Campaign of murder, terror & harassment against Kashmiri students studying in various parts of India. Student tortured and murdered. Hung with his hands tied. Indian Police dismiss it a suicide. Refuse to investigate.

Kashmiri Student ‘Murdered’ In Lucknow

In a bizarre incident, a Kashmiri student doing his MBA course in Uttar Pradesh has allegedly been murdered but the Lucknow police closed the case without either registering a case or conducting any investigation.
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However, the family sources said, that on seeing clear marks of violence over the body, which convinced them he had not ended his life but had been murdered. At this, the body was photographed and videographed in presence of the deputy superintendent of police, Uri, after which it was laid to rest at the ancestral graveyard.

The family sources alleged it was a clear case of murder and the body had been hung from the tree to show it as suicide. “If at all, Danish had to end his life, he could have done it at the hostel itself. Why should he have gone missing and hanged himself from a tree away from the college that too having his hands tied up,” they asked, adding Danish had gone to Lucknow to pursue his studies and had no signs of any mental stress.

Reports said it was the sixth case of Kashmiri students being subjected to harassment outside the state which has claimed one precious life with this incident and which has created a sense of insecurity among all their fellow students studying in various Indian states.
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What should be the punishment for a person(s) who killed numerous innocent women & children? Specifically, 24 innocents killed including 10 women & children killed at point blank range. Shot in the head.

What should be the punishment?

a) Death Penalty

b) Life Imprisonment

c) Anything remotely approaching any semblance of an attempt at justice

d) A possible MAXIMUM sentence of three months of confinement, forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay for three months and a reduction in rank for the LEADER. EXONERATION for all others.

If you picked a, b or c, you failed. d) is the right answer. Ok, it was a trick question. All the dead were Iraqis, so they don’t matter. They were lesser human beings. Was this verdict juctice? No. My bad, typo. Was this verdict American justice? Oh, yes! Salute the troops, lets start the parade. The righteous and brave american warriors have saved the world (by executing babies, women & men). All hail USA.

And this is the remarkable american justice in “a case” that came to light in some of the media. The thousands others who have been massacred in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan & all over the world, they have been spared this shining beacon of American justice.

US marine pleads guilty to Haditha killings

Update Edit: US marine to serve no time over Iraq killings

A US marine accused over the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians in the city of Haditha was demoted to the rank of private but will serve no time behind bars, a military spokesman has said.

Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, the last squad member to face justice after all the others were cleared, was sentenced to 90 days confinement but he will not serve it for procedural reasons, the spokesman said.
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“the last squad member to face justice”. Hmm, is that what we call this farce? Justice. Seriously? USA, USA. Salute the troops. Shooting innocent people including point blank executions of children & women nets only 1 person a DEMOTION in rank while all others walk scot free. Justice? No. ‘American’ Justice? You betcha. America <— the pits of moral depravity.

David Barsamian talks about Journalism in Kashmir

http://www.thekashmirwalla.com/2012/01/exclusive-david-barsamian-on-journalism-in-kashmir/

By Shahnaz Khan:

The purpose of this article is to highlight the impact of the religious laws in Pakistan as they are being currently interpreted and implemented without going into the finer nuances of either the law or the religion. These laws come into limelight from time to time for brief periods only when a famous person is involved or if there are political implications.  Once the issue disappears from the front pages of the news media the whole thing is forgotten.  But the fact is that these laws affect ordinary citizens on a daily basis.  I want to make the point that these laws, implemented without using common sense or taking the present day realities and the changing nature and circumstances of the crime, have become vehicles for promoting injustice, threats to the peace and harmony of the society, tools for political expediency, and suppression of critical thinking.

On promoting injustice: Qisas and Diyat laws are a prime example of this, being used to the detriment of the weaker members of the society that is women and the poor. Let’s first take the issue of women. Honor killings, disfigurement and mutilation of women by cutting of their body parts or throwing acid on them because someone’s “honor” is threatened are common occurrences.  Under the above mentioned law it is the “wali” of the victim who is authorized to negotiate the terms of punishment with the murderer.  He (since it is almost always a male) has the right to forgive the murderer and accept monetary compensation.  But the irony is that in most cases, wali himself (or those closely related to him) is the murderer, being the husband, the father or the brother etc.  Now does it make sense to have the murderer dictate the terms of his punishment?  It is like investing the powers of the judge, jury and the executioner in the same person who is also the offender, giving him the right to make all the decisions.  Is that the spirit of the Islamic law?

In the case of disfigurement and mutilation, the victim herself (since most of the time it a woman) should have the right to negotiate and agree to the terms of punishment.  Has there ever been a court decision where a woman was authorized to throw acid on the face of the offender or cut off his nose as a punishment?  If this is not a mockery of justice, what else is?

In fact an even more sinister aspect of this whole situation is that men, family or tribe have been granted the right to impose their will on women in the name of honor.  This is the basis of honor crimes.  That is why killing of a woman is justified because, “she deserved it” because she broke the so called moral and ethical code of the society.   This assumption, this mind set, this atrocious behavior in the name of tradition, culture and religion is a horrifying aspect of “our values and norms” that we never tire of flaunting and praising, because these values make us better than those ‘immoral’ westerners. Really?  There is a need to challenge this.  What is honor and who defines it? Why do women have to give up their decision making powers, happiness, dignity, and freedom to save the so called honor of men, family, tribe etc. etc.?  It has become honorable to kill and maim women and dishonorable to respect them, their bodies and their humanity.  If this is not a skewed logic, what else is?  And if this is not denigration of women, what else is? And we never tire of telling the world how Islam has elevated the status of women and how she has been protected!

Now let’s see how this law affects the poor.  If the victim is poor and the offender rich, he/she not only has the financial wherewithal but in Pakistan also has the added political, social and legal clout to coerce the victim’s wali into accepting the monetary compensation instead of paying with his/her life for the perpetrated crime. But what if the victim is rich and the offender is poor?  Do I have to explain what will happen?  Religion which claims to bring economic and legal justice is in fact failing the poor on both accounts.  Can there be any more atrocious consequences of a law?  Can there be a law that is more discriminatory against the poor?  If this is not a distortion of justice to the utmost, what else is? And if all of the above is not promoting injustice, what else is?

