Bharat Rakshak

Pakistan: Pakistani news services reported that the security forces are poised to launch a full-scale offensive in North Waziristan Agency (NWA) if talks with the Pakistani Taliban fail. An unidentified senior government official said reinforcements would not have to be sent into the area because the troops already are deployed there and only would have to be repositioned for what he said would be a "very visible operation." Comment: The government suspended peace talks after a Pakistani Taliban faction detonated a bomb in Karachi that killed 12 police officers last week and another group announced it had executed 23 paramilitary soldiers who were kidnapped in June 2010. In the past week, Pakistan Air Force combat aircraft have attacked targets in Waziristan, in an apparent warning of additional military operations unless the Pakistani Taliban attacks stop and negotiates in good faith. Large, visible punitive operations in the tribal agencies have had little success for many reasons. A key one is that they always must rely on local paramilitary forces for intelligence and combat support. That dependency invariably defeats operational security, undermines effectiveness and limits success. The paramilitary forces are recruited from and live in the agency so they have little incentive to cooperate in operations against their own tribe or neighbors. A big military show that stalled would embolden the Pakistani Taliban and ensure no resumption of talks. The environment for peace talks also is more complex than ever because every security development in Pakistan is influenced by the drawdown of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan this year. That will be another watershed event in South Asia. For example, this is the last opportunity Pakistan will have to improve security conditions in the tribal agencies in the northwest while American forces are still capable of lending support. For the Pakistani Taliban, the drawdown of NATO forces portends a cutoff of pilfered supplies. That is an incentive to engage in talks to stall for time and build up stocks. Attacks during talks signal that negotiations with the government are not a sign of weakness. That message explains the targeting of government security personnel. The Karachi attack demonstrates that the Pakistani Taliban have support and are capable of attacking outside the tribal agencies.

Jane's weekly quoting a senior Pakistani official says China is set to sell up to six submarines to Pakistan by end of 2014.

Pakistan's ambitious defence planners are also pushing China for selling submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles. But western diplomats say China may be reluctant to hand over such sophisticated equipment fearing harsh reactions from Washington. {Absolutely nothing of that sort. The 'harsh reactions' could be stage-managed to pacify India, but with the India-US relation what it is nowadays, even that would not happen. Very soon, PN would have submarine-launched ballistic missiles.}

Eleven khasadar officials who were providing security to a polio team were killed and seven others were injured in two separate blasts in Jamrud, Express News correspondent Yasir Ali reported on Saturday.

SSridhar wrote:X-post from 'Pakistan arms, ops thread'
Pak set to get Chinese submarines - ToI

Jane's weekly quoting a senior Pakistani official says China is set to sell up to six submarines to Pakistan by end of 2014.

The average height of Pakistanis has fallen four inches over the last 50 years due to malnourishment and food deficiency

cousin marriages were also one of the reasons for the short stature of Pakistanis

Just shut up for a while. I am the produce of cousin marriage and I am more stronger and bigger than my parents and also My neighbors have a love marriage and their offsprings are manhandled by me on a daily basis and non-cousin marriage did not benefited them at all rather they decreased in height compared to their father. So your idea is absolutely wrong. Only if your families have some diseases then cousin marriage is not good otherwise it is fine.

just look at the cricket team of 80s and 90s. all were long and handsome. and look at the cricket team now. all are dwarfs compared to the 90s players. saeed anwar was the shortest player in 90s team. but if he had come to team now, he would be one of the tallest. the lack of height also affecting the batting and pace performence of the team

Height and weight of children across the socio-economic spectrum have registered an increase

Dilbu wrote:

This is incorrectly called the beginning of Muslim contact with what is now referred to as South Asia, yet it supports one of the many official narratives of when Muslim ‘consciousness’ and identity were created in this region.

Pakis do make a spirited effort to rename 'Indian subcontinent' as South Asia but as usual they are fooling no one but themselves.

OF COURSE, this is an absurd question. How on earth could the Taj Mahal ‘be Pakistani’ and claim a nationality which was only imagined 400 years after the mausoleum was constructed, and one hopes that no one in their senses would ask such a preposterous question.

Yet, in a class of undergraduate students at one of Pakistan’s best universities, precisely this question was animatedly debated during a session on Pakistan’s history, with some students stating that the Taj was part of Pakistan’s history, and others implying that it was ‘Pakistani’.

These students had all taken a course in Pakistan Studies prior to starting their undergraduate degree. Clearly, the highly controversial and contested nature of how history is constructed in Pakistan, given the numerous possibilities of framing a history of Pakistan, allows for multiple competing narratives, including a claim to the Taj ‘being’ Pakistani.

