Taal Matol
Anarkali!
By Shoaib Hashmi
Anarkali is one of the great-unsung heroines of Lahore. Her name means 'blossom of the pomegranate tree' and she lived in the sixteenth century during the reign of the Emperor Akbar; in fact, she was a girl at his court. Present too, was his son Salim, later the emperor Jehangir, and one day he was walking in the garden carrying two of his pet pigeons. He wanted to go look at some flowers and so he handed the pigeons to a passing girl, which happened to be Anarkali.

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Gaza on my mind
The cold, hard facts of Israel's attempts to destabilise the state of Palestine
By Dr Arif Azad
The full extent of Israel's deliberate destruction of Palestinian institutions is slowly dawning on the outside world after four weeks of Israel's barbaric assault on Gaza. Again the Israeli government got away with murder and managed to pull wool over the eyes of West. This is not the first time Israel had it so easy with pogrom of the Palestinian. Since its creation, Israel has refused to recognise Palestinians as human beings deserving of political and civil rights. The West has simply looked the other way while it's spoilt child -- Israel -- has wreaked havoc on the region where it was planted as European colonial settlement. Like all colonial enterprises, European Jewish immigrants to Palestine set about eliminating all traces of Palestinian political and social life. (Gaza outrage is the latest in a long line of such acts) The bloody minded ideology of Zionism was expansionist, terrorist in its tactics. It sought to eliminate Palestinian identity and nationhood by all means possible. 

RIPPLE EFFECT
Why are the courts silent over the missing?
By Omar R. Quraishi
I often get mails from Amina Masood Janjua -- who is the wife of Masood Janjua, missing for dozens of months, and according to her, picked up by the intelligence agencies during the time of General Musharraf. Hers is one of many cases of disappearances of dozens of Pakistani citizens during the previous government, otherwise known as the missing persons' scandal.

Slumdog Millionaire has a perfect plot. The protagonist Jamal Malik is a precocious slum-dwelling child with enough traumatic experiences that he has acquired an uncanny emotional and factual knowledge of the world as well as the human heart. The conflict that drives the plot forward is produced by his dire poverty. There are plenty of sub-plots that move forward the main story line. The classic conflict -- of a young man against the brutal world -- has been transformed into a thriller-like emotional drama depicting the battle between street-smart survivalism and the iron fist of poverty.

That is where the problem lies. How can one represent poverty while having a slick plot? The little first-hand experience of poverty I have tells me that poverty is actually the absence of all plots. Being poor means the story of your life is out of your control. Circumstances have more control over the storyline than the protagonist. That is why I felt that the experience of poverty feels "used" by the screenwriter of the movie. But, then, the next logical question arises: how to represent poverty in such a way that it engages people. That is the dilemma at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire. The life of the poor lacks all plots but the story of Bombay slums, or other favelas of the world, must be told in a meaningful way. Meanings are produced, out of countless facts and events, with the help of a story because human beings understand the world in a storied manner. There is a beginning, middle and end in almost all grand narratives. Even socially emancipating narratives, of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, imagine a perfect ending with the arrival of a classless society or the superman. Such is the seduction of the narrative arch that even science cannot escape it and imagines, almost out of habit, a big bang leading to human evolution and the implosion or gravity-free expansion of the universe at the end.

If human consciousness of the world is structured like a story, the experience of poverty, at least from the point of view of the audience, has to have a cohesive narrative structure. But, as I have posited above, poverty is the absence of all plots. Then how can one represent poverty in a story and still do justice to the experience of poverty? The answer to this question lies in the way the conflict is resolved at the peak of the narrative arch in the movie. Because the narrative concerns itself with poverty, the answer to the problem of representation is also part of the movie. Poverty provides the resolution to the suspenseful climax. Jamal's experience of living in abject poverty has sharpened his social acumen to the extent that he does not bite the false bait dangled before him by Prem Kumar of Kon Banaiga Krorepati?, the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Why Jamal Malik does not bite the false bait is because the host of the programme says to him that Jamal is like him. They both have risen out of dire poverty. And then writes a false answer on the washroom mirror where the conversation is taking place.

