By Chris Maser
02 January, 2008
Culturechange.org
The corporation, it turns out, is an invention of the British Crown through the creation of the East India Company by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, which, being the original, transnational corporation, set today’s precedence for big businesses. The East India Company, "found India rich and left it poor," says author Nick Robin. The corporate structure of the East India Company was deemed necessary to allow the British to exploit their colonies in such a way that the owner of the enterprise was, for the first time, separated from responsibility for how the enterprise behaved.
This conscious separation of personal responsibility from the act of looting is not surprising because "looting" is, theoretically as least, considered immoral in Christian circles. The corporation is thus a "legal fiction," that lets the investors who own the business avoid personal responsibility whenever the business dealings are unethical or even blatantly illegal, despite the fact that such unscrupulous behavior profits them enormously.
A corporation, after all, has but one purpose—to make money for the owners. Economist Milton Friedman gave voice to this pinhole vision when he answered his own rhetorical question: "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not." In fact, the "corporate system," say analysts, "has no room for beneficence toward employees, communities, or the environment," a notion endlessly demonstrated on a daily global scale.
Founders of the United States, such as Thomas Jefferson, recognized the dangers of corporate greed, which accounts for why the founding fathers believed corporate charters should be granted only to those entities willing to serve the greater public interest. Throughout most of the 19th century, therefore, states typically restricted a corporation they chartered to the ownership of one kind of business and strictly limited the amount of capital it could amass. In addition, states required stockholders to be local residents, detailed specific benefits that were due the community, and placed a 20- to 50-year limit on the life of a corporation’s charter. Legislatures would withdraw a corporation’s charter if it strayed from its stated mission or acted in an irresponsible manner.
Although the power of modern corporations dates back to this era, it has been greatly augmented by two major legal dodges aimed at giving them unencumbered authority to serve only the self-interest of a few people. This was accomplished first by the piecemeal removal of those restrictions imposed to protect the welfare of the public from the self-serving interests of the few.
The second change came in 1886, when the U.S. Supreme Court made the corporation all but invulnerable by decreeing, in a case brought by the Southern Pacific Railroad against Santa Clara County, California, that a corporation has the right of "personhood" under the 14th Amendment (originally intended to protect the rights of freed slaves) and, as such, enjoys the same constitutional protections that you or I do as individuals. This second change was reaffirmed in 1906, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, "The Corporation is a creature of the state. It is presumed to be incorporated for the benefit of the public." Within a century, the corporation had been transfigured into a "superhuman creature of the law," that is legally superior to any American citizen because the corporation has civil rights without civil responsibilities.1
When People become Commodities
We, as a society, are losing sight of one another as human beings—witness the Wall-Street money chase in which numerous, large corporations discount human value as they increasingly convert people into faceless commodities that are bought and sold on a whim to improve the corporate standing in the competitive marketplace. After all, market share translates into political power, which translates into higher profit margins, both of which exacerbate the corporate disregard for people, the rampant destruction of Nature, and the squandering of natural resources.
There was a time when people were valued for what they were as individuals. Although American workers have long had an enforced workweek of 40 hours, there currently is an insidious infringement into personal life due to pagers and cell phones, which allow corporations to "own" employees 24 hours a day. Businesses seem to have no moral compunctions about calling employees whenever they choose—"for the good of the company." For those who would choose to live by the corporate proverb, "for the good of the company," the Families and Work Institute said that in 2001 employees are more likely to:
• lose sleep
• have physical and emotional health problems
• make mistakes on the job
• feel and express anger at employers
• resent co-workers who they perceive are not pulling their weight
• look for different jobs
In the workplace, these feelings translate into more injuries and thus more claims for workers’ compensation, increased absenteeism, higher health insurance and health-care costs, impaired job performance, and greater employee turnover—all of which are counterproductive and costly not only for employees but also for employers.2
At home, these feelings are often converted into a sense of not enough time to care for once-loved pets. About four million pets were brought each year to 1,000 shelters surveyed during 1994, 1995, and 1996, the vast majority of which were dogs. Of those, about 64 percent were killed. Only 24 percent were adopted; others were primarily lost pets that were ultimately reunited with their families. Most of the owners who gave up pets were under 30 years of age. When asked why they were giving up their pet, many said that the hours they were being required to work disallow time to adequately care for their animal.3
Moreover, if American workers want more time with and for their families, the corporate response is: "If you aren’t willing to do the job the way we want, we’ll find someone who will." This attitude raises the question of what comes first today in our land of opportunity, where supposedly one is free to seek liberty and the pursuit of happiness—love or money? This question seems all the more relevant in light of the Enron debacle.
The collapse of Enron highlights how some corporations are using people simply as commodities to boost company earnings. While Enron’s employees were both forced to purchase and simultaneously prohibited from selling company stock in their Enron-heavy 401(k) retirement accounts, Enron executives cashed out more than $1 billion in stocks when it was near its peak in value. Regular employees, however, had to watch helplessly as their Enron stock plummeted in value and their life savings disappeared.4
Clearly, the punishing free-for-all of globalization and open markets has not invited love into its house and thus is as much about the fear of lost opportunity as it is about maximizing profit. And now, as fear enters into the monetary counting houses, one must realize that any rosy face painted on the economy is done so with far too many temporary and dead-end jobs in the service sector.
The growing use of long-term, temporary workers by American businesses has created a new kind of employment discrimination, but not across the board because some people actively choose such an arrangement. Employers typically hire contingent workers, such as independent contractors and temporary workers, to fill gaps in personnel, especially to meet high seasonal demands in business. Because, technically, they are not "company employees," long-term, temporary employees or "permatemps" can work at a job for years without being entitled to paid vacations, health insurance, pensions, and other benefits (such as rights and protections under federal labor statutes) enjoyed by permanent employees who do the same work.5 Although not all corporations operate this way, the arrangement is, nevertheless, desirable from the employer’s point of view because it holds down the cost of labor, which means higher profits.
The result is millions of employed people in the United States who cannot afford the basic necessities of food, housing, clothing, and medical care. This problem is well depicted in the movie "Hidden in America," which shows that below the image of shining prosperity is a hidden layer of poverty with its desperate but proud parents and hungry children.
There is also a kind of sweatshop alive and well in the United States—faster and faster with no time to slow down. A Gallup Poll in the summer or 1999 found that 44 percent of working Americans referred to themselves as "workaholics." Yet, 77 percent said they enjoyed their time away from work more than they did their time while working. In fact, our American quest for material wealth—the money chase—leads to profound unhappiness, emotional isolation, and higher divorce rates because we are so busy striving for income there is no time for normal, human relationships.6
Our American ration of irony, however, is that the more connected we become electronically, the more detached and isolated we become emotionally because we are losing the human elements of life: the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice, a smile, a handshake, a touch on the shoulder, a kind word. In essence, we’re losing the human dimension of scale in terms of time, space, touch, sound, and size; we are physically and emotionally losing one another and ourselves. Nothing makes this clearer than such things as home fax machines, laptop computers, cell phones, beepers, Palms, BlackBerrys, and iPods.
People are now "on-line" at home; in transit to work; at work; in transit to home via cars, planes, trains, and on foot. In other words, people are virtually tethered to work. Such workaholism is not only expected by employers, it’s often demanded if one wants to keep their job, which has added "24/7" to our lexicon.
This kind of workaholism is especially hard on women because they are increasingly expected to work outside the home, juggle childcare, school activities for their children, and also maintain the home as though they had to nothing else to do. In addition, the 24/7 phenomenon hit the American work scene shortly after woman became a major part of the workforce.
As things pile endlessly upon one another, the whole of life seems to melt down into a gigantic obligation that becomes increasingly difficult to meet because there simply is not enough time to get everything done, let alone done well. A standard greeting today is: "I’m so busy."
This greeting is worn like the "red badge of courage" was in the past, as though our exhaustion is proof of our worth and our ability to withstand stress, which, in turn, is a mark of our maturity. In fact, we seem to measure our importance by how busy we are. The busier we are, the more important we feel to ourselves and, we imagine, to others, which is reminiscent of the underlying theme of the British television program "Keeping up Appearances."
If we do not rest, however, we will lose our way because action without time for reflection is seldom wise. Rest nourishes our minds, bodies, and souls, which are poisoned by the hypnotic trance of perpetual motion as accomplishment and social "success." Therefore, we never truly rest, especially many who are self-employed.
In the quarter century following World War II, giant corporations like Ma Bell, General Motors, General Electric, and Westinghouse were the place to be, representing, as they did, the pinnacle of what capitalism had to offer workers: extraordinary job security and a cornucopia of benefits. In fact, college graduates tripped over one another seeking life-time careers with these bedrock corporations because they could expect a comfortable house, a generously financed retirement package, lifelong health insurance, and, more often than not, a 9 to 5 job that allowed an organized man to form a healthy balance between work and family.