Pakistani history has been a contentious topic where different sets of narratives give differing accounts of what Pakistani history is and, hence, how one imagines Pakistan.

Given the eventual partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan, some historians have claimed that Pakistan was ‘created’ in 712 AD when an Arab invader came to what is now part of Pakistan.

This is incorrectly called the beginning of Muslim contact with what is now referred to as South Asia, yet it supports one of the many official narratives of when Muslim ‘consciousness’ and identity were created in this region.

Other competing narratives look to the Delhi Sultanate, or the Mughal Empire, or events in the 19th century and 1857, crystallising into a separate Muslim identity which, inevitably led to Muslim ‘separatism’ and to the creation of Pakistan.

The question, when was Pakistan ‘created’, is one which simply works around a Muslims-are-different-from-Hindus discourse, culminating in a separate homeland.

Hence, if the history of Pakistan is the history of Muslims in India, and just as Mohammad bin Qasim can become part of a certain legacy and heritage and can be caricatured as the ‘first Pakistani’, so too can the Taj as ‘being’ Pakistani. Pakistani history and a history of Pakistan’s people and their land, become two conflicting narratives.

As a consequence, ‘Pakistani’ history, ignores the history of the people who live in what was Pakistan (West and East) and what is left of it. Mohenjodaro, Harappa, and the history of the people of Pakistan is dominated by a north Indian (largely Hindustani) Muslim history, and that too only of kings and their courts.

The Pakistan ‘freedom movement’ of course — and not the movement for independence from British colonialism for all Indian peoples — shapes this discourse more teleologically, once politics dominate undivided India in the 20th century.

The little writing that has taken place about Pakistani history is largely hagiographic and hyperbolic, where the project Pakistan with Muslims as a driving force is required to explain processes which led to the culmination of the events leading to August 1947.

The actors, or at least the heroes are almost always Muslim, and students seldom hear about the role Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Patel and Bose played in bringing about freedom for the 300 million Indians under colonialism.

One only hears of a handful of Muslim men who brought about freedom for Muslims from a Hindu majority. The British imperialists are inconsequential in this narrative, and are only responsible for making a mess of partition by not giving Pakistan many of the districts which are claimed on the basis of them being Muslim-majority areas.

In the most ingenious and creative recent book to be published on Pakistan’s emergence as a political idea, historian Faisal Devji in his Muslim Zion raises some fascinating and sophisticated arguments which complicate any simplistic notion of what passes as Pakistani history.

His book is a highly nuanced and multilayered understanding of the ideas which led to the justification and creation of Pakistan, and while many of Devji’s conceptualisations need to be contested, for our purposes his statement that Pakistan’s history lies outside its borders, gives rise to some of the problems of imagining a history of Pakistan described here, and allows some to claim the Taj Mahal as ‘Pakistani’.

Moreover, if this claim that Pakistan’s history lies ‘outside its borders’ is valid, and indeed in many critical ways this is certainly the case, it also implies, that the country which came into being called Pakistan, in this hegemonic notion of history, really has no history of its own. The so-called ‘freedom movement’ was fought in a foreign land, the land of the Taj Mahal, not the land of the people who inherited a country called Pakistan where their ancestors had lived for millennia.

Ascribing a status of nationality to brick and mortar — even the Taj Mahal — poses numerous challenging epistemological questions, yet the question of what Pakistani history is, remains unaddressed in a land still searching for understanding. Depending on how one answers this question, one is led through many ideological labyrinths and some geographical ones as well.

If Pakistan is imagined ideologically, then all one has to do is determine when Pakistan came in to being, clearly no easy task, and limiting oneself to a history of the Muslims in India, or a history of Islam in South Asia. If Pakistan is imagined geographically, the connotations of how the history of the peoples and lands of Pakistan is taught and understood, varies hugely.

The writer is a political economist.

Some experts have expressed fear that the main highway connecting Gilgit with Skardu may be next if soil erosion is not stopped.

chetak wrote: Given the eventual partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan, some historians have claimed that Pakistan was ‘created’ in 712 AD when an Arab invader came to what is now part of Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, March 1 (Xinhua) -- The death toll rose to 14 in the bomb attacks that hit the vehicles of security personnel in Pakistan's northwestern tribal region of Khyber Agency on Saturday, officials said.

Assistant Civil Administrator of Khyber Agency Jahangir Wazir said that at least 14 people including a child and 13 security personnel were killed and four others injured when three bomb blasts hit two vehicles of the security forces in the Jamrud Town of Khyber Agency, a restive region bordering Afghanistan.

Wazir said that the unknown terrorists attacked the two convoys comprising the personnel of Levies Force and Frontier Constabulary, with bomb blasts followed by intensive firing at them in two different areas of Jamrud Town.

