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Israel’s great achievement in the political and diplomatic realm has been to draw American anger from those who carried out the 9/11 attacks to its own enemies, namely Saddam, Hamas and the non-existent Al Qaeda in Palestine

Barring the occasional article in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times which gives a viewpoint other than that favoured by Sharon and his ardent supporters in the United States, among which you can include the president himself, his deputy, his defence secretary and his national security adviser, the rest of the mainstream US publications remain uncritically pro-Israel.

As for the networks, in particular cable channels such as Fox News, the less said about their lack of balance on the Middle East the better. Many people in Pakistan can view for themselves today, thanks to the satellite dish, what some of them churn out with such sickening predictability day after day on the issue.

It is, therefore, something of a surprise to have one of the leading conservative columnists of the country, Robert D Novak, invite attention a day after Christmas to a speech by Sen. Chuck Hagel that would have gone unreported otherwise. The Republican senator from Nebraska who recently returned from a week-long fact-finding trip to the Middle East told the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs that the road to Arab-Israeli peace would not go through Baghdad as was being argued by President George Bush and those who support his thinking.

The Senator left no one who heard him in any doubt that the war about to be launched against Iraq was not America’s war so much as it was Ariel Sharon’s. According to Novak, “In private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress, the former general leaves no doubt that the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam’s Hussein’s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling for war.”

Hegel told his audience that military force alone would neither assure a democratic transition in Iraq, bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians, nor assure stability in the Middle East. He also warned that as America prepared for war, its standing among Muslim countries, even among long-time allies, was low.

Novak writes, “Yet the Bush administration has tied itself firmly to Sharon and his policies. Gen. Amran Mitzna, the new Labour Party leader challenging the heavily favoured Sharon in the January 28 election, is denied access to US officials. In private conversation, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice has insisted that Hezbollah — not Al Qaeda — is the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisation. How could that be, considering Al Qaeda’s global record of mass carnage?”

Quite correctly, Novak concludes from the national security adviser’s comments that the US war against terrorism, accused of being Iraq-centric, is actually Israel-centric. “That ties Bush to Sharon,” he writes, “The prime minister says astonishing things to US visitors. He once rejected hope for negotiations, contending that Arabs and Jews will kill each other for a hundred years. Recently, he promised to put a Jewish settlement on top of any high ground.” He calls the Bush-Sharon bond as “indissoluble”.

Israel and its mighty public relations machine in the United States have successfully sold the White House on the idea that Israel’s fight is now America’s fight. Recently, the Israelis “discovered” an Al Qaeda cell in Gaza. It was later found that the cell had been created by none other than the resourceful intelligence agency Mossad. There was none in existence, but that did not stop the Washington Post, an ardent and unapologetic Israel supporter, from publishing an article that called the establishment of the Al Qaeda cell “horrifying news.”

Israel’s great achievement in the political and diplomatic realm has been to draw American anger from those who carried out the 9/11 attacks to its own enemies, namely Saddam, Hamas and the non-existent Al Qaeda in Palestine.

Sharon said on Christmas day that he knew when the US would attack Iraq and where.

He should know.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Death came to Nasir Ahmed Farooki in the one city he had always loved, returning to it again and again, through good times and bad, returning to it when he was in money and returning to it when he was down at heel, but, as always, with his eyes on the stars. He knew Paris like the back of his hand. He knew its restaurants, its night places, its bookshops, but more than all those, he knew its gaming tables because he was a man who loved to try his luck against odds that he knew always worked in favour of those who offered them.

Nasir told me last spring when we spent a lot of time together in Islamabad – he was editing Justice Nasim Hasan Shah’s autobiography - that he was writing a book on gambling, putting down in it the experience of a lifetime of courtship with the lady called luck. He read me a chapter. It was riveting because when he was in his element, he could write brilliantly. I once asked him, “Nasir, do you have a system that will beat the odds at Chemin de Fer or Blackjack?” “If there was such a system, I who would have had it; but there can be near systems. It needs brains to be good at gambling.” “And brains to know when to quit,” I put in. “Yes, that too,” he replied. I recalled an evening with Nasir at one of London’s great clubs in Berkley Square, yes, the Berkeley Square of that 1940s’ song about angels dancing at the Ritz and a nightingale singing in Berkley Square. Nasir was playing big that night. I sat behind him as in awe I watched him drop close to a hundred thousand pounds. Suddenly he rose, “Not my night. Let’s get out of here and eat,” he said. You can’t get cooler than that.

