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Posted by admin in Bhutto-Zardari Feudal Family Corruption, BOOT THE SCOUNDRELS OR SHOWDAZ, Hypocrites in Islam, LIAR POLITICIANS, Makaar Dushman, Morosi Siyasat & Political Crooks on March 3rd, 2013
Police reached at the site of the blast as the entire city Police is deputed in the engagement ceremony of PPP’s Advisor to CM, Sharmila Farooqi at Mohatta Palace in Clifton area.
PM is busy in the Mohatta Palace as the would be husband of Sharmila Farooqi is the Secretary of PPP Chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and all the high government officials
are at the Mohatta Palace to please Sharmila Farooqi and her would be husband.
This is how the government officials set their priorities.
SHAME AND CURSE ON ALL GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS. MAY THEY PAY WITH THEIR OWN LIVES AS POOR KARACHITES DID!
To attend engagement ceremony is more important than looking after the dead and injured people of Abbas Town of Karachi.
We Love Pakistan, We Believe In Almighty Allah. May Allah Punish Sharmila Farooqi for Playing with Karachi Citizens Lives.
http://sharmeelafarooqiscandal.wordpress.com/sharmeela-farooqi-corruption/
Posted by admin in Asif Zardari Crook Par Excellance, Bhutto-Zardari Feudal Family Corruption, BOOT THE SCOUNDRELS OR SHOWDAZ, EXPATRIATE PAKISTANIS SPEAK-UP, Jahiliya "Jihadis"Illiterate Fanatics, Pakistan's Ruling Elite Feudals Industrialists, THE BATTLE FOR PAKISTAN SERIES, ZARDAR'S CORRUPTION on March 3rd, 2013
Yet its colourful interior minister, a man described by one commentator as Pakistan’s answer to London’s mayor Boris Johnson – a hugely famous politician who not everyone takes seriously – does just that.
“We have given a good beating to the terrorist,” Rehman Malik, 61, told the Guardian in December. “We have been able to break their back, we are in a position now to fight, to fight and fight.”
It is the sort of statement his detractors say blithely ignores reality, but that has also helped turn the career bureaucrat into one of the country’s best known politicians.
Whether or not the public believes domestic security has improved will be a key issue as the Pakistan People’s party (PPP) prepares to face the electorate in a few months’ time.
Critics say the government’s poor record on basic competence issues is epitomised by Malik, who many feel owes his position more to his usefulness as a master of political dealing rather than any great ability to administer internal security.
For many Pakistanis the interior minister, with his designer ties and purple-hued hair, is the face of the government: he is the only senior member of the bloated federal cabinet to have remained in post for the entire time the PPP has been in power, eclipsing even the prime minister.
He has found fame through his almost daily television appearances, usually made at the scene of the sort of catastrophic attacks that would end the career of a home secretary.
Everyone has a favourite Malik moment. For some it was when he said a spate of sectarian murders in Karachi was the handiwork of angry wives and girlfriends. Or there was the press conference in 2011 when he revealed to a country still reeling from a brazen Taliban attack on an important naval base in Karachi that the militant assault squad were “wearing black clothes like in Star Wars movies”.
An important trip to India in December produced a crop of gaffes that prompted fury in the Indian media. “The best thing would be to put Scotch Tape on his mouth to stop him talking,” said one former Pakistani diplomat, who claims to be a long-standing friend of the minister.
“Malik has his own irrepressible style of expressing himself, which may not be one of the most sophisticated in the world, but I think serious, sober Indians understood that.”
EMBARRASSMENT OR TREASURE: Malik’s status at home – somewhere between national embarrassment and national treasure – seems secure, however. “People love him,” said Murtaza Chaudhry, producer and host of the news comedy show Banana News Network (BNN) in which an actor playing Malik regularly lampoons the minister. “He is by far the most favourite character with the viewers.”
Recently his character was shown proudly presenting a flimsy construction of cupboard boxes that he boasted was of his own design, cost “only $60,000” and could protect the public from explosions.
