Talking to the Taliban leader in Afghanistan may help bring peace to the country, according to a former Pakistan spy chief once referred to as the “father of the Taliban.”
Retired Gen. Hamid Gul, a former head of the ISI spy agency, worked with the CIA through the 1980s to fund and train the Afghan Jihad against the Soviets. Many of the Mujahedeen went on to govern Afghanistan as the Taliban, who are led by Mullah Omar.
“The best situation would be to talk to Mullah Omar,” Gul said. “Put up your own conditions where I would say it is legitimate … I think they will accept. I know their psychology.”
Face-to-face talks would work best, Gul added.
“You have to engage him. You have to talk to him,” Gul said. “There is no one else, for heaven sake, why beat around the bush?”
Last year, Gul said Omar was the only person who can improve U.S. interests in Afghanistan.
“Mullah Omar, nobody else,” Gul said.
He insisted that President Barack Obama’s administration can access Omar through the Pakistan military. But the Pakistani Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) denied that the Pakistani military is in contact with Omar and that it can bring him and other commanders to the negotiating table.
In his latest interview, Gul decried the terrorist label on the Taliban, saying former President George W. Bush was wrong to call them that.
“This is wrong, by any definition,” he said. “No shred of evidence is available that they were involved in any terrorist activity.”
Last year, Gul said a stated Taliban condition to any discussions – the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan first – was not a fixed demand.
With concessions from Washington, it could be softened and make way for negotiations to begin, he said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he will pursue talks with the Taliban as part of a reconciliation and reintegration plan.
Karzai has said he plans to buy off low-level Taliban foot soldiers with cash and make peace with some Taliban leaders by offering them government positions.
While Washington supports the plan, it rejects a dialogue involving Omar.
The Taliban has said Omar is not interested in a peace deal.
Was he or wasn’t he? You might have been scratching your head as you read conflicting reports about whether Adam Gadahn, the American-born mouthpiece for al Qaeda, had been captured in Pakistan. Some unnamed Pakistani officials said they got him, while anonymous American officials shot back that there is no evidence to support the claim.
Now we are as certain as we can be that it is not him. We have both Pakistani and American officials saying Gadahn is not in custody, but why the contradictions, the confusion in the first place?
Former senior U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say the Pakistani government has been very good at letting the U.S. know within a reasonable period of time when it has captured someone noteworthy. Furthermore, they say the Pakistanis want credit for it. But it can be complicated.
One reason: Pakistan is hardly a cohesive society. Large portions of the country lie outside the control of the central government. The authorities at the federal level sometimes don’t know what is going on in far-flung parts of the country. In some parts – like North and South Waziristan – tribes are much more influential than the government. Foreign extremists and terrorists need the blessings of tribal leaders to remain within their territory.
Often times suspects are caught in remote areas. It takes time for the Pakistanis to understand who they have. Physical appearances might have changed, dental records or fingerprints aren’t readily available.
Once it is established they have a prized catch – especially if it’s an al Qaeda or Afghan Taliban leader – then the Pakistani officials have to decide how to handle the suspect. The U.S. will undoubtedly want access to the individual. If the person is an American, then the Pakistanis would be obligated to provide at the very least, U.S. consular access. There could be requests to transfer the person to the United States or elsewhere.
Pakistani officials may also want some time to figure out how they will play their cards. What will they get for their efforts? One thing they don’t want is to be seen as being in the pocket of America.
The U.S. could have it own motives for not wanting a name to be immediately disclosed. What intelligence can be gained through interrogation while the suspect’s cohorts are unaware of the detention? It’s been reported that news of the detention in February of the Taliban’s #2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was held back for several days for this reason. In the case of an American citizen, the U.S. might want to have physical control of the person before an announcement out of fear the transfer would be blocked or the suspected terrorist is set free. A court in Lahore, for example, recently blocked any attempt to extradite Baradar to Afghanistan where Americans would likely have better access if not outright control of him.