Nasir was a man of great generosity and even greater affection. In his heyday in London in the mid 1970s when he seemed to run in front as money chased him, I once said to him, “Nasir, I don’t know what you do, but cut me in.” In those days, there wasn’t a more generous host for his friends visiting from Pakistan than him. He hosted them at the finest restaurants and the finest clubs and if they wanted to try their hand at the tables, he even gave them money which they invariably lost, not knowing when to quit and greed being an even more powerful human instinct than sex. But Nasir wasn’t greedy. He just loved the excitement of the chase. He never touched a drop of anything hard in his life. He never smoked though I have seen him puff at a Havana or two. He did not chase women. And he prayed five times a day.

In 1976, that long, hot, unending English summer which has never returned, I said to Nasir, “Chief, a weekend in Paris in high style would be nice.” And off we went, the four of us, one being his cousin Gen. Shafiq Ahmed, with Nasir driving his bottle green Jaguar recklessly enough to overtake everything on the autoroute to Paris. I thought we would never make it, but we did, put up in the Napoleon Suite at Hotel George V, spent our evenings at floorshows at Crazy Horse and Moulin Rouge and ate at Maxim’s, our starters being quail eggs.

Nasir used to say, “I may have my enemies but I am not without my friends.” One of his non-friends was the late Altaf Gauhar on whom Nasir based his character Tufail Heera in his novel Snakes and Ladders, a title that tells you everything there is to know about Civil Service intrigue. Nasir believed in getting even. His book appeared after the coup de grace had been administered to the Afro-Asian Book Club he had established in Lahore in 1966 which published the first collection of Chinese writings outside China after the Cultural Revolution. Nasir also organised an international film festival which the police closed down on the eve of the screening of Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar at the Regal Cinema, Lahore. Behind it all, Nasir maintained, was the then powerful information ministry run by Altaf Gauhar whom Nasir referred to as Alter Goebbles. Nasir was dragged through the courts for months, being made to answer all kinds of trumped up charges from smuggling to being an enemy sympathiser. At the time, you could cross AG only at your peril. AG always denied that he had had anything to do with it.

I met Nasir in Lahore around 1963. By then I had already read his novel Faces of Love and of Death, a fine book with a thinly disguised portrait of A. K. Brohi and one of Qurratulain Hyder and Musarrat Shaukat Ali. Nasir went to F.C. College in Lahore and on the eve of independence, like Bhutto, he sailed for California where he took a degree at Stanford. He returned to Karachi, walked into the office of the redoubtable editor of Dawn,Altaf Hussain, who hired him as assistant editor in charge of the weekly magazine. Nasir also worked for the Civil & Military Gazette in Lahore. He also brought out Lahore’s first English evening title, The Standard, but it folded after a few months. Always restless and imbued with what the Germans call wanderlust, he was off again. He found a job with the Christian Science Monitor in Boston, then came for the paper to Paris where he worked out of its Place Vendome office. He used to talk about his involvement with the Algerian revolution and at one point did some gunrunning for the FLN. He was jailed which enabled him to speak French fluently. He once showed me a letter from Ahmed Ben Bela acknowledging his contribution to the struggle. When I was living in Paris in 1973-74, Nasir and I often walked up and down its great boulevards where he told me stories about girls with names like Solange and Monique and where he had first run into them. By 1973, they were obviously long gone.

Nasir married Nilofar who had come from Dhaka to work for his Book Club. The Club folded but the marriage lasted for thirty-two years. Nilofar now lives in London as do Nasir’s three daughters, two of them married. Nasir hitched on to a Chinese American nurse named Jeannette but in the last years, the marriage remained in a state of suspended inanimation.

Nasir was a born journalist and a writer. It is a pity he did not really write after the late 1960s. His book of short stories Sadness at Dawn and his stage play, The Naked Night are works of great value. I sometimes felt that perhaps Nasir’s real calling was politics because his mind worked in intricate patterns. He could be a brilliant tactician with an overall grasp of apparently disconnected events. His analysis of political situations was always brilliant. What he did not have was patience and that is one thing a good politician needs.