Malik, who seems to relish the limelight, says he enjoys watching the comedy shows. He says there is no point complaining, or challenging reports of his many famous statements, which he says are always “twisted” by the media.
However, Chaudhry said that BNN had received a 10-page letter from Malik’s lawyer objecting to the mockery.
Malik’s defenders say he is much more capable and intelligent than his public personality suggests. “To some extent it’s just a ploy to disarm everyone,” said Mehmal Sarfraz, a Lahore-based journalist who credits the minister with successfully countering some threats in areas where civilian rulers have influence (many Pakistanis believe only the country’s powerful military has the ability to tackle militancy).
“Half the time he doesn’t believe what he is saying is true, he’s just saying what he thinks the public wants to hear.”
But critics find the buffoonery far from amusing. “He makes these statements which never make any sense, so no one can take him seriously,” said Aftab Sherpao, a former interior minister who was once a leading PPP figure. “When he gets up in parliament people just mock him – they laugh and jeer him.”
One analyst suggests the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is the nearest equivalent politician in the West because he is “kind of goofy, kind of silly but people like him”.
Malik thinks he is more of a Mandelson, a Churchill, or a Miliband (“the one who was British secretary of state, not the present one”). “But I would not want to be compared to any of these people,” he said after reeling off more names, including a US president. “I consider myself a worker, a party worker – that is all.”
Despite his protestations of humbleness, the elected senator has achieved a remarkable, and to many perplexing, level of power in government. Neither a lifelong politician nor a member of the landed gentry, he rose from within the bureaucracy despite being what one commentator called a “lower-middle class outsider”.
His break came in the 1990s when he was spotted by Benazir Bhutto. At the time she was PPP leader and in her second term as prime minister and he was an official at the Federal Investigation Agency.
POLITICAL FIXER: He made himself an indispensable political fixer, particularly when Bhutto was living in exile in London in the late 1990s (until recently Malik was a British citizen and still has family and major business interests in the UK).
His influence over President Asif Ali Zardari is less clear. Some believe Malik has potentially damaging information about the business activities of a couple who have faced a number of overseas legal cases and investigations into major corruption allegations.
Cynics say his job is not to grapple with crime and terrorism, or reform the country’s dysfunctional interior ministry, but to help Zardari do whatever it takes to hold together his fragile governing coalition.
Malik is regularly dispatched to Karachi to smooth things over with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement whenever the party flexes its muscles.
On Jan 2 he even shuttled to London for a last-minute meeting with Muttahida supremo Altaf Hussain after he announced his party would participate in the anti-corruption protests in Islamabad orchestrated by Tahir-ul-Qadri. “As far as Altaf Hussain is concerned, Malik is just an errand boy,” said Aftab Sherpao.
Nonetheless, it will be on domestic security – as well as the dire state of Pakistan’s economy – on which the public are likely to make their judgment in the coming months.
According to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, the level of violence has dropped since the government came to power in 2008. But the past few weeks have seen an attack on a major airport, the assassination of leading politicians, and the kidnapping by the Taliban of 23 tribal policemen – 21 of whom were lined up on a cricket pitch and killed.
Although sectarian attacks remain a huge problem, claiming 537 lives last year and injuring many more, Rehman Malik takes credit for “creating harmony between Sunnis and Shias”.
“In my five years there is hardly killing, mass killing, of Sunnis and Shias,” he said, weeks before two dreadful mass-casualty attacks on Hazara Shias in Quetta this year that claimed almost 200 lives. He says his strategy of “psy-war” – making sure the security forces have “a good backing and personal patting” – is paying off.
“It is important because your people are demoralised in war, you have to give them hope,” he said. “Wherever there is someone killed you must have seen I’m going to the field, in minutes I am there on the scene, supervising the whole situation.”
He has upset people with his enthusiasm for shutting mobile phone networks in major cities at short notice in an attempt to thwart terror plots; although the tactic seems to work.
