After reading following news, I just became speechless, I couldn’t stop my self to crying. I just don’t understand what is going on in this country. May Allah curse upon these cruel people. http://www.express.com.pk/epaper/PoPupwindow.aspx?newsID=1101450850&Issue=NP_LHE&Date=20120216    

If you’re an Irani banking with Iran’s state owned Bank Tejarat and happen to own stocks in US markets, hey guess what, you’re SCREWED. The worlds greatest democracy – you know the one that spent 10 years and 4 trillion USD allegedly looking for ONE man – has decided to impose sanctions on Bank Tejarat [...]

Worlds Greatest Democracy Screws Anti-Nuclear Irani’s is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.

If the civilians are called into question for their loyalty to the constitution of Pakistan, why not also put the spotlight on high-placed military officials, including coup-makers and their abettors?

Grieved beyond words to hear this news: “Renowned human rights activist and social worker Zarteef Khan Afridi is killed in Saparee area of Khyber Agency this morning while he was on his way to school where he has been teaching for more than two decades. Zarteef Afridi has been a committed human rights worker, member Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and active member of several peace groups working in FATA for last two decades. He has been receiving threats from local militants for his work on peace and rights in FATA. He was a bold and courageous worker and refused to bow down to the pressure of these militants. Till his last breath he was working for his mission and fighting for rights of tribal people. We are anguished on this brutal act and demand immediate action from law enforcing agencies against those involve in this murder. We also extend our words of condolence and to his family and all those friends that were part of his struggle. Our message shall also be conveyed to these extremists’ forces that the society will not deter from its resolve to bring peace and fight against extremism and all those forces harboring such elements in the country. Zarteef and his struggle will always be remembered and cherished.” — Email from Irfan Mufti, South Asia Partnership. Profile of Zarteef Khan Afridi: In the eye of the storm

Prominent Pakistani scientist Dr Umar Saif has received a prestigious award for research work funded by the US State Department for the last three years – but the State Department has yet to grant him a visa that he applied for in September.

The $ 100,000 USD Google Faculty Research Award jointly given to Dr Umar Saif makes him the first faculty member in a Pakistani university to receive the competitive grant, awarded for the low-cost rural telephony systems that he has been working on for the past three years along with colleagues at UC Berkeley — Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure at Google, currently on leave from his work as Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Tapan Parikh, Assistant Professor at the iSchool at UC Berkeley and Kurtis Heimerl, a graduate student working with Dr Brewer. Dr Saif teaches at the Lahore University of Management Sciences from where he is currently on leave, working as the (youngest) Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB).

“We would like to thank you for submitting your proposal, ‘The Intelligent Telephony Access Point’, to our Google Research Awards program. We appreciate your patience, as we conduct a very thorough review of all the submissions that we receive, involving several teams of Google engineers and researchers.

“We are very pleased to inform you that we will support your proposal with an award in the amount of $100,000 USD,” says an email from Alfred Spector, Maggie Johnson, Jeff Walz, Jen Phillips, and David Harper of Google Inc., dated December 1, 2011.

The project is aimed at enabling communication “to coordinate rescue efforts during times of disaster when traditional communication systems may be unavailable.”

Ironically, the US State Department that has been funding his research has yet to grant Dr Saif a visa. He was unable to attend a conference at MIT in October because of this, as I wrote in my report on US visa weirdness.

Foreign scientists applying for US visas often have to go undergo an administrative screening process called Visas Mantis that slows down the process considerably, says Kathy Bailey Mathae, director of the Board on International Scientific Organizations (BISO), National Academy of Sciences (NAS). BISO works closely with the State Department to resolve visa issues related to scientists and science students.

One way of redress is a questionnaire that scientists or science students can submit if they haven’t heard about their visa at least 21 days after the date of their interview.

“We can highlight important cases for the State Department, but it may take up to 60 days,” she said. “It will never be ideal, but we have seen a lot of progress.”

