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THE FINE ART OF
GRILLING
Qaiser
Toro Dorado Quality Steaks
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1012SP
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Qaiser@torodorado.com
www.grillrestaurant.eu
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Dear sir ,Killing is never the just solution for many
problems but it still goes on either from the State in the name of
security and peace or from the group of people in the name of
freedom but occupation , suppuration andKeeping mass of people
under might plus robbing the territories fortune in the name of
Allah or bug wan is also never correct .We are getting enough of
our neighbors they must let us live on our own from now onQaiser k
www.jklf.info
qaiser99@gmail.com Mumbai atrocities highlight
need for solution in KashmirJihadi groups will exploit Muslim
grievances unless p
Three weeks ago, in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar, I met a
young surgeon named Dr Iqbal Saleem. Iqbal described to me how on
11 August this year, Indian security forces entered the hospital
where he was fighting to save the lives of unarmed civilian
protesters who had been shot earlier that day by the Indian army.
The operating theatre had been tear-gassed and the wards riddled
with bullets, creating panic and injuring several of the nurses.
Iqbal had trained at the Apollo hospital in Delhi and said he
harboured no hatred against Hindus or Indians. But the incident had
profoundly disgusted him and the unrepentant actions of the
security forces, combined with the indifference of the Indian
media, had convinced him that Kashmir needed its independence.
I thought back to this conversation last week, when news came
in that the murderous attackers of Mumbai had brutally assaulted
the city's hospitals in addition to the more obvious Islamist
targets of five-star hotels, Jewish centres and cafes frequented by
Americans and Brits. Since then, the links between the Mumbai
attacks and the separatist struggle in Kashmir have become ever
more explicit. There now seems to be a growing consensus that the
operation is linked to the Pakistan-based jihadi outfit,
Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, operates
openly from his base at Muridhke outside Lahore.
This probable Pakistani origin of the Mumbai attacks, and the
links to Kashmir-focused jihadi groups, means that the horrific
events have to be seen in the context of the wider disaster of
Western policy in the region since 9/11. The abject failure of the
Bush administration to woo the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan
away from the Islamists and, instead, managing to convince many of
them of the hostility of the West towards all Muslim aspirations,
has now led to a gathering catastrophe in Afghanistan where the
once-hated Taliban are now again at the gates of Kabul.
Meanwhile, the blowback from that Afghan conflict in Pakistan
has meant that Asif Ali Zardari's government has now lost control
of much of the North West Frontier Province, in addition to the
Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, while religious and political
extremism flourishes as never before.
Pakistan's most intractable problem remains the relationship
of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) over the last 25 years with
myriad jihadi groups. Once, the ISI believed that they could use
jihadis for their own ends, but the Islamists have increasingly
followed their own agendas, to the extent that they now feel
capable of launching well-equipped and well-trained armies into
Indian territory, as happened so dramatically in Mumbai.
Visiting Pakistan last week, it was clear that much of the
north of the country was slipping out of government control. While
it is unlikely that Zardari's government had any direct link to the
Mumbai attacks, there is every reason to believe that its failure
effectively to crack down on the country's jihadi network, and its
equivocation with figures such as Hafiz Muhammad Syed, means that
atrocities of the kind we saw last week are likely to continue.
India meanwhile continues to make matters worse by its
ill-treatment of the people of Kashmir, which has handed to the
jihadis an entire generation of educated, angry middle-class
Muslims. One of the clean-shaven boys who attacked CST railway
station - now named by the Indian media as Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad
Amin Kasab, from Faridkot in the Pakistani Punjab - was wearing a
Versace T-shirt. The other boys in the operation wore jeans and
Nikes and were described by eyewitnesses as chikna or well-off.
These were not poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the
villages, brainwashed by mullahs, but angry and well-educated,
middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive
being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in
Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively.
If Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is the most emotive
issue for Muslims in the Middle East, then India's treatment of the
people of Kashmir plays a similar role among South-Asian Muslims.
At the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the state should
logically have gone to Pakistan. However, the pro-Indian sympathies
of the state's Hindu Maharajah, as well as the Kashmiri origins of
the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, led to the state
passing instead to India - on the condition that the Kashmiris
retained a degree of autonomy.
Successive Indian governments, however, refused to honour
their constitutional commitments to the state. The referendum,
promised by Nehru at the UN, on whether the state would remain part
of India, was never held. Following the shameless rigging of the
1987 local elections, Kashmiri leaders went underground. Soon
after, bombings and assassination began, assisted by Pakistan's ISI
which ramped up the conflict by sending over the border thousands
of heavily armed jihadis.
India, meanwhile, responded with great brutality to the
insurgency. Half-a-million Indian soldiers and paramilitaries were
dispatched to garrison the valley. There were mass arrests and much
violence against ordinary civilians, little of which was ever
investigated, either by the government or the Indian media. Two
torture centres were set up - Papa 1 and Papa 2 - into which large
numbers of local people would 'disappear'. In all, some 70,000
people have now lost their lives in the conflict. India and
Pakistan have fought three inconclusive wars over Kashmir, while a
fourth mini-war came alarmingly close to igniting a nuclear
exchange between the two countries in 1999. Now, after the Mumbai
attacks, Kashmir looks likely to derail yet again the burgeoning
peace process between India and Pakistan.
Kashmir continues to divide the establishment of Pakistan
more than any other issue. Zardari might publicly announce that he
doesn't want to let Kashmir get in the way of improved relations
between India and Pakistan, but Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is
officially banned, continues to function under the name of Jama'at
al-Dawa, and Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed continues openly to incite
strikes against Indian and Western targets. At one recent meeting,
he proclaimed that 'Christians, Jews and Hindus are enemies of
Islam' and added that it was the aim of the Lashkar to 'unfurl the
green flag of Islam in Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi'.
Sayeed also proclaims that the former princely state of what
he calls 'Hyderabad Deccan' is also a part of Pakistan, which may
explain the claim of responsibility for the attacks by a previously
unknown group named the Deccan Mujahideen. It is clear Sayeed
appears to operate with a measure of patronage from the Pakistani
establishment and the Zardari government recently cleared the
purchase of a bulletproof Land Cruiser for him. When Pakistan's
Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was yesterday asked on
Indian TV whether Pakistan would now arrest Sayeed, he dodged the
question answering: 'We have to recognise that there are elements
in every society that can act on their own.'
In the months ahead, we are likely to see a security
crackdown in India and huge pressure applied to Pakistan to match
its pro-Indian and pro-Western rhetoric with real action against
the country's jihadi groups. But there is unlikely to be peace in
South Asia until the demands of the Kashmiris are in some measure
addressed and the swamp of grievance in Srinagar somehow drained.
Until then, the Mumbai massacres may be a harbinger of more
violence to come.