That was the era when job security formed the underpinnings of the corporate operating principle. In 1962, Earl S. Willis, manager of employee benefits at General Electric, wrote, "Maximizing employee security is a prime company goal." Later, he wrote, "The employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer’s most productive asset." In recent times, however, General Electric’s John F. Welch, Jr., was known as "Neutron Jack" for shedding 100,000 jobs at the company.
Job security has vanished at numerous companies. Today, chief executives dump thousands of workers in the blink of an eye, hoping such moves will please securities analysts and thus investors, so their stocks will inch up 5 percent on the stock exchange. In addition, corporate managers slash away at employee benefits as though employees have suddenly ceased to be humans and have become commodities that can be forced into a more efficient mode of production with less cost to the corporation. They also phase out "defined benefit" retirement plans in favor of the far-less expensive 401(K) "do it yourself plans."
Many employees of the post World War II era, until the latter part of the 1960s, were true believers in their companies. They were also exemplary employees who worked 12 and 14 hours days, six and even seven days a week, whatever it took to ensure their company’s success. They did this enthusiastically because their company’s success was the foundation of their job security, and hence their success as family providers.
Then things changed. The corporate mind-set closed and corporate attitudes hardened. Now, despite their dedication, despite all the birthdays, bedtimes, and school events they have missed as their children grew up, many have been chopped from their company’s payroll in a "merger," "re-engineering," "rightsizing," "downsizing," and "re-deployment." Bitter at the callous way they have been treated, many workers regret having been so dedicated, only to be treated like commodities that are discarded at will.7
"In a personal sense, it hurts, but in a macro sense, it is the action we’ve got to take to remain competitive," says Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pennsylvania. "Ultimately the adjustments that the economy is making is going to set us up for the next strong period of growth." What Naroff seems to be saying between the lines is: While it hurts to be fired, it’s not personal; it’s business.
Others contend, however, that companies may well harm themselves by firing the people who purchase their products, potentially damaging the economy in ways that cannot be rectified with quick fixes, such as tax cuts or lowering the interest rate. In other words, layoffs (especially large, continuous ones) can only hurt the economy.
An economist, on the other hand, would counter with the notion that what really matters is how consumers view the situation. Some would even suggest that workers have become relatively used to being fired for the market convenience of their employer, as though that makes it "acceptable," even "okay." One could also rationalize that many of the job cuts will be less painful than they sound, in part because companies in a tight labor market have scores of unfilled jobs that are easy to eliminate. And then there is the argument that many other cuts would be spread over years, and some might not even occur.8
While this all sounds very "rational," workers and consumers act on emotions, not what passes for economic "logic," and announced layoffs can lead them to panic, because uncertainty and fear of the unknown are powerful allies when it comes to irrational thinking and the often-unwise actions it spawns. Thus, even if nothing in a person’s own job changes, the fact that their company has fired people to increase the economic bottom line can, and often does, drastically change an employee’s attitude about the wisdom of loyalty to the company and thus cripples the company’s real wealth—the allegiance and imagination of its employees.
No wonder it ‘s called "downsizing." The end result is that a worker’s dignity levels out near zero! And what does the corporation lose when employees are fired—especially older, long-term employees? The corporation loses its collective memory and its history, both accrued through years of loyal service.
All of this revolves around consumption and consumerism. Consumption to the economist is the "end-all and be-all" of production. It means economic growth. Consumption is the heart and soul of capitalism itself. The rate of consumption by a populace is also the standard economic measure of human welfare.
Consumption as an end it itself arose with the conceptualization of "the economy" as a macro-social entity and "economics" as a macro-social science—rather than as household management, which is the true meaning of the word economy. To this end, Adam Smith wrote: "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production."
Because consumption and consumerism dominate social discourse and political agendas of all parties, consumerism hogs the limelight at center stage as the prime objective of Western industrialized societies, which, in the collective, are known as "consumer societies." Within these consumer societies, the purpose of consumption is: variety, distraction from daily stresses, pleasure, power, and the status that one hopes will bring with them a measure of happiness and social security. None of this comes to pass, however, because people themselves are increasingly seen as economic commodities. How can a commodity find security from another commodity? In this sense, the marketplace satisfies only temporarily our collective neuroses, while hiding the values that give true meaning to human life.9
Author James B. Twitchell puts it nicely: "Once we are fed and sheltered, our needs are and have always been cultural, not natural. Until there is some other system to codify and satisfy those needs and yearnings, commercialism [consumerism]—and the culture it carries with it—will continue not just to thrive but to triumph."10
In the final analysis, it is doubtful many people really subscribe to the economist’s notion that human happiness and contentment derives solely from, or even primarily from, the consumption of goods and services. It’s therefore surprising that such a notion has come to hold nearly dictatorial power over public policy and the way industrialized societies are governed.
We are today so ensnared in the process of selling and buying things in the market place, that we cannot imagine human life being otherwise. Even our notion of well-being and of despair are wedded to the flow and ebb of the markets. Why is this so much a part of our lives? It is largely because people have yet to understand the notion of conscious simplicity, which is based on the realization that there are two ways to wealth: want less or work more. Put differently, true wealth lies in the scarcity of one’s wants—as opposed to the abundance of one’s possessions.
Thursday 3 January 2008
Afghanistan Does Not Exist: Viva Pakistan
By Gaither Stewart
31 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org
(Rome) I must be paranoid for I believe that Washington stands behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Since the truth is as hard to come by in Pakistan as it is in Washington, D.C. most observers can only hazard guesses as to what really happened there in recent days and weeks. So I too will take the liberty of expounding my version of events.
Though today even how she died is disputed, in my opinion Washington sponsored Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Another of Washington’s mad plans gone wrong! Like so many others in that region. I mean, a courageous woman, secular, in a limited sense democratic, sent back home, probably with another bag full of dollars, to clean up the image of General Musharraf’s faltering military regime in Pakistan. And hopefully to make things right in the US military protectorate and ally in the East.
But make things right how? With her life?
Now whoa there! That is stretching matters.
Abroad, Benazir was known as a democrat. Didn’t her children play with Clinton’s daughter? After all! On the other hand everybody in Pakistan knew she was an ally of Washington. True, she was of an illustrious family, corrupt but illustrious—anything or anyone, it is easy to think, is better than the military that has ruled over Pakistan forever.
Still, it is misleading to describe her as a martyr. Benazir Bhutto was certainly no saint. Still, a woman Prime Minister looks good. I can imagine some man, yes, it has to be a man, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his tie awry, his jacket hanging on the back of his chair at a conference table in some grotto across the Potomac. The others gathered around the table like the image of a woman at the head of a puppet regime in Pakistan this upper echelon bureaucrat depicts. Yes, just the thing we need, a woman to head these unruly Asians, Pashtuns, fundamentalists, terrorists all. And after all she is a pro-American woman. She will be malleable and controllable.
But, the idea man says—now grimly, saving the best part to last, as if it were the natural outcome—of course she will never be elected. She has to be sacrificed. Heads nod, lips tighten, pencils draw circles and bizarre figures.
Yet anyone in his right mind with only vague knowledge of Asia can grasp that a political alliance between Benazir Bhutto and the ex-general President Musharraf couldn’t exist in heaven or on earth. Nor does the establishment of democracy in Pakistan has anything to do with it. As if a woman, secular, mundane, not widely loved in Pakistan outside her own Pakistan Peoples Party, could successfully head this Moslem country of 165 million people in which power today is divided among the military, Taliban fundamentalists and Al Qaida terrorists.
Benazir Bhutto’s elite class not only supported the Taliban for years. With US help her class in fact created the Taliban in order to extend Pakistani control over Afghanistan and its rebellious tribes, and also organize them to fight the Soviet Communist invaders from the north, and perhaps also to somehow get their hands on the poppy plantations.
Instead, in the end, the Talibans talibanized parts of Pakistan so that today the northwest borders between the two countries have tended to vanish, creating a huge, Taliban Pashtun-infested no-man’s land. Italian reporters there say you can’t tell them apart. Now both Afghan Talibans and Pakistani Talibans are fighting against US and NATO forces in the same losing war others have fought earlier in history. It is the very same war that everyone has always lost—one crisis, one conflict, one holy war.
For it is the same fundamentalism that both Musharraf and Washington have used and continue to use unabashedly when they agree with one faction or another. Any number of factions would have killed Mrs. Bhutto.
So this assassination, like that of Martin Luther King or of John Kennedy and legions of others down the trail of international intrigue, has much wider ramifications than a secular woman aspiring to political power.
A woman in the trenches against the entire force of the nation! Besides, Musharraf had told her he would never allow her to return home from her exile in London and Dubai. What changed his mind?
