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| December 05, 2008 | Friday | Zilhaj 6, 1429 |
Updated round-the-clock, with major updates after 10:00 PST (05:00 GMT)
Government installs wind turbines in Thatta Friday, 05 Dec, ISLAMABAD: The government has installed the country’s first ever 1.2 megawatts (MW) wind turbines for commercial power generation in Jhimpir district Thatta (Sindh).The initiative comes as part of the effort for tapping renewable energy sources to overcome the crippling power cuts. The power generated from the first phase of the farm would be enough to electrify 60,000 homes in the Hyderabad Electricity Supply Company region. The successful installation of the turbines would be the first attempt as part of the establishment of the country’s first wind farm. (Posted @ 20:55 PST)
Blast in Peshawar kills 10 Friday, 05 Dec, PESHAWAR: At least 10 people were killed and several more wounded when a bomb ripped through a crowded marketplace in Peshawar late Friday, police said. 'Ten people were killed on the spot while several others were wounded in the blast,' local police official Shahnawaz Khan told AFP. Doctor Sahib Gul at the city's main Lady Reading hospital put the number of injured at 35. (Posted @ 19:43 PST)
Asad Rauf likely to miss Chennai Test Friday, 05 Dec, LAHORE: Pakistani umpire Asad Rauf said Friday that visa problems may prevent him being at next week's first Test between India and England after it was relocated following the Mumbai attacks. Rauf said his Mumbai visa would not allow him to travel to Chennai, where the match is now scheduled to be held, and the Indian High Commission was closed for the Eid celebrations. (Posted @ 19:14 PST)
US cuts 533,000 jobs in November Friday, 05 Dec, WASHINGTON: Skittish employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years, catapulting the unemployment rate to 6.7 per cent, dramatic proof the country is careening deeper into recession. The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, showed the crucial employment market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid clip, and handed Americans some more grim news right before the holidays. (Posted @ 19:04 PST)
No ‘action without evidence’ against Masood Azhar Friday, 05 Dec, ISLAMABAD: The government on Thursday confirmed that India has provided Pakistan a list of three persons who are allegedly involved in the Mumbai carnage that claimed 200 lives. 'India has given us three names and demanded stern action against them,' Adviser to the Prime Minister on Interior Rehman Malik said during a press conference. (Posted @ 19:00 PST)
Taliban kill ‘US spy’ in North Waziristan Friday, 05 Dec, MIRAMSHAH: Taliban militants shot dead a tribesman in a restive Pakistani area bordering Afghanistan, accusing him of spying for the United States, officials said Friday. The body of the 30-year-old man was dumped on a roadside on Friday in the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, they said. A note found on the victim's body warned that anyone 'found spying against mujahedeen will face the same fate,' a security official said. (Posted @ 17:46 PST)
Indian govt admits ‘lapses,’ expresses anger Friday, 05 Dec, MUMBAI: India's new interior minister admitted Friday there had been intelligence and security lapses ahead of last week's attacks on Mumbai, AFP reported. ‘Ultimately there have been some lapses,’ Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told a news conference. ‘These are being looked into and I will do my utmost... to overcome the causes of these lapses and try to improve the effectiveness of the security system,’ he said. (Posted @ 17:16 PST)
India and Russia sign deal for new nuclear plants Friday, 05 Dec, NEW DELHI: Russia President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday signed agreements to develop new nuclear plants in India as the countries sought to deepen ties beyond their historic defence and weapon sales relationship. The deal will allow Russia to build more reactors at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and plants in other parts of the country, the Indian government said in statement. (Posted @ 16:48 PST)
Surviving gunman reveals Pakistan connection Friday, 05 Dec, MUMBAI: The sole survivor of a group of attackers who targeted the Indian financial capital of Mumbai has revealed several interesting facts regarding his training and the planning which went into coordinating the assault. According to the Associated Press, the surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab – who is 21 - told interrogators he had been sent by the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba and identified two of the plot's masterminds. (Posted @ 16:37 PST)
Afghan, Pakistani leaders meet in Turkey Friday, 05 Dec, ISTANBUL: Turkey was on Friday to host three-way talks with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan in an effort to bring the two troubled neighbours closer. President Abdullah Gul was to chair the meeting with his counterparts, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, scheduled to start at 1345 GMT in Istanbul, after bilateral talks with both leaders. (Posted @ 15:32 PST)