The personnel of Levies Force and Frontier Constabulary, a paramilitary force, were on duty for the security of health workers who were running a campaign for polio vaccination in the region.

The security personnel retaliated the attacks and saved the polio workers by sending them into nearby houses.

The explosions and firing destroyed the vehicles completely and spread panic in the area.

Local people and rescue teams shifted the bodies and injured to hospital.

According to the officials, the bombs were planted on the roadside and were triggered with a remote controlled device.

Security forces have cordoned off the area and launched a search operation to arrest the culprits.

No group claimed responsibility for the attacks yet.

Despite a number of vaccination campaigns over the years, Pakistan is still one of only three countries in the world where the polio virus is still endemic.

Militants in Pakistan have been opposing polio vaccination and consider such campaigns a move to make Muslim boys sterile and a cover for spying.

anupmisra wrote:While the bakis got shorter by 4", their Sooth Asian SDRE counterparts increased by two inches. Indian children walking tall: Study shows teenagers are 2 inches taller than in 1992

Height and weight of children across the socio-economic spectrum have registered an increase

Height of Pakistanis has fallen 4 inches over 50 years, say experts

FAISALABAD: The average height of Pakistanis has fallen four inches over the last 50 years due to malnourishment and food deficiency.

This was revealed in a workshop on “Applied Nature Need Based research Projects of Food Industries” organized by National Institute of Food Science & Technology (NIFSAT) University of Agriculture, Faisalabad here on Monday.

Speaking on the occasion, Vice Chancellor, UAF Professor Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan, said that cousin marriages were also one of the reasons for the short stature of Pakistanis. He urged the need for new diet packages to be introduced for balanced, affordable food.

Dr Iqrar also expressed concerns over existing eating habits, saying 50 years ago, large amounts of corn flour was traditionally consumed, but over time, Pakistanis had lost the mechanism to cook roti with corn flour, which was a cheaper, healthier staple food item.

The Pakistani Taliban have announced a month-long ceasefire aimed at reviving stalled peace talks with government.

Spokesman Shahidullah Shahid said all Taliban fighters had been urged to "refrain from any activity during this period".

The talks broke down last month, after Taliban-linked militants said they had killed 23 soldiers they were holding.

This triggered air strikes by the Pakistani military against suspected militant hideouts in the north-west.

Mr Shahid said that the Taliban had decided on a ceasefire "because of a positive response from the government, an appeal from the religious scholars and for the better future of Pakistan".

He requested the Pakistani government to fulfil the group's demands, which include an end to US drone strikes and the introduction of sharia law.

Irfan Siddiqui, an adviser to the Pakistani prime minister, said that he had so far not received any information regarding a ceasefire, but added that it would be a "positive development".

QUETTA, March 1 (APP): At least ten armed men were killed in a shootout in Sui area of Balochistan while in a separate incident, three security men died as a result of IED attack in Kalat district, official sources said on Saturday. “The security personnel carried out raid in Darinjan and Rustam Bazar areas of Sui where armed men opened fire at them, FC spokesman told APP.
In a retaliation, ten armed men were killed while huge cache of arms and ammunition were also recovered.
Meanwhile, in a separate incidents three FC men were killed and six others were wounded. FC spokesman said that security personnel vehicle was patrolling in Balochistan’s Kalat district when it hit improvised explosive device. Resultantly, three soldiers died instantly Six others received critical injuries.

ISLAMABAD: Afghanistan hit out at Pakistan on Friday for allowing ‘terrorists’ training centres and sanctuaries on its soil a day after Islamabad cautioned Kabul against permitting militants to take shelter across the border during any military operation in the Waziristan tribal region.
The problem of ‘terrorism and extremism in the region’ originates from Pakistan, Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ahmed Shakeeb Mustaghni said.

On Thursday, Pakistani foreign ministry spokesperson Tasnim Aslam urged Afghanistan not to allow militants to enter its territory in the wake of airstrikes in the tribal region. In a statement issued on Friday, Afghanistan’s foreign ministry said, “Pakistan has hideouts and training centres for terrorists and extremists for years and attacks have been launched into Afghanistan from there that have caused casualties.” Afghanistan, the ministry added, has always called for ‘sincere and practical’ cooperation with Pakistan to fight terrorism and extremism. The Dari version of the statement was received by The Express Tribune in Islamabad.

shiv wrote:While the bakis got shorter by 4", their Sooth Asian SDRE counterparts increased by two inches. Indian children walking tall: Study shows teenagers are 2 inches taller than in 1992

Height and weight of children across the socio-economic spectrum have registered an increase

shiv wrote:ote="anupmisra"]While the bakis got shorter by 4", their Sooth Asian SDRE counterparts increased by two inches. url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/in ... -1992.html]Indian children walking tall: Study shows teenagers are 2 inches taller than in 1992[/url]Here joo go

Height of Pakistanis has fallen 4 inches over 50 years, say expertsBEGGRABAD: The average height of Pakistanis has fallen four inches over the last 50 years due to malnourishment and food deficiency., Faisalabad here on Monday.