The old question holds here: Who stands to benefit most from her death? In an air of her martyrdom and in the atmosphere of chaos reigning in Pakistan, the result of her removal is that the United States, backed by martial law imposed by a US-supported military regime, can concentrate on a military build up in Pakistan as a substitute for defeat in Iraq and impending debacle in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is an illusion. It is only virtual. Afghanistan doesn’t exist. England learned that the hard way. Soviet Russia experienced it. Once a favorite goal of the jet-set of former times, Kabul, like the country, is no more. An Italian journalist friend depicts Kabul today as a place of dust, mud and bivouacs, heavy Chinese bicycles, rickety taxis, sirens and fires and bombs. In other words, another Baghdad.
Pakistan is thus the soft under belly of an illusion. Pakistan is to become the site for future US concentration ... and more illusions.
RETURN
Nonetheless, Bhutto’s return was important for Bush and his ridiculous “exportation of democracy” slogans. Nonetheless, sane observers can only guess at possible strategic purposes. Yet, the project itself was stupid.
Everybody knew, including Benazir Bhutto herself, that the variegated forces of the country wanted to kill her. Don’t forget that Benazir’s father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an autocratic opportunist who called himself Socialist who headed one of the few non-military governments of Pakistan in the 1970s, was overthrown and hanged by another general-dictator, Zia ul-Haq. There is a tradition here, a script to be followed.
That must have been the goal.
The country was already in chaos, civil war a constant threat. The obvious next step for Washington was application of the good old “strategy of tension”. For now, after the assassination, the road is paved for a ferocious unrelenting crushing of all opposition inside the identifiable borders of the country and the salvation of a tottering regime and collapsing US policies in the whole region.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a disaster, the Pearl Harbor permitting American military build-up in Pakistan. Though Al Qaida denies the attentat, it or one of many fundamentalist groups could have been the willing arm—the version Musharraf proposes—but surely Washington organized the return home of Benazir Bhutto, back home to die.
In that sense she was a victim, a sacrificial victim of the US urge for world supremacy. Benazir Bhutto was a calculating politician. One wonders how she could be so naïve as to believe in “bringing democracy” to a chiefly military-fundamentalist nation, with a thin façade of democracy, and a puppet of the USA.
In the end, it seems, her pro-American, Anglo-Saxon nature and her natural courage got the best of her. No rational calculation could have suggested return to Pakistan. I suspect only promises of glory by those gray men in Washington, a guarantee of total US support and perhaps bags of money could have swayed her.
Again and again, it is the same old story of the USA taking the wrong side, in this case, of being on any side at all. Which goes to prove that the battle for justice and democracy has absolutely nothing to do with it; perhaps not even control over those nuclear weapons held by the Pakistani military regime is the issue. The issue is again the gas and oil pipelines from former Soviet Central Asia running through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the sea … and those poppy fields, too.
Again: Who benefited from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto? Like Musharraf, Fox News naturally goes for Al Qaida. So that is obviously the line of part of the US establishment. At this point Musharraf had little to gain from her death. The true truth is that before her assassination the United States had already set in motion a plan to strengthen its position in Pakistan since the Iraq war is already lost and the Afghanistan adventure a failure.
Chaos never hurts the truly powerful. Bhutto’s murder and the subsequent upheaval are the pretext for an iron fist to cover the arrival and concentration of US forces there, a deployment reportedly scheduled for early 2008. Thus America is stepping into this huge and complex nation in the first person.
Therefore, I go for the secret services of the United States of America, erring again. In a few years we will doubtless be writing and reading about an exit strategy from Pakistan.
This is not the first such mistake.
Yet, puppets like Benazir Bhutto and Pevrez Musharraf, courageous or malicious, continue to come and go.
31 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org
(Rome) I must be paranoid for I believe that Washington stands behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Since the truth is as hard to come by in Pakistan as it is in Washington, D.C. most observers can only hazard guesses as to what really happened there in recent days and weeks. So I too will take the liberty of expounding my version of events.
Though today even how she died is disputed, in my opinion Washington sponsored Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Another of Washington’s mad plans gone wrong! Like so many others in that region. I mean, a courageous woman, secular, in a limited sense democratic, sent back home, probably with another bag full of dollars, to clean up the image of General Musharraf’s faltering military regime in Pakistan. And hopefully to make things right in the US military protectorate and ally in the East.
But make things right how? With her life?
Now whoa there! That is stretching matters.
Abroad, Benazir was known as a democrat. Didn’t her children play with Clinton’s daughter? After all! On the other hand everybody in Pakistan knew she was an ally of Washington. True, she was of an illustrious family, corrupt but illustrious—anything or anyone, it is easy to think, is better than the military that has ruled over Pakistan forever.
Still, it is misleading to describe her as a martyr. Benazir Bhutto was certainly no saint. Still, a woman Prime Minister looks good. I can imagine some man, yes, it has to be a man, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his tie awry, his jacket hanging on the back of his chair at a conference table in some grotto across the Potomac. The others gathered around the table like the image of a woman at the head of a puppet regime in Pakistan this upper echelon bureaucrat depicts. Yes, just the thing we need, a woman to head these unruly Asians, Pashtuns, fundamentalists, terrorists all. And after all she is a pro-American woman. She will be malleable and controllable.
But, the idea man says—now grimly, saving the best part to last, as if it were the natural outcome—of course she will never be elected. She has to be sacrificed. Heads nod, lips tighten, pencils draw circles and bizarre figures.
Yet anyone in his right mind with only vague knowledge of Asia can grasp that a political alliance between Benazir Bhutto and the ex-general President Musharraf couldn’t exist in heaven or on earth. Nor does the establishment of democracy in Pakistan has anything to do with it. As if a woman, secular, mundane, not widely loved in Pakistan outside her own Pakistan Peoples Party, could successfully head this Moslem country of 165 million people in which power today is divided among the military, Taliban fundamentalists and Al Qaida terrorists.
Benazir Bhutto’s elite class not only supported the Taliban for years. With US help her class in fact created the Taliban in order to extend Pakistani control over Afghanistan and its rebellious tribes, and also organize them to fight the Soviet Communist invaders from the north, and perhaps also to somehow get their hands on the poppy plantations.
Instead, in the end, the Talibans talibanized parts of Pakistan so that today the northwest borders between the two countries have tended to vanish, creating a huge, Taliban Pashtun-infested no-man’s land. Italian reporters there say you can’t tell them apart. Now both Afghan Talibans and Pakistani Talibans are fighting against US and NATO forces in the same losing war others have fought earlier in history. It is the very same war that everyone has always lost—one crisis, one conflict, one holy war.
For it is the same fundamentalism that both Musharraf and Washington have used and continue to use unabashedly when they agree with one faction or another. Any number of factions would have killed Mrs. Bhutto.
So this assassination, like that of Martin Luther King or of John Kennedy and legions of others down the trail of international intrigue, has much wider ramifications than a secular woman aspiring to political power.
A woman in the trenches against the entire force of the nation! Besides, Musharraf had told her he would never allow her to return home from her exile in London and Dubai. What changed his mind?
The old question holds here: Who stands to benefit most from her death? In an air of her martyrdom and in the atmosphere of chaos reigning in Pakistan, the result of her removal is that the United States, backed by martial law imposed by a US-supported military regime, can concentrate on a military build up in Pakistan as a substitute for defeat in Iraq and impending debacle in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is an illusion. It is only virtual. Afghanistan doesn’t exist. England learned that the hard way. Soviet Russia experienced it. Once a favorite goal of the jet-set of former times, Kabul, like the country, is no more. An Italian journalist friend depicts Kabul today as a place of dust, mud and bivouacs, heavy Chinese bicycles, rickety taxis, sirens and fires and bombs. In other words, another Baghdad.
Pakistan is thus the soft under belly of an illusion. Pakistan is to become the site for future US concentration ... and more illusions.
RETURN
Nonetheless, Bhutto’s return was important for Bush and his ridiculous “exportation of democracy” slogans. Nonetheless, sane observers can only guess at possible strategic purposes. Yet, the project itself was stupid.
Everybody knew, including Benazir Bhutto herself, that the variegated forces of the country wanted to kill her. Don’t forget that Benazir’s father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an autocratic opportunist who called himself Socialist who headed one of the few non-military governments of Pakistan in the 1970s, was overthrown and hanged by another general-dictator, Zia ul-Haq. There is a tradition here, a script to be followed.
That must have been the goal.
The country was already in chaos, civil war a constant threat. The obvious next step for Washington was application of the good old “strategy of tension”. For now, after the assassination, the road is paved for a ferocious unrelenting crushing of all opposition inside the identifiable borders of the country and the salvation of a tottering regime and collapsing US policies in the whole region.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a disaster, the Pearl Harbor permitting American military build-up in Pakistan. Though Al Qaida denies the attentat, it or one of many fundamentalist groups could have been the willing arm—the version Musharraf proposes—but surely Washington organized the return home of Benazir Bhutto, back home to die.
In that sense she was a victim, a sacrificial victim of the US urge for world supremacy. Benazir Bhutto was a calculating politician. One wonders how she could be so naïve as to believe in “bringing democracy” to a chiefly military-fundamentalist nation, with a thin façade of democracy, and a puppet of the USA.