Indian media claims ‘proof’ of ISI involvement Friday, 05 Dec, NEW DELHI: The Indian media has claimed that the government has proof that Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was involved in last week's attacks in Mumbai, AFP reported. Several newspapers cited sources as saying intelligence pooled with the United States suggested the Inter-Services Intelligence had played an active role in training the gunmen who carried out the attack. (Posted @ 15:30 PST)
Powerful head of Russian Orthodox church Alexiy dies Friday, 05 Dec, MOSCOW: Patriarch Alexiy II, the head of Russia's powerful Orthodox Church, has died at his residence at the age of 79, a church spokesman said on Friday. A spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church said Alexiy had died on Friday morning at his residence in Peredelkino outside Moscow. The Church never commented on Alexiy's health and did not immediately disclose a cause of death but diplomats in Moscow had said that the patriarch had been suffering from cancer. (Posted @ 14:47 PST)
Indian govt admits ‘lapses’ prior to Mumbai attacks Friday, 05 Dec, MUMBAI: India's new interior minister admitted Friday there had been intelligence and security lapses ahead of last week's attacks on Mumbai, AFP reported. ‘Ultimately there have been some lapses,’ Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told a news conference. ‘These are being looked into and I will do my utmost... to overcome the causes of these lapses and try to improve the effectiveness of the security system,’ he said. (Posted @ 14:05 PST)
Suicide blast in kills two in Orakzai agency Friday, 05 Dec, KOHAT: At least two people were killed in a suspected suicide attack in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, officials said. The blast in the mountainous Orakzai tribal district came as shoppers prepared for Eid celebrations, local government official Ahmad Ali told AFP. 'We have received reports about a bomb blast. There are casualties, but we do not yet know the details,' Ali said, adding that it was not clear if it was a suicide attack. (Posted @ 13:47 PST)
Pakistan troops kill 10 Taliban militants in Swat PESHAWAR: Pakistani troops killed at least 10 militants in the north-western Swat valley, where the military is waging an offensive against the Taliban, officials said Friday, AFP reported. Troops killed six militants in a ski resort town in the valley and destroyed their ammunition dump and hide-outs on Thursday, a security official told AFP. (Posted 11:19 PST)
Two policemen killed in Bannu rocket attack MIRANSHAH: Two policemen and two Taliban militants were killed in a rocket attack and subsequent clashes early Friday in a north-western Pakistani town, police said. Militants fired rockets at Purdalkhel police station in the garrison town of Bannu, a base for Pakistani military hunting Al-Qaeda-linked Taliban militants in the restive tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.(Posted 10:13 PST)
Bilawal to receive Benazir's UN award UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan Peoples Party chairperson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will visit New York next week to accept the United Nations award on behalf of his assassinated mother, the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The UN has bestowed the award on Benazir posthumously. (Posted 05:13 PST)
Major security scare at New Delhi airport NEW DELHI: The Indian capital's international airport was the scene of a major security scare overnight Thursday but no incidents have been confirmed, a security official at the airport told AFP. 'We have combed the airport inch by inch and we have found nothing. The same is for the domestic airport. Nothing has happened,' said K. R. Singh, an official at the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) airport control room. (Posted 03:26 PST)
A region exhausted by war By Simon Jenkins
THE massacre in Mumbai has stirred the ghost of war between India and Pakistan, just when relations were supposedly improving. That is what the terrorists wanted. That is the lesson that came from the West after 9/11. If belligerence and thumping retaliation are the lodestars of counter-terrorism, India is now entitled to assault Pakistan.
Until Washington went to war on Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, virtually every nation in the region sympathised with the US over 9/11. The widespread view was that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda had gone too far, much too far. It might take time to curb him, but even Iran and Egypt sent condolences, and Yasser Arafat gave blood for the people of New York. We tend to forget this.
The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq crushed all opportunity to use the disaster as a prelude to reconciliation, though Tony Blair did boldly pursue that opening in the weeks immediately after 9/11. It was obliterated by the Pentagon’s rush to war. The spirit of jihad fuelled a retaliatory jihad. The West breathed the word crusade.