On threat to peace and harmony:  Whenever a law is passed in the name of religion, it becomes nearly impossible to change or modify it even if subsequently it becomes apparent that it is being misused, has become a contrivance for aggression and is actually causing harm to the society by disturbing peace and tranquility.  This is evident from the blasphemy laws as applied in Pakistan, which are being used to harass the religious minorities, for personal revenge, or for political motives.  Even when the accused is not convicted by the court, he or she faces a constant threat to his or her life.  At times people feel free to punish the alleged offender without due course of the law.  The person is presumed guilty unless proven innocent rather than the other way around.  Even minor and unintentional actions are interpreted in the harshest way possible thus leaving very little room for justice to be carried out fairly and impartially.  Unfortunately this, like all other religious issues, has become a political tool to be used to inflame people’s emotions (which are, regrettably, highly inflammable).   It has come to the point where even an utterance of unintended phrase, any discussion about the problems surrounding this issue, or any mention of further probing this legitimacy and authenticity of the law can cost one his or her life.  If this is not disturbing peace and tranquility of the society, what else is?

As James Baldwin, a black American novelist and play writer and a leading voice in the civil rights movement, said, “If one really wishes to know how the justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! —and listens to their testimony.”  So, the flag bearers of the religion, the rulers and the politicians, go and listen to the women, the religious minorities, and the poor and find out if justice is being administered in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan!

On use for political expediency:  Since religious laws are amenable to different interpretations, they have a tendency to become tools in the hands of dictators, other autocrats and selfish political motives.  Wasn’t the Qisas and Diyat ordinance of 1990 signed by Gen Zia for political expediency? Didn’t various political entities i.e. the government, the religious parties, and the army use and justify the Qisas and Diyat law to their own advantage during Raymond Davis fiasco?  Aren’t there enough historical examples and cases where religion was used to support the decisions of the ruler rather than guiding it?  Why do we refuse to learn from them?  There always have been and always will be scholars who are willing to comply with the demands of the authority.  The alliance of religion with the power will drown any dissenting voice.  It has been so in all religions and Islam is no different.

On suppression of free thought:  The last point I would like to make is that the danger lies not only in the specific laws but also the fact that when the word religion is attached to any law, rule or issue it immediately becomes off limits to any further discussion or debate among the very people whose lives will be affected by it.  The doors of reason are closed.  Questioning is not allowed. Any debate becomes a prisoner to rigid and fixed parameters set by the self proclaimed scholars, many of whom have vested interests and people are forced to suspend their intellectual faculties.  And gradually it becomes their second nature to accept whatever edicts they are asked to follow.

Plato said, “Justice in the life and conduct of the state is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.”  But when the hearts and souls of citizens have given up the quest for justice because an intellectual decay has set in due to suppression of free thought, is there still hope?

The miraculous uprising which swept the whole region should be seen in the context of political, economic, demographic and technological backdrop of the region, not in continuation with any past movement.

Immanuel Wallerstein, the known social scientist, views the Arab spring as a continuation of the unfinished movement of 1968 which, after becoming a worldwide movement, did not achieve its goals. The current surge in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), to him, is the reincarnation of the same movement, trying to recapture the unfinished business of the sixties.

The MENA movement, however, entails a different scenario in terms of its strategies, objectives and global outreach. Originating from the most unexpected region of the world, it has now become a worldwide movement and in this sense it is the first global movement of its kind supported by the world audience who is watching it through electronic and social media.

These revolts should be seen as a logical outcome of political, economic, demographic, global and technological contexts of the 21^st century.

Political Factors

The Muslim world has been in the clutches of dictators for the last 60 years in the form of complete or partial autocratic systems in different countries. These dictators have been surviving using internal oppression on one hand, and support from external powers, on the other.

In the countries where a complete dictatorial system exists, the legitimate political structure is absent and human rights are denied. Monarchy or a pseudo democratic structure has been in place by ruling elites and industrialists. Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya under the Kaddafi regime, and Iraq before the U.S. invasion, are some examples of complete autocratic systems. Autocracies gained power in these countries because of these factors:

1. Power is consolidated through controlling natural resources where petro dollars remain a major source of power for these regimes. Ruling elites control profits of natural resources which are conveniently distributed among selected groups.
2. The total grip on economic, social and political structures is based on the absence of political process, denying basic human rights to people, and imposing severe restrictions on freedom of expression.
3. Monarchy is justified through religious legitimacy in some countries. In Saudi Arabia, for example, a system of political and economic control has been legitimized by the religious clergy who support the rulers and their system.

In the countries, on the other hand, where a system of partial dictatorship prevails, some rights have been given to the masses denying their participation in a genuine political process. Media are free to some extent, business activities are allowed, and education is provided but the electoral drama is played to elect the same dictator again and again. Here, people are denied of their democratic rights by efficiently keeping them away from the political process.

Any resistance to change the system is dealt with a brutal force using police and armed forces. In this system of half-democracy and half-dictatorship, however, the real power lies with dictators, who rule the masses in collaboration with the armed forces, industrialists and the oligarch while masses are forcefully kept away from the genuine political process. Egypt under Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia under Zainulabedein Bin Ali had the same, half-and-half democracies.

These two administrative structures in the region have also survived for over half-a-century because of external powers that have several benefits in keeping these dictators. They use them in regional administrative arrangements to keep their control and ensure the oil supply which is so vital for their economic survival.

The so-called doctrine of “gradualism” was introduced to legitimize a prolonged support to dictators in the region. The absurd doctrine promotes the idea that democracy can be gradually introduced in the region with an assumption that people are not ready for a complete democracy in these countries yet. The youth movements, however, have proved the doctrine wrong.

Demographic and Economic Factors

The same Muslim nations that have been suffering at the hand of their dictators are facing wide range of unemployment, economic disparities and exploitation of business and ruling classes. These societies, however, offer some demographic dynamics that ultimately played against the current political setup and demanded a profound and meaningful change.

Youth is a large proportion of the region’s population which is growing faster than any other age group. A Brookings Institute Report says the proportion of youth in the Middle East is between 27% and 34%. The population of 15-29 age groups in Egypt is currently 29% while in Libya, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia it is 28%. The same population group in UAE, West Bank and Gaza is 27% while it is 30% in Jordan and Yemen. In Algeria and Syria it is 31%, and in Qatar 34%.

The youth unemployment rate in the region is alarming. According to ILO, unemployment figures for youth are twice the rate of the general population. It also indicates an obvious gender gap where unemployment rate for young men is 22.7 percent as compared to the 31.7 percent for young women. While more than half of the female population in the region is illiterate, the Arab world has the lowest participation of women in the labor force in the world, 25 percent.

In an article published in Viewpoint in 2010, I predicted a possible youth surge in the region in these words “Equipped with unemployment, gender inequity, lack of political empowerment and illiteracy this young-and-restless segment of the population could easily become a source of political chaos and civil unrest” (Middle East on a Shopping Spree for Higher Education, Viewpoint, July 23, 2010).