In the end, it seems, her pro-American, Anglo-Saxon nature and her natural courage got the best of her. No rational calculation could have suggested return to Pakistan. I suspect only promises of glory by those gray men in Washington, a guarantee of total US support and perhaps bags of money could have swayed her.
Again and again, it is the same old story of the USA taking the wrong side, in this case, of being on any side at all. Which goes to prove that the battle for justice and democracy has absolutely nothing to do with it; perhaps not even control over those nuclear weapons held by the Pakistani military regime is the issue. The issue is again the gas and oil pipelines from former Soviet Central Asia running through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the sea … and those poppy fields, too.
Again: Who benefited from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto? Like Musharraf, Fox News naturally goes for Al Qaida. So that is obviously the line of part of the US establishment. At this point Musharraf had little to gain from her death. The true truth is that before her assassination the United States had already set in motion a plan to strengthen its position in Pakistan since the Iraq war is already lost and the Afghanistan adventure a failure.
Chaos never hurts the truly powerful. Bhutto’s murder and the subsequent upheaval are the pretext for an iron fist to cover the arrival and concentration of US forces there, a deployment reportedly scheduled for early 2008. Thus America is stepping into this huge and complex nation in the first person.
Therefore, I go for the secret services of the United States of America, erring again. In a few years we will doubtless be writing and reading about an exit strategy from Pakistan.
This is not the first such mistake.
Yet, puppets like Benazir Bhutto and Pevrez Musharraf, courageous or malicious, continue to come and go.
A dream
This morning I dreamt that the late Mrs Jayalaxmi Vasu from Guru Kripa was telling me that I was a good economics teacher. I had finished half the syllabus and still had the rest to complete - but she told me that I was doing a good job.
I wonder what this dream means, as I have never spoken to the late lady - though her daughter Sujata is Lekha's close confidant.
I wonder what this dream means, as I have never spoken to the late lady - though her daughter Sujata is Lekha's close confidant.
Happiness For Sale
By Mike Ghouse
02 January, 2008
MikeGhouse.net
MikeGhouse.net
A sale transaction requires consideration for exchange of products and services. The consideration in buying happiness is your effort. Happiness is on Sale, it is on sale, because the effort required is minimal against the gain. Though a lopsided transaction, the supply is plentiful and does not take away anything from anyone but enrich every one with a heart felt smile.
Remember the last time you helped someone? You got some one up when he or she fell and you were thanked profusely for that act of kindness, do you recall that joy? You were beaming and your fellow workers and friends wanted to know what it was; you humbly shared the small experience.
Do you recall the twinkle in your eyes and wanted to praise those two that made the national news recently? When a man fell on the tract in New York subway, the other man jumped to save his life risking his own. Then a Bangladeshi student stood up against the bullies who beat up the subway passengers who wished Happy Hanukkah to that bully.
Life becomes meaningful and powerful when you do things for others; it is the anecdote against sorrow that surrounds us from time to time. That is the wisdom in Bahai, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islam, Jain, Jewish, Native religions, Shinto, Sikh, Wicca, Zoroastrian and other faiths – living for the sake of others, a proven formula for happiness.
Way back in 1978, my Peugeot 504 failed me on a Saudi Freeway to Dhahran, I stood there in 116 degrees heat waving at every vehicle that drove on a full throttle going over 140 MPH. I was dying with thirst and blisters were all over my lips and my face, I looked like some one from the western movies. The drivers, who wanted to stop, could not do so within a walking range. After nearly five hours of eternity, a man finally stopped and drove his Toyota truck the full half mile in reverse. His Burqa Clad wife was with him on the passenger's side and in the back were a couple of goats and sheep. I was imagining sitting with the goats and started feeling faintly, but he pulled his wife closer to him and asked me to hop in that little Toyota. I was too tired to worry where I was going. He gave me the life giving water and drove.
We barely communicated with my minimal Arabic and his English, we went to his home some where in the outer rim of the town of Abqaiq. His family brought in the tea and other refreshments followed by a huge dinner with several of his friends. He had one of his friends haul off my car and was getting it fixed; the fuel injection vehicles don't work very well in that kind of heat. I had purchased that Car from Nick Gruev, an Albanian American friend out of Houston.
The Sheikh's friends came were fixing the Hubbly Bubbly (Huqqa) and passing it between their friends, I was dreading to put that thing in my mouth should it come to me, sure enough it did and reluctantly I pretended puffing it. Around 8 PM, his mechanic friend drove up with my car.
As I was ready to leave, I thanked Shaikh Ahmed Al-Sabah profusely and pulled my wallet to pay, he pushed my hand and said "Aqhi, you are my guest and don't even think of it." I pleaded, it was the greatest favor a stranger has done to me and I asked, how I can pay.
He looked at me intently and asked, would you promise me something? In gratitude I said yes, but shuddered what now? He took time and looked at me again and said these life changing words to me "Next time, if you see some one needing help, would you stop and help?" I eagerly said Yes, satisfied; he asked again, are you sure? I gave an emphatic yes, to which he said, "Alhamdu Lillah (praise the lord) that is my reward.
I buy happiness at every nook and corner; it is very satisfying to see other people in their full human form when they give their beautiful smile. A genuine smile is the most beautiful thing on the earth, nothing compares to it.
Every day, you have those opportunities. Make an effort in doing things for others and see how easy it is to be happy.
Here are a few thoughts for you to ponder:
Push yourselves to be prejudice free against people from every meeting, incident, TV shows, and work or news items that you come across.
Find excuses to greet other people and wish them well, don't worry what they think of you, just do it and see the response and counter response.
Work on bringing humility and fight off every thought and action that gives you the idea that your race, faith, nation, culture, language or life style is superior to others.
Commit to yourselves that your words and actions do not flare up conflicts, but mitigate them.
Commit yourselves that you are going to do your share of living for others, for starters one hour a week will enrich you with joy.
It does not take any money; it is your goodwill that brings you the joy. It is yours to keep and is on sale.
Best wishes for 2008
She said what? About who? Shameful celebrity quotes on Search Star!
Sunday 30 December 2007
It is possible to be moral without God
We should recognise and celebrate good wherever we come across it, while being ready to acknowledge and counter the darker side of human nature
Richard Harries
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer
Philosopher Michael Ruse has written: 'The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.' But in all the hype and embarrassment over geneticist Professor Richard Dawkins's anti-religious arguments, there is an important strand in his argument that has been overlooked: his views on morality. These are interesting and significant, and well worth weighing very seriously.
First, and most importantly, he corrects the wrong impression given by the title of his most famous book, The Selfish Gene. Many people took this to mean that he thought that human beings had no option but to act selfishly. Quite the contrary. At a personal level, Dawkins believes that whatever the evolutionary processes that have brought us where we are, we have a responsibility to act as moral agents.
He grounds this in the fact that although genes always act in such a way as to maximise their chance of replicating themselves, the organism of which they are a part may in fact act altruistically, this being the way the genes optimise their chance of surviving. He gives four examples of this, two being well-known. One is how mammals can act with great altruism on behalf of their offspring. Another is the reciprocal benefits that flowers and bees bring to each other through the process of pollination. This co-operation increases the chances of the genes of each of them surviving.
In a more speculative way, Dawkins then builds on this in suggesting that as the sex instinct is not limited to reproduction but can find a broader focus in its contribution to culture, so this capacity to think of others is no longer confined to helping kin or forms of reciprocal altruism, but can find wider expressions. From a philosophical point of view, this is important in refuting the idea that as humans we will always be driven by considerations of narrow self-interest, that morality is unnatural to our evolutionary make-up. On the contrary, Dawkins shows that it is just as built-in for mammals such as ourselves to act in the interest of others. Morality is part of our nature.
Dawkins also draws on the work of Peter Singer and Marc Hauser who presented two moral dilemmas to a wide range of people. In the first, a railway truck careering out of control down a track is about to kill five people in the way. But the onlooker has the chance of pulling a lever and diverting the truck on to a siding where there is one person standing, who will inevitably be killed. Do you pull the lever? The vast majority of people of all ages, ethnic and cultural backgrounds said yes.
In the other dilemma, there is no lever or siding, but a bridge on which sits a very fat man. If this man is pushed and falls in front of the truck, it will be stopped and save five lives. The onlooker is too light to make any difference to the truck, so jumping himself would serve no good purpose. But he is strong enough to push the fat man off. Should he do it? The vast majority of people, again from every conceivable background, said no.
Peter Singer draws some conclusions from this that I do not want to do myself, but the important point is that people's moral judgments have far more in common than used to be thought. There was a time when people loved to emphasise the alleged differences between different societies and hence the relativity of all moral judgments. But it seems we all inhabit a moral realm which we can recognise as such.
