Some breaking news: Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto (above) has been killed in a suicide bomb attack in Rawalpindi. More details here.
And here is Seumas Milne's brilliant piece from The Guardian on the background to the current crisis in Pakistan. Martin Meenagh has an excellent piece too on today's events which you can read here.
7 comments:
Benazir Bhutto may have been very beautiful and stylish, and she may have held degrees from Harvard and Oxford. But her superb English was in fact the mere speaking of her first language; she had little Urdu and even less Sindhi, despite Sindh’s being her (dynastic) political heartland. She was, at the end of the day, a corrupt and ineffective Prime Minister.
And Pakistan was a bad idea in the first place.
A handful of cranks and semi-schismatic priests were able to force the partition the United Kingdom against the wishes of the Gaelic-Irish working class on both sides of the Irish Sea, and of the Catholic hierarchy no less than Protestant leaders. A handful of cranks and outer-fringe rabbis were able to force the re-creation of Wilhelmine or Weimar Germany in the Levant against the wishes of almost every Jewish religious authority on earth at the time, and of the territory in question’s Jewish Arab no less than its Christian Arab, Muslim Arab and Druze Arab inhabitants.
And a handful of cranks and mad mullahs (of questionable qualifications) were able to force the establishment, against the wishes of the Indian Muslim working class and of India’s Islamic scholars, of the only country on earth where the case for an Islamic State is permanently unanswerable, since the country itself has no other reason to exist.
Quite what most Muslims in what was then India made of this is clear from the fact that post-partition India is the second-largest Muslim country on earth, even though Muslims are a minority there, and contains more Muslims than the entire population of Pakistan.
Pakistan is engaged in a nuclear arms race with its southern neighbour, but the all-powerful generals will not allow any politician anywhere near the nuclear codes, and moreover maintain a permanent unit to stage a coup whenever they feel that this is necessary, as they do with remarkable frequency.
Meanwhile, the creation of Pakistan massively boosted those who wanted Hindutva in all its caste-conscious ghastliness, in principle throughout what they see as Bharat, but in practice throughout the territory that they might be able to control, namely India. (Such people are by no means confined to the RSS and the BJP, important though those and the associated organisations are as the leading edge.)
Hence the Indian side of the nuclear arms race. And hence the fact that hundreds of millions of people in India were probably better off under the Moghuls, and certainly better off under the British.
Yet still the Muslim hundreds of millions do not jump out of the frying pan that is India and into the fire that is Pakistan.
Cut and pasted that from your blog, didn't you?
David Lindsay,
Say hello to your BNP friends.
By the way, you know nothing... nothing whatsoever, and if you wish to enlighten your small mind, find out about the divide and rule policy in British India.., there are actually books recording a debate about islam and christianity, as well as the establishment of a new sect of muslim agents called Qadiani, whose leader claims to be a prophet, and denounced any resistance to the british in India.
The same story in Iraq, Liberators came to a unified country.. and when they leave... the Shiate, Sunni, and Kurds have been defiend and a miracle needed to unify them again.
by the way, there are Shiate and Sunnis in Kurdistan.. but it works better to define this group by race rather than religion..
Benazir Bhutto was hope in the face of peaceful change in Pakistan, of General Pervez Musharaf.
For Islamic radicals there is no room for democracy, mercy, or the mid-term and once again was thus a suicide bomb ended the life of Bhutto (for 54 years) and those that accompanied by launching the country into confusion .
Dum side is the military dictator and the other, the roots of Al Qaeda.
The choice is difficult…
Is the killer bomb has gone to paradise?
Will there be 70 virgins waiting for you?
In XXI century full cost me to believe that people are going well educated, the meeting of death.
For bin Laden, the control of Pakistan becomes essential, more than the control of Afghanistan. Managing Pakistan, Al Qaeda will be with the control of a major armies of the world and lay the hands on nuclear weapons, then yes, the Game-level rise.
USA becomes loser the game…
Pakistan, Afganistão, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Indonesia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, are many faces of the same coin.
Some talk on clash of civilizations, one thousand years later, the varnish burn, between the north and south, between the West and the East, between Islam and the rest of the world and there is a global terrorism, which dreams with a worldwide caliphate and with its capital in London.
We never forgot the Islamic Al-Andalusian and the Al-garbe (Spain and Portugal), because for them, these lands (our lands) are lands of Islam.
Are you Remember Atocha, Madrid, Spain?
Text - Mario Nunes
http://kafekultura.blogspot.com
Which part of it is wrong?
That's as may be, David, but I am very upset that she has died in such a horrible way. And (odd as this may sound!) at Christmas too :P
Neil.
Do you like the poetry of Petofi Sandor?
I jacked in the job with 1000 quid in my pocket to live in Hungary and WRITE.
I don't agree with your outlandish vies on the Munkaspart.
But I am willing to join a left--right coalition if you accept the premise of liberal democracy.
Not neoliberalism.
I feel the same way as you about the destruction of traditional ways of life in Hungary and Poland.
I love your articles on Hungary, thoght I disagree with your far left politics whicj I find slightly annoying and banal.
BUT You are right about the poverty, the total destruction of a nation itro an investment zone and the crippling taxes small busineses have to pay to the MSZP regime.
How bad does it have to get when Tories like myself have to make alliance with the hard left like you ?
I joke. But there must be a new resistance to the neoliberal elite in Budapest ie pumpkinhead because it is just wrong that young Hungarians with their culture and sense of history are being denied opportunities.
Like Gilmour, I am a wet. Always was. I hate Thatcher and neoliberalism.
I have been very critical of your politics in the past . I am still.
But i LOVE your articles on Hungary, as much as I disagree.
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