In September he pushed for a national “Love of the Holy Prophet” day in response to public anger over a crude YouTube video that mocked Islam. What was meant to be a peaceful day of protest was taken as a state-sponsored opportunity for deadly rioting by religious extremists.
One diplomat, who was on “lockdown” as teargas drifted across the embassy walls from pitched battles between demonstrators and police outside Islamabad’s embassy quarter, recalls being phoned by a delighted Malik reporting how well he thought it was all going.
“I let them protest, but from a certain point I will not let them go further,” Malik said. “I ordered the [teargas] shelling. Had I not been there they had full programme to barge in [to the diplomatic enclave].”
BNN is working on a special series dedicated just to Malik, who will appear as a caped superhero. In Chaudhry’s favourite scene, Malik will be seen rushing into a burning building – but only to rescue a dog.
In the background people throw themselves from windows to escape the inferno as Malik delivers his catchphrase to the waiting TV crews: “Everything is under control.”
com.jpg&w=400&h=318&ei=o6IzUYjNOKvFiwLDpYCgAQ&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:41,s:0,i:214)
By arrangement with the Guardian
Posted by admin in Drone Attacks, Pakistan's Hall of Shame on March 2nd, 2013
Former Ambassador Cameron Munter testified on Capitol Hill before the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Sept. 23, 2010. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo)
A Former Ambassador to Pakistan Speaks Out
America’s former ambassador to Pakistan talks about his battle with the CIA over drones. Tara McKelvey reports.
Cameron Munter, the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, looked suntanned, but not rested, as he sat in a Foggy Bottom bar a few blocks from the State Department on a fall evening. He placed an Islamabad Golf baseball cap on the table, a souvenir from a decades-long career that had recently ended in a public flameout.
This past May, it was announced that Munter would be leaving his post. At the time, a State Department spokesman said he had made “a personal decision” to step down. But a few weeks after the announcement, The New York Times—in an article about counterterrorism policy—quoted one of Munter’s colleagues saying the ambassador “didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.”
That didn’t sound like the man I had met several months earlier at a party in Washington—back then, he seemed to relish his job as ambassador. I wondered why Munter’s colleague had said that, and I also wanted to know why he had resigned. He agreed to meet me at a bar to tell his side of the story, explaining that the Times had been wrong about him. It made him sound like a softie, he said, a mischaracterization that he wanted to correct.
Munter—who grew up in Claremont, Calif.—was no stranger to geopolitical hot spots even before he took the Pakistan job. He had been ambassador to Serbia from 2007 to 2009 and later served as deputy chief of mission in Baghdad.
It was Richard Holbrooke, then serving as special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, who initially approached Munter about the ambassadorship to Pakistan. He arrived in Islamabad in October 2010; less than three months later, Holbrooke was admitted to a Washington hospital for heart surgery, and two days after that he was dead. “I miss him every day,” says Munter. “The only reason I took that damn job is because he talked me into it, and then he died.”
Holbrooke had handed off an important but tough assignment. For months, the Obama administration’s relations with Pakistan had been in steady decline. Instead of diplomacy, Washington was increasingly employing brass-knuckle techniques, such as threatening to cut back on aid. “When I get calls from the White House, they say, ‘Dial up the pain,’” Munter tells me. “In Islamabad, they don’t respond well to dialing up the pain.”
Soon, Americans and Pakistanis were fighting over the drone program, a contentious issue they had previously worked together on. And this would also become a major source of tension between Munter and Washington officials.
“The use of drones is a good way to fight the war. But you’re going to kill drones if you’re not using them judiciously.”
It wasn’t that Munter was against drone strikes. “We prevented major attacks,” Munter tells me. “To me, that’s my job, and I’m proud we did it.” He also thinks allegations that drone strikes kill civilians are trumped up. “We have people who bring us the bodies of little girls,” he says, stretching out his arms as if he were carrying a small corpse, “and say drones killed them. They’re making it up, or they’re willfully believing lies.”