When the Tunisian youth came out to streets in early 2011, they were demonstrating the same dissatisfaction against the prevailing conditions in their society with a hope to change their system. The youth uprising intends to achieve these objectives besides other goals:

1. Establishing a legitimate political system where people can participate in a genuine democratic process.
2. Introducing a new economic system on the basis of equality.
3. Establishing a pragmatic foreign policy to restore national sovereignty.
4. Restoration of basic human right of people.
5. Equal opportunities of education for all.
6. Equal participation of women in social, economic and educational fields.

Overall, the youth struggle that started in early 2011 is different from previous movements in the region. First the movement has a global perspective. Global news media exposed brutalities of government forces on unarmed protestors and supported their struggle in these countries.

Unlike other political movements of the past, the current uprising does not have an apparent leadership. The ocean of protesting men, women and youth, does not have a single charismatic leader but several young leaders organizing protest rallies.

Not exaggerating the use of social media, whose role in the movement has been over emphasized, the young leaders who are more educated and technologically savvy, widely used social media to unite the core group of leaders. Undoubtedly, social media, the internet, TV and satellite technologies gave this movement a global face. In this sense, although the technology provided the movement a moral justification supported by the worldwide audience, the real credits goes to the youth who managed and used it effectively.

The miraculous uprising which swept the whole region should be seen in the context of political, economic, demographic and technological backdrop of the region, not in continuation with any past movement.

© 2012, Qaisar Abbas. This article may not be reproduced in any form without providing an active attribution link/ reference to The Pakistan Forum. All attribution links within the article must also be retained.

Recognizing that heroism from members of news media is rare, City42 reporter Asad Sahi fed a civilian some much needed minerals from his microphone earlier this year. The act was part of his new year resolution of ‘giving back’ and what a giver he is. The civilian can clearly be seen unperturbed by the sudden [...]

City42 Reporter Feeds Civilian is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.

After staunch and oft repeated claims of no “confirmed” civilian casualties as a result of NATO bombings in Libya, that lie is firmly exposed. A study by reporters of only a SMALL SAMPLING of strike locations has provided that confirmation. The real magnitude of the death toll will remain hidden as NATO has not and will not investigate these deaths as per their own admission. It has now been confirmed that many women & children were among NATO’s victims, many of them killed in their sleep. Also, people who tried to rescue the victims as well as ambulances also came under attack from NATO and suffered casualties. NATO and USA have and will continue to harp about their campaign in Libya being a success. The media and right wing nutters will fall over themselves and sing praises about the “successful” campaign. The innocent men, women and children who were murdered by NATO may not share this assertion.

NATO Forced to Admit Air Strikes Killed Dozens of Libyan Civilians, Contradicting Initial Denials

“We only saw a small sampling of the strike sites that may have been affected, so the death toll is probably much larger”

By Shahan Mufti

The route from Karachi to Kabul was the best way to get supplies to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the main artery for a Pashtun trucking empire—until Pakistan shut it down.

Like a broker tracking the dips and spikes of a volatile but lucrative stock, Mohammad Shakir Afridi has kept a close eye on U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan since the first Americans landed in the country 10 years ago. As president of the Khyber Transport Assn., one of the largest associations of truck owners in Pakistan, Afridi’s biggest contract involves moving military equipment for American and coalition forces through Pakistan to military bases in Afghanistan. The slightest policy shift in Washington can carry major consequences for Afridi and his business.

Sitting on a rooftop in a leafy residential block in Peshawar, the largest city in northwest Pakistan, Afridi slaps the morning paper on the floor beside his mat. “Twenty-four of our boys in one go,” he spits out. A front page photograph shows a field full of coffins draped in Pakistani flags. The soldiers were killed on Nov. 26 when U.S. helicopters and jet fighters from Afghanistan fired on military outposts on the Pakistani side of the border. The relationship between Pakistan and the U.S., which has been rocky for years, hit a new low. While the U.S. military promised to investigate and the NATO chief regretted the “tragic, unintended” incident, the Pakistani Prime Minister said there would be “no more business as usual” with the U.S. Pakistan demanded the U.S. vacate an airbase it was using in the South and choked off all U.S. and coalition military supplies traveling through the country.

Afridi learned of the American attack before the Pakistan military or government had issued any statement; one of his truck drivers called to tell him the border was closed. Afridi was later given orders from the military to halt trucks near the border, and to direct all others to the southern port city of Karachi. He quickly obliged. “It’s serious this time,” Afridi says. “They’ll make the Americans sweat.”

U.S. and Allied forces in Afghanistan get the bulk of their supplies in two ways. The first is the Northern Distribution Network, a web through Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia that crosses through at least 16 countries, using a combination of roads, railway, air, and water to move supplies in from the north. The chain can be complex and circuitous. One path through the network, for example, might involve military cargo that arrives by sea in Istanbul. From there it travels the width of Turkey on truck and crosses the northern border into Poti, Georgia. In Georgia the equipment goes by rail to Baku in Azerbaijan, where it’s loaded onto a ship bound for the Kazakh Port of Aktau, across the Caspian Sea. Then it’s put on trucks for the 1,000-mile ride through Kazakhstan, then a train through Kyrgyzstan and, finally, into Afghanistan.

The second passage to Afghanistan, known as Pakistani Lines of Communication, begins at the port of Karachi and continues on one of two land routes, north toward the logistical hub at Bagram Airfield or west toward Kandahar. It has always been the primary option for American forces: It’s the shortest and cheapest, requires only one border crossing, and minimal time on the road inside Afghanistan. Nearly 60,000 trucks drive more than 1,200 miles through the length of Pakistan every year carrying supplies and fuel. According to varying figures provided by U.S. and NATO forces, 40 percent to 60 percent of all military supplies used by coalition forces in Afghanistan come through Pakistan.

Afridi doesn’t cut the figure of a man playing a key role in the U.S.’s long war in Afghanistan. The 46-year-old Pashtun is from the Khyber Agency, one of the seven Pakistani tribal sectors along the border with Afghanistan. He has a neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard and prefers to drape his rotund figure in a plain white shalwar kameez and a black vest. When he’s not too preoccupied, he wears a disarming smile. The only thing that makes him stand out from the legions of similarly dressed men on the streets of Peshawar are his dark tinted glasses and a cell phone that never stops ringing.

ven Afridi wouldn’t have dreamed of such a life a decade ago. His grandfather started the family transport business in the 1960s, buying a few trucks to move melons, grapes, and wheat from the fertile lands of the Punjab in Pakistan to largely arid Afghanistan. Afridi inherited the business in the 1980s. In 1996 he added a few tanker trucks to his fleet after signing a contract with Pakistan State Oil to transport fuel from refineries in Karachi. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and coalition forces moved in to occupy the landlocked country, Afridi’s business took off. He says he orchestrates a fleet of nearly 4,000 flatbeds and more than 3,000 fuel tankers that haul military supplies into Afghanistan.