The reason behind Jamal's distrust of the hinted answer speaks of his intimate knowledge of poverty and how it creates a vicious psychological cycle. The poor, in their struggle to survive and in the presence of scarce resources, turn upon each other. That is the point around which the plot pivots. And that is where the movie succeeds as an accurate representation of poverty, despite the perfect plot. The perfect resolution of the conflict, and the onset of the dénouement, depends on the lessons learnt by Jamal in absolute poverty, which has taught him not to trust anybody except himself. Because of the false answer written on the washroom mirror by another ex-slum-dweller, it becomes easy for Jamal to get at the right answer. He chooses the Life Line option of 50/50 to get to the two possibly correct answers out of the four options. Then he leaves out the answer provided by another former poor man. The remaining one option proves to be the correct option. At this point, the ex-slum-dweller Prem Kumar turns upon Jamal Malik and decides to hand him over to the police because he (Prem Kumar) thinks that Jamal Malik has an insider's help. The ex-poor man turns against the soon-to-be-an-ex-poor. And that is what makes the plot more convincing than the usual rich-versus-poor plots.

This movie is different and convincing because it shows the lasting and corrupting effects of poverty on the former slum-dwellers and that is the reason for the success of its plot. It makes perfect sense because it is psychologically so true-to-life even though the events, when ordered into a neat plot, are so unlike life. At a sociological level, then, the movie introduces a new dimension in the age-old question of representation. It turns the question of representing poverty as a problem to be resolved and extrapolated by the plot.

Naveed Kahloon, a farmer from Fort Abbas a Tehsil of Bahawalnagr district, has sowed wheat in 60 acres of his land this year. He and many other farmers of his area were encouraged to cultivate wheat after Prime Minister Gilani's announcement to increase the procurement price from Rs625 to Rs950 per 40 kg in Sept 2008.

Everything was going great for them, even nature favoured them with timely rains and good weather. Naveed was a satisfied person, hoping to reap the best reward. But things started changing drastically for him during the last two weeks of December 2008. The wheat crop is on the crucial stage of boot at this time of the year. It needs urea fertilizer badly to get nitrogen nutrients before the heading stage.

But Naveed and many other farmers of his area have failed to get the fertilizer for the last two weeks. "At this stage, I need two bags of urea per acre and believe me I could only manage to get 30 bags after a lot of struggle and that too from the black-market at the price of Rs1100 per bag instead of the government's announced price of Rs660," says Naveed. "Even if the fertilizer is available at thrice the actual price I have to buy it, otherwise I will have to face a loss of at least 20 percent of yield per acre."

Naveed says for the past two weeks his entire family has been busy searching for the fertilizer. "We have been constantly going to National Fertilizer Company, which has established a point at the office of Tehsil Agriculture Officer in Fort Abbas, but it is not available there. On Jan 19, a truck arrived with 3,000 bags of urea but more than 4,000 farmers were present to get it. At the end of the day, there was a scuffle between farmers and the agriculture officials. The farmers broke the office of Tehsil Agriculture Officer, who later called the police to control the farmers and did not give them fertilizer," tells Naveed. He says many of the farmers of his area have started cursing themselves for having decided to grow wheat."

The situation is worse in other parts of Punjab and farmers in different areas have been staging protests on the unavailability of urea fertilizer. So far, farmers from Multan, Sialkot, Pakpattan, Gujranwala, Mandi Bahauddin, Vehari, Nankana, sargodha, Leyyah, Bahawalnagar and Bahawalpur have registered strong protest by blocking main roads and at some places even blocking the railway line for hours.

Agriculture experts agree that lack of urea fertilizer at this stage can reduce the per acre yield by 20 to 30 percent. "Booting and heading are the most crucial stages of the wheat crop when it needs maximum nitrogen nutrients which can only be provided through Urea, the most important nitrate for the wheat crop," says Dr Saifullah, assistant professor at the Institute of Soil and Environmental Sciences, University of agriculture Faisalabad.

He believes rains at this stage were the best gift of nature for farmers and was the best time to apply Urea. "In hot and dry weather, up to 40 percent of urea fertilizer can change into ammonia gas and evaporate before it reaches the crop while flood irrigation, which is the commonly used method of irrigation in Pakistan, can also result in upto 20 percent fertilizer wastage as it seeps down in the earth with water. So, when it rains, it is the best time which ensures maximum availability of nutrients to the crop."