This is no surprise to monotheists who believe that all of us, whatever we believe or do not believe, have been created in the image of God and this means we have an ability not only to think, but to have some insight into what is right and what is wrong. In its most philosophical form, it is a belief in natural law, and in its most advanced legal form, a belief in universal human rights.
Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov said: 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.' Sartre agreed. Dawkins disagrees. Morality belongs to us as human beings. I agree too. I do not believe that a society without a religious basis for its morality will always collapse. But I do think that the relationship between morality and religion is more complex than either Dawkins or religious believers usually allow. Take an analogy: someone hears a great piece of music and responds to it in itself. But someone else knows that the piece is part of a symphony and can be even more appreciated when heard as part of the whole in which it has a crucial place. As human beings we can recognise and respond to particular moral insights. But a religious believer claims to understand these as part of a much larger whole in which they have a vital place: in particular, there is a fount and origin of all our moral insights which is good, perfect good, all good, our true and everlasting good. For a Christian, this is above all shown in the willingness of God to enter the flux of history, to redeem it from within.
Religious people have been at fault in the past for slagging off moralities that did not have a faith basis. Today, it is the other way round, with religion being widely criticised for stopping people acting with moral maturity. But the crisis of moral values is such that we should simply recognise and rejoice in the good wherever it is to be found, while continuing to converse about whether it has its place in a larger scheme of things.
Commenting on the view that a society without religion will collapse, Dawkins writes: 'Perhaps naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing - whether by God or each other - in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such surveillance - and nor, dear reader, do you.'
But this overlooks a number of points. First, many people who have strong moral commitments without any religious foundation were shaped by parents or grandparents for whom morality and religion were fundamentally bound up. Moreover, many of those in the forefront of progressive political change, who have abandoned religion, have been driven by a humanism that has been essentially built up by our Christian heritage as Charles Taylor has recently brought out in his magisterial study, A Secular Age. How far are we living on moral capital?
Then, although I believe there is a shard of goodness in every human person, there is a dark side to our nature that it is sentimental to ignore, one which is still wreaking such terrible havoc. As WH Auden put it: 'We have to love our crooked neighbour with our crooked heart.' This points to the need for both self-knowledge and grace. At the beginning of this new year, with the world so stricken with growing inequality, corruption, decadence and conflict, each of us, believer and unbeliever alike, need all the help we can get.
· Richard Harries (Lord Harries of Pentregarth) was Bishop of Oxford. His book, The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World, is published by SPCK next month
Richard Harries
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer
Philosopher Michael Ruse has written: 'The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.' But in all the hype and embarrassment over geneticist Professor Richard Dawkins's anti-religious arguments, there is an important strand in his argument that has been overlooked: his views on morality. These are interesting and significant, and well worth weighing very seriously.
First, and most importantly, he corrects the wrong impression given by the title of his most famous book, The Selfish Gene. Many people took this to mean that he thought that human beings had no option but to act selfishly. Quite the contrary. At a personal level, Dawkins believes that whatever the evolutionary processes that have brought us where we are, we have a responsibility to act as moral agents.
He grounds this in the fact that although genes always act in such a way as to maximise their chance of replicating themselves, the organism of which they are a part may in fact act altruistically, this being the way the genes optimise their chance of surviving. He gives four examples of this, two being well-known. One is how mammals can act with great altruism on behalf of their offspring. Another is the reciprocal benefits that flowers and bees bring to each other through the process of pollination. This co-operation increases the chances of the genes of each of them surviving.
In a more speculative way, Dawkins then builds on this in suggesting that as the sex instinct is not limited to reproduction but can find a broader focus in its contribution to culture, so this capacity to think of others is no longer confined to helping kin or forms of reciprocal altruism, but can find wider expressions. From a philosophical point of view, this is important in refuting the idea that as humans we will always be driven by considerations of narrow self-interest, that morality is unnatural to our evolutionary make-up. On the contrary, Dawkins shows that it is just as built-in for mammals such as ourselves to act in the interest of others. Morality is part of our nature.
Dawkins also draws on the work of Peter Singer and Marc Hauser who presented two moral dilemmas to a wide range of people. In the first, a railway truck careering out of control down a track is about to kill five people in the way. But the onlooker has the chance of pulling a lever and diverting the truck on to a siding where there is one person standing, who will inevitably be killed. Do you pull the lever? The vast majority of people of all ages, ethnic and cultural backgrounds said yes.
In the other dilemma, there is no lever or siding, but a bridge on which sits a very fat man. If this man is pushed and falls in front of the truck, it will be stopped and save five lives. The onlooker is too light to make any difference to the truck, so jumping himself would serve no good purpose. But he is strong enough to push the fat man off. Should he do it? The vast majority of people, again from every conceivable background, said no.
Peter Singer draws some conclusions from this that I do not want to do myself, but the important point is that people's moral judgments have far more in common than used to be thought. There was a time when people loved to emphasise the alleged differences between different societies and hence the relativity of all moral judgments. But it seems we all inhabit a moral realm which we can recognise as such.
This is no surprise to monotheists who believe that all of us, whatever we believe or do not believe, have been created in the image of God and this means we have an ability not only to think, but to have some insight into what is right and what is wrong. In its most philosophical form, it is a belief in natural law, and in its most advanced legal form, a belief in universal human rights.
Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov said: 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.' Sartre agreed. Dawkins disagrees. Morality belongs to us as human beings. I agree too. I do not believe that a society without a religious basis for its morality will always collapse. But I do think that the relationship between morality and religion is more complex than either Dawkins or religious believers usually allow. Take an analogy: someone hears a great piece of music and responds to it in itself. But someone else knows that the piece is part of a symphony and can be even more appreciated when heard as part of the whole in which it has a crucial place. As human beings we can recognise and respond to particular moral insights. But a religious believer claims to understand these as part of a much larger whole in which they have a vital place: in particular, there is a fount and origin of all our moral insights which is good, perfect good, all good, our true and everlasting good. For a Christian, this is above all shown in the willingness of God to enter the flux of history, to redeem it from within.
Religious people have been at fault in the past for slagging off moralities that did not have a faith basis. Today, it is the other way round, with religion being widely criticised for stopping people acting with moral maturity. But the crisis of moral values is such that we should simply recognise and rejoice in the good wherever it is to be found, while continuing to converse about whether it has its place in a larger scheme of things.
Commenting on the view that a society without religion will collapse, Dawkins writes: 'Perhaps naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing - whether by God or each other - in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such surveillance - and nor, dear reader, do you.'
But this overlooks a number of points. First, many people who have strong moral commitments without any religious foundation were shaped by parents or grandparents for whom morality and religion were fundamentally bound up. Moreover, many of those in the forefront of progressive political change, who have abandoned religion, have been driven by a humanism that has been essentially built up by our Christian heritage as Charles Taylor has recently brought out in his magisterial study, A Secular Age. How far are we living on moral capital?
Then, although I believe there is a shard of goodness in every human person, there is a dark side to our nature that it is sentimental to ignore, one which is still wreaking such terrible havoc. As WH Auden put it: 'We have to love our crooked neighbour with our crooked heart.' This points to the need for both self-knowledge and grace. At the beginning of this new year, with the world so stricken with growing inequality, corruption, decadence and conflict, each of us, believer and unbeliever alike, need all the help we can get.
· Richard Harries (Lord Harries of Pentregarth) was Bishop of Oxford. His book, The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World, is published by SPCK next month
Saturday 29 December 2007
'You Can Name Musharraf As My Assassin If I Am Killed': Benazir
'You Can Name Musharraf As My Assassin If I Am Killed': Benazir
Her exchange of e-mails with a confidant shows Benazir was on the verge of exposing an ISI operation to rig the January 8 election
AMIR MIR
On November 13, 2007, I had a one-to-one meeting with former prime minister Benazir Bhutto at the Lahore residence of Senator Latif Khosa. She said she had no doubt about the people who had masterminded the attack on her on October 18, the day she had returned to Pakistan from exile. Benazir told me, "I have come to know after investigations by my own sources that the October 18 bombing was masterminded by some highly-placed officials in the Pakistani security and intelligence establishments who had hired an Al Qaeda-linked militant—Maulvi Abdul Rehman Otho alias Abdul Rehman Sindhi—to execute the attack." She said three local militants were hired to carry out the attack under the supervision of Abdul Rehman Sindhi, an Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) militant from the Dadu district of Sindh.
Before Benazir arrived in Pakistan, Sindhi had been mysteriously released from prison, where he had been incarcerated for his role in the May '04 bombing of the US Cultural Centre in Karachi. She said she subsequently wrote a letter naming her would-be assassins. When I asked her who the recipient of the letter was and whether she had named Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf as well, she had smiled and said, "Mind one thing, all those in the establishment who stand to lose power and influence in the post-election set-up are after me, including the General. I can't give you further details at this stage. However, you can name Musharraf as my assassin if I am killed."