On a November morning, two days after the U.S. attack, Afridi rides around in a brand new black Toyota Hilux Vigo pickup. He’s just returned from the haj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, a prohibitively expensive ritual Muslims are required to do at least once in a lifetime—if they are able to afford it. Afridi says this year was his second haj. His first was in 2010.

Despite the prosperity, there are times he wishes he had never become involved with the Americans. After all, he is bringing fuel and supplies to forces fighting Pashtuns like himself in a neighboring country. In Peshawar, where his business is based—and where the Pashtuns are a majority—he’s a man on the run, constantly looking over his shoulder. As Pakistanis increasingly see the U.S. as the real enemy in the conflict in South Central Asia, Afridi feels like a target for doing business with them. “Can you believe it? They won’t even let my guards carry their guns here anymore,” Afridi gestures to the two unamused looking men, with no obviously displayed firearms, who have hung near him like a shadow ever since they jumped out of the cargo bed of the pickup.

The fallout from the Nov. 26 friendly fire incident means Afridi’s business is at a standstill, indefinitely. Still, he thinks the Pakistanis have done the right thing. He says he hates the sight of the American flag, and stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Pakistan’s army. “Your homeland is like your mother,” he says, pausing to turn off a ringing phone. “You can screw people here and there, that’s just business.” He peers over his dark glasses. “But you never, ever screw your mother.”

Of Afghanistan’s neighbors, Pakistan has the longest border and has historically wielded the most influence. It also provides the nearest seaport to Kabul. To leverage Pakistan’s strategic position, the U.S. has poured more than $20 billion into the country over the past decade. The money is not simply to strengthen Pakistan’s democracy against the threat from militants, as diplomats sometimes suggest. It has also been a way to buy Pakistan’s loyalty, aimed specifically at luring Pakistan away from the Taliban. Most important, the money is also for the continued use of Pakistan’s highway network. “If we want to be successful in Afghanistan,” as General James L. Jones Jr., former National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama, said in recent congressional testimony, “the roads to that success have a lot to do with Pakistan.”

The U.S. has worked hard to find an alternative. The Northern Distribution Network, running through Europe and Central Asia, was developed only in 2009. That was after the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan had begun the previous year. Besides easing congestion on Pakistani ports and border crossings, it was also an opportunity to decrease dependence on Pakistan, which the U.S. increasingly suspected was collaborating with the Taliban inside Afghanistan and providing their fighters and leaders sanctuary in Pakistan. Today around half of U.S. military supplies to Afghanistan come in from the north, but the northern network comes with its own set of challenges. (About 10 percent to 20 percent of supplies are flown in.) Besides being very long and costing three times as much to use as the Pakistani route, it’s vulnerable to attack. Only days before the closure of the Pakistani Lines of Communication, a Russian news agency reported an explosion along the northern supply route in Uzbekistan.

Russia’s sphere of influence spreads across much of the northern route, which can cause complications. In 2009, for example, after Kyrgyzstan threatened to eject the U.S. from the Manas Air Base, a key node in the supply chain, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Russia was “working against us.” Two days after the Pakistanis closed the supply route in November, and the U.S. was left with only the northern route, Russia’s NATO envoy made loosely veiled threats at closing off the northern supply line as well if NATO didn’t begin to rethink its European missile defense shield.

Many countries along the northern route still don’t allow the passage of foreign military gear, so Pakistan was the only way for the U.S. to move nearly all of its combat equipment. At a congressional hearing in May, Lieutenant General Mitchell H. Stevenson, the U.S. Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, was asked what the “long term impact” would be if the supply route through Pakistan was “suddenly shut down.” After explaining that the Army kept a 45-day supply of reserve fuel on the ground in Afghanistan, the general said they could only “last several weeks” without any significant impact.

This is what Pakistan’s calculation appears to have been from Day One. According to Abdul Sattar, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister from 1999 to 2002, the evening after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, General Pervez Musharraf, who then ruled Pakistan as an unelected Chief Executive, called a meeting at the military’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. He wanted to discuss his country’s response to the inevitable U.S. call for cooperation.

Abdul Sattar, one of only two people at that meeting not affiliated with the military, says that by midnight the group had decided on the broad outlines of Pakistan’s official response to the U.S. in case of a war in Afghanistan. Sattar suggested a “Yes, but…” approach to Musharraf, meaning Pakistan should agree in principle to whatever reasonable demands the U.S. would make, then secure strategic advantages while negotiating the fine details.

Sattar was soon sidelined though, as were many others, and decision-making shifted into an insulated and small circle of generals closest to the dictator. “I would not hear much after that, a memo here or there, months after the fact,” says Sattar, now retired and living in a quiet corner of Islamabad. The agreements the U.S. reached with Musharraf were never fully revealed, but information trickled out over the years.

The most important part of Pakistan’s role in America’s war was impossible to conceal: The country’s highway network would be the route along which the U.S. military’s supply chain would run. On this issue, Pakistan had taken the “Yes, but…” path. The country did not allow American military vessels on its waters. The U.S. Transport Command handed out massive contracts to international shipping lines such as Singapore’s APL (NPTOF), the Danish company Maersk (AMKAF), and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd. Since the beginning of the war, APL has received more than $700 million in defense-related contracts and has moved more than 300,000 shipping containers for the U.S. military. Maersk has won nearly $2 billion in contracts. The goods transported through Pakistan include everything from blankets and microwave dinners to armored Humvees and Kevlar vests, and even shipping containers full of frozen food.

Getting all the overseas crude oil and other supplies to the port city of Karachi has proven to be the easy part. Once the cargo is unloaded in Karachi, however, the international shipping lines subcontract the job of getting it to Afghanistan to local agencies. Those agencies in turn hire local truckers like Shakir Afridi. And so the lifeline for one of the largest deployments of U.S. forces in American history falls into the hands of a loose association of truck drivers and owners from the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The nerve center of the transport business in Karachi is in Shireen Jinnah Colony, a smoggy and rusty seaside neighborhood with an apocalyptic landscape. Flatbed trucks are assembled from scratch on the side of the road. These “jingle trucks” are painted in every color of the spectrum and decorated with hundreds of intricate metal, wooden, plastic, and glass trinkets. In the background, monstrous oil refineries pump thick smoke into the air. From a small room in an office block abutting the Port of Karachi, Muntazir Afridi, Shakir’s younger brother, deals with the southern end of the Afridi family business.