Ibrahim Mughal Chairman Agri Forum Pakistan also sees a 20 to 25 percent shortfall in wheat production in the wake of the worst shortage of urea and its black marketing. Mughal believes the shortage is only because of the mismanagement on account of federal and provincial agriculture departments. "At present the country is facing shortage of over 10 million urea fertilizer bags. We need 50 million bags but only 40 million bags are available," he says. Mughal says the target of 25 million tons of wheat seems impossible this year just because of urea shortage. "Just because of some 'elements' within the government who have wasted the opportunity to make money." Mughal suggests a commission should be set up to hold the people responsible for the situation.

The federal Agriculture Department held a meeting on Dec 20, 2008, jointly chaired by federal secretaries of Ministries of Food, Agriculture and Industries to chalk out fertiliser distribution plans in the province. According to the plan, National Fertiliser Corporation (NFC) would distribute 50 percent of local and 100 percent imported urea at Sub-Divisional level in the province. In total, 125 distribution/sale points have been set up at sub-divisional level in Punjab. Other than the existing 28 NFC sale points, 97 additional sale points have been identified by the provincial agriculture department and the supply of urea "will be ensured by NFC at all these points." The sale price of urea at sub-divisional level is Rs 660 per bag.

These points, however, are not helping the farmers at all, as the process to get the fertilizer from these points is lengthy as well as complicated. Farmers are required to provide attested copy of ownership of their land (Fard), identity card, bank draft and Numberdar attestation of them being practicing farmers. "To get all these documents, one has to spend time and money," says Ibrahim Mughal. "There is a very good network of fertilizer dealers in Punjab and the government should use it. The dealers should be monitored closely and should not be allowed to black-market the fertilizer. Why has the government introduced a completely new and lengthy process?" he asks.

Federal Minister for Food and Agriculture Nazar Muhammad Gondal pledged to overcome urea shortage by Dec 31, 2008, but so far the situation has hardly changed. Mian Manzoor Ahmad Wattoo, Minister for Industries and Production also promised on Jan 1 that till Jan 15, 300,000 Metric Tons of imported urea fertilizer would be transported into the country for distribution among local farmers besides 3,50,000 tons of local urea for which NFC and Utility Stores have arranged transports and warehouses. He has also formed a committee to monitor all systems of distribution, transportation and import of urea.

A war of words is going on between the federal government and the Punjab government on the issue, both blaming each other for the crisis. Nazar Mohammad said the availability of the fertilizer is the responsibility of the federal government, but to ensure that it is sold at a fixed rate is the job of the provincial government. The Punjab government is of the view that they had already informed the federal government of the situation in early December, 2008, but it had not responded accordingly. Punjab Agriculture minister Ali Ahmed Olakh tells TNS that after so many years Punjab has succeeded in achieving the target of wheat sowing on 17 million acres. "But I am not sure if we could be able to achieve the production target of 20 million tons of wheat production mainly due to shortage of urea at a crucial time," he says. Olakh says the entire provincial machinery is trying to work out this shortage, "but we are unable because we do not have enough supply of urea." He does not deny the sale of urea in the black-market, "so far we have registered cases against more than 1300 fertilizer dealers over the issue of black-marketing and hoarding."

"In Punjab, Everything from Urea's transportation to its distribution is being done by the federal government through agencies. The Punjab government is just helping them, so how can we be responsible for the situation?" he says.

Anarkali is one of the great-unsung heroines of Lahore. Her name means 'blossom of the pomegranate tree' and she lived in the sixteenth century during the reign of the Emperor Akbar; in fact, she was a girl at his court. Present too, was his son Salim, later the emperor Jehangir, and one day he was walking in the garden carrying two of his pet pigeons. He wanted to go look at some flowers and so he handed the pigeons to a passing girl, which happened to be Anarkali.

He came back to find her hanging on to one pigeon. He asked her what had happened to the other one and she said, "It flew away." He asked her how and she said, "Like this!" and she opened her other hand and the other one flew away too. Prince Salim found her gesture so endearing that he fell in love with her there and then. Akbar found out about the little affair, did not approve, and had the woman bricked up in a wall!

At least that is how the story has come down to us from countless tales and movies; though in some of them they took a kinder look at Akbar, and said he actually let her out through a back entrance! The truth is her tomb has always been known, just outside the walled city of Lahore, and the street leading to it is the Anarkali Bazaar, the oldest and largest market in town.