Nasir Ahmed Farooki was the most colourful, the most brilliant and the most restless man I ever had the privilege to befriend. Had he written his autobiography, it would have told a fascinating story because it would have described a life lived to the hilt, dangerously at times, but always in hope and in a state of high excitement. He had the remarkable ability to recover from the most crushing setbacks, several of which came his way during his wonderful and turbulent life. We will not see another like you, Chief.

While our embassy kept crowing that Pakistan was not on the list, the fact is that the large majority of visitors from Pakistan who landed in the United States in recent months was either photographed, fingerprinted and made to register with the INS, or made to answer all kinds of questions

Pakistan’s rulers, the military ones being essentially indistinguishable from the civilians, are alone among God’s sentient creatures — or are they from the Prince of Darkness — who have been thumping their chests for nearly three decades bragging to the world that Pakistan is now a “frontline state.”

Other countries would shudder at the mere thought of being anywhere close to a conflict because being a frontline state amounts to standing at the edge of a precipice or taking the crater of a volcano for a picnic area. Gen. Ziaul Haq, may God forgive him, was the first one to declare that Pakistan was a “frontline” state. General Pervez Musharraf has followed in his spiritual mentor’s footsteps. In a way he has gone one up on him. While Zia did not create the Afghan mess, Musharraf did. Zia stayed with the side he had chosen, which was why he was perhaps done away with. Musharraf dropped his “boys” in black turbans, black beards and black hearts like a hot potato and without batting an eye, declared Pakistan a “frontline” state.

Well, the chickens have now come home to roost. And eggs that had not hatched are being thrown in our face. The latest of these missiles comes from President George Bush’s current number one favourite: the Department of Homeland Security. Pakistan may be a frontline state and “the most allied ally”, the unfortunate phrase Ambassador Asharf Jehangir Qazi chose the other day to describe his country, but Caesar’s wife it is not. In other words, not only is this “close ally and friend in the war on international terrorism” not above suspicion; au contraire, it is highly suspect.

The word at Homeland Security and FBI is: fingerprint the whole freakin’ lot of them. In the beginning was the Axis of Evil, as revealed to George the Second, which like a runaway cell has since been multiplying itself. By December 17, there were 18 countries whose citizens between the ages of 16 and 46 were required to register themselves with the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) if they had arrived after a certain date and were planning to stay for a certain period. Registration means standing in a long, long queue for hours on end, writing out your life story and that of your family on a form, answering questions and then getting fingerprinted like any garden variety criminal. All 18 countries, except perhaps one, were, it should go without saying, Muslim.

While the embassy kept crowing that Pakistan was not on that list, the fact is that the large majority of visitors from Pakistan who landed in the United States in recent months was either photographed, fingerprinted and made to register with the INS, or made to answer all kinds of questions. Some of these questions fell in that well-known category exemplified by the classic query: Have you stopped beating your wife? Well, Pakistan is now on the list and so is that other prime ally, Saudi Arabia. Allah be praised!

Poor Pakistani diplomats. While Ambassador Qazi, now doubly reassured of his longevity in Washington, given the arrival in the catbird seat of that rather large gentleman from Balochistan, was said to be running from the State Department to the National Security Council that insiders now call the Curse of Condi to the Department of Justice in a spirited but quixotic effort to have the decision overturned, his deputy, the affable Mohammad Sadiq was acting like a damsel whose knight errant has pushed her into the castle moat. He told one newsman that it was “an extremely unnecessary step” by the Americans. He also called the move “inessential”.

Those of us who were hoping he would not say it, were in for a disappointment, because he did end up saying it. Here is what he said, “The US authorities have praised Pakistan for its contribution in the campaign against global terrorism.”

Pass me the sick bag Mickey old boy.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

In Boca Raton in the sunny state of Florida, Albert Kayda, a peaceful man who would not even hurt a fly, has been facing harassment and abuse every day from ignorant Americans who associate him with Al Qaeda! “My name is Al Kayda, so people think I am a member of Al Qaeda. But I’m not even an Arab. I’m German. I’m a carpenter for God’s sake. I don’t destroy things. I build them”

If it is not true, it could well be true, but so wacko have some people gone since September 11 that even the tallest story can be told without anyone thinking they are being taken for a ride.