Al Zawahiri: Al Qaeda imprint is distinct, but analysts say it’s a smokescreen
Twenty-four hours after Benazir was assassinated, Asia Times Online, a Hong Kong-based web newspaper, reported that Al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for her killing, further adding that the death squad consisted of Punjabi associates of the underground anti-Shi'ite militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, operating under Al Qaeda orders. "We terminated the most precious American asset who had vowed to defeat the mujahideen." These were the words of one Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a top Al Qaeda commander for the Afghanistan operations as well as an Al Qaeda spokesperson. "This is our first major victory against those (Benazir and Musharraf) who have been siding with infidels (the West) in the fight against Al Qaeda..." Interestingly enough, Sindhi—the person whom Benazir had named in our conversation—is an LeJ member.
But few here believe LeJ could have managed to carry out the attack without assistance from sections in the establishment. Analysts believe Al Qaeda has become a convenient smokescreen to explain motivated attacks on political rivals. The question people are asking is: What motive could the establishment have in killing Benazir?
Top political sources told Outlook that hours before Benazir was assassinated, she was on the verge of exposing an ISI operation to rig the January 8 general election. They say she had been collecting incontrovertible proof about a rigging cell allegedly established at an ISI safe house in Islamabad. The cell was tasked with changing the election results in favour of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q) on the day of the polling. Sources say a close confidant of Benazir had sent an e-mail message on December 25 to her address—sazdubai@emirates.net.ae—informing her that Brigadier Riazullah Khan Chib was working in tandem with Intelligence Bureau director Brigadier General (retd) Ejaz Hussain Shah to manipulate election results.The PML-Q (a party of Musharraf loyalists) was in power before the National Assembly was dissolved, and was the instrument through which Musharraf had ruled Pakistan over the last five years.
The e-mail message to Benazir said the so-called Election Monitoring Cell was to ensure that ballot papers in over 100 constituencies of Punjab and Sindh were stamped in favour of the PML-Q. These ballot papers were to be stamped at the ghost polling stations established in the provincial headquarters of the ISI and the IB, and were to be counted before the presiding officers were to announce the results. "All this is being done because of the fact that Musharraf simply can't afford a hostile parliament as a result of the 2008 polls," the e-mail message said.
Benazir replied to the e-mail message from her Blackberry the same day. She wrote, "I was told that the ISI and the MI have been asked not to meddle. But I will doublecheck." On December 27 at 1.12 pm, a few hours before she was assassinated, Benazir sent a mail to the confidant asking, "I need the address of the safe house (in Islamabad) as well as the phone numbers of the concerned. Pl try and obtain ASAP. Mbb, Sent from my BlackBerry(r) wireless device."
PML-Q sponsor: Chaudhry Pervez Elahi
The confidant wrote back at 3:06, "I have re-checked the information with the same source which earlier said the ISI and the MI have been asked not to meddle. The source claims that Brigadier Riazullah Khan Chib retired from the ISI a few months ago but was re-employed, since he belongs to the arm of the artillery and considered close to Musharraf who too comes from the same wing of the army. The source says Chib's cover job is somewhere else but he is actually supervising a special election cell which is working in tandem with the chief of the Intelligence Bureau. I have further been told that Brigadiers Ejaz Shah and Riaz Chib are close friends because of their having served (in) Punjab as the provincial heads of the ISI and the Punjab regional director of the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) respectively in the past. Both are considered to be loyalists of the Chaudhries..." It was the powerful Chaudhry brothers of Punjab province (Shujaat Hussain and Pervez Elahi) who spawned the PML-Q after engineering a split in the PML (Nawaz).
The confidant's message further stated: "The rigging cell/safe house in question is located on Shahra-e-Dastoor, close to the Pakistan House Bus Stop in Sector G-5 of Islamabad. It is a double-storey building, without inscribing any address, as is the case with most of safe houses. The cell consists of some retired and serving intelligence officials, which will show its magic on the election-day. Let me further inform you that Musharraf had granted Sitara-e-Imtiaz Military to Brig (Retd) Riaz Chib on December 17, 2007, for his meritorious services in operational field. Before his retirement, Chib was in charge of the ISI-led Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) which used to deal with the internal security matters, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit and Baltistan."
Weeks before her return on October 18, Benazir had been accusing Ejaz Shah of plotting to kill her. She told me in our meeting that she was in London when she was told about the conspiracy to assassinate her. She then added, "Having come to know of the plot, I instantly wrote a letter to General Musharraf, naming those in the establishment possibly conspiring to kill me, seeking appropriate action. However, it did not occur to me then that I was actually committing a blunder and signing my own death warrant by not naming Musharraf himself as my possible assassin.It later dawned upon me that Musharraf could have possibly exploited the letter to his advantage and ordered my assassination." Following the October 18 attack, it was disclosed that Shah was one of the three persons whom Benazir had named in her letter to Musharraf.
However, a week before my conversation with Benazir, a high-level meeting reportedly presided over by Musharraf in Islamabad had already dismissed her accusations as "childish". Those who participated in the meeting were informed that the suicide attack on Benazir bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda, arguing that she has incurred the wrath of militants because of her support for the military operation against the Red Mosque fanatics in Islamabad in July and for declaring that she would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to question the father of the Pakistani nuclear programme Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan about his proliferation activities.
Days before her return to Pakistan, Benazir told The Guardian that she felt the real danger to her came from fundamentalist elements in the Pakistan military and intelligence establishment opposed to her return. She scoffed at the assassination threats of Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, saying, "I am not worried about Baitullah Mehsud. I am worried about the threat within the present government. People like Baitullah are mere pawns."
Asked in an interview on NBC a day later whether it was not risky to name a close friend of Musharraf (Shah) as being someone who's plotting against her, Benazir said: "Well, at that time I did not know whether there would be an assassination attempt that I would survive. And I wanted to leave on record the (name of) suspects. I also didn't know that he (Shah) was a friend of General Musharraf. But I asked myself that even if I knew that he was a friend and I thought of him as a suspect, would I have not written? No, I would have written."
But this isn't to say that investigations into the assassination of Benazir will reveal the names of those who masterminded it. Like all infamous assassination cases, the mastermind will remain a shadowy figure on whose role people will only speculate about in whispers.
Her exchange of e-mails with a confidant shows Benazir was on the verge of exposing an ISI operation to rig the January 8 election
AMIR MIR
On November 13, 2007, I had a one-to-one meeting with former prime minister Benazir Bhutto at the Lahore residence of Senator Latif Khosa. She said she had no doubt about the people who had masterminded the attack on her on October 18, the day she had returned to Pakistan from exile. Benazir told me, "I have come to know after investigations by my own sources that the October 18 bombing was masterminded by some highly-placed officials in the Pakistani security and intelligence establishments who had hired an Al Qaeda-linked militant—Maulvi Abdul Rehman Otho alias Abdul Rehman Sindhi—to execute the attack." She said three local militants were hired to carry out the attack under the supervision of Abdul Rehman Sindhi, an Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) militant from the Dadu district of Sindh.
Before Benazir arrived in Pakistan, Sindhi had been mysteriously released from prison, where he had been incarcerated for his role in the May '04 bombing of the US Cultural Centre in Karachi. She said she subsequently wrote a letter naming her would-be assassins. When I asked her who the recipient of the letter was and whether she had named Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf as well, she had smiled and said, "Mind one thing, all those in the establishment who stand to lose power and influence in the post-election set-up are after me, including the General. I can't give you further details at this stage. However, you can name Musharraf as my assassin if I am killed."
Al Zawahiri: Al Qaeda imprint is distinct, but analysts say it’s a smokescreen
Twenty-four hours after Benazir was assassinated, Asia Times Online, a Hong Kong-based web newspaper, reported that Al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for her killing, further adding that the death squad consisted of Punjabi associates of the underground anti-Shi'ite militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, operating under Al Qaeda orders. "We terminated the most precious American asset who had vowed to defeat the mujahideen." These were the words of one Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a top Al Qaeda commander for the Afghanistan operations as well as an Al Qaeda spokesperson. "This is our first major victory against those (Benazir and Musharraf) who have been siding with infidels (the West) in the fight against Al Qaeda..." Interestingly enough, Sindhi—the person whom Benazir had named in our conversation—is an LeJ member.
But few here believe LeJ could have managed to carry out the attack without assistance from sections in the establishment. Analysts believe Al Qaeda has become a convenient smokescreen to explain motivated attacks on political rivals. The question people are asking is: What motive could the establishment have in killing Benazir?
Top political sources told Outlook that hours before Benazir was assassinated, she was on the verge of exposing an ISI operation to rig the January 8 general election. They say she had been collecting incontrovertible proof about a rigging cell allegedly established at an ISI safe house in Islamabad. The cell was tasked with changing the election results in favour of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q) on the day of the polling. Sources say a close confidant of Benazir had sent an e-mail message on December 25 to her address—sazdubai@emirates.net.ae—informing her that Brigadier Riazullah Khan Chib was working in tandem with Intelligence Bureau director Brigadier General (retd) Ejaz Hussain Shah to manipulate election results.The PML-Q (a party of Musharraf loyalists) was in power before the National Assembly was dissolved, and was the instrument through which Musharraf had ruled Pakistan over the last five years.