When the British took over Lahore from the Sikhs in 1848, they found this large building in the middle of nowhere, mounted a huge red sandstone cross on it and used it as the first church. Then they built the new Anglican Cathedral not far away, took the cross down and planted it in the garden with a plaque telling the story, where it still stands, and gave the tomb away to the bureaucracy as home of the Punjab Archives. They built all the governmental offices round it, and today it sits in the middle of the Punjab Secretariat.

Now it seems they have suddenly woken up to its historicity, and decided it needs to be cleared of encroachments and stand on its own! Trouble is it sits in the middle of a large walled-in and guarded enclave, out of which the whole Punjab Government is run. So what are they going to do?

It will be easy enough to move the Archives out of it, they are just filing cabinets full of papers, but the place is full of buildings, the offices of all the Cabinet Ministers and their underlings, a veritable army of bureaucrats in permanent occupation. Maybe it'll be easier to re-write the guide books, underwrite the story that Akbar was just joking and the lady got out through a back way, and let the secretaries and under-secretaries carry on!

The full extent of Israel's deliberate destruction of Palestinian institutions is slowly dawning on the outside world after four weeks of Israel's barbaric assault on Gaza. Again the Israeli government got away with murder and managed to pull wool over the eyes of West. This is not the first time Israel had it so easy with pogrom of the Palestinian. Since its creation, Israel has refused to recognise Palestinians as human beings deserving of political and civil rights. The West has simply looked the other way while it's spoilt child -- Israel -- has wreaked havoc on the region where it was planted as European colonial settlement. Like all colonial enterprises, European Jewish immigrants to Palestine set about eliminating all traces of Palestinian political and social life. (Gaza outrage is the latest in a long line of such acts) The bloody minded ideology of Zionism was expansionist, terrorist in its tactics. It sought to eliminate Palestinian identity and nationhood by all means possible. The main purpose was achieved through terrorist organisations like Irgun that practiced terror to drive away Palestinians. By doing this Israeli state manufactured the myth of Palestine being an empty land where Jewish settlers pitched their tents and laid down the rudiments of civilized Jewish state. The only problem in realising this sanitised narrative lay in the presence of centuries old Palestinian people and institutions. Therefore, in order to establish it hegemony, the Zionist narrative required dispossession of the Palestinian people. This has involved grabbing more Palestinian land to 'create facts on ground'. Within Israel itself Israeli authorities have been engaged in dispossessing Israeli Palestinians from their ancestral homes, restricting their movements and rights. Such massive denial of rights to Israeli Palestinian is being justified by advancing racist and apartheid notion of 'ethnic democracy' which grants the fruits of democracy only to the Jewish Israelis.

While a string of UN resolutions demanded of Israel to withdraw from the occupied terrorises, Israel continued to treat these territories as contested. In a further drive to create more fact on the ground Israel began settling Jewish immigrants on the occupied territories. These Jewish immigrants form the core of hard-line political parties and enjoy fair representation in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The illegal settlements and continued Israel occupation led to Intifada in 1989 which pitched stone-throwing children in an unequal battle with vastly armed Israeli army. This unequal battle with an army of stone-throwing children brought Israel much infamy. Further alarmed by the rise of Islamists in the resistance movement, Israel reached out to Yasir Arafat , already in political wilderness because of his support for Sadaam Hussein in the Gulf War, for a deal to undercut the Islamists. By reaching out to Arafat, Israel was also searching a way of shifting the cost of occupation to the Palestinians. Arafat fell into the trap of the Oslo accord which tied PLO to act as policeman for Israel. The Oslo accord also lent legitimacy to the stranglehold of Israel over the Palestinian territory. At the time Edward Said, great Palestinian intellectual, criticised Arafat for not even bothering to consult cartographers on the new peace road map he was going to sign up to. Thus the greatest scam of Palestinian-Israeli peace accord was born. In the wake of the Oslo peace accord Israel assiduously put about the myth of Israel going an extra mile for peace while , in fact, it was Yasir Arafat who had made the greatest concession by accepting the state of Israel and by extension endorsing the land grab Israel had made in 1949. However, pliable and conciliatory, Arafat found it difficult to act against his own people on a consistent basis as required by Israel. The result was Israel's degradation of Arafat and his team as unreliable peace partners.

This propaganda was further boosted by another allied myth that Arafat had passed up the great peace opportunity by not accepting Israeli peace concessions made at Camp David summit in 2000. Now plucky historian like Avi Shlaim have proved that there was nothing substantial on offer at Camp David ,and whatever was on offer , if accepted by Arafat, would have been fatal to the bare-bones Palestinian interests .

