizens, especially amongst the elite, mistakenly believed that he was the leader who could really steer the country from this menace and stabilise Pakistan. In reality the reverse was true. The Taliban and militant forces kept expanding their frontiers and the Talibanisation mindset was creeping in while he played politics and pursued his expedient agenda of self-preservation. In the last two years with the coming in of the democratic government and the change in military leadership, the country’s policy of … Continue reading Defeating militancy