Pakistan – Breaking News

 "Treason of the Hawks"

by Stephen Walt

In Every War Must End, his classic study of war termination, Fred Iklé coined the term "treason of the hawks" to describe those tragic situations where hardliners stubbornly refuse to make peace and thereby lead their countries to disaster. Iklé, who served as Ronald Reagan’s under secretary of defense and is certainly no dove, recognized that obstinate opposition to making peace is as dangerous to a nation’s future as naïve pacifism and potentially as damaging as deliberately selling out to the enemy. 

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A heartbreaking extract from the:

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"In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate

Friday, as we all know, is God’s day for the Moslems. We began, my sons and I, Qassab, graduate of the faculty of engineering, department of construction engineering, at the Islamic university, and Ibrahim, first year at the faculty of accountancy, at “AlAzhar” university. It was a beautiful warm day. I awoke in the morning as usual, did the things that I needed to do, and then the boys awoke, and I asked them to do some chores for me. I decided that, with the help of allah, we would set out for the city together, before the end of the humanitarian ceasefire/truce that the Israeli army declared while it was entering the AlFukhary neighborhood, which is on the border of my private farming land. And so it was, after the Friday noon prayers, we took the things we needed for home and set out in the car, and after 200 meters, we passed a route that was blocked because of tanks and heavy mechanical equipment which had been used to surround the area the night before, and we managed despite the digging works to pass another 700 meters, and then we found a route that was being used by heavy mechanical equipment, it was a harder way than the one before, but because our car was a land rover jeep I managed to go through it, and I said to my children, “I am going to cross this road-hump, which looks like a sand roadblock” and I continued and said “I am not driving a Subaru” and I called for the help of allah.

All the way I took care to go according to the instructions, as they were written for me. From the AlUmur Mosque “AlReda” route we passed through the “Electricity” square [‘Muhawal alQahraba’]. I proceeded straight on, intending to pass through a side alley that I know well. I was surprised to discover an empty area, and when I looked to my left, I was surprised to see two soil roadblocks, with a tank in one of them. This was an unexpected surprise. I raised my hand as in greeting, no one stopped me. I continued driving for another 50 meters and then bursts of gunfire were shot at me.

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Obama’s AfPak war engulfs Pakistan’s Swat Valley
By James Cogan

A humanitarian catastrophe is taking place in areas of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP), as a result of the Obama administration’s expansion of the occupation of Afghanistan into the so-called "AfPak war".

Over the past seven years, ethnic Pashtun Islamist movements in NWFP and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have lent assistance to the resistance being waged against the American-led forces in Afghanistan by the Pashtun-based Taliban, including by disrupting US and NATO supply routes through Pakistan.

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Palestine – do the right thing

by George Galloway MP

“Where is the ummah; where is this Arab world they tell us about in school.”

Those words will forever remain etched on my brain. They were spoken by a 10 year old girl in a bombed out ruin in Gaza in March. She had lost almost her entire family in the 22-day Israeli bombardment earlier this year. The second time she spoke, it was to the back of my head. I had to turn away; what answer could you give her?

While Hugo Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador to Venezuela, the leaders of the Arab League, with a handful of exceptions, spent those murderous weeks in December and January scarcely summoning even the synthetic indignation that has so often attended previous bloody episodes in the Palestinian tragedy.

But that was not so of public opinion, not only in the Muslim world, but mobilized on the streets of Western capitals. In Britain, over 100,000 people took to the streets and night after night we blockaded the Israeli embassy. Above all, the Gaza onslaught produced in the US an unprecedented outpouring. There have, for sure, been protests before, but this has turned out to be more than an ephemeral release of impotent rage. Something is changing.

That has become more and more apparent to me over the last two months as I’ve spoken on Palestine at packed meetings and fundraisers across the US.  The opinion polls in January showed a plurality of Americans against the Israeli onslaught. It may not have been a surprise to those of us who witnessed Ariel Sharon’s leveling of Beirut in the late summer of 1982, but the sight of white phosphorous – which forms a gaseous cloud – being used against civilians in Gaza stunned the senses of millions or people who had up to that point been led to believe that it was somehow the Palestinians who were occupying Israeli land rather than the other way round.

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