The trucking industry in Karachi, which is as far away as you can get in the country from Afghanistan, is in the hands of the city’s large minority Pashtun population. Mostly immigrants from Peshawar and the tribal areas on the Afghan frontier, the Pashtuns arrived in the 1950s and ’60s in flocks, looking for jobs. Largely uneducated and unskilled, 1,000 miles from home, they slowly acquired transport contracts to supply Pakistan’s north. Their deep cultural ties to Afghanistan’s majority Pashtun population also made them favorites for transport jobs for Afghan trade. In a city where ethnic groups battle and bloody the streets over slices of the local economy, two tribes in particular have an unshakable grip on the trucking business: the Shinwaris and the Afridis.

Muntazir Afridi’s office is sparse. Taped to the wall are photos of the holy mosque in Mecca and the prophet’s mosque in Medina. A desk sits in a corner, and on a rickety coffee table is an overflowing ashtray. “In Bombay they have their film industry,” Muntazir proclaims with a smile, while sipping his morning green tea on a stained couch. “In Karachi we have the trucking industry.”

With NATO transport shut down, the office block, which houses logistics companies, trucking companies, insurers, and customs clearing agents, is quiet. In an adjacent room, a group of men, mostly truck drivers, lie on soft rugs watching a Pashto film on television. The smell of Afghan hash hangs thick in the air. Other men, clearly stranded, shuttle between offices in the block with fists of crumpled papers, asking for loans, food, and lodging.

Muntazir is in his mid-20s and dressed, like his brother, in a plain white shalwar kameez. His beard is long and neat. He points outside at the sheer scale of the enterprise. Stretching for miles, from the walls of the office block below all the way to where the large cranes of Karachi’s port are visible through the smog, is a patchwork of hundreds of oil tankers and flatbed trucks in yellow and red and green. “On a regular day they would all be on the move like ants,” Muntazir says, but instead the trucks are parked, overflowing from the terminal lots. Lines of jingle trucks are parked, sometimes double parked, for miles along the roads of Karachi. The entire southern quarter of the city looks like it’s been invaded by trucks.

The Afridi family is only one of hundreds that have enjoyed the boom from the steady flow of American military supplies through Pakistan after 2001. The real gold rush started with the troop surge in Afghanistan that began soon after Obama won the election in 2008. When he took office there were just over 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By January 2010, the number had more than doubled to nearly 70,000. In May of this year, troop levels peaked at nearly 100,000.

More troops naturally meant more supplies. Figures issued by the Pakistan Federal Tax Ombudsman illustrate the spike in traffic at Karachi’s port. U.S. military equipment received at the port rose from nearly 16,000 shipping containers in 2005 to more than 54,000 in 2009. Halfway through 2010 the U.S. military had already shipped nearly 30,000 containers to Karachi.

In Pakistan the demand for trucks skyrocketed. “Everyone who had nothing to lose took out a loan and bought a truck,” Muntazir says. He invited many of his extended relatives from the tribal areas to come to Karachi and start driving. The local “third party vendor” transport companies, to whom the international shipping lines subcontracted, were so desperate for drivers that Muntazir says they began lending money to people they had just met, so they would buy a truck and get supplies moving. “There was just no way the companies would be able to deal with truckers,” Muntazir says. “They couldn’t keep track of a thing.” Entire truckloads started going missing. Drivers would take the wheel of a brand new truck and simply drive off, never to return. The supply chain was coming undone.

This is where Shakir, the elder brother, began to do work he describes as “brokering,” placing himself between truck owners and the local transport companies. He takes responsibility for the cargo and ensures it gets to U.S. and other ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Acting as a guarantor, Afridi receives a cut from the logistics companies when the cargo is picked up and again when it’s dropped off. The work has proved so profitable that Afridi has sold his entire fleet.
In November 2008, Hakimullah Mehsud, a commander of the newly formed Taliban Movement of Pakistan, invited the news media to Orakzai, a tribal agency in Pakistan, for his first press conference. Mehsud arrived riding in a brand new armored U.S. military Humvee. As he posed for photographs, he told reporters he had captured a few American vehicles after attacking and looting a military convoy traveling through Pakistan. He boasted he would increase these attacks.

Such attacks started at the same time as the U.S. troop surge in late 2008. Fuel tankers began getting torched regularly and shipping containers were ripped open, looted, and left empty along highways. In the local press, Pakistani military officials told of groups in the tribal areas stealing helicopter parts. Militants who couldn’t get to the trucks took to bombing bridges and roads along the route, at times shutting the supply route for days.

The supply line was not just vulnerable to militants. In the past several years, the Pakistani and American visions for Afghanistan’s future have diverged so far that the relationship has turned hostile. Pakistan first cut off NATO’s supplies in September 2008, in response to the first-ever reported incursion of U.S. troops into Pakistan. Two months later, after a drone aircraft targeted Pakistan’s “settled,” nontribal lands for the first and only time, 160 NATO trucks were burned in a nightlong rampage in Peshawar. Many believed the event was staged by the Pakistani military and meant to send a clear signal. Vice Admiral Mark D. Harnitchek, deputy commander of the U.S. Transportation Command, said in a 2009 speech that 12 percent of the freight bound for Bagram in December 2008 had disappeared.

The supply line has been under consistent fire ever since. In 2009 there were 25 attacks on NATO supply lines in Pakistan, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, an online database tracking terror incidents in the region. In 2011, before the supply line was closed in November, there had already been a total of 111 reported incidents, destroying hundreds of supply vehicles. Even in times of relative calm, the Pakistani military has had its hand on the valve, as it alone decides how many trucks carrying U.S. military equipment to let through on any given day.

The spike in attacks is partly because drivers and truck owners have jumped into the action. Drivers in particular, discouraged by the high risks involved, have taken to selling their loads of fuel on the black market, then setting fire to the tankers and collecting insurance money. They can earn a nice profit, even after paying off local collaborators. Though the scam is a pain for the brokers, Muntazir says he feels for the truckers. “These guys risk their lives, and they get what? Thirty thousand, maybe forty thousand rupees for a trip?” That’s about four hundred dollars. Peanuts, says Muntazir. “Anyway, you can’t blame them trying to make their little bit,” he adds. “The real money is being made by those guys dealing in dollars”—meaning Pakistani transport companies, the Americans, and others higher up the food chain.