Following its fabricated policy of the lack of reliable Palestinian peace partner, Israel made much of it token withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 by dismantling few of the illegally constructed Jewish settlements as a sign of its seriousness about the peace process. In the process, no mention was made of tit-for-tat planned expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister at the time. By such clever moves, Israel was able to establish its economic and military stranglehold over the Palestinian area by dividing it into mutually exclusive enclaves. As a result, Palestine areas look like a big concentration camp like Auswitz (here the irony of off-springs of Auswitch victims corralling Palestinian population into a permanent concentration camp should not be lost on us). Against this backdrop Hamas assumed, quite naturally, the mantle of a national liberation organisation after Israeli's systemic annihilation of PLO and Fatah as a credible secular alternative. (Israel herself facilitated the rise of Hamas to undercut PLO in the eighties). The stage was thus set for Hamas to make electoral gains in the election of 2005 which led to the formation of the Unity government. The Unity government, however, soon collapsed thanks to Israel's divide and rule tactics. As a result, Hamas took over its stronghold of Gaza to run it in line with its electoral mandate by expelling Fatah. The bad example of democracy throwing up a leadership not made in the mirror of Israeli's interests was too much for Israel and its powerful allies to stomach.

Now Israel rethought its strategy and threw its support behind Mahmood Abbas, a discredited leader of Fatah. To achieve this policy objective, Israel portrayed its wanton attack on Gaza as a contest between Hamas and Israel and not between Palestinians and Israelis. The events leading up to December's barbaric incursion into Gaza are all forged in the furnace of Israeli fabrication factory. So far Israel has put down its action to violation of cease fire by Hamas (Israel set up National Information Directorate in April 2008 to put about key messages of Hamas being responsible for breaking ceasefire and the contest being between Israel and the Hamas). It is now clear that Israel had been preparing for this action since at least 2005, when IDF built a mock city of Gaza to train soldiers on how to conduct warfare in an urban city like Gaza, according to Paul Rogers of web-magazine Open Democracy. Prior to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in December, Israel had also been engaged in the act of starving Gaza by reducing the flow of food-aid to the area since October 2008, as pointed out by Sarah Roy in the London Review of Books. Finally Israel put its long gestating plan of decimating Gaza and slowly evolving Palestinian institutions on November 5 by breaking ceasefire and killing 6 Hamas leaders. The full assault was launched on December 27 which has caused irreparable damage to the Palestinian infrastructure apart from killing more than one thousand Palestinians. Will the world act quickly to bring Israel to book for its war crime in Palestine again?

Dear Mr President,

Even though the economic crisis and the situation in Palestine stole some lime light away from the "war on terrorism" that is being waged in this part of the world, I am sure you would not be looking to close the chapter any time soon. Hence, I present to you, some strategy point on how the US should battle the terrorism emanating from this part of the world. Of course, in order to be considered 'legitimate' I write from an American foreign policy perspective, and with a liberal rationality.

As you might have noticed, the tragic events of 9/11 have plunged the US into a war that it was not ready to fight and, I would argue, is still not fully equipped to fight. I believe, the lack of an emphatic US victory in combating terrorism can perhaps be attributed to the failure of the policy planners to conceptualise the unconventional and multi-dimensional nature of this struggle.

I would argue that in order to win the "war on terror", US must radically change its policies at two levels, the strategic/ military level and the cultural level, as well as adopt a long-term regional perspective that takes into account the specificities of socio-cultural and political environment in Pakistan and in the Pakistani areas bordering Afghanistan.

At the strategic level, US policy has been wedded with ideas of conventional warfare for far too long, ideas deriving from the misplaced use of the metaphor "war on" in connection with fighting terror. This metaphor has a long lineage in US domestic and foreign policy such as the "war on crime" in 1970s, and the "war on drugs" in 1980s but it has done more damage than good to the efforts to combat terrorism. The notion of "war" immediately connotes that there should be an identifiable concrete enemy with a fixed epicentre or location and a set hierarchical structure. Due to the inability of the policy makers to get out of the language of "war" there has been the tendency to continuously project the war on terror as a war against an identifiable enemy, al-Qaeda and its affiliates such as the Taliban, with a conventional hierarchical structure. A close study of the various terror strikes that have taken place all over the world will reveal that the various perpetrators are not in any way linked with each other in any conventional hierarchy. Even in Pakistan, several terrorist organisations have propped up recently that have no concrete links with the al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 strikes. To successfully formulate a plan to combat these networks, there should hence be recognition of the rhizome structure of these terrorist organisations.