The e-mail message to Benazir said the so-called Election Monitoring Cell was to ensure that ballot papers in over 100 constituencies of Punjab and Sindh were stamped in favour of the PML-Q. These ballot papers were to be stamped at the ghost polling stations established in the provincial headquarters of the ISI and the IB, and were to be counted before the presiding officers were to announce the results. "All this is being done because of the fact that Musharraf simply can't afford a hostile parliament as a result of the 2008 polls," the e-mail message said.
Benazir replied to the e-mail message from her Blackberry the same day. She wrote, "I was told that the ISI and the MI have been asked not to meddle. But I will doublecheck." On December 27 at 1.12 pm, a few hours before she was assassinated, Benazir sent a mail to the confidant asking, "I need the address of the safe house (in Islamabad) as well as the phone numbers of the concerned. Pl try and obtain ASAP. Mbb, Sent from my BlackBerry(r) wireless device."
PML-Q sponsor: Chaudhry Pervez Elahi
The confidant wrote back at 3:06, "I have re-checked the information with the same source which earlier said the ISI and the MI have been asked not to meddle. The source claims that Brigadier Riazullah Khan Chib retired from the ISI a few months ago but was re-employed, since he belongs to the arm of the artillery and considered close to Musharraf who too comes from the same wing of the army. The source says Chib's cover job is somewhere else but he is actually supervising a special election cell which is working in tandem with the chief of the Intelligence Bureau. I have further been told that Brigadiers Ejaz Shah and Riaz Chib are close friends because of their having served (in) Punjab as the provincial heads of the ISI and the Punjab regional director of the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) respectively in the past. Both are considered to be loyalists of the Chaudhries..." It was the powerful Chaudhry brothers of Punjab province (Shujaat Hussain and Pervez Elahi) who spawned the PML-Q after engineering a split in the PML (Nawaz).
The confidant's message further stated: "The rigging cell/safe house in question is located on Shahra-e-Dastoor, close to the Pakistan House Bus Stop in Sector G-5 of Islamabad. It is a double-storey building, without inscribing any address, as is the case with most of safe houses. The cell consists of some retired and serving intelligence officials, which will show its magic on the election-day. Let me further inform you that Musharraf had granted Sitara-e-Imtiaz Military to Brig (Retd) Riaz Chib on December 17, 2007, for his meritorious services in operational field. Before his retirement, Chib was in charge of the ISI-led Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) which used to deal with the internal security matters, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit and Baltistan."
Weeks before her return on October 18, Benazir had been accusing Ejaz Shah of plotting to kill her. She told me in our meeting that she was in London when she was told about the conspiracy to assassinate her. She then added, "Having come to know of the plot, I instantly wrote a letter to General Musharraf, naming those in the establishment possibly conspiring to kill me, seeking appropriate action. However, it did not occur to me then that I was actually committing a blunder and signing my own death warrant by not naming Musharraf himself as my possible assassin.It later dawned upon me that Musharraf could have possibly exploited the letter to his advantage and ordered my assassination." Following the October 18 attack, it was disclosed that Shah was one of the three persons whom Benazir had named in her letter to Musharraf.
However, a week before my conversation with Benazir, a high-level meeting reportedly presided over by Musharraf in Islamabad had already dismissed her accusations as "childish". Those who participated in the meeting were informed that the suicide attack on Benazir bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda, arguing that she has incurred the wrath of militants because of her support for the military operation against the Red Mosque fanatics in Islamabad in July and for declaring that she would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to question the father of the Pakistani nuclear programme Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan about his proliferation activities.
Days before her return to Pakistan, Benazir told The Guardian that she felt the real danger to her came from fundamentalist elements in the Pakistan military and intelligence establishment opposed to her return. She scoffed at the assassination threats of Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, saying, "I am not worried about Baitullah Mehsud. I am worried about the threat within the present government. People like Baitullah are mere pawns."
Asked in an interview on NBC a day later whether it was not risky to name a close friend of Musharraf (Shah) as being someone who's plotting against her, Benazir said: "Well, at that time I did not know whether there would be an assassination attempt that I would survive. And I wanted to leave on record the (name of) suspects. I also didn't know that he (Shah) was a friend of General Musharraf. But I asked myself that even if I knew that he was a friend and I thought of him as a suspect, would I have not written? No, I would have written."
But this isn't to say that investigations into the assassination of Benazir will reveal the names of those who masterminded it. Like all infamous assassination cases, the mastermind will remain a shadowy figure on whose role people will only speculate about in whispers.
I Am But A Disembodied Voice, The Living Dead
I Am But A Disembodied Voice, The Living Dead
What have I done that I can neither cross my own threshold nor enjoy human company?
TASLIMA NASREEN Where am I? I am certain no one will believe me if I say I have no answer to this apparently straightforward question, but the truth is I just do not know. And if I were to be asked how I am, I would again answer: I don't know. I am like the living dead: benumbed; robbed of the pleasure of existence and experience; unable to move beyond the claustrophobic confines of my room. Day and night, night and day. Yes, this is how I have been surviving. This nightmare did not begin when I was suddenly bundled out of Calcutta—it has been going on for a while. It is like a slow and lingering death, like sipping delicately from a cupful of slow-acting poison that is gradually killing all my faculties. This is a conspiracy to murder my essence, my being, once so courageous, so brave, so dynamic, so playful. I realise what is going on around me but am utterly helpless, despite my best efforts, to wage a battle on my own behalf. I am merely a disembodied voice. Those who once stood by me have disappeared into the darkness.
I ask myself: what heinous crime have I committed? What sort of life is this where I can neither cross my own threshold nor know the joys of human company? What crime have I committed that I have to spend my life hidden away, relegated to the shadows? For what crimes am I being punished by this society, this land? I wrote of my beliefs and my convictions. I used words, not violence, to express my ideas. I did not take recourse to pelting stones or bloodshed to make my point. Yet, I am considered a criminal. I am being persecuted because it was felt that the right of others to express their opinions was more legitimate than mine.
Does India not realise how immense the suffering must be for an individual to renounce her most deeply-held beliefs? How humiliated, frightened, and insecure I must have been to allow my words to be censored. If I had not agreed to the grotesque bowdlerisation of my writings by those who insisted on it, I would have been hounded and pursued till I dropped dead. Their politics, their faith, their barbarism, and their diabolical purposes are all intent on sucking the lifeblood out of me, because the truths I write are so difficult for them to stomach. How can I—a powerless and unprotected individual—battle brute force? But come what may, I cannot take recourse to untruth.
What have I to offer but love and compassion? In the way that they used hatred to rip out my words, I would like to use compassion and love to rip the hatred out of them. Certainly, I am enough of a realist to acknowledge that strife, hatred, cruelty and barbarism are integral elements of the human condition. This will not change; and how can an insignificant creature like me change all this? If I were to be eradicated or exterminated, it would not matter one whit to the world at large. I know all this. Yet, I had imagined Bengal would be different. I had thought the madness of her people was temporary. I had thought that the Bengal I loved so passionately would never forsake me. She did.
Exiled from Bangladesh, I wandered around the world for many years like a lost orphan. The moment I was given shelter in West Bengal, it felt as though all those years of numbing tiredness just melted away. I was able to resume a normal life in a beloved and familiar land. So long as I survive, I will carry within me the vistas of Bengal, her sunshine, her wet earth, her very essence. The same Bengal whose sanctuary I once walked many blood-soaked miles to reach has now turned its back upon me. I am a Bengali within and without; I live, breathe, and dream in Bengali. I find it hard to believe that I am no longer wanted in Bengal.
I am a guest in this land, I must be careful of what I say.I must do nothing that violates the code of hospitality. I did not come here to hurt anyone's sentiments or feelings. Wounded and hurt in my own country, I suffered slights and injuries in many lands before I reached India, where I knew I would be hurt yet again. For this is, after all, a democratic and secular land where the politics of the votebank imply that being secular is equated with being pro-Muslim fundamentalist. I do not wish to believe all this. I do not wish to hear all this. Yet, all around me I read, hear, and see evidence of this. I sometimes wish I could be like those mythical monkeys, oblivious to all the evil that is going on around me. Death who visits me in many forms now feels like a friend. I feel like talking to him, unburdening myself to him. I have no one else to speak to, no one else to whom I can unburden myself.