In June 2010, after an unsourced news report on Pakistani TV claimed that nearly 11,000 Afghanistan-bound shipping containers that had arrived in Karachi had gone missing, the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked another agency, the Federal Tax Ombudsman’s office, to investigate. The case landed on the desk of Shoaib Suddle. A career police officer, Suddle was Karachi’s police chief at the height of a war between several ethnic groups in the mid-1990s. He has a doctorate in white-collar criminology from the University of Wales and has also served as the chief of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau.

When Suddle first began his investigation, he received little encouragement from his colleagues. It’s made-up news, people would say. How can thousands of shipping containers go missing without anyone noticing? Then he had a breakthrough. The Pakistani ports and customs authorities were not keeping track, but he found that private container terminals in Karachi were keeping detailed records of the exact time containers would depart and return. Some trucks would never check back in. But thousands of mostly empty trucks were coming back too soon, sometimes a few hours after departing for Afghanistan.

“We found the mother of all scams,” Suddle said. In a report published by his office earlier this year, he described complex transnational networks bribing local customs agents and using crooked bureaucrats in Pakistan to forge documents and create fake companies. The intent of that corruption was to get goods labeled as Afghanistan-bound into the country, and then divert them for resale on the black market.

In total, Suddle estimated that at least 7,992 shipping containers had never reached Afghanistan. The report called this “the tip of the iceberg.” A follow-up investigation, also ordered by the Pakistani Supreme Court, revealed that close to 29,000 cargo loads have gone missing in the country. There is no way of knowing precisely what disappeared. While many of these containers were loaded with commercial cargo destined for Afghanistan, military equipment for coalition forces accounts for nearly 40 percent of all trade to Afghanistan through Pakistan. Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue estimates that 3,300 shipping containers full of military equipment were among those missing.

According to an agreement between the Pakistani and British ministries of defense, signed in June 2002 and made public only recently, Pakistan allows ISAF military equipment to arrive in Pakistan without inspection. The U.S. military is not even required to file a customs declaration form describing contents inside shipping containers. Much of the lost military gear finds its way into the Pakistani black market. Some of it might even make it across the border into Afghanistan—but into the wrong hands.
In the Khyber Agency, not far from Peshawar, the hemorrhaging U.S. supply line stocks a long bazaar the locals call Karkhano Market. Among the haphazard corrugated-iron storefronts and randomly arranged merchandise, middle-aged women are shopping for “USA” branded oil and soap bars with the American flag printed on them. Crisply clothed young men in dark glasses who walk in and out of back doors make hushed deals with suppliers. Scruffy fighters drop in from Afghanistan to sample the latest in the military technology available on roadside tables.

Alongside old British rifles and Soviet AK-47s, American military gear like Kevlar vests, boots, camouflage suits, night-vision goggles, and knives hang from hooks. Tall stacks of large boxes carrying ammunition and weapons parts will not be opened without a good reference. In the bargain bins, thrown in with used fleece socks and shrink-wrapped copies of The Book of Mormon, are U.S. military operation manuals that restrict distribution to “DoD and DoD contractors only,” and carry instructions to destroy “by any method that must prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of documents.” A large sign for a shop on the second floor reads, “Haji M. Ikhlas USA traders,” with crude paintings of a U.S. military helmet and army boots. In 2009 a U.S. military laptop that the U.S. Army’s 864th Engineer Combat Battalion used for diagnostics and maintenance of military weapons systems and vehicles was found in this same market. It contained restricted U.S. military information, as well as software for military platforms, the identities of numerous military personnel, and information about vulnerabilities in American military vehicles used in Afghanistan. All that for $650.

Shopkeepers say that much of their stock comes from Afghanistan or is brought in from elsewhere in Pakistan—they don’t differentiate. From whatever direction, it’s clear that the stuff is stolen from the U.S. military supply chain, and here in the open black market it fetches a good price.

This is an enterprise that none of the subcontractors in the U.S. military supply chain—the international shipping lines, the local logistics agencies, the truck owners and drivers, and brokers like Shakir Afridi—lose much sleep over. After all, it doesn’t affect their bottom line.
Back inside the city limits of Peshawar, Shakir Afridi is attending a lunch at the house of a truck owner he represents. There are more than a dozen guests, some of whom introduce themselves as truck owners, others as drivers. There are local officials from towns along the supply route who might help out with paperwork in case of an accident, and reps from the transporters’ union, too.

Afridi sits at the head of a decadent spread of goat meat and Kabuli pulao rice. “When I was in Mecca last month, I prayed and begged Allah to finish this war,” he says, sinking his teeth into a leg of goat, coated in dripping salty fat. A truck owner sitting next to him pours himself a glass of Pepsi and passes Afridi his phone. He wants to share a photograph of one of his drivers, whose eyes had been gouged out, he explains, by Taliban who attacked his truck as he drove along the western route to Kandahar. “This is a dirty, dirty business,” says Afridi shaking his head sadly.

Afridi says he’s not worried about revenue should the war end. He’s confident other contracts will come through. After all, he’s been cooperating with Pakistan’s military for years now, “standing shoulder to shoulder.” He talks about the Central Asian “stans”—all landlocked, growing, and looking to trade. He thinks Pakistan will start moving goods into Central and East Asia. Most important, he is convinced that “Allah, not America, is the one who provides sustenance to man.”

As Pakistan and the U.S. drift apart, Afridi’s prayers for an end to the war may soon be answered. As of Dec. 13, the supply route remains closed. President Obama has ordered a military investigation into the events of Nov. 26. In the meantime the blame game continues. While Obama has called President Asif Ali Zardari to offer condolences, the U.S. has yet to apologize. To the contrary, some U.S. officials are saying Pakistan was warned of the operation in advance. On Dec. 8, 32 oil tankers and 10 shipping containers full of NATO military supplies parked at a poorly protected terminal in Quetta were burned and destroyed. A day later the Pakistani Senate heard testimony about how the country had incurred nearly half a billion dollars in road damage over a decade because of NATO supply trucks. Pakistan’s government pulled out of the Bonn conference held to plan the last stages of the conflict in Afghanistan. Pakistan, it seems, wanted to make the point that while it is consistently asked to do more to help in the war in Afghanistan, it can do less, too.

“America has been trying to get out of this for years now,” says Afridi as he pushes away his empty plate and sticks a toothpick in his mouth. Dessert and green tea are served. “We have them so badly hemmed in that they can’t go anywhere,” he chuckles. By helping supply the U.S. with enough to keep busy in Afghanistan, but not enough to win, Afridi believes he is killing two birds with one stone. He is turning a profit and bleeding the country he hates most in the world. “They want out, but we’re still not done with them yet,” he says as he dips a spoon into a bowl of custard. “There’s still a little more to go.”