With the re-imagination of the terrorist networks, would come a re-thinking of the space where the struggle must be carried out. As I had pointed out earlier, the current struggle against terrorism cannot be fixed to a certain location; this struggle must be carried out at a global and regional level. In order to fight the terrorists emanating from Pakistan; the efforts cannot be focused on a certain part of Pakistan alone. Recent experience has shown that as soon as a certain terrorists in a certain area are taken out through military strikes, another terrorist network springs up in a different location. Indeed, there is a vicious cycle involved here: US and Pakistani militaries attack presumed terrorist hideouts in which many civilians including women and children are killed which inspires more people to join the ranks of Taliban and al-Qaeda. These new recruits may include the immediate relatives of the victims as well as distant people who feel that the existence of Muslims or their particular tribe or ethnic group is threatened by such actions.

Therefore, it is crucial that the very process of the making of Jehadists must somehow be disrupted and for this, we need to look at the processes of subject formation or the kinds of personal and collective motivations that turn ordinary Muslims into militant fighters who join the ranks of Taliban and al-Qaeda. This would involve a candid re-assessment and re-thinking of the socio-cultural front in the war on terror.

At the cultural level, the first step for the US should be to reanalyse the rhetoric it uses in public forums. The language of the US government has continuously revolved around the use of binaries: civil vs. uncivil or rational vs. non-rational. Due to this binary language, US has polarised the world and antagonised the Muslim population in various parts of the world. Due to the choice of words, the current battle appears to be framed in terms of a "clash of civilizations". Through the use of phrases such as "with us or against us" the US government has made it out that, for an individual there is no choice other than being either pro-America, and hence pro-peace, or pro-terrorists. As a result of this language, segments of the population which previously owed no allegiance to any terrorist organisation even though they were critical of US policies have started sympathising with and supporting these militant organisations after the initiation of the "war on terror". In terms of Pakistan, the constant support of former President Musharraf's language of 'enlightened moderation' has not only alienated certain population segments that do not identify with this ideology but in the absence of a third option they have been pushed towards sympathising with extremism as the only alternative to 'enlightened moderation'.

This leads us to another problem that has not been properly dealt with as of yet; the recognition of the role religion plays in the daily lives of Muslims in Pakistan. Even though on a very symbolic and general level the majority of the population within Pakistan subscribes to certain Muslim religious values, not all of them necessarily advocate a theocratic state. It is a matter of record that religious parties in Pakistan have never gotten more than 3-5 percent of the popular vote in an election held under a democratic regime. Through its discursive practices, the US has posited the space of non-violence as a space that can be occupied only by the liberal minded 'enlightened moderates'. To win over the general population, America needs to configure the importance of religion within its rhetoric so that the religious sentiments of the masses are in no way desecrated and the masses are assured that the concurrent battle against terrorism is not a battle against Islam itself.

US policy makers also need to take into account the ethnic aspect of the ongoing movements in the tribal belt of Pakistan, which has a regional dimension. These policy makers have continually overlooked the possibility that the rise of Taliban is not so much part of a global Muslim revivalist agenda as it is an expression of discontent among the ethnic Pashtun people who straddle the Pak-Afghan border. By shoring up the Punjabi dominated Pakistani military in Pakistan and the Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek people of Afghanistan in order to get them to fight tribal insurgencies, ordinary Pahstuns have also started fighting against the US backed forces seeing it as a threat to Pashtun/ Afghan identity. Historically, the Pakistani State with the support of the US government has always backed religious parties and organisations in order to suppress the demands of nationalist groups, but now it is time for the US to urge Pakistan to do the exact opposite support the Pashtun nationalists to counter and drain the bases of support for Islamist extremist organisations. This can be done by following up on the Pashtun ethno-nationalist parties' calls for greater provincial autonomy and greater parity between the constituent federating units of Pakistan in terms of resource allocation. Such an approach would also help resolve the simmering conflict in southwestern Balochistan province and free up some of the thousands of military personnel and assets that Pakistani government has committed there.