According to a popular weekly which has not been unknown to publish the truth off and on, in Boca Raton in the sunny state of Florida, Albert Kayda, a peaceful man who would not even hurt a fly, has been facing harassment and abuse every day from ignorant Americans who associate him with Al Qaeda! “My name is Al Kayda, so people think I am a member of the Al Qaeda organisation,” he explains. “But I’m not even an Arab. I’m German.” Kayda, 27, swears he’s never committed a terrorist act. “I’m a carpenter for God’s sake. I don’t destroy things. I build them.”

That notwithstanding, every day, Kayda finds threatening messages left on his door. He is bombarded by garbage, people put his trash cans on fire and worse, he swears, “They skinned my cat, they shattered the windows on my car, they spray-painted graffiti all over my walls. And every time I walk down the street, they shout out, ‘Al Qaeda go home!’ But they don’t understand, I am home! America is my home. I love this country, and I don’t ever want to leave. Where would I go?”

Despite all the abuse he has taken, Kayda told the weekly, he has absolutely no intention of changing his name. “This name has served me well all my life. It’s the name my father had when he came over to this country 40 years ago, and his father had it before him. I’m proud of my heritage.” Kayda says he does not hate those who torment him. “They’re just ignorant people, that’s all. They think they’re being patriotic or something. But I wish they’d direct their energy toward the enemies of America instead of a loyal citizen like myself. I’m just as American as they are.” Kayda feels that eventually the heat will be off him. “In a few years, this will pass, and no one will even remember what the Al Qaeda organisation was. Til then, I’ll just keep a low profile.”

Such is the atmosphere in this country now that you can’t even joke about Osama bin Laden or the Taliban without a good chance of being taken to the station by the boys in blue who are not known for their sense of humour.

One man who has learnt this lesson for life is Robert Mickens, a Greyhound bus driver. Some days ago, while taking a busload of passengers from Philadelphia to New York, he took a detour in order to avoid heavy traffic that was clogging the route the bus takes normally. When some passengers asked whether he knew where he was going, he replied jokingly, “I am taking you to the Taliban.”

No sooner had the words left his lips, than several passengers fished out their mobile phones and frantically began dialling 911, the number to call in case of emergency. And lo and behold, before you could say Johnny Walker, as many as 18 police cruisers had sprung into life, tyres screeching, blue, red and yellow lights flashing. The bus was besieged and brought to a halt. Mickens was taken into custody and grilled at the station for a long while. He was also charged with creating a false public alarm. The bus, before being taken to New York by a substitute driver, was thoroughly searched, just in case it was carrying any Taliban terrorists or Taliban-planted booby traps. The police was not amused when it found nothing of the sort.

Greyhound did not say if it was or wasn’t taking disciplinary action against Mickens, the guy who did not know what not to say when.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            Dilip Kumar has one thing in common with Jesus Christ and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Like them he was born in December. This year he was eighty years old, a day he marked like any other, they say, though his friends and fans, spread as they are in all parts of the earth, flooded him with messages.

            Those of us who cut our teeth on Dilip Kumar can still be caught at an unguarded moment imitating one of his characteristic gestures. Lahore’s great portrait photographer, the late M. Bhatti who ran his studio imperially from the corner of the Mall and Beadon Road, was fond of telling a certain Dilip Kumar story. One day, a distracted young man walked into his studio and asked if he was M. Bhatti the photographer. He was, Bhatti told him. The young man, after some hesitation, pulled out a crumpled picture from his pocket, snipped out of a newspaper, and handed it to Bhatti who had been looking at him all this time with increasing amusement. Bhatti flattened the picture with his hand on the table behind which he sat, looked at it carefully and asked, “So?” “Bhatti sahib, meri bus bilkul aisi hi aik tasveer bana dai’n,” the young man said. Gently, Bhatti patted him on the cheek and answered,  “Barkhoodar, jis din tum meray paas Dilip Kumar wali shakal lai ke aao gai, uss din uss jaisi tasveer bhi banna doon ga.”