A similar opportunity can be detected again. Sensible Indians know that sensible Pakistanis are appalled by the horror taking hold of their country. Opinion in both states can see that the surest route to curbing extremism is to normalise relations and collaborate against an insurgency that is feasting on the Nato occupation of Afghanistan. More Pakistani soldiers have died as a result of the occupation than those of any other state.
Exhausted is the best word to describe the so-called arc of instability from the Mediterranean to Islamabad after eight years of western intervention. Last week I watched Lebanon celebrate its independence day in the streets of Beirut. Soldiers marched, bands played, politicians saluted under awnings while planes roared overhead. But the streets were totally empty, cleared of people for fear of terrorist attack. There was not a murmur of applause. Even in modern Beirut, bleak, fearful exhaustion ruled the day.
Lebanon is exhausted by its feud with Syria and Syria by its feud with Israel. Hamas in Gaza is exhausted by its feud with Fatah. Israel, even as it approaches an election, is exhausted by the threat from Hezbollah. As a result its politicians might, just might, at last cut a deal with Syria — through the agency of the Saudis — on Golan and the West Bank.
Eastwards, the war in Iraq is petering out through sheer exhaustion. Two million Iraqis camped outside Damascus cannot hope to go home until the Americans have left and some new settlement reached between Sunnis and Shias. Iran, too, is a nation exhausted by external sanctions and internal squabbling between clerics and secularists, its economy deteriorating and oil revenues crashing. If only the outside world can back off, a moderate victory in its forthcoming election is just possible.
In Afghanistan exhaustion is reflected in the desperate pragmatism of its ruler, Hamid Karzai. He surveys his dwindling sphere of power but cannot cleanse his regime of the corruption and drug-lordism that exasperates his western masters. Seven years after the toppling of the Taliban, the leaders of the West now advocate talking to them.
Along the North-West Frontier, Nato is entering precisely the strategic trap that closed round the Russians in the 1990s — and the British in the 19th century. Yet even here, the rough coalition of Taliban, Al Qaeda and other insurgents is hard pressed by the Pakistan army, while extremist subsidies flowing from the Gulf are said to be declining. It is possible, just possible, that even Al Qaeda too is exhausted.
Long wave theory suggests that the Muslim world may now be ready for a reaction against the extremism that has brought such devastation on its head for the past two decades. It has not just torn apart small countries, such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, but convulsed large ones, such as Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Pakistan. It has given unprecedented potency to sects, militias and gangs, yet has failed to create peace — let alone the caliphate.
Any traveller to these parts at present is overwhelmed by Obamania. From the dinner tables of Lahore to the lecture halls of Beirut’s American University, the president-elect carries an astonishing burden of expectation. To a people for whom George W Bush became synonymous with mindless anti-Americanism, Obama’s race, name, moderation and lack of bombast have risen like a messiah from another land.
The hopes are unreal. Obama will back the Saudi plan for the Middle East and push Israel to the negotiating table. He will end the occupation of Iraq. He will calm relations with Iran and recognise that US aggression has aided only extremism. He will unleash his general, David Petraeus, to negotiate with the Taliban. He will stop bombing Pakistan villages and recruiting thousands to Al Qaeda. Obama will aid Pakistan’s secular schools, not its army.
These expectations are close to absurd. The new president, in his appointments and public statements, promises to be no more coherent in his regional strategy than other Democrats. Anyone who thinks a “surge” can win the war in Afghanistan, or is ready to invade Pakistan to guard its nuclear weapons has, at best, a steep learning curve ahead.
Yet Obama’s store of goodwill must be unprecedented for a US leader in modern times. Were he to visit Cairo or Beirut or even Tehran, he would be greeted as a custodian of promise. An area battered by dreadful US policies for a decade wants only a smile, a nudge and a promise to do better from a country that has done it such harm.
If Obama can withdraw his troops from the region, stifling the chief oxygen of jihad, a moment of opportunity would be at hand.
— The Guardian, London
Founder: Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah
Editor: Abbas Nasir
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The DAWN Media Group
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