While one former U.S. official maintains the Pakistanis would not lie to the U.S. about the identity of someone in detention, another says the U.S. is still wary when it comes to completely trusting the Pakistanis. According to this former official, there are many factions in the government who will deceive you or not tell you everything. And this person believes the Pakistani government today is more disjointed than was the case during the military rule of General Pervez Musharraf.
Regardless of whether the U.S. would have wanted to delay disclosure of a capture, current and former government officials say that to mislead or lie to the press would simply be asking for trouble, and cost the U.S. government credibility.
The value to keeping a name secret is to use the time to get as much information as possible before the person’s contacts know what has happened. “Once it is out there, it’s done,” an official says.
One of the officials summed up the confusion over the fate of Adam Gadahn as an unfortunate distraction from the co-operative relationship that has developed between the U.S. and Pakistan in tracking down and arresting terrorist suspects.
LAHORE: Two suicide attackers blew themselves up near security forces vehicles in R A Bazar area of South Cantt as crowds gathered for Friday prayers killing at least 39 people including five security personnel and injuring 95.
“Thirty-nine people were killed and 95 wounded in the attacks,” Inspector General Police Punjab Tariq Salim Dogar told reporters after visiting the blast site.
“We have collected concrete technical evidence, which will help identify the attackers. Both the attackers were on foot,” he added.
Five security men were dead and 15 injured in the attack, security sources said.
“There were two suicide bombers who attacked two military vehicles within the space of 15 seconds,” SSP Operations Mohammad Shafiq told Geo News.
“The heads of both attackers have been found,” he said.
Rescue workers and paramedics rushed to the R A Bazaar, a densely populated area of the city. The area was crowded as the blasts occurred shortly before the main Friday prayers were to start.
Emergency has been declared in city hospitals and injured were shifted to CMH and other hospitals.
Security forces have cordoned off the area and traffic was blocked. Media was not allowed to go near the scene.
Meet Google. The noun that became a verb. The world’s favourite search engine, and the company whose motto is “Don’t be evil…” Graphics by Patrick Clair, written by Elmo Keep and Jon Casimir.
Colleen LaRose believed her looks would allow her to blend in
The blonde middle-aged woman apparently raised no concerns with her boyfriend or her neighbours on Main Street, Pennsburg, near Philadelphia.
But online she had allegedly agreed to kill in the name of holy war, believing her European looks would allow her to blend in among Swedes as she homed in on her target.
Colleen LaRose, according to a US court indictment, posted messages online under the name Jihad Jane, expressing her desire to participate in jihad, or holy war.
Arrested in October 2009, Ms LaRose had exchanged emails over 15 months to recruit fighters for “violent jihad”.
Her activities apparently came as a surprise to her boyfriend Kurt Gorman, whom she met in 2005.
Mr Gorman told Associated Press: “She was a good-hearted person. She pretty much stayed around the house.”
‘Pleasure to die for’
She looked after his father until his death in August 2009, but left their residence a day after the father’s funeral, taking Mr Gorman’s passport with her, allegedly to give to a contact in South Asia she had agreed to marry.
“I came home and she was gone. It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Having left the US in August, by the end of September, she had allegedly written online that it would be “an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for” her intended spouse, the indictment said.
“Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!” she is accused of writing.
A Department of Justice statement said Ms LaRose and five others “recruited men on the internet to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe, and recruited women on the internet who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad”.
Ms LaRose, a US citizen born in 1963, is charged with “conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.”
She was apparently approached by others after she posted a video on YouTube in June 2008, saying she was “desperate to do something somehow to help” ease the suffering of Muslims, the indictment said.
Web images show her wearing a Muslim headscarf, but Mr Gorman said he never saw anything like that at their home, nor did she attend any religious services.
Unknown to him, she had allegedly agreed to travel to Sweden and kill Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had angered Muslims by drawing the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog.
She denies soliciting funds for terrorist groups and of being the Jihad Jane of online postings, the indictment said.
Very few women have been charged with terrorism in the US, the Justice Department said.