            In those days, such young men were to be found everywhere in India and Pakistan or wherever Dilip Kumar’s movies were shown. They all tried to play him in real life situations since youth is a time of illusion and make-believe. What they forgot was that their hero’s great romances were seldom to be replicated in real life. But what of that! They tried to speak in his hushed voice, a lock of hair dangling in a tiny curl on their foreheads; they lowered their eyes when they spoke to a girl, a happening more imagined than real; they memorised his great lines as they stood in front of a mirror trying to look like the tragic hero, most of whose movies ended on a death scene.

            A classmate of ours in college who had modeled himself on Dilip Kumar was known, but behind his back only, as Dilip Kumhar or Dilip the Potter. There must have been Dilip the Potters in every big and small city and town in India and Pakistan. Ah! how we knew his lines, delivered in his soft, well-modulated, shy, self-conscious voice. There is Dilip Kumar in the movie Shabnam, saying to Kamni Kaushal, once the Uma Kayshap of Kinnaird College, Lahore, who is dressed as a boy, “Tagore nai kaha tha: ‘Tumhari aankhain dau neeli jheelain hain aur mein unn meain doob, doob jana chahata hoon.” Whether Tagore ever spoke of eyes like blue lakes in which he wanted to drown and then drown again, we neither knew nor cared. I do know, however, of at least one love letter – though like most love letters of those days, it was never delivered - in which this line was reproduced without acknowledgment to the Seer of Shanti Naketan.

            Then there was the Dilip of Deedar who is slapped across the face by Ashok Kumar, the jealous husband of Nargis. Ashok says, “Ramu zindgi bari haseen hai.” “Doctor sahib,” answers Dilip, “Aap nain kabhi Mala kau ghaur se nahin dekha, wo zindigi se bhi zayada haseen hai.”

For Mala, read Nargis, that narcissus of undying bloom and indolent eyes. And who can forget the Dilip of Kedar Sharma’s Jogan, in love with that vestal virgin of Krishna, played to saintly perfection by Nargis? Or Dilip cast against the loveliest woman ever to appear on the Indian screen, the tragic beauty, Madhubala, a woman Dilip loved but could not marry because of the pigheadedness of her angry Pathan father Ataullah Khan, who dragged Dilip through the courts for years, charging him with the abduction of Mumtaz Begum, the daughter the world knew as Madhubala. The great love scenes between the two in Tarana are as moving today as they were all those years ago. One thinks of Dilip appearing against another woman he was in love with, Kamni Kaushal, who was already married. When their last film Arzoo was released, it was advertised as, “For the last time together.”

            Dilip made his first movie Jawar Bhata in 1946 and in quick succession Milan, but his first great success was Jugnu where he played against Nur Jehan who, unlike him, was shown as coming from a poor family and who dies of consumption. My friend Khwaja Mahmood

Anwar in Sialkot used to say that anybody who coughs more than once in a movie is not going to last long, tuberculosis being the disease most favoured by the industry. Some years ago, I presented a video of Jugnu to Jugnu (Mohsin), asking her to watch Dilip Kumar throw all those banknotes in his greedy father’s face and screaming, “Pitaji, aap kau daulat chayyhai?”

            I have always believed that Nawaz Sharif will not go to heaven because of the three hundred umras he has performed over the years –  in the last two especially – but because he had the courage, decency and imagination to welcome this great son of Peshawar and, by that measure, Pakistan, and pin one of the country’s highest honours on him.

            For myself, what I can wear as a medal is my being one of the panel that interviewed Dilip Kumar on PTV in 1998. However, PTV being PTV, I was horrified to discover that there was not one but six interviewers, plus the moderator Moeen Akhtar. I have seen a few disasters in my time, but that was easily the greatest. Moeen Akhtar did not let anyone talk, including the great star of the show. With Dilip in the middle, we formed a semi-circle around him. The opening was auspicious because the ever elegant Naveed Shehzad asked Dilip a very poetic question in her silvery voice. But since auspicious beginnings are to be distrusted, as they often end in the contrary direction, that exactly was what happened that evening as well. Moeen Akhtar hogged the show and asked not a single question that had the remotest bearing on Dilip’s work, his craft as an actor, his great leading ladies, the legendary directors like Mehbub and Bimal Roy he had worked under, or anything about what he read or liked. It was Moeen Akhtar all the way, and when you thought he was done, there was more of him, just yap, yap, yap.