Mufti is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.

Source : Business Week

For the pathetic decisions by Lowe’s Home Improvement and for the hate mongers and bigots like Christian Florida Family Association, there are others who reject their message of bigotry. People like U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison, actress Mia Farrow, California state Senator Ted Lieu, mogul Russell Simmons and many others step up and lead through their words and actions.

US conservatives force firm to pull pro-Muslim ad

…
Keith Ellison, one of only two Muslim congressmen, also signed the petition.

“The success of All-American Muslim shows how ready the country is to learn about Muslims as Americans,” he said in a statement.

“This probably makes hate-mongers uncomfortable — as they should be,” Mr Ellison, a Democrat who site in the House of Representatives for a Minnesota district.

The petition had a positive impact and Tuesday Russell Simmons, a hip-hop Mogul and a practicing Buddhist, said he had bought spots for the next week’s show. He said he wanted to buy time for this week’s show as well but it was sold out.

“Just purchased remaining spots for #allamericanmuslim for next week The show is now sold out! keep your money Lowe’s and we will keep ours,” Mr Simmons tweeted.

Famous American actress, singer, humanitarian, and fashion model, Mia Farrow asked her followers to join her in a boycott of the home improvement chain, tweeting: “Big effort on Twitter to hit Lowe’s where it hurts, Let’s all boycott Lowe’s.”

California state Senator Ted Lieu called the Lowe’s ad pull, “stunning bigotry.”

“I call on Lowe’s to rescind its action and apologise to Americans who are Muslim. If Lowe’s continues its religious bigotry, I will encourage boycotts of Lowe’s and look into legislative remedies,” he wrote.
…

…(one of many innocents buried in mass unmarked graves)

Infant girl’s body with bullet marks buried in unmarked grave

Chahal (Baramulla), Dec 09: Atta Muhammad has buried 235 bodies of unidentified people. But it was the burial of a six-month-old baby girl in 2002 that brought tears to his eyes for the first time.

“She was brought here by policemen in a vehicle and handed over to me for burial. I buried her as per the Islamic rites. The girl was not more than six months old,” the 75-year-old grave digger says in a choked voice.
“When I took her for burial bath, I saw a bullet wound near her belly. That was for the first time I wept while burying somebody.”

The infant’s body is among the 250 bodies buried in one of the valley’s biggest graveyard of unidentified people at village Chahal in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.
…
Meanwhile, human rights activists say the revelation of the grave of the infant girl contradicts the claims of the government and security agencies.
…
According to the SHRC report released early this year, there are 2156 unidentified graves at 38 sites in Kashmir.
…

Children in Uzbekistan often pick cotton with bare hands, with sometimes nothing more than slippers or sandals on their feet. © Environmental Justice Foundation

As I’ve written on the subject before, Uzbekistan is one of the worst human rights offenders out there. Recent news of child labor during this fall’s cotton harvesting season once again put the country into the international spotlight drawing sharp criticism by human rights activists. Meanwhile, in the same vein, Bell Pottinger Group’s dealings with the dictatorship was recently revealed and criticized in the news. This firm is a London-based public relations agency and is one of the largest lobbying companies in the U.K.

For the past several years each fall, when the cotton harvesting season in Uzbekistan begins, the news media and human rights groups sound the alarm about children as young as ten years old (reports on this differ) being pulled from school and forced to work the cotton fields. Bear in mind that the Uzbek government bars independent international observers in the country during the harvest season.

This year the story largely remains the same – there was a spike in coverage of this issue starting in September. However, a few positive developments took place this fall:

1) Sixty of the world’s major retailers, including Walmart, Walt Disney, H&M and Adidas agreed to boycott all products known to contain Uzbek cotton. But skepticism remains. According to the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights’ Director Niyazova Umida, “such kind of a boycott will not help immediately because there are a lot of other cotton traders – from China, Bangladesh and Pakistan and other Asian countries.”

2) The European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee unanimously blocked a trade deal that would have lowered the tariffs on EU imports of Uzbek cotton, citing objections to that country’s continued use of forced child labor in its cotton harvests.

The situation surrounding forced child labor in the cotton industry remains appalling. I have no way of knowing that the clothes I’m wearing today are not made out of Uzbek cotton which made its way to Bangladesh or somewhere else where it was processed into yarn or sown and later sold to large retailers in Europe or the U.S. and finally found its way to a consumer like me. I know that H&M is one of the companies that made an effort to eliminate cotton from Uzbekistan from its supply chain and this is explicitly stated on their website.

I love Lucky Brand and I especially like their jeans so I decided to check out their website and see if there is any information about the source of their cotton or their social responsibility policy regarding child labor or other unethical practices. I don’t see anything of this sort on their web page. I do see this:

We were born in Southern California and it’s a big part of what we make. We’re inspired by amazing nature, like the orange groves and mountains of Ojai and the beach towns that dot the pacific Coast Highway. We love great music, art and photography – new and old. And we can’t get enough of the casual lifestyle and amazing weather (Who doesn’t like taking a drive with the top down on a 70-degree winter day?). In addition to giving our jeans their distinctive look and vibe, Southern California also inspires our seasonal Lucky Brand fashion collections – jackets, sweaters, dresses, pants and accessories that work with or without your denim.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with this. I too love all those things as I spent a large chunk of my life growing up in So Cal. But while thinking about the ocean breeze and orange groves I had a haunting image of children forced to pick cotton instead of attending school under the scorching Central Asian sun. It doesn’t sit well with me.

I recently went to lunch with a German friend. Somebody complimented her scarf and she said she got it at Primark. I had never heard of the store before so I asked about it and one of her first comments was that it seems like a sweatshop and she doesn’t like it despite the fact that they sell cheap clothes. This reminded me of the sandblasted/distressed jeans story that was making rounds on my Facebook newsfeed shared and reposted by friends. People were appalled by it. Consumers do care and I hope they can make a difference. But without calling attention to this issue chances are nothing will change.

If you’re in Liverpool, the International Slavery Museum is hosting an exhibition White Gold: the True Cost of Cotton until September 2012. The exhibition highlights the abuse of labor rights in the cotton industry primarily focusing on in Uzbekistan.
Boy picking cotton. Photo: Courtesy National Museums Liverpool.

Watch White Gold – the True Cost of Cotton from Environmental Justice:

Other videos about child labor in Uzbekistan worth checking out: Newsnight Investigates the Uzbek Cotton Industry.

By Pamela Constable for The Washington Post

Siraj Ahmed Malik, an ambitious young Pakistani journalist, was enjoying a stint last fall on a fellowship at the University of Arizona when he started getting chilling messages from home.

One after another, his friends and colleagues were disappearing, he learned, and their bodies were turning up with bullet holes and burn marks. A doctor’s son from his home town was arrested and vanished. A fellow reporter was kidnapped, and his corpse was found near a river. A student leader was detained, and his bullet-riddled body dumped on a highway. A writer whose stories Malik had edited was shot and killed.

“These were kids I had played cricket with, people I had interviewed, younger reporters I had taught,” Malik, 28, said in an interview last week in Arlington County, where he now lives. The final straw came in early June, when one of his mentors, a poet and scholar, was gunned down in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, Malik’s native province.

On Aug. 19, Malik applied for political asylum in the United States. In his petition, he said that his work as a journalist and ethnic activist in Baluchistan, where he had exposed military abuses, made him likely to be arrested, tortured, abducted and “ultimately killed by the government” if he returned.

Two weeks ago, his petition was granted. It was a highly unusual decision by U.S. immigration officials, given Pakistan’s status: a strategic partner in Washington’s war against Islamic terrorism; a longtime recipient of U.S. aid; and a democracy with an elected civilian government and vibrant national news media.

“I never wanted to leave my country, but I don’t want to become a martyr, either,” said Malik, a soft-spoken but steely man who spends his days hunched over a laptop at coffee shops in Clarendon, checking with sources back home to update his online newspaper, whose name means “Baluch Truth.”

“What’s going on in Baluchistan is like the dirty war in Argentina,” he said. “I need to be telling the story, but I can’t afford to become the story.”

Baluchistan is the Wild West of Pakistan — a remote desert province, larger than France, that is home to a mix of radical Islamic groups, rival ethnic and refugee gangs, rebellious armed tribes, and security agencies that have long been reported to kidnap, torture and kill dissidents with impunity.

Living under constant threat

Yet this ongoing violence and skulduggery receives scant international attention. Foreign journalists are banned from visiting the region alone, while headlines about Pakistan are dominated by a separate, high-stakes border conflict in which American drones and Pakistani troops are battling the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

As a result, a handful of local journalists such as Malik have been left to investigate and report the news without big-city patrons or visiting foreign delegations to give them cover.

“The threat of disappearance was always lurking in the back of our minds,” Malik wrote in his asylum petition. “My friends, colleagues and I lived with the knowledge that yesterday it was him that disappeared; today it is someone else; tomorrow it could easily be me.”

As Malik recounted over coffee, pressure and threats from unidentified intelligence agents were a daily hazard. According to his asylum file, agents accosted him in airports and hotels, detained and questioned him, and repeatedly threatened to “teach me a lesson.”

Malik acknowledges that as an advocate for the Baluch nationalist cause, his journalism is hardly neutral. The ethnic minority movement, which seeks autonomy from the central government, includes armed groups. Malik claims that he does not condone them, but he describes their stance as a “defensive” response to official abuse.

Still, his case for protection was bolstered by reports from human rights groups and letters from university officials in Arizona, who called him “nothing short of brave.” In a July report, Human Rights Watch described a “practice of enforced disappearances” of Baluch leaders and intellectuals, often by security agencies, and listed 45 abductions or killings since 2009.

Activists including Malik assert that more than 5,000 Baluch have vanished in the past decade, but the issue has never been seriously addressed, while the government has both co-opted and persecuted Baluch tribal chiefs. In 2007, Pakistan’s military president fired the head of the Supreme Court, who sought to probe the disappearances. In 2008, a civilian government took office and an investigative commission was established, but little action has been taken.

“The authorities have no answers because there is no accountability,” said one Pakistani diplomat, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. He suggested that Malik had exaggerated his fear of persecution as a “ploy” to remain in the United States, but he also called disappearances “the tip of the iceberg” in a society where security forces hold sway behind the scenes. Even a chief justice, he added, “knows there are lines he cannot cross.”

Driven to speak out

Najam Sethi, a newspaper publisher and titan of Pakistan’s liberal media establishment, was Malik’s boss from 2006 to 2010, when he worked as a correspondent in Quetta. For the past few months, Sethi has been on his own sabbatical at the New America Foundation in Washington, partly to escape the pressure he faces at home.

At a public forum here last week, Sethi described Pakistan’s news media as free to snipe at politicians and expose financial scandals but said it remains cautious about reporting on military and intelligence institutions, partly out of respect and partly out of fear.

“The media are scared, because there is no one to protect them,” Sethi said.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 40 Pakistani journalists have been killed since 1992. In May, a well-known investigative reporter, Saleem Shahzad, was abducted and found murdered. Shahzad had received threats after writing about al-Qaeda infiltration of the military, and a senior U.S. military official said his killing had been “sanctioned” by the government.

Asked about Malik, Sethi said he thought his former staffer had been too aggressive and outspoken. As Malik’s editor, he said, he had intervened several times with military authorities to protect him. “I wish he hadn’t gone so far,” Sethi said. “He crossed too many red lines.”

Malik, however, said he felt “betrayed” by such liberal media leaders, saying they have avoided speaking out against oppression in Baluchistan. He recounted how Baluch groups had been galvanized by the 2006 army slaying of the legendary tribal chief Nawab Akbar Bugti.

“For us, the killing of Bugti was Pakistan’s 9/11,” Malik said. After that, he said, he stepped up his exposure of the violence and abuses. His activities drew increasing attention from government agents, who, he said, called him a “traitor” and threatened to kill him if he did not stop.

Instead, Malik persisted. In early 2010, he attended a conference in India and denounced the disappearances. From his fellowship perch in Arizona last winter, and then while working briefly at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington in the spring, he wrote and spoke out at every opportunity.

But as the deaths of other Baluch journalists and friends began to mount, Malik said last week, he began to hesitate about returning.

“Baluchistan needs a messenger to the world,” he said, itching to get back to his reporting. “Here in the United States, I don’t have an office or money, but at least I can stay alive and get the message out.”

Filed under: All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, Freedoms, Pakistan, Pakistan Army, Pakistanis Tagged: Abductions, Baluch, Baluchistan, Committee Protect Journalists, Freedom of Speech, Nawab Akbar Bugti, Pakistan Army, Pakistani Journalists, Press Freedoms Pakistan, Saleem Shahzad, Siraj Ahmed Malik, University of Arizona, Wild West of Pakistan