Following last night’s choice of the Oscars’ jury to award Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker with the Best Picture prize, the debate has since then moved to the pubs and the ether. It appears to be primarily concerned with whether Bigelow’s portrait of “the” war does justice to the genre and whether, with time, Avatar will come to be recognised as more deserving of the aspired title. The debate however is having the effect of reducing Cameron’s gargantuan critique of modernity to “just another war movie”, adding to the already popular dismissal of the film, by the intellectual left, as a western guilt-fantasy.
Lets start by considering the assumption that Avatar is “just another war movie”.
If indeed we accept that Cameron’s intention was to provide us with a science-fictional portrait of war, then we must also conclude that von Trier’s Dogville is nothing more than an aesthetically minimalist representation of the Great Depression. Just as von Trier exploits the Great Depression as a historical backdrop against which he develops a provocative portrayal of human nature, so does Cameron in the use he makes of military intervention in Avatar.
I can understand that the topical violence that characterizes both projects might easily lend itself to the juxtaposition of one film against the other but, beyond that, the two projects remain profoundly different, both in terms of their subject and in the breadth of their message.
Whereas The Hurt Locker is a self-proclaimed war movie, Avatar is not. Avatar is at its core an ecological movie, which offers a powerful and accessible critique of modernity that brings to the fore what Horkheimer and Adorno would have referred to, perhaps more poetically, as the dialectic of enlightenment. At the heart of the film lies a critique of the artificial separation of the physical and the metaphysical that is characteristic of modern, western philosophies, and which we carry with us since Plato’s times. This original sin, which gave birth to modernity, is what has condemned us as a civilization to our expulsion from the Garden of “Pandora”, with a progressive loss of our connection to nature and, by virtue, of our humanity. It is this slow process of de-humanisation that has left us, in Cameron’s view, both physically and metaphorically crippled, and which Cameron chooses to embody in the character of Private Jake Sully.
Although not as elegant in its execution as Lawrence’s celebrated allegory of our infertile modernity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Cameron’s juxtaposition of the physically challenged Sully to his muscled Avatar-counterpart is certainly reminiscent of the powerful juxtaposition of the wheelchair-bound husband of Lady Chatterley to her virile and rural lover. Ironically, what posterity has come to recognise as one of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century, was originally slated by critics as pure filth. Whether this will be another element that Cameron will come to share with Lawrence, only time will tell.
What is certain, however, is that in his critique of modernity, and not just of war, Cameron draws repeatedly from the wealth of insights provided by theories of “deep ecology” and “ecological psychology”, such as those developed by Arne Naess and Theodore Roszak. And while there is a middle ground between modern capitalist societies and “primitivism” – used here with reference to its theoretical meaning and not derogatively – the two are juxtaposed as a way of conveying a strong sense of the void that separates us from our nature.
Cameron’s constant recalling of the deep and spiritual connection with Gaia, or Pandora if you prefer, makes it difficult to push the radical environmental message of this film to the sidelines in favour of a reductionist military interpretation of the film. Military intervention in Avatar is not employed in a context of war, but in one of violence in its broadest application, and one that finds its expression in the association of militarism to that of power, or “hegemony” if I may quote Gramsci.
Whilst the violence resulting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan originates in the relatively recent ideological agency of the neo-conservatives, the violence portrayed in “Avatar” is driven by the material interest of transnational capital dating back to Colonial times of the Dutch West India Company – and whose pillaging and plundering continues today through the agency of international trade rules at the service of the modern corporate oppressor of the likes of Shell, Monsanto, Motorola and so forth.
The kind of violence portrayed in Avatar addresses therefore far more universal and profoundly metaphysical questions of human nature, hubris and modernity that transcend not only the historical context of the Iraq and Afghan wars, but of war itself.
The power of Cameron’s critique lies therefore in the breadth of its message, for it allows to draw from the allegory of the Na’vi’s faith to serve as an avatar for struggles as diverse as those affecting the oppressed Palestinians or the indigenous tribes of Bolivia; from military occupation, to environmental depredation. For this very reason, it feels unfair to reduce Avatar to just another war film because it constitutes the first mainstream blockbuster movie to give us a critical and progressive view of our “human ecology”, one that, in contrast with The Hurt Locker, offers us a more holistic and somewhat Aristotelian interpretation of human nature.
