Looks like the tooth fairy is not biting.
Germany's central bank has shot down EU proposals for a European banking union, warning categorically that eurozone liabilities cannot be shared without a fundamental shift towards fiscal and political union. Which ain't gonna happen.
The CORRECT solution is to undo the EURO the obvious solution is another power grab.
It all depends on your perspective of what the goal is. For the Europhile elite across the continent, the goal is the USE under the control of the anti-democratic technocracy.
Late one evening 25 years ago, when the rickety minibus he worked on pulled into Kupwara at the end of a bone-rattling ride from the market town of Sopore, Syed Bashir Ahmad decided he was done selling tickets. From the bus station, he began walking up over the Dudhniyal forests, across the Line of Control (LoC). His passengers, that day, had included a group of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) cadre, headed for training at Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-run camps in Pakistan. Mr. Ahmad decided to go along, he says, more or less on a whim.
Frostbitten and exhausted, his journey ended in a hospital. Three months later, Mr. Ahmad moved in with relatives in Muzaffarabad, married a cousin, and eventually began working as a taxi driver.
Last week, he returned home with his wife, Safina Ahmad, and their seven children, hoping to rebuild his life. Later this summer, their oldest daughter, Bushra, will marry a relative's son. Sabah Ahmad, just 12, likes the homeland she has known for eight days: "in Muzaffarabad," she says, "we couldn't sleep without a fan, and the power kept going all the time. Here, it's cool."
Perhaps too cool. Until the Indian government stitches together a legal framework for the hundreds of families who have returned to Jammu and Kashmir since 2005,
What happened in 2005 that changed things?
Ms Ahmad can be prosecuted as an illegal immigrant. Though the children can lay claim to Indian citizenship, the government has yet to waive regulations mandating that their birth be registered at a mission overseas. Finding jobs and setting up businesses is tough; social acceptance is, at best, grudging.
Back in the summer of 2005, troops at the Indian Army's Nanak Post, near Uri, watched as four small brightly-coloured specks clawed their way up the mountainside. Through their binoculars, the troops could see the group was not terrorists, but a woman with two crying infants in her arms; the man next to her, luggage tied around his back, was urging two older children up the climb. Finally, as the family reached the barbed wire that divides Kashmir, he shouted out: "my name is Nasir Ahmad Pathan, and I want to come home."
Ever since 2007, when The Hindu's sister publication, Frontline, interviewed the Pathan family for a report on Kashmir's returning ex-jihadists, many more have made the crossing. This year, almost a hundred have returned, joining the 140-odd last year; the total exceeds 500.
For most, the decision to come home seems pragmatic. "Sugar sells at Rs.85 a kilo in Muzaffarabad," says Mr. Ahmad's wife, Safina, "and a gas cylinder costs Rs.1,600. We had a son to put through college, and daughters to be married. So I asked my husband, when your family has land and a home, why should we keep living like this?"
In most cases, the journey home involves a substantial investment. The Ahmad family paid Rs.70,000 each to an agent in Rawalpindi for Pakistani passports and airfares from Karachi to Kathmandu. From Kathmandu, the family crossed the open India-Nepal border into Uttar Pradesh, and caught a train from Lucknow. In recent years, most families that have returned have done the same.
Expensive, but easy-peasy -- what mental lack causes the jihadis to try crossing where the Indian Army stands guard instead?
Life, though, remains profoundly uncertain for those who have returned. Five years after they came to India, the Pathan family are yet to receive citizenship papers, or any other form of documentation. Neither has Abdul Rasheed, who returned with his Pakistani wife, Nyla Abbasi and two children to Srinagar in 2009. Others have had more serious problems. Kulgam resident Mohammad Jalil Amin, for example, served 10 months in jail when he was arrested on returning home, though in June 2006.
Zonia Dar, whose father Shabbir Ahmad Dar returned to India earlier this summer, has spent five months trying to restart her education as a doctor. Her qualification from a Karachi medical college, though, is worth nothing in India.
To be fair, Indian medical schools teach nothing of djinns or the efficacy of Mohammed's urine, so there's a lot of studying wasted right there.
In 2010, the government of India announced a rehabilitation policy -- but Pakistan hasn't responded. Indian diplomats, sources said, have informally discussed the issue with the United Nations and international humanitarian organisations, but to little effect. "In the long term," says a senior police officer, "this is going to be real problem. There has to be some framework."
Without support, those who have returned are finding things to be difficult. In 2001, Kreeri resident Sharif Din, then a 17-year-old high school student, joined a group of young people recruited by local Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander Mushtaq Butt. Even while he trained for two months at a Hizb-ul-Mujahideen camp near Muzaffarabad, Mr. Din's family raised the money needed to buy him out of a tour of duty with the jihadist group. "I won't lie," he says, "I was terrified about coming back to fight. I was almost killed by the Army twice on the way into Pakistan, and the boys who were with me at the camp are either still there, or dead. I begged my family to save me."
Back home, though, Mr. Din isn't able to use the pharmacological qualification he acquired in Pakistan. Even though he briefly found a job at the Florence Hospital in Srinagar, he says, the Army insisted he live in Kreeri so he could be under surveillance.
He is now contemplating setting up a pharmacy, but hasn't yet managed to raise the capital. He hopes to marry, but no one is willing to give a daughter to a man without a job, and who faces possible trouble with the police.
Like Mr. Din, former Muslim Janbaaz Force jihadist Manzoor Ahmad, a one-time embroidery-artisan from Khadniyar near Baramulla, has faced difficulties rebuilding his life in the year since he came home. Having dropped out of school in 1991, he finds no market for his rusty talents. In Pakistan, he earned Rs.6,000 a month working in a mobile accessories store; in Khadniyar, he spends his days helping his brother write villagers' petitions to government offices. He hopes to start his own mobile-phone business eventually.
Manzoor Ahmad's business idea has had a mixed welcome from his family. A relative recalls his brother telling him, "for all these years while you were wasting your time in Pakistan, we tended the lands, we looked after the home, we even put up with beatings from Army men because we were your relatives. Now, you come back here and ask for a share in the property to start a shop?"
In Muzaffarabad, jihad commanders have been blaming Pakistan's diminished support for the death of their war. "We are fighting Pakistan's war in Kashmir," Hizb-ul-Mujahideen chief Muhammad Yusuf Shah said earlier this month "and if it withdraws its support, the war would be fought inside Pakistan." Mr. Shah has held out threats like these before. In February 2009, he warned that if "there is a setback to the war due to the cowardice of the [Pakistan] government, then this war will need to be fought in Islamabad and Lahore."
The reality, though, is that the jihad is dead in Kashmir itself -- not because of Pakistan's declining support, but because of the choices the men who fought it, and the society around them, have made. Even the Jamaat-e-Islami, the political mill in which the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen was manufactured, is now in the hands of politicians, firmly committed to politics. Dozens of the organisation's local cadre have fought panchayat elections; its amir, Sheikh Ghulam Muhammad, allowed units to ally with the People's Democratic Party in the 2008 Assembly elections.
In its own interest, India must work harder to enable the thousands who crossed the LoC to come home -- and to give those who have made the journey back a second shot at life.
Posted by: john frum ||
06/13/2012 00:00 ||
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[Dawn] A FACTION of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain has defeated the local Kukikhel ...a tribe of primitives inhabiting Khyber Agency. They are a branch of the Afridi tribe. Traditionally they have been migratory, tromping between Jamrud and the Rajgal valley with the seasons. The tribe has had mustache-cursing relationships with several other tribes, including the Zakkakhel and Kambarkhel, and with the Mullagori. They make welcome most anyone with a turban and automatic weapons, but every once in awhile they get together a tribal lashkar to mollify the government... tribe to take over one of the last bits of Khyber Agency's Tirah Valley that had not already fallen into myrmidon hands. Remote as it is, Tirah is no insignificant mountain hideout. On the one side it shares a border with Afghanistan. On the other it leads to the plains of Bara, which connect the agency to the outskirts of Beautiful Downtown Peshawar. Khyber also links several agencies to each other, serving as a north-south route within Fata. So it has long been fought over by a mix of myrmidon organizations, including the TTP, the Ansarul Islam and Mangal Bagh ...a former bus driver, now head of the Deobandi bandido group Lashkar-e-Islam and the Terror of Khyber Agency... 's Lashkar-e-Islam. But given the mountainous terrain and remoteness of the area, the task of fending off myrmidon occupation was outsourced to local tribal lashkars, supported by occasional aerial bombardments by the army. This latest myrmidon victory in Tirah is proof that the strategy has failed.
Pak troops had gone into the area shortly after the American invasion of Afghanistan had pushed Orcs and similar vermin across the border. The move had more than just practical importance; given the area's remoteness, it was seen at the time as evidence of Pakistain's commitment to containing militancy. But for the last several years the security forces have not maintained a presence in Tirah and the situation has tanked, likely because they had their hands full elsewhere, were unable to claim the decisive upper hand in neighbouring agencies that have served as communications and supply routes, did not manage to come up with a successful strategy for the area, and simply didn't pay enough attention. Experts point out that conducting an operation in Tirah might not have been a smart approach; various myrmidon groups may have started working together in response. If so, another workable approach was required, and was not worked out.
The upshot is that almost all of Tirah is now in myrmidon hands. The implications are both foreign and domestic, strategic and humanitarian. Cross-border movement could become another bone of contention with Afghanistan. If Tirah's Orcs and similar vermin are now able to make even more headway in Bara, Peshawar's security, so tenuously improved, will be at risk once again. Militants in other parts of Fata could see the defeat as an encouraging sign of state weakness. Meanwhile, ...back at the secret hideout, Scarface Al sneeringly put his proposition to little Nell... the Kukikhel have had to flee their homes, and according to the local administration it is entirely unclear when they will be able to return. Pakistain has made progress against militancy, but Tirah is an example of how it still hasn't managed to crack the code in parts of the tribal areas.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/13/2012 00:00 ||
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[Dawn] THE reported death of Abu Yahya al-Libi in the latest US drone strike may have dealt yet another blow to the Al Qaeda leadership operating from Pakistain's lawless tribal region and is seen as a triumph for President B.O.'s relentless decapitation campaign. But the long-term success of this tactic of fighting Al Qaeda remains questionable.
Indeed, the killing of a top Al Qaeda ideologue who made an incredible escape from an American detention centre at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan in 2005 is one of the biggest successes for the US war against the terror network after the killing of the late Osama bin Laden ... who is now neither a strong horse nor a weak horse, but a dead horse... A deputy to Ayman al Zawahiri ... Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area. That is not a horn growing from the middle of his forehead, but a prayer bump, attesting to how devout he is... , Al Libi is the latest on the list of more than two dozen senior Al Qaeda operatives killed in the CIA's drone campaign over the past three years. Yet the removal of the old guards often known as 'sheikhs' won't obliterate the group whose centre of gravity appears to have now shifted from Pakistain's tribal region to Yemen and Somalia.
Meanwhile, ...back at the laboratory the fumes had dispersed, to reveal an ominous sight... Al Qaeda, operating from the Pak borderland, has managed to transform and replenish itself with new recruits. Though the US counterterrorism officials assert that the network has been crippled, and the number of hard-core foreign Death Eaters operating out of the tribal territories is now reduced to less than 200, the reality is that a new Al Qaeda has emerged in Pakistain.
Largely comprising local Death Eaters and Islamic hard boyz from other countries they are replacing the leaders killed in the drone strikes. The network has also grown in strength due to the new alliances it has made with the Pak Taliban and other outlawed turban and Sunni sectarian groups.
Drawn from educated urban middle-class youth splintered from mainstream Islamic parties including Jamaat-e-Islami ...The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an independent branch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores... , they are the new face of Al Qaeda in Pakistain. Many of them have risen high in the group's hierarchy, presenting a formidable challenge not only to the US coalition forces in Afghanistan, but also to the Pak state.
Ilyas Kashmiri was the prime example of this new breed of non-Arab commanders who occupied a very senior position in the Al Qaeda hierarchy. A veteran member of Harkat ul Jihad Islami, Kashmiri became the main strategist of Al Qaeda and had also been seen as one of the contenders to take over the command of the group after the death of Osama bin Laden.
Kashmiri was believed to be the criminal mastermind behind some of the most spectacular terrorist attacks inside Pakistain, including the one on the Mehran naval base. He was killed in CIA Predator strike in South Wazoo last year.
Among others who became the part of the core group of Al Qaeda in Pakistain were two leading medical doctors from Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... -- Arshad Waheed and Akmal Waheed. Both were active members of the JI before joining Al Qaeda in Waziristan.
Dr Arshad Waheed, a renowned orthopaedic surgeon who took the nom de guerre Sheikh Moaz, not only provided medical help to the forces of Evil but also became a trained fighter. He was killed in March 2008 when a CIA-operated drone struck his hideout near Wana in South Waziristan.
An Al Qaeda videotape released after his death hailed him as a martyr who was "unparalleled in faith, love for his religion, and belief in Allah". Dr Akmal Waheed , a cardiologist, is still active in Al Qaeda somewhere in the border area.
The Waheed brothers' role in Al Qaeda raised questions about the JI's connection with the global jihad network. This was certainly not an isolated case. In 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured from the house of a leader of the JI women's wing. There were several other such incidents where JI members were involved in providing shelter to Al Qaeda runaways.
Although there is no evidence of the JI's organizational links with Al Qaeda, many of its members maintained close connections with the group. Their association with Al Qaeda operatives is not accidental.
The country's most powerful Islamic political party was after all the original face of jihad in Pakistain. Thousands of its cadres had fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and later in Kashmire, Bosnia and Chechnya. Though the party leadership denied any links with Al Qaeda, many younger cadres joined the fighting against the US-led occupation forces in Afghanistan.
The cadre Al Qaeda attracted are ideologically and politically motivated. Products of secular educational institutions rather than Islamic seminaries, they have been the planners of many terrorist attacks that heralded the new phase of militancy sweeping the country over the past few years. They include spectacular attacks on high security military installations such as on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi and Mehran naval base in Bloody Karachi.
Strongly committed to the cause of global jihad this new Al Qaeda generation acts as a magnet for radicalised Moslems, including a number of western citizens who travel to Pakistain. Then there are sympathisers providing monetary and logistic support, thus giving the group new depth in the country's urban centres.
Though North Waziristan remains the main hub of Al Qaeda activities, the intensification of the CIA drone strikes has forced many Pak operatives to scatter outside the targeted regions. With a strong support network they do not face much difficulty in operating from urban centres.
The rise of small terrorist cells has made the task of countering them harder. These terrorist groups multiplied with the escalation in the Pak military offensives in the northwest and tribal regions. Some of these groups have just four or five members making them hard to detect.
The absence of a coherent counterterrorism strategy has also allowed Al Qaeda-associated groups to operate freely. Most of those set to sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock Drop the rosco and step away witcher hands up! are freed by the courts either because of lack of evidence or because the judges are threatened. Pakistain is now a major battleground for Al Qaeda and its associated turban groups with dangerous implications for the regional security.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/13/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
"Shifted ... to Yemen and Somalia" > IMO read, OLDER MEMBERS OF OSAMA'S INNER CIRCLE IN AFPAK, THE YOUNG BUNS IN AFRICA???
#2
US/UK/Saudi/AlQaeda are involved already - where on earth does he think the Sunnis got all those weapons?
The plan is simple - let western allies (Saudi/Al Qaeda) purge Syria of Christians (this is largely complete - 90% purged already from Homs according to Syrian Church).
Once the Christians are gone - Israel can flatten the rest without getting the blame for all those dead Christians, and every one is happy.
The Palestinians lose their Christian backers and then Israel finishes off their Islamic backers. Job done.
#5
Does anyone really think having a super-sized Hamas/Hezbollah (i.e. a Muslim Brotherhood Syrian government) with 10 times Israel's land area and 3 times Israel's population, armed with MiG's and SAM's on Israel's borders is a good thing? Syria's Alawite regime has been funneling Iranian supplies to Hezbollah in exchange for Iranian aid to Syria. A Muslim Brotherhood-run Syria will devote the entire resources of the state towards killing as many Israelis as they can. The Alawites have traditionally been hostile towards Israel because they were using Arab Nationalism as a shield against Sunni Arab resentment at being ruled by Alawites. The sectarian war against Sunnis has basically destroyed the whole idea of Arab Nationalism in Syria. It's now everybody in Syria against the Sunni Arabs, who are now being financed by the Gulf's Sunni Arabs - the same people who are keeping Hamas alive and financing al Qaeda. Why would Israel shun this opportunity to reach an unspoken understanding with the Alawites - the same kind of understanding it reached with Jordan's King Hussein after the 1967 war? Especially with Egypt about to hand power over to a Muslim Brotherhood government that is about to march against Israel? If Syria's falls to the Ikhwan, Jordan won't be far behind, given its long and porous border with Syria.
#6
I think we're developing a new generation of people who are just now figuring out the old Cold War phrase 'My dictator is better than your dictator' wasn't necessarily a bad option in the real world. Not to be confused with some mythical magical world of academics [particularly those with a Marxist tint] in which everything is to blame on America.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Zawahiri
Wazoo