So, Mr. Obama, put simply all I recommend is that the US should shift the site of battle from the grounds and the skies to the hearts of the local population.

I often get mails from Amina Masood Janjua -- who is the wife of Masood Janjua, missing for dozens of months, and according to her, picked up by the intelligence agencies during the time of General Musharraf. Hers is one of many cases of disappearances of dozens of Pakistani citizens during the previous government, otherwise known as the missing persons' scandal.

Mrs Janjua has written letters to even Barack Obama -- though one wonders whether they ever managed to make it to him -- and says that her US visa was revoked some weeks ago minutes before she was to board a plane from Geneva to New York, where she had gone to speak on the missing persons' scandal. No reason was given for this -- it never is -- but it probably had to do with the fact that many of the people picked up during Musharraf's regime were detained because of their alleged involvement in the war on terror. In the case of Masood Janjua, the government has yet to inform a court of law of his whereabouts. His wife however is convinced that he is in the custody of the intelligence agencies because she says that one former detainee, who was also held incommunicado but eventually released, said that he had seen him in a military prison. In addition, she says, her husband was contacted by an army officer for questioning and soon after he

disappeared.

While Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was the chief justice, he took it upon himself to hear such cases. Several people who had been held incommunicado were released because of the efforts of the Supreme Court under him to keep asking the government to do more. For instance, when the hearings began initially, one saw the usual passing of the buck. The interior ministry was made the respondent and when its representative did show up he told the court that the people who had disappeared were not in the custody of any law-enforcement agency under the ministry's jurisdiction -- meaning the police and paramilitary forces. The ministry officials were asked by the court that who then should be held responsible and whether the missing were in the custody of the military, to which they replied that the intelligence agencies did not come under the interior ministry's purview and that the ministry could not direct officials of military intelligence agencies to appear before the court.

At least then -- not sure about now -- the court could see through these tactics and the fact that they were a blatant violation of one of the cardinal rights guaranteed to citizens under the constitution and by the law -- the writ of habeas corpus -- and kept on asking the government for answers. This eventually bore fruit -- though not personally for Mrs Janjua. Several of those who had disappeared turned up at their homes, dropped off quietly by their captors while some were produced before the court. Then there is the case of Saud Memon, said to be a well-off businessman and a major financier of the militant group whose members were allegedly involved in Daniel Pearl's murder (the house where the reporter was kept and eventually killed, police claim, was owned by this man). He was reported missing for almost four years and was eventually produced when the Supreme Court began taking interest in cases of the missing. He was brought in a wheelchair, and according to newspaper reports, he weighed a mere 80 pounds had lost his memory and could not recognize his own family members. He had earlier been released and left on some street by his captors in terrible health. He died a few days later.

Now it may well be that the allegation against him may have been true but the government should have produced him before a court of law, charged him for it, and given him a chance to defend himself. That should have been done with all those who were picked up and that surely needs to be done now as well -- since many of those who were picked up -- like Amina Masood Janjua's husband -- are still missing and their

families are looking for them.

*******

Here is an email that I got in response to my column of last week on Swat. It was written by a doctor who is from Swat and does not wish to disclose his identity. It is worth reprinting in full, without censoring, because it may well reflect the opinion that people of the region have about the rest of the country and of its institutions. It goes like this: "The people of Swat have a rich history and cultural values to their credit. They are law-abiding and peace-loving people. They had their own government, which catered to all their social needs like any other social welfare state. Violence was unknown to them and the valley was called a paradise of the East for good reason. After its merger with Pakistan, it lost many things and gained all the ills of Pakistan's pro-militancy strategy. Our government's policies have nothing to do with public opinion. They are run by a few generals and their puppets. They only care for their personal interests with an utter disregard for the sons of the soil. "Now we, Pakhtuns, are the chosen victims of this policy, no less than the Jews were the victims of Holocaust. It is now an open secret that Taliban regiment is the semi-official wing of the Pakistan army. It is, as they claim, their strategic asset. They are paid by the ISI to terrorise and kill the social and political activists at home and to bleed Pakistan's neighbours to the east and the west. The modus-operandi of the fake operation in Swat indicates that Taliban regiment and the Punjab regiment are in fact Siamese twins --joined at the hip. We no more love Pakistan and its army. They have turned our paradise into hell."

The writer is Editorial Pages Editor of The News.

Email: omarq@cyber.net.pk