Dr. Zakir Naik with Shaharukh Khan, Soha Ali khan, karan Johar, Kabir Khan, Maulana Mehmood Madni and with some others invited by NDTV 24 by 7 in the Show of Barkha Dutt on Topic MUSLIM IDENTITY.
There has never been a shortage of fatwas. These legal rulings or opinions made by religious authorities address a wide array of issues concerning politics and social norms, and have both justified and widely condemned the use of violence. In 1998, Al Qaeda ideologues Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a fatwa “to kill the Americans and their allies.”
However, since then, a number of imams and scholars have issued fatwas against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In November 2008, for example, more than 6,000 Muslim clerics in India signed a fatwa against terrorism, following a similar edict issued earlier in the year by India’s top Islamic institution Darul Uloom Deoband.
Most recently, Dr. Tahir ul-Qadri, a Pakistani Barelvi Muslim scholar, issued a 600-page global ruling against terrorism and suicide bombing, which provides a point-by-point theological rebuttal “of every argument used by Al-Qaeda inspired recruiters.” Although many scholars have released similar fatwas in the past, Dr. Qadri, the founder of Minhaj al-Quran International, “argued that his massive document goes much further by omitting ‘ifs and buts’ added by other thinkers,” noted the BBC.
Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri goes that crucial step forward and announces categorically that suicide bombings and attacks against civilian targets are not only condemned by Islam, but render the perpetrators totally out of the fold of Islam, in other words, to be unbelievers.
The fatwa has garnered much press attention among western news outlets, such as Fox News, CNN, and the Washington Post. But while many have celebrated the release of a religious decree grounded in Islamic jurisprudence and history, others remain doubtful of its actual impact on potential young suicide bombers. While Minhaj al-Quran International is active in 70 countries and has 5,000 members in the UK, Qadri is considered to be relatively liberal and tolerant. Therefore, the people that would follow and accept his fatwa are unlikely to be the same as those susceptible to being recruited by Islamist militant groups.
Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC, further emphasised, “The Sunni religious authority, as distinct from the Shi’a religious authority, is fragmented. So there’s not one figure who can issue a fatwa that every Sunni will listen to.” While Ahmed noted that any fatwa of this kind is important, the problem we are facing with suicide bombers “is that they are not from the same class [as moderate scholars like Qadri]. These young recruits respond much more to their own imams and preachers.”
No one questions the airtight credibility of Qadri’s text. But the issue we should raise is not whether the fatwa will have an impact, but how to ensure that it does. Fatwas or edicts of this kind can be influential if they are implemented in a culturally nuanced way, using language that can be understood by the intended target audience. In other words, if militant recruiters are using drone strikes to vilify the United States or the Pakistani government, countering this ideology requires messaging that takes similar realities into consideration. Although Qadri’s fatwa is based in exhaustive academic research, most young jihadists won’t take the time to sift through 600 pages in their decision-making.
Qadri may not be a universally accepted figure, but his text can be used as the focal point for a strategic communications campaign geared towards countering militancy and terrorism. This fatwa will only have the intended effect if local imams and religious leaders from various sects endorse and adapt it for their nuanced communities – applying Qadri’s language and framing it within the ground realities.
Madrassa leaders more open to reform can incorporate the fatwa’s text into their curriculum. Imams of local mosques can use the fatwa’s framing of terrorists as today’s Khawārij in their sermons, subsequently making it digestible for the public. Rather than simply shutting down jihadist chat rooms, intelligence agencies can create pop-up ads using language from the fatwa to vilify and undermine militant ideology. Pamphlets, billboard ads, and radio spots can be other potential mediums.
We are well-aware that Islam is a religion of peace, that it has been hijacked by militant and terrorist organisations to justify violence and intolerance against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The question, therefore, is how do we use that knowledge to make a tangible difference?
Ultimately, Qadri’s 600-page fatwa has its limitations, and could very likely end up on the metaphorical shelf, gathering dust. But this airtight research could instead be used to enforce a more localised and nuanced campaign that could have a more strategic impact.