            I suggested some days later that Dilip Kumar had earned another medal, this time for gallantry, because he had endured ninety minutes of the most excruciating chatter without complaining even once. I stand behind that proposal as we all wish this great man who has brought so much happiness to millions upon millions, many, many happy returns of the day.

            George Orwell wrote that if you wanted to imagine the future, you should think of a jackboot in your face. While the defeat of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain and the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites spared the world the fate that Orwell writing in the 1930s saw as inevitable, a different kind of totalitarianism that he did not foresee has descended on countries that were once more tolerant.

            Today, ironically, the most repressive governments in the world are not to be found in Africa or Latin America, but straddling the family of nations grouped under the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) which, logic demands, should call itself the Islamic Conference Organisation or just the Islamic Organisation if not the Islamic Conference. But perhaps it would be politic to drop the matter at this point for fatwas have been issued over far milder offences by the faithful against the faithful.

            The induction of the new Muthida Majlis-i-Amal government in the North West Frontier Province has brought the nightmare of religious repression and rule by clergy home to Pakistan. Who do we thank for this? Obviously the man who as of October 1999 has considered himself a cut above the rest and supreme monarch of all he surveys and even what he does not survey or wish to survey. If there were space enough on the General’s protruding bemedalled chest, I would have pinned yet another medal on it, Pakistan being one of those countries where there are postwar newspaper correspondents and peacetime warrior generals.

            When the General first came, he praised the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kamal Pasha. That was the last time the great Ataturk’s name left his lips. Early on, I decided that the best way to measure the General’s progressive world-view would be to see how many appearances in public he made with his two dogs who were seen for the first and last time, affectionately cradled in his arms, in those first few days. Had he mentioned Mustafa Kamal’s name again or allowed himself to be seen with his dogs even once, he would have passed my dog test. Well, as everyone knows, on both counts his score has been zero plus zero. And as Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawarday said on another occasion, “Zero plus zero plus zero is zero.”

            Be that as it may, the Mullahs have arrived. Those who were dancing with joy at the fall of the Taliban must be pulling out there hair and feeling very silly indeed. The Taliban haven’t gone anywhere. They are alive and well and in control of government in the fair city of Peshawar. They will soon be in part-control of Balochistan and, if Brother Altaf Hussain, whose fawning followers in Karachi held a grand celebration on his becoming a British citizen, keeps his withdrawn support to Prime Minister Jamali withdrawn, the Mullahs will rule us from Islamabad as well.

            A couple of years into the Zia-ul-Haq era, the late Dr Ashiq Hussain Batalvi remarked that the Mullahs had had their revenge of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Had Dr Batalvi been alive, he would have readily conceded that compared to the fate that has now befallen us, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq rule was not only liberal but almost libertine. He cultivated the Mullahs and other religious reactionaries to strengthen himself, but he never allowed them to take political power. From 1977 to 1988, the eleven years that Zia-ul-Haq held sway over Pakistan, the Mullahs were not the wielders of power but supplicants seeking financial and other favours.

            The one who has landed us in their lap is the man everyone thought was an enlightened, progressive modern Muslim who had vowed to reshape this country into the Pakistan that the Quaid-i-Azam had dreamt and talked about. A country where religion would be a private matter between man and God and where Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims and Christians will cease to be Christians, not in a religious but a constitutional sense. Well, we woz wrong and we woz robbed.

            In the aftermath of the fall of Dhaka, that inimitable journalist H.K. Burki wrote about Pakistan’s “fat and flabby Generals.” What phrase would he coin to describe the hirsute brigade that has descended on Pakistan like a locust swarm? Hairy and horrifying?

We already have a foretaste of what is to come. The newly-elected NWFP Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani on Friday, 29 November announced a complete ban on “taverns and gambling dens” in the province and asked the district administrations to comply with his orders.

Speaking on the floor of the House, after being elected Chief Minister, he also ordered a ban on the playing of tape-recorders, VCRs and any kind of music in buses, coaches and passenger vehicles. Not only was it sinful and against the dictates of Islam, which he obviously considers a religion which forbids people to smile or be happy, to play music, but in his view it also caused accidents. This is nothing short of brilliant because nobody but nobody anywhere in the world had come up with such an original theory about what caused accidents.