What Munter did want, however, was a more selective use of drones, coupled with more outreach to the Pakistani government—in short, a bigger emphasis on diplomacy and less reliance on force. “What they’re trying to portray is I’m shocked and horrified, and that’s not my perspective,” he said, referring to The New York Times article. “The use of drones is a good way to fight the war. But you’re going to kill drones if you’re not using them judiciously.” Munter thought the strikes should be carried out in a measured way. “The problem is the political fallout,” he says. “Do you want to win a few battles and lose the war?”
“What is the definition of someone who can be targeted?” I asked. “The definition is a male between the ages of 20 and 40,” Munter replied. “My feeling is one man’s combatant is another man’s—well, a chump who went to a meeting.”
Munter wanted the ability to sign off on drone strikes—and, when necessary, block them. Then-CIA director Leon Panetta saw things differently. Munter remembers one particular meeting where they clashed. “He said, ‘I don’t work for you,’ and I said, ‘I don’t work for you,’” the former ambassador recalls. (George Little, a former CIA spokesman who is now at the Pentagon—where Panetta is currently serving as Defense secretary—disputed this account. “I’ve heard these rumors before,” he said. “That’s exactly what this is: rumor. [Panetta] has had productive relationships with Ambassador Munter and other ambassadors with whom he has worked.”)
The question of whether Munter should have had the ability to stop drone strikes was complicated. According to National Defense University’s Christopher Lamb, an ambassador has top authority at an embassy and should therefore be informed of CIA plans for covert action. And there is certainly precedent for this procedure. It is also true, however, that ambassadors historically have rarely objected to such operations when they are told about them.
That made what happened in March 2011 all the more extraordinary. That month, the CIA ordered a drone strike against militants in North Waziristan. Munter tried to stop the strike before it happened, but, according to the Associated Press, Panetta “dismissed” Munter’s request.
The timing of the strike was noteworthy: it was the day after CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who had shot two Pakistani men, was released from a Lahore jail. The fact that Davis had been detained for weeks reportedly angered the CIA. “It was in retaliation for Davis,” a former aide to Munter told the Associated Press, referring to the strike. (The CIA did not respond to my request for comment.) In the end, the strike killed at least 10 militants, and reportedly 19 or more civilians. And Munter wasn’t the only one who was upset. So were the Pakistanis: Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Army chief, said the men had been “callously targeted.” Rumors circulated that some of them were spies for the military, risking their lives to help fight the Taliban.
Following the strike, President Obama set up a more formal process by which diplomats could have input into these strikes. “I have a yellow card,” Munter recalled, describing the new policy. “I can say ‘no.’ That ‘no’ goes back to the CIA director. Then he has to go to Hillary. If Hillary says ‘no,’ he can still do it, but he has to explain the next day in writing why.”
It was a limited victory for Munter, but his relationship with Washington remained difficult. Munter says he got along with Panetta’s successor at the CIA, David Petraeus. Still, with Holbrooke gone, the ambassador lacked powerful allies in the administration, and even his friends used the word “arrogant” to describe him. Moreover, he did not get high marks as an administrator: an inspector-general report criticized the management of the Islamabad embassy, calling it “controlling.”
Yet insiders and outsiders agree that the main reason for his demise was not his personality, bossy or otherwise, but the fact that he was off message. “Munter’s argument was that it would be much better to engage Pakistan diplomatically rather than just to rely on pressure,” says Vali Nasr, who served as a senior adviser to Holbrooke and is now at Johns Hopkins University. “The real issue was that he was not on the same page as Washington.”
During our interview, Munter criticized the way White House officials approached Pakistan. “They say, ‘Why don’t we kick their ass?’ Do we want to get mad at them? Take their car keys away? Or look at the larger picture?” He leaned back in his chair and recalled his last National Security Council meeting: “The president says, ‘It’s an hour meeting, and we’re going to talk about Afghanistan for 30 minutes and then Pakistan for 30 minutes.’ Seventy-five minutes later, we still haven’t talked about Pakistan. Why? Because Pakistan is too fucking hard.”