RSoami wrote:The attack on Polio party is also significant in the use of roadside bomb. If the bad Taliban start using this method of targetting the Pakis, just like the good Taliban does in Afghanistan, very soon Pashtoonistan will be beyond the reach of Pakistani Army.

Our Pakistani porter wryly commented that Pakistani prisoners from India are released in twos and threes, while Pakistan is far more generous when it comes to freeing our quaidis {Like how they buy mangoes by the basketful, Indians buy 2-3}

There were other subtle protests, like the artistically painted autorickshaws carrying social messages of peace (you can sponsor one for just Rs 1,500) that were parked inside the complex. This was to counter the aggressive religious propaganda on autos which dart in and out of traffic across the city.

At the Punjab Governor's reception for delegates, hosted at his magnificent mansion ('the lawns here are bigger than those around Buckingham Palace', boasted a local)

The outspoken activist/feminist ,legendary writer Fahmida Riaz, repeatedly and loudly cribbed she was missing alcohol! Someone else joked, "What a laugh! A cocktail party without cocktails!" But certain resourceful people in our group managed to get around this troublesome detail quite efficiently! Mohsin Hamid made up for the lapse the next night by hosting an elegant party (with unlimited cocktails!) at his mother-in-law's stylish Italian restaurant, Cosa Nostra. The ravishing Begums of Lahore twirled and preened in their chinchilla wraps and antique Tooshes, their delicate hands balancing heavy whiskey tumblers. {Bull cutlet candidates for sure!}

But the amusing message to India was delivered by Mehr Tarar - the tireless tweeter, also known as the 'other woman' in the Shashi Tharoor-Sunanda Pushkar tragedy...."Sunanda ruined my life and reputation by calling me an ISI agent. She also ruined her own husband's political career by making all those false allegations. I did not have an affair with Shashi. I am not a stalker. But now my name is permanently linked to theirs and gets thrown up each time you google them. I have become a part of their lives! I want to request India to leave me alone. I feel really bad that Shashi may not get a ticket because of all this." Message over. Strange that Mehr ("Please spell my name correctly. It is 'Mehr', like Mehr Jessia spells it") is more worried about Tharoor's political future, than the tragic death of Sunanda ("What did she get by killing herself... look at the number of lives she ruined!"). Those boots are definitely made for walking!!!

ISLAMABAD : With an estimated population of over 180 million and growth rate of 2%, Pakistan population will double in the next 36 years.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan on Sunday announced that the government had decided to suspend the air strikes on terrorist hideouts which were going on for a few days.

He welcomed the call for a month-long ceasefire by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Saturday.

He reiterated that the government had not launched a military operation against terrorists anywhere in the country since it took over in June last year and whatever action was taken was in response to terror strikes.

The government has repeatedly clarified that the military had a right to self-defence if its personnel were targeted. Chaudhry Nisar’s announcement comes after consultation with the Prime Minister and Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif.

While stating that the government had responded to the TTP’s positive announcement on Saturday, the minister was clear that it will not tolerate violence and reserves the right to retaliate in such cases.

SSridhar wrote:X-post from 'Pakistan arms, ops thread'
Pak set to get Chinese submarines - ToI

Blast in Landikotal kills 2 FC personnel

Armed men open fire in Islamabad district court

Agnimitra wrote:

SSridhar wrote:X-post from 'Pakistan arms, ops thread'
Pak set to get Chinese submarines - ToI

Pertinent to Iran-Oman-India undersea pipeline.

10:20am

Dr Ayesha told media that 11 people are dead. She also said that at least 25 people are injured, adding that around half are in critical condition.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

10:18am

Emergency was declared in Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims). Pims representative Dr Ayesha confirmed that 10 people were killed.

Eye witnesses say that the attackers were tall, had long hair and arrived in a white Prado.

Lilo wrote:What is the nature of Ibadis (of Oman) vs Shia Sunni ?
Any aspects wrt historical experience or cultural outlook which may predispose them to ally with Indian interests in longterm as opposed to say Saudi Arabics and other assorted Pakis ?
Maybe you can put it as post in West Asia thread if your time permits...

Anujan wrote: One judge got his 72.