            Durrani said that the “enforcement of the Islamic system” was the MMA’s  manifesto and his government would implement the unanimous recommendations of the Islamic Ideology Council. The tell-tale word here is “enforcement,” as if Islam were some kind of a martial law regulation that needed to be “enforced” through the police.

            A report in this newspaper describe the scene in the NWFP Assembly that has seen better days, “Amid thumping of desks, the Chief Minister declared a ban on all taverns and gambling dens and directed all district administrations to immediately implement it. He said all drivers and conductors who refuse to stop buses and coaches to offer prayers, despite being asked by the passengers, would be punished according to law.”

He then thundered, “We cannot allow VCRs and tape recorders in passenger vehicles in our province.” He also announced that separate ablution stands would be constructed for women at bus stands, adding, “We all have to respect the law. My cabinet ministers and I will first apply the rules to ourselves and then ask others to obey the law. Our decisions will not be personal.” He also threatened to “compel” all government departments to “follow the law.”

What can one say except: come back Zia-ul-Haq. All is forgiven.

There is no let-up in the propaganda against Iraq. It goes on, morning, noon and night. The least these raring-to-go Darth Raders can do is to make an effort to pronounce the name of Saddam Hussain and his country Iraq correctly

The appointment of Henry Kissinger as head of a commission set up by President George Bush to investigate US intelligence failures before the September 11 attacks was only to be expected from this ultra conservative administration programmed to take America to a war which will be economically debilitating, economically ruinous and politically disastrous.

There are many people in this country and abroad who fervently believe that Kissinger is a war criminal who should be tried. His suspected misdeeds are far too well-known to be enumerated here. He is intellectually arrogant and he has chosen to ignore all criticism of his conduct in office. His books are an unapologetic attempt to justify himself. He has offered no apology nor admitted any of the charges levelled at him. He has just taken no notice of what his critics have said.

In Pakistan, a large number of people believe that his warning to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto over his nuclear programme led to the Prime Minister’s downfall, if not his execution. As far as I know, Kissinger has never denied having said to Bhutto in Lahore that unless he changed course, a “horrible example” would be made of him.

Since his retirement from public life, he has followed a lucrative career as a high-powered consultant. He also makes large sums of money from his lectures and books. How anyone can listen to his drone for an hour or more is an unexplained mystery.

Have Kissinger’s services also been made use of by General Pervez Musharraf? The answer to that question is that we do not know. On his last visit to the States, on the last day, the General received Kissinger in his suite at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. Why that meeting took place and what the two talked about, we do not know. Those who speak on behalf of the General, including his Man Friday Major General Rashid Qureshi, and his constantly yapping information minister of the time, Nisar Memon, have remained mum. Kissinger is said to have an abhorrence of doing anything without being paid for it and I don’t think he met Gen. Musharraf for his intellectually stimulating company.

This has been a bad week for the liberal way of life in America. On Monday, the President signed the new Department of Homeland Security into law, a bureaucratic monster which will combine several existing departments and their disparate personnel who would fight for turf every inch of the way. Traditionally, it is the Democrats who have been accused by the Republicans of Big Government, so it is ironic that a Republican administration should have created this great monster in the name of “homeland security.”

Meanwhile, the UN inspectors have arrived in Iraq and the Iraqis have said that they are free to go anywhere, including the presidential palaces which were not open to them last time around and where, it has always been insinuated by the US, the real goodies are hidden. However, there is no let-up in the propaganda against Iraq. It goes on, morning, noon and night. The least these raring-to-go Darth Raders can do is to make an effort to pronounce the name of Saddam Hussain and his country Iraq correctly. It is clear that the decision to invade Iraq has already been taken. The onus is on Iraq to prove that it does not have weapons of mass destruction. If the inspectors find nothing, Bush would say that Iraq has cheated. No matter what Iraq does, it cannot win.

Many people have wondered why Tony Blair is more gung-ho than even Bush. Now we have an answer and from no less a person than the playwright Harold Pinter. In a speech at a House of Commons meeting, he said when Cromwell took the Irish town of Drogheda, he gathered all its residents to the main square and ordered his soldiers to “kill all the women and rape all the men.” When one of his aides asked if the General meant it the other way around, somebody from the crowd shouted, “Mr Cromwell knows what he’s doing.”

“That voice is the voice of Tony Blair,” said Pinter, “Mr Bush knows what he’s doing.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

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