– See more at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/20/a-former-ambassador-to-pakistan-speaks-out.html#sthash.nXmHWDVc.dpuf
Nov 20, 2012 4:45 AM EST
Posted by admin in Pakistan-A Nation of Hope on March 2nd, 2013
Earlier this week, we wrote about a significant but often overlooked aspect of the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen: so-called signature strikes, in which the U.S. kills people whose identities aren’t confirmed. While President Obama and administration officials have framed the drone program as targeting particular members of Al Qaeda, attacks against unknown militants reportedly may accountfor the majority of strikes.
The government apparently calls such attacks signature strikes because the targets are identified based on intelligence “signatures” that suggest involvement in terror plots or militant activity.
So what signatures does the U.S. look for and how much evidence is needed to justify a strike?
The Obama administration has never spoken publicly about signature strikes. Instead, generally anonymous officials have offered often vague examples of signatures. The resulting fragmentary picture leaves many questions unanswered.
In Pakistan, a signature might include:
Training camps…
A group of guys…
Officials have characterized the intelligence that goes into these strikes as thorough, based on “days” of drone surveillance and other sources — and said that apparently low-level people may still be key to an organization’s functioning. In 2010, an official told the Los Angeles Times that the CIA makes sure “these are people whose actions over time have made it obvious that they are a threat.”
In Yemen, signature strikes are reportedly bound by stricter rules. Officials have often cited the necessity of a plot against Americans:
These strikes are not supposed to target “lower-level foot soldiers battling the Yemeni government,” U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. A White House spokesmansaid last summer that the U.S. “[has] not and will not get involved in a broader counterinsurgency effort” in Yemen.
But experts say some strikes in Yemen do appear to have been aimed at local militants. In Pakistan, in addition to low-level militants who might be involved in the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. has sometimes hit those who posed a threat to the Pakistani government.
As we detailed, signature strikes have also been criticized by human rights groups and some legal observers because of the lack of transparency surrounding them, including on the number of civilians killed.
Posted by admin in Asif Zardari Crook Par Excellance, Bhutto-Zardari Feudal Family Corruption, BOOT THE SCOUNDRELS OR SHOWDAZ, Corruption, Letters to the Editor, Looters and Scam Artists, PAKISTAN'S CORRUPT POLITICAL PARTIES:PPP, Pakistan's Hall of Shame, Pakistan's Ruling Elite Feudals Industrialists, ZARDAR'S CORRUPTION on March 2nd, 2013
Unless the civil society rises from the drugged slumber, Pakistan’s coup de Grace is inevitable as the corrupt, faithless, shot eaters of power and a prostituted opposition comprising reprobates, cowards, and corrupt to their hilt without soul have got the frail? Weak, trembling mom de plume FAKHROO Bhai lacks the courage, conviction and gumption to say boo to the hardened criminals who get degrees from oath commissioner selling stamp papers. The education minister is in the lead. At least write if you believe what sellable pimps are doing threatening the trembling CEC. E.g., NALAIK NAIK and fraudia Nisar Chaudhry. Supreme court’s inextricably shabby conduct in Qadri case for Articles 63-64 and 245 will be no less a watershed in the polluted history of judiciary lead by the charlatan Muhammad Munir Khan of Ayub Khan, Yahya, Bhutto martial laws and reprehensible law of necessity. Armageddon!
In his write-up titled ‘ECP’s blues: Fakhru Bhai should show some spine’ (February 28), Brig (r) Farooq Hameed Khan reiterated what AM (r) Shahid Latif had written in his column last week: a spineless and distinctly dubious Election Commission and an honest but lacking-in-courage chief election commissioner may not be able to ensure fair elections and a level playing field to honest persons with a
strong will to change the direction of Pakistan. The CEC must either justify his appointment and disqualify every single violator of Articles 63 and 64, in particular the tax evaders and loan defaulters, with grit and courage or immediately throw in the towel.
If he fails to fulfill any of the legal and moral obligations, his name will be sullied in perpetuity and the nation will be thrown back in the unclean hands of criminals who have purposefully pushed it into the pits of ignominy.
S Sajad Haider
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