I have lost my beloved Bengal. No child torn from its mother's breast could have suffered as much as I did during that painful parting. Once again, I have lost the mother from whose womb I was born. The pain is no less than the day I lost my biological mother. My mother had always wanted me to return home. That was something I could not do. After settling down in Calcutta, I was able to tell my mother, who by then was a memory within me, that I had indeed returned home. How did it matter which side of an artificial divide I was on? Now, I do not have the courage to tell my mother that I have been unceremoniously expelled by those who had once given me shelter, that my life now is that of a nomad. My sensitive mother would be shattered if I were to tell her all this. Instead, I have now taken to convincing myself that I must have transgressed somewhere, committed some grievous error. Why else would I be in such a situation? Is daring to utter the truth a terrible sin in this era of falsehood and deceit? Is it because I am a woman?
I know I have not been condemned by the masses. If their opinion had been sought, I am certain the majority would have wanted me to stay on in Bengal. But when has a democracy reflected the voice of the masses? A democracy is run by those who hold the reins of power, who do exactly what they think fit. An insignificant individual, I must now live life on my own terms and write about what I believe in and hold dear. It is not my desire to harm, malign, or deceive. I do not lie. I try not to be offensive. I am but a simple writer who neither knows nor understands the dynamics of politics. The way in which I was turned into a political pawn, however, and treated at the hands of base politicians, beggars belief. For what end, you may well ask. A few measly votes. The force of fundamentalism, which I have opposed and fought for many years, has only been strengthened by my defeat.
This is my beloved India, where I have been living and writing on secular humanism, human rights and emancipation of women. This is also the land where I have had to suffer and pay the price for my most deeply held and fundamental convictions, where not a single political party of any persuasion has spoken out in my favour, where no non-governmental organisation, women's rights or human rights group has stood by me or condemned the vicious attacks launched upon me. This is an India I have never before known. Yes, it is true that individuals in a scattered, unorganised manner are fighting for my cause, and journalists, writers, and intellectuals have spoken out in my favour, even if they have never read a word I have written. Yet, I am grateful for their opinions and support.
Wherever individuals gather in groups, they seem to lose their power to speak out. Frankly, this facet of the new India terrifies me. Then again, is this a new India, or is it the true face of the nation? I do not know.Since my earliest childhood I have regarded India as a great land and a fearless nation. The land of my dreams: enlightened, strong, progressive, and tolerant. I want to be proud of that India. I will die a happy person the day I know India has forsaken darkness for light, bigotry for tolerance. I await that day. I do not know whether I will survive, but India and what she stands for has to survive.
Taslima Nasreen is an exiled Bangladeshi writer who was forced to leave her home in Calcutta in November, and put under police protection at an undisclosed location.
Messenger on the move… Text MSN to 63463 now!
What have I done that I can neither cross my own threshold nor enjoy human company?
TASLIMA NASREEN Where am I? I am certain no one will believe me if I say I have no answer to this apparently straightforward question, but the truth is I just do not know. And if I were to be asked how I am, I would again answer: I don't know. I am like the living dead: benumbed; robbed of the pleasure of existence and experience; unable to move beyond the claustrophobic confines of my room. Day and night, night and day. Yes, this is how I have been surviving. This nightmare did not begin when I was suddenly bundled out of Calcutta—it has been going on for a while. It is like a slow and lingering death, like sipping delicately from a cupful of slow-acting poison that is gradually killing all my faculties. This is a conspiracy to murder my essence, my being, once so courageous, so brave, so dynamic, so playful. I realise what is going on around me but am utterly helpless, despite my best efforts, to wage a battle on my own behalf. I am merely a disembodied voice. Those who once stood by me have disappeared into the darkness.
I ask myself: what heinous crime have I committed? What sort of life is this where I can neither cross my own threshold nor know the joys of human company? What crime have I committed that I have to spend my life hidden away, relegated to the shadows? For what crimes am I being punished by this society, this land? I wrote of my beliefs and my convictions. I used words, not violence, to express my ideas. I did not take recourse to pelting stones or bloodshed to make my point. Yet, I am considered a criminal. I am being persecuted because it was felt that the right of others to express their opinions was more legitimate than mine.
Does India not realise how immense the suffering must be for an individual to renounce her most deeply-held beliefs? How humiliated, frightened, and insecure I must have been to allow my words to be censored. If I had not agreed to the grotesque bowdlerisation of my writings by those who insisted on it, I would have been hounded and pursued till I dropped dead. Their politics, their faith, their barbarism, and their diabolical purposes are all intent on sucking the lifeblood out of me, because the truths I write are so difficult for them to stomach. How can I—a powerless and unprotected individual—battle brute force? But come what may, I cannot take recourse to untruth.
What have I to offer but love and compassion? In the way that they used hatred to rip out my words, I would like to use compassion and love to rip the hatred out of them. Certainly, I am enough of a realist to acknowledge that strife, hatred, cruelty and barbarism are integral elements of the human condition. This will not change; and how can an insignificant creature like me change all this? If I were to be eradicated or exterminated, it would not matter one whit to the world at large. I know all this. Yet, I had imagined Bengal would be different. I had thought the madness of her people was temporary. I had thought that the Bengal I loved so passionately would never forsake me. She did.
Exiled from Bangladesh, I wandered around the world for many years like a lost orphan. The moment I was given shelter in West Bengal, it felt as though all those years of numbing tiredness just melted away. I was able to resume a normal life in a beloved and familiar land. So long as I survive, I will carry within me the vistas of Bengal, her sunshine, her wet earth, her very essence. The same Bengal whose sanctuary I once walked many blood-soaked miles to reach has now turned its back upon me. I am a Bengali within and without; I live, breathe, and dream in Bengali. I find it hard to believe that I am no longer wanted in Bengal.
I am a guest in this land, I must be careful of what I say.I must do nothing that violates the code of hospitality. I did not come here to hurt anyone's sentiments or feelings. Wounded and hurt in my own country, I suffered slights and injuries in many lands before I reached India, where I knew I would be hurt yet again. For this is, after all, a democratic and secular land where the politics of the votebank imply that being secular is equated with being pro-Muslim fundamentalist. I do not wish to believe all this. I do not wish to hear all this. Yet, all around me I read, hear, and see evidence of this. I sometimes wish I could be like those mythical monkeys, oblivious to all the evil that is going on around me. Death who visits me in many forms now feels like a friend. I feel like talking to him, unburdening myself to him. I have no one else to speak to, no one else to whom I can unburden myself.
I have lost my beloved Bengal. No child torn from its mother's breast could have suffered as much as I did during that painful parting. Once again, I have lost the mother from whose womb I was born. The pain is no less than the day I lost my biological mother. My mother had always wanted me to return home. That was something I could not do. After settling down in Calcutta, I was able to tell my mother, who by then was a memory within me, that I had indeed returned home. How did it matter which side of an artificial divide I was on? Now, I do not have the courage to tell my mother that I have been unceremoniously expelled by those who had once given me shelter, that my life now is that of a nomad. My sensitive mother would be shattered if I were to tell her all this. Instead, I have now taken to convincing myself that I must have transgressed somewhere, committed some grievous error. Why else would I be in such a situation? Is daring to utter the truth a terrible sin in this era of falsehood and deceit? Is it because I am a woman?
I know I have not been condemned by the masses. If their opinion had been sought, I am certain the majority would have wanted me to stay on in Bengal. But when has a democracy reflected the voice of the masses? A democracy is run by those who hold the reins of power, who do exactly what they think fit. An insignificant individual, I must now live life on my own terms and write about what I believe in and hold dear. It is not my desire to harm, malign, or deceive. I do not lie. I try not to be offensive. I am but a simple writer who neither knows nor understands the dynamics of politics. The way in which I was turned into a political pawn, however, and treated at the hands of base politicians, beggars belief. For what end, you may well ask. A few measly votes. The force of fundamentalism, which I have opposed and fought for many years, has only been strengthened by my defeat.
This is my beloved India, where I have been living and writing on secular humanism, human rights and emancipation of women. This is also the land where I have had to suffer and pay the price for my most deeply held and fundamental convictions, where not a single political party of any persuasion has spoken out in my favour, where no non-governmental organisation, women's rights or human rights group has stood by me or condemned the vicious attacks launched upon me. This is an India I have never before known. Yes, it is true that individuals in a scattered, unorganised manner are fighting for my cause, and journalists, writers, and intellectuals have spoken out in my favour, even if they have never read a word I have written. Yet, I am grateful for their opinions and support.
Wherever individuals gather in groups, they seem to lose their power to speak out. Frankly, this facet of the new India terrifies me. Then again, is this a new India, or is it the true face of the nation? I do not know.Since my earliest childhood I have regarded India as a great land and a fearless nation. The land of my dreams: enlightened, strong, progressive, and tolerant. I want to be proud of that India. I will die a happy person the day I know India has forsaken darkness for light, bigotry for tolerance. I await that day. I do not know whether I will survive, but India and what she stands for has to survive.
Taslima Nasreen is an exiled Bangladeshi writer who was forced to leave her home in Calcutta in November, and put under police protection at an undisclosed location.
Messenger on the move… Text MSN to 63463 now!
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