Unfortunately, the progress hasn’t benefited Dr Saif, who has since filled and submitted the BISO questionaire, hoping to get the US visa in time for another conference in mid-November on Hot Topics in Networks. However, the visa remains elusive, even as awards come his way. Dr Saif ended up participating in the conference via a recorded presentation and Skype Q&A. How messed up can one system get?

Well, obviously it’s only been an hour or two since this whole thing was announced, and we know very little at this point. It would behoove everyone, including myself, to be cautionary in their pronouncements and “lessons” from this episode. To that end, I’m thinking more in terms of questions than answers.

Question 1: Does this mean the U.S. can leave the region?

When Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan with the “surge”, there were, broadly speaking, two lines of thought on the decision. One was that Obama is a Hillary-ite neocon Democrat. The other was that Obama didn’t want to appear soft on terror/the war(s), lest he be outflanked by the Republicans on the issue.

Well, this event now affords us the opportunity to see which of those interpretations was right. If the surge was motivated mostly by domestic political considerations, rather than international security considerations, we should see a close-to-immediate decreasing American presence in the region (“immediate” in international political terms). This is because no matter what Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich say, Obama has, for domestic purposes, won the so-called war on terror. Not objectively, but symbolically. And frankly, all of American politics runs on symbols. If — again, big if — Obama wants to get out of the region, this is the best excuse he could find.

Question 2: Is Obama’s re-election guaranteed?

In my view, yes, essentially. All those questions about how much he really is an American can now be answered in a debate or news-cycle-soundbite very easily. “I got him”. That’s it. That’s all he needs to say.

Question 3: What will the dominant reaction to Pakistan’s role in this be?

Some will say, “Look, Pakistan helped! Couldn’t have done it without ‘em! Brilliant! Give them more aid!”. The GHQ will be pushing this logic, I can promise you. Others will say “What the hell was he doing there in the first place, eh? And given that there’s plenty more where that came from, we should escalate! Screw them Pakis!”. I’m paraphrasing of course. But only just.

The rest of us will be somewhere in the middle, dazed and confused as always.

Question 4: Who will give the American media geography lessons?

I don’t watch cable news at the best of times, but when something really big happens, I stay away from it like the plague. Nevertheless, through Twitter, I have learned that people like Wolf Blitzer are calling Abbottabad a suburb of Islamabad. Sigh. It’s not. Please go to maps.google.com if it helps. Abbottabad is about as close to Peshawar as it is Islamabad.

Question 5: Isn’t the best place to hide someone in a big city?

I’ve always told people that I thought Bin Laden would be in a place like Karachi – dense but sprawling at the same time, massive but small. You can hide there, trust me. Get one of your lieutenant’s lieutenants to find you an apartment, and never leave. You’d never be found, as long as you keep your mouth shut. The conventional wisdom, on the other hand, is that geographically withdrawn areas like FATA are a better bet. Tribal regions are well and good, except when the world’s biggest superpower is looking for you, in which case you get more and more isolated and circumscribed with respect to where you can go and be.

Well, looks like both the conventional wisdom and I were wrong. Abbottabad is not the tribal areas but it’s hardly Karachi. It’s a smallish town. I dunno what the American equivalent would be: Columbus? Austin? Whatever.

Question 6: What does this mean for the so-called war on terror?

It basically means nothing as far as the Americans are concerned. Objectively, not symbolically, al-Qaeda will not be affected by the death of Bin Laden. It is an industry as much as it is a firm. Software would not stop being developed tomorrow if Steve Jobs was killed. Same thing here. Americans are as likely be killed by an al-Qaeda attack tomorrow as they were today. Which is to say, not very likely.

For Pakistanis, it likely means more suicide bombings. Every time there is a so-called “success” in this war, from “liberating” Lal Masjid to killing Baitullah Mehsud, there is increased violence, as militant groups try to remind everyone they’re still around and not going anywhere. I have no reason to